Clumsiness

“ The clumsy people tread on our toes, step on a lady's dress and tear it maybe, or bump against baby's cot in passing and wake the little sleeper.
Do you think we could find out the secret of being clumsy? Is not it for want of taking care? You remember Elinor, in Story Lesson 79, how she upset her tea, broke the vase, and spoilt the tablecloth, all for want of care? It is the same with clumsy people—they forget to take care? ”

“ Avail us nought: the light comes in and in;
Displays us to ourselves; displays—ah, shame—
Unto the inquisitive day our nakedness.
He comes; He calls. The large eye of His truth,
His full, severe, all-comprehending view,
Fixes itself upon our guiltiness.
O God, O God! what are we? what shall we be?
What is all this about, I wonder now?
Yet I am better, too. I think it will pass
’Tis going now, unless it comes again.
A terrible possession while it lasts.
Terrible, surely; and yet indeed ’tis true.
E’en in my utmost impotence I find
A fount of strange persistence in my soul ”

“ I cultivated a passionless and cold exterior,—a listless, uninterested and frigid demeanor,—for I discovered that this was accepted by many people as dullness or stupidity, and that by assuming such a character, certain otherwise crafty persons would talk more readily before me, and betray themselves and their vices unawares. ”

“ Now, the over-tender conscience will, of course, exaggerate the wickedness of the world; and the Spirit in my poem may be merely the hypothesis or subjective imagination formed——’
‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, my dear boy,’ interrupted my uncle, ‘don’t go into the theory of it. If you’re wrong in it, it makes bad worse; if you’re right, you may be a critic, but you can’t be a poet. And then you know very well I don’t understand all those new words. But as for that, I quite agree that consciences are much too tender in your generation—schoolboys’ consciences, too! ”

“ How strange is life, how sad and perplexing its contradictions! Why should such an exhibition as that be supposed to give pleasure? Perhaps it does not give pleasure, but is only a necessary fulfilment of one of the many delusions we are in with regard to each other in this bewildering world. They are of all sorts and degrees, these delusions, and I suppose that in the last analysis it was not pleasure I got from the clown and his clowning, clowned he ever so merrily. ”

“ And hardly tasking, subtly questioning,
Another spirit went around the ring
To each and each: and as he ceased his say,
Each after each, I heard them singly sing,
Some querulously high, some softly, sadly low,
We know not, what avails to know?
We know not, wherefore need we know?
This answer gave they still unto his suing,
We know not, let us do as we are doing.
Dost thou not know that these things only seem?
I know not, let me dream my dream.
Are dust and ashes fit to make a treasure? ”

“ Finally, then, I conclude that blushing,—whether due to shyness—to shame for a real crime—to shame from a breach of the laws of etiquette—to modesty from humility—to modesty from an indelicacy—depends in all cases on the same principle; this principle being a sensitive regard for the opinion, more particularly for the depreciation of others, primarily in relation to our personal appearance, especially of our faces; and secondarily, through the force of association and habit, in relation to the opinion of others on our conduct. ”

“ But the clown will go on talking in a living and, therefore, a leisurely fashion, and the great truth of pure gossip which sprang up in simpler ages and was the fountain of all the literatures, will flow on when our intricate and tortured society has died of its sins. ”

“ Following the direction of her gaze, I felt a sudden thrill of fear pass through me as I perceived a human face surveying us from behind one of the trees—a man's face, every feature of which was distorted by the most malignant hatred and anger. Finding himself observed, he stepped out and advanced towards us, when I saw that it was none other than the general himself. ”

“ If you do not understand—remain in ignorance. There is, as the clown says in ‘Twelfth Night’ no darkness like ignorance. I suppose you know, my dear, what it is to be pressed upon and trampled on by those just behind you in the social ball? ”

“ I am always a little sorry for clumsy people; they seem to be so often in trouble. If the clumsy boy is allowed to collect the slates, he is sure to send some of them sliding on to the floor with a noise like thunder ”

