_The Arnold Bennett Calendar_
BY ARNOLD BENNETT
NOVELS
THE OLD WIVES’ TALE
HELEN WITH THE HIGH HAND
THE MATADOR OF THE FIVE TOWNS
THE BOOK OF CARLOTTA
BURIED ALIVE
A GREAT MAN
LEONORA
WHOM GOD HATH JOINED
A MAN FROM THE NORTH
ANNA OF THE FIVE TOWNS
THE GLIMPSE
POCKET PHILOSOPHIES
HOW TO LIVE ON 24 HOURS A DAY
THE HUMAN MACHINE
LITERARY TASTE
MENTAL EFFICIENCY
PLAYS
CUPID AND COMMONSENSE
WHAT THE PUBLIC WANTS
POLITE FARCES
MILESTONES
THE HONEYMOON
MISCELLANEOUS
THE TRUTH ABOUT AN AUTHOR
THE FEAST OF ST. FRIEND
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
NEW YORK
_The
Arnold Bennett
Calendar_
_Compiled By
Frank Bennett_
[Illustration]
_New York_
_George H· Doran Company_
COPYRIGHT, 1912
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
THE·PLIMPTON·PRESS
[W·D·O]
NORWOOD·MASS·U·S·A
_Enoch Arnold Bennett was born at Hanley-in-the-Potteries (one of the
“Five Towns” frequently appearing in his writings) on 27th May 1867.
He was educated at the endowed Middle School, Newcastle-under-Lyme,
and matriculated in the London University. From school he went into
the office of his father, who practised as a solicitor at Hanley,
and stayed with him until 1889, when he took a post in a solicitor’s
office in London, which he held until 1893. In that year he abandoned
the law finally to become assistant editor of_ Woman, _and succeeded
to the editorship in 1896. This post he resigned in 1900 to devote
himself exclusively to literature. In the meantime several of his
works had been issued, the first being “A Man from the North”
(1898) and a handbook, “Journalism for Women,” followed in the next
year by the publication of a volume of plays, “Polite Farces,” his
first experiments in drama. Afterwards appeared in rapid succession
nine other novels, two volumes of short stories, seven volumes of
belles-lettres, and seven fantasias. Besides these he wrote two plays,
“Cupid and Common-Sense,” produced by the Stage Society in 1908, and
“What the Public Wants,” also produced by the Stage Society in 1909,
and afterwards by Mr. Hawtrey at the New Royalty Theatre. Both these
plays were subsequently staged in Glasgow, and by Miss Horniman’s
Company. The most important of his publications include:--among
novels, “Leonora,” “A Great Man,” “Sacred and Profane Love,” “Whom
God Hath Joined----,” “The Old Wives’ Tale,” and “Clayhanger”; among
the belles-lettres, “The Truth about an Author,” “Literary Taste,”
“The Reasonable Life,” “The Human Machine,” and “How to Live on
Twenty-Four Hours a Day” (the last four contributed originally to_ T.
P.’s Weekly, _and containing indications of Mr. Bennett’s theories of
life); and in the short stories, “Tales of the Five Towns,” and “The
Grim Smile of the Five Towns.” Mr. Bennett has very definite leanings
towards Socialism, and, under a pseudonym, writes regularly for_ The
New Age. _He also contributes from time to time to the most important
progressive weekly and monthly magazines._
_F. C. B._
_The Arnold Bennett Calendar_
_January_
_One_
The individual who scoffs at New Year’s resolutions resembles the
woman who says she doesn’t look under the bed at nights; the truth is
not in him.
_Two_
To give pleasure is the highest end of any work of art, because the
pleasure procured from any art is tonic, and transforms the life into
which it enters.
_Three_
There are only two fundamental differences in the world--the
difference between sex and sex, and the difference between youth and
age.
_Four_
The only class of modern play in which it is possible to be both
quite artistic and quite marketable, is the farce.
_Five_
To enjoy a work of imagination is no pastime, rather a sweet but
fatiguing labour. After a play of Shakespeare or a Wagnerian opera
repose is needed. Only a madman like Louis of Bavaria could demand
_Tristan_ twice in one night.
_Six_
Great books do not spring from something accidental in the great
men who wrote them. They are the effluence of their very core, the
expression of the life itself of the authors.
_Seven_
It is within the experience of everyone that when pleasure and pain
reach a certain intensity they are indistinguishable.
_Eight_
One of the main obstacles to the cultivation of poetry in the average
sensible man is an absurdly inflated notion of the ridiculous.
_Nine_
The crudest excitement of the imaginative faculty is to be preferred
to a swinish preoccupation with the gross physical existence.
_Ten_
The brain is the diplomatist which arranges relations between our
instinctive self and the universe, and it fulfils its mission when it
provides for the maximum of freedom to the instincts with the minimum
of friction.
_Eleven_
A woman who has beauty wants to frame it in beauty. The eye is a
sensualist, and its appetites, once aroused, grow. A beautiful woman
takes the same pleasure in the sight of another beautiful woman as
a man does; only jealousy or fear prevents her from admitting the
pleasure.
_Twelve_
The beginning of wise living lies in the control of the brain by the
will.
_Thirteen_
To utter a jeremiad upon the decadence of taste, to declare that
literature is going to the dogs because a fourth-rate novel has been
called a masterpiece and has made someone’s fortune, would be absurd.
