Drinkwater

“ As I returned home that night from what are known as "the wilds of Hammersmith" (Hammersmith is a suburb of London) I said to myself: "This play is bound to succeed" The next moment I said to myself: "This play cannot possibly succeed. It has no love interest. It is a political play. Its theme is the threatened separation of the Southern States from the Northern States. Nobody ever heard of a play with such an absurd theme reaching permanent success. No author before John Drinkwater ever had the effrontery to impose such a theme on a London public." ”

“ Seven times in the river of Jordan, and be
Whole. And Naaman questioned, and was wrath,
As was not any river of Damascus
Purer than Jordan, and in more virtue flowing?
But, little, his servants said, was this to do,
And, as persuasion led him, he went down
And seven times let Jordan cover him,
And came with a clean body as of old,
A strong man with the tides of blood before him,
With equal limbs for all the spirit could dare,
And into Syria he sang upon his riding. ”

“ He had been born of love. They had been lovers,
Who made him, and no more, but they were lovers.
She of a proud house, proud to make it prouder
With wit and beauty, and a young brain glowing,
And a swift body fearless and pitiful ”

“ LAKE. How shall they stand for wisdom, who forbid
The body's love, which is so small a thing,
Yet let the souls, or minds, or what you will
Be mated, as though spirit were the drudge,
For no-one's heed, and limbs alone to be,
As though clay were the gold, inviolate? ”

“ In the course of a lifework of artistic creation he could not but want to say a dozen times that the grass was green and the sky blue, the water clear and love uncertain, and it is merely pointless to forbid him these things because they have been said before. ”

“ David and Jonathan under the long torches
Were silent then. And David's eyes were fixed
Long upon Jonathan, as eyes may sometimes look
On eyes, and see no face, looking beyond
Into unimaged life, into the brain
Moving behind the circumstance of flesh,
Eyes that to-morrow passing might hardly know
The mere face that to-night they gaze upon.
And Jonathan having spoken, waited there
While David searched him slowly with still eyes.
Then David rose, and drew the tent-fold back,
And looked upon the stars of Palestine
Long, and a mallow moon; and Jonathan waited. ”

“ The hewn rocks and the cloud-wrack of Iceland, the great thews of Sigurd and the might of his god-given sword, the proud beauty of the deep-bosomed women who are the mates and mothers of fierce and terrible kings, all these things are sung with a vigour as tremendous as is their own, and yet there is not a strained moment or an uncontrolled turn of expression from beginning to end. ”

“ No more perfect example of critical stupidity could well be found than the notion that Morris, as a creative artist, separated himself from the affairs of the life about him, as if in retreat. Every line of poetry that he wrote was the direct expression of the spirit in which he ordered his daily practice. ”

“ Into this scheme of life are admitted seasons of quiet contemplation, of responsiveness to such common things as the beauty of the clouds or the soft sound of earth breaking to the plough, hours when all the simple and recurrent bounties of the day are accepted joyfully and without question. ”

“ I could not deem myself a slave. Even Shelley, or that mood in him that was preoccupied with the fiery pinnacles in the clouds, kept the diction of his most ethereal flights in tune with the same instinctive necessity. ”

“ They denote, on the contrary, a spiritual activity astonishing in its range and sanity. For they imply a recognition on the part of the poet that to pass down a river on a golden afternoon, or to lie beneath the stars at night, or to move beneath the walls of an unknown city whilst memories of home and kin crowd on the mind, is an experience as adventurous as the riding of a storm or the winning of a Golden Fleece. To be languid is to be indifferent, and indifference in the presence of anything not wholly alienated from nature and simple humanity was the last thing of which Morris was capable. ”

“ To every man spiritually alive the coming of spring is an experience recurrent yet always vital, always a discovery. Nearly every new poet writes well about the spring, just as every new poet writes well about love. So powerful is the creative impulse begotten by these experiences that it impels many men to attempt utterance without any adequate powers, and so the common gibes find their justification. But it is absurd to pronounce against the creative impulse itself whilst condemning the inefficient expression. ”

