“Just as you may despise Charles for his overburden of [fossil-hunting] apparatus, you perhaps despise him for his lack of specialization. But you must remember that natural history had not then the pejorative sense it has today of a flight from reality—and only too often into sentiment…. It is not that amateurs can afford to dabble everywhere; they ought to dabble everywhere, and damn the scientific prigs who try to shut them up in some narrow oubliette.”
“Yet this distance, all those abysses unbridged and then unbridgeable by radio, television, cheap travel and the rest, was not wholly bad. People knew less of each other, perhaps, but they felt more free of each other, and so were more individual. The entire world was not for them only a push or a switch away. Strangers were strange, and sometimes with an exciting, beautiful strangeness. It may be better for humanity that we should communicate more and more. But I am a heretic, I think our ancestors’ isolation was like the greater space they enjoyed: it can only be envied. The world is only too literally too much with us now.”
“Dr. Grogan was, in fact, as confirmed an old bachelor as Aunt Tranter a spinster. Being Irish, he had to the full that strangely eunuchistic Hibernian ability to flit and flirt and flatter womankind without ever allowing his heart to become entangled. A dry little kestrel of a man, sharp, almost fierce on occasion, yet easy to unbend when the company was to his taste, he added a pleasant astringency to Lyme society for when he was with you you felt he was always hovering a little, waiting to pounce on any foolishness—and yet, if he liked you, it was always with a tonic wit and the humanity of a man who had lived and learned, after his fashion, to let live.”
“The swift gay crunch of the iron-bound wheels, the slight screech of an insufficiently greased axle, the old affection revived by Mrs. Hawkins, his now certainty of being soon in real possession of this landscape, all this evoked in Charles that ineffable feeling of fortunate destiny and right order which his stay in Lyme had vaguely troubled. This piece of England belonged to him, and he belonged to it; its responsibilities were his, and its prestige, and its centuries-old organization.”
“It is, of course, its essentially schizophrenic outlook on society that makes the middle class such a peculiar mixture of yeast and dough. We tend nowadays to forget that it has always been the great revolutionary class; we see much more the doughy aspect, the bourgeoisie as the heartland of reaction, the universal insult, forever selfish and conforming. Now this Janus-like quality derives from the class’s one saving virtue, which is this: that alone of the three great castes of society it sincerely and habitually despises itself.”
“This tension, then—between lust and renunciation, undying recollection and undying repression, lyrical surrender and tragic duty, between the sordid facts and their noble use—energizes and explains one of the age’s greatest writers [Thomas Hardy]; and beyond him, structures the whole age itself.”
“Milk punch and champagne may not seem a very profound philosophical conclusion to such soul-searching; but they had been perennially prescribed at Cambridge as a solution to all known problems, and though Charles had learned a good deal more about the problems since leaving the university he had not bettered the solution. Fortunately his club, like so many English gentlemen’s clubs, was founded on the very simple and profitable presumption that a man’s student days are his best. It had all the amenities of a rich college without any of its superfluous irritations (such as dons, deans and examinations). It pandered, in short, to the adolescent in man. It also provided excellent milk punch.”
“I am infinitely strange to myself.”
“I have felt that too. It is because we have sinned. And we cannot believe we have sinned.”
“This—the fact that every Victorian had two minds—is the one piece of equipment we must always take with us on our travels back to the nineteenth century. It is a schizophrenia seen at its clearest, its most notorious, in the poets I have quoted from so often—in Tennyson, Clough, Arnold, Hardy; but scarcely less clearly in the extraordinary political veerings from Right to Left and back again of men like the younger Mill and Gladstone; in the ubiquitous neuroses and psychosomatic illnesses of intellectuals otherwise as different as Charles Kingsley and Darwin; in the execration at first poured on the Pre-Raphaelites, who tried—or seemed to be trying—to be one-minded about both art and life; in the endless tug-of-war between Liberty and Restraint, Excess and Moderation, Propriety and Conviction, between the principled man’s cry for Universal Education and his terror of Universal Suffrage; transparent also in the mania for editing and revising, so that if we want to know the real Mill or the real Hardy we can learn far more from the deletions and alterations of their autobiographies than from the published versions… more from correspondence that somehow escaped burning, from private diaries, from the petty detritus of the concealment operation. Never was the record so completely confused, never a public facade so successfully passed off as the truth on a gullible posterity; and this, I think, makes the best guidebook to the age very possibly Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Behind its latterday Gothick lies a very profound and epoch-revealing truth.”
“All through human history the elect have made their cases for election. But Time allows only one plea…. It is this. That the elect, whatever the particular grounds they advance for their cause, have introduced a finer and fairer morality into this dark world. If they fail that test, then they become no more than despots, sultans, mere seekers after their own pleasure and power. In short, mere victims of their own baser desires.”
“My dear Charles, if you play the Muslim in a world of Puritans, you can expect no other treatment. I am as fond as the next man of a pretty ankle. I don’t blame you. But don’t tell me that the price is not fairly marked.”
“And the other pleasure lay in the Americans themselves. At first, perhaps, he noticed a certain lack of the finer shades of irony; and he had to surmount one or two embarrassing contretemps when humorously intended remarks were taken at face value. But there were such compensations… a frankness, a directness of approach, a charming curiosity that accompanied the open hospitality: a naivety, perhaps, yet with a face that seemed delightfully fresh-complexioned after the farded culture of Europe.”
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