Literary Critics

"Miserable Orpheus who, turning to lose his Eurydice, beholds her for the first time as well as the last."

"The true index of a man’s character is the health of his wife."

"A mistake which is commonly made about neurotics is to suppose that they are interesting. It is not interesting to be always unhappy, engrossed with oneself, malignant or ungrateful, and never quite in touch with reality. Neurotics are heartless."

"There are many who dare not kill themselves for fear of what the neighbours will say."

"Imprisoned in every fat man a thin one is wildly signalling to be let out."

"Everything is a dangerous drug to me except reality, which is unendurable."

"No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning."

"Life is a maze in which we take the wrong turning before we have learnt to walk."

"A stone lies in a river; a piece of wood is jammed against it; dead leaves, drifting logs, and branches caked with mud collect; weeds settle there, and soon birds have made a nest and are feeding their young among the blossoming water plants. Then the river rises and the earth is washed away. The birds depart, the flowers wither, the branches are dislodged and drift downward; no trace is left of the floating island but a stone submerged by the water; — such is our personality."

"The friendships which last are those wherein each friend respects the other's dignity to the point of not really wanting anything from him."

"'Dry again?' said the Crab to the Rock-Pool. 'So would you be,' replied the Rock-Pool, 'if you had to satisfy, twice a day, the insatiable sea.'"

"Beneath a mask of selfish tranquility nothing exists except bitterness and boredom. I am one of those whom suffering has made empty and frivolous: each night in my dreams I pull the scab off a wound; each day, vacuous and habit-ridden, I help it re-form."

"No education is worth having that does not teach the lesson of concentration on a task, however unattractive. These lessons, if not learnt early, will be learnt, if at all, with pain and grief in later life."

"You imply our education is of no use to you in after life. But no education is. We are not an employment agency; all we can do is to give you a grounding in the art of mixing with your fellow men, to tell you what to expect from life and give you an outward manner and inward poise, an old prescription from the eighteenth century which we call a classical education, an education which confers the infrequent virtues of good sense and good taste and the benefit of dual nationality, English and Mediterranean, and which, taking into account the difficulties of modern life, we find the philosophy best able to overcome them."

"Were I to deduce any system from my feelings on leaving Eton, it might be called The Theory of Permanent Adolescence. It is the theory that the experiences undergone by boys at the great public schools, their glories and disappointments, are so intense as to dominate their lives and arrest their development. From these it results that the greater part of the ruling class remains adolescent, school-minded, self-conscious, cowardly, sentimental, and in the last analysis homosexual."

"To this period [age seven] I trace my worst faults. Indecision, for I found that by hesitating for a long time over two toys in a shop I would be given both and so was tempted to make two alternatives always seem equally attractive; Ingratitude, for I grew so used to having what I wanted that I assumed it as a right; Laziness, for sloth is the especial vice of tyrants; the Impatience with boredom that is generated by devotion; the Cruelty which comes from a knowledge of power and the Giving way to moods, for I learnt that sulking, crying, moping and malingering were bluffs that paid."

"It is by a blend of lively curiosity and intelligent selfishness that the artists who wish to mature late, who feel too old to die, the Goethes, Tolstoys, Voltaires, Titians and Verdis, reach a fruitful senescence. They cannot afford to associate with those who are burning themselves up or preparing for a tragedy or whom melancholy has marked for her own. Not for them the accident-prone, the friend in whom the desire for self-destruction keeps blistering out in broken legs or threatening them in anxiety-neuroses. Not for them the drumming finger, the close-cropt nail, the chewed glasses, the pause on the threshold, the wandering eye, or the repeated ‘um’ and ‘er.’"

"Failure on the other hand is infectious. The world is full of charming failures (for all charming people have something to conceal, usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others) and unless the writer is quite ruthless with these amiable footlers, they will drag him down with them."

"It is after creation, in the elation of success, or the gloom of failure, that love becomes essential."

"Popular success is a palace built for a writer by publishers, journalists, admirers and professional reputation makers, in which a silent army of termites, rats, dry rot and death-watch beetles are tunnelling away, till, at the very moment of completion, it is ready to fall down. The one hope for a writer is that although his enemies are often unseen they are seldom unheard. He must listen for the death-watch, listen for the faint toc-toc, the critic's truth sharpened by envy, the embarrassed praise of a sincere friend, the silence of gifted contemporaries, the implications of the don in the manger, the visitor in the small hours. He must dismiss the builders and contractors, elude the fans with an assumed name and dark glasses, force his way off the moving staircase, subject every thing he writes to a supreme critical court. Would it amuse Horace or Milton or Swift or Leopardi? Could it be read to Flaubert? Would it be chosen by the Infallible Worm, by the discriminating palates of the dead?"

"There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall."

"Whom the Gods wish to destroy, they first call promising. Young writers if they are to mature require a period of between three and seven years in which to live down their promise. Promise is like the mediaeval hangman who after settling the noose, pushed his victim off the platform and jumped on his back, his weight acting a drop while his jockeying arms prevented the unfortunate from loosening the rope. When he judged him dead he dropped to the ground."

"The refractory pupil of Socrates, Aristippus the Cyrene, who believed happiness to be the sum of particular pleasures and golden moments and not, as Epicurus, a prolonged intermediary state between ecstasy and pain."

"So wrote Pater, calling an art-for-art's sake muezzin to the faithful from the topmost turret of the ivory tower."

"The landlady and Tam grew gracious Wi' favours secret, sweet, and precious."

"Ah, gentle dames! it gars me greet To think how monie counsels sweet, How monie lengthened, sage advices, The husband frae the wife despises!"

"Where sits our sulky, sullen dame, Gathering her brows like gathering storm, Nursing her wrath to keep it warm."

"Farewell to the Highlands, farewell to the North; The birth-place of valour, the country of worth."

"My heart's in the Highlands, my heart is not here, My heart's in the Highlands, a-chasing the deer; A-chasing the wild deer, and following the roe, My heart's in the Highlands, wherever I go."

"John Anderson, my jo, John, When we were first acquent, Your locks were like the raven, Your bonie brow was brent; But now your brow is beld, John, Your locks are like the snaw, But blessings on your frosty pow, John Anderson, my jo!"

"It was a' for our rightfu' King We left fair Scotland's strand."

"Now a' is done that men can do, And a' is done in vain."

"He turn'd him right and round about Upon the Irish shore; And gae his bridle reins a shake, With adieu forevermore, My dear— And adieu forevermore!"

"Though I have never been able to trace my ancestry to the Land o' Cakes, I have—and I know it is saying a great deal—a Scotchman's love for the poet whose fame deepens and broadens with years. The world has never known a truer singer. We may criticise his rustic verse and compare his brief and simple lyrics with the works of men of longer scrolls and loftier lyres; but after rendering to Wordsworth, Tennyson and Browning the homage which the intellect owes to genius, we turn to Burns, if not with awe and reverence, [yet] with a feeling of personal interest and affection. We admire others; we love him. As the day of his birth comes round, I take down his well-worn volume in grateful commemoration, and feel that I am communing with one whom living I could have loved as much for his true manhood and native nobility of soul as for those wonderful songs of his which shall sing themselves forever."

"Dear Rob! manly, witty, fond, friendly, full of weak spots as well as strong ones—essential type of so many thousands—perhaps the average, as just said, of the decent-born young men and the early mid-aged, not only of the British Isles, but America, too, North and South, just the same. I think, indeed, one best part of Burns is the unquestionable proof he presents of the perennial existence among the laboring classes, especially farmers, of the finest latent poetic elements in their blood."

"This prophecy of the unity of the [human] race [in "A man's a man for a' that"] is founded on the thoroughly Scottish sentiment, fostered by Scottish history from the days of Wallace till our own times, of the value of man as man, of the dignity of labour, whether physical or mental or moral, as compared with the tinsel shows of privileged indolence. The scorn for the empty "birkie ca'd a lord," and for the king-made dignities unbacked by merit, have persistently remained as Scottish qualities all down the ages, and they are becoming the qualities of men wherever thought has filtered down to the humbler classes, wherever the peasant has learned to venerate himself as man."

"[A]ll the faculties of Burns' mind were, as far as I could judge, equally vigorous; and his predilection for poetry, was rather the result of his own enthusiastic and impassioned temper, than of a genius exclusively adapted to that species of composition. From his conversation, I should have pronounced him to be fitted to excel in whatever walk of ambition he had chosen to exert his abilities."

"His person was strong and robust; his manners rustic, not clownish; a sort of dignified plainness and simplicity, which received part of its effect, perhaps, from one's knowledge of his extraordinary talents. His features are represented in Mr. Nasmyth's picture, but to me it conveys the idea, that they are diminished as if seen in perspective. I think his countenance was more massive than it looks in any of the portraits. I would have taken the poet, had I not known what he was, for a very sagacious country farmer of the old Scotch school, i.e. none of your modern agriculturists, who keep labourers for their drudgery, but the douce gudeman who held his own plough. There was a strong expression of sense and shrewdness in all his lineaments; the eye alone, think, indicated the poetical character and temperament. It was large, and of a dark cast, which glowed (I say literally glowed) when he spoke with feeling or interest. I never saw such another eye in a human head, though I have seen the most distinguished men of my time. His conversation expressed perfect self-confidence, without the slightest presumption. Among the men who were the most learned of their time and country, he expressed himself with perfect firmness, but without the least intrusive forwardness; and when he differed in opinion, he did not hesitate to express it firmly, yet at the same time with modesty."

"I would claim that Burns is not merely Scotland's greatest poet, but that he is worthy to rank among the greatest poets of the world... Why I claim this place for Burns is this—that he was the poet of nature and of humanity. He raised the conception of the peasant and gave honour and dignity to toil. It is for that reason that all the labouring classes and masses of the world have found in Burns their truest interpreter and their truest friend; and it is as that friend and as that interpreter that I do claim for him a place in the innermost niches of the temple of Fame."

