Impression

“ We speak not from our own fixed impression, however deeply felt, but from what we have heard and observed everywhere, from the natural, incidental, unconscious remarks dropped from persons' mouths, and evidently showing what they thought and felt. ”

“ Now, in order to a deep impression, it is wisely contrived, that things should be introduced to our acquaintance, with a certain pomp and solemnity productive of a vivid emotion. When the impression is once fairly made, the emotion of novelty, being no longer necessary, vanisheth almost instantaneously ”

“ But the impressions of reflection resolve themselves into our passions and emotions’. [2] From the polemic against abstract ideas we learn further that ‘the appearance of an object to the senses’ is the same thing as an ‘impression becoming present to the mind’. ”

“ The tendency of our perceptions is to emphasise increasingly the objective elements in an impression, unless we have some special reason, as artists have, for doing the opposite. ”

“ How shall we know when an impression comes upon us, from whence it comes? There are certain rules laid down in God’s blessed book, which if we are careful to observe, we shall not go astray: “It will be a lamp to our feet, and a light unto our path.” ”

“ Then if we go to others, that is, to the subjects of influence, we find every man endowed with two inlets of impression; the ear and the understanding for the reception of speech, and the sympathetic powers, the sensibilities or affections, for tinder to those sparks of emotion revealed by looks, tones, manners and general conduct. And these sympathetic powers, tho not immediately rational, are yet inlets, open on all sides, to the understanding and character. ”

“ The impression which might be created by the delivery of any particular passage, or by the expression of any occasional sentiment, he seems at all times to consider as of subordinate importance to the preservation of that permanent character, whether of intense and overpowering suffering, or wild desperation, by which he thinks the feelings of the spectators may be most deeply and heartily interested. ”

“ I used to say to these admirers, "wherever you like, or wherever it may chance, you will see that you will never find ten consecutive lines which are comprehensible, unartificial, natural to the character that says them, and which produce an artistic impression. ”

“ Readers who picture not only the peculiar character speaking, but the person to whom he speaks, will receive and give a more adequate impression, one more dramatic, more simple, and far more expressive of character than those who confuse it with a lyric or a story. ”

“ Such an appeal to be effective must be an impression conveyed through the senses; and, in fact, it cannot be made in any other way, because temperament, whether individual or collective, is not amenable to persuasion. All art, therefore, appeals primarily to the senses, and the artistic aim when expressing itself in written words must also make its appeal through the senses, if its high desire is to reach the secret spring of responsive emotions. ”

“ See if it is founded upon solid qualities, capable of making an impression upon an upright and serious mind, or upon those superficial qualities which the world esteems, and which allure volatile minds. ”

“ I can but speak for myself at least—something that I want to feel both as historic and esthetic truth, both as pictorial and moral interest, something that will repay my fancy tenfold if I can but feel it, hovers before me, and I say to myself that, whether or no a great poem is to come off, I will be hanged if one of the vividest of all stories and one of the sharpest of all impressions doesn’t. ”

“ But our own impressions!—The light and heat of that blue veil over our heads, the heavens spread out, perhaps not like a curtain over anything!—How reassuring, after so long a debate about the rival criteria of truth, to fall back upon direct sensation, to limit one’s aspirations after knowledge to that! ”

“ We perceive display’d externally, hope, fear, joy, grief: we can read the character of a man in his face; and{117} beauty, which makes so strong an impression, is known to result, not so much from regular features and a fine complexion, as from good nature, good sense, sprightliness, sweetness, or other mental quality, expressed some way upon the countenance. ”

“ Experience has rendered her wise and sad, indulgent and serene; it has shown her how to organise her impressions, so that her art—simple as it is and apparently facile—has some of the qualities of a philosophy. ”

“ in the same way, it is only at the first encounter that a face makes its full impression upon us. ”

“ To feel a unity, a character and a tone in one's impressions, to feel them related and all harmoniously coloured, that was positively to face the æsthetic, the creative, even, quite wondrously, the critical life and almost on the spot to commence author. ”

“ To most of them, these impressions never reach the point of coherency. They brood, and muse, and expand in the actual and figurative warmth, and proffer the general opinion that it is a damn fine day! ”

“ But I magnified, as usual, the impression any word or deed of mine could produce on others; ”

“ By it their beautiful forms are emphasized; they are reduced to terms of line—their impression is simplified, and by that very means they answer the æsthetic craving more directly as well as more softly and gently. ”

“ The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life in general so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it—this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience, and they occur in country and in town, and in the most differing stages of education. If experience consists of impressions, it may be said that impressions are experience, just as (have we not seen it?) they are the very air we breathe. ”

“ In each expression of yourself—in your every word, tone, and act—you convey some idea of your particular character and ability. You should know how to make true, attractive impressions of your best self ”

“ But, to begin with, be not swept off your feet, I beseech you, by the vividness of the impression, but say, "Wait for me a little, O impression; ”

“ What we are speaking of are the deep impressions, which cannot properly be made commensurable at all, which may spring up directly out of an inward experience, an apprehension of nature, the world and history, in the depths of the spirit. ”

“ Response to impressions, correlation of those impressions into a connected body of phenomena, and final interpretation of them as a whole are, have been, and always will be the marks of the enduring in all literature, whether poetry or prose. ”

“ Therefore we need feel no surprise if any individual, peasant or man of business or abstract thinker, reveal a lack, even a total lack, of such impressions as I am speaking of; nor even if among those who love art a great proportion be still incapable of identifying those vague contemplative emotions from which all art is sprung. ”

“ Experience, already reduced to a group of impressions, is ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of personality through which no real voice has ever pierced on its way to us, or from us to that which we can only conjecture to be without. ”

“ The novelty of their position dazes them a little; and, like the realistic story-tellers and the impressionist painters, they are perhaps more occupied with their points of view than with the things they are viewing. ”

“ Let me repeat that a novel is an impression, not an argument; ”

“ Temperament is the primary requisite for the critic—a temperament exquisitely susceptible to beauty, and to the various impressions that beauty gives us. ”

“ When I came out in front of the house from a short and steep but stately avenue I said to myself that here surely we had arrived at the farthest limits of what ivy-smothered brickwork and weather-beaten gables, conscious old windows and clustered mossy roofs can accomplish for the eye. It is impossible to imagine a more finished picture. And its air of solitude and delicate decay—of having been dropped into its grassy hollow as an ancient jewel is deposited upon a cushion, and being shut in from the world and back into the past by its circling woods—all this drives the impression well home. ”

“ And, in chosen men and women, I find somewhat in form, speech, and manners, which is not of their person and family, but of a humane, catholic, and spiritual character, and we love them as the sky. They have a largeness of suggestion, and their face and manners carry a certain grandeur, like time and justice.
The feat of the imagination is in showing the convertibility of every thing into every other thing. ”

“ To the most eloquent expression of the eye, to the handwriting of the passions on his features, to a sensibility which tears to pieces the hearts of his auditors, to powers so unparalleled, he adds a judgment of the most exquisite accuracy, the [Pg 25] fruit of long experience and close observation, by which he preserves every gradation and transition of the passions, keeping all under the control of a just dependence and natural consistency.... It was a fiction as delightful as fancy, and as touching as truth. ”

“ They say to you, oh Poet, ‘Perfect those gifts of your higher nature—yet be not of them vainglorious, since, humanly speaking, they are not yours, but lent for a purpose, and the brief space of earth-life.’ Look upon every beautiful thought, every gift of expression, as the direction of One who has dowered you with the possibility of opening other eyes to the beauty, and other minds to the understanding of such expression. ”

“ Every one knows what charm there is in the talk of a man of the world who puts before his listeners, in picturesque phrases, the variable incidents of actual life as he himself has encountered them. The whim, the personal idiom, the glancing humour, the concrete image, the vivacious disorderliness, the skilful dealing at first hand with glowing human experience, give to talk of this sort a peculiarly winning quality. And the style that in literature mimics afar the colloquial rhythms and the idiom of such familiar talk has also, its peculiar charm. ”

“ The manner in laughter, in tears, in irony, in indignations and enthusiasms, in judgments—and even in love. The manner in which, as in the features and character of a human face, the inner truth is foreshadowed for those who know how to look at their kind. ”

“ In this striking summing-up of a character, the penetrating observer of human nature—taking in at a glance and depicting by a few masterly touches all that helps to make up a picture of the real living being—begins to reveal herself. ”

“ Imagination, reason, and that peculiar human quality in speech which defies analysis as much as the perfume of the rose, but which touches the heart and reaches the mind, are blended in each of these utterances in perfect proportion. ”

“ A style so sweet and simple, and yet so ornamented! a temper so benevolent, so cheerful, so exhilarating! a body of knowledge, and of original thought, so immense and various, so strikingly just, so universally useful! What person, of any age, sex, temper, calling, or pursuit, can possibly converse with The Spectator without being conscious of immediate improvement? ”

“ It is this literary temperament of your work, this beautiful quality of composition, and feeling of the presentation, grasping reality all the while, and controlling and playing with the detail, it is this in our chattering and slobbering day that gives me the sense of the ampler tread and deeper voice of the man—in fact of his speaking in his own voice at all, or moving with his own step. ”

“ To them alone these isolated passages—linked together in the imagination by all the intervening graces of attitude and sentiment, by the recollection of a countenance where the kindled soul looks out through every feature, and of a voice whose tones tremble into one's very heart—will give some faint reflection of the effect produced by the whole of this beautiful piece of acting,—or rather of nature, for here "each seems either." ”

“ She is deep, obscure, and infinite. It is only minds on whom she makes her fullest impressions that can penetrate her shrine or unveil her Holy of Holies. It is only those whom she has filled with her spirit that have the boldness or the power to reveal her mysteries to others. But Nature has a thousand aspects, and one man can only draw out one of them. Whoever does this is a man of genius. One displays her force, another her refinement; one her power of harmony, another her suddenness of contrast; one her beauty of form, another her splendour of colour. ”

“ All intellectual and impassioned faces are historical;—the heads of philosophers, poets, lovers, and madmen. Passion sometimes produces beauty by this means, and there is a beauty of form, the effect entirely of expression; as a smiling mouth, not beautiful in common, becomes so by being put into that action. ”

“ For it is precisely the exact and delicate response to such subtle visitings, whether it be a visiting of fear and dread or of beauty and delight, which, expressing itself in the individual's manner of living and taste for life, we call personality; which, manifesting itself in his art, we call style; which, exhibiting itself in his purpose and action, we call character. ”

“ Our sight seems designed to supply all these defects, and may be considered as a more delicate and diffusive kind of touch, that spreads itself over an infinite multitude of bodies, comprehends the largest figures, and brings into our reach some of the most remote parts of the universe."
Every passing mood and every peculiarity of mind or character are reflected in the style. It may be gay, humorous, serious, sad, melancholy, according to the state of the writer's feelings. ”

“ The weight which different persons will attach to these objections will no doubt vary with their individual temperaments, their susceptibility to the magical charm of the verse, their sense of artistic propriety, and the degree to which they are able to recall in imagination the conditions of a bygone form of artistic presentation. ”