"Modernity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... as "tobacchanalian" (compounded from tobacco and bacchanalian) Lewis Carrol claimed as his own under the title of "portmanteau words," - another example of the antiquity of modernity. ...
— The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam Jr. (The Rubiyt of Omar Khayym Jr.) • Wallace Irwin
... England. No one could fail to identify the architecture of these two characteristic edifices, or of the shops whose roofs slanted toward the street; no one could mistake the speech and countenance of many a passer-by. Evidences of modernity, buildings that might have been anywhere else, were not lacking; but these huge piles of iron and stone served only to bring into sharper contrast the remnants of ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... room the poles met, and the most remote civilizations of the world rubbed shoulders with modernity. Here, encased, were a family of snow-white ermine from Alaska and a pair of black Manchurian leopards. A flying lemur from the Pelews contemplated swooping upon the head of a huge tigress which glared with glassy eyes across the place at the snarling muzzle ...
— Fire-Tongue • Sax Rohmer
... clearly ante bellum, for there is no mention of hostilities, no gun-fire is heard from the direction of Westende, and Belgium is still bathing. But it must have been only just before the War, for the emancipation which the female sex here enjoys is marked by an extreme modernity. A decade or two ago we might have been shocked at the spectacle of a young lady turning up at a bachelor's flat at 9 A.M. on a Sunday in a ball-frock, after a night out at a dancing-club. Lately we have learnt to bear such escapades without flinching. But it was not ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 150, February 2, 1916 • Various
... days, when the idlest man of the street corner would fight at the drop of a hat, if his inferiority to earth's potentates were suggested to him, all the excitement seems absurdly antiquated. There is, however, something approaching modernity in Byron's disposal of the question, as he makes the hero of The Lament of Tasso express the ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... element of love,—the most intimate and personal of all emotions. There is no love in Homer, and scarcely any love in Virgil and in Milton. Tasso, to be sure, uses a love motive as the basis for each of the three leading strands of his story; but because of this, his epic, though gaining in modernity and charm, loses something of the communal immensity—the impersonal dignity—of the "Iliad" and the "AEneid." On the other hand, novelistic authors, since they have been interested mainly in the revelation of intimate phases of individual personality, have ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... and flower-laden. There was a scent in it, too, as of ripe grapes, as if a fragrance lingered from vanished days when wine for the gods was made from Elephantine vineyards, and fig-trees never lost their leaves. We ourselves, and our big three-decked boat were alone in our modernity, if one forgot the line of gay buildings on the shore. Everything else might have been of the time when the world supposed Elephantine to be placed directly on the Tropic of Cancer, and believed in the magic lamp which lit the unfathomable well; the time when quarries of red and yellow ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... The strange interdependence of spirit and body, though only understood intelligently in these intelligent days, was guessed at by sensible mediaeval mothers. And certainly, at the period when Mrs. Baines represented modernity, castor-oil was still the remedy of remedies. It had supplanted cupping. And, if part of its vogue was due to its extreme unpleasantness, it had at least proved its qualities in many a contest with disease. Less than two years previously old ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... free play of Schiller's dramatic instinct so much as his deferential attitude towards Dalberg. Thus we know that the most important of them all, the shifting of the action back into the age of expiring feudalism, was made reluctantly. Schiller felt, and had reason to feel, that the modernity of his drama was its very life-blood;[32] for the squeamish Dalberg, however, the robbers in the age of Frederick the Great were a painful anachronism. So they were put back three centuries and costumed in the style of the 'Ritterstueck'. Other less ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... absolutely necessary, try to imitate nature's own methods by using the glorious trees around you, instead of iron and tin shaped by man's hand; pause before you have murdered your natural loveliness by ghastly modernity, or you will ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... you. When a man marries a modern girl with all the trappings and the suits of modernity, he ought to be prepared to ...
— Outside Inn • Ethel M. Kelley
... certainly when the women are doomed to wear fourteen or sixteen skirts, which have the effect of making them liable to pulmonary complaints, it is surprising that modern fashions are not more generally adopted. The plea for modernity in respect of Dutch national costumes is considered rank heresy among artists, but the figures look better in a picture and at a distance than in everyday life, added to which the custom of cutting off ...
