The Portrait of Mr. W.H.

“It is always a silly thing to give advice, but to give good advice is absolutely fatal.”

“All charming people are spoiled. It is the secret of their attraction.”

“The greatest events of life often leave one unmoved; they pass out of consciousness, and, when one thinks of them, become unreal. Even the scarlet flowers of passion seem to grow out in the same meadow as the poppies of oblivion. We reject the burden of their memory, and have anodynes against them. But the little things, the things of no moment, remain with us.”

“No man dies for what he knows to be true. Men die for what they want to be true, for what some terror in their hearts tells them is not true.”

“No sooner, in fact, had I sent it off than a curious reaction came over me. It seemed to me that I had given away my capacity for belief in the Willie Hughes theory of the Sonnets, that something had gone out of me, as it were, and that I was perfectly indifferent to the whole subject. What was it that had happened? It is difficult to say, perhaps, by finding perfect expression for a passion I had exhausted the passion itself. Emotional forces, like the forces of physical life, have their positive limitations. Perhaps the mere effort to convert any one to a theory involves some form of renunciation of the power of credence. Perhaps I was simply tired of the whole thing, and, my enthusiasm having burnt out, my reason was left to its own unimpassioned judgment. However it came about, and I cannot pretend to explain it, there was no doubt that Willie Hughes suddenly became to me a mere myth, an idle dream, the boyish fancy of a young man who, like most ardent spirits, was more anxious to convince others than to be himself convinced.”

“The soul, the secret soul, was the only reality.”

“As I walked home through St. James Park the dawn was just breaking over London. The white swans were lying asleep on the polished lake, and the gaunt palace looked purple against the pale-green sky.”

“The only apostle who did not deserve proof was St. Thomas, and St. Thomas was the only apostle who got it.”

“Strange, that we knew so little about ourselves, and that our most intimate personality was concealed from us! Were we to look in tombs for real life, and in art for the legend of our days?”

“and once read a paper before our debating society to prove that it was better to be good-looking than to be good.”

“Art being to a certain degree a mode of acting, an attempt to realise one's own personality on some imaginative plane out of reach of the trammelling accidents and limitations of real life, to censure an artist for a forgery was to confuse an ethical with an aesthetical problem.”

“At any rate, wherever he lay - whether in the little vineyard at the gate of the Gothic town, or in some dim London churchyard amidst the roar and bustle of our great city - no gorgeous monument marked his resting-place. His true tomb, as Shakespeare saw, was the poet's verse, his true monument the permanence of the drama.”