Those Barren Leaves quotes

But being a young man of sense, he preferred leisure, if a choice had to be made, to money. The expense of energy was not to be compensated for by the three francs he would receive at the end of the climb.

Money brings no satisfaction if one has to work for it; for if one works for it one has no time to spend it.

The ideal, he reflected, as he replaced his cap and once more started climbing, the ideal would be to win a big prize in the lottery. A really immense prize.

Her hair was nearly black and she wore it drawn sleekly back from her forehead and twined in a large knot at the base of her neck. Her uncovered ears were quite white and very small.

It was an inexpressive face, the face of a doll, but of an exceedingly intelligent doll.

She took the telegram and opened it.

She became very confidential indeed. “I get quite frightened when I see my name in the papers and photographers want to take pictures of me and people ask me out to dinner. I’m afraid of losing my obscurity.

Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.

” How little and obscure she was! How poor and honest, so to speak. Those roaring lions at Lady Trunion’s, those boring lion huntresses … they had no hope of passing through the needle’s eye.

she was entirely qualified to appreciate it in every detail. For the view was now her property. It was therefore the finest in the world; but at the same time, she alone had the right to let you know the fact.

We are all apt to value unduly those things which happen to belong to us.

Provincial picture galleries are always stuffed with Raphaels and Giorgiones. The most brilliant metropolis in Christendom, according to its inhabitants, is Dublin. My gramophone and my Ford car are better than yours.

Nowadays, when young women go about in kilts and are as barebacked as wild horses, there’s no excitement. The cards are all on the table, nothing’s left to fancy. All’s aboveboard and consequently boring.

Hypocrisy, besides being the tribute vice pays to virtue, is also one of the artifices by which vice renders itself more interesting.

And between ourselves,” said Mr. Cardan, taking the whole table into his confidence, “it can’t do without those artifices. There’s a most interesting passage on this subject in Balzac’s Cousine Bette. You remember the story?”

They turned to hypocrisy in mere self-preservation. But the present generation, tired of playing at Madame Marneffe, has reverted to the empire notions of Baron Hulot. … Emancipation is excellent, no doubt, in its way. But in the end it defeats its own object.

People ask for freedom; but what they finally get turns out to be boredom.

To those for whom love has become as obvious an affair as eating dinner, for whom there are no blushful mysteries, no reticences, no fancy-fostering concealments, but only plain speaking and the facts of nature—how flat and stale the whole business must become!

Mrs. Aldwinkle had even bought the stars.

“How bright they are!” she exclaimed, as she stepped out at the head of her little troop of guests on to the terrace. “And how they twinkle! How they palpitate! As though they were alive. They’re never like this in England, are they, Calamy?”

Calamy agreed.

Agreeing, he had found, was a laboursaving device⁠—positively a necessity in this Ideal Home.

He always tried to agree with Mrs. Aldwinkle.

“In this horrible bourgeois age”—Mrs. Aldwinkle’s vocabulary (like Mr. Falx’s, though for different reasons) contained no word of bitterer disparagement than “bourgeois”—“it’s only Southern people who still understand or even, I believe, feel passion.”

Mrs. Aldwinkle believed in passion, passionately.

From behind the glowing red end of his cigar Mr. Cardan began to speak. In the darkness his voice sounded more than ever ripe and fruity. “You’re quite right,” he assured Mrs. Aldwinkle, “quite right. It’s the climate, of course.

Joy will take the place of suffering as the principal theme of art; in the process, it may be, art will cease to exist.

A happy people, we now say, has no history; and we might add that happy individuals have no literature.

The novelist dismisses in a paragraph his hero’s twenty years of happiness; over a week of misery and spiritual debate he will linger through twenty chapters. When there is no more misery, he will have nothing to write about.

Then, at any rate, there was no question of doing what one liked; there was no liberty, no choice. One did what one was told and that was all.

Now I’m free; I have every opportunity for doing exactly what I like⁠—and I consistently do what I don’t like.

”

Old gentlemen in clubs were not more luxuriously cradled than I along the warm Tyrrhenian.

Arms outstretched, like a live cross, I floated face upwards on that blue and tepid sea. The sun beat down on me, turning the drops on my face and chest to salt. My head was pillowed in the unruffled water;

But we still cling pathetically to art. Quite unreasonably; for the thing has far less reason for existence than most of the objects of worship we have got rid of, is utterly senseless, indeed, without their support and justification.

Art for art’s sake⁠—halma for halma’s sake.

It is time to smash the last and silliest of the idols. My friends, I adjure you, put away the ultimate and sweetest of the inebriants and wake up at last completely sober—among the dustbins at the bottom of the area steps.

For though I may not have played a hand of Bridge since I was eight and have never learned mah-jongg, I can claim at least to have studied the rules of style.

I have learned the art of writing well, which is the art of saying nothing elaborately.

I have acquired all the literary accomplishments. But then, if I may say so without fatuity, I also have a talent. “Nothing profits more than self-esteem founded on just and right.” I have Milton on my side to justify me in my assertion.

What a symbol of human idealism!” The melodious voice grew louder and louder as the young man dipped and dipped his oars. “Earthy particles transfigured into heavenly forms. The heavenly forms are not self-existent, not absolute.

Dust writes these vast characters across the sky.

”

and though fully aware of the nature of the reality by which I am surrounded, though deliberately keeping myself reminded of the complete imbecility of what I am doing, I yet remain heroically at my post.

My whole time is passed on the switchback; all my life is one unceasing slide through nothing.

All my life, I insist; for it is not merely into Gog’s Court that I magically introduce the fun of the fair. I so arrange my private life that I am sliding even out of office hours.

“A sense of something far more deeply interfused.” Ever since that day those words, pronounced in my father’s cavernous voice, have rumbled through my mind.

It took me a long time to discover that they were as meaningless as so many hiccups. Such is the nefarious influence of early training.

My father, however, who never contrived to rid himself of the prejudices instilled into him in childhood, went on believing in his Wordsworthian formulas till the end. Yes, he too, I am afraid, would have preferred the precocious larks to my maturer lucubrations.

My attempt to approach, to make contact, was baffled. At the same time I felt that I ought to have known that she wouldn’t like reading. After all, what need was there for her to read?

When one is life itself, one has no use for mere books.

Years later she admitted that she had always made an exception for the novels of Gene Stratton-Porter. When I was seventeen she went to live with another set of relations in South Africa.

Barbara was silent for some time. Then with a little sigh she said:

“Men are always silly about me. I don’t know why.”

I looked at her. Could she really have uttered those words? She was still smiling as life itself might smile. And at that moment I had a horrible premonition of what I was going to suffer.

Sometimes, no doubt, love does get involved with some or all of these things; sometimes these things exist by themselves, apart from love.

But one must be prepared to swallow one’s love completely neat and unadulterated. It is a fiery, crude and somewhat poisonous draught.

Every hour I spent with Barbara brought fresh evidence of her inability to play the ideal part my imagination had all these years been assigning to her.

If I were to make love to a young woman, I should know precisely what I was making love to. But that, in those days, was something I still had to learn. In Barbara’s company I was learning it with a vengeance.

I was learning that it is possible to be profoundly and slavishly in love with someone for whom one has no esteem, whom one does not like, whom one regards as a bad character and who, finally, not only makes one unhappy but bores one.

And why not, I might now ask, why not? That things should be like this is probably the most natural thing in the world.

In the end, however, Barbara would break the magic silence and with it the illusion.

“It’s such a pity,” she would say pensively, “that July hasn’t got an r in it. Otherwise we might have had supper in an oyster bar.”

Or else, remembering that I was a literary man, she would look at the gaudy remains of the sunset and sigh. “I wish I were a poet,” she would say.

It was a longing which, for some time, I rigorously suppressed. I fought against it as against an evil thing, too horribly unlike my previous love, too outrageously incompatible with my conception of Barbara’s higher nature.

