Pretentiousness

“ You forget that, in spite of my bad eyesight, I have a very highly developed sense of beauty; and this, quite apart from the fact that such embittered women are repugnant to me and spoil my spirits and my whole atmosphere. Much intellect in a woman amounts to very little as far as I am concerned, for this so-called intellect, by which only the most superficial men are deceived, is nothing more than the most absurd pretentiousness. There is nothing more tiring than such an intellectual goose, who does not even know how tedious she is. ”

“ There are the many men who, by ill-timed or too frequent levity, lose all credit for their serious qualities, or who by pretentiousness or self-assertion or restless efforts to distinguish themselves, make themselves universally disliked, or who by their egotism or their repetitions or their persistence, or their incapacity of distinguishing essentials from details, or understanding the dispositions of others, or appreciating times and seasons, make their wearied and exasperated hearers blind to the most substantial merits. ”

“ My own view is that this pretentiousness and desire for display is at the bottom of it; that young people want to begin where their fathers and mothers left off, and that courage is lacking to take a step down and begin together on the lowest rung of the ladder. ”

“ But if one is not capable of going to such lengths, if indeed one has nothing that one can resign, how is it possible to practise simplicity of life? It can be done by limiting one's needs, by avoiding luxuries, by having nothing in one's house that one cannot use, by being detached from pretentiousness, by being indifferent to elaborate comforts. There are people whom I know who do this, and who, even though they live with some degree of wealth, are yet themselves obviously independent of comfort to an extraordinary degree. ”

“ It is the Vice of others, to affect Obscurity in their Thoughts and Language, to write in a difficult crabbed Style, and perplex the Reader with an intricate Meaning in more intricate Words.
The common Way of offending against Plainness and Perspicuity of Style is, an Affectation of hard unusual Words, and of close contrasted Periods: The Fault of Pedants and sententious Writers! that are vainly ostentatious of their Learning, or their Wisdom. Hard Words and quaint Expressions are abominable: Wherever Your Lordship meeteth such a Writer, throw him aside for a Coxcomb. ”

“ To be nothing whatever to look at? To be unfortunately plain—or even if you like repulsively ugly? Oh yes, I understand it perfectly, just as I understand—I have to as a part of my trade—many other forms of stupidity. It's nothing new to one that ninety-nine people out of a hundred have no eyes, no sense, no taste. ”

“ And when this dissection is after a fashion accomplished, it is the less useful, in that the same strand is discovered to change its color and texture from one section to another. Deception is here a vice and there a virtue. Folly is here amusing and there horrifying. Egoism is here absorbent and there encroaching. There are sentimental epicures and unsentimental epicures and ascetic sentimentalists. There are vulgar snobs and refined snobs and a vulgarity that is not snobbish. ”

“ When the man shocks us, while the writer shines,
Our scorn in life, our envy in his lines.
Yet, proud of parts, with prudence some dispense,
And play the fool, because they're men of sense.
What instances bleed recent in each thought,
Of men to ruin by their genius brought!
Against their wills what numbers ruin shun,
Purely through want of wit to be undone!
Nature has shown, by making it so rare,
That wit's a jewel which we need not wear. [pg 351]
Of plain sound sense life's current coin is made;
With that we drive the most substantial trade.
Prudence protects and guides us; wit betrays ”

“ As we stand now, our greatest temptation to mediocrity lies in our misleading content; and this content is fostered by our incorrigible habit of considering ourselves a little aside from the grand march of human events. ”

“ Who cares now to discern, laughingly, the difference between reality and pretentious sham, between that which man is and that which he wishes to represent; the feeling of this contrast has quite a different effect if we seek reasons. ”

“ Perfect wisdom would cast out not only ignorance, but also frivolity, sentimentality, vanity, all sorts of false standards and all manner of fallacies. Therefore snobs, romanticists, egoists, fanatics, merely exemplify folly in its varieties and ramifications.
The snob is defined by his great expositor as “one who meanly admires mean things.” A modern scholar calls vulgarity “satisfaction with anything inferior when a superior is attainable.” ”

“ But the very same extravagances and showy paradoxes, when caught up by inferior spirits, presently lose their garb, not only of beauty, but of decency, and show themselves in the unpleasing bareness of error. ”

“ After all they were amateurs, and the ruling passion of my life was the detestation of the amateur. Combined with this was another perversity—an innate preference for the represented subject over the real one: the defect of the real one was so apt to be a lack of representation. ”

“ How petty seems the work on which they are hurrying and skurrying! How childishly they jostle against one another and turn to snarl and scratch! They jabber and screech and curse, but their puny voices do not reach up here. ”

“ When they saw a sedate man of simple manners appear amongst them, they mistook his simplicity for haughtiness, his candor for rusticity, his laconism for stupidity, and rejected his benevolent cares, because, wishing to be useful, and not being a sycophant, he knew not how to flatter people he did not esteem. ”

“ Which of us is proof against the temptation of making a display of magnanimity, or of playing egoistically with another devoted heart? Which of us, in fact, has the force of character to be superior to petty vanity, to petty fine feelings, sympathy and self-reproach?... ”

“ To me the eye tells everything, and I have never yet looked directly into a person's eyes without being able to satisfy myself as to their disposition. Cruelty, vanity, deceit, temper, sensuality, and all the other vices display themselves at once; and so with vulgarity—the glitter of the vulgar, of the ignorant, petty, mean, sordid mind, the mind that estimates all things and all people by money and clothes, cannot be hidden; "vulgarity" will out, and in no way more effectually than through the eyes. ”

“ He was entirely an unpretending man—and may be said to have collected rather from the pleasure and reputation attached to such pursuits than from a thorough and keen relish of the kind of taste which it imparts. ”

“ Such improprieties often proceed rather from stupidity than malice. Those who thus shine only to dazzle, are influenced merely by custom and example, and neither examine, nor are qualified to examine, the motives of their own practice, or to state the nice limits between elegance and ostentation. They are often innocent of the pain which their vanity produces, and insult others when they have no worse purpose than to please themselves. ”

“ Besides, the critic just isn't a plain man: if he were, pray, what would he be doing in his neighbour's garden? You're anything but a plain man yourself, and the very raison d'être of you all is that you're little demons of subtlety. ”

“ Is it the same people which applauds to-day the sweet genius and tender malices of the one, and which applauded the bitter genius and slaughterous satire of the other? After all, that is possible—the hatred of vice is only another manifestation of the love of innocence.’ ... ”

“ Pretension and shams are in none more speedily and cordially detected and exposed. Whether displayed in manners or intellectual efforts, conceit is rebuked and effectually repressed. Modest merit and refined tastes are appreciated, first by the select few, and then by the less discerning many. ”

“ The spurious prudence, making the senses final, is the god of sots and cowards, and is the subject of all comedy. It is nature's joke, and therefore literature's. The true prudence limits this sensualism by admitting the knowledge of an internal and real world. ”

“ We move among wraiths of "purposeful" or "wistful" men, "straight," "fine" women or women misunderstood, or dulled beyond reprieve. Penetrating, imaginative passages there are, to be sure, an arresting use of a word here and there, a sense of the beauty of old weathered things, of the pitiless craft and hypocrisy of man in his most predatory moments. "How cunning they were, the men who had been successful in life. ”

“ We resent all criticism, which denies us any thing that lies in our line of advance. Say to the man of letters, that he cannot paint a Transfiguration, or build a steamboat, or be a grand-marshal,—and he will not seem to himself depreciated. But deny to him any quality of literary or metaphysical power, and he is piqued. Concede to him genius, which is a sort of Stoical plenum annulling the comparative, and he is content; but concede him talents never so rare, denying him genius, and he is aggrieved. ”

“ It is no more necessary to describe everything cynically than it is to set forth all our petty diseases in detail. There are many influences which, independent of passion or shame, do far more to form character. ”

“ Oh, yes! if we are lightly esteemed it is because we are bad exponents. The ideal has dignity enough. They charge us, in their unimaginable stupidity, with failing to appreciate our lines, especially when they are Shakespeare's—with being unliterary. ”

“ IN all highly civilized communities Pretense is prominent, and sooner or later invades the regions of Literature. In the beginning, this is not altogether to be reprobated; it is the rude homage which Ignorance, conscious of its disgrace, offers to Learning; but after a while, Pretense becomes systematized, gathers strength from numbers and impunity, and rears its head in such a manner as to suggest it has some body and substance belonging to it. In England, literary pretense is more universal than elsewhere from our method of education. ”

“ To stand with all the doors of one's soul wide open, to He slavishly in the dust before every trivial fact, at all times of the day to be strained ready for the leap, in order to deposit one's self, to plunge one's self, into other souls and other things, in short, the famous "objectivity" of modern times, is bad taste, it is essentially vulgar and cheap. ”

“ Of all the numberless sorts of bad taste and want of tact, perhaps the worst is to insist, no matter where you are or with whom you are, on arguing about the hardest subjects to the full pitch of elaboration and detail. ”

“ Indeed, when literature and the fine arts become fashionable, and much the subject of conversation, there is a vast deal of this kind of criticism, which is fallen into from imitation and vanity, and which can have no good effect upon morals except as it supplies the place of scandal. ”

“ There is, next, the more subtle and refined pleasure of observing the strange truths which they unfold, the beautiful laws which they reveal, and the resemblances and relations which they display. The false romanticism of vulgar fancy requires something pretentious and unnatural to gratify its taste ”

“ Recognising thus that to carry through the individual pretension is at the best a battle, he adored a hard surface and detested a soft one—much more a muddled; regarded a style without rhythm and harmony as in a work of pretended beauty no style at all. He considered that the failure of complete expression so registered made of the work of pretended beauty a work of achieved barbarity. ”

“ The vulgar, or rather those who find it their interest to calumniate the vulgar for the sake of confounding philosophers with them, may fancy them mere human beings, subject like man to the sufferings of pain and love, to the limitations of personality. ”

“ It is true that individuals were more discussed than events, and that characters, not facts, formed the staple of the talk; but how amusing was it, what stores of anecdote were opened, what strange histories and curious illustrations of life unfolded! Pretension was ridiculed, vulgarity exposed, stupidity laughed at, awkwardness criticized, and want of tact condemned, with most unsparing ridicule ”

“ INTERCOURSE AND PRETENSION.—We forget our pretensions when we are always conscious of being amongst meritorious people; being alone implants presumption in us. The young are pretentious, for they associate with their equals, who are all ciphers but would fain have a great significance. ”

“ He should be learned in the inaccuracies of good authors, and deeply erudite in the absurdities of bad ones; recognizing false taste under all its disguises, and holding up, as a beacon to avoid, the pitiful ambition of mannerism and of writing finely. ”

“ Reading of this kind is too apt to inspire an excessive love of admiration, and desire to possess personal beauty; and gives us such false notions of the world in which we are to perform our part, that the most respectable occupations, or duties of domestic life, become irksome and tedious. ”

“ The displayers of them, in their impatient haste to catch the pennies of the public, or admiration, or whatever they might be desiring, were presenting, raw, confused and unimagined, their own unfelt and uncogitated experience, or, sometimes, an extension of their experience, in which, by an appalling logic, while they limned life as they would like to live it, they were led to the limits of unreason and egoistic folly. ”

“ Many can resist the softest seductions of vice; many are proof against all the blandishments of mere enjoyment, come in what shape it will; but how few can stand firm against the assaults of clever irony, or hold fast to their convictions when assailed by the sharp shafts of witty depreciation! ”

“ The truth is that, superior as they are to many of the ‘changes and chances of this mortal world,’ they, too, have their weak points, and vanities of their own, about which they are touchy as other people. ”

“ He who rises above mediocrity is sure to incur the envy and hatred of the mediocre. I am astounded that I among so many should be selected as a perpetual target. Were I as egotistical as some of my critics say, the published reports of my vagaries and dissipations would have been as Balm in Gilead to my immoral soul! ”