Part 4
_Eleven_
The heart is convinced that custom is a virtue. The heart of the dirty working-man rebels when the State insists that he shall be clean, for no other reason than that it is his custom to be dirty.
_Twelve_
To be honest with oneself is not so simple as it appears.
_Thirteen_
“My wife will never understand,” said Mr. Brindley, “that complete confidence between two human beings is impossible.”
_Fourteen_
Demanding honesty from your authors, you must see that you render it yourself.
_Fifteen_
Imagine the technical difficulties of a painter whose canvas was always being rolled off one stick on to another stick, and who was compelled to do his picture inch by inch, seeing nothing but the particular inch which happened to be under his brush. That difficulty is only one of the difficulties of the novelist.
_Sixteen_
It is a fact that few novelists enjoy the creative labour, though most enjoy thinking about the creative labour. Novelists enjoy writing novels no more than ploughmen enjoy following the plough. They regard business as a “grind.”
_Seventeen_
The born journalist comes into the world with the fixed notion that nothing under the sun is uninteresting. He says: “I cannot pass along the street, or cut a finger, or marry, or catch a cold or a fish, or go to church, or perform any act whatever, without being impressed anew by the interestingness of mundane phenomena, and without experiencing a desire to share this impression with my fellow-creatures.”
_Eighteen_
Any change, even a change for the better, is always accompanied by drawbacks and discomforts.
_Nineteen_
It is much easier to begin a novel than to finish it. This statement applies to many enterprises, but to none with more force than to a long art-work such as a novel or a play.
_Twenty_
A true book is not always great. But a great book is never untrue.
_Twenty-one_
The impossible had occurred. I was no longer a mere journalist; I was an author. “After all, it’s nothing,” I said, with that intense and unoriginal humanity which distinguishes all of us. And in a blinding flash I saw that an author was in essence the same thing as a grocer or a duke.
_Twenty-two_
When the reason and the heart come into conflict the heart is invariably wrong.
_Twenty-three_
Marriage is excessively prosaic and eternal, not at all what you expect it to be.
_Twenty-four_
I do not forget that the realism of one age is the conventionality of the next. In the main the tendency of art is always to reduce and simplify its conventions, thus necessitating an increase of virtuosity in order to obtain the same effects of shapeliness and rhythm.
_Twenty-five_
For the majority of people the earth is a dull planet. It is only a Stevenson who can say: “I never remember being bored,” and one may fairly doubt whether even Stevenson uttered truth when he made that extraordinary statement. None of us escapes boredom entirely; some of us, indeed, are bored during the greater part of our lives. The fact is unpalatable, but it is a fact.
_Twenty-six_
An average of over an hour a day given to the mind should permanently and completely enliven the whole activity of the mind.
_Twenty-seven_
A large class of people positively resent being thrilled by a work of fiction, and the domestic serial is meant to appeal to this class.
_Twenty-eight_
It is natural that people who concern themselves with art only in their leisure moments, demanding from it nothing but a temporary distraction, should prefer the obvious to the recondite, and should walk regardless of beauty unless it forces itself upon their attention by means of exaggerations and advertisement. The public wants to be struck, hit squarely in the face; then it will take notice.
_Twenty-nine_
When a book attains a large circulation one usually says that it succeeds. But the fine books succeed of themselves, by their own virtue, and apart from the acclamatory noises of fame. Immure them in cabinets, cast them into Sahara; still they imperturbably succeed. If, on a rare occasion, such a book sells by scores of thousands, it is not the book but the public which succeeds; it is not the book but the public which has emerged splendidly from a trial.
_Thirty_
The artists who have courage fully to exploit their own temperaments are always sufficiently infrequent to be peculiarly noticeable and welcome. Still more rare are they who, leaving it to others to sing and emphasise the ideal and obvious beauties which all can in some measure see, will exclusively exercise the artist’s prerogative as an explorer of hidden and recondite beauty in unsuspected places.
_Thirty-one_
Bad books, by flattering you, by caressing, by appealing to the weak or the base in you, will often persuade you what fine and splendid books they are.
_November_
_One_
It is well to remind ourselves that literature is first and last a means of life, and that the enterprise of forming one’s literary taste is an enterprise of learning how best to use this means of life.
_Two_
Instead of saying, “Sorry I can’t see you, old chap, but I have to run off to the tennis club,” you must say, “... But I have to work.” This, I admit, is intensely difficult to say. Tennis is so much more urgent than the immortal soul.
_Three_
A talent never persuades or encourages the owner of it; it drives him with a whip.
_Four_
One of the chief things which one has to learn is that the mental faculties are capable of a continuous hard activity; they do not tire like an arm or a leg. All they want is change, not rest, except in sleep.
_Five_
Characterisation, the feat of individualising characters, is the inmost mystery of imaginative literary art. It is of the very essence of the novel. It never belongs to this passage or that. It is implicit in the whole. It is always being done, and is never finished till the last page is written.
_Six_
Can you deny that when you have something definite to look forward to at eventide, something that is to employ all your energy, the thought of that something gives a glow and a more intense vitality to the whole day?
_Seven_
Most good books have begun by causing anger which disguised itself as contempt.
_Eight_
When a thing is supreme there is nothing to be said.
_Nine_
_Ivan Sergeïtch Turgenev’s Birthday_
The author of a miracle like _On the Eve_ may be born, but he is also made. In the matter of condensation alone Turgenev was unique among the great literary artificers. He could say more in a chapter of two thousand words than any other novelist that ever lived. What he accomplishes again and again in a book of sixty thousand words, Tolstoi could not have accomplished under a quarter of a million.
_Ten_
Fine taste in fiction is almost as rare among novelists as among the general public.
_Eleven_
I have never once produced any literary work without a preliminary incentive quite other than the incentive of ebullient imagination. I have never “wanted to write,” until the extrinsic advantages of writing had presented themselves to me.
_Twelve_
Beauty is strangely various. There is the beauty of light and joy and strength exulting; but there is also the beauty of shade, of sorrow and sadness, and of humility oppressed. The spirit of the sublime dwells not only in the high and remote; it shines unperceived amid all the usual meannesses of our daily existence.
_Thirteen_
Always give your fellow creature credit for good intentions. Do not you, though sometimes mistakenly, always act for the best? You know you do. And are you alone among mortals in rectitude?
_Fourteen_
There is no such case as the average case, just as there is no such man as the average man. Every man and every man’s case is special.
_Fifteen_
Outside the department of fiction there are two kinds of authors--those who want to write because they have something definite to say, and those who want something definite to say because they can write.
_Sixteen_
A lover is one who deludes himself; a journalist is one who deludes himself and other people.
_Seventeen_
Although a very greedy eater of literature, I can only enjoy reading when I have little time for reading. Give me three hours of absolute leisure with nothing to do but read, and I instantly become almost incapable of the act.
_Eighteen_
I would point out that literature by no means comprises the whole field of knowledge, and that the disturbing thirst to improve one’s self--to increase one’s knowledge--may well be slaked quite apart from literature.
_Nineteen_
The public, by its casual approval, may give notoriety and a vogue which passes, but it is incapable of the sustained ardour of appreciation which alone results in authentic renown. It is incapable because it is nonchalant. To the public art is a very little thing--a distraction, the last resort against _ennui_. To the critics art looms enormous. They do not merely possess views; they are possessed by them. Their views amount to a creed, and that creed must be spread. Quiescence is torment to the devotee. He cannot cry peace when there is no peace. Passionate conviction, like murder, will out. “I believe; therefore you must believe”: that is the motto which moves the world.
_Twenty_
Only those who have lived at the full stretch seven days a week for a long time can appreciate the full beauty of a regularly recurring idleness.
_Twenty-one_
Publishers as a commercial class are neither more nor less honourable than any other commercial class, and authors are neither more nor less honourable than publishers. In the world of commerce one fights for one’s own hand and keeps within the law; the code is universally understood, and the man who thinks it ought to be altered because _he_ happens to be inexperienced, is a fool.
_Twenty-two_
There can be no sort of doubt that unless I was prepared to flout the wisdom of the ages, I ought to have refused his suggestion. But is not the wisdom of the ages a medicine for majorities? And, indeed, I was prepared to flout it, as in our highest and our lowest moments we often are.
_Twenty-three_
London is chiefly populated by greyhaired men who for twenty years have been about to become journalists and authors. And but for a fortunate incident--the thumb of my Fate has always been turned up--I might ere this have fallen back into that tragic rearguard of Irresolutes.
_Twenty-four_
I think it is rather fine, this necessity for the tense bracing of the will before anything worth doing can be done. I rather like it myself. I feel it to be the chief thing that differentiates me from the cat by the fire.
_Twenty-five_
The most important preliminary to the task of arranging one’s life so that one may live fully and comfortably within one’s daily budget of twenty-four hours, is the calm realisation of the extreme difficulty of the task, of the sacrifices and the endless effort it demands.
_Twenty-six_
Whatever sin a man does he either does for his own benefit or for the benefit of society.
_Twenty-seven_
The critic’s first requisite is that he should be interested. A man may have an instinctive good taste, but if his attitude is one of apathy, then he is not a true critic. The opinions of the public are often wrong; the opinions of the critic are usually right. But the fundamental difference between these two bodies does not lie here; it lies in the fact that the critics “care,” while the public does not care.
_Twenty-eight_
When, after the theatre, a woman precedes a man into a carriage, does she not publish and glory in the fact that she is his? Is it not the most delicious of avowals? There is something in the enforced bend of one’s head as one steps in. And when the man shuts the door with a masculine snap----
_Twenty-nine_
Ardour in well-doing is a misleading and a treacherous thing. It cries out loudly for employment; you can’t satisfy it at first; it wants more and more; it is eager to move mountains and divert the course of rivers; it isn’t content till it perspires. And then, too often, when it feels the perspiration on its brow, it wearies all of a sudden and dies, without even putting itself to the trouble of saying, “I’ve had enough of this.”
_Thirty_
Literature exists so that where one man has lived finely ten thousand may afterwards live finely.
_December_
_One_
To hear a master play a scale, to catch that measured, tranquil succession of notes, each a different jewel of equal splendour, each dying precisely when the next was born--this is to perceive at last what music is made of, to have glimpses of the divine magic that is the soul of the divinest art.
_Two_
When the swimmer unclothes, and abandons himself to the water, naked, letting the water caress the whole of his nakedness, moving his limbs in voluptuous ease untrammelled by even the lightest garment, then, as never under other conditions, he is aware of his body; and perhaps the thought occurs to him that to live otherwise than in that naked freedom is not to live.
_Three_
Has it never struck you that you have at hand a machine wonderful beyond all mechanisms in sheds, intricate, delicately adjustable, of astounding and miraculous possibilities, interminably interesting? That machine is yourself.
_Four_
The sound reputation of an artist is originally due never to the public, but to the critics. I do not use the word “critic” in a limited, journalistic sense; it is meant to include all those persons, whether scribes or not, who have genuine convictions about art.
_Five_
The movement for opening museums on Sundays is the most natural movement that could be conceived. For if ever a resort was invented and fore-ordained to chime with the true spirit of the British Sabbath, that resort is the average museum.
_Six_
The manufacture of musical comedy is interesting and curious, but I am not aware that it has anything to do with dramatic art.
_Seven_
Though you have the wealth of a cloak-room attendant at the Carlton Hotel, you cannot buy yourself a minute more time than I have, or the cat by the fire has.
_Eight_
The man of business, even in the very daily act of deceit, will never yield up the conviction that, after all, at bottom he is crystal honest. It is his darling delusion.
_Nine_
Happiness is not joy, and it is not tranquillity. It is something deeper and something more disturbing. Perhaps it is an acute sense of life, a realisation of one’s secret being, a continual renewal of the mysterious savour of existence.
_Ten_
Our best plays, as works of art, are strikingly inferior to our best novels. A large section of the educated public ignores the modern English theatre as being unworthy of attention.
_Eleven_
Romance, interest, dwell not in the thing seen, but in the eye of the beholder.
_Twelve_
Every bookish person has indulgently observed the artless absorption and surrender with which a “man of action” reads when by chance a book captures him, his temporary monomania, his insistence that the bookish person shall share his joy, and his impatience at any exhibition of indifference. For the moment the terrible man of action is a child again; he who has straddled the world is like a provincial walking with open-mouthed delight through the streets of the capital.
_Thirteen_
The woman who quarrels with a maid is clumsy, and the woman who quarrels with a good maid is either a fool or in a nervous, hysterical condition, or both.
_Fourteen_
Men have a habit of taking themselves for granted, and that habit is responsible for nine-tenths of the boredom and despair on the face of the planet.
_Fifteen_
Anyone can learn to write, and to write well, in any given style; but to see, to discern the interestingness which is veiled from the crowd--that comes not by tuition; rather by intuition.
_Sixteen_
The forms of faith change, but the spirit of faith is immortal amid its endless vicissitudes.
_Seventeen_
Consider the attitude of Dissenters of the trading and industrial classes towards the art of literature.... That attitude is at once timid, antagonistic, and resentful. Timid, because print still has for the unlettered a mysterious sanction; antagonistic because Puritanism and the arts have by no means yet settled their quarrel; resentful because the autocratic power of art over the imagination and the intelligence is felt without being understood.
_Eighteen_
It is said that men are only interested in themselves. The truth is that, as a rule, men are interested in every mortal thing except themselves.
_Nineteen_
It is less difficult, I should say, to succeed moderately in journalism than to succeed moderately in dressmaking.
_Twenty_
Music cannot be said. One art cannot be translated into another.
_Twenty-one_
A deep-seated objection to the intrusion of even the most loved male at certain times is common, I think, to all women. Women are capable of putting love aside, like a rich dress, and donning the _peignoir_ of matter-of-fact dailiness, in a way which is an eternal enigma to men.
_Twenty-two_
There’s nothing like a corpse for putting everything at sixes and sevens.
_Twenty-three_
Great grief is democratic, levelling--not downwards but upwards. It strips away the inessential and makes brothers. It is impatient with all the unavailable inventions which obscure the brotherhood of mankind.
_Twenty-four_
The expression of the soul by means of the brain and body is what we call the art of “living.”
_Twenty-five_
That Christmas has lost some of its magic is a fact that the common-sense of the western hemisphere will not dispute. To blink the fact is infantile. To confront it, to try to understand it, to reckon with it, and to obviate any evil that may attach to it--this course alone is meet for an honest man.
_Twenty-six_
It must be admitted in favour of the Five Towns that, when its inhabitants spill milk, they do not usually sit down on the pavement and adulterate the milk with their tears. They pass on. Such passing on is termed callous and coldhearted in the rest of England, which loves to sit down on pavements and weep into irretrievable milk.
_Twenty-seven_
At thirty the chances are that a man will understand better the draughts of a chimney than his own respiratory apparatus--to name one of the simple, obvious things; and as for understanding the working of his own brain--what an idea!
_Twenty-eight_
Science is making it increasingly difficult to conceive matter apart from spirit. Everything lives. Even my razor gets “tired.”
_Twenty-nine_
No book in any noble library is so interesting, so revealing, as the catalogue of it.
_Thirty_
Love is the greatest thing in life; one may, however, question whether it should be counted greater than life itself.
_Thirty-one_
The indispensable preparation for brain-discipline is to form the habit of regarding one’s brain as an instrument exterior to one’s self, like a tongue or a foot.
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.