A garland of quotations XXIV
Culled from the finest cantors in literary history, and re-woven every Monday
To write in hissing dispraise of our more successful fellow-craftsman, and of those who admire him! that is not a clean or pretty trade. It seems, alas! an easy one, and it gives pleasure to so many. It does not even want good grammar. But it pays—well enough even to start and run a magazine with, instead of scholarship and taste and talent! humor, sense, wit, and wisdom! It is something like the purveying of pornographic pictures: some of us look at them and laugh, and even buy. To be a purchaser is bad enough; but to be the purveyor thereof—ugh!
•George Du Maurier, Trilby (1894).
Of all the cants which are canted in this canting world,—though the cant of hypocrites may be the worst,—the cant of criticism is the most tormenting!
•Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy III (1761).
Someone who does not smell the fragrance of a rose surely should not be permitted to criticize it; and if he smells it, à la bonheur! he will not have the inclination to criticize it.
•Nietzsche, letter to Paul Deussen, Oct. 1868.
The sure sign of the general decline of an art is the frequent occurrence, not of deformity, but of misplaced beauty. In general, Tragedy is corrupted by eloquence, and Comedy by wit.
•Lord Macaulay, “Machiavelli” (1827).
It is a common failing of childhood to think that if one makes a hero out of a demon the demon will be satisfied.
•Yukio Mishima, Confessions of a Mask (1949).
A tyrannical statute always proves the existence of tyranny; but a laudable edict may only contain the specious professions, or ineffectual wishes, of the prince, or his ministers. This, I am afraid, is a just, though mortifying, canon of criticism.
•Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Vol. III (1781).
Without patricide there is neurosis. With patricide it is even worse!
•René Girard, “To double business bound”: Essays on Literature, Mimesis, and Anthropology (1978)
…if only by the structure of his vocal organs, a German is congenitally unable to read our [British] poetry.
•Arthur Quiller-Couch, Studies in Literature (1918).
“Sheer genius!” she said. “That gives it class and a real deep message.”
“What is it?” I asked. “I’m not tuned in.”
“The art critics will think of the meaning,” she said. “All we have to do is agree with them.”
•Keith Robertson, Henry Reed’s Journey (1963).
And so it was that she presented me with fifty-odd volumes of The Tale of Genji in a special case, together with copies of Zai, Tôgimi, Serikawa, Asauzu, and many other tales. Oh, how happy I was when I came home with all these books in a bag! In the past I had been able to have only an occasional hurried look at fragments of The Tale of Genji, and much of it had remained infuriatingly obscure. Now I had it all in front of me and I could sit undisturbed behind my curtain, bent comfortably forward as I took out the books one by one and enjoyed them to my heart’s content. I wouldn’t have changed places with the Empress herself.
•Sugawara no Takasue no musume, Sarashina Diary (ca. 1070).
Sources: Nietzsche: Unpublished Letters (Philosophical Library, 1959); Macaulay: Critical and Historical Essays vol. 2 (J.M. Dent, 1914); Mishima: trans. Meredith Weatherby (New Directions, 1958); Sugawara: As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams (Penguin Classics, 1971); some of this material is copyrighted, and I plead only fair use.