Virginia Woolf

“ But we do suggest that the skyscraper primitives have taken the harder task, for they must always tread on the uncomfortable verge of writing a Chamber of Commerce literature. As to their omission of humanism, they can answer that it is not the province of the artist to decide whether a given sensation is an asset or a detriment to the community. They accept the sensation simply as a fact, and exploit it. Which they can do with impunity, provided that they are content to leave art on the plane of chess playing or baseball, simply one more outlet for human energy. ”

“ They are characterized by the same butterfly beauty, the same imagination and simplicity as mark her previously published books; they range from the verge of realism to the rainbow clouds of fantasy; at times they reveal a deep but unaffected emotion, at times they are beautifully symbolical, and occasionally they are warm and vivid in their criticism of life. ”

“ This, then, is the distinguishing mark of a decadence: that each man has his own little corner; each man is his own John Jones and Company; each man hunts out his own spiritual markets.
Decadence is that stage in the history of art wherein nothing can be built upon anything preceding. There is nothing beyond A Rebours—there can only be something different. ”

“ It is compounded of deft psychology, gentle irony, and sheer joyousness—all welded in a narrative which twinkles with wit and poetry. The novelist sees her men eye to eye with Jane Austen, and her women eye to eye with Barrie; they emerge into the radiant Italian sunlight with just enough of the reality rubbed off them to make it highly probable that they would act and react precisely as they do. At any rate, one's scepticism is charmed into silence—and that, in itself, is achievement. ”

“ Mr Watson is a trained ethnologist, and has satisfied himself that men must make as simple an adjustment to environment and to other men as animals make to their jungles and their mates. His people are, with few exceptions, elemental, animal-fibred, with their unhumorous minds focused on their sheep herding or their pursuit of a mate to share their incessant struggle to wring a living out of difficult mediums. One misses something, however, in so direct and unsubtle an account of life. ”

“ To maintain the autonomy, and the disinterestedness, or every human activity, and to perceive it in relation to every other, require a considerable discipline. It is the function of a literary review to maintain the autonomy and the disinterestedness of literature, and at the same time to exhibit the relations of literature—not to 'life,' as something contrasted to literature, but to all the other activities, which, together with literature, are the components of life. ”

“ We dissociate ourselves utterly from the business of giving prizes, and at the same time we call the attention of our publishers to the situation in France because the prize is an excellent method of temporary publicity, and it is possible that publishers in America will be tempted to use it freely. There are so many prizes in France, the considerations are so varied, and political and literary intrigue so constant, that among intelligent people a prize has already lost all significance. ”

“ There is no beauty, there is only intensity. And a city like New York can claim their enthusiasm, not because it is a harmonious unit functioning in such a way as to produce the most widely developed type of human life (which they know well enough it is not) but because it is so intensely, so characteristically, itself.
The negative quality in the criticism of the Seven Arts group is caused by their hankering after traditional beauty, beauty with the connotations which the word has traditionally held. ”

“ A literary review should maintain the application, in literature, of principles which have their consequences also in politics and in private conduct; and it should maintain them without tolerating any confusion of the purposes of pure literature with the purposes of politics or ethics.
"In the common mind all interests are confused, and each degraded by the confusion. And where they are confused, they cannot be related; in the common mind any specialized activity is conceived as something isolated from life, an odious task or a pastime of mandarins. ”

“ For in our time the pursuit of literary perfection, and the preoccupation with literature and art for their own sake, are objects of attack, no longer in the name of 'morals,' but in the name of a much more insidious catchword: 'life.' I say 'more dangerous,' because the term 'morals,' at worst, stands for some order or system, even if a bad one ”

“ Yet in these gnarled times, the classical spirit would be so inimical to the spirit of modern business that when all its ramifications have been followed through we learn that classicism would be nothing other than howling rebellion. ”

“ What Mr Archer is really an apostle of is art-to-conceal art—a clever persuasion of an audience that a play is not a play. The Elizabethans, however, knew that a play was a play, and permitted a framework which offered a maximum of opportunities to display internal functional relationships. From that standpoint, it may be asserted that modern drama has laboured to obscure the elements of drama, and Mr Eliot's Sacred Wood stands untouched by Mr Archer's opposing theories as well as unapproached in style by the flat and pale language of his lectures. ”

“ When Mr Armstrong looks at life realistically, he writes in vivid and incisive style, but when he interposes the rose-tinted spectacles of allegory, things seem a little out of focus and not half so much worth looking upon. ”

“ But a faint air of artificiality hangs over the ball field as it does over the editorial sanctum of "say, The New Republic" and the names of living people and the street numbers one recognizes stare out of the pages like living eyes behind paper masks. ”

“ Dick all right?"
"First rate!" said Clarissa.
Of course, she thought, walking on, Milly is about my age—fifty—fifty-two. So it is probably that, Hugh’s manner had said so, said it perfectly—dear old Hugh, thought Mrs Dalloway, re­membering with amusement, with gratitude, with emotion, how shy, like a brother—one would rather die than speak to one’s brother—Hugh had always been, when he was at Oxford, and came over, and perhaps one of them (drat the thing!) couldn’t ride. How then could women sit in Parliament? How could they do things with men? ”

“ The great thing for us is that all of the protests against art and letters, protests which fancy themselves purely moral, concede more than they withhold. They are abject in the presence of art—a nice position to maintain—and even if they overvalue the influence of art, acknowledge its legitimacy and its relevance to life. ”

“ This voluminous and incredibly fascinating account of a life which was itself voluminous and incredible is one of the most entertaining books of the year; a detailed and colourful reflection of an amusing life amid an environment which can never be duplicated. ”

“ There is great wisdom—not merely knowledge—tolerance without sentimentalism, and keen satire where satire is due. Snobbery and arrogance come in for their share of it in no ambiguous terms. Stuart Sherman is always alert to fend off scintillating and artificially-heated attacks on the genuine achievements of American writers he is quite as ready to slash at sand-built, and unwarranted American pretensions and reputations. ”

“ The author, a communist poet and dramatist at present serving sentence in a Bavarian prison for taking part in the Munich uprisings, is not, like Hauptman, interested so much in the spectacle of the workers' rebellion against the machines, as in the blind groping of the workers to establish a brotherhood of man, the painful awakening of class consciousness in the birth throes of the modern industrial era. ”

“ Its author has the faculty, capitalized in newspaper serials and stories of the smart set and by all writers of ability, of getting down to business at once, touching the patient where he lives. She goes in for being frightfully subtle. In one breath she is perceptive, subtle, ingenious, glittering, tinny, thin, and complacent. Her cleverness betrays her. ”

“ We fight bitterly for our leisure and, gaining it, fret it away in the search of such a society as will nourish it and make it fruitful. Because earnest artists flee vulgar society, they are occasionally compelled to be solitary, and there is seldom the free communication between workers in the seven arts which the workers in each require for sanity and for a little happiness. ”

“ Looking back over the old futurist pamphlets of 1909, one is astonished to find that nothing new has come into the world since that time, and the skyscraper primitives have taken over, more or less articulately, the entire futurist credo. ”

“ It remains for the arts to do the handsome thing—and they are doing it. "Life" becomes the touchstone of literary endeavour—not "true to life" but "serving life" the standard of measurement. "Life" in these connexions means the present problem—not the eternal; and it will presently be improper, if not impossible, for a writer to concern himself with a theme which has no bearing on revolutions, applied psychology, or, in general, the moral and physical catastrophe which, we have been assured, impends. ”

“ It is agreeable to attack a book which is becoming popular through advertising; but few critics are in such a position that they can give themselves the bad name of independence; few editors can remain permanently in command of their papers if publishers can use advertising as a weapon. ”

“ We know that some publishers are so intent upon the immediate good that they do not understand the cumulative value of adverse criticism—if it is intelligent and honest—as a basis for confidence when favourable criticism appears. One of the most influential organs of criticism in America has praised countless thousands of books—and sold them so. We are aware of that power. But the number of individuals who are growing sceptical, and who are caring for independent intelligence, is growing. ”

“ Until finally each artist must discover some remote virgin territory much as the engineer discovers another oil pocket. All sorts of inventions are brought in, the field is exploited, the vein is exhausted—art passes elsewhere. Huysmans is an especially poignant instance of this procedure which, waiving all connotations aside for the moment, we recognize as decadence. ”

“ But nationalism is simply a fusion, a reconciliation, of the two preceding stages: nationalists being men who see their environment from both "close up" and "long shot." At the present time there are varying shades of such nationalists concerning themselves with belles-lettres in America, the two prominent divisions being the surviving members of the Seven Arts, and the "pure" artists, or what Gorham B. Munson has called the "skyscraper primitives." ”

“ The English countryside, however, seems to be as unpleasantly populated as the English town in Gilbert Cannan. The second book, Black, White, and Brindled, presents a series of short stories entirely different in character and with a setting as exotic as the earlier one was dull. The dazzling white and blue of the West Indies, the atmosphere of negro laziness and sudden, mysterious crime, come as a surprise—even a pleasant surprise—after the grey inevitableness of Men. The tragedy in the first is a creeping palsy which claims its victims and leaves no hope. ”

“ She stiffened a little, waiting for Durtnall’s van to pass. Big Ben struck the tenth; struck the eleventh stroke. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. Pride held her erect, inheriting, handing on, acquainted with discipline and with suffering. ”

“ De Gourmont gives his ideas the outlines of women, and offers them the caresses of Diomedes, Pascase, and Cyran. Sophistication at its summit becomes a lucid naiveté. He builds a sad Utopia wherein his mind blossoms in the restless colours of flesh. In an immortal garden besieged by decay, Diomedes moves idly between Pascase, his youth—acolyte yet alien, subtle but young—and Cyran, his age—a tempting destination barely evaded ”

“ How many men—tens and hundreds of thousands of men—could say as much as you and I and Leigh Hunt of a mother whose memory they worship: but all this has no existence in the world of certain fictionists whose fictions are invariably hailed by the reviewers as the "real thing," as "true to life" and all that. ”

“ The House of the Enemy, by Camille Mallarmé (12mo, 256 pages; McBride: $2) is a highly-seasoned Spanish dish, served steaming hot with passion and with a dash of Benavente sauce. What there is about these La Mancha amours which renders them such family affairs is still more or less of a mystery; marriage seems to be an avenue of intrigue dotted with in-laws. Aside from its violent story, which doesn't quite compel credence, this novel has colourful moments and a quick-paced narrative style. ”

“ And the intellectual poverty, the thinness, of some of the artists whose natural gifts are great is due in part to this. Mr Van Wyck Brooks has traced in his essays on James a few steps in the passage of a genius who needed an intellectual web more varied, more cunningly and more lovingly wrought than our own. One can anticipate the conclusion that flight from America is inadvisable; for many it is impossible; and the deep damnation which seems to threaten Europe is not reassuring for its own future, not to speak of its capacity to offer anything to a stranger. ”

“ The Greeks are supposed to have been lovers of beauty and of wisdom; indeed it may be their peculiar and happy character to have been able to love both. But, as an eminent philosopher once informed an undergraduate, their love of beauty would never have led them to tolerate, for a moment, such works of art as were dangerous to the state. ”

“ His beautiful daughter interrupts this dream, and, presenting a front of martyrdom to the world, manages to inflict suffering upon everyone about her, until her father sacrifices his happiness to save others from being her victims. ”

“ There will be another Tuesday when I shall not see you as I don't think of returning just yet. The loneliness of this little downland village suits my nerves. We are 3 miles from a telegraph office, 7 miles from a butcher, a doctor and a newspaper, and there is no public house so it is all dark and still after 8 o'clock and everyone goes to bed. The only light is from the stars and the only sound the faint far off tinkle of sheep-bells. ”