"Verisimilitude" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... realistic-supernatural; but no one can help feeling how much the author is aided by his "broker's clerk" style of description, and by the familiar Parisian scenes among which he makes his hero move. It is easier to compass verisimilitude in the Palais-Royal than on the South Pacific, to say nothing of the thousand assisting touches, out of place in rhyme and metre, which can be thrown into a prose narrative. The Ancient Mariner, however, in spite of all these drawbacks, is as real to the reader as is the hero of the Peau de ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... for instance, such as L. Enault and Karasowski have given of Chopin's first meeting with George Sand can be recommended only to those who care for amusing gossip about the world of art, and do not mind whether what they read is the simple truth or not, nay, do not mind even whether it has any verisimilitude. Nevertheless, we will give these gentlemen a hearing, and then try if we cannot find some firmer ground ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... delicate fitness meeting all wants, without being impressed and stirred by it, even to the regeneration of his soul? If there is any thing calculated to make man feel and live like a child of God, it would surely seem to be this conception. Its unrivalled simplicity and verisimilitude compel the assent of the mind to its reality. It is the most adequate and sublime view of things that ever entered the reason of man. It is worthy the inspiration of God, worthy the preaching of the Son of God. All the artificial and arbitrary schemes of fanciful theologians are as ridiculous ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... de geste proper; but the marvels are excellent, the poet relating them with an admirable mixture of gravity and complaisance, in spirited style and language, and though with extremely little attention to coherence and verisimilitude, yet with no small power of what may be ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... constitutionally ill-adapted for fellowship with Him because they lack what Keats calls "negative capability"—"that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. Coleridge, for instance, would let go a fine isolated verisimilitude, caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge." We have to trust God with His secrets, as well as try to penetrate them as far as our minds will carry ...
— Some Christian Convictions - A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day Thinking • Henry Sloane Coffin
... by an interesting plot. But American readers have learned by this time, much to their credit, not to apply to Jean Paul for the sensation of a cunningly woven narrative, like that of the English school, which furnishes verisimilitude to real life that is quite as improbable, though less glaringly so, than his departures from it. "Hesperus" is filled with pure and noble thought. The different types of female character are particularly well-defined; and if Jean Paul sometimes affects to say cynical things ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... writer, when he adopts a high aim, must be a law to himself, bide his time, and take the risk of discovering, at last, that his life has been a failure. His task is one in which failure is easy, when he must not only depict the truths of Nature, but must do this with such verisimilitude as to vindicate its truth to other eyes, And since this recognition may not even begin till after his death, we can see what Rivarol meant by his fine saying, that "genius is only great patience," and Buffon, by his more ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... last chapter, very obligingly washed the paint off his face and became Sir Reginald Somebody-or-other; a trick I never forgave him. The idea of a man being an Indian brave, and then giving that up to be a baronet, was one which my mind rejected. It offended verisimilitude, like the pretended anxiety of Robinson Crusoe and others to escape ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... belonged to a kindred people, characterized by chivalrous love and honour, and in which the principal characters are not even of princely rank. Had this example been followed, a number of prejudices respecting the tragic Ceremonial would have disappeared of themselves; Tragedy from its greater verisimilitude, and being most readily intelligible, and deriving its motives from still current modes of thinking and acting, would have come more home to the heart: the very nature of the subjects would alone have turned them from the stiff observation ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... original, I say; is it possible he could have read it somewhere, adding a few little touches of his own? Unfortunately, our story-teller in his desire for artistic verisimilitude has overreached himself. ...
— The Fur Bringers - A Story of the Canadian Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... resolved to give the affair the strongest possible air of verisimilitude; and he engaged a governess, a Miss Belthrop, for Pollyooly. That led to his engaging a nurse, Emily Gibbs, for the Lump, though Pollyooly protested that it was ...
— Happy Pollyooly - The Rich Little Poor Girl • Edgar Jepson
... Bengalees with that democratic tinge which has won the sympathies of English Radicals; and, even if the tinge in most cases be very slight, the Bengalee's own adaptability enables him to clothe his opinions with extraordinary skill and verisimilitude in the form which he intuitively knows will best suit an English audience. Of any real democratic spirit amongst the educated classes of Bengal it is difficult to find a trace, for they are separated from the masses whom they profess to represent by a social gulf which only ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... details of the craft. And Clarissa, and Grandison still more, will also give the fullest warning of the impracticability of the method, after all; for Richardson is forced to pay heavily for its single benefit. He pays with the desperate shifts to which he is driven in order to maintain any kind of verisimilitude. The visible effort of keeping all Clarissa's friends at a distance all the time, so that she may be enabled to communicate only by letter, seems always on the point of bearing him down; while in the case of Grandison it may be said to do so finally, when Miss Byron ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... conscious of the appreciation, every scenic item—the double stage, the attendant chorus, the classic dress, that had awakened Miss Vanhansen's ridicule, from the sandal on the foot to the toque on the head—all which could lend verisimilitude to the spectacle. For the benefit of happy May, Alcestis lived again in modern St. Ambrose's. Once more she suffered and died willingly in the room of Admetus; once more the miserable husband's half-heroic, half-savage ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... Dickens's views of English life and society are about as far from the truth as those of the French dramatists and romancers, "George Eliot" is able to represent the social circumstances in which her action is laid with the strongest appearance of verisimilitude. We may not ourselves have known Shepperton, or Hayslope, or St. Ogg's; but we feel as much at home in them as ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... modern progress. Even the woman, who arrogated a spirit of prophecy and had long practised the devices of a fortune-teller, thus accustomed to scan the possibilities and in some degree versed in the adjustment of the probabilities, accorded the homely verisimilitude of their worldly-wise representations the meed of a simple and respectful credulity. The mountaineers were ignorant indeed in their sort, but far too sophisticated to entertain aught but the most contemptuous disbelief in her pretensions ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... no 'm! I was just playin' round the tent, me and another boy, and Bud he come up and jumped on us." And then to add verisimilitude to his narrative, he appended: "Him ...
