Surplice

“ The case of Surplice is a very exquisite example: everyone, of course, is afraid of les maladies venérinnes—accordingly all pick an individual (of whose inner life they know and desire to know nothing, whose external appearance satisfies the requirements of the mind à propos what is foul and disgusting) and, having tacitly agreed upon this individual as a Symbol of all that is evil, proceed to heap insults upon him and enjoy his very natural discomfiture ... ”

“ On the contrary, I merely state what interested me peculiarly in the course of my sojourn at La Ferté: I mention that I was extremely moved to find that, however busy sixty men may be kept suffering in common, there is always one man or two or three men who can always find time to make certain that their comrades enjoy a little extra suffering. In the case of Surplice, to be the butt of everyone's ridicule could not be called precisely suffering ”

“ The odour of your sanctity already shames me, Lady Surplice. The saints in Paradise shall find in you a matchless companion. Talbot, the bosom of Abraham awaits you. I hope you will like it. Your only crimes, Lady Surplice, have been those of snobbery and vulgarity; and as the Bible was written before the existence of modern England, France and America, the very possibility of snobbery and vulgarity was unthought of, and thus they escaped inclusion among the heinous sins——”
“But look here,” protested Guy de Travest, “what reason but cruelty can you have for altering Lady Surplice’s destiny? ”

“ Else why should it be called Hell?{363}”
“Then,” flashed my lady with a brilliant smile, “when I die, I shall also be able to give——”
“When you die, Lady Surplice, you will go to Heaven. For you are a good woman. You have a kind heart. You have cared for your husband and your children, and you have always given freely to the sick, the halt, the blind, the deaf and the dumb. In fact, Lady Surplice, I am very glad to have allowed myself this opportunity of congratulating you. You and your butler are perhaps the only two people in this room who will ascend to salvation. ”

“ If possible, the priest ought to be assisted at low mass by a server, man or boy, who should be a devout person and well instructed in the duties incumbent upon him at the altar. He should be tidy and clean, and if possible habited in cassock and surplice. In approaching the altar, the server walks a little in advance of the priest, and has his hands joined before his breast. If he carries the book he will hold it with his left hand so that it rests upon his left arm, and keep his right hand before his breast ”

“ Preceding the processional cross, the magnificent beadle, all blue and silver, was already rearing the level of the Rosary cupola, the spacious esplanade formed by the roof of the lower church, across which the pilgrimage deputations began to wind, with their bright-coloured silk and velvet banners waving in the ruddy glow of the sunset. Then came the clergy, the priests in snowy surplices, and the priests in golden chasubles, likewise shining out like a procession of stars. ”

“ It was as if his face had been cast first in a rather rugged and irregular mold, and the image had then been lightly retouched, here and there, by some gentler, more feminine hand. His expression was singular; it was a look which I can best describe as a sort of intelligent innocence—the look of an absent-minded seraph. He knew, if you insisted upon it, about the corruptions of this base world; but, left to himself, he never thought of them. ”

“ And we may remind ourselves at this point of a fatal mistake. If you take appearances, singly or all together, and assert barely that the Absolute is either one of them or all—the position is hopeless. Having first set these down as appearance, you now proclaim them as the very opposite; for that which is identified with the Absolute is no appearance but is utter reality. ”

“ We can see things only from our limited standpoint. I have undertaken to solve matters supposed to be superhuman, or "of God," and hence perfect in their way, in a human, and therefore imperfect, manner. Our limitations natu [Pg 210] rally extending to our power of observation, the duality of our nature in matters of this kind does not permit us—I might say, forbids us—arriving at final conclusions. We can go as far as our understanding permits us to go—beyond that, we may at most indulge in speculation. ”

“ If the qualities which I have ranged under the head of the Sublime be all found consistent with each other, and all different from those which I place under the head of Beauty; and if those which compose the class of the Beautiful have the same consistency with themselves, and the same opposition to those which are classed under the denomination of Sublime, I am in little pain whether anybody chooses to follow the name I give them or not, provided he allows that what I dispose under different heads are in reality different things in nature. ”

“ Hence consciousness is serial, and inferences are serial, and judgments are necessarily serial; but thought must go on. Gaze into the eye of my lady and think of its sapphirine hue; in a moment you think of something else—the sable curtain, the coy glance, perchance the cerulean heaven, or the deep blue sea. It is impossible to hold your mind for more than a moment on the blueness of the eye ”

“ And as he pondered thus, it seemed to him that the mists which obscure the source of human existence from human knowledge had dispersed a little, and that he had been granted a deeper glimpse than most men into the fathomless gulf of the Unknown. ”

“ That which I desire is not consciously assumed to exist, but still vaguely, somehow and in some strange region, it is felt to be there; and, because it is there, its non-appearance excites painful tension. Pursuing this subject we should find that, in every case in the end, to be thought of is to be entertained as, and so judged to be, real. ”

“ When, to-day, I compare the pale, thin, little suffering face that fills my whole soul, with yonder rosy, chubby, roguish countenance as it gleams upon me sometimes from my earliest childhood, I can hardly realise that both can have belonged to one and the same being. ”

“ Yet the least thought shows how complex and elusive this ‘self’ is. It is one of those cases with which the world teems—a juggle of the open daylight—in which an object appears so perfectly simple, frank, innocent, and without concealment, and yet is really profoundly complex, deliberate, and unfathomable. ”

“ And I thought any man who had tact enough for that would be my undoing and I should not wonder,” with a swift look from under her long lashes, “if it were true, but you will never tell a soul I told you, will you?” beseechingly. “It’s a secret—the undoing, you know.” ”

“ Often the shunting seems a mere trifle; but, in reality, the switch is that wizard-wand which brings into evidence such corollaries of life as felicity or misery, peace or tribulation, honour or ignominy, found on the permanent way. ”

“ What we do from conviction as we call it, from pondering about a matter and balancing it first in one scale and then in the other, over and over again, is seldom worth much. Whatever is permanent, characteristic, genuine in our nature, is instinct, prejudice, call it superstition;—a conclusion without question or inquiry, an act because one cannot help it. ”

“ Your suspicions—’
‘Suspicions! Pah!’ said she indignantly. ‘Certainties.’
‘Your certainties, my lady, as you call them, your suspicions as I call them, are cruel, unjust, wholly devoid of foundation in fact. I can declare no more; except that I have not acted for my own profit or my own pleasure. I have not in this proceeding considered myself. Once again, I think my heart is broken. ”

“ In making these experiments I have endeavored to treat myself impersonally, as a subject, so to say, placed at my disposal for experimental purposes; my ego having been the object as well as the subject of my investigations. In occasionally speaking of the results thus obtained in a eulogistic manner, this should not be looked upon as self-praise, therefore, but rather as an impersonal mode of describing what has come under some one's observation—this "some one" being myself. ”

“ We need not lose time in describing the co-operation of the foregoing principle with{367} surprise in producing the effect that is felt upon the appearance of any unusual resemblance or contrast. Surprise first operates, and carries our opinion of the resemblance or contrast beyond the truth. The principle we have been describing carries us still farther; for being bent upon gratification, it forces upon the mind a conviction that the resemblance or contrast is complete. ”

“ Supposing that I had been made a fool of by the compact into which you entered with Miss Craven, who would have been to blame? Was there ever a more shameful compact entered into by a clever man and a clever woman to make a victim of a girl who believed that the world was overflowing with sincerity? ”

“ The actions which are classed under the general appellation of marriage, education, friendship, &c., are perpetually going on, and to a superficial glance, are similar one to the other.
But, if we would see the truth of things, they must be stripped of this fallacious appearance of uniformity. In truth, no one action has, when considered in its whole extent, any essential resemblance with any other. ”

“ I may, indeed, divide in my thoughts, or conceive apart from each other, those things which, perhaps, I never perceived by sense so divided. Thus I imagine the trunk of a human body without the limbs, or conceive the smell of a rose without thinking on the rose itself. ”

