On ignoble, unchivalrous monarchies:
"That was, there can be little doubt, the real reason of the fascination of the Napoleon legend--that while Napoleon was a despot like the rest, he was a despot who went somewhere and did something, and devied the pessimism of Europe, and erased the word "impossible." One does not need to be a Bonapartis torejoice at the way in which the armies of the First Empire, shouting their songs and jesting with their colonels, smote and broke into pieces the armies of Prussia and Austria driven into battle with a cane." 89
On Browning's aversion to spiritualism (or spiritualists):
Memoirs of David Home
"He enjoyed being a husband. This is quite a distinct thing from enjoying being a lover, though it will scarcely be gound apart from it." 94
"Home was infinitely less dangerous as a dexterous swindler than he was as a bad or foolish man in possession of unknown or ill-comprehended powers. It is surely curious to thing that a man must object to exposing his wife to a few conjuring tricks, but could not be afraid of exposing her to the lose and nameless energies of the universe." 97
On the conventionality of Browning:
"Poetry deals with primal and conventional things--the hunger for bread, the love of woman, the love of children, the desire for immportal life. If men really had new sentiments, poetry could not deal with them." 99
"He was everything that he was with a definite and conscious pleasure--a man, a Liberal, an Englishman, an author, a gentleman, a lover, a married man." 100
"Browning boasted of being domesticated; there are half a hundred men everywhere who would be inclined to boast of not being domesticated. Bad men are almost without exception conceited, but they are commonly conceited of their defects." 101
On me:
"It is easy enough to be agreeable to a circle of admirers, especially feminine admirers, who have a peculiar talent for discipleship and the absorption of ideas. But when a man is loved by other men of his own intellectual stature and of a wholly different type and order of eminence, we may be certain that there was something genuine about him, and something far more important than anything intellectual. Men do not like another man because he is a genius, least of all when they happen to be geniuses themselves. This general truth about Browning is like hearing of a woman who is the most famous beauty in a city, and who is at the same time adored and confided in by all the women who live there." 102-3
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