Suspended Judgments
Suspended Judgments
Essays on Books and Sensations
The art of discrimination -- Montaigne -- Pascal -- Voltaire -- Rousseau -- Balzac -- Victor Hugo -- Guy de Maupassant -- Anatole France -- Paul Verlaine -- Remy de Gourmont -- William Blake -- Byron -- Emily Brontë -- Joseph Conrad -- Henry James -- Oscar Wilde -- Suspended judgment.
Book Excerpt
the past leaves them indifferent, the glamour of the present finds them antipathetic and resentful. With glacial coldness they survey both past and present, and the frosty fire of their devotion is for what, as yet, is not.
Dull indeed should we be, if in the search of finer and more delicate discriminations in the region of art, we grew blunt and blind to the subtle-edged pathos of all these delicate differences between man and man.
It is by making our excursions in the aesthetic world thus entirely personal and idiosyncratic that we are best spared from the bitter remorse implicit in any blunders in this more complex sphere.
We have learned to avoid the banality of the judicial decisions in the matter of what is called beautiful. We come to learn their even greater uselessness in the matter of what is called the good.
To discriminate, to discriminate endlessly, between types we adore and types we suspect, this is well and wise; but in the long result we are driven, whether it is
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