The Moon and Sixpence quotes

It is still possible to discuss his place in art, and the adulation of his admirers is perhaps no less capricious than the disparagement of his detractors; but one thing can never be doubtful, and that is that he had genius.

To my mind the most interesting thing in art is the personality of the artist; and if that is singular, I am willing to excuse a thousand faults.

I suppose Velasquez was a better painter than El Greco, but custom stales one’s admiration for him: the Cretan, sensual and tragic, proffers the mystery of his soul like a standing sacrifice.

but that is akin to the sexual instinct, and shares its barbarity: he lays before you also the greater gift of himself. To pursue his secret has something of the fascination of a detective story.

It is a riddle which shares with the universe the merit of having no answer.

The most insignificant of Strickland’s works suggests a personality which is strange, tormented, and complex; and it is this surely which prevents even those who do not like his pictures from being indifferent to them;

I do not speak of that greatness which is achieved by the fortunate politician or the successful soldier; that is a quality which belongs to the place he occupies rather than to the man; and a change of circumstances reduces it to very discreet proportions.

The Prime Minister out of office is seen, too often, to have been but a pompous rhetorician, and the General without an army is but the tame hero of a market town.

The greatness of Charles Strickland was authentic. It may be that you do not like his art, but at all events you can hardly refuse it the tribute of your interest. He disturbs and arrests.

The subject was grateful, and the industrious Weitbrecht-Rotholz in his imposing monograph has been able to give a remarkable list of authorities.

The faculty for myth is innate in the human race.

It seizes with avidity upon any incidents, surprising or mysterious, in the career of those who have at all distinguished themselves from their fellows, and invents a legend to which it then attaches a fanatical belief.

It seizes with avidity upon any incidents, surprising or mysterious, in the career of those who have at all distinguished themselves from their fellows, and invents a legend to which it then attaches a fanatical belief.

It is the protest of romance against the commonplace of life.

The incidents of the legend become the hero’s surest passport to immortality.

Weitbrecht-Rotholz was able to print the letter in facsimile, and it appears that the passage referred to ran in fact as follows:

God damn my wife. She is an excellent woman. I wish she was in hell.

It is not thus that the Church in its great days dealt with evidence that was unwelcome.

Weitbrecht-Rotholz was able to print the letter in facsimile, and it appears that the passage referred to ran in fact as follows: God damn my wife. She is an excellent woman. I wish she was in hell.

It is not thus that the Church in its great days dealt with evidence that was unwelcome.

Dr. Weitbrecht-Rotholz was an enthusiastic admirer of Charles Strickland, and there was no danger that he would whitewash him. He had an unerring eye for the despicable motive in actions that had all the appearance of innocence.

He was a psychopathologist, as well as a student of art, and the subconscious had few secrets from him. No mystic ever saw deeper meaning in common things.

The mystic sees the ineffable, and the psychopathologist the unspeakable.

There is a singular fascination in watching the eagerness with which the learned author ferrets out every circumstance which may throw discredit on his hero.

But I seek refuge in no such excuses.

I forget who it was that recommended men for their soul’s good to do each day two things they disliked: it was a wise man, and it is a precept that I have followed scrupulously; for every day I have got up and I have gone to bed.

But there is in my nature a strain of asceticism, and I have subjected my flesh each week to a more severe mortification. I have never failed to read the Literary Supplement of The Times.

In their chastened smile is an indulgent mockery. They remember that they too trod down a sated generation, with just such clamor and with just such scorn, and they foresee that these brave torchbearers will presently yield their place also.

There is no last word. The new evangel was old when Nineveh reared her greatness to the sky.

These gallant words which seem so novel to those that speak them were said in accents scarcely changed a hundred times before. The pendulum swings backwards and forwards. The circle is ever travelled anew.

Of course, much of it was. But the odes of Keats and of Wordsworth, a poem or two by Coleridge, a few more by Shelley, discovered vast realms of the spirit that none had explored before.

Mr. Crabbe was as dead as mutton, but Mr. Crabbe continued to write moral stories in rhymed couplets.

I have read desultorily the writings of the younger generation. It may be that among them a more fervid Keats, a more ethereal Shelley, has already published numbers the world will willingly remember. I cannot tell.

We did not think it hypocritical to draw over our vagaries the curtain of a decent silence.

