Part 2
The female sex is prone to be inaccurate and careless of apparently trivial detail, because this is the general tendency of mankind. In men destined for a business or a profession, the proclivity is harshly discouraged at an early stage. In women, who usually are not destined for anything whatever, it enjoys a merry life, and often refuses to be improved out of existence when the sudden need arises. No one by taking thought can deracinate the mental habits of, say, twenty years.
_Twenty-six_
Kindliness of heart is not the greatest of human qualities--and its general effect on the progress of the world is not entirely beneficent--but it is the greatest of human qualities in friendship.
_Twenty-seven_
There is a certain satisfaction in hopelessness amid the extreme of misery. You press it to you as the martyr clutched the burning fagot. You enjoy it. You savour, piquantly, your woe, your shame, your abjectness, the failure of your philosophy. You celebrate the perdition of the man in you. You want to talk about it brazenly; even to exaggerate it, and to swagger over it.
_Twenty-eight_
The great public is no fool. It is huge and simple and slow in mental processes, like a good-humoured giant, easy to please and grateful for diversion. But it has a keen sense of its own dignity; it will not be trifled with; it resents for ever the tongue in the cheek.
_Twenty-nine_
The beauty of horses, timid creatures, sensitive and graceful and irrational as young girls, is a thing apart; and what is strange is that their vast strength does not seem incongruous with it. To be above that proud and lovely organism, listening, apprehensive, palpitating, nervous far beyond the human, to feel one’s self almost part of it by intimate contact, to yield to it, and make it yield, to draw from it into one’s self some of its exultant vitality--in a word, to ride--I can comprehend a fine enthusiasm for that.
_Thirty_
The respectable portion of the male sex in England may be divided into two classes, according to its method and manner of complete immersion in water. One class, the more dashing, dashes into a cold tub every morning. Another, the more cleanly, sedately takes a warm bath every Saturday night. There can be no doubt that the former class lends tone and distinction to the country, but the latter is the nation’s backbone.
_Thirty-one_
Although you may easily practise upon the credulity of a child in matters of fact, you cannot cheat his moral and social judgment. He will add you up, and he will add anybody up, and he will estimate conduct, upon principles of his own and in a manner terribly impartial. Parents have no sterner nor more discerning critics than their own children.
_April_
_One_
A person’s character is, and can be, nothing else but the total result of his habits of thought.
_Two_
Beware of hope, and beware of ambition! Each is excellently tonic, like German competition, in moderation, but all of you are suffering from self-indulgence in the first, and very many of you are ruining your constitutions with the second.
_Three_
As a matter of fact, people “indulge” in remorse; it is a somewhat vicious form of spiritual pleasure.
_Four_
When a thing is thoroughly well done it often has the air of being a miracle.
_Five_
After all the shattering discoveries of science and conclusions of philosophy, mankind has still to live with dignity amid hostile nature, and in the presence of an unknowable power, and mankind can only succeed in this tremendous feat by the exercise of faith and of that mutual goodwill which is based in sincerity and charity.
_Six_
All the days that are to come will more or less resemble the present day, until you die.
_Seven_
In literature, when nine hundred and ninety-nine souls ignore you, but the thousandth buys your work, or at least borrows it--that is called enormous popularity.
_Eight_
If life is not a continual denial of the past, then it is nothing.
_Nine_
The profoundest belief of the average man is that virtue ought never to be its own reward. Shake that belief and you commit a cardinal sin; you disturb his mental quietude.
_Ten_
It is notorious that the smaller the community, and the more completely it is self-contained, the deeper will be its preoccupation with its own trifling affairs.
_Eleven_
To my mind, most societies with a moral aim are merely clumsy machines for doing simple jobs with the maximum of friction, expense and inefficiency. I should define the majority of these societies as a group of persons each of whom expects the others to do something very wonderful.
_Twelve_
There is nothing like a sleepless couch for a clear vision of one’s environment.
_Thirteen_
The supreme muddlers of living are often people of quite remarkable intellectual faculty, with a quite remarkable gift of being wise for others.
_Fourteen_
Our leading advertisers have richly proved that the public will believe anything if they are told of it often enough.
_Fifteen_
Here’s a secret. No writer likes writing, at least not one in a hundred, and the exception, ten to one, is a howling mediocrity. That’s a fact. But all the same, they’re miserable if they don’t write.
_Sixteen_
The first and noblest aim of imaginative literature is not either to tickle or to stab the sensibilities, but to render a coherent view of life’s apparent incoherence, to give shape to the amorphous, to discover beauty which was hidden, to reveal essential truth.
_Seventeen_
There is a theory that a great public can appreciate a great novel, that the highest modern expression of literary art need not appeal in vain to the average reader. And I believe this to be true--provided that such a novel is written with intent, and with a full knowledge of the peculiar conditions to be satisfied; I believe that a novel could be written which would unite in a mild ecstasy of praise the two extremes--the most inclusive majority and the most exclusive minority.
_Eighteen_
“Give us more brains, Lord!” ejaculated a great writer. Personally, I think he would have been wiser if he had asked first for the power to keep in order such brains as we have.
_Nineteen_
Under the incentive of a woman’s eyes, of what tremendous efforts is a clever man not capable, and, deprived of it, to what depths of stagnation will he not descend!
_Twenty_
Elegance is a form of beauty. It not only enhances beauty, but it is the one thing which will console the eye for the absence of beauty.
_Twenty-one_
There are several ways of entering upon journalism. One is at once to found or purchase a paper, and thus achieve the editorial chair at a single step. This course is often adopted in novels, sometimes with the happiest results; and much less often in real life, where the end is invariably and inevitably painful.
_Twenty-two_
Existence rightly considered is a fair compromise between two instincts--the instinct of hoping one day to live, and the instinct to live here and now.
_Twenty-three_
Your own mind is a sacred enclosure into which nothing harmful can enter except by your permission.
_Twenty-four_
The average man is not half enough of an egotist. If egotism means a terrific interest in one’s self, egotism is absolutely essential to efficient living.
_Twenty-five_
Events have no significance except by virtue of the ideas from which they spring; the clash of events is the clash of ideas, and out of this clash the moral lesson inevitably emerges, whether we ask for it or no. Hence every great book is a great moral book, and there is a true and fine sense in which the average reader is justified in regarding art as the handmaid of morality.
_Twenty-six_
_William Shakespeare’s Birthday_
Shakespeare is “taught” in schools; that is to say, the Board of Education and all authorities pedagogic bind themselves together in a determined effort to make every boy in the land a lifelong enemy of Shakespeare. It is a mercy they don’t “teach” Blake.
_Twenty-seven_
_Herbert Spencer’s Birthday_
There are those who assert that Spencer was not a supreme genius! At any rate he taught me intellectual courage; he taught me that nothing is sacred that will not bear inspection; and I adore his memory.
_Twenty-eight_
Unite the colossal with the gaudy, and you will not achieve the sublime; but, unless you are deterred by humility and a sense of humour, you may persuade yourself that you have done so, and certainly most people will credit you with the genuine feat.
_Twenty-nine_
The average reader (like Goethe and Ste. Beuve) has his worse and his better self, and there are times when he will yield to the former; but on the whole his impulses are good. In every writer who earns his respect and enduring love there is some central righteousness, which is capable of being traced and explained, and at which it is impossible to sneer.
_Thirty_
Literature is the art of using words. This is not a platitude, but a truth of the first importance, a truth so profound that many writers never get down to it, and so subtle that many other writers who think they see it never in fact really comprehend it. The business of the author is with words. The practisers of other arts, such as music and painting, deal with ideas and emotions, but only the author has to deal with them by means of words. Words are his exclusive possession among creative artists and craftsmen. They are his raw material, his tools and instruments, his manufactured product, his alpha and omega. He may abound in ideas and emotions of the finest kind, but those ideas and emotions cannot be said to have an effective existence until they are expressed; they are limited to the extent of their expression; and their expression is limited to the extent of the author’s skill in the use of words. I smile when I hear people say, “If I could _write_, if I could only put down what I feel--!” Such people beg the whole question. The ability to _write_ is the sole thing peculiar to literature--not the ability to think nor the ability to feel, but the ability to write, to utilise words.
_May_
_One_
Only a small minority of authors overwrite themselves. Most of the good and the tolerable ones do not write enough.
_Two_
The entire business of success is a gigantic tacit conspiracy on the part of the minority to deceive the majority.
_Three_
There are at least three women-journalists in Europe to-day whose influence is felt in Cabinets and places where they govern (proving that sex is not a bar to the proper understanding of _la haute politique_); whereas the man who dares to write on fashions does not exist.
_Four_
Habits are the very dickens to change.
_Five_
Not only is art a factor in life; it is a factor in all lives. The division of the world into two classes, one of which has a monopoly of what is called “artistic feeling,” is arbitrary and false. Everyone is an artist, more or less; that is to say, there is no person quite without that faculty of poetising, which, by seeing beauty, creates beauty, and which, when it is sufficiently powerful and articulate, constitutes the musical composer, the architect, the imaginative writer, the sculptor, and the painter.
_Six_
Is it nothing to you to learn to understand that the world is not a dull place?
_Seven_
In neither faith nor enthusiasm can a child compete with a convinced adult. No child could believe in anything as passionately as the modern millionaire believes in money, or as the modern social reformer believes in the virtue of Acts of Parliament.
_Eight_
Literature, instead of being an accessory, is the fundamental _sine qua non_ of complete living.
_Nine_
No novelist, however ingenious, who does not write what he feels, and what, by its careful finish, approximately pleases himself, can continue to satisfy the average reader. He may hang for years precariously on the skirts of popularity, but in the end he will fall; he will be found out.
_Ten_
Only the fool and the very young expect happiness. The wise merely hope to be interested, at least not to be bored, in their passage through this world. Nothing is so interesting as love and grief, and the one involves the other.
_Eleven_
One of the commonest characteristics of the successful man is his idleness, his immense capacity for wasting time.
_Twelve_
People who regard literary taste simply as an accomplishment, and literature simply as a distraction, will never truly succeed, either in acquiring the accomplishment or in using it half-acquired as a distraction.
_Thirteen_
The finest souls have their reactions, their rebellions against wise reason.
_Fourteen_
My theory is that politeness, instead of decreasing with intimacy--should increase! And when I say “Politeness” I mean common, superficial politeness. I don’t mean the deep-down sort of thing that you can only detect with a divining-rod.
_Fifteen_
Marcus Aurelius is assuredly regarded as the greatest of writers in the human machine school, and not to read him daily is considered by many to be a bad habit.
_Sixteen_
Part of the secret of Balzac’s unique power over the reader is the unique tendency of his own interest in the thing to be told.
_Seventeen_
_“Anna of the Five Towns” finished 1901_
The art of fiction is the art of telling a story. This statement is not so obvious and unnecessary as it may seem. Most beginners and many “practised hands” attend to all kinds of things before they attend to the story. With them the art of fiction is the art of describing character or landscape, of getting “atmosphere,” and of being humorous, pathetic, flippant, or terrifying; while the story is a perfunctory excuse for these feats. They are so busy with the traditional paraphernalia of fiction, with the tricks of the craft, that what should be the principal business is reduced to a subsidiary task. They forget that character, landscape, atmosphere, humour, pathos, etc., are not ends in themselves, but only means toward an end.
_Eighteen_
How true it is that the human soul is solitary, that content is the only true riches, and that to be happy we must be good.
_Nineteen_
Men of letters who happen to have genius do not write for men of letters. They write, as Wagner was proud to say he composed, for the ordinary person.
_Twenty_
Great success never depends on the practice of the humbler virtues, though it may occasionally depend on the practice of the prouder vices.
_Twenty-one_
“I’ve been to the National Gallery twice, and, upon my word, I was almost the only person there! And it’s free, too! People don’t _want_ picture-galleries. If they did, they’d go. Who ever saw a public-house empty, or Peter Robinson’s? And you have to pay there!”
_Twenty-two_
He who has not been “presented to the freedom” of literature has not wakened up out of his prenatal sleep. He is merely not born. He can’t see; he can’t hear; he can’t feel in any full sense. He can only eat his dinner.
_Twenty-three_
All the arts are a conventionalisation, an ordering of nature.
_Twenty-four_
The aim of literary study is not to amuse the hours of leisure; it is to awake oneself, it is to be alive, to intensify one’s capacity for pleasure, for sympathy, and for comprehension.
_Twenty-five_
Like every aging artist of genuine accomplishment, he knew--none better--that there is no satisfaction save the satisfaction of fatigue after honest endeavour. He knew--none better--that wealth and glory and fine clothes are naught, and that striving is all.
_Twenty-six_
Prepare to live by all means, but for Heaven’s sake do not forget to live.
_Twenty-seven_
_My Birthday_
Sometimes I suddenly halt and address myself: “You may be richer or you may be poorer; you may live in greater pomp and luxury, or in less. The point is, that you will always be, essentially, what you are now. You have no real satisfaction to look forward to except the satisfaction of continually inventing, fancying, imagining, scribbling. Say another thirty years of these emotional ingenuities, these interminable variations on the theme of beauty. Is it good enough?” And I answered: “Yes.” But who knows? Who can preclude the regrets of the dying couch?
_Twenty-eight_
The balanced sanity of a great mind makes impossible exaggeration, and, therefore, distortion.
_Twenty-nine_
No art that is not planned in form is worth consideration, and no life that is not planned in convention can ever be satisfactory.
_Thirty_
The value of restraint is seldom inculcated upon women. Indeed, its opposites--gush and a tendency to hysteria--are regarded, in many respectable quarters, as among the proper attributes of true womanliness; attributes to be artistically cultivated.
_Thirty-one_
There grows in the North Country a certain kind of youth of whom it may be said that he is born to be a Londoner. The metropolis, and everything that appertains to it, that comes down from it, that goes up into it, has for him an imperious fascination. Long before schooldays are over he learns to take a doleful pleasure in watching the exit of the London train from the railway station. He stands by the hot engine and envies the very stoker. Gazing curiously into the carriages he wonders that men and women, who in a few hours will be treading streets called Piccadilly and the Strand, can contemplate the immediate future with so much apparent calmness; some of them even have the audacity to look bored. He finds it difficult to keep from throwing himself in the guard’s van as it glides past him; and not until the last coach is a speck upon the distance does he turn away and, nodding absently to the ticket-clerk, who knows him well, go home to nurse a vague ambition and dream of town.
_June_
_One_
To cultivate and nourish a grievance when you have five hundred pounds in your pocket, in cash, is the most difficult thing in the world.
_Two_
The full beauty of an activity is never brought out until it is subjected to discipline and strict ordering and nice balancing.
_Three_
The unfading charm of classical music is that you never tire of it.
_Four_
The spirit of literature is unifying; it joins the candle and the star, and by the magic of an image shows that the beauty of the greater is in the less.
_Five_
If people, by merely wishing to do so, could regularly and seriously read, observe, write, and use every faculty and sense, there would be very little mental inefficiency.
_Six_
Laws and rules, forms and ceremonies, are good in themselves, from a merely æsthetic point of view, apart from their social value and necessity.
_Seven_
Fashionable women have a manner of sitting down quite different from that of ordinary women. They only touch the back of the chair at the top. They don’t loll but they only escape lolling by dint of gracefulness. It is an affair of curves, slants, descents, nicely calculated. They elaborately lead your eye downwards over gradually increasing expanses, and naturally you expect to see their feet--and you don’t see their feet. The thing is apt to be disturbing to unhabituated beholders.
_Eight_
There are moments in the working day of every novelist when he feels deeply that anything--road-mending, shop-walking, housebreaking--would be better than this eternal torture of the brain; but such moments pass.
_Nine_
During a long and varied career as a bachelor, I have noticed that marriage is usually the death of politeness between a man and a woman. I have noticed that the stronger the passion the weaker the manners.
_Ten_
My sense of security amid the collisions of existence lies in the firm consciousness that just as my body is the servant of my mind, so is my mind the servant of _me_.
_Eleven_
The fault of the epoch is the absence of meditativeness.
_Twelve_
People who don’t want to live, people who would sooner hibernate than feel intensely, will be wise to eschew literature.
_Thirteen_
No one is so sure of achieving the aims of the literary craftsman as the man who has something to say and wishes to say it simply and have done with it.
_Fourteen_
The mind can only be conquered by regular meditation, by deciding beforehand what direction its activity ought to take, and insisting that its activity take that direction; also by never leaving it idle, undirected, masterless, to play at random like a child in the streets after dark.
_Fifteen_
The enterprise of forming one’s literary taste is an agreeable one; if it is not agreeable it cannot succeed.
_Sixteen_
The attitude of the average decent person towards the classics of his own tongue is one of distrust--I had almost said, of fear.
_Seventeen_
Am I, a portion of the Infinite Force that existed billions of years ago, and which will exist billions of years hence, going to allow myself to be worried by any terrestrial physical or mental event? I am not.
_Eighteen_
There is not a successful inexpert author writing to-day who would not be more successful--who would not be better esteemed and in receipt of a larger income--if he had taken the trouble to become expert. Skill does count; skill is always worth its cost in time and labour.
_Nineteen_
It is easier to go down a hill than up, but the view is from the top.
_Twenty_
For me there is no supremacy in art. When fifty artists have contrived to be supreme, supremacy becomes impossible. Take a little song by Grieg. It is perfect, it is supreme. No one could be greater than Grieg was great when he wrote that song. The whole last act of _The Twilight of the Gods_ is not greater than a little song of Grieg’s.
_Twenty-one_
We talked books. We just simply enumerated books without end, praising or damning them, and arranged authors in neat pews, like cattle in classes at an agricultural show. No pastime is more agreeable to people who have the book disease, and none more quickly fleets the hours, and none is more delightfully futile.
_Twenty-two_
The law of gravity is absurd and indefensible when you fall downstairs; but you obey it.
_Twenty-three_
It is difficult to make a reputation, but it is even more difficult seriously to mar a reputation once properly made--so faithful is the public.
_Twenty-four_
That which has cost a sacrifice is always endeared.
_Twenty-five_
If literary aspirants genuinely felt that literature was the art of using words, bad, slipshod writing--writing that stultifies the thought and emotion which it is designed to render effective--would soon be a thing of the past. For they would begin at the beginning as apprentices to all other arts are compelled to. The serious student of painting who began his apprenticeship by trying to paint a family group, would be regarded as a lunatic. But the literary aspirant who begins with a novel is precisely that sort of lunatic, and the fact that he sometimes gets himself into print does not in the least mitigate his lunacy.
_Twenty-six_
In spite of all the differences which we have invented, mankind is a fellowship of brothers, overshadowed by insoluble and fearful mysteries, and dependent upon mutual goodwill and trust for the happiness it may hope to achieve.
_Twenty-seven_
The brain is a servant, exterior to the central force of the Ego. If it is out of control, the reason is not that it is uncontrollable but merely that its discipline has been neglected.
_Twenty-eight_