Prejudices, Third Series quotes

This is what I believe and preach, in nomine Domini, Amen.

Yet I remain on the dock, wrapped in the flag, when the Young Intellectuals set sail.

Yet here I stand, unshaken and undespairing, a loyal and devoted Americano, even a chauvinist, paying taxes without complaint, obeying all laws that are physiologically obeyable, accepting all the searching duties and responsibilities of citizenship unprotestingly investing the sparse usufructs of my miserable toil in …

In precisely the same way it seems to me to be nonsensical for a man to offer generally some commodity that only a few rare and dubious Americans want, and then weep and beat his breast because he is not patronized.

One seeking to make a living in a country must pay due regard to the needs and tastes of that country.

Here in the United States we have no jobs for grand dukes, and none for Wirkliche Geheimräte, and none for palace eunuchs, and none for masters of the buck-hounds, and none (any more) for brewery Todsaufer—and very few for oboe players, metaphysicians, astrophysicists, assyriologists, water-colorists, …

Then why practice such trades—that is, as trades? The man of independent means may venture into them prudently; when he does so, he is seldom molested; it may even be argued that he performs a public service by adopting them.

But the man who has a living to make is simply silly if he goes into them; he is like a soldier going over the top with a coffin strapped to his back.

Let him abandon such puerile vanities, and take to the uplift instead, as, indeed, thousands of other victims of the industrial system have already done.

… neglect of the humanities and their monks, the Republic has never got half enough bond salesmen, quack doctors, ward leaders, phrenologists, Methodist evangelists, circus clowns, magicians, soldiers, farmers, popular song writers, moonshine distillers, forgers of gin labels, mine guard, detectives, spies, snoopers, and agents provocateurs.

The rules are set by Omnipotence; the discreet man observes them.

Observing them, he is safe beneath the starry bed-tick, in fair weather or foul.

Nor can the man of science. The best and clearest thinking of the world is done and the finest art is produced, not by men who are hungry, ragged and harassed, but by men who are well-fed, warm and easy in mind.

It is the artist’s first duty to his art to achieve that tranquility for himself.

Shakespeare tried to achieve it; so did Beethoven, Wagner, Brahms, Ibsen and Balzac. Goethe, Schopenhauer, Schumann and Mendelssohn were born to it. Joseph Conrad, Richard Strauss and Anatole France have got it for themselves in our own day.

It is a doctrine chiefly voiced, I believe, by those who have tried the business and failed. They take refuge behind the childish notion that there is something honorable about poverty per se—the Greenwich Village complex. This is nonsense.

Poverty may be an unescapable misfortune, but that no more makes it honorable than a cocked eye is made honorable by the same cause.

Do I advocate, then, the ceaseless, senseless hogging of money? I do not. All I advocate—and praise as virtuous—is the hogging of enough to provide security and ease.

Do I advocate, then, the ceaseless, senseless hogging of money? I do not. All I advocate—and praise as virtuous—is the hogging of enough to provide security and ease.

Despite all the romantic superstitions to the contrary, the artist cannot do his best work when he is oppressed by unsatisfied wants.

Nor can the philosopher. Nor can the man of science.

Despite all the romantic superstitions to the contrary, the artist cannot do his best work when he is oppressed by unsatisfied wants. Nor can the philosopher. Nor can the man of science.

The best and clearest thinking of the world is done and the finest art is produced, not by men who are hungry, ragged and harassed, but by men who are well-fed, warm and easy in mind.

It is the artist’s first duty to his art to achieve that tranquility for himself. Shakespeare tried to achieve it; so did Beethoven, Wagner, Brahms, Ibsen and Balzac. Goethe, Schopenhauer, Schumann and Mendelssohn were born to it.

Once more, here is the Paradise of back-slappers, of democrats, of mixers, of go-getters. Maintain ordinary reserve, and you will arrest instant attention—and have your hand kissed by multitudes who, despite democracy, have all the inferior man’s unquenchable desire to grovel and admire.

Nowhere else in the world is superiority more easily attained or more eagerly admitted.

The chief business of the nation, as a nation, is the setting up of heroes, mainly bogus. It admired the literary style of the late Woodrow; it respects the theological passion of Bryan; it venerates J. Pierpont Morgan; it takes Congress seriously;

The mysticism of the mediæval peasantry gets into the communal view of them, and they begin to sprout haloes and wings. As I say, no intrinsic merit—at least, none commensurate with the mob estimate—is needed to come to such august dignities.

Everything American is a bit amateurish and childish, even the national gods.

The most conspicuous and respected American in nearly every field of endeavor, saving only the purely commercial (I exclude even the financial) is a man who would attract little attention in any other country.

Nowhere else in the world is superiority more easily attained or more eagerly admitted.

The chief business of the nation, as a nation, is the setting up of heroes, mainly bogus.

It admired the literary style of the late Woodrow; it respects the theological passion of Bryan; it venerates J. Pierpont Morgan; it takes Congress seriously;

It is not that of young men, but that of old men. All the characteristics of senescence are in it: a great distrust of ideas, an habitual timorousness, a harsh fidelity to a few fixed beliefs, a touch of mysticism.

The average American is a prude and a Methodist under his skin, and the fact is never more evident than when he is trying to disprove it.

His vices are not those of a healthy boy, but those of an ancient paralytic escaped from the Greisenheim. If you would penetrate to the causes thereof, simply go down to Ellis Island and look at the next shipload of immigrants.

And with the concept of wrongness, of course, he always confuses the concept of mere differentness—to him the two are indistinguishable. Anything strange is to be combatted; it is of the Devil.

The mob-man cannot grasp ideas in their native nakedness.

They must be dramatized and personalized for him, and provided with either white wings or forked tails. All discussion of them, to interest him, must take the form of a pursuit and scotching of demons.

The mob-man cannot grasp ideas in their native nakedness. They must be dramatized and personalized for him, and provided with either white wings or forked tails. All discussion of them, to interest him, must take the form of a pursuit and scotching of demons.

He cannot think of a heresy without thinking of a heretic to be caught, condemned, and burned.

The Fathers of the Republic, I am convinced, had a great deal more prevision than even their most romantic worshipers give them credit for. They not only sought to create a governmental machine that would be safe from attack without;

It is a sign, rather, of a culture that is slipping downhill—one that is reverting to the most primitive standards and ways of thought.

The taboo, indeed, is the trademark of the savage, and wherever it exists it is a relentless and effective enemy of civilized enlightenment.

