"Artificiality" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... poetry to all extremes of "false wit," and of glaring pretence and artificiality of style, makes the contrast all the more vivid between its brocaded stiffness and the ease and freedom of the Sagas. But even apart from the Court poetry, it is clear that there was little chance for any development of the Northern heroic poetry into an Homeric fulness ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... Lanier is more free from his characteristic faults. One regrets that so much of his work, highly imaginative as it is, is marred by over-elaboration and artificiality. ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various
... other cases, to remedy the evils of one artificiality, another artificiality has been introduced. The natural, spontaneous exercise having been forbidden, and the bad consequences of no exercise having become conspicuous, there has been adopted a system of factitious exercise—gymnastics. That this ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... wife discussed the war, and housing problems, and the futility of fixing such a price on meat that it paid farmers to put their calves to the cow, instead of selling the milk. After all, the words had been spoken before, and words are of little account. There are times—not often, for artificiality and civilisation are stern taskmasters—but there are times when a man and woman become as Gods and know. What need of words between them then; a mathematician does not require to consult the multiplication table or look up the rules ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... Cunning. — N. cunning, craft; cunningness[obs3], craftiness &c. adj.; subtlety, artificiality; maneuvering &c. v.; temporization; circumvention. chicane, chicanery; sharp practice, knavery, jugglery[obs3]; concealment &c. 528; guile, doubling, duplicity &c. (falsehood) 544; foul play. diplomacy, politics; Machiavelism; jobbery, backstairs influence. art, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... taught man to walk the greater part of his intellectual journey by means of arbitrary systems of writing and printing. When the next Columbian Year arrives we shall see him untaught (a hard thing withal) and retaught on nature's plan of learning. Nature teaches language by sound only. Artificiality writes a scrawl. Nature's book is a book of words. Man's book is as yet a book of signs and symbols. Nature's book utters itself to the ear, and man's book blinds the eyes and overheats the imagination. Nature's method is to ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... myself into that kind of life but was still more conscious of my own weakness and artificiality. I cannot forget myself and my complex, distorted past, and my future appears to me still more hopeless. Every day I have before me the distant snowy mountains and this majestic, happy woman. But not ...
— The Cossacks • Leo Tolstoy
... the exhilaration of his more exalted bacchanalian and love songs—the mood, we may infer, of his normal working life. We may again observe the correspondence between the change of dialect and change of tone in stanzas nine and ten, the increase of artificiality coming with his literary English and culminating in the unspeakable "tenebrific scene." His humor returns with his Scots ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... years, broad streaks of humanity somewhat out of my latitude. I found that as he took such appearances the inward caste-spirit of European "aristocracy" pervaded rich America, with cynicism and artificiality at the fore. Of the bulk of official persons, Executives, Congressmen, Legislators, Aldermen, Department heads, &c., &c., or the candidates for those positions, nineteen in twenty, in the policeman's judgment, were just players in a game. Liberty, Equality, Union, and all the grand words of ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... idle men and women, and under windows where sat the sweet and the lovely, and yet never attract a curious eye, never provoke a single remark. Dear, dear, it only shows that there is nothing diviner about a king than there is about a tramp, after all. He is just a cheap and hollow artificiality when you don't know he is a king. But reveal his quality, and dear me it takes your very breath away to look at him. I reckon we are all fools. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... and an overwhelming sense of the inherent rottenness of western civilisation. It was upon such occasions that he saw, or thought he saw, the inevitable tendency of European cities to emasculate and corrupt the rugged nobilities of mankind. A revolt against artificiality had followed. Immediately, there in the heart of the world's greatest city, there had grown up about him the mirage of the primeval forest, whose boughs are steeped in silence, borne up by tall bare trunks, which lured him ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... specific meaning, it is flatly opposed to that making-over, that readjustment of our impulses, which is the very differentia of morality. There is, indeed, a eulogistic sense of the word "natural"; to Rousseau the "return to nature" meant the abandonment of needless artificiality and silly convention. But except in this sense, what is "natural" has no particular merit. The great achievements of man have consisted not in following natural, primitive instincts, but in controlling ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... by the heavy golden bracelet is cold, yet soft and yielding like a sleep. The face has the natural ease of slumber, and not the rigid artificiality of death. 'Tis true there is no pulse, no beat of heart nor stir of breath, yet neither is there the sombre grotesqueness of the last pose. But the difference between life and death is here so small that ...
— The Flutter of the Goldleaf; and Other Plays • Olive Tilford Dargan and Frederick Peterson
... procedure has been quite rough and ready. Words or forms have been taken from a variety of languages, and simply mixed up together, without any scientific attempt at co-ordination or simplification. The resulting international languages have varied in their degree of artificiality, and in the proportions in which they were consciously or semi-consciously compiled, or else adopted their elements ready-made, without conscious adaptation, from existing tongues. But their production, widespread and continuous use, and great practical utility, ...
— International Language - Past, Present and Future: With Specimens of Esperanto and Grammar • Walter J. Clark
... attempt. In truth, he knew not how to address her. The words he penned were tumid, meaningless. He could not send professions of love, for his heart seemed to be suffering a paralysis, and the laborious artificiality of his style must have been evident. The only excuse for breaking silence would be to let her know that he had resumed honest work; he must wait till the opportunity offered. It did not distress him to be without news of her. If she wished to write, and was only withheld by ignorance ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... of Verdi's oldtime skill, and sometimes sound like Mozart rubbed through the Wagnerian sieve. Finally, to cap the climax, he writes a fugue. A fugue to wind up a comic opera! A fugue—the highest exemplification of oldtime artificiality in music! A difficult fugue to sing, yet it runs out as smoothly as the conventional tag of Shakespeare's own day, whose place, indeed, it takes. It is a tag suggested by "All the world's a stage," and though it is a fugue, it ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... with the white cedar, the cocoa-nut tree, and the tall, rich mountain cabbage—the most beautiful of all tropical trees; but perchance it would not require a very long excursion to weary him with the artificiality of the scenery, and cause him to sigh for the "woods and wilds," the "banks and braes," of his own ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... exciting time, to the leaders of the party. It was quite a delight to me, as I listened, to recall my own dislike of his style of speaking, his fishy coldness, his uncongenial and unsympathetic politeness, and his insufferable though most gentlemanly artificiality. The shape of his head (I see it now) was misery to me, and weighed down my ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... the group of pines by the pole trail the following afternoon because he had said he would, but with a new attitude of mind. He had come into contact with the artificiality of conventional relations, and it stiffened him. No wonder she had made him keep silence the afternoon before! She had done it gently and nicely, to be sure, but that was part of her good-breeding. Hilda found him formal, reserved, polite; and marvelled at it. In her was no coquetry. ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... social unit, in which seniority of age was of more account than superiority of talents, in which natural affections had often to succumb before arbitrary man-made customs. Because of this very artificiality, Giri in time degenerated into a vague sense of propriety called up to explain this and sanction that,—as, for example, why a mother must, if need be, sacrifice all her other children in order to save the first-born; or why a daughter must ...
— Bushido, the Soul of Japan • Inazo Nitobe
... as the reign of Elizabeth England imported almost all "artificiality," as high-grade manufactures of a certain sort were called. A famous Elizabethan play turns on the scarcity of needles, [Sidenote: Gammer Gurton's Needle, c. 1559] the whole household being turned upside down to look for {536} the one lost by Gammer Gurton. These articles, as well as knives, ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... manager, and Darco's half-dozen of champagne was richly paid for by the elan with which everybody played. As to the neophyte, they fed and nursed him, and were in at the close of every speech of his with a spring and a rattle which made the audience half forget the artificiality of the scenes he clouded. Mr. Berry took as much whisky-and-water as was good for him, and perhaps a little more, and Paul in his nervous anxiety lent a helpful hand towards the emptying of the bottle. There was no buzz in the cast-iron head and no cloud ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... deplorable. It involves the introduction of an artificiality into a real natural order. Love is real and positive; chastity is real and positive. But sexual abstinence is unreal and negative, in the strict sense perhaps impossible. The underlying feelings of all those who have emphasized its importance is that a physiological ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... that of a Gilbert and Sullivan opera, and not one-tenth as amusing. Following, as it does, immediately on the heels of The Wild Duck, which was as remarkable a slice of real life as was ever brought before a theatrical audience, the artificiality of Rosmersholm shows Ibsen as an artist clearly stepping backward that he may ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... to me as nervous and delicate, which is perhaps the right temperament to enable her accurately to depict in her romances the strained artificiality and silken softness of aristocratic existence. Her style also possesses the needful lightness and grace, and she accordingly succeeds admirably in her sketches of high life, with all its elegant nullities and spiritless pomp. One of her best works is the romance of Cousinerna, (The Cousins,) ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... and declare that to live in the country and drive in a governess-cart is synonymous with being buried. Many girls marry just as servants change their places—in order "to better themselves;" and alas! that parents encourage this latter-day craze for artificiality and glitter of town life that so often fascinates and spoils a bride ere the honeymoon is over. The majority of girls to-day are not content to marry the hard-working professional man whose lot is cast in the country, but prefer to marry a man in town, so that they may ...
— The Seven Secrets • William Le Queux
... doubtless would have put him right if they had thought of having the work sung instead of simply having it printed as an antiquarian curiosity. The music does not suggest the eighteenth century with its jangling harpsichords, its narrow, dirty streets, its artificiality, its brilliant candle-lighted rooms where the wits and great ladies assembled and talked more or less naughtily. There is indeed a strange, pathetic charm in the eighteenth century to which no one can be indifferent: it is a dead century, ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... their quiet splendour; and it was during this service of his at the city's gates that he learned his lovely sense of blacks and greys and silvers, of which Paris offers so much always, and which predominate in his canvases. Even his tropical scenes strive in no way toward artificiality of effect, but give rather the sense of their profundity than of oddity, of their depth and mystery than of peculiarity. He gives us the sense of having been at home in them in his imagination, being so well at home in those scenes ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... European literature, and his peculiar subject, with only gods and angels (Adam and Eve are scarcely human, even after the fall) for characters and selected portions of eternity and infinity for time and place, gave him the tendency to artificiality and strain to the outmost verges of sublimity, and to extraordinary involution of phrase and idea—for all of which he must have a suitable prosody. He chose blank verse when the poetical fashion was ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... by an Anglican Society to lecture at Coventry. He said "What shall I lecture on?" They answered "Anything from an elephant to an umbrella." "Very well," he said, "I will lecture on an umbrella." He treated the umbrella as a symbol of increasing artificiality. We wear hair to protect the head, a hat to protect the hair, an umbrella to protect the hat. Gilbert said once he was willing to start anywhere and develop from anything the whole of his philosophy. In the ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... imitative. Once men had convictions, but we have only opinions, and these are usually borrowed. The artificiality of life, and the rush and the worry afford no time for great desires ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... These authorize only a natural religion, the acknowledgment in pious living of a God who, having contrived this natural world, has given it over to the rule, not of priests and prophets, but of natural law. The artificiality of its conception of God, and the calculating spirit of its piety, make deism a much less genuine expression of the religious experience than either the moral chivalry of theism or the intellectual and mystical exaltation ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... anything that might jar or disturb it, even to the length of a sort of insincerity, to which he assigns its quaint "praise;" this lover of stage plays significantly welcoming a little touch of the artificiality of play to sweeten ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... is so connected with specific modes of human existence, that from its main examples we can reconstruct the life of men who used it. Sculpture and painting, by limiting their presentation to the imitation of external things, have all the help which experience and, association render. The mere artificiality of music's vehicle separates it from life and makes its message untranslatable. Yet, as I have already pointed out, this very disability under which it labours is the secret of its extraordinary potency. Nothing intervenes between ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... Brighton preacher. It will be generally admitted that these two volumes will furnish means for estimating the character of Mr. Robertson which are not supplied in any or all of his published works.... There was no artificiality or show about the pulpit production, no half-utterances or whispers of solemn belief; but there was the natural restraint which would be imposed by a true gentleman upon his words when speaking to mixed congregations. Many of us wanted to know how he talked and ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... of civilisation's lust of re-arrangement that we should be so ready to conventionalise the beauty of this world into decorative patterns for our pilgrim tents. It is a phase, and will melt into other phases; but it tends to the increase of artificiality, and exists not only in art but in everything. It is no new thing for jaded sentiment to crave the spur of the unnatural, to prefer the clever imitation, to live in a Devachan where the surroundings appear that which we would have them to be; but it is an interesting record of the ...
— The Roadmender • Michael Fairless
... always abhorred town-life," Mike said, "and all its artificiality and rottenness and ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... and what follies made them ridiculous. The same naturalness and humor which marked "Don Quixote" and the "Decameron" also are seen in the "Canterbury Tales." Chaucer freed himself from all the affectations and extravagances and artificiality which characterized the poetry of the Middle Ages. With him began a new style in writing. He and Wyclif are the creators of English literature. They did not create a language, but they formed and ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... has been felt that some explanation is required to account for the extreme complexity and artificiality of troubadour poetry in its most highly developed stage. Some nine hundred different forms of stanza [8] construction are to be found in the body of troubadour poetry,[5] and few, if any schools of lyric poetry in the world, can show a higher degree of technical perfection ...
— The Troubadours • H.J. Chaytor
... intoxication of the spirit rather than of the senses, no flame of lust but rather a purifying and exalting fire. To feel otherwise has merely been the unhappy privilege of men intoxicated by the stifling and unwholesome air of modern artificiality. To the natural man, always and everywhere, even to-day, nakedness has in it a power of divine terror, which ancient men throughout the world crystallised into beautiful rites, so that when a woman ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... "That's what I call artificiality. By the way, how have you been ruined? Who ruined you? Was it the hated works-manager?" There had been no change in his tone; he spoke with the ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... He was compelled, of course, to use much more concrete and vivid terms than the eighteenth century poets had used, because he was dealing with much more concrete and vivid matter; but his language, nevertheless, has a prevailing stateliness, and at times an artificiality, which recommended it to readers tired of the inanities of Hayley and Mason, but unwilling to accept the startling simplicity and concreteness of diction exemplified by the Lake poets ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... situated to interpret the signs of the times, and is likewise more open to the solicitations of novelty, more ready to try new methods. A noticeable defect of the French drama, in the first half of the nineteenth century, was the pronounced artificiality of its characters and plots. Whatever the kind of play exhibited, the same stereotyped noble fathers, ingenuous maidens, coquettes, and Lotharios strutted on the boards. Whatever else changed, these did not. Only their costumes differed. ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... In those next few days, before he was strong enough to be moved back to his own house, he thought more of her goodness and less of her salvation. It was then that he had his great moment, his revealing moment! All of a sudden, at the touch of Life, his honest artificiality had dropped from him, and he knew that he had never before known anything worth knowing! He knew he was in love. He knew it when he realized that he was not in the least troubled about her soul. "That is what she meant!" he thought; "she wanted me to care for her, before ...
— The Voice • Margaret Deland
... quite the equal of its companions. Written, as it was, for Countess Anna de Hanska, Balzac's step-daughter of the future, while she was still very young, it partakes necessarily of the rather elaborate artificiality of all attempts to suit the young person, of French attempts in particular, and it may perhaps be said of Balzac's attempts most of all. It belongs, in a way, to the Arcis series—the series which also includes the fine Tenebreuse Affaire and the unfinished Depute d'Arcis—but ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... is a laudable one. For the athlete is the product of nature—a step towards the more perfect type of animal, while the scholar is the outcome of artificiality. What, I ask, does the scholar gain, either morally or physically, or in any other way, by knowing who was tribune of the people in 284 BC or what is the precise difference between the various constructions of cum? It is not as if ignorance ...