“ The whole fabric seems to have tumbled to pieces; it lies in a horrible chaos. I can make no order within myself. Have I lied to myself? have I acted and postured the Great Man to persuade myself that I am one? ”

“ It is absurd to call it merely superficial; here there is no question of superficiality; we might as well call a stone that strikes us between the eyes merely superficial. The very word 'superficial' is founded on a fundamental mistake about life, the idea that second thoughts are best. ”

“ In the day or at night, sometime I will find
A soul that is trampled and weary;
And I shall find ways, to be helpful and kind
To the heart that is bowed and dreary.
So the heart of me, friend, has found surcease ”

“ The sublime of disposition makes itself seen, it is visible to the spectator, because it rests upon co-existence, the simultaneous; the sublime action, on the contrary, is conceived only by the thought, because the impression and the act are successive, and the intervention of the mind is necessary to infer from a free determination the idea of previous suffering. ”

“ The real of being, its normal action, and the origin of all things to mortal sense is the unreal; whereas the unreal or imitative movements of this finite belief, that reverse the infinite modus and action, is self-styled the real, and whoever contradicts that supposition is a deceiver or deceived. ”

“ Sublimity is produced by aggregation, and littleness by dispersion. Great thoughts are always general, and consist in positions not limited by exceptions, and in descriptions not descending to minuteness. It is with great propriety that subtlety, which in its original import means exility of particles, is taken in its metaphorical meaning for nicety of distinction. Those writers who lay on the watch for novelty, could have little hope of greatness; for great things cannot have escaped former observation. ”

“ But infallibility, though sometimes claimed, is by no means to be expected from this source, and the messages coming from each subliminal self must be judged and valued according to their own intrinsic character and merit, just as a message coming to us from any primary self, whether known or unknown to us, must be judged and valued according to its source, character, and merit. ”

“ There had seldom been a case in which he had not successfully employed a curious subterranean logic—an apparently wilful insistence upon what seemed at first glance the unvital and immaterial—as a preliminary to a swift volte-face by which he turned the evidence at a new and unexpected angle of inference, and drove home the doubt with a brilliant display of oratory which captivated and—for the moment—convinced. ”

“ Large.—With Comparison large, one will be strongly given to criticising and analyzing, and will readily detect fallacies and improprieties that would escape the observation of those in whom this organ is small. If Ideality and Individuality are large, his language will abound with elevated metaphors and figures of speech, but if Causality is small, his judgment will be defective. If Secretiveness is small, and Combativeness and Self-esteem large, he will be strongly inclined to criticise every observation he hears, and will thus excite enmity and ill-will. ”

“ But, on the other hand once more, since the amount of change is different in each case, appearances differ widely in their degrees of truth and reality. There are predicates which, in comparison with others, are false and unreal. ”

“ But the blanks did not fill and though behind them he could not look, yet the subconscious self that registers and retains everything we do and hear and say prompted him dumbly that behind the blanks there lurked the dismal and, perhaps, the dire. ”

“ The suppression and obscurity arrays a simple truth in a veil of something like guilt, that is altogether meretricious, as opposed to the matronly majesty of our Scripture, for instance; and the conceptions as they recede from distinctness of idea approximate to the nature of feeling, and gain thereby a closer and more immediate affinity with the appetites. ”

“ Shall I be so uncivil as to hold back?"
"It might not displease her if you did."
"Her?"
"Your Mrs. Phillips. If I may risk a guess——"
"You may not. Your precious 'psychology' can wait. Don't be in such a damned hurry to use it." ”

“ Gladstone's case, that simplicity of character is no hindrance to subtlety of intellect. ”

“ This is true of what we call a bizarre mixture of incongruent elements in mode of attire or in manners; for it is experience and the habits of social life which dispose our minds to regard them as foreign one to the other. Much of our mirthful gratification at exhibitions of the incongruous arises through a perception of the intrusion of something foreign into a situation. ”