— Dutch Life in Town and Country • P. M. Hough
... "Esmond" is pronounced by Prof. Saintsbury to be "among the very summits of English prose fiction, exquisitely written in a marvellous resurrection of eighteenth-century style, touched somehow with a strange modernity and life which make it no pastiche, containing the most brilliant passages of mere incident, and, above all, enshrining such studies of character ... as not four other makers of English ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... ancient Barebarrow himself. If you refer to a good map you will find this spot surrounded by such indications of immemorial antiquity as "Tumuli," "British Village," and the like. The Roman encampment on the other side of Davenham Minster was modernity itself, I thought, compared with this ancient haunt of the neolithic forerunners of the early Briton; this resting-place of men whose doings were a half-forgotten story many centuries before the birth of ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... the metal he intended to carry them out. The feudal castles of old Bosnia passed in stately review, Maglaj, Usora, clinging leech-like to their inaccessible peaks, grim sentinels of the vista of years, frowning at the roaring engine of modernity which sent its echoes mocking at their lonely dignity. Marishka could look, but not for long, for in a moment would come the terrible down-grade and the white, leaping road before them, which held her eyes with ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... the last thing in modernity," and I handed it to her. "A hard white diamond of egregious size, it cannot fail to be a reminder of our hard business bargain, and I shall ask you to be good enough to ...
— Man and Maid • Elinor Glyn
... century. They reproduced the simple style of the sagas, and reduced life to its primitive elements. The stories of 'Fiskerjenten' (The Fisher Maiden: 1868), and 'Brude Slaaten' (The Bridal March: 1873), belong, on the whole, with this group; although they are differentiated by a touch of modernity from which a discerning critic might have prophesied something of the author's coming development. These stories have been translated into many languages, and have long been familiar to English readers. It is worth noting that ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... men. You are calling to us to come forth from the cool seclusion of these trees' shade, to leave their delights and toil in the glare of the world at raising a mushroom growth on a dull, featureless plain that reaches everywhither. Modern Macbeths, sophisticated by your modernity and adding perverted instinct to crime, you are murdering not sleep, but dreams—dreams that haunt about the mouldering lodges of the past, and soften the contact with reality by lending their own colouring atmosphere. You are hammering the last nail into the coffin of the old leisurely ...
— International Language - Past, Present and Future: With Specimens of Esperanto and Grammar • Walter J. Clark
... to welcome and reassure the visitor. All this in Bursley, which even by Knype was deemed an out-of-the-world spot and home of sordid decay! In Hanbridge she would have been less surprised to discover such marvels, because the flaunting modernity of Hanbridge was notorious. And her astonishment would have been milder had she had been in the habit of going out at night. Like all those who never went out at night, she had quite failed to keep pace with the advancing stride of the ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... incessant striving to adapt herself to her environment, that she might search its farthest nook and angle; what with ceaseless efforts to check her almost momentary impulse to cry out against the vulgar display of modernity and the vicious inequity of privilege which she saw on every hand; what with her purity of thought; her rare ideals and selfless motives; her boundless love for humanity; and her passionate desire to so live ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... quivered a little, and the girl was struck dumb with wonder that a man of such intelligence, of such a wide outlook, of such modernity, should hold to ...
— The Green Rust • Edgar Wallace
... author? His sole reason is that the "Bowdlerized" and bastard version which he printed had been copied from a manuscript written into an old book printed in 1843! What does the ink say about dates? What do the pen marks say? Great gods and little fishes! If ever I shall desire to antiquitize a modernity I'll copy it into an old book and send a transcript to that delightful Babe of the Woods of The ...
— The Dead Men's Song - Being the Story of a Poem and a Reminiscent Sketch of its - Author Young Ewing Allison • Champion Ingraham Hitchcock
... for a left-handed compliment. Mr. Walpole's soundness is not of conventions but of convictions; and even as to these, let no one suppose that Mr. Walpole's convictions are old-fashioned. He is distinctly a man of his time; and it is just because of that modernity, informed by a sane judgment of urgent problems and wide and deep sympathy with all mankind, that we look forward hopefully to the growth and increased importance of his work. In his style, so level, so ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... hotels. (Save, possibly, in the reticence of its advertisements! The Majestic would advertise bathrooms as a miracle of modernity, just as though common dwelling-houses had not possessed bathrooms for the past thirty years. Wilkins's had superlative bathrooms, but it said nothing about them. Wilkins's would as soon have advertised two hundred bathrooms as two hundred ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... as an artist, Taine was captivated by his conception of history, M. Bourget adores him as a psychologist, M. Barres lays stress upon his 'sentiment d'honneur,' and the 'Beylistes' see in him the embodiment of modernity. Certainly very few writers have had the good fortune to appeal at once so constantly and in so varied a manner to succeeding generations as Henri Beyle. The circumstances of his life no doubt in part account for the complexity of his genius. He was born in 1783, when the ancien regime ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... Goncourt and Degas. To us they are too often unwisely bracketed. The style of the painter has been judged as analogous to the novelist's; yet, apart from a preference for the same subjects for the "modernity" of Paris, there is not much in Degas that recalls Goncourt's staccato, febrile, sparkling, "decomposed", impressionistic prose. Both men are brilliant, though not in the same way. Pyrotechnics are abhorrent to Degas. He has the serenity, ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... animals were here, roaming these dark primeval glades? What animals, with the smaller stamp of modernity, were pressing here for supremacy? As I gazed westward I could envisage great herds of bison roaming, a lure to men who might ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... of them; God will judge them. We pray for all those who know not what they do. But perhaps those of the other Catholic camp, the militant camp, are not entirely without sin. In the other camp they are intoxicated with the idea of modernity. Modernity is good, but the eternal is better. I fear that there they do not esteem the eternal at its just value. It is expected that the Church of Christ will derive much strength from united Catholic action in the fields of administration and politics, ...
— The Saint • Antonio Fogazzaro
... princesses of Hohenlohe. This flirtation between Baron Reischach and Princess Victoria formed the theme of quite a number of the anonymous letters, in which the princess was charged with every kind of indelicacy, while the unfortunate baron was ridiculed in connection with the modernity of his nobility. Other love affairs of "poor Vicky" were likewise discussed in no friendly manner, and she was represented as being to such a degree infatuated for Count Andrassy, the eldest son of the famous Austro-Hungarian statesman, that the young ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... and yet natural things which sometimes startle us is the value some minds attach to mere modernity in art. An old thing is tossed up in a new way, and there are those who attach more value to the way than the thing, and are instantly agape with admiration of originality. But originality and modishness are different ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray
... one feels it is not accident that gives to it its peculiar charm, but pre-arranged design; the idea of one conception carried to its logical completion. This striking unity (despite the afterthought of the spire) certainly helps to impart an air of modernity to the building, that is lacking in far less ancient work, for oddly enough it is often the decaying features of the latest decorated style that impress the vulgar by their apparent age. The extreme care in ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Salisbury - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the See of Sarum • Gleeson White
... of its apparent vigour and uncompromising modernity, one suspected a sub-stratum of weakness and ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... true Huysmans, the Huysmans of A Rebours, and it is just such surroundings that seem to bring out his peculiar quality. With this contempt for humanity, this hatred of mediocrity, this passion for a somewhat exotic kind of modernity, an artist who is so exclusively an artist was sure, one day or another, to produce a work which, being produced to please himself, and being entirely typical of himself, would be, in a way, the ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... these tricks of modernity pale before the genius of antiquity, before nervous attacks which are violent, before the Pyrrhic dance of married life! Oh! how many hopes for a lover are there in the vivacity of those convulsive movements, in the fire of those glances, in ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... remained, then, but to give him books, and she was glad that she was forced to this conclusion because, when she reflected, she realized that his reading seemed to be very much neglected, or at least without any lift of imagination or any quality of modernity in it. As far as she had observed, he read the same old things over and over again, and did not know at all what was now going on in the great world of literature. She herself was a famous reader, and an authority about books with other girls, and with the young men who asked her across ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... he met Barry coming in, linked arm in arm with two radiant youths of his own kind and class. Musketeers of modernity, they found their adventures on the city streets, in cafes and cabarets, instead of in field and ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey
... if not its taint. She had lived only for herself. Conscience had awakened—but, alas! too late. She had overthrown the sordid, self-seeking habit of life; she had awakened to real womanhood; she had fought the insidious spell of modernity and she had defeated it; she had learned the thrill of taking root in new soil, the pain and joy of labor, the bliss of solitude, the promise of home and love and motherhood. But she had gathered all these marvelous things to her ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... epilogue strongly emphasize this modernity in the varied modern types of character which they represent, with their diverse opinions upon contemporary topics. "As to the epilogue," writes Mr. Brooke (p. 130), "it illustrates all I have been saying about Tennyson's method with ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... The hustling methods of modernity possess undoubted possibilities for humorous treatment, and no one has appreciated the fact more keenly than the authors of "Wisdom While you Wait." In this their latest work the prospectus of the Napolio Syndicate ...
— More Cricket Songs • Norman Gale
... are dead," said Hardman, lean, eager, absolute, a fanatic of modernity. "They have been a long while dying, and this war has finished them. We see now that they are useless in the modern world. Nobody is going to waste time in studying them. Education must be direct and scientific. Train men for efficiency and prepare ...
— The Valley of Vision • Henry Van Dyke
... answered his dragoman; "I have eaten of modernity, the damndest dish that was ever set to lips. Look at those fellows," he went on, "busy as ants from nine o'clock in the morning to seven in the evening. ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... other, go farthest back, through association, into the mists of the Middle Ages. The church dates from the thirteenth century and, though it has been skilfully restored on more than one occasion, there is nothing in its cathedral-like proportions that suggests modernity; the Moot Hall, erected a hundred years later, remains precisely as when it was first fashioned, and though it, too, has passed under the hand of the restorer its renovation has only taken the shape of strengthening an already formidably ...
— In the Mayor's Parlour • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... reminiscences came sweeping through his memory. He grew more important, and let fall the borrowed cloak of servility; his head was perched a little higher and a trifle askew as he surveyed them. The reflected grandeur of past days was on him, and in comparison modernity seemed common-place. All these brilliant, dashing, elegant men and women of his youth were gone. He was the only human echo left of their greatness, and his diminutive person grew more erect as he realized his importance as ...
— The Bondwoman • Marah Ellis Ryan
... of observing and discoursing upon the changes of taste in the matter of wine: and such people will find in Boswell almost as much to interest their curiosity as Johnson's own fellowship of tea-drinkers. The drinker of champagne will have to accept the mere modernity of his beverage, which finds no place in Johnson's famous hierarchy: "Claret for boys, port for men, brandy for heroes." Or, once more, if our meal ends in tobacco, we may please ourselves by contemplating the alternate, but never contemporaneous, ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... of day, presented a wonderful spectacle. It was a mining camp positively crystallizing into being before the very eyes of all beholders. It was nearly all tents and canvas structures—a heterogeneous mixture of incompleteness and modernity to which the telegraph wires had already been strung from the outside world. It had no fair supply of water, but it did have a newspaper, issued once ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... midst of their hillside ring of necessary modernity, the people of the Great City had kept their playground inviolate. Work, science, industry—all necessary. But the real business of life was pleasure. Art, music, beauty.... And I am not far from thinking that unless abused, their ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... for him. He was reduced to a vague: "We don't want to inflict ourselves—" He could not get Sir Richmond aside for any adequate expression of his feelings about Miss Seyffert, before the four of them were seated together at tea amidst the mediaeval modernity of the Old George smoking-room. And only then did he begin to realize the depth and extent of the engagements to which Sir Richmond ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... that afternoon at four, when it was again neat, clean, orderly, smelling of soap and sunshine. Standing there in the centre of the big room, freshly napped, smartly coiffed, blue-serged, trim, the very concentrated essence of modernity, she eyed with stern deliberation the funeral wheat wreath in its walnut frame; the trunks; the chests; the boxes all shelved and neatly inscribed with their "H's Fshg ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... these stories are old-fashioned both in manner and in substance. In manner they may be, but in substance I maintain they are intensely modern, alive with the spirit of our time. Any latter- day novelist might envy Crabbe his power of developing a story. It is this essential modernity that is to make Crabbe's place in English literature secure for generations ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... interests—except the remnants of Egyptian and aboriginal work—is that of the Middle Ages, the early Gothic, because that is when the art became a considerable one in Europe. It is a time of romance, of chivalry, of deep religious feeling, and yet seems like the childhood of modernity. Is it the fault of crudity in pictorial art, or the fault of romances that we look upon those distant people as more elemental than we, and thus feel for them the indulgent compassion that a child excites? However it is, ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... season, with its bands of health-seeking and somewhat noisy tourists, is not the best time of the year for a visit to Land's End. As a show place it has been compelled to provide certain conveniences for the traveller, and these jarring notes of modernity are rather aggressive. There is much to be said for Mr. W. H. Hudson's plea for a national fund that shall purchase the Land's End; but one fears much water will have flowed around the historic headland before a "Society for the Preservation of Noble ...
— The Cornish Riviera • Sidney Heath
... defenders of the bad theory of the classical origin of romance generally have based one of their few plausible arguments, need not occupy us. For the question is not whether Denis Pyramus or any one else (modernity would not be modernity if his claims were not challenged) told it, but how he told it. Still less need we treat the other question before indicated. Here is one of the central stories of the world—one ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... as an opportunity for the testing of all her knowledge, all her skill, and the full measure of her altruism. Nor was he the proverbial mass of plastic clay to be molded into some preconceived form. Her wisdom and modernity interdicted such a conception of childhood as that. Rather, he was a growing plant, waiting for her skill to nurture him into blossom and fruitage. Some of his qualities she found good; others not. The good ones she made the objects of her special care; the others she allowed to perish from ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... her teeth on the "Critique of Pure Reason" in her prodigious teens. Yet she could toss off, for the "Telegraph," paragraphs of an incomparable levity. In the country Miss Bickersteth was a blustering, full-blooded Diana of the fields. In town she was intellect, energy and genial modernity made flesh. Even Tanqueray, who drew the line at the dreadful, clever little people, had not drawn it at Miss Bickersteth. There was something soothing in her large and florid presence. It had no ostensible air of journalism, ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... infusion or transfusion—when it does not fall into the antiquated hedonistic doctrines of agreeable illusion, of games, and generally of what affords a pleasurable emotion; or of moral doctrines, where art is a symbol and an allegory of the good and the true;—is yet not able, despite its airs of modernity and its psychology, to escape the fate of the doctrine which makes of art a semi-imaginative conception of the world, like religion. The process that it describes is mythological, not aesthetic; it is a making of gods or of idols. "To make one's gods is an unhappy art," said ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... happens, this shadowy arcade, so close to the hotels (under which, indeed, you must make your way to reach one of the oldest of these hostelries, the Hotel de la Ville), is a place to which the traveller returns again and again, weary of the garish modernity that has spoiled so much of the city, far at least from the tram lines that have made of so many Italian cities a pandemonium. It is from this characteristic pathway between the little shops that one should set out to ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... writer has found this combination but seldom in France; at Lyons, Marseilles, Moulins in the Allier, and at Chatellerault in Poitou only. Modernity is making its way in France, but only in spots; its progress is steady, but as yet it has not penetrated into many outlying districts. Modern art nouveau ideas in France, which are banal enough, but which are an improvement ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... what Beauty was to them! We are quite lost to that high touch to-day. Beauty hung over them, a star to draw Men's aspiration. That divides them quite From our debased modernity. ...
— Mr. Faust • Arthur Davison Ficke
... London and Paris of this part of the peaceful ocean, dispensing the styles and comforts, the inventions and luxuries, of civilization, making the laws and enforcing or compromising them, giving justice and injustice to litigants, despatching all the concomitants of modernity to littler islands. Papeete is the entrepot of all the ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... Persius or Juvenal, at the Jews (Sat. I, v, 100), whose stern exclusiveness of faith was beginning to excite in Rome the horror vigorously expressed by Gallio in M. Anatole France's recent brilliant work. Or he delineates, on a full canvas and with the modernity which is amongst his most endearing characteristics, the "Bore" of the Augustan age. He starts on a summer morning, light-hearted and thinking of nothing at all, for a pleasant stroll along the Sacred Way (Sat. I, ix).[1] A man whom he hardly knew accosts him, ignores a stiff ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell
... by several critics of my first book as refuting my theory regarding the modernity of true love. They seemed to think, with the Persian poet, that there must be something particularly wonderful and elevated in the feelings of a lover who is indifferent to the usual charms of femininity and prefers ugliness. This, indeed, is the prevalent sentiment on the ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... of this transformation in certain of his earlier works,—in "The Newly Married Couple," for example, with its delicate analysis, of a common domestic relation, or in "The Fisher Maiden," with its touch of modernity,—but from these suggestions one could hardly have prophesied the enthusiasm and the genial force with which Bjoernson was to project his personality into the controversial arena of modern life. The series of works ...
— Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson • William Morton Payne
... and training of troops, stratagem, the use of spies, etc., and for twenty-five centuries it has been the bible of the Chinese or Japanese ruler. The book is distinguished alike by the poetry and grandeur of its language and the modernity of its spirit. ...
— Cavalry in Future Wars • Frederick von Bernhardi
... great merit of Miss E. B. Abraham's performance is that she plays the part of Deianeira neither as if that lady were a relic of the most insipid period of classical sculpture, nor yet as though she were cousin-german to Hedda Gabler. When she errs, she errs on the side of modernity; and that is as it should be. Certainly she puts too much "psychology" into the character of the fond, gentle lady, whose simple humanity at pathetic odds with Fate wins sympathy from the audience ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... the ex-farmers' wives and daughters, though they still discussed her with more or less frankness in the sewing-circles and at neighborhood tea-drinkings. Crystallized into accusation, there was little to be urged against her save that she was pretty and rich, and that her leaning toward modernity was sometimes a little startling. But being human, the missionary seamstresses and the tea-drinkers made the most of these drawbacks, whetting criticism to a cutting edge now and then with curious speculations about Margery's mother, and wondering why Jasper ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... exquisite in sentiment and excellent in execution. The "Silk-cocoon Carder of Quimper" has been thus noticed by De Rengis: "If I am not mistaken, Signora Margherita Pillini has also taken this road, full of modernity, but not free from great danger. Her 'Silk-cocoon Carder' is touched with great disdain for every suggestion of the old school. Rare worth—if worth it is—that a young woman should be carried by natural inclination into such care ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... fall of night, when the shadows cast a seemly cloak over the vulgarity of the modern buildings, and give an air of romance even to the glittering lights of the appalling esplanade, which flaunts its tawdry modernity cheek by jowl with the quay, built by one of the Ptolemies, and in use ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... entirely right, is Monsieur d'Agreste; he has got to the bottom of things. One must keep in step with modernity—one must be fin de siecle. Comtesse, you should hunt; there is nothing like a fox or a boar to make life worth living. It's better, infinitely better, than a pursuit of hearts; a boar's more troublesome than ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... father, whose glance thanks you for any kind word said in passing, or assumes a grieved expression by reason of some epigram, flung at the work of art, that may wound some heart behind you. A figure not to be forgotten, certainly, if ever it should occur to any painter with a passion for modernity to fix on canvas that very typical manifestation of Parisian life, the opening of an exhibition in that vast conservatory of sculpture, with its paths of yellow sand, and its immense glass roof beneath which, half-way up, stand out the galleries of the first floor, lined by heads ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... like Athens. Nicaragua has been annexed like Jerusalem," cried the old man, with amazing fire. "The Yankee and the German and the brute powers of modernity have trampled it with the hoofs of oxen. But Nicaragua is not ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... silly, to turn upon the speaker and affect an air of disengagement and modernity and to say: "Ah, that indeed is the unfortunate aspect of ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... ideal. More likely than not they follow in this important matter their custom in matters of lesser import—of employing a method directly opposed to the method of their own parents, and employing it simply because it is directly opposed. This is but too apt to be their interpretation of the phrase "modernity in child nurture." But the children learn the lesson. They learn the other great and fundamental lessons of life, too, and learn them well, from these American fathers and mothers who are so friendly and companionable and sympathetic ...
— The American Child • Elizabeth McCracken
... firmly convinced that all religion, no matter what its antiquity or its modernity may be, is an invention of our groping earthly minds. It occurs to him that it would be interesting and proper to lay aside all theology, all creed, all the superficial trappings placed by man about his conceptions of a deity, and consider only the basic God-idea. ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... of medicine delightfully surprising in their modernity to be found here and there in many of these early Christian writers on medicine. For instance, in a compend of medicine written by one Leo, who, under the Emperor Theophilus, seems to have been a prominent physician of Byzantium (the compend was ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... peculiarly modern problem-makers have been exorcising our not inexhaustible taste for the problematic, so that there was no very violent excitement over even the series of new "Keys" to the sonnets which came forth in the lull of the analysis of the plays; and yet, even with all the problems of modernity in view, it seems as if it must be rather by accident of oversight than for lack of interest in new developments of Shakspere-study that so little attention has been given among us to a question which, ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... Rubempre. It is a grief from which I have never been able completely to rid myself. It haunts me in my moments of pleasure. I remember it when I laugh. But Balzac is no more a realist than Holbein was. He created life, he did not copy it. I admit, however, that he set far too high a value on modernity of form, and that, consequently, there is no book of his that, as an artistic masterpiece, can rank with Salammbo or Esmond, or The Cloister and the Hearth, or the Vicomte ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... Burying-ground on Tremont Street. I found the gates open, and I explored every path in the place, wreaking myself in such meagre emotion as I could get from the tomb of the Franklin family, and rejoicing with the whole soul of my Western modernity in the evidence of a remote antiquity which so many of the dim inscriptions afforded. I do not think that I have ever known anything practically older than these monuments, though I have since supped so full of classic and mediaeval ruin. I am sure that I was more ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... They seem to want a calendar of saints in the manner of the Positivist calendar. Bahai teaching will then escape the danger of being not quite conscious enough of its debt to the past. For we have to reconcile not only divergent races and religions, but also antiquity and (if I may use the word) modernity. I may mention that the beloved Master has deigned to call me by a new name.[Footnote: 'Spiritual Philosopher.'] He will bear with me if I venture to interpret that name in a sense favourable to ...
