Vernon Lee

“ For if life, wisely lived, ought to be, as I firmly believe, nothing but a long act of courtship, then, surely, its exquisite things—summer nights with loose-hanging stars, pale sunny winter noons, first strolls through towered towns or upon herb-scented hills, the hearing again of music one has understood, not to speak of the gesture and voice of the people whom one holds dear—all these, and all other exquisite movements or exquisite items of life, should be felt with the added indescribable pleasure of being gifts. ”

“ In a small way, we all of us commit that man's mistake of thinking that the life of our dear ones is in an image, instead of in the heartbeats which the image—like a name, a place, any associated thing—can produce in ourselves. And only changing things can answer to our changing self; only living creatures live with us. Once learned by heart, the portrait, be it never so speaking, ceases to speak, or we to listen to its selfsame message. What was once company to us, because it awakened a flickering feeling of wished-for presence, becomes, after a time, mere canvas or paper ”

“ I was struck with the charm of such a hotel room—the very few ornaments, greatly cherished since they were carried about; the books for reading, not for furniture; the bought flowers in common glasses; and the consequent sense of selection, deliberateness, and personality. Good heavens, I reflected, are we mortals so cross-grained that we can thoroughly enjoy things only by contrast, and that a sort of mild starvation is needed to whet our æsthetic appetite? ”

“ Genuine friendship is an addition to our real self, a revelation of new possibilities; and young people, busily absorbing the traditions of the past and the fashions of the day, have very rarely got a real self to reveal or to bestow. So that the feeling we experience in later life towards our playmates is, in fact, rather a wistful pleasure in the thought of our own past than any real satisfaction in their present selves. ”

“ Life is for ever murmuring to us the secret of its unendingness; and it is to our honour, and for our happiness, that we, poor flashes of a second, identify ourselves with the great unceasing, steady light which we and millions of myriads besides go to make up. Are we much surer of being alive to-morrow than of being dead in fifty years? "Is there any moment which can certify to its successor?" That is the answer to La Fontaine's octogenarian, planting his trees, despite the gibes of the little beardless boys whom, as is inevitable in such cases, he survived. ”

“ One speeds along the straight road, flying into the beckoning horizon, conscious only of mountain lines or stacked cloud masses; living, for the instant, in air, space become fluid and breathable, earth a mere detail; and then, at the turn, slackening earth's power asserting itself with the road's windings. Curiosity keenly on edge, or memory awakened; and the past also casting its spells, with the isolated farms or the paved French villages by the river-bank, or the church spire, the towers, in the distance.... ”

“ For life must be phrased, lest it become mere jabber, without pleasure or lesson. Indeed, one may say that if games teach a man to stand a reverse or snatch an opportunity, so bicycling might afford an instructive analogy of what things to notice, to talk about and remember on life's high-roads and lanes; and what others, whizzing past on scarce skimming wheel, to reject from memory and feeling.
The bicycle, in this particular, like the imagination it so well symbolizes, is a great liberator, freeing us from dwelling among ugliness and rubbish. ”

“ Happiness is good for us, excellent for us, necessary for us, indispensable to us. But ... how put such transcendental facts into common or garden (for it is garden) language? But we—that is to say, poor human beings—are one thing, and life is quite another. And as life has its own programme irrespective of ours, to wit, apparently its own duration and intensifying throughout all changes, it is quite natural that we, its little creatures of a second, receive what we happen to ask for—namely, happiness—as a reward for being thoroughly alive. ”

“ The suns will cake the insufficient earth and parch the delicate roots; the storms will batter and tear the frail creepers. No doubt. But at this present moment all is fair and fragrant. And when the storms have done their wicked worst, and the sun and the frosts—nay, when that roof on which we perch is pulled to pieces, tiles and bricks, and the whole block goes—may there not be, for those caring enough, the chance of growing another garden, there or elsewhere? ”

“ Francis' Hymn to the Sun might be given as an example of the wise man's courtship of what we stupidly call inanimates.
For courtship might be our attitude towards everything which is capable of giving pleasure; and would not many more things give us pleasure—let us say, the sun in the heavens, the water on the stones, even the fire in the grate, if, instead of thinking of them as existing merely to make our life bearable, we called them, like the saint of Assisi, My Lord the Sun, and Sister Water, and Brother Fire, and thought of them with joy and gratitude? ”

“ For there is always something puzzling in the present; unrestful and disquieting in all novelty; and we require, poor harassed mortals, the past and lots of it; the safe, the done-for past, a heap of last year's leaves or of dry, scented hay (which is mere dead grass and dead meadow-flowers) to take our rest upon. There is a virtue ineffable in things known, tried, understood; a comfort and a peacefulness, often truly Elysian, in finding one's self again in this quiet, crepuscular, downy world of old friendships—a world, as I have remarked, largely peopled with ghosts, our own and other folks' ”

“ Nay, privately, being quite incapable of deciphering a score, I confess that there is something dry and dreary in absolutely soundless music—music which from the silent composer passes to the silent performer, who is at the same time a silent listener, without the neighbours being even one bit the wiser? Besides, were this gift universal, it would deprive us of that delightful personality the mere performer, whose high-strung nervousness, or opulent joviality, is, after all, a pleasant item in art, a humorous dramatic interlude, in the excessive spirituality of music. ”

“ We care not what a creature like this happens to be doing or suffering; we care for her existence because it means energy and charm. Why not deliberately aim at such effects? Now that the stage is no longer the mere concert-room for magnificent poetry, lyric or epic, it might become what would be consonant with our modern psychologic tastes, the place where the genius of author or actor allowed us to come in sight, with the fulness and completeness of the intentional and artificial, of those finest spectacles of all, great temperaments. ”

“ The most thrilling moment, I will confess, which theatres can still give me is that—but it is really sui generis and ineffable—when, having got upstairs, you meet in the narrow lobbies of an old-fashioned playhouse the tuning of the fiddles and the smell—of gas, glue, heaven knows what glories of yester-year—which, ever since one's babyhood, has come to mean "the play." People have expended much genius and more money to make theatrical representation transcend imagination ”

“ And the essential goodness and fruitfulness of life, its worthiness to be lived over and over again, had come home to me more and more with the knowledge and the love of her who had made my own life so far happier and more significant. So that my endeavour to enumerate some of the unnoticed gifts and deepest consolations of life has come to be connected in my mind with this creature who consoled so many and gave herself, with such absolute gift of loving-kindness or gratitude, to all people and all things that deserved it. ”

“ Compare with this the blessedness of knowing that the contents of the other person's mind are nice, pure of all worldliness, pretence, and meanness; that the creature's thoughts, if opened out to one, would diffuse the scent of sunshine and lavender even as does clean, well-folded linen.
Hence the charm of a whole lot of persons not conspicuous for conversational powers: men who have lived much out-of-doors, with gun or rod; shy country neighbours, cross old scholars, simple motherly little housewives; and, if one get at their reality, peasants and even servants. ”

“ For every creature we do really love seems to reveal a whole side of life, by the absorbing of our attention into that creature's ways; nay, more, the fact that what we call loving is in most cases a complete creation, at least a thorough interpretation of them by our fancy and our shaken-up, refreshed feelings.
A new friendship, by this unconscious imitation of the new friend's nature and habits, and by the excitement of the thing's pleasant novelty, causes us to discover new qualities in literature, art, our surroundings, ourselves. ”

“ Moreover, that next train was not till eight in the evening, and it was now half-past five.
I felt all it was proper to feel on the occasion, and said, if anything, rather more. Missing a train is a terrible business, even if you miss nothing else in consequence; and the inner disarray, the blow and wrench to thoughts and feelings, is most often far worse than any mere upsetting of arrangements. A chasm suddenly gapes between present and future, and the river of life flows backwards, if but for a second. It is most fit and natural to lose one's temper ”

“ Only one thing we should guard against, and act firmly about, despite all sentimental scruples. During the period of activity of a portrait—I mean while we still, more or less, look at it—we must beware lest it take, in our memory, the place of the original. Those unchanging features have the insistence of their definiteness and permanence, and may insidiously extrude, exclude, the fleeting, vacillating outlines of the remembered reality. And those alone concern our heart, and have a right to occupy our fancy. ”

“ To what he has said I should like to add that if we are often silent with those whom we love best, it is because we are sensitive to their whole personality, face, gesture, texture of soul and body; that we are living with them not only in the present, but enriched, modified by all they have said before, by everything remaining in our memory as theirs. To talk would never express a state of feeling so rich and living ”

“ But the power which appeals to some of us is struggling and brooding tragically, as in Michelangelo and Beethoven; while the power which straightway subdues certain others is easy, temperate, and radiant, as in Titian and Mozart. And thus it comes about that every soul—"where a soul can be discerned"—is the citizen, conscious or not, of a spiritual country, and obeys a hierarchy, bends before a sovereign genius, crowned or mitred by inscrutable right divine, never to be deposed. ”

“ The hotel room I have spoken of reveals the fact that we usually have far too many pleasant things about us, to be able to extract much pleasure from any of them; while, of course, somebody else, at the other end of the world let us say, or merely in the mews to the back, has so very much too little as to have none at all, which is another way of diminishing possible enjoyment. There seems, moreover, to be a certain queer virtue in mere emptiness, in mere negation. We require a margin of nothing round everything that is to charm us ”

“ Mankind may be divided into playgoers and not playgoers; and the first are far more numerous, and also far more illustrious. It evidently is a defect, and perhaps a sign of degeneracy, akin to deafness or to Daltonism, not to enjoy the theatre; not to enjoy it, at least in the reality, when there or just after coming away. For I can enjoy the thought of the play, and the thought of other folks liking it, so long as I am not taken there. ”

“ It spoils the Campagna, for instance, to have a brougham, with coachman and footman, and grooms to lead back the horses, all kicking their heels at the bridge of the Anio: worthy persons, no doubt, and conscientiously subserving our higher existence; but the bare fact of whom, their well-appointed silhouettes, seem somehow incongruous as we get further and more solitary among the pale grass billows, deeper into that immense space, that unlimited horizon of ages.
These are some of the prestigious merits of the bicycle, though many more might be added. ”

“ We are apt to blunt our literary sense by reading far too much, and to lessen our capacity for getting the great delights from books by making reading into a routine and a drudgery. Of course I know that reading books has its utilitarian side, and that we have to consider printed matter (let me never call it literature!) as the raw material whence we extract some of the information necessary to life. But long familiarity with an illiterate peasantry like the Italian one, inclines me to think that we grossly exaggerate the need of such book-grown knowledge. ”

“ I feel sure that so doing would save much of that dreadful bitterness and dryness of soul, a state of conscious non-receptivity corresponding in musical experience with what ascetic writers call "spiritual aridity"—which must occasionally depress even the most fortunate of listeners. For, look in thy conscience, O friendly fellow-concert-goer, and say truly, hast thou not, many times and oft, sat to no purpose upon narrow seats, blinded by gas, with no outlook save alien backs and bonnets, while divinest music flowed all around, yet somehow wetted not thy thirsty and irritated soul? ”