The only way to get rid of a
temptation
is to yield to it.
Oscar Wilde - Aphorisms, the Soul of Man
There are no temptations there.
That
is the reason why people who live out of town are so absolutely
uncivilised. Civilisation is not by any means an easy thing to attain
to. There are only two ways by which man can reach it. One is by being
cultured, the other by being corrupt. Country people have no opportunity
of being either, so they stagnate.
What nonsense people talk about happy marriages! A man can be happy with
any woman so long as he does not love her.
The things one feels absolutely certain about are never true. That is
the fatality of faith and the lesson of romance.
In the common world of fact the wicked are not punished nor the good
rewarded. Success is given to the strong, failure thrust upon the weak.
Nothing should be able to harm a man except himself. Nothing should be
able to rob a man at all. What a man really has is what is in him. What
is outside of him should be a matter of no importance.
Modern morality consists in accepting the standard of one's age. I
consider that for any man of culture to accept the standard of his age
is a form of the grossest immorality.
Perplexity and mistrust fan affection into passion, and so bring about
those beautiful tragedies that alone make life worth living. Women once
felt this, while men did not, and so women once ruled the world.
Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man's, face. It cannot be
concealed. People talk sometimes of secret vices. There are no such
things.
If a wretched man has a vice it shows itself in the lines of his mouth,
the drop of his eyelids, the moulding of his hands even.
There are sins whose fascination is more in the memory than in the doing
of them, strange triumphs that gratify the pride more than the passions
and give to the intellect a quickened sense of joy, greater than they
bring or can ever bring to the senses.
No civilised man ever regrets a pleasure, and no uncivilised man ever
knows what a pleasure is.
As for a spoiled life, no life is spoiled but one whose growth is
arrested. If you want to mar a nature you have merely to reform it.
Socialism itself will be of value simply because it will lead to
individualism.
Some years ago people went about the country saying that property has
duties. It is perfectly true. Property not merely has duties, but has so
many duties that its possession to any large extent is a bore. If
property had simply pleasures we could stand it, but its duties make it
unbearable.
It is through joy that the individualism of the future will develop
itself. Christ made no attempt to reconstruct society, and consequently
the individualism that He preached to man could be realised only through
pain or in solitude.
Most people become bankrupt through having invested too heavily in the
prose of life. To have ruined oneself over poetry is an honour.
The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad
artists. Good artists exist simply on what they make, and consequently
are perfectly uninteresting in what they are.
What are the virtues? Nature, Renan tells us, cares little about
chastity, and it may be that it is to the shame of the Magdalen, and not
to their own purity, that the Lucretias of modern life owe their freedom
from stain. Charity, as even those of whose religion it makes a formal
part have been compelled to acknowledge, creates a multitude of evils.
The mere existence of conscience, that faculty of which people prate so
much nowadays, and are so ignorantly proud, is a sign of our imperfect
development. It must be merged in instinct before we become fine.
Self-denial is simply a method by which man arrests his progress, and
self-sacrifice a survival of the mutilation of the savage, part of that
old worship of pain which is so terrible a factor in the history of the
world, and which even now makes its victims day by day and has its
altars in the land. Virtues! Who knows what the virtues are? Not you.
Not I. Not anyone. It is well for our vanity that we slay the criminal,
for if we suffered him to live he might show us what we had gained by
his crime. It is well for his peace that the saint goes to his
martyrdom. He is spared the sight of the horror of his harvest.
Nowadays all the married men live like bachelors and all the bachelors
like married men.
The higher education of men is what I should like to see. Men need it so
sadly.
The world is perfectly packed with good women. To know them is a
middle-class education.
Hesitation of any kind is a sign of mental decay in the young, of
physical weakness in the old.
Our husbands never appreciate anything in us. We have to go to others
for that.
Most women in London nowadays seem to furnish their rooms with nothing
but orchids, foreigners and French novels.
The canons of good society are, or should be, the same as the canons of
art. Form is absolutely essential to it. It should have the dignity of a
ceremony as well as its unreality, and should combine the insincere
character of a romantic play with the wit and beauty that make such
plays delightful to us. Is sincerity such a terrible thing? I think not.
It is merely a method by which we can multiply our personalities.
The tragedy of old age is not that one is old but that one is young.
A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all
creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse
their rhymes are the more picturesque they look. The mere fact of having
published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible.
He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry
that they dare not realise.
Being adored is a nuisance. Women treat us just as humanity treats its
gods. They worship us, and are always bothering us to do something for
them.
If a man treats life artistically his brain is his heart.
The 'Peerage' is the one book a young man about town should know
thoroughly, and it is the best thing in fiction the English have ever
done.
The world has always laughed at its own tragedies, that being the only
way in which it has been able to bear them. Consequently whatever the
world has treated seriously belongs to the comedy side of things.
The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint
has a past and every sinner has a future.
What is termed sin is an essential element of progress. Without it the
world would stagnate or grow old or becomes colourless. By its curiosity
it increases the experience of the race. Through its intensified
assertion of individualism it saves us from the commonplace. In its
rejection of the current notions about morality it is one with the
higher ethics.
Formerly we used to canonise our heroes. The modern method is to
vulgarise them. Cheap editions of great books may be delightful, but
cheap editions of great men are absolutely detestable.
Individualism does not come to man with any claims upon him at all. It
comes naturally and inevitably out of man. It is the point to which all
development tends. It is the differentiation to which all organisms
grow. It is the perfection that is inherent in every mode of life and
toward which every mode of life quickens. Individualism exercises no
compulsion over man. On the contrary, it says to man that he should
suffer no compulsion to be exercised over him. It does not try to force
people to be good. It knows that people are good when they are let
alone. Man will develop individualism out of himself. Man is now so
developing individualism. To ask whether individualism is practical is
like asking whether evolution is practical. Evolution is the law of
life, and there is no evolution except towards individualism.
The longer I live the more keenly I feel that whatever was good enough
for our fathers is not good enough for us. In art, as in politics, 'les
grand peres ont toujours tort. '
No woman is a genius. Women are a decorative sex. They never have
anything to say but they say it charmingly.
Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world's original sin. If
the cave men had known how to laugh history would have been different.
