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The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Arnold Bennett Calendar, by Enoch Arnold
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Title: The Arnold Bennett Calendar

Author: Enoch Arnold Bennett

Compiler: Frank C. Bennett

Release Date: Mar 27, 2021 [eBook #64933]

Language: English

Produced by: D A Alexander, David E. Brown, and the Online Distributed
             Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ARNOLD BENNETT CALENDAR ***





_The Arnold Bennett Calendar_




BY ARNOLD BENNETT


NOVELS

  THE OLD WIVES’ TALE
  HELEN WITH THE HIGH HAND
  THE MATADOR OF THE FIVE TOWNS
  THE BOOK OF CARLOTTA
  BURIED ALIVE
  A GREAT MAN
  LEONORA
  WHOM GOD HATH JOINED
  A MAN FROM THE NORTH
  ANNA OF THE FIVE TOWNS
  THE GLIMPSE

POCKET PHILOSOPHIES

  HOW TO LIVE ON 24 HOURS A DAY
  THE HUMAN MACHINE
  LITERARY TASTE
  MENTAL EFFICIENCY

PLAYS

  CUPID AND COMMONSENSE
  WHAT THE PUBLIC WANTS
  POLITE FARCES
  MILESTONES
  THE HONEYMOON

MISCELLANEOUS

  THE TRUTH ABOUT AN AUTHOR
  THE FEAST OF ST. FRIEND


  GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
  NEW YORK




  _The
  Arnold Bennett
  Calendar_

  _Compiled By
  Frank Bennett_

  [Illustration]

  _New York_
  _George H· Doran Company_




  COPYRIGHT, 1912
  BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

  THE·PLIMPTON·PRESS
  [W·D·O]
  NORWOOD·MASS·U·S·A


_Enoch Arnold Bennett was born at Hanley-in-the-Potteries (one of the
“Five Towns” frequently appearing in his writings) on 27th May 1867.
He was educated at the endowed Middle School, Newcastle-under-Lyme,
and matriculated in the London University. From school he went into
the office of his father, who practised as a solicitor at Hanley,
and stayed with him until 1889, when he took a post in a solicitor’s
office in London, which he held until 1893. In that year he abandoned
the law finally to become assistant editor of_ Woman, _and succeeded
to the editorship in 1896. This post he resigned in 1900 to devote
himself exclusively to literature. In the meantime several of his
works had been issued, the first being “A Man from the North”
(1898) and a handbook, “Journalism for Women,” followed in the next
year by the publication of a volume of plays, “Polite Farces,” his
first experiments in drama. Afterwards appeared in rapid succession
nine other novels, two volumes of short stories, seven volumes of
belles-lettres, and seven fantasias. Besides these he wrote two plays,
“Cupid and Common-Sense,” produced by the Stage Society in 1908, and
“What the Public Wants,” also produced by the Stage Society in 1909,
and afterwards by Mr. Hawtrey at the New Royalty Theatre. Both these
plays were subsequently staged in Glasgow, and by Miss Horniman’s
Company. The most important of his publications include:--among
novels, “Leonora,” “A Great Man,” “Sacred and Profane Love,” “Whom
God Hath Joined----,” “The Old Wives’ Tale,” and “Clayhanger”; among
the belles-lettres, “The Truth about an Author,” “Literary Taste,”
“The Reasonable Life,” “The Human Machine,” and “How to Live on
Twenty-Four Hours a Day” (the last four contributed originally to_ T.
P.’s Weekly, _and containing indications of Mr. Bennett’s theories of
life); and in the short stories, “Tales of the Five Towns,” and “The
Grim Smile of the Five Towns.” Mr. Bennett has very definite leanings
towards Socialism, and, under a pseudonym, writes regularly for_ The
New Age. _He also contributes from time to time to the most important
progressive weekly and monthly magazines._

                                                              _F. C. B._




_The Arnold Bennett Calendar_




_January_


_One_

  The individual who scoffs at New Year’s resolutions resembles the
  woman who says she doesn’t look under the bed at nights; the truth is
  not in him.


_Two_

  To give pleasure is the highest end of any work of art, because the
  pleasure procured from any art is tonic, and transforms the life into
  which it enters.


_Three_

  There are only two fundamental differences in the world--the
  difference between sex and sex, and the difference between youth and
  age.


_Four_

  The only class of modern play in which it is possible to be both
  quite artistic and quite marketable, is the farce.


_Five_

  To enjoy a work of imagination is no pastime, rather a sweet but
  fatiguing labour. After a play of Shakespeare or a Wagnerian opera
  repose is needed. Only a madman like Louis of Bavaria could demand
  _Tristan_ twice in one night.


_Six_

  Great books do not spring from something accidental in the great
  men who wrote them. They are the effluence of their very core, the
  expression of the life itself of the authors.


_Seven_

  It is within the experience of everyone that when pleasure and pain
  reach a certain intensity they are indistinguishable.


_Eight_

  One of the main obstacles to the cultivation of poetry in the average
  sensible man is an absurdly inflated notion of the ridiculous.


_Nine_

  The crudest excitement of the imaginative faculty is to be preferred
  to a swinish preoccupation with the gross physical existence.


_Ten_

  The brain is the diplomatist which arranges relations between our
  instinctive self and the universe, and it fulfils its mission when it
  provides for the maximum of freedom to the instincts with the minimum
  of friction.


_Eleven_

  A woman who has beauty wants to frame it in beauty. The eye is a
  sensualist, and its appetites, once aroused, grow. A beautiful woman
  takes the same pleasure in the sight of another beautiful woman as
  a man does; only jealousy or fear prevents her from admitting the
  pleasure.


_Twelve_

  The beginning of wise living lies in the control of the brain by the
  will.


_Thirteen_

  To utter a jeremiad upon the decadence of taste, to declare that
  literature is going to the dogs because a fourth-rate novel has been
  called a masterpiece and has made someone’s fortune, would be absurd.
  I have a strong faith that taste is as good as ever it was, and that
  literature will continue on its way undisturbed.


_Fourteen_

  There is a loveliness of so imperious, absolute, dazzling a kind
  that it banishes from the hearts of men all moral conceptions, all
  considerations of right and wrong, and leaves therein nothing but
  worship and desire.


_Fifteen_

  When homage is reiterated, when the pleasure of obeying a command and
  satisfying a caprice is begged for, when roses are strewn, and even
  necks put down in the path, one forgets to be humble; one forgets
  that in meekness alone lies the sole good; one confuses deserts with
  the hazards of heredity.


_Sixteen_

  There are men who are capable of loving a machine more deeply than
  they can love a woman. They are among the happiest men on earth.


_Seventeen_

  The uncultivated reader is content to live wholly in and for the
  moment, sentence by sentence. Keep him amused and he will ask no
  more. You may delude him, you may withhold from him every single
  thing to which he is rightfully entitled, but he will not care. The
  more crude you are, the better will he be pleased.


_Eighteen_

  It is only in the stress of fine ideas and emotions that a man may be
  truly said to live.


_Nineteen_

  Oh, innocence! Oh, divine ignorance! Oh, refusal! None knows your
  value save her who has bartered you! And herein is the woman’s
  tragedy.


_Twenty_

  To extract from the brain, at will and by will, concentration on
  a given idea for even so short a period as half an hour is an
  exceedingly difficult feat--and a fatiguing! It needs perseverance.


_Twenty-one_

  A merely literary crudity will affect the large public neither one
  way nor the other, since the large public is entirely uninterested in
  questions of style; but all other crudities appeal strongly to that
  public.


_Twenty-two_

_“Cupid and Commonsense” produced._

  Everyone who has driven a motor-car knows the uncanny sensation that
  ensues when for the first time in your life you engage the clutch,
  and the Thing beneath you begins mysteriously and formidably to move.
  It is at once an astonishment, a terror, and a delight. I felt like
  that as I watched the progress of my first play.


_Twenty-three_

  Can you see the sun over the viaduct at Loughborough Junction of
  a morning, and catch its rays in the Thames off Dewar’s whisky
  monument, and not shake with the joy of life? If so, you and
  Shakespeare are not yet in communication.


_Twenty-four_

  Adults have never yet invented any institution, festival or diversion
  specially for the benefit of children. The egoism of adults makes
  such an effort impossible, and the ingenuity and pliancy of
  children make it unnecessary. The pantomime, for example, which is
  now pre-eminently a diversion for children, was created by adults
  for the amusement of adults. Children have merely accepted it and
  appropriated it. Children, being helpless, are of course fatalists
  and imitators. They take what comes, and they do the best they can
  with it. And when they have made something their own that was adult,
  they stick to it like leeches.


_Twenty-five_

  The living speak of the uncanniness of the dead. It does not occur
  to them that manifestations of human existence may be uncanny to the
  dead.


_Twenty-six_

  There is no royal road to the control of the brain. There is no
  patent dodge about it, and no complicated function which a plain
  person may not comprehend. It is simply a question of: “I will, _I_
  will, and I _will_.”


_Twenty-seven_

  I knew that when love lasted, the credit of the survival was due
  far more often to the woman than to the man. The woman must husband
  herself, dole herself out, economise herself so that she might be
  splendidly wasteful when need was. The woman must plan, scheme,
  devise, invent, reconnoitre, take precautions; and do all this
  sincerely and lovingly in the name and honour of love. A passion for
  her is a campaign; and her deadliest enemy is satiety.


_Twenty-eight_

  Efficient living, living up to one’s best standard, getting the last
  ounce of power out of the machine with the minimum of friction: these
  things depend on the disciplined and vigorous condition of the brain.


_Twenty-nine_

  In the world of books, as in every other world, one-half does not
  know how the other half lives. In literary matters the literate
  seldom suspect the extreme simplicity and _naïveté_ of the
  illiterate. They wilfully blind themselves to it; they are afraid to
  face it.


_Thirty_

  The mysteriousness of woman vanishes the instant you brutally face
  it. Boys and ageing celibates are obsessed by the mysteriousness of
  woman. The obsession is a sign either of immaturity or of morbidity.
  The mysteriousness of woman,--take her, and see then if she is
  mysterious!


