If it is the love of that which your work represents; if, being a landscape painter, it is love of hills and trees that moves you; if, being a figure painter, it is love of human beauty and human soul that moves you; if, being a flower or animal painter, it is love, and wonder, and delight in petal and in limb that move you, then the spirit is upon you, and the earth is yours and the fulness thereof. 270 Ruskin: The Two Paths. Lect. 1. Nothing must come between nature and the artist's sight; nothing between God and the artist's soul. 271 Ruskin: The Stones of Venice. The Fall. Ch. 2. There is no great painter, no great workman in any art, but he sees more with the glance of a moment than he could learn by the labor of a thousand hours. Ch. 2. 272 Ruskin: The Stones of Venice. The Fall. Ch. 2. The whole function of the artist in the world is to be a seeing and a feeling creature; to be an instrument of such tenderness and sensitiveness that no shadow, no hue, no line, no instantaneous and evanescent expression of the visible things around him, nor any of the emotions which they are capable of conveying to the spirit which has been given him, shall either be left unrecorded, or fade from the book of record. 273 Ruskin: The Stones of Venice. The Fall. Timon. Wrought he not well that painted it? Apem. He wrought better that made the painter. 274 Shakespeare: Timon of Athens. Act i. Sc. 1. Art is a language, and a seemingly careless workman may be a truer artist than his painstaking fellow. When one has little to say, his technics are a kind of pedantry, while a faulty poem or picture may be great because a great thought of character is in it. The best workman is he who adapts means to the noblest end, and we tire of those who, with no message to deliver, elaborate their style. 275 Stedman: Poets of America. Ch. 12. The Outlook. There is no such a thing as a dumb poet or a handless painter. The essence of an artist is that he should be articu late. 276 Swinburne: Essays and Studies. Matthew Arnold's New Poems. This gift of love and faith, now rare enough, has been and should be ever the common apanage of artists. Swinburne: Essays and Studies. Pictures of 1868. 277 Notes on Some A great artist can paint a great picture on a small canvas. A painter is a companion for kings and emperors. 279 Benjamin West: Exclamation in a Conversation. ASPIRATION. Enflamed with the study of learning and the admiration of virtue; stirred up with high hopes of living to be brave men and worthy patriots, dear to God and famous to all ages. Milton: Tractate of Education. 280 ASSURANCE. God Almighty cannot prevent me from winning a victory to-day. 281 Gen. Joseph Hooker: Letter to President Abraham Lincoln, the day previous to the fight at Chancellorsville. ATHEISTS. Though a man declares himself an atheist, it in no way alters his obligations. 282 AUDACITY. Henry Ward Beecher: Life Thoughts. Stubborn audacity is the last refuge of guilt. 283 Johnson: Works. IX. 115. (Oxford edition, 1825.) AUGURY. We defy augury: there is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come; the readiness is all. 284 AUTHORITY see Judges, Office, Old Age, Submission. Power and authority are sometimes bought by kindness; but they can never be begged as alms by an impoverished and defeated violence. 285 Burke: Speech. Conciliation with America. He who is firmly seated in authority soon learns to think security, and not progress, the highest lesson of statecraft. From the summit of power men no longer turn their eyes upward, but begin to look about them. Aspiration sees only one side of every question; possession, many. Lowell: Among My Books. New England Two Centuries Ago. Kindness out of season destroys authority. 286 287 Saadi: The Gulistan. Ch. 8. Rules for Conduct in Life. No. 18. AUTHORS see Authorship, Biography, Criticism, Fame, Fiction, Historians, Individuality, Literature, Patriots, Plagiarism, Quotation, Translators, Vanity Nobody writes a book without meaning something, though he may not have the faculty of writing consequentially, and expressing his meaning. 288 Addison: Whig Examiner. No. 4 A book made, renders succession to the author; for as long as the book exists, the author remaining aduvatos, immortal, cannot perish. 289 Richard Aungervyle ( Richard de Bury): Philobiblon. The pen is the tongue of the hand: a silent utterer of words for the eye. 290 Henry Ward Beecher: Proverbs from Plymouth He who writes prose builds his temple to fame in rubble. He who writes verses builds it in granite. 291 Bulwer-Lytton: Caxtoniana. Essay xxvii. Writers, especially when they act in a body, and in one direction, have great influence on the public mind. 292 Burke: Reflections on the Revolution in France. Authors are martyrs, witnesses for the truth, or else nothing. Money cannot make or unmake them. They are made or unmade, commanded and held back, by God Almighty alone, whose inspiration it is has given them understanding. 293 Carlyle: Journal, July 22, 1832. Incessant scribbling is death to thought. 294 Carlyle: Letter to John Carlyle, March 27, 1831. Oh, thou who art able to write a book, which once in the two centuries or oftener there is a man gifted to do, envy not him whom they name city-builder, and inexpressibly pity him whom they name conqueror or city-burner! Thou, too, art a conqueror or victor, but of the true sort; namely, over the Devil. Thou, too, hast built what will outlast all marble and metal, and be a wonder-bringing city of the mind, a temple and seminary and prophetic mount, whereto all kindreds of the earth will pilgrim. 295 Carlyle: Sartor Resartus. Bk. ii. Ch. 8. The writer of a book, is not he a preacher preaching not to this parish or that, on this day or that, but to all men in all times and places ? 296 Carlyle: Heroes and Hero Worship. The Hero as Man of Letters. The pen is the tongue of the mind. 297 Cervantes: Don Quixote. Pt. ii. Ch. 16. (Jarvis, Translator.) Authors are lamps, exhausting themselves to give light to others; or rather may they be compared to industrious bees, not because they are armed with a sting, but because they gather honey from every flower, only that their hive may be plundered when their toil is completed. 298 Paul Chatfield, M.D. (Horace Smith). The Tin Next to doing things that deserve to be written, there is nothing that gets a man more credit, or gives him more pleasure, than to write things that deserve to be read. 299 Lord Chesterfield: Letters to His Son. 1739. Authors, like women, commonly dress when they make a visit. Respect to themselves makes them polish their thoughts, and exert the force of their understanding more than they would, or can do, in ordinary conversation. 300 301 Jeremy Collier: Essays upon Several Moral Subjects. Of the Entertainment of Books. It is not easy for a man to speak of his own books. Dickens: Speeches, Literary and Social. III. Feb. 1, 1842. An author is a solitary being, who, for the same reason he pleases one, must consequently displease another. 302 Isaac Disraeli: Literary Character of Men of Genius. Literary Miscellanies. On Reading. Authors stand between the governors and the governed, and form the single organ of both. Those who govern a nation cannot at the same time enlighten the people, for the executive power is not empirical; and the governed cannot think, for they have no continuity of leisure. 303 Isaac Disraeli: Literary Character of Men of I think the author who speaks about his own books is almost as bad as a mother who talks about her own children. 304 Disraeli (Earl of Beaconsfield): Speech at Banquet to Lord Rector, Glasgow, Nov. 19, 1870. Talent alone cannot make a writer. There must be a man behind the book, a personality which, by birth and quality, is pledged to the doctrines there set forth, and which exists to see and state things so, and not otherwise, holding things because they are things. 305 Emerson: Representative Men. Goethe; or, The The writer, like a priest, must be exempted from secular labor. His work needs a frolic health: he inust be at the top of his condition. 306 Emerson: Poetry and Imagination. Creation. An affected modesty is very often the greatest vanity, and authors are sometimes prouder of their blushes than of the praises which occasioned them. 307 Farquhar: The Constant Couple; or, A Trip to the Jubilee. Preface. Every author, in some degree, portrays himself in his works, even be it against his will. 308 Goethe: The Poet's Year. One writer, for instance, excels at a plan, or a title-page, another works away the body of the book, and a third is a dab at an index. Goldsmith: The Bee. No. 1. Oct. 6, 1759. 309 310 The ablest writer is a gardener first, and then a cook. His tasks are, carefully to select and cultivate his strongest and most nutritive thoughts, and, when they are ripe, to dress them wholesomely, and so that they may have a relish. J. C. and A. W. Hare: Guesses at Truth. Bees are sometimes drowned (or suffocated) in the honey which they collect. So some writers are lost in their collected learning. 311 Hawthorne: American Note-Books. 1842. The love of letters is the forlorn hope of the man of letters. His ruling passion is the love of fame. 312 Hazlitt: Sketches and Essays. On the Conversation of Lords. I never saw an author in my life, saving perhaps one, that did not purr as audibly as a full-grown domestic cat on having his fur smoothed the right way by a skilful hand. 313 Holmes: Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. Ch. 3. The endeavor to please by novelty leads men wide of simplicity and nature, and fills their writings with affectation and conceit. 314 Hume Essays. XIX. Of Simplicity and Refinement in Writing. We choose our favorite author as we do our friend, from a conformity of humor and disposition. 315 Hume: Essays. XXII. Of the Standard of Taste. May I hope to become the meanest of these existences? This is a question which every author who is a lover of books asks himself some time in his life, and which must be pardoned because it cannot be helped. 316 Leigh Hunt: The Literary Examiner. My The only happy author in this world is he who is below the care of reputation. 317 Washington Irving: Tales of a Traveller. The is Books! their worth is a matter of fancy, say of weakness to the weaker part of mankind; they have no standard value, none at their birth. Hence the unknown maker of a bookI speak especially of the time when I first sinned in ink a sort of gypsy in the social scale, a picturesque vagabond. who somehow or the other contrives to live on the sunny side of the statutes, but is nevertheless vehemently suspected of all sorts of larceny by respectable householders. 318 Douglas Jerrold: Specimens of Jerrold's Wit. The Perils of Authorship. |