I wonder who it was defined man as a rational animal. It was the most
premature definition ever given. Man is many things, but he is not
rational.
Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art.
To get into the best society nowadays one has either to feed people,
amuse people, or shock people--that is all.
You should never try to understand women. Women are pictures, men are
problems. If you want to know what a woman really means--which, by the
way, is always a dangerous thing to do--look at her, don't listen to
her.
Ordinary women never appeal to one's imagination. They are limited to
their century. No glamour ever transfigures them. One knows their minds
as easily as one knows their bonnets. One can always find them. There is
no mystery in any of them. They ride in the park in the morning and
chatter at tea parties in the afternoon. They have their stereotyped
smile and their fashionable mauve.
Don't run down dyed hair and painted faces. There is an extraordinary
charm in them--sometimes.
To have been well brought up is a great drawback nowadays. It shuts one
out from so much.
The people who have adored me--there have not been very many, but there
have been some--have always insisted on living on long after I had
ceased to care for them or they to care for me. They have become stout
and tedious, and when I meet them they go in at once for reminiscences.
That awful memory of women! What a fearful thing it is! And what an
utter intellectual stagnation it reveals!
Examinations are pure humbug from beginning to end. If a man is a
gentleman he knows quite enough, and if he is not a gentleman whatever
he knows is bad for him.
Credit is the capital of a younger son, and he can live charmingly on
it.
The object of art is not simply truth but complex beauty. Art itself is
really a form of exaggeration, and selection, which is the very spirit
of art, is nothing more than an intensified mode of over-emphasis.
The popular cry of our time is: 'Let us return to Life and Nature, they
will recreate Art for us and send the red blood coursing through her
veins; they will shoe her feet with swiftness and make her hand strong. '
But, alas! we are mistaken in our amiable and well-meant efforts. Nature
is always behind the age. And as for life, she is the solvent that
breaks up Art, the enemy that lays waste her house.
There are only two kinds of women--the plain and the coloured. The plain
women are very useful. If you want to gain a reputation for
respectability you have merely to take them down to supper. The other
women are very charming. They commit one mistake, however--they paint in
order to try and look young.
The way of paradoxes is the way of truth. To test reality we must see it
on the tight-rope. When the verities become acrobats we can judge them.
Life imitates art far more than art imitates life. . . . The Greeks with
their quick, artistic instinct understood this, and set in the bride's
chamber the statue of Hermes or of Apollo, that she might bear children
as lovely as the works of art that she looked at in her rapture or her
pain. They knew that life gains from art not merely spirituality, depth
of thought and feeling, soul-turmoil or soul-peace, but that she can
form herself on the very lines and colours of art, and can reproduce the
dignity of Pheidias as well as the grace of Praxiteles. Hence came this
objection to realism. They disliked it on purely social grounds. They
felt that it inevitably makes people ugly, and they were perfectly
right.
Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of
the intellect--simply a confession of failure.
There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid
that others might pick them up.
What a fuss people make about fidelity! Why, even in love it is purely a
question for physiology. It has nothing to do with our own will. Young
men want to be faithful and are not; old men want to be faithless and
cannot--that is all one can say.
Modernity of form and modernity of subject-matter are entirely and
absolutely wrong. We have mistaken the common livery of the age for the
vesture of the muses, and spent our days in the sordid streets and
hideous suburbs of our vile cities when we should be out on the hillside
with Apollo. Certainly we are a degraded race, and have sold our
birthright for a mess of facts.
Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the
senses but the soul.
I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable. There is
something unfair about its use. It is hitting below the intellect.
Those who live in marble or on painted panel know of life but a single
exquisite instant, eternal, indeed, in its beauty but limited to one
note of passion or one mood of calm. Those whom the poet makes live have
their myriad emotions of joy and terror, of courage and despair, of
pleasure and of suffering. The seasons come and go in glad or saddening
pageant, and with winged or leaden feet the years pass by before them.
They have their youth and their manhood, they are children, and they
grow old. It is always dawn for St Helena as Veronese saw her at the
window. Through the still morning air the angels bring her the symbol of
God's pain. The cool breezes of the morning lift the gilt threads from
her brow. On that little hill by the city of Florence, where the lovers
of Giorgione are lying, it is always the solstice of noon--of noon made
so languorous by summer suns that hardly can the slim, naked girl dip
into the marble tank the round bubble of clear glass, and the long
fingers of the lute player rest idly upon the chords. It is twilight
always for the dancing nymphs whom Corot set free among the silver
poplars of France. In eternal twilight they move, those frail,
diaphanous figures, whose tremulous, white feet seem not to touch the
dew-drenched grass they tread on. But those who walk in epos, drama, or
romance see through the labouring months the young moons wax and wane,
and watch the night from evening into morning star, and from sunrise
into sun-setting can note the shifting day with all its gold and shadow.
For them, as for us, the flowers bloom and wither, and the earth, that
green-tressed goddess, as Coleridge calls her, alters her raiment for
their pleasure. The statue is concentrated to one moment of perfection.
The image stained upon the canvas possesses no spiritual element of
growth or change. If they know nothing of death it is because they know
little of life, for the secrets of life and death belong to those, and
to those only, whom the sequence of time affects, and who possess not
merely the present but the future, and can rise or fall from a past of
glory or of shame. Movement, that problem of the visible arts, can be
truly realised by literature alone. It is literature that shows us the
body in its swiftness and the soul in its unrest.
Behind every exquisite thing that exists there is something tragic.
Worlds have to be in travail that the merest flower may blow.
Beauty is a form of genius--is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs
no explanation. It is one of the great facts of the world, like
sunlight, or spring-time, or the reflection in dark water of that silver
shell we call the moon. It cannot be questioned, it has its divine right
of sovereignty.
The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it and
your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to
itself.
Women spoil every romance by trying to make it last for ever.
He's sure to be a wonderful success. He thinks like a Tory and talks
like a Radical, and that's so important nowadays.
Nowadays to be intelligible is to be found out.
We make gods of men and they leave us. Others make brutes of them and
they fawn and are faithful.
The husbands of very beautiful women belong to the criminal classes.
To me beauty is the Wonder of wonders. It is only shallow people who do
not judge by appearances.
The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.
The thoroughly well-informed man is the modern ideal. And the mind of
the thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing. It is like a
bric-a-brac shop, all monsters and dust, with everything priced above
its proper value.
Women have no appreciation of good looks in men--at least good women
have none.
To influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think
his natural thoughts or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are
not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are
borrowed. He becomes an echo of someone else's music, an actor of a part
that has not been written for him.
Those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love; it is the
faithless who know love's tragedies.
An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his
own life into them. We live in an age when men treat art as if it were
meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of
beauty.
A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies. I have not got
one who is a fool. They are all men of some intellectual power, and
consequently they all appreciate me.
The value of an idea has nothing whatever to do with the sincerity of
the man who expresses it.
I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no
principles better than anything else in the world.
He who would lead a Christ-like life is he who is perfectly and
absolutely himself. He may be a great poet, or a great man of science;
or a young student at the university, or one who watches sheep upon a
moor; or a maker of dramas, like Shakespeare, or a thinker about God,
like Spinoza; or a child who plays in a garden, or a fisherman who
throws his nets into the sea. It does not matter what he is as long as
he realises the perfection of the soul that is within him.
The aim of life is self-development. To realise one's nature
perfectly--that is what each of us is here for.
There is no such thing as a good influence. All influence is
immoral--immoral from the scientific point of view.
Words have not merely music as sweet as that of viol and lute, colour as
rich and vivid as any that makes lovely for us the canvas of the
Venetian or the Spaniard, and plastic form no less sure and certain than
that which reveals itself in marble or in bronze, but thought and
passion and spirituality are theirs also--are theirs, indeed, alone.
There is nothing so absolutely pathetic as a really fine paradox. The
pun is the clown among jokes, the well-turned paradox is the polished
comedian, and the highest comedy verges upon tragedy, just as the
keenest edge of tragedy is often tempered by a subtle humour. Our minds
are shot with moods as a fabric is shot with colours, and our moods
often seem inappropriate. Everything that is true is inappropriate.
The longer one studies life and literature the more strongly one feels
that behind everything that is wonderful stands the individual, and that
it is not the moment that makes the man but the man who creates the age.
To know the vintage and quality of a wine one need not drink the whole
cask.
It is a sad thing to think of, but there is no doubt that genius lasts
longer than beauty. That accounts for the fact that we all take such
pains to over-educate ourselves.
The ugly and the stupid have the best of it in this world. They can sit
at their ease and gape at the play. If they know nothing of victory they
are at least spared the knowledge of defeat.
To have a capacity for a passion, and not to realise it is to make
oneself incomplete and limited.
Even in actual life egotism is not without its attractions. When people
talk to us about others they are usually dull. When they talk to us
about themselves they are nearly always interesting, and if one could
shut them up when they become wearisome as easily as one can shut up a
book of which one has grown wearied they would be perfect absolutely.
Every great man nowadays has his disciples and it is invariably Judas
who writes the biography.
Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside of, herself. She is
not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance. She is a veil
rather than a mirror. She has flowers that no forest knows of, birds
that no woodland possesses. She makes and unmakes many worlds, and can
draw the moon from heaven with a scarlet thread. Hers are the 'forms
more real than living man,' and hers the great archetypes, of which
things that have existence are but unfinished copies. Nature has, in her
eyes, no laws, no uniformity. She can work miracles at her will, and
when she calls monsters from the deep they come. She can bid the
almond-tree blossom in winter and send the snow upon the ripe cornfield.
At her word the frost lays its silver finger on the burning mouth of
June, and the winged lions creep out from the hollows of the Lydian
hills. The dryads peer from the thicket as she passes by, and the brown
fauns smile strangely at her when she comes near them. She has
hawk-faced gods that worship her, and the centaurs gallop at her side.
In literature mere egotism is delightful.
If we live for aims we blunt our emotions. If we live for aims we live
for one minute, for one day, for one year, instead of for every minute,
every day, every year. The moods of one's life are life's beauties. To
yield to all one's moods is to really live.
Many a young man starts in life with a natural gift for exaggeration
which, if nurtured in congenial and sympathetic surroundings, or by the
imitations of the best models, might grow into something really great
and wonderful. But, as a rule, he comes to nothing. He either falls into
careless habits of accuracy or takes to frequenting the society of the
aged and the well-informed. Both things are equally fatal to his
imagination.
The spirit of an age may be best expressed in the abstract ideal arts,
for the spirit itself is abstract and ideal.
As for believing things, I can believe anything provided that it is
quite incredible.
'Know thyself' was written over the portal of the antique world. Over
the portal of the new world 'Be thyself' shall be written. And the
message of Christ to man was simply: 'Be thyself. ' That is the secret of
Christ.
London is full of women who trust their husbands. One can always
recognise them, they look so thoroughly unhappy.
For those who are not artists, and to whom there is no mode of life but
the actual life of fact, pain is the only door to perfection.
The English public always feels perfectly at its ease when a mediocrity
is talking to it.
Men always fall into the absurdity of endeavouring to develop the mind,
to push it violently forward in this direction or in that. The mind
should be receptive, a harp waiting to catch the winds, a pool ready to
be ruffled, not a bustling busybody for ever trotting about on the
pavement looking for a new bun shop.
There is nothing more beautiful than to forget, except, perhaps, to be
forgotten.
All bad art comes from returning to life and nature, and elevating them
into ideals. Life and nature may sometimes be used as part of art's
rough material, but before they are of any real service to art they must
be translated into artistic conventions. The moment art surrenders its
imaginative medium it surrenders everything. As a method realism is a
complete failure, and the two things that every artist should avoid are
modernity of form and modernity of subject-matter.
Men may have women's minds just as women may have the minds of men.
London is too full of fogs and serious people. Whether the fogs produce
the serious people or whether the serious people produce the fogs I
don't know.
How marriage ruins a man! It's as demoralising as cigarettes, and far
more expensive.
He must be quite respectable. One has never heard his name before in the
whole course of one's life, which speaks volumes for a man nowadays.
Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it
to its purpose.
As long as a thing is useful or necessary to us or affects us in any
way, either for pain or pleasure, or appeals strongly to our sympathies
or is a vital part of the environment in which we live, it is outside
the proper sphere of art.
I couldn't have a scene in this bonnet: it is far too fragile. A harsh
word would ruin it.
Music creates for one a past of which one has been ignorant and fills
one with a sense of sorrows that have been hidden from one's tears.
Nothing is so fatal to personality as deliberation.
I adore London dinner parties. The clever people never listen and the
stupid people never talk.
Learned conversation is either the affection of the ignorant or the
profession of the mentally unemployed.
The Academy is too large and too vulgar. Whenever I have gone there,
there have been either so many people that I have not been able to see
the pictures--which was dreadful, or so many pictures that I have not
been able to see the people--which was worse.
All art is quite useless.
Beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins.
Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration and destroys the harmony
of any face. The moment one sits down to think one becomes all nose or
all forehead or something horrid.
The one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception
absolutely necessary for both parties.
Secrecy seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious
or marvellous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides
it.
Conceit is one of the greatest of the virtues, yet how few people
recognise it as a thing to aim at and to strive after. In conceit many a
man and woman has found salvation, yet the average person goes on
all-fours grovelling after modesty.
It is difficult not to be unjust to what one loves.
Humanity will always love Rousseau for having confessed his sins not to
a friend but to the world.
Just as those who do not love Plato more than truth cannot pass beyond
the threshold of the Academe, so those who do not love beauty more than
truth never know the inmost shrine of art.
There is a fatality about all physical and intellectual distinction: the
sort of fatality that seems to dog, through history, the faltering steps
of kings. It is better not to be different from one's fellows.
To be born, or at any rate bred, in a handbag, whether it had handles or
not, seems to me to display a contempt for the ordinary decencies of
family life that reminds one of the worst excesses of the French
Revolution.
Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art.
There must be a new Hedonism that shall recreate life and save it from
that harsh, uncomely Puritanism that is having, in our own day, its
curious revival. It must have its service of the intellect, certainly,
yet it must never accept any theory or system that will involve the
sacrifice of any mode of passionate experience. Its aim, indeed, is to
be experience itself and not the fruits of experience, bitter or sweet
as they may be. Of the aestheticism that deadens the senses, as of the
vulgar profligacy that dulls them, it is to know nothing. But it is to
teach man to concentrate himself upon the moments of a life that is
itself but a moment.
Art never expresses anything but itself. It has an independent life,
just as thought has, and develops purely on its own lines. It is not
necessarily realistic in an age of realism nor spiritual in an age of
faith. So far from being the creation of its time it is usually in
direct opposition to it, and the only history that it preserves for us
is the history of its own progress.
People who mean well always do badly. They are like the ladies who wear
clothes that don't fit them in order to show their piety. Good
intentions are invariably ungrammatical.
Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe the
improbable.
When art is more varied nature will, no doubt, be more varied also.
If a man is sufficiently imaginative to produce evidence in support of a
lie he might just as well speak the truth at once.
The ancient historians gave us delightful fiction in the form of fact;
the modern novelist presents us with dull facts under the guise of
fiction.
Nature is no great mother who has home us. She is our own creation. It
is in our brain that she quickens to life. Things are because we see
them, and what we see and how we see it depends on the arts that have
influenced us. To look at a thing is very different from seeing a thing.
One does not see anything until one sees its beauty.
The proper school to learn art in is not life but art.
I won't tell you that the world matters nothing, or the world's voice,
or the voice of society. They matter a good deal. They matter far too
much.
I wouldn't marry a man with a future before him for anything under the
sun.
I am the only person in the world I should like to know thoroughly, but
I don't see any chance of it just at present.
Modern memoirs are generally written by people who have entirely lost
their memories and have never done anything worth recording.
Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to
time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.
Women are like minors, they live upon their expectations.
Twisted minds are as natural to some people as twisted bodies.
It is the very passions about whose origin we deceive ourselves that
tyrannise most strongly over us. Our weakest motives are those of whose
nature we are conscious. It often happens that when we think we are
experimenting on others we are really experimenting on ourselves.
Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing it is always from the
noblest motives.
I thought I had no heart. I find I have, and a heart doesn't suit me.
Somehow it doesn't go with modern dress. It makes one look old, and it
spoils one's career at critical moments.
I don't play accurately--anyone can play accurately--but I play with
wonderful expression. As far as the piano is concerned sentiment is my
forte. I keep science for life.
I delight in men over seventy. They always offer one the devotion of a
lifetime.
Everybody who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching--that is
really what our enthusiasm for education has come to.
Nature hates mind.
From the point of view of form the type of all the arts is the art of
the musician. From the point of view of feeling the actor's craft is the
type.
Where we differ from each other is purely in accidentals--in dress,
manner, tone of voice, religious opinions, personal appearance, tricks
of habit, and the like.
The more we study art the less we care for Nature. What art really
reveals to us is Nature's lack of design, her curious crudities, her
extraordinary monotony, her absolutely unfinished condition. . . . It is
fortunate for us, however, that nature is so imperfect, as otherwise we
should have had no art at all. Art is our spirited protest, our gallant
attempt to teach Nature her proper place. As for the infinite variety of
nature, that is a pure myth. It is not to be found in Nature herself. It
resides in the imagination or fancy or cultivated blindness of the man
who looks at her.
Facts are not merely finding a footing-place in history but they are
usurping the domain of fancy and have invaded the kingdom of romance.
Their chilling touch is over everything. They are vulgarising mankind.
Ordinary people wait till life discloses to them its secrets, but to the
few, to the elect, the mysteries of life are revealed before the veil is
drawn away. Sometimes this is the effect of art, and chiefly of the art
of literature which deals immediately with the passions and the
intellect. But now and then a complex personality takes the place and
assumes the office of art, is, indeed, in its way a real work of art,
Life having its elaborate masterpieces just as poetry has, or sculpture,
or painting.
Thinking is the most unhealthy thing in the world, and people die of it
just as they die of any other disease.
A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite
and it leaves one unsatisfied.
The aim of the liar is simply to charm, to delight, to give pleasure. He
is the very basis of civilised society.
It is quite a mistake to believe, as many people do, that the mind shows
itself in the face. Vice may sometimes write itself in lines and changes
of contour, but that is all. Our faces are really masks given to us to
conceal our minds with.
is the reason why people who live out of town are so absolutely
uncivilised. Civilisation is not by any means an easy thing to attain
to. There are only two ways by which man can reach it. One is by being
cultured, the other by being corrupt. Country people have no opportunity
of being either, so they stagnate.
What nonsense people talk about happy marriages! A man can be happy with
any woman so long as he does not love her.
The things one feels absolutely certain about are never true. That is
the fatality of faith and the lesson of romance.
In the common world of fact the wicked are not punished nor the good
rewarded. Success is given to the strong, failure thrust upon the weak.
Nothing should be able to harm a man except himself. Nothing should be
able to rob a man at all. What a man really has is what is in him. What
is outside of him should be a matter of no importance.
Modern morality consists in accepting the standard of one's age. I
consider that for any man of culture to accept the standard of his age
is a form of the grossest immorality.
Perplexity and mistrust fan affection into passion, and so bring about
those beautiful tragedies that alone make life worth living. Women once
felt this, while men did not, and so women once ruled the world.
Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man's, face. It cannot be
concealed. People talk sometimes of secret vices. There are no such
things.
If a wretched man has a vice it shows itself in the lines of his mouth,
the drop of his eyelids, the moulding of his hands even.
There are sins whose fascination is more in the memory than in the doing
of them, strange triumphs that gratify the pride more than the passions
and give to the intellect a quickened sense of joy, greater than they
bring or can ever bring to the senses.
No civilised man ever regrets a pleasure, and no uncivilised man ever
knows what a pleasure is.
As for a spoiled life, no life is spoiled but one whose growth is
arrested. If you want to mar a nature you have merely to reform it.
Socialism itself will be of value simply because it will lead to
individualism.
Some years ago people went about the country saying that property has
duties. It is perfectly true. Property not merely has duties, but has so
many duties that its possession to any large extent is a bore. If
property had simply pleasures we could stand it, but its duties make it
unbearable.
It is through joy that the individualism of the future will develop
itself. Christ made no attempt to reconstruct society, and consequently
the individualism that He preached to man could be realised only through
pain or in solitude.
Most people become bankrupt through having invested too heavily in the
prose of life. To have ruined oneself over poetry is an honour.
The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad
artists. Good artists exist simply on what they make, and consequently
are perfectly uninteresting in what they are.
What are the virtues? Nature, Renan tells us, cares little about
chastity, and it may be that it is to the shame of the Magdalen, and not
to their own purity, that the Lucretias of modern life owe their freedom
from stain. Charity, as even those of whose religion it makes a formal
part have been compelled to acknowledge, creates a multitude of evils.
The mere existence of conscience, that faculty of which people prate so
much nowadays, and are so ignorantly proud, is a sign of our imperfect
development. It must be merged in instinct before we become fine.
Self-denial is simply a method by which man arrests his progress, and
self-sacrifice a survival of the mutilation of the savage, part of that
old worship of pain which is so terrible a factor in the history of the
world, and which even now makes its victims day by day and has its
altars in the land. Virtues! Who knows what the virtues are? Not you.
Not I. Not anyone. It is well for our vanity that we slay the criminal,
for if we suffered him to live he might show us what we had gained by
his crime. It is well for his peace that the saint goes to his
martyrdom. He is spared the sight of the horror of his harvest.
Nowadays all the married men live like bachelors and all the bachelors
like married men.
The higher education of men is what I should like to see. Men need it so
sadly.
The world is perfectly packed with good women. To know them is a
middle-class education.
Hesitation of any kind is a sign of mental decay in the young, of
physical weakness in the old.
Our husbands never appreciate anything in us. We have to go to others
for that.
Most women in London nowadays seem to furnish their rooms with nothing
but orchids, foreigners and French novels.
The canons of good society are, or should be, the same as the canons of
art. Form is absolutely essential to it. It should have the dignity of a
ceremony as well as its unreality, and should combine the insincere
character of a romantic play with the wit and beauty that make such
plays delightful to us. Is sincerity such a terrible thing? I think not.
It is merely a method by which we can multiply our personalities.
The tragedy of old age is not that one is old but that one is young.
A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all
creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse
their rhymes are the more picturesque they look. The mere fact of having
published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible.
He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry
that they dare not realise.
Being adored is a nuisance. Women treat us just as humanity treats its
gods. They worship us, and are always bothering us to do something for
them.
If a man treats life artistically his brain is his heart.
The 'Peerage' is the one book a young man about town should know
thoroughly, and it is the best thing in fiction the English have ever
done.
The world has always laughed at its own tragedies, that being the only
way in which it has been able to bear them. Consequently whatever the
world has treated seriously belongs to the comedy side of things.
The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint
has a past and every sinner has a future.
What is termed sin is an essential element of progress. Without it the
world would stagnate or grow old or becomes colourless. By its curiosity
it increases the experience of the race. Through its intensified
assertion of individualism it saves us from the commonplace. In its
rejection of the current notions about morality it is one with the
higher ethics.
Formerly we used to canonise our heroes. The modern method is to
vulgarise them. Cheap editions of great books may be delightful, but
cheap editions of great men are absolutely detestable.
Individualism does not come to man with any claims upon him at all. It
comes naturally and inevitably out of man. It is the point to which all
development tends. It is the differentiation to which all organisms
grow. It is the perfection that is inherent in every mode of life and
toward which every mode of life quickens. Individualism exercises no
compulsion over man. On the contrary, it says to man that he should
suffer no compulsion to be exercised over him. It does not try to force
people to be good. It knows that people are good when they are let
alone. Man will develop individualism out of himself. Man is now so
developing individualism. To ask whether individualism is practical is
like asking whether evolution is practical. Evolution is the law of
life, and there is no evolution except towards individualism.
The longer I live the more keenly I feel that whatever was good enough
for our fathers is not good enough for us. In art, as in politics, 'les
grand peres ont toujours tort. '
No woman is a genius. Women are a decorative sex. They never have
anything to say but they say it charmingly.
Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world's original sin. If
the cave men had known how to laugh history would have been different.
I wonder who it was defined man as a rational animal. It was the most
premature definition ever given. Man is many things, but he is not
rational.
Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art.
To get into the best society nowadays one has either to feed people,
amuse people, or shock people--that is all.
You should never try to understand women. Women are pictures, men are
problems. If you want to know what a woman really means--which, by the
way, is always a dangerous thing to do--look at her, don't listen to
her.
Ordinary women never appeal to one's imagination. They are limited to
their century. No glamour ever transfigures them. One knows their minds
as easily as one knows their bonnets. One can always find them. There is
no mystery in any of them. They ride in the park in the morning and
chatter at tea parties in the afternoon. They have their stereotyped
smile and their fashionable mauve.
Don't run down dyed hair and painted faces. There is an extraordinary
charm in them--sometimes.
To have been well brought up is a great drawback nowadays. It shuts one
out from so much.
The people who have adored me--there have not been very many, but there
have been some--have always insisted on living on long after I had
ceased to care for them or they to care for me. They have become stout
and tedious, and when I meet them they go in at once for reminiscences.
That awful memory of women! What a fearful thing it is! And what an
utter intellectual stagnation it reveals!
Examinations are pure humbug from beginning to end. If a man is a
gentleman he knows quite enough, and if he is not a gentleman whatever
he knows is bad for him.
Credit is the capital of a younger son, and he can live charmingly on
it.
The object of art is not simply truth but complex beauty. Art itself is
really a form of exaggeration, and selection, which is the very spirit
of art, is nothing more than an intensified mode of over-emphasis.
The popular cry of our time is: 'Let us return to Life and Nature, they
will recreate Art for us and send the red blood coursing through her
veins; they will shoe her feet with swiftness and make her hand strong. '
But, alas! we are mistaken in our amiable and well-meant efforts. Nature
is always behind the age. And as for life, she is the solvent that
breaks up Art, the enemy that lays waste her house.
There are only two kinds of women--the plain and the coloured. The plain
women are very useful. If you want to gain a reputation for
respectability you have merely to take them down to supper. The other
women are very charming. They commit one mistake, however--they paint in
order to try and look young.
The way of paradoxes is the way of truth. To test reality we must see it
on the tight-rope. When the verities become acrobats we can judge them.
Life imitates art far more than art imitates life. . . . The Greeks with
their quick, artistic instinct understood this, and set in the bride's
chamber the statue of Hermes or of Apollo, that she might bear children
as lovely as the works of art that she looked at in her rapture or her
pain. They knew that life gains from art not merely spirituality, depth
of thought and feeling, soul-turmoil or soul-peace, but that she can
form herself on the very lines and colours of art, and can reproduce the
dignity of Pheidias as well as the grace of Praxiteles. Hence came this
objection to realism. They disliked it on purely social grounds. They
felt that it inevitably makes people ugly, and they were perfectly
right.
Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of
the intellect--simply a confession of failure.
There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid
that others might pick them up.
What a fuss people make about fidelity! Why, even in love it is purely a
question for physiology. It has nothing to do with our own will. Young
men want to be faithful and are not; old men want to be faithless and
cannot--that is all one can say.
Modernity of form and modernity of subject-matter are entirely and
absolutely wrong. We have mistaken the common livery of the age for the
vesture of the muses, and spent our days in the sordid streets and
hideous suburbs of our vile cities when we should be out on the hillside
with Apollo. Certainly we are a degraded race, and have sold our
birthright for a mess of facts.
Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the
senses but the soul.
I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable. There is
something unfair about its use. It is hitting below the intellect.
Those who live in marble or on painted panel know of life but a single
exquisite instant, eternal, indeed, in its beauty but limited to one
note of passion or one mood of calm. Those whom the poet makes live have
their myriad emotions of joy and terror, of courage and despair, of
pleasure and of suffering. The seasons come and go in glad or saddening
pageant, and with winged or leaden feet the years pass by before them.
They have their youth and their manhood, they are children, and they
grow old. It is always dawn for St Helena as Veronese saw her at the
window. Through the still morning air the angels bring her the symbol of
God's pain. The cool breezes of the morning lift the gilt threads from
her brow. On that little hill by the city of Florence, where the lovers
of Giorgione are lying, it is always the solstice of noon--of noon made
so languorous by summer suns that hardly can the slim, naked girl dip
into the marble tank the round bubble of clear glass, and the long
fingers of the lute player rest idly upon the chords. It is twilight
always for the dancing nymphs whom Corot set free among the silver
poplars of France. In eternal twilight they move, those frail,
diaphanous figures, whose tremulous, white feet seem not to touch the
dew-drenched grass they tread on. But those who walk in epos, drama, or
romance see through the labouring months the young moons wax and wane,
and watch the night from evening into morning star, and from sunrise
into sun-setting can note the shifting day with all its gold and shadow.
For them, as for us, the flowers bloom and wither, and the earth, that
green-tressed goddess, as Coleridge calls her, alters her raiment for
their pleasure. The statue is concentrated to one moment of perfection.
The image stained upon the canvas possesses no spiritual element of
growth or change. If they know nothing of death it is because they know
little of life, for the secrets of life and death belong to those, and
to those only, whom the sequence of time affects, and who possess not
merely the present but the future, and can rise or fall from a past of
glory or of shame. Movement, that problem of the visible arts, can be
truly realised by literature alone. It is literature that shows us the
body in its swiftness and the soul in its unrest.
Behind every exquisite thing that exists there is something tragic.
Worlds have to be in travail that the merest flower may blow.
Beauty is a form of genius--is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs
no explanation. It is one of the great facts of the world, like
sunlight, or spring-time, or the reflection in dark water of that silver
shell we call the moon. It cannot be questioned, it has its divine right
of sovereignty.
The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it and
your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to
itself.
Women spoil every romance by trying to make it last for ever.
He's sure to be a wonderful success. He thinks like a Tory and talks
like a Radical, and that's so important nowadays.
Nowadays to be intelligible is to be found out.
We make gods of men and they leave us. Others make brutes of them and
they fawn and are faithful.
The husbands of very beautiful women belong to the criminal classes.
To me beauty is the Wonder of wonders. It is only shallow people who do
not judge by appearances.
The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.
The thoroughly well-informed man is the modern ideal. And the mind of
the thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing. It is like a
bric-a-brac shop, all monsters and dust, with everything priced above
its proper value.
Women have no appreciation of good looks in men--at least good women
have none.
To influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think
his natural thoughts or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are
not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are
borrowed. He becomes an echo of someone else's music, an actor of a part
that has not been written for him.
Those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love; it is the
faithless who know love's tragedies.
An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his
own life into them. We live in an age when men treat art as if it were
meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of
beauty.
A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies. I have not got
one who is a fool. They are all men of some intellectual power, and
consequently they all appreciate me.
The value of an idea has nothing whatever to do with the sincerity of
the man who expresses it.
I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no
principles better than anything else in the world.
He who would lead a Christ-like life is he who is perfectly and
absolutely himself. He may be a great poet, or a great man of science;
or a young student at the university, or one who watches sheep upon a
moor; or a maker of dramas, like Shakespeare, or a thinker about God,
like Spinoza; or a child who plays in a garden, or a fisherman who
throws his nets into the sea. It does not matter what he is as long as
he realises the perfection of the soul that is within him.
The aim of life is self-development. To realise one's nature
perfectly--that is what each of us is here for.
There is no such thing as a good influence. All influence is
immoral--immoral from the scientific point of view.
Words have not merely music as sweet as that of viol and lute, colour as
rich and vivid as any that makes lovely for us the canvas of the
Venetian or the Spaniard, and plastic form no less sure and certain than
that which reveals itself in marble or in bronze, but thought and
passion and spirituality are theirs also--are theirs, indeed, alone.
There is nothing so absolutely pathetic as a really fine paradox. The
pun is the clown among jokes, the well-turned paradox is the polished
comedian, and the highest comedy verges upon tragedy, just as the
keenest edge of tragedy is often tempered by a subtle humour. Our minds
are shot with moods as a fabric is shot with colours, and our moods
often seem inappropriate. Everything that is true is inappropriate.
The longer one studies life and literature the more strongly one feels
that behind everything that is wonderful stands the individual, and that
it is not the moment that makes the man but the man who creates the age.
To know the vintage and quality of a wine one need not drink the whole
cask.
It is a sad thing to think of, but there is no doubt that genius lasts
longer than beauty. That accounts for the fact that we all take such
pains to over-educate ourselves.
The ugly and the stupid have the best of it in this world. They can sit
at their ease and gape at the play. If they know nothing of victory they
are at least spared the knowledge of defeat.
To have a capacity for a passion, and not to realise it is to make
oneself incomplete and limited.
Even in actual life egotism is not without its attractions. When people
talk to us about others they are usually dull. When they talk to us
about themselves they are nearly always interesting, and if one could
shut them up when they become wearisome as easily as one can shut up a
book of which one has grown wearied they would be perfect absolutely.
Every great man nowadays has his disciples and it is invariably Judas
who writes the biography.
Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside of, herself. She is
not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance. She is a veil
rather than a mirror. She has flowers that no forest knows of, birds
that no woodland possesses. She makes and unmakes many worlds, and can
draw the moon from heaven with a scarlet thread. Hers are the 'forms
more real than living man,' and hers the great archetypes, of which
things that have existence are but unfinished copies. Nature has, in her
eyes, no laws, no uniformity. She can work miracles at her will, and
when she calls monsters from the deep they come. She can bid the
almond-tree blossom in winter and send the snow upon the ripe cornfield.
At her word the frost lays its silver finger on the burning mouth of
June, and the winged lions creep out from the hollows of the Lydian
hills. The dryads peer from the thicket as she passes by, and the brown
fauns smile strangely at her when she comes near them. She has
hawk-faced gods that worship her, and the centaurs gallop at her side.
In literature mere egotism is delightful.
If we live for aims we blunt our emotions. If we live for aims we live
for one minute, for one day, for one year, instead of for every minute,
every day, every year. The moods of one's life are life's beauties. To
yield to all one's moods is to really live.
Many a young man starts in life with a natural gift for exaggeration
which, if nurtured in congenial and sympathetic surroundings, or by the
imitations of the best models, might grow into something really great
and wonderful. But, as a rule, he comes to nothing. He either falls into
careless habits of accuracy or takes to frequenting the society of the
aged and the well-informed. Both things are equally fatal to his
imagination.
The spirit of an age may be best expressed in the abstract ideal arts,
for the spirit itself is abstract and ideal.
As for believing things, I can believe anything provided that it is
quite incredible.
'Know thyself' was written over the portal of the antique world. Over
the portal of the new world 'Be thyself' shall be written. And the
message of Christ to man was simply: 'Be thyself. ' That is the secret of
Christ.
London is full of women who trust their husbands. One can always
recognise them, they look so thoroughly unhappy.
For those who are not artists, and to whom there is no mode of life but
the actual life of fact, pain is the only door to perfection.
The English public always feels perfectly at its ease when a mediocrity
is talking to it.
Men always fall into the absurdity of endeavouring to develop the mind,
to push it violently forward in this direction or in that. The mind
should be receptive, a harp waiting to catch the winds, a pool ready to
be ruffled, not a bustling busybody for ever trotting about on the
pavement looking for a new bun shop.
There is nothing more beautiful than to forget, except, perhaps, to be
forgotten.
All bad art comes from returning to life and nature, and elevating them
into ideals. Life and nature may sometimes be used as part of art's
rough material, but before they are of any real service to art they must
be translated into artistic conventions. The moment art surrenders its
imaginative medium it surrenders everything. As a method realism is a
complete failure, and the two things that every artist should avoid are
modernity of form and modernity of subject-matter.
Men may have women's minds just as women may have the minds of men.
London is too full of fogs and serious people. Whether the fogs produce
the serious people or whether the serious people produce the fogs I
don't know.
How marriage ruins a man! It's as demoralising as cigarettes, and far
more expensive.
He must be quite respectable. One has never heard his name before in the
whole course of one's life, which speaks volumes for a man nowadays.
Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it
to its purpose.
As long as a thing is useful or necessary to us or affects us in any
way, either for pain or pleasure, or appeals strongly to our sympathies
or is a vital part of the environment in which we live, it is outside
the proper sphere of art.
