Patrick: Lagniappe

If a person is too poor to keep a servant, though ever so elegant, he must sweep his own rooms : if a dear girl has no dear Mamma to settle matters with the young man, she must do it for herself.  And oh, what a mercy it is that these women do not exercise their powers oftener!  We can't resist them, if they do.  Let them show ever so little inclination, and men go down on their knees at once : old or ugly, it is all the same.  And this I set down as a positive truth.  A woman with fair opportunities, and without an absolute hump, may marry WHOM SHE LIKES.

--Vanity Fairy by William Makepeace Thackeray

Patrick: Lagniappe

Although schoolmistresses' letters are to be trusted no more nor less than churchyard epitaphs ; yet, as it sometimes happens that a person departs this life, who is really deserving of all the praises the stonecutter carves over his bones ; who is a good Christian, a good parent, child, wife, or husband ; who actually does leave a disconsolate family to mourn his loss ; so in academies of the male and female sex it occurs every now and then that the pupil is fully worthy of the praises bestowed by the disinterested instructor.

--Vanity Fairy by William Makepeace Thackeray

Patrick: Lagniappe

The truth is that unless you are either a critic of the first rank, or lucky enough to be caught up in a major revolution in taste, there are unlikely to be more than a limited number of original things which you have to say about any author who has been widely discussed already.  But dissertations have to be submitted, and (where promotion is at stake) books have to be published.  There are various possibilities open.  You can spread your insights thin (many a long-drawn-out thesis could be compressed into a tolerably interesting article).  You can choose an unexplored subject - and as time goes on, those that remain are bound to be more and more trivial.  Or you can strain after false originality.  One way or another, the books which result, and which multiply at an increasing rate, are likely to mean as little to posterity as most nineteenth-century collections of sermons do to a modern reader.

--The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters by John Gross

[N.B.:  Gross lived long enough to see his prediction come true in a most horrible fashion: modern academic literary scholarship now takes the form of straining after false originality in a recondite (and barbarically jangling) language of deliberate opacity which constitutes nothing more than a collection of sermons on what is regarded as the commonplace political orthodoxy of the faculty lounge--no more are there paeans to the Trinity (Father, Son and Holy Ghost) but instead the Quadrinity (GLBT).]

Patrick: Lagniappe

[Dr. Leavis's] whole rhetorical manner and method of approach have tended, certainly since the late 1930s, towards the setting-up of a closed system.

How do you maintain such a system and make it look plausible, if as Leavis does you always claim to be proceeding, in Dr Johnson's phrase, 'not dogmatically but deliberately'?  Various techniques suggest themselves.  While protesting that you are open to argument, you habitually use the language of intimidation, language which brooks no opposition ('irrefutable', 'obvious and unanswerable', 'indubitable', 'has no claim to be treated as a critical authority on the verse of the period - or any verse').*

*  This is Leavis writing about Sir Herbert Grierson and the seventeenth century.  No claim at all?  Any verse whatever?

--The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters by John Gross

[N.B.:  Of course, the irony today is that Dr. Leavis's own anathema has been visited on his own head: he is now treated as a critical outcast and "has no claim to treated as a critical authority" on any literary matter whatsoever.]

Patrick: Lagniappe

And a good Chesterton paradox is the reverse of a neat self-contained epigram: it suggests ideas rather than clinches them.  When he says, for instance, that Herbert Spencer's closed intellectual system made him more truly medieval than Ruskin, he is starting a train of thought which may not necessarily take in Spencer and Ruskin and the Middle Ages, but which does cut provocatively - 'bisociatively' - across conventional assumptions.  He once described Shaw's plays as expanded paradoxes, and his own paradoxes have the power to gather force and expand in the mind.

--The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters by John Gross

Patrick: Lagniappe

[Chesterton's] critical writings, on the other hand, are still widely known, although they have long been excluded from the official canon of modern literary criticism.  The reasons are plain enough.  His methods are everything that our schoolmasters have brought us up to abjure.  He is too excited by large conceptions to pay very much attention to accuracy in small ones.  He is often content to make his point through a mere phrase, or a joke, or an unexpected adjective.  He would hardly have known how to begin 'erecting his impressions into laws'.  He is extravagant, and he relished extravagance in others.  Much of what he wrote was unashamed popularization.  He is casual, unguarded, unsystematic.  He plays with words, and he would rather parody an author than tabulate his faults.  He contradicts himself.  While he is working out his own ideas he is never afraid to get in the way of his author.  In a word, he is a stimulating and at times an inspired critic.

--The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters by John Gross

[N.B.:  There's an example of a rare bit of rhetoric: the compliment disguised as an insult.  I wonder if there's a fancy term for that?]

Patrick: Lagniappe

The chief practical purpose of literary histories is to teach us something about books which we have never read and probably never will.  Nobody quite likes admitting it, and most historians proceed on the unspoken assumption that sooner or later one can get round to reading everything.  But the ordinary reader, at least, knows that life is short; and if he feels simply oppressed, when all the major masterpieces and minor masterpieces in the world seem to fly in his face like Alice's cards.  So much to do, so little done.  And it gets worse all the time.  Early in the nineteenth century, Jeffrey observed plaintively that if authors insisted on turning out books at the rate that they did, within a mere two hundred years or so it would be necessary to invent 'some sort of short-hand reading', if the whole system were not to break down.  A generation later, as the avalanche really gathered force, two hundred years must have looked like an absurdly optimistic estimate.

--The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters by John Gross

Patrick: Lagniappe

Style, in particular, must be one of the most stilted books ever written, with every sentence straining to be brilliant.  a characteristic flourish is the description of the teacher of writing as

a Professor of eloquent and thieving, his wingèd shoes remark him as he skips from metaphor to metaphor. . . . . From his distracting account of the business it would appear that he is now building a monument, anon he is painting a picture (with brushes dipped in a gallipot made of an earthquake). . . .

We look up Churton Collins's comments in the Saturday Review, and we are not disappointed:

This is the most intolerable piece of literary coxcombry which it has ever been our irritating ill-fortune to meet with.  It may be described as the reductio ad absurdum of the preciosity of Pater and Stevenson.  The one endeavor of the writer appears to be to avoid simplicity and to juggle alternately with paradoxes and platitudes.  All is spangle, tinsel, paste. . . .

--The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters by John Gross

[N.B.:  This was written in 1969.  Oh, how the fallen have fallen further.]

Patrick: Lagniappe

*  In the Saintsbury Memorial Volume a former student recalls learning a specimen sentence by heart:  'But while none, save these, of men living, had done, or could have done, such things, there was much here which - whether either could have done it or not - neither had done.'

--The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters by John Gross

Patrick: Lagniappe

What incensed [Harrison] most of all, however, was the spread of bibliomania, the passion for resurrecting forgotten texts and dredging up minor curiosities.  If there was one literary type of the period whom he thoroughly despised it was the 'book-trotter', whom he depicted wandering aimlessly from shelf to shelf and then finally settling down to write Half-Hours with Obscure Authors.  with such men nibbling at the foundations, great books were in danger of being smothered by the sheer weight of little ones. 

--The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters by John Gross

Patrick: Lagniappe

[Morley] calculates how much can be got through if half an hour a day is set aside for reading, and wonders whether Mark Pattison was being unreasonable when he said that no self-respecting citizen should own less than a thousand volumes.  ('He pointed out that one could stack 1,000 octavo volumes in a bookcase that shall be 13 feet by 10 feet, and 6 inches deep, and that everybody has that small amount of space at disposal.')  In addition, he recommends the making of abstracts and the keeping of commonplace books.  The great thing about literature is that it can elevate a man's character, without in any way unfitting him for a public career:  'I venture to sat that in the present Government, including the Prime Minister,* there are three men at least who are perfectly capable of earning their bread as men of letters.'"

*  Salisbury, who had been a Saturday reviewer during Morley's time on the paper: every week they used to sit alone together in the editorial anteroom waiting for their assignments, without once exchanging a single word.

--The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters by John Gross

Patrick: Lagniappe

There were closer links between literature and public life in Victorian England that can readily be realized in our own more complex, more compartmentalized world.  Statesmen wrote learned works in their spare time; authors were lured into party politics.  Consider, for example, how many nineteenth-century historians also served (with varying degrees of success) as Members of Parliament: among others, Grote, Macaulay, Acton, G. O. Trevelyan, Lecky, Bryce.  Or, from another angle, think of Gladstone, with his Homeric Studies, his lifelong passion for Dante, his unflagging literary interests.  In the 1830s his first book was praised by Wordsworth and made occasion for a famous Edinburgh article by Macaulay, 'Gladstone on Church and State'; fifty years later, his review of Robert Elsmere ('Weg on Bobbie') was the talk of the day; in the midst of parliamentary business he somehow found time to write about Tennyson and Leopardi.

--The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters by John Gross

Patrick: Lagniappe

His successor, James Payn, an old friend from Eton and Cambridge days, was a popular novelist without any intellectual pretensions who was called in by the publishers in an effort to win back lost readers.*

*  Payn's prosperous career might be summed up as everything that Gissing's wasn't.  In the course of the literary recollections which he wrote for the Cornhill he remarks that there is less jealousy among authors than in any other profession - a view which has not yet been confirmed by subsequent research.

--The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters by John Gross

[N.B.:  The recently deceased John Gross was the last modern practitioner of that fine lost art: the composition of the delicious footnote.]

Patrick: Lagniappe

Whilst they hesitated, Tallien received a note in a remembered handwriting.  That bit of paper saved unnumbered lives, and changed the fortune of France, for it contained these words: "Coward! I am to be tried tomorrow."  At Bordeaux, Tallien had found a lady in prison, whose name was Madame de Fontenay, and who was the daughter of the Madrid banker Cabarrus.  She was twenty-one, and people who saw her for the first time could not repress an exclamation of surprise at her extraordinary beauty.  After the release, she divorced her husband, and married Tallien.  In later years she became the Princess de Chimay; but, for writing that note, she received the profane but unforgotten name of Notre Dame de Thermidor.

--Lectures on the French Revolution by Lord Acton

[N.B.:  Who says history isn't written by a sentimental romance novelist?]

Patrick: Lagniappe

Next morning, Saturday July 13, Charlotte purchased her dagger, and called on Marat.  although he was in the bath where he spent most of his time, she made her way in, and explained her importunity by telling him about the conspirators she had seen in Normandy.  Marat too down their names, and assured her that in a few days he would have them guillotined.  At that signal she drove her knife into his heart.  When the idiotic accuser-general intimated that so sure a thrust could only have been acquired by practice, she exclaimed, "The monster!  He takes me for a murderess."  All that she felt was that she had taken one life to preserve thousands.  She was knocked down and carried through a furious crowd to prison.  At first she was astonished to be still alive.  She had expected to be torn in pieces, and had hoped that the respectable inhabitants, when they saw her head displayed on a pike, would remember it was for them that her young life was given.  Of all murderers, and of all victims, Charlotte Corday was the most composed.  When the executioner came for the toilette, she borrowed his shears to cut off a lock of her hair.  As the cart moved slowly through the raging streets, he said to her, "You must find the way long."  "No," she answered, "I am not afraid of being late."  They say that Vergniaud pronounced this epitaph: "She has killed us, but she has taught us all how to die."

--Lectures on the French Revolution by Lord Acton

Patrick: Lagniappe

The crowning tragedy is not that which Paris witnessed, when Santerre raised his sword, commanding the drums to beat, which had been silenced by the first word of the dying speech; it is that Lewis XVI. met his fate with inward complacency, unconscious of guilt, blind to the opportunities he had wasted and the misery he had caused, and died a penitent Christian but an unrepentant king. 

--Lectures on the French Revolution by Lord Acton

Patrick: Lagniappe

I need spend no words in impressing on you the fact that these republicans began at once with atrocities as great as those of which the absolute monarchy was justly accused, and for which it justly perished.  What we have to fix in our thoughts is this, that the great crimes of the , and crimes as great as those in the history of other countries, are still defended and justified in almost every group of politicians and historians, so that, in principle, the present is not altogether better than the past.

--Lectures on the French Revolution by Lord Acton

Patrick: Lagniappe

The issue between constitutional monarchy, the richest and most flexible of political forms, and the Republic one and indivisible (that is, not federal), which is the most rigorous and sterile, was decided by the crimes of men, and by errors more inevitably fatal than crime.  There is another world of expiation of guilt; but the wages of folly are payable here below. 

--Lectures on the French Revolution by Lord Acton

Patrick: Lagniappe

The secret of war, said Wellington, is to find out what is going on on the other side of the hill.  When Brunswick rode over the field some days later, a staff officer asked him why he had not moved forward.  He answered, "Because I did not know what was behind the hill." 

--Lectures on the French Revolution by Lord Acton

Patrick: Lagniappe

The allied army was commanded by the Duke of Brunswick, the most admired and popular prince of his time.  His own celebrity disabled him.  Many years ago Marshall Macmahon said to an officer, since in high command at Berlin, that an army is best when it is composed of soldiers who have never smelt gunpowder, of experienced non-commissioned officers, and of generals with their reputation to make.  Brunswick had made his reputation under the great king, and he feared to compromise it.

--Lectures on the French Revolution by Lord Acton

Patrick: Lagniappe

On the 17th of February 1792 Pitt informed the House of Commons that the situation of Europe had never afforded such assurance of continued peace.  He did not yet recognise the peril that lay in the new French Constitution.  Under the Constitution, no government could be deemed legitimate unless it aimed at liberty, and derived its powers from the national will.  All else is usurpation; and against usurped authority, insurrection is a duty.  The Rights of Man were meant for general application, and were no more specifically French than the multiplication table.  They were not founded on national character and history, but on Reason, which is the same for all men. The Revolution was essentially universal and aggressive; and although these consequences of its original principle were assiduously repressed by the First Assembly, they were proclaimed by the Second, and roused the threatened Powers to intervene.

--Lectures on the French Revolution by Lord Acton

Patrick: Lagniappe

The Americans were aware that democracy might be weak and unintelligent, but also that it might be despotic and oppressive.  And they found out the way to limit it, by the federal system, which suffers it to exist nowhere in its plenitude.  They deprived their state governments of the powers that were enumerated, and the central government of the powers that were reserved.  As the Romans knew how monarchy would become innocuous, by being divided, the Americans solved the more artful problem of dividing democracy into two.

--Lectures on the French Revolution by Lord Acton

[N.B.:  These are the jokes folks.  The problem with enumerating powers is that such powers necessarily must have limits but guess who gets to determine the limits?  That's right--the entity granted the power.  And that entity, not surprisingly, will interprets the limits as broadly as possible.  Indeed, it might take what appears to be a rather innocuous enumerated power--such as regulating interstate commerce--and expand its limits so as to become, as a practical matter, limitless.]

Patrick: Lagniappe

Law ought to spring from custom, and to be governed by it, not by independent, individual theory that defies custom.  You have to declare the law, not to make it, and you can only declare what experience gives you.  The best government devised by reason is less free than a worse government bequeathed by time.

--Lectures on the French Revolution by Lord Acton

Patrick: Lagniappe

- and there's a new look that the middle-aged male authors have, or the ones conscious of entering middle age (their 'maturity'), their mouths go up in a grin of spiky, or disdainful, imbecility, the dandy as village idiot.

--The Last Cigarette by Simon Gray

Patrick: Lagniappe

- and a lot of the novels gave the impression that they were written by the same woman under a variety of similar-sounding pseudonyms, and the faces of these women looked strangely misogynist.  I imagine them at parties, praising each other's work with moues and grimaces, or in the literary pages describing each other's pots in coils of deadening prose but with adjectives 'engrossing, enthralling, delicious, delightful' - that the publishers can trowel out and paste all over the paperback edition -

--The Last Cigarette by Simon Gray

Patrick: Lagniappe

- to begin with, I hate going into bookshops these days, not a book that isn't whoring after you, slashes of paper across their middle and between their legs like lewd costumes, three of us for the price of one, the publisher their pimp - 'Three of my best girls! Or boys! For the price of one!!'

--The Last Cigarette by Simon Gray

Patrick: Lagniappe

Well, until tomorrow, then, and here I am, in the tomorrow, and I can't remember, haven't a clue as to what it was, that important memory, and so my almost tears are of frustration with myself, and contempt for myself, my anger at my stupidity about my memory, that I don't even remember that my memory keeps failing, and always when I most need it--why then does it tantalize me with tit-bits so vivid that they are both unforgettable and forgotten, it's almost as if they have a life of their own, like fish, say, they swim towards the forefront of our consciousness like fish and just before they get there you blink and they're gone--sometimes as you blink you see them going, their tails flicking them into the muzzy waters they came out of--

--The Last Cigarette by Simon Gray

[N.B.:  Another great, glorious grammatical gargoyle.]

Patrick: Lagniappe

In my experience there really is only one thing worse than falling out of love, and that is being fallen out of love with - being fallen out of love with fills you with all the horrors of abandonment, you are contemptible to yourself and therefore, you assume, contemptible to others and consequently even more contemptible to yourself, and really you have no choice but to go away and commit some form of temporary suicide.  Well, falling out of love is an altogether grubbier affair, there are no blinding rages or weeping breakdowns to obliterate what is really one long act of procrastination - you look at the only recently adored face, so sweet, so trusting, so vulnerable, and you think to yourself, how could I bring pain to that?  And what you also think is, why can't I hurry up and get it over with, get her over with?

--The Last Cigarette by Simon Gray

Patrick: Lagniappe

The trouble with the dead is not that they are lost, and therefore might be found, but that they are beyond finding and are not therefore lost, they are absent to this world, in all the places that they were accustomed to be present in, and that you were accustomed to their being present in, the space at your side, the opposite seat at your usual table, the other half of the bed, the neighbouring pillow - nothing can be more finally absent than a dead person, and yet the dead persist in being almost present in traces and glimpses, whisking around the corner of your memory to drive you mad, like the incompletely forgotten name of a film start from many years ago - there was one I was trying to remember the other evening, a man in the restaurant reminded me of him, a slim, middle-aged man eating by himself, not out in the open part of the restaurant but in a cramped bit by the bar - he minds, me I said to Victoria, of that actor, in that film - I could see the actor's face quite clearly, though in the film it was usually half in shadow, a neat little moustache, opaque eyes, and he had a cleft in his chin, more dimple than cleft, shiny black hair pasted back, and there was the voice, drawling but toneless, I knew him so well in my teens, but who was he? 

--The Last Cigarette by Simon Gray

[N.B.:  That's all one sentence, folks.  When you can write like that, consider yourself a writer.  And the forgotten actor?  Well, he can be found here.]

Patrick: Lagniappe

[H]ere is a sentence: 'Once I saw them in a party, when she thought herself unobserved: she looked at him with a glance that was heavy, brooding, possessive, consumed with the need to be sure of him.'  All [C. P. Snow's] adjectives come in threes and fours as if he has to fill a quota, it's like reading P. G. Wodehouse without the jokes.

--The Last Cigarette by Simon Gray

[N.B.:  That's a killer stiletto thrust--simultaneously revealing the craft of a great writer and the crassness of another.  Or, in the immortal words of David St. Hubbins, with an assist from Nigel Tufnel, "It's such a fine line between stupid and, uh . . .  clever."]

Patrick: Lagniappe

The Light and the Dark - how can a novel with a title like that conceivably be any good?  It's almost a parody, The Light and the Dark, by C. P. Snow, Charles Percival Snow.  Percival?  You're just guessing, why not Philip?  Or Patrick?  Why not Clive, come to that?  Clive Patrick (or Paddy) Snow's The Light and the Dark, The Wet and the Dry, The Hot and the Cold, The Pie and the Sky - are you sure that retiling the novel and fiddling about with the author's name is more interesting than actually reading?

--The Last Cigarette by Simon Gray

[N.B.:  This was the fourth novel in C. P. Snow's Strangers and Brothers series--soon followed by Dancers and Plumbers, Demons and Snowmen and Puppeteers and Puppets (featuring his masterpiece, The Blind and the Distracted).]

Patrick: Lagniappe

Really it doesn't matter whether a state becomes an omelette for reasons that sound virtuous, if imbecilic, or for reasons that sound nasty, the sounds are irrelevant, the intentions are identical - to control all its members through terror.  The state of terror is the state itself.  And the state itself is the man himself.  Hitler, Mao, Stalin were the state and the terror, and in the end you can only decide morally between them in quantitative terms - Which of them killed most?  The one who had most to kill.  And after him, Stalin.  Or the other way around.  And after them, Hitler.  Once the debate takes this form, it isn't worth having, even on a radio phone-in.  They were foul states, created by foul people by foul means for a foul purpose, they spoke different languages, used a different vocabulary, but the experience of living in them would have been pretty well identical--unless, as I said, you were an Aryan in Hitler's Germany, but that's scarcely a moral distinction.

--The Last Cigarette by Simon Gray

Patrick: Lagniappe

So what was Osip Mandelstam thinking when he recited the famous but unpublished, indeed vanished, poem that evening in Moscow?  Supposing you were there, pleased to be numbered among his friends and colleagues, your excitement as he takes the paper out of his pocket, unfolds it, begins to declaim it - you relish his mischievous smile, the sparkle of his eye, the familiar, expressive voice, old Osip with a new poem!  And then you hear the words 'Stalin', 'murderer' - but for a second or two you don't grasp their meaning, and you hope that you're not going to, but when you look away from Osip's face in all its merriness and mischief you see in the other faces what they're probably now seeing in yours, and you know that you all know what you've just heard - a suicide note, a collective suicide note because all your names are on it, you signed it with your ears - so if you value your life, and the lives of your loved ones, you'd better hurry to the authorities, describe the poem, provide a list of everybody in the room, and hope that you are the first to inform, because is you aren't it will seem that you've only informed because you're afraid that you've already been informed on.  But whether you're first or last it is unlikely that you will survive, in fact not even the officials to whom you've informed will survive, the time will come when they will be swept away with all the muck and eggshells from 'those days', that's how the historical process works, after all, these days become 'those days', the subjective becomes the objective, the executors the executed, more and more and more eggs get broken, the omelette gets bigger and bigger and bigger, it has a face with a moustache and a pipe, and Joe's your uncle!  Yes, dear old Uncle Joe, the human omelette. 

