A piece of prose that I love.
Aug. 17th, 2005 11:55 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rumtastiqueA chunk from a novel I was reading (gaudy night, by dorothy sayers) which struck me last week when I read it:
“Suppose,” said Harriet, falling back on words which were not her own, ”Suppose one is cursed with both a heart and a brain?”
“You can usually tell,” said Miss de Vine, “by seeing what kind of mistakes you make. I’m quite sure that one never makes fundamental mistakes about the thing one really wants to do. Fundamental mistakes arise out of lack of genuine interest. In my opinion, that is.”
“I made a very big mistake once,” said Harriet, ‘as I expect you know. I don’t think that arose out of lack of interest. It seemed at the time the most important thing in the world.”
“And yet, you made the mistake. Were you really giving all your mind to it, do you think? Your mind? Were you really being as cautious and exacting about it as you would be about writing a passage of fine prose?”
“That’s rather a difficult sort of comparison. On can’t, surely, deal with emotional excitements in that detached spirit.”
“Isn’t the writing of good prose an emotional excitement?”
“yes, of course it is. At least, when you get the thing dead right and know it’s dead right, there’s no excitement like it. It’s marvelous. It makes you feel like God in the Seventh Day- for a bit, anyhow.”
“Well, that’s what I mean. You expend the trouble and you don’t make any mistake – and then you experience the ecstasy. But if there’s any subject in which you’re content with being second rate, then it isn’t really your subject.”
“You’re dead right,” said Harriet, after a pause. “If one’s genuinely interested one knows how to be patient, and let time pass, as Queen Elizabeth said. Perhaps that’s the meaning of the phrase about genius being eternal patience, which I always thought rather absurd. If you truly want a thing, you don’t snatch; if you snatch, you don’t really want it. Do you suppose that, if you find yourself taking pains about a thing, it’s a proof of it’s importance to you?”
“I think it is, to a large extent. But a big proof is that the thing comes right, without those fundamental errors. One always makes surface errors of course. But a fundamental error is a sure sign of not caring. I wish one could teach people nowadays that the doctrine of snatching what one thinks one wants is unsound.”
“I saw six plays this winter in London,” said Harriet, “all preaching the doctrine of snatch. I agree that they left me with the feeling that none of the characters knew what they wanted.”
“No,” said Miss de Vine. “If you are once sure what you do want, you’ll find that everything else goes down before it like grass under a roll – all other interests, your own and other people’s.”
“Suppose,” said Harriet, falling back on words which were not her own, ”Suppose one is cursed with both a heart and a brain?”
“You can usually tell,” said Miss de Vine, “by seeing what kind of mistakes you make. I’m quite sure that one never makes fundamental mistakes about the thing one really wants to do. Fundamental mistakes arise out of lack of genuine interest. In my opinion, that is.”
“I made a very big mistake once,” said Harriet, ‘as I expect you know. I don’t think that arose out of lack of interest. It seemed at the time the most important thing in the world.”
“And yet, you made the mistake. Were you really giving all your mind to it, do you think? Your mind? Were you really being as cautious and exacting about it as you would be about writing a passage of fine prose?”
“That’s rather a difficult sort of comparison. On can’t, surely, deal with emotional excitements in that detached spirit.”
“Isn’t the writing of good prose an emotional excitement?”
“yes, of course it is. At least, when you get the thing dead right and know it’s dead right, there’s no excitement like it. It’s marvelous. It makes you feel like God in the Seventh Day- for a bit, anyhow.”
“Well, that’s what I mean. You expend the trouble and you don’t make any mistake – and then you experience the ecstasy. But if there’s any subject in which you’re content with being second rate, then it isn’t really your subject.”
“You’re dead right,” said Harriet, after a pause. “If one’s genuinely interested one knows how to be patient, and let time pass, as Queen Elizabeth said. Perhaps that’s the meaning of the phrase about genius being eternal patience, which I always thought rather absurd. If you truly want a thing, you don’t snatch; if you snatch, you don’t really want it. Do you suppose that, if you find yourself taking pains about a thing, it’s a proof of it’s importance to you?”
“I think it is, to a large extent. But a big proof is that the thing comes right, without those fundamental errors. One always makes surface errors of course. But a fundamental error is a sure sign of not caring. I wish one could teach people nowadays that the doctrine of snatching what one thinks one wants is unsound.”
“I saw six plays this winter in London,” said Harriet, “all preaching the doctrine of snatch. I agree that they left me with the feeling that none of the characters knew what they wanted.”
“No,” said Miss de Vine. “If you are once sure what you do want, you’ll find that everything else goes down before it like grass under a roll – all other interests, your own and other people’s.”
