Anthony M. Ludovici

“ It is excruciating, it is brutal. It is inhuman, Lord Henry! Shall I tell you the truth,—though it's dreadful, wicked. Well, I hate my sister. I loathe her with a deadly loathing. My fingers itch to—oh, all through the night I think of some means of disfiguring her. It is the most diabolical cruelty to put any woman into the position I am in now. I long to fly away, where I shall never, never see her again. It's that and nothing else that has given me these fainting fits. I have controlled my loathing too long. One day, if only fate is kind, I shall fall down and be killed. ”

“ Can it be wondered at, therefore, that modern mankind as a whole are beginning to suspect that the joie de vivre is grossly over-rated? Can it be wondered at that the bulk of mankind are beginning to feel that life can well be lived without love? ”

“ Then woe to all those who are tempted to practise one virtue more! Woe to humanity! Woe to the whole world!
There is, on the other hand, a form of egoism, which is both virtuous and noble. It is the egoism of him whose multiplication would make the world better, more desirable, happier, healthier, superior in spirit and body. Egoism in such a case is a moral duty; wherever, in such a case, giving, bestowing—altruism in fact—is not compatible with survival, then egoism becomes the highest principle of all, and it is in such circumstances that altruism may become a vice. ”

“ In order to solve this problem man must already be a liar in his heart. But he must, above all, be an artist. And he is that. Metaphysics, religion, morality, science—all these things are but an offshoot of his will to Art, to falsehood, to a flight from 'truth,' to a denial of 'truth.' This ability, this artistic capacity, par excellence, of man—thanks to which he overcomes reality with lies—is a quality which he has in common with all other forms of existence.... ”

“ He will ascribe his rebuffs to a passing whim on the part of his beloved, to a momentary lapse in her customary humour, to her food, to a desire on her part to test him, to transitory evil influences from outside, to the thermometer, the barometer, the moon!—in fact to anything, except to the possibility that she could actually have cooled towards him; and the more overpowering his arrogance happens to be, the more complex and subtle will be the explanations which his imagination will furnish for the unpleasant change in his affairs. ”

“ For the only power that rules Woman with an iron hand, the only power that moulds her destiny and actuates her behaviour and aspirations, she can never desert; and that is a power far more inexorable and irresistible than the power of man. It is the power of Life itself, with which she is much more deeply, secretly and thoroughly in touch than we are, or could ever hope to be. We are an amputation from Life, to which we return only at odd intervals, as it were to pay tribute: she is Life’s uninterrupted stream that receives this tribute. ”

“ People forget that each generation of them is born from mothers who, in an uninterrupted line reaching right back to our anthropoid ancestors, have filled their lives with something more than self-support and business usefulness. Each generation of these unmated women-workers is born from mothers who must have known the ardent embrace of a lover, the ecstasy of consummated love, and the clinging devotion of adoring offspring. No break can have occurred in this long dynasty of love, otherwise they—the women-workers themselves—would not be there. ”

“ There is no greater delight or passionate love on earth for the artist than this: to feel that he has stamped his hand on a people and on a millennium, to feel that his eyes, his ears, and his touch have become their eyes, and their ears, and their touch. ”

“ A wonderful serenity had come upon her, and her lips no longer seemed tormented with words they did not dare to utter.
"What is so terrible, Lord Henry," she said at last, "what the world does not seem to understand, and will not see, is that a girl with a sister is placed in intimate, daily, and inevitable contact with the very woman who is her most constant and most formidable rival. She sees her grow up and gradually assume womanly shape. She watches the development of every feature with eyes starting out of her head with horror. ”

“ To them the only purity worth having is that which is the outcome of fire. Everything else is impure. A tepid passion, a non-exuberant passion, is impure: it can wait, it can temporize, it can play with Life; it can even thwart the highest purposes of Life: therefore it is impure.
How often in our own small circle have we not seen a youth that we admired—a positive, robust and savoury fellow, full of trust and energy—condescend to take the most fragile, shadowy reminiscence of Life for a mate and the mother of his children! ”