— Tales of St. Austin's • P. G. Wodehouse
... avoiding motion to avoid shattering or tarnishing. This is their fate, only in degree less inhuman than that of Hellenic and Trojan princesses offered up to the Gods, or pretty slaves to the dealers. Their artificiality is at once their bane and their source of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Bisbee, the southern California oil-magnate, had died suddenly of typhoid fever at the private hospital of Dr. Bell, where he had been taken from his magnificent apartment on Riverside Drive? Kennedy and I had discussed it at the time. We had commented on the artificiality of the twentieth century. No longer did people have homes; they had apartments, I had said. They didn't fall ill in the good old-fashioned way any more, either in fact, they even hired special rooms to die in. They hired ...
— The Silent Bullet • Arthur B. Reeve
... strange, archaic sort of way, pronouncing the words which appear upon its pages with a pronunciation never employed under any other circumstances. The newspaper is read, the psalms are intoned. It is a crime to be natural. All the time men are sick of the whole fabric of artificiality, and long for that touch of nature which makes the whole ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson
... "be—Modesty! It's all very well as a pretty, becoming, every-day fashion, but it should be laid aside in the serious matters of life. It is an artificiality; admirable, useful, excellent as a daily conventional rule, but it should yield when there is a great natural question at issue. Modesty! a fictitious, artificial, inculcated shame to intrude itself between two people considering gravely the ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
... play-acting and pose!" I hear someone complain, referring to the Village with contemptuous irritation. "They pretend to be seeking after truth and liberty of thought, and that sort of thing, and yet they are steeped in artificiality." ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... different with Gi-il-ga-mesh, or Gish-g(n)-mash, which represent the popular and actual pronunciation of the name, or at least the approach to such pronunciation. Such forms, stripped as they are of all artificiality, impress one as genuine names. The conclusion to which we are thus led is that Gish-bil(or bl)-ga-mesh is a play upon the genuine name, to convey to those to whom the real name, as that of a foreigner, would suggest ...
— An Old Babylonian Version of the Gilgamesh Epic • Anonymous
... that the sight might be the longer enjoyed, that her pupil should have come at that precise period of the day to stand there motionless at that particular spot; that this pale city girl in her civilised dress should have in her appearance at that moment no suggestion of artificiality, but should seem a something natural and unadulterated as flowering tree and grass and sunshine, a part of nature, in absolute and perfect harmony with it. The point to which Fan had wandered was a little beyond the orchard, close ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... and the best way of accounting for this dualism is, I submit, that of differential evolution. Further study of Messrs. Spencer and Gillen's work, together with the criticisms of various scholars, Mr. Lang, Mr. Hartland, Mr. Frazer, Mr. Thomas, and others, convinces me that the extreme artificiality of the class system is due partly to a want of understanding of the entire facts, and partly to the ad hoc adoption by the natives themselves of new plans to meet difficulties which must arise out of a too close adhesion to their ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... neighbourhood of one another, however, they were wont to assume an elaborate artificiality of speech and manner in communion with their friends, that was designed with each to point the moral of a complete indifference and forgetfulness. But the girl was by far the better actor; and not only did she ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... sickness that though this might be true to some extent, for all that he knew, many unsophisticated girls would and did go to towns and remain there for years without losing their simplicity of life and embellishments. Others, alas, had an instinct towards artificiality in their very blood, and became adepts in counterfeiting at the first glimpse of it. However, perhaps there was no great sin in a woman adding to her hair, and he resolved to think ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... old and young, soldiers and statesmen, the world of society and the recluse, alike. You can hardly read any novel of Scott's and not become better aware what public life and political issues mean. And yet there is no artificiality, no elaborate attitudinizing before the antique mirrors of the past, like Bulwer's, no dressing out of clothes-horses like G. P. R. James. The boldness and freshness of the present are carried back ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton
... through modern speculation on the tendencies of early thought, through traits and touches in our own actual states of mind, which may seem sympathetic with those tendencies. In such a picture there must necessarily be a certain artificiality; things near and far, matter of varying degrees of certainty, fact and surmise, being reflected and concentrated, for its production, as if on the surface of a mirror. Such concrete character, however, Greek poet or sculptor, from time to time, impressed on the vague ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... the conditions of his new life. Being well bred, he respected, outwardly at least, the laws of artificiality and conventionality, and bowed before the idols of the ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... author. I found it difficult to believe that he was in earnest. The book seemed to me to betray the whimsical sans-culottism of a man of pleasure who, when the ball is at an end, sits down with his gloves on, and philosophizes on the artificiality of civilization and the wholesomeness of honest toil. An indigestion makes him a temporary communist; but a bottle of seltzer presently reconciles him to his lot, and restores the equilibrium of the universe. He loves the people at a distance, can talk prettily ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... of the fifteenth century knew drapery only as an exotic, an exotic with whose representation the habit of seeing mediaeval costume was for ever interfering; on the stripped, unseemly, indecent body he places, with the stiffness of artificiality, drapery such as he has never seen upon any living creature; the result is awkwardness and rigidity. And what attitude, what gesture, can he expect from this stripped and artificially draped model? None, for the model scarce knows how to stand in so unaccustomed a condition ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... freed convict named Wainewright. He provided me with the clothes of a gentleman. The beard I wore, and which has since served me as a disguise in my many enterprises, was given to me in the first place by Wainewright. To perfect that beard and destroy every semblance of artificiality, I had worked at it for three years in the cunning, patient way old prisoners toil at such a task. Wainewright helped me to get to the mainland, and I was safe, with a forged ticket-of-leave in my pocket ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... sensible to her. She went on for what seemed to be a long time, following mechanically the line of the pavement, without knowing what she was doing, along the long course of Park Lane, and then into the cheerful bustle of Piccadilly, where, with a sense of morning ease and leisure, not like the artificiality of the afternoon, so many people were coming and going, all occupied in business of their own, though so different from the bustle of more absorbing business, the haste and obstruction of the city. Lucy was not beautiful enough or splendid enough to attract much attention from the passers-by ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... so far on the reader's patience as to return to the inspiration of the beginning of this sketch for a conclusion? The remark of which I would deliver myself is that the artificiality of which the poet Pope is accused in his natural scenery generally applies to his references to sport. He is more sympathetic with his anglers than with his fowlers, but neither appears to kindle the fire as in the lines in which he traces the name ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... psychologically perhaps the deepest: the dance is an art, and as such, of deep aesthetic influence on the whole mental life. Whenever the joy in dancing comes into the foreground, this art is developed to high artificiality. No step and no movement is left to the chance inspiration of the moment; everything is prescribed, and to learn the dances not seldom means an almost scientific study. In the great dancing periods of the rococo time the mastery of the exact ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... passions and modes of thought that belonged to every century except his own, and to sum up, as it were, in himself the various moods through which the world-spirit had ever passed, loving for their mere artificiality those renunciations that men have unwisely called virtue, as much as those natural rebellions that wise men still call sin. The style in which it was written was that curious jewelled style, vivid and obscure at once, full of argot and of archaisms, ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... to its more obvious possibilities for constructive and manual development, Miss Rankin's experiment offers social features of unusual suggestiveness, for the village provides a civic experience fairly comprehensive and free from the artificiality that is apt to characterize attempts to introduce civic content into school ...