_Thirty-one_

  Train journeys have too often been sorrowful for me, so much so that
  the conception itself of a train, crawling over the country like
  a snake, or flying across it like a winged monster, fills me with
  melancholy. Trains loaded with human parcels of sadness and illusion
  and brief joy, wandering about, crossing, and occasionally colliding
  in the murk of existence; trains warmed and lighted in winter; trains
  open to catch the air of your own passage in summer; night-trains
  that pierce the night with your yellow, glaring eyes, and waken
  mysterious villages, and leave the night behind and run into the dawn
  as into a station; trains that carry bread and meats for the human
  parcels, and pillows and fountains of fresh water; trains that sweep
  haughtily and wearily indifferent through the landscapes and the
  towns, sufficient unto yourselves, hasty, panting, formidable, and
  yet mournful entities: I have understood you in your arrogance and
  your pathos!




_February_


_One_

  The ecstasy of longing is better than the assuaging of desire.


_Two_

  As regards facts and ideas, the great mistake made by the average
  well-intentioned reader is that he is content with the names of
  things instead of occupying himself with the causes of things.


_Three_

  Time and increasing knowledge of the true facts have dissipated for
  me the melancholy and affecting legend of literary talent going
  a-begging because of the indifference of publishers. O young author
  of talent, would that I could find you and make you understand how
  the publisher yearns for you as the lover for his love.


_Four_

  The brain can be disciplined by learning the habit of obedience. And
  it can learn the habit of obedience by the practice of concentration.


_Five_

  You can attach any ideas you please to music, but music, if you will
  forgive me saying so, rejects them all equally. Art has to do with
  emotions not with ideas, and the great defect of literature is that
  it can only express emotions by means of ideas. What makes music the
  greatest of all the arts is that it can express emotions without
  ideas. Literature can appeal to the soul only through the mind.
  Music goes direct. Its language is a language which the soul alone
  understands, but which the soul can never translate.


_Six_

  If a man does not spend at least as much time in actively and
  definitely thinking about what he has read as he spent in reading, he
  is simply insulting his author.


_Seven_

  He was of that small and lonely minority of men who never know
  ambition, ardour, zeal, yearning, tears; whose convenient desires are
  capable of immediate satisfaction; of whom it may be said that they
  purchase a second-rate happiness cheap at the price of an incapacity
  for deep feeling.


_Eight_

  No man, except a greater author, can teach an author his business.


_Nine_

  Size is the quality which most strongly and surely appeals to the
  imagination of the multitude. Of all modern monuments the Eiffel
  Tower and the Big Wheel have aroused the most genuine curiosity and
  admiration: they are the biggest. As with this monstrous architecture
  of metals, so with the fabric of ideas and emotions: the attention
  of the whole crowd can only be caught by an audacious hugeness, an
  eye-smiting enormity of dimensions so gross as to be nearly physical.


_Ten_

  Genius apart, woman is usually more touchingly lyrical than man in
  the yearning for the ideal.


_Eleven_

  I had fast in my heart’s keeping the new truth that in the body, and
  the instincts of the body, there should be no shame but rather a
  frank, joyous pride.


_Twelve_

  A person is idle because his thoughts dwell habitually on the instant
  pleasures of idleness.


_Thirteen_

  By love I mean a noble and sensuous passion, absorbing the energies
  of the soul, fulfilling destiny, and reducing all that has gone
  before it to the level of a mere prelude.


_Fourteen_

  For myself, I have never valued work for its own sake, and I never
  shall.


_Fifteen_

  Having once decided to achieve a certain task, achieve it at all
  costs of tedium and distaste. The gain in self-confidence of having
  accomplished a tiresome labour is immense.


_Sixteen_

  All who look into their experience will admit that the failure
  to replace old habits by new ones is due to the fact that at the
  critical moment the brain does not remember; it simply forgets.


_Seventeen_

  Many writers, and many clever writers, use the art of literature
  merely to gain an end which is connected with some different art, or
  with no art. Such a writer, finding himself burdened with a message
  prophetic, didactic, or reforming, discovers suddenly that he has
  the imaginative gift, and makes his imagination the servant of his
  intellect, or of emotions which are not artistic emotions.


_Eighteen_

  I only value mental work for the more full and more intense
  consciousness of being alive which it gives me.


_Nineteen_

  Whatever the vagaries of human nature, the true philosopher is never
  surprised by them. And one vagary is not more strange than another.


_Twenty_

  You can control nothing but your own mind. Even your two-year-old
  babe may defy you by the instinctive force of its personality.


_Twenty-one_

  To take the common grey things which people know and despise, and,
  without tampering, to disclose their epic significance, their
  essential grandeur--that is realism as distinguished from idealism or
  romanticism. It may scarcely be, it probably is not, the greatest art
  of all; but it is art precious and indisputable.


_Twenty-two_

  There are few mental exercises better than learning great poetry or
  prose by heart.


_Twenty-three_

  The British public will never be convinced by argument. But two drops
  of perspiration on the cheeks of a nice-looking girl with a torn
  skirt and a crushed hat will make it tremble for the safety of its
  ideals, and twenty drops will persuade it to sign anything for the
  restoration of decency. You surely don’t suppose that _argument_ will
  be of any use!


_Twenty-four_

  Some people have a gift of conjuring with conversations. They are
  almost always frankly and openly interested in themselves. You may
  seek to foil them; you may even violently wrench the conversation
  into other directions. But every effort will be useless. They will
  beat you. You had much better lean back in your chair and enjoy their
  legerdemain.


_Twenty-five_

  The voice of this spirit says that it has lost every illusion about
  life, and that life seems only the more beautiful. It says that
  activity is but another form of contemplation, pain but another form
  of pleasure, power but another form of weakness, hate but another
  form of love, and that it is well these things should be so. It says
  there is no end, only a means; and that the highest joy is to suffer,
  and the supreme wisdom is to exist. If you will but live, it cries,
  that grave but yet passionate voice--if you will but live! Were
  there a heaven, and you reached it, you could do no more than live.
  The true heaven is here where you live, where you strive and lose,
  and weep and laugh. And the true hell is here, where you forget to
  live, and blind your eyes to the omnipresent and terrible beauty of
  existence.


_Twenty-six_

  The most important preliminary to self-development is the faculty of
  concentrating at will.


_Twenty-seven_

  Diaries, save in experienced hands, are apt to get themselves
  done with the very minimum of mental effort. They also tend to an
  exaggeration of egotism, and if they are left lying about they tend
  to strife.


_Twenty-eight_

  The English world of home is one of the most perfectly organized
  microcosms on this planet, not excepting the Indian _purdah_. The
  product of centuries of culture, it is regarded, not too absurdly,
  as the fairest flower of Christian civilisation. It exists chiefly,
  of course, for women, but it could never have been what it is had
  not men bound themselves to respect the code which they made for it.
  It is the fountain of refinement and of consolation, the nursery of
  affection. It has the peculiar faculty of nourishing itself, for it
  implicitly denies the existence of anything beyond its doorstep, save
  the constitution, a bishop, a rector, the seaside, Switzerland, and
  the respectful poor.


_Twenty-nine_

  I have always been a bookman. From adolescence books have been one of
  my passions. Books not merely--and perhaps not chiefly--as vehicles
  of learning or knowledge, but books as books, books as entities,
  books as beautiful things, books as historical antiquities, books
  as repositories of memorable associations. Questions of type, ink,
  paper, margins, watermarks, paginations, bindings, are capable of
  really agitating me.




_March_


_One_

  It is characteristic of the literary artist with a genuine vocation
  that his large desire is, not to express in words any particular
  thing, but to express _himself_, the sum of his sensations. He feels
  the vague, disturbing impulse to write long before he has chosen
  his first subject from the thousands of subjects which present
  themselves, and which in the future he is destined to attack.


_Two_

  In the mental world what counts is not numbers but co-ordination.


_Three_

  In England, nearly all the most interesting people are social
  reformers: and the only circles of society in which you are not
  bored, in which there is real conversation, are the circles of social
  reform.


_Four_

  Anthology construction is one of the pleasantest hobbies that a
  person who is not mad about golf and bridge--that is to say, a
  thinking person--can possibly have.


_Five_

  That part of my life which I conduct by myself, without reference--or
  at any rate without direct reference--to others, I can usually manage
  in such a way that the gods do not positively weep at the spectacle
  thereof.


_Six_

  It’s quite impossible to believe that a man is a genius, if you’ve
  been to school with him, or even known his father.


_Seven_

  It is the privilege of only the greatest painters not to put letters
  on the corners of their pictures in order to keep other painters from
  taking the credit for them afterwards.


_Eight_

  Your own mind has the power to transmute every external phenomenon to
  its own purposes.


_Nine_

  Anything would be a success in London on Sunday night. People are so
  grateful.


_Ten_

  The one cheerful item in a universe of stony facts is that no one can
  harm anybody except himself.


_Eleven_

  The eye that has learned to look life full in the face without a
  quiver of the lid should find nothing repulsive. Everything that is,
  is the ordered and calculable result of environment. Nothing can be
  abhorrent, nothing blameworthy, nothing contrary to nature. Can we
  exceed nature? In the presence of the primeval and ever-continuing
  forces of nature, can we maintain our fantastic conceptions of sin
  and of justice? We are, and that is all we should dare to say.


_Twelve_

  The art of life, the art of extracting all its power from the human
  machine, does not lie chiefly in processes of bookish-culture, nor
  in contemplations of the beauty and majesty of existence. It lies
  chiefly in keeping the peace, the whole peace, and nothing but the
  peace, with those with whom one is “thrown.”


_Thirteen_

  We have our ideals now, but when they are mentioned we feel
  self-conscious and uncomfortable, like a school-boy caught praying.


_Fourteen_

  After the crest of the wave the trough--it must be so; but how
  profound the instinct which complains!


_Fifteen_

  The performance of some pianists is so wonderful that it seems as if
  they were crossing Niagara on a tight-rope, and you tremble lest they
  should fall off.


_Sixteen_

  The secret of calm cheerfulness is kindliness; no person can be
  consistently cheerful and calm who does not consistently think kind
  thoughts.


_Seventeen_

  It is indubitable that a large amount of what is known as
  self-improvement is simply self-indulgence--a form of pleasure which
  only incidentally improves a particular part of the human machine,
  and even that part to the neglect of far more important parts.


_Eighteen_

  The average man has this in common with the most exceptional genius,
  that his career in its main contours is governed by his instincts.


_Nineteen_

  The most beautiful things, and the most vital things, and the most
  lasting things are often mysterious and inexplicable and sudden.


_Twenty_

  An accurate knowledge of _any_ subject, coupled with a carefully
  nurtured sense of the relativity of that subject to other subjects,
  implies an enormous self-development.


_Twenty-one_

  The great artist may force you to laugh, or to wipe away a tear, but
  he accomplishes these minor feats by the way. What he mainly does is
  to _see_ for you. If, in presenting a scene, he does not disclose
  aspects of it which you would not have observed for yourself, then he
  falls short of success. In a physical and psychical sense power is
  visual, the power of an eye seeing things always afresh, virginally
  as though on the very morn of creation.


_Twenty-two_

  It is well, when one is judging a friend, to remember that he is
  judging you with the same god-like and superior impartiality.


_Twenty-three_

  He who speaks, speaks twice. His words convey his thoughts, and his
  tone conveys his mental attitude towards the person spoken to.


_Twenty-four_

  The man who loses his temper often thinks he is doing something
  rather fine and majestic. On the contrary, so far is this from being
  the fact, he is merely making an ass of himself.


_Twenty-five_

  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_

  I have been told by one of our greatest novelists that he constantly
  reads the dictionary, and that in his youth he read the dictionary
  through several times. I may recount the anecdote of Buckle, the
  historian of civilisation, who, when a certain dictionary was
  mentioned in terms of praise, said: “Yes, it is one of the few
  dictionaries I have read through with pleasure.”


_Twenty-nine_

  The public may, and generally does, admire a great artist. But it
  begins (and sometimes ends) by admiring him for the wrong things.
  Shakespeare is more highly regarded for his philosophy than for his
  poetry, as the applause at any performance of “Hamlet” will prove.
  Balzac conquers by that untamed exuberance and those crude effects of
  melodrama which are the least valuable parts of him.


_Thirty_

  You cannot divide literature into two elements and say: This is
  matter and that style. Further, the significance and the worth of
  literature are to be comprehended and assessed in the same way as the
  significance and the worth of any other phenomenon: by the exercise
  of common-sense. Common-sense will tell you that nobody, not even a
  genius, can be simultaneously vulgar and distinguished, or beautiful
  and ugly, or precise and vague, or tender and harsh. And common-sense
  will therefore tell you that to try to set up vital contradictions
  between matter and style is absurd. If you refer literature to the
  standards of life, common-sense will at once decide which quality
  should count heaviest in your esteem.




_July_


_One_

  When one has really something to say, one does not use clichés; one
  cannot.


_Two_

  The extinguishing of desire, with an accompanying indifference, be it
  high or low, is bad for youth.


_Three_

  Do you suppose that if the fame of Shakespeare depended on the man in
  the street, it would survive a fortnight?


_Four_

  Common-sense will solve any problem--any!--always provided it is
  employed simultaneously with politeness.


_Five_

  London is the most provincial town in England--invariably vulgar,
  reactionary, hysterical, and behind the rest of the country. A nice
  sort of place England would be if we in the provinces had to copy
  London.


_Six_

  Progress is the gradual result of the unending battle between human
  reason and human instinct, in which the former slowly but surely wins.


_Seven_

  As an athlete trains, as an acrobat painfully tumbles in private, so
  must the literary aspirant write.


_Eight_

  A classic is a work which gives pleasure to the minority which is
  intensely and permanently interested in literature.


_Nine_

  It is said that geography makes history. In England, and especially
  in London, weather makes a good deal of history.


_Ten_

  The one primary essential to literary taste is a hot interest in
  literature. If you have that, all the rest will come.


_Eleven_

  In the Five Towns human nature is reported to be so hard that you can
  break stones on it. Yet sometimes it softens, and then we have one
  of our rare idylls of which we are very proud, while pretending not
  to be. The soft and delicate South would possibly not esteem highly
  our idylls, as such. Nevertheless they are our idylls, idyllic for
  us, and reminding us, by certain symptoms, that, though we never cry,
  there is concealed somewhere within our bodies a fount of happy tears.


_Twelve_

  Reason is the basis of personal dignity.


_Thirteen_

  It is by the passionate few that the renown of genius is kept alive
  from one generation to another.


_Fourteen_

  We are all of us the same in essence; what separates us is merely
  differences in our respective stages of evolution.


_Fifteen_

  It is well known that dignity will only bleed while you watch it.
  Avert your eyes and it instantly dries up.


_Sixteen_

  All literature is the expression of feeling, of passion, of emotion,
  caused by a sensation of the interestingness of life.


_Seventeen_

  Just as science is the development of common-sense, so is literature
  the development of common daily speech.


_Eighteen_

  Every man who thinks clearly can write clearly, if not with grace and
  technical correctness.


_Nineteen_

  It is important, if you wish ultimately to have a wide, catholic
  taste, to guard against the too common assumption that nothing modern
  will stand comparison with the classics.


_Twenty_

  In the matter of its own special activities the brain is usually
  undisciplined and unreliable. We never know what it will do next.


_Twenty-one_

  It’s the dodge of every begging-letter writer in England to mark his
  envelope “Private and Urgent.”


_Twenty-two_

  Women grow old; women cease to learn; but men, never.


_Twenty-three_

  In literature, but in nothing else, I am a propagandist; I am not
  content to keep my opinion and let others keep theirs. To have a
  worthless book in my house (save in the way of business), to know
  that any friend is enjoying it, actually distresses me. That book
  must go, the pretensions of that book must be exposed, if I am to
  enjoy peace of mind.


_Twenty-four_

  I have often thought: If a son could look into a mother’s heart, what
  an eyeopener he would have!


_Twenty-five_

  When a writer expresses his individuality and his mood with accuracy,
  lucidity, and sincerity, and with an absence of ugliness, then he
  achieves good style. Style--it cannot be too clearly understood--is
  not a certain splendid something which the writer adds to his
  meaning. It is _in_ the meaning; it is that part of the meaning which
  specially reflects his individuality and his mood.


_Twenty-six_

  Crime is simply a convenient monosyllable which we apply to what
  happens when the brain and the heart come into conflict and the brain
  is defeated.


_Twenty-seven_

  Reflect that, as a rule, the people whom you have come to esteem
  communicated themselves to you gradually, that they did not begin the
  entertainment with fireworks.


_Twenty-eight_

  To devise the contents of an issue, to plan them, to balance them;
  to sail with this wind and tack against that; to keep a sensitive,
  cool finger on the faintly beating pulse of the terrible many-headed
  patron; to walk in a straight line through a forest black as
  midnight; to guess the riddle of the circulation-book week by week;
  to know by instinct why Smiths sent in a repeat order, or why
  Simpkins’ was ten quires less; to keep one eye on the majestic march
  of the world, and the other on the vagaries of a bazaar-reporter
  who has forgotten the law of libel; these things, and seventy-seven
  others, are the real journalism. It is these things that make editors
  sardonic, grey, unapproachable.


_Twenty-nine_

  I will be bold enough to say that quite seventy per cent. of ambition
  is never realised at all, and that ninety per cent. of all realised
  ambition is fruitless.


_Thirty_

  To comply with the regulations ordained by English Society for the
  conduct of successful painters, he ought, first, to have taken the
  elementary precaution of being born in the United States. He ought,
  after having refused all interviews for months, to have ultimately
  granted a special one to a newspaper with the largest circulation. He
  ought to have returned to England, grown a mane and a tufted tail,
  and become the king of beasts; or at least to have made a speech at a
  banquet about the noble and purifying mission of art. Assuredly, he
  ought to have painted the portrait of his father or grandfather as an
  artisan to prove that he was not a snob.


_Thirty-one_

  Women enjoy a reputation for slipshod style. They have earned it.
  A long and intimate familiarity with the manuscript of hundreds
  of women-writers, renowned and otherwise, has convinced me that
  not ten per cent. of them can be relied upon to satisfy even the
  most ordinary tests in spelling, grammar, and punctuation. I do
  not hesitate to say that if twenty of the most honoured and popular
  women-writers were asked to sit for an examination in these simple
  branches of learning, the general result (granted that a few might
  emerge with credit) would not only startle themselves, but would
  provide innocent amusement for the rest of mankind.




_August_


_One_

  My theory is that if a really big concern is properly organized, the
  boss ought to be absolutely independent of all routine. He ought to
  be free for anything that turns up unexpectedly.


_Two_

  Often I have felt that: “I know enough, I feel enough. If my future
  is as long as my past, I shall still not be able to put down the
  tenth part of what I have already acquired.”


_Three_

  In journalism, as probably in no other profession, success depends
  wholly upon the loyal co-operation, the perfect reliability, of a
  number of people--some great, some small, but none irresponsible.


_Four_

  The significance and the worth of literature are to be comprehended
  and assessed in the same way as the significance and the worth of any
  other phenomenon: by the exercise of common-sense.


_Five_

  All wrong-doing is done in the sincere belief that it is the best
  thing to do.


_Six_

  There is always a mental inferior handy, just as there is always a
  being more unhappy than we are.


_Seven_

  Often have I said inwardly: “World, when I talk with you, dine with
  you, wrangle with you, love you, and hate you, I condescend.” Every
  artist has said that. People call it conceit; people may call it what
  they please.


_Eight_

  The artistic pleasures of an uncultivated mind are generally violent.


_Nine_

  Literature cannot be said to have served its true purpose until it
  has been translated into the actual life of him who reads.


_Ten_

  When you cannot express yourself, depend upon it that you have
  nothing precise to express.


_Eleven_

  Monotony, solitude, are essential to the full activity of the artist.
  Just as a horse is seen best when coursing alone over a great
  plain, so the fierce and callous egotism of the artist comes to its
  perfection in a vast expanse of custom, leisure, and apparently
  vacuous reverie.


_Twelve_

  There can be no doubt that the average man blames much more than
  he praises. His instinct is to blame. If he is satisfied he says
  nothing; if he is not, he most illogically kicks up a row.


_Thirteen_

  We can no more spend all our waking hours in consciously striving
  towards higher things than we can dine exclusively off jam.


_Fourteen_

  All spending is a matter of habit.


_Fifteen_

  The views from Richmond Hill or Hindhead, or along Pall Mall
  at sunset, the smell of the earth, the taste of fruit and of
  kisses--these things are unaffected by the machinations of trusts and
  the hysteria of stock exchanges.


_Sixteen_

  If there is one point common to all classics, it is the absence of
  exaggeration.


_Seventeen_

  It is only people of small moral stature who have to stand on their
  dignity.


_Eighteen_

  When you live two and a half miles from a railway you can cut a dash
  on an income which in London spells omnibus instead of cab. For
  myself, I have a profound belief in the efficacy of cutting a dash.


_Nineteen_

  No one can write correctly without deliberately and laboriously
  learning how to write correctly. On the other hand, everyone can
  learn to write correctly who takes sufficient trouble. Correct
  writing is a mechanical accomplishment; it could be acquired by a
  stockbroker.