— The Court of Boyville • William Allen White
... conviction by brief examination while Pocket was fetching his things from behind the bush. Pocket pressed for earlier details with a morbid appetite which was not gratified without reluctance, and out of a laconic interchange the deed was gradually reconstructed with appealing verisimilitude. It was Baumgartner who had first caught sight of the somnambulist, treading warily like the blind, yet waving the revolver as he went, as though any moment he might let it off. The moment came with a wretched reeling man who joined Baumgartner ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... there we have no reason to trust our common methods of argument, or to think that our usual analogies and probabilities have any authority. Our line is too short to fathom such immense abysses. And however we may flatter ourselves that we are guided, in every step which we take, by a kind of verisimilitude and experience, we may be assured that this fancied experience has no authority when we thus apply it to subjects that lie entirely out of the sphere of experience. But on this we shall have ...
— An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding • David Hume et al
... It is impossible to read a page of his masterpieces without recognising that they could have been composed only in an American environment. The dialect in which they are written enhances their verisimilitude without impairing their dignity; and the flashes of humour which light up the gravity of the narrative are never out of place nor out of tune. The cunning and resourcefulness of his boyish heroes are the cunning and resourcefulness of America, and the sombre Mississippi is the proper ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... dit-il, "vous parlez si souvent de chastete que cela devient indecent. Votre amitie n'est pas plus 'sainte' que celle des autres." [If he had added "maternite" the stigma would have been completer still.] And there is also a startling verisimilitude in the reply ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... point Margery said her best word, "Gorky," which means, "A thousand thanks for the verisimilitude of your charming and interesting story, but is not the love element a trifle weak?" (Margery ...
— Happy Days • Alan Alexander Milne
... accounts of him in the "Memoirs of Eminent Monks," compiled in A.D. 519, and a later work, the "Memoirs of Marvellous Monks," by the third emperor of the Ming dynasty (A.D. 1403-1424), which, however, is nearly all borrowed from the other; and all in them that has an appearance of verisimilitude can be ...
— Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms • Fa-Hien
... effect. If truth to natural appearances is carried far in the figures, the same truth will be expected in the background; but if only certain truths are selected in the figures, and the treatment does not approach the naturalistic, much more liberty can be taken with the background without loss of verisimilitude. ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed
... Colard with his sweetheart, the humpbacked Missonier, an aristocratic looking veiled lady with green feathers in her hat, and a tobacco-dealer in a blue coat. The hat with the green feathers was a special proof of Bach's powers of invention, and stood out with picturesque verisimilitude against the ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... tell as to the absolute truth of these tales, but they had such verisimilitude that they impressed and shocked him. He was doubly astounded at the evident enjoyment with which they were received by his friends, and especially at the fact of the hearty and unrestrained manner in which ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... any feminine reader of this veracious history I should say that the repetition which she has just noticed is not an accident, but has been carefully set down. It is an attempt to give verisimilitude to the conversation—because men always say things ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 12, 1917 • Various
... indicating her delight in blood; Hanuman, the monkey-god, with his huge tail; Krishna engaged in his gambols; Ganesh, the god of wisdom, with his elephant head and protuberant belly; and many others beside. Everything you see is wild, grotesque, unnatural, forbidding, utterly wanting in verisimilitude and refinement, with nothing to purify and raise the people, with everything fitted to pervert their taste and lower their character; and yet, I must add, with everything to give a faithful representation of the mythology prepared by their religious leaders. The pundits ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy
... what does the spirit need in the face of modern life? The sense of freedom. That naive, rough sense of freedom, which supposes man's will to be limited, if at all, only by a will stronger than his, he can never have again. The attempt to represent it in art would have so little verisimilitude that it would be flat and uninteresting. The chief factor in the thoughts of the modern mind concerning itself is the intricacy, the universality of natural law, even in the moral order. For us, necessity is not, as of old, a sort of mythological personage without us, with whom we can do ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... objection that these things, fresh and interesting to us, were ordinary and banal to them, would be a rather shallow one. The point is that, in previous fiction, circumstantial verisimilitude of this kind had hardly been tried at all. So it is with the incident of Nicodeme sending a rabbit (supposed to be from his own estate, but really from the market—a joke not peculiar to Paris, but specially favoured there), or losing at bowls a capon, to old Vollichon, and on the strength of each ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... circle. A Beckett had been called to the Bar some time before, so that his ballads as well as the articles from his hand which appeared—and, from time to time, continued—over the signature of "Mr. Briefless," had a touch of verisimilitude which went straight to the soft places in the hearts and imagination of the Great Unbriefed. "Mr. Briefless" became an institution in the paper, as, in other journals, Mr. O. P. Q. Philander Smiff, and again, in a lower social scale, Mr. Alfred Sloper, became recognised ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... progress of his play. Ease and command had grown reassuringly; his psychology was surer, perhaps because his own psychological experience had been so much enriched; and his dialogue, losing nothing of its neatness and economy, had taken on an added verisimilitude. It was too early to judge dispassionately; but, as Eric made his last corrections and sent a copy of the script to Manders, he felt a warmer glow of confidence than either of his first plays ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... among them to exhibit one flaw in this masterpiece of drama. For the drama, it is perfect; though such a fable in a romance might make the reader crack his sides, so imperfect, so ethereally slight is the verisimilitude required of these conventional, rigid, ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... yearth right smart, though," persisted Wyatt, for pickax and shovel had been brought in the wagon for the sake of an aspect of verisimilitude and to mask their ...
— His Unquiet Ghost - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... also employed by Mrs Turner to carry food to Overbury in the Tower. If the substitution story has any truth in it it might well have been a Monson girl who played the part of the Countess. But, of course, a Monson girl may have been chosen by the inventors to give verisimilitude to the substitution story, simply because the family was friendly with Turner, and the tale of the lewd high jinks with Symon added to make it seem more likely that old Lady Monson would lend ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure
... remarkable for his keen observation of every-day life and character, the average existence in town and country of mankind high and low: he is a truthful reporter, the verisimilitude of the picture is part of its attraction. It is not too much to say that, pictorially, he is the first great English realist of the Novel. For broad comedy presentation he is unsurpassed: as well as for satiric gravity of comment ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... accomplices of Nature's moods, and set in the midst of her voices. Here, in swift succession, are storm and sunshine; falling rain-drops; the plash and ripple of mountain streams; bird notes of rare verisimilitude, from the anxious twitterings before the thunder-shower, to the chorus of thanksgiving after it has swept vigorously past. And Theo Desmond, lying in semi-darkness, with pain for his sole comrade, knew ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... of the fault of which I speak. He has very great dramatic power; but it is more of the kind shown by Walter Scott than of the kind shown by Shakspeare. He can reproduce historical characters with great vividness and effect, and with enough knowledge of humanity to make the verisimilitude admirably strong; but as to the deep knowledge with which Shakspeare searches the radical elements of the human soul, he has it not. His Death of Queen Elizabeth is a strong Walter Scott picture; so are his Execution of Strafford, and his Charles I., which I saw ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... staged in any other of the nine provinces. The author humbly craves indulgence if he has in any way exceeded the license allowed him in spinning the incidents necessary for a novel of this type while seeking verisimilitude in settings ...
— Every Man for Himself • Hopkins Moorhouse
... appreciation than in expression, whose pleasure in his expression is subordinate to his interest in the external world, and in large measure confined to the delight every artist has in technical felicity when he can attain it. Their skies are beautifully observed—graduated in value with delicate verisimilitude from the horizon up, and wind-swept, or drenched with mist, or ringing clear, as the motive may dictate. All objects take their places with a precision that, nevertheless, is in nowise pedantic, and is perfectly free. Cazin's palette is, moreover, a thoroughly individual ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... world—had been gradually fused. In the artistic treatment of such material the chief difficulty lies in preserving a just measure between the beast-character and the imported element of humanity. Little by little the anthropomorphic features were developed at the expense of verisimilitude; the beast forms became a mere masquerade; the romances were converted into a satire, and the satire lost rather than gained ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... assumption of the existence of little people not six inches high, and of a country in which the inhabitants 'appeared as tall as an ordinary spire-steeple,' the exactness and verisimilitude of the narrative, with its minute geographical details, make it appear so reasonable that a young reader may feel inclined to resent the criticism of an Irish bishop who said that 'the book was full of improbable lies, and for his part he hardly believed a word of it.' It is curious to note that ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... Young Duke the manner is not so burlesque, but there is the same roughness of execution, combined with the same rush and fire. In either book, what we feel to-day to be the great objection to our enjoyment is the lack of verisimilitude. Who can believe in the existence of persons whose titles are the Earl of Fitz-Pompey and Baron Deprivyseal, or whose names are Lady Aphrodite and Sir Carte Blanche? The descriptions are "high-falutin" beyond all endurance, and there is particularly noticeable a kind of stylistic ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... the teeth of verisimilitude, I think extremely well of it," he answered firmly. "I admire it immensely. I think it's an altogether ripping little book. I think it's one of the nicest little ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... violet-colored ink and a ruby pen; that they must be entirely indifferent to publishers' accounts, and inexperienced in every form of poverty except poverty of brains. It is true that we are constantly struck with the want of verisimilitude in their representations of the high society in which they seem to live; but then they betray no closer acquaintance with any other form of life. If their peers and peeresses are improbable, their literary men, tradespeople, and cottagers are impossible; and ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... trifles one can go by. The character of the publication, the general verisimilitude of the news, the consideration of the motive, and so on. I don't trust blindly the accuracy of special correspondents—but why should this one have gone to the trouble of concocting a circumstantial falsehood on a matter of no importance ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... inferior painter they may be represented so as to please none but the most uncultivated eye. Each spectator is charmed in proportion to his recognition of a triumph over difficulty which is measured by the degree of verisimilitude. The degrees are many. In the lowest the pictured object is so remote from the reality that we simply recognise what the artist meant to represent. In like manner we recognise in poor novels and dramas what the authors mean ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... actors in that famous tale. Mere accident it was that had intercepted those explanations as to the extent of fiction in these points which in this case it would have been so natural to make. Indeed, considering the exquisite verisimilitude of the work meeting with such absolute inexperience in the reader, it was almost a duty to have made them. This duty, however, something had caused me to forget; and when next I saw the young mountaineer, I forgot that I had forgotten it. Consequently, at first I was perplexed by the ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... Moses and Solomon pictures in the Uffizi are of course only a pretext for gloriously coloured arrangements of people with rich scenic backgrounds. No.621 is the finer. The way in which the baby is being held in the other indicates how little Giorgione thought of verisimilitude. The colour was ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... Presidency,—certainly before he is elected. The material to be plaster, made of the shells of those oysters with which Virginia shall have paid her public debt. It may be objected, that plaster is not durable enough for verisimilitude, since bronze itself could hardly be expected to outlast one of the Governor's speeches. But it must be remembered that his mere effigy cannot, like its prototype, have the pleasure of hearing itself talk; so that to the mind of the spectator the oratorical despotism is tempered with some ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... is entirely devoid, not merely of verisimilitude, but even of possibility. Tacitus could not be deceived in appropriating to the Christians of Rome the guilt and the sufferings which he might have attributed with far greater truth to the followers of Judas the Gaulonite, for the latter never went to Rome. Their ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... of "Our People," is unrivalled in certain bourgeois, military, and provincial types. No one can draw a volunteer, a monthly nurse, a Scotchman, an "ancient mariner" of the watering-place species, with such absolutely humorous verisimilitude. Personages, too, in whose eyes—to use Mr. Swiveller's euphemism—"the sun has shone too strongly," find in Mr. Keene a merciless satirist of their "pleasant vices." Like Leech, he has also a remarkable power ...
— The Library • Andrew Lang
... no more remembers his mother than an eight-year-old horse? This is cruel beyond measure, and unjust beyond comment; but, sad to say, it is true; and the platitudinous tract-liar, for the sake of verisimilitude, as well as of novelty, should make a memo. of it. Amongst all the hard-cases of my acquaintance, I can only think of one whose mother's unseen presence is a power, and her memory a holy beacon, shining, by-the-way, with a decidedly intermittent light. Unfortunately, a glance ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... than a character—a fault which also seems to apply to that Molieresque hypocrite, the younger Blifil. Fielding seems to have welded this latter together, rather than to have fused him entire, and the result is a certain lack of verisimilitude, which makes us wonder how his pinchbeck professions and vamped-up virtues could deceive so many persons. On the other hand, his father, Captain John Blifil, has all the look of life. Nor can there be any doubt about the vitality of Squire Western. Whether the germ of his character ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... her exquisite thought to involve the man from Scotland Yard. Mark Brendon, then known to be taking holiday at Princetown, had been pointed out to her; she appraised him correctly and her woman's intuition told her what verisimilitude would spring from his active cooperation. Secure in her own genius, she therefore complicated the issues by appealing to Brendon and winning his enthusiastic assistance. Much sprang from this, for ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts
... however limited in range and tainted with alien qualities human love may be, it is still "a pin-point rock of His boundless continent." It is not a semblance of the divine nature, an analogon, or verisimilitude, but the love of God himself in man: so that man is in this sense an incarnation of the divine. The Godhood in him constitutes him, so that he cannot become himself, or attain his own ideal or true nature, except by becoming perfect as God ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... Turner, and have acted it out. But how about the innumerable cases not unlike the Foster cases quoted, where sensitives get impressions much more vivid than the sitter appears capable of holding, and act them out with dramatic verisimilitude of which the sitter is absolutely incapable; and how about the innumerable cases where the sensitive gets impressions and memories which the ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... satisfactorily disguised, and with even his shock of black hair adding to the verisimilitude of his likeness to the natives of the city, he sought for some means of reaching the street below. While he might have risked a drop from the eaves of the roof he feared to do so lest he attract the attention of passers-by, and probable discovery. The roofs of the buildings ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... himself and be only too glad to get it out of his hands and into God's. They gratefully acknowledged that publicans not only give them money but allow them to collect it in the bar—sometimes even when there is a Salvation meeting outside preaching teetotalism. In fact, they questioned the verisimilitude of the play, not because Mrs Baines took the money, but because ...
— Bernard Shaw's Preface to Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... his full share of Anglo-Indian revelry, and who knew the Indian army thoroughly. Whereas in Oakfield the tone rises often to righteous indignation, in The Wetherbys it falls to a strain of caustic humour, and in the modern reader's mouth it might leave an unpleasant taste; yet the verisimilitude of the narrative would be questioned by no competent judge. As Oakfield fought at Chillianwalla, so Wetherby fights in the almost equally desperate battle of Ferozeshah, where the English narrowly escaped a great disaster; and here, again, we have a momentary ray of ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... on the street, the rear wall a door opening on an entrance hall, and the left wall a door opening on a room adjacent; and in none of these could the fireplace have been logically set. The unusual device of stage-direction, therefore, contributed to the verisimilitude of the set as well as to the convenience of the action. The experiment was successful for the purposes of this particular piece; it did not seem to disrupt the attention of the audience; and the question, therefore, is suggested whether it might not, in many other plays, be advantageous ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... would be at once raised, but as several persons we knew had seen us walking towards the Belle Tout, it would, without a doubt, be surmised that we had been drowned while bathing. The only thing we regretted was that we had not left some portion of our clothing on the beach to give verisimilitude to the suggestion. However, we troubled ourselves not one whit about the past. I was glad to escape from the doom of the gas-lit cellar, and was looking forward with keen anticipation to a new life in ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... familiar scene, and a more plentiful and exact adjustment of ordinary and familiar manners. It is true that Addison, partly owing to the undercurrent of his satirical humour (Steele succeeds rather better here), has not attained the astonishing verisimilitude of the writer to whom we shall come next and last but one in this chapter. His characters are perfectly natural, but we know, all the while, that they are works of art. But in most of the points just mentioned he has exactly the tricks of the novelist's art that Defoe has not. The smaller ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... application of truth is hurtful to beauty, and preoccupation with beauty impedes truth. However, without an ideal there is no truth; this is why types are of a more continuous reality than portraits. Art, besides, only aims at verisimilitude; but verisimilitude depends on the observer, and is a relative and ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... Drama be found not produc't beyond the fift Act, of the style and uniformitie, and that commonly call'd the Plot, whether intricate or explicit, which is nothing indeed but such oeconomy, or disposition of the fable as may stand best with verisimilitude and decorum; they only will best judge who are not unacquainted with Aeschulus, Sophocles, and Euripides, the three Tragic Poets unequall'd yet by any, and the best rule to all who endeavour to write Tragedy. The circumscription of time wherein the ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... the struggle, in which she conquered and became the liberator of Greece, is also an allusion to the later history. Hence we may safely conclude that the entire narrative is due to the imagination of Plato, who has used the name of Solon and introduced the Egyptian priests to give verisimilitude to his story. To the Greek such a tale, like that of the earth-born men, would have seemed perfectly accordant with the character of his mythology, and not more marvellous than the wonders of the East narrated by Herodotus ...
— Critias • Plato
... Withers was on strange terms, if any terms at all. She threatened to him in the middle of his best stories, smiled quietly when he preached, yawned to his poetical recitations, left the room when he sang, mistook the subjects of his sketches with a verisimilitude of innocence that often deceived even himself, was silent and sneered much whenever he was present. And all these rudenesses she performed with a successful air of genuine abstraction; they never failed of their intention by being overdone, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... this anecdote to Mr. Octavius Gilchrist, the editor of the poems of the witty Bishop Corbet. [No solid foundation for this tradition is known, though there is a certain circumstantial verisimilitude about it. Rushton was and is in the midst of forest scenery such as the poem describes, and it had been the seat of the persecuted Roman Catholic family of Tresham, some of whose buildings, covered with emblems of their faith, survive to ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... at me with his dark penetrating glance. I was struck by the absolute verisimilitude of this suggestion. But we were always tilting at each other. I saw an opening and pushed ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... delightful stream of naive confession and mordant sarcasm that never seems either ill-natured or artificial, that lashes without vindictiveness, and excoriates without malice. In strict ratio, however, to the verisimilitude of the performance, must be esteemed the talents of the non-Oriental writer, who was responsible for so lifelike a creation. No man could, have written or could now write such a book unless he were steeped and saturated, not merely in Oriental experience, but in Oriental forms of expression ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... of the Aeneid into English verse was that of Gawin Douglas, bishop of Dunkeld in Scotland, which was published in 1553. It is a spirited translation, marked by considerable native force and verisimilitude, and it was certainly unsurpassed until that of Dryden appeared. In the best passages it renders the tone and feeling of the original with extreme felicity—indeed, all but perfectly. Take for instance this passage ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... convince us that everything is happening in a perfectly natural manner? The outer form to be sure is that of everyday life, but this is no proof that the poets demanded of their audiences a belief in the verisimilitude of the events depicted. Can we have no fantastic fairyland without some outlandish accompaniment such as a chorus garbed as birds or frogs? But we reserve fuller discussion of this point until later. We might suggest an interesting comparison to the nonsense verse of W. S. Gilbert, which represents ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • William Wallace Blancke
... that more play of mind might be dangerous. This is that "Scholasticism" and "Mediaevalism" against which the modernists inveigh or under which they groan; and to this intellectual barrenness may be added the offences against taste, verisimilitude, and justice which their more critical minds may discern in many an act and pronouncement of their official superiors. Thus both their sense for historical truth and their spontaneous mysticism drive the modernists to contrast ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... tedious or irksome in the heavy massing up of animate and inanimate back-grounds which goes on all the while in Balzac's novels, I find these things most germane to the matter. What I ask from a book is precisely this huge weight of formidable verisimilitude which shall surround me on all sides and give firm ground for my feet to walk on. I love it when a novel is thick with the solid mass of earth-life, and when its passions spring up volcano-like from flaming pits and bleeding craters of torn and ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... of astronomy; and the description of Sir John's recently improved instruments, the principle on which the inestimable improvements were founded, the account of the wonderful discoveries in the moon, etc., all are probable and plausible, and have an air of intense verisimilitude.' The 'New Yorker' considered the discoveries 'of astounding interest, creating a new era ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... strictly speaking, it is impossible to demonstrate that all bodies are absolutely insensible, no man, unless instructed by a particular revelation, can decide the question otherwise than by calculating and comparing the verisimilitude of this opinion with that of ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... a thing as a miserable daughter, have you? Some fairly good-looking girl who has been crossed in love, or is misunderstood. Because if so, you might dress her up in something out of the local museum and send her along. A little thing like that gives verisimilitude to a design." ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome
... stood like this, holding on to the verandah pole;" and he opened his mouth and one eye, twisting up his hideous countenance into a ghastly imitation of Bessie's sorrow-stricken face, and gripping the post that supported the hut to give verisimilitude to his performance. ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... labour the point of the "been and took and eaten" as an instance of felicity in reconstructing children's conversation, and making the verisimilitude to their grammar the charm of ...
— George Du Maurier, the Satirist of the Victorians • T. Martin Wood
... Selma Lagerloef. Although born in Sweden she has achieved remarkable mastery of English diction. As a friend of Miss Lagerloef and an artist she is enabled herself to pass through the temperament of creation and to reproduce the original in essence as well as sufficient verisimilitude. Mrs. Howard is no mere artisan translator. She goes over her page not but a dozen times, and the result is not a labored performance, but a work of real art in strong and ...
— Jerusalem • Selma Lagerlof
... accompanied by resemblances as striking to passages in other Platonic writings. They are sensible of a want of point in the dialogue and a general inferiority in the ideas, plan, manners, and style. They miss the poetical flow, the dramatic verisimilitude, the life and variety of the characters, the dialectic subtlety, the Attic purity, the luminous order, the exquisite urbanity; instead of which they find tautology, obscurity, self-sufficiency, sermonizing, rhetorical declamation, pedantry, egotism, uncouth ...
— Laws • Plato
... since what had happened once might happen again, a certain probability, at least no kind of improbability, was attached to the idea taken in itself, of miraculous intervention in later times, and miraculous accounts were to be regarded in connexion with the verisimilitude, scope, instrument, character, testimony, and circumstances, with which they presented themselves to us; and, according to the final result of those various considerations, it was our duty to be sure, or to believe, or to opine, or to surmise, or to tolerate, ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... with its soft, nearly blonde locks that curled short about it below the heavy waves of what she called her "real hair." That was chestnut, dark brown at night. Nature had given her long dark lashes with perfect verisimilitude, but had at the last moment capriciously decided against man's peace and hidden behind them, set deep behind them under flexible Italian brows, those curious slate-blue eyes that fixed her face in your mind inalterably. ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... with a subsequent assembly of notables at Poitiers, and repeal of all the toleration that had been vouchsafed to the Protestants.[428] All this may have been false; but, if false, it was invested with a wonderful verisimilitude, and to Huguenots and Papists it had, so far as their actions were concerned, all the effect of truth. At all events the promises of the king could not be trusted. Had he not been promising, again and again, for ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... Furioso is not in its knight-errantry, or its main plot, or the cunning interweavement of its minor ones, but in its endless variety, truth, force, and animal spirits; in its fidelity to actual nature while it keeps within the bounds of the probable, and its no less enchanting verisimilitude during its wildest sallies of imagination. At one moment we are in the midst of flesh and blood like ourselves; at the next with fairies and goblins; at the next in a tremendous battle or tempest; then in one of the loveliest of solitudes; then hearing a tragedy, then a comedy; then ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... hidden among the mysteries of the purple East, shrouded as it is in legend and fable, scholars have marshaled sufficient facts to prove that the beverage was known in Ethiopia "from time immemorial," and there is much to add verisimilitude to Dufour's narrative. This first coffee merchant-prince, skilled in languages and polite learning, considered that his character as a merchant was not inconsistent with that of an author; and he even went so far as to say there ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... impossibilities, smoothing over difficulties, keeping the mind on the alert, they may surprise, interest, divert, and entertain, so that wonder and delight joined may keep pace one with the other; all which he will fail to effect who shuns verisimilitude and truth to nature, wherein lies the perfection of writing. I have never yet seen any book of chivalry that puts together a connected plot complete in all its numbers, so that the middle agrees with the ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... about cricket; and the activity it calls forth can be justified on no rational theory. Even football, although it admirably simulates the tug and the ebb and flow of battle, has presented difficulties to the mind of young sticklers after verisimilitude; and I knew at least one little boy who was mightily exercised about the presence of the ball, and had to spirit himself up, whenever he came to play, with an elaborate story of enchantment, and take the missile as a sort of ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... must use methods of unapproached delicacy, of unimagined subtlety and celerity. It is easy enough to catch the look of the patrician in the upper air, of the plebeian underfoot, but to render the image of a world-bourgeoisie, compacted in characters of undeniable verisimilitude, that will be difficult, but it will be possible, and the success will be of an effulgence such as has never yet taken the eyes ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... by surprise, console themselves by introducing into the composition of the falsehood which they have to invent, thinking that it can be safely incorporated, and will lend the whole story an air of verisimilitude. It was true that, when Odette had just done something which she did not wish to disclose, she would take pains to conceal it in a secret place in her heart. But as soon as she found herself face to face with the man to whom she was obliged to lie, she became ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... words, verisimilitude, not verity, is wanted in fiction. The observer notes his facts, and then the artist seizes on the ideas behind them, the types they represent, the spiritual substances they embody. The result, when all goes well, is as ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... the course of his narratives with dreams,—dreams that often have no connection with the plot, so far as there may be said to exist a plot,—but dreams of vivid and sharp verisimilitude. Whether these dreams were interjected to deceive the reader, or merely to indulge the novelist's whimsical fancy, is hard to divine; but one always wakes with surprise to find that it is all a dream. A few hours before Svidrigailov commits suicide he has ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... last three days? That "Thomas Carlyle is coming to America," and the tidings cordially greeted by the editors; though I had just received your letter silent to any such point. Make that story true, though it had never a verisimilitude since thirty odd years ago, and you shall make many souls happy and perhaps show you so many needs and opportunities for beneficent power that you cannot be allowed to grow old or withdraw. Was I not once promised a visit? This house entreats you earnestly and lovingly to come and ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... Pines," and the second sixteen days before the date of Sloetten's narrative. It is hardly possible that Neville could have been forgetful of his having made a Dutch vessel responsible for the discovery and history of Pine, and it is more than probable that he took this means of giving greater verisimilitude to the Isle of Pines, by bringing forward an independent discovery by a French vessel. However intended, the ruse did not contribute to such a purpose, as the combined parts did not enjoy as wide a circulation as the ...
— The Isle Of Pines (1668) - and, An Essay in Bibliography by W. C. Ford • Henry Neville
... England had come to terms; 6,000 of the Swiss infantry deserted to the French on the eve of the battle. Ladislaus of Hungary had died, leaving him guardian of his son, and he must go to arrange matters there. He had no money to pay his troops. The last has an appearance of verisimilitude. Money was at the bottom of all his difficulties, and drove him to the most ignominious shifts. He had served as a private in Henry's army for 100 crowns a day. His councillors robbed him; on one occasion he had not money to pay for his dinner;[216] on another he sent down to ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... sufficient reason, for rejecting his story; and yet the general truth of the descriptions, and a certain verisimilitude which marks it, might easily deceive a careless reader and perplex a critical one. These, however, are easily explained. Six years before Hennepin published his pretended discovery, his brother friar, Father ...
— France and England in North America, a Series of Historical Narratives, Part Third • Francis Parkman
... description of the land of Gilead. It seems that in reviving the past, the Hebrew poets were often vouchsafed remarkable insight into nature and local coloring, which ordinarily was not a characteristic of theirs. The same warmth and historical verisimilitude is found again in Asenath ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... influence in the stars, and a spark in her own bosom responsive to his devotion. For the tumultuous moment, however, when Adrian's name was on all men's tongues, and before all men's eyes, the ghost walked in triumphant verisimilitude of life. At all the meetings of Jaffery and Doria, he was there smiling beneath his laurels, whenever he was evoked; and he was evoked continuously. Either by law of irony or perhaps for intrinsic merit, the bridges ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... conceive how the thoughts were led from the former to the latter. The transitions, nevertheless, may have been all so easy and gradual, that, were they successfully detected by the fortunate ingenuity of a theorist, we should instantly recognize, not only the verisimilitude, but the truth of the conjecture: in the same way as we admit, with the confidence of intuitive conviction, the certainty of the well-known etymological process which connects the Latin preposition e or ex with the English substantive stranger, ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... their crimes in this world. The manner in which this retribution is accomplished Plato represents under the figures of mythology. Doubtless he felt that it was easier to improve than to invent, and that in religion especially the traditional form was required in order to give verisimilitude to the myth. The myth too is far more probable to that age than to ours, and may fairly be regarded as 'one guess among many' about the nature of the earth, which he cleverly supports by the indications of ...
— Phaedo - The Last Hours Of Socrates • Plato
... occasions, without trammel or hindrance, the practical exponents of the spirit of the age, of all the various historical illustrations of the period, which the Author's researches among conflicting but equally important authorities had enabled him to garner up, while, at the same time, the appearance of verisimilitude necessary to an historical romance might, he imagined, be successfully preserved by the occasional introduction of the living characters of the era, in those portions of the plot comprising events with which ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... been lying to myself for the past three weeks. With a smile on my lips I have looked myself in the eye and told the one falsehood over and over again. I have been the ass fondly to believe I told it with such detail and verisimilitude as to carry conviction to myself. I told it for the last time a ...
— John Henry Smith - A Humorous Romance of Outdoor Life • Frederick Upham Adams
... mixed manoeuvres slept in six inches of mud. As he threw his leg across his bicycle, Herbert, from the motor-car farther up the hill, fired two shots over his head. These, he explained to Ford, were intended to give "verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative." And the sighing of the bullets gave young Bradshaw exactly what he wanted—the assurance that he was not the victim of a practical joke. He threw his weight forward ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... an hundred shapes of fiction, may be found in our baronial halls—a pledge, to a certain extent, like the invulnerability of Achilles, of the good fortune of its possessor. It is wonderful that Shakespeare, who is so happy in the verisimilitude of his fairy lore, and so apt to embellish his plot with its mythology, should not have thought of causing the king-making Earl of Warwick to lose the horn of that prodigious cow—no doubt one of those guardian pledges bestowed upon his family—by way of presage to his fall. Deer's antlers, ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... presentment of wasps or hornets, and so obtaining immunity from the attacks of birds or animals. Many of these curiously mimetic insects are banded with yellow and black in the very image of their stinging originals, and have their tails sharpened, in terrorem, into a pretended sting, to give point and verisimilitude to the deceptive resemblance. More curious still, certain South American butterflies of a perfectly inoffensive and edible family mimic in every spot and line of colour sundry other butterflies of an utterly unrelated and fundamentally dissimilar type, but of so ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... and wished he had never doubted." Before publishing his story Mackenzie read it to Adam Smith, in order to be told whether anything should be omitted or altered as being out of keeping with Hume's character, and so completely was Smith carried away by the verisimilitude that he not only said he found not a syllable to object to, but added that he was surprised he had never heard the anecdote before. In his absence of mind he had forgotten for the moment that he had been asked to listen to the story as a work ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... the outer door, feeling the necessity for a somewhat careful conning of his tale to give it, as he said himself, a little artistic verisimilitude. Then, with his lesson—as he thought—well learned, and praying for aid of unknown gods, he went ...
— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor
... goes down and the salty fog creeps up from the sea, and the icy mist rolls down from the mountains to chill our bones; and when it has not rained for six months at a stretch, your own private swimming pool is a comfort. This to add verisimilitude to what everyone else in Lilac Valley is going to ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter
... and Henry Pearson, aged 28 (no fixed abode), and Martha Griffin, aged 54, of Maybury Tenements, were circulating among the crowd offering matches for sale. They have nothing to do with this story, but their names and addresses make for verisimilitude; or at least, I hope so. In case they do not, let me add that Mary Griffin wore a blue peignoir which had seen better days, and Herbert Pearson's matches struck everywhere except on ...
— The War of the Wenuses • C. L. Graves and E. V. Lucas
... island lying off the mouth of the Oroonoque (Orinoco). The latter locality was adopted by Defoe. But it is not the fact or the adventures which give power to Robinson Crusoe. It is the manner of treating what might occur to any fancy, even the dullest. The charm consists in the simplicity and the verisimilitude of the narrative, the rare adaptation of the common man to his circumstances, his projects and failures, the birth of religion in his soul, his conflicting hopes and fears, his occasional despair. We see in him a brother, and a suffering one. We live his life on the island; we share his terrible ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... were first discovered and worked out for the short-story in the medium of poetry.[8] The ballad and narrative poem must be, by reason of their highly artificial form, comparatively short, possessing totality, immediateness, compression, verisimilitude, and finality. The old ballad which commemorates the battle of Otterbourne, fought on August 10, 1388, is a fine example of the short-story method. Its opening stanza speaks the last ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... spend upon Browning, she endeavored to get his idea of that poet. Her famous theory as to her ability to place any one satisfactorily in the scale of culture according to his degree of appreciation of "Rabbi ben Ezra" was unfortunately known to her lodger before she could with any verisimilitude produce the book, and he was wary of committing himself. The exquisite effrontery with which she finally brought out her gray-green volume was only equalled by the forbearing courtesy with which he welcomed both it and her. Nor did he offer any other comment on her opening the ...
— A Philanthropist • Josephine Daskam
... in verisimilitude,' Henry Wilmers added slyly; and Diana rejoined: 'You recognize a verisimilitude of the mirror when it is in advance of reality. Flatter the sketch, Miss Paynham, for a likeness to be seen. Probably there are still Old Conservatives who would prefer ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... us to do more than touch lightly upon the many excellences of these books. We have given extracts enough to enable our readers to see for themselves the severe elegance of style, the compactness and force of the narrative, the verisimilitude of the characters, the unity of plan, and the cogency of the reasoning. We trust they will also perceive the great moral effect that cannot fail to be produced. Such books are specially adapted to meet a daily increasing want. Our American youth are too apt to value ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... learn, in Echard's view, was "regularity," that is, the discipline imposed upon a dramatist by observing the Unities, and obeying the other "rules of the drama" (such as the liaisons), in pursuit of verisimilitude and tautness of structure. Echard's main hope was that his translation and notes would correct his contemporaries' habit of ignoring the Roman dramatists' "essential Beauties," and "contenting themselves with considering ...
— Prefaces to Terence's Comedies and Plautus's Comedies (1694) • Lawrence Echard
... broken through by personal qualities. He adapts mythology like the Homeric poems to the wants of the state, making 'the Phoenician tale' the vehicle of his ideas. Every Greek state had a myth respecting its own origin; the Platonic republic may also have a tale of earthborn men. The gravity and verisimilitude with which the tale is told, and the analogy of Greek tradition, are a sufficient verification of the 'monstrous falsehood.' Ancient poetry had spoken of a gold and silver and brass and iron age succeeding one another, but Plato supposes these differences ...
— The Republic • Plato
... kings reigning then; the behavior of the servants of Pharaoh is perfectly in keeping with the popular ideas and practices as the monuments reveal them. The story of Joseph has been confirmed, as to its essential accuracy, as to the verisimilitude of its pictures of Egyptian life, by every recent discovery. Georg Ebers declares that "this narrative contains nothing which does not accurately correspond to a court of Pharaoh in the best times of the Kingdom." Many features of this narrative which a rash skepticism ...
— Who Wrote the Bible? • Washington Gladden
... shall doubtless find this factor is never entirely absent, while if we were to apply the same pertinacity and subtlety that Jung in his "Wandlungen" has brought to bear in working over the treacherous material of mythology, we might prove with no less verisimilitude than he has shown the primacy of the libido that in the beginning was anger, and that not Anaxagoras' love or the strife of Heraclitus was the fons et origo of all things, that the Ichtrieb is basal, ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... somewhat at the hint; which seemed to have an ugly verisimilitude in it: but still, philosophy he must learn, and bread he must eat; so ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley |
