"Realist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... book by the Russian soldier and artist Verestchagin is interesting to the student. As a realist, he condemns all art founded on the principles of picture-makers, and depends only on exact imitation, and the conditions of accident. In our seeking after truth, and endeavour never to be unreal or affected, it must not be forgotten that this endeavour after truth is to be made with materials ...
— The Mind of the Artist - Thoughts and Sayings of Painters and Sculptors on Their Art • Various
... wilderness without a chart. We are fortunate in having with us a man who has left the 'main travelled roads' of fiction and, to mix metaphors a little, a man who can tell us whether the 'idols' that are 'crumbling' are those of the realist or those of ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... dictionary. One would not have it away; one can hear the caress with which the master pronounces it, "making his mouth," as Swift did for his "little language." Nor does the customary adjective fail in later literature. It was dear to the Realist, and it is dear to the Symbolist. The only difference is that in the French of the ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell
... just this that makes life so hard to value, and the delight of each so incommunicable. And it is just a knowledge of this, and a remembrance of those fortunate hours in which the bird has sung to us, that fills us with such wonder when we turn to the pages of the realist. There, to be sure, we find a picture of life in so far as it consists of mud and of old iron, cheap desires and cheap fears, that which we are ashamed to remember and that which we are careless whether we forget; but of the note of that time-devouring ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... of an undirected youth and an undisciplined manhood explain Marcus Clarke's failure to render to his adopted country the service which, as a distinctly gifted writer of the realist school, he seemed well fitted to perform. He was a Bohemian, who, while resisting the worst vices of his class, shared its carelessness and improvidence to a degree that left little ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... of them is a realist. There have been two realists who have written poetry of the sea. One is Shakespeare, who wrote: "Now would I give a thousand furlongs of sea for an acre of barren ground." The other is James Montgomery Flagg, who in his "All in the Same Boat" exposes the ...
— Ship-Bored • Julian Street
... conflicts of humanity. It is the conflict of organisation against initiative, of discipline against freedom. It was the conflict of the priest against the prophet in ancient Judaea, of the Pharisee against the Nazarene, of the Realist against the Nominalist, of the Church against the Franciscan and the Lollard, of the Respectable Person against the Artist, of the hedge-clippers of mankind against the shooting buds. And to-day, while we live in a period of tightening ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... ordinary trifles of taste and sentiment, but in those essentials which form the root of character, and branch out in all the leaves and blooms that expand to the sunshine and shrink from the cold,—that the worldling should wed the worldling, the artist the artist. Can the realist and the idealist blend together, and hold together till death and beyond death? If not, can there be true ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... possible experience, are nothing but phenomena, that is, mere representations; and that these, as presented to us—as extended bodies, or as series of changes—have no self-subsistent existence apart from human thought. This doctrine I call Transcendental Idealism.* The realist in the transcendental sense regards these modifications of our sensibility, these mere representations, as ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... ardent disciple of Tolstoy. The result was to transform the romanticist of 'Gunnar'—steeped in the legends of old Norway, creating a fairy-land atmosphere about him and delighting to live in the ideal,—into a so-called realist, setting himself to the task of brushing away all illusions and painting life as sterile and unpicturesque as it is in its meanest, most commonplace conditions. To do this, he claimed, was the stern function of the author. ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... he need not bother about what you may think of him. So it is with me. My scheme of living is based upon being true to myself. You may class me with Baron Munchausen if you choose; I shall not mind so long as I have the consolation of feeling, deep down in my heart, that I am a true realist, and diverge not from the paths of truth as truth manifests ...
— Ghosts I have Met and Some Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... time the so-called "Realist" movement originated in Bohemia, led by Professor Masaryk, Professor Kaizl and Dr. Kramr. It was not a separate party movement, but a philosophic effort for a regenerated democratic national policy. The Realists demanded a practical, forward movement, such as would at ...
— Independent Bohemia • Vladimir Nosek
... itself, the thought, the reality; so intent that he is not at the same time, in that half-unconscious way which is the way of the really great poet, equally intent on the form, that both may come to ripeness together. Again it is the heresy of the realist. Just as he drags into his verse words that have had no time to take colour from men's association of them with beauty, so he puts his 'naked thinking heart' into verse as if he were setting forth an argument. He gives us the real thing, as he would ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... little realist, who had already had all manner of experiences. But now the fear had at last curdled his blood, and he accepted the supernatural without a protest. The world had evidently perished, and he himself was drifting—drifting ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... things, Voltaire stood out as a realist, in the modern sense of the word, and if he detested the Church it was largely because it represented untruth. He did not deflect opinion to the same extent as his great contemporary Rousseau, but he represented it more; and of the men of the Revolution, it ...
— The French Revolution - A Short History • R. M. Johnston
... condemning it. Such a writer is a moralist, and there is no better example than Richardson. Again, it is possible to draw vice with neither sympathy nor disapprobation, but simply as a fact which is there. Such a writer is a realist, and such was Fielding. Once more, it is possible to draw vice in order to extract amusement from it. Such a man is a coarse humorist, and such was Smollett. Lastly, it is possible to draw vice in order to show sympathy ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... open the blind to look out. The moon would be full upon the lake, and the calm breath, pure light, and the deep voice, harmonized well with the thought of the Flemish hero. When will this country have such a man? It is what she needs—no thin Idealist, no coarse Realist, but a man whose eye reads the heavens while his feet step firmly on the ground, and his hands are strong and dexterous in the use of human instruments. A man, religious, virtuous, and—sagacious; a man of universal sympathies, but self-possessed; a man who knows ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. I, No. 6 - Of Literature, Art, And Science, New York, August 5, 1850 • Various
... Widgery Pimble transcribes very searchingly the post-prandial lethargy of a boa-constrictor, the process of deglutition being indicated with great dignity and delicacy, as might be expected from so austere a realist. From one angle the figure might be taken for a Bengal tiger, and from another for a zebra—a good proof of the suggestiveness of the artist's method. But, whether it be reptile or quadruped, the spirit of repletion broods over the canvas with irresistible ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, April 5, 1916 • Various
... a moral in the "Nominalist and Realist" that will prove all sums. It runs something like this: No matter how sincere and confidential men are in trying to know or assuming that they do know each other's mood and habits of thought, the net result ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... being chosen to enhance the congruity or variety of what was already given. Perhaps it was never a prime object with Duerer to conceive the event, it was rather the picture that he attempted to conceive; it is Rembrandt who attempts to conceive events, not Duerer. He is very far from being a realist in this sense: though certain of his etchings possess a considerable degree of such realism, it is not what characterises him as a creator or inventor. But a "profound realistic perception" almost unequalled he did possess; what he saw he painted not as he saw it, not ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... a regular, rather long, oval-shaped face, and wide-set dark gray, shining eyes; he was very thoughtful, and apparently very serene. I shall be told, perhaps, that red cheeks are not incompatible with fanaticism and mysticism; but I fancy that Alyosha was more of a realist than any one. Oh! no doubt, in the monastery he fully believed in miracles, but, to my thinking, miracles are never a stumbling-block to the realist. It is not miracles that dispose realists to belief. The genuine realist, ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... picture as M. Edouard Detaille's "Le Reve," which won him so much applause a few years ago. M. Detaille is an irreproachable realist, and may do what he likes in the way of the materially impossible with impunity. Sleeping soldiers, without a gaiter-button lacking, bivouacking on the ground amid stacked arms whose bayonets would prick; above them in the heavens the ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... realist in the modern and abused sense of that term, was the father of realism. It was this side of his teaching which was greedily seized upon, and even exaggerated. Educational zeal now ran in this channel. The conviction of the churches of the time, that one can make men what one ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... life. We have in a true sense become more civilized since 1750: the ape and tiger of Tennyson's poem have receded somewhat in human nature during the last century and a half. The plea that since Fielding was a realist depicting society as it was in his day, his license is legitimate, whereas Richardson was giving a sort of sentimentalized stained-glass picture of it not as it was but, in his opinion, should be,—is a specious one; it is well that in literature, faithful reflector of the ideals of ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... every resource of a disordered time for securing education and money, patriotic at heart but willing to profit from France, or indeed from Russia, England, the Orient; wherever material advantage was to be found. This boy was both idealist and realist, each in the high degree corresponding to his great abilities. He shone neither as a scholar nor as an officer, being obdurate to all training,—but by independent exertions and desultory reading of a high class he formed an ideal of ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... attractions at all, slipped through a hedge, skirted a field of ripening oats, and settled himself very comfortably under a beech tree on the edge of a small wood. His orderly followed him and laid down a large package on the grass beside the doctor. The Colonel, an enthusiastic realist, had insisted that McMahon should bring with him a supply of surgical instruments, dressings and other things necessary for dealing with wounds. McMahon opened the package. He took out a novel, a tin of tobacco, a great many ...
— Our Casualty And Other Stories - 1918 • James Owen Hannay, AKA George A. Birmingham
... a strange attraction for Browning, as we see in The Inn Album, in Red Cotton Nightcap Country, and elsewhere. I may add that it is curious to find him, in 1841, writing exactly like a modern realist, nearly fifty years before realism of this kind had begun. And this illustrates what I have said of the way in which he anticipated by so many years the kind of work to which the literary world should come. The whole scene between Sebald and Ottima ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... Every realist knows that the democratic way of life is at this moment being directly assailed in every part of the world—assailed either by arms, or by secret spreading of poisonous propaganda by those who seek to destroy unity and ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt • Franklin D. Roosevelt
... illustrates one effect of the War on Paul's mind: he was becoming less of an idealist and more of a realist. ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... criticise him. And no man ever lived, I suppose, easier for every little creature crawling about the earth in self-satisfied futility to criticise and ridicule. For myself, I can do nothing but admire, revere, honour, and love this extraordinary old realist, who saved so many thousands of human beings from utmost misery; who aroused all the Churches of the Christian religion throughout the world; who communicated indirectly to politics a spirit of reality which every year grows more potent for social ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton
... we rightly assert that a form of imaginative life is clearly pathologic? In my opinion, the answer must be sought in the nature and degree of belief accompanying the labor of creating. It is an axiom unchallenged by anyone—whether idealist or realist of any shade of belief—that nothing has existence for us save through the consciousness we have of it; but for realism—and experimental psychology is of necessity realistic—there are ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... reached the one where the cries and contortions were the most frightful. Such a scene he has reproduced. No hospital physician would have pictured the straggle in such colors. In the same way, that other realist, M. Zola, has painted a patient suffering from delirium tremens, the disease known to common speech as "the horrors." In describing this case he does all that language can do to make it more horrible than the reality. He gives us, not realism, but super-realism, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... writer's saddest experiences in the East End are told with an unshrinking fidelity, which yet has nothing mawkish or prurient in it. Edith Sichel was too good an artist to be needlessly disgusting. "It might," she said, "be well for the modern realist to remember that literalness is not the same as truth, nor curiosity ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... Captain Feldman said, always the realist. "Why do homely women fight for jobs on ...
— Zen • Jerome Bixby
... Mr. Frost's realism photographic? Consider in this connection his own statement: "There are two types of realist—the one who offers a good deal of dirt with his potato to show that it is a real one; and the one who is satisfied with the potato brushed clean.... To me the thing that art does for life is to strip it ...
— Contemporary American Literature - Bibliographies and Study Outlines • John Matthews Manly and Edith Rickert
... treatment of life, and realism is a deliberate attempt to present life as it is—not to improve upon it or to select it, but to give an impression of its complexity as well as of its bleakness. The romanticist typifies and stereotypes character, the realist recognises the inconsistency and the changeableness of personality. The romanticist presents qualities and moods personified, the realist depicts the flux and variableness of mood, and the effects exerted by ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... industrial slavery or antipaedobaptism. Still the market for his wares is steadier than the market for any other kind of literary wares, and the prices are better. The historian, who is a kind of inferior realist, has something like the same steadiness in the market, but the prices he can command are much lower, and the two branches of the novelist's trade are not to be compared in a business way. As for the essayist, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... set off, after the man, who was a born realist, had tried to snatch a kiss from the skipper on the threshold. Fortunately for the success of the venture, it was pelting with rain, and, though a few people gazed curiously at the couple as they went hastily along, they ...
— Many Cargoes • W.W. Jacobs
... of novelty, experiment, "strangeness added to beauty," contrast with the classical respect for rules, models, formulae, precedents, conventions; so, in another way, its discontent with things as they are, its idealism, aspiration, mysticism contrast with the realist's conscientious adherence to fact. "Ivanhoe" is one kind of romance; "The ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... his sympathies, is still a pupil, a school which regards M. Zola as one of its leading lights. En Route, and its sequels, portray in the colours of realism, in the language of decadence, the conversion of a realist, nay, of a decadent, to mysticism and faith. "The voice indeed is the voice of Jacob, but the hands are the hands of Esau," and according as the critic centres his attention too exclusively on one or the other, such ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... anything of the mystery of the world. His reader never derives from him the consciousness, that he so often derives from Vergil, of a 'deep beyond the deep, and a height beyond the height'. He has neither the virtues of the mystic nor of the realist. Ultimately, life is for him a pageant with intervals for sentimental threnodies and ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... is inseparable from Ingeborg and guides her right in the great crisis is not, he maintains, a trait merely of the woman of ancient Scandinavia but is inherent in each noble female, no matter when or where she lives. And Tegnr, who surely was no realist after the fashion of Strindberg, chooses to picture woman as she appears in her ...
— Fritiofs Saga • Esaias Tegner
... here lies the value of the novels of Henryk Sienkiewicz. He has worked out the problem of the modern novel so as to satisfy the most ardent realist, but he has worked it out upon great and broadly human lines. For him facts are facts indeed; but facts have souls as well as bodies. His genius is analytic, but also imaginative and constructive; it is not forever going upon botanizing ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... church). But let us be careful not to see in all this anything more than symbolical language, semantics[6] an opportunity to speak in parables. It is only on the theory that no work is to be taken literally that this anti-realist is able to speak at all. Set down among Hindus he would have made use of the concepts of Sankhya,[7] and among Chinese he would have employed those of Lao-tse[8]—and in neither case would it have made any ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... a Lapide, a former head of a house in Paris, migrated to Basle, in order to lend his influence and authority to the Realist party in that rising university. Trithemius says of him: "Hic doctrinam eorum Parisiensium qui reales appellantur primus ad Basiliensium universitatem transtulit, ibidemque plantavit, roboravit et auxit." This Johannes Heynlin ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... been called "a Virginia realist." To him, receiving his first views of life from the foot of the Blue Ridge, one realism of the external world was too beautiful to admit of his finding in the ideal anything that could more nearly meet his fancy-picture ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... constitutions perversions of the true form. But we cannot read the Politics without recognising and profiting from the insight into the nature of the state which is revealed throughout. Aristotle's failure does not lie in this, that he is both idealist and realist, but that he keeps these two tendencies too far apart. He thinks too much of his ideal state, as something to be reached once for all by knowledge, as a fixed type to which actual states approximate or from which they are perversions. But if we are to think of actual politics as intelligible in ...
— Politics - A Treatise on Government • Aristotle
... this great writer has admitted George Crabbe to be the most potent influence that has affected his work. I have heard him declare many times how much he was inspired by Crabbe, whereas the later French realists had no influence upon him whatever. "Crabbe was our first great English realist" Mr. Hardy would tell you if only we could persuade him to speak from this platform, as unfortunately he ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... too popular fallacy concerning the tales of Mr Kipling. Mr Kipling's passion for the concrete, which is a passion of all truly imaginative men, together with his keen delight in the work of the world, has caused him to be falsely regarded as a note-book realist of the modern type. He is assumed to be happiest when writing from direct experience without refinement or transmutation. We cannot trace this error to its source and expose the many fallacies it contains without going deeper into aesthetics than is here ...
— Rudyard Kipling • John Palmer
... know much about it," she responded with the unconscious cruelty of age. Having been once the victim of a great passion, she had developed at last into an uncompromising realist, wholly devoid of sentimentality, while Miss Jemima, lacking experience, had enveloped the unknown in a rosy veil ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... portrays, any more than they are your idea, or mine, of those surroundings. Is it to be supposed that he thought the dwellings of our Lord were palaces? Or that he could not paint a stable? Those who maintain that Holbein was a Realist in the modern sense of the word must reconcile as best they can the theory with the facts. But when we see the stage set with every stately circumstance,—the Babe amid the fading splendours of earthly palaces, our Lord mocked by matter as well as man,—I dare to think that we shall do ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... made, that Galds was a realist, as if he were primarily an observer, a transcriber of life, requires to be modified where the dramas are concerned. Pure realism is present in his dramatic work, but it does not occupy anything like the predominant place which some suppose. ...
— Heath's Modern Language Series: Mariucha • Benito Perez Galdos
... infamous sacrilege." Unconsciously insincere, like the majority of people in their justificative confessions, Balzac often allowed his heart to intrude where it had no business to be present. Nevertheless in his realist pictures he exercised himself with all the cold delight of the anatomist, and with none of the warm emotion that might have become communicative. This Brunetiere implicitly admits when he says that most of Balzac's novels are, so to speak, ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... or atmospheric enveloping, without the representation of weight and bulk and shadow and atmosphere and perspective. Every increase in the power to represent nature, every advance in the mastery of the object, adds a new power over the expression of feeling, which varies with the object. The realist is, therefore, right in his demand that nature itself be painted; only he should remember that the nature which presents itself in art is never the naked object, but veiled in feeling; and, as so veiled, may sometimes be seen pretty much as it really ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... discovered the bent of his mind and prefigured his future philosophy, in the choice of his theme, and in his vivid appreciation and strenuous positing of the individual as the fundamental principle of ontology. He takes Nominalistic ground in relation to the old controversy of Nominalist and Realist, siding with Abelard and Roscellin and Occam, and against St. Thomas and Duns Scotus. The principle of individuation, he maintains, is the entire entity of the individual, and not mere limitation of the universal, whether by "Existence" or by "Haecceity." ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... a world of gnomes and hob-goblins, of ghouls and of laughing angels. The realist of the Thackeray School finds nothing but monstrous exaggeration here—and fantastic mummery. If he were right, par-dieu! If his sleek "reality" were all that there was—"alarum!" We were indeed "betrayed"! But no; the children are right. Dickens is right. ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... who had a warrant for his arrest spoke to him and inquired if he knew that devil Bunyan. "Know him?" said Bunyan. "You might call him a devil if you knew him as well as I once did." We have in these anecdotes a key to the nature of Bunyan's genius. He was a realist, a romanticist, and a humourist. He was as exact a realist (though in a different way) as Mr. Pepys, whose contemporary he was. He was a realist both in his self-knowledge and in his sense of the outer world. He ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... third part the naive and sentimental poets are contrasted. The former, Schiller contends, is concerned with the definite, the latter with the infinite. From the realist we turn easily and with pleasure to actual life; the idealist puts us for the moment out of humor with it. The one follows the laws of nature, the other those of reason. The one asks what a thing is good for, the other whether it is good. Withal, ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... Having become a realist, in the most emphatic sense of that word, to have promised to bring some one with her to meeting if she possibly could, meant to her just that, and nothing less than that. Of course, such an understanding of a promise made it impossible to stop with the asking of one person, or two, or three, ...
— The Chautauqua Girls At Home • Pansy, AKA Isabella M. Alden
... rather than hope, the riddle of the painful earth rather than any joy of living. Attempts have been made to vindicate Crabbe from the charge of being a gloomy poet, but I cannot think them successful; I can hardly think that they have been quite serious. Crabbe, our chief realist poet, has an altogether astonishing likeness to the chief prose realist of France, Gustave Flaubert, so far as his manner of view goes, for in point of style the two have small resemblance. One of the most striking things in Crabbe's biography is his remembrance of the gradual disillusion ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... The realist and the romantic tiger are agreed upon one point, however. They both look down on tigers that don't read but merely ...
— The Crow's Nest • Clarence Day, Jr.
... actual experience of men, toward precision and accurate detail: Romance has been abandoned for what is called Realism. But here we are threatened by a danger from the opposite direction: for a clumsy Realist is apt to suppose that his business is merely to describe facts without adding anything out of his own imaginative faculty, that he may bring his characters on the stage in their daily garb, in the dirty slovenliness with which they go about dreaming ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... to the actual significance of Gogol's masterpiece differ. Some consider the author a realist who has drawn with meticulous detail a picture of Russia; others, Merejkovsky among them, see in him a great symbolist; the very title Dead Souls is taken to describe the living of Russia as well as its dead. Chichikov himself is now ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... as philologist, or traveller, or wild missionary, or folk- lorist, or antiquary, that Borrow lives and will live. It is as the master of splendid, strong, simple English, the prose Morland of a vanished road-side life, the realist who, Defoe-like, could make fiction seem truer than fact. To have written the finest fight in the whole world's literature, the fight with the Flaming Tinman, is surely something of ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... editor, penning ferocious attacks upon landlords at his desk inside, or demonstrating, in spite of the high temperature, the desperate wickedness of all critics of the Irish Party. But Moriarty was by temperament a realist. He suspected that Thaddeus Gallagher, divested of his coat and waistcoat, was asleep, with his feet on the office table. Next to the newspaper office was the Imperial Hotel, owned and managed by Mr. ...
— General John Regan - 1913 • George A. Birmingham
... tan pumps. As a matter of fact, they had been a source of annoyance to me for more than forty-eight hours. I had found myself thinking of them at most inopportune times, greatly to the detriment of my work as a realist. ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... virginibus puerisque; but it is certain that every word of Charles Dickens was so written, even when he set himself (as he sometimes did) to describe animal natures and the vilest of their sex. Dickens is a realist in that he probes the gloomiest recesses and faces the most disheartening problems of life: he is an idealist in that he never presents us the common or the vile with mere commonplace or repulsiveness, and without some ray of humane and genial charm to ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... proved that the days of aimless fumblings were over: in "Hunger" he stands suddenly revealed as a master of style and description, a bold and independent thinker, a penetrating, keen psychologist, a realist ...
— Shallow Soil • Knut Hamsun
... Smiths and Branghtons: but the whole book is far superior to Evelina. The extravagance of the fin-de-siecle society which it represents has probably disguised from not a few readers who do not know the facts, the other fact that it is a real attempt at realist observation of manners: and it has the narrative merit which was Miss Edgeworth's gift of nature. But the hero is patchy and improbable: the heroine, a good and quite possible girl, is not sufficiently "reliefed out"; ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... her father, as it were half in pity and half in disdain. Did the innocent fellow not then understand the nature of women? Or was he too sentimental to admit it, too romantic to be a realist? ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... THE POET 237 I. Divergent psychical tendencies of Browning—"romantic" temperament, "realist" senses—blending of their donnees in his imaginative activity—shifting complexion of "finite" and "infinite" 237 II. His "realism." Plasticity, acuteness, and veracity of intellect and senses 239 III. But his realism qualified by ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... result falling within the recognizable field of pastoral; but neither of these considerations affects the historical fact. It is commonly admitted that among pastoral writers Theocritus adhered most closely to nature; yet no one has been found to describe him as a realist, whether in method or intention. But though this process of idealization is practically universal, few poets have confessed to it. Only occasionally an author, writing according to the demands of his age or of his individual taste, has been alive to what appeared to be a contradiction between his ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... how reality submits itself to an order, it is because the absence of every kind of order appears possible or conceivable. It is this absence of order that realists and idealists alike believe they are thinking of—the realist when he speaks of the regularity that "objective" laws actually impose on a virtual disorder of nature, the idealist when he supposes a "sensuous manifold" which is coordinated (and consequently itself without order) under the ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... is right in so far as he denies that law as an abstract thing (considered apart from a person—as his thought) is anything: the realist is right in so far as he affirms that law, apart from {64} any particular manifestation, is an eternal reality. The reconciliation of nominalism and realism is found in God. Applying this to the case in hand—you admit that the Ten Commandments are the ground of morality; therefore, ...
— Letters to His Friends • Forbes Robinson
... and investor to resume the old political mystery dance, in which rents are to be sent up and wages down, while the old feuds of Wales and Ireland, ancient theological and sectarian jealousies and babyish loyalties, and so forth are to be waved in the eyes of the no longer fascinated realist. ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... Ragni's symbolical walk in the woodlands, In God's Way, of passages of pure idealism." Yes, he returns—"in measure." He is "capable of idyllic passages." In other words, his nature reasserts itself, and he remains an imperfect convert. "He has striven hard to be a realist, and at times he has seemed to acquiesce altogether in the naturalistic formula, but in truth he has never had anything essential in common with M. Zola." In other words, he has fallen between two stools. He has tried ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... spite. Philosophy is prejudice put into propositions, and art is prejudice put into paint or sound, and religion is a pious opinion. Every man is born a Platonist or an Aristotelian, a Romanticist, or a Realist, or an Impressionist, and usually erects his own limitations into a creed. Every country, town, district, family, individual, has a special set of prejudices along the lines of which it moves, and which it mistakes for exclusive truths or reasoned conclusions. Touch human society ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... joined the cause of Mr. Martyn and Mr. Yeats, self-confessedly, to have his finger in a new literary pie, really felt the landscape as he says he does in his books, or whether he just momentarily caught the power of seeing it through their eyes. Can one who was once so resolute a realist really appreciate "faint Celtic haze; a vision of silver mist and distant mountain and moor"? Perhaps he can, as a good actor appreciates a part alien to his sympathy, that he is playing. But whether or not Mr. Moore learned to love the lonely landscape ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... upon rules, and inspired by the Greco-Latin ideal. Like the Flemings, the Germans, the Spaniards, and in opposition to the Italians whose influence had conquered all the European academies, the French Realist-Impressionists, relying upon the qualities of lightness, sincerity and expressive clearness which are the real merits of their race, detached themselves from the oppressive and narrow preoccupation with the beautiful and with all the metaphysics and ...
— The French Impressionists (1860-1900) • Camille Mauclair
... observers. He was also, by the way, a good shot with rifle or pistol. If you read one of his chapters in "Hunting the Grizzly" and ask yourself wherein its animation and attraction lie, you will find that it is because every sentence and every line report things seen. He does not, like the Realist, try to get a specious lifelikeness by heaping up banal and commonplace facts; he selects. His imagination reminds one of the traveling spark which used to run along the great chandelier in the theatre, and ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... own enjoyment in the weaving of the unsubstantial webs of improbable adventure that fill the preceding pages. With an ironic satisfaction was it that a writer who is not unaccustomed to be called a mere realist here attempted fantasy, even though the results of his effort may reveal invention only and not imagination. It may even be that it was memory (mother of the muses) rather than invention (daughter of necessity) which inspired ...
— Tales of Fantasy and Fact • Brander Matthews
... equally without strong passions, and without strong convictions. He is naturally attracted most by what is most opposed to the academic, Virgilian, Horatian, or Petrarchesque aestheticism of his contemporaries; he is essentially a realist, and all the effects, which he produces, all the beauty, charm, or beastliness of his work, corresponds to beauty, charm, or beastliness in the reality of things. If Lorenzo writes at one moment carnival ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... often enough, only in the insignificant moment of its action, it may come to seem to us, at all events less realizable; and thus it is that we speak of those who have vividly painted exterior things as realists. Properly speaking, Maupassant is no more a realist than Maeterlinck. He paints a kind of reality which it is easier for us ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... yet a man who floated all his life in typical romantic fashion from passion to repentance, "passing from lust of the flesh to sorrow for sin in perpetual alternation." Guy de Maupassant again is a naturalist of the second sort, a brutal realist; de Maupassant, who died a suicide, crying out to his valet from his hacked throat "Encore l'homme au rancart!"—another ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... Monsieur Valentin; "but when I hear men of your school talk so much about the Ideal, I (as a realist) always want to know what they themselves understand by ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... London life, despite his trend towards caricature, Jonson has shown himself a genuine realist, drawing from the life about him with an experience and insight rare in any generation. A happy comparison has been suggested between Ben Jonson and Charles Dickens. Both were men of the people, lowly born and hardly bred. Each knew the London of his ...
— The Poetaster - Or, His Arraignment • Ben Jonson
... it be adequate, it will inevitably transcend this; but must not be in hopeless conflict with it. The stretched-out, graded, striving world of biological evolution, the many-faced universe of the physical relativist, the space-time manifold of realist philosophy—these great constructions of human thought, so often ignored by the religious mind, must on the contrary be grasped, and accommodated to the world-view which centres on the God known in religious experience. They are true within their own systems of reference; and the soul ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... academic or civil presidents, or senators, or professors, or great lawyers, and impose on the frivolous, and a good deal on each other, by these fames. At least, it is a point of prudent good manners to treat these reputations tenderly, as if they were merited. But the sad realist knows these fellows at a glance, and they know him; as when in Paris the chief of the police enters a ballroom, so many diamonded pretenders shrink and make themselves as inconspicuous as they can, or give him a supplicating ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... night as to whether the normal healthy child is at heart a mystic or a realist; whether he likes fairy tales because they show him a magical world where flowers can talk and umbrellas are turned into black geese, or because they tell of strange romantic things happening to a real human boy like himself; but there can be no shadow of doubt that much of the verse intended ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... when Napoleon, to change the conversation, praised a superb rose which the Queen was wearing, she said to him, "Would your majesty not accept this rose in return for Magdeberg?" A more chivalrous person might have accepted, but Napoleon was too much of a realist to be won over by a pretty proposition. One may be sure that he restricted himself to admiring the beauty of the rose and also of the hand which proffered it, but he did not take the flower, which brought tears to the Queen's eyes. The conqueror, however, did not seem to notice. He kept Magdeberg ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... be reckoned as hearings at all—he bore himself, by the confession of all, with courage, meekness, and dignity. The charges brought against him were various; some so far-fetched as that urged by a Nominalist from the University of Paris—for Paris was Nominalist now—namely, that as a Realist he could not be sound on the doctrine of the eucharist. Others were vague enough, as that he had sown discord between the church and the state. Nor were accusations wanting which touched a really weak point in his teaching, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... of these two young scholars diverged. Emerson became an idealist and an ethical reformer. Elizur Wright became a realist and a political reformer. Realism seems to belong to the soil ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... "The French Academy, I presume, are individually as appreciative of human weaknesses as most men; but taken collectively, some spirit higher and stronger than their own keeps them unanimous in their rejection of the notorious Realist who sacrifices all the canons of art and beauty to the discussion of topics unmentionable ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... other to the variable object, without thereby knowing what each would be if it could be discerned apart from the other. "A direct intuition of things in themselves," according to Kant and Hamilton, is an intuition of things out of space and time. Does Mr. Mill suppose that any natural Realist professes to have ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel
... method one of excessive complication. He began with a shadow, then a touch, superimposing tone upon tone, modelling his paint somewhat like Monticelli, but without a hint of that artist's lyricism. Sober, without rhetoric, a realist, yet with a singularly rich and often harmonious palette, Cezanne reported faithfully ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... him. And it is just this that makes life so hard to value, and the delight of each so incommunicable. And just a knowledge of this, and a remembrance of those fortunate hours in which the bird has sung to us, that fills us with such wonder when we turn the pages of the realist. There, to be sure, we find a picture of life in so far as it consists of mud and of old iron, cheap desires and cheap fears, that which we are ashamed to remember and that which we are careless whether we forget; but of ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... "restraint" may be misunderstood: but it is intended to indicate something of the general difference between "classical" ages on the one side and "romantic" or "realist" on the other. ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... delighted his countrymen with a sense of freshness and strength. They felt as though they heard Danish for the first time spoken in its fulness. The poet Aarestrup (in 1848) declared that Blicher had raised the Danish language to the dignity of Icelandic. Blicher is a stern realist, in many points akin to Crabbe, and takes a singular position among the romantic idealists of the period, being like them, however, in the love of precise and choice language, and hatred of the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... qualities of the realist and the idealist which Dickens possessed to a remarkable degree, together with his naturally jovial attitude toward life in general, seem to have given him a remarkably happy feeling toward Christmas, though the privations and hardships of his boyhood could have allowed him but little real ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... Maupassant is the greatest realist that ever lived. All other realists seem idealists in comparison. Many of the situations he describes are situations doubtless in which he himself "had a hand." Others are situations which he came across, in his enterprising debouchings ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... it seems to me A Novel needs but to be good; Romancer's more than Realist, And True Love's ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, May 14, 1892 • Various
... literature, these books show Mr. Garland to be a realist, that is, a writer who deals with the facts of real life, but as you read Boy Life on the Prairie, you will see that he is fond of the ideal, of the fanciful, and of descriptions of simple rural scenes. The latter quality is very plain, when he writes of the birds and of ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... O. Henry is romantic; in his settings he is a realist. Della and Jim are romantic lovers, they are not prudent nor calculating, but act upon impulse. In his descriptions, however, he is a realist. The eight-dollar-a-week flat, the frying pan on the back of the stove, the description of Della "flopping down on the couch for a cry," and ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... shrewd observation; and if it should ever lead him to play the part of a satirist, the satire must needs be rather that of love than of malice. One who esteemed so highly the work of Balzac and of Flaubert might well be surmised to have something in his composition of what we now call the realist in art; and the work of the realist might serve to sustain and vindicate the idealist's ventures of imaginative faith. The picture of the lath-and-plaster entry of "Mount Zion" and of the pious sheep—duly ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... Fiery Gizzard Creek, let us say, for love of the name, you may very soon precipitate yourself into such a maze of coves, such a tangle of tough, tearing shrubbery (the term "laurel hell" is the mountaineer as realist), that you will regret, perhaps, the day you abandoned what in this region is euphemistically called a road. But you will hardly forget the view from some inland point, where you look, not out over the Tennessee plains, but over a branching canyon of coves, cut like the Grand Canyon out ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... despite his authorship of many novels, still considered himself a realist. He affected to say that he did not write his books; that he merely transcribed them from life as he saw it, and he insisted always that he ...
— A Rebellious Heroine • John Kendrick Bangs
... Shakespeare so irresistible in England.[5] In Tolstoy's estimation, Shakespeare must fall or stand as a thinker, in which capacity I do not think he will stand a moment's examination from so tremendously keen a critic and religious realist. Unfortunately, the English worship their great artists quite indiscriminately and abjectly; so that is quite impossible to make them understand that Shakespeare's extraordinary literary power, his fun, ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy |
