Elizabeth Bisland

“ Though she be called "a fine woman" still, men of all ages will turn from her to dote upon an empty-headed debutante. Her comprehension and sympathy, her wit and her learning are less enthralling than the vapid babblings of red-cheeked misses just out of pinafores. Her heart is as young as ever; she knows herself capable of a finer, nobler passion and tenderness than the girl can dream of, yet the selfish, egotistic emotions of the self-confident chit awake a rapture that would be dulled by the richest warmth she could give. ”

“ The Sphinx lies watching the generations whirled past her into existence. She listens to the cries, the turmoil, the bitter plaints of those within the walls who believed that they had solved her problem a century ago, and as she listens she smiles her cold, incredulous smile. Not yet have they divined her secret, if one may judge from their loud protests, and this new generation pouring in among them has but small patience with their failure. ”

“ The fish in the sea, the reptile in the dust, the bird in the forest, the wild beast in the jungle are all aware of their mates' passion for gleaming scales, for glowing plumes, for dappled hides and orgulous crests of hair. They know, they have always known, that no king can reign without splendour. Only man, bent solely upon his own comfort and, it would seem, upon the abandonment of his power, deliberately sets himself against this need of the female, which has become imbedded in her nature through every successive step up in the scale of evolution. ”

“ If a dream is a memory, then the stories of their momentary duration are easily credible. The falling rod upon the sleeper's neck might recall, as by a lightning flash, some scene in the Red Terror in which his ancestor participated—an ancestor so nearly allied, perhaps, to the victim suffering under the knife as to know all the agonies vicariously, and leave the tragedy bitten into his memory and his blood forever.
When the words heredity or instinct are contemplated in their broad sense they mean no more than inherited memory. ”

“ To provide this lover, whose potent tenderness shall ensure a myriad generation—this lover with greater wing flight than any of his fellows—with countless facetted eyes, with greater body and stronger limbs, this creature of such passion as to sacrifice his life for one moment of joy—the unflagging life work of not less than five of the sexless workers must be given, and hundreds of drones are raised each year that among them one may prove strong enough to attain to that dizzy aerial love. ”

“ The thing would seem so incredible, and yet the dream would explain all the puzzling facts so clearly. To a young and noble mind, evil in those one loves appears impossible. One would be always fighting the thought—which pulled the very ground of confidence from under one's feet—and yet always laying traps to prove one's suspicions true, as the jealous notoriously do; wishing yet fearing to know the truth. Hamlet's varying fits of violence and indecision seem natural enough under the circumstances, and not a sign of madness nor of eccentricity of character. ”

“ Unless the thought comes from within the known borders of the body's own life, the will will have none of it. But overtaken by fatigue and sinking into slumber with the night, his domain is left fenceless and unpatrolled, for with the will goes his troop of watchmen, judgment, logic, deliberation, ethics; and memory, ungoverned and uncontrolled, holds a feast of misrule. The barrier between past and present melts away; all his ancestors are merged into the individual ”

“ To an iron inevitableness of fate he opposes only indifference and an unbending courage. That which has been will be, and the end is death and darkness. He has no illusions. He wars neither for love of country nor love of Helen. If Troy falls nothing is gained. If the Greeks fail nothing will be lost. In time all the sweat and blood shed upon Ilium's windy plain will evaporate into a mere mist of uncredited legend. In Achilles, the other self, the alter ego, is the stronger man. The ghost of dead experience is as living as he. ”

“ To touch the heart of his mystery we find in him one thought, strange to the point of lunacy, the thought of duty, the thought of something owing to himself, to his neighbour, to his God; an ideal of decency to which he would rise if possible, a limit of shame, below which if it be possible he will not stoop.... Not in man alone, but we trace it in dogs and cats which we know fairly well, and doubtless some similar point of honour sways the elephant, the oyster and the louse, of whom we know so little"—
Alas, Poor Yorick! How a century of liberty has humbled him. ”

“ At my age, alas! one no longer gets into mischief, either by moonlight or at midsummer, and yet to-day all the tricksey spirits of the invisible world are supposed to be abroad—tangling the horses' manes, souring the milkmaid's cream, setting lovers by the ears. Some such frisky Puck stirs even peaceable middle-aged blood at this season to mild little secret sins, such as beginning a diary in which to set down one's private naughty views—the heresies one has grown too staid and cautious to give speech to any longer. ”

“ Impatient of rulers, but submissive to those who scourged the impulses of their appetites. Scornful of kings, and turning from beauty and genius to exalt the insane and insect-ridden fakir with knotted unshorn locks who muttered vague prophecies. Struggling always to escape from the grip of the inevitable cruelties of natural forces by opposing to them bloody sacrifices and cruel self-restraints—flowering at last into that supreme incarnation of the Semitic mind called Jesus Christ, who wrested from asceticism a dream of a panacea for the brutalities of the laws of life. ”

“ But for the most part he stops his ears to the soul's stern, sad preaching with the thick wax of sentimentalism, and that undying determination that life shall be not what it is, but what he wishes it to be—and so stumbles along, through ever-renewed pangs and tragedies, after a mirage in the hard desert of existence, to whose stones and flints, despite his bruises, he will not turn his eyes. ”

“ Whence comes this double, this alter ego, this bosom's lord, and strange, nameless ghost who haunts the house of life? How many thousand deaths have we died to give him life? For he is inexpressibly aged, infinitely sophisticated; and while the me still crowns its locks with youth's golden illusions, he is grey with knowledge and hoary with disenchantment. Though a part of our most intimate selves, he is not at one with us. He sympathizes with none of our enthusiasms, is tempted by none of our sins.... ”

“ Upon the Etruscan tombs, of all mortuary monuments the most lovely, is to be found a revelation clearer than words of the European attitude toward death—those recumbent figures, all grace and peace, carved by the hands of forgotten genius with so inexplicable a skill that the immemorial stone grows deliquescent before one's eyes as if melting and sinking into the mother earth. In them is no sense of struggle or rebellion. They consent to extinction as gently as autumn's last day fades into the silence and darkness of winter. ”

“ Wilde, whose whole existence was the pursuit of passion and beauty, violently resenting the fact that with the lapse of years he was no longer able to wake the old thrill of existence by any of the old methods—finding that poetry, art, and the beauty of women all left him more and more jaded and cold, he grasped at vice as a means of heat, and brought himself within the iron clutch of the law. ”

“ In such horrid sequence does cruelty engender cruelty.
The people about me regarded my emotion and retreat with surprise and contempt. Some such sensation, I suppose, as would have been felt by a Roman who should have seen me shed tears when the big cats of the arena crushed the bones of some brave young barbarian or Christian. These creatures were so far beneath him in the scale of existence that he could not conceive of any poignancy of suffering or emotion in such a mere animal. Was not one hair of a Roman worth many sparrows—or Christians? ”

“ In the hearts of such as these all the sweet illusions of existence came to full and natural bloom. To their lusty egoism life [Pg 69] has all the exhilaration and freshness of a new and special creation.
Far otherwise is it with the haunted man, whose dwelling is blighted by that cold presence with its terrible memory. Forever echoes through his chambers the cry that hope will be unfulfilled, that love will die, the morning fade, that what has been will be again and forever again; that the waters of life will climb the shore only to crawl back again into the blind deeps of eternity ”

“ The optimists have a theory that those who don't take the same view of life as themselves must therefore be unhappy. It's an amazing conclusion. They seem to have no idea how the pessimists enjoy their own sense of superiority. It is as if the blind should say to the man with eyes: "How unhappy you must be to see things just as they are. Now I can imagine them to be anything I please!"
The man with eyes could, of course, only smile; it being obviously impossible to discuss such a proposition.
The believers in personal immortality labour under the same curious illusion apparently. ”

“ It is the attitude of mind of a child, who is more interested by rabbits coming out of a conjurer's hat than by wireless telegraphy.
There is as great an inequality in the inheritance of health as in the heirship of wealth or brains. Some are born with a fortune of vigour and soundness so large that not a lifetime of eager squandering will leave them poor, and others enter the world paupers of so dire a need that no charity of medicine will ever raise them to comfort; but most of us have just that mediocre legacy of vitality which makes us indistinguishable units in the mass. ”

“ Often this capricious faculty will seize upon some few high lights in a vivid picture and reject all the unimportant details. As a rule, however, it is the profound stirring of the emotions which wakes the memory to activity. A woman never forgets her first lover. A man to the end of his life can recall his first triumph, or his [Pg 27] most imminent danger, and a trifle will often, after the lapse of half a century, fill the eye with tears, make the cheek burn, or the heart beat with the power of the long-passed emotion, preserved living and fresh by the memory. ”

“ The worst of rebels and cynics is so dependent upon the countenance of his fellows that when good-will is withdrawn a sort of madness of despair falls upon him, and this vain, sensitive poet makes it plain how the passionate protest of the ordinary criminal was in his case intensified to ecstasy. One sees the poor creature, like a rat in a cage, darting hither and thither, and shivering with sick and furious helplessness at the rigidity of the barriers by which the world had shut him away from any further part in the body corporate. ”

“ They appeared to me—these elders—to be imagining a King's cloak to cover the world as it really was; to be neglecting and minimizing the things really worth while; to be inventing ideals and standards not in themselves noble.
I struggled long against the mask and domino which muffled words and impeded action, but time and the years have made me more patient. I have grown to see that they may have their uses. The average man shrinks aghast from the naked truth, even when it is beautiful. There is a sort of universal prudery that shrinks from the nude in life as well as in art. ”

“ The later decades of the democratic century had refused to contemplate the world-old riddle of the blind Fates who create one vessel to honour and another to dishonour. So woman, no more than her fellows, would consider the caprices of destiny which from the union of one man and one woman will produce an heir to beauty, talent, and success, and from the same union—without volition or intention upon anyone's part—brings forth a cripple, an idiot, or the helpless Inadequate, who is foredoomed to failure with a grim gravitation no human laws or institutions can arrest. ”

“ And well it is for us that upon many the mantle of flesh lies so warm and thick that this ghost called consciousness of self cannot chill their blood with his dank wisdom breathed from out a world of graves. ”

“ There is in the breasts of many parents a half-resentful feeling that they should not be asked to sacrifice themselves to the new generation. They insist upon their own right to all that is to be got out of life, feeling that what they give to the children is never repaid. This selfish type forgets that in doing their duty they are but returning to their children what they themselves received from the past generation, and that the children will in turn pay to their descendants the inherited debt of honour with interest. ”

“ Virginity instead of purity became the ideal of the highest type of woman, who shrank from the fulfilment of her functions as a stepping down, instead of glorying in it as the fulfilment of her sacred purpose. What had been urged upon her upon every side she endeavoured to conform to in the spirit as well as the letter. Her mind strained towards the virginal as well as her body. The higher type of woman cried out to man for spiritual rather than physical love, and she found his natural sane tenderness for her person brutal rather than beautiful. ”

“ Carlyle says: "No nobler feeling than that of admiration for one higher than himself dwells in the breast of man. It is at this hour, and at all hours the unifying influence in man's life. Religion, I find, stands upon it ... what, therefore, is loyalty proper, the life breath of all society, but an effluence of hero worship; submissive admiration for the truly great! Society is founded upon hero worship." ”

“ Troy is a dream, but the battle forever is waged between the fresh incarnation of being and the memories of past being. Every creature wakes out of childhood aware that he lives not alone in even the secretest chambers of his life. ”

“ The whole history of supernaturalism has been the history of travel in the wrong direction—a wrong turning that had its beginning in a childish impatience that would attain to its [Pg 131] end by sudden leaps in lieu of dusty plodding along the highway that led by slow windings to the desired end.
Man found painful barriers of time, space, and physical decay fencing him out of his Eden of gratified desire, and like a child he straightway fell to dreaming of flying carpets, of magic lamps, of transmutable metals, of fountains of youth and elixirs of life. ”