Ronald Arbuthnott Knox

“ May we not boldly say that the truth relative to their two minds—and all truth, remember, is relative to a mind—is that the man and the woman ARE REALLY the most beautiful pair of creatures in the world? That the honeyed whispers of love, which 121to the profane ear would seem to contain baseless flatteries, are nevertheless in a very real sense the Truth? Dear Miss Winterhead, if you brought home to us from America, per impossible, the most ungainly of hunchbacks, I for one would still hold it Truth that he was the handsomest of men, because to your Truth-perceiving mind he is so. ”

“ I have sometimes thought that it would be a pleasant occupation for the fancy to throw oneself forward into the future, and to write the imaginary reminiscences of an old lady, one’s granddaughter, who was putting print to paper in 2050! What a strange picture she would give of ourselves! How often she would hit the mark, how often miss it by a hair’s-breadth! She would let us see ourselves, I suppose, as a race of almost legendary heroes, to be spoken of with bated breath: ours would be the rugged virtues and the quaint, old-world ways! ”

“ It nearly broke O’Leary’s heart when the Retaining Fees Bill went through. I remember Lord Hopedale saying to him, ‘Surely you don’t defend the old system? You wouldn’t have a man get the best counsel because he can pay the biggest fee?’ and he just looked up with a twinkle in his eye and said, ‘I do defend it. Aren’t those that want the best counsel the biggest rogues? And aren’t the biggest rogues the rich people who can afford to pay for the best counsel?’ Oh, he was a wonderful smart chap, O’Leary. ”

“ In the old days, when reviewers held themselves bound to read through a book before they recorded their impressions of it, I should no doubt have had my weak points discovered by the eye of unfriendly criticism; to-day, one can still hope that one’s deficiencies will pass unobserved! I am afraid, now I come to look back over the record, that after all it is a chronicle of small doings; if I had known that I was to write reminiscences in my old age, perhaps I would have travelled further in search of impressions, and striven higher so as to satisfy my readers with the story of greater things. ”

“ Learn to forget that we were ever held up to you as models of what men should be: remember only that we are pictures of what men will be: to see human nature, fashioned of the same clay and cast in the same ultimate mould as yourselves, living in other conditions and reacting upon a situation that is not yours, may be tedious indeed, but not altogether unprofitable. Do not despise the future; you go into it, and from you it comes.”
That is our apology—ours who are young—for this business of writing forecasts. ”

“ To sneer at what is old-fashioned is an easy triumph, for the dead cannot plead in answer; cannot try to explain, far less succeed in explaining to us, what it felt like to wear those clothes, use that forgotten slang, cultivate those types and thrill to those ideals. True, their unchartered and undesired advocates, the praisers of the past, have done their cause disservice: youth will have its hit back at the greybeards for all the Polonius-tedium that boyhood endured, in forced silence. ”

“ I said, “has it taken you a fortnight to discover that?” “Guess I’m not going to be that kind of fool any longer,” he said—and he wasn’t. But there! What right has an old woman, after all her good resolutions, to repeat all these tender passages? Enough to say, as Porstock himself said in announcing the affair to our host, that we came down hitched. I asked his leave to speak to his mother the same evening, and found her kindness itself. “Take him, my dear,” she said, “and God bless you; you have discovered our treasure.” ”

“ Towards the end of the thirties, owing, I believe, to the great number of Anglo-Indians who came back after Home Rule was granted, the bath became a perfect obsession, and hardly any men thought they could get on without washing all over with water and soap twice a day. It may be imagined how slow and cumbrous this process was! And yet all this time we never used anything but a vacuum cleaner for our carpets and curtains—as if carpets and curtains were more entitled to the benefits of civilization than Man! ”

“ There was bad blood between the rowing and the football sets at the time, because the football semi-final had been reported in the St. Lucy’s Chronicle in a way that we all thought odious. But it was not a time for narrow, sectarian grudges; and we all turned out in our football skirts and our blue-and-gold-edged “perspirers” to watch the race from the towing path. The habit of putting on “change” to watch the races was merely a survival, ever since the towing path had been turned into a moving platform, but it was a ritual rigorously observed. ”

“ As I see things, religion does not so often dictate to the world its standards of behaviour—a morality, or even a hypocrisy, can sometimes do that with equal effect—as help men and women to live up to the standards of the time and to rise above them. But I am afraid there is no doubt that in the sixties and seventies we had lost, in great measure, the unclouded faith and simple piety of the twenties and thirties. ”

“ We are going to abandon Truth, and go forward boldly, none knows whither.
“What, then, is religion? The best definition that has been given of it is, I suppose, Poschling’s: ‘Religion is that realization of the Ego under the stimulus, real or apparent, of the Non-ego, which finds its hyper-egoization in de-egoization and its de-egoization in hyper-egoization.’ Let it stand at that. We will now return to the short-sighted policy of Baasha”—the rest of Bishop Dives’ sermon did not bear upon my immediate difficulties. ”

“ If we have seen, at the same time, that the ideals which once satisfied and the conditions which once contented us were ideals which ambition should have despised, and conditions which dignity should have resented, we will remember in the days to come that we must never again let ourselves be duped by the ignoble lure of a false peace. We have fought for honour, for civilization, for high aims and pure enthusiasms: we have met the powers of evil, and forced upon them the conditions of a not dishonourable peace. ”

“ Now, it is plain that all this is going to have a great influence, a very great influence indeed, upon the religious conceptions of our day. We used to say, for example, ‘The soul exists after death.’ We can no longer say that; we have to reduce our thought, that is our thinkage, to simpler elements. We have to say, ‘It is thinkworthy that if that thing which we call the soul is thinkworthy at all, then that thinkworthiness is still thinkworthy after death.’ Try it over a few times, and you will find it quite easy. ”

“ Canon Dives was very urgent with me to take Holy Orders. “It is just your sort we want,” he was kind enough to say: “people who have stripped Life of its mysteries and looked Truth in the face.” I objected that I felt disqualified on theological grounds: my geographical training had taught me that what is nowhere is nothing, and the idea of a Supreme Being who was ubiquitous affronted my intelligence. ”

“ Right you’ll be right, and you won’t ever let anything come between you, as some do. “The world has changed a great deal, Hodges,” as Miss Linthorpe said to me more than once, “since you and I went to school, but a man and a woman’s a man and a woman now as much as ever, even if the woman does get herself up in trousers and spats” (you’ll excuse my mentioning it, but those were Miss Linthorpe’s words, you know the way she had) . And to my way of thinking a man and a woman are a man and a woman, so long as they don’t let anything come between them, as some do. ”

“ But when it is the thoughtage not only of my thinkage but of the world-thinkage, then we go further; then we are not content to say, This is thinkable; we must needs add, This is thinkworthy. 215More than that we do not know, and we shall never know. The old confidence that objects exist, outside of and apart from our thinkage, is gone. The old confidence that things are true, outside of and apart from our thinkage, is gone. That confidence, valuable as it has been in the training of our race, and powerfully as it has contributed to the development of our history, is no longer ours. ”

“ No illusion lasts, no experience is other than transitory. And yet when we look back upon our young days, we can surely say that there was more of stability and permanence about those peaceful, slow-going times than we can find in the bustle and hurry of to-day. Our youth belongs to the last generation of English life that really saw life steadily and saw it whole ”

“ Really, we are spoilt nowadays!
Nor were the incidental duties of a Member of Parliament inconsiderable. Now I would be writing my autograph in the prizes to be distributed at my old school; now I would be at the telephone opening a bazaar; now I would be trudging out, in all weathers, to the wireless installation at the back of the house to unveil a statue, to lay a foundation-stone, or (for I was still known as a sportswoman) to kick off at some Manchester football match. ”

“ Now, that all thought is relative to a thinker has long been clear so far as the process of thought, what we call nowadays the thinkage, is concerned. It is the boast of modern philosophy, trained, and proud to have been trained, in the school of relativist Science, that it has gone further than this. It assures us (I trust I make my meaning clear) that it is not only our thinkage but our thoughtage that is relative to a thinker. ”

“ It is not easy, this search of ours; like hill-climbers, we are bounded by our own horizon, and cannot yet see the full possibilities of disbelief that lie ahead of us. And just as, surely, we do not blame Luther because, with his limited perspective, he failed to disbelieve in the Bible; just as we do not blame Kant because he could not see how to disbelieve in the human reason ”

“ I always distrust people who say they look back to their school days as the happiest time of their lives: either they must have been unimaginative women from the first, or retrospect has mellowed for them the sour realities of memory. ”

“ Only artists looked at pictures, and they chiefly to see how they could invent a new method, and turn the old ones on to the scrap-heap. “They didn’t always succeed,” he explained. “You’d be too young to remember the commotion there was in the early thirties, when nobody would talk about anything but relativity, and Manning Barker suddenly laid it down that there could be no such thing as Truth, even in Art, without velocity. His school would only paint for the screen, and you had to sit for a quarter of an hour to see the portrait of a Cabinet minister. ”

“ In those days, many families were still old-fashioned enough to have a doctor who not only diagnosed the presence of disease but went on to prescribe for it himself—very much as if you were to put a law case in the hands of a solicitor and he were to take your case into court and plead as counsel. ”

“ It would have been my good fortune to find solace in the companionship of two brothers younger than myself, had not a mysterious destiny—which of us can read his life’s record without confusion, when he considers the long tale of infants who never reach maturity?—carried off both in the age of their innocence to a world where innocence has its value. ”

“ But, more important than all these busy idlenesses of Oxford life, I began to find myself at this time as a public speaker. Juliet Savage had early joined all the clubs she could hear of: I never knew a woman who had such a passion for the exchange of opinions. ”

“ MY PARLIAMENTARY ELECTION The Party System has its critics; it will always have its critics. But you will not abolish it; you can do so only by being false to your own principles, and forming an anti-Party Party.—Lord Hopedale.
I had not, up to this time, taken much part in public affairs even on a small scale. ”

“ Now, the marriage contract is made between two persons each of whom is to the other, and therefore philosophically speaking is, the most beautiful creature in the world. They are married, a shadow grows up between them, there are scenes, difficulties—suddenly they wake up to find that they are no longer in love with one another. ”

“ It cannot be too often repeated; in thinking a thing we thing it: our thinkage—wonderful thought! I mean, wonderful thoughtage!—thinks thingness into the thing! It cannot be too often repeated, the man who thinks things things things!
217“And another great advantage arises, once we have mastered this salutary doctrine. The old religious formulas were always trying to make our thoughts correspond with realities conceived as real, truths conceived as true, outside of and apart from ourselves. They were always saying, I believe in this, I believe in that—oh dear, oh dear, oh dear! ”

“ It is greatly to be hoped that in the event of another European War the central position of Mittel-Europa would have a powerful influence in putting a speedy end to the conflict. It would clearly be impossible for the Republic to take sides with either belligerent, since it would immediately strangle all its industries by doing so. Being neutral, it would necessarily interpose a barrier between any two great powers who were trying to fly at one another’s throats. ”

“ We are all so glad that you are bringing your tame bear back to England with you, and look forward with tremendous excitement to the day when you will exhibit him. I do most earnestly hope that you will be happy: I’m sure you deserve to be; one gives up so much, does one not, in tying oneself up to a stranger for years and years like that. ”

“ But our grandsons will be unwitting accomplices in the conspiracy of unconventionality that now educates us: there will be no attitudinizing about their scepticism, no arrière pensée in their immorality. To them, as to us, the fashion of the age will seem a Providential culmination: they will play hide-and-seek in its shadowy confines without stopping to ask whether or no they are lost in them. ”

“ He said because it lived by innovation; it did not develop gradually, like the mind or the tastes of a man as he grows up, but found its successive inspirations in continual revolt from the latest fashion: “it’s a series of kicks,” he said, “like the old petrol tanks.” That meant that the public simply didn’t care about pictures, because they—the laymen—hadn’t leisure to follow all the latest movements in art criticism. In the old days you took years to learn how to paint a picture, and only a fortnight to learn how to criticize one ”

“ Sweating away on the treadmill, humanity fancies that it is mountaineering, and that the dawn is just going to show above the next slope. There’s an epigram for you. Let me finish now, before I spoil it....
The rest of Miss Linthorpe’s statement, though equally curious, was entirely private. I am afraid I have got well past her age without ever acquiring her truculent directness of thought and of expression. ”