Helen Zimmern

“ In Alma Tadema's case the environment does indeed explain the man. His keen sense of beauty, his classic tastes, his love of flowers, make themselves felt in every nook and corner of his abode; in the silver-walled studio with its onyx windows, in its mosaic atrium, in which a fountain splashes, in Lady Tadema's special room with its oak-beamed ceiling, its Dutch panelling, its old Dutch furniture, in its low-windowed library packed with splendid illustrated works on artistic themes, in its pretty garden ever gay with blossoms, with its fish pond and trellised colonnade. ”

“ And it is the same in all the others, while the centre of Helen is the girl herself. Yet the other characters are no less admirably drawn, with the old delicacy and firmness of touch, the occasional quaint gleams of humour. In its way Miss Edgeworth never limned a finer portrait than that of Lady Davenant, the large-brained, large-hearted woman of the world, endowed with strong principle, keen sense and real vigour of character, mingled with prejudice, impulsive likes and dislikes, an imperfect adherence in practice to her own theories of right and wrong, and a stern power of self- judgment. ”

“ A sincere lover of Truth, who took life seriously, he shunned mere appearances from his very youth, regardless that this might isolate him from all relations human and social. This profound, thoughtful man, in whose breast a warm heart pulsated, ran through a whole lifetime like a child angered at play—solitary, misunderstood, but true to himself. Born and educated in competence, his genius was unhampered by the burdens of this world. ”

“ There is literally no rein of law at this moment to hold the Irish; and through the whole country there is what I cannot justly call a spirit of reform, but a spirit of revolution, under the name of reform; a restless desire to overthrow what is, and a hope—more than a hope—an expectation of gaining liberty or wealth, or both, in the struggle; and if they do gain either, they will lose both again and be worse off than ever—they will afterwards quarrel amongst themselves, destroy one another, and be again enslaved with heavier chains. ”

“ Through the branches is seen the sky, a sky of purest sapphire, a blue distinct from that of the tideless tranquil ocean, but no less glorious or intense. Nowhere perhaps better than here has Tadema reproduced the effects of summer seas and skies in their brilliant ardour, their palpitating delicacy of hue and texture. The very air that pervades the picture is hot and light, saturated and quivering with the quickening pulsation of a southern sun.
The intimate life of the Roman women has often attracted Alma Tadema's brush. ”

“ I have always told you it is difficult to live with you; and the better I get to know you, the more I feel this difficulty increase, at least for me. I will not hide it from you : as long as you are what you are, I would rather bring any sacrifice than consent to live with you. I do not undervalue your good points, and that which repels me does not lie in your heart; it is in your outer, not your inner being; in your ideas, your judgment, your habits; in a word, there is nothing concerning the outer world in which we agree. ”

“ I should tell you beforehand that there is no humour in it, and no Irish character. It is impossible to draw Ireland as she now is in a book of fiction—realities are too strong, party-passions too violent to bear to see, or care to look at their faces in the looking-glass. The people would only break the glass, and curse the fool who hold the mirror up to nature—distorted nature, in a fever. We are in too perilous a case to laugh, humour would be out of season, worse than bad taste. ”

“ The spectator who misses the allusions, the meaning of his subject-pictures, nevertheless finds matter for full and intense enjoyment as he contemplates the lovely fabrics, the cool half-shades, the clear sunlight, the exquisite flowers, the heat-saturated sea and sky, the marbles and the bric-à-brac that appear on almost every canvas, and are painted with a skill, a consummate science that captivates the connoisseur, and with a reality that delights the uninstructed crowd. ”

“ It is, therefore, much to possess a writer like Arthur Schopenhauer, capable of imparting Western form to Eastern ideas, or rather to ideas once solely Eastern; but which, like seeds wafted by the winds, have wandered far from their birthplace to germinate anew in the brain of Europe. Schopenhauer will for ever stand prominent among those who have helped forward the conception of the Universe as Unity, and even if the peculiar form in which he embodied it fails to obtain currency as the most convenient and correct, it will none the less surely rank among the most impressive and sublime. ”

“ Such a man, who has after many bitter combats conquered his own nature, remains only as a purely intellectual being—an untarnished mirror of the universe. Nothing has power to disturb or agitate him, for he has severed all the thousand threads of the Will, which bind us to the world and draw us hither and thither in constant pain, under the form of desire, fear, envy, anger. ”

“ London society is familiar with this wiry, strong-set figure, with this face of kindly comeliness, with the cheery voice, with the frank, observant eye, the merry quips and pranks, the energy, the intense love of all that is great, and good, and lovely. To be with him is to feel invigorated, for he seems to have so much superfluous vitality that he is able to dispense it to his surroundings. ”

“ Miss Edgeworth's heart was capacious and could answer to all calls made upon it. Whether it was to rejoice with those that rejoiced, or to weep with those that wept, she always responded.
It is the condition, the doom of advancing, advanced age, to see friend after friend go, for so much it detaches one from life; yet it still more makes us value the friends we have left. ”