The spade was not invariably called a bloody shovel. Woman had not yet altogether come into her own.

I lived near Victoria Station, and I recall long excursions by bus to the hospitable houses of the literary. In my timidity I wandered up and down the street while I screwed up my courage to ring the bell;

Rose Waterford cast down her eyes demurely to give greater effect to her reply.

“She gives luncheon-parties. You’ve only got to roar a little, and she’ll ask you.”

Rose Waterford was a cynic. She looked upon life as an opportunity for writing novels and the public as her raw material.

Strickland, and for ten minutes we talked together. I noticed nothing about her except that she had a pleasant voice. She had a flat in Westminster, overlooking the unfinished cathedral, and because we lived in the same neighbourhood we felt friendly disposed to one another.

The Army and Navy Stores are a bond of union between all who dwell between the river and St. James’s Park.

Mrs. Strickland asked me for my address, and a few days later I received an invitation to luncheon.

There was blue delft on the chimneypiece. At that time there must have been five hundred dining-rooms in London decorated in exactly the same manner.

It was chaste, artistic, and dull.

When we left I walked away with Miss Waterford, and the fine day and her new hat persuaded us to saunter through the Park.

“Why do nice women marry dull men?”

“Because intelligent men won’t marry nice women.”

I could not think of any retort to this, so I asked if Mrs. Strickland had children.

Mrs. Strickland used her advantage with tact. You felt that you obliged her by accepting her sympathy. When, in the enthusiasm of my youth, I remarked on this to Rose Waterford, she said:

“Milk is very nice, especially with a drop of brandy in it, but the domestic cow is only too glad to be rid of it. A swollen udder is very uncomfortable.”

Rose Waterford had a blistering tongue. No one could say such bitter things; on the other hand, no one could do more charming ones.

“Milk is very nice, especially with a drop of brandy in it, but the domestic cow is only too glad to be rid of it. A swollen udder is very uncomfortable.”

Rose Waterford had a blistering tongue. No one could say such bitter things; on the other hand, no one could do more charming ones.

There was another thing I liked in Mrs. Strickland. She managed her surroundings with elegance. Her flat was always neat and cheerful, gay with flowers, and the chintzes in the drawing-room, notwithstanding their severe design, were bright and pretty.

… at last we were all assembled, waiting for dinner to be announced, I reflected, while I chatted with the woman I had been asked to “take in,” that civilised man practises a strange ingenuity in wasting on tedious exercises the brief span of his life.

It was the kind of party which makes you wonder why the hostess has troubled to bid her guests, and why the guests have troubled to come.

There were ten people. They met with indifference, and would part with relief. It was, of course, a purely social function. The Stricklands “owed” dinners to a number of persons, whom they took no interest in, and so had asked them; these persons had accepted.

I recognised its social values, I saw its ordered happiness, but a fever in my blood asked for a wilder course. There seemed to me something alarming in such easy delights.

In my heart was a desire to live more dangerously.

I was not unprepared for jagged rocks and treacherous shoals if I could only have change—change and the excitement of the unforeseen.

My only excuse is that the impression they made on me was no other. There was just that shadowiness about them which you find in people whose lives are part of the social organism, so that they exist in it and by it only.

They are like cells in the body, essential, but, so long as they remain healthy, engulfed in the momentous whole.

The Stricklands were an average family in the middle class. A pleasant, hospitable woman, with a harmless craze for the small lions of literary society; a rather dull man, doing his duty in that state of life in which a merciful Providence had placed him;

She sat down. I did not at all know what to say. I felt a certain shyness at referring to matters which were no concern of mine.

I did not then know the besetting sin of woman, the passion to discuss her private affairs with anyone who is willing to listen.

Mrs. Strickland seemed to make an effort over herself.

and I was perturbed by the suspicion that the anguish of love contemned was alloyed in her broken heart with the pangs, sordid to my young mind, of wounded vanity.

I had not yet learnt how contradictory is human nature; I did not know how much pose there is in the sincere, how much baseness in the noble, nor how much goodness in the reprobate.

But there was something of an adventure in my trip, and my spirits rose as I approached Paris.

I made up my mind to see Strickland the following evening, for I felt instinctively that the hour must be chosen with delicacy.

An appeal to the emotions is little likely to be effectual before luncheon.

My own thoughts were then constantly occupied with love, but I never could imagine connubial bliss till after tea.

I made up my mind to see Strickland the following evening, for I felt instinctively that the hour must be chosen with delicacy. An appeal to the emotions is little likely to be effectual before luncheon.

My own thoughts were then constantly occupied with love, but I never could imagine connubial bliss till after tea.

I enquired at my hotel for that in which Charles Strickland was living. It was called the Hôtel des Belges. But the concierge, somewhat to my surprise, had never heard of it. I had understood from Mrs.

I was prepared to be persuasive, touching, and hortatory, admonitory and expostulating, if need be vituperative even, indignant and sarcastic; but what the devil does a mentor do when the sinner makes no bones about confessing his sin?

I had no experience, since my own practice has always been to deny everything.

I tried to curl my lip.

“How is she going to live?”

“I’ve supported her for seventeen years. Why shouldn’t she support herself for a change?”

Of course there were many things I might have answered to this. I might have spoken of the economic position of woman, of the contract, tacit and overt, which a man accepts by his marriage, and of much else;

I looked at him for quite a long time. I did not understand. I thought he was mad. It must be remembered that I was very young, and I looked upon him as a middle-aged man. I forgot everything but my own amazement.

“That’s what made me think it was high time to begin.”

“I rather wanted to be a painter when I was a boy, but my father made me go into business because he said there was no money in art. I began to paint a bit a year ago.

“I tell you I’ve got to paint. I can’t help myself.

When a man falls into the water it doesn’t matter how he swims, well or badly: he’s got to get out or else he’ll drown.

”

But the fear of not being able to carry it through effectively has always made me shy of assuming the moral attitude; and in this case the certainty that my sentiments would be lost on Strickland made it peculiarly embarrassing to utter them.

Only the poet or the saint can water an asphalt pavement in the confident anticipation that lilies will reward his labour.

I paid for what we had drunk, and we made our way to a cheap restaurant, crowded and gay, where we dined with pleasure. I had the appetite of youth and he of a hardened conscience.

I had said all I had to say on the subject that had brought me to Paris, and though I felt it in a manner treacherous to Mrs. Strickland not to pursue it, I could not struggle against his indifference.

It requires the feminine temperament to repeat the same thing three times with unabated zest.

I solaced myself by thinking that it would be useful for me to find out what I could about Strickland’s state of mind. It also interested me much more. But this was not an easy thing to do, for Strickland was not a fluent talker.

… in his soul some deep-rooted instinct of creation, which the circumstances of his life had obscured, but which grew relentlessly, as a cancer may grow in the living tissues, till at last it took possession of his whole being and forced him irresistibly to action.

The cuckoo lays its egg in the strange bird’s nest, and when the young one is hatched it shoulders its foster-brothers out and breaks at last the nest that has sheltered it.

But how strange it was that the creative instinct should seize upon this dull stockbroker, to his own ruin, perhaps, and to the misfortune of such as were dependent on him;

With some men it needs a cataclysm, as a stone may be broken to fragments by the fury of a torrent; but with some it comes gradually, as a stone may be worn away by the ceaseless fall of a drop of water.

Strickland had the directness of the fanatic and the ferocity of the apostle.

But to my practical mind it remained to be seen whether the passion which obsessed him would be justified of its works.

and at the utmost only that they are willing to act contrary to the opinion of the majority because they are supported by the approval of their neighbours.

It is not difficult to be unconventional in the eyes of the world when your unconventionality is but the convention of your set.

It affords you then an inordinate amount of self-esteem. You have the self-satisfaction of courage without the inconvenience of danger. But the desire for approbation is perhaps the most deeply seated instinct of civilised man.

It is not difficult to be unconventional in the eyes of the world when your unconventionality is but the convention of your set. It affords you then an inordinate amount of self-esteem.

You have the self-satisfaction of courage without the inconvenience of danger.

But the desire for approbation is perhaps the most deeply seated instinct of civilised man. No one runs so hurriedly to the cover of respectability as the unconventional woman who has exposed herself to the slings and arrows of outraged propriety.

It affords you then an inordinate amount of self-esteem. You have the self-satisfaction of courage without the inconvenience of danger. But the desire for approbation is perhaps the most deeply seated instinct of civilised man.

No one runs so hurriedly to the cover of respectability as the unconventional woman who has exposed herself to the slings and arrows of outraged propriety.

