In all unimportant matters, style, not sincerity, is the essential.  In all important matters, style, not sincerity, is the essential.

If one tells the truth one is sure, sooner or later, to be found out.

Pleasure is the only thing one should live for.  Nothing ages like happiness.

It is only by not paying one’s bills that one can hope to live in the memory of the commercial classes.

No crime is vulgar, but all vulgarity is crime.  Vulgarity is the conduct of others.

Only the shallow know themselves.

Time is waste of money.

One should always be a little improbable.

There is a fatality about all good resolutions.  They are invariably made too soon.

The only way to atone for being occasionally a little overdressed is by being always absolutely over-educated.

To be premature is to be perfect.

Any preoccupation with ideas of what is right or wrong in conduct shows an arrested intellectual development.

Ambition is the last refuge of the failure.

A truth ceases to be true when more than one person believes in it.

In examinations the foolish ask questions that the wise cannot answer.

Greek dress was in its essence inartistic.  Nothing should reveal the body but the body.

One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art.

It is only the superficial qualities that last.  Man’s deeper nature is soon found out.

Industry is the root of all ugliness.

The ages live in history through their anachronisms.

It is only the gods who taste of death.  Apollo has passed away, but Hyacinth, whom men say he slew, lives on.  Nero and Narcissus are always with us.

The old believe everything:  the middle-aged suspect everything:  the young know everything.

The condition of perfection is idleness:  the aim of perfection is youth.

Only the great masters of style ever succeed in being obscure.

There is something tragic about the enormous number of young men there are in England at the present moment who start life with perfect profiles, and end by adopting some useful profession.

To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance.

THE RISE OF HISTORICAL CRITICISM

The first portion of this essay is given at the end of the volume containing Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and Other Prose Pieces.  Recently the remainder of the original manuscript has been discovered, and is here published for the first time.  It was written for the Chancellor’s English Essay Prize at Oxford in 1879, the subject being ’Historical Criticism among the Ancients.’  The prize was not awarded.  To Professor J. W. Mackail thanks are due for revising the proofs.

IV.