Leslie Stephen

“ Caroline Emelia Stephen (1834–1909) , Sir Leslie Stephen's only sister, and youngest of the family, was born at Kensington on 8 Dec. 1834. Educated at home in a literary atmosphere, she became an occasional contributor at an early age to the 'Saturday Review' and the 'Spectator.' Always religiously inclined, she occupied herself with philanthropic work, and in 1871 published a sympathetic tractate on 'The Service of the Poor.' Acquaintance with Robert Fox and his family at Falmouth interested her in the Society of Friends. ”

“ Like Johnson, under a brusque exterior and a coltish temper, he concealed a sympathetic and humorous soul. In spite of " natural sorrows "—the loss of two much loved wives, he pronounced his life to have been a happy one. He died at his house, 22 Hyde Park Gate, on the 22nd of February 1904, and his remains were buried at Golders Green. A Leslie Stephen memorial lectureship was founded at Cambridge in 1905. Under an austere form and visage Stephen was in reality the soul of susceptibility and of an almost freakish fun. ”

“ I lead such a funny life, utterly without interest or pleasure outside of my work: nothing, indeed, but work all day long, except a short walk alone on the cold hills, and meals, and a couple of pipes with my father in the evening. It is surprising how it suits me, and how happy I keep.
SATURDAY. - I have received such a nice long letter (four sides) from Leslie Stephen to-day about my Victor Hugo. It is accepted. This ought to have made me gay, but it hasn't. I am not likely to be much of a tonic to-night. ”

“ Stephen, Sir Leslie (1832-1904) . -- Biographer and critic, s. of the above, was b. in London, and ed. at Eton, King's Coll., London, and Camb., where he obtained a tutorial Fellowship, and took orders. He came under the influence of Mill, Darwin, and H. Spencer, and devoted himself largely to the study of economics. His religious views having undergone a change, he gave up the clerical character and his Fellowship, and became a pronounced Agnostic. In 1865 he definitely adopted a literary career, and contributed to the Saturday Review, Fraser's Magazine, and other periodicals. ”

“ Among Turner's strongest passions were his love of fame and his love of money, but the strongest of all was his love of nature. He studied her every day, early and late, throughout his life. On his tours, on foot, on sea, or in the coach, in England, Scotland, Switzerland, France, Germany, Holland, and Italy, he was constantly at work, noting as he went, in swift pencil outline, all he thought worthy of memory; and his memory was equal to his industry. No mind was ever so stored with impressions of nature or was so able to weave them at will into visions of beauty. ”

“ Nothing that has been achieved in modern architecture has surpassed the beauty of their campaniles, not only from the elegance of each, but from their complete variety, while at the same time in harmony with one another. ”

“ The dazzling of the eye by blazing sunlight and brilliant colours, the relief given by the cool deep streams under luxuriant foliage, the vague consciousness of wondrous forms of life lurking in the forest depths, can be realised without any special accuracy of portraiture. ”

“ Mrs. Oliphant (1828-1897) in her Literary History of England; and George Eliot (1819-1880) in her Essays (Worldliness and Other Worldliness) .
[44] It has no bearing upon the subject that the horrors of the Bastille at the time of its fall were greatly exaggerated.
[47] Theology in the English Poets, by Stopford A. Brooke.
[56] Mr. Leslie Stephen, who became Sir Leslie Stephen, K.C.B., in 1902, was born in 1832 and died in 1904. In addition to the article in the D.N.B., this great critic has one on “Cowper and Rousseau” in his Hours in a Library. ”

“ And what is the great obstacle to seeing things as they really are? The great obstacle is, I take it, that we are ourselves part of the things to be seen; and that there is an ancient and proverbial difficulty about seeing ourselves. ”

“ Were there not another life that I hope for, all the vanities of this world should not entreat a moment's breath from me. Could the devil work my belief to imagine I could never die, I could not outlive that very thought. ”