I do not believe the people who tell me they do not care a row of pins for the opinion of their fellows. It is the bravado of ignorance.

But the desire for approbation is perhaps the most deeply seated instinct of civilised man. No one runs so hurriedly to the cover of respectability as the unconventional woman who has exposed herself to the slings and arrows of outraged propriety.

I do not believe the people who tell me they do not care a row of pins for the opinion of their fellows. It is the bravado of ignorance.

They mean only that they do not fear reproaches for peccadillos which they are convinced none will discover.

“Look here, if everyone acted like you, the world couldn’t go on.”

“That’s a damned silly thing to say. Everyone doesn’t want to act like me. The great majority are perfectly content to do the ordinary thing.”

And once I sought to be satirical.

“You evidently don’t believe in the maxim: Act so that every one of your actions is capable of being made into a universal rule.”

“I never heard it before, but it’s rotten nonsense.”

“Well, it was Kant who said it.”

You might as well ask for a reflection without a mirror. I take it that conscience is the guardian in the individual of the rules which the community has evolved for its own preservation.

It is the policeman in all our hearts, set there to watch that we do not break its laws. It is the spy seated in the central stronghold of the ego.

Man’s desire for the approval of his fellows is so strong, his dread of their censure so violent, that he himself has brought his enemy within his gates;

“My own impression is that she’s well rid of you,” I said.

“My dear fellow, I only hope you’ll be able to make her see it. But women are very unintelligent.”

He’ll come back with his tail between his legs and settle down again quite comfortably.” Mrs. MacAndrew looked at her sister coolly. “Perhaps you weren’t very wise with him sometimes. Men are queer creatures, and one has to know how to manage them.”

Mrs. MacAndrew shared the common opinion of her sex that a man is always a brute to leave a woman who is attached to him, but that a woman is much to blame if he does.

Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connait pas.

I knew when he was dying he’d send for me, and I was ready to go; I’d have nursed him like a mother, and at the last I’d have told him that it didn’t matter, I’d loved him always, and I forgave him everything.”

I have always been a little disconcerted by the passion women have for behaving beautifully at the deathbed of those they love. Sometimes it seems as if they grudge the longevity which postpones their chance of an effective scene.

“But now—now it’s finished. I’m as indifferent to him as if he were a stranger. I should like him to die miserable, poor, and starving, without a friend. I hope he’ll rot with some loathsome disease. I’ve done with him.”

I expected then people to be more of a piece than I do now, and I was distressed to find so much vindictiveness in so charming a creature. I did not realise how motley are the qualities that go to make up a human being.

Now I am well aware that pettiness and grandeur, malice and charity, hatred and love, can find place side by side in the same human heart.

I wondered if there was anything I could say that would ease the sense of bitter humiliation which at present tormented Mrs. Strickland. I thought I would try.

My friends pursued their course with uneventfulness; they had no longer any surprises for me, and when I met them I knew pretty well what they would say; even their love-affairs had a tedious banality.

We were like tramcars running on their lines from terminus to terminus, and it was possible to calculate within small limits the number of passengers they would carry.

Life was ordered too pleasantly. I was seized with panic. I gave up my small apartment, sold my few belongings, and resolved to start afresh.

But I knew it was not kindness that prompted the offer.

It is not true that suffering ennobles the character; happiness does that sometimes, but suffering, for the most part, makes men petty and vindictive.

He was constantly wounded, and yet his good-nature was such that he could not bear malice: the viper might sting him, but he never learned by experience, and had no sooner recovered from his pain than he tenderly placed it once more in his bosom.

His life was a tragedy written in the terms of knockabout farce.

Because I did not laugh at him he was grateful to me, and he used to pour into my sympathetic ear the long list of his troubles.

His life was a tragedy written in the terms of knockabout farce. Because I did not laugh at him he was grateful to me, and he used to pour into my sympathetic ear the long list of his troubles.

The saddest thing about them was that they were grotesque, and the more pathetic they were, the more you wanted to laugh.

But though so bad a painter, he had a very delicate feeling for art, and to go with him to picture-galleries was a rare treat. His enthusiasm was sincere and his criticism acute. He was catholic.

I imagine that a pickpocket, proud of his light fingers, must feel a sort of indignation with the careless woman who leaves in a cab a vanity-bag with all her jewels in it.