--The Last Cigarette by Simon Gray

[N.B.:  One can get a small taste of what this vanished poem must have been like.]

Patrick: Lagniappe

There is a rumoured to be a law pending, or perhaps it is already secretly passed, that will make it a criminal offence - treason, I suppose - to slander or to libel the European Union.  I suppose that by making it into a potential victim of a crime - the victim of a crime of utterance; the next step the victim of a crime of thought - they hope to convince us that it actually and specifically exists, as a person exists, and that we can feel its pain when unkind and disbelieving things are said and thought about it.

When I ponder such matters, I consider it astonishing that I have decided to attempt to give up smoking.

--The Last Cigarette by Simon Gray

Patrick: Lagniappe

The generally accepted idea is that if it's rough, it must be more real, more authentic.  Yet the poor outsiders, whose marks are very often every bit as unpolished, can't help how they draw--they couldn't make a clean line if they had to.  So they are left out of the art "club."  They are doing the very best they can but because their lack of exhibited drafting skill is, we believe, not their choice, they are often viewed as lesser artists.

--Bicycle Diaries by David Byrne

[N.B.:  We live in an age of conceptual art so what matters is not the "rough" but the concept behind the "rough."  Frank Stella once made the remark that he (or anyone else) could spend 20 years learning to draw but why bother.  There are plenty of well-respected artists such as Stella "who couldn't make a clean line if they had to" but are still in the art "club" because of the concepts behind their work.  Now you might object and say that art concerns aesthetics not rhetoric but that's an argument for another day.]

Patrick: Lagniappe

If you obsessively scribble on bits of paper, as hugely successful artist Louise Bourgeois does some of the time (to pick an obvious example), is your work better than some very similar work by one of the folks at Creative Growth because you have more objectivity about your own work?  Is scribbling better art when it has a conscious intention?  Is it better work when you're aware that you're scribbling and could do other kinds of drawing if you really wanted to?  I don't think there is any way one could objectively say that of the two works one is better or worse than the other.

--Bicycle Diaries by David Byrne

[N.B.:  Objectively, one is signed "Louise Bourgeois" and the other is not--that's how you determine which is better.  A doodled napkin signed "Pablo Picasso" is worth infinitely more than one signed by you or I.  In art, the signature is a kind of sympathetic magic that transforms dross into gold.]

Patrick: Lagniappe

I sense the world might be more dreamlike, metaphorical, and poetic than we currently believe--but just as irrational as sympathetic magic when looked at in a typically scientific way.  I wouldn't be surprised if poetry--poetry in the broadest sense, in the sense of a world filled with metaphor, rhyme, and recurring patterns, shapes, and designs--is how the world works.  The world isn't logical, it's a song.

--Bicycle Diaries by David Byrne

Patrick: Lagniappe

Singers (and possibly listeners of music too) when they write or perform a song don't so much bring to the work already formed emotions, ideas, and feelings as much as they use the act of singing as a device that reproduces and dredges them up.  The song remakes the emotion--the emotion doesn't produce the song.  Well, the emotion has to have been there at some time in one's life for there to be something from which to draw.  But it seems to me that a creative device--if a work can be considered a device--evokes that passion, melancholy, loneliness, or euphoria but is not itself an expression, an example, a fruit of that passion.  Creative work is more accurately a machine that digs down and finds stuff, emotional stuff that will someday be raw material that can be used to produce more stuff, stuff like itself--clay to be available for future use.

--Bicycle Diaries by David Byrne

Patrick: Lagniappe

Filipinos are hopeful that Japan, for example, might employ some of their highly trained medical personnel, but the Japanese are notoriously uncomfortable dealing physically with foreigners, and the idea of being touched by one, God forbid!  The Japanese instead prefer to develop robots to take care of their own mundane housekeeping and medical needs.  Racism as a spur to technical innovation.

--Bicycle Diaries by David Byrne

Patrick: Lagniappe

Maybe the intent was actually not to hide this surveillance gear too well.  Maybe it was deemed more important to make people aware that they were being looked at and listened to rather than having the public just suspect that the spying was going on.  A camera this blatant would confirm the rumors.  If you're not aware you're being observed, if there isn't occasional proof, then you won't live in fear, so then what's the point?  The best surveillance is when everyone suspects that they're being watched all the time.  The government then doesn't even have to watch the cameras--they need only let people believe someone might be watching.

--Bicycle Diaries by David Byrne

Patrick: Lagniappe

In War of the Worlds, for example, Tom Cruise has the only car that works, after he and a friend peer under the hood and say, "It's the solenoid!"  And so it is.  This moment took me back to my youth, when cars could still be repaired without computers.  They just had gas lines and spark plugs and things like that.  I never understood anything about engines, but there were always kids in high school who would look under my hood, and solemnly explain, "It's the solenoid."  The solenoid, always the solenoid.  You could impress girls with a line like that.  "It's the solenoid."  Works every time.

--review of Undead collected in Your Movie Sucks by Roger Ebert

Patrick: Lagniappe

One element of Sorority Boys is undeniably good, and that is the tile.  Pause by the poster on the way into the theater.  That will be your high point.  It has all you need for a brainless, autopilot, sitcom ripoff: a high concept that is right there in the title, easily grasped at the pitch meeting..  The title suggests the poster art, the poster art gives you the movie, and story details can be sketched in by study of Bosom Buddies, National Lampoon's Animal House, and the shower scenes in any movie involving girls' dorms or sports teams.

--review of Sorority Boys collected in Your Movie Sucks by Roger Ebert

Patrick: Lagniappe

Chevy Chase has been in what can charitably be called more than his share of bad movies, but at least he knows how to deliver a laugh when he's given one.  (When his career-driven wife makes a rare appearance at dinner, he asks his son to "call security.")  After the screening of Snow Day, I overheard another critic saying she couldn't believe she wished there had been more Chevy Chase, and I knew how she felt.

--review of Snow Day collected in Your Movie Sucks by Roger Ebert

Patrick: Lagniappe

Years pass--two or three in the movie, more in the theater.

--review of Serendipity collected in Your Movie Sucks by Roger Ebert

Patrick: Lagniappe

One rule all comedians should know, and some have to learn the hard way, is that they aren't funny--it's the material that get the laughs.  Another rule is that if you're the top dog on a movie set, everybody is going to pretend to laugh at everything you do, so anyone who tells you it's not that funny is trying to do you a favor.

--review of Rush Hour 2 collected in Your Movie Sucks by Roger Ebert

Patrick: Lagniappe

You recall the Idiot Plot.  That's the plot that would be solved in an instant if anyone on the screen said what was obvious to the audience.  A movie like this isn't entertainment.  It's more like a party game that you lose if you say the secret word.

--review of Princess Diaries collected in Your Movie Sucks by Roger Ebert

Patrick: Lagniappe

Pearl Harbor is a two-hour movie squeezed into three hours, about how on December 7, 1941, the Japanese staged a surprise attack on an American love triangle.  Its centerpiece is forty minutes of redundant special effects, surrounded by a love story of stunning banality.  The film has been directed without grace, vision, or originality, and although you may walk out quoting lines of dialogue, it will not be because you admire them.

--review of Pearl Harbor collected in Your Movie Sucks by Roger Ebert

Patrick: Lagniappe

This titanic closing fight, by the way, may use cutting-edge effects, but has been written with slavish respect for ancient clichés.  It begins with the venerable It's Only a Cat Scene, in which a cat startles a character (but not the audience) by leaping at the lens.  Then the characters retire to a Steam and Flame Factory, one of those Identikit movie sets filled with machines that produce copious quantities of steam, flames, and sparks.  Where do they have their fight?  On a catwalk, of course.  Does anyone end up clinging by his fingertips?  Don't make me laugh.

--review of The One collected in Your Movie Sucks by Roger Ebert

Patrick: Lagniappe

Seagal's great contribution to the movie is to look very serious, even menacing, in close-ups carefully framed to hide his double chin.  I do not object to the fact that he's put on weight.  Look who's talking.  I object to the fact that he thinks he can conceal it from us with knee-length coats and tricky camera angles.  I would rather see a moved about a pudgy karate fighter than a movie about a guy you never get a good look at.

--review of Half Past Dead collected in Your Movie Sucks by Roger Ebert

Patrick: Lagniappe

Various cops and social workers enter the house, some never to emerge, but the news of its malevolence doesn't get around.  You'd think that after a house has been associated with gruesome calamities on a daily basis, the neighbors could at least post an old-timer outside to opine that some mighty strange things have been a-happening in there.

--review of The Grudge collected in Your Movie Sucks by Roger Ebert

Patrick: Lagniappe

This movie doesn't scrape the bottom of the barrel.  This movie isn't the bottom of the barrel.  This movie isn't below the bottom of the barrel.  This movie doesn't deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence with barrels.

--review of Freddy Got Fingered collected in Your Movie Sucks by Roger Ebert

[N.B.:  On a whim, I decided a couple of days ago to start quoting some humorous bits from Roger Ebert--and now I find that he has passed on to the great silver cinema in the sky.  I'm sure he'd appreciate a few of these finely wrought witticisms. Rest in Peace.]

Patrick: Lagniappe

"As the decade progressed, so did snowboarding," we learn at one point, leading me to reflect that as the decade progressed, so did time itself.

--review of First Descent collected in Your Movie Sucks by Roger Ebert

Patrick: Lagniappe

Black-and-white is better suited to many kinds of comedy because it underlines the dialogue and movement while diminishing the importance of fashions and eliminating the emotional content of various colors.  Billy Wilder fought for black-and-white on Some Like It Hot because he thought his drag queens would never be accepted by the audience in color, and he was right.

--review of All the Queen's Men collected in Your Movie Sucks by Roger Ebert

Patrick: Lagniappe

"You come among us from a country we don't know, and can't imagine, a country you care for so little that before you've been a day in ours you've forgotten the very house you were born in--if it wasn't torn down before you knew it!  You come among us speaking our language and not knowing what we mean' wanting the things we want, and not knowing why we want them; aping our weaknesses, exaggerating our follies, ignoring or ridiculing all we care about--you come from hotels as big as towns, and from towns as flimsy as paper, where the streets haven't had time to be named, and the buildings are demolished before they're dry, and the people are as proud of changing as we are of holding to what we have--and we're fools enough to imagine that because you copy our ways and pick up our slang you understand anything about the things that make life decent and honorable for us!"

--The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton

Patrick: Lagniappe

But it is comparatively easy to behave beautifully when one is getting what one wants, and when some one else, who has not always been altogether kind, is not.

--The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton

Patrick: Lagniappe

"If you're as detached as that, why does the obsolete institution of marriage survive with you?"

"Oh, it still has its uses.  One couldn't be divorced without it."

--The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton

Patrick: Lagniappe

But perhaps another stroke of luck might befall him: he was getting to have the drifting dependence on "luck" of the man conscious of his inability to direct his life.

--The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton

Patrick: Lagniappe

"Isn't that the key to our easy divorces?  If we cared for women in the old barbarous possessive way do you suppose we'd give them up as readily as we do?  The real paradox is the fact that the men who make, materially, the biggest sacrifices for their women, should do least for them ideally and romantically."

--The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton

Patrick: Lagniappe

Some of the principal figures of Undine's group had rallied for the occasion, and almost all were in exasperating enjoyment of the privileges for which she pined.  There was young Jim Driscoll, heir-apparent of the house, with his short stout mistrustful wife, who hated society, but went everywhere lest it might be thought she had been left out; the "beautiful Mrs. Beringer," a lovely aimless being, who kept (as Laura Fairford said) a home for stray opinions, and could never quite tell them apart; little Dicky Bowles, whom every one invited because he was understood to "say things" if one didn't; the Harvey Shallums, fresh from Paris, and dragging in their wake a bewildered nobleman vaguely designated as "the Count," who offered cautious conversational openings, like an explorer trying beads on savages; and, behind these more salient types, the usual filling in of those who are seen everywhere because they have learned to catch the social eye.  Such a company was one to flatter the artist as much as his sitter, so completely did it represent that unanimity of opinion which constitutes social strength.

--The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton

Patrick: Lagniappe

He could not rouse in her any scruple about incurring fresh debts, yet he knew she was no longer unaware of the value of money.  She had learned to bargain, pare down prices, evade fees, brow-beat the small tradespeople and wheedle concessions from the great--not, as Ralph perceived, from any effort to restrain her expenses, but only to prolong and intensify the pleasure of spending.  Pained by the trait, he tried to laugh her out of it.  He told her once that she had a miserly hand--showing her, in proof, that, for all their softness, the fingers would not bend back, or the pink palm open.  But she retorted a little sharply that it was no wonder, since she'd heard nothing talked of since their marriage but economy; and this left him without any answer.  So the purveyors continued to mount to their apartment, and Ralph, in the course of his frequent flights from it, found himself always dodging the corners of black glazed boxes and swaying pyramids of pasteboard; always lifting his hat to sidling milliners' girls, or effacing himself before slender vendeuses floating by in a mist of opopanax.  He felt incompetent to pronounce on the needs to which these visitors ministered; but the reappearance among them of the blond-bearded jeweller gave him ground for fresh fears.  Undine had assured him that she had given up the idea of having her ornaments reset, and there had been ample time for their return; but on his questioning her she explained that there had been delays and "bothers" and put him in the wrong by asking ironically if he supposed she was buying things "for pleasure" when she knew as well as he that there wasn't any money to pay for them.

--The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton

Patrick: Lagniappe

Peter lounging and luxuriating among the seductions of the Boulevard with the disgusting ease of a man whose wants are all measured by money, and who always has enough to gratify them.

--The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton

Patrick: Lagniappe

[D]uring their first days together it had seemed as though pecuniary questions were the last likely to be raised between them.  But his marital education had since made strides, and he now knew that a disregard for money may imply not the willingness to get on without it but merely a blind confidence that it will somehow be provided.  If Undine, like the lilies of the field, took no care, it was not because her wants were as few but because she assumed that care would be taken for her by those whose privilege it was to enable her to until floral insouciance with Sheban elegance.