— A Catalogue of Play Equipment • Jean Lee Hunt
... of a man's mind is one with that of the general consciousness, that the individual reason is a miniature of the universal reason, that in fact the history of a philosopher's thinking is an abstract of the history of philosophy. The same holds good in the field of religious thought. Without much artificiality, without forcing the facts, a rational scheme of the Christological heresies might be drawn up. They might be pictorially represented as the rungs of a ladder, which the truth-seeking mind scales rung by rung, pausing ...
— Monophysitism Past and Present - A Study in Christology • A. A. Luce
... who occupied the social stratum just one degree below that in which they themselves moved. In fact, when Mrs. Willoughby had been severely injured in an automobile accident during the previous summer Glenclair had shown real solicitude for her and had forgotten a good deal of its artificiality ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve
... another in all those affectations and fatuous insincerities, by which all the men childishly allowed themselves to be duped. One alone was really pretty, said nothing, and gave pleasure by her very lack of artificiality. To her I might have been favourably inclined because of her ignorance, had she not gloried in this, and tried to emphasize her difference from the others by a piquant ingenuousness. One day I discovered that she had plenty of wit, ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... temper disarmed difference of opinion of anything harsh or unpleasant, and formed another credential for the prominence she attained in society. The absence of all artificiality in sentiment and manners, when contrasted with the straining after effect acquired by fashionably-bred ladies, also added to her attractions in the ...
— Excellent Women • Various
... thousands of years old. It had inspired the idyls of Theocritus in the midst of the magnificence and luxury of the courts of Alexandria and Syracuse. It reechoed through the pages of Virgil's bucolic poetry. It made itself heard, howsoever faintly, in the artificiality and sham of the pastoral plays from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. And it was but logical that this sentiment should seek its most adequate and definitive expression in a portrayal of all phases of the life and fate of those who, as the tillers of the soil, had ever remained ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... which is the most charitable, forgiving, long-suffering, modest, and innocent. The "best society" is, in its very name, that in which there is the least hypocrisy and insincerity of all kinds, which recoils from, and blasts, artificiality, which is anxious to be all that it is possible to be, and which sternly reprobates all shallow pretence, all coxcombry and foppery, and insists upon simplicity as the infallible characteristic of true worth. That is the "best society," ...
— The Potiphar Papers • George William Curtis
... and dazzling femininity of the Californian towns and cities, but never had they known anything approaching the ideal grace of this type of exalted, even if artificial, womanhood. And although in the fierce freedom of their little republic they had laughed to scorn such artificiality, a few yards of satin and lace cunningly fashioned, and thrown over a frame of wood and wire, touched them now with a strange sense of its superiority. The better to show its attractions, Clinton Grey had placed the figure near a full-length, gold-framed mirror, ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... forgotten inventor of the older world smote his rival or enemy with a branch of wood and found that it was good and thereafter made a practice of smiting rivals and enemies with branches of wood, then, and on that day, artificiality may be said to have begun. Then, and on that day, was begun a revolution destined to change the history of life. Then, and on that day, was laid the cornerstone of that most ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... to say that Horace finally came more fully into his own. This was not because he changed. He did not change. The times changed. The barriers of intellectual sloth and artificiality fell away, and men became accessible to him. Virgil lost nothing of his old-time appeal to the fancy and to the ear, but Horace's virtues also were discovered: his distinction in word and phrase, his understanding of the human ...