The savage is the most meticulously moral of men; there is scarcely an act of his daily life that is not conditioned by unyielding prohibitions and obligations, most of them logically unintelligible.

The savage is the most meticulously moral of men; there is scarcely an act of his daily life that is not conditioned by unyielding prohibitions and obligations, most of them logically unintelligible.

The mob-man, a savage set amid civilization, cherishes a code of the same draconian kind.

He believes firmly that right and wrong are immovable things—that they have an actual and unchangeable existence, and that any challenge of them, by word or act, is a crime against society.

He believes firmly that right and wrong are immovable things—that they have an actual and unchangeable existence, and that any challenge of them, by word or act, is a crime against society.

And with the concept of wrongness, of course, he always confuses the concept of mere differentness—to him the two are indistinguishable.

Anything strange is to be combatted; it is of the Devil. The mob-man cannot grasp ideas in their native nakedness. They must be dramatized and personalized for him, and provided with either white wings or forked tails.

But Jackson and his merry men broke through the barbed wires thus so carefully strung, and ever since 1825 vox populi has been the true voice of the nation. To-day there is no longer any question of statesmanship, in any real sense, in our politics.

The only way to success in American public life lies in flattering and kowtowing to the mob.

A candidate for office, even the highest, must either adopt its current manias en bloc, or convince it hypocritically that he has done so, while cherishing reservations in petto.

The few men who maintained a consistent course in both cases, voting either for or against both League and treaty, were denounced by the newspapers as deliberate marplots, and found their constituents rising against them.

To such an extent had the public become accustomed to buncombe that simple honesty was incomprehensible to it, and hence abhorrent!

As I have pointed out in a previous work, this dominance of mob ways of thinking, this pollution of the whole intellectual life of the country by the prejudices and emotions of the rabble, goes unchallenged because the old landed aristocracy of the colonial era …

… were mellowed and reënforced by the hint that such a noble assault, beside being safe, would also be extremely profitable—that it would convert very dubious debts into very good debts, and dispose forever of a diligent and dangerous competitor for trade, especially in Latin America.

All the idealist nonsense emitted by Dr. Wilson and company was simply icing on the cake.

Most of it was abandoned as soon as the bullets began to fly, and the rest consisted simply of meaningless words—the idiotic babbling of a Presbyterian evangelist turned prophet and seer.

The old cool head is gone, and the old dogged way with difficulties. The typical American of to-day has lost all the love of liberty that his forefathers had, and all their distrust of emotion, and pride in self-reliance.

He is led no longer by Davy Crocketts; he is led by cheer leaders, press agents, word-mongers, uplifters.

I do not believe that such a faint-hearted and inflammatory fellow, shoved into a war demanding every resource of courage, ingenuity and pertinacity, would give a good account of himself.

He is the eloquent statesman, the patriotic editor, the fount of inspiration, the prancing milch-cow of optimism. He becomes public leader, Governor, Senator, President. He is Billy Sunday, Cyrus K. Curtis, Dr. Frank Crane, Charles E. Hughes, Taft, Wilson, Cal Coolidge, General Wood, Harding.

His, perhaps, is the best of trades under democracy—but it has its temptations!

Let us try to picture a master corsair, thoroughly adept at pulling the mob nose, who suddenly bethought himself of that Pepin the Short who found himself mayor of the palace and made himself King of the Franks.

There were lightnings along that horizon in the days of Roosevelt; there were thunder growls when Bryan emerged from the Nebraska steppes.

On some great day of fate, as yet unrevealed by the gods, such a professor of the central democratic science may throw off his employers and set up a business for himself.

When that day comes there will be plenty of excuse for black type on the front pages of the newspapers.

I predict no revolution in the grand manner, no melodramatic collapse of capitalism, no repetition of what has gone on in Russia. The American proletarian is not brave and romantic enough for that; to do him simple justice, he is not silly enough.

Capitalism, in the long run, will win in the United States, if only for the reason that every American hopes to be a capitalist before he dies.

Its roots go down to the deepest, darkest levels of the national soil; in all its characters, and particularly in its antipathy to the dreams of man, it is thoroughly American.

It is the reason which grows out of my mediæval but unashamed taste for the bizarre and indelicate, my congenital weakness for comedy of the grosser varieties.

The United States, to my eye, is incomparably the greatest show on earth.

It is a show which avoids diligently all the kinds of clowning which tire me most quickly—for example, royal ceremonials, the tedious hocus-pocus of haut politique, the taking of politics seriously—and lays chief stress upon the kinds which delight me unceasingly—for example, the ribald combats …

Another because, living here, he can read the New York Evening Journal. Another because there is a warrant out for him somewhere else. Me, I like it because it amuses me to my taste.

I never get tired of the show. It is worth every cent it costs.

That cost, it seems to me is very moderate. Taxes in the United States are not actually high. I figure, for example, that my private share of the expense of maintaining the Hon. Mr.

But feeling better for the laugh. Ridi si sapis, said Martial. Mirth is necessary to wisdom, to comfort, above all, to happiness. Well, here is the land of mirth, as Germany is the land of metaphysics and France is the land of fornication.

Here the buffoonery never stops.

What could be more delightful than the endless struggle of the Puritan to make the joy of the minority unlawful and impossible?

But feeling better for the laugh. Ridi si sapis, said Martial.

Mirth is necessary to wisdom, to comfort, above all, to happiness.

Well, here is the land of mirth, as Germany is the land of metaphysics and France is the land of fornication. Here the buffoonery never stops.

Yet more, he ran to exotic tastes in eating and drinking, preferring occult goulashes and risi-bisis to honest American steaks, and great floods of Pilsner to the harsh beverages of God-fearing men.

Finally, there was his talk, that cataract of sublime trivialities: gossip lifted to the plane of the gods, the unmentionable bedizened with an astounding importance, and even profundity.

In his early days, when he performed the tonal and carnal prodigies that he liked to talk of afterward, I was at nurse, and too young to have any traffic with him.

I try to give you, ineptly and grotesquely, some notion of the talk of the man, but I must fail inevitably.

It was, in brief, chaos, and chaos cannot be described.

But it was chaos made to gleam and corruscate with every device of the seven arts—chaos drenched in all the colors imaginable, chaos scored for an orchestra which made the great band of Berlioz seem like a fife and drum corps.

In it Huneker is utterly himself. In it the last trace of the pedagogue vanishes. Art is no longer, even by implication, a device for improving the mind.

It is wholly a magnificent adventure.

That notion of it is what Huneker brought into American criticism, and it is for that bringing that he will be remembered. No other critic of his generation had a tenth of his influence.

He had absolutely no feeling for extra-æsthetic valuations. If a work of art that stood before him was honest, if it was original, if it was beautiful and thoroughly alive, then he was for it to his last corpuscle.

What if it violated all the accepted canons? Then let the accepted canons go hang!

What if it lacked all purpose to improve and lift up? Then so much the better! What if it shocked all right-feeling men, and made them blush and tremble? Then damn all men of right feeling forevermore.

What he brought back from Paris was precisely the thing that was most suspected in the America of those days: the capacity for gusto. Huneker had that capacity in a degree unmatched by any other critic.

When his soul went adventuring among masterpieces it did not go in Sunday broad-cloth; it went with vine leaves in its hair.

The rest of the appraisers and criers-up—even Howells, with all his humor—could never quite rid themselves of the professorial manner. When they praised it was always with some hint of ethical, or, at all events, of cultural purpose;

he was never more the professor than when he was arguing for some hobgoblin of the professors. But Huneker did it with verve and grace; he made it, not schoolmastering, but a glorious deliverance from schoolmastering. As I say, his influence was enormous.

The fine arts, at his touch, shed all their Anglo-American lugubriousness, and became provocative and joyous.

The spirit of senility got out of them and the spirit of youth got into them. His criticism, for all its French basis, was thoroughly American—vastly more American, in fact, than the New England ponderosity that it displaced.

But Huneker did it with verve and grace; he made it, not schoolmastering, but a glorious deliverance from schoolmastering. As I say, his influence was enormous. The fine arts, at his touch, shed all their Anglo-American lugubriousness, and became provocative and joyous.

The spirit of senility got out of them and the spirit of youth got into them.

His criticism, for all its French basis, was thoroughly American—vastly more American, in fact, than the New England ponderosity that it displaced.

These qualities gave him great charm. He was not only humorous; he was also good-humored; even when the crushing discomforts of his last illness were upon him his amiability never faltered.

And in addition to humor there was wit, a far rarer thing.

His most casual talk was full of this wit, and it bathed everything that he discussed in a new and brilliant light. I have never encountered a man who was further removed from dullness;

Into an assembly of national critics who had long wallowed in dogmatic puerilities, Huneker entered with a taste infinitely surer and more civilized, a learning infinitely greater, and an address infinitely more engaging.

No man was less the reformer by inclination, and yet he became a reformer beyond compare.

He emancipated criticism in America from its old slavery to stupidity, and with it he emancipated all the arts themselves.

What the pedagogues always object to in, for example, the Quarterly reviewers is that they forgot the books they were supposed to review, and wrote long papers—often, in fact, small books—expounding ideas suggested (or not suggested) by the books under review.

Every critic who is worth reading falls inevitably into the same habit.

He cannot stick to his task: what is before him is always infinitely less interesting to him than what is within him.

Every critic who is worth reading falls inevitably into the same habit.

He cannot stick to his task: what is before him is always infinitely less interesting to him than what is within him.

If he is genuinely first-rate—if what is within him stands the test of type, and wins an audience, and produces the reactions that every artist craves—then he usually ends by abandoning the criticism of specific works of art altogether, and setting up shop as a …

Nothing is in him save the ghostly echoes of other men’s thoughts and feelings. If he were a genuine artist he would have thoughts and feelings of his own, and the impulse to give them objective form would be irresistible.

An artist can no more withstand that impulse than a politician can withstand the temptations of a job.

There are no mute, inglorious Miltons, save in the hallucinations of poets. The one sound test of a Milton is that he functions as a Milton.

If he were a genuine artist he would have thoughts and feelings of his own, and the impulse to give them objective form would be irresistible. An artist can no more withstand that impulse than a politician can withstand the temptations of a job.

There are no mute, inglorious Miltons, save in the hallucinations of poets.

The one sound test of a Milton is that he functions as a Milton. His difference from other men lies precisely in the superior vigor of his impulse to self-expression, not in the superior beauty and loftiness of his ideas.

An artist can no more withstand that impulse than a politician can withstand the temptations of a job. There are no mute, inglorious Miltons, save in the hallucinations of poets.

The one sound test of a Milton is that he functions as a Milton.

His difference from other men lies precisely in the superior vigor of his impulse to self-expression, not in the superior beauty and loftiness of his ideas.

Gradually he becomes, whether in or out of the academic grove, a professor, which is to say, a man devoted to diluting and retailing the ideas of his superiors—not an artist, not even a bad artist, but almost the antithesis of an artist.

He is learned, he is sober, he is painstaking and accurate—but he is as hollow as a jug.

Nothing is in him save the ghostly echoes of other men’s thoughts and feelings. If he were a genuine artist he would have thoughts and feelings of his own, and the impulse to give them objective form would be irresistible.

What saved Carlyle, Macaulay and company is as plain as day. They were first-rate artists.

They could make the thing charming, and that is always a million times more important than making it true.

Truth, indeed, is something that is believed in completely only by persons who have never tried personally to pursue it to its fastnesses and grab it by the tail. It is the adoration of second-rate men—men who always receive it at second-hand.

What saved Carlyle, Macaulay and company is as plain as day. They were first-rate artists. They could make the thing charming, and that is always a million times more important than making it true.

Truth, indeed, is something that is believed in completely only by persons who have never tried personally to pursue it to its fastnesses and grab it by the tail.

It is the adoration of second-rate men—men who always receive it at second-hand. Pedagogues believe in immutable truths and spend their lives trying to determine them and propagate them;

But even so, it is risky to call them absolute truths. All that one may safely say of them is that no one, as yet, has demonstrated that they are errors. Soon or late, if experience teaches us anything, they are likely to succumb too.

The profoundest truths of the Middle Ages are now laughed at by schoolboys. The profoundest truths of democracy will be laughed at, a few centuries hence, even by school teachers.

In the department of æsthetics, wherein critics mainly disport themselves, it is almost impossible to think of a so-called truth that shows any sign of being permanently true. The most profound of principles begins to fade and quiver almost as soon as it is stated.

Pedagogues believe in immutable truths and spend their lives trying to determine them and propagate them; the intellectual progress of man consists largely of a concerted effort to block and destroy their enterprise.

Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered; there is only error to be exposed.

In whole departments of human inquiry it seems to me quite unlikely that the truth ever will be discovered.

Nevertheless, the rubber-stamp thinking of the world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of the truth—that error and truth are simple opposites. They are nothing of the sort.

What the world turns to, when it has been cured of one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one.