"I think Burns was one of the most extraordinary men I ever met with; his poetry surprised me very much, his prose surprised me still more, and his conversation surprised me more than both his poetry and prose."

"The worker is a mere appendage to the capitalist factory. Machinery has eliminated him. Robert Burns said: “O God, that men should be so cheap, and bread should be so dear!”"

"There was a world of well-dressed company that evening in Dumfries; for the aristocracy of the adjacent country for twenty miles round had poured in to attend a county ball, and were fluttering in groupes along the sunny side of the street, gay as butterflies. On the other side, in the shade, a solitary individual paced slowly along the pavement. Of the hundreds who fluttered past, no one took notice of him; no one seemed to recognise him. He was known to them all as the exciseman and poet, Robert Burns; but he had offended the stately Toryism of the district by the freedom of his political creed; and so, tainted by the plague of Liberalism, he lay under strict quarantine. He was shunned and neglected; for it was with the man Burns that these his contemporaries had to deal. Let the reader contrast with this truly melancholy scene, the scene of his festival a fortnight since. Here are the speeches of the Earl of Eglinton and of Sir John M'Neill, and here the toast of the Lord Justice-General. Let us just imagine these gentlemen, with all their high aristocratic notions about them, carried back half a century into the past, and dropped down, on the sad evening to which we refer, in the main street of Dumfries. Which side, does the reader think, would they have chosen to walk upon? Would they have addressed the one solitary individual in the shade, or not rather joined themselves to the gay groupes in the sunshine who neglected and contemned him? They find it an easy matter to deal with the phantom idea of Burns now: how would they have dealt with the man then?"

"Burns had intellectual breadth and religious susceptibility enough to appropriate what was best in the two phases of the religious thought of his time. Thus it happened that while the average Moderate looked upon Calvinism as represented by the Covenanters as a detestable fanaticism, an enemy to the amenities of social life, Burns paid tribute to their magnificent stand for liberty... Burns, who had Covenanting blood in his veins, had no need to go to Rousseau for his democratic fervour. His "A man's a man for a' that" owes infinitely more to Samuel Rutherford than to Rousseau."

"The influence of Burns on the imaginative literature of Scotland has been deep and abiding. Many Scotsmen have been so touched, moved, and stirred by his writings, as to arouse an irrepressible feeling within them to compose verse themselves; and to-day there are many in the humble walks of life who can write passable and even animated verse and song, and appreciate the highest works of the imaginative and elaborate faculties of the race. Burns has exercised much influence over the mind of the Scottish people by removing prejudice and superstition, fostering liberty and independence of spirit, and greater freedom of thought."

"The economic truths of Socialism, its industrialism, and its sociology, must remain the vainest of vain dreamings unless we preserve among the people the political frame of mind which can appreciate democratic liberty and worth. When "a man's a man for a' that" is recited without making the blood tingle, the man has ceased to be."

"He was a leading Liberal, certainly. It had been said by a great statesman in the old days that he did not care who made the laws so long as he could make the ballads. In the last century the accents of freedom were heard in Scotland in the ballads of Burns. "Scots wha hae wi' Wallace bled" and "A man's a man for a' that" were regarded as almost revolutionary in the days when he wrote."

"I also liked the Romantic poets. Wordsworth, Keats, Burns and Blake were some of my favourites. There was something about their rebellious spirit against the evils of industrialization that moved me. Of course now, some of their pessimism, mysticism and limited critical realist visions make me quite uncomfortable."

"He speaks for a community he is rooted in, as Chaucer and Langland did. He is a lyrical poet of simple tenderness; but he is also a comic and satirical poet with a hard and definite moral vision, a very sharp eye indeed for permanent kinds of human folly, and a glancing and flickering wit... He is also a poet of the people as no modern English poet worth anything has been. He thus fills a gap for the English reader; and if young English poets, ingenious but academic, were to read him to-day they might learn to double their strength by touching the earth."

"He has given voice to all the experiences of common life; he has endeared the farm-house and cottage, patches and poverty, beans and barley; ale, the poor man's wine; hardship, the fear of debt, the dear society of weans and wife, of brothers and sisters, proud of each other, knowing so few, and finding amends for want and obscurity in books and thought. ... And, as he was thus the poet of the poor, anxious, cheerful, working humanity, so had he the language of low life. He grew up in a rural district, speaking a patois unintelligible to all but natives, and he has made that Lowland Scotch a Doric dialect of fame. It is the only example in history of a language made classic by the genius of a single man."

"There was neither fortune nor title in the man's pedigree, and yet he sprang from the salt of the earth, for he came from that lowland Scottish peasant stock which was one of the finest stocks that the world could show, if one might judge from its results. The limitations of these men might be marked, but there sprang from them every now and again one who could voice the feelings of his fellow men, and such a man was Robert Burns."