“ The old brilliancy, the quick humor, the strong sense of justice and truth which is the moral backbone of her work, are there as before; but through the whole tale there breathes a new spirit of wider tenderness for weak, struggling human nature, and a gentleness towards its foibles, which her earlier writings lacked. Years had taught her a wider toleration, had shown her, too, how large a part quick, unreasoning instincts and impulses play in the lives of men and women, even of those whose constant struggle it is to subdue act and thought to the rule of duty. ”

“ And this is constantly the case in Alma Tadema's paintings. From each canvas has been erased some gem, under each picture is hidden some exquisite detail, painted over regardlessly by the artist; no matter how lovely it may be in itself, if it fails to fit into the ensemble it is always destroyed. Hence there is in his pictures no corner or space that is neglected or hastily blocked in. All is as perfect as he knows how to make it, and I have heard him say, not rarely, that a little glimpse of sky, some little peep into the open, has given him as much labour as the entire picture. ”

“ I say her books, not her friends and enemies, for I fear she has no friends to plead for her except her books. I never met anyone of any party who was her friend. This strikes me with real melancholy, to see a woman of the first talents in Europe, who had lived and shone in the gay court of the gayest nation in the world, now deserted and forlorn, living in wretched lodgings, with some of the pictures and finery—the wreck of her fortunes—before her eyes; without society, without a single friend, admired—and despised: she lived literally in spite, not in pity. ”

“ The condition of liberty of the press should be rigid interdiction of all anonymous and pseudonymous authorship, so that everyone may at least be responsible with his honour for what he proclaims through the far-reaching trumpet of the press. He thought it dishonorable to attack anyone anonymously who had not himself written anonymously, and was a sworn foe to cliquism and mutual admiration. He thought it pernicious to extend to literature the toleration shown by society to stupid, brainless people, for there they are impertinent intruders, and it is a duty towards the good to attack the bad. ”

“ Yet with all its palpable defects there is such an admixture of excellence that Harrington should not be left unread, even though we may regret that such capital figures, painted with such nice skill and delicate discrimination, should be imbedded in so puerile a tale. The characters are keenly and lightly drawn, standing out boldly and clearly. The jargon of society is once more successfully reproduced, as well as those fashionable ladies who hide the claws of a tigress under a velvet paw, and whose complex and shifting nature Miss Edgeworth understood so well and reproduced so faithfully. ”

“ When we see friend or foe descend, forsaken, into the night of death, our eyes search for a joy that may endure, and every other feeling is stilled in a burning desire to know the sources of life. This ardent yearning after the knowledge of the eternal, which comes to most men only in sight of death, rarely, and evanescent as a dream, was to him the constant companion of a long life. ”

“ Briefly, Alma Tadema's double nationality, his Dutch birth, his long English residence, coupled with his classic tastes, his admiration for the Japanese, have contributed to render his art a curious complex of conflicting tendencies, tendencies that in themselves are again welded into a harmonious whole by the idiosyncrasy of the man. We seem to feel, even through the medium of his pictures, his kind-heartedness, his quick appreciation of all that is good and beautiful, his dislike of mystery, of vain searchings in dark mental places, his love of sunshine, moral and real. ”

“ In truth, in the whole course of reading or hearing it read I was sorry to stop and glad to go on. It bears peculiarly well that severe test of being read aloud; it never wearies the ear by the long resounding line, but keeps the attention alive by the energy shown. It is the perfection of style so varied, and yet the same in fitness, in propriety, in perspicuity, in grace, in dignity and eloquence, and, whenever naturally called forth, in that just indignation which makes the historian as well as the poet. If Voltaire says true that "the style is the man," what a man must Macaulay be! ”

“ It is this very quality that makes Schopenhauer, quite apart from his pessimism, so pre-eminently the philosopher for every-day necessities. He had lived in the world, he was no closet theoriser, he knew the world's requirements, needs, demands, his aphorisms and axioms are not too high flown for practice. They are besides, couched in plain, intelligible language, and often express the dim perceptions of every thinking mind.
Though man a thinking being is defined, Few use the great prerogative of mind ; How few think justly of the thinking few ; How many never think, who think they do. ”

“ Schopenhauer attributes to the artist, the man of genius, a perfection second only to that of the ascetic who has attained entire negation of the will. The reason is that he accomplishes, though only in moments of ecstasy, the same end of self-annihilation which the other habitually achieves. All art depends upon the apprehension of eternal ideas, intermediate between the phenomenal world and the world of essential reality. In aesthetic contemplation, the single object contemplated becomes the idea of its species, and the contemplating individual a pure organ of intelligence. ”

“ Miss Edgeworth was hemmed in by the visible; she did not seek to justify the ways of God to man; life was to her no riddle; if man would but act rightly, all would be well; she deemed that it is given into his own hands to do good or evil, to be happy or the reverse. There was in her nothing of the poet and the seer; and by so much as she fails to speak to humanity in all its aspects, by so much she fails to take rank among the greatest teachers of our race. But with wisdom and good sense she recognized her limitations ”

“ The finest buildings are not the most useful ; a temple is no dwelling-house. A man endowed with rare intellectual gifts, who is forced to follow a merely useful profession which the most ordinary person might pursue, is like a costly painted vase used as a cooking utensil. To compare useful people to geniuses is like comparing bricks to diamonds.'
With all this the man of genius is not happy, for he is, in a certain sense, unnatural. ”

“ Where was Madame de Genlis' sense of delicacy when she penned and published Les Chevaliers du Cigne? Forgive, my dear Aunt Mary. You begged me to see her with favourable eyes, and I went to see her after seeing her Rosiere de Salency, with the most favourable disposition, but I could not like her. There was something of malignity in her countenance and conversation that repelled love, and of hypocrisy which annihilated esteem; and from time to time I saw, or thought I saw, through the gloom of her countenance, a gleam of coquetry. ”

“ Genius is an intelligence, which has revolted against its natural mission, the service of the will ; hence a long train of miseries and an habitual melancholy, resting mainly on this principle, that the clearer and brighter the intelligence that illuminates the Will, the more distinctly does the latter appreciate the misery of its condition. Yet the ecstasy of the man of genius affords while it lasts the perfect counterpart of the bliss which springs from absolute self-renunciation, and the entire dissipation of the illusion which persuades man of his individuality. ”

“ Miss Edgeworth knew what children were like; she saw them not only from without but from within; she had lived all her life among little people. Their world never became a paradise from which she was shut out. The advantages she thus enjoyed were as rare as they are important for the due comprehension of the needs of childhood, and she utilized them to the utmost. The chief charm of her tales, that which makes them sui generis both now and then, is that she not only wrote in the language of children, but, what is even rarer, from the child's point of view. ”

“ When a man is destined to impress, the mark of his intellect upon the whole human race, he can only know one joy or grief, that of seeing his capacities completely developed and being able to accomplish his work, or being hindered in it. Everything else is insignificant ; true to this, we find that in all ages the greatest minds have set the highest value upon leisure, and each man's leisure is worth as much as he himself is worth.'
Shenstone's maxim : 'Liberty is a more invigorating cordial than Tokay,' was a favourite quotation of Schopenhauer's. ”

“ No one has exerted themselves with more energy in the service of her friends. I felt in her company the delightful influence of a cheerful temper and soft, attractive manners—enthusiasm which age cannot extinguish, and which spends, but does not waste itself on small but not trifling objects. I wish I could at seventy-two be such a woman! She told me that Rousseau, whilst he was writing so finely on education, and leaving his own children in the Foundling Hospital, defended himself with so much eloquence that even those who blamed him in their hearts could not find tongues to answer him. ”

“ No conclusions are drawn; the narrative, which never flags or drags, is rattled off with spirit, the abundant anecdotes are poured forth with true Irish exuberance, while the humor of the story arises in great measure from the sublime unconsciousness of the story-teller to the wit, naïvete or absurdity of his remarks. We are held spell-bound, we laugh and weep in a breath, we are almost over-persuaded by loyal old Thady to pardon the errors of the family, "one of the most ancient in the kingdom, related to the kings of Ireland, but that was before my time." ”

“ Edgeworth to Ireland! The fact was, everybody cared more about her. She was a nice little unassuming "Jeanie Deans" looking body, as we Scotch say, and if not handsome, certainly not ill-looking. Her conversation was as quiet as herself. One would never have guessed she could write her name; whereas her father talked, not as if he could write nothing else, but as if nothing else was worth writing. To turn from them to their works, I admire them; but they excite no feeling and they leave no love—except for some Irish steward or postillion. ”

“ To teach the art of living, the science of being happy, is her one endeavor; and thus her fancy, her wit, her strictures, are all made to bend to her main purpose, that of being the vehicles of her practical philosophy. Yet to regard Miss Edgeworth as a mere teaching machine is to do her gross injustice. Like most people, she was better than her creed. Despite her doctrines, her genius was too strong for her, and it is thanks to this that sundry of these tales from Fashionable Life are among her highest and most successful efforts. ”

“ I met Sir Walter Scott in Mr. Ticknor's library with all his benign, calm expression of countenance, his eye of genius and his mouth of humor—such as he was before the life of life was gone, such as genius loved to see him, such as American genius has given him to American friendship, immortalized in person as in mind. His very self I see feeling, thinking and about to speak—and to a friend to whom he loved to speak ”

“ With delicate and playful humor we are shown the heroic and imaginative side of the Irish peasantry. We quite love the kindly old woman who kills her last fowl to furnish supper to the stranger, whom she does not know to be her landlord. On the other hand we are amused beyond measure with Mrs. Rafferty, the Dublin grocer's wife and parvenue, who, in the absence of those who should have upheld Irish society, is able to make that dash that Lady Clonbrony vainly seeks to make in London. Her mixture of taste and incongruity, finery and vulgarity, affectation and ignorance, is delightful. ”