--The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton

Patrick: Lagniappe

"Ralph don't make a living out of the law, you say?  No, it didn't strike me he'd be likely to,f rom the talks I've had with him.  Fact is, the law's a business that wants---"  Mr. Spragg broke off, checked by a protest from Mr. Dagonet.  "Oh, a profession, you call it?  It ain't a business?"  His smile gre more indulgent as this novel distinction dawned on him.  "Why, I guess that's the whole trouble with Ralph.  Nobody expects to make money in a profession; and if you've taught him to regard the law that way, he'd better go right into cooking-stoves and done with it."

--The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton

Patrick: Lagniappe

Ralph interposed with another laugh.  "You see, Undine, you'd better think twice before you divorce me!"

"Ralph!" his mother again breathed; but the girl, flushed and sparkling, flung back:  "Oh, it all depends on you!  Out in Apex, if a girl marries a man who don't come up to what she expected, people consider it's to her credit to want to change.  You'd better think twice of that!"

--The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton

[N.B.:  Hypergamy is not just something bantered about nowadays--and this novel is probably the best illustration of it.]

Patrick: Lagniappe

Her incessant movements were not the result of shyness: she thought it the correct thing to be animated in society, and noise and restlessness were her only notion of vivacity.  She therefore watched herself approvingly, admiring the light on her hair, the flash of teeth between her smiling lips, the pure shadows of her throat and shoulders as she passed from one attitude to another.  Only one fact disturbed her: there was a hint of too much fulness in the curves of her neck and in the spring of her hips.  She was tall enough to carry off a little extra weight, but excessive slimness was the fashion, and she shuddered at the thought that she might some day deviated from the perpendicular.

--The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton

Patrick: Lagniappe

Undine was fiercely independent and yet passionately imitative.  She wanted to surprise every one by her dash and originality, but she could not help modelling herself on the last person she met, and the confusion of ideals thus produced caused her much perturbation when she had to choose between two courses.

--The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton

Patrick: Lagniappe

One thing is glaringly certain: Brett's addiction did his art no good at all.  He thought it did, of course.  Junkies often think that.  He once defiantly inscribed the initials WS--"With Smack"--on one of his prizewinning Australian paintings, just so that those in the know would know.  Whatever losses may be forced on junkies by their habit, they are apt to claim that these have been net gains, compensating them in some measure by a deepening of their perceptions, and consequently of their art.  Actually, this has never been provably so.  The examples often cited for the defense--the classic one, of course, being the interrupted opium dream on which Coleridge's Kubla Khan was based--come nowhere near outweighing the countless malformations, abortions, and confusions of talent brought about in writers, painters, and musicians by the use of heavily addictive drugs.  Can anyone who really knows music lay his hand on his heart and honestly sear that Charlie Parker's or Ray Charles's musical achievements were greater for the insights granted them by the needle?  In writers and painters, whose work is even less the product of brilliant moments of improvisation, where it demands the steady elaboration of complex and even rational sequences, the benefits of heroin are even less arguable.

--Things I Didn't Know by Robert Hughes

[N.B.:  Actually, I think Hughes is wrong, at least with respect to classical composers who don't compose with the compositional net down, as it were--so that "steady elaboration of complex and even rational sequences" was just as important for their work.  For those classical composers I can't think of one who was a junkie.]

Patrick: Lagniappe

The shame of addiction, which can be very pressing, is apt to make junkies into missionaries.  They like, and need, to drag others down with them.  Such aggression compensates for their own weakness and dependency with drugs.

--Things I Didn't Know by Robert Hughes

Patrick: Lagniappe

Ken attached an almost mystical importance to porn, and I do not.  Memories of real sex, for which I am blessed with excellent recall, suit me just fine in its place, and they do not add ten dollars to the hotel bill. 

--Things I Didn't Know by Robert Hughes

[N.B.:  This remark is a good example of how quickly technology changes.  I suppose in ten years one will have to explain that in the recent past one could rent movies--including pornographic ones--from one's hotel-room television set.]

Patrick: Lagniappe

The youth underground was culturally illiterate, ignorant of most things older than itself.  Having so little sense of the past, its predictions about the future were baseless. . . . The depths of tedium that can be plumbed by sitting around half stoned, listening to people chatter moonily about reuniting humankind and erasing its aggressive instincts through Love and Dope, are scarcely imaginable to those who have not suffered them. 

--Things I Didn't Know by Robert Hughes

Patrick: Lagniappe

It came from the notion, favored, I suppose, by Marxist intellectuals of a certain cast of mind, that art which strives to give and to record pleasure, on no matter how complex and nuanced a level of recollection, must be superficial in and of itself; that the sensuous must be of a lower level than the intellectual.  I have never been able to agree with this fatuously categorical judgment, and it was the Bonnard show that really brought my objections into the foreground. 

--Things I Didn't Know by Robert Hughes

Patrick: Lagniappe

It was of a retrospective show of the work of Pierre Bonnard, at the Royal Academy.  Until then I had not looked at Bonnard much and had lazily assumed, like many and, indeed, most people, that he was what the French condescendingly call a petit-maître, not a "major" artist like Picasso or Matisse: too domestic in subject matter, too intimate in scale, too lacking in public command.  "It's not painting, what he does," Picasso had said to Françoise Gilot, who had faithfully recorded this arrogant stupidity; and in 1947, less than twenty years before, the most influential French art magazine, Cahier d'Art--which never dared publish anything that might have met with the disapproval of Picasso and his circle--greeted the death of Bonnard at the age of seventy-nine with the ferocious judgment that the esteem for Bonnard "is shared only by people who know nothing about the grave difficulties of art and cling above all to what is facile and agreeable."  After two days' looking at the Academy's magnificent show I realized that this was nothing but rhetorical poppycock.

--Things I Didn't Know by Robert Hughes

[N.B.:  As for Picasso's remark--it takes one to know one.]

Patrick: Lagniappe

In 1966 I wrote, for the Sunday Times, the first review that I can reread with pleasure, as though it were someone else's work.

--Things I Didn't Know by Robert Hughes

[N.B.:  This is the true test of good written work--oh, and if everything one writes gives this same sensation than either one is Jane Austen or a hack.]

Patrick: Lagniappe

Perhaps the best comment I heard on this theme park of religious mumbo jumbo came from an Irishman I met one day, on line at the Grotto [at Lourdes].  He was a quadruple amputee--I forget what had been the cause of this catastrophic accident, though he told me--and he reposed in a large wicker basket on wheels, with his head sticking out one end, not unlike a claret bottle.  A green blanket, embroidered with a gold harp, was drawn over him, and his basket was pushed by one of his brothers.  This, he told me, was his ninth visit to Lourdes; he came every year and had every intention of keeping up his visits.  Eventually, with some hesitation, I got around to what seemed to me the crux of the situation.  Did he really think the intercession of the Virgin was going to make one or more of his lost limbs sprout again?  He looked at me as though I were mad.  "What sort of a fool d'you take me for?" he said sharply.  "I come here because I like to be with me own class of people."

--Things I Didn't Know by Robert Hughes

Patrick: Lagniappe

The owner of a bar in Tuscania made fake bronze gods, warriors, and other "Etruscan" goodies that were sold in the Porta Portese market in Rome and from there made their way up the food chain to wealthy collectors; the new bronzes, cast and hammered in a local garage, were laid in a shallow trench behind the bar and covered with straw.  This served as a urinal for clients; human urine gave the metal a superficially convincing patina.

--Things I Didn't Know by Robert Hughes

Patrick: Lagniappe

The great merit of one's own painting, for a critic, is that it teaches a somewhat negative but important lesson.  It shows you how incredibly difficult certain effects that one sees in the work of real masters can be to achieve.  It demonstrates that nothing, not even facility itself, is easy.  Without knowing about such matters, one cannot write usefully about art.  Ars celat artem, ran the Latin tag; art conceals art.  One of the critic's tasks is to unmask, in some degree, the fact of that concealment.

--Things I Didn't Know by Robert Hughes

Patrick: Lagniappe

The sea around Argentario was speckled with islands, the nearest of which was called Giannutri.  On Giannutri were the beautiful ruins of a Roman villa, supposedly built by the dissolute late emperor Elagabalus.  Three columns with Corinthian capitals still rose from a plinth at the top of a crumbling flight of steps, and framed a blue view over the Tyrrhenian.  It was a romantic spot; nobody lived there--in those days there was no need for guardiani--and you could go diving among the rocks for sea urchins, which grew there in clumps and spreading black meadows of slowly waving spines; their orange roe, extracted with scissors and a teaspoon, was good eaten raw but made an exquisite pasta sauce if you collected enough.  A little further out from the rocks, in about twenty feet of water, lay row upon row of band-new ancient Roman amphorea, which had been made and fired in a pottery kiln on the mainland and laid down to "mature," acquiring incrustations of marine growth and fan corals, until they were ready to bring up and transport to the Porta Portese flea market in Rome for unwitting American and German tourists.

--Things I Didn't Know by Robert Hughes

Patrick: Lagniappe

Christianity permits and sanctions the drinking of wine; and of all the holy brethren in Palestine there are none who hold fast to this gladsome rite so strenuously as the monks of Damascus; not that they are more zealous Christians than the rest of their fellows in the Holy Land, but that they have better wine.  Whilst I was at Damascus, I had my quarters at the Franciscan convent there; and very soon after my arrival I asked one of the monks to let me know something of the spots that deserved to be seen: I made my inquiry in reference to the associations with which the city had been hallowed by the sojourn and adventures of St. Paul.  "There is nothing in all Damascus," said the good man, "half so well worth seeing as our cellars;" and forthwith he invited me to go, see, and admire the long range of liquid treasure that he and his brethren had laid up for themselves on earth.  And these, I soon found, were not as the treasures of the miser that lie in unprofitable disuse; for day by day, and hour by hour, the golden juice ascended from the dark recesses of the cellar to the uppermost brains of the friars.  Dear old fellows!  In the midst of that solemn land, their Christian laughter rang loudly and merrily--their eyes kept flashing with joyful fire, and their heavy woollen petticoats could no more weigh down the springiness of their paces, than the filmy gauze of a danseuse can clog her bounding step.

--Eothen by Alexander Kinglake

Patrick: Lagniappe

Lady Hester's unholy claim to supremacy in the spiritual kingdom was, no doubt, the suggestion of fierce and inordinate pride most perilously akin to madness; but I am quite sure that the mind of the woman was too strong to be thoroughly overcome by even this potent feeling.  I plainly saw that she was not an unhesitating follower of her own system; and I even fancied that I could distinguish the brief moments during which she contrived to believe in Herself, from those long and less happy intervals in which her own reason was too strong for her.

--Eothen by Alexander Kinglake

Patrick: Lagniappe

The ruins (the fragments of one or two prostrate pillars) lie upon a promontory bare and unmystified by the gloom of surrounding groves.  My Greek friend in his consular cap stood by, respectfully waiting to see what turn my madness would take now that I had come at last into the presence of the old stones.  If you have no taste for research, and can't affect to look for inscriptions, there is some awkwardness in coming to the end of a merely sentimental pilgrimage, when the feeling which impelled you has gone: ins such a strait you have nothing to do but to laugh the thing off as well--and, by the by, it is not a bad plan to turn the conversation (or rather allow the natives to turn it) towards the subject of hidden treasures: this is a topic on which they will always speak with eagerness, and if they can fancy that you, too, take an interest in such matters, they will not only begin to think you perfectly sane, but will even perhaps give you credit for some more than human powers of forcing dark Earth to show you its hoards of gold.

--Eothen by Alexander Kinglake

Patrick: Lagniappe

This family party of the good Consul's (or rather of mine, for I originated the idea, though he furnished the materials) went off very well: the mamma was shy at first, but she veiled her awkwardness by affecting to scold the children.  These had all immortal names--names too which they owed to tradition, and certainly not to any classical enthusiasm of their parents: every instant I was delighted by some such phrases as these:--"Themistocles, my love, don't fight."--"Alcibiades, can't you sit still?"--"Socrates, put down the cup."--"Oh, fie! Aspasia, don't, oh! don't be naughty!"  It is true that the names were pronounced, Socrahtie, Aspahsie--that is, according to accent, and not according to quantity, but I suppose it is scarcely now to be doubted that they were so sounded in ancient times.

--Eothen by Alexander Kinglake

Patrick: Lagniappe

In all baseness and imposture there is a coarse, vulgar spirit, which, however artfully concealed for a time, must sooner or later show itself in some little circumstance sufficiently plain to occasion an instant jar upon the minds of those whose taste is lively and true: to such men a shock of this kind, disclosing the ugliness of a cheat, is more effectively convincing than any mere proofs could be.

--Eothen by Alexander Kinglake

[N.B.:  Inadvertently, this is a compact summary of the theme of Herman Melville's Benito Cereno.]

Patrick: Lagniappe

What more will you ever learn?  Yet the dismal change is ordained, and the, thin meagre Latin (the same for everybody), with small patches of Greek, is thrown like a pauper's pall over all your early lore; instead of sweet knowledge, vile, monkish, doggerel grammars, and graduses, dictionaries, and lexicons, and horrible odds and ends of dead languages are given you for your portion, and down you fall from Roman story to a three-inch scrap of "Scriptores Romani."--from Greek poetry, down, down to the cold rations of "Poetae Graeci," cut up by commentators, and served out by schoolmasters!

--Eothen by Alexander Kinglake

[N.B.:  This was published in 1844 when a public school education necessarily included stuffing the young students like geese full of Latin and a bit of Greek (for garnish).]

Patrick: Lagniappe

Here the imperfect and presumptuous will say:  "It is the story of millions: all first love is so."  Not at all; no more than dreams are Visions.  Not millions, but one in many millions, and then, in millions more one other, in millions more again one other are thus elect of the God.

It will be asked:  "How can you affirm so mighty a truth of one silent lad dead these two centuries ago?  Louis was limited and of the common sort, one who only became great through industrious aptitude for a great function.  Moreover he left no hint of all this--indeed, less record than do most men leave of what has pierced their souls.  How then do you know?"  By one unfailing test: the immortal passage left him immune to Passion henceforward forever.

--Louis XIV by Hillaire Belloc

Patrick: Lagniappe

There falls upon some very few human lives an experience transcending every other.  They that have received it stand separate from all their fellows.  It has no name.

