Vernon Lee

Let us never forget, dear friends, how close all round lies Limbo, the Kingdom of Might-have-been.

Vernon Lee was the pseudonym of the French-born British writer Violet Paget (14 October 1856 – 13 February 1935). She is remembered today primarily for her supernatural fiction and her work on aesthetics. An early follower of Walter Pater, she wrote over a dozen volumes of essays on art, music and travel.

Quotes

• Having once seen Alice Oke in the reality, it was quite impossible to remember that one could have fancied her at all different: there was something so complete, so completely unlike every one else, in her personality, that she seemed always to have been present in one's consciousness, although present, perhaps, as an enigma.
  • A Phantom Lover: A Fantastic Story (Boston: Roberts Bros, 1886) ch. 2, p. 23

• "Have you any ghosts at Okehurst, by the way?" I asked. The place seemed as if it required some to complete it."
  "I hope not," answered Oke, gravely.
  His gravity made me smile.
  "Why, would you dislike it if there were?" I asked.
  "If there are such things as ghosts," he replied," I don't think they should be taken lightly. God would not permit them to be, except as a warning or a punishment."
  • A Phantom Lover (1886) ch. 2, pp. 41–2

• Sor Asdrubale, as they call my landlord, is also a notary. He regrets the Pontifical Government, having had a cousin who was a Cardinal’s trainbearer, and believes that if only you lay a table for two, light four candles made of dead men’s fat, and perform certain rites about which he is not very precise, you can, on Christmas Eve and similar nights, summon up San Pasquale Baylon, who will write you the winning numbers of the lottery upon the smoked back of a plate, if you have previously slapped him on both cheeks and repeated three Ave Marias. The difficulty consists in obtaining the dead men’s fat for the candles, and also in slapping the saint before he have time to vanish.
  “If it were not for that,” says Sor Asdrubale, “the Government would have had to suppress the lottery ages ago—eh!”
  • "Amore Dure: Passages from the Diary of Spiridion Trepka", in Murray's Magazine, vol. 1, no. 1 (January 1887) pp. 51–2, and collected in Hauntings: Fantastic Stories (London: John Lane, 1906) p. 8

• There is no end to the deceits of the past; we protest that we know it is cozening us, and it continues to cozen us just as much.
  • "In Praise of Old Houses", in Longman's Magazine, no. 1170 (July 1892) p. 295, and collected in Limbo, and Other Essays (London: Grant Richards, 1897) p. 40

• Let us rather think gently of things, sad, but sad without ignominy, of friendships stillborn or untimely cut off, hurried by death into a place like that which holds the souls of the unchristened babies; often, like them, let us hope, removed to a sphere where such things grow finer and more fruitful, the sphere of the love of those we have not loved enough in life.
  But that at best is but a place of ghosts; so let us never forget, dear friends, how close all round lies Limbo, the Kingdom of Might-have-been.
  • "Limbo", in Limbo, and Other Essays (1897) p. 17

• Leisure requires the evidence of our own feelings, because it is not so much a quality of time as a peculiar state of mind. We speak of leisure time, but what we really mean thereby is time in which we can feel at leisure. What being at leisure means is more easily felt than defined.
  • "About Leisure", in Limbo, and Other Essays (1897) p. 139

• As towards most other things of which we have but little personal experience (foreigners, or socialists, or aristocrats, as the case may be), there is a degree of vague ill-will towards what is called Thinking.
  • "Against Talking", in Hortus Vitae (1904) p. 119

• There is something about the big, stately house, where the Immortal One had received all the minor Olympians, or their homage, which makes one feel why that grandson gradually left it to the portraits of the Friends and the Sweethearts, and to the Plaster-casts (gathering a garment of sooty dust), which seem in some hieratic relation to the busts and paintings and prints and silhouettes of that Man-God, portrayed at every age, and with every unlikeliness of smirk and frown, from the eye-flashing aquiline youth with locks tied back in a bag, half-Werther, half-Wilhelm Meister, through every variety of Goethe travelling through life with Roman ruins or grand ducal palaces as background, to Goethe in all the different forbiddingnesses of old age. Forbidding, but not enough, alas I for the sycophancies of Eckermann, the theatricalities of Byron, the shakable sentimental conceit of Jane Welsh Carlyle, who sends him a copy of verses and (of all embarrassing untidy presents) a long tail of "a woman's hair." (Faugh!) There he presides, variously Olympian, over the dreary 1820 wallpapers and sofas and card-tables, key-patterned or sham Gothic, but all faded and dust-engrained; among the dismal collections of ores and crystals and skulls and stuffed birds: a pantalooned and stocked and swallow-tailed Rentier Faust. And round him that court of huge blackened casts, Ludovisi Junos and Rondanini Joves, and various decapitated Adorantes and Ilioneuses; that other company of faded ladies, stomachered or short-waisted, Lottes and Lilis and Maximilianes and Christianes, Suleikas, Gretchens, and Ottilies, on whose love and love for him (as on the succulent roast ox-thighs of Homeric days) the god Wolfgang nourished and increased his own divinity.
  • The Sentimental Traveller: Notes on Places (London: John Lane, 1908) ch. 6, pp. 51–2
  • On the Goethe House at Weimar

• Surely the excellence of all poetry — what puts Shelley above Keats, Goethe above Shelley (in his Lyrics), and English, German and Italian Poetry so incomparably above French—surely the great thing is the co-ordination into a total mood, as distinguished from the charm of detached metaphors or descriptions or verses.
  • Lee quoted in Maurice Baring, Have You Anything To Declare?: A Note Book with Commentaries (1936).