— The Reconciliation of Races and Religions • Thomas Kelly Cheyne
... Colum determined to put aside thoughts of dramas of old Ireland in 1900, he evidently could not keep the old legends out of his mind. They intrude now and then into his verses for all his modernity, and one of them, "The Destruction of the House of Da Derga," forced him to turn it into a play. "The Destruction of the Hostel" has not been published, but it seems to have pleased those who saw and heard it as played by the boys of St. Enda's ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... great forward movement of the life-force. If (as not unfrequently was the case) he happened to have two heads, he would point out the elementary maxim which declares them to be better than one. He would enlarge on the subtle modernity of such an equipment, enabling a giant to look at a subject from two points of view, or to correct himself with promptitude. But Jack was the champion of the enduring human standards, of the principle of one man one head and one man one conscience, of the single head and the ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... quaintly-named haunts of old provincial, of sedately passive rather than confidently eager, traffic; but this made, among us, for much harmless inquisitory life—while we were fairly assaulted, at home, by the scale and some of the striking notes of our fine modernity. The young, the agreeable (agreeable to anything), the apparently opulent M. Prosper Sauvage—wasn't it?—had not long before, unless I mistake, inherited the place as a monument of "family," quite modestly local yet propitious family, ambition; with an ample extension in the rear, ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... the night before. He greeted him with exquisite cordiality and his welcome to Amory was like a welcome unfeigned. He was clad in white of no remembered fashion, with the green gem burning on his breast, but his manner was that of one perfectly tailored and about the most cosmopolitan offices of modernity. One might have told him one's most subtly humourous story and rested certain ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... philosopher ventured to call the "true German spirit." This spirit, linked to the Greeks by the noblest ties, and shown by its past history to have been steadfast and courageous, pure and lofty in its aims, its faculties qualifying it for the high task of freeing modern man from the curse of modernity—this spirit is condemned to live apart, banished from its inheritance. But when its slow, painful tones of woe resound through the desert of the present, then the overladen and gaily-decked caravan of culture is pulled up short, horror-stricken. ...
— On the Future of our Educational Institutions • Friedrich Nietzsche
... remember that Spohr lived until comparatively recent times; for whereas Spohr's music is already older than Beethoven's, older than Mozart's, in many respects quite as old as Haydn's, much of Schubert's is as modern as Wagner's, and more modern than a great deal that was written yesterday. This modernity will, I fancy, be readily admitted by everyone; and it is the only one quality of Schubert's music which any two competent people will agree to admit. Liszt had the highest admiration for everything he wrote; Wagner admired the songs, but wondered at Liszt's acceptance of the chamber ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... are those who practice the careerist religion. The careerist religion is the religion par excellence of modernity. Someone once said, with the perfect candor of the North American, that America is the land of opportunity. He meant that America is the land of the Careerist or, as it has also been put, it is the land of the man on the make. The careerist, or the man on the make, is of a thousand genera ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... agreeable old rose. Rep curtains over Nottingham lace hung from the two windows. There was a davenport between them, and, opposite, a cabinet with a looking-glass back in three arches. It was Mr. Ransome's social distinction that he had inherited this walnut-wood furniture. Modernity was represented by a brand-new overmantle in stained wood and beveled glass, with little shelves displaying Japanese vases. The wall paper turned this front parlor into a bower of gilt roses (slightly ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... edition. He loved to sit in the leather armchair by Ravenel's window. And Ravenel didn't mind particularly. Sammy seemed to enjoy his talk; and then the broker's clerk was such a perfect embodiment of modernity and the day's sordid practicality that Ravenel rather liked to ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... not," Mrs. Maturin retorted confidently. "If you won't talk about it, I will, I have no shame. And this girl has it—this thing I'm trying to express. She's modern to her finger tips, and yet she's extraordinarily American—in spite of her modernity, she embodies in some queer way our tradition. She loves our old houses at Silliston—they make her feel ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... resplendent livery. Across a great hall, whose white stone floor, height, and stained-glass windows gave Wrayson the impression that he had found his way by mistake into the nave of a cathedral, he was ushered into a drawing-room, whose modernity and comparatively low ceiling were almost a relief. Here there were books and flowers and music, some exquisite water-colours upon the white walls, newspapers and magazines lying about, which gave the place a ...
— The Avenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... are surprised,' I said kindly, 'and naturally you think it rather queer. You mustn't let any one know. Mount Mark could never comprehend such modernity. I feel very advanced, myself. I want to spring up and shout, "Votes for Women" or "Up with the Red Flag," or "Villa Forever," or something ...
— Sunny Slopes • Ethel Hueston
... have a dash of dark blood in his veins. Beside him sat the Kabyle servant, who, in his picturesque embroidered clothes, with his jaunty fez, appeared amusingly out of place in the smart automobile, which struck the last note of modernity. The chauffeur had a reckless, daring face, with the smile of a mischievous boy; but he steered with caution and skill through the crowded streets where open trams rushed by, filled to overflowing with white-veiled Arab women of the lower classes, and ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... and that this so-called mysticism is nothing but a deviation or wrong interpretation of the sexual impulse. The same thing applies to the flagellants of the declining Middle Ages, and some Protestant sects of modernity. The raptures of St. Teresa and Madame Guyon, also, belong to this category, however much the fact may be concealed by pseudo-religious conceptions. I have no doubt that Eastern mysticism, too, grew up on a sexual foundation, ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... not blindness, and that he was perfectly aware of the vices of his own work. The child of his time, he threw all his brilliant gifts unhesitatingly into the scale of new ideas and new fashions; his "modernity," to use a current term of the present day, is greater than that of any other ancient author of anything like ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... could scarcely have been attained without the poet's masterly prose translation, and yet it is evident that the poem could not have been conceived and carried out in French verse. The freshness, the artlessness, the lack of modernity, would have suffered if the poet had bent his inspiration to the official language. Using a new idiom, wherein he practically had no predecessor, he was free to create expression as he went along, and was not compelled to cast his thought in ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer
... exclaimed, "the invasion of modernity. Even your time-forgotten paradise, Mannering, has its civilizations, then. ...
— A Lost Leader • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... beneath a veil of feathery elms and round-topped maples. It was not until you had climbed the hill from the clump of houses and shops which had grown up around the railway station,—a place of prosperous ugliness and unabashed modernity,—that you perceived the respectable evidences of what is called in America "an ancient town." The village green, and perhaps a half dozen of the white wooden houses which fronted it with their prim porticoes, were possibly a little more than a hundred years old. The low farmhouse, which showed ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... girl's mind as well as her actions, in spite of her sophistication, reflecting the artlessness of her companion. The damage that she had done, as I was afterwards to discover, was mainly by the force of suggestion. She assumed the absurd premises of modernity, drew her own preposterous conclusions and Jerry drank them in, absorbed them as he did all ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... City has lost much of its rural village character and charm, and has meanwhile acquired some ugly modernity in spots, the City's preservation ordinance, adopted in 1984, throws a protective cloak against further demolition around structures built as residences prior to 1911. Other buildings, such as churches and historic sites, are also protected by the ordinance, subject to certification by the Historical ...
— A Virginia Village • Charles A. Stewart
... it is only in that part of the South which has become "industrial" that it came as a thunderclap, with all the intermediate and accelerative steps taken at a bound. Men spoke of it as "the boom." It was not that. It was merely that the spirit of modernity had discovered a hitherto overlooked corner of the field, and made haste ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... shows an art so different in its characteristics from that of Sweden that she might be at the other end of the earth. Where the Swedish artists show boldness, sometimes almost to the point of crudeness, the Dutch are intent on some degree of finish. Modernity of color is apparent, and while there are few strokes that indicate timidity, there are fine touches of the poetic in which the Hollander's heart shows its love of home and gardens. Those great tulip beds ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... marble, in the Bargello, but has a bronze substitute in its original niche, below which is a relief of the slaying of the dragon from Donatello's chisel. Of this glorious S. George more will be said later. But I may remark now that in its place here it instantly proves the modernity and realistic vigour of its sculptor. Fine though they be, all the other statues of this building are conventional; they carry on a tradition of religious sculpture such as Niccolo Pisano respected, many years earlier, when he worked at the Pisan pulpit. But ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas |
