The Common Reader (Complete Edition: Series 1&2)

now when criticism is necessarily in abeyance; when books pass in review like the procession of animals in a shooting gallery, and the critic has only one second in which to load and aim and shoot and may well be pardoned if he mistakes rabbits for tigers, eagles for barndoor fowls, or misses altogether and wastes his shot upon some peaceful cow grazing in a further field.

o reading of life can possibly outdo the strangeness of life itself, no symbol of caprice and unreason be too extreme to represent the astonishing circumstances of our existence.

Yet it is no less than the truth to say that while he lived there was one novelist at all events who made the art of fiction seem an honourable calling; while Hardy lived there was no excuse for thinking meanly of the art he practised.

the age—if we can judge so amorphous a shape

At the same time the sympathy which identifies the author with his hero is a passion of great intensity; it makes the pages fly; it lends what has perhaps little merit artistically another and momentarily perhaps a keener edge.

Imagination is at its freest when it is most generalized; it loses something of its sweep and power, it becomes petty and personal, when it is limited to the consideration of a particular case calling for sympathy.

What damage the art of photography has inflicted upon the art of literature has yet to be reckoned.

are known by their hats, not merely by their poems.

her husband “had the habit” of preferring her to other women, “and habits are much stronger in him than passions”

that though Stella never saw him except in Mrs. Dingley’s presence, she was one of those ambiguous women who live chiefly in the society of the other sex