This is the whole history of the intellect in brief.

… that shows sound structure, and brilliant color, and the flash of new and persuasive ideas, and civilized manners, and the charm of an uncommon personality in free function, then he has given something to the world that is worth having, and sufficiently justified his existence.

Is Carlyle’s “Frederick” true? Who cares?

As well ask if the Parthenon is true, or the C Minor Symphony, or “Wiener Blur.”

So with criticism.

Let us forget all the heavy effort to make a science of it; it is a fine art, or nothing.

If the critic, retiring to his cell to concoct his treatise upon a book or play or what-not, produces a piece of writing that shows sound structure, and brilliant color, and the flash of new and persuasive ideas, and civilized manners, and the charm of …

It is, of course, not easy to practice this abstention. Two forces, one within and one without, tend to bring even a Hazlitt or a Huneker under the campus pump.

One is the almost universal human susceptibility to messianic delusions—the irresistible tendency of practically every man, once he finds a crowd in front of him, to strut and roll his eyes.

The other is the public demand, born of such long familiarity with pedagogical criticism that no other kind is readily conceivable, that the critic teach something as well as say something—in the popular phrase, that he be constructive.

So beset, front and rear, he sometimes sinks supinely to the level of a professor, and his subsequent proceedings are interesting no more.

The true aim of a critic is certainly not to make converts.

He must know that very few of the persons who are susceptible to conversion are worth converting. Their minds are intrinsically flabby and parasitical, and it is certainly not sound sport to agitate minds of that sort.

I thus try to avoid cherishing them too lovingly, and it always gives me a shiver to see any one else gobble them at one gulp.

Criticism, at bottom, is indistinguishable from skepticism.

Both launch themselves, the one by æsthetic presentations and the other by logical presentations, at the common human tendency to accept whatever is approved, to take in ideas ready-made, to be responsive to mere rhetoric and gesticulation.

In their demand is the theory that instruction, if they could get it, would profit them—that they are capable of doing better work than they do. As a practical matter, I doubt that this is ever true.

Bad poets never actually grow any better; they invariably grow worse and worse.

In all history there has never been, to my knowledge, a single practitioner of any art who, as a result of “constructive” criticism, improved his work.

If, on the contrary, I discern holes in them, I shelve them in a pianissimo manner, and set about hatching new ones to take their place. But constructive criticism irritates me.

I do not object to being denounced, but I can’t abide being school-mastered, especially by men I regard as imbeciles.

I find, as a practicing critic, that very few men who write books are even as tolerant as I am—that most of them, soon or late, show signs of extreme discomfort under criticism, however polite its terms.

All the benefits I have ever got from the critics of my work have come from the destructive variety.

A hearty slating always does me good, particularly if it be well written.

It begins by enlisting my professional respect; it ends by making me examine my ideas coldly in the privacy of my chamber. Not, of course, that I usually revise them, but I at least examine them.

… the creative artist, he on his part naturally resents the critic’s air of pedagogical superiority and he resents it especially when he has an uneasy feeling that he has fallen short of his best work, and that the discontent of the critic is thus justified.

Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.

Under it all, of course, lurks the fact that I began with: the fact that the critic is himself an artist, and that his creative impulse, soon or late, is bound to make him neglect the punctilio.

It is precisely at this point, of course, that criticism becomes genuine criticism; before that it was mere reviewing. When a critic passes it he loses his friends.

By becoming an artist, he becomes the foe of all other artists.

But the transformation, I believe, has good effects upon him: it makes him a better critic. Too much Gemütlichkeit is as fatal to criticism as it would be to surgery or politics.

They were not content to refute him; they constantly tried to dispose of him altogether. The very ferocity of that ancient row shows that the native literature, in those days, was in a healthy state. Books of genuine value were produced.

Literature always thrives best, in fact, in an atmosphere of hearty strife.

Poe, surrounded by admiring professors, never challenged, never aroused to the emotions of revolt, would probably have written poetry indistinguishable from the hollow stuff of, say, Prof. Dr. George E. Woodberry.

And on the other hand, it melodramatizes the business of the critic, and so convinces thousands of bystanders, otherwise quite inert, that criticism is an amusing and instructive art, and that the problems it deals with are important.

What men will fight for seems to be worth looking into.

After a hearty dinner of potage créole, planked Chesapeake shad, Guinea hen en casserole and some respectable salad, with two or three cocktails made of two-thirds gin, one-third Martini-Rossi vermouth and a dash of absinthe as Vorspiel and a bottle of Ruhländer 1903 to wash …

… often has its back to the wall, and that its barbaric manners and morals, at least in large part, are due to that fact—that they are, in essence, precisely the same manners and morals that are displayed by any other creature or institution so beset.

Necessity is not only the mother of invention; it is also the mother of every imaginable excess and infamy.

A woman defending her child is notoriously willing to go to lengths that even a Turk or an agent of the Department of Justice would regard as inordinate, and so is a Presbyterian defending his hell, or a soldier defending his fatherland, or a banker …

… her child is notoriously willing to go to lengths that even a Turk or an agent of the Department of Justice would regard as inordinate, and so is a Presbyterian defending his hell, or a soldier defending his fatherland, or a banker defending his gold.

It is only when there is no danger that the average human being is honorable, just as it is only when there is danger that he is virtuous.

He would commit adultery every day if it were safe, and he would commit murder every day if it were necessary.

… to find a single issue of genuine appeal to the populace, at any time during the past century, that did not involve a more or less obvious scheme for looting a minority—the slave-owners, Wall Street, the railroads, the dukes, or some other group representing capital.

Even the most affecting idealism of the plain people has a thrifty basis.

In the United States, during the early part of the late war, they were very cynical about the Allied cause;

their existence depends upon a wasting of its tissue. In the same way, perhaps, man is a local disease of the cosmos—a kind of pestiferous eczema or urethritis. There are, of course, different grades of eczema, and so are there different grades of men.

No doubt a cosmos afflicted with nothing worse than an infection of Beethovens would not think it worth while to send for the doctor.

But a cosmos infested by prohibitionists, Socialists, Scotsmen and stockbrokers must suffer damnably. No wonder the sun is so hot and the moon is so diabetically green!

The fact is that the life of man, as it is more and more studied in the light of general biology, appears to be more and more empty of significance.

Once apparently the chief concern and masterpiece of the gods, the human race now begins to bear the aspect of an accidental by-product of their vast, inscrutable and probably nonsensical operations.

