Lascelles Quotes & Sayings

A clever girl may pass through the phase of foolish miss on the way to sensible woman. — Mary Lascelles

Poetry is the work of poets, not of peoples or communities; artistic creation can never be anything but the production of an individual mind. — Lascelles Abercrombie

The artist (I suppose) usually pays for the privilege by some sort of partial insomnia, by the possession of one faculty that will not be controlled nor put to sleep. In a poet this must often be the visual imagination, bringing before his eyes a succession of images which he never summoned, and of which some (it is only too likely) will be ugly or pitiful. — Mary Lascelles

As William Bernstein describes in 'A Splendid Exchange', 'The Arabs, invigorated by their conquests, experienced a cultural renaissance that extended to many fields; the era's greatest literature, art, mathematics, and astronomy was not found in Rome, Constantinople, or Paris, but in Damascus, Baghdad and Cordova. — Christopher Lascelles

The reason can only be this: heroic poetry depends on an heroic age, and an age is heroic because of what it is, not because of what it does. — Lascelles Abercrombie

The sole agents, indeed, in the action of her novels are individual human beings. And the comedy is the outcome of their making fools of themselves and of one another. — Mary Lascelles

By the general process of epic poetry, I mean the way this form of art has constantly responded to the profound needs of the society in which it was made. — Lascelles Abercrombie

Traditional matter must be glorified, since it would be easier to listen to the re-creation of familiar stories than to quite new and unexpected things; the listeners, we must remember, needed poetry chiefly as the re-creation of tired hours. — Lascelles Abercrombie

A story conducted by the time of a clock and calendars alone would be a story not of human beings but of mechanical toys. — Mary Lascelles

Lascelles threw himself into the carriage, snorting with laughter and saying that he had never in his life heard of anything so ridiculous and comparing their snug drive through the London streets in Mr. Norrell's carriage to ancient French and Italian fables where fools set sail in milk-pails to fetch the moon's reflection from the bottom of a duckpond ... — Susanna Clarke

Mr. Lascelles whispered to Mr. Drawlight that he had not realized before that doing kind actions would lead to his being addressed in familiar terms by so many low people - it was most unpleasant - he would take care to do no more. — Susanna Clarke

Landscapes we must owe something to the eye of the beholder. — Mary Lascelles

By the time the slave trade ended, the Caribbean had taken an estimated 50 percent of the roughly fifteen million African slaves transported to the Americas as cheap labour over a three hundred year period. In fact, up until the beginning of the 19th century, the majority of immigrants to the Americas were African. — Christopher Lascelles

How to tell students what to look for without telling them what to see is the dilemma of teaching. — Lascelles Abercrombie

There is only one thing which can master the perplexed stuff of epic material into unity; and that is, an ability to see in particular human experience some significant symbolism of man's general destiny. — Lascelles Abercrombie

No poet will ever take the written word as a substitute for the spoken word; he knows that it is on the spoken word, and the spoken word only, that his art is founded. — Lascelles Abercrombie

It is more difficult to keep the attention of hearers than of readers. — Lascelles Abercrombie

Few novelists can be more scrupulous than Jane Austen as to the phrasing of the thoughts of their characters. — Mary Lascelles

If epic poetry is a definite species, the sagas do not fall within it. — Lascelles Abercrombie

That is to say, epic poetry has been invented many times and independently; but, as the needs which prompted the invention have been broadly similar, so the invention itself has been. — Lascelles Abercrombie

The first epics were intended for recitation; the literary epic is meant to be read. — Lascelles Abercrombie

As for Elizabeth Bennet, our chief reason for accepting her point of view as a reflection of her author's is the impression that she bears of sympathy between them
an impression of which almost every reader would be sensible, even if it had not the explicit confirmation of Jane Austen's letters. Yet, as she is presented to us in Pride and Prejudice, she is but a partial and sometimes perverse observer. — Mary Lascelles

With several different kinds of poetry to choose from, a man would decide that he would like best to be an epic poet, and he would set out, in conscious determination, on an epic poem. — Lascelles Abercrombie

It seems difficult, sometimes, to believe that there was a time when sentiments now become habitual, sentiments that imply not only the original imperative of conduct, but the original metaphysic of living, were by no means altogether habitual. — Lascelles Abercrombie

Epic poetry exhibits life in some great symbolic attitude. It cannot strictly be said to symbolize life itself, but always some manner of life. — Lascelles Abercrombie

An epic is not made by piecing together a set of heroic lays, adjusting their discrepancies and making them into a continuous narrative. — Lascelles Abercrombie

The epic poet collaborates with the spirit of his time in the composition of his work. That is, if he is successful; the time may refuse to work with him, but he may not refuse to work with his time. — Lascelles Abercrombie

But the development of human society does not go straight forward; and the epic process will therefore be a recurring process, the series a recurring series - though not in exact repetition. — Lascelles Abercrombie

When many story-tellers occupy themselves with a social world which offers no great variety of lively action, their stories will probably resemble one another as to many of the major incidents, and if they draw on these limited resources like spend thrifts such resemblances will be inevitable
and therefore not significant. — Mary Lascelles

Others beside Jane Austen have made their Eltons, though none quite so cooly as she. — Mary Lascelles

But the gravest difficulty, and perhaps the most important, in poetry meant solely for recitation, is the difficulty of achieving verbal beauty, or rather of making verbal beauty tell. — Lascelles Abercrombie

In Jane Austen it was the critical faculty that would not be quieted; and that faculty in her, played on men and women. — Mary Lascelles

The world knows of a vast stock of epic material scattered up and down the nations; sometimes its artistic value is as extraordinary as its archaeological interest, but not always. — Lascelles Abercrombie

For the stage displays the first vigorous expression, as the natural thing and without conspicuous restraint, of private individuality. — Lascelles Abercrombie

Jane Austen never repeats herself. — Mary Lascelles

The epic poet has behind him a tradition of matter and a tradition of style; and that is what every other poet has behind him too; only, for the epic poet, tradition is rather narrower, rather more strictly compelling. — Lascelles Abercrombie

Mannerism, especially when it takes the form of recurrent word or phrase, is by no means easy to represent; there is but a hair's breadth between the point at which the reader delightfully recognizes is as a revealing habit of speech, and the point at which its iteration begin to weary him. — Mary Lascelles

The Border Ballads, for instance, and the Robin Hood Ballads, clearly suppose a state of society which is nothing but a very circumscribed and not very important heroic age. — Lascelles Abercrombie

Sympathy compounded of liking and compassion in varying proportions evidently seemed to Jane Austen the most natural inventive to imaginative interest in a character. — Mary Lascelles

Ah, but sir,' said Lascelles, 'it is precisely by passing judgments upon other people's work and pointing out their errors that readers can be made to understand your own opinions better. It is the easiest thing in the world to turn a review to one's own ends. One only need mention the book once or twice and for the rest of the article one may develop one's theme just as one chuses. It is, I assure you, what every body else does. — Susanna Clarke

Jane Austen's narrative style seems to me to show (especially in the later novels) a curiously chameleon-like faculty; it varies in colour as the habits of expression of the several characters impress themselves on the relation of the episode in which they are involved, and on the description of their situations. — Mary Lascelles

The balance of private good and general welfare is at the bottom of civilized morals; but the morals of the Heroic Age are founded on individuality, and on nothing else. — Lascelles Abercrombie

Charlotte Palmer is no sillier than Harriet Smith; and yet, how intolerable we should find it to see and hear as much of Charlotte as we do of Harriet! And would Miss Bates have been endurable if she had been presented in the mood and manners of Sense and Sensibility? — Mary Lascelles