Robertson Davies

In the header to this blog I quote Robertson Davies (from whom I have stolen... adopted the phrase “ornamental knowledge”), but I am shocked to find that I have not quoted him here to any degree. So here I make a poor attempt to remedy that oversight.

It used to be that we did our e-mail using hard-drive resident programs known collectiviely as “e-mail clients” and that it was common to set up a standard signature to go out at the bottom of all our e-mails. Very quaint, I know. I have just opened my old e-mail client and pulled up all of my Robertson Davies sigs. These run from 1994 to about 2005. There are far more quotations marked in the hard copies of Davies that I own, but search/copy/paste is so much easier than opening all those books and typing.

N.b. that in plain text e-mails, sent in lower ASCII, the convention was that text surrounded by underscores indicated italics, and asterisks (stars) indicated bold text.

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“...the most strenuous efforts of the most committed educationalists in the years since my boyhood have been quite unable to make a school into anything but a school, which is to say a jail with educational opportunities.”
-- Jonathan Hullah, M.D., F.R.C.P., narrator of
Robertson Davies’ _The Cunning Man_, I [4]
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“It is so easy to plan lives of humanitarian self-sacrifice for other people.”
-- Jonathan Hullah, M.D., F.R.C.P., narrator of
Robertson Davies’ _The Cunning Man_, II [13]
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Welsh rhetoric is part of me, and my curse is that the world is full of literal-minded morlocks who don’t understand, and think I’m a crook because their tongues are wrapped in burlap and mine is hinged with gold.
-- Robertson Davies, _The Lyre of Orpheus_
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Canadian National Prayer according to the omniscient narrator of Robertson Davies’ _The_Lyre_of_Orpheus_:

O God, grant me mediocrity and comfort; protect me from the radiance of Thy light.
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“Oh, I wasn’t suggesting that we *do* anything,” said Maria. “I was just suggesting that we *talk* a little more compassionately.”

Robertson Davies, _The Lyre of Orpheus_

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There is a point in a man’s undressing when he looks stupid, and nothing in the world can make him into a romantic figure. It is at the moment when he stands in his underwear and socks.
-- Robertson Davies, _The Manticore_
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And in the Middle Ages, how concerned people who lived close to the world of nature were with the faeces of animals. And what a variety of names they had for them: the Crotels of a Hare, the Friants of a Boar, the Spraints of an Otter, the Werderobe of a Badger, the Waggying of a Fox, the Fumets of a Deer. Surely there might be some words for the material so near to the heart of Ozy Froats better than shit? What about the Problems of a President, the Backward Passes of a Footballer, the Deferrals of a Dean, the Odd Volumes of a Librarian, the Footnotes of a Ph.D., the Low Grades of a Freshman, the Anxieties of an Untenured Professor? As for myself, might it not be appropriately called the Collect for the Day?

Professor the Reverend Simon Darcourt, musing in _The Rebel Angels_
- by Robertson Davies
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It was in dealing with stupid pupils that his wit was shown. A dunce, who had done nothing right, would not receive a mark of Zero from him, for Hector would geld the unhappy wretch of marks not only for arriving at a wrong solution, but for arriving at it by a wrong method. It was thus possible to announce to the class that the dunce had been awarded _minus_ thirty-seven out of a possible hundred marks; such announcements could not be made more than two or three times a year, but they always brought a good laugh. And that laugh, it must be said, was not vaingloriously desired by Hector as a tribute to himself, but only in order that it might spur the dunce on to greater mathematical effort. That it never did so was one of the puzzles which life brought to Hector, for he was convinced of the effectiveness of ridicule in making stupid boys and girls intelligent.
Robertson Davies, _Tempest-Tost_
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“Oho, now I know what you are. You are an advocate of Useful Knowledge.”
“Certainly”
“You say that a man’s first job is to earn a living, and that the first task of education is to equip him for that job?”
“Of course.”
“Well allow me to introduce myself to you as an advocate of Ornamental Knowledge. You like the mind to be a neat machine, equipped to work efficiently, if narrowly, and with no extra bits or useless parts. I like the mind to be a dustbin of scraps of brilliant fabric, odd gems, worthless but fascinating curiosities, tinsel, quaint bits of carving, and a reasonable amount of healthy dirt. Shake the machine and it goes out of order; shake the dustbin and it adjusts itself beautifully to its new position.”
-- “Cobbler” Humphrey challenging Mackilwraith in chapter five of _Tempest-Tost_, book one of Robertson Davies’ Salterton Trilogy
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“Curiosity killed the cat,” said Hector....
“I deny that,” said Cobbler, “the cat probably died a happy martyr to research.”
Robertson Davies, _Tempest-Tost_
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“She herself was a victim of that lust for books which rages in the breast like a demon, and which cannot be stilled save by the frequent and plentiful acquisition of books. This passion is more common, and more powerful, than most people suppose.”
-Robertson Davies, _Tempest-Tost_
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“...nothing is more fatal to maidenly delicacy of speech than the run of a good library.”
-Robertson Davies, _Tempest-Tost_
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The third book of the Salterton Trilogy (_A Mixture of Frailties_) centers on a young girl from a very conservative protestant sect who earns the opportunity to go to England & Europe to study music. There’s quite a bit of good grist over the clash between her upbringing, her own moral standards, and the shockingly loose morals of musicians. There comes a great moment where she is given advice that includes the lines “If you’re living in what is pompously called sin with Revelstoke, you’d better be sure you are enjoying it, or you will soon find that you have neither your cake nor your penny.... the biggest mug in the world is the sinner who isn’t getting any pleasure from it”. And the first book (_Tempest-Tost_) has one of the world’s most pompous teachers as a main character, so you KNOW I enjoyed that.
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“[Coincidence is a] useful, dismissive word for people who cannot bear the idea of pattern shaping their own lives. [It] is what they call pattern in which they cannot discern something they are prepared to accept as meaning.”
-Robertson Davies, _What’s_Bred_in_the_Bone_
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Much may be learned about any society by studying the behavior and accepted ideas of its children, for children...are shadows of their parents, and what they believe and what they do are often what their parents believe in their hearts and would do if society would put up with it.
-Robertson Davies, _What’s_Bred_in_the_Bone_