Books & Authors

This is a list of other books and authors mentioned in Parade's End with a note of reference.

He had had it from mere 'articles'--on the philosophies and domestic lives of such great figures as Carlyle and Mill, or on the expansion of inter-colonial trade.

John Stuart Mill

'Whether we consider him as the imaginer of mysterious, sensuous and exact plastic beauty; as the manipulator of sonorous, rolling and full-mouthed lines; of words as full of colour as were his canvases; or whether we regard him as the deep philosopher, elucidating and drawing his illumination from the arcana of a mystic hardly greater than himself, to Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti, the subject of this little monograph, must be accorded the name of one who has profoundly influenced the outward aspects, the human contacts, and all those things that go to make up the life of our higher civilization as we live it to-day...'

'I can't say,' Tietjens answered contemptuously. 'I don't read poetry except Byron. But it's a filthy picture...'

Well, you've got your John Stuart Mills and your George Eliots for the high-class thing. Leave the furniture out!

'"She walks, the lady of my delight,
A shepherdess of sheep;
She is so circumspect and right:
She has her thoughts to keep."'

'I don't know,' Miss Wannop said, 'when I read what Ruskin says about it in the Crown of Wild Olive. Or no! It's the Queen of the Air. That's his Greek rubbish, isn't it? I always think it seems like an egg-race in which the young woman didn't keep her eyes in the boat. But I suppose it comes to the same thing.'

She had said to him: 'Oh...a little caviare! A peach!' a long time before, with the vague underfeeling that the names of such comestibles must convey to her person a charm in the eyes of Caliban.

'Die Sommer Nacht hat mirs angethan

Das war ein schweigsame Reiten...'

he said aloud.

How could you translate that? You couldn't translate it: no one could translate Heine:

'It was the summer night came over me:

That was silent riding...'

A voice cut into his warm, drowsy thought:

The Nut Brown Maid - 'And I must to the greenwood go, Alone: a banished man!' Border ballad! Written not seven miles from Groby!

He said:

'Where do you get your absurd Latin nomenclature from? Isn't it phalaena...' She had answered:

'From White...The Natural History of Selborne is the only natural history I ever read...'

'He's the last English writer that could write,' said Tietjens.

Oh!' and then: 'The reason why I'm unconcerned over your rudeness about my Latin is that I know I'm a much better Latinist than you. You can't quote a few lines of Ovid without sprinkling howlers in...It's vastum, not longum..."Terra tribus scopulis vastum procurrit"...It's alto, not coelo..."Uvidus ex alto desilientis."...How could Ovid have written ex coelo? The "c" after the "x" sets your teeth on edge.'

Tietjens said: 'Excogitabo!'

'That's purely canine!' she said with contempt.

'Besides,' Tietjens said, longum is much better than vastum. I hate cant adjectives like "vast."...'

'It's like your modesty to correct Ovid,' she exclaimed. 'Yet you say Ovid and Catullus were the only two Roman poets to be poets. That's because they were sentimental and used adjectives like vastum...What's "Sad tears mixed with kisses" but the sheerest sentimentality?'