I couldn't have a scene in this bonnet: it is far too fragile. A harsh
word would ruin it.
Music creates for one a past of which one has been ignorant and fills
one with a sense of sorrows that have been hidden from one's tears.
Nothing is so fatal to personality as deliberation.
I adore London dinner parties. The clever people never listen and the
stupid people never talk.
Learned conversation is either the affection of the ignorant or the
profession of the mentally unemployed.
The Academy is too large and too vulgar. Whenever I have gone there,
there have been either so many people that I have not been able to see
the pictures--which was dreadful, or so many pictures that I have not
been able to see the people--which was worse.
All art is quite useless.
Beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins.
Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration and destroys the harmony
of any face. The moment one sits down to think one becomes all nose or
all forehead or something horrid.
The one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception
absolutely necessary for both parties.
Secrecy seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious
or marvellous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides
it.
Conceit is one of the greatest of the virtues, yet how few people
recognise it as a thing to aim at and to strive after. In conceit many a
man and woman has found salvation, yet the average person goes on
all-fours grovelling after modesty.
It is difficult not to be unjust to what one loves.
Humanity will always love Rousseau for having confessed his sins not to
a friend but to the world.
Just as those who do not love Plato more than truth cannot pass beyond
the threshold of the Academe, so those who do not love beauty more than
truth never know the inmost shrine of art.
There is a fatality about all physical and intellectual distinction: the
sort of fatality that seems to dog, through history, the faltering steps
of kings. It is better not to be different from one's fellows.
To be born, or at any rate bred, in a handbag, whether it had handles or
not, seems to me to display a contempt for the ordinary decencies of
family life that reminds one of the worst excesses of the French
Revolution.
Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art.
There must be a new Hedonism that shall recreate life and save it from
that harsh, uncomely Puritanism that is having, in our own day, its
curious revival. It must have its service of the intellect, certainly,
yet it must never accept any theory or system that will involve the
sacrifice of any mode of passionate experience. Its aim, indeed, is to
be experience itself and not the fruits of experience, bitter or sweet
as they may be. Of the aestheticism that deadens the senses, as of the
vulgar profligacy that dulls them, it is to know nothing. But it is to
teach man to concentrate himself upon the moments of a life that is
itself but a moment.
Art never expresses anything but itself. It has an independent life,
just as thought has, and develops purely on its own lines. It is not
necessarily realistic in an age of realism nor spiritual in an age of
faith. So far from being the creation of its time it is usually in
direct opposition to it, and the only history that it preserves for us
is the history of its own progress.
People who mean well always do badly. They are like the ladies who wear
clothes that don't fit them in order to show their piety. Good
intentions are invariably ungrammatical.
Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe the
improbable.
When art is more varied nature will, no doubt, be more varied also.
If a man is sufficiently imaginative to produce evidence in support of a
lie he might just as well speak the truth at once.
The ancient historians gave us delightful fiction in the form of fact;
the modern novelist presents us with dull facts under the guise of
fiction.
Nature is no great mother who has home us. She is our own creation. It
is in our brain that she quickens to life. Things are because we see
them, and what we see and how we see it depends on the arts that have
influenced us. To look at a thing is very different from seeing a thing.
One does not see anything until one sees its beauty.
The proper school to learn art in is not life but art.
I won't tell you that the world matters nothing, or the world's voice,
or the voice of society. They matter a good deal. They matter far too
much.
I wouldn't marry a man with a future before him for anything under the
sun.
I am the only person in the world I should like to know thoroughly, but
I don't see any chance of it just at present.
Modern memoirs are generally written by people who have entirely lost
their memories and have never done anything worth recording.
Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to
time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.
Women are like minors, they live upon their expectations.
Twisted minds are as natural to some people as twisted bodies.
It is the very passions about whose origin we deceive ourselves that
tyrannise most strongly over us. Our weakest motives are those of whose
nature we are conscious. It often happens that when we think we are
experimenting on others we are really experimenting on ourselves.
Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing it is always from the
noblest motives.
I thought I had no heart. I find I have, and a heart doesn't suit me.
Somehow it doesn't go with modern dress. It makes one look old, and it
spoils one's career at critical moments.
I don't play accurately--anyone can play accurately--but I play with
wonderful expression. As far as the piano is concerned sentiment is my
forte. I keep science for life.
I delight in men over seventy. They always offer one the devotion of a
lifetime.
Everybody who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching--that is
really what our enthusiasm for education has come to.
Nature hates mind.
From the point of view of form the type of all the arts is the art of
the musician. From the point of view of feeling the actor's craft is the
type.
Where we differ from each other is purely in accidentals--in dress,
manner, tone of voice, religious opinions, personal appearance, tricks
of habit, and the like.
The more we study art the less we care for Nature. What art really
reveals to us is Nature's lack of design, her curious crudities, her
extraordinary monotony, her absolutely unfinished condition. . . . It is
fortunate for us, however, that nature is so imperfect, as otherwise we
should have had no art at all. Art is our spirited protest, our gallant
attempt to teach Nature her proper place. As for the infinite variety of
nature, that is a pure myth. It is not to be found in Nature herself. It
resides in the imagination or fancy or cultivated blindness of the man
who looks at her.
Facts are not merely finding a footing-place in history but they are
usurping the domain of fancy and have invaded the kingdom of romance.
Their chilling touch is over everything. They are vulgarising mankind.
Ordinary people wait till life discloses to them its secrets, but to the
few, to the elect, the mysteries of life are revealed before the veil is
drawn away. Sometimes this is the effect of art, and chiefly of the art
of literature which deals immediately with the passions and the
intellect. But now and then a complex personality takes the place and
assumes the office of art, is, indeed, in its way a real work of art,
Life having its elaborate masterpieces just as poetry has, or sculpture,
or painting.
Thinking is the most unhealthy thing in the world, and people die of it
just as they die of any other disease.
A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite
and it leaves one unsatisfied.
The aim of the liar is simply to charm, to delight, to give pleasure. He
is the very basis of civilised society.
It is quite a mistake to believe, as many people do, that the mind shows
itself in the face. Vice may sometimes write itself in lines and changes
of contour, but that is all. Our faces are really masks given to us to
conceal our minds with.