To call it exalted love or love inspired means nothing.  The word "love" is used in every tongue and by all mankind to mean things so different, so varying in degree and quality, that to use it here is meaningless.  It has no name.

The thing has no name.  For names attach only to things generally known and this thing, a revelation, is known to very few and is incommunicable.  The only parallel to it is the experience of the mystics, their momentary union with the Divine.  This, those who have been so transfigured can never later describe.

--Louis XIV by Hillaire Belloc

Patrick: Lagniappe

This body of lawyers, the Parlement of Paris, was in no way representative of national opinion, but it could repose on that opinion in moments of popular opposition to the government, and thereby increase its power and position.  It also had, of course, that invaluable asset (which attached throughout christendom to all lawyers, from the market-town solicitor to the highest judge) of knowing the law, or, at any rate, being the official exponent of the law.  Such a body may not have the technical right of making laws, but it can in practice mould them and has in this fashion great scope in managing men's lives, unless it is checked and curbed by a strong central power.

--Louis XIV by Hillaire Belloc

[N.B.:  It's a good thing the United States has no equivalent institution--some supreme arbiter of laws that can make law under the guise of merely interpreting it.]

Patrick: Lagniappe

The French constitution included bodies known as "Parlements."  The similarity of the name with that of the English Parliaments is confusing--for both ultimately sprang from the same source, the "Parlement" or "Palaver" of the early French-speaking mediaeval kings of both France and England, when they met their nobles and chief legal advisers and talked over matters on which they wanted advice or on which they needed general consent.

--Louis XIV by Hillaire Belloc

Patrick: Lagniappe

Since the whole virtue of monarchy is that it makes government personal, its defect is that the life of the throne follows the life of a man and the vicissitudes thereof.  a monarchy is weak when the monarch is weak.  It is at its weakest during a minority.

--Louis XIV by Hillaire Belloc

Patrick: Lagniappe

Seeing what wealth can do, nothing can check its control of society save the presence of a master too rich to be bribed and too strong to be beaten down.  Alternatively, in the absence of such a head, society may from force of habit accept as inevitable and (in time) as even natural, the direction of itself by the rich.  When that state of things has grown mature and is established, what we have called "Aristocracy" is present--the most stable and permanent of human arrangements.  States so governed last on for centuries in splendour, and even during their decay they are monuments of their own past greatness.  Such was Carthage, such was Venice, such has England been for now three hundred years and perhaps may so remain indefinitely so long as she is ruled by gentlemen.

The aristocratic state is menaced by two things only: the moral menace of falling into mere plutocracy, a cancer which rapidly kills,* and the material menace of invasion by a large army.  For in aristocracies the masses will never accept permanent military service.

* Here is the test of this disease appearing: it is present when a very rich anybody is treated as the superior of a very poor gentleman.

--Louis XIV by Hillaire Belloc

[N.B.:  Paris Hilton?  Kim Kardashian?  Well, hello, Plutocracy!]

Patrick: Lagniappe

Therefore it is that when, after prolonged civil wars, the fighting forces emerge as the masters of the State, no longer its servants, they crown their Commanders-in-Chief.  Armies are of their nature monarchic, and victory over foreigners too is only to be achieved under a leader.  In both ways by civil war as by foreign expeditions, even by mere resistance to an invader, the old saying is proved, "War makes the King."*

*  Mark how the great American Civil War in the last century increased--and continues to increase--the Monrachic element in the United States, the power of the President.

--Louis XIV by Hillaire Belloc

Patrick: Lagniappe

This prevalence of Monarchy through the ages is due to two forces: first that men think of themselves, at heart, as equals in right; next, that men armed for battle or organised for civil action can best achieve their objects under a leader.  Filled with an obscure resentment against the power of mere wealth, or even caste, men will applaud and follow One who shall be master of their masters.  The monarch incarnates the common man, in his multitude, as well as the whole society over which he himself presides.  Also, en can only act if they are embrigaded under a hierarchy of command leading up to one Commander: nearly all great common enterprises must be ordered so, and in the supreme test of war armies are led and battles won by a single will and brain.  "Two good generals are no match for one mediocre general."  Men demand a name to lead them, and in victory they worship one successful captain.

--Louis XIV by Hillaire Belloc

Patrick: Lagniappe

There is indeed a third and nobler way than submission tot he rule of One or of A Few, and this third way is that where all families in the State combine to frame the decrees which they shall collectively obey, and choose by lot, or by open selection among themselves, the officers who shall enforce the laws.  Such government "by the people"--the ideal of all free men--is called Democracy.  Alas!  It is possible only in small states, and even these must enjoy exceptional defences moral or material, if they are to survive.  So defended whether by natural obstacles, or by an agreement among their neighbours, democracies very limited in scale have endured: Andorra after at least a thousand years in her mountain valleys is still here.  But, for the most part, the lesser communities are absorbed in the greater, and not till these break up can democracy (in the smaller fragments) reappear.  The human story, as a whole, tells of Kingship on the one hand, on the other of Republics under accepted authority of the rich; of enduring democracy hardly anything.

--Louis XIV by Hillaire Belloc

Patrick: Lagniappe

Men can only live in community: but communities must be governed or they crumble from within.

The instinct and experience of man has discovered two ways in which large communities can be governed.  They may be governed by one man, or by a group of men.  The first form we call Monarchy, the second Aristocracy--class government.  Under either of these the unity of the State, its internal order, its power to resist attack may be permanently maintained.

--Louis XIV by Hillaire Belloc

Patrick: Lagniappe

He loved hunting and shooting and good food and the company of good-looking women and the pleasures of society.  And like so many of the members of that society he cared little for the changing world outside it.  Science and mechanics, which were beginning already to change the whole life of Europe, meant nothing to him.  Nor did painting, nor music; nor did books.  In fact in the great mass of his private correspondence only once does he mention having read one. It was The Count of Monte Cristo.  'So far as I have got in it,' he confessed, 'I find it is tiresome--very poisonous.'

--The Destruction of Lord Raglan by Christopher Hibbert

Patrick: Lagniappe

He loved hunting and shooting and good food and the company of good-looking women and the pleasures of society.  And like so many of the members of that society he cared little for the changing world outside it.  Science and mechanics, which were beginning already to change the whole life of Europe, meant nothing to him.  Nor did painting, nor music; nor did books.  In fact in the great mass of his private correspondence only once does he mention having read one. It was The Count of Monte Cristo.  'So far as I have got in it,' he confessed, 'I find it is tiresome--very poisonous.'

--The Destruction of Lord Raglan by Christopher Hibbert

Patrick: Lagniappe

Lord FitzRoy took his pregnant wife to Brussels and on 18 June was at Wellington's side at Waterloo.  They had left Brussels together at eight o'clock in the morning of the 16th and for three days he had acted once more as the Duke's principal A.D.C.  Towards the evening of the third day a musket-ball from a sniper on the roof of the farmhouse of La Haye Sainte smashed his right elbow.  He walked back to a cottage used as forward hospital and showed his lacerated arm to the surgeon in charge. The surgeon told him to lie down on a table and then he cut the arm off between the shoulder and the elbow.  Lord FitzRoy did not even murmur.  The Prince of Orange, lying wounded in the same room, was unaware that an operation had been performed, until the arm was tossed away by the surgeon and the Colonel called out, 'Hey, bring my arm back.  There's a ring my wife gave me on the finger.'

--The Destruction of Lord Raglan by Christopher Hibbert