Laurence Housman

“ Julia!... Where's William?
JULIA. I haven't inquired.
LAURA (self-importance and a sense of duty consuming her.) I wish to see him.
JULIA. Better not, as it didn't occur to you before.
LAURA. Am I not to see my own husband, pray?
JULIA. He didn't ever live here, you know.
LAURA. He can come, I suppose. He has got legs like the rest of us.
JULIA. Yes, but one can't force people: at least, not here. You should remember that—before he married you—he had other ties.
(Mrs. James preserves her self-possession, but there is battle in her eye.) ”

“ LAURA. Hannah, what have you got my best tray for? You know that is not to be used every day.
JULIA. It's all right, Laura. You don't understand.
LAURA. What don't I understand?
JULIA. Here one always uses the best. Nothing wears out or gets broken.
LAURA. Then where's the pleasure of it? If one always uses them and they never break—'best' means nothing!
JULIA. It is a little puzzling at first. You must be patient.
LAURA. I'm not a child, Julia.
JULIA (beautifully ignoring) . A little more coal, please, Hannah. (Then to her sister as she pours out the tea.) And how did you leave everybody? ”

“ KATHARINE. Yes—to the world; not to us. We wanted to be as we are, didn't we?
PARNELL. As we are, and as we were—how long is it?—eleven years ago. There's been no change since. When I go back to my star, I shall have found what I came for. That's what matters most. Souls either find or lose themselves—live or die. I lived: I shouldn't have done, on this earth, but for you—but for you.
(There is a pause. He sits meditating.)
KATHARINE. And of what—now?
PARNELL. The next generation—possibly the next but one: you and I gone, and Ireland free. ”

“ KATHARINE. Does Butt count?
PARNELL. He wasn't a failure: he didn't try to do anything. If Ireland needs more failures, to make a case for her conviction, shall I grudge mine? Yes, all her failures count: they get into the blood! Why, even the silly statues in her streets mean more than statues can mean here. Prosperity forgets; adversity remembers. Even hatred has its use: it grips, and drives men on.
KATHARINE. Did you need—hatred, to do that for you?
PARNELL. Yes: till I got love!... Reason, conviction aren't enough. Morley said a good thing the other day. ”

“ Look at all that valiance, that beauty of life gone out to perish for a cause it knows to be right; think of the generosity of that giving by the young men; think of the faithful courage of the women who steel themselves to let them go; think of the increase of spirit and selflessness which everywhere rises to meet the claim. All over the land which goes to war that is happening (and in the enemy's land it is the same) , making war a sacred and a holy thing. And having got it so sanctified, then the Devil can do with it almost what he likes. That's what he has done, Tumulty. ”

“ CHAMBERLAIN. Yes, you've done that—sometimes. Sometimes you haven't. I shouldn't call you an old politician, though. Being old is the thing you've always managed to avoid. And yet, you've been in at a good many political deaths first and last.
DIST. V. That, in itself, is an ageing experience.
CHAMBERLAIN. Yes? ... I wonder.
DIST. V. Oh, but surely!
CHAMBERLAIN. I wasn't sure; but I take your word for it.
DIST. V. In politics, somehow, the deaths seem always to exceed the births: those who go have become more intimate: one has got to know them. ”

“ Step by step, their failure is coming home to them; but still it is only as failure that they see it—mere human inability to surmount insuperable difficulties: the greed, the folly, the injustice, the blindness, the cruelty of it they don't see. And the people don't teach it them. They can't. No nation—no victorious nation—has gotten it at heart to say, "We, too, have sinned." Lest such a thing should ever be said or thought, one of the terms of peace was to hand over all the blame; so, when the enemy signed the receipt of it, the rest were acquitted. ”

“ It wasn't politics; not then. Now—now it's the great stroke, and Home Rule goes down under it.... Is that history, or is it "Alice in Wonderland"?... If you are my ruin now, you were also my ruin then, when you were helping me to think that I could win justice for a nation from politicians like these: win it by any means except by beating them, bringing them to their knees, making them red with the blood of a people always in revolt, till their reputation stinks to the whole world! ”

“ To men who have no faith in it, to men who dislike it, to men who will try persistently, sedulously, day in, day out, to turn it back to their own selfish ends. There, in those hands, its fate will lie—perhaps for a generation to come. And it is only by faith in the common people, not in their politicians, that I dare look forward and hope that the instrument— blunt and one-sided though it be now—may yet become mighty and two-edged and sharp, a sword in the hand of a giant—of one whose balances are those of justice, not of power. But I shan't see it, Tumulty ”

“ EX-PRES. I'm accustomed to people not agreeing with me, Tumulty.... Yes: too much faith—not in what I stood for, but in myself: perhaps—though there I'm not so sure—perhaps too little in others. To some I gave too much: and the mischief was done before I knew.
TUMULTY. You don't need to name him, President.
EX-PRES. I don't need to name anyone now. Sometimes a man may know his own points of weakness too well—guard against them to excess, be overcautious because of them; and then, trying to correct himself, just for once he's not cautious enough. ”