“ To travel in the company of one whose senses are so vitally responsive to every sound and sight of beauty, to every tremor of emotion that may show itself in the people whom we meet on the wayside, demands no small spiritual alertness in ourselves. ”

“ Alice Meynell, on the other hand, with her diction so chaste and disciplined and exact, her imagery so frugal and unadorned, is a rarefied incarnation of the grave magic that the genius of Matthew Arnold had caught from the seventeenth century, a century which in so far as it worked upon Thompson did so rather in its florid ecstasy. ”

“ Sometimes at night when not even lepers walked,
Solitary in the Syrian meadows she
Would wander in the old perplexity
That the moon makes of love. Never, she knew,
Could any adoration that she brought
Touch even the Lord Naaman's banishment,
The Naaman fallen from the time when even
Great ladies dare not speak the thing they felt. ”

“ The significance of this exaltation is indefinable, having in it something of divinity. To the words of poetry it is given to announce the discovery; to the music to embody and in some inadequate measure translate the ecstasy which pervades the discovery. The poet's madness is happily not a myth; for to be mad is to be ecstatic. ”

“ He was a brown man, burnt with love of summer,
His young beard curled, and russet as the eyes
That looked on life, and feared it, yet were master,
Because they knew the tyranny they feared,
Measured it, learnt it, gazed it into nothing. ”

“ To read the work of the almost forgotten smaller men of that time is to chance often upon a phrase in which the tenderness, and heart-ache, and the warm sense of colour and natural beauty, which were so to dominate the great epoch from Wordsworth to Keats, break through the witty and balanced argument of an age when it was not considered to be the thing to say too much about the heart. ”

“ In trance of spaces where not even wings nor breath
Recall the moving of substantial things.
Rather in me for ever should be glowing
The imaging mind mated in equal limbs,
Thought visible in lines of the athlete,
Wisdom persuading in the lover's clasp.
And how should thought know thought until the whole
Of body's beauty is by body learnt? ”

“ Because of beauty is in me.
And then I know that every mind
Among the millions of my kind
Makes earth his own particular
And privately created star,
That earth has thus no single state,
Being every man articulate. ”

“ It is, of course, the peculiar glory of Gothic—or romantic—art, that while the parts combine to make a whole more wonderful than themselves, they yet have an independent beauty and completeness of their own. ”

“ You, who have sacrificed nothing, babble about destroying the South while other people conquer it. I accepted this war with a sick heart, and I've a heart that's near to breaking every day. I accepted it in the name of humanity, and just and merciful dealing, and the hope of love and charity on earth. And you come to me, talking of revenge and destruction, and malice, and enduring hate. These gentle people are mistaken, but they are mistaken cleanly, and in a great name. It is you that dishonour the cause for which we stand—it is you who would make it a mean and little thing. ”

“ We have seen that the earth was to Morris from boyhood in some sort a sacred thing. And the people of the earth were no less. His one overmastering passion was for a world wherein men and women lived in full responsiveness to the beauty of the earth, labouring with their hands and adventurous and capricious in spirit, finding joy in their work and in contact with each other, and rejecting all the things of civilization that were dulling and mechanical. ”

“ The wisdom of childhood is sometimes supposed to lie in the child's attitude of unquestioning acceptance, but the truth is that it lies in a constant sense of adventure. The wisdom of the poet is as the child's in this; for both wake daily in the hope and expectancy of new revelations. Unquestioning acceptance and the stifling of curiosity are the last infirmities of foolish minds. Life ceases to be lovely when it ceases to be adventurous. ”

“ He saw men having no adventurousness in their own spirits, dulled by routine, and with their own wills bent and impoverished by the will of some one else, degraded into mere echoes and reflections. He saw that the crying need of the world was character, and he sought to teach men that in bringing back joy to their daily work they would put their feet on the first step towards the only true dignity and pride of life. ”

“ Give them one heart, and mutual love. Teach those who look too much upon Thy instrument to depend more upon Thyself. Pardon such as desire to trample upon the dust of a poor worm, for they are Thy people, too. ”

“ It is in this mellowing of the fierce Volsung strain that the redemption of the cosmic spirit of the epic is found. To show this is a purpose not less noble than that of Milton when he robed himself to justify the ways of God to man, and it is one which must be clearly understood before we can hope to grasp the imaginative impulse that runs as a central thread through all the coloured jewels of Morris's masterpiece. This new chastening of the humanity in Sigurd not only makes the life among which he moves sweeter, but it reacts upon the most tragic judgments of the gods. ”

“ His desire always was that men should at least be allowed to prove themselves freely. From the turbulent passions and sorrows inseparable from humanity he asked no escape, taking them gladly as the darker threads in the many-coloured web of our heritage, but he denounced fiercely the doctrine that, finding men forced into daily betrayal of themselves, blandly announced that here was proof of their radical meanness and unworth. ”

“ In the way of life out of which has come this menacing destruction upon us is much of beauty, much of nobility, and the light of man's mind. These things it will be for us in season to cherish and preserve. ”

“ Nowhere are there any signs of labour; nowhere the tumultuous glory of language that rushes at times from the lips of more variable if not greater poets; and yet, with the rarest exceptions, he nowhere descends from his own high level. ”

“ Cromwell:
I could take all. I do not want it. I want to restore your fortune, to give you back a regenerate kingship. Will you take it, sir? It is of love I offer it, love of England, of your great office. And you should adorn that inheritance. Men should be proud to call you King, sir.
Ireton:
We have that pride—and we have suffered.
Cromwell:
I can disabuse rumour about Scotland, I can persuade Parliament about the Presbytery, I can convince the army of your good faith as to tolerance, if you will but give me the word. Let us together make Charles Rex the noblest name of Christendom. ”

“ To complain that Tennyson overestimated the power of words to give up some remote, and as it were almost independent, life of their own to the poet’s incantation, is to complain that he presumed to look upon language as in itself a source of poetic life, which was no very wild thing for a poet to do, since life, like God, does move in a mysterious way. ”

“ Many people in this country want abolition; many don't. I'll say nothing for the moment as to the rights and wrongs of it. But every man, whether he wants it or not, knows it may come. Why does the South propose secession? Because it knows abolition may come, and it wants to avoid it. It wants more: it wants the right to extend the slave foundation. We've all been to blame for slavery, but we in the North have been willing to mend our ways. ”

“ There had once in English poetry been an age of faith, and there had once been an age of reason, but FitzGerald was of an age in which faith and reason were, in the life of the nation, for the moment inextricably confused, and when poetry addressed itself to rhapsodical belief—or unbelief if you will—as it did in the Rubaiyat, the seductions of reason were ever-present and the fervour of confession was embarrassed by the insinuations of argument. ”

“ Cromwell:
Sir, this is a day when every man must speak the truth that is in him, or be silent in shame, and for ever. Mr. Hampden is my kinsman, as you know, one who has my best affection. His word has ever been a strength among us, and no man here but knows his valiance in the cause. ”

“ As you deal by me, and I by you, His eye sees us. Nothing good befalls us but it is by His will, no affliction is ours but His loving mercy will hear us. The Lord God walks at our hand. He is here now in our midst. ”

“ When a great poet comes not unexpectedly but as the natural and full development of a long tradition, it is easy not only to estimate the positive value of his own achievement, but also to trace or even to predict his influence upon his successors. New poets will come, possessing some measure of genuine inspiration, and carry the tradition through to its quiet and often lovely close; they will take their honourable places about the few commanding figures, worthy of their kinship and proud of it. ”