The Arnold Bennett Calendar

To cultivate and nourish a grievance when you have five hundred pounds in your pocket, in cash, is the most difficult thing in the world.

The full beauty of an activity is never brought out until it is subjected to discipline and strict ordering and nice balancing.

The unfading charm of classical music is that you never tire of it.

The spirit of literature is unifying; it joins the candle and the star, and by the magic of an image shows that the beauty of the greater is in the less.

If people, by merely wishing to do so, could regularly and seriously read, observe, write, and use every faculty and sense, there would be very little mental inefficiency.

Laws and rules, forms and ceremonies, are good in themselves, from a merely æsthetic point of view, apart from their social value and necessity.

Fashionable women have a manner of sitting down quite different from that of ordinary women. They only touch the back of the chair at the top. They don’t loll but they only escape lolling by dint of gracefulness. It is an affair of curves, slants, descents, nicely calculated. They elaborately lead your eye downwards over gradually increasing expanses, and naturally you expect to see their feet—and you don’t see their feet. The thing is apt to be disturbing to unhabituated beholders.

There are moments in the working day of every novelist when he feels deeply that anything—road-mending, shop-walking, housebreaking—would be better than this eternal torture of the brain; but such moments pass.

During a long and varied career as a bachelor, I have noticed that marriage is usually the death of politeness between a man and a woman. I have noticed that the stronger the passion the weaker the manners.

My sense of security amid the collisions of existence lies in the firm consciousness that just as my body is the servant of my mind, so is my mind the servant of me.

The fault of the epoch is the absence of meditativeness.

People who don’t want to live, people who would sooner hibernate than feel intensely, will be wise to eschew literature.

No one is so sure of achieving the aims of the literary craftsman as the man who has something to say and wishes to say it simply and have done with it.

The mind can only be conquered by regular meditation, by deciding beforehand what direction its activity ought to take, and insisting that its activity take that direction; also by never leaving it idle, undirected, masterless, to play at random like a child in the streets after dark.

The enterprise of forming one’s literary taste is an agreeable one; if it is not agreeable it cannot succeed.

The attitude of the average decent person towards the classics of his own tongue is one of distrust—I had almost said, of fear.

Am I, a portion of the Infinite Force that existed billions of years ago, and which will exist billions of years hence, going to allow myself to be worried by any terrestrial physical or mental event? I am not.

There is not a successful inexpert author writing to-day who would not be more successful—who would not be better esteemed and in receipt of a larger income—if he had taken the trouble to become expert. Skill does count; skill is always worth its cost in time and labour.

It is easier to go down a hill than up, but the view is from the top.

For me there is no supremacy in art. When fifty artists have contrived to be supreme, supremacy becomes impossible. Take a little song by Grieg. It is perfect, it is supreme. No one could be greater than Grieg was great when he wrote that song. The whole last act of The Twilight of the Gods is not greater than a little song of Grieg’s.

We talked books. We just simply enumerated books without end, praising or damning them, and arranged authors in neat pews, like cattle in classes at an agricultural show. No pastime is more agreeable to people who have the book disease, and none more quickly fleets the hours, and none is more delightfully futile.

The law of gravity is absurd and indefensible when you fall downstairs; but you obey it.

It is difficult to make a reputation, but it is even more difficult seriously to mar a reputation once properly made—so faithful is the public.

That which has cost a sacrifice is always endeared.

If literary aspirants genuinely felt that literature was the art of using words, bad, slipshod writing—writing that stultifies the thought and emotion which it is designed to render effective—would soon be a thing of the past. For they would begin at the beginning as apprentices to all other arts are compelled to. The serious student of painting who began his apprenticeship by trying to paint a family group, would be regarded as a lunatic. But the literary aspirant who begins with a novel is precisely that sort of lunatic, and the fact that he sometimes gets himself into print does not in the least mitigate his lunacy.

In spite of all the differences which we have invented, mankind is a fellowship of brothers, overshadowed by insoluble and fearful mysteries, and dependent upon mutual goodwill and trust for the happiness it may hope to achieve.

The brain is a servant, exterior to the central force of the Ego. If it is out of control, the reason is not that it is uncontrollable but merely that its discipline has been neglected.

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

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

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