Sidney Dark

Sydney Dark

Sidney Ernest Dark (14 January 1874 – 11 October 1947) was an English journalist, critic. editor, and author of more than 30 books in a variety of genres. In 1921 in London he was one of the founders of the PEN Club.

Quotes

  • ... Dickens is to me a writer apart. I have been reading and re-reading his novels since I was six. I know his characters as I hardly know any of the men and women I have met in the flesh. Dickens is the novelist of the lettered and of the unlettered. The man at the street corner who has hardly heard of Thackeray knows all about Sam Weller and Mrs. Gamp.
  • ... Wells has many affinities with Dickens. He does not possess Dickens's glorious humour. He has never been able to realise that even in mean streets life may have its thrills, but he belongs essentially, as Dickens belonged, to the English lower middle class. Wells is an articulate man of the people. And this is the fact that gives him his peculiar importance in the modern world.
  • Great literature is the creation of its age and its nation. It is inconceivable that Shakespeare's plays could have been written anywhere but in England and at any time but the later Renaissance. ... But while great literature is the child of one age it is the father of the next. As a nation reads, so it becomes. Let me decide what the people shall read, and you may make their laws. In saying this I am not merely referring to social and political and philosophic treatises. I am thinking of the whole gamut of a library, and particularly of works of the imagination.
  • In the early years of the eleventh century the German emperors were masters of Rome. Henry III., the father of Henry IV., deposed three popes, no man saying him nay. The removal of the right of election from the Roman nobility to the College of Cardinals, however, brought to an end an system under which it was the Emperor who really decided who should sit on the papal throne, and Gregory was determined that lesser ecclesiastical appointments should also be taken out his hand. In the complicated feudal system, bishops and abbots often held their lands as the vassals of a suzerain lord, compounding for the military service demanded from lay vassals. It was the habit, too, of the pious to endow monasteries and churches on the condition that they held the patronage. And, in one way and another, the noble, the prince, and the emperor claimed the right of ecclesiastical investiture which in effect meant the right of nomination to the offices of the Church. This lay patronage naturally led to simony, and it was the fashion for rich abbeys and attractive bishoprics to be sold to the highest bidder, to the scandal of the faithful and the hindrance of the work of the Church.
  • ... in condemning Elizabeth it should be remembered that the statesmanship of intrigue of which she was a mistress has survived from her time to ours, and was not destroyed even by the Great War. She was the pupil of Machiavelli, and she put the theories of the Italian political philosopher into more successful practice than any other sovereign or statesman in history.
    • Queen Elizabeth. Doran's modern readers' bookshelf/Hodder and Stoughton's people's library. Hodder and Stoughton. 1927. p. 12. 
  • ... The Terror had its Fouquier-Tinville. The Stuart despotism had its Judge Jeffreys. ... He drank prodigiously, even for the seventeenth century. He was subject to violent bursts of passion, and he had absolutely no self-control. He was the supreme bully. His greatest joy in life was to denounce, to jeer, and to hurt. And nature had eminently fitted him for the rôle that he had chosen. Jeffreys's one passion was a genuine hatred of Whigs and Dissenters ...
    • "Judge Jeffreys". Twelve Bad Men. Thomas Y. Crowell Company. 1928. pp. 145–173.  (quote from pp. 145–146; portraits by Mabel Pugh)
  • Josephine was with Hortense at Navarre at the time of the first abdication in 1813. She went back to Malmaison at the request of the Czar Alexander, who assured her that the position of herself and her children was perfectly safe. The allied kings and statesmen waited on her. She was treated with the utmost deference, but it was she who grieved for Napoleon in Elba far more than Marie Louise, and before the Hundred Days began, Josephine, shriven and with her children kneeling by her side, died with the name of Bonaparte on her lips. Twenty thousand persons passed the catafalque where the Empress lay in state. Royal honours were hers at her funeral.
    • "Josephine de Beauharnais". Twelve Royal Ladies. Thomas Y. Crowell Company. 1929. pp. 291–313.  (quote from pp. 312–313; portraits by Mabel Pugh — Note: Sidney Dark has the wrong year for Napoleon's 1st abdication, which actually occurred in April 1814.)
  • Lawyers have never been popular. It will be remembered that although there is at least one lawyer in most of the Dickens novels, few of them are drawn as attractive personalities.
    • London. Macmillan & Company. 1937. p. 76.  (176 pages; 55 illustrations; book written by Sidney Dark to accompany drawings of London done in 1908 by Joseph Pennell; 1st edition 1936)
  • There is nothing in this wide world more romantic than a great river on the banks of which stands a great city, and of all the cities in Europe, London is luckiest in its river. The Seine at Paris, the Tiber at Rome, are insignificant compared to the wide sweep of the Thames at London.
  • Christianity is a revolutionary religion or it is nothing.
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