Stevenson who can say: “I never remember being bored,” and one may
fairly doubt whether even Stevenson uttered truth when he made that
extraordinary statement. None of us escapes boredom entirely; some of
us, indeed, are bored during the greater part of our lives. The fact
is unpalatable, but it is a fact.
_Twenty-six_
An average of over an hour a day given to the mind should permanently
and completely enliven the whole activity of the mind.
_Twenty-seven_
A large class of people positively resent being thrilled by a work of
fiction, and the domestic serial is meant to appeal to this class.
_Twenty-eight_
It is natural that people who concern themselves with art only in
their leisure moments, demanding from it nothing but a temporary
distraction, should prefer the obvious to the recondite, and should
walk regardless of beauty unless it forces itself upon their
attention by means of exaggerations and advertisement. The public
wants to be struck, hit squarely in the face; then it will take
notice.
_Twenty-nine_
When a book attains a large circulation one usually says that it
succeeds. But the fine books succeed of themselves, by their own
virtue, and apart from the acclamatory noises of fame. Immure them in
cabinets, cast them into Sahara; still they imperturbably succeed.
If, on a rare occasion, such a book sells by scores of thousands, it
is not the book but the public which succeeds; it is not the book but
the public which has emerged splendidly from a trial.
_Thirty_
The artists who have courage fully to exploit their own temperaments
are always sufficiently infrequent to be peculiarly noticeable and
welcome. Still more rare are they who, leaving it to others to sing
and emphasise the ideal and obvious beauties which all can in some
measure see, will exclusively exercise the artist’s prerogative as an
explorer of hidden and recondite beauty in unsuspected places.
_Thirty-one_
Bad books, by flattering you, by caressing, by appealing to the weak
or the base in you, will often persuade you what fine and splendid
books they are.
_November_
_One_
It is well to remind ourselves that literature is first and last a
means of life, and that the enterprise of forming one’s literary
taste is an enterprise of learning how best to use this means of life.
_Two_
Instead of saying, “Sorry I can’t see you, old chap, but I have to
run off to the tennis club,” you must say, “... But I have to work.”
This, I admit, is intensely difficult to say. Tennis is so much more
urgent than the immortal soul.
_Three_
A talent never persuades or encourages the owner of it; it drives him
with a whip.
_Four_
One of the chief things which one has to learn is that the mental
faculties are capable of a continuous hard activity; they do not tire
like an arm or a leg. All they want is change, not rest, except in
sleep.
_Five_
Characterisation, the feat of individualising characters, is the
inmost mystery of imaginative literary art. It is of the very essence
of the novel. It never belongs to this passage or that. It is
implicit in the whole. It is always being done, and is never finished
till the last page is written.
_Six_
Can you deny that when you have something definite to look forward to
at eventide, something that is to employ all your energy, the thought
of that something gives a glow and a more intense vitality to the
whole day?
_Seven_
Most good books have begun by causing anger which disguised itself as
contempt.
_Eight_
When a thing is supreme there is nothing to be said.
_Nine_
_Ivan Sergeïtch Turgenev’s Birthday_
The author of a miracle like _On the Eve_ may be born, but he is
also made. In the matter of condensation alone Turgenev was unique
among the great literary artificers. He could say more in a chapter
of two thousand words than any other novelist that ever lived. What
he accomplishes again and again in a book of sixty thousand words,
Tolstoi could not have accomplished under a quarter of a million.
_Ten_
Fine taste in fiction is almost as rare among novelists as among the
general public.
_Eleven_
I have never once produced any literary work without a preliminary
incentive quite other than the incentive of ebullient imagination.
I have never “wanted to write,” until the extrinsic advantages of
writing had presented themselves to me.
_Twelve_
Beauty is strangely various. There is the beauty of light and joy and
strength exulting; but there is also the beauty of shade, of sorrow
and sadness, and of humility oppressed. The spirit of the sublime
dwells not only in the high and remote; it shines unperceived amid
all the usual meannesses of our daily existence.
_Thirteen_
Always give your fellow creature credit for good intentions. Do not
you, though sometimes mistakenly, always act for the best? You know
you do. And are you alone among mortals in rectitude?
_Fourteen_
There is no such case as the average case, just as there is no such
man as the average man. Every man and every man’s case is special.
_Fifteen_
Outside the department of fiction there are two kinds of
authors--those who want to write because they have something definite
to say, and those who want something definite to say because they can
write.
_Sixteen_
A lover is one who deludes himself; a journalist is one who deludes
himself and other people.
_Seventeen_
Although a very greedy eater of literature, I can only enjoy reading
when I have little time for reading. Give me three hours of absolute
leisure with nothing to do but read, and I instantly become almost
incapable of the act.
_Eighteen_
I would point out that literature by no means comprises the whole
field of knowledge, and that the disturbing thirst to improve one’s
self--to increase one’s knowledge--may well be slaked quite apart
from literature.
_Nineteen_
The public, by its casual approval, may give notoriety and a vogue
which passes, but it is incapable of the sustained ardour of
appreciation which alone results in authentic renown. It is incapable
because it is nonchalant. To the public art is a very little thing--a
distraction, the last resort against _ennui_. To the critics art
looms enormous. They do not merely possess views; they are possessed
by them. Their views amount to a creed, and that creed must be
spread. Quiescence is torment to the devotee. He cannot cry peace
when there is no peace. Passionate conviction, like murder, will out.
“I believe; therefore you must believe”: that is the motto which
moves the world.
_Twenty_
Only those who have lived at the full stretch seven days a week for
a long time can appreciate the full beauty of a regularly recurring
idleness.
_Twenty-one_
Publishers as a commercial class are neither more nor less honourable
than any other commercial class, and authors are neither more nor
less honourable than publishers. In the world of commerce one fights
for one’s own hand and keeps within the law; the code is universally
understood, and the man who thinks it ought to be altered because
_he_ happens to be inexperienced, is a fool.
_Twenty-two_
There can be no sort of doubt that unless I was prepared to flout the
wisdom of the ages, I ought to have refused his suggestion. But is
not the wisdom of the ages a medicine for majorities? And, indeed, I
was prepared to flout it, as in our highest and our lowest moments we
often are.
_Twenty-three_
London is chiefly populated by greyhaired men who for twenty years
have been about to become journalists and authors. And but for a
fortunate incident--the thumb of my Fate has always been turned
up--I might ere this have fallen back into that tragic rearguard of
Irresolutes.
_Twenty-four_
I think it is rather fine, this necessity for the tense bracing of
the will before anything worth doing can be done. I rather like it
myself. I feel it to be the chief thing that differentiates me from
the cat by the fire.
_Twenty-five_
The most important preliminary to the task of arranging one’s life so
that one may live fully and comfortably within one’s daily budget of
twenty-four hours, is the calm realisation of the extreme difficulty
of the task, of the sacrifices and the endless effort it demands.
_Twenty-six_
Whatever sin a man does he either does for his own benefit or for the
benefit of society.
_Twenty-seven_
The critic’s first requisite is that he should be interested. A man
may have an instinctive good taste, but if his attitude is one of
apathy, then he is not a true critic. The opinions of the public are
often wrong; the opinions of the critic are usually right. But the
fundamental difference between these two bodies does not lie here; it
lies in the fact that the critics “care,” while the public does not
care.
_Twenty-eight_
When, after the theatre, a woman precedes a man into a carriage, does
she not publish and glory in the fact that she is his? Is it not the
most delicious of avowals? There is something in the enforced bend of
one’s head as one steps in. And when the man shuts the door with a
masculine snap----
_Twenty-nine_
Ardour in well-doing is a misleading and a treacherous thing. It
cries out loudly for employment; you can’t satisfy it at first; it
wants more and more; it is eager to move mountains and divert the
course of rivers; it isn’t content till it perspires. And then, too
often, when it feels the perspiration on its brow, it wearies all
of a sudden and dies, without even putting itself to the trouble of
saying, “I’ve had enough of this.”
_Thirty_
Literature exists so that where one man has lived finely ten thousand
may afterwards live finely.
_December_
_One_
To hear a master play a scale, to catch that measured, tranquil
succession of notes, each a different jewel of equal splendour, each
dying precisely when the next was born--this is to perceive at last
what music is made of, to have glimpses of the divine magic that is
the soul of the divinest art.
_Two_
When the swimmer unclothes, and abandons himself to the water, naked,
letting the water caress the whole of his nakedness, moving his limbs
in voluptuous ease untrammelled by even the lightest garment, then,
as never under other conditions, he is aware of his body; and perhaps
the thought occurs to him that to live otherwise than in that naked
freedom is not to live.
_Three_
Has it never struck you that you have at hand a machine wonderful
beyond all mechanisms in sheds, intricate, delicately adjustable, of
astounding and miraculous possibilities, interminably interesting?
That machine is yourself.
_Four_
The sound reputation of an artist is originally due never to the
public, but to the critics. I do not use the word “critic” in a
limited, journalistic sense; it is meant to include all those
persons, whether scribes or not, who have genuine convictions about
art.
_Five_
The movement for opening museums on Sundays is the most natural
movement that could be conceived. For if ever a resort was invented
and fore-ordained to chime with the true spirit of the British
Sabbath, that resort is the average museum.
_Six_
The manufacture of musical comedy is interesting and curious, but I
am not aware that it has anything to do with dramatic art.
_Seven_
Though you have the wealth of a cloak-room attendant at the Carlton
Hotel, you cannot buy yourself a minute more time than I have, or the
cat by the fire has.
_Eight_
The man of business, even in the very daily act of deceit, will never
yield up the conviction that, after all, at bottom he is crystal
honest. It is his darling delusion.
_Nine_
Happiness is not joy, and it is not tranquillity. It is something
deeper and something more disturbing. Perhaps it is an acute sense of
life, a realisation of one’s secret being, a continual renewal of the
mysterious savour of existence.
_Ten_
Our best plays, as works of art, are strikingly inferior to our best
novels. A large section of the educated public ignores the modern
English theatre as being unworthy of attention.
_Eleven_
Romance, interest, dwell not in the thing seen, but in the eye of the
beholder.
_Twelve_
Every bookish person has indulgently observed the artless absorption
and surrender with which a “man of action” reads when by chance a
book captures him, his temporary monomania, his insistence that
the bookish person shall share his joy, and his impatience at any
exhibition of indifference. For the moment the terrible man of action
is a child again; he who has straddled the world is like a provincial
walking with open-mouthed delight through the streets of the capital.
_Thirteen_
The woman who quarrels with a maid is clumsy, and the woman who
quarrels with a good maid is either a fool or in a nervous,
hysterical condition, or both.
_Fourteen_
Men have a habit of taking themselves for granted, and that habit is
responsible for nine-tenths of the boredom and despair on the face of
the planet.
_Fifteen_
Anyone can learn to write, and to write well, in any given style;
but to see, to discern the interestingness which is veiled from the
crowd--that comes not by tuition; rather by intuition.
_Sixteen_
The forms of faith change, but the spirit of faith is immortal amid
its endless vicissitudes.
_Seventeen_
Consider the attitude of Dissenters of the trading and industrial
classes towards the art of literature.... That attitude is at once
timid, antagonistic, and resentful. Timid, because print still has
for the unlettered a mysterious sanction; antagonistic because
Puritanism and the arts have by no means yet settled their quarrel;
resentful because the autocratic power of art over the imagination
and the intelligence is felt without being understood.
_Eighteen_
It is said that men are only interested in themselves. The truth is
that, as a rule, men are interested in every mortal thing except
themselves.
_Nineteen_
It is less difficult, I should say, to succeed moderately in
journalism than to succeed moderately in dressmaking.
_Twenty_
Music cannot be said. One art cannot be translated into another.
_Twenty-one_
A deep-seated objection to the intrusion of even the most loved male
at certain times is common, I think, to all women. Women are capable
of putting love aside, like a rich dress, and donning the _peignoir_
of matter-of-fact dailiness, in a way which is an eternal enigma to
men.
_Twenty-two_
There’s nothing like a corpse for putting everything at sixes and
sevens.
_Twenty-three_
Great grief is democratic, levelling--not downwards but upwards.
It strips away the inessential and makes brothers. It is impatient
with all the unavailable inventions which obscure the brotherhood of
mankind.
_Twenty-four_
The expression of the soul by means of the brain and body is what we
call the art of “living.”
_Twenty-five_
That Christmas has lost some of its magic is a fact that the
common-sense of the western hemisphere will not dispute. To blink the
fact is infantile. To confront it, to try to understand it, to reckon
with it, and to obviate any evil that may attach to it--this course
alone is meet for an honest man.
_Twenty-six_
It must be admitted in favour of the Five Towns that, when its
inhabitants spill milk, they do not usually sit down on the pavement
and adulterate the milk with their tears. They pass on. Such passing
on is termed callous and coldhearted in the rest of England, which
loves to sit down on pavements and weep into irretrievable milk.
_Twenty-seven_
At thirty the chances are that a man will understand better the
draughts of a chimney than his own respiratory apparatus--to name one
of the simple, obvious things; and as for understanding the working
of his own brain--what an idea!
_Twenty-eight_
Science is making it increasingly difficult to conceive matter apart
from spirit. Everything lives. Even my razor gets “tired.”
_Twenty-nine_
No book in any noble library is so interesting, so revealing, as the
catalogue of it.
_Thirty_
Love is the greatest thing in life; one may, however, question
whether it should be counted greater than life itself.
_Thirty-one_
The indispensable preparation for brain-discipline is to form the
habit of regarding one’s brain as an instrument exterior to one’s
self, like a tongue or a foot.
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.