The Pleasure of Writing (part 2), Rose Macaulay

        “England, the pirate, has ransacked the countries of Europe for her speech:  Greece, Rome, France, Germany, Scandinavia, have poured in tribute to her treasury, which shines and jingles with the most confused rich coinage in the world.  To play with these mixed coins, to arrange them in juxtaposition, to entertain oneself with curious tropes, with meiosis, litotes, hyperbole, pleonasms, pedanticisms, to measure the words fitly to the thought, to be by turns bombastic, magniloquent, terse, flamboyant, minishing, to use Latinisms, Gallicisms, Hellenisms, Saxonisms, every ism in turn, to scatter out native riches like a spendthrift tossing gold -- this is the pleasure of writing.”

Rose Macaulay, “”Writing,” Personal Pleasures

The Pleasure of Writing (part 1), Rose Macaulay

         “Words, living and ghostly, the quick and the dead, crowd and jostle the otherwise too empty corridors of my mind, to the exclusion, doubtless, of much else that should be there.  How charmingly they flit before me, heavy laden with their honey like bees, yet light on the wing; slipping shadowy out from dusty corners, hiding once more, eluding my reach, pirouetting in the air above me, now too light, too quick, to be caught in my net, now floating down, like feathers, like snowflakes, to my hands.  They arrange themselves in the most elegant odd patterns; they sound the strangest sweet euphonious notes, they flute and sing and taber, and disappear, like apparitions, with a curious perfume and a most melodious twang.  Or they abide my question; they offer their pedigrees for my inspection; I trace back their ancestry, noting their diverse uses, modes, offspring, kin, transformations, transplantations, somersaults, spellings, dignities, degradations, lines and phrases which have enambered them for ever, phrases and lines which they themselves immortally enkindled. To move among this bright, strange, often fabulous herd of beings, to summon them at my will, to fasten them on to paper like flies, that they may decorate it, this is the pleasure of writing.”

Rose Macaulay, “Writing,” Personal Pleasures

Rose Macaulay on the Roots of Mysticism and Romance

         “This vast and curious universe, with its impenetrable destinies, these wild and spinning masses lit by strange fires, dashing hither and thither to destruction through cold and illimitable space, or running obediently round and round, like the squirrel in his cage, this singular planet we ourselves adorn, humming with its queer freight of animal and vegetable life, its squalor and materialism lit, as by wavering candles, by beauty, by valour, and by dreams – certainly the whole universe is built of the very fabric of romance.”

Rose Macaulay,  A Casual Commentary

Rose Macaulay on Women, Fashion and Money

Ever since I read her The Towers of Trebizond, I have been drawn to Rose Macaulay, whose thoughts on women, fashion, and money I reproduce here without comment:

“Let us . . . consider sartorial problems -- those of them which belong peculiarly to women.  The chief of these is, of course, how to dress well on expenditure insufficient for that purpose.  And it may at once be admitted that this is impossible.  You must either dress badly or spend more money than you wish to -- in most cases more than you have got.  It is a simple alternative, and every woman must make up her own mind which she intends to adopt.  Many women adopt both.  Another sartorial problem has always been how to reconcile a certain conformity to fashion with a certain comfort and grace . . . And it, too, is insoluble.  You cannot be at once graceful, comfortable, and in the mode.  Probably you will be none of these things.  Life is hard for women, as the saying goes.”

Rose Macaulay, A Casual Commentary  (New York:  Boni & Liveright, 1926, p. 237)

Dame Rose Macaulay on Mobs (23 February, 1952)

“Do you feel that people, particularly in crowds, are getting rather frightening?  Or perhaps they always were.  Mob hysteria seems to attack them so often and so violently, and they . . . climb onto the bonnets of their car, shriek like Maenads, and block the traffic completely, so that police have to clear a way for the wretched victims. . . I suppose this mass hysteria has always been with us; it crops up all through history, and has taken many forms.  The French revolution mobs shouting for the guillotine; the Jews shouting “Crucify Him!”; the wild religious revivalists of the Middle ages; the Jacquerie; the anti-Jewish pogrom crowds yelling against Jews; to-day football [i.e., soccer] crowds trampling one another to death at the gates; and all those terrible film fans screaming.

I suppose there is a deep potential excitement in human nature, like a wild animal, and being surrounded by a crowd unleashes it, and out it leaps, feeding on the excitement of its neighbors and growing madder and madder, till people are chased and lynched . . . Yet individually the mob are probably ordinary quite decent and kindly people.  How horrible a thing it would be to be at their mercy, when they turn into a pack of baying wolves.  O Sapientia!  What are we made of?  How can God endure us?"

Dame Rose Macaulay, a letter to Fr. J. Johnson, 23 February, 1952