Alice Meynell: Quotes about reason

“The pretty game of calling on the children of the audience of "Peter Pan" to declare their faith in fairies seemed to me disastrous—a game of men and women at the expense of children, a cumbersome frolic at best and an artificial, a tyrannous use of the adult sense of sentimental humour against the helpless. I could with better conscience use my superior physical strength upon them than exploit them for love of my own condescension. (And yet Sir J. Barrie has written the most adorable "pretending" story ever written about a child.)No, children love a fairy story not because they think it true, but because they think it untrue, and because it makes no fraudulent appeal to their excellent good sense. That sense they are delighted to put aside while they "pretend." That is their own word.[…] "Let's pretend," not "Let's believe."”

Alice Meynell

Their mother does not put "Let's pretend" into the child's mouth; she finds it there. Without it there is no play. But the pretending is always drama and never deception or self-deception.</p>
"V. Fairies", pp. 32–33
Childhood (1913)

Faith , Game , Children , Thinking

“The eyelids confess, and reject, and refuse to reject. They have expressed all things ever since man was man.And they express so much by seeming to hide or to reveal that which indeed expresses nothing. For there is no message from the eye. It has direction, it moves, in the service of the sense of sight; it receives the messages of the world. But expression is outward, and the eye has it not. There are no windows of the soul, there are only curtains.”

Alice Meynell

"Eyes", pp. 98–99
The Colour of Life and Other Essays (1896)

Sense , Soul , World

“The mothers of all ages are those who have suffered because others suffered; for each of them, self is less sensitive than the sense of her child. Self is not locked up in the maternal heart, there to be cherished, as it is by the egoist, or to be crushed and silenced, as it is by the Saint. In the mother, self is not lost, but loses all its evil by the passionate personal love that distributes it among sons and daughters. Perfect self-less love would perhaps be distributed through the multitude, but a mother is not perfect: nature has so much use for her—separate, family use—that she cannot let her go free from irrational, indispensable partialities and limitings, even injustices, all serving the turn of the race.”

Alice Meynell

Source: Mary, the Mother of Jesus: An Essay (1912), Ch. IV. "The Mother", p. 40

Family , Personality , Silence , Daughters

“A sense of art mixes with our modern piety. We are apt to admire the evangelical reticence for its dignity,[…] we are apt to respect the Scripture narratives with their few intense details, their close events and their great omissions alike, for their simplicity, and—it is to be feared that our literature leads us so far—for their "effect."”

Alice Meynell

Source: Mary, the Mother of Jesus: An Essay (1912), Ch. II. "Mary in the Scriptures", pp. 18, 21

Sense , Fear , Literature , Art