From Rose Macaulay’s The Lee Shore:

“But all the same,” said Peter, suddenly aggrieved, “you might be pleasant to your own cousin, even if he is in a motor. Why be proud?”

He was really a little vexed that Rodney should look with aloofness on Urquhart. For him Urquhart embodied the brilliance of life, its splendidness and beauty and joy. Rodney, with his fanatical tilting at prosperity, would, Peter half consciously knew, have to see Urquhart unhorsed and stripped bare before he would take much notice of him.

“Too many things,” said Rodney, indistinctly over his thick pipe. “That’s all.”

Peter, irritated, said, “The old story. The more things the better; why not? You’d be happy on a desert island full of horrid naked savages. You think you’re civilised, but you’re really the most primitive person I know.”

Rodney said he was glad; he liked to be primitive, and added, “But you’re wrong, of course. The naked savages would like anything they could get—beads or feathers or top hats; they’re not natural ascetics; the simple life is enforced…. St. Francis took off all his clothes in the Piazza and began his new career without any.”

“Disgusting,” murmured Peter.

“That,” said Rodney, “is what people like Denis should do. They need to unload, strip bare, to find themselves, to find life.”

“Denis,” said Peter, “is the most alive person I know, as it happens. He’s found life without needing to take his clothes off—so he scores over St. Francis.”

Denis had rushed through the twilight vivid like a flame—he had lit it for a moment and left it grey. Peter knew that.

“But he hasn’t,” Rodney maintained, “got the key of the thing. If he did take his clothes off, it would be a toss-up whether he found more life or lost what he’s got. That’s all wrong, don’t you see. That’s what ails all these delightful, prosperous people. They’re swimming with life-belts.”

“You’ll be saying next,” said Peter, disgusted, “that you admire Savonarola and his bonfire.”

“I do, of course. But he’d only got hold of half of it—half the gospel of the empty-handed. The point is to lose and laugh.” For a moment Rodney had a vision of Peter standing bare-headed in the dust and smiling. “To drop all the trappings and still find life jolly—just because it is life, not because of what it brings. That’s what St. Francis did. That’s where Italy scores over England. I remember at Lerici the beggars laughing on the shore, with a little maccaroni to last them the day. There was a man all done up in bandages, hopping about on crutches and grinning. Smashed to bits, and his bones sticking out of his skin for hunger, but there was the sun and the sea and the game he was playing with dice, and he looked as if he was saying, ‘Nihil habentes, omnia possidentes; isn’t it a jolly day?’ When Denis says that, I shall begin to have hopes for him. At present he thinks it’s a jolly day because he’s got money to throw about and a hundred and one games to play at and friends to play them with, and everything his own way, and a new motor….

From Rose Macaulay’s Told By An Idiot:

Such are time’s revenges that the so daring social, literary and intellectual cleavages made by our forefathers in those years are now regarded as quaintly old-fashioned compromises with freedom, even as our own audacities will doubtless be regarded thirty years hence. But the people of the [eighteen] nineties, even as the people of the eighties, seventies, sixties, and so back, and even as the people of the twentieth century, thought they were emancipating themselves from tradition, saw themselves as bold buccaneers sailing uncharted seas, and found it great fun. The illusion of advance is sustaining, to all right-minded persons, and should by all means be cultivated. It gives self-confidence and poise. It even seems to please elderly persons to mark or fancy changes of habit, which they have no wish to emulate, among their juniors, and it certainly pleases their juniors to be thus remarked upon, for they, too, believe that they are something new—the new young, as they have always delighted to call themselves—so all are pleased and no harm is done.

And shortly before:

“Well, your grandfather thinks even Una is too modern. It’s the golf and bicycling and [dropping her] g’s, I suppose. I expect the fact is that it’s difficult, in these days, to avoid being new. You children and your friends all are. In fact, the whole world seems to be.”

“The world is always new, mamma darling, and always old. It’s no newer than it was in 1880, or 1870—in fact, not so new, by some years. The only year in which it was really new was, according to grandpapa and the annotators of the Book of Genesis, 4004 B.C.”

“Yes, I dare say it was sadly new then, and no doubt grandpapa would have found it so. But somehow one hears the word a good deal just now, used by young people as well as old. What with new women, and new art, and new literature, and new humour, and the new hedonism that Denman and Stanley talk about, and that seems to mean making your drawing-room like an old curiosity shop and burning incense in it and lighting it with darkened crimson lamps and lying on divans with black and gold cushions and smoking scented cigarettes and reading improper plays aloud . . . Only Rome says that isn’t new in the least, but thousands of years old.”

“Oh, Rome. Rome thinks nothing new. She was born blasée. She hasn’t got grandpapa’s or Stanley’s fresh mind. She always expects the unexpected. Oscar Wilde says that to do that shows a thoroughly modern mind. If Rome had been Eve, she’d have looked at the new world through a monocle (she’d have worn that, even if nothing else) and seen that it was stale, and said with a yawn, ‘All this is very vieux jeu.’”

“And very possibly,” said mamma, “it was.”

I do wonder if Macaulay’s judgment on the illusion of advance – ‘all are pleased and no harm is done’ – would remain the same today.

From Rose Macaulay’s The Towers of Trebizond (ch 12). I more and more understand the fame of the novel’s opening line – “Take my camel, dear.”

[Halide] and I looked at aunt Dot’s things, to see what she had taken with her. Her miscellaneous collection of medicine bottles was here; it was a largish collection, because she did not know what most of them were, or for what complaints, on account of chemists not caring to say more on the labels than “The Pills “, “The Tablets “, “The Mixture “, and other non-committal tides, so aunt Dot took a great many of these anonymous bottles about with her on her travels and ate and drank them at random when she ailed. She always said this anonymity was owing to chemists not being able to read the handwriting of the doctors who wrote the prescriptions, or understand the abbreviations of the Latin words used, so that they did not know whether they were making up the things prescribed or another set of things altogether, and thought it better that the labels should be non-committal. I once asked a doctor why he did not write better, and also in English, and put the words in full. He said that the patient might in that case understand it, which would not do. Chemists too think that this would not do, and that if a patient knew what he was taking it might even prove fatal, because of nerves, and the name of the remedy might make him guess what illness he had, which would prove still more fatal. For the same reason, nurses who take temperatures will not ever tell the patient what the thermometer says, because that too might end in death, so that people who like to know how they are getting on have to hide their private thermometers somewhere about them and take their own temperatures. Anyhow, aunt Dot had left her array of bottles and pill-boxes in her medicine bag, and I thought I would take them along with me and eat and drink some of them when I felt weak, and one would counteract another, so they would do no harm.

[and in the next chapter]

Then I went back to the camel and took it to the stables where it had lodged and gave it mash and root and things, and said, “Lie down. Go to sleep,” and it knelt down and chewed, and I thought that later I would give it something from a bottle that aunt Dot had among her medicines which was only labelled “The Mixture” by the chemist, but aunt Dot had written on it “Camel sedative. Dose according to need.” I thought that either she had never given the camel any of this stuff, or that the stuff was no good. However, I decided to give it a dose later, in case it made it stamp and kick and roar less in the night, as this annoys the people near it a good deal.