A quotation essay: on a Rose Macaulay quotation


Author: Doctor Terence Rajivan Edward
Abstract. I present three responses to a Rose Macualay quotation listing literary publications from 1901. Two of the responses also deal with analytic philosophy. One is that some folk are likely to react to analytic philosophy's discussion of how a sentence is not a mere list by trying to produce sentences which are lists and failing that, which are very list-like at least. Another is a model for how faulty premise-by-premise reconstructions arise: "I have mastered the list. Let's move on to these," someone thinks and then adds "therefore" to a list of propositions, before the last one.
Draft version: Version 3 (14th September 2026, slight additions; v2 14th Sep 26, abstract extended, background information added, more references, etc.; version 1, 19th August 2023)
PDF available at academia.edu:
https://www.academia.edu/105746746/A_quotation_essay_on_a_Rose_Macaulay_quotation



It was in this decade. I was going through the large 20th century fiction in English section of the University of Manchester's main library. I paid particular attention to authors who had only one book of theirs there, planning to read all such isolated figures. I was especially interested in older books of this type. Why did that survive? Why did the library selection system keep that? (The 19th century fiction section features little or no "one hit wonders"; there are mainly volumes of famous names.) I found one by Rose Macaulay, dating back to 1923, an enjoyable essayistic novel. In it, Macaulay writes:
"1901 drew to its close... (Mr. Conrad had published "Lord Jim," Mr. Henry James "The Sacred Fount," Mr. Hardy "Poems New and Old," Mr. Wells "Love and Mr. Lewisham," Mr. Yeats "The Shadowy Waters," Mrs. Chesterton "The Wild Knight," Mr. Kipling "Kim," Mr. Belloc "The Path to Rome," Lady Russell "The Benefactress," Mr. Laurence Housman "A Modern Antæus," Mr. Anthony Hope "Tristram of Blent," Mrs. Humphry Ward "Eleanor," Mr. Arnold Bennett "The Grand Babylon Hotel," Mr. Charles Marriott "The Column," Mr. George Moore "Sister Teresa," Mr. Max Beerbohm "And Yet Again")" (1983 [1923]: 204)
This quotation prompted three reactions in me.


(a) A hypothesis I have is that Rose Macaulay can sensibly assume that all or almost all these authors are known by someone reading her - the reader could be a contemporary of hers, of fractionally above average interest in literature, for whom these stars are close enough to be luminous, or living now, most probably an expert, etc. It would be insensible for various more renowned others to make such an assumption, given their much wider readership (e.g. Virginia Woolf, see also Kundera 1996: 10).


(b) I think around this time analytic philosophers were preoccupied with the difference between a sentence and a mere list, and correspondingly a proposition and a mere series of concepts. Obviously (!), if you tell some people about this line of inquiry, they will just start producing mere lists where there should be sentences. ("I am not taking instruction from you"?) Then there are other people who feel that inclination, but unable to realize it within the rules, produce list-like sentences.


(c) There are problems with premise-by-premise reconstructions in what is called analytic political philosophy, an area of research which perhaps did not exist then (see Archard 2003: 257-258; Searle 2003: 10). Here is a model for what is going on, in some cases: some people start by making lists of propositions, such as a bullet-point list in their essay, and think, "Right I have mastered the list, now I am going to try the premise-by-premise reconstruction," and then they insert a "therefore" into a list, before its final proposition.


References
Archard, David. 2003. Political and Social Philosophy.   In Nicholas Bunnin and E.P. Tsui-James, 2003 (second edition; first edition 1996), The Blackwell Companion to Philosophy. Oxford: Blackwell. Available at:
https://dn721804.ca.archive.org/0/items/nicholas-bunnin-the-blackwell-companion-to-philosophy-second-edition/nicholas-bunnin-the-blackwell-companion-to-philosophy-second-edition.pdf
Edward, Terence Rajivan. 2025 (version 4). A booklet of some of analytic philosophy's faulty reconstructions.  Available at:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/398374996_A_booklet_of_some_of_analytic_philosophy's_faulty_rational_reconstructions
And:
https://www.academia.edu/145299070/A_booklet_of_some_of_analytic_philosophy_s_faulty_rational_reconstructions
Kundera, Milan. (translated by A. Asher). 1996. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. London: Faber and Faber. (The material of interest is this: "Since there is not a single historical event we can count on being commonly known, I must speak of events that took place a few years ago as if they were a thousand years old: In 1939, the German army entered Bohemia, and the Czech state ceased to exist. In 1945, the Russian army entered Bohemia, and the country was once again called an independent republic.")
Macaulay, Rose. 1983 (originally 1923). Told by an Idiot. London: Virago. Also available at:
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/75677/pg75677-images.html
(The quotation has now been cut-and-paste from this Internet version. Should it be Mr Chesterton?)
Searle, John. 2003 Contemporary Philosophy in the United States. In Nicholas Bunnin and E.P. Tsui-James, 2003 (second edition; first edition 1996), The Blackwell Companion to Philosophy. Oxford: Blackwell. Available at:
https://dn721804.ca.archive.org/0/items/nicholas-bunnin-the-blackwell-companion-to-philosophy-second-edition/nicholas-bunnin-the-blackwell-companion-to-philosophy-second-edition.pdf