“ A fate unavoidable for an age that spills its best blood with the carelessness of ignorance. A fate unavoidable for a people that is driven by its very religion to disobedience and anarchy. And I thought of my own race, which has seen so many fates, so many ages, so many empires decline—and there was I, the eternal Jew, witnessing another catastrophe. ”

“ Many people imagine that Greek sculpture—to take that salient province again—deliberately avoided truth to Nature, and aimed at some utterly conventional thing called the ideal. Nothing could be more mistaken. The whole aim of Greek sculpture was to reproduce the living man or woman, and the sublime of its execution was attained only when the carving seemed instinct with life—a life not merely of the limbs, but a life of the soul, which informed the countenance, and was felt to be controlling every limb. ”

“ Nothing beneath that fierce August sun escaped the keen comprehending eye of Vanessa Vollenberg. The mother and the two daughters with whom she found her present lot cast, gave her food enough for meditation and secret comment; but while their acumen and penetration were hardly inferior to her own, she felt an adult among people not completely grown up. It was as if they still retained more of the ingenuousness of primitive womanhood than she, and thus she "circumnavigated" them, while they, all too self-centred, had barely discovered in which hemisphere her shores were to be found. ”

“ We abet and promote a process by which millions of our women deliberately turn their backs upon their primary adaptations, and spring to our side like neuters in the arena of our active life, our besotting duties, our drudgery! But not content with undermining their health and their happiness by denying the just privilege of their primary adaptations, we undermine their spirits by casting them like convicts into the wheels of the very machine that has already reduced us to such pale shadows of our former selves, such faint echoes of manhood, that they were rightly growing dissatisfied with us. ”

“ Now, seeing that mankind is undoubtedly moulded by the nature of the values which prevail over it, it is manifestly of paramount importance to the philosopher to know which order of values conduces to rear the most desirable species of man, and then to advocate that order, with all the art and science at his disposal.
Nietzsche saw two lines of life: an ascending and a descending line. At the end of the one he pictured an ideal type, robust in mind and body, rich enough in spirit and vigour to make giving and bestowing a necessary condition of its existence ”

“ If the world grows ugly, and Life loses her bloom; if all winds are ill winds, and the sunshine seems sickly and pale; if we turn our eyes dubiously about us, and begin to question the justification of our existence, we may be quite certain that this man, this realist, and his type, are in the ascendancy, and that he it is who is stamping his ugly fist upon our millennium.
For the function of Art is the function of the ruler. It relieves the highest of their burden, so that mediocrity may be twice blessed, and it makes us a people by luring us to a certain kind of Life. ”

“ Lord Henry continued, "that youth makes a universal appeal; it is of interest to everybody. Its peculiar fascination makes it a possession to which none can be indifferent. Do you see that? Do you see how youth has the world's eye upon it,—how, not only in its own, but also in all older generations, it meets with the smile of welcome, of interest, of ready affection? All the world over this is so."
"Yes, yes,—I see," cried Leonetta. ”

“ For it is precisely in the moments of our greatest weakness, when we feel uncertain, when we have made mistakes and know that we have erred, that the preachers against life and the body, and against the fundamental instincts and desires of Mortal Life, will seem to be right, will seem almost to convince us that they are right. Like vultures they wait afar off till they see the body of our trust and hope in life, the corpse of our clean conscience, prostrate on the ground, and then down they swoop and devour the carrion that is their natural food. ”

“ It no longer reflects beauty on reality: it seeks its beauty in reality. And that is why it falls to pieces judged by the standard of Ruler-Art. It cannot bear the fierce light of an art that is intimate with Life and inseparable from Life. In its death-throes it has decked itself with all kinds of metaphysical plumes, in order that it may thus, perhaps, live after death. But these plumes have been used before by dying gods and have proved of no avail. "Virtue for virtue's sake," was the cry of a dying religion. "Art for art's sake," is now the cry of an expiring godlike human function. ”

“ Thus it was the condemnation of modern values, together with the thought of man's being able to surpass himself, which gave Nietzsche the grounds and the necessary strength for abandoning pessimism and embracing that wise optimism which characterises the whole of his works after The Joyful Wisdom.
True, God was dead; but that ought only to make man feel more self-reliant, more creative, prouder. Undoubtedly God was dead: but man could now hold himself responsible for himself. He could now seek a goal in manhood, on earth, and one that was at least within the compass of his powers. ”

“ Watch the career of the girl who sells herself to the modern taskmaster of commerce or industry! Could anything be more tragic? Could any satyr bring about grosser degradation of health and spirits? What sympathy or horror or righteous indignation can you rouse in the moral toads, who inveigh against prostitution, by pointing to the rounded shoulders, the loveless life, the listless eyes, the bloodless cheeks and hands of the typewriter or other machine drudge? ”

“ But, have you ever known, have you ever witnessed at close quarters, the worship of a devoted son for his mother? Have you ever been anywhere near two people, mother and son, who have been bound by that most unique and most passionate of affections, which has made the local interest of old age seem sufficiently vast and full to reconcile the mother to a happy relinquishment of that other interest,—the interest the world feels in youth?"
Still Leonetta gazed into Lord Henry's face, and still Cleopatra kept her eyes thoughtfully on the ground. ”

“ Long before the dawn of the eighteenth century, the very principles that were at the base of European life and aspirations—the principle of the depravity of man, the principle of liberty for liberty's sake, the principle of the pursuit of general truth; and finally, the principle that experience —that is to say, a direct appeal to nature—was the best method of furnishing the mind—all these principles had been leading steadily to one conclusion, and this conclusion Rousseau was the first to embody in his energetic and fulminating protest against culture, tradition, human power and society. ”

“ A firm believer in tradition, law, and order, and, in spite of his opponents' accusations, an undaunted enemy of Anarchy and laisser-aller, he saw in Socialism and Democracy nothing more than two slave organisations for the raising of every individual to his highest power, individuality made as general as possible; or, in other words, Socialism and Democracy meant to Nietzsche the annihilation of all higher aims and hopes. It meant valuing all the weeds and noble plants alike, and with such a valuation, the noble plants, being in the minority, must necessarily suffer and ultimately die out. ”

“ All the exalted emotions that possess an artist at his work, all the solemn misgivings that beset a responsible man when he feels he is determining the future of Man, ought to surge in the breast of him who contemplates matrimony. To feel that emotion which the modern world calls “love” may excuse a man for forming an illicit union, but, alone, it does not justify him in concluding so grave a contract as marriage.
The disadvantages of the monogamic marriage are chiefly confined to its effects upon the individual, and are of a nature that the State can, as a rule, afford to ignore and to waive. ”

“ His face was distraught with indignation and with the bitterness of a thwarted love of mankind; it was also illuminated by the distant dream of a world as he would have it, so that though he brought down his fist on the corner of Sir Joseph's table with some weight, the baronet was too much moved to notice the gesture.
"Things are so bad," he pursued, lightly lowering his voice, "that to have any genuine insight to-day, any special human feeling to-day, means perforce to devote these gifts to the social problem, instead of to art and to beauty. That is the curse of being born into this Age. ”

“ Imagine the jubilation, the feeling of power and the sense of extreme relief that must have filled the hearts of the ancient New Zealanders, when the first great Maori artist arose and said to his brothers and sisters that it was the god of the forests, Tane Mahuta, with his tall trees that had wrenched the sky by force from mother Earth, where once upon a time he used to crush her teeming offspring to death. ”

“ Throughout his life and all his many recantations and revulsions of feeling, he remained faithful to one purpose and to one aim—the elevation of the type man. However bewildered we may become beneath the hail of his epigrams, treating of every momentous question that has ever agitated the human mind, we still can trace this broad principle running through all his works: his desire to elevate man and to make him more worthy of humanity's great past. ”

“ Puritanism, always so hostile to sex, would fondly like one to believe that sex is no longer one of the first considerations of Life, even for women. It would give a good deal, and has given a good deal, to convince everybody that one can “get on without it”! And, indeed, its values and atmosphere have now reared so many thousands of wretched, lank, bloodless and lifeless men and women who can get on without it, and who do get on without it, that quite a large number of people are beginning to believe that Puritanism is right. ”

