through a long lapse of time; when all its pleasures, like those of benevolence, are familiar, and nothing untasted or unknown is left to stimulate curiosity and keep up the desire of prolonged existence.” — J.S.M.
“Push everything as far as it will go.” — O.W.
“The old desire everything — the middle-aged believe everything — the young know everything.” — O.W.
“To love madly — perhaps is not wise — yet should you love madly — it is far wiser than not to love at all.” — M.M.
“People who learn only from experience do not allow for intuition.” — A.H.H.
“No life is spoiled but one whose growth is arrested.” — O.W.
“We are not sent into the world to air our moral prejudices.” — O.W.
“If you want to mar a nature, you have merely to reform it.” — O.W.
“The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.” — O.W.
“Conscience and cowardice are the same things. Conscience is the trade mark of the firm. That is all.” — O.W.
“To realise one’s nature perfectly — that is what each of us is here for.” — O.W.
(1907)
“I am that which is.”
“No mortal man dare lift the veil.”
“He is alone of himself; to him alone do all men owe their being.” — Religion Of Beethoven; August, 1805.
“Realise your youth while you have it. Don’t squander the gold of your days listening to the tedious — trying to improve the hopeless failure — or giving away your life to the ignorant, the common or the vulgar — which are the aims, the false ideals of our Age. Live! Live the wonderful life which is in you. Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always reaching…. Be afraid of nothing.” — O.W.
“Ambition is a curse if you are not … proof against everything else, unless you are willing to sacrifice yourself to your ambition.” — A Woman (K.M.).
“It cannot be possible to go through all the abandonment of music and care humanly for anything human afterward.” — A Woman.
“All musicians, no matter how insignificant, come to life emancipated of their power to take life seriously. It is not one man or woman but the complete octave of sex that they desire.” — A.W.
“You feel helpless under the yoke of creation.” — A.W.
“Nature makes such fools of us! What is the use of liking anyone if the washerwoman can do exactly the same thing? Well, this is Nature’s trick to ensure population.” — A.W.
“Most women turn to salt, looking back.” — A.W.
“Big people have always entirely followed their own inclinations. Why should we remember the names of people who do what everyone does? To (be in) love with success is to be illustrious.” — A.W.
“I do not want to earn a living; I want to live.” — O.W.
“You inspect yourself from the heights of an inspiration and rebound in sickening jolts from pinnacles to the mud on the street.” — A.W.
“A woman really cannot understand music till she has the actual experience of those laboriously con- cealed things which are evidently the foundation of them all.” — A.W. (K.M.)
“The translation of an emotion into act is its death — its logical end…. But … this way isn’t the act of unlawful things. It is the curiosity of our own temperament, the delicate expression of our own tendencies, the welding into an Art of act or incident some raw emotion of the blood. For we castrate our minds to the extent by which we deny our bodies.” — O.W.
March 20, 1907. Selections from Dorian Gray
“Being natural is simply a pose — and the most irritating pose I know…. I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world.”
“The worst of having a romance of any kind is that it leaves one so unromantic.”
“Those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love; it is the faithless who know love’s tragedies.”
“No influence is immoral — immoral from the scientific point of view. Nothing can cure the soul but the senses — just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.” — O.W.
2
The novel, Juliet , which Kathleen Beauchamp began on May 18th, 1907, her last term at Queen’s, shows this influence. She absorbed so completely what she was reading at the time; it became such a part of her, that it was inevitable she should reflect something of it, just as she reflected in all of her writing her state, her immediate attitude to life, as well as her mood of the moment.
What she was writing for herself, then, was vastly different from the sketches she wrote for publication in the College Magazine. Those, with one exception, had been stories of her New Zealand childhood. That exception was the second to be published (March, 1904), Die Einsame, unlike the others in style, with something of herself in its conception of the solitary life of the spirit, but in its form obviously influenced by her reading. Ida Baker, at the same time, had written a story “practically the same thing, but, of course, without the literary mark,” as she explained :”it was because we were so much in harmony.”
Kathleen’s story was highly spoken of by Miss Bedford, the drawing instructor. In her next three, nevertheless, she returned to her childhood theme, in great contrast to the contributions which made up the rest of the magazine : what The Candid Critic, a caustic scarlet-covered junior pamphlet appearing in June, 1905, called “Odes to Spring and Fairy Tales by College Hans Andersens.” Her next published sketch (December, 1904) was Your Birthday, a sprightly but very tender study of a child. For the following half-yearly issue (July, 1905) the twenty-second year of the magazine, Kathleen Beauchamp was sub-Editor and Ida Baker, Treasurer. Kathleen’s story was One Day, a day in the life of the children of her family; and, her sister says, a true picture. She had not yet mastered her material, however, and the style was artificial, though there were some amusing and several charming touches and consistent character drawing of the four children. For the next issue (December, 1905) she was Head Editor, with Francis Maurice sub-Editor. In that number, her sketch, About Pat, showed something of the perception that triumphed in her later work.
She evidently had no connection with the issue of her final term (July, 1906). By that time she was writing for herself alone. She was beginning to live vividly and with new awareness, and she was putting so much of it into Juliet that the “novel” was too “advanced” to be offered to a college audience.
3
During the time she was writing Juliet (her last three months at Queen’s) Arnold Trowell was in London giving recitals at the Bechstein Hall, before audiences that were, for the most part, very enthusiastic. He had finished his
