some bagatelles

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Edgar Degas said of the 28-year-old Oscar Wilde, after a visit to his studio: “He behaves as if he’s playing Lord Byron in some suburban theatre.” (in last Saturday’s Guardian)*

“A critic makes himself useful to the extent that when reading him we cry, “No! No! No!” – William Logan, on the back cover of this month’s Poetry magazine.

“Breakfast with Lloyd George, lunch with Diaghilev, tea with Sean O’Casey, cocktails with Gershwin, dinner at the Garrick club with HG Wells.” – from Beverley Nichols’ diary, as reported in his memoir The Sweet and Twenties, as reported by Sebastian Shakespeare in the Evening Standard .

According to an article in Slate: “The Dickinson spinster sisters, Sue [Dickinson, their sister-in-law] informed [Mabel Loomis Todd], ‘have not, either of them, any idea of morality’. Sue added darkly, ‘I went in there one day, and in the drawing room I found Emily reclining in the arms of a man’.”

Our Oscar again, in 1887 – this time courtesy of Squandermania:

“Never was there a time in our national history when there was more need than there is now for the creation of a spirit of enthusiasm among all classes of society, inspiring men and women… Tirades of pessimism require but little intellectual effort, and the world is not much the better for them; but to inspire a people with hope and courage, to fill them with a desire after righteousness and duty, this is work that requires the combination of intelligence and feeling of the highest order. Who, in the midst of all our poverty and distress, that threatens to become intensified, will step into the breach and rouse us to the almost superhuman effort that is necessary to alter the existing state of things?”

* quoted with condolences to the article’s author Julian Barnes, whose wife, Pat Kavanagh, died two days after its publication.

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