Intentions: The decay of lying; Pen, pencil, and poison; The critic as artistLamb, 1909 |
Common terms and phrases
absolutely admirable æsthetic critic Aristotle art criticism artist beauty become certainly Charles Lamb Charles Reade charm cism colour creation creative critical spirit culture curious Cyril dear Decay of Lying delightful dreams Dvorák emotional Ernest everything exquisite eyes fact faculty fancy fascinated feel fiction George Meredith Gilbert Giorgione give Goethe Greek Hamlet highest Criticism ideal imaginative imitative instinct intellectual invented L'Assommoir less Linden House lips literature live look Lucien de Rubempré lute marvellous mean ment merely method mode mood moral Nature never OSCAR WILDE painter painting pass passion perfect personality Philistine Plato pleasure poet poetry poison prose purely purple realise recognise Robert Elsmere secret seems self-conscious sense Shakespeare simply sordid soul sphere strange style subject-matter subtle talk tell temperament thing Thomas Griffiths Wainewright thought tion true critic truth ture visible arts Vivian vulgar Wainewright weary wonder write
Popular passages
Page 152 - ... the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the reverie of the middle age with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias.
Page 201 - A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.
Page 224 - This note, sounded in the modern world by Goethe first, will become, I think, the starting point for the cosmopolitanism of the future. Criticism will annihilate race-prejudices, by insisting upon the unity of the human mind in the variety of its forms. If we are tempted to make war upon another nation, we shall remember that we are seeking to destroy an element of our own culture, and possibly its most important element.
Page 225 - As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular.
Page 6 - Nature herself. It resides in the imagination, or fancy, or cultivated blindness of the man who looks at her. Cyril. Well, you need not look at the landscape. You can lie on the grass and smoke and talk. Vivian. But Nature is so uncomfortable. Grass is hard and lumpy and damp, and full of dreadful black insects. Why, even Morris' poorest workman could make you a more comfortable seat than the whole of Nature can. Nature pales before the furniture of 'the street which from Oxford has borrowed its...
Page 185 - ... understands their meanings, and listens to their voices, and develops that spirit of disinterested curiosity which is the real root, as it is the real flower, of the intellectual life, and thus attains to intellectual clarity; and, having learned "the hest that is known and thought in the world...
Page 32 - Tritons blowing their horns round the coral reefs of the Enchanted Isle, and the fairies singing to each other in a wood near Athens, who led the phantom kings in dim procession across the misty Scottish heath, and hid Hecate in a cave with the weird sisters.
Page 19 - Green's philosophy very plentifully sugars the somewhat bitter pill of the author's fiction. I also cannot help expressing my surprise that you have said nothing about the two novelists whom you are always reading, Balzac and George Meredith. Surely they are realists, both of them ? Vivian.
Page 6 - When I look at a landscape I cannot help seeing all its defects. It is fortunate for us, however, that nature is so imperfect, as otherwise we should have had no art at all. Art is our spirited protest, our gallant attempt to teach Nature her proper place.
Page 184 - Criticism ; for the true critic is he who bears within himself the dreams and ideas and feelings of myriad generations, and to whom no form of thought is alien, no emotional impulse obscure.