Suspended Judgments: Essays on Books and Sensations

[Note: I have made the following spelling changes: qualites which strike to qualities which strike, revelled in to reveled in, proteges to proteges, voluptuous femininty to volu...

Two men may start together to write confessions, and one of the two may dissect every nerve and fibre of his inmost soul, while the other may ramble carelessly on about the plac...

They will miss nothing of the caprices and humours and comedies of every day of human life; for they will know that in the final issue none of us are wiser than the day and what...

But for the rest the issue is now plain, the great dilemma clear. No more fooling with shadows when faith has lost its substance; no more walking on the road to Emmaus when the...

He mocked at the traditions of men; but he remains a champion of man's highest prerogative. He turned the churches into indecent ridicule; but wherever an honest man strikes at...

In his Confessions he does his best to make posterity hate him; and in private life he must have been constantly, like one of those strange self-lacerating persons in Dostoievsk...

One is tempted to feel that, after all, there is a certain underlying justification for the man in the street's objection to this kind of so-called "realism." We have a right af...

There is as little of the sensual in Victor Hugo's temperament as there is in the temperament of a pure-minded child; but like a child he finds a shuddering pleasure in approach...

It is, after all, the "thing itself" which matters--the thing which "owes the worm no silk, the cat no perfume." Forked straddling animals are we all, as the mad king says in th...

In the manner of the great classical writers of Athens and Rome he holds himself back from any emotional betrayal of his own feelings. He is the type of character most entirely...

Verlaine uses the term _nuance_ in his "ars poetica" to express the evasive quality in poetry which appeals to him most and of which he himself is certainly one of the most deli...

One is persuaded by the poetry of Verlaine that the loveliest things are the most evasive things, the things which come most lightly and pass most swiftly. One realises from his...

Remy de Gourmont's ultimate contribution to the art of criticism is the disentangling, from among the more purely rational vehicles of thought, of what we might regard as the se...

Now in our own age--an age that feels as though Wilde himself were growing a little old-fashioned--we find ourselves returning to William Blake and discovering him to be more en...

It is for this reason--for the reason that he expressed so completely in his wayward and imperious manner the natural feelings of normal youthfulness--that he became in his own...

The thing is a refuge for those to whom the gods have given a "talent for literature," and have stopped with that gift. The Poetic Drama flourishes in Anglo-Saxon Democracies. I...

By that singular and forlorn scenery--the scenery of the Yorkshire moors round about her home--she was, however, in the more flexible portion of her curious nature inveterately...

You can, if you like, call this region of faint rumours and misty intimations the proper sphere and true hunting-ground of the new psychology. As a matter of fact, psychologists...

I think the pleasure I derive from Conrad is largely due to the fact that while he liberates us with a magnificent jerk from the tiresome monotonous sedentary life of ordinary c...

I do not blush to confess that I have myself sometimes shared this righteous astonishment. Is it possible that the aloofness of this tenderhearted man from the burden of his age...

But let none of the strenuous gentlemen, whose abrupt ways seem encouraged by this earthquake, congratulate themselves that refinement and beauty and distinction and toleration...

The role of the capitalist-hired preacher is to condemn him for this and to regret the departure from the scene of that imaginary and extremely ridiculous figure, the worker who...

And what is true of races is true of persons both in life and in criticism. All that is really interesting in us springs in the first place from the traditions of the race to wh...