Nature had made him a butt, but had denied him insensibility.

He writhed under the jokes, practical and otherwise, which were perpetually made at his expense, and yet never ceased, it seemed wilfully, to expose himself to them. He was constantly wounded, and yet his good-nature was such that he could not bear malice:

“

Why should you think that beauty, which is the most precious thing in the world, lies like a stone on the beach for the careless passerby to pick up idly? Beauty is something wonderful and strange that the artist fashions out of the chaos of the world in the torment of his soul.

And when he has made it, it is not given to all to know it. To recognize it you must repeat the adventure of the artist.

“Don’t you want fame? It’s something that most artists haven’t been indifferent to.”

“Children. How can you care for the opinion of the crowd, when you don’t care twopence for the opinion of the individual?”

“We’re not all reasonable beings,” I laughed.

“We’re not all reasonable beings,” I laughed.

“Who makes fame? Critics, writers, stockbrokers, women.”

“Wouldn’t it give you a rather pleasing sensation to think of people you didn’t know and had never seen receiving emotions, subtle and passionate, from the work of your hands? Everyone likes power.

I don’t mean the past of seven or eight years ago, but further back still, when you first met your wife, and loved her, and married her. Don’t you remember the joy with which you first took her in your arms?”

“I don’t think of the past. The only thing that matters is the everlasting present.”

I thought for a moment over this reply. It was obscure, perhaps, but I thought that I saw dimly his meaning.

“Nonsense,” I answered promptly; “

I don’t disapprove of the boa-constrictor; on the contrary, I’m interested in his mental processes.

”

“Haven’t you been in love since you came to Paris?”

“I haven’t got time for that sort of nonsense. Life isn’t long enough for love and art.”

“Your appearance doesn’t suggest the anchorite.”

We set up the pieces, and when the board was ready he considered it with a comfortable eye.

There is a sense of satisfaction in looking at your men all ready for the fray.

“Did you really think I’d lend you money?” I asked.

“It’s disappointing to find that at heart you are sentimental. I should have liked you better if you hadn’t made that ingenuous appeal to my sympathies.”

“I should have despised you if you’d been moved by it,” he answered.

We began to play. We were both absorbed in the game. When it was finished I said to him:

Strickland was in a good humour, and when Dirk Stroeve came up and sat down with us he attacked him with ferocious banter. He showed a skill I should never have credited him with in finding the places where the unhappy Dutchman was most sensitive.

Strickland employed not the rapier of sarcasm but the bludgeon of invective.

The attack was so unprovoked that Stroeve, taken unawares, was defenceless. He reminded you of a frightened sheep running aimlessly hither and thither. He was startled and amazed. At last the tears ran from his eyes.

He was startled and amazed. At last the tears ran from his eyes. And the worst of it was that, though you hated Strickland, and the exhibition was horrible, it was impossible not to laugh.

Dirk Stroeve was one of those unlucky persons whose most sincere emotions are ridiculous.

But after all when I look back upon that winter in Paris, my pleasantest recollection is of Dirk Stroeve. There was something very charming in his little household.

That was in his character. He was a man without any conception of gratitude. He had no compassion.

The emotions common to most of us simply did not exist in him, and it was as absurd to blame him for not feeling them as for blaming the tiger because he is fierce and cruel.

But it was the whim I could not understand.

If I have succeeded at all in giving the complicated impression that Strickland made on me, it will not seem outrageous to say that

I felt he was at once too great and too small for love.

But I suppose that everyone’s conception of the passion is formed on his own idiosyncrasies, and it is different with every different person. A man like Strickland would love in a manner peculiar to himself. It was vain to seek the analysis of his emotion.

Love is absorbing; it takes the lover out of himself; the most clear-sighted, though he may know, cannot realise that his love will cease; it gives body to what he knows is illusion, and, knowing it is nothing else, he loves it better than reality.

It makes a man a little more than himself, and at the same time a little less.

He ceases to be himself. He is no longer an individual, but a thing, an instrument to some purpose foreign to his ego. Love is never quite devoid of sentimentality, and Strickland was the least inclined to that infirmity of any man I have known.

He told her that Strickland would soon tire of her. When he repeated to me the whole sordid little scene I was outraged. He had shown neither sense nor dignity. He had omitted nothing that could make his wife despise him.

