Horace on Wyndham Lewis

“Satire to be good must be unfair and single-minded. To be backed by intense anger is good — though absolutely not necessary.”

“I should invent very little if I were a flatterer. […] I should just encourage people to describe themselves, and use the description they seemed most to relish.”

“The als ob doctrine of a sportsmanlike average, that is the perfect democrat. […] If you do not acquire this simple democratic habit of make-believe, there is no place for you in contemporary life.”

“Morality is of the surface. But also the values that decide whether a person is ridiculous or free from absurdity are pure conventions of a society, they exist only in a surface-world, of two dimensions.”

“[I]f within a decade and a half you massacre ten million people in war and another ten million in civil war, it is not easy after that to return to a morality that regards it as wrong to pocket a salt-spoon.”

“[T]he world created by Art — Fiction, Drama, Poetry etc. — must be sufficiently removed from the real world so that no character from the one could under any circumstances enter the other (the situation imagined by Pirandello), without the anomaly being apparent at once.”

“Society is a defensive organization against the incalculable. It is so constituted as to exclude and to banish anything, or any person, likely to disturb its repose, to rout its pretensions, wound its vanity, or to demand energy or a new effort, which it is determined not to make.”

“Yet it is true that in our democratic society flattery does take the form of saying to people that they are like other people — rather than unlike or possessing something peculiarly their own. And the personal advantages that are chosen to flatter them about are those that they share with great crowds of other people.”

“We have the immense background of War and of Revolution. That is enough — the blood is gratis! Both the soldier and the communist enrol themselves to murder — one under militarist rules, the other under marxist disciplines. But both are homicide-clubs, you call your victim "Hun", you call him "Bourgeois", it is all one — no, wars and communes have cheapened murder.”