W.D. Clarke

Lady Bertram did not think deeply, but, guided by Sir Thomas, she thought justly on all important points; and she saw, therefore, in all its enormity***, what had happened, and neither endeavoured herself, nor required Fanny to advise her, to think l

Lady Bertram did not think deeply, but, guided by Sir Thomas, she thought justly on all important points; and she saw, therefore, in all its enormity***, what had happened, and neither endeavoured herself, nor required Fanny to advise her, to think little of guilt and infamy [emphasis added].

Moral/-ly/-ity 16 instances
Earnest/-ly/-ness: 27 instances
Justly/Justice: 26 instances
Respectable/-bility 22 instances
Delicacy: 25 instances
Honour/-able: 36 instances

Proper: 26 instances
Propriety: 22 instances
Properly: 22 instances
Property: 22 instances

The anxiety, which in this state of their attachment must be the portion of Henry and Catherine, and of all who loved either, as to its f

The anxiety, which in this state of their attachment must be the portion of Henry and Catherine, and of all who loved either, as to its final event, can hardly extend, I fear, to the bosom of my readers, who will see in the tell-tale compression of the pages before them, that we are all hastening together to perfect felicity.

Archbishop Arundel is said to have pointed out Richard’s paradoxes to his handsome face: ‘Thou art a fair man, but thou art the falsest of men’; at the end of this diatribe against Richard’s crimes, ‘the king knew not what he should say’. As we approach him through contemporary records and chronicles, any sense of the ‘real’ man beneath the image recedes, never to be caught. Chroniclers tell us what they think he said or did, or that bias or rumour believed he had done or said – and even then they give us a Richard who baffled those around him. But the idea of Richard II is as real an object of historical study as the man himself. When it comes to trying to understand the fate of a king, the idea of him may be the only real object of study there is.

works of art must be understood, interpreted, evaluated, not in terms of timeless principles and standards valid for all men everywhere, but by a correct grasp of the purpose and therefore the peculiar use of symbols, especially of language, which belong uniquely to their own time and place, their own stage of social growth; that this alone can unravel the mysteries of cultures entirely different from one’s own and hitherto dismissed either as barbarous confusions or as being too remote and exotic to deserve serious attention […] He conceived of aesthetics, which he called ‘poetics’, as being concerned with a basic activity of men seeking not to give pleasure or embellish truths, but to express a vision of the world, an activity that could be studied on a level with law or politics. He saw language and mythology as a free creation of the human spirit, and one providing more dependable data for human history than conscious records

Expressionism: the doctrine that human activity in general, and art in particular, express the entire personality of the individual or the group, and are intelligible only to the degree to which they do so. Still more specifically, expressionism claims that all the works of men are above all voices speaking, are not objects detached from their makers, are part of a living process of communication between persons and not independently existing entities, beautiful or ugly, interesting or boring, upon which external observers may direct the cool and dispassionate gaze with which scientists – or anyone not given to pantheism or mysticism – look on objects in nature. This is connected with the further notions that every form of human self-expression is in some sense artistic, and that self-expression is part of the essence of human beings as such; which in turn entail such distinctions as those between integral and divided, or committed and uncommitted (that is, unfulfilled), lives; and thence lead to the concept of various hindrances, human and non-human, to the self-realisation which is the richest and most harmonious form of self-expression that all creatures, whether or not they are aware of it, live for.

Modern writers have turned the savage violence of the Beasts of the Apocalypse into Lessing’s harmless moral imagery, and Aesop’s fierce vision into smooth Horatian elegance. To understand truly one must descend to the depths of the orgies, to Bacchus and Ceres. Nieuwentyt’s and Newton’s and Buffon’s discoveries cannot inspire poetry as mythology has done. For this there must be a reason. Nature has been killed by the rationalists because they deny the senses and the passions. ‘Passion alone gives to abstractions and hypotheses hands, feet, wings; images it endows with spirit, life, language. Where are swifter arguments to be found? Where the rolling thunder of eloquence, and its companion, the monosyllabic brevity of lightning?’ For this we must go to the artist, not to the modern philosopher […] What is it to understand? If you wish to understand [e.g.] the Bible you must comprehend […] with the passion of ‘a friend, an intimate, a lover’ [...] above all, not by rules. […] for sense and words are one, and all translation distorts. Some sentences may resemble one another, or carry similar meanings, but no sentence can literally be substituted for any other, for the connection of words and sense is organic, indissoluble, unique. Words are the living carriers of feeling – only pedants and scholars dilute them by analysis or kill them with devitalising formulae. A word is the stamp of life – the richer the better.

an annuity is a very serious business; it comes over and over every year, and there is no getting rid of it. You are not aware of what you are doing. I have known a great deal of the trouble of annuities; for my mother was clogged with the payment of three to old superannuated servants by my father’s will, and it is amazing how disagreeable she found it.

Lady Middleton was equally pleased with Mrs. Dashwood. There was a kind of cold hearted selfishness on both sides, which mutually attracted them; and they sympathised with each other in an insipid propriety of demeanour, and a general want of understanding

You must not inquire too far, Marianne—remember I have no knowledge in the picturesque, and I shall offend you by my ignorance and want of taste if we come to particulars. I shall call hills steep, which ought to be bold; surfaces strange and uncouth, which ought to be irregular and rugged;\* and distant objects out of sight, which ought only to be indistinct through the soft medium of a hazy atmosphere.\* You must be satisfied with such admiration as I can honestly give. I call it a very fine country—the hills are steep, the woods seem full of fine timber, and the valley looks comfortable and snug—with rich meadows and several neat farm houses scattered here and there. It exactly answers my idea of a fine country, because it unites beauty with utility—and I dare say it is a picturesque one too, because you admire it; I can easily believe it to be full of rocks and promontories, grey moss and brush wood, but these are all lost on me. I know nothing of the picturesque.

I suspect,’ said Elinor, ‘that to avoid one kind of affectation, Edward here falls into another. Because he believes many people pretend to more admiration of the beauties of nature than they really feel, and is disgusted with such pretensions, he affects greater indifference and less discrimination in viewing them himself than he possesses. He is fastidious and will have an affectation of his own.’

‘It is very true,’ said Marianne, ‘that admiration of landscape scenery is become a mere jargon. Every body pretends to feel and tries to describe with the taste and elegance of him who first defined what picturesque beauty was.\* I detest jargon of every kind, and sometimes I have kept my feelings to myself, because I could find no language to describe them in but what was worn and hackneyed out of all sense and meaning.’

I know the summer will pass happily away. I mean never to be later in rising than six, and from that time till dinner I shall divide every moment between music and reading. I have formed my plan, and am determined to enter on a course of serious study. Our own library is too well known to me, to be resorted to for anything beyond mere amusement. But there are many works well worth reading, at the Park; and there are others of more modern production which I know I can borrow of Colonel Brandon. By reading only six hours a-day, I shall gain in the course of a twelve-month a great deal of instruction which I now feel myself to want.