Israel Zangwill

“ What we demand from preaching—as from newspapers—is an echo of our own voices, and when the preacher or the newspaper leads it is only by pretending to follow. Opportunity makes the politician. Watch the crowd streaming out of church after a sermon. Do they wear an air of edification or humiliation? Are they bowed down with the consciousness of their backslidings? No: they are aesthetes come from a literary and oratorical performance. They are not thinking of themselves at all, but of the quality of the sermon. Yes, around each of us the world turns, and each soul is the hub of the universe. ”

“ Such is the transmutation of time, which can colour with poetry things much more prosaic than life in ancient Venice. Nothing of us that doth fade
But doth, suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Poets and seers feel the richness and strangeness of the life that is passing under their very eyes. With Maeterlinck it is the mystery, with Stevenson the colour, with Wordsworth the divinity. To see the glamour of the contemporary is the note of your modern. ”

“ Let us remember, then, ideals are goads and goals, counsels of perfection. No one expects people to come quite up to them, but it is better for human nature that they should be there. For there is something in hero-worship, despite Carlyle's grandiosities, provided you choose your hero wisely. We do, in this valley of doubt and confusion, touched with false sparkles, follow men who speak from their souls sincerely, who work from their hearts. Instinctively we feel it degrading and disillusionising that inspiration shall be paid in hard cash, and genius entered on the credit side of a ledger. ”

“ It is a great joy to give an artist the joy of being understood. Not every artist arrives at the divine standpoint: "And God saw all that He made, and behold it was very good." The human creator is not always content with the rapture of creation. He sits lonely amid his worlds. Neglect may be the nurse of strength, but as often it is the handmaid of idleness. The artist without an audience will smoke the enchanted cigarettes of Balzac. The rough labour of execution is largely the labour of conveying to others what the artist already feels and sees. ”

“ Imagine a great writer being called upon to produce a black-and-white picture of a man of no importance: Let us imagine, say Meredith, being offered a thousand pounds for a pen-and-ink portrait of a provincial mayor—being asked to devote his graphic art, his felicitous choice of words, his gifts of insight and sympathy, his genius, in a word, to the portrayal of a real live mayor—the same to be published in book-form, asked for at the libraries, and discussed at dinner-tables and in the reviews as a specimen of the season's art. ”

“ There is no glory in being a dweller in so amorphous a city, whose motley floating population is alone sufficient to stock a town; there can be no sense of brotherhood in meeting a Londoner abroad, still less a Middlesex or Surrey man. Devonians may feast off junkets and cream, in touching fellowship, and the hearts of Edinburgh men stir with common memories of Princes Street; but a Cockney, who has far more to be proud of, is overwhelmed into apathy. It is only in a compact city that one can develop that sense of special belonging which George Eliot contends is at the root of so many virtues. ”

“ VIII IN DEFENCE OF GAMBLING Without gambling life would lose its salt in many a humble household. The humdrum, deadening routine of monotonous daily toil finds relief by this creation of an outside interest; to have a shilling on the favourite enlarges and colours existence, gives it a wider and vaguer horizon. Imagine the delicious anguish of suspense, the excitement of hearing the result, the exultation of winning. And the beauty of gambling is that you cannot lose. Gambling is really a disguised system of purchase. ”

“ For this dying century of ours is all things to all men. We are living in the most picturesque confusion of the old and new known to history—in a cross-road of chronology where all the ages meet. 'T is a confusion of tongues outbabbling Babel, a simultaneous chattering of the centuries. And, more troubled than the Tower-builders, we understand, one another better than we understand ourselves; again, like "The Charlatan," half odic force, half fraud, who is never so honest as when he confesses himself charlatan. ”

“ What a pity that life is so stern and severe, that for the light morality of Bohemia somebody must pay, some life be wrecked! Nature fills us with youth and romance, but for her own purposes only. She is the great matrimonial agent, and heavy is the penalty she exacts from those who would escape her books, and extract from life more poetry than it holds. And so the beautiful roselight of Bohemia veils many a tragedy, many a treachery. Yet will the grisette be ever a gracious memory, and literature will always embalm the "Mimi Pinson" of De Musset. ”

“ Every gleam of light will be eagerly sought for, every ray focussed; every hint of love and pity and beauty, of significance and divinity, in this infinite and infinitely mysterious universe, will be eagerly snatched up and thrust upon an age hide-bound in orthodoxy; every touch and trace of tenderness that softens suffering and sweetens the bitterness of death, will be treasured up in secret mistrust of the reigning creed ”

“ Happy the unlettered and the inartistic, to whom even the picturesque person is a person, who can think of olive oil when he sees the olive-trees weaving their graceful patterns above the stone walls, and can watch the sun set in lurid splendour behind the purple mountains with never a thought of Turner or Childe Harold!
For modern civilised beings, in incessant relations with the reflections of life through literature and art, it is difficult to receive any impressions which do not re-reflect what lies in the mirror of art. ”

“ For the Venice of every day is a dead city, with nothing left of its ancient glories but wealth. Though the millions be reckoned in lire, there are over a hundred millionaires in Venice. But of that mighty artistic and religious impulse which produced countless churches and palaces, pictures and frescoes, which strewed the very street walls with spirited sculpture, and warmed even parochial offices with priceless paintings, there is as little trace as of the indomitable energy that founded a great Republic on wooden piles and guarded it from the sea by dykes and from its enemies by the sea. ”

“ At the Place de la Nation the fun grows thicker: there is a rain of confetti, and everybody comes out in coloured spots; the switchback is busy, chairs mount and descend on ropes, and there is a bunch of balloons; on a platform outside a booth a showman beats a drum, the riding-master cracks his whip, and ladies of uncertain ages and exuberant busts smile all day in evening dress; in the neighbouring Cirque the Ball of the City of Paris is whirling noisily. Yes, life goes on in the old, old way in the land of equality and brotherhood ”

“ Limiting ourselves, then, to these two main varieties of the artistic temperament, the active and the passive, I should say that the latter is an unmixed blessing, and the former a mixed curse.
What, indeed, can be more delightful than to possess good aesthetic faculties—to be able to enjoy books, music, pictures, plays! This artistic sensibility is the one undoubted advantage of man over other animals, the extra octave in the gamut of life. Most enviable of mankind is the appreciative person, without a scrap of originality? who has every temptation to enjoy, and none to create. ”

“ Such success as the Antwerp Exhibition has won is a success of side-shows; a panorama of camels and dancing-girls defiles before my eyes, my ears are yet ringing with the barbarous music and incantations of the Orient. Old Antwerp rises picturesque, with its burghers and warriors; the glorious picture galleries stretch away, overladen with artistic treasure; the mimic elephant mounts, mammoth-like, to the skies; the grounds and the façades of the buildings gleam fairy-like in the soft night air, with a million illuminations ”