J. B. Priestley

“ If it is Madame Nature who gives us the truth, who sets up the standard by which our talk must be judged, then there is hardly room in this universe for bold lying and no man should be accused of it.
The great poets follow Nature as closely in this love of the hyperbole as they do in other matters. It is your little poets, your timid versifiers, who write in fear of the raised eyebrows of the pedant and the guffaw of the unimaginative, and keep their images down to the level of coffee-room gossip. ”

“ Go to the cards, and see existence woven madly in black and crimson—The life they present knows nothing of boredom, for no card in all the pack stands for such a thing—Go read the cards! As for myself, I have but one confession to make: I dare not play at cards now, for they are fraught with such significance to me that I could not trifle with them in a mere game. I cannot rid them of their meanings, and while others are thinking of nothing but winning tricks, I see myself, and my unconscious colleagues, playing havoc with the destinies of dark ladies and fair men. ”

“ I have never played a mouth-organ, because I know that my own native optimism would not be strong enough to resist the baneful influence of the music it makes. To hear it now and again is more than enough for me.
To one who is filled with the joy of life—a small boy, for example—such hopeless strains may prove only invigorating, may serve as a wholesome check upon his ebullient spirits, like the skeleton at the Egyptian feasts. But to most of us weaker brethren, frail in spirit, music that is unillumined by even a glimmer of hope is intolerable. ”

“ Once I am a little way out of the town it is as if the world had been swept clean of men. I pass a few young mothers, who are proudly ushering their round-eyed solemn babes into the presence of the morning sun, a lumbering cart or two, and maybe a knot of labourers, who look up from their task with humorous resignation in their faces; these and others I overtake and pass by, and then there is often an end of my fellows. I alone keep a lounging tryst with the sun, himself, I fancy, a mighty, genial idler and the father of all dreamers and idlers among men. ”

“ I believe that at the very end, when the depths of our folly and ignorance are fully revealed, when all our false notes have been cast up into one awful total by the recording angel of music, it will be found that we, the bad pianists, have been misjudged among men, that we, too, have loved and laboured for the divine art. When we file into Elysium, forlorn, scared, a shabby little band, and come within sight of Beethoven, whom we have murdered so many times, I believe that a smile will break through the thunder-cloud of his face. ”

“ Thus, if we went to science, in one or other of its various branches, for a minute description of a red rose, a glass of wine, a wonderful sunset, or a lovely child, the result, in every instance, would seem to be an outlandish thing of horror. So it is with the universe; when we can apprehend it as we can a rose or a sunset, not through science but through the poetry that saturates our being, we shall see the universe in all its majesty and splendour, with all its blazing multi-coloured suns, strange planets and wild moons, moving in the endless dance. ”

“ Many men had his respect, even his homage, but as an editor—and I never knew him as anything else—he would allow no man to dictate to him; he served only the Public and ‘those few great principles.’ ‘An editor,’ he would say, tapping a sheet of paper with his glasses, ‘is the servant of the Public although his duty is to educate it.’ And his innocent vanity would swell out into such monstrous proportions, would bud and blossom into such foolish phrases, that his hearer would wonder if he had suddenly strayed into the rigid world of the third-rate comic novel. ”

“ But mark how little of a man’s life he can explain, no matter how often he opens the doors and searches the dusty lumber rooms of his mind. There was no reason, in or out of nature, for my first mood of depression. And, to me, there would seem as little reason for the sudden change, the momentary exultation, and the pleasant aftermath. At times the sight of a mountain of felicity will not raise a man’s spirits; at other times, if his foot trips over a molehill, he will cry out in ecstasy at the goodness of life. ”

“ But while so much is conceded to frail human nature, the earnest young people who read Ambition cannot have their minds stuffed with any glittering nonsense, love stories, tales of piracy, and the like; if there is to be fiction, it must be of one kind only. The hero must not be some absurd swashbuckler, the prey of we know not what romantic whims and fancies; he must be a good, solid young fellow ‘who advances in position and earnings through study of a trade or profession by means of a correspondence course.’ Well told, the story of such an enterprising youth must be worth any man’s reading. ”

“ As a husband and family man Mathew would have been admirable and still the very soul of hospitality, but, you may depend upon it, he would never have carried out his astonishing scheme, never have had his coffee-house and tavern and what not at Thomastown, never have come down to us as one of the most delightful eccentrics of his age. As it was, the life at Thomastown was a purely masculine affair, as remote from femininity as that of a monastery or a college, and better than either, where men not desperately in love could ‘fleet the time carelessly,’ away from their ladies’ eyes. ”

