#worldsworthedition

[utopianatolia]

Kitaplar...

248) Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray

sounds better, doesn’t it?’ ‘He is all my art to me now. I sometimes think, Harry, that there are only two eras of any importance in the history of the world. The first is the appearance of a new medium for art, and the second is the appearance of a new personality for art also. What the invention of oil-painting was to the Venetians, the face of Antinoüs was to late Greek sculpture, and the face of Dorian Gray will some day be to me. It is not merely that I paint from him, draw from him, model from him. Of course I have done all that. He has stood as Paris in dainty armor, and as Adonis with huntsman’s cloak and polished boar- spear. Crowned with heavy lotus-blossoms, he has sat on the prow of Adrian’s barge, looking into the green, turbid Nile. He has leaned over the still pool of some Greek woodland, and seen in the water’s silent silver the wonder of his own beauty. But he is much more to me than that. I won’t tell you that I am dissatisfied with what I have done of him, or that his beauty is such that art cannot express it. There is nothing that art cannot express, and I know that the work I have done since I met Dorian Gray is good work, is the best work of my life. But in some curious way—I wonder will you understand me?—his personality has suggested to me an entirely new manner in art, an entirely new mode of style. I see things differently, I think of them differently. I can now re-create life in a way that was hidden from me before. ‘A dream of form in days of thought,’—who is it who says that? I forget; but it is what Dorian Gray has been to me. The merely visible presence of this lad, —for he seems to me little more than a lad, though he is really over twenty,—his merely visible presence,—ah! I wonder can you realize all that that means? Unconsciously he defines for me the lines of a fresh school, a school that is to have in itself all the passion of the romantic spirit, all the perfection of the spirit that is Greek. The harmony of soul and body,—how much that is! We in our madness have separated the two, and have invented a realism that is bestial, an ideality that is void. Harry! Harry! if you only knew what Dorian Gray is to me! You remember that landscape of mine, for which Agnew offered me such a huge price, but which I would not part with? It is one of the best things I have ever done. And why is it so? Because, while I was painting it, Dorian Gray sat beside me.’ 

‘Poets are not so scrupulous as you are. They know how useful passion is for publication. Nowadays a broken heart will run to many editions.’ ‘I hate them for it. An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them. We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty. If I live, I will show the world what it is; and for that reason the world shall never see my portrait of Dorian Gray.’

There is no such thing as a good influence, Mr. Gray. All influence is immoral,—immoral from the scientific point of view.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Because to influence a person is to give him one’s own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of some one else’s music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. The aim of life is self-development. To realize one’s nature perfectly,—that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one’s self. Of course they are charitable. They feed the hungry, and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked. Courage has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never really had it. The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion,—these are the two things that govern us. And yet ‘I believe that if one man were to live his life out fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream,—I believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would forget all the maladies of mediaevalism, and return to the Hellenic ideal,— to something finer, richer, than the Hellenic ideal, it may be. But the bravest man among us is afraid of himself. The mutilation of the savage has its tragic survival in the selfdenial that mars our lives. We are punished for our refusals. Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind, and poisons us. The body sins once, and has done with its sin, for action is a mode of purification. Nothing remains then but the recollection of a pleasure, or the luxury of a regret. The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful. It has been said that the great events of the world take place in the brain. It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also. 

but there is no doubt that Genius lasts longer than Beauty. That accounts for the fact that we all take such pains to over-educate ourselves. In the wild struggle for existence, we want to have something that endures, and so we fill our minds with rubbish and facts, in the silly hope of keeping our place. The thoroughly well informed man,— that is the modern ideal. And the mind of the thoroughly well informed man is a dreadful thing. It is like a bric-à- brac shop, all monsters and dust, and everything priced above its proper value. I think you will tire first, all the same. Some day you will look at Gray, and he will seem to you to be a little out of drawing, or you won’t like his tone of color, or something. You will bitterly reproach him in your own heart, and seriously think that he has behaved very badly to you. The next time he calls, you will be perfectly cold and indifferent. It will be a great pity, for it will alter you. The worst of having a romance is that it leaves one so unromantic

If the caveman had known how to laugh, history would have been different

The basis of optimism is sheer terror. We think that we are generous because we credit our neighbor with those virtues that are likely to benefit ourselves. We praise the banker that we may overdraw our account, and find good qualities in the highwayman in the hope that he may spare our pockets. I mean everything that I have said. I have the greatest contempt for optimism. And as for a spoiled life, no life is spoiled but one whose growth is arrested. If you want to mar a nature, you have merely to reform it.

before I knew you, acting was the one reality of my life. It was only in the theatre that I lived. I thought that it was all true. I was Rosalind one night, and Portia the other. The joy of Beatrice was my joy, and the sorrows of Cordelia were mine also. I believed in everything. The common people who acted with me seemed to me to be godlike. The painted scenes were my world. I knew nothing but shadows, and I thought them real. You came,—oh, my beautiful love!— and you freed my soul from prison. You taught me what reality really is. To-night, for the first time in my life, I saw through the hollowness, the sham, the silliness, of the empty pageant in which I had always played. To-  for the first time, I became conscious that the Romeo was hideous, and old, and painted, that the moonlight in the orchard was false, that the scenery was vulgar, and that the words I had to speak were unreal, were not my words, not what I wanted to say. You had brought me something higher, something of which all art is but a reflection. You have made me understand what love really is. My love! my love! I am sick of shadows. You are more to me than all art can ever be. What have I to do with the puppets of a play? When I came on to-night, I could not understand how it was that everything had gone from me. Suddenly it dawned on my soul what it all meant. The knowledge was exquisite to me. I heard them hissing, and I smiled.

‘You said to me that Sibyl Vane represented to you all the heroines of romance—that she was Desdemona one night, and Ophelia the other; that if she died as Juliet, she came to life as Imogen.’ ‘She will never come to life again now,’ murmured the lad, burying his face in his hands. ‘No, she will never come to life. She has played her last part. But you must think of that lonely death in the tawdry dressing-room simply as a strange lurid fragment from some Jacobean tragedy, as a wonderful scene from Webster, or Ford, or Cyril Tourneur. The girl never really lived, and so she has never really died.

It was rumored of him once that he was about to join the Roman Catholic communion; and certainly the Roman ritual had always a great attraction for him. The daily sacrifice, more awful really than all the sacrifices of the antique world, stirred him as much by its superb rejection of the evidence of the senses as by the primitive simplicity of its elements and the eternal pathos of the human tragedy that it sought to symbolize. He loved to kneel down on the cold marble pavement, and with the priest, in his stiff flowered cope, slowly and with white hands moving aside the veil of the tabernacle, and raising aloft the jewelled lantern-shaped monstrance with that pallid wafer that at times, one would fain think, is indeed the ‘panis caelestis,’ the bread of angels, or, robed in the garments of the Passion of Christ, breaking the Host into the chalice, and smiting his breast for his sins. The fuming censers, that the grave boys, in their lace and scarlet, tossed into the air like great gilt flowers, had their subtle fascination for him. As he passed out, he used to look with wonder at the black confessionals, and long to sit in the dim shadow of one of them and listen to men and women whispering through the tarnished grating the true story of their lives.

Mysticism, with its marvellous power of making common things strange to us, and the subtle antinomianism that always seems to accompany it, moved him for a season; and for a season he inclined to the materialistic doctrines of the Darwinismus movement in Germany, and found a curious pleasure in tracing the thoughts and passions of men to some pearly cell in the brain, or some white nerve in the body, delighting in the conception of the absolute dependence of the spirit on certain physical conditions, morbid or healthy, normal or diseased.

108-111

The Renaissance knew of strange manners of poisoning,—poisoning by a helmet and a lighted torch, by an embroidered glove and a jewelled fan, by a gilded pomander and by an amber chain. Dorian Gray had been poisoned by a book.

What of Art? Its a malady Love? An illusion Religion The fashinable substitute for Belief You are a sceptic. Never.Scepticism is the begining of Faith

[utopianatolia]

Kitaplar...

251) William Shakespeare - Julius Caesar

Like a Colossus, and we petty men Walk under his huge legs and peep obout To find ourselves dishonourable graves Men at some time are masters of their fates The fault, dear, Brutus, is not in our stars But in ourselves, that we are underlings.

I can as well be hanged as tell the manner of it: it was mere foolery, I did not mark it. I saw Mark Antony offer him a crown, yet ‘twas not a crown neither, ‘twas one of these voronets: and, as I told you, he put it by once: but for all that, to my thinking, he was very loath to lay his fingers off it. And then he offered it the third time; he put it the third time by: and still as he refused it, the rabblement hooted and clapped their chopped hands and threw up their sweaty night-caps and uttered such a deal of stinking breath because Caesar refused the crown, that it had almost choked Caesar; for he swooned and fell down at it: and for mine own part, I durst not laugh for fear of opening my lips and receiving the bad air.

If ı were Brutus now and he were Cassius He should not humour me. I will this night In several hands, in at his windows throw As if they came from several citizens Writings, all tending to the great opinion That Rome holds of his name, wherein obscurely Caesar’s ambition shall be glanced at Anf after this let Caesar seat him sure For we will shake him, or worse day endure

That should be in a Roman you do want Or else you use not. You look pale and gaze And put on fear and cast yourself in wonder Too see the strange impatience of th heavens But if you would consider the true cause Why all these fires, why all these gliding ghosts Why birds and beasts from quality and kind Why old men,fools, and children calculate Why all these things change from their ordinance Their natures and preformed faculties To monstrous quality,why,you shall find That heaven hath nfused them with these spirits To make them instruments of fear and warning Unto some monstrous state Now could I, Casca, name to thee a man Most like this dreadful night That thunders, lightens, opens graves, and roars As doth the lion in the Capitol A man no mightier than thyself or me In personal action, yet prodigious grown And fearful, as these strange eruptions are

Therein, ye gods, you make the weak most strong Therein, ye gofs, you tyrants do defeat. Nor stony tower, nor walls of beaten brass Nor airless dungeon, nor strong links of iron Can be retentive to strentgth of spirit But life, being weary of these wordly bars, Never lacks power to dismiss itself If I know this, know all the world besides, That part of tyranny that I do bear I can shake off at a pleasure

And why should Caesar be a tyrant then? Poor man! I know he would not be a wolf But that he sees the Romans are but sheep: He were no lion were not Romans hinds. Those that with haste will make a mighty fire Begin it with weak straws: what trash is Rome What rubbisg and what offal, when it serbes For the base matter to illuminate So bile a thing as Caesar!! But,O grief....

24

The Tarquin drive, when he was called a king “Speak, strike, redress” Am I entreated To speak and strike? O Rome I make thee promise If the redress will follow, thou receivest Thy full petition at the hand of Brutus

Cowards die many times before their deaths The valiant never taste of death but once Of all the wonders that I yet have heard It seems to me most strange that men should fear Seeing that death, a necesseary end Will come when it will come

Calphurnia here, my wife, stays me at home: She dreamt to-night she saw my statua Which like a fountain with a hundred spouts Did run pure blood, and many lusty Romans Came smiling and did bathe their hands in it: And these does she apply for warnings and portents And evils imminent; and on her knee Hath begged that I will stay  at home to-day

Et tu, Brute? Then fall,Caesar! Liberty, freedom! Tyranny is dead Run hence, proclaim,cry it about the streets

Brutus. Be patient till the last. • Romans, countrymen, and lovers! hear me for my • cause, and be silent, that you may hear: believe me for mine honour, and have respect to mine honour, that you may believe: censure me in your wisdom, and awake your senses, that you may the better judge. If there be any in this assembly, any dear friend of Cnsar's, to him I say that Brutus' love to Caesar was no less than his. If then that friend demand why Brutus rose against Caesar, this is my answer : not that I loved Cesar less, but that I loved Rome more. Had you rather Caesar were living, and die all slaves, than that Caesar were dead, to live all free men ? As Caesar loved me, I weep for him; as he was fortunate, I rejoice at it; as he was valiant, I honour him; but as he was ambitious, I slew him. There is tears for his love; joy for his fortune; honour for his valour; and death for his ambition. Who is here so base that would be a bondman ? If any, speak; for him have I offended. Who is here so rude that would not be a Roman ? If any, speak; for him have I offended. Who is here so vile that will not his country? If any, speak; for him have I offended. I pause for a reply.

With this I depart that, as I slew my best lover for the good of Rome, I have the same dagger for myself, when it shall please my country to need my death.

And that craves wary walking, crown him that  And then I grantput a sting in him,  That at his will,he may do danger with.  Th'abuse og, greatness is when it disjoins Remorse from power: and, to speak truth of Caesar,   I have not known when his affections swayed More than his _reason. But 'tis a common proof That lowliness is young ambition's ladder,  Whereto the climber-upward turns his face; But when he once attains the upmost round, He then unto the ladder turns his back, Looks in the clouds, scorning the base degrees By which he did ascend: so Caesar may; • Then, lest he may, prevent. And, since the quarrel Will bear no colour for the thing he is,   Fashion it thus: that what he is, augmented,  Would run to these and these extremities:  And therefore think him as a serpent's egg Which hatched would as his kind grow mischievous  And kill him in the shell.