“ Wearied by the incessant tossing and boiling of the torrent which carries us away, we look back with fond regret to the little backwater so far above Niagara, where scarcely a ripple marks the approaching rapids. ”

“ Mead lived more in the broad sunshine of life than almost any man.’ The world in which he desired to live was that of learning, the taste for which in every branch began in his boyhood and continued to old age. ”

“ A great poet, indeed, weaves a magic mirror out of these dream-like materials, in which he shows us the great passions, love, and jealousy, and ambition, reflected upon a gigantic scale. But, in weaker hands, the characters become eccentric instead of typical: his vision simply distorts instead of magnifying the fundamental truths of human nature. The liberty which could be used by Shakespeare becomes dangerous for his successors. Instead of a legitimate idealisation, we have simply an abandonment of any basis in reality. ”

“ Montaigne, says Sainte-Beuve, is to Pascal like the fox which gnawed the vitals of the Spartan boy—a torment, yet almost a part of himself. Though a mystic, he is a mathematician, clear-headed, precise, impatient of mere vague reverie. ”

“ You must be a very mole if the darkness be real. From your childhood to this day I have ever shown you by more than words how high an estimate I entertain both of the depth and the breadth of your capacity. I have ever conversed with you as with a man, not as with a child ”

“ A cockney, born and bred, takes surroundings for granted. The hubbub has ceased to distract him; he is like the people who were said to become deaf because they always lived within the roar of a waterfall: he realises the common saying that the deepest solitude is solitude in a crowd ”

“ Hawthorne in England was like a plant suddenly removed to a rich soil from a dry and thirsty land. He drinks in at every pore the delightful influences of which he has had so scanty a supply. An old cottage, an ivy-grown wall, a country churchyard with its quaint epitaphs, things that are commonplace to most Englishmen and which are hateful to the sanitary inspector, are refreshing to every fibre of his soul. ”

“ The musician, it is probable enough, could have done nothing better. But there are times when we feel that we would rather have the actual sounds, the downright utterance of an agonised human being, than the far-away echo of passion set up in the artistic brain. We prefer the roar of the tempest to the squeaking of the Æolian harp. We tire of the skilfully prepared sentiment, the pretty fancies, the unreal imaginations, and long for the harsh, crude, substantial fact, the actual utterance of men struggling in the dire grasp of unmitigated realities. ”

“ Undoubtedly it is a very difficult task to be alternately witness and judge; to feel strongly, and yet to analyse coolly; to love every feature in a familiar face, and yet to decide calmly upon its intrinsic ugliness or beauty. ”

“ Huge as he is, he is still a creature. His ribs, his fins, his whalebone, his blubber, the very spiracles through which he spouts a torrent of brine against his origin, and covers me all over with the spray—everything of him and about him is from the throne. ”

“ Educated like his creator in the streets of London, he is the ideal cockney. His exuberant animal spirits, humorous shrewdness, and kindliness under a mask of broad farce, made him the favourite of all cockneys in and out of London, and took the gravest readers by storm. ”

“ His humility caused him, when dying, to bid those with him bury him outside his church, in a spot where his grave would be trodden by the feet of the passers-by, and receive the raindrops from the eaves. ”

“ Would he not be the basest of men if he did not save his country at any cost? To destroy half a population and reduce the other half to misery has been thought a sacrifice not too great for such an end. Would not Mackintosh himself allow Fletcher, when intrusted with an important fortress, to sacrifice the lives and properties of innocent people in defence of his position? ”

“ He is a reed, the feeblest in nature; but yet he is a 'thinking reed.' A vapour, a drop of water might kill him; but should the whole universe crush him, he is nobler than it, for he knows that he is crushed, and the universe knows not that it crushes. He is great as a discrowned king. ”

“ My sense of relationship is stimulated and strengthened as I gaze at the forms sinking slowly beyond my grasp down into the abyss of the past, and try in imagination to raise them once more to the surface. I do all that I can for them in simply acknowledging that they form a part of the great process in which I am for the instant on the knife-edge of actual existence, and unreal only in the sense in which the last motion of my pen is unreal now. ”

“ The wild commotion in sea, sky, and earth, which heralds the approach of the south-west wind, harmonises with his dispirited restlessness, and he has to seek refuge in the vague hope that his thoughts, cast abroad at random like the leaves and clouds, may somehow be prophetic of a magical transformation of the world. ”

“ When you have made an early start, followed the coast-guard track on the slopes above the cliffs, struggled through the gold and purple carpeting of gorse and heather on the moors, dipped down into quaint little coves with a primitive fishing village, followed the blinding whiteness of the sands round a lonely bay, and at last emerged upon a headland where you can settle into a nook of the rocks, look down upon the glorious blue of the Atlantic waves breaking into foam on the granite, and see the distant sea-levels glimmering away till they blend imperceptibly into cloudland ”

“ Thorne, who is ruined by his love of gin, are solid and undeniable realities. We see the world as it was, only in a dark mirror which is incapable of reflecting the fairer shades of thought and custom. ”

“ It is simply an expression of the reluctance of the human being to use the awful word "never." As the years take from us, one by one, all that we have loved, we try to avert our gaze; we are fain to believe that in some phantom world all will be given back to us, and that our toys have only been laid by in the nursery upstairs. ”

“ We should be indeed disappointed were we to expect in Pope's letters what we find in the best specimens of the art: the charm which belongs to a simple outpouring of friendly feeling in private intercourse; the sweet playfulness of Cowper, or the grave humour of Gray, or even the sparkle and brilliance of Walpole's admirable letters. ”

“ The Downs have a singular charm in the exquisite play of long, gracefully undulating lines which bound their gentle edges. If not a 'majestic range of mountains,' as judged by an Alpine standard, there is no want of true sublimity in their springing curves, especially when harmonised by the lights and shadows under cloud-masses driving before a broad south-westerly gale ”

“ And if you miss the serene atmosphere of calmer forms of art, it is something to feel at times as no one but Carlyle can make you feel, that each instant is the 'conflux of two eternities;' that our little lives, in his favourite Shakespearean phrase, are 'rounded with a sleep;' that history is like the short space lighted up by a flickering taper in the midst of infinite glooms and mysteries, and its greatest events brief scenes in a vast drama of conflicting forces, where the actors are passing in rapid succession—rising from and vanishing into the all-embracing darkness. ”

“ His foibles were an uneasy sense of dignity, an almost childish delight in the outward trappings of authority, and a despotic temper peculiarly unsuitable to the work in hand. He quarrelled with every one who had an opinion of his own, and made personal enemies of men without whose support he was merely beating the air. ”

“ When I lift my eyes to realities, I can dimly descry across the street a vision of my neighbour behind his looking-glass adjusting the parting of his back hair, and achieving triumphs with his white tie calculated to excite the envy of a Brummel. ”

“ I may be ashamed of myself when I read some hideous revelation of modern crime, not to stimulate my ardour as a patriot and a reformer, but to add a zest to my comfortable chair in the club window or at the bar of my favourite public-house. ”

“ He was in love—not with an external object, but with love itself; he formed out of his passionate longings those beautiful, unreal, highstrung beings, whose ecstasies and agonies kept fine ladies sitting up all night in forgetfulness of balls and assemblies, and which now, alas! have faded, as unreal things are apt to fade, and become rather wearisome and slightly absurd. Facts revenge themselves upon the man who denies their existence; and poor Rousseau did not escape the inevitable Nemesis. ”

“ The elder Shandy could not have found in the universe a listener more admirably calculated to act as whetstone for his strangely-constructed wit, to dissent in precisely the right tone, not with a brutal intrusion of common-sense, but with the gentle horror of innocent astonishment at the paradoxes, mixed with veneration for the portentous learning of his senior. By looking at each brother alternately through the eyes of his relative, we are insensibly infected with the intense relish which each feels for the cognate excellence of the other. ”