Scorn

by Parris, Matthew;

  Is not a Patron, My Lord, one who looks with unconcern on a Man struggling for Life in the water and when he has reached ground encumbers him with help? The notice which you have been pleased to take of my Labours, had it been early, had been kind; but it was delayed till I am indifferent and cannot enjoy it, till I am solitary and cannot impart it, till I am known and do not want it.

  I hope it is no very cynical asperity not to confess obligation where no benefit has been received, or to be unwilling that the Public should consider me as owing that to a Patron, which Providence has enabled me to do for myself.

  Having carried on my work thus far with so little obligation to any Favourer of Learning I shall not be disappointed though I should conclude it, if less be possible, with less, for I have been long wakened from that Dream of hope, in which I once boasted myself with so much exaltation, My lord, Your Lordship’s Most humble Obedient Servant, Sam: Johnson

  Samuel Johnson to Lord Chesterfield

  PATRON: n.s. One who countenances, supports or protects. Commonly a wretch who supports with insolence, and is paid with flattery.

  Samuel Johnson, Dictionary of the English Language

  Very nice, though there are dull stretches.

  Antoine de Rivarol on a two-line poem

  Chaucer, notwithstanding the praises bestowed upon him, I think obscene and contemptible; he owes his celebrity merely to his antiquity.

  Lord Byron on Geoffrey Chaucer. Attrib.

  A hyena that wrote poetry in tombs.

  Friedrich Nietzsche on Dante

  A Methodist parson in Bedlam.

  Horace Walpole on Dante

  Dr Donne’s verses are like the Peace of God, for they pass all understanding.

  James I on John Donne

  His verse … is the beads without the string.

  Gerard Manley Hopkins on Robert Browning

  He has plenty of music in him, but he cannot get it out.

  Lord Tennyson on Robert Browning

  Our language sunk under him.

  Joseph Addison on John Milton

  Thomas Gray walks as if he had fouled his small-clothes and looks as if he smelt it.

  Christopher Smart

  There are two ways of disliking poetry. One is to dislike it. The other is to read Pope.

  Oscar Wilde on Alexander Pope

  In science you want to say something nobody ever knew before, in words everyone can understand. In poetry, you are bound to say something everyone knows already in words that nobody can understand.

  Mathematician Paul Dirac

  Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people.

  Adrian Mitchell

  The truth is like poetry. And most people fucking hate poetry.

  Overheard in a Washington DC bar by author Michael Lewis

  My favourite poem is the one that starts ‘Thirty days hath September’ because it actually tells you something.

  Groucho Marx

  Great Wits are sure to Madness near alli’d

  And thin Partitions do their Bounds divide …

  John Dryden on the Earl of Shaftesbury, Absalom and Achitophel

  His imagination resembled the wings of an ostrich. It enabled him to run, though not to soar.

  Thomas Babington Macaulay on John Dryden

  Who is this Pope I hear so much about? I cannot discover what is his merit. Why will my subjects not write in prose?

  George II on Alexander Pope

  Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer,

  And without sneering, teach the rest to sneer;

  Willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike,

  Just hint a fault, and hesitate dislike;

  Alike reserved to blame, or to commend,

  A tim’rous foe, and a suspicious friend …

  Alexander Pope on Joseph Addison, Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot

  Steele might become a reasonably good writer if he would pay a little attention to grammar, learn something about the propriety and disposition of words and incidentally, get some information on the subject he intends to handle.

  Jonathan Swift on Richard Steele

  A monster, gibbering shrieks and gnashing imprecations against mankind – tearing down all shreds of modesty, past all sense of manliness and shame: filthy in word, filthy in thought, furious, raging, obscene.

  William Thackeray on Jonathan Swift

  Thackeray settled like a meat-fly on whatever one had got for dinner; and made one sick of it.

  John Ruskin on William Thackeray

  Here are Jonny Keats’ piss-a-bed poetry, and three novels by God knows whom … No more Keats, I entreat: flay him alive; if some of you don’t I must skin him myself: there is no bearing the drivelling idiotism of the Mankin.

