How we cite our quotes: Citations follow this format: (Act.Scene)
Quote #1
Septimus: Well, so much for Mr. Noakes. He puts himself forward as a gentleman, a philosopher of the picturesque, a visionary who can move mountains and cause lakes, but in the scheme of the garden he is as the serpent. (1.1)
Septimus is being rather unfair to Mr. Noakes – after all, the gardener didn't tempt him to make love to Mrs. Chater, he just tattled on him to her husband. Septimus is stretching his metaphor to make the point that man's having power to manipulate nature doesn't make Mr. Noakes anything like God – he could be Satan instead.
Quote #2
Thomasina: If you could stop every atom in its position and direction, and if your mind could comprehend all the actions thus suspended, then if you were really, really good at algebra you could write the formula for all the future; and although nobody can be so clever as to do it, the formula must exist just as if one could. (1.1)
Thomasina is the first to state this theme that develops throughout the play: the idea that natural phenomena follow laws that can be described through math. Her suggestion here that human knowledge of nature could, theoretically, be all-encompassing, seems very different from the snatches of Romantic poetry we get throughout the play, where the mystery of nature is something to be preserved and appreciated.
Quote #3
Lady Croom: Where there is the familiar pastoral refinement of an Englishman's garden, here is an eruption of gloomy forest and towering crag, of ruins where there was never a house, of water dashing against rocks where there was neither spring nor a stone I could not throw the length of a cricket pitch. (1.1)
Lady Croom's words echo Septimus's metaphor of the serpent in the garden of Eden: just because Mr. Noakes is capable of transforming the garden in ways that seem almost magical doesn't mean that he should.
Quote #4
Lady Croom: But Sidley Park is already a picture, and a most amiable picture too. The slopes are green and gentle. The trees are companionably grouped at intervals that show them to advantage. The rill is a serpentine ribbon unwound from the lake peaceably contained by meadows on which the right amount of sheep are tastefully arranged – in short, it is nature as God intended, and I can say with the painter, "Et in Arcadia ego!" "Here I am in Arcadia," Thomasina. (1.1)
It's hard to tell whether Lady Croom is being ironic on purpose here – does she really think that the best nature gets some human help in its design, or is she dividing the Godly classical landscaping from Mr. Noakes's Satanic inventions?
Quote #5
Bernard: Lovely. The real England.
Hannah: You can stop being silly now, Bernard. English landscape was invented by gardeners imitating foreign painters who were evoking classical authors. The whole thing was brought home in the luggage from the grand tour. Here, look – Capability Brown doing Claude, who was doing Virgil. Arcadia! And here, superimposed by Richard Noakes, untamed nature in the style of Salvator Rosa. It's the Gothic novel expressed in landscape. Everything but vampires. (1.2)
Hannah points out that both the classical and the Gothic landscapes are ultimately literary in origin – not too surprising, since she's a scholar working on landscape and literature. Her comment raises the interesting point of how far afield literature can permeate into a culture (how many tweens today are wearing fashions inspired by Twilight?). And if everyone's just imitating someone else, is there any hope for originality?
Quote #6
Hannah: The hermit was placed in the landscape exactly as one might place a pottery gnome. And there he lived out his life as a garden ornament. (1.2)
So far the play has mostly treated the landscape as an accessory for humans, so it's intriguing that the relation can work the other way. Perhaps particular kinds of landscapes can create particular kinds of people, as well as vice versa?
Quote #7
Hannah: The grass went from the doorstep to the horizon and the best box hedge in Derbyshire was dug up for the ha-ha so that the fools could pretend they were living in God's countryside. And then Richard Noakes came in to bring God up to date. (1.2)
It's usual to think of "natural" as "without human intervention," but Hannah's history of gardening suggests that the definition of "natural" is subject to fashion. If ideas of nature depend on historical context, does that extend to science as well? If two time periods have different ideas about what nature is, does that mean that their science will go about investigating it in different ways?
Quote #8
Thomasina: Each week I plot your equations dot for dot, xs against ys in all manner of algebraical relation, and every week they draw themselves as commonplace geometry, as if the world of forms were nothing but arcs and angles. God's truth, Septimus, if there is an equation for a curve like a bell, there must be an equation for one like a bluebell, and if a bluebell, why not a rose? (1.3)
Thomasina's words here recall those step-by-step drawing books we had as kids where you'd go from a pile of circles and curves to a passable rendition of a human face. Perhaps the principle is the same – moving from the simple to the complex in stages is easier than just leaping ahead to the finished project. Unless, of course, you're a genius.
Quote #9
Valentine: People were talking about the end of physics. Relativity and quantum looked as if they were going to clean out the whole problem between them. A theory of everything. But they only explained the very big and the very small. The universe, the elementary particles. The ordinary-sized stuff which is our lives, the things people write poetry about – clouds – daffodils – waterfalls – and what happens in a cup of coffee when the cream goes in – these things are full of mystery, as mysterious to us as the heavens were to the Greeks. (1.4)
Is a view of nature as mysterious necessary in order to write poetry about it? And it's kind of funny that the most familiar things are also the most difficult to explain scientifically. Or is it precisely their familiarity that makes them more difficult to see with the distance required for scientific observation?
Quote #10
Bernard: A great poet is always timely. A great philosopher is an urgent need. There's no rush for Isaac Newton. We were quite happy with Aristotle's cosmos. Personally, I preferred it. Fifty-five crystal spheres geared to God's crankshaft is my idea of a satisfying universe. I can't think of anything more trivial than the speed of light. Quarks, quasars – big bangs, black holes – who gives a s***? (2.5)
Bernard seems to think that it's A-OK for humans to create a model of nature that is beautiful if not factual. The idea of such a model being "satisfying" is intriguing – what need is being satisfied?