Subtlety

“ That life has complications of its own; but I shouldn’t call it subtle. Very far from it. And savages make you feel that it’s subtlety enough merely to have a white skin; there’s something irrelevant and ignoble in pushing subtlety further. In the end the sun wears you out, I suppose, and makes you want nothing very much ”

“ Gladstone's case, that simplicity of character is no hindrance to subtlety of intellect. ”

“ It is not likely that children younger than this will open the matter themselves, or take any vital interest in the discussion. For, as I have said elsewhere, subtlety is a child's virtue, and any device by which their hero, who is in the main just, outwits or removes hostile [Pg 137] forces, is acceptable. ”

“ All satisfaction with mere cleverness, mere daintiness, mere subtlety, oddity, bravado, bluffness, etc., with which fine designs have been teased or disfigured is wound of his dealing. No literature has he scarred more deeply than our English. ”

“ A distinction has been made between acuteness and subtlety of understanding. This might be illustrated by saying, that acuteness consists in taking up the points or solid atoms, subtlety in feeling the air of truth. ”

“ I mean, that he invents nothing that is illusory between himself and the object of his desire. If subtlety had been in the heart of this lover, one might have expected more frequent verbal conceits in the methods of telling his tale ”

“ These subtle wights (so blind are mortal men,
Though satire couch them with her keenest pen)
For ever will hang out a solemn face,
To put off nonsense with a better grace:
As pedlers with some hero's head make bold,
Illustrious mark! where pins are to be sold.
What's the bent brow, or neck in thought reclin'd?
The body's wisdom to conceal the mind.
A man of sense can artifice disdain;
As men of wealth may venture to go plain;
And be this truth eternal ne'er forgot,
Solemnity's a cover for a sot. ”

“ The vulgar, who are not in the secret, will admire the look of preternatural health and vigour; and the fashionable, who regard only appearances, will be delighted with the imposition. Keep to your sounding generalities, your tinkling phrases, and all will be well. Swell out an unmeaning truism to a perfect tympany of style. A thought, a distinction is the rock on which all this brittle cargo of verbiage splits at once. Such writers have merely verbal imaginations, that retain nothing but words. ”

“ The reader has doubtless remarked, that amongst the lawless and the rash, there is a certain fondness for figures of speech, and that tropes and metaphors, simile and synecdoche, are far more prevalent amongst them than amongst the more orderly classes of society. Whether it is or not, that they wish to get rid of a precise apprehension of their own acts, I cannot say; but certain it is, that they do indulge in such flowers of rhetoric, and sometimes, in the midst of humour, quaintness, and even absurdity, reach the point of wit, and at times soar into the sublime. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The commonest and most familiar objects are thus raised to a dignity quite out of keeping with their real nature; and here, if anywhere, is verified the saying that ‘from the sublime to the ridiculous there is but one step.’ Everything is sacrificed to a false glare and glitter of language, and sense is always made [102] subservient to sound. Those beautiful English words ‘boys’ and ‘girls’ are almost banished from our modern vocabulary. ”

“ In these unattractive "impressions" the wit is often laboured, and does not play "beneficently round the changing facets of egoism, absurdity, and vice, as the sunshine over the rippling sea or the dewy meadows." ”

“ 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. ”

“ Then again, the boldly hazarded stroke of wit has this peculiarity, that at the moment it pleases us while it astonishes us by its boldness, but when told afterwards, it sounds offensive, and disgusts us. ”

“ On looking at this homœopathic treatment of the 31⁄8 quadrature—remember, homœopathic, similia similibus, [390] not infinitesimal—and at the imputation thrown upon it, I asked myself, what is vulgarity? No two agree, except in this, that every one sees vulgarity in what is directed against himself. Mark the world, and see if anything be so common as the description of the other side's remarks as "vulgar attempt at wit." ”

“ All beauties of language, all flights of poetry, all particular scenes and speeches, powerful and impressive as they may be, are merely subordinate. No character, how exquisitely or elaborately soever conceived and finished, is drawn for itself ”

“ I have employed a certain familiar style of language to express the actual way in which people talk with each other, whom education and a certain refinement of sentiment have placed above the use of vulgar idioms. I use the word vulgar in its most extensive sense; the vulgarity of rank and fashion is as gross in its way, as that of poverty, and its cant terms equally expressive of base conceptions, and therefore equally unfit for poetry. ”

“ They are not so enchanting in their nature, nor so subtle in their effects. In the one, the noxious insinuations of licentious wit are concealed under the artful blandishments of sympathetic sensibility; while we at once recoil from the rude assault which is made upon our delicacy, by the roughness and vulgarity of the other. ”

“ Wit lashes external appearances, or cunningly exchanges single foibles into character; humor glides into the heart of its object, looks lovingly upon the infirmities it attacks, and represents the whole man. ”

“ All elegance of mind and manners is banished. A theatrical, bombastic, windy phraseology of heroic virtue, blended and mingled up with a worse dissoluteness, and joined to a murderous and savage ferocity, forms the tone and idiom of their language and their manners. ”

“ The four faculties in question seem to me all of their class; but when either fancy or humour is expressed to gain an end, is pointed at a purpose — whenever either becomes objective in place of subjective, then it becomes, also, pure wit or sarcasm, just as the purpose is benevolent or malevolent. ”

“ Flattery as a vice is made to seem unworthy, and its victim ridiculous in the two selections following:
The Fox and the Crow, Volume I, page 64. The Spider and the Fly, III, 19.
B. Our character is largely made up of our feelings and emotions. Reason takes us in hand and tells us right from wrong, but we must feel before we can act. To cultivate right feeling, laudable emotions; to make one wish to do and hence will to do is perhaps the greatest function of real literature, that is the literature of beauty and of [91] inspiration. ”

“ What then is the design of this singular and mysterious power, in connexion with this sad and unaccountable nature—so often the theme of eulogy and lament—of lofty, long, and desperate satire, among men? The best answer, we think, is rendered in the influence, where operation is open to every one who thinks, observes, reasons, acts, among his fellows.—To enter into particular definitions here, would be needless as well as wearisome. The general effect upon man, as a sentient and moral being, must be the point to which our simple remarks and reasons must be confined. ”

“ Neatness correlates, in varying degrees, with all the traits except vulgarity and sociability; intelligence with all except vulgarity and perhaps sociability; humor with all except neatness, conceit and refinement, where the coefficients are low; conceit correlates especially closely with neatness, beauty and snobbishness; beauty with neatness, [Pg 171] humor, conceit and refinement; vulgarity correlates positively with only humor and snobbishness, and negatively with refinement; refinement, with everything except humor, snobbishness and vulgarity ”

“ Our present critic for instance is “down”—very understandingly down as seems to us—on some of the sides of his author’s rich temperamental vulgarity; which is accompanied on those sides by want of taste, want of wit, want of style, want of knowledge of ever so many parts of the general subject, too precipitately proposed, and want of fineness of feeling about ever so many others. ”

“ 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 ”

“ While the ear is charmed with the style, and the fancy riots on the luxuriance of description, which so intimately blend the charms of virtue and the fascinations of vice, they are not readily distinguished by all. ”

“ They vulgarise and degrade whatever is interesting or sacred to the mind, and suppose that they thus add to the dignity of their profession. They represent a face that seems as if no thought or feeling of any kind had ever passed through it, and would have you believe that this is the very sublime of expression, such as it would appear in heroes, or demigods of old, when rapture or agony was raised to its height. ”

“ His constant pleasantry was the genuine effusion of good nature and good humor, tempered with delicacy and modesty, and without even the slightest tincture of malignity, so frequently the disagreeable source of what is called wit in other men. ”

“ For example, the spectacle of the lackey donning the externals of a fine gentleman—a favourite subject of mirthful treatment by Molière and others—may amuse us as a transparent pretence, as a fine display of insolent vanity, or, again, as an amusing caricature of the extravagant absurdities of fine manners. Extravagance in dress and the like is frequently found in the company of a deliciously erroneous idea of one’s own importance. ”

“ From your own observation, reflect what a disagreeable impression an awkward address, a slovenly figure, an ungraceful manner of speaking, whether stuttering, muttering, monotony, or drawling, an unattentive behavior, etc., make upon you, at first sight, in a stranger, and how they prejudice you against him, though for aught you know, he may have great intrinsic sense and merit. And reflect, on the other hand, how much the opposites of all these things prepossess you, at first sight, in favor of those who enjoy them. ”

“ For my part, I can see few things more desirable, after the possession of such radical qualities as honour and humour and pathos, than to have a lively and not a stolid countenance; to have looks to correspond with every feeling; to be elegant arid delightful in person, so that we shall please even in the intervals of active pleasing, and may never discredit speech with uncouth manners or become unconsciously our own burlesques. ”

“ For Elegance is no essential Property of Wit. Pure Wit resulting solely from the quick Elucidation of one Subject, by the sudden Arrangement, and Comparison of it, with another Subject.--If the two Objects arranged together are elegant, and polite, there will then be superadded to the Wit, an Elegance and Politeness of Sentiment, which will render the Wit more amiable. ”

“ It is, strange to say, by reading another complexity into her image that we finally simplify it. The riddle consists in the irreconcilability of her distinction and her vulgarity. Vulgar somehow in spite of everything is the record of so much taking and tasting and leaving, so much publicity and palpability of “heart,” so much experience reduced only to the terms of so many more or less greasy males. ”

“ Being such, it has the infrequence that marks all excellence, both in life and its mirrored reflection. There is much of an unsatiric and subintellectual order, the kind that comes from ingenuity and cunning, and takes the shape of pranks and jests for the fun of them ”

“ A formless or unsubstantial thing cannot be distinguished as gross or subtle, discriminate as minutely as you will. What can be spoken of is the gross or palpable part of an entity; what can be imagined only is its subtle part or essence ”

“ I will, therefore, say, that the inward beauty, whether fully represented or not by the outward form, implies, in the first place, the absence of all those qualities which tend to lower and vulgarise life. ”

“ It is too much the fashion, in conversation, to use exaggerated [301] expressions which are opposed to truth, without the person employing them being aware of it, from the mere force of habit. Why need we say splendid for pretty, magnificent for handsome, horrid for unpleasant, immense for large, thousands, or myriads, for any number more than two? ”

“ The usual noisy demonstrations of such sort of people in their good or ill luck—their dealings one with another, their vehemence, but goodness of heart, common-place remarks and unaffected manners, their naïve wit and humour—all this was excellently imitated. ”

“ There is no mistaking it; the leak of distinction is produced by a positive element of the vulgar; and that the vulgar should flourish in an air so charged, intellectually speaking, with the “aristocratic” element, becomes for us straightway the greatest of oddities and at the same time, critically speaking, one of the most interesting things conceivable. ”

“ On the other hand, vulgar display must be shown to be vulgar, shoddy must be unmasked, the effect of aping the uncultured [20] rich set forth, and that which is unreal and that which goes for naught but vanity displayed under their true colors,—that comparisons may be made, and that truer conceptions of life, its duties and obligations, may be secured. ”