Louise Imogen Guiney

“ Devotion to a blackberry pasture and a swimming-pool confers youth on the devotee, provided he has not to pick fruit nor rescue ribald little boys for a living. A travelled man, a man of the world, has a ripe expert look: one says of him, admiring his talk and his manners, that he bears his age with grace. But nothing is so ageless as a sailor: he can bear his age neither well nor ill, for the obvious reason. In his hard cheek and blue eye are innocence, readiness, zest, taciturnity, daring, shyness, truth: all the fine wild qualities which "they that sit in parlors never dream of." ”

“ The primeval heathen has stirred within us. We have been under the witchery of Isis. We aspire to be a Moonshee, rather than any potentate of this universe. Have we not followed you, O "planet of progression!" all our bright, volatile, restless, tide-like days? We wound you not with the analytic eye, nor startle you with telescopes. The scepticisms of astronomy enter not into our rubric. Are you not comely? Do you not spiritualize the darkness with one touch of your pale garment? Then what are they to us, your dimensions and your distances? Gross vanity of knowledge! ”

“ Or the keeper abominably abuses a certain elephant, a very saint for patience, a genius for cleverness, a hero for humor; and six years after, the same elephant, in another duchy, spies his old tormentor, winds his lithe proboscis about his waist, and neatly cracks him against a wall. A dozen influential persons plead, as defence for the assassin, his unparalleled nobleness of character; but the public blood is up: he has to die. To some reforms we shall never come, for thought about them is deadened in us by the operation of our accursed generic pride. ”

“ We cannot wish it away; but we can demand a mastery over it in the least, as well as in the greatest: a melancholy like that of Burns, truth itself, native dignity itself; or the Virgilian melancholy of Tennyson in his sweet broodings over the abysses of our unblest life, and the turn of his not hopeless thought and phrase. We can demand, in these matters, the insincerity of the too-little, rather than the cant of the too-much. The danger of expressing despondency is extreme. The maudlin shoots like a parasite from the most moving themes, and laughter dogs us in our rapt mood. ”

“ It is only when he is quite alone that he drops his jaw, and stretches his legs; then, heigho! arises like a smoke, and envelops him becomingly, the beautiful native well-bred torpidity of the gods, of poetic boredom, of "the Oxford manner."
"How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable!"
sighed Hamlet of this mortal outlook. As it came from him in the beginning, that plaint, in its sincerity, can come only from the man of culture, who feels about him vast mental spaces and depths, and to whom the face of creation is but comparative and symbolic. ”

“ But she has also a Sahara spectacle of the most stolid, empty folk in the universe: the sapless, rootless, flowerless millions who pay, as it were, for-159- Shakespeare and Shelley, for Turner and Purcell, for Newton and Darwin. Easy, is it not, for the superlative quality to form and act, in fullest power here and there, in a nation where no smallest grain of it is ever wasted on the common mortal? But Ireland reeks with genius impartially distributed. It is infectious; every one suffers from it, in its various stages and manifestations. ”

“ Strange and fearful is his discovery, amid the bric-à-brac of the world, that this knowledge, or this material benefit, is for him alone. He would fain beg off from the acquisition, and shake the touch of the tangible from his imperious wings. It is not enough to cease to strive for personal favor; your true indifférent is Early Franciscan: caring not to have, he fears to hold. Things useful need never become to him things desirable. Towards all commonly-accounted sinecures, he bears the coldest front in Nature, like a magician walking a maze, and scornful of its flower-bordered detentions. ”

“ Holbein's greedy instinct for form wreaks itself on Henry's characteristic contours: everywhere you recognize the puffy flesh, the full jaw and beady eyes, the level close-shaven head; and, more than all, the round, protuberant, malformed chin, like an onion set in the thin growth of carroty beard. Other artists slur over that ugly little chin, but not the man from Augsburg. Hardly do the elaborations of embroidered doublets and jewelled surcoats with barrel sleeves, laughably misplaced on this hogshead Majesty, give the great court-painter such easy pleasure in the handling. ”

“ Marry, a glow of honest self-satisfaction is cheaply traded for a wad of current specie, and an inkling into the ways of a bold and thirsty world. Methinks I have "arrived"; I have attained a courteous composure proof against mortal hurricanes. Life is no longer a rude and trivial comedy with the Beautifully Bulldozed, who feels able to warm to his own catastrophe, and even to cry, "Pray, madam, don't mention it," to an apologizing lady in a gig, who drives over him and kills him, and does so, moreover, in the most bungling manner in the world. ”

“ Before the eventual proof came that he was clear of blame, there were thoughts even of an imperative parting, and a reaching for the rectification towards the Happy Hunting-Grounds, where, at an era's end, we could be joyous together; and where under the old guiding then never unskilful, the old sympathy then never erring, the Fine Gentleman could be to his virtue's full, and in no misapprehending air, his innocent, upright, loving self again. But instantly, as if to wipe out forever that possible evil of which men could dream him guilty, came the moving and memorable end. ”

“ A MAN of thought wears himself out, standing continually on the defensive. The more original a character, the more it is at war with common conditions, the more it wastes its substance scourging the tides and charging windmills; and this being recognized, the exceptional person, your poet or hero, is expected to show an ascetic pallor, to eat and sleep little, to have a horrible temper, and to die at thirty-seven. Has he an active brain, he must pay for it by losing all the splendid passivity, inner and outer, which belongs to oxen and philosophers. ”

“ Like the gods, you may, if you will, apprehend all that has ever been, at a glance, and out of that all, seize the little which is perfect and durable, and live in it: "in the central calm at the heart of agitation." By so much as London and her draggled outer precincts are bulging and vile, and her mood stupid, cruel, and senseless, victory is the larger for having found here a spiritual parterre of perpetual green. ”

“ Marry, man himself, in the birth of his moral ugliness, set up the hateful division, estranged these inestimable friends, and then, unto everlasting, pursues, maligns, subjugates, and kills the beings braver, shrewder, and more innocent than he. He has wrested from its beautiful meaning his "dominion over them." Power made him tyrannous, and tyranny bred in its victims hate and revenge and fear, and from the footfall of man all creation flees away, unless, indeed, as in Swift's most telling allegory, where the cultured Houyhnhnms may succeed in subjecting the Yahoos. ”

“ Venerable Ireland has failed, as the world reckons failure. She cannot take prettily to her rôle of subjugated province. Abominably misruled, without a senate, without commerce, she has fallen back into the sullen interior life, into the deep night of reverie. From that brooding dark she has let leap no modern flame supremely great. For the great artist is not Irish, as yet, though with warm exaggerations, uncritical enthusiasms, affectionate encouragements, her own exalt her own. ”

“ Sudden frescos begin, unawares, to gleam and flush there, in gold and olive and rose, as if Fra Angelico had been set loose with his palette in a sequestered cloister. Your Horace, be it known, was a home-keeper, and, as Stevenson claimed that dogs avoid doing, "talks big of what does not concern him."
There is but one thing which can honorably draw the heart out of an American in Europe. He has wrought for himself the white ideal of government; he belongs to a growing, not a decaying society; there is much without, upon which he looks with wonder and even with pity ”

“ HORACE was not often wrong, in his habitual beautiful utterance of commonplace; but was he not altogether wrong when he gave us the maxim that the traveller may change the sky over him, but not the mind within him? that the mood, the personal condition, is not to be driven forth by any new sea or land, but must cling to a man in his flight, like the pollen under a bee's wing? ”

“ An actor finds it inspiring to step forth from the wings, steeled cap-à-pie in self-consciousness, before a great houseful of enthusiastic faces and hands; but if he ever knows a moment yet more ecstatic, it is when he is alone in the hill-country, swimming in a clear pool, and undemonstratable as human save by his habiliments hanging on a bush, and his dog, sitting on the margin under, doubtfully eyeing now these, now the unfamiliar large white fish which has shed them. ”

“ To handle the inscrutable Celt on his own acres is to learn,-161- or at least to apprehend, the secret of a live resistance, incredibly prolonged, to a power almost wearied out with maintaining mastery. The sense of equity, the sense of humor itself, in the humblest and silentest Irishman, is armor enough against fate. He, the law-breaker, has compensations which the law-makers wot not of, in his own ethic subtleties. His soul swells big with dreams. ”

“ Poet by poet, from the beginning, has known the look of London's void heart at night, and has had, next it, his keenest gust of sovereignty, on jealous marches when his own footfall is soft as a forest creature's, for fear of man and of mortal interruption. The living are gone for the moment: the dead and their greatness are "nearer than hands and feet." ”

“ Old friends, these painted folk! You look at them on canvases which Evelyn admired at Weybridge; which Pepys longed to buy; to which Horace Walpole provided a date and a name; which brushed Ben Jonson and Carew passing towards the masques of Whitehall; which have seen change and the shadow of change, and are themselves ever richer for the remembered eyes which have looked up at them, during three hundred years. ”

“ Every chapter of the Fine Gentleman's biography is crammed with events, perils, excitements, catastrophes, and blunders, due in great part, by a scientific verdict, to this tremendous vitality balancing on too narrow a base. With years, there began to come the "philosophic mind." His sweetness and submission grew with his strength; never was there a sinner so tender of conscience, so affected by remonstrance, so fruitful, after, in the good works of amended ways. New virtues seemed to shoot on all sides, and the old ones abided and flourished. ”

“ The men and women on the walls are neither sophisticated nor complex. They are vehement in oath as in compliment, and hit at Fate straight from the shoulder. The best among them has a certain fierce zest of habit. Sidney and Sir Thomas More, each in his stainless soul, would have put the other in the pillory for blunders of piety. And such characters, with their stormy circumstance, their distinct homogeneous look and mien, get to be fully understood. Nobody pretends to know the involutions of James the Second ”

“ For children he had the most marked indulgence and affection, an inexhaustible gentleness, as if he found the only statecraft he could respect among them. For their delight he made himself into a horse, and rode many a screaming elf astride of his back for a half-mile through the meadow, before coming to the heart of the business, which was to sit or kneel suddenly, and cast poor Mazeppa yards away in the wet grass: a proceeding hailed with shouts of acclaim from the accompanying crowd of playfellows. ”

“ It is quite as well that the gods have allowed us no vote concerning our own fates: it would be too hard a riddle to guess whether it is a dignified thing to continue, or when it is a profitable hour to cease. A greedy soul, desiring to live, reaps his wish, like Endymion, between moonrise and dawn, and gapes, yet unaware, for a bank-account and octogenarianism. Why wouldst thou grow up, sirrah? "To be a philosopher? a madman. An alchemist? a beggar. A poet? ”

“ Could the spirited Prince have had, ever and again, through those dark seasons, a pittance of the abounding prosperity which befell him after he had given up self-discipline, and had almost given up hope, it might have saved from fatal torpor "the only genius of the Stuart line."
So perverted grew his habit of mind, that eventually the strongest incentives could barely move, anger, or rouse him. To act like a man awake, he needed a shock, an emergency. ”

“ In naught have we more wronged the feudal ages than in denying to them an intimate knowledge and love of scenic detail. One glance at their cathedral capitals, at leaves, rose-haws, antlers, cobwebs, and shells, in stone carven since the tenth century, should have been corrective of that foolish depreciation of a people far nearer to the heart of things than we. The common dislike of gypsies is another revelation of jealousy: for we are not the Mother's favored children. ”

“ We owe our gratitude to the men of letters who deliberately undertake to be gay: for nobody expects unconscious and spontaneous gayety in books nowadays. The modern spirit has seen to that. No thanks of ours are too good even for the bold bad Mr. Henley, who is so acrid towards Americans: for he is the one living poet already famous, who has struck, and means to strike, the very note of "How happy is he born and taught," and "Shall I, wasting in despair." ”

“ From the dazzle of history it is a bit difficult, at-44- first, to turn the inward eye upon art alone. But it is Hans Holbein whom we have really come to see. And he is here in his plenary pomp: in chalk drawings, miniatures in hone-stone, burnt wood, and enamel, and in easel-pictures of every sort.
No. 42, in the West Gallery, is an immense cartoon with outlines pricked, made for a fresco in the old Whitehall, comprising a life-sized group of the two Henries and their respective queens, the estate of only one of whom, had, as the modern world knows, finality. ”

“ Youth is the most inspiring thing on earth, but not the best to let loose, especially while it carries swaggeringly that most dangerous of all blunderbusses, knowledge at half-cock. There is, indeed, no more melancholy condition than that of healthy boys scowling over books, in an eternal protest against their father Adam's fall from a state of relative omniscience. Sir Philip Sidney thought it was "a piece of the Tower of Babylon's curse that a man should be put to school to learn his mother-tongue!" ”

“ Unique patrician wit, delicacy of feeling, knightly courtesy, have run out of their allotted conduits, and they color the speech of beggars. Distinction of all sorts sprouts in the unlikeliest places. Violent Erin produces ever and anon the gentlest philosopher; recluse Erin sends forth the consummate cosmopolitan; hunted and jealous Erin holds up on its top stalk the open lily of liberality,
——"courteous, facile, sweet,
Hating that solemn vice of greatness, pride."
Ireland is at work in every department of every civilization: it is a seed-shedding, an aroma, intangible as April. ”