Aging & Wisdom Quote by Andre Maurois

The line sounds like a scolding from the sidelines, but it’s really a dare: if you’re an artist, your job is not to be “relevant” in the way your era defines relevance. Maurois chooses “reactionary” provocatively, yanking a political term into an aesthetic argument. He’s not praising nostalgia for its own sake; he’s insisting that art, at its best, is an irritant. It refuses the era’s default settings.

The phrase “tenor of the age” is doing heavy lifting. It’s not just fashion or taste; it’s the moral mood, the agreed-upon emotional weather. Maurois implies that every period has a script it wants people to read from, and that conformity can feel like progress simply because it’s loud and crowded. Against that, “stand out” becomes a moral posture as much as a stylistic one.

Then he lands the insult: “flopping along.” It’s physical, even a little humiliating, conjuring a fish on a dock. The subtext is contempt for the artist as careerist: the one who chases trends, performs opinions on schedule, and mistakes applause for necessity. Maurois wrote through the churn of two world wars and the rise of mass politics and mass media, when “the age” became a machine for manufacturing consensus. In that climate, the artist’s resistance isn’t polite dissent; it’s survival. To make something that lasts, he suggests, you have to risk being out of step now.