The artists who have courage fully to exploit their own temperaments are always sufficiently infrequent to be peculiarly noticeable and welcome. Still more rare are they who, leaving it to others to sing and emphasise the ideal and obvious beauties which all can in some measure see, will exclusively exercise the artist’s prerogative as an explorer of hidden and recondite beauty in unsuspected places.
Thirty-one
Bad books, by flattering you, by caressing, by appealing to the weak or the base in you, will often persuade you what fine and splendid books they are.
[109]
November
One
It is well to remind ourselves that literature is first and last a means of life, and that the enterprise of forming one’s literary taste is an enterprise of learning how best to use this means of life.
Two
Instead of saying, “Sorry I can’t see you, old chap, but I have to run off to the tennis club,” you must say, “... But I have to work.” This, I admit, is intensely difficult to say. Tennis is so much more urgent than the immortal soul.