_Twenty_

  An understanding appreciation of literature means an understanding
  appreciation of the world, and it means nothing else.


_Twenty-one_

  Much ingenuity with a little money is vastly more profitable and
  amusing than much money without ingenuity.


_Twenty-two_

  Nothing is easier than to explain an accomplished fact in a nice,
  agreeable, conventional way.


_Twenty-three_

  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.


_Twenty-four_

  In the choice of reading the individual must count; caprice must
  count, for caprice is often the truest index to the individuality.


_Twenty-five_

  There is an infection in the air of London, a zymotic influence
  which is the mysterious cause of unnaturalness, pose, affectation,
  artificiality, moral neuritis, and satiety. One loses grasp of the
  essentials in an undue preoccupation with the vacuities which society
  has invented. The distractions are too multiform. One never gets a
  chance to talk common-sense with one’s soul.


_Twenty-six_

  An early success is a snare. The inexperienced author takes too much
  for granted. Conceit overcomes him. He regards himself with an undue
  seriousness. He thinks that he is founded on granite for ever.


_Twenty-seven_

  The splendid pertinacity and ingenuity of the American journalist
  in wringing copy out of any and every side of existence cannot fail
  to quicken the pulse of those who are accustomed to the soberer,
  narrower, sleepier ways of English newspapers. Fleet Street pretends
  to despise and contemn American methods, yet a gradual Americanising
  of the English press is always taking place, with results on the
  whole admirable.


_Twenty-eight_

  Stand defiantly on your own feet, and do not excuse yourself to
  yourself.


_Twenty-nine_

  This is a matter of daily observation: that people are frantically
  engaged in attempting to get hold of things which, by universal
  experience, are hideously disappointing to those who have obtained
  possession of them.


_Thirty_

  It is a current impression that style is something apart from,
  something foreign to, matter--a beautiful robe which, once it is
  found, may be used to clothe the nudity of matter. Young writers
  wander forth searching for style, as one searches for that which is
  hidden. They might employ themselves as profitably in looking for the
  noses on their faces. For style is personal, as much a portion of
  one’s self as the voice. It is within, not without; it needs only to
  be elicited, brought to light.


_Thirty-one_

  When I had been in London a decade, I stood aside from myself and
  reviewed my situation with the god-like and detached impartiality
  of a trained artistic observer. And what I saw was a young man who
  pre-eminently knew his way about, and who was apt to be rather too
  complacent over this fact; a young man with some brilliance but far
  more shrewdness; a young man with a highly developed faculty for
  making a little go a long way; a young man who was accustomed to be
  listened to when he thought fit to speak, and who was decidedly more
  inclined to settle questions than to raise them.




_September_


_One_

  It is of no use beginning to air one’s views until one has collected
  an audience.


_Two_

  A man whom fate had pitched into a canal might accomplish miracles in
  the way of rendering himself amphibian: he might stagger the world by
  the spectacle of his philosophy under amazing difficulties; people
  might pay sixpence a head to come and see him; but he would be less
  of a nincompoop if he climbed out and arranged to live definitely on
  the bank.


_Three_

  The contemplation of hills is uplifting to the soul; it leads to
  inspiration and induces nobility of character.


_Four_

  Plot is the primary thing in fiction. Only a very clever craftsman
  can manipulate a feeble plot so as to make it even passably
  interesting. Whereas, the clumsiest bungler in narration cannot
  altogether spoil a really sound plot.


_Five_

  It cannot be too clearly understood that the professional author, the
  man who depends entirely on his pen for the continuance of breath,
  and whose income is at the mercy of an illness or a headache, is
  eternally compromising between glory and something more edible and
  warmer at nights. He labours, in the first place, for food, shelter,
  tailors, a woman, European travel, horses, stalls at the opera, good
  cigars, ambrosial evenings in restaurants; and he gives glory the
  best chance he can. I am not speaking of geniuses with a mania for
  posterity; I am speaking of human beings.


_Six_

  The average man flourishes and finds his ease in an atmosphere of
  peaceful routine. Men destined for success flourish and find their
  ease in an atmosphere of collision and disturbance.


_Seven_

  There are simply thousands of agreeable and good girls who can
  accomplish herring-bone, omelettes, and simultaneous equations in a
  breath, as it were. They are all over the kingdom, and may be seen in
  the streets and lanes thereof about half-past eight in the morning
  and again about five o’clock in the evening. But the fact is not
  generally known. Only the stern and base members of School Boards or
  Education Committees know it. And they are so used to marvels that
  they make nothing of them.


_Eight_

  In the sea of literature every part communicates with every other
  part; there are no land-locked lakes.


_Nine_

  With an obedient, disciplined brain a man may live always right up to
  the standard of his best moments.


_Ten_

  A prig is a pompous fool who has gone out for a ceremonial walk, and,
  without knowing it, has lost an important part of his attire, namely,
  his sense of humour.


_Eleven_

  If I have an aptitude for anything at all in letters, it is for
  criticism. Whenever I read a book of imagination, I am instantly
  filled with ideas concerning it; I form definite views about its
  merit or demerit, and, having formed them, I hold those views with
  strong conviction. Denial of them rouses me; I must thump the table
  in support of them; I must compel people to believe that what I say
  is true; I cannot argue without getting serious, in spite of myself.


_Twelve_

  The great convenience of masterpieces is that they are so
  astonishingly lucid.


_Thirteen_

  It is as well not to chatter too much about what one is doing, and
  not to betray a too-pained sadness at the spectacle of a whole world
  deliberately wasting so many hours out of every day, and therefore
  never really living. It will be found, ultimately, that in taking
  care of one’s self one has quite all one can do.


_Fourteen_

  Think as well as read. I know people who read and read, and, for all
  the good it does them, they might just as well cut bread-and-butter.
  They take to reading as better men take to drink. They fly through
  the shires of literature on a motor-car, their sole object being
  motion. They will tell you how many books they have read in a year.


_Fifteen_

  The mass could not, and never at any period of history did,
  appreciate fine art, but could and would appreciate and support
  passable deteriorations of fine art.


_Sixteen_

  Honesty, in literature as in life, is the quality that counts first
  and counts last.


_Seventeen_

  No author ever lived who could write a page without giving himself
  away.


_Eighteen_

  To be one’s natural self is the most difficult thing in literature.
  To be one’s natural self in a drawing-room full of observant eyes
  is scarcely the gift of the simple debutant, but rather of the
  experienced diner-out. So in literature: it is not the expert but the
  unpractised beginner who is guilty of artificiality.


_Nineteen_

  Much nonsense has been talked about the short story. It has been
  asserted that Englishmen cannot write artistic short stories, that
  the short story does not come naturally to the Anglo-Saxon. Whereas
  the truth is that nearly all the finest short-story writers in the
  world to-day are Englishmen, and some of the most wonderful short
  stories ever written have been written by Englishmen within the last
  twenty years.


_Twenty_

  If a book really moves you to anger, the chances are that it is a
  good book.


_Twenty-one_

  In the cultivation of the mind one of the most important factors is
  precisely the feeling of strain, of difficulty, of a task which one
  part of you is anxious to achieve and another part of you is anxious
  to shirk.


_Twenty-two_

  The very greatest poetry can only be understood and savoured by
  people who have put themselves through a considerable mental
  discipline. To others it is an exasperating weariness.


_Twenty-three_

_Samuel Johnson’s Birthday_

  Even Johnson’s Dictionary is packed with emotion.


_Twenty-four_

  All blame, uttered or unexpressed, is wrong. I do not blame myself. I
  can explain myself to myself. I can invariably explain myself.


_Twenty-five_

  When one has thoroughly got imbued into one’s head the leading
  truth that nothing happens without a cause, one grows not only
  large-minded, but large-hearted.


_Twenty-six_

  If an editor knows not peace, he knows power. In Fleet Street, as
  in other streets, the population divides itself into those who want
  something and those who have something to bestow; those who are
  anxious to give a lunch, and those who deign occasionally to accept
  a lunch; those who have an axe to grind, and those who possess the
  grindstone.


_Twenty-seven_

  Regard, for a moment, the average household in the light of a
  business organisation for lodging and feeding a group of individuals;
  contrast its lapses, makeshifts, delays, irregularities, continual
  excuses with the awful precision of a city office. Is it a matter
  for surprise that the young woman who is accustomed gaily to remark,
  “Only five minutes late this morning, father,” or “I quite forgot to
  order the coals, dear,” confident that a frown or a hard word will
  end the affair, should carry into business (be it never so grave) the
  laxities so long permitted her in the home?


_Twenty-eight_

  This I know and affirm, that the average woman-journalist is the
  most loyal, earnest, and teachable person under the sun. I begin
  to feel sentimental when I think of her astounding earnestness,
  even in grasping the live coal of English syntax. Syntax, bane of
  writing-women, I have spent scores of ineffectual hours in trying to
  inoculate the ungrammatical sex against your terrors!


_Twenty-nine_

  I have never refused work when the pay has been good.


_Thirty_

  There is no logical answer to a guffaw.




_October_


_One_

  A most curious and useful thing to realise is that one never knows
  the impression one is creating on other people.


_Two_

  At seventy men begin to be separated from their fellow-creatures. At
  eighty they are like islets sticking out of a sea. At eighty-five,
  with their trembling and deliberate speech, they are the abstract
  voice of human wisdom. They gather wisdom with amazing rapidity in
  the latter years, and even their folly is wise then.


_Three_

  In its essence all fiction is wildly improbable, and its fundamental
  improbability is masked by an observance of probability in details.


_Four_

  Only reviewers have a prejudice against long novels.


_Five_

  The most important of all perceptions is the continual perception of
  cause and effect--in other words, the perception of the continuous
  development of the universe--in still other words, the perception of
  the course of evolution.


_Six_

  No reading of books will take the place of a daily, candid, honest
  examination of what one has recently done, and what one is about to
  do--of a steady looking at one’s self in the face (disconcerting
  though the sight may be).


_Seven_

  The beauty of a classic is not at all apt to knock you down. It will
  steal over you, rather.


_Eight_

  Self-respect is at the root of all purposefulness, and a failure in
  an enterprise deliberately planned deals a desperate wound at one’s
  self-respect.


_Nine_

  A man may be a sub-editor, or even an assistant-editor, for half
  a lifetime, and yet remain ignorant of the true significance of
  journalism.


_Ten_

  Happiness does not spring from the procuring of physical or mental
  pleasure, but from the development of reason and the adjustment of
  conduct to principles.


_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.

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