“ Longcluse watches all these symptoms of his state of mind with a sardonic enjoyment, beneath which, perhaps, is the sort of suspense with which a beast-tamer watches the eye of the animal whose fury he excites only to exhibit the coercion which he exercises through its fears, and who is for a moment doubtful whether its terrors or its fury may prevail. ”

“ The purpose of life seemed suddenly clear to him, and the large patience of the sky passed into his own nature as he sat facing the white dawn. At rare intervals in the lives of all strenuous souls there comes this sense of kinship with external things—this passionate recognition of the appeal of the dumb world. ”

“ Her eyes, shyly questioning for a moment and then shyly tender, answered his question before her lips had moved, and it would have been hard to convince them that the minutes which followed ever had a parallel within human experience. ”

“ Is it well to become callous? to grow indifferent—almost blind to evil? to pass through life shrugging one's shoulders? Well, perhaps it is. And yet, I've had enough to make me callous. But one can't alter one's nature. ”

“ Instinct turns instinct out, and thought
Wheels round on thought. To bleed for others’ wrongs
In vindication of a cause, to draw
The sword of the Lord and Gideon oh, that seems
The flower and top of life! But fight because
Some poor misconstruing trifler haps to say
I lie, when I do not lie,
Why should I? Call you this a cause? I can’t. ”

“ And he renders himself obnoxious to calumny, when he neglects to observe the circumstances under which these objects of universal pursuit and flight have disguised themselves in one another’s garments. ”

“ Discreet and reticent as we have all been, and careful in our criticisms of so bizarre an event, there still must be many to question the reality of such superstitious fears, and some to ask if such a sound could be without human agency, and a very guilty agency, too. ”

“ And the feeling and the perception of how superficial and unreal, how oppressively confined, how intolerably fixed and ultimate, how arrogant and cold and fruitless, such persistent neglect of the Data of Sense had somehow, at last, rendered philosophy, gave now polemical edge to men’s zealous study and discovery of this world. ”

“ The smile of incredulity which thinks itself so wise and is so foolish, the suspicions which flatter themselves they are so cunning, and are really the fruit of so much dulness, will gleam over these pages, and wither all their meaning — for the readers who smile. ”

“ His habits of circumgyration, with sudden stops and starts,—his strange air of abstractedness, a sort of excogitative look, apparently puzzled to find something out,—odd way of talking to himself, as if he himself were some other person, saying, “what a noise the fellow makes,” “I think the fellow’s a fool,” and striking his face in apparent anger,—strange mode of mentioning names once familiar to him,—putting a question,—seeming to listen, and giving an answer quite foreign to it, are most striking, and such as no descriptive powers can enable another to conceive, without seeing him. ”

“ Perhaps one reason of it is, that every few minutes during the whole time, my conscience stung me severely, so that I could scarcely go on with my part.
"Are you a fool," said I, "to be lying there in such a posture, for that God of yours? ”

“ Doubtless, nothing quite like them was ever pitched out headlong into the world as they were. The confusion, the clamour, the jar of words that half suffice and thoughts that half exist—all these and other more absolutely offensive qualities—audacity, monotony, bombast, obscure play of licence and tortuous growth of fancy—cannot quench or even wholly conceal the living purport and the imperishable beauty which are here latent. ”

“ How often, when the abominations of Lupton, its sham energies, its sham morals, its sham enthusiasms, all its battalia of cant surged and beat upon me, have I been sorely tempted to yield, to suffer no more the press of folly, but to steal away by a secret path I knew, to dwell in a secure valley where the foolish could never trouble me. ”

“ When a preconcerted calumny or any underhand conspiracy will cause you to fall from a position to which you ambitiously aspired, and which position you may have kept up by intrigue, you will at last be convinced of the nothingness and instability of human greatness. ”

“ If he had ever considered them at all it was as cold and conscious creatures who taught themselves to cover up what they felt, so that when their emotions strove to assert themselves they were found, through long disuse, to be dumb and inarticulate. ”

“ Leading me whither, I had died of fright.'
Nor does the poet omit the development of Receptivity:—
'I'm eyes, ears, mouth of me, one gaze and gape,
Nothing eludes me, everything's a hint,
Handle and help.'
At the last the youth, once an innocent jester, pours a stream of half-believed lies upon the man who, having caught him in his fraud, lets him go with a chance to start life afresh. ”

