Conclusion
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 October 2009
Summary
…gave me the idea that a person does not (as I had imagined) stand motionless and clear before our eyes with his merits, his defects, his plans, his intentions…exposed on his surface, like a garden at which, with all its borders spread out before us, we gaze through a railing, but is a shadow which we can never succeed in penetrating, of which there can be no such thing as direct knowledge, with respect to which we form countless beliefs, based upon his words and sometimes upon his actions, though neither words nor actions can give us anything but inadequate and as it proves contradictory information – a shadow behind which we can alternately imagine, with equal justification, that there burns the flame of hatred and of love.
Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, vol 5 (Chatto and Windus paperback edition, 1967), pp83–4It is easier to say what John Hopton was not than what he was. He was not a ‘courtier civil servant’. He was not the author of the Morte D'Arthur: cattle rustling, extortion, robbery with violence, rape, and attempted murder did not fill his life as they did Sir Thomas Malory's. He was not a knight and he did not want to be. He did not want to be a leader of Suffolk society. He was no magnate's man. He was not, it seems, much like other fifteenth century gentlemen. Yet, no two of them were alike, nor have we been describing them.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- John Hopton: A Fifteenth Century Suffolk Gentleman , pp. 258 - 260Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1981