John Cowper Powys

“ Deep calls unto deep within us; and in the circle of our mortal personality an immortal drama unrolls itself. Waves of unredeemed chaos roll upward from the abysses of our souls, and like a brackish tide contend with the water-springs of life.
Over the landscape of our vision lies a shadow, a rarely lifted shadow, the shadow of our own malice. But the human race has not been destined to carry on the unending struggle alone. Its subjective human vision has touched in the darkness a subjective super-human vision; and the symbol of the encounter of these two is the lonely figure of Christ. ”

“ The world is wide, and Nature has at least this in common with Heaven, that it has many mansions.
The feverish passion for fair things which obsessed Oscar Wilde and carried him so far is not for all the sons of men; nor even, in every hour of their lives, for those who most ardently answer to it. That feverishness burns itself out; that smouldering fire turns to cold ashes. Life flows on, though Salome, daughter of Herodias, lies crushed under the piled-up shields, and though in all the prisons of the world "the damned grotesques make arabesques, like the wind upon the sand." ”

“ Milton was more interested in the struggle of ideas, in the struggle of races, in the struggle of immortal principles, in the struggle of gods, in the great creative struggle of life and death, than he was interested in the exquisite cadences of words or their laborious arrangement. A modern artist's heart's desire is to escape from the world to some "happy valley" and there, sitting cross-legged, like a Chinese Idol, between the myrtle-bushes and the Lotus, to make beautiful things in detachment forever, one by one, with no pause or pain. ”

“ Mother-of-pearl shells, faded antimacassars, china dogs, fruit under glass-cases, old faded photographs of long-since dead people, illuminated texts embroidered in bright wool, tarnished christening mugs of children that were now old women, portraits of celebrities from days when Victoria herself was in her cradle, all the sweet impossible bric-a-brac of a tea-parlour in a village shop surrounded them as they sat there, and thrilled at least two of their hearts—for Linda’s mood was as receptive and as sensitive as Nance’s—with an indescribable sense of the pathos of human life. ”

“ It takes the emotion of love and the emotion of malice and tries to force its way behind them. It turns upon itself, in its insane trouble, and seeks to get itself out of its own way and to efface itself, so that "something" beyond itself may flow into its place.
At these moments the soul's complex vision is roused to a supreme pitch of rhythmic energy. The apex-thought of its focussed attributes gathers itself together to pierce the mystery. Like a strain of indescribable music the apex-thought rests upon itself and brings each element of its being into harmony with every other. ”

“ A child is solemn when it is pretending to be an engine-driver or a pilot, and Victor Hugo was solemn when he pretended to be a saviour of society. No one but a person endowed with the perfect genius of childishness could have acted toward his mistress and his wife in the way he did, or have been so serenely blind to the irony of the world.
There is as little of the sensual in Victor Hugo's temperament as there is in the temperament of a pure-minded child; but like a child he finds a shuddering pleasure in approaching the edge of the precipice ”

“ When she said the words, “I do love you,” a shivering ecstasy shot through the stone-carver’s veins, followed by a ghastly chilliness, like the hand of death, as he grasped their complete meaning. The most devastating tone, perhaps, of all, for an impassioned lover to hear, is that particular tone of calm tender affection. It has the power of closing up vistas of hope more effectively than the expression of the most vigorous repulsion. There was a ring of weary finality in her voice that echoed through his mind, like the tread of coffin-bearers through a darkened passage. ”

“ In a few hundred years, surely, the human race will recognize its absolute right to make mock at the grotesque elements in the sex comedy, and such laughter will clear the air of much "virtue" and much "vice."
Wine is his first symbol of the large, sane, generous mood he bequeaths to us—the focusing of the poetry of life, and the glow and daring of it, and its eternal youthfulness.
But it is more than a symbol—it is a sacrament and an initiation. It is the sap that rises in the world's recurrent spring. It is the ichor, the quintessence of the creative mystery. ”

“ He raised one of his arms with a queer, spasmodic gesture and let it drop as suddenly as he had raised it.
“Love rejoices to bear everything,” he went on. “It forgives and forgives again. It serves its beloved night and day, unseen and unfelt, it draws strength from suffering. When the blows of fate strike it, it sinks into its own heart and rises stronger than fate. When the passing hour’s cruel to it, it sinks away within, below the passing of every possible hour, beyond the hurt of every conceivable stroke. Love does not ask anything. It does not ask to be recognized. ”

“ THE ROSE-LEAVES
AS long as the roots of the green, green grass
Grow cool in the kindly clay,
The rose-leaves of sorrow will fall and pass
And drift on the wind away.
Oh, rose-leaves, rose-leaves of delicate sorrow!
Oh, rose-leaves passionate!
Over the grasses of tomorrow
You drift on the wind of fate.
Lightly, lightly you fall and drift,
Delicate rose-leaves of exquisite pain;
But something is left that no wind can lift,
That returns again, that returns again.
Quivering rose-leaves, lighter than air,
The wind may carry you away ”

“ The justice of the gods cancels the malice of the righteous, and the devoted gratitude of humanity tears up the contemptuous libels of the world.
He has come into his own, as all great poets must at last, in defiance of the puritan, in defiance of public opinion, and in spite of all aspersion. He has come into his own; and no one who loves poetry can afford to pass him by.
For while others may be more witty, more learned, more elaborate, none can be more melodious. His poetry is touched with the music that is beyond all argument. He lives by his sincerity. He lives by his imagination. ”

“ As these two girls, the fair-haired and the dark-haired, let the solemn burden of the night thus press unheeded upon them, they would have needed no fantastic imagination, in an invisible observer, to be aware of the tense vibration between them of some formidable spiritual encounter.
High up above the mass of Leonian stone which we have named Nevilton House, the Milky Way trailed its mystery of far-off brightness across the incredible gulfs. What to it was the fact that one human heart should tremble like a captured bird in the remorseless power of another? ”

“ Deep calls to Deep; and the mysterious oceans of Personality move and stir in a terrific reciprocity.
The unfathomable gulfs of the eternal duality within us are roused to undreamed-of response in answer to this abysmal stirring of the powers that create the world.
What is good in us is enlarged and heightened; what is evil in us is enlarged and deepened; while, under the increasing pressure of this new wave of the perilous stuff "of emotion," slowly, little by little, as we give ourselves up to the ecstasy of contemplation, the intensified "good" overcomes the intensified "evil." ”

“ Linda, flinging Philippa aside, rushed to meet him. “Adrian! Adrian!” she cried piteously, “take me home to Nance.” She clung to his arm and in the misery of her outraged feelings, began sobbing like a child who has been lost in the dark. Sorio, soothing and petting her as well as he could, looked enquiringly at Philippa as she came up.
“Oh, it’s nothing. It’s nothing, Adrian. It’s only that I wanted her to come up to the house. She seems to have misunderstood me and got silly and frightened. She’s not a very sensible little girl.” ”

“ Are we not these very wretches whose blind life is so base that they envy every other Fate? Are we not those who are neither for God or for his Enemies but are "for themselves"; those who may not even take refuge in Hell, lest the one damned get glory of them! The very terror of this clear-cutting sword-sweep, dividing us, bone from bone, may, nay! probably will, send us back to our gentle "lovers of humanity" who, "knowing everything pardon everything." But one sometimes wonders whether a life all "irony," all "pity," all urbane "interest," would not lose the savor of its taste! ”

“ Wisdom older than any god,
Wisdom older than the world!
There are whispers here, there are whispers deep,
Hid in these places, that can raise
Memories out of caverns of sleep,
That throw strange meanings upon our days!
Is it life, is it life, that all these years,
We've been living, tasting, and calling good?
Ah! Your eyes are full of tears!
The wood has caught you, the magic wood.
Something breaks down where the wood begins;
Something breaks down in this hidden spot!
What are our virtues? What are our sins? ”

“ Every leaf and grass blade seemed to be intently alert and listening.
In her heart Lacrima was conscious of an unusual sense of foreboding and apprehension. Surely there could be nothing worse in store for her than what she already suffered. She wondered what Maurice Quincunx was doing at that moment. Was he thinking of her, and were his thoughts the cause of this strange oppression in the air? Poor Maurice! She longed to be free to devote herself to him, to smooth his path, to distract his mind. Would fate ever make such a thing possible? How unfair Gladys was in her suspicions! ”

“ The sea-scenes in his books are unequalled in all prose literature. To match them you would have to go to the poets—to Shakespeare—to Swinburne. A single line of Hugo has more of the spirit of the sea, more of its savagery, its bitter strength, its tigerish leap and bite, than pages of Pierre Loti. Whether I am prejudiced by my childish associations I do not know, but no other writer makes me smell the sea-weed, catch the sharp salt tang, feel the buffeting of the waves, as Victor Hugo does. ”

“ To drift at nightfall into an unknown town, and wander through its less frequented ways, and peep into its dark, empty churches, and listen to the wind in the stunted trees that grow by its Prison, and watch some flickering particular light high up in some tall house—the light of a harlot, a priest, an artist, a murderer—surely there is no imaginative experience equal to this! Then, the things one sees, by chance, by accident, through half-open doors and shutter-chinks and behind lifted curtains! Verily the ways of men upon earth are past finding out, and their madness beyond interpretation! ”

“ One deep, far-drawn channel of strength and hope remained open in the remote depths of his mind—associated with his inmost identity and with what in the fortress of his soul he loved to call his “secret”—and far off, at the end of this vista, visualized through clouds of complicated memories—was the image of his boy, his boy left in America, from whom, unknown even to Nance, he received letters week by week, letters that were the only thing, so it seemed to him at this moment, which gave sweetness to his life. ”

“ But after gathering together all we have accumulated among these various paths leading to the edge of the mystery of art, what we are compelled to recognize, when we confront the palpable thing itself, is that, in each unique embodiment of it, it arrests and entrances us, as with a sudden transformation of our entire universe.
Out of the abysses of personality—human or super-human—every new original work of art draws us, by an irresistible magnetism, into itself, until we are compelled to become what it is, until we are actually transformed into its inmost identity. ”

“ Life in a great city is like life in an enchanted forest. One never knows what hideous ogre or what exquisite hamadryad one may encounter. And the little ways of all one's scrabbling and burrowing and chuckling and nodding and winking house-mates! To go through the world expecting adventures is to find them sooner or later. But one need only cross one's threshold to find one adventure—the adventure of a new, unknown fellow-creature, full of suspicion, full of cloudy malice, full of secretive dreams, and yet ready to respond—poor devil—to a certain kind of signal! ”

“ Ah, Nance, my dear, it’s no use kicking against the pricks. We were made to bear, to endure, to submit, to suffer. Any attempt to escape this great law necessarily ends in misery. Suffering is not the worst evil in the world. Yielding to brutal force is not the worst, either. I sometimes think, from what I’ve observed in my life, that there are depths of horror known to men, depths of horror through which men are driven, compared with which all that we suffer at their hands is paradise! ”

“ This region is nothing more nor less than that strange margin of our minds, where memories gather which are deeper than memories, and where emotions float by and waver and hover and alight, like wild marsh-birds upon desolate sea-banks.
Conrad's genius, like the genius of all great writers who appeal to what is common and universal in us, to what unites the clever and the simple, the experienced and the inexperienced, is revealed in something much less accidental and arbitrary than the selection of any striking background, however significant, of ocean-mystery or jungle solitude. ”

“ Unutterable loneliness takes possession of him and he feels himself to be an exile in a dark and hostile assemblage of elemental forces. If at such a moment by means of some passionate invocation of the immortal gods, or by means of some desperate sinking into his own soul and gathering together of the creative energy in him, he is able to resist this desolation, how strange and sudden a shifting of mood occurs! He then, by a bold movement of imagination, restores the balance of his complex vision; and in a moment the spectacle is transfigured. ”

“ Nature loves to reveal the most delicate side-lights and the most illuminating glimpses to those who take this attitude. Such disinterestedness brings its own reward.
To love truth for the sake of power or gain or pride or success is a contemptible prostitution; to love it for its own sake is a tragic foolishness. What is truth—in itself—that it should be loved? But to love it for the pleasure of pursuing it, that is the temper dear to the immortal gods. For this is indeed their own temper, the very way they themselves—the shrewd undying ones—regard the dream shadows of the great kaleidoscope. ”

“ It lies in that inhuman and forbidden wish to arrest the processes of life—to lay a freezing hand—a dead hand—upon what we love, so that it shall always be the same. The really immoral thing is to isolate, from among the affections and passions and attractions of this human world, one particular lure; and then, having endowed this with the living body of "eternal death," to bend before it, like the satyr before the dead nymph in Aubrey's drawing, and murmur and mutter and shudder over it, through the eternal recurrence of all things! ”

“ If, therefore, in our desperate struggle with the unfathomable nature of this duality, we demand why it is that the gods have failed, in spite of their love, to give us any clue to some ultimate reconciliation, the answer must be that such an ultimate reconciliation is as much beyond the reach of their vision as it is beyond the reach of ours. The attainment of such a reconciliation would seem to mean the absolute end of life as we know it and of creation as we know it. Such a reconciliation would seem to mean nothing less than the swallowing up of the universe in unthinkable nothingness. ”

“ But, as we have said, in spite of all these difficulties and in spite of the deep-hidden dismay which his nervous, querulous mood excited in her, Nance was full of a thrilling and inexpressible happiness during these Autumn days. She loved the roar of the great wind—the north-west wind—in chimneys and house-tops at night. She loved the drifting of the dead leaves along the muddy roads. She loved the long swishing murmur of the rushes growing by the dyke paths as they bent their feathery heads over the wet banks or bowed in melancholy rhythm across the rain-filled ditches. ”

“ The "new soul," which he was permitted by the gods to evoke out of the very abyss, has become, in the passionate subjectivity of our age, the very life-blood of our intellect. Not one among our most interesting artists and writers but does his utmost to reveal to the world every phase and aspect of his personal identity. What was but a human necessity, rather concealed and discouraged than reveled in and exploited before Montaigne, has, after Montaigne, become the obsession and preoccupation of us all. We have got the secret, the great idea, the "new soul." ”

“ None of the great works of art and poetry, the austere beauty of which reflects the real nature of the universe, could continue to exercise their magical power upon us, could continue to sustain us and comfort us, if those tragic ultimate realities were not ultimate realities.
The sublime ritual of art, which at its noblest has the character of religion, could not exist for a moment in a world as softly fluctuating and as dimly wavering as this modern scepticism would make it. Life is at once more beautiful and far more tragic. ”

“ Neither to gloss over the outrageous reality nor to lose our resistant obstinacy, whatever such reality may do to us, is the last word of noble commonsense. And it is a noble commonsense which, after all, is Voltaire's preeminent gift.
The Voltairian spirit refuses to be fooled by man or god. The universe may batter it and bruise it, but it cannot break it. The brutality of authority, the brutality of public opinion, may crush it to the earth; but from the earth it mocks still, mocks and mocks and mocks, with the eternal youthfulness of its wicked tongue! ”

“ The dog will worry us by its fuss, its solicitation, its desire to be petted. The gnats or midges will stir in us an indignant hostility; since their tribe have been known to poison the blood of man. The human invader, above all; how loud and unpleasing his voice is! The eternal malice in the depths of our soul pounces upon this tendency of grass to be "a common weed," of gnats to bite, of dogs to bark, of shadows to flicker, of a man to have an evil temper, of a woman to have an atrocious shrewishness, or an appalling sluttishness ”