What do you think?
Rate this book
The Oxford Book of English Prose
book
1092 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1925
2 people are currently reading
55 people want to read
About the author
Arthur Quiller-Couch
771 books67 followersSir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch was a Cornish writer, who published under the pen name of Q. He is primarily remembered for the monumental "Oxford Book of English Verse 1250-1900" (later extended to 1918), and for his literary criticism. He guided the taste of many who never met him, including American writer Helene Hanff, author of 84 Charing Cross Road, its sequel, Q's Legacy, and the putatively fictional Horace Rumpole via John Mortimer, his literary amanuensis.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
December 23, 2025
‘ Her foundations are upon the holy hills '
SOME say the Declaration of War threw us into a primitive abyss of hatred and the lust for blood. Others declare that we behaved very well. I do not know. I only know the thoughts that flowed through the mind of a friend of mine when he heard the news. My friend — I shall make no endeavour to excuse him — is a normal, even ordinary man, wholly English, twenty-four years old, active and given to music. By a chance he was ignorant of the events of the world during the last days of July. He was camping with some friends in a remote part of Cornwall, and had gone on, with a companion, for a four-days’ sail. So it wasn’t till they beached her again that they heard. A youth ran down to them with a telegram : ‘We’re at war with Germany. We’ve joined France and Russia.’
My friend ate and drank, and then climbed a hill of gorse, and sat alone, looking at the sea. His mind was full of confused images, and the sense of strain. In answer to the word ‘ Germany ’, a train of vague thoughts dragged across his brain. The pompous middle-class vulgarity of the building of Berlin ; the wide and restful beauty of Munich ; the taste of beer ; innumerable quiet, glittering cafes ; the Ring ; the swish of evening air in the face, as one skis down past the pines ; a certain angle of the eyes in the face ; long nights of drinking, and singing, and laughter ; the admirable beauty of German wives and mothers ; certain friends ; some tunes ; the quiet length of evening over the Starnberger-See. Between him and the Cornish sea he saw quite clearly an April morning on a lake south of Berlin, the grey water slipping past his little boat, and a peasant-woman, suddenly revealed against apple-blossom, hanging up blue and scarlet garments to dry in the sun.
-----------------
On that little hill by the city of Florence, where the lovers of Giorgione are lying, it is always the solstice of noon, of noon made so languorous by summer suns that hardly can the slim naked girl dip into the marble tank the round bubble of clear glass, and the long fingers of the lute-player rest idly upon the chords. It is twilight always for the dancing nymphs whom Corot set free among the silver poplars of France. In eternal twilight they move, those frail diaphanous figures, whose tremulous white feet seem not to touch the dew-drenched grass they tread on. But those who walk in epos, drama, or romance, see through theabouring months the young moons wax and wane, and watch the night from evening unto morning star, and from sunrise unto sunsetting, can note the shifting day with all its gold and shadow. For them, as for us, the flowers bloom'and wither, and the Earth, that Green-tressed Goddess as Coleridge calls her, alters her raiment for their pleasure. The statue is concentrated to one moment of perfection. The image stained upon the canvas possesses no spiritual element of growth or change. If they know nothing of death, it is because they know’ little of life, for the secrets of life and death belong to those, and those only, whom the sequence of time affects, and who possess not merely the present but the future, and can rise or fall from a past of glory or of shame. Movement, that problem of the visible arts, can be truly realized by Literature alone. It is Literature that shows us the body in its swiftness and the soul in its unrest. PP950
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
I read Dickens and Shakespeare without shame or stint ; but their pregnant observations and demonstrations of life are not co-ordinated into any philosophy or religion : on the contrary, Dickens’s sentimental assumptions are violently contradicted by his observations ; and Shakespeare's pessimism is only his wounded humanity. Both have the specific genius of the fictionist and the common sympathies of human feeling and thought in pre-eminent degree. They arc often saner and shrewder than the philosophers just as Sancho Panza was often saner and shrewder than Don Quixote. They clear away vast masses of oppressive gravity by their sense of the ridiculous, which is at bottom a combination of sound moral judgment with lighthearted good humor. But they are concerned with the diversities of the world instead of with its unities... PP952
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
SOME say the Declaration of War threw us into a primitive abyss of hatred and the lust for blood. Others declare that we behaved very well. I do not know. I only know the thoughts that flowed through the mind of a friend of mine when he heard the news. My friend — I shall make no endeavour to excuse him — is a normal, even ordinary man, wholly English, twenty-four years old, active and given to music. By a chance he was ignorant of the events of the world during the last days of July. He was camping with some friends in a remote part of Cornwall, and had gone on, with a companion, for a four-days’ sail. So it wasn’t till they beached her again that they heard. A youth ran down to them with a telegram : ‘We’re at war with Germany. We’ve joined France and Russia.’
My friend ate and drank, and then climbed a hill of gorse, and sat alone, looking at the sea. His mind was full of confused images, and the sense of strain. In answer to the word ‘ Germany ’, a train of vague thoughts dragged across his brain. The pompous middle-class vulgarity of the building of Berlin ; the wide and restful beauty of Munich ; the taste of beer ; innumerable quiet, glittering cafes ; the Ring ; the swish of evening air in the face, as one skis down past the pines ; a certain angle of the eyes in the face ; long nights of drinking, and singing, and laughter ; the admirable beauty of German wives and mothers ; certain friends ; some tunes ; the quiet length of evening over the Starnberger-See. Between him and the Cornish sea he saw quite clearly an April morning on a lake south of Berlin, the grey water slipping past his little boat, and a peasant-woman, suddenly revealed against apple-blossom, hanging up blue and scarlet garments to dry in the sun.
-----------------
On that little hill by the city of Florence, where the lovers of Giorgione are lying, it is always the solstice of noon, of noon made so languorous by summer suns that hardly can the slim naked girl dip into the marble tank the round bubble of clear glass, and the long fingers of the lute-player rest idly upon the chords. It is twilight always for the dancing nymphs whom Corot set free among the silver poplars of France. In eternal twilight they move, those frail diaphanous figures, whose tremulous white feet seem not to touch the dew-drenched grass they tread on. But those who walk in epos, drama, or romance, see through theabouring months the young moons wax and wane, and watch the night from evening unto morning star, and from sunrise unto sunsetting, can note the shifting day with all its gold and shadow. For them, as for us, the flowers bloom'and wither, and the Earth, that Green-tressed Goddess as Coleridge calls her, alters her raiment for their pleasure. The statue is concentrated to one moment of perfection. The image stained upon the canvas possesses no spiritual element of growth or change. If they know nothing of death, it is because they know’ little of life, for the secrets of life and death belong to those, and those only, whom the sequence of time affects, and who possess not merely the present but the future, and can rise or fall from a past of glory or of shame. Movement, that problem of the visible arts, can be truly realized by Literature alone. It is Literature that shows us the body in its swiftness and the soul in its unrest. PP950
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
I read Dickens and Shakespeare without shame or stint ; but their pregnant observations and demonstrations of life are not co-ordinated into any philosophy or religion : on the contrary, Dickens’s sentimental assumptions are violently contradicted by his observations ; and Shakespeare's pessimism is only his wounded humanity. Both have the specific genius of the fictionist and the common sympathies of human feeling and thought in pre-eminent degree. They arc often saner and shrewder than the philosophers just as Sancho Panza was often saner and shrewder than Don Quixote. They clear away vast masses of oppressive gravity by their sense of the ridiculous, which is at bottom a combination of sound moral judgment with lighthearted good humor. But they are concerned with the diversities of the world instead of with its unities... PP952
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
November 25, 2024
Fascinating. I’d love to have it
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews