Hadrian the Seventh quotes

In mind he was tired, worn out, by years of hope deferred, of loneliness, of unrewarded toil. In body he was almost prostrate by the pain of an arm on the tenth day of vaccination.

Bodily pain stung him like a personal affront.

“Someone will have to be made miserable for this,” he once said during the throes of a toothache. He was no stranger to mental fatigue: but, when to that was added corporeal anguish, he came near collapse. His capacity for work was constricted:

In mind he was tired, worn out, by years of hope deferred, of loneliness, of unrewarded toil. In body he was almost prostrate by the pain of an arm on the tenth day of vaccination. Bodily pain stung him like a personal affront.

“Someone will have to be made miserable for this,” he once said during the throes of a toothache.

He was no stranger to mental fatigue: but, when to that was added corporeal anguish, he came near collapse. His capacity for work was constricted: the mere sight of his writing materials filled him with disgust.

and now a hekatombe, sovereign, royalty, aristocracy, government, bureaucracy, all annihilated, and Anarchy in excelsis. France will take fire at any minute now, that’s absolutely certain. Oh, how horrible!

But we’re all Christians, Flavio; and this is only one of the many funny ways in which we love one another.

”

Out of courtesy, out of kindness, he was used to give way; but all the same he tenaciously knew and clung to his original purpose. He knew that delay was his enemy: yet he invariably would stand aside and let himself be delayed.

And now towards the end of his youth, he was poor, lonely, a misanthropic altruist.

He returned to his armchair, breathing a long sigh of irritation and exhaustion: broke up three cigarette dottels for a (tobacco famine was afflicting him), rolled them in a fresh paper, and applied a match.

but with that meek subservient aspect—how Luckock used to chaff about it!—no wonder everyone takes advantage of you. What’s the good of having your fastidious mind clearly written on that fastidious mouth if you don’t insist on behaving fastidiously.

Cultivate the art of looking as though you were about to say No. You always can say Yes after No.

But, if you begin with Yes, as you always do, you prevent yourself from ever saying No. That’s why everyone can swindle you. You’re far too anxious to give way. Buck up a bit, you ugly little thing!

“Oh I know of that psalm where it is written that You set apart for Yourself the godly. Am I godly? Ah no: nor even goodly.

I’m Your prisoner writhing in my fetters, fettered, impotent, utterly unhappy.

“Only he, who is good and clean, is happy. I am clean, God, but neither good nor happy. Not alone can a man be good or happy. Force, which generates no one thing, is not force. All intelligence must be active, potent. I’m intelligent.

“ ‘I was an hungred and ye gave me no meat’ down to ‘Depart from me, ye cursed, into aeonial fire.’ Yes, the sharp line was drawn across my life. I had one true friend, a protestant.

As for the Faith, I found it comfortable. As for the Faithful, I found them intolerable.

The Bishop of Caerleon at present is the exception which proves the rule, because he came to me in the teeth of calumny.”

“

I am what you and your Catholics have made me.

”

The catastrophe is complete. I nourish no grudge, and seek no revenge, no, nor even justice. I am content to live my own life, avoiding all my brother-Catholics, or treating them with severe forbearance when circumstances throw them in my path.

I don’t squash cockroaches.

”

and I solemnly assever that I believe those owl-like hierarchs to have been completely flabbergasted because I neither whimpered penitence, nor whined for mercy, but actually had the effrontery to tell them the blind and naked truth about myself.

Truth nude and unadorned, is such a rare commodity among Catholics

, as you know, and especially among the clergy;

“

It is the only string which you have left unbroken on my lute.

”

“Not even a paradox.

A poor thing: but mine own,

” George flung in, glaring through his great-great-grandfather’s silver spectacles which he used indoors.

“Man alive!” cried the bishop.

“I do not care to preserve a record of my superiors’ humiliation,” said George, again in his didactic recitative.

“I see that Mr. Rose knows how to behave nobly, as you said, Frank,” the cardinal commented.

Things like these distract me; and sometimes keep me away altogether.

I like to worship my Maker, alone, from a distance, unseen of all save Him.

You see, among the laity, I am as a fish out of water: because I am a clerk, whose place is not without but within the cancelli.

What was causing the special correspondents in Rome to exude the subterfuges, with which (as a pis-aller) they are accustomed to gain their daily bread, was no such recondite matter after all.

Just as Jews are less commercial, and Jesuits less cunning, so journalists are less capable than they are supposed to be.

As a matter of fact, they are quite unscientific persons, in that they go about their business in a fortuitous manner trusting to the human element called “smartness” for producing their effects. They have not yet realized the instability of all human elements.

Then, they looked whole inquisitions one at another, saying nothing. And, after half-an-hour they adjourned till the morrow: gathered up their trains; and swept each to his separate cell. Stupid conclavists tried to read their expressions.

As well try to find out his thoughts from the sole of his unworn shoe as from the face of a cardinal.

The cardinalitial mask is as superior (in impenetrable pachydermatosity) to that of the proverbial public-schoolboy, as is the cuticle of a crocodile to that of pulex irritans.

To him, with his keen and carefully cultivated sense of the ridiculous, the absurdity of a human individual composing complacent criticisms of Divine decrees, hashing up scriptural and liturgical tags with a proper and essentially sensuous pleasure in patchwork, seemed like gratuitous impertinence. “

Dear Jesus, be not to me a Judge, but a Saviour,

” was all the form of words which he used. It included everything, as far as he could see. He repeated it over and over again and again like a wonderful incantation; and anon it had its psychic effect.

Unconsciously, George was urged further and further in. His demeanour was abstrusely unemotional: he continued violently absorbent of the spectacle. Presently, he whispered to the bishop, “What is it? What is happening?”

“I think God has given us a Pope.”

“Wait. We shall know in a minute.”

“Your Holiness would perhaps prefer to be called Leo, or Pius, or Gregory, as is the modern manner?” the Cardinal-Dean inquired with imperious suavity.

“The previous English pontiff was Hadrian the Fourth: the present English pontiff is Hadrian the Seventh. It pleases Us; and so, by Our Own impulse, We command.”

Then there was no more to be said. The election of Hadrian the Seventh was proclaimed in the Conclave. They came to the ceremony of adoration. One by one, Their Eminencies kissed the Supreme Pontiff’s foot and hand and cheek.

He made sure of the one step: fearlessly strode and stood; and prepared for the next. He never looked behind. The amethyst, the pontifical name, and now—? Yes! “

Begin as you mean to go on,

” He advised Himself.

His features showed no emotion. He well knew all about that. He was accepting, even insisting on, the observance of all rites to consolidate Him in the Supreme Pontificature: not that He cared for them, but that He might be free to act.

It was not the glory of the world which He craved: but the combat, the combat⁠—because one rests so much more sweetly after strife.

Slowly, and with all the unspeakable solemnity accumulated during centuries, the mass was sung. The Apostle elevated the Host to the four quarters of the globe. Cardinals ruffled like huge flamingoes round Him. He always was white and still.

“Holiness, this is suicide for You and murder for us. The City is full of Jews and Freemasons; and we shall most assuredly be stabbed, or shot, or shattered to pieces with bombs, or drenched with vitriol—”

“The Church wants a martyr badly. Your Eminency is invited, not commanded.”

Berstein muttered to Vivole, in a scandalized tone, that the Pope was courting popularity. Pepato, with a note of admiration, commented on the mad English. Word of the invitation rushed on ahead.

“Aren’t they lovely?” He said. “

Isn’t the world full of lovely things, lovely live things? It’s the dead and the stagnant that are ugly.

”

“

Priests are not ‘as other men.’

However, We take it that you all believe yourselves to have acted conscientiously.

You must collect Our mind from Our conduct as well as from our words. We entirely disapprove of the clergy competing for or using any secular power or dominance whatever, especially such power as inheres in the command of money.

The clergy are ministers⁠—ministers⁠—not masters.

And as to the other charge—‘the gross injustices which are of daily occurrence’?”

“This comes from Your Eminency’s archdiocese,” he said.

The cardinal looked at the thing, as one looks at the grass of the field. There it is. One has seen it all before.

“We disapprove of that,” said the Pope.

“God helps those who help themselves—”

“But not those who help themselves out of other people’s pockets.”

“The workman is worthy of his hire—”

“But suppose the faithful do not give freewill offerings?”

“Then starve and go to Heaven, as Ruskin says. That is what We are going to do, if possible.”

“How are we to build our churches?”

… at statesmanship in regard to states over which he had no control at all, and which were really rather commodiously managed by the secular power, he was requested to turn his attention to the increase of business which inevitably now would come into his department.

“The world is sick for the Church,” said Hadrian; “but She never would confess it as long as the Church posed as Her rival.”

Nevertheless the thing was a blow, a blow that was heavy and strong. Half the College put on an indifferent noncommittal air: the other half roared anathemas and execrations. And Ragna howled,

As they were going in to dinner, Mundo whispered to Fiamma “Have we a saint or a madman for a Pope?”

“Two-thirds of the one and one-third of the other,” replied the radiant Archbishop of Bologna.

After one of the receptions of English pilgrims, Hadrian privately received an unusual visitor in the last antechamber. She was brought in by a gentleman, who remained outside one of the doors during the interview, while his fellow guarded the outside of the other.

He was accused of an anarchistical kind of enthusiasm. When He heard that, He said,

“We are conservative in all Our instincts, and only contrive to become otherwise by an effort of reason or principle, as We contrive to overcome all Our other vicious propensities.”

That was considered an additional indecorum. His quaintly correct and archaic diction exasperated men who had no means of expressing their thoughts except in the fluid allusive clipped verbosity of the day.

Where did the Rights of Man come in? But then Hadrian was quite certain that Christians actually had no worldly “rights” at all. Arraigned on the question of superstition by the stolidly commonsense Talacryn, He said

“Extra-belief, superstition, that which we hope or augur or imagine, is the poetry of life;”

and His utterance was regarded as almost heretical.

No one complained of its colour. Red was canonically correct. But the silk should have been satin. Also, the pattern of the gold embroidery was uncommon. A rich design, of conventional foliage and grotesques enclosing armorials and keys, was what custom demanded. (

Hadrian had no armorials. Years before, while discussing heraldic blazons with an aged clergyman, he had burst out with “My shield is white.” “Keep it so,” the other replied. And Hadrian’s shield was Argent.

) But this narrow strip, no wider than a ribbon, severely adorned with little fylfot crosses (“a Buddhist emblem” Berstein sneered) in little rectangular panels, with no expansive ends, and a scanty fringe, was hardly at all the kind of stole to inspire either the …

Infinite difference, He said, was the note of the Divine Creator’s scheme. Not equality, but diversity, of physique, of intellect, of condition, was man’s birthright.

One man was not as good as another: he generally was a great deal better⁠—as every man well knew.

The claim to equality was so indecently unjust that it only could emanate from inferiors who hoped to gain by degrading their superiors. Socialists, who claimed equality, solely were actuated by the lust of improving their own condition at the expense of their brother.

“Why?”

Hadrian’s predilection was for the inconsistent, rather than for that undevelopable fossil which goes by the name of consistency.

“It would be inconsistent, Holiness, for the Church to proclaim, by the most solemn act of Her ministry, as a child submissive to Her, one who always refused;

“God bless you, little boy;” said the Apostle.

“Oh, He can speak my English words!” the youngster shouted with delight.

“Yolanda, come and kiss these rings, and hear Him say ‘God bless you, little boy’ again—no—girl I mean, Missy dear;” with a side-look at the governess.

and came back again. Hadrian returned his gaze, very gently, quite inflexibly. The boy must learn his lesson now. Prince Filiberto pondered the novel doctrine from all his little points of view; and at last he grasped the consequence like a man.

“Ah well, then I suppose I had better keep it myself. I am sorry that I gave it to you, Missy, yesterday.”

Hadrian experienced the strangest-possible rigour of the throat. Another moment and something in Him would have spoiled all. He rose: blessed His visitors; and passed swiftly away through the trees to the left.

He spoke to them, not only with the authority of His apostolature, but with the affection of a comrade who wished to serve them from the experience (inherited and acquired) of a member of the older nations. He concluded with delicious slyness,

“The young ones think the old are fools: the old ones know the young ones are.”

America was openly delighted, not only by the consideration which the Pope showed in addressing Her next to England but, by the pungent vivid validity of His remarks.

“I am very glad to hear this. I am pleased to know that there is one point on which I can agree with Your Holiness.”

“We trust that there are many points on which We cannot agree with Your Majesty.”

The Kaiser was taken aback. “I do not understand,” he said.

The Kaiser was taken aback. “I do not understand,” he said.

“Complete agreement signifies complete stagnation. Disagreement at least postulates activity; and only by activity is The Best made manifest and approved.”

“Holiness, I beg Your pardon. I see the point. That is a very grand and at-all-times-to-be-remembered doctrine. I must try to remember Your beautiful words: for it is The Best which I am seeking for Germany.”

They were by the door. The Black Pope had one hand under the blue-linen curtain, and was fumbling for the handle. The White Pope quickly clinched His admonition. “

Don’t pretend to be Superior Persons. Don’t give yourselves such airs. Don’t gad about in hansom cabs quite so much. Don’t play billiards in public-houses. Don’t nurture jackals. Try to be honest.

Don’t oppress the poor. Don’t adore the rich. Don’t cheat either. Tell the truth: or try to. Love all men, and learn to serve. And don’t be vulgar.”

The White Pope quickly clinched His admonition. “Don’t pretend to be Superior Persons. Don’t give yourselves such airs. Don’t gad about in hansom cabs quite so much. Don’t play billiards in public-houses. Don’t nurture jackals. Try to be honest.

Don’t oppress the poor. Don’t adore the rich. Don’t cheat either. Tell the truth: or try to. Love all men, and learn to serve. And don’t be vulgar.

”

Then the virtuous Jerry also began to flounder. Want? Eh, but he wanted several things.

“Name them:” the Pope commanded.

“For what?” the Pope inquired.

“If you wish to do well for yourself, if you wish honestly to earn a better living than you ever have earned, you shall have the opportunity.”

An appeal to a goodness which is not in him is, to a vain and sensitive soul, a stinging insult.

Jerry’s face became wetter and redder. “And fhat about damages for the past?” he barked.

Leighton blinked; and thought it a dreadful pity. Talacryn was for running out and trying to persuade the blackmailers even at some cost—anything was better than scandal, he said. The Pope told him not to be a stupid fool with his infernal hankerings after compromise.

“Fancy paying for silence!”

His Holiness scornfully adjoined.

However, this is neither the case of a saint, as you so acutely have observed: nor a case of bi-location, as you so hilariously would pretend.” He flung the retort at the cardinal with such force that Berstein sought his seat with not innocuous concussion.

“Lord Cardinals, the voice of the snake and the voice of the goose are one and the same. They both hiss:”

the Pope added before moving again.

If I were to give Him a little present, like a baccy-pouch, ten to one it wouldn’t be precisely to His taste—anyhow it ’ld only be like giving Him a calf of His Own cow. Oh damn!

It’s like a wax match offering a light to the sun.

” He suddenly faced to the door again; and his words came in the form of a solemn pledge. “Lord, I promise.” He remained entranced for several moments: and anon went on his way with steadfast brow.

“I had half-a-dozen. You see when I was kicked out from college, without a farthing or a friend at hand, I literally became an adventurer.

Thank God Who gave me the pluck to face my adventures. I was obliged to live by my wits. Thank God again Who gave me wits to live by.

”

… Catholics and sometimes priests, I trusted to their honour, and obtained no stamped agreement:—when I was defrauded of my wages, my landlords lost patience (poor things—I don’t blame them,) harried me, reproached me, at length turned me out, and so prevented me from paying them.

I dug myself out of the gutter with these bare hands again and again; and started anew to earn enough to pay my debts.

Debts! They never were off my chest for twenty years, no matter what these vile liars say. Debts! They say that I incurred them for luxurious living, unjustifiably—”

Certainly no one of you ever made a practical attempt to direct that energy.

I was a like a wild colt careering round and round a large meadow.

You all looked on and sneered ‘Erratic!’ Of course I was erratic, for you all did your very best, by stolidity, hints, insinuations, commands, to create obstacles over which I had to jump, through which I had to tear a way;

and there was no one to bit and bridle me, to ride me, and to share his couch with me. And of course my pseudonymity has been misunderstood by the stupid, as well as mispresented by the invidious.

Most people have only half developed their single personalities.

That a man should split his into four and more; and should develop each separately and perfectly, was so abnormal that many normals failed to understand it. So when ‘false pretences’ and similar shibboleths were shrieked, they also took alarm and howled.

I believe that I perceived it; and laughed to myself about it. But I did my best to disabuse the fools of their foolery. That made things worse.

Liars themselves, they could not conceive of a man speaking truth to his own detriment.

My disclaimer was taken for a lie; and they honoured me the more for it; and chuckled at the thought of their own perspicacity:—that is to say, when what I said was intelligible to them. You see I used to be a great talker.

I myself was grossly deceived: barbarously man-woman-and-priest-handled. I was foolish to try to explain myself. I was foolish to try to work with, to live with, to equal myself in every respect with, verminous persons within the meaning of the act.

I ought to have died. But I did not die. That is all. It is not half. Now you know. Make what you please of it.

”

It’s comical to say it: but my indefatigability was nothing but a purely selfish pose, put-on solely to make philanthropists look unspeakably silly, to give the lie direct to all their idiotic iniquitous shibboleths. It wasn’t that I couldn’t stop working: but that I wouldn’t.

The fact is that I long, I burn, I yearn, I thirst, I most earnestly desire, to do absolutely nothing. I am so tired.

I have such a genius for elaborate repose. But convention always alleges idleness, or drunkenness, or lechery, or luxury, to be the causa causans of scoundrelism and of poverty. That’s a specimen of the ‘Eidola Specus,’ the systematizing spirit which damns half the world.

It wasn’t that I couldn’t stop working: but that I wouldn’t. The fact is that I long, I burn, I yearn, I thirst, I most earnestly desire, to do absolutely nothing. I am so tired.

I have such a genius for elaborate repose.

But convention always alleges idleness, or drunkenness, or lechery, or luxury, to be the causa causans of scoundrelism and of poverty. That’s a specimen of the ‘Eidola Specus,’ the systematizing spirit which damns half the world.

and I laboured like a driven slave. No: I never was idle. But I was a most abject fool. I used to think that this diligent ascetic life eventually would pay me best.

I made the mistake of omitting to give its due importance to the word ‘own’ in the adage ‘Virtue is its own reward.’

I had no other reward, except my unwillingly cultivated but altogether undeniable virtue. A diabolic brute once said to me ‘If I had your brains I would be earning a thousand a year.’ I replied ‘Take them: tell me what to do:

I never learned by experience. I still kept on. A haggard shabby shy priestly-visaged individual, such as I was, could not hope to win the confidence of men who daily were approached by splendid plausible cadgers. My requests were too diffident, too modest.

I made the mistake of appealing to brains rather than to bowels, to reason rather than to sentiment.

I wanted hundreds, or thousands—say two: others wanted and got tens and hundreds of thousands. A cotton-waste merchant could not risk fifteen-hundred on my work, although he liked me personally and said that he believed in the value of my inventions: