Notes on printing for authors : literary etiquette / by Victor G. Plarr.

  • Plarr, Victor, 1863-1929.
Date:
1903
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Notes on printing for authors : literary etiquette / by Victor G. Plarr. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    own semi-education. The cliche is a dominant force among us; it is also a mark of imperfect mental training and bad manners. Because some winter, who knows little Latin and less Greek, praises illiteracy as a form of “ freshness ” and “ originality,” have nothing to do with that worst form of cant. Ex nihilo nihil. There is no such thing as spon- taneous generation in literature ; most of the world’s masterpieces have been the result of infinite labom- and culture. Turn a deaf ear, pray, to those admired modern critics who would have us all come, mentally and sesthetically, naked and unpedigreed into the arena of literature. Ignorance is not the preliminary condition of perfection in letters and in taste. It is these critics who have invented the ridiculous phrase “ complex modernity,” fortunately not so popular now as a few years ago. Such a phrase is a form of literary under-breeding; it betrays ignorance of history and much else. Our modernities grow archaic as we -write, and are far more insipid than the antiquities of even the forties of last century. An antiquated and dodo-like thing is the “ New Woman; ” the “ New Diplomacy ” is already senile; the “ Problem ” is in a decline. It is to be hoped that the “New Thought” will soon be as they. Japanese art, though it has some devotees worthy of respect, was mainly the discovery of those critics to whom the Frieze of the Parthenon and the Frescoes in the Sistine are incomprehensible or a bore. Literary good manners—the good breeding of style—