Prejudices: Third SeriesA. A. Knopf, 1922 - 328 pages |
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Expressions et termes fréquents
actually Adolph Ochs æsthetic American antith artist average beauty Beethoven believe better brief capacity capital capitalist chautauqua chiefly civilized course critic deal delusion democracy democratic doctrine doubt drama of ideas English example fact feeling fellow forward-looker genuine George Bernard Shaw German give H. L. MENCKEN Huitzilopochtli human Huneker idiotic imagine inferior intellectual intelligent Ixtlilton Joseph Conrad Knights of Pythias Ku Klux Klan learned least less live Methodist mind natural never newspaper Nietzsche nonsense novel Painted Veils passion patriot Paul Elmer pedagogue perhaps plain play poet poetry political precisely professors Prohibition prose Republic romantic simply Socialists sort sound superior teacher teaching theory thing third-rate tion to-day true truth trying United universities uplift whole Wilfrid Scawen Blunt woman women worse worst write
Fréquemment cités
Page 89 - He is, first and last, simply trying to express himself. He is trying to arrest and challenge a sufficient body of readers, to make them pay attention to him, to impress them with the charm and novelty of his ideas, to provoke them into an agreeable (or shocked) awareness of him, and he is trying to achieve thereby for his own inner ego the grateful feeling of a function performed, a tension relieved, a katharsis attained which Wagner achieved when he wrote "Die Walkure," and a hen achieves every...
Page 85 - ... or policeman to his betters. But if a genuine artist is concealed within him — if his feelings are in any sense profound and original, and his capacity for self-expression is above the average of educated men — then he moves inevitably from the work of art to life itself, and begins to take on a dignity that he formerly lacked. It is impossible to think of a man of any actual force and originality, universally recognized as having those qualities, who spent his whole life appraising and describing...
Page 173 - The doctrine is simply this: that the Union soldiers who died at Gettysburg sacrificed their lives to the cause of self-determination, that government of the people, by the people, for the people should not perish from the earth. It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue. The Union soldiers in that battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves.
Page 82 - The motive of the critic who is really worth reading — the only critic of whom, indeed, it may be said truthfully that it is at all possible to read him, save as an act of mental discipline — is something quite different. That motive is not the motive of the pedagogue, but the motive of the artist. It is no more and no less than the simple desire to function freely and beautifully, to give outward and objective form to ideas that bubble inwardly and have a fascinating lure in them, to get rid...
Page 65 - Katzenjammer, how to play Brahms, the degeneration of the Bal Bullier, the sheer physical impossibility of getting Dvorak drunk, the genuine last words of Walt Whitman. . . . I left in a sort of fever, and it was a couple of days later before I began to sort out my impressions, and formulate a coherent image. Was the man allusive in his books— so allusive that popular report credited him with the actual manufacture of authorities? Then he was ten times as allusive in his discourse— a veritable...
Page 13 - Here the general average of intelligence, of knowledge, of competence, of integrity, of self-respect, of honor is so low that any man who knows his trade, does not fear ghosts, has read fifty good books, and practices the common decencies stands out as brilliantly as a wart on a bald head, and is thrown willy-nilly into a meager and exclusive aristocracy. And here, more than anywhere else that I know of or have heard of, the daily panorama of human existence, of private and communal folly — the...
Page 59 - English campaign (at least in times of peace), one falls asleep. In the United States the thing is done better. Here politics is purged of all menace, all sinister quality, all genuine significance, and stuffed with such gorgeous humors, such inordinate farce that one comes to the end of a campaign with one's ribs loose, and ready for "King Lear," or a hanging, or a course of medical journals.
Page 95 - constructive" criticism is based upon the same false assumption that immutable truths exist in the arts, and that the artist will be improved by being made aware of them.
Page 84 - ... and solely to sort out and give coherence to the ideas of Mr. Mencken, and to put them into suave and ingratiating terms, and to discharge them with a flourish, and maybe with a phrase of pretty song, into the dense fog that blanketed the Republic. The critic's choice of criticism rather than of what is called creative writing is chiefly a matter of temperament — perhaps, more accurately of hormones — with accidents of education and environment to help.
Page 82 - This is true, it seems to me, only of bad critics, and its degree of truth increases in direct ratio to their badness. The motive of the critic who is really worth reading...