I have a strong faith that taste is as good as ever it was, and that
literature will continue on its way undisturbed.
_Fourteen_
There is a loveliness of so imperious, absolute, dazzling a kind
that it banishes from the hearts of men all moral conceptions, all
considerations of right and wrong, and leaves therein nothing but
worship and desire.
_Fifteen_
When homage is reiterated, when the pleasure of obeying a command and
satisfying a caprice is begged for, when roses are strewn, and even
necks put down in the path, one forgets to be humble; one forgets
that in meekness alone lies the sole good; one confuses deserts with
the hazards of heredity.
_Sixteen_
There are men who are capable of loving a machine more deeply than
they can love a woman. They are among the happiest men on earth.
_Seventeen_
The uncultivated reader is content to live wholly in and for the
moment, sentence by sentence. Keep him amused and he will ask no
more. You may delude him, you may withhold from him every single
thing to which he is rightfully entitled, but he will not care. The
more crude you are, the better will he be pleased.
_Eighteen_
It is only in the stress of fine ideas and emotions that a man may be
truly said to live.
_Nineteen_
Oh, innocence! Oh, divine ignorance! Oh, refusal! None knows your
value save her who has bartered you! And herein is the woman’s
tragedy.
_Twenty_
To extract from the brain, at will and by will, concentration on
a given idea for even so short a period as half an hour is an
exceedingly difficult feat--and a fatiguing! It needs perseverance.
_Twenty-one_
A merely literary crudity will affect the large public neither one
way nor the other, since the large public is entirely uninterested in
questions of style; but all other crudities appeal strongly to that
public.
_Twenty-two_
_“Cupid and Commonsense” produced._
Everyone who has driven a motor-car knows the uncanny sensation that
ensues when for the first time in your life you engage the clutch,
and the Thing beneath you begins mysteriously and formidably to move.
It is at once an astonishment, a terror, and a delight. I felt like
that as I watched the progress of my first play.
_Twenty-three_
Can you see the sun over the viaduct at Loughborough Junction of
a morning, and catch its rays in the Thames off Dewar’s whisky
monument, and not shake with the joy of life? If so, you and
Shakespeare are not yet in communication.
_Twenty-four_
Adults have never yet invented any institution, festival or diversion
specially for the benefit of children. The egoism of adults makes
such an effort impossible, and the ingenuity and pliancy of
children make it unnecessary. The pantomime, for example, which is
now pre-eminently a diversion for children, was created by adults
for the amusement of adults. Children have merely accepted it and
appropriated it. Children, being helpless, are of course fatalists
and imitators. They take what comes, and they do the best they can
with it. And when they have made something their own that was adult,
they stick to it like leeches.
_Twenty-five_
The living speak of the uncanniness of the dead. It does not occur
to them that manifestations of human existence may be uncanny to the
dead.
_Twenty-six_
There is no royal road to the control of the brain. There is no
patent dodge about it, and no complicated function which a plain
person may not comprehend. It is simply a question of: “I will, _I_
will, and I _will_.”
_Twenty-seven_
I knew that when love lasted, the credit of the survival was due
far more often to the woman than to the man. The woman must husband
herself, dole herself out, economise herself so that she might be
splendidly wasteful when need was. The woman must plan, scheme,
devise, invent, reconnoitre, take precautions; and do all this
sincerely and lovingly in the name and honour of love. A passion for
her is a campaign; and her deadliest enemy is satiety.
_Twenty-eight_
Efficient living, living up to one’s best standard, getting the last
ounce of power out of the machine with the minimum of friction: these
things depend on the disciplined and vigorous condition of the brain.
_Twenty-nine_
In the world of books, as in every other world, one-half does not
know how the other half lives. In literary matters the literate
seldom suspect the extreme simplicity and _naïveté_ of the
illiterate. They wilfully blind themselves to it; they are afraid to
face it.
_Thirty_
The mysteriousness of woman vanishes the instant you brutally face
it. Boys and ageing celibates are obsessed by the mysteriousness of
woman. The obsession is a sign either of immaturity or of morbidity.
The mysteriousness of woman,--take her, and see then if she is
mysterious!
_Thirty-one_
Train journeys have too often been sorrowful for me, so much so that
the conception itself of a train, crawling over the country like
a snake, or flying across it like a winged monster, fills me with
melancholy. Trains loaded with human parcels of sadness and illusion
and brief joy, wandering about, crossing, and occasionally colliding
in the murk of existence; trains warmed and lighted in winter; trains
open to catch the air of your own passage in summer; night-trains
that pierce the night with your yellow, glaring eyes, and waken
mysterious villages, and leave the night behind and run into the dawn
as into a station; trains that carry bread and meats for the human
parcels, and pillows and fountains of fresh water; trains that sweep
haughtily and wearily indifferent through the landscapes and the
towns, sufficient unto yourselves, hasty, panting, formidable, and
yet mournful entities: I have understood you in your arrogance and
your pathos!
_February_
_One_
The ecstasy of longing is better than the assuaging of desire.
_Two_
As regards facts and ideas, the great mistake made by the average
well-intentioned reader is that he is content with the names of
things instead of occupying himself with the causes of things.
