Essayists From England

"A genuine taradiddle of the gross and palpable kind never fails for want of vouchers. Hundreds know it to be true—hundreds more were all but eye-witnesses of the fact related—some actually were; all can attest it on their personal responsibility. Upon that point everybody has a reputation for veracity to stake—though the same stake had been forfeited fifty times; and everybody can contribute to the original story an unquestionable incident of his own coinage "to make assurance doubly sure." So it goes round, until the first projector hardly recognizes his own lie; and ends by believing ten times more absurdity than he had palmed upon others."

"Man will take anything you like, except warning."

"Forewarned, forearmed, is sheer nonsense. Who is so indefatigable a scribbler as your abundantly damned author? Which of our orators speak so long and so often as he whom nobody listens to? What actors are so constantly before the public as those whom the town will not go to see? Who so easy to deceive as the dupe who has been taken in all his days? The gamester is a legitimate child of that frail couple, Flesh and Blood; he loses a fourth of what he is worth at the first throw—esteems himself lucky if he loses less today than he did yesterday—goes on staking and forfeiting hour by hour—and parts with his last guinea by exactly the same turn of the dice which lost him his first. Experience leaves fools as foolish as ever."

"Everybody's word is worth Nobody's taking."

"It is surely one of the strangest of our propensities to mark out those we love best for the worst usage; yet we do, all of us. We can take any freedom with a friend; we stand on no ceremony with a friend."

"We feel bound to be punctual and conscientious with those we are indifferent about; while we can afford at any time, on the frostiest night, to be an hour after our appointment with the single gentleman who occupies an apartment in our heart's core."

"Social and political life is a Society for the Diffusion of Mendacity."

"Everybody is seldom to be believed. "They say" is not proof that they know. On dit is French for a fib."

"So, in our wisdom and fair justice we go on—"Giving to dust that is a little gilt, More laud than gold e'er dusted;" proclaiming the merits of the bad wine, and making it, by every token, as enticing as we can; and blessing our stars that the good will be found out by its flavor "without our stir." As it is inestimable, we seek not to win esteem for it; as it is beyond all praise, we bestow no praises upon it."

"What if two negatives make an affirmative ...does it follow that two nobodies shall be some body?"

"Two hats, we grant, may be better than one; yet is one enough at a time. It is so with the head. It should be sole and self-relying. We like to wear ours in single blessedness on our own shoulders, and not let it hanker after a place on other people's."

"Wherever two or three are gathered together, one, at least, has left his head at home in his night-cap, or hung it up in his hat as he entered."

"It is an odd mode of diminishing one's own weakness to ask a friend to lend us the equal force of his."

"Sooth't were a pleasant life to lead, With nothing in the world to do But just to blow a shepherd's reed, The silent season thro' And just to drive a flock to feed,— Sheep—quiet, fond and few!"

"Give me to live with Love alone And let the world go dine and dress; For Love hath lowly haunts... If life's a flower, I choose my own— 'T is "love in Idleness"."

"No longer would we imprison thee though thou art all gentleness and would chat and jest with us by the hour."

"As with the tender juvenile, who sets light to his frock, so with the sweet senior, who sets his fortunes on fire. Even in his maturer time, in his state of cinderhood, he still craves to be further consumed."

"Of all the many and (thanks to a free press) the ever-multiplying blessings attendant upon the "glorious constitution" of literature, not the least precious and profitable to a modern cultivator of systems and syllables, in pamphlets, magazines, and folios, is the right of Quotation."

"We insist on self-roasting, by slow degrees, and at regular intervals, to show our contempt for experience, and to develop our chief virtue, which is obstinacy."

"The starched matron is fain to put faith in the compliment which in her day of youth and grace she knew to be nonsense. ...If her mirror will not admit of this she has other resources; she has sage counsel, admirable judgment, perfect knowledge of the world. ...Tell her she is not to be imposed upon, and you impose upon her effectually. Admire her penetration, and you will not find her impenetrable."

"No prime-minister in the parliament of letters has, at any time, ventured to introduce a bill for the apprehension of all vagrant inverted commas that may be found trespassing in the sunny places of argument; and to restrain the poaching propensities of authors in general, who are apt to stroll without a license into the manors of other men's genius."

"The ancient gentleman who has seen the world, who is profoundly experienced, and much too deep to be the dupe of an age so shallow as this, is to be won by an admiring glance at the brilliancy of his knee-buckle; praise his very pigtail, and you may lead him by it."

"None are so easily taken in as the "knowing ones." The knowing one is generally an egregious ninny. The man who loses his last shilling at Doncaster, is no other than he who was sure of winning; who could prove by his betting-book that he must win by backing Chaff against the field. He is a fine specimen of the family of Oldbirds. So is the careful, cautious wight, the original Master Surecard, the man of many savings, who in his old age falls in love with a loan; who dies in prison from the pressure of foreign bonds, or drowns himself in the new canal by way of securing what he calls his share. The genuine old bird is a pigeon."

"Shall we not rejoice then and revel in the glorious liberty of extract, and quote to the thousandth line? Shall we not have pages like the Pyramids? Who ever skipped a quotation, though it made against the interest of the story? Besides, how many books might be numbered that are valuable only in a solitary quotation!—as the oyster is esteemed for the pearl it may sometimes contain."

"Mr. Wyndham Lewis, the most brilliant journalist of my generation (in addition to his other gifts), often squanders his genius for invective upon objects which to every one but himself seem unworthy of his artillery, and arrays howitzers against card houses."

"I do not think I had ever seen a nastier-looking man.... Under the black hat, when I had first seen them, the eyes had been those of an unsuccessful rapist."

"Lewis sought no disciples, nor does he offer a program or solution, rather his contribution is a critical discipline. Lewis is a stimulant, a mode of perception, rather than a position or practice."

"And this is the point at which I must part company with Mr. Wyndham Lewis. Mr. Lewis proposes a Shakespeare who is a positive nihilist, an intellectual force willing destruction. I cannot see in Shakespeare either a deliberate scepticism, as of Montaigne, or a deliberate cynicism, as of Machiavelli, or a deliberate resignation, as of Seneca. I can see that he used all of these things, for dramatic ends: you get perhaps more Montaigne in Hamlet, and more Machiavelli in Othello, and more Seneca in Lear ... Mr. Lewis, and other champions of Shakespeare as a great philosopher, have a great deal to say about Shakespeare's power of thought, but they fail to show that he thought to any purpose; that he had any coherent view of life, or that he recommended any procedure to follow."

"A buffalo in wolf's clothing."

"That is the sacrosanct period-of-periods — the Victorian death, the birth of ! Ah the pioneer naughtiness of the "Naughty Nineties", that 'Made the World Safe for Homosexuality!'"

"Every pastime has its attendant politics."

"Sex was really all bluff — power the thing."

"Satire to be good must be unfair and single-minded. To be backed by intense anger is good — though absolutely not necessary."

"[I]f within a decade and a half you massacre ten million people in war and another ten million in civil war, it is not easy after that to return to a morality that regards it as wrong to pocket a salt-spoon."

"We have the immense background of War and of Revolution. That is enough — the blood is gratis! Both the soldier and the communist enrol themselves to murder — one under militarist rules, the other under marxist disciplines. But both are homicide-clubs, you call your victim "Hun", you call him "Bourgeois", it is all one — no, wars and communes have cheapened murder."

"[D]oes not all power that is real exact that it shall be visible!"

"Morality is of the surface. But also the values that decide whether a person is ridiculous or free from absurdity are pure conventions of a society, they exist only in a surface-world, of two dimensions."

"I should invent very little if I were a flatterer. […] I should just encourage people to describe themselves, and use the description they seemed most to relish."

"Society is a defensive organization against the incalculable. It is so constituted as to exclude and to banish anything, or any person, likely to disturb its repose, to rout its pretensions, wound its vanity, or to demand energy or a new effort, which it is determined not to make."

"By adopting the life of the artist the rich have not learnt more about art, and they respect it less. With their more irresponsible 'bohemian' life they have left behind their 'responsibilities' — a little culture among the rest. Indeed they are almost as crudely ignorant as is the traditional painter. Besides — living in cafés, studios and 'artistic' flats — they are all 'artists' in a sense themselves. They have made the great discovery that every one wielding a brush or pen is not a 'genius', any more than they are. But they have absorbed a good deal of the envy of those who are not 'geniuses' for those who are (having in a sense placed themselves upon the same level) — and the contempt of those who are, for those who are not. The result is that they abominate good art as much as bad artists do, and have as much contempt for bad art as have good artists! There is more indifference to and often hatred of every form of art in these pseudo-artistic circles — in the studios, in short, now mostly occupied by them — than in all the rest of the world put together."

"I am not in agreement with the current belief in a strained 'impersonality' as the secret of artistic success. Nor can I see the sense of pretending — as it must be a pretence, and a thin one, too — that in my account to you of what I have seen I can be impartial and omniscient. That would be in the nature of a bluff or a blasphemy. There can only be one judge and I am not he.I am not a judge but a party. All I can claim is that my cause is not an idle one — that I appeal less to passion than to reason."

"[T]he world created by Art — Fiction, Drama, Poetry etc. — must be sufficiently removed from the real world so that no character from the one could under any circumstances enter the other (the situation imagined by Pirandello), without the anomaly being apparent at once."

"Yet it is true that in our democratic society flattery does take the form of saying to people that they are like other people — rather than unlike or possessing something peculiarly their own. And the personal advantages that are chosen to flatter them about are those that they share with great crowds of other people."

"The als ob doctrine of a sportsmanlike average, that is the perfect democrat. […] If you do not acquire this simple democratic habit of make-believe, there is no place for you in contemporary life."

"The second cause (and this applies to a much smaller number of such people — only indeed, to the very cream and élite of them) is that some (born with a happy or unhappy knack not possessed by their less talented fellows) produce a little art themselves — more than the inconsequent daubing and dabbing we have noticed, but less than the 'real thing'. And with this class you come to the Ape of God proper. For with these unwanted and unnecessary labours, and the amour-propre associated with their results, envy steps in. The complication of their malevolence that ensues is curious to watch. But it redoubles, in the natural course of things, the fervour of their caprice or ill-will to the 'professional' activities of the effective artist — that rare man born for an exacting intellectual task, and devoting his life unsparingly to it."

"I am an artist, and, through my eye, must confess to a tremendous bias. In my purely literary voyages my eye is always my compass. “The architectural simplicity” – whether of a platonic idea or greek temple – I far prefer to no idea at all, or no temple at all, or, for instance, to most of the complicated and too tropical structures of India. Nothing could ever convince my EYE – even if my intelligence were otherwise overcome – that anything that did not possess this simplicity, conceptual quality, hard exact outline, grand architectural proportion, was the greatest art. Bergson is indeed the arch enemy of every impulse having its seat in the apparatus of vision, and requiring a concrete world. Bergson is the enemy of the Eye, from the start; though he might arrive at some emotional compromise with the Ear. But I can hardly imagine any way in which he is not against every form of intelligent life. (p. 338)"

"The modern man whether of Bloomsbury Baltimore or Berlin has vanquished vanity — he offers himself to his own inspection as the worm he turns out to be. If he is vain at all, and it must be conceded that self-love is hard to kill, it is about his humility. His own Vernichtung is his greatest pride the laying bare of the nullity, the Nichtigkeit, that is the 'self' at the heart of energy (which is merely the doctrine of Xt that 'he who humbleth himself shall be exalted' ! Be modest, protest you are nobody, a biological bagatelle and hi presto! you will get top-marks, and be given authority, that is the idea — it is the christian strategy. …)"

"The self-feeling bears no relation, amongst quite normal men and women, to physical fact. The nature of their particular physique, is not that the last thing of which they think? Look, an intensely ill-favoured woman she will frequently behave as if she were very attractive. No one is surprised — for they in their turn are they not beauties too? stunted puny men, to turn to men, do they not possess the assurance of a champion athlete? Well then, all these people have the assurance of being what they are not: whatever happens, a something more favourable than the facts isn't it! This is the rule of the normal average."

"The Relativity theory, the copernican upheaval, or any great scientific convulsion, leaves a new landscape. There is a period of stunned dreariness; then people begin, antlike, the building of a new human world. They soon forget the last disturbance. But from these shocks they derive a slightly augmented vocabulary, a new blind spot in their vision, a few new blepharospasms or tics, and perhaps a revised method of computing time. (p. 336)"

"The puritanic potentialities of science have never been forecast. If it evolves a body of organized rites, and is established as a religion, hierarchically organized, things more than anything else will be done in the name of "decency". The coarse fumes of tobacco and liquors, the consequent tainting of the breath and staining of white fingers and teeth, which is so offensive to many women, will be the first things attended to."