I had not yet learned to reconcile myself to the fact that Barbara’s higher nature was an invention of my own, a figment of my proper imagination.

One very hot evening in July I drove her to the door of the house in Regent Square, Bloomsbury, in which she occupied a little flat under the roof. We had been dancing and it was late;

The white sail towered over me; with a little sizzling ripple at the prow, with a clop clop of tiny waves against its flanks, the brown varnished boat bore quickly down on me.

It is a horrible thing to be afraid, to be shaken by that sudden spasm of fear which cannot be controlled because it comes so quickly that the controlling forces of the mind are taken unaware.

Every cell in the body, it seems, feels terror; from a man one is humiliated for a moment into a congeries of shrinking amoebae. One descends the scale of being;

In a few seconds I was almost buried under a mound of burning grey sand. On the faces of all my good Samaritans I noticed an expression of childlike earnestness.

They rushed backwards and forwards with their little buckets as though there were nothing more serious in life than building sand castles on the stomachs of drowned men.

And the children themselves joined in. Horrified at first by the spectacle of my limp and livid corpse, they had clung to paternal hands, shrunk away behind protecting skirts, looking on while Professor Schaefer was being practised on me, with a reluctant and disgusted curiosity.

For a long time I lay with my eyes shut. An immensely long way off, it seemed, somebody was still rubbing my feet. Periodically, somebody else pushed a spoon with brandy and milk in it into my mouth. I felt very tired, but wonderfully comfortable.

And it seemed to me at that moment that there could be nothing more exquisitely pleasurable than merely breathing.

After a while, I felt sufficiently strong and sufficiently safe in my strength to open my eyes again and look about me. How novel, how wonderfully charming everything seemed!

I opened my eyes. “Mi sento felice.” He smiled at me. The rays round the twin bright glories of his eyes emphasized themselves. It was as though the holy symbol had somehow suddenly become more holy.

“It is good not to be dead,” he said.

And I looked once more at the sky and the pink umbrella overhead. I looked at the young giant, so strong and yet so docile at my feet. I turned my eyes to right and left. The circle of curious spectators had dissolved.

They behave at every moment as though they had been miraculously preserved from death the moment before; they live exhilaratedly for the mere sake of living and can be intoxicated with happiness just because they happen not to be dead.

For those not born convalescent it may be that the secret of happiness consists in being half-drowned regularly three times a day before meals.

I recommend it as a more drastic alternative to my “water-shoot-in-every-office” remedy for ennui.

And about time too, as I notice on rereading what I have written.

Few things are more profoundly boring and unprofitable than literary descriptions.

For the writer, it is true, there is a certain amusement to be derived from the hunt for apt expressive words.

But that does not prevent them from inflicting upon others all that they themselves have suffered.

Indeed I sometimes think that some authors must write as they do purely out of a desire for revenge.

Mrs. Aldwinkle’s other guests had arrived and were waiting for us. I was introduced and found them all equally charming. The little niece rushed to Mrs. Aldwinkle’s assistance;

Mrs. Aldwinkle’s voice, raised by irritation to a peculiar loudness, made itself audible to my muffled mind. “How often have I told you, Cardan,” it said, “that you understand nothing of modern art?”

“At least a thousand times,” Mr. Cardan replied cheerfully. “But bless your heart,” he added (and I opened my eyes in time to see his benevolent smile), “I never mind at all.”

The smile was evidently too much for Mrs. Aldwinkle’s patience. With the gesture of a queen who implies that the audience is at an end she rose from her seat. “Just time,” she said, looking at her watch, “there’s just time.

“Ah, but that was different,” said the voice of the red-faced man.

“Because, my young friend, the other fellow is in all cases the rule; but I am invariably the exception. Shall we follow?”

Mrs. Aldwinkle made me look at painted ceilings till I almost fell down from giddiness. She dragged me through room after baroque room; then drove me up dark stairs into the Middle Ages.

Mr. Falx went on, shaking his head: “There’s a certain moral laxity, a certain self-indulgence. … I confess I don’t like this way of life. I may be prejudiced; but I don’t like it.”

“Everyone has his favourite vice,” said Mr. Cardan.

“You forget, Mr. Falx, that we probably don’t like your way of life.”

He continued to look at her between his puckered eyelids with the same steady insolence, the same certainty of power—a certainty so complete that he could afford to make no exertions; placidly, drowsily, he could await the inevitable triumph.

He disquieted Miss Thriplow. That was why she liked him.

They strolled on. Fifteen days ago they could never have walked like this, two on a terrace, talking at leisure of Miss Thriplow’s Special Subject.

“I don’t believe you’ve ever been in love,” she said.

“I can’t remember ever having been out of it,” Calamy answered.

“Which is the same thing as saying that you’ve never really been in. Not really,” Miss Thriplow repeated. She knew what the real thing was like.

… Lilian liked her to take part in the conversation, and remembering—for she had a good memory—a phrase that her aunt used at one time to employ frequently, but which had recently faded out of the catalogue of her favourite locutions, Irene gravely brought it out.

“Contraception,” she pronounced, “has rendered chastity superfluous.”

Mr. Cardan leaned back in his chair and roared with laughter.

It isn’t done that way. These seventeenth-century Italians tried to express passion by making use of passionate gestures. They only succeeded in producing something that either leaves us cold—though it may, as you say, amuse us—or which actually makes us laugh.

Art which is to move its contemplator must itself be still; it is almost an aesthetic law.

Passion must never be allowed to dissipate itself in wild splashings and boilings over. It must be shut up, so to speak, and compressed and moulded by the intellect. Concentrated within a calm, untroubled form, its strength will irresistibly move.

Cardan for saying nothing more about her friend in the white apron. These simple folk … the little shovel for the sugar … so much better, so much gooder than we. … In the end she almost wished that he would say something about it.

Mr. Cardan’s silence seemed more ironic than any words.

“Perhaps I haven’t,” said Mr. Cardan mollifyingly. He took the opportunity to pour out some more wine for his host.

Nobody has a right, he reflected, to be more miserable than we are. Each one of us is the most unhappily circumstanced creature in the world.

Hence it’s enormously to our credit that we bear up and get on as well as we do.

But Mr. Elver was feeling too deplorably sick to be able to think of wine without horror. He refused it, shuddering. “I didn’t mean to do anything,” he whispered. “I meant it just to happen.”

“Just to happen? Yours must be a very hopeful nature,” said Mr. Cardan.

“It’s in Dante, you know. My father brought us up on Dante; I loathed the stuff,” he added, as though it had been castor oil. “But things stuck in my mind. Do you remember the woman who tells how she died:

Perhaps, in a flash of Bergsonian intuition, the beast had realized the childish essence of Miss Elver’s character, had recognized the infant under the disguise of the full-grown woman.

Dogs are good Bergsonians, thought Mr. Cardan. Men, on the other hand, are better Kantians.

He approached softly.

It rustled among the leaves of the poplars and the sound was like that of the sea heard from far off. In the midst of the landscape lay Mr. Cardan, pensively smoking his cigar; the smoke of it drifted away along the wind.

Twenty-five thousand pounds, Mr. Cardan was thinking.

If one were to invest them in the seven percent. Hungarian Loan, they would bring in seventeen hundred and fifty a year. And if one lived in Italy that went a long way; one could consider oneself rich on that.

Cardan’s half-wit; that was all. Even Mary Thriplow, who might have been expected to take an interest in so genuine a specimen of the simple soul, paid little attention to her. The fact was that Grace was really too simple to be interesting.

Simplicity is no virtue unless you are potentially complicated.

Mrs. Chelifer, being with all her simplicity a woman of intelligence, threw light, Miss Thriplow felt, on her own case. Grace was simple only as a child or an imbecile is simple; her didactic value was therefore nil. Miss Thriplow remained faithful to Mrs. Chelifer.

“To love primitively, with fury. To be no more civilized, but savage. No more critical, but wholeheartedly passionate. No more a troubled and dubious mind, but a young, healthy body certain and unwavering in its desires.

The beast knows everything, says Uncle Yerochka in Tolstoy.

Not everything; no. But he knows, at any rate, all the things the mind does not know. The strong complete spirit must know what the beast knows as well as what the mind knows.”

It is fashionable now to be exactly the opposite of what it was fashionable to be in the eighteenth century. So that you get emotionally impotent people simulating passion with their minds.

Hypocrites of instinct, they often more than half deceive themselves.

And, if they are intelligent, they completely deceive all but the most observant of those around them. They act the emotional part better than those who actually feel the emotions. It is Diderot’s paradox of the comedian, in real life;

Nothing would give me greater satisfaction. Latin and Greek have a certain infinitesimal practical value. But Etruscan is totally and absolutely useless. What better basis for a gentleman’s education could possibly be discovered? It’s the great dead language of the future.

If Etruscan didn’t exist, it would be necessary to invent it.

”

They say that foxes enjoy being hunted; but I venture to doubt the truth of this comforting hypothesis. Experientia does it, as Mrs. Micawber’s papa (ha ha! from Mr. Toft) … Etcetera.

If loving without being loved in return may be ranked as one of the most painful of experiences, being loved without loving is certainly one of the most boring.

Perhaps no experience is better calculated to make one realize the senselessness of the passion. The spectacle of someone making a fool of himself arouses only laughter. When one is playing the fool oneself, one weeps.

she was helpless. She just obeyed orders and did her best; but her best was ludicrous. And not merely ludicrous but appalling.

She was like a buffoon carrying a skull.

Unflaggingly she played the deplorable part assigned to her. Every day she brought me flowers. “I want them to blossom in your verses,” she said.

Those had been almost the only articulate words she had uttered. Through that long death-agony they were the only witnesses to the existence of her soul. For the rest of the time she had been no more than a sick body, mindlessly crying and muttering.

The tragedy of bodily suffering and extinction has no catharsis.

Punctually it runs its dull, degrading course, act by act to the conclusion. It ennobles neither the sufferer nor the contemplator. Only the tragedy of the spirit can liberate and uplift.

The most ludicrous comedies are the comedies about people who preach one thing and practise another, who make imposing claims and lamentably fail to fulfil them.

We preach immortality and we practise death.

Tartuffe and Volpone are not in it.

They had hurried back from the fields on purpose. The grapes were not so plentiful nor of quite such good quality as they had been last year. But still, one thanked God for His mercies, such as they were.

Blessed are the fools, thought Mr. Cardan, for they shall see nothing.

Or perhaps they do see and, seeing, nevertheless comfortingly believe in future compensations and the justice of eternity. In either case—not seeing, or seeing but believing—they are fools. Still, believing is probably the best solution of all, Mr. Cardan went on to reflect.

The bearers filed in, bringing with them from the fields a healthy smell of sweat. They were dressed for the occasion in garments that ought, no doubt, to have been surplices, but which were, in point of fact, rather dirty and crumpled white dust-coats.

They looked like a cricket eleven entirely composed of umpires.

After the bearers came the priest, followed by a miniature umpire in a dust-coat so short that it did not hide his bare knees. The service began. The priest reeled off his Latin formulas as though for a wager;

“Why do you make me so unhappy?” she asked between clenched teeth. She saw herself, as she spoke the words, lying face downward on her bed, desperately sobbing.

It needs a great spirit to be greatly unhappy.

“Make you unhappy?” echoed Calamy in a voice of irritation; he was still smarting with the pain of that bite. “But I don’t. I make you uncommonly happy.”

The conscious and individual part of her spirit inclined towards Aunt Lilian. But consciousness and individuality—how precariously, how irrelevantly almost, they flowered out of that ancient root of life planted in the darkness of her being!

The flower was for Aunt Lilian, the root for Hovenden.

“But you won’t be all alone,” she protested. “We shall constantly be with you. You’ll come and stay with us.”