Walter Lionel George

“ It is therefore in science and statesmanship that the romantic quality of the future will be found. Romance is a maligned word, debased to fit any calf-love; romance is pinkish, or bluish, tender, feeble, and ends in orange blossom, or, as the case may be, tears by the side of mother's grave. That is the romance of the provincial touring company. True romance is virile, generous, and its voice is as that of the trumpet. Romance is the wage of the watcher, who with ever-open eyes scans the boundless air in eternal expectation that a thing unknown will appear. ”

“ He has not said to his angels: ‘Have virtue,’ but ‘Have love,’ and has given us lips more sensitive than the rest of our skin so that we may caress women, eyes raised on high to see the light, subtle scent to breathe the soul of flowers, sinewy thighs to grip the flanks of stallions and to fly swift as thought without railway or engine, delicate hands to draw over the long heads of greyhounds, the velvet lines of cats, and the gleaming shoulders of creatures without virtue ”

“ When we look down upon Piccadilly Circus flaring from every veranda, and, like the laburnum, dropping wells of fire, when in these days we stand at the corner of Tottenham Court Road and watch the electric signs: ‘Player’s Navy Mixture,’ ‘Meux’s London Original Stout,’ ‘Y.M.C.A.,’ and ‘Tube,’ when we walk in all that brightness, we do not realise that this is the spirit of our city, the rather crude, commercial, and friendly spirit of London. Nor, in other cities at night, say in Birmingham, where through the dirty glass falls dirty yellow light, do we perceive in man unambitiousness. ”

“ Victoria stepped out on to the platform with a heart that bounded and yet shrank. Not even the first faint coming of the coastline had given her the almost physical shock that she experienced on this bare platform. Waterloo station lay around her in a pall of faint yellow mist that gripped and wrenched at her throat. Through the fog a thousand ungainly shapes of stairs and signals thrust themselves, some crude in their near blackness, others fainter in the distance. It might have been a dream scene but for the uproar that rose around her from the rumble of London, the voices of a great crowd. ”

“ What shall we say then of that vague thing, genius, which is to mankind what the thing some call soul is to man? For my part, I believe it to be volcanic rather than sedimentary. It is as if the spirit of the race had accumulated in a creature, the spirit of life claiming to be born. Genius will out, but it is most frequent in certain periods of human history, such as the Elizabethan or Medician, in certain places, such as France, Italy, and the Low Countries, under certain influences, such as oppression, war, revolution, or social decay. ”

“ To lunch at the Savoy makes one feel not so much that one is among the rich as among the well-to-do on short leave. The Savoy is sober; its luxury is quieter than that of the Joseph Lyons restaurant; in a way, with its top lights, its flowers, it recalls the Joseph Lyons civilisation; the flowers are real, but not much more so; the band is more discreet, but it plays the same tunes. Its population, too, is different; at the Savoy, you do not see the young clerk, but you do see what some of the young clerks will become if they are lucky; many foreigners in a state of gormandise and bejewelment ”

“ Woman has felt in the home much as a workman might feel if he were given the White House as a present, told to live in it and keep it clean without help on two dollars a week. If the home be a precious possession, it may very well be a possession bought at too high a price—at the price of youth, of energy, and of enlightenment. The whole attitude of woman toward the home is one of rebellion—not of all women, of course, for most of them still accept that, though all that is may not be good, all that is must be made to do. ”

“ Folkestone was bright and sunny. The sting in the glowing air brought fresh colour to Victoria's cheeks, a deeper brilliancy to her grey eyes; she felt well; her back was straighter; when a lock of dark hair strayed into her mouth driven by the high wind it tasted salt on her lips. Sometimes she could have leaped, shouted, for life was rushing in upon her like a tide. Most days, however, she was quiet, for Holt was not affected by the sea. His listlessness was now such that he hardly spoke. ”

“ The cinema, like most new and virile things, has split opinion, and has collected round itself more unwise friends and unthinking enemies than any other form of entertainment. Few people like cinemas; they either love them or loathe them, while a few, I suppose, fall into my section of feeling and hate them for not being better than they are. For I believe in the cinema; I do not think that the cinema will do away with the theatre and the novel, but I do believe that it is destined to play a still larger part in the amusement of the people. ”

“ This does not suit genius. Genius needs solitude, true solitude, not only a place where you cannot buy newspapers, but a place where there are none in the consciousness. Genius needs to retreat upon itself, to fecundate itself until from the nightmare [Pg 234] of one life is born the dream of another. Genius cannot find this solitude, because the round globe hums as it spins, because it is alive with haste, with deeds crowding into the fleet hour that is no slower nor more rapid however crowded it may be, but only more hectic. ”

“ It springs from the wish to create a romantic atmosphere round one's self and to increase one's personal importance. Because men hold out hands less greedy toward drama and romance they are less afflicted, but they do not entirely escape, and we have all observed the new importance of the man whose brother has been photographed in a newspaper or, better still, killed in a railway accident. If he has been burned in a theater, the grief of his male relatives is subtly tinged with excited delight. Romance, the wage of lies, is woman's compensation for a dull life. ”

“ Every day now Victoria's brain grew clearer and her body weaker. A sullen spirit of revolt blended with horrible depression was upon her, but she was getting thinner, paler; dark rings were forming round her eyes. She knew pain now; perpetual weariness, twitchings in the ankles, stabs just above the knee. In horrible listlessness she dragged her weary feet over the tiled floor, responding to commands like the old cab horse which can hardly feel the whip. In this mood, growing churlish, she repulsed Betty, avoided Farwell and tried to seclude herself. ”

“ The future of genius lies with science and the State, because the State has effected a corner in power and romance. For art and letters there is little hope in a growingly mechanical civilisation, because the modern powerful depend upon the mob and not upon each other; therefore, as Napoleon said, they must be a little like the mob—be the super-mob. In their view, as in the view of those who follow them, art cannot rival money and domination. The mob hates the arts whenever they rise high, for the arts can be felt, but not understood ”

“ I like Whitechapel Road; the streets that run off it are indeed tragic with dirt and desolation, but the road itself, which is the pleasure-house of the inhabitants, is full of vitality. At all times it is thickly peopled, mostly with foreign Jews of all types, many of them scrubby little men with beards, who gesticulate in groups at street corners, and argue with their co-religionists. Some are in a state of offensive prosperity. Those Jewish crowds are more alive than the average London crowd; their eyes shine more, as if they were more capable of conceiving desire. ”

“ Victoria went up to her room and locked the door behind her. She sat down on her small basket trunk and stared out of the dormer window. She was still all of a tingle; her hands, grasping the rough edges of the trunk, trembled a little. Yet she felt, amid all her perturbation, the strange gladness that overcomes one who has had a shock; the contest was still upon her.
'Yes,' she said aloud, 'I'm free. I'm out of it.' She hated the dullness and ugliness which the Holts had brought with them from the Midlands. The feeling came over her almost like a spasm. ”