There’s something hypnotic about the word tea.
Is not the great defect of our education today – a defect traceable through all the disquieting symptoms of trouble that I have mentioned – that although we often succeed in teaching our pupils “subjects,” we fail lamentably on the whole in teaching them how to think: they learn everything, except the art of learning.
You may say you won’t interfere with another person’s soul, but you do – merely by existing. The snag about it is the practical difficulty, so to speak, of not existing.
In art, the Trinity is expressed in the Creative Idea, the Creative Energy, and the Creative Power – the first imagining of the work, then the making incarnate of the work, and third the meaning of the work.
Our speculations about Shakespeare are almost as multifarious and foolish as our speculations about the maker of the universe, and, like those, are frequently concerned to establish that his works were not made by him but by another person of the same name.
One demands a little originality in these days, even from murderers,” said Lady Swaffham. “Like dramatists, you know – so much easier in Shakespeare’s time, wasn’t it? Always the same girl dressed up as a man, and even that borrowed from Boccaccio or Dante or somebody. I’m sure if I’d been a Shakespeare hero, the very minute I saw a slim-legged young page-boy I’d have said: ‘Ods bodikins! There’s that girl again!
There’s something hypnotic about the word ‘tea’. I’m asking you to enjoy the beauties of the English countryside; to tell me your adventures and hear mine; to plan a campaign involving the comfort and reputation of two-hundred people; to honor me with your sole presence and to bestow upon me the illusion of paradise, and I speak as though the pre-eminent object of all desire were a pot of boiled water and a plateful of synthetic pastries in Ye Olde Worlde Tudor Tea Shoppe.
I think my mother’s talents deserve a little acknowledgement. I said so to her, as a matter of fact, and she replied in these memorable words: “My dear child, you can give it a long name if you like, but I’m an old-fashioned woman and I call it mother-wit, and it’s so rare for a man to have it that if he does you write a book about him and call him Sherlock Holmes.
Harriet had long ago discovered that one could not like people any the better, merely because they were ill, or dead – still less because one had once liked them very much.
So I am a Socialist,” said Ingleby, “but I can’t stand this stuff about Old Dumbletonians. If everybody had the same State education, these things wouldn’t happen.” “If everybody had the same face,” said Bredon, “there’d be no pretty women.
The mellow bells, soaring and singing in tower and steeple, told of time’s flight through an eternity of peace; and Great Tom, tolling his nightly hundred-and-one, called home only the rooks from off Christ Church Meadow.
A man was taken to the Zoo and shown the giraffe. After gazing at it a little in silence: ‘I don’t believe it,’ he said.
The sin of our times is the sin that believes in nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, hates nothing, finds purpose in nothing, lives for nothing and remains alive because there is nothing for which it will die.
Bother the right man!” cried Miss Findlater, crossly. “I do hate that kind of talk. It makes one feel dreadful – like a prize cow or something. Surely, we have got beyond that point of view in these days.
The art of change ringing is peculiar to the English, and, like most English peculiarities, unintelligible to the rest of the world. To the musical Belgian, for example, it appears that the proper thing to do with a carefully tuned ring of bells is to play a tune upon it. By the English campanologist, the playing of tunes is considered to be a childish game, only fit for foreigners; the proper use of bells is to work out mathematical permutations and combinations.
The glass-blower’s cat is bompstable,” said Mr. Parker aloud and distinctly.
I beg your pardon,” said Lord Peter, “I was quoting poetry. Very silly of me. I got the habit at my mother’s knee and I can’t break myself of it.
I hope you won’t mind, because I haven’t shaved since this morning, but I’m going to take you round the next quiet corner and kiss you.
The making of miracles to edification was as ardently admired by pious Victorians as it was sternly discouraged by Jesus of Nazareth. Not that the Victorians were unique in this respect. Modern writers also indulge in edifying miracles though they generally prefer to use them to procure unhappy endings, by which piece of thaumaturgy they win the title of realists.
Like all male creatures Wimsey was a simple soul at bottom.