There is no cruelty greater than a woman’s to a man who loves her and whom she does not love; she has no kindness then, no tolerance even, she has only an insane irritation.

Blanche Stroeve stopped suddenly, and as hard as she could slapped her husband’s face. She took advantage of his confusion to escape, and ran up the stairs to the studio. No word had passed her lips.

He was getting something of a paunch, and sorrow had no effect on it. He looked more than ever like a prosperous bagman.

It is hard that a man’s exterior should tally so little sometimes with his soul.

Dirk Stroeve had the passion of Romeo in the body of Sir Toby Belch. He had a sweet and generous nature, and yet was always blundering; a real feeling for what was beautiful and the capacity to create only what was commonplace;

He was getting something of a paunch, and sorrow had no effect on it. He looked more than ever like a prosperous bagman. It is hard that a man’s exterior should tally so little sometimes with his soul.

Dirk Stroeve had the passion of Romeo in the body of Sir Toby Belch.

He had a sweet and generous nature, and yet was always blundering; a real feeling for what was beautiful and the capacity to create only what was commonplace; a peculiar delicacy of sentiment and gross manners.

a real feeling for what was beautiful and the capacity to create only what was commonplace; a peculiar delicacy of sentiment and gross manners. He could exercise tact when dealing with the affairs of others, but none when dealing with his own.

What a cruel practical joke old Nature played when she flung so many contradictory elements together, and left the man face to face with the perplexing callousness of the universe.

I always tried my best to beat Strickland, because he was a player who despised the opponent he vanquished; his exultation in victory made defeat more difficult to bear. On the other hand, if he was beaten he took it with complete good-humour.

He was a bad winner and a good loser.

Those who think that a man betrays his character nowhere more clearly than when he is playing a game might on this draw subtle inferences.

there was no reasoning with him. I thought it probable enough that Blanche Stroeve would not continue to find life with Strickland tolerable, but one of the falsest of proverbs is that you must lie on the bed that you have made.

The experience of life shows that people are constantly doing things which must lead to disaster, and yet by some chance manage to evade the result of their folly.

When Blanche quarrelled with Strickland she had only to leave him, and her husband was waiting humbly to forgive and forget. I was not prepared to feel any great sympathy for her.

He was too tired to weep. He lay on his back limply, as though all the strength had gone out of his limbs, and presently I saw that he had fallen asleep. It was the first natural sleep he had had for a week.

Nature, sometimes so cruel, is sometimes merciful.

I covered him and turned down the light. In the morning when I awoke he was still asleep. He had not moved. His gold-rimmed spectacles were still on his nose.

“The world is hard and cruel. We are here none knows why, and we go none knows whither. We must be very humble.

We must see the beauty of quietness. We must go through life so inconspicuously that Fate does not notice us.

And let us seek the love of simple, ignorant people. Their ignorance is better than all our knowledge. Let us be silent, content in our little corner, meek and gentle like them. That is the wisdom of life.”

I could not help a chuckle.

It is one of the defects of my character that I cannot altogether dislike anyone who makes me laugh.

But I pulled myself together.

“You’ve come down in the world if you can bring yourself to flatter.”

“You’ll never really dislike me so long as I give you the opportunity to get off a good thing now and then.”

I had to bite my lip to prevent myself from laughing. What he said had a hateful truth in it, and another defect of my character is that I enjoy the company of those, however depraved, who can give me a Roland for my Oliver.

In giving to the character of his invention flesh and bones he is giving life to that part of himself which finds no other means of expression. His satisfaction is a sense of liberation.

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

There was in my soul a perfectly genuine horror of Strickland, and side by side with it a cold curiosity to discover his motives.

Her tranquillity was like the sullen calm that broods over an island which has been swept by a hurricane. Her cheerfulness was the cheerfulness of despair. Strickland interrupted my reflections with an observation the profound cynicism of which startled me.

“A woman can forgive a man for the harm he does her,” he said, “but she can never forgive him for the sacrifices he makes on her account.”

“It must be reassuring to you to know that you certainly run no risk of incurring the resentment of the women you come in contact with,” I retorted.

Because women can do nothing except love, they’ve given it a ridiculous importance. They want to persuade us that it’s the whole of life. It’s an insignificant part.

I know lust. That’s normal and healthy. Love is a disease.

Women are the instruments of my pleasure; I have no patience with their claim to be helpmates, partners, companions.”

He stopped in front of my chair, and stood looking down at me with an expression in which I read a contemptuous amazement.

“Do you really care a twopenny damn if Blanche Stroeve is alive or dead?”

I thought over his question, for I wanted to answer it truthfully, at all events to my soul.

it seemed to me cruel that it should have been broken to pieces by a ruthless chance; but the cruellest thing of all was that in fact it made no great difference.

The world went on, and no one was a penny the worse for all that wretchedness.

I had an idea that Dirk, a man of greater emotional reactions than depth of feeling, would soon forget; and Blanche’s life, begun with who knows what bright hopes and what dreams, might just as well have never been lived.

“Why do you seek my acquaintance?” I asked him. “You know that I hate and despise you.”

“Your only quarrel with me really is that I don’t care a twopenny damn what you think about me.”

I felt my cheeks grow red with sudden anger. It was impossible to make him understand that one might be outraged by his callous selfishness. I longed to pierce his armour of complete indifference.

It was impossible to make him understand that one might be outraged by his callous selfishness. I longed to pierce his armour of complete indifference. I knew also that in the end there was truth in what he said.

Unconsciously, perhaps, we treasure the power we have over people by their regard for our opinion of them, and we hate those upon whom we have no such influence.

I suppose it is the bitterest wound to human pride. But I would not let him see that I was put out.

… social intercourse he gives you the surface that he wishes the world to accept, and you can only gain a true knowledge of him by inferences from little actions, of which he is unconscious, and from fleeting expressions, which cross his face unknown to him.

Sometimes people carry to such perfection the mask they have assumed that in due course they actually become the person they seem.

But in his book or his picture the real man delivers himself defenceless. His pretentiousness will only expose his vacuity. The lathe painted to look like iron is seen to be but a lathe. No affectation of peculiarity can conceal a commonplace mind.

I did not know why Strickland had suddenly offered to show them to me. I welcomed the opportunity.

A man’s work reveals him.

In social intercourse he gives you the surface that he wishes the world to accept, and you can only gain a true knowledge of him by inferences from little actions, of which he is unconscious, and from fleeting expressions, which cross his face unknown to …

We are like people living in a country whose language they know so little that, with all manner of beautiful and profound things to say, they are condemned to the banalities of the conversation manual.

Their brain is seething with ideas, and they can only tell you that the umbrella of the gardener’s aunt is in the house.

The final impression I received was of a prodigious effort to express some state of the soul, and in this effort, I fancied, must be sought the explanation of what so utterly perplexed me.

The only thing that seemed clear to me—and perhaps even this was fanciful—was that he was passionately striving for liberation from some power that held him. But what the power was and what line the liberation would take remained obscure.

Each one of us is alone in the world. He is shut in a tower of brass, and can communicate with his fellows only by signs, and the signs have no common value, so that their sense is vague and uncertain.

We seek pitifully to convey to others the treasures of our heart, but they have not the power to accept them, and so we go lonely, side by side but not together, unable to know our fellows and unknown by them.

They have a faculty of concentration on that which occupies them at the moment, and it irks them if one encroaches on the other.

As lovers, the difference between men and women is that women can love all day long, but men only at times.

With Strickland the sexual appetite took a very small place. It was unimportant. It was irksome. His soul aimed elsewhither.

He asked nothing his fellows except that they should leave him alone. He was single-hearted in his aim, and to pursue it he was willing to sacrifice not only himself—many can do that—but others. He had a vision.

Strickland was an odious man, but I still think he was a great one.

The only painter that interested him who was at all unexpected was Brueghel the Elder. I knew very little about him at that time, and Strickland had no power to explain himself. I remember what he said about him because it was so unsatisfactory.

“He’s all right,” said Strickland. “I bet he found it hell to paint.”

When later, in Vienna, I saw several of Peter Brueghel’s pictures, I thought I understood why he had attracted Strickland’s attention. Here, too, was a man with a vision of the world peculiar to himself.

Then the wind dropped, and the sea was calm and blue. The Pacific is more desolate than other seas; its spaces seem more vast, and the most ordinary journey upon it has somehow the feeling of an adventure.

The air you breathe is an elixir which prepares you for the unexpected.

Nor is it vouchsafed to man in the flesh to know aught that more nearly suggests the approach to the golden realms of fancy than the approach to Tahiti.

Eight years before he had rashly married a wife. There are men whom a merciful Providence has undoubtedly ordained to a single life, but who from wilfulness or through circumstances they could not cope with have flown in the face of its decrees.

There is no object more deserving of pity than the married bachelor.

Of such was Captain Nichols. I met his wife. She was a woman of twenty-eight, I should think, though of a type whose age is always doubtful; for she cannot have looked different when she was twenty, and at forty would look no older.

Of such was Captain Nichols. I met his wife. She was a woman of twenty-eight, I should think, though of a type whose age is always doubtful; for she cannot have looked different when she was twenty, and at forty would look no older.

She gave me an impression of extraordinary tightness.

Her plain face with its narrow lips was tight, her skin was stretched tightly over her bones, her smile was tight, her hair was tight, her clothes were tight, and the white drill she wore had all the effect of black bombazine.

I suppose that he clung to Captain Nichols because he was acquainted with those parts, and it was Captain Nichols who persuaded him that he would be more comfortable in Tahiti.

“You see, Tahiti’s French,” he explained to me. “And the French aren’t so damned technical.”

I thought I saw his point.

Then Monsieur Cohen said an admirable thing.

“I wish that poor Strickland had been still alive. I wonder what he would have said when I gave him twenty-nine thousand eight hundred francs for his picture.”

Her laughter was the most catching I ever heard; it would begin, a low peal in her throat, and would grow louder and louder till her whole vast body shook. She loved three things—a joke, a glass of wine, and a handsome man.

To have known her is a privilege.

She was the best cook on the island, and she adored good food.

But when she let down her hair, which she did now and then, for she was vain of it, you saw that it was long and dark and curly; and her eyes had remained young and vivacious.

Her laughter was the most catching I ever heard; it would begin, a low peal in her throat, and would grow louder and louder till her whole vast body shook.

She loved three things—a joke, a glass of wine, and a handsome man. To have known her is a privilege.

I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place.

Accident has cast them amid certain surroundings, but they have always a nostalgia for a home they know not.

I’m told he lives with an ugly old Greek woman and has half a dozen scrofulous kids. The fact is, I suppose, that it’s not enough to have brains. The thing that counts is character. Abraham hadn’t got character.”

Character? I should have thought it needed a good deal of character to throw up a career after half an hour’s meditation, because you saw in another way of living a more intense significance.

And it required still more character never to regret the sudden step. But I said nothing, and Alec Carmichael proceeded reflectively:

I wondered if Abraham really had made a hash of life.

Is to do what you most want, to live under the conditions that please you, in peace with yourself, to make a hash of life; and is it success to be an eminent surgeon with ten thousand a year and a beautiful wife?

I suppose it depends on what meaning you attach to life, the claim which you acknowledge to society, and the claim of the individual. But again I held my tongue, for who am I to argue with a knight?

Tiaré mingled French with English in her conversation, for she used both languages with equal facility. She spoke them with a singing accent which was not unpleasing.

You felt that a bird would speak in these tones if it could speak English.

“Now, what do you say to marrying Ata? She’s a good girl and she’s only seventeen. She’s never been promiscuous like some of these girls—a captain or a first mate, yes, but she’s never been touched by a native. Elle se respecte, vois-tu.

the world was full of odd persons, who did odd things; and perhaps they knew that a man is not what he wants to be, but what he must be.

In England and France he was the square peg in the round hole, but here the holes were any sort of shape, and no sort of peg was quite amiss.

I do not think he was any gentler here, less selfish or less brutal, but the circumstances were more favourable. If he had spent his life amid these surroundings he might have passed for no worse a man than another.

Our trees have prospered, and there is shell on my reef. I have come to Tahiti now to buy a schooner. I can get enough shell to make it worth while to fish for it, and, who knows? I may find pearls.

I have made something where there was nothing. I too have made beauty.

Ah, you do not know what it is to look at those tall, healthy trees and think that every one I planted myself.”

but my hope was small that Strickland would consent to take it, and even smaller that, if he did, it would do him good. I gave the boy a message for Ata that I would come whenever she sent for me.

Life is hard, and Nature takes sometimes a terrible delight in torturing her children.

It was with a heavy heart that I drove back to my comfortable home in Papeete.”