— Horace and His Influence • Grant Showerman
... secret spite of dullness, who interrupted from time to time and always to check or disorder thought; and I noticed with what mastery he was foiled and thrown. I noticed, too, that the impression of artificiality that I think all Wilde's listeners have recorded, came from the perfect rounding of the sentences and from the deliberation that made it possible. That very impression helped him as the effect of metre, or of the antithetical prose of the seventeenth ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats
... The inevitable artificiality of years of unconscious eugenic selection melted in a breath before the fierce onrush of savage emotion. The girl sprang to her feet as the hot blood surged to her face and paced frantically back and ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... For, as we have seen, the Middle Ages could bequeath to the sixteenth century no ideal of peaceful outdoor enjoyment. Hence, in the poetry of the sixteenth century, still permeated by mediaeval traditions, an appalling artificiality of delightfulness. Fallerina, Alcina, Armida, Acrasia, all imitated from the original Calypso, are not strong and splendid god-women, living among the fields and orchards, but dainty ladies hidden in ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... that the church can put the artistic question on one side. There is no escape from art; art is only the best that man can do, and his second, third, fourth or fifth best are only worse efforts in the same direction, and in proportion as they fall short of the best the more plainly betray their artificiality. To refuse the best for the sake of something inferior of the same kind can never be a policy; it is rather an uncorrected bad habit, that can only be excused by ignorance; and ignorance on the question of music is every day becoming less excusable; and the growing interest and intelligence ...
— A Practical Discourse on Some Principles of Hymn-Singing • Robert Bridges
... thoughts were not. With his cruelly true mental vision which pierced through shams, and his capacity for detached observation—which properly applied might have carried him very far, indeed—he perceived the grotesqueness, the artificiality of the emotion which in that moment he experienced, but by which he refused to be possessed. It sprang entirely from the consciousness that she was his mother; as if, all things considered, the more or less accidental fact that she had brought him into the world ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... remote from the ordinary motives of human conduct, and his characteristics just those which have always excited the distrust, if not the scorn, of the more practical and vigorous order of minds. Probably, too—especially in his later years—there was a certain amount of self-consciousness and artificiality in his attitude toward the outer world, which was the result partly of the social difficulties we have described, partly of his own sense of difference from his surroundings, and partly again of that timidity of nature, that self-distrust, which ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... which justify his assertions. Fielding has an odd touch of the pedant. He is fond of airing his classical knowledge; and he is equally fond of quoting this imaginary code which he has had to study so thoroughly and painfully. The effect, however, is to give an air of artificiality to some of his minor characters. They show the traces of deliberate composition too distinctly, though the blemish may be forgiven in consideration of the genuine force and freshness of his thinking. If manufactured articles, they are not second-hand manufactures. His knowledge, ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... BARONESS ORCZY has not feared to put her most famous product, The Scarlet Pimpernel, to a similar trial. Whether the result of this renewed dilution is entirely satisfactory I leave you to judge, but certainly at least something of the well-known and popular aroma of romantic artificiality clings about the pages of her latest story, Lord Tony's Wife (HODDER AND STOUGHTON), while at the bottom of the cup there is not a little dash of the old strong flavour. On the other hand, though ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, October 31, 1917 • Various
... are drawn with free, broad touches, without Mr. Buchanan's artificiality, and, if we may venture to say it, with more realism than Mr. ...
— The White Lie • William Le Queux
... all the concatenations of phrase which are foisted on to unripe youth nowadays in the pages of a Gradus. One might almost say that he saw his loves at second-hand, through alien eyes, were it not that he faced them with some directness as physical beings, and that the artificiality implied in the criticism is incongruous with the honesty of such a natural man. But apart from a few particulars that would find a place in a census paper one would be hard put to it to distinguish Cassandre from Helene. What charming things Ronsard has to say of either ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... through unknown paths, beguiling with its harmony and beauty." "There is another poetry, natural, rapid, terse, which springs from the soul as an electric spark, which strikes our feelings with a word, and flees away. Bare of artificiality, free within a free form, it awakens by the aid of one kindred idea the thousand others that sleep in the bottomless ocean of fancy. The first has an acknowledged value; it is the poetry of everybody. The second lacks any absolute ...
— Legends, Tales and Poems • Gustavo Adolfo Becquer
... have burdened his memory with words he cannot understand, or things which are of no use to him, when nature has been stifled by the passions they have implanted in him, this sham article is sent to a tutor. The tutor completes the development of the germs of artificiality which he finds already well grown, he teaches him everything except self-knowledge and self-control, the arts of life and happiness. When at length this infant slave and tyrant, crammed with knowledge but empty of sense, feeble ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... with a touching humility at her feet. What a wonderful wedding hers was, she thought!—far removed from all the world of fashion, without any of the hypocritical congratulations of "society" friends,—without the sickening, foolish waste, expense and artificiality, which nowadays makes a marriage a mere millinery parade. She had spoken her vows before thousands whom her husband had helped and rescued from heathenism and misery, and all their good wishes and prayers for her happiness were wedding gifts such as no money could purchase. With ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... upon her were heirlooms of the Heyburn family, and in that grey light looked cold and glassy. The powder and the slight touch of carmine upon her cheeks, which at night had served to heighten her beauty, now gave her an appearance of painted artificiality. She was undeniably a pretty woman, and surely required no artificial aids to beauty. About thirty-three, yet she looked five years younger; while her husband was twenty years senior to herself. She still retained a figure so girlish that most people took her for Gabrielle's elder sister, ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux
... are not reminded that everything is for show, and not for use. There is no primness in the garden. There is an honest degree of orderly disorder, and an absence of formality. You do not feel as if you ought not to walk on the grass for fear of hurting it. There is no artificiality ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... plainsman, Bob McLeod the cripple, Dr. Watson, Darley Roberts, or even How Landor the Indian, one finds the same foundation stones of character,—repression, virility, firmness of purpose, an abhorrence of artificiality or affectation,—love of Nature and of Nature's works rather than things man-made. And these were unquestionably the pronounced traits of Will Lillibridge's personality. Markedly reserved, silent, forceful, he was seldom found in the places where men ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... of Mr. Mayne is that he takes you to life; I think the great weakness of the wide-heard author is that he takes you immediately, in almost all of his plays, to the theatre, and only secondarily, if at all, after the memory of his artificiality has died away, to ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... and attained like all art, only through conscious effort. An artistic appearance once meant letting nature have its way. It has come to mean, nature directed and controlled by Art, and while we do not resort to the artificiality (in this moment) of hoops, crinoline, pyramids of false hair, monstrous head-dresses, laced waists, low neck and short sleeves for all hours and all seasons, paper-soled shoes in snow-drifts, etc., we do insist ...
— Woman as Decoration • Emily Burbank
... This time, somehow, the action grated on her. Before, it had seemed impulsive, a mere spontaneous evidence of friendship. Now there was a suggestion of artificiality,—of calculation. She drew back a little in her chair. Deep down in her some watchful instinct had sounded an alarm. She ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... Guerin' of Augier and in the 'Ami des femmes' of Dumas. And, in their turn, these plays and their fellows supplied a pattern to the novelist—to Daudet especially. A certain lack of largeness, a certain artificiality of action in Daudet's 'Fromont jeune et Risler aine,' is probably to be ascribed to the fact that the story was first conceived in the form of a play, altho it was ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... Writing.—Fine writing is especially to be avoided in visualization, since the tone of artificiality is immediately destructive of the reader's confidence in the sincerity of the writer. It betrays the author's purpose of producing an effect. The appearance of truth free from any semblance of over-statement is ...
— The Writing of the Short Story • Lewis Worthington Smith
... in a rather obvious way. If there had been less artificiality there would have been more charm; of middle height, she was slim and dark, and her hair, parted in the middle, fell in waves over her temples. She affected a rather simple, aesthetic manner that suited her dark eyes and rather pale complexion. You said that she was intense until you knew her. To-night ...
— The Wooden Horse • Hugh Walpole
... it" the more there seemed to be to manage. From the time when she frankly gave herself into the clutches of artificiality the natural physical merit of her seemed to her to deteriorate at a ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... noted here that the whole thing is ridiculously stagey and artificial. In spite of the new ideas fermenting in Wagner's brain, he had not yet got away from the stage-trickiness of Scribe. Unreality and artificiality face you at every step. The music is a different matter. No one, not even Mendelssohn in his Hebrides overture, has ever given us the sea, the noise and colour of it, its violence and ruthlessness, ...
— Wagner • John F. Runciman
... in things, true enough. But a philosophy that breathes out nothing but refinement will never satisfy the empiricist temper of mind. It will seem rather a monument of artificiality. So we find men of science preferring to turn their backs on metaphysics as on something altogether cloistered and spectral, and practical men shaking philosophy's dust off their feet and following ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... communication assisted the dissemination of books. People read more; many instructive books met with a large sale, and circulating libraries were established in the larger towns. In literature the period is marked by an advance in the transition from artificiality of thought, and still more of expression, to what was natural and spontaneous. Antiquity began to attract, and romanticism gradually gained ground. Thomson, who led the flight of poetry from the gilded ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... wise law of living according to the dictates of our own natures. The command to shun everything contradictory to the simple fundamental traits of our own characters pleased me, and wherever I saw affectation, artificiality, and mannerism I was repelled, while from my grandfather's teaching I drew the principle that I could do nothing better than to remain, so far as life would permit, what I had been as a child ere I had heard the first word of philosophy, or felt ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... bringing himself to regard Japanese verse as a literary form or in thinking of it otherwise than as an exercise in ingenuity, an Oriental puzzle; and this notion is heightened by the prevalence of the couplet-composing contests, which did much to heighten the artificiality of the genre. ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... made; she was a very unfashionable-looking person. But the good figure that Mr. Dillwyn liked to see was there; the fair outlines, simple and graceful, light and girlish; and the exquisite hair caught the light, and showed its varying, warm, bright tints. It was massed up somehow, without the least artificiality, in order, and yet lying loose and wavy; a beautiful combination which only a few heads can ...
— Nobody • Susan Warner
... my wildest pace. I could not extract from him a look of surprise, far less the admiration that I wanted. What was a girl's riding to him? He knew a pace—all the paces—that I could never follow. I felt the absurdity of our mutual position, its utter artificiality, and how it must ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... got up, and laugh for no reason at all, with merry childish laughter, and then gulp it down with a sort of hiccough. It were impossible to tell how she spent the time. All Colette's efforts to equip her with the brilliant artificiality which is so easily imposed on the mind of a young girl, like a kind of lacquered varnish, had been wasted: the varnish would not hold. She learned nothing: she would take months to read a book, and would like it immensely, though in a week she would forget both its title and its subject: ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... the garden covers many pages of the "New Heloisa," pages at once eloquent and interesting. Artificial as are many of its details, the letter is a plea for nature against artificiality. The readers in the eighteenth century were charmed, and hastened to imitate Rousseau's heroine. The straight gravel walks, the formal flower-beds, the clipped hedges of old France, became tiresome in the eyes of their possessors. A dreamer had told them that all these things ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... unhesitatingly, admired Crabbe, had been brought up on the poets of the eighteenth century, in the very best of whom the qualities which Crabbe lacks had been but sparingly and not eminently present. It must be remembered too, that from the great vice of the poetry of the eighteenth century, its artificiality and convention, Crabbe is conspicuously free. The return to nature was not the only secret of the return to poetry; but it was part of it, and that Crabbe returned to nature no one could doubt. Moreover he came just ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... intellectual and distinctive head, but the instant he turned to Prince Andrew the firm, intelligent expression on his face changed in a way evidently deliberate and habitual to him. His face took on the stupid artificial smile (which does not even attempt to hide its artificiality) of a man who is continually receiving many ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... part of the thirteenth century artificiality and vulgarity began to preponderate, provoking as counterweights didactic works such as Der Krieg auf der Wartburg. The fourteenth century saw the rise of the free cities, literary guilds, and five universities. It also marks the cultivation of political satire ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... somewhat curious that, throughout his former life, through his boyhood, his years in the Corps, and the brief period of his society life, Ivan should have been on terms of genuine intimacy with himself; whereas, after the dissolution of all artificiality in his surroundings, when at last he stood before himself, face to face with his naked soul, he became suddenly disturbed, uncertain, afraid of that self-confidence on which he had hitherto so ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... angler. There is nothing but the roughest of tracks to follow, for the carefully-made pathway that used to go right up to the fall was swept away half a dozen years ago, when the stream in a fierce mood cleared its course of any traces of artificiality. We are deeply grateful, and make our among the big rocks and across the slippery surfaces of shale, with the roar of the waters becoming more and more insistent. The sun has turned into the ravine a great searchlight that has lit up the rock walls and strewn the wet grass beneath ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... the simple deep sincerity to make use of the discovery. That natural sincerity of feeling kept Haydn on the right path through all the weary Esterhazy years, when he was surrounded by French influences and every influence that made for artificiality and falsity. ...
— Haydn • John F. Runciman
... cowherds is an exact reflection of his own attitudes and enthusiasms. To Jamini Roy, the Bengali village with its sense of rude health is infinitely to be preferred to a city such as Calcutta with its artificiality and disease and in a style of bold simplifications, he has constantly celebrated the natural vigour and inherent dignity ...
— The Loves of Krishna in Indian Painting and Poetry • W. G. Archer
... bearskins and gnawing at the roots of trees? Don't talk to me about 'natural.' Nothing is natural nowadays, except perhaps the inexhaustible stupidity of people who choke over a little process of beautification and yet swallow the whole complicated artificiality ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... ever to hear the like again. Talent, taste, feeling, were there, all in superlative degree, and disclosed with the unassuming confidence of power; whilst long and loving practice in solitude had averted a certain artificiality which, in the judgment of the uninitiated, generally accompanies musical skill. His was no triumphant mastery of a complicated and perplexing score; he was a sympathetic interpreter, a life-breathing, magic-lending exponent of his composer's ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... systems composed solely of direct Experience and pure Intuition; and, at the same time, almost ceaselessly insist upon the sheer novelty, the utter unexpectedness of all direct Experience, and the entire artificiality of the constructions of Thought—constructions which alone adulterate our perceptions of reality with the non-realities repetition, uniformity, foreseeableness. Yet the amazing success of the application of such constructions to actual Nature stares ...
— Progress and History • Various
... found an admirable solution of his problem in a double invocation—first of the Heavenly Muse of Mount Sinai, second, of the Holy Spirit. In the composition of In Memoriam, Tennyson knew that an invocation of the Muse would give an intolerable air of artificiality to the poem; he therefore, in the introductory stanzas, offered up a prayer to the Son of God. Now it was impossible for Mr. Hardy to make use of Greek Deities, or of Jehovah, or of any revelation of God in Christ; to his mind all three equally belonged to the lumber-room ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... with neuralgic effort, some were impertinent, some propitiatory, some dull, but all were—disappointing, disappointing. God was not in any of them. A platform is no setting for the shy processes of an honest human mind,—we are all strained to artificiality in the excessive glare of attention that beats upon us there. One does not exhibit opinions at a meeting, one acts them, the very truth must rouge its cheeks and blacken its eyebrows to tell, and to Lady Harman it was the acting chiefly and the make-up that was visible. They ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... evils that existed in society were due to the mistakes of civilization, that if men could get back to a "state of nature" and start again, things might be much better. It was felt that there was too much artificiality, too much interference with natural development. Arthur Young condemned the prevailing policy of government, "because it consists of prohibiting the natural course of things. All restrictive forcible measures ...
— An Introduction to the Industrial and Social History of England • Edward Potts Cheyney
... peculiarly Slavonic about Pushkin is his simplicity, his naivete. Though affected by foreign models, he was close to the soil. This is shown particularly in his prose tales, and it is here that his title as Founder of Russian Literature is most clearly demonstrated. He took Russia away from the artificiality of the eighteenth century, and exhibited the possibilities of native material ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... the order here developed. The outline on pp. x, xi shows the logical framework on which the book is constructed. Under the limitations of such a table, confined to a single term in every case, it is of course impossible to avoid the appearance of artificiality of form and inadequacy of treatment. This collection of dry bones is offered as the easiest way of exhibiting at a glance the conception of ethics as an organic whole of interrelated members: a conception it ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde
... his disciples, giving it the name of Troitza or Thrice Holy Trinity. Thither I wandered in thought. A call might be there for me, so weary of the egotism, envy, detraction, greed, grind and battle of the soulless artificiality called society. ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace |
