Bernard Le Bouyer de Marmontel

“ For sixty years the book lay germinating in a hard and barren soil, unworthy of it; and then rose fresh and strong from oblivion to the just and growing fame it enjoys to-day. It has been well said ‘to give the soul of man an impetus towards truth.’
Though his tastes, his poverty, and his health alike precluded Vauvenargues from joining in the socialities of the cafés and the salons during his brief life in Paris, he saw sometimes Marmontel and d’Argental, and often Voltaire. ”

“ In 1726, if not before, he was journeyman to William Bowyer [q. v.] , the 'learned' printer, and he ever acknowledged the kindness with which he had been treated, in proof of which he left by his will ten guineas to Bowyer for a mourning wig. ”

“ One was a maiden who, disguised in the dress of a page, had been taken from Marmion's train. The cloak and hood could not conceal or mar her beauty. On the breast of her doublet was Lord Marmion's badge, a falcon crest, which she vainly attempted to conceal.
At the command of the Prioress, the silken band that fastened the young girl's long, fair hair was undone, and down over her slender form fell the rich golden ringlets. Before them stood Constance de Beverley, a professed nun of Fontevraud. Lured by the love of Marmion, she had broken her vow, and fled from the convent. ”

“ Browning is a metaphysical poet, is to show that he is not a metaphysical thinker, though he is a thinker whose thought is metaphysical so far as principle goes. A metaphysical thinker is always in some way or other thinking about thought ”

“ There is nothing pleasant in nonsense. In both humour and the ludicrous the imperfection must refer to some kind of right or truth, and revolve, as it were, round a fixed axis. "To laugh heartily we must have reality," writes Marmontel, and it is remarkable that most good comic situations have been taken from the author's own experience. The best kind of humour is the most artistic embellishment of the ludicrous.
The fact that humour is often found in comparisons, probably led Léon Dumont to consider that it arose from the meeting of two opposite ideas in the mind. ”

“ Miss Marjorie Bowen has a remarkable gift for the presentation of a number of lifelike portraits against a vivid and gorgeous background, and the successive pictures of the Dutch and Flemish Schools which she creates in Prince and Heretic, make it, if not quite so successful as I Will Maintain, at least a book which no lover of the Lowlands can afford to miss. ”

“ And with that Bowyer burst into the room with his men behind him. He held a revolver in his hand.
"I shall shoot the first man who moves," he said; and no one did move. They stood like wax figures moulded in an attitude for ever. Imagine, if you can, the scene which confronted me! On the library ladder, with a hand thrust behind the books on one of the highest shelves, was mounted one of the three foreigners. A second--he whom we had seen at the window--stood over a chair into which Bradley Rymer was strapped with a gag over his mouth. The third supported Violet. ”

“ Mortimer says in a recent admirable critique--"His position in regard to the thought of the age is paradoxical, if not inconsistent. He is in advance of it in every respect but one, the most important of all, the matter of fundamental principles; in these he is behind it. His processes of thought are often scientific in their precision of analysis; the sudden conclusion which he imposes upon them is transcendental and inept." Browning's conclusions, which harmonise so well with our haphazard previsionings, are sometimes so disastrously facile that they exercise an insurrectionary influence. ”

“ Browning often treats his subject as a pure thinker might, but he has always conceived it as a poet; he has always seen in one flash, everything, whether moral or physical, visible or invisible, which the given situation could contain. ”

“ Browning's art too often falls, and find what fault we may with his method, let us ever remember how much he has to say, and how effectively he communicates the shock of new thought which was first imparted to him by the vivid conception of a large and far-reaching story. The value of the thought, indeed, is not to be measured by poetic tests ”

“ Mlle. Clairon laughingly replied that she saw plainly that he would never let her alone until she had adopted a tone and manner more suited to comedy than to tragedy. To which Marmontel rejoined that this she could never do, since her voice, her look, her pronunciation, her gestures, her attitudes, were all instinctively dignified and majestic, and that, if she would but consent to be natural, her tragic powers could not fail to be enhanced. ”

“ In 1724 Bowyer was a nonjuror; we know nothing more of his religious views except a few traces, in his early life, recorded by Ord in the 'History of Cleveland,' where it is said that he had a controversy with a priest who defended the conduct of his sister, a professed nun of the order of Poor Clares, at Dunkirk. The letters commence October 1696, and end in June 1697, at the time when he was a journeyman printer at Daniel Sheldon's in Bartholomew Close. He seems to have been a very kind-hearted man, and ever ready to show kindness to others. ”

“ In this passage, Browning gives expression to an idea which continually reappears in his pages—that human life, in its essence, is movement to moral goodness through opposition. His fundamental conception of the human spirit is that it is a process, and not a fixed fact. ”

“ Browning sat reading a letter which ran as follows:
"I find myself so happy with your little Rosamond, who chances to be my room-mate, that I have postponed my visit to Riverside, until some future time, which, if you continue neutral, may never come—but the moment you trespass on forbidden ground, or breathe a word of love into her ear—beware! She loves you. ”

“ The scientific attitude of the intelligence is almost as markedly visible in Mr. Browning as the strength of his creative power. The lesson of The Ring and the Book is perhaps as nearly positive as anything poetic can be. It is true that ultimately the drama ends in a vindication of what are called the ways of God to man, if indeed people are willing to put themselves off with a form of omnipotent justice which is simply a partial retribution inflicted on the monster, while torture and butchery fall upon victims more or less absolutely blameless. ”

“ Browning has no occasion to do, because he takes its assumptions upon trust. He is a constant analyst of secondary motives and judgments. No modern freethinker could make a larger allowance for what is incidental, personal, and even material in them: we shall see that all his practical philosophy is bound up with this fact. ”

“ Most of us, at one time or another, have endured or inflicted that well-intentioned banality. And here is Miss Marjorie Bowen, most skilful of historical romancers, setting out to tell us precisely what stories. She calls her volume Shadows of Yesterday (Smith, Elder) , explaining in a preface that is by no means the least attractive chapter that they are supposed to be the histories attached to a collection of antique oddments in a little Italian museum. ”

“ It is of good hap, of welcome significance: none the less there is an aspect of our mortality of which the poet's evasion is uncompromising and absolute. I cannot do better than quote Mr. Mortimer's noteworthy words hereupon, in connection, moreover, with Browning's artistic relation to Sex, that other great Protagonist in the relentless duel of Humanity with Circumstance. "The final inductive hazard he declines for himself; his readers may take it if they will. It is part of the insistent and perverse ingenuity which we display in masking with illusion the more disturbing elements of life. ”

“ No one grows any better, either bodily or morally, by being on the Bowery. So the quicker they go to some other place the better.
But the Bowery draws men by its own strange attraction. They get into the swing of its life, and find the company that misery loves. God knows there's plenty of it there! I've seen men that you could not drive from the Bowery. But when a man takes Jesus as his guide he wants to search for better grounds. ”

“ Early in the next year he took into partnership the apprentice-manager of his business, and thenceforward the ever-increasing success of the business was insured. The typographical anecdotes of the Bowyer Press from 1722, when Bowyer became a partner with his father, to 1766, when he took John Nichols into partnership, extend in Nichols's 'Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century' to 703 closely printed 8vo pages, and from the latter date to his death in 1777 the joint productions of Bowyer and Nichols occupy in description and anecdotes 293 further pages of the same work. ”

“ Many books have been written on the philosophy of Browning's poetry. Stated briefly its message is that of an optimism which depends on a recognition of the strenuousness of life. The base of his creed, as of Carlyle's, is the gospel of labour; he believes in the supreme moral worth of effort. Life is a "training school" for a future existence, and our place in it depends on the courage and strenuousness with which we have laboured here. Evil is in the world only as an instrument in the process of development; by conquering it we exercise our spiritual faculties the more. ”

“ Morwenna came from Wales, from Brecknockshire, where was her father’s palace: she loved the things of God more than the things of men.
And then the wild Atlantic rolled against these cliffs as now, and the gorse flamed over them as now, and the little brook dived through fern, and foamed over the rocks to join the sea, as now. And there were men and women where you dwell, as now; and there were little children on their knees, as now. But then there was no knowledge of God in the hearts of men, as there is now. There was no church, as now ”

“ The graceful windows of the nave, the altarpiece of the 18th century, and in particular, the Renaissance cloister adjoining the south side, are its most interesting features. Among the industries are iron-founding, steam sawing, the manufacture of woollens, carriage-making, cooperage and brandy-distilling. There is a large trade in wine, plums, cattle, grain and other agricultural produce.
Marmande was a bastide founded about 1195 on the site of a more ancient town by Richard Cœur de Lion, who granted it a liberal measure of self-government. ”

“ Browning's dramatic sympathies and metaphysical or religious ideas constitute him an optimist. He believes that no experience is wasted, and that all life is good in its way. We also see that his optimism takes the individual and not the race for its test and starting point; and that he places the tendency to good in a conscious creative power which is outside both, and which deals directly with each separate human soul. But neither must we forget that the creative purpose, as he conceives it, fulfils itself equally through good and evil ”

“ Browning's intelligence, on the other hand, is masculine and courageous, moving cheerfully on the solid earth of an articulate and defined conviction, and careful not to omit realities from the conception of the great drama, merely for being unsightly to the too fastidious eye, or jarring in the ear, or too bitterly perplexing to faith or understanding. ”

“ Brownell has painted the sea-fights in which he took part as a combatant. But no man can tell a story at second hand with the truth of incident which belongs to an eye-witness who was part of what he saw. ”

“ He lodged at Marsland. Parson Davis of Kilkhampton came over to Morwenstow to celebrate the holy communion. The Frenchman was succeeded by Mr. Bryant, who lived at Flexbury, in the parish of Poughill; the next to him was Mr. Thomas, a man who ingratiated himself with the farmers—a cheery person, fond of a good story, and interested in husbandry, “but not much of the clerical in him,” as an old Morwenstow man describes him. ”

“ Browning considers, unrepaying in the one case, while it yields all necessary results in the other. According to the scientist, Man reigns supreme by his intelligence; according to the Believer, he is subject to all the helplessness of his ignorance. In reasoning, therefore, each from his own consciousness, the one finds his starting point at the summit of creation, the other virtually at the bottom of it. The Scientist acknowledges no mind beyond that of man ”

“ Chaucer applies the name to the loose frock of the ploughman (Prologue, 541) . See Clarendon Press ed. of Chaucer’s Prologue, &c.
line 152. scutcheon = escutcheon, shield.
line 156. ‘Lord Marmion, the principal character of the present romance, is entirely a fictitious personage. In earlier times, indeed, the family of Marmion, Lords of Fontenay, in Normandy, was highly distinguished. Robert de Marmion, Lord of Fontenay, a distinguished follower of the Conqueror, obtained a grant of the castle and town of Tamworth, and also of the manor of Scrivelby, in Lincolnshire. ”

“ That he has unquestioningly accepted the knowledge which science has brought and recognizing its relative character, has yet interpreted it in such a way as to make it subserve the highest ideals in ethics, religion, and art, and that far from reflecting any degeneration in Browning's philosophy of life, these poems put on a firmer basis than ever the thoughts prominent in his poetry from the first, and which constantly find illustration indirectly and sometimes directly in his dramatic poems. ”

“ To force you into the straighter, broader courses of the uncomplex would be as cruel as to upset a bowl with gold-fish in it and leave them gasping on the tablecloth. Ooh!" She sat back on her heels and ruefully beheld her grimy fingers.
Maurice tried his hardest to endure her. She heard him breathing heavily.
"It's really quite unnecessary to have a fire," she soliloquised. "But it makes a point in a room, I always think. Keeps one in countenance. Humanises things a bit. Makes a centre point for———"
She became incoherent. Maurice's irritation audibly increased. ”