Table Talk

The Brompton Oratory

The only place in london where one can forget that it is Sunday.

Weber

Weber’s pianoforte pieces remind me of the beautiful glass chandeliers at the Brighton Pavilion.

George Sand, etc.

After all the Muses are women, and you must be a man to possess them—properly.

Mendelssohn

Mendelssohn has no gift for construction. He has only a feeling for continuity.

Shakespeare

When an Englishman has professed his belief in the supremacy of Shakespeare amongst all poets, he feels himself excused from the general study of literature. He also feels himself excused from the particular study of Shakespeare.

Rossini’s “Stabat Mater”

The dolorous Mother should be sung by a virgin of Morales, one of the Spanish painter’s unhealthy and hardly deiparous creatures, with high, egg-shaped, creamy forehead and well-crimped silken hair.

Alexander Pope

Pope has more virulence and less vehemence than any of the great satirists. His character of Sporus is the perfection of satirical writing. The very sound of words scarify before the sense strikes.

Impressionists

How few of our young English impressionists knew the difference between a palette and a picture! However, I believe that Walter Sickert did—sly dog!

Turner

Turner is only a rhetorician in paint. That is why Ruskin likes him.

English Literature

What a stay-at-home literature is the English! It would be easy to name fifty lesser French writers whose names and works are familiar all over the world. It would be difficult to name four of our greatest whose writings are read to any extent outside England.

His affectation

I’m so affected, that even my lungs are affected.

Taking a chill

I caught cold—by going out without the tassel on my walking stick.

Christianity

Nero set Christians on fire, like large tallow candles—the only light Christians have ever been known to give.

¶ The first ten aphorisms were collected under the title “Table Talk” and printed in John Lane’s edition of the expurgated text of Under the Hill, 1904. The latter three mots are traditionally ascribed to Beardsley, and have been printed in a number of variant versions.