Edmund Wilson

“ In the first place, Mr Barry takes the inhabitants of his country house for very smart and cultivated people when they are actually half-baked in the extreme. You think he is going to study them seriously, then you discover that he shares their view of themselves—that he is impressed by their suburban luxuries and ravished by their silly-clever wit—a wit which is only one of the means such people employ to make agreeable the banality of their lives—like curtains of flowered chintz and little electric wall-lamps. ”

“ His forthcoming history of Rome should be of unusual interest. My only objection to his portrait of Virgil would be that he has concerned himself almost entirely with the events of Virgil's public life and the development of his ideas; he makes no psychological portrait; you hear nothing of Virgil's emotional life—about which his poetry suggests some curious speculations. I suppose someone will presently psycho-analyse him and poor pius Aeneas and his dreams will stand naked in the lecture-room.
But in the meantime, what is of prime importance is to maintain Virgil's reputation as a poet. ”

“ The Italian ones still have some of the naïve charm of the pre-realistic world. And their performance, unlike that of Mr Sarg's, is throughout enlivened with music; instead of a play with dreary spoken speeches, there is the score of a little opera by Cesar Cui. But I really can't see a whole evening of marionettes for anybody but children; I don't know how they have got such a reputation in New York as an exotic and delightful form of entertainment. No person over the age of twelve should ever allow himself to get let in for a marionette performance. ”

“ They have reckoned without the great principle—amply illustrated by Helen of Troy—that the stupid jokes of clever people can never hope to be so successful as the stupid jokes of stupid people. Clever people have a way of spoiling banality by betraying that they do not believe in it. ”

“ But in Congreve and in Wycherley all the conventional values are inverted: it is the holiday of the worldly and it has all the exhilaration of a holiday. What could be more gratifying and more cheerful than these husbands and wives who are never faithful, these young men whose intentions are never honourable, these coquettes who never want to marry? ”

“ I don't see why the essentially truthful, if rather squalid, tragedy of The God of Vengeance should be banished from the New York stage while it is permitted to teach people that God is good because, in a war where seven million men were killed, He has rescued one woman's lover. ”

“ Congreve and Wycherley were the supreme glorification of Joseph Surface's point of view, except that with them Joseph Surface was not under the necessity of becoming a hypocrite as well ad a cynic: he is frankly out to seduce an attractive woman or to induce a rich one to marry him. And this, expressed with far greater intensity and with far more literary brilliance than Sheridan was ever able to muster, is what gives the comedy of the Restoration its unique importance. ”

“ We shy instinctively at Virgil in later life, just as we do at the Bible, because we remember it as something intolerably dreary and largely unintelligible which we had to slave over during pleasant afternoons when we would much rather have been doing something else. ”

“ Every line is a technical triumph; every word is the right word. Even when the subject is quite dull or prosaic, as it not infrequently is, the poet has bent all his energy to presenting it in the most intense and concentrated form and in a manner exactly suited to the matter. ”

“ What books on war are likely to be read by the educated young people of the next generation? Not the movie-poster propaganda of the press bureaus, but the books I have mentioned above. There are scarcely any other literary works which can be conceived as having a chance of survival; the well-written books of the war, if they are not detached and prosaic like Mr Boyd's, are in general either the saddened reflections of non-combatant older writers—like Masefield's history of Gallipoli or Kipling's epitaphs for dead soldiers ”

“ She has a gift for swift changes of mood—rather perhaps when she is dancing than when she is acting—which in its sureness and its distinction even recalls a little Yvette Guilbert. Light and shadow, awkwardness and grace flutter her tiny figure like a breeze. One wonders if she will not be able to develop material which will enable her to appear to even better advantage. ”

“ I have just seen this play for the first time after its triumphant run of a whole season and I protest that it contains the most frightful moral idea I have ever encountered on stage or screen—and it is only the other day that I saw a movie heroine not only restored to perfect tranquillity herself, but also completely cleared of guilt in the eyes of everybody else by discovering that her husband, whom she had tried to poison, had actually died from some other cause. In Seventh Heaven Mr Austin Strong shows us a faithful little French gamine who falls in love with an atheist street-cleaner. ”

“ What is most memorable in the Georgics?—a poem which is supposed to have been written as a glorification of the country, a piece of officially inspired propaganda for a back-to-the-land movement. Not, to my taste at any rate, the conscientious exaltation of Bacchus nor the elegant and rather conventional "O fortunatos nimium" passage; in this latter he speaks of the "secura quies et nescia fallere vita," but the net effect of his poem is to make you feel with extreme poignancy that the country life like any other both deceives and fails mankind. ”

“ And Palinurus, even before he reaches Hades and in relating the simple story of his death seems to breathe the pathos of the frustration of all human endeavour, moves already in the vagueness of a dream—all alone on the sleeping sea, tempted softly between sleeping and waking by the bodiless voices of the night. ”

“ You will say perhaps that this is a mere tour de force which no serious poet should ever have attempted, that Virgil might better have gone on writing brief pastorals, like the Eclogues, all his life. But there is a genuine poetic emotion which carries off both the Georgics and the Aeneid, though it is not of precisely the same lyric character as the lacrimae rerum. It is the devotion to the idea of Rome. It is a little hard for us in twentieth century America to understand this intense enthusiasm for an official political and social ideal ”

“ No real conflict takes place between her and Aeneas because Aeneas is completely indifferent; he seems to have no reactions at all one way or the other; and one cannot escape the notion that the poet himself shared not a little of the indifference of his hero. I see no reason for believing that Virgil, whom the Neapolitans called Parthenias, was especially interested in women or that he was emotionally capable of dramatizing the Aeneas-Dido situation. ”

“ With the World War Barbusse burst his bombshell of naturalism compounded with humanitarianism and Dos Passos drew on Barbusse and Stendhal for a more local bombshell of his own. Finally Mr Boyd has rewritten The Red Badge of Courage, which I am told he had never read, as Crane had rewritten La Chartreuse de Parme, which I dare say he had never read either. It is not merely a literary trick which they have all learnt, but a common way of thinking which they have arrived at. And it is a way of thinking which in the future may make the melodramatization of war more and more difficult. ”

“ The spiritualist-detective play Zeno, which combines the sinister excitement of melodrama with the agreeable surprise of a conjuring performance. In this play, a man who wants to rob a safe commits a dangerous murder, stages a fake spiritualistic seance, fills the pockets of a whole assemblage of people with objects designed falsely to cast suspicion on them, and with the aid of a whole army of accomplices succeeds in installing highly complicated mechanical devices in a house in which people are living. ”

“ Aren't We All? is an amusing enough little English comedy which would be more amusing if it were less good-natured. The Winter Garden has some good comedians, but very few funny ideas. Helen of Troy, New York, a musical comedy by Connelly and Kaufman, is only mildly amusing in itself. ”

“ What could be more bracing than this contact with a world where the most primitive of human instincts are subjected in their nakedness to the scrutiny of the subtlest and most civilized intelligence, where there is no intermediary of the spirit to bridge the gulf between the mind and the body, where there is no obscurement by romantic emotion either savage or sentimental? ”

“ The father who having smothered his own artistic ambitions by a money-making career allows his son to do the same thing just at the moment when he is himself most keenly feeling his own futility, and who after becoming at the end of years one of the mainstays of a large soap company is unable to take a year's vacation without being in danger of losing his job! ”

“ No doubt Professor Frank is very certain about a great many things which no one can know anything about—since the evidence on Roman civilization seems so incomplete as actually to make certainties in matters of this kind very difficult, at the same time that it is considerable enough to arouse scholars with a gift for the fiction of historical criticism into constructing any number of equally plausible and directly contradictory legends ”

“ They engage in it without spirit and their lack of enthusiasm usually shows. Right against a gag aimed at the boobs they will write a sarcasm intended for the intelligent, with the result that the latter are left unsatisfied while the fun has been spoiled for the former. I believe that the authors of Helen of Troy would have been more successful in having the complete courage of their convictions than in at- tempting to guarantee themselves against failure by dragging in all the old tricks. ”

“ It is a sad struggle to wring a living from Nature: the sun dries up your crops; your orchards catch fire and burn down; your cattle get stung by snakes or are wiped out by the plague. All the greatest things in the Georgics are tragic: the description of northern Italy laid waste with the cattle-plague—desertaque regna Pastorum, et longe saltus lateque vacantes ”

“ This is a prospect which, I suppose, will be hailed with cheers by Mr Matthew Josephson, who regards the advertisers as the genuine artists and the people who object to the commercial ideal as contemptible "small persecuted colonies"; but I confess I am on the side of the persecuted. I cannot get over the idea that people who pursue the arts for their own sake deserve more respect than the people who hire themselves out as ballyhoos for breakfast foods and deodorants. ”

“ But what shall be said of the grand manner, which has been so savagely outlawed among us since the realists and the imagists have declared war upon rhetoric—which seems to prevent many intelligent people from supposing that there can be anything in Virgil at all? ”

“ The new acts which have been substituted are not only, in general, more interesting than the old, but they also fit better in the Follies: in almost every case, you have a high pressure act substituted for a vague or slowly moving one. ”

“ For the rest, I don't mind having dogs and seals and even elephants trained to do tricks, but I do object to sulky lions and tigers badgered into jumping over each other. Lions and tigers, like domestic cats, have no feeling for human games; they cannot enter into the spirit of the thing. Where a seal will dance about on a spring-board and bark eagerly for fish, a tiger has to be driven with a whip and a revolver fired off in its face ”

“ The advertisers have already laid waste the countryside, achieved a censorship over the contents of magazines, and reduced the works of the great artists and savants to finely printed little blocks of text, which are used to wad out large pages on Campbell's Soup and Vacuum Cup Tires, and now, it appears, they are beginning to determine the character of theatrical entertainment. It is not inconceivable that the day will come when works of art of all kinds will be produced to promote the sale of motor-cars and canned salad dressing. ”

“ For the rest, the rôle of the younger brother, whom the text makes nothing worse than thick-witted, is not only perverted into a village idiot part, but is doubly ruined by an actor who has obviously no gift for idiocy, but looks as if he would be far more at home as a brilliant young Member of Parliament in an English drawing-room drama. ”

“ The Roman Empire, to be sure, dignified its conquests with a noble ideal (parcere subjectis et debellare superbos) ; but by the chaos of the Middle Ages common sense was revolted again and great men from Dante to Kant devoted much thought to European peace: the religious wars provoked the satire of Erasmus and Grotius' foundations of international law, and as comment on the War of the Spanish Succession you had Swift's pamphlet on The Conduct of the Allies and Southey's poem about little Peterkin finding the skull from the Battle of Blenheim ”

“ Williams finally snatches the stick away from him and bashes him with it over the head, but the baton only bends in two and the demon remains unscathed. There is nothing for the poor gentleman to do but to hand it back politely. ”

“ When he first comes on there is no spotlight and he has to shout to the electrician; he desires to sing a song, but his voice is not quite strong enough, and when he does get under way his silk hat begins slipping off. ”

“ It is also the period when the dramatic critics, after the theatrical intermission of the summer, return with appetites refreshed and appreciation revived. They enjoy an indifferent play more in August than they do a good one in May. ”

“ It is the period when there are a great many openings and almost nothing that is worth seeing. It is the period when theatres are easy to rent and when they are consequently used for trying out all sorts of dubious and abortive productions with limited means at their disposal. ”