On language:
Slipshod language, opaque meaningless metaphors, not only excuse the mind from the rigours of thought, they protect the conscience from the sense of responsibility.
I said that abstract nouns ending in -ousness were a cumbrous impediment to
our language, and advocated a more general use of the abstract neuter -um, as
in tedium, odium, continuum, residuum, decorum, and other instances. So I
suggested, as occasion arose, meticulum, obsequium, fastidium, supercilium,
bogum, impecunium; and Charles Stuart added felicitously bibulum.
The sole warranted masters of English prose style now are: Francis Bacon, John Donne, Thomas Hobbes, Sir Thomas Browne, Gibbon, George Moore. This canon is final, and supersedes all previous final canons.
Dead metaphors are the unfailing resource of cant and hypocrisy.
On the sublime:
Ah, says Stuart Hampshire, but there’s no doubt in Handel, no cri de coeur; and I have to admit that it’s true. Through the wounds of a broken heart, through the clefts of a cracked universe, great art does surely peep. But not Handel’s. His is not of this kind, nor runs in this competition; for it is sublime, and sublimity has no room for doubt. It is the serene contemplation of one who sees humanity from the upper air, from such a height that its fears and sorrows, though sensed and interpreted, are but features of a various and majestic pageant.
On art:
That scientific knowledge is commensurate with political power is a proposition worth examining; but art is a law unto itself. It happens.
‘In the Louvre’, expostulated Paul Maze earnestly, ‘there is a picture by Salvator Rosa (or whoever it may have been) of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, and beside it is a picture by Rembrandt, of a joint of raw meat …’ ‘A far less hackneyed topic’, I interposed, and dwelt for a while on the relatively unexploited artistic properties of butcher’s meat, particularly sausages, offals, and the like. [...] Since that day I have never been invited to Campion Hall.
Shakespeare penetrates to the remote world of the human fancy, to the elevated world of passionless philosophy, to the buried world of the human heart, and the mysteries that he finds there he brings back not in meaningless fragments, nor in tedious complexity, but concentrated and compressed in a crystalline bubble, which he tumbles carelessly before us as a casual stage property.
On mythology:
That is what makes the Greek world so delightful to me, – the perpetual
intermingling of the human and the divine which makes poetry possible; and
the lack of it in Western civilisation can only be supplied by recourse to the
ancient Greeks.
On crisis after prosperity:
So all such societies, cultured, epicurean, Phaeacian societies, their crisis must come, when they are forced to face the present, and live in the present, and either adjust themselves to it, or flee from it into an unreality of their memories or their imagination. The society of the 1930s was not, after all, a corrupt society. In it too there were many delightful islands, where a cultured life was led and appreciated. But Munich came, Munich that gave the shock to both the hosts and the guests at those eloquent banquets, reminding both that the world had changed out of doors. In the seventeenth century the cultured cavalier aristocracy and their cultured humanist guests faced their Munich too. It came, like ours, in a peaceful decade, a seemingly prosperous decade, the 1630s, when from all the passions and wars that distracted the Continent England seemed happily exempt. In the midst of that false prosperity, that artificial political calm, one by one, the great magnates had to choose their sides in the impending struggle, and risk the property which they had too long taken for granted; and the humanists too, one by one, had to make their choice, and adventure themselves in that world of ideas in which they had for so long been happy sojourners at others’ expense.
On bores:
But why am I so impatient? I asked myself. Only 90% of what [Arnold] Lunn is saying is demonstrably silly, the remaining 10%, though laughably platitudinous, is quite sensible. But examining the matter I realised that sense or silliness were quite irrelevant; it was the fact that I knew in advance everything that he would say on any topic that made his statements so appalling when they came; and I remembered that conversation with H.G. Wells had been a similar experience. This then, I said to myself, is the real quality of the bore, predictability of response.
On the baroque:
I was dogmatising about style, and saying that perfect style is lucid and effortless, the expression not of simplicity but of complexities mastered and at rest; and at once I saw it before me, a still, translucent sea, deep, smooth, and serene, but beneath which a diver would find coiled and tangled forests of weeds, and submarine deserts of broken rocks and shipwrecks and dead bones, and coral labyrinths, and green caverns, and darkness, and subaqueous slime; but all these would be far below, deducible, not seen, under the smooth, glassy surface. But even before I had finished my generalisation, while I was still illustrating it with the classical names of Swift and Gibbon, and Johnson, and Flaubert, I saw the same scene at low tide, the water breaking over rotten, barnacled hulks and twisted spars, and gurgling up dark, tortuous caverns, and forming pools that reflected the whole sky in their narrow compass, with star-fish and sea-anemones in them; and there were gulls and cormorants and kittywakes about, and whelks and sea-urchins and hermit-crabs under the weeds and stones; and I realised that of course I was forgetting those wonderful baroque writers, Apuleius, and St Augustine and John Donne, and Milton, and Sir Thomas Browne.
On the S.I.S:
There are only two classes of men in the British Secret Service, – those who
protect their incompetence by neurotic secrecy, and those who screen it with
bombastic advertisement.
On religion:
What good has Religion done in the world, I sometimes ask myself. And at once I think of intellectual bondage, of Jesuitical education, of hypocritical professions, of vindictive cruelty, and the crass, incompetent apathy of parasitical priests. But these hot, immediate emotions soon pass off, and I find myself repeating a rolling series of hypnotic polysyllables which, but for religion, might never have existed to make the human tongue worth manipulating: Anchorite, Baptistery, Basilica, Canonical, Cardinal, Carmelite, Catacomb, Catechumen, Chasuble, Cloister, Commination, Consistory, Conventual, Coenobitic, Corybant, Dithyramb, Ecclesiastical, Encyclical, Enthusiast, Epiphany, Eremite, Eucharist, Evangelist, Exegetical, Genuflexion, Gnostic, Gymnosophist, Heresiarch, Heterodoxy, Hierarchy, Homoonsian, Iconoclastic, Idiorhythmic, Inquisition, Litany, Liturgical, Missionary, Monastic, Mystagogne, Paradise, Pentateuch, Propaganda, Psalmody, Quadragesima, Quasimodo, Reliquary, Septuagint, Seraphim, Supererogatory, Tympanum, Ultramontane, – let alone all those eloquent sects and heresies, – Manichaeans, Maronites, Nestorians, Circumcellions, – like the sands of the sea for number. Can football, can cricket, can winter-sports, cocktail-bars, or philandering – can even foxhunting or falconry produce a constellation of vocables that can twinkle in the presence of these?
On vanity:
Self-mortification is the coup de théǎtre of a wounded vanity.
I’m pleased with my capacity for varied enjoyment, and expect others to admire it too; that’s my chief vanity.
A dream:
Recently I dreamt – I don’t know what I dreamt; but in the course of my dream, I saw a painting by, I understood, Botticelli, and it was a painting of angels making merry in the sky; but it wasn’t the theme that struck me, for of that I have no details in my memory; it was the background. For the artist had painted the picture as if he had stood, not upon the ground, looking upwards, but himself on a level with his angels, up in the middle air; and far below lay a landskip more desolate & enchanting than ever I have seen from tower or mountain-top, a vast, dreary, unpeopled waste, over which great floods lay spread in formless patterns, coiling aimlessly this way and that in long arms and reaches over the grey treeless waste; and between it and the clear, bright air where the angels were holding their celestial conversazione, there wheeled, like drifting flakes of snow, a cloud of wild swans, with wide rings and necks outstretched, looking ever downwards, so vivid that I thought I could hear their heavy pinions whirring – the symbol of life, midway between the dead world and eternity.
Finally, a prizewinning remark on the rural vs urban imagination:
The other morning, while cub-hunting in Charndon Wood, it occurred to me to wonder whether perhaps, in our great cities, in London, Detroit, or Stalingrad, here are not people who can have no conception of the world from which these images [of flora and fauna in Homer] are drawn, to whom the phenomena of wildlife are the tedious ritual of an esoteric world from which they are excluded. I remembered that not long ago Eve Aitken had taken a goat to London in a tube-train, since other transport was unavailable; and at King’s Cross a conductress, seeing this strange, almost heraldic animal led into her subterranean kingdom, thought it was a breed of dog, – this being presumably the only quadruped that had hitherto penetrated, from above ground, into the lamplight and ozone of her nether catacombs.