“ Isn't it amazing how a man with charm can do things that nobody else dare? I never managed to charm anybody.
JESSE COLLINGS. You made friends—and kept them.
CHAMBERLAIN. So does he. He has been successful all round: art, politics, letters, society—he has friends in all. I've only been successful in business.
JESSE COLLINGS. My dear friend, aren't you forgetting yourself? You came out of business.
CHAMBERLAIN. No, I only changed to business on a larger scale—carried it on under a bigger name. That's how I found myself. I had to make things into a business in order to make a success of them. ”

“ Something happens: there comes a change; war in a people's mind drives justice out.... Can soldiers fight without "seeing red"—can a nation? Not when nations have to fight on the tremendous scale of modern war. Then they are like those monstrous mechanisms of long-range destructiveness, which we so falsely call "weapons of precision," but which are in fact so horribly unprecise that, once let loose, we cannot know what lives of harmlessness, of innocence, of virtue, they are going to destroy. ”

“ CHAMBERLAIN. You've hit it, Collings. It's himself. Not selfishly. He stands for so many things that he values—that he thinks good for the world—necessary for the stability of the social order. He is their embodiment: he is the most emblematic figure in the modern world that I know—in this country, at any rate—representing so much that is good in the great traditions which have got to go. And to stave off that day he will do almost anything. He would even—if he thought it would enable him the better to prick some of his bubbles—he would even take office under Lloyd George. ”

“ JULIA. Oh! She would be sorry. Tea-cake?
LAURA (taking the tea-cake that is offered her) . I'm not so sure. She was nursing Edwin's boy through the measles, so of course I didn't count. (Nosing suspiciously.) Is this China tea?
JULIA. If you like to think it. You have as you choose. How is our brother, Edwin?
LAURA. His wife's more trying than ever. Julia, what a fool that woman is!
JULIA. Well, let's hope he doesn't know it.
LAURA. He must know. I've told him. She sent a wreath to my funeral, 'With love and fond affection, from Emily.' Fond fiddlesticks! Humbug! She knows I can't abide her. ”

“ When a man comes really to himself, Tumulty—sees clearly within—does it help him toward seeing also what lies outside, beyond, and ahead—make him more sure that, as regards others, he has done right? I don't know—I would give my life to know—if what I did, when all else had failed, was best. The political forces, prejudices, antagonisms, the powers of evil around me, have been so dubiously deceiving and dark, that I do not know now whether to have been uncompromisingly true to principle would have done any good. ”

“ JULIA. I can't say, Laura.
LAURA. No—no more can I; no more can anyone! Martha has got the miser spirit. She's as grasping as a caterpillar. I ought to have had that tea-pot.
JULIA. Why?
LAURA. Because I had a house of my own, and people coming to tea. Martha never had anyone to tea with her in her life—except in lodgings.
JULIA. We all like to live in our own way. Martha liked going about.
LAURA. Yes. She promised me, after William—I suppose I had better say 'evaporated' as you won't let me say 'died'—she promised always to stay with me for three months in the year. She never did. ”

“ But why for their instrument of torture did they choose primroses? Oh, I can invent a reason! It was Moses Primrose, cheated of his horse with a gross of green spectacles cased in shagreen. But that was not the reason. For then came new insight, and a fresh humiliation. As I looked more intently I saw that I was not being mocked; I was being worshipped, adulated, flattered; I had become a god—for party purposes perhaps—and this was my day, given in my honour, for national celebration. ”

“ Put it, that the making public of our claim—our right to each other—is to be allowed by any possibility to affect the cause of a nation—the justice of that cause: doesn't that fact, if true, show that the whole basis of the political principles they have so boasted, and on which we have so blindly relied, was utterly and fantastically false and rotten? Haven't we, providentially, given the world the proof that it needed of its own lie? ”

“ Just at this moment the Victorian age has that bloom upon it—autumnal, not spring-like—which, in the nature of things, cannot last. That bloom I have tried to illumine before time wipes it away.
Under this rose-shaded lamp of history, domestically designed, I would have these old characters look young again, or not at least as though they belonged to another age. This wick which I have kindled is short, and will not last; but, so long as it does, it throws on them the commentary of a contemporary light. In another generation the bloom which it seeks to irradiate will be gone ”

“ I had one power—one weapon, still left to me unimpaired: to speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God! And the proposition is just this: whether to be stark honest, even against the apparent interests of the very cause you are out to plead, is not in the long run the surest way—if it be of God— to help it make good: whether defeat, with the whole truth told, isn't better than defeat hidden away and disowned, in the hope that something may yet come of it. You may get a truer judgment that way in the end ”

“ DIST. V. What more can one do than direct it for the generation in which one lives? That, it seems to me, is our main responsibility.
CHAMBERLAIN. Well, that's what you and I have done. How? Mainly by pulling down bigger men than ourselves. Randolph, Parnell, Gladstone—we got the better of them, didn't we? Have you never wondered why men of genius get sent into the world—only to be defeated? Gladstone was a bigger man than the whole lot of us; but we pulled him down—and I enjoyed doing it. Parnell, for all his limitations, was a great man. ”

“ KATHARINE (embracing him) . Oh, my dear, my dear, my dear!
PARNELL. How true to life love makes everything!—so clear and straight— looking back now. Through you I've learned this truth at any rate—that there are two things about which a man must never compromise—first his own soul, the right to be himself—no matter what others may think or do. ”