  Lord Byron on John Keats

  A mere sodomite and a perfect leper.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson on Algernon Swinburne

  Such writing is a sort of mental masturbation … a bedlam vision produced by raw pork and opium.

  Lord Byron on John Keats, letter to John Murray

  The world is rid of Lord Byron, but the deadly slime of his touch still remains.

  John Constable (the artist) on news of Byron’s death

  A tadpole of the Lakes.

  Lord Byron on John Keats

  A denaturalized being who, having exhausted every species of sensual gratification, and drained the cup of sin to its bitterest dregs, is resolved to show that he is no longer human, even in his frailties, but a cool, unconcerned fiend.

  John Styles on Lord Byron

  Mad, bad, and dangerous to know.

  Lady Caroline Lamb on Lord Byron

  A man must serve his time to every trade

  Save censure – critics all are ready made.

  Lord Byron, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers

  Byron! – he would be all forgotten today if he had lived to be a florid old gentleman with iron-grey whiskers, writing very long, very able letters to The Times about the Repeal of the Corn Laws.

  Max Beerbohm on Lord Byron

  Here is Miss Seward with six tomes of the most disgusting trash, sailing over Styx with a Foolscap over her periwig as complacent as can be – Of all Bitches dead or alive a scribbling woman is the most canine.

  Lord Byron on Anna Seward

  A system in which the two greatest commandments were to hate your neighbour and to love your neighbour’s wife.

  Thomas Babington Macaulay on Byron’s poetry

  Shelley is a poor creature, who has said or done nothing worth a serious man being at the trouble of remembering … Poor soul, he has always seemed to me an extremely weak creature; a poor, thin, spasmodic, hectic, shrill and pallid being … The very voice of him, shrill, shrieky, to my ear has too much of the ghost.

  Thomas Carlyle on Percy Bysshe Shelley

  The same old sausage, fizzing and sputtering in its own grease.

  Henry James on Thomas Carlyle

  A lewd vegetarian.

  Charles Kingsley on Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Walt Whitman is as unacquainted with art as a hog with mathematics.

  London Critic on Walt Whitman

  Longfellow is to poetry what the barrel-organ is to music.

  Van Wyck Brooks on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  A bell with a wooden tongue.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson on William Wordsworth

  Two voices there are: one is of the deep;

  It learns the storm-cloud’s thunderous melody …

  And one is of an old half-witted sheep

  Which bleats articulate monotony …

  And, Wordsworth, both are thine.

  James Kenneth Stephen on William Wordsworth

  Wordsworth went to the Lakes, but he never was a lake poet. He found in stones the sermons he had already put there.

  Oscar Wilde on William Wordsworth

  Dark, limber verses stuft with lakeside sedges,

  And propt with rotten stakes from rotten hedge
s.

  Walter Savage Landor on William Wordsworth

  Never did I see such apparatus got ready for thinking, and so little thought. He mounts scaffolding, pulleys, and tackle, gathers all the tools in the neighbourhood with labour, with noise, demonstration, precept, abuse, and sets – three bricks.

  Thomas Carlyle on Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Carlyle is a poet to whom nature has denied the faculty of verse.

  Alfred Lord Tennyson on Thomas Carlyle, letter to W.E. Gladstone

  A dirty man with opium-glazed eyes and rat-taily hair.

  Lady Frederick Cavendish on Alfred Lord Tennyson

  Twin miracles of mascara, her eyes looked like the corpses of two small crows that had crashed into a chalk cliff.

  Clive James on Barbara Cartland

  English Literature’s performing flea.

  Seán O’Casey on P.G. Wodehouse

  Reading him is like wading through glue.

  Alfred Lord Tennyson on Ben Jonson

  There was little about melancholia that he didn’t know; there was little else that he did.

  W.H. Auden on Alfred Lord Tennyson

  A fly would break its legs walking across his face.

  Anonymous on W.H. Auden

  My face looks like a wedding cake that has been left out in the rain.

  W.H. Auden on himself

  The higher water mark, so to speak, of Socialist literature is W.H. Auden, a sort of gutless Kipling.

  George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier

  He is all ice and wooden-faced acrobatics.

  Wyndham Lewis on W.H. Auden

  He is all blood, dirt and sucked sugar stick.

  W.B. Yeats on Wilfred Owen

  By appointment: Teddy Bear to the Nation.

  Alan Bell on John Betjeman, in The Times

  All right, then, I’ll say it: Dante makes me sick.

  Félix Lope de Vego y Carpio after being told he was about to die

  Cusk herself seems extraordinary – a brittle little dominatrix and peerless narcissist who exploits her husband and her marriage with relish … acres of poetic whimsy and vague literary blah, a needy, neurotic mandolin solo of reflections on child sacrifice and asides about drains.

  Camilla Long

  I know nothing of Parris’s social background … [but] whatever his social origins the general style of his letter with its illiterate, petulant, self-righteous tone, is the voice of the new, ‘classless’ Conservatism … jumping up everywhere nowadays, usually from the lower middle class. Frequently they have very unattractive moustaches.

  Auberon Waugh in April 1979 on the editor of this book

  One thing is certain, Parris will never be heard of again.

  Frank Johnson, April 1979

  Fuck off Parris, you talentless bastard.

  Anonymous note found, by chance, apparently slipped quite randomly into the pages of one of the editor’s books in his bookshelves

  Art

  The finest collection of frames I ever saw.

  Scientist and inventor Sir Humphrey Davy, asked his opinion of Paris art galleries. Attrib.

  If people only knew as much about painting as I do, they would never buy my pictures.

  Sir Edwin Henry Landseer to W.P. Frith

  Art is the unceasing effort to compete with the beauty of flowers – and never succeeding.

  Marc Chagall

  If Botticelli were alive today he’d be working for Vogue.

  Peter Ustinov

  Tracey Emin’s bed is art because it’s made by an artist, and yours isn’t, because it isn’t.

  AA Gill

  Cold, mechanical, conceptual bullshit.

  Kim Howells MP, Culture Minister, on the Turner Prize

  Pretentious, self-indulgent, craftless tat.

  Ivan Massow on modern art while Chairman of the Institute of Contemporary Arts

  They say Rothko killed himself because he met the people who bought his art.

  Adrian Searle

  Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.

  Tom Stoppard

  Mrs Balinger is one of those ladies who pursue Culture in bands, as though it were dangerous to meet it alone.

  Edith Wharton, novelist

  Art today is institutionalised narcissism, a conspiracy between creators and curators to make poor people feel stupid.

  Stephen Bayley

  He bores me. He ought to have stuck to his flying machines.

  Pierre-Auguste Renoir on Leonardo da Vinci

  Degas is nothing but a peeping Tom, behind the coulisses, and among the dressing-rooms of the ballet dancers, noting only travesties of fallen debased womanhood.

  Pamphlet published by The Churchman

  The English public takes no interest in a work of art until it is told that the work in question is immoral.

  Oscar Wilde

  The kind of people who always go on about whether a thing is in good taste invariably have very bad taste.

  Joe Orton

  The masses’ bad taste is rooted more deeply in reality than the intellectuals’ good taste.

  Bertolt Brecht

  In the art world, ‘tasteful’ is probably a bigger insult than ‘tasteless’.

  Grayson Perry

  He will never be anything but a dauber.

  Titian on Tintoretto

  Daubaway Weirdsley.

  Punch on Aubrey Beardsley, British artist

  Rembrandt is not to be compared in the painting of character with our extraordinarily gifted English artist, Mr Rippingille.

  John Hunt, 19th-century art critic, on Rembrandt

  I doubt that art needed Ruskin any more than a moving train needs one of its passengers to shove it.

  Tom Stoppard on John Ruskin, in The Times Literary Supplement

  I don’t mind. I have gloves on.

  Mark Twain after running his hand over a Whistler painting, which caused the artist to exclaim: ‘Don’t touch that, Can’t you see, it isn’t dry yet.’

  Well, not bad, but there are decidedly too many of them, and they are not very well arranged. I would have done it differently.

  James Whistler when asked if he agreed that the stars were especially beautiful one night

  Perhaps not, but then you can’t call yourself a great work of nature.

  James Whistler after a sitter complained that his portrait was not a great work of art

  The explanation is quite simple. I wished to be near my mother.

  James Whistler after a snob asked him why he had been born in such an unfashionable place as Lowell, Massachusetts

  I cannot tell you that, madam. Heaven has granted me no offspring.

  James Whistler when asked if he thought genius hereditary

  Mr Whistler has always spelt art with a capital ‘I’.

  Oscar Wilde on James Whistler

  My dear Whistler, you leave your pictures in such a sketchy, unfinished state. Why don’t you ever finish them?

  Frederic Leighton, British painter, on James Whistler

  My dear Leighton, why do you ever begin yours?

  James Whistler’s riposte to Frederic Leighton

  Like a carbuncle on the face of an old and valued friend.

  Charles, Prince of Wales, 1986, on a proposed extension to the National Gallery

  A pot of paint has been thrown in the public’s face.

  Variously believed to have been said by John Ruskin about Whistler’s painting Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocker, or by Camille Mauclair about Jean Puy’s Stroll under the Pines

  Mr Lewis’ pictures appeared to have been painted by a mailed fist in a cotton glove.

  Dame Edith Sitwell on Wyndham Lewis

  It resembles a tortoise-shell cat having a fit in a plate of tomatoes.

  Mark Twain on J.M.W. Turner’s The Slave Ship

  It makes me look as if I were straining a
t a stool.

  Winston Churchill on his portrait by Graham Sutherland

  If my husband would ever meet a woman on the street who looked like the woman in his paintings, he would fall over in a dead faint.

  Mrs Pablo Picasso on her husband’s paintings

  His pictures seem to resemble, not pictures, but a sample book of patterns of linoleum.

  Cyril Asquith on Paul Klee

  A decorator tainted with insanity.

  Kenyon Cox on Paul Gauguin

  The only genius with an IQ of 60.

  Gore Vidal on Andy Warhol

  Inspiration is for amateurs. I just get to work.

  American artist Chuck Close

  How can I take an interest in my work when I don’t like it?

  Francis Bacon

  I stick to my business, which is art. Suggest you stick to yours, which is butchery.

  Jacob Epstein to Nikita Khrushchev after he made what was described as a ‘vigorous’ observation about Epstein’s work

  Music

  Listening to a record is like going to bed with Marilyn Monroe’s photograph.

  Otto Klemperer

  I can’t stand to sing the same song the same way two nights in succession, let alone two years or ten years. If you can, then it ain’t music, it’s close-order drill or exercise or yodeling or something, not music.

  Billie Holiday

  Of all the bulls that live, this hath the greatest ass’s ears.

  Elizabeth I on the musician John Bull

  Those people on the stage are making such a noise I can’t hear a word you’re saying.

  Henry Taylor Parker, American music critic, rebuking some members of an audience who were talking near him

  I like your Opera. One day I think I’ll set it to music.

  Richard Wagner to a young composer, also attributed to Ludwig van Beethoven

  Wagner has beautiful moments but awful quarter hours.

  Gioachino Rossini on Richard Wagner

  After Rossini dies, who will there be to promote his music?

  Richard Wagner on Gioachino Rossini

  … This din of brasses, tin pans and kettles, this Chinese or Caribbean clatter with wood sticks and ear-cutting scalping knives … Heartless sterility, obliteration of all melody, all tonal charm, all music … This revelling in the destruction of all tonal essence, raging satanic fury in the orchestra, this diabolic, lewd caterwauling, scandal-mongering, gun-toting music, with an orchestral accompaniment slapping you in the face …