A blacksmith making a horse-shoe produces something almost as brilliant and mysterious—the shower of sparks. But his eye and thought, as we know, are not on the sparks, but on the horse-shoe. The sparks, indeed, constitute a sort of disease of the horse-shoe;

But his eye and thought, as we know, are not on the sparks, but on the horse-shoe. The sparks, indeed, constitute a sort of disease of the horse-shoe; their existence depends upon a wasting of its tissue.

In the same way, perhaps, man is a local disease of the cosmos—a kind of pestiferous eczema or urethritis.

There are, of course, different grades of eczema, and so are there different grades of men. No doubt a cosmos afflicted with nothing worse than an infection of Beethovens would not think it worth while to send for the doctor.

he is even mortally afraid of his own kind—and not only of their fists and hooves, but even of their sniggers.

No other animal is so defectively adapted to its environment.

The human infant, as it comes into the world, is so puny that if it were neglected for two days running it would infallibly perish, and this congenital infirmity, though more or less concealed later on, persists until death.

Alone of all animals, terrestrial, celestial or marine, man is unfit by nature to go abroad in the world he inhabits. He must clothe himself, protect himself, swathe himself, armor himself.

He is eternally in the position of a turtle born without a shell, a dog without hair, a fish without fins.

Lacking his heavy and cumbersome trappings, he is defenseless even against flies. As God made him he hasn’t even a tail to switch them off.

He must clothe himself, protect himself, swathe himself, armor himself. He is eternally in the position of a turtle born without a shell, a dog without hair, a fish without fins. Lacking his heavy and cumbersome trappings, he is defenseless even against flies.

As God made him he hasn’t even a tail to switch them off.

I now come to man’s one point of unquestionable natural superiority: he has a soul. This is what sets him off from all other animals, and makes him, in a way, their master.

He struts and plumes himself because he has this soul—and overlooks the fact that it doesn’t work. Thus he is the supreme clown of creation, the reductio ad absurdum of animated nature.

He is like a cow who believed that she could jump over the moon, and ordered her whole life upon that theory.

He is like a bullfrog boasting eternally of fighting lions, of flying over the Matterhorn, and of swimming the Hellespont. And yet this is the poor brute we are asked to venerate as a gem in the forehead of the cosmos!

Try to think of a congregation of educated rats gravely listening to such disgusting intellectual rubbish as was in the public bulls of Dr. Woodrow Wilson.

Man’s natural instinct, in fact, is never toward what is sound and true; it is toward what is specious and false.

Let any great nation of modern times be confronted by two conflicting propositions, the one grounded upon the utmost probability and reasonableness and the other upon the most glaring error, and it will almost invariably embrace the latter.

It is so in religion, which, like poetry, is simply a concerted effort to deny the most obvious realities. It is so in nearly every field of thought.

The ideas that conquer the race most rapidly and arouse the wildest enthusiasm and are held most tenaciously are precisely the ideas that are most insane.

This has been true since the first “advanced” gorilla put on underwear, cultivated a frown and began his first lecture tour in the first chautauqua, and it will be so until the high gods, tired of the farce at last, obliterate the race with one …

But what is too often overlooked is that the capacity to perform an act is by no means synonymous with its salubrious exercise.

The simple fact is that most of man’s thinking is stupid, pointless, and injurious to him.

Of all animals, indeed, he seems the least capable of arriving at accurate judgments in the matters that most desperately affect his welfare.

Alas, he is not content with this slow and sanguinary progress! Always he looks further and further ahead.

Always he imagines things just over the sky-line.

This body of imaginings constitutes his stock of sweet beliefs, his corpus of high faiths and confidences—in brief, his burden of errors.

And that burden of errors is what distinguishes man, even above his capacity for tears, his talents as a liar, his excessive hypocrisy and poltroonery, from all the other orders of mammalia.

Man is the yokel par excellence, the booby unmatchable, the king dupe of the cosmos.

He is chronically and unescapably deceived, not only by the other animals and by the delusive face of nature herself, but also and more particularly by himself—by his incomparable talent for searching out and embracing what is false, and for overlooking and denying what is …

This is the immemorial attitude of men in the mass, and of their chosen prophets, to whatever is honest, and important, and most probably true.

But if truth thus has hard sledding, error is given a loving welcome.

The man who invents a new imbecility is hailed gladly, and bidden to make himself at home; he is, to the great masses of men, the beau ideal of mankind.

But if truth thus has hard sledding, error is given a loving welcome.

The man who invents a new imbecility is hailed gladly, and bidden to make himself at home; he is, to the great masses of men, the beau ideal of mankind.

Go back through the history of the past thousand years and you will find that ninetenths of the popular idols of the world—not the heroes of small sects, but the heroes of mankind in the mass—have been merchants of palpable nonsense.

I have been told that the average age of the men who made the Authorized Version of the Bible was beyond sixty years.

Had they been under thirty they would have made it lyrical; as it was, they made it colossal.

The reason for all this is not far to seek. Prose, however powerful its appeal to the emotions, is always based primarily upon logic, and is thus scientific;

Nine-tenths of the best poetry of the world has been written by poets less than thirty years old; a great deal more than half of it has been written by poets under twenty-five.

One always associates poetry with youth, for it deals chiefly with the ideas that are peculiar to youth, and its terminology is quite as youthful as its content.

When one hears of a poet past thirty-five, he seems somehow unnatural and even a trifle obscene; it is as if one encountered a graying man who still played the Chopin waltzes and believed in elective affinities.

they offer him refuges. Their purpose is not to keep him in order, but simply to give him countenance by providing him with a formal orderliness when he is most out of order.

Using them is like swimming with bladders.

The first literary composition of a quick-minded child is always some sort of jingle. It starts out with an inane idea—half an idea. Sticking to prose, it could go no further.

Reading the thing, one gets a vague effect of agreeable sound, and so the logical feebleness is overlooked. It is, in a sense, like observing a pretty girl, competently dressed and made up, across the footlights.

But translating the poem into prose is like meeting and marrying her.

Much of the current discussion of poetry—and what, save Prohibition, is more discussed in America?—is corrupted by a fundamental error. That error consists in regarding the thing itself as a simple entity, to be described conveniently in a picturesque phrase.

His book is called “Poetry and Dreams.” Its virtue lies in the fact that it rejects all the customary mystical and romantic definitions of poetry, and seeks to account for the thing in straightforward psychological terms.

Poetry, says Prescott, is simply the verbal materialization of a day-dream, the statement of a Freudian wish, an attempt to satisfy a subconscious longing by saying that it is satisfied.

In brief, poetry represents imagination’s bold effort to escape from the cold and clammy facts that hedge us in—to soothe the wrinkled and fevered brow with beautiful balderdash.

Here, of course, I wander into platitude, for the news that all men are frauds was already stale in the days of Hammurabi.

The ingenious Freud simply translated the fact into pathological terms, added a bed-room scene, and so laid the foundations for his psychoanalysis.

Incidentally, it has always seemed to me that Freud made a curious mistake when he brought sex into the foreground of his new magic.

I say he cherishes those ideas. Maybe he simply tolerates them unwillingly; maybe they are no more than inescapable heritages from his barbarous ancestors, like his vermiform appendix.

Think of the poems you like, and you will come upon many such intellectual fossils—ideas that you by no means subscribe to openly, but that nevertheless give you a strange joy.

I put myself on the block as Exhibit A. There is my delight in Lizette Woodworth Reese’s sonnet, “Tears.” Nothing could do more violence to my conscious beliefs. Put into prose, the doctrine in the poem would exasperate and even enrage me.

But progress is not continuous; it has interludes. There are days when every one of us experiences a sort of ontogenetic back-firing, and returns to an earlier stage of development.

It is on such days that grown men break down and cry like children; it is then that they play games, or cheer the flag, or fall in love.

And it is then that they are in the mood for poetry, and get comfort out of its asseverations of the obviously not true.

One day I believe that he would have written prose as good as Dryden’s, and the next day I begin to fear that he would have produced something as bad as Swinburne’s. He had the ear, but he lacked the logical sense.

Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince.

I do not forget, of course, that there is a borderland in which it is hard to say, of this or that composition, whether it is prose or poetry.

This danger in poetry, given auditors impressionable enough, is too little estimated and understood.

It is largely responsible for the persistence of sentimentality in a world apparently designed for the one purpose of manufacturing cynics.

It is probably chiefly responsible for the survival of Christianity, despite the hard competition that it has met with from other religions. The theology of Christianity—i. e., its prose—is certainly no more convincing than that of half a dozen other religions that might be named;

But what mood? The mood, in a few words, of intellectual and spiritual fatigue, the mood of revolt against the insoluble riddle of existence, the mood of disgust and despair.

Poetry, then, is a capital medicine.

First its sweet music lulls, and then its artful presentation of the beautifully improbable soothes and gives surcease. It is an escape from life, like religion, like enthusiasm, like glimpsing a pretty girl.

Poetry, then, is a capital medicine. First its sweet music lulls, and then its artful presentation of the beautifully improbable soothes and gives surcease.

It is an escape from life, like religion, like enthusiasm, like glimpsing a pretty girl.

And to the mere sensuous joy in it, to the mere low delight in getting away from the world for a bit, there is added, if the poetry be good, something vastly better, something reaching out into the realm of the intelligent, to wit, appreciation …

A sound sonnet is almost as pleasing an object as a well-written fugue. A pretty lyric, deftly done, has all the technical charm of a fine carving.

I think it is craftsmanship that I admire most in the world.

Brahms enchants me because he knew his trade perfectly. I like Richard Strauss because he is full of technical ingenuities, because he is a master-workman. Well, who ever heard of a finer craftsman than William Shakespeare?

Always he was a wary fellow, both in his dealings with measures and in his dealings with men.

He knew how to keep his mouth shut.

Nevertheless, it was his eloquence that probably brought him to his great estate. Like William Jennings Bryan, he was a dark horse made suddenly formidable by fortunate rhetoric. The Douglas debate launched him, and the Cooper Union speech got him the presidency.

There is here nothing of the cold correctness of the usual literary “estimate.”

Warts are not forgotten, whether of the nose or of the immortal soul.

The subject, beginning as a political shibboleth or a row of books, gradually takes on all the colors of life, and then begins to move, naturally and freely.

So literary confectioners undertook stuff that would be more to their taste, and the modern novel was born. A single plot served most of these confectioners; it became and remains one of the conventions of the form.

Man and maid meet, love, and proceed to kiss—but the rest must wait.

The buss remains chaste through long and harrowing chapters; not until the very last scene do fate and Holy Church license anything more. This plot, as I say, still serves, and Arnold Bennett is authority for the doctrine that it is the safest known.

The stories in “The Line of Love,” though they may appear superficially to be excessively romantic, really owe all of their charm to their pungent realism.

The pleasure they give is the pleasure of recognition; one somehow delights in seeing a mediæval baron acting precisely like a New York stockbroker.

As for “Jurgen,” it is as realistic in manner as Zola’s “La Terre,” despite its grotesque fable and its burden of political, theological and epistemological ideas.

At one stroke it will demolish superstitions that have prevailed in the Western World since the fall of the Roman Empire. It will seem harsh, but it will be true. And, being true, it will be a good novel.

There can be no good one that is not true.

What ailed the women novelists, until very recently, was a lingering ladyism—a childish prudery inherited from their mothers. I believe that it is being rapidly thrown off; indeed, one often sees a concrete woman novelist shedding it. I give you two obvious examples:

… woman’s chastity, that another and worse war is hatching, that the very regulation of the weather has fallen into the hands of rogues—such a man will grab at anything, even birth control, osteopathy or the Fourteen Points, rather than let the foul villainy go on.

The apparent necessity of finding a remedy without delay transforms itself, by an easy psychological process, into a belief that the remedy has been found; it is almost impossible for most men, and particularly for tender-minded men, to take in the concept of the insoluble.

Every problem that remains unsolved, including even the problem of evil, is in that state simply because men of strict virtue and passionate altruism have not combined to solve it—because the business has been neglected by human laziness and rascality.

But this, of course, is not saying that the quacks themselves are honest. On the contrary, their utter dishonesty must be quite as obvious as the simplicity of their dupes.

Trade is good for them in the United States, where hope is a sort of national vice, and so they flourish here more luxuriously than anywhere else on earth.

Some one told me lately that there are now no less than 25,000 national organizations in the United States for the uplift of the plain people and the snaring and shaking down of forward-lookers—societies for the Americanization of immigrants, for protecting poor working-girls against Jews …

It is for this high purpose also that the forward-looker suffers.

Where is the grave-yard of dead gods? What lingering mourner waters their mounds?

There was a day when Jupiter was the king of the gods, and any man who doubted his puissance was ipso facto a barbarian and an ignoramus. But where in all the world is there a man who worships Jupiter to-day? And what of Huitzilopochtli?

That I invent the names. I do not. Ask the rector to lend you any good treatise on comparative religion: you will find them all listed. They were gods of the highest standing and dignity—gods of civilized peoples—worshipped and believed in by millions.

All were theoretically omnipotent, omniscient and immortal. And all are dead.

Next to the clerk in holy orders, the fellow with the worst job in the world is the schoolmaster. Both are underpaid, both fall steadily in authority and dignity, and both wear out their hearts trying to perform the impossible.

you will find them all listed. They were gods of the highest standing and dignity—gods of civilized peoples—worshipped and believed in by millions. All were theoretically omnipotent, omniscient and immortal. And all are dead.

Next to the clerk in holy orders, the fellow with the worst job in the world is the schoolmaster.

Both are underpaid, both fall steadily in authority and dignity, and both wear out their hearts trying to perform the impossible. How much the world asks of them, and how little they can actually deliver!

Is it any wonder that the poor birch-man, facing this labor that would have staggered Sisyphus Æolusohn, seeks refuge from its essential impossibility in a Chinese maze of empty technic?

The ghost of Pestalozzi, once bearing a torch and beckoning toward the heights, now leads down stairways into black and forbidding dungeons.

Especially in America, where all that is bombastic and mystical is most esteemed, the art of pedagogics becomes a sort of puerile magic, a thing of preposterous secrets, a grotesque compound of false premises and illogical conclusions.

The merciless application of this formula (which changes every four days) now seems to be the chief end and aim of pedagogy.

Teaching becomes a thing in itself, separable from and superior to the thing taught.

Its mastery is a special business, a transcendental art and mystery, to be acquired in the laboratory.

And what does it consist of? It consists, first, of a natural talent for dealing with children, for getting into their minds, for putting things in a way that they can comprehend.

And it consists, secondly, of a deep belief in the interest and importance of the thing taught, a concern about it amounting to a sort of passion.

A man who knows a subject thoroughly, a man so soaked in it that he eats it, sleeps it and dreams it—this man can always teach it with success, no matter how little he knows of technical pedagogy.

That is because there is enthusiasm in him, and because enthusiasm is almost as contagious as fear or the barber’s itch.

An enthusiast is willing to go to any trouble to impart the glad news bubbling within him.

He thinks that it is important and valuable for to know; given the slightest glow of interest in a pupil to start with, he will fan that glow to a flame. No hollow formalism cripples him and slows him down.

Such idiots, despite the rise of “scientific” pedagogy, have not died out in the world. I believe that our schools are full of them, both in pantaloons and in skirts.

There are fanatics who love and venerate spelling as a tom-cat loves and venerates catnip.

There are grammatomaniacs; schoolmarms who would rather parse than eat; specialists in an objective case that doesn’t exist in English; strange beings, otherwise sane and even intelligent and comely, who suffer under a split infinitive as you or I would suffer under gastro-enteritis.

A man of high intelligence, perhaps, may accomplish the thing by a conscious intellectual feat. But it is vastly easier to the man (or woman) whose habits of mind are naturally on the plane of a child’s.

The best teacher of children, in brief, is one who is essentially child-like.

I go so far with this notion that I view the movement to introduce female bachelors of arts into the primary schools with the utmost alarm.

Like most other professional writers I get a good many letters from my customers.

Complaints, naturally, are more numerous than compliments; it is only indignation that can induce the average man to brave the ardors of pen and ink.

Well, the complaint that I hear most often is that my English is unintelligible—that it is too full of “hard” words. I can imagine nothing more astounding. My English is actually almost as bald and simple as the English of a college yell.

secretaries—these things infallibly repel the youth who is above milksoppery. In every boys’ school the favorite teacher is one who occasionally swears like a cavalryman, or is reputed to keep a jug in his room, or is known to receive a scented note every morning.

Boys are good judges of men, as girls are good judges of women.

It is not by accident that most of them, at some time or other, long to be cowboys or ice-wagon drivers, and that none of them, not obviously diseased in mind, ever longs to be a Sunday-school superintendent. Put that judgment to a simple test.

He is the sort of fellow who, if he were a bacteriologist, would report the streptococcus pyogenes to be as large as a St. Bernard dog, as intelligent as Socrates, as beautiful as Beauvais Cathedral and as respectable as a Yale professor.

No man ever quite believes in any other man. One may believe in an idea absolutely, but not in a man.

In the highest confidence there is always a flavor of doubt—a feeling, half instinctive and half logical, that, after all, the scoundrel may have something up his sleeve.

No married woman ever trusts her husband absolutely, nor does she ever act as if she did trust him. Her utmost confidence is as wary as an American pick-pocket’s confidence that the policeman on the beat will stay bought.

Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.

Or, psychoanalytically, as a wish neurose. There is thus a flavor of the pathological in it; it goes beyond the normal intellectual process and passes into the murky domain of transcendental metaphysics.

If he got no reward whatever, the artist would go on working just the same; his actual reward, in fact, is often so little that he almost starves. But suppose a garment-worker got nothing for his labor: would he go on working just the same?

Can one imagine him submitting voluntarily to hardship and sore want that he might express his soul in 200 more pairs of pantaloons?

Hygiene is the corruption of medicine by morality. It is impossible to find a hygienist who does not debase his theory of the healthful with a theory of the virtuous.

But suppose a garment-worker got nothing for his labor: would he go on working just the same? Can one imagine him submitting voluntarily to hardship and sore want that he might express his soul in 200 more pairs of pantaloons?

Hygiene is the corruption of medicine by morality.

It is impossible to find a hygienist who does not debase his theory of the healthful with a theory of the virtuous.

This brings it, at the end, into diametrical conflict with medicine proper. The aim of medicine is surely not to make men virtuous; it is to safeguard and rescue them from the consequences of their vices.

The true physician does not preach repentance; he offers absolution.

The value the world sets upon motives is often grossly unjust and inaccurate. Consider, for example, two of them: mere insatiable curiosity and the desire to do good.

No man of self-respect could devote himself to pathology on such terms. What actually moves him is his unquenchable curiosity—his boundless, almost pathological thirst to penetrate the unknown, to uncover the secret, to find out what has not been found out before.

His prototype is not the liberator releasing slaves, the good Samaritan lifting up the fallen, but the dog sniffing tremendously at an infinite series of rat-holes.

And yet he is one of the greatest and noblest of men. And yet he stands in the very front rank of the race.

The business man, in fact, acquiesces in this assumption of his inferiority, even when he protests against it.

He is the only man who is forever apologizing for his occupation.

He is the only one who always seeks to make it appear, when he attains the object of his labors, i. e., the making of a great deal of money, that it was not the object of his labors.

It is the popular theory, at least in America, that monarchism is a curse fastened upon the common people from above—that the monarch saddles it upon them without their consent and against their will. The theory is without support in the facts.

Kings are created, not by kings, but by the people.

They visualize one of the ineradicable needs of all third-rate men, which means of nine men out of ten, and that is the need of something to venerate, to bow down to, to follow and obey.

Go back still further. Property arose out of the fact that a few relatively courageous men were able to accumulate more possessions than whole hordes of cowardly men, and, what is more, to retain them after accumulating them.

The man who boasts that he habitually tells the truth is simply a man with no respect for it.

It is not a thing to be thrown about loosely, like small change; it is something to be cherished and hoarded, and disbursed only when absolutely necessary. The smallest atom of truth represents some man’s bitter toil and agony;

The man who boasts that he habitually tells the truth is simply a man with no respect for it.

It is not a thing to be thrown about loosely, like small change; it is something to be cherished and hoarded, and disbursed only when absolutely necessary.

The smallest atom of truth represents some man’s bitter toil and agony; for every ponderable chunk of it there is a brave truth-seeker’s grave upon some lonely ash-dump and a soul roasting in hell.

One of the most mawkish of human delusions is the notion that friendship should be eternal, or, at all events, life-long, and that any act which puts a term to it is somehow discreditable.

The fact is that a man of active and resilient mind outwears his friendships just as certainly as he outwears his love affairs, his politics and his epistemology.

They become threadbare, shabby, pumped-up, irritating, depressing. They convert themselves from living realities into moribund artificialities, and stand in sinister opposition to freedom, self-respect and truth.

surely the eighteenth century produced nothing that can be read with greater ease to-day. Nor is there any inherent reason why even the most technical divisions of its subject should have gathered cobwebs with the passing of the years.

Taxation, for example, is eternally lively; it concerns ninetenths of us more directly than either smallpox or golf, and has just as much drama in it; moreover, it has been mellowed and made gay by as many gaudy, preposterous theories.

As for foreign exchange, it is almost as romantic as young love, and quite as resistent to formulæ. Do the professors make an autopsy of it?

Always it is safer and more hygienic for him to think one way than to think another way, and in that bald fact there is excuse enough to hold his whole chain of syllogisms in suspicion.

He may be earnest, he may be honest, but he is not free, and if he is not free, he is not anything.

Well, are the reverend professors of economics free? With the highest respect, I presume to question it.

All it can see in an original idea is potential change, and hence an invasion of its prerogatives.

The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos.

Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it.

There is seldom, if ever, any evidence that the kind of government he is unlawfully inclined to would be any better than the government he proposes to supplant.

Political revolutions, in truth, do not often accomplish anything of genuine value; their one undoubted effect is simply to throw out one gang of thieves and put in another.

After a revolution, of course, the successful revolutionists always try to convince doubters that they have achieved great things, and usually they hang any man who denies it. But that surely doesn’t prove their case.

Under the British hoof they would have got on just as well, and probably a great deal better.

The ideal government of all reflective men, from Aristotle to Herbert Spencer, is one which lets the individual alone—one which barely escapes being no government at all.

This ideal, I believe, will be realized in the world twenty or thirty centuries after I have passed from these scenes and taken up my home in Hell.

The best a dramatist can hope to do is to give poignant and arresting expression to an idea so simple that the average man will grasp it at once, and so banal that he will approve it in the next instant.

The phrase “drama of ideas” thus becomes a mere phrase. What is actually meant by it is “drama of platitudes.”

So much for the theory. An appeal to the facts quickly substantiates it. The more one looks into the so-called drama of ideas of the last age—that is, into the acting drama—the more one is astounded by the vacuity of its content.

… out of men (and women) by having the name of being a well-heeled fellow than I have ever got by being decent to them, or by dazzling them with my sagacity, or by hard industry, or by a personal beauty that is singular and ineffable.

The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.

It is my honest belief that I am no wiser to-day than I was five or ten years ago; in fact, I often suspect that I am appreciable less wise.

I am also an easier mark for male swindlers than I used to be; at fifty I’ll probably be joining clubs and buying Mexican mine stock.

The truth is that every man goes up-hill in sagacity to a certain point, and then begins sliding down again.

Nearly all the old fellows that I know are more or less balmy. Theoretically, they should be much wiser than younger men, if only because of their greater experience, but actually they seem to take on folly faster than they take on wisdom.

What he is spontaneously inclined to do is of vastly more value to all of us than what the majority is willing to do. There is, indeed, no such thing as duty-in-itself; it is a mere chimera of ethical theorists.

Human progress is furthered, not by conformity, but by aberration.

The very concept of duty is thus a function of inferiority; it belongs naturally only to timorous and incompetent men. Even on such levels it remains largely a self-delusion, a soothing apparition, a euphemism for necessity.

But this merely begs the question. Is it actually noble to cling to a religious idea so tenaciously? Certainly it doesn’t seem so to me. After all, no human being really knows anything about the exalted matters with which all religions deal.

The most he can do is to match his private guess against the guesses of his fellow-men.

For any man to say absolutely, in such a field, that this or that is wholly and irrefragably true and this or that is utterly false is simply to talk nonsense.

Such shivers, repeated often enough, must inevitably shake his inner integrity off its base.

No man can love, and yet remain truly proud. It is a disarming and humiliating experience.

Patriotism is conceivable to a civilized man in times of stress and storm, when his country is wobbling and sore beset. His country then appeals to him as any victim of misfortune appeals to him—say, a street-walker pursued by the police.

The science of psychological pathology is still in its infancy. In all its literature in three languages, I can’t find a line about the permanent ill effects of acute emotional diseases—say, for example, love affairs.

The common assumption of the world is that when a love affair is over it is over—that nothing remains behind.

This is probably grossly untrue. It is my belief that every such experience leaves scars upon my psyche, and that they are quite as plain and quite as dangerous as the scars left on the neck by a carbuncle.

This is probably grossly untrue. It is my belief that every such experience leaves scars upon my psyche, and that they are quite as plain and quite as dangerous as the scars left on the neck by a carbuncle.

A man who has passed through a love affair, even though he may eventually forget the lady’s very name, is never quite the same thereafter.

His scars may be small, but they are permanent. The sentimentalist, exposed incessantly, ends as a psychic cripple; he is as badly off as the man who has come home from the wars with shell-shock. The precise nature of the scars remains to be determined.