THE NOTE BOOK OF A LINGUIST
Goethe wrote: Was ich litt und was ich lebte, sind hier Blumen nur im Strausz. I paraphrase: Was ich lese und was ich denke, hab ich hier bewahrt für mich. (What I read and what I think I have stored up here for myself.)
This sentence from one of Concha Espina’s novels pleased me: Acaso han huido para siempre en el mundo las aves altarnaras de la Humanidad. (Perhaps vanished forever from the earth are the heavenly wings of humanity.) That is what Spanish thinkers declare that we lack more than anything else, human values.
Byron and Shelley created merely to console themselves for the fact that they could not learn how to live. To them a man of action was something strange, something enviable.
Maurois’s Ariel (Shelley) is satisfying and unsatisfying at the same time. I feel some of it might be better. It lacks substance, and yet it is pleasant reading enough. The book is semi-fiction; it was not meant to be yard-wide fact. But I keep the feeling of being forced to look at a water-color when I am longing for a rich, deep-pigmented oil. There is something I want and can not find. It is bad form however to look a fact too firmly in the face.
What was really wrong with the lives of Shelley and Byron, and some of their delightful friends, was the influence in cold, Saxon England, with its peculiar ability to cling to a straight line and ignore the nimble necessity of corners, of the French Eighteenth Century. It made the duller English mad. They did not put on well the mental clothes of French thought and philosophy. As a race they have never been too successful in putting on any clothes.
They lacked humor and a kind of emotional release in the wearing. The clothes did not fit. But they thundered ahead with desperate earnestness, and neglected the gay occasional dandying trot. British seriousness minus Gallic salt.
An English woman of cultivation and good intent, in America, recently showed the same peculiarity. She started a movement to suppress Mother Goose. She insisted the book would teach children to lie, to distrust their elders. The following is one of her quoted illustrations: