Scorn (20 page)

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 hedges.
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 at 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 …
J.L. Klein on Richard Wagner

Don't trouble yourself to play further. I much prefer the second.
Gioachino Rossini to a would-be composer who had just played the first of two works from which he wished Rossini to choose the better

Rossini would have been a great composer if his teacher had spanked him enough on the backside.
Ludwig van Beethoven on Gioachino Rossini

When I composed that, I was conscious of being inspired by
God Almighty. Do you think I can consider your puny little fiddle when He speaks to me?
Ludwig van Beethoven in reply to a complaint by a violinist that a passage was unplayable

All Bach's last movements are like the running of a sewing-machine.
Arnold Bax on Johann Sebastian Bach

The audience seemed rather disappointed; they expected the ocean, something big, something colossal, but they were served instead with some agitated water in a saucer.
Louis Scheider on
La Mer
by Claude Debussy

I like the bit about quarter to eleven.
Erik Satie on ‘From dawn to noon on the sea' from
La Mer
by Claude Debussy

Little pink bonbons stuffed with snow.
Claude Debussy on Edvard Grieg

Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end.
Igor Stravinsky

Gaudy musical harlotry, savage and incoherent bellowings.
Boston Gazette
on Franz Liszt

Composition indeed! Decomposition is the proper word for such hateful fungi!
The Dramatic and Musical World
on Franz Liszt, 1855

I had another dream the other day about music critics. They were small and rodent-like with padlocked ears, as if they had stepped out of a painting by Goya.
Igor Stravinsky, in the
Evening Standard

I can compare
Le Carnaval Romain
by Berlioz to nothing but the caperings and gibberings of a big baboon, over-excited by a dose of alcoholic stimulus.
George Templeton Strong on Hector Berlioz,
Diary

A Tub of Pork and Beer.
Hector Berlioz on George Frideric Handel

If there is anyone here whom I have not insulted, I beg his pardon.
Johannes Brahms on leaving a gathering of friends

Brahms is just like Tennyson, an extraordinary musician with the brains of a third-rate village policeman.
George Bernard Shaw on Johannes Brahms

The scoundrel Brahms. What a giftless bastard! It annoys me that this self-inflated mediocrity is hailed as a genius. Chaotic and absolutely empty dried-up stuff.
Pyotr Tchaikovsky on Johannes Brahms,
Diary

Music that stinks to the ear.
Eduard Hanslick on Tchaikovsky

I nearly trod in some once.
Sir Thomas Beecham on Stockhausen

Listening to the Fifth Symphony of Ralph Vaughan Williams is like staring at a cow for forty-five minutes.
Aaron Copland

Critics are misbegotten abortions.
Ralph Vaughan Williams on music critics

You know whatta you do when you shit? Singing, it's the same thing, only up!
Enrico Caruso

The only time you want to see 100 gypsies on your doorstep.
Publicity by Mole Valley District Council, for a Romany orchestra's visit to Surrey

It is quite untrue that the English people don't appreciate music. They may not understand it but they absolutely love the noise it makes.
Sir Thomas Beecham

I had not realized that the Arabs were so musical.
Sir Thomas Beecham on hearing that a concert by Malcolm Sargent in Tel Aviv had been interrupted by the sound of gunfire directed at the concert hall

The musical equivalent of St Pancras station.
Sir Thomas Beecham on Edward Elgar's
Symphony in A Flat

Like playing a birdcage with a toasting fork.
Sir Thomas Beecham on the harpsichord

A glorified bandmaster.
Sir Thomas Beecham on Arturo Toscanini

Madame, there you sit with that magnificent instrument between your legs, and all you can do is scratch it!
Arturo Toscanini to a woman cellist; also attributed to Sir Thomas Beecham

If you will make a point of singing ‘All we, like sheep, have gone astray' with a little less satisfaction, we shall meet the aesthetical as well as the theological requirements.
Sir Thomas Beecham to a choir

Brass bands are all very well in their place – outdoors and several miles away.
Sir Thomas Beecham. Attrib.

Jazz is the only form of music that the musicians seem to be enjoying more than the audience.
Adage

There are two golden rules for an orchestra: start together and finish together. The public doesn't give a damn what goes on in between.
Sir Thomas Beecham

Dominoes.
George Bernard Shaw to the conductor of a palm-court orchestra in a restaurant, who had asked what he would like the orchestra to play

One should try everything once, except incest and folk-dancing.
Arnold Bax

Music written by dead guys.
Nigel Kennedy on classical music

Nothing thrills a classical music crowd more than a new piece of music that doesn't make them physically ill.
Joe Queenan

When Jack Benny plays the violin it sounds as if the strings are still in the cat.
Fred Allen

George Melly you're a repulsive sweaty faced lout singing love songs. Why your past it. Hang your gun up. And all your dirty jokes leave them to real comedians. You have a mouth like a ducks ass. Have you only one suit and shabby at that. And your dirty suggestive songs. Somebody ought to tell you. You dirty minded oaf. You're a load of rubbish.
Anonymous letter, as spelt, to George Melly

His approach to the microphone is that of an accused man pleading with a hostile jury.
Kenneth Tynan on Frankie Lane

Miss Truman is a unique American phenomenon with a pleasant voice, of little size and fair quality … There are few moments during her recital when one can relax and feel confident she will make her goal, which is the end of the song.
Paul Hume on the singer Margaret Truman, in the
Washington Post

I have just read your lousy review buried in the back pages of the paper. You sound like a frustrated old man who never made a success, an eight-ulcer man on a four-ulcer job, and all four ulcers working. I have never met you, but if I do you'll need a new nose and plenty of beefsteak and perhaps a supporter below.
Harry S. Truman replying to a review of Truman's daughter's recital in the
Washington Post

Frank Sinatra is a singer who comes along once in a lifetime … why did he have to come along in my lifetime?
Bing Crosby

I always knew Frank would end up with a boy.
Ava Gardner on Sinatra's marriage to Mia Farrow

Mr Jones is, in the words of his own hit, not unusual … at least
not as a singer; as a sex symbol he is nothing short of inexplicable.
Sheridan Morley, in
Punch

Do you gargle with pebbles?
Prince Philip to Tom Jones, after a Royal Variety show

He sang like a hinge.
Ethel Merman on Cole Porter

If white bread could sing it would sing like Olivia
Newton-John.
Anonymous review

For years I've been vaguely aware of [pop star] Michael Bolton's existence, just as I'd been vaguely aware that there was an Ebola virus in Africa. Horrible tragedies, yes, but they had nothing to do with me.
Joe Queenan

I don't like country music, but I don't mean to denigrate those who do. And for the people who like country music, denigrate means ‘put down'.
Bob Newhart

The Beatles are not merely awful, I would consider it sacrilegious to say anything less than that they are godawful. They are so unbelievably horrible, so appallingly unmusical, so dogmatically insensitive to the magic of the art, that they
qualify as crowned heads of anti-music, even as the imposter popes went down in history as ‘anti-popes'.
William F. Buckley, Jr.

Their lyrics are unrecognisable as the Queen's English.
Edward Heath on The Beatles

Europe is not just about free trade and single currencies, it's about building a continent fit for Sir Edward Heath to conduct the European Community Youth Orchestra in the
Ode to Joy
.
Mark Steyn, the
Daily Telegraph

He's not even the best drummer in The Beatles.
John Lennon, when asked whether Ringo Starr was the best drummer in the world. Attrib.

John Lennon ain't no revolutionary. He's a fucking idiot, man.
Todd Rundgren, in an interview with
Melody Maker
in 1974

I guess we're all looking for attention Rodd [sic], do you really think I don't know how to get it, without revolution? I could dye my hair green and pink for a start!
John Lennon, in a letter of reply to the same magazine, titled
AN OPENED LETTUCE TO SODD RUNTLESTUNTLE

This man has child-bearing lips.
Joan Rivers on Mick Jagger

Surely nothing could be that funny.
George Melly when told the wrinkles on Mick Jagger's face were laughter lines

You have Van Gogh's ear for music.
Billy Wilder to Cliff Osmond. Attrib.

Among certain more affluent hippies Bowie is apparently the symbol of a kind of thrilling extremism, a life-style (the word is for once permissible) characterised by sexual omnivorousness, lavish use of stimulants – particularly cocaine, very much an elitist drug, being both expensive and galvanising – self-parodied narcissism, and a glamorously early death. To dignify this unhappy outlook with such a term as nihilist would, of course, be absurd … [Bowie] is unlikely to last long as a cult.
Martin Amis on David Bowie in 1973

Wood Green shopping centre has been committed to vinyl.
The New Musical Express
on the pop group Five Star

The ‘Mode' make very dubious puffing noises as though they were blowing up a paddling pool.
Smash Hits
on Depeche Mode

He has an attractive voice and a highly unattractive bottom. In his concert performances he now spends more time wagging the latter than exercising the former.
Clive James on Rod Stewart

Her voice sounded like an eagle being goosed.
Ralph Novak on Yoko Ono, in
People

I remember when pop music meant jerking off to pictures of Marc Bolan and duffing up Bay City Rollers' fans in lunch breaks. Being 13 was never as vapid as this. If it had been, we would all be traffic wardens by now.
Melody Maker
on the pop group Bros

They are the Hollow Men. They are electronic lice.
Anthony Burgess on disc jockeys, in
Punch

Bambi with testosterone.
Owen Gleiberman on Prince, in
Entertainment Weekly

Michael Jackson's album was called
Bad
because there wasn't enough room on the sleeve for Pathetic.
Prince

If you're horrible to me, I'm going to write a song about it, and you won't like it. That's how I operate.
Taylor Swift

I don't want a wig that looks like a wig; I want one that could pass for a weave.
Nicki Minaj

All that money, and he's still got hair like a fucking dinner lady.
Boy George on Elton John

I never liked the sound of my own voice. Till it made me rich.
James Blunt responding to criticism of his music

What can you say about five women whose principal distinguishing characteristic is that they have different names?
Roger Ebert on the
Spice Girls

If you can imagine a soothing blend of jojoba oils, vanilla, and WD40 being poured into both ear holes simultaneously, then you will have only been able to scratch the surface of the feast of pleasure that is Katie And Pete's ‘A Whole New World' Album. I also found the case very useful for replacing a tile that had been missing in my bathroom for the past two and a half years.
R.C. Murray, Amazon Review of Katie Price and her then husband Peter Andre's
A Whole New World