“ Only in an age like our own could this ridiculous travesty of an artist pass for an artist. It is only in our age that his neurotic touchiness could possibly be mistaken for strength and vigour; and yet there are hundreds of his kind among the painters and sculptors of the day.
Many a student's call to Art, at present, is merely a reminder, on the part of Nature, that he should cultivate restraint and forbearance, and should go in for commerce; for there is a whole universe between such a man and the artist of value. Not that sensitiveness is absent in the real artist ”

“ Society in England seems resolutely determined not to face and answer the question: Is prostitution necessary or unnecessary? If it is necessary to the kind of civilization we have evolved, then the only honourable, the only humane, the only magnanimous course to take, is to face it bravely and honestly, and do all we can for those women who are contributing their lives to a public service, just as we do all we can for soldiers and sailors in war-time, and for all public workers who perform useful and dangerous duties for the public weal. ”

“ It often happens, even in our days, that another world is pictured as by no means a better world, [45] and the healthy and optimistic layman may feel a certain thankfulness to Life and to Humanity. It is then once more that he turns to the artist who has felt the same in a greater degree, who can give him this thing—be it a corner of Life or of Humanity—who can snatch it from the eternal flux and torrent of all things into decay or into death, and who can carve or paint it in a form unchanging for him, in spite of a world of Becoming, of Evolution, and of ebb and flow. ”

“ So intense is this feeling of power and of slavery at the same time, so exquisite is the scale of emotions that run from the bottom note of absolute subjection to a human being to the top note of supreme sovereignty over a human being—so that the girl bids and her bidding is done, and the man bids and his bidding is done—that it is probably the richest experience, as spiritual sensations go, that anyone can have. While it is being undergone the self-preservative instinct of both parties is entirely suspended. ”

“ If in the Europe, and especially in the England of to-day, everybody has a right to every judgment and to every joy; if a certain slavish truthfulness to nature and reality, rawness and ruggedness, have well-nigh wrecked higher aspirations, and if everybody can press his paltry modicum of voice, of thought, of draughtsmanship, of passion and impudence to the fore, and thus spread his portion of mediocrity like dodder over the sacred field of Art ”

“ Noble as they are in themselves, they can claim in addition the highest possible sanction and testimonial that it is possible for a human character to receive—the sanction and testimonial of Human Survival itself, without which no virtue on earth can hope to last or to prevail, and by the side of which the mere applause and approval of one or many generations of men is but as a pair of bellows puffing in the wind. ”

“ Hence, beauty need not impel all men to the river. There are some who, after contemplating it, will feel just near enough to it not to despair altogether of attaining to its level, and this thought will lend them both hope and courage.
The ruler-artist, therefore, in order that his subject-beauty may have some meaning, must be the synthesis of the past and the future of a people. Up to his waist in their spirit, he must mould or paint them the apotheosis of their type. ”

“ There is the prostitution of healthy rosy-fingered youth in hundreds of other walks of life, and nobody, or scarcely anybody, stirs to point it out. The young girls who to-day are sent by their parents at the age of sixteen to twenty to bow their heads for forty-three hours a week before a typewriter, or a ledger, or a stamping, cutting or folding machine, get ill just as quickly, lose their beauty just as surely, and grow depressed and spiritless just as rapidly, as the sexual prostitute, and they get only a sixteenth or less of the prostitute’s entertainment out of life into the bargain. ”

“ It is separating Art from Life, and it is relegating it to a sphere—a Beyond—where other things, stronger than Art, have already been known to die. The notion of art for art's sake can only arise in an age when the purpose of Art is no longer known, when its relation to Life has ceased from being recognized, and when artists have grown too weak to find the realization of their will in their works. ”

“ To watch the face of an elderly, negative spinster when a really healthy boy loses his temper, is to witness in one human countenance the whole history of the long conflict between those vultures of which I have spoken and the artless yea-sayer to Life.
Later on, if he is carefully handled, this boy will take his love seriously; he will cling to the girl he chooses in a manner that will make that same spinster marvel at his determination, and he will be as fierce and as serious in his desire for the woman of his choice as he once was over his games, over his hates, and over his meals. ”