“ Nothing that has been arranged for the piano or that can be played in some sort of fashion on the instrument comes amiss if it has once aroused our enthusiasm; symphonies, operas, tone-poems, string-quartets are all welcome. Nay, we often prefer the arrangements of orchestral things, for we do not think of the piano merely as a solo instrument; to us it is the shining ivory and ebony gateway to the land of music. As our fingers wander over the keys our great dream-orchestras waken to life. ”

“ A few hours’ sleep or a brisk walk destroys the whole mournful fabric, and we step out lively as before. A few misguided men, having much to do with these things, make some sort of a creed of such folly, and angrily deny that man has an immortal soul. In this they are wise according to their lights, for believing themselves to be caged in such a universe their only hope lies in a speedy extinction. The soul has no better place in their dreary cosmos than a skylark would have in a Birmingham factory.
Blake was once at a friend’s house when the talk turned on the vastness of Space. ”

“ Now, it is enthusiasm alone that carries us through. Our performance of any ‘piece of average difficulty’ (as the publishers say) is nothing short of a series of miracles. As we peer at the music and urge our fingers to scurry over the keys, horrid gulfs yawn before us, great rocks come crashing down, the thick undergrowth is full of pitfalls and mantraps, but we are not to be deterred. Though we do not know what notes are coming next, or what fingers we shall use, if the music says presto, then presto it must be; the spirit of the tune must be set free, however its flesh may be lacerated. ”

“ A book may be a vain thing, but it knows nothing of that swelling vanity which belongs to us alone, and to creators more than most. This apart, we must discriminate between good and bad authors. A writer who has been unsuccessful in his art, one who is not master of his craft, a bad author in fact, may be, and very often is, better than his books. An encounter with such a one will not be sought after, except by the wise few, but it may very well bring surprise and delight in its train. ”

“ With the dwindling of time and the shedding of illusions, their imagination has ceased to minister to their vanity. They require some confirmation from the world of their good opinion of themselves. Now that the far horizons, infinitely beguiling in youth, have vanished, the world itself shines more brightly against the steadily deepening background, and a dedication, a respectful hearing, a salute here, some little notice there, these become matters of some moment; they warm the heart when all other fires are being heaped with pale ashes. ”

“ It is only on the score of technique, the mere rule of thumb business, that we stand below the serious amateurs; we belong to a higher order of beings and have grander souls; in spirit we come nearer to the great masters. The motives of the serious amateur are not above suspicion. In his assiduous practice, his limited repertoire, his studied semi-public style of performance, is there not a suggestion of vanity? Is his conscious parade of skill, taken along with his fear of unknown works, the mark of a selfless devotion to music, and music alone? ”

“ Nevertheless, I have just discovered a man who, considered simply as a host, seems to me greater than even Old Wardle himself. Life has a knack of over-reaching letters, and so it chances that my candidate is no mere character of fiction, dispensing the vast but insubstantial hospitality born of a novelist’s flow of fancy and ink, but one who was a real—a very real—person in his day. ”

“ For myself, not only from my obedience, but my particular genius, I do embrace it; for even that vulgar and tavern-music, which makes one man merry, another mad, strikes in me a deep fit of devotion, and a profound contemplation of the first composer.’
But these mouth-organ strains will make a man neither mad nor merry, nor yet strike in him a deep fit of devotion; but if his ear is like mine, they will make him sink into depression and dye his world a ghastly blue. ”

“ Our gossip and scandal is a grub, which in a hundred years’ time, with the advent of the historian, will become a chrysalis; and in four or five hundred years’ time, the hard shell will be burst open, and there will be seen the winged splendour of epic poetry or romantic drama. Have not all the subjects of history and epic poetry once been nothing more than eager talk in the court or the kitchen? ”

“ It is true that a man may rant it and roar it with the best, may try to scale Parnassus as the Titans did Olympus and pile up gigantic image upon image, and yet be no poet; but it is equally true to say that all great poets have shown the same love of amazing hyperboles. Those extraordinary persons who hate a swelling image, a genial exaggeration, who distrust the hyperbole, may read their Shakespeare (though I doubt it) but they cannot read him with constant pleasure. ”

“ Men, who have had more say in public if less in private, have always been prompt to accuse women of devoting too much of their time and energy to this dubious sport. Gossip, they have declared, is woman’s greatest pastime. But here at least our feminists, who have spluttered over so many imaginary wrongs, have passed by one undoubted grievance, for the truth is, men are as much given to gossiping as women. Man’s talk may sound more important because it involves wider interests, yet a good deal of it is nothing more nor less than gossip. ”

“ They appear to think that we distort their trumpery figures or enlarge a statement here and there, for no purpose whatever, but from sheer carelessness, lack of memory, or a mischievous love of lying. They are wrong and it is easy to see why. Such quibblers do not understand the working of the imagination; they have yet to learn that good talk is a form of art, and that exaggeration is one of art’s great devices, a worthy part of its process of selection and emphasis, by which any number of petty details are brought into unity and made to serve great purposes. ”

“ I may be wrong, and it is quite possible that I do Garrick an injustice, but that matters little, in no way detracting from the newly burnished fame of our friend from York.
At the time when Frodsham determined to take a holiday in London, Garrick was at Drury Lane, and at the very height of his fame. Adulation was his daily food, and no flattery was too gross for him to swallow. A chorus of praise from high and low followed him everywhere; he could do nothing wrong; and, it goes without saying, he could make the fortune of a fellow actor with a nod of his head. ”

“ But one would have thought that the readers of Ambition, grimly practical fellows, every one of them essentially ‘a man of this world,’ were above the mere trifling of the story-teller, that they were ready, nay, eager, to face the stern facts, the naked issues of life, without calling in the writer of fiction to beguile and comfort them with his cunning old tricks. But no, even in this bleak and forbidding region, the story-teller is welcomed; the ancient craft is not allowed to perish even in these high altitudes. ”

“ It is a monstrously silly fable that the aged are indifferent to praise, position and honour, that they have outgrown the little vanities of the world. The fact that a few old men have retired from the world because they were weary and infirm does not support the legend; and one has only to listen to their talk to discover how far such ancients have got beyond vanity. As for your active old men, they ceaselessly bestir themselves in pursuit of notice and applause. ”

“ The road, for all its thick drift of leaves, deep gold and brown, at either side, seems to lie naked in the sunshine, and I drink in this unexpected solitude as eagerly as a dusty traveller takes his ale. For a time, it comes as a delectable and quickening draught, and though outwardly a sober, meditative, almost melancholy pedestrian, I hold high festival in the spirit, drink deep, and revel with the younger gods.
One of the greatest dangers of living in large towns is that we have too many neighbours and human fellowship is too cheap. We are apt to become wearied of humanity ”

“ That slight but distinctly uncomfortable sense of inferiority which we may possibly have felt in the actual presence of Jones is now compensated for by a marked sense of our own superiority and a glow of self-satisfaction.
Unless we are on our guard, we are ready to sacrifice victim after victim for the sake of this delectable but transitory feeling. Every night, in countless drawing-rooms, knives are reddened and altars smoke to propitiate this dark god of self-righteousness. And the victim of this dreadful worship is too often young and open-hearted and beautiful—and a woman. ”

“ Give me a restless hour or two in bed and I can solve, to my own satisfaction, all the doubts of humanity. When I am in the humour I can compose grand symphonies, and paint magnificent pictures. I am, at once, Shakespeare, Beethoven, and Michael Angelo; yet it gives me no satisfaction; for the one thing I cannot do is to go to sleep.
Once in bed, when it is time to close the five ports of knowledge, most folks I know seem to find no difficulty in plunging their earthly parts into oblivion. ”

“ I was visiting the weekly fair in a pleasant little town, and had joined the crowd of country folks drifting about the stalls in the market square, when, suddenly, a mighty voice burst forth from the centre of a group of persons huddled in a far corner. In the country, where the long days are filled with the sight and sound of the lower creatures, there is no resisting this eruptive clamour of a human voice for an audience, and, along with others, I hurried to join the thickening press of folk in the corner. ”

“ But, according to science, one is a nightmare of space, the other a putrescent cinder. This may be the truth for science, in which there are no nightmares, but it is not the truth for us. Science, with all its data and phenomena, appeals only to one small part of a man, but the ultimate truth must appeal to the whole man, to the emotional, reasoning, moral, imaginative creature with an immortal soul. ”