Various

“ Since even as Hermes mocked the Lord of the Unerring Bow, so is genius mocked of the world, when it has bartered the herds, and the grain, and the rod that metes wealth, for the seven chords that no ear, dully mortal, can hear.
He can bend great thoughts to take the shapes that he choose, as the chained god in Pherae bound the strong kings of the desert and forest to carry his yoke; yet, like the god, he likewise stands fettered to the mill to grind for bread.
Ouida.
“IF LOVE WERE ALL.”
(PRISONER OF ZENDA.)
“If love were all!” ”

“ The province of Art is not to present a specific message, but to impart a feeling. If we go home from the Lyceum hushed, treading on air, we have heard Oratory, even though we cannot recall a single sentence; and if we read a poem that brings the unbidden tears and makes the room seem a sacred chancel, we have read Literature. The Master has imparted to our spirits a tithe of his own sublimity of soul.
For the good old ladies who prick the Bible for a message I have a profound sympathy: the Sacred Page fits man’s every mood, and this is why it is immortal. ”

“ Were I an instructor in a Commercial College, I might advise that in business correspondence there should be clearness and force and elegance; but if I were a Professor of Literature and Oratory, I would not smother inspiration in a formula. I would say, Cultivate the heart and intellect, and allow nature to do the rest. For while it is still a mooted question whether a man’s offspring after the flesh are heirs to his mental and spiritual qualities, it is very sure that the children of his brain are partakers in whatsoever virtue that his soul possesses. ”

“ The Boston Commonwealth (what satire there is in that name!) is a nice paper, but its editor has not smiled for forty years; and all of his little writers carry so much culture that they are round-shouldered, flat-chested, bow-legged and near-sighted. They belong to the large class that invariably miss the point of things and use dignity for a mask to hide their lack of a sense of fun. The Commonwealth accuses us of being envious of the Chip-Munk; of being violently prejudiced against Mr. Cudahy’s book, and of speaking irreverently of Boston. ”

“ How can we have great art in our day? We have no faith. Belief of some sort is the life-blood of art. When Athene and Zeus ceased to excite [75] veneration in the minds of men, sculpture and architecture both lost their greatness. When the Madonna and her Son lost that mystery and divinity, which for the simple minds of the early painters they possessed, the soul went out of canvas and of wood. When we carve a Venus now, she is but a frivolous woman; when we paint a Jesus now, it is but a little suckling, or a sorrowful prisoner. ”

“ Literature is the noblest of all the arts. Music dies on the air, or at best exists only as a memory; oratory ceases with the effort; the painter’s colors fade and the canvas rots; the marble is dragged from its pedestal and is broken into fragments; but [24] the Index Expurgatorius is as naught, and the books burned by the fires of the auto da fe still live. Literature is reproduced ten thousand times ten thousand and lodges its appeal with posterity. It dedicates itself to Time. ”

“ It is meat and drink to the modest Literary Aspirant to see himself in type, even if his “effort” is served with a few modifications in style, but when he beholds the offspring of his genius scalped on the crown, shorn on each side, and whittled down to a sickly wedge of small talk at the close, the swift flow of interesting narrative converted to a sluggish bayou with the cream ideas carefully skimmed from its surface and discarded, he stares helplessly at the title and signature, which are all the recognizable features left, and resolves to become—a kicker. ”

“ Will human ears give heed to thy song now thy sceptre has passed to my hands? Immortal music only is left thee, and the vision foreseeing the future. O god! O hero! O fool! what shall these profit thee now?”
Thus to the artist by whom they had been begotten the dim white shapes of the deities sometimes speak. Thus he sees them, thus he hears, whilst the pale and watery sunlight lights up the form of [76] the toiler in Pherae. For even as it was with the divinity of Delos, so is it likewise with the genius of a man, which, being born of a god, yet is bound as a slave to the grind-stone. ”

“ You have, it seems, now set your little hearts much on Education. You will have education for all men and women now, and for all boys and girls that are to be. Nothing, indeed, can be more desirable, if only we determine also what kind of education they are to have. It is taken for granted that any education must be good; that the more of it we get, the better; that bad education only means little education; and that the worst thing we have to fear is getting none. Alas, that is not at all so. Getting no education is by no means the worst thing that can happen to us. ”

“ Ford does not tell his young people of a literary shop that stifles more genius than the verse works in Jersey City or the anglomaniac reminiscence mills on Union Square. He has forgotten the metropolitan paper that counts its pages by the ream. What the exclusive clique-ridden magazine discourages by closed doors the Sunday maelstrom swallows alive. The glory of bigness is the destruction of individuality in literary work. The brand of the sweat shop is on all the yawning jaws consume—like the slaver cm the boa’s feast. ”

“ Like cyclones, fashions have a spiral movement; and now the good old custom of the presciences has returned, and like the cyclone, manifests itself in the West: a Chicago woman giving a weekly “Thursday Morning.” The bed on which the hostess languishes is a Louis the Fourteen Times—a gigantic four poster, with curtains partially drawn. When each caller is announced a thin blue-veined hand is held out from behind the curtains, and visions of a snowy lace-trimmed, Marchale Field night gown swim before his eyes as the thin hand is reverently kissed. ”

“ It is far different, however, when trusting in an author’s name or at least in the imprint of a publisher of high standing, a man takes up a book which he has bought in the expectation of finding it a readable or at all events a genuine novel, but soon discovers it to be a string of sausages, whose thin membrane of such romance as it does afford exists merely to encase a solid stuffing of railroad advertisements, “scenic route” business and such secondhand truck. ”

“ And their work lives after them; the little towns are all grey and still and half peopled now; the iris grows on the ramparts, the canes wave in the moats, the shadows sleep in the silent market-place, the great convents shelter half a dozen monks, the dim majestic churches are damp and desolate, and have the scent of the sepulchre.
But there, above the altars, the wife lives in the Madonna and the child smiles in the Angel, and the olive and the wheat are fadeless on their ground of gold and blue ”

“ Everywhere genius becomes conservative and sterile; art grows self-conscious and measures achievement by technical difficulties; ceremonial binds social life; law protects artificial privilege; religion is refined into theology or materialized into idolatry; hospitality becomes an exchange, and the humanities are buried alive under their own machinery. They who protest, who exalt purpose and measure achievement thereby, are called Philistines.
They realize the finiteness of all created things. They see evolution in all, and hold naught that is finite to be final. ”

“ In the name of all who have hated shams, in the name of all brave knights whose lances have shivered against the dead walls of human stupidity, ignorance, malice and convention; in the name of every stifled and unuttered song that should have mounted like a meadow lark’s to heaven; in the name of every pilloried hope and dead ambition killed in the long battle with the Mediocrities and the Banalities greet thee, Knight Errant from Philistia, and bid thee God speed. ”

“ Writers of different schools exist because their style fits the mind of a certain style of reader. The sprightly, animated picturesqueness, the play of wit and flights of imagination are only a full expression of what many faintly feel. Thus their mood is mirrored and their thought expressed: hence they are pleased.
In fact the only reason why we like a writer is because he expresses our thought in a way we like. And the reason we dislike a writer is because he deals in that which is not ours. ”

“ If The Philistine disturbs placid self-complacency anywhere, as one or two of its critics intimate, it is sorry, for there is no such happiness attainable anywhere this side of Nirvana as its serene contemplation of the charms of self which Narcissus and some more modern fakirs exemplify; and the magazine of to-day is its gospel. But so good a Philistine as Horace Greeley is my authority for believing that the still pool in which self-love sees the reflection it feeds upon is a breeder of death, not life, and effervescence is the sworn foe of the morbid. ”

“ Professor Hill has in one book, by actual count, twenty-seven different propositions that he divides into three parts. I have forgotten them all save the one just named. This statement I never can forget. I hold it with a deathless grasp that defies the seasons and sorrows of time: for there are things burned so deep into one’s soul that the brand can never be removed; [171] and should reason abdicate, I’ll gibber through the grates of my padded cell at each pitying passer-by, “The three requisites in correct writing are Clearness, Force, and Elegance.” ”

“ The teacher who teaches best is not he who insists on our memorizing rules, but he who produces in the pupil a pleasurable animation. We learn only in times of joy and in times of grief. The teacher who can give his pupils pleasure in their work shall be crowned with laurel, but grief—grief is the unwelcome gift of the gods alone!
Let the writer have a clear conception and then express it so it is at the moment clear to his Other-Self—that Self that looks on over the shoulder of every man, endorsing or censuring his every act and thought and deed. ”

“ But Nordau’s principal casus belli is the present diversity in literature, he thinks; its lack of unity—a segregation which denotes decay.
Pish!
Diversity is a step towards universality. And is not the present aspect due primarily to a self assertive spirit, a declaration of individual independence in literature, built upon the lack of single leaders and the abolition of a great literary center?
Take the literary capillarity of a great name. It has a marvelous effect, availing perhaps for all time, but scarcely to the succeeding generation. ”

“ Cudahy’s book, I wish to place on file a modest word of protest concerning the modern sex novel.
Just now the stage and story-book seem to vie with one another in putting on parade the Men and Women who Did for the delectation of those who Have or May. The motif in all these books and plays is to depict the torturing emotions that wring and tear the hearts of these unhappy mortals. The Camp of Philistia does not boast that there are in it no People who Did, neither do we deny the reality of the heartaches and tears that come from unrequited love and affection placed not wisely. ”

“ From a literary and philosophic standpoint literature contains nothing like it. Examine Rochefoucauld, Montaigne, Plutarch, Pliny the Elder, Pliny the Younger or Solomon, and you will not find its fellow. Read it again, and read it slowly: “It-is-singular-yet-a-fact-that-what-we-are-most-loath-to-believe-possessed-by-others-is-what-we-are-incapable-of-ourselves.” This is undoubtedly the finest thing in the language and a reward of one million dollars will be paid to any Philistine who will furnish the solution. ”

“ In rainy weather we writers flatten our noses against the panes of strange windows, lost to all sense of propriety, in the wild hope that some one within is reading one of our amusing works. In the case of the present writer, however, it is all proper to say that he has suffered disillusionment so often that he has espoused a chill dignity, and sits at home and reads his own works in a spirit of grim appreciation. ”

“ Let us strive to look out on life with open vision and simple soul, seeing that it is fair; that no plant [85] cometh forth to face the winter’s blight, but when the winter is over then green, tender things of beauty push upwards to meet the sunshine—first the blade, then the ear, and after that the full corn in the ear. Then cometh the insect, with his drop of gall, and ugliness and excrescence follow. ”

“ Until we have a school of literature that will combine all schools and give the liberty to a full expression of every mood, there will be a warfare between the “sects” that give free rein to imagination and the sect that, having no imagination, merely describes. When one school driven by the jibes and jeers of the other tilts to t’other side, a heavy man will start the teeter back, and he is the man we crown. ”

“ The women, it must be confessed, had grown a trifle weary of the De June Idyllic Plan; and in the good old-fashioned womanly way, oft in the night season, each had confessed in her own heart, that one loving husband for each woman was what Nature intended. So they accepted the situation, and each began to use those winning ways that Herbert Spencer says are woman’s weapons: woman conquers through her intuition. ”

“ The great orator always shows a dash of contempt for the opinions of his audience, and the great writer is he who loses self consciousness and writes himself down as he is, for at the last analysis all literature is a confession. ”

“ To sing a song that finds its way into the hearts of men; to act a part that helps another toward his happiness, and do it all without blare of trumpets and jangle of hurdy-gurdy; and then walk on to the next town, stopping by the roadside wells to soak a dry crust in cool water, or, perhaps, a fresh cake in a mug of Bass as occasion served, and then, at the end, to lie down quietly, listening to the singing by the people of one’s own songs—though they know it not—presents a picture of a perfect harmony. ”

“ There is something charmingly alluring and sweetly seductive in a confession. Mr. Henry James has said: “The sweetest experience that can come to a man on his pilgrimage through this vale of tears is to have a lovely woman ‘confess’ to him; and it is said that while neither argument, threat, plea of justification, nor gold can fully placate a woman who believes she has been wronged by a man, yet she speedily produces, not only a branch, but a whole olive tree when he comes humbly home and confesses.” ”