“ Therefore everything ludicrous is either a flash of wit or a foolish action, according as the procedure has been from the discrepancy of the objects to the identity of the concept, or the converse; the former always intentional, the latter always unintentional, and from without. To seem to reverse the starting-point, and to conceal wit with the mask of folly, is the art of the jester and the clown. ”

“ For the greater part of that time I could expatiate on the meanness of dishonesty, on the villany of falsehood, on the despicable arts of calumny; in a word, upon all those deformities of character which awaken the natural indignation of the human heart against the pests and the disturbers of human society. ”

“ The childish innocence and beauty of countenance, the childish frankness and gaiety of heart, the childish quickness and intelligence of understanding, were exchanged for vacant looks, stupid indifference, and that half-cunning expression which is always induced by craven fear. ”

“ I shook my head. “He will tell you what he thinks. No man’s judgment is infallible.”
Turning away from me, she moved with an energetic step to the house. As I followed her into the hall the threshold creaked under my tread, and I was visited by an apprehension, or, if you prefer, by a superstitious dread of the floor above. Oh, I got over that kind of thing before I was many years older; though in the end I gave up medicine, you know, and turned to literature as a safer outlet for a suppressed imagination. ”

“ Everything about my tragedy has been hideous, mean, repellent, lacking in style; our very dress makes us grotesque. We are the zanies of sorrow. We are clowns whose hearts are broken. We are specially designed to appeal to the sense of humour. ”

“ I say openly without any false modesty, which I despise even as I despise hypocrisy, there were lectures at which I myself being in a state of exaltation, called forth in my audience, especially in my nervous lady visitors, a mood of intense agitation, which turned into hysterical laughter and tears. ”

“ When these gentry hold forth, by the hour, about their convictions and their theories, their beliefs and disbeliefs, their likings and dislikings, their tastes and their principles, their souls, their minds, and their bodies—if, in despair, you at last, by way of a change, turn the conversation towards some one else, they become loftily silent. ”

“ However this may be, there can be little doubt that man in all ages of which we have any knowledge has possessed that faculty which perceives ridiculous incongruities in the relative positions of certain objects, and in the actions and sayings of individuals, which we term the “sense of the ludicrous.” ”

“ And yet as they preach and strut and shout and threaten, crouching as they clutch at rags of facts and fancies to hide their nakedness, they go twisting, flying by my tired eyes and I see them ever stripped,—ugly, human. ”

“ Brought up in an atmosphere of art and literature, I never became acquainted with that false modesty and embarrassment that seizes upon most young people when, for the first time, they are confronted with the most mysterious and fascinating subject of existence. ”

“ People are so accustomed to my pale face, languid indifference and, what M—— calls, my impracticable silence, that after the first glance and introduction, I believe they are scarcely sensible of my presence: so I sit, and look, and listen, secure and harboured in my apparent dullness. The flashes of wit, the attempts at sentiment, the affectation of enthusiasm, the absurdities of folly, and the blunders of ignorance ”

“ If there were a solvent for lies, what surprises would be in store for us! Nearly everybody who now appears to us to be upright, inflexible, and to hold his chest high, would be disclosed as a flaccid, weak person, presenting in reality a sorry spectacle. ”

“ His newborn solemnity was the most marked feature of his demeanour, but sometimes it dissolved into pathetic demands for sympathy, and then again froze into profound and lugubrious silence. He said that he was sleeping badly, and the pallor of his face and the darkness beneath his eyes seemed to confirm this. ”

“ The expression of their emotions is certainly almost human, as they sit and stare at him, coughing and snarling with anger and contempt, drawing back their heads and throwing the hand before the face with a gesture of abhorrence, and other movements indicative of shocked and outraged feelings. ”

“ They call to us in appeal, their questioning livens the dark not only the voices of the shapes that we have passed within the staunch reality of the day, but the voices of the shapes that outnumber these, the shapes of loneliness and disillusion, and the wordless voices of those two are terrible. ”