Various

“ It seemed to her extremely narrow to eliminate this kind of relationship from life entirely—to sit back and wait for a stupid old husband. She read a good deal of Shelley, and managed, against all odds, to skim through a book by Havelock Ellis. Reason, she said, ought to dominate life—reason and beauty. So she smoked a cigarette and experienced a wild, imaginative thrill—a thrill which only ended in the old pangs of conscience which seemed to curse her in every new venture. ”

“ And yet in following the development of certain great poets I am more and more capable of imagining what I know to be true, that, granted the temperament, genius is made by intense industry; and that it is labor which causes the difference between the great man and the unhappy dilettante.
Dante’s “Vita Nuova” is merely a promise of the Divine Comedy. His greatness consists not in his having made, but in his having kept that promise. ”

“ But in the case of the world’s artists it pleases the general to say: “Well, well, life is stranger than fiction, is it not?”
A modern philosopher has written, and it seems to me most wisely, “Our temperaments are in some sort our destinies”. Now let me admit thus far the world’s conclusion. The true artist is born like the rest of us with a certain temperament, which is in some sort his destiny. But it is at this point we must leave the world. For if it were only this birthright that was required, certainly there would be in this present day a plethora of geniuses. ”

“ When we speak of an artist we do not think of a day-laborer, nor of labor. We are amused at Whistler’s famous repartee to Ruskin’s lawyer when he asked him how he dared charge so much for an hour’s work, and Whistler replied, “Not for an hour’s work, but for the knowledge of a lifetime,” but as a jury we are not convinced by it. ”

“ The Philistine world talk of artists as something not undesirable certainly as past events, but undesired as present calamities. There is in the air a sense of anxiety concerning them. They make the complacent so uncomfortable. So has the world damned them as unique, apart from the majority, being fearful of their destiny, and has evolved, because of this fear, the false dogma of spontaneous creation in art. A Dante is born the author of the Divine Comedy; a Shelley rises a child from the womb the inevitable father of the Prometheus and the Cenci ”

“ Roger almost satisfied her highest ideal.
She asked Mary Waterworth about him one night, and Mary told her that he was engaged. Mary even showed her a picture of Georgiana, which Helen gazed at for a long time. Georgiana had light hair and large eyes, which were probably brown, and almost classic features. She was very lovely, Helen thought. The expression of her face seemed to say, “I understand Roger. I belong to Roger. There is more to bind us together than a night’s flirtation. There is the whole past.” Helen was jealous in spite of herself. ”

“ Now I do not think that walking along a road by a river and thinking of a girl one loves, and speaking, as if one’s tongue moved of its own accord, a line of verse concerning her is an unusual performance. In fact, given the temperament, it seems a very natural one. I venture to say that no one who has ever written poetry has not done the same. And Dante’s resulting poem is not extraordinary. It certainly could not at the time have suggested by itself its author as a compeer of ὁ ποιήτη. It exemplifies the artistic temperament, and is indicative of it. ”

“ The philosophy of “all things must change”, applied to conditions as well as to matter, extends a sweet and optimistic prospect to youth. And it is to this natural tendency, as well as to any deep-rooted sincerity concerning evils, that much of our controversy may be attributed. And when a beginning has been made, a flaming question raised, there are the additional attractions of being given an opportunity to turn clever phrases, to appear in the public eye, to champion or rend in a spirit of battle. ”

“ I admire you. I think an engagement is sacred—of course. But what I meant was that often men are carried away—in a moment—by a look or a gesture—by anything. And I can’t exactly blame them for it. I can’t see how a man is expected to live up to his ideal, in a case like that.”
“No.” She seemed to ponder the question carefully. “But don’t you see, it’s the woman’s fault—when men are carried away?”
[156]
They looked at each other, then, each recognizing the potentialities of their own situation. The look was intense. It sent a flush across Helen’s cheek. ”

“ They were married quite peacefully in an old New England church, and she went with him to live in New York.
Winter passed. Spring came. Georgiana returned. It is only after some such calm as this that one can look back and contemplate the true causes of a storm. Helen found, after she had lived intimately with Roger for a short time, that there were a great many things yet to be learned about each other’s characters. Not only this. There were a great many things to be forgiven in each other’s characters—more things, perhaps, than the average man and wife can forgive. ”

“ It is the controversy itself which is interesting, especially in an institution where experience and tradition form the basis of the laws and customs. Controversy at Yale must mean an offensive begun by young minds upon what time has taught their controlling elders. And consequently, as is being seen, it takes a ton of controversy to germinate a pound of “reform”.
[138]
But young minds are impulsively active. They are impatient, and the distant hope of a change in a present state of affairs holds in itself a vast attraction. ”

“ The Prometheus, the Cenci, the Defence of Poetry are the creations of a genius. The change is unusual, but not miraculous. His industry was more intense than most, for he accomplished in less than ten years that for which most geniuses require a lifetime. From the stage in 1811 when “Reason is all in all”, and “poetical beauty ought to be subordinated to the inculcated moral” to the stage in 1820 in the “Defence of Poetry” where “There is no want of knowledge respecting what is wisest and best in morals, government and political economy.... ”

“ Whatever materials he lays hold of, he plucks out of it beauty: out of the dung-hill the flower, out of the chill moon passion, out of the night light, out of the noon-tide shade. If he is found lying in the gutter, as Oscar Wilde has remarked, he will at least be looking at the stars. ”

“ They smiled, in a reminiscent way, and rejected the thought that Helen was learning to play with fire.
When she was sixteen, she played once too often, with a boy named Harry McMichael, who was a freshman football hero at Harvard. His vigorous personality, and the almost savage way he took her hand, after she had tempted him for several days “in fun”, quite swept her away, so that her puritanism seemed all afloat in a flood of emotions. She had never thought of this contingency. Heretofore, she had been mistress, not only of her lovers, but of herself also. ”

“ Not that any man is insincere, though it goes hard against the grain for him to throw aside the sophistication he has been a long time acquiring and be simple: to kick his education out of the way as it were and make a path for himself. To be caught overtaxing our slim knowledge of the world and thereby to appear ridiculous is no doubt disagreeable enough ”

“ Steeped in their tawdry little enthusiasms, they always go at things hard and correctly. If they like a thing, their appreciation is like squirting a hose on it. One sees them make a mistake once in a while and admire an atrocity. ”

“ In fact, an educated person wandering in a well-known exhibition needs no guidance, other than names and authors, to recall everything to him.
I suppose those schoolgirls one meets abroad, daughters of the wealthy studying “art” in its habitat, are the worst off in this respect. You see them marching in herds through the museums led by their formidable teachers, stopping to gaze and murmur and look at the people passing while they are furnished with the necessary facts. ”

“ One of these types is the stoic mentalist, to whom everything is mind and reason. The other is the emotional, uncontrolled realist, who lives for pleasure and dreams of ideals. Both of these divergent types are able to see clearly the foibles which permeate the life of mankind; the first because he realizes human weaknesses and thereby refrains from falling into indulging in them, while the second delves into the experiences and pleasures of the senses and comes to a realization of the futility of it all. ”

“ The argumentative machinery clanks frantically, and the sound and rhythm of it beats a false sincerity into the minds of the controversialists, a kind of belief founded more upon emotional than mental activity; more upon desire than knowledge. ”

“ Not a paradise of blossoming brotherhood, not a natural growth under God’s heaven, but a Socialism ripened prematurely under the heat of compulsion and watered with blood; a Socialism under a sky of glass, unstable, sterile.... ”

“ It is beautiful prose, it is—after its own fashion—an interesting story, and it is certainly true to a peculiar little minority of human life. In these days when dramatic value must be subjective to be great, it is a great book. ”

“ She sails serenely on—like an angel—imagining that everyone else is an angel also. Sometimes, when she deserts me for a long time, I don’t live up to scratch. I always complain to her, and tell her about it. ”

“ Why should not a man bend every effort to see in fine works the things that many minds of a brilliancy sharper than his own have seen? Perhaps it is best just to ratify, or to satisfy ourselves that we are at one with the great concensus of judgments—that all’s well with our souls, at any rate. ”

“ Whether it may be thought to neglect too much the good influence of controversy upon right thinking, is another and fairer question. One thing it seeks to inculcate: a realization of the component parts of undergraduate controversy, a useful knowledge of the natural emotional forces involved which veil clarity; so that truth may be found more fully than in the replies to questionaires and in the disputes revolving about destructive editorials. ”

“ The artist either goes forth to meet life, or evades it utterly in both cases for the purpose of making it cosmos. While others are content with a moderate dividend of experience, the artist must have all of experience, or none of it. ”

“ The Yale University Press, thinking perhaps, with me, that even the most beautiful things perish if the opportunity for reading or seeing or hearing them is not offered the vexed and hurrying children of men, has undertaken here the pious task of making O’Shaughnessy’s finest poems accessible to readers of English poetry.... ”

“ Also, in Senior year, we tend to acquire more or less veneration for the force of experience and for the opinions of older minds than our own. The greatest lesson of life is dawning upon us,—that the truest form of living is one which is built upon simplicity, fundamentals, and a direction of our actions by old example. ”

“ A controversy may be said to be worth while to us only when it involves more thought than impulse. A questionaire has recently been sent broadcast through the University which is quite definite in its spirit of controversy, but which falls for no definiteness of thought. ”

“ While one may not have been made ready by intensive courses, the report of fame is not published merely for those who take them, and you cannot escape hearsay and the wealth of criticism that passes on the tide of conversation. ”

“ And I believe that a person cultivated according to modern standards is unable to arrive at a definite conclusion of the kind in question by following his natural inclination. He may survive the temptation, more subtle in action than in its abstract nakedness, that I have outlined, but if he does so it is a resistance fraught with effort and as such harmful. The very determination of a person to do justice to his individuality spoils the adventure. ”

“ Anyone who has caught nature off her guard, who has walked abroad after a thunder shower in dry weather, or who has tramped past newly-ploughed fields, or lain among the cowslips on a crystal-bright May morning with the fresh south wind in his face, will find a source of quiet pleasure in “A Hind of Richmond Park”. ”

“ The answer is simply we learn through disappointments, and through a later realization of our childlike wistfulness for new things. This latter begins often as early as our Senior year, in which we realize other things as well, including our transience as undergraduates and our lack of time for conducting many of the new states of affairs which we advocate so heartily, such as complete student government. There is too much extra-curriculum activity already in our lives here to allow us to be administrators as well. ”

“ For here is a car of moderate price whose appeal to your sense of the beautiful is equally as strong as the preference it arouses because of its exceptional performance.
The advanced practice displayed in the engineering of this model is certain to serve as a pattern for four-cylinder development everywhere in the industry.
And the results achieved in the way of heightened smoothness, quietness, acceleration, and fuel economy constitute so far a step forward as to set the car undebatably above and apart from any comparison. ”