_Three_
Time and increasing knowledge of the true facts have dissipated for
me the melancholy and affecting legend of literary talent going
a-begging because of the indifference of publishers. O young author
of talent, would that I could find you and make you understand how
the publisher yearns for you as the lover for his love.
_Four_
The brain can be disciplined by learning the habit of obedience. And
it can learn the habit of obedience by the practice of concentration.
_Five_
You can attach any ideas you please to music, but music, if you will
forgive me saying so, rejects them all equally. Art has to do with
emotions not with ideas, and the great defect of literature is that
it can only express emotions by means of ideas. What makes music the
greatest of all the arts is that it can express emotions without
ideas. Literature can appeal to the soul only through the mind.
Music goes direct. Its language is a language which the soul alone
understands, but which the soul can never translate.
_Six_
If a man does not spend at least as much time in actively and
definitely thinking about what he has read as he spent in reading, he
is simply insulting his author.
_Seven_
He was of that small and lonely minority of men who never know
ambition, ardour, zeal, yearning, tears; whose convenient desires are
capable of immediate satisfaction; of whom it may be said that they
purchase a second-rate happiness cheap at the price of an incapacity
for deep feeling.
_Eight_
No man, except a greater author, can teach an author his business.
_Nine_
Size is the quality which most strongly and surely appeals to the
imagination of the multitude. Of all modern monuments the Eiffel
Tower and the Big Wheel have aroused the most genuine curiosity and
admiration: they are the biggest. As with this monstrous architecture
of metals, so with the fabric of ideas and emotions: the attention
of the whole crowd can only be caught by an audacious hugeness, an
eye-smiting enormity of dimensions so gross as to be nearly physical.
_Ten_
Genius apart, woman is usually more touchingly lyrical than man in
the yearning for the ideal.
_Eleven_
I had fast in my heart’s keeping the new truth that in the body, and
the instincts of the body, there should be no shame but rather a
frank, joyous pride.
_Twelve_
A person is idle because his thoughts dwell habitually on the instant
pleasures of idleness.
_Thirteen_
By love I mean a noble and sensuous passion, absorbing the energies
of the soul, fulfilling destiny, and reducing all that has gone
before it to the level of a mere prelude.
_Fourteen_
For myself, I have never valued work for its own sake, and I never
shall.
_Fifteen_
Having once decided to achieve a certain task, achieve it at all
costs of tedium and distaste. The gain in self-confidence of having
accomplished a tiresome labour is immense.
_Sixteen_
All who look into their experience will admit that the failure
to replace old habits by new ones is due to the fact that at the
critical moment the brain does not remember; it simply forgets.
_Seventeen_
Many writers, and many clever writers, use the art of literature
merely to gain an end which is connected with some different art, or
with no art. Such a writer, finding himself burdened with a message
prophetic, didactic, or reforming, discovers suddenly that he has
the imaginative gift, and makes his imagination the servant of his
intellect, or of emotions which are not artistic emotions.
_Eighteen_
I only value mental work for the more full and more intense
consciousness of being alive which it gives me.
_Nineteen_
Whatever the vagaries of human nature, the true philosopher is never
surprised by them. And one vagary is not more strange than another.
_Twenty_
You can control nothing but your own mind. Even your two-year-old
babe may defy you by the instinctive force of its personality.
_Twenty-one_
To take the common grey things which people know and despise, and,
without tampering, to disclose their epic significance, their
essential grandeur--that is realism as distinguished from idealism or
romanticism. It may scarcely be, it probably is not, the greatest art
of all; but it is art precious and indisputable.
_Twenty-two_
There are few mental exercises better than learning great poetry or
prose by heart.
_Twenty-three_
The British public will never be convinced by argument. But two drops
of perspiration on the cheeks of a nice-looking girl with a torn
skirt and a crushed hat will make it tremble for the safety of its
ideals, and twenty drops will persuade it to sign anything for the
restoration of decency. You surely don’t suppose that _argument_ will
be of any use!
_Twenty-four_
Some people have a gift of conjuring with conversations. They are
almost always frankly and openly interested in themselves. You may
seek to foil them; you may even violently wrench the conversation
into other directions. But every effort will be useless. They will
beat you. You had much better lean back in your chair and enjoy their
legerdemain.
_Twenty-five_
The voice of this spirit says that it has lost every illusion about
life, and that life seems only the more beautiful. It says that
activity is but another form of contemplation, pain but another form
of pleasure, power but another form of weakness, hate but another
form of love, and that it is well these things should be so. It says
there is no end, only a means; and that the highest joy is to suffer,
and the supreme wisdom is to exist. If you will but live, it cries,
that grave but yet passionate voice--if you will but live! Were
there a heaven, and you reached it, you could do no more than live.
The true heaven is here where you live, where you strive and lose,
and weep and laugh. And the true hell is here, where you forget to
live, and blind your eyes to the omnipresent and terrible beauty of
existence.
_Twenty-six_
The most important preliminary to self-development is the faculty of
concentrating at will.
_Twenty-seven_
Diaries, save in experienced hands, are apt to get themselves
done with the very minimum of mental effort. They also tend to an
exaggeration of egotism, and if they are left lying about they tend
to strife.
_Twenty-eight_
The English world of home is one of the most perfectly organized
microcosms on this planet, not excepting the Indian _purdah_. The
product of centuries of culture, it is regarded, not too absurdly,
as the fairest flower of Christian civilisation. It exists chiefly,
of course, for women, but it could never have been what it is had
not men bound themselves to respect the code which they made for it.
It is the fountain of refinement and of consolation, the nursery of
affection. It has the peculiar faculty of nourishing itself, for it
implicitly denies the existence of anything beyond its doorstep, save
the constitution, a bishop, a rector, the seaside, Switzerland, and
the respectful poor.
_Twenty-nine_
I have always been a bookman. From adolescence books have been one of
my passions. Books not merely--and perhaps not chiefly--as vehicles
of learning or knowledge, but books as books, books as entities,
books as beautiful things, books as historical antiquities, books
as repositories of memorable associations. Questions of type, ink,
paper, margins, watermarks, paginations, bindings, are capable of
really agitating me.
_March_
_One_
It is characteristic of the literary artist with a genuine vocation
that his large desire is, not to express in words any particular
thing, but to express _himself_, the sum of his sensations. He feels
the vague, disturbing impulse to write long before he has chosen
his first subject from the thousands of subjects which present
themselves, and which in the future he is destined to attack.
_Two_
In the mental world what counts is not numbers but co-ordination.
_Three_
In England, nearly all the most interesting people are social
reformers: and the only circles of society in which you are not
bored, in which there is real conversation, are the circles of social
reform.
_Four_
Anthology construction is one of the pleasantest hobbies that a
person who is not mad about golf and bridge--that is to say, a
thinking person--can possibly have.
_Five_
That part of my life which I conduct by myself, without reference--or
at any rate without direct reference--to others, I can usually manage
in such a way that the gods do not positively weep at the spectacle
thereof.
_Six_
It’s quite impossible to believe that a man is a genius, if you’ve
been to school with him, or even known his father.
_Seven_
It is the privilege of only the greatest painters not to put letters
on the corners of their pictures in order to keep other painters from
taking the credit for them afterwards.
_Eight_
Your own mind has the power to transmute every external phenomenon to
its own purposes.
_Nine_
Anything would be a success in London on Sunday night. People are so
grateful.
_Ten_
The one cheerful item in a universe of stony facts is that no one can
harm anybody except himself.
_Eleven_
The eye that has learned to look life full in the face without a
quiver of the lid should find nothing repulsive. Everything that is,
is the ordered and calculable result of environment. Nothing can be
abhorrent, nothing blameworthy, nothing contrary to nature. Can we
exceed nature? In the presence of the primeval and ever-continuing
forces of nature, can we maintain our fantastic conceptions of sin
and of justice? We are, and that is all we should dare to say.
_Twelve_
The art of life, the art of extracting all its power from the human
machine, does not lie chiefly in processes of bookish-culture, nor
in contemplations of the beauty and majesty of existence. It lies
chiefly in keeping the peace, the whole peace, and nothing but the
peace, with those with whom one is “thrown.”
_Thirteen_
We have our ideals now, but when they are mentioned we feel
self-conscious and uncomfortable, like a school-boy caught praying.
_Fourteen_
After the crest of the wave the trough--it must be so; but how
profound the instinct which complains!
_Fifteen_
The performance of some pianists is so wonderful that it seems as if
they were crossing Niagara on a tight-rope, and you tremble lest they
should fall off.
_Sixteen_
The secret of calm cheerfulness is kindliness; no person can be
consistently cheerful and calm who does not consistently think kind
thoughts.
_Seventeen_
It is indubitable that a large amount of what is known as
self-improvement is simply self-indulgence--a form of pleasure which
only incidentally improves a particular part of the human machine,
and even that part to the neglect of far more important parts.
_Eighteen_
The average man has this in common with the most exceptional genius,
that his career in its main contours is governed by his instincts.
_Nineteen_
The most beautiful things, and the most vital things, and the most
lasting things are often mysterious and inexplicable and sudden.
_Twenty_
An accurate knowledge of _any_ subject, coupled with a carefully
nurtured sense of the relativity of that subject to other subjects,
implies an enormous self-development.
_Twenty-one_
The great artist may force you to laugh, or to wipe away a tear, but
he accomplishes these minor feats by the way. What he mainly does is
to _see_ for you. If, in presenting a scene, he does not disclose
aspects of it which you would not have observed for yourself, then he
falls short of success. In a physical and psychical sense power is
visual, the power of an eye seeing things always afresh, virginally
as though on the very morn of creation.
_Twenty-two_
It is well, when one is judging a friend, to remember that he is
judging you with the same god-like and superior impartiality.
_Twenty-three_
He who speaks, speaks twice. His words convey his thoughts, and his
tone conveys his mental attitude towards the person spoken to.
_Twenty-four_
The man who loses his temper often thinks he is doing something
rather fine and majestic. On the contrary, so far is this from being
the fact, he is merely making an ass of himself.
_Twenty-five_
The female sex is prone to be inaccurate and careless of apparently
trivial detail, because this is the general tendency of mankind.
In men destined for a business or a profession, the proclivity is
harshly discouraged at an early stage. In women, who usually are not
destined for anything whatever, it enjoys a merry life, and often
refuses to be improved out of existence when the sudden need arises.
No one by taking thought can deracinate the mental habits of, say,
twenty years.
_Twenty-six_
Kindliness of heart is not the greatest of human qualities--and
its general effect on the progress of the world is not entirely
beneficent--but it is the greatest of human qualities in friendship.
_Twenty-seven_
There is a certain satisfaction in hopelessness amid the extreme
of misery. You press it to you as the martyr clutched the burning
fagot. You enjoy it. You savour, piquantly, your woe, your shame,
your abjectness, the failure of your philosophy. You celebrate the
perdition of the man in you. You want to talk about it brazenly; even
to exaggerate it, and to swagger over it.
_Twenty-eight_
The great public is no fool. It is huge and simple and slow in mental
processes, like a good-humoured giant, easy to please and grateful for
diversion. But it has a keen sense of its own dignity; it will not be
trifled with; it resents for ever the tongue in the cheek.
_Twenty-nine_
The beauty of horses, timid creatures, sensitive and graceful and
irrational as young girls, is a thing apart; and what is strange
is that their vast strength does not seem incongruous with it. To
be above that proud and lovely organism, listening, apprehensive,
palpitating, nervous far beyond the human, to feel one’s self almost
part of it by intimate contact, to yield to it, and make it yield,
to draw from it into one’s self some of its exultant vitality--in a
word, to ride--I can comprehend a fine enthusiasm for that.
_Thirty_
The respectable portion of the male sex in England may be divided
into two classes, according to its method and manner of complete
immersion in water. One class, the more dashing, dashes into a cold
tub every morning. Another, the more cleanly, sedately takes a warm
bath every Saturday night. There can be no doubt that the former
class lends tone and distinction to the country, but the latter is
the nation’s backbone.
_Thirty-one_
Although you may easily practise upon the credulity of a child in
matters of fact, you cannot cheat his moral and social judgment. He
will add you up, and he will add anybody up, and he will estimate
conduct, upon principles of his own and in a manner terribly
impartial. Parents have no sterner nor more discerning critics than
their own children.
_April_
_One_
A person’s character is, and can be, nothing else but the total
result of his habits of thought.
_Two_
Beware of hope, and beware of ambition! Each is excellently tonic,
like German competition, in moderation, but all of you are suffering
from self-indulgence in the first, and very many of you are ruining
your constitutions with the second.
_Three_
As a matter of fact, people “indulge” in remorse; it is a somewhat
vicious form of spiritual pleasure.
_Four_
When a thing is thoroughly well done it often has the air of being a
miracle.
_Five_
After all the shattering discoveries of science and conclusions of
philosophy, mankind has still to live with dignity amid hostile
nature, and in the presence of an unknowable power, and mankind can
only succeed in this tremendous feat by the exercise of faith and of
that mutual goodwill which is based in sincerity and charity.
_Six_
All the days that are to come will more or less resemble the present
day, until you die.
_Seven_
In literature, when nine hundred and ninety-nine souls ignore you,
but the thousandth buys your work, or at least borrows it--that is
called enormous popularity.
_Eight_
If life is not a continual denial of the past, then it is nothing.
_Nine_
The profoundest belief of the average man is that virtue ought never
to be its own reward. Shake that belief and you commit a cardinal
sin; you disturb his mental quietude.
_Ten_
It is notorious that the smaller the community, and the more
completely it is self-contained, the deeper will be its preoccupation
with its own trifling affairs.
_Eleven_
To my mind, most societies with a moral aim are merely clumsy
machines for doing simple jobs with the maximum of friction, expense
and inefficiency. I should define the majority of these societies as
a group of persons each of whom expects the others to do something
very wonderful.
_Twelve_
There is nothing like a sleepless couch for a clear vision of one’s
environment.
_Thirteen_
The supreme muddlers of living are often people of quite remarkable
intellectual faculty, with a quite remarkable gift of being wise for
others.
_Fourteen_
Our leading advertisers have richly proved that the public will
believe anything if they are told of it often enough.
_Fifteen_
Here’s a secret. No writer likes writing, at least not one in a
hundred, and the exception, ten to one, is a howling mediocrity.
That’s a fact. But all the same, they’re miserable if they don’t
write.
_Sixteen_
The first and noblest aim of imaginative literature is not either to
tickle or to stab the sensibilities, but to render a coherent view
of life’s apparent incoherence, to give shape to the amorphous, to
discover beauty which was hidden, to reveal essential truth.
_Seventeen_
There is a theory that a great public can appreciate a great novel,
that the highest modern expression of literary art need not appeal in
vain to the average reader. And I believe this to be true--provided
that such a novel is written with intent, and with a full knowledge
of the peculiar conditions to be satisfied; I believe that a novel
could be written which would unite in a mild ecstasy of praise the
two extremes--the most inclusive majority and the most exclusive
minority.
_Eighteen_
“Give us more brains, Lord!” ejaculated a great writer. Personally, I
think he would have been wiser if he had asked first for the power to
keep in order such brains as we have.
_Nineteen_
Under the incentive of a woman’s eyes, of what tremendous efforts
is a clever man not capable, and, deprived of it, to what depths of
stagnation will he not descend!
_Twenty_
Elegance is a form of beauty. It not only enhances beauty, but it is
the one thing which will console the eye for the absence of beauty.
_Twenty-one_
There are several ways of entering upon journalism. One is at once to
found or purchase a paper, and thus achieve the editorial chair at a
single step. This course is often adopted in novels, sometimes with
the happiest results; and much less often in real life, where the end
is invariably and inevitably painful.
_Twenty-two_
Existence rightly considered is a fair compromise between two
instincts--the instinct of hoping one day to live, and the instinct
to live here and now.
_Twenty-three_
Your own mind is a sacred enclosure into which nothing harmful can
enter except by your permission.
_Twenty-four_
The average man is not half enough of an egotist. If egotism means a
terrific interest in one’s self, egotism is absolutely essential to
efficient living.
_Twenty-five_
Events have no significance except by virtue of the ideas from which
they spring; the clash of events is the clash of ideas, and out of
this clash the moral lesson inevitably emerges, whether we ask for
it or no. Hence every great book is a great moral book, and there is
a true and fine sense in which the average reader is justified in
regarding art as the handmaid of morality.
_Twenty-six_
_William Shakespeare’s Birthday_
Shakespeare is “taught” in schools; that is to say, the Board of
Education and all authorities pedagogic bind themselves together in a
determined effort to make every boy in the land a lifelong enemy of
Shakespeare. It is a mercy they don’t “teach” Blake.
_Twenty-seven_
_Herbert Spencer’s Birthday_
There are those who assert that Spencer was not a supreme genius! At
any rate he taught me intellectual courage; he taught me that nothing
is sacred that will not bear inspection; and I adore his memory.
_Twenty-eight_
Unite the colossal with the gaudy, and you will not achieve the
sublime; but, unless you are deterred by humility and a sense
of humour, you may persuade yourself that you have done so, and
certainly most people will credit you with the genuine feat.
_Twenty-nine_
The average reader (like Goethe and Ste. Beuve) has his worse and his
better self, and there are times when he will yield to the former;
but on the whole his impulses are good. In every writer who earns
his respect and enduring love there is some central righteousness,
which is capable of being traced and explained, and at which it is
impossible to sneer.
_Thirty_
Literature is the art of using words. This is not a platitude, but a
truth of the first importance, a truth so profound that many writers
never get down to it, and so subtle that many other writers who think
they see it never in fact really comprehend it. The business of the
author is with words. The practisers of other arts, such as music and
painting, deal with ideas and emotions, but only the author has to
deal with them by means of words. Words are his exclusive possession
among creative artists and craftsmen. They are his raw material,
his tools and instruments, his manufactured product, his alpha and
omega. He may abound in ideas and emotions of the finest kind,
but those ideas and emotions cannot be said to have an effective
existence until they are expressed; they are limited to the extent of
their expression; and their expression is limited to the extent of
the author’s skill in the use of words. I smile when I hear people
say, “If I could _write_, if I could only put down what I feel--!”
Such people beg the whole question. The ability to _write_ is the
sole thing peculiar to literature--not the ability to think nor the
ability to feel, but the ability to write, to utilise words.
_May_
_One_
Only a small minority of authors overwrite themselves. Most of the
good and the tolerable ones do not write enough.
_Two_
The entire business of success is a gigantic tacit conspiracy on the
part of the minority to deceive the majority.
_Three_
There are at least three women-journalists in Europe to-day whose
influence is felt in Cabinets and places where they govern (proving
that sex is not a bar to the proper understanding of _la haute
politique_); whereas the man who dares to write on fashions does not
exist.
_Four_
Habits are the very dickens to change.
_Five_
Not only is art a factor in life; it is a factor in all lives. The
division of the world into two classes, one of which has a monopoly
of what is called “artistic feeling,” is arbitrary and false.
Everyone is an artist, more or less; that is to say, there is no
person quite without that faculty of poetising, which, by seeing
beauty, creates beauty, and which, when it is sufficiently powerful
and articulate, constitutes the musical composer, the architect, the
imaginative writer, the sculptor, and the painter.
_Six_
Is it nothing to you to learn to understand that the world is not a
dull place?
_Seven_
In neither faith nor enthusiasm can a child compete with a convinced
adult. No child could believe in anything as passionately as the
modern millionaire believes in money, or as the modern social
reformer believes in the virtue of Acts of Parliament.
_Eight_
Literature, instead of being an accessory, is the fundamental _sine
qua non_ of complete living.
_Nine_
No novelist, however ingenious, who does not write what he feels,
and what, by its careful finish, approximately pleases himself,
can continue to satisfy the average reader. He may hang for years
precariously on the skirts of popularity, but in the end he will
fall; he will be found out.
_Ten_
Only the fool and the very young expect happiness. The wise merely
hope to be interested, at least not to be bored, in their passage
through this world. Nothing is so interesting as love and grief, and
the one involves the other.
_Eleven_
One of the commonest characteristics of the successful man is his
idleness, his immense capacity for wasting time.
_Twelve_
People who regard literary taste simply as an accomplishment, and
literature simply as a distraction, will never truly succeed, either
in acquiring the accomplishment or in using it half-acquired as a
distraction.
_Thirteen_
The finest souls have their reactions, their rebellions against wise
reason.
_Fourteen_
My theory is that politeness, instead of decreasing with
intimacy--should increase! And when I say “Politeness” I mean common,
superficial politeness. I don’t mean the deep-down sort of thing that
you can only detect with a divining-rod.
_Fifteen_
Marcus Aurelius is assuredly regarded as the greatest of writers in
the human machine school, and not to read him daily is considered by
many to be a bad habit.
_Sixteen_
Part of the secret of Balzac’s unique power over the reader is the
unique tendency of his own interest in the thing to be told.
_Seventeen_
_“Anna of the Five Towns” finished 1901_
The art of fiction is the art of telling a story. This statement is
not so obvious and unnecessary as it may seem. Most beginners and
many “practised hands” attend to all kinds of things before they
attend to the story. With them the art of fiction is the art of
describing character or landscape, of getting “atmosphere,” and of
being humorous, pathetic, flippant, or terrifying; while the story
is a perfunctory excuse for these feats. They are so busy with the
traditional paraphernalia of fiction, with the tricks of the craft,
that what should be the principal business is reduced to a subsidiary
task. They forget that character, landscape, atmosphere, humour,
pathos, etc., are not ends in themselves, but only means toward an
end.
_Eighteen_
How true it is that the human soul is solitary, that content is the
only true riches, and that to be happy we must be good.
_Nineteen_
Men of letters who happen to have genius do not write for men of
letters. They write, as Wagner was proud to say he composed, for the
ordinary person.
_Twenty_
Great success never depends on the practice of the humbler virtues,
though it may occasionally depend on the practice of the prouder
vices.
_Twenty-one_
“I’ve been to the National Gallery twice, and, upon my word, I was
almost the only person there! And it’s free, too! People don’t
_want_ picture-galleries. If they did, they’d go. Who ever saw a
public-house empty, or Peter Robinson’s? And you have to pay there!”
_Twenty-two_
He who has not been “presented to the freedom” of literature has not
wakened up out of his prenatal sleep. He is merely not born. He can’t
see; he can’t hear; he can’t feel in any full sense. He can only eat
his dinner.
_Twenty-three_
All the arts are a conventionalisation, an ordering of nature.
_Twenty-four_
The aim of literary study is not to amuse the hours of leisure; it is
to awake oneself, it is to be alive, to intensify one’s capacity for
pleasure, for sympathy, and for comprehension.
_Twenty-five_
Like every aging artist of genuine accomplishment, he knew--none
better--that there is no satisfaction save the satisfaction of
fatigue after honest endeavour. He knew--none better--that wealth and
glory and fine clothes are naught, and that striving is all.
_Twenty-six_
Prepare to live by all means, but for Heaven’s sake do not forget to
live.
_Twenty-seven_
_My Birthday_
Sometimes I suddenly halt and address myself: “You may be richer or
you may be poorer; you may live in greater pomp and luxury, or in
less. The point is, that you will always be, essentially, what you
are now. You have no real satisfaction to look forward to except
the satisfaction of continually inventing, fancying, imagining,
scribbling. Say another thirty years of these emotional ingenuities,
these interminable variations on the theme of beauty. Is it good
enough?” And I answered: “Yes.” But who knows? Who can preclude the
regrets of the dying couch?
_Twenty-eight_
The balanced sanity of a great mind makes impossible exaggeration,
and, therefore, distortion.
_Twenty-nine_
No art that is not planned in form is worth consideration, and no
life that is not planned in convention can ever be satisfactory.
_Thirty_
The value of restraint is seldom inculcated upon women. Indeed,
its opposites--gush and a tendency to hysteria--are regarded, in
many respectable quarters, as among the proper attributes of true
womanliness; attributes to be artistically cultivated.
_Thirty-one_
There grows in the North Country a certain kind of youth of whom
it may be said that he is born to be a Londoner. The metropolis,
and everything that appertains to it, that comes down from it, that
goes up into it, has for him an imperious fascination. Long before
schooldays are over he learns to take a doleful pleasure in watching
the exit of the London train from the railway station. He stands by
the hot engine and envies the very stoker. Gazing curiously into the
carriages he wonders that men and women, who in a few hours will be
treading streets called Piccadilly and the Strand, can contemplate
the immediate future with so much apparent calmness; some of them
even have the audacity to look bored. He finds it difficult to keep
from throwing himself in the guard’s van as it glides past him; and
not until the last coach is a speck upon the distance does he turn
away and, nodding absently to the ticket-clerk, who knows him well,
go home to nurse a vague ambition and dream of town.
_June_
_One_
To cultivate and nourish a grievance when you have five hundred
pounds in your pocket, in cash, is the most difficult thing in the
world.
_Two_
The full beauty of an activity is never brought out until it is
subjected to discipline and strict ordering and nice balancing.
_Three_
The unfading charm of classical music is that you never tire of it.
_Four_
The spirit of literature is unifying; it joins the candle and the
star, and by the magic of an image shows that the beauty of the
greater is in the less.
_Five_
If people, by merely wishing to do so, could regularly and seriously
read, observe, write, and use every faculty and sense, there would be
very little mental inefficiency.
_Six_
Laws and rules, forms and ceremonies, are good in themselves, from
a merely æsthetic point of view, apart from their social value and
necessity.
_Seven_
Fashionable women have a manner of sitting down quite different
from that of ordinary women. They only touch the back of the chair
at the top. They don’t loll but they only escape lolling by dint of
gracefulness. It is an affair of curves, slants, descents, nicely
calculated. They elaborately lead your eye downwards over gradually
increasing expanses, and naturally you expect to see their feet--and
you don’t see their feet. The thing is apt to be disturbing to
unhabituated beholders.
_Eight_
There are moments in the working day of every novelist when
he feels deeply that anything--road-mending, shop-walking,
housebreaking--would be better than this eternal torture of the
brain; but such moments pass.
_Nine_
During a long and varied career as a bachelor, I have noticed that
marriage is usually the death of politeness between a man and a
woman. I have noticed that the stronger the passion the weaker the
manners.
_Ten_
My sense of security amid the collisions of existence lies in the
firm consciousness that just as my body is the servant of my mind, so
is my mind the servant of _me_.
_Eleven_
The fault of the epoch is the absence of meditativeness.
_Twelve_
People who don’t want to live, people who would sooner hibernate than
feel intensely, will be wise to eschew literature.
_Thirteen_
No one is so sure of achieving the aims of the literary craftsman as
the man who has something to say and wishes to say it simply and have
done with it.
_Fourteen_
The mind can only be conquered by regular meditation, by deciding
beforehand what direction its activity ought to take, and insisting
that its activity take that direction; also by never leaving it idle,
undirected, masterless, to play at random like a child in the streets
after dark.
_Fifteen_
The enterprise of forming one’s literary taste is an agreeable one;
if it is not agreeable it cannot succeed.
_Sixteen_
The attitude of the average decent person towards the classics of his
own tongue is one of distrust--I had almost said, of fear.
_Seventeen_
Am I, a portion of the Infinite Force that existed billions of years
ago, and which will exist billions of years hence, going to allow
myself to be worried by any terrestrial physical or mental event? I
am not.
_Eighteen_
There is not a successful inexpert author writing to-day who would
not be more successful--who would not be better esteemed and in
receipt of a larger income--if he had taken the trouble to become
expert. Skill does count; skill is always worth its cost in time and
labour.
_Nineteen_
It is easier to go down a hill than up, but the view is from the top.
_Twenty_
For me there is no supremacy in art. When fifty artists have
contrived to be supreme, supremacy becomes impossible. Take a little
song by Grieg. It is perfect, it is supreme. No one could be greater
than Grieg was great when he wrote that song. The whole last act
of _The Twilight of the Gods_ is not greater than a little song of
Grieg’s.
_Twenty-one_
We talked books. We just simply enumerated books without end,
praising or damning them, and arranged authors in neat pews, like
cattle in classes at an agricultural show. No pastime is more
agreeable to people who have the book disease, and none more quickly
fleets the hours, and none is more delightfully futile.
_Twenty-two_
The law of gravity is absurd and indefensible when you fall
downstairs; but you obey it.
_Twenty-three_
It is difficult to make a reputation, but it is even more difficult
seriously to mar a reputation once properly made--so faithful is the
public.
_Twenty-four_
That which has cost a sacrifice is always endeared.
_Twenty-five_
If literary aspirants genuinely felt that literature was the art
of using words, bad, slipshod writing--writing that stultifies the
thought and emotion which it is designed to render effective--would
soon be a thing of the past. For they would begin at the beginning as
apprentices to all other arts are compelled to. The serious student
of painting who began his apprenticeship by trying to paint a family
group, would be regarded as a lunatic. But the literary aspirant
who begins with a novel is precisely that sort of lunatic, and the
fact that he sometimes gets himself into print does not in the least
mitigate his lunacy.
_Twenty-six_
In spite of all the differences which we have invented, mankind is
a fellowship of brothers, overshadowed by insoluble and fearful
mysteries, and dependent upon mutual goodwill and trust for the
happiness it may hope to achieve.
_Twenty-seven_
The brain is a servant, exterior to the central force of the Ego. If
it is out of control, the reason is not that it is uncontrollable but
merely that its discipline has been neglected.
_Twenty-eight_
I have been told by one of our greatest novelists that he constantly
reads the dictionary, and that in his youth he read the dictionary
through several times. I may recount the anecdote of Buckle, the
historian of civilisation, who, when a certain dictionary was
mentioned in terms of praise, said: “Yes, it is one of the few
dictionaries I have read through with pleasure.”
_Twenty-nine_
The public may, and generally does, admire a great artist. But it
begins (and sometimes ends) by admiring him for the wrong things.
Shakespeare is more highly regarded for his philosophy than for his
poetry, as the applause at any performance of “Hamlet” will prove.
Balzac conquers by that untamed exuberance and those crude effects of
melodrama which are the least valuable parts of him.
_Thirty_
You cannot divide literature into two elements and say: This is
matter and that style. Further, the significance and the worth of
literature are to be comprehended and assessed in the same way as the
significance and the worth of any other phenomenon: by the exercise
of common-sense. Common-sense will tell you that nobody, not even a
genius, can be simultaneously vulgar and distinguished, or beautiful
and ugly, or precise and vague, or tender and harsh. And common-sense
will therefore tell you that to try to set up vital contradictions
between matter and style is absurd. If you refer literature to the
standards of life, common-sense will at once decide which quality
should count heaviest in your esteem.
_July_
_One_
When one has really something to say, one does not use clichés; one
cannot.
_Two_
The extinguishing of desire, with an accompanying indifference, be it
high or low, is bad for youth.
_Three_
Do you suppose that if the fame of Shakespeare depended on the man in
the street, it would survive a fortnight?
_Four_