"Craftsmanship" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... said Dick; "you have only been three hours and a half together; and it isn't to be hoped that the history of two centuries could be told in three hours and a half: let alone that, for all I know, you may have been wandering into the realms of geography and craftsmanship." ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... contemplating those airy abstractions and lofty visions of which alone he greatly cared to sing, to the neglect and detriment of the merely external and formal element of his song. Shelley recked little of the jots and tittles of literary craftsmanship; he committed many a small sin against the rules of grammar, and certainly paid but a halting attention to the nice distinctions of punctuation. Thus in the early editions a comma occasionally plays the part of a semicolon; ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... the stalwart youth and his father swung the ax and their cunning craftsmanship impressed the English woman and her daughter and were soon to be the topic of many a London tea party. Mrs. Hare spoke of it as she was ...
— In the Days of Poor Richard • Irving Bacheller
... now most generally known represents the much later period of the "Keltic" sonata—a fact which will, however, be sufficiently evident to anyone who studies the two versions carefully enough to perceive the difference between more or less experimental craftsmanship and ripe and heedful artistry. The observer will notice in these pieces, incidentally, the abandonment of the traditional Italian terms of expression and the substitution of English words and phrases, which are used freely and with adroitness to indicate every shade of the composer's meaning. ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... white cloud of that very bright star which shines on the edge of night and morning. All things were transfigured in her light. Before her the grass grew greener and more glittering and rare flowers started in her way. A silver basket of most delicate craftsmanship, the work of some cunning cerd, was on her right arm. It shone clear and sparkling against her mantle which was exceedingly lustrous, many times folded, darkly crimson, and of substance unknown. She towered above her aged companion, straight ...
— The Coming of Cuculain • Standish O'Grady
... show a complete absence of uniformity, some being carved with figures, and others with leaves or intricate line ornament. To obtain an adequate impression of all the fantastic imagination expressed in these capitals, and the craftsmanship brought to bear upon the carving, it is necessary to climb to the triforium galleries. The aisle windows are narrow and placed high in the wall. The interest of the exterior is centred upon the bas-relief ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... slumbering by her lover's side with the sun on it. "And Mark rewed therefore." The story, especially in its completion with the "Iseult of Brittany" part and the death of Tristram, gives scope for every possible faculty and craftsmanship of the most analytic as of the most picturesque novelist of modern times. There is nothing in the least like it in ancient literature; and to get a single writer who would do it justice in modern times we should have to take the best notes of Charles Kingsley, and Mr. Blackmore, and Mr. Meredith, ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... authorities of the State has undoubtedly given a peculiar prestige to the profession of letters in France. It has emphasized that tendency to take the art of writing seriously—to regard it as a fit object for the most conscientious craftsmanship and deliberate care—which is so characteristic of French writers. The amateur is very rare in French literature—as rare as he is common in our own. How many of the greatest English writers have denied that they were men of letters!—Scott, Byron, Gray, ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... the unravelling of a piece of fine and ancient needlework—and so discovering the secrets of its make and craftsmanship. A few loose ends were first followed up; then gradually the whole tissue has been involved, till at last the nature and quality of each thread, the purpose and the skill of each stitch, are becoming plain, and what was ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... same way as those in the optic axis, so that the apertures of glasses may be made of any size desired without impairing distinctness of vision!" He wrinkled his brow and fell to making geometrical diagrams on the envelope, but neither his theoretical mathematics nor his practical craftsmanship could grapple with so obscure a request, and he forgot to eat while he pondered. He consulted his own treatise on the Rainbow, but to no avail. At length in despair he took up the last letter, to find a greater surprise awaiting ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... laugh Leapt he from careless sleep: right well he knew The Immortal One celestial. Now his heart Could hold no thought beside; his mind was fixed Upon the wondrous work, and through his soul Marched marshalled each device of craftsmanship. ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... Ebers's early life was worth the telling, and he has told it himself, as no one else could tell it, with all the consummate skill of his perfected craftsmanship, with all the reverent love of an admiring son, and with all the happy exuberance of a careless youth remembered in all its brightness in the years of his maturity. Finally, the book teaches a beautiful lesson of fortitude in adversity, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... a cross, by which the Milanese of to-day express their triumph in liberation from Teutonic rule, that the "Baldacchino" of all mediaeval religious ceremony owed its origin to the taste of the milliners of Milan, as the safety of the best knights in European battle rested on the faithful craftsmanship of ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... training as Tchaikowsky and Rimsky-Korsakoff. He preserved his originality intact, but at a heavy cost. The weakness of his technique has been exaggerated by those who put down all his peculiarities to ignorance; but in some respects—particularly as regards orchestration—his craftsmanship was certainly unequal to the demands of his inspiration, for his aims were very lofty. Had this been otherwise, Moussorgsky's name would have been more closely linked with those of Berlioz and ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... troubled our precocious Elizabeth but little as yet. The girl grew rapidly in craftsmanship and in personal beauty. Indeed, she developed towards womanhood as early and as swiftly as in skill of artistry, being remarkable for her prettiness, her freshness and delicacy of colouring, and her elegance of figure—early displaying the airy wit that, with these abundant gifts of her fairy godmother, ...
— Vigee Le Brun • Haldane MacFall
... in modern times was the choir screen at Lichfield, designed and carried out by the same artists as the Hereford screen; though the latter and subsequent production transcends that of Lichfield, both in craftsmanship ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Hereford, A Description - Of Its Fabric And A Brief History Of The Episcopal See • A. Hugh Fisher
... as a work of art, is "The Fall of the House of Usher," which is as nearly perfect in its craftsmanship as human work may be. It is a romance of death with a setting of profound gloom, and is wrought out as a highly imaginative study in fear—a symphony in which every touch blends into a perfect unity of effect. "Ligeia," perhaps standing next, incorporating "The Conqueror Worm" as its ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... different from M. France's as prunes from prisms, and yet, being the work of equally great artists, they would, doubtless, have struck us as equally true. Is not, then, the positive finality of "Le Lys Rouge," though expressed in terms of a different craftsmanship, the same, in essence, as the negative finality of the "Bergeret" volumes? Are not both, in fact, merely flower of author true to himself? So long as the scent, colour, form of that flower is strong and fine enough to affect ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... works of craftsmanship were once beautiful, unwittingly or not, they are now divided into two kinds, works of art and non-works of art: now nothing made by man's hand can be indifferent: it must be either beautiful and elevating, or ugly and degrading; and those things that are without ...
— Hopes and Fears for Art • William Morris
... (Eton, Christ Church, and Christian service) described how an English sergeant stood round the traverse of a German trench, in a night raid, and as the Germans came his way, thinking to escape, he cleft one skull after another with a steel-studded bludgeon—a weapon which he had made with loving craftsmanship on the model of Blunderbore's club in the pictures ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... no question of mere executive skill and simple craftsmanship in Luis de Leon's poems. He is, indeed, always sound and competent in these respects; but artistry is not his supreme virtue as a poet. He is ever prone to be a little rugged in his manner, and this ruggedness has proved something of a trap to the unwary. Luis de Leon has no real ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
... of the new realists to win general recognition was A. N. Tolstoy, who speedily caught and vulgarised Remizov's knack of creating grotesque "provincial" characters. He has an easy way of writing, which is miles apart from Remizov's perfect craftsmanship, a love for mere filth, characteristic of his time and audience, and water enough to make his writings palatable to the average reader. So he early became the most popular of the literary novelists of the ...
— Tales of the Wilderness • Boris Pilniak
... production. We have until recently greatly neglected the human factor that is so large an element in our very productivity. The development of vast repetition in the process of industry has deadened the sense of craftsmanship, and the great extension of industry has divorced the employer and his employee from that contact that carried responsibility for the human problem. This neglect of the human factor has accumulated much of ...
— Herbert Hoover - The Man and His Work • Vernon Kellogg
... an inherent antagonism between the impulse for freedom and spontaneity which is characteristic of genius, and a conventional, hard-and-fast rule or method of securing certain technical results; but there is no antagonism between the boldest originality and the most complete mastery of craftsmanship. There is, rather, a deep and vital relationship between the two. For every art is a language, and to secure power and beauty and adequacy of expression a man must command all the secrets and resources ...
— Essays On Work And Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... Richard Washburn Child (E.P. Dutton & Company). I do not regard this as more than a piece of extremely competent craftsmanship, and its interest to the man of letters is largely technical, but it contains one excellent story full of dramatic suspense and a certain literary honesty. I think "Identified" might be commended to a ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... "All one's life is music if one touched the notes rightly and in tune." A very happy thought and true. But finding the right note is infinitely more difficult than the striking in tune. Ideas, to be sure, you must seek. But orderly thought, patience and fine craftsmanship in carrying out your idea frequently count for more than the originality or brilliance of the idea itself. Owing to the restlessness of the world situation—wars and rumors of wars, strikes and overtendency towards jazz and slang—there is already, especially in the work of youngsters, ...
— Pictorial Photography in America 1922 • Pictorial Photographers of America
... said gallantly to the banged door: "Well, there is my wurrk. I will forget my petty pairsonal troubles in my wurrk, just as men do!" And she typed away, squeezing out such drops of pride of craftsmanship as can be found in that mechanical exercise, making no mistakes, and ending the lines so that they built up a well-proportioned page, so intently that she had almost finished before she noticed that it was funny stuff about a divorce such ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... of elaborate iron scrollwork, craftsmanship clever enough in its way, but of an ornate kind more in keeping with the orange trees of the South than ...
— Bat Wing • Sax Rohmer
... School of short story writers. His style possesses those qualities necessary for telling a short tale,—directness, force, suggestiveness. Rarely has any writer so mastered the technique, the craftsmanship of this particular literary form. He has the gift of force and dramatic power, rather than of beauty ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... forcibly the barrenness of what was best in that of man: nor is it to be wondered at, that, seeing her perfect and exquisite creations poured forth in a profusion which conception could not grasp nor calculation sum, he should think that it ill became him to be niggardly of his own rude craftsmanship; and where he saw throughout the universe a faultless beauty lavished on measureless spaces of broidered field and blooming mountain, to grudge his poor and imperfect labour to the few stones that he had raised one upon another, for habitation or memorial. The years of his ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... the conceptions and the craftsmanship of those thirteenth century glass-workers, their emphatic language, necessary at such great heights, the way in which they had made the pictures legible from a distance by introducing a single figure ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... as I am in the finer shades of literary craftsmanship, there is great uncertainty in my mind whether it is good or bad "art" to anticipate your next chapter by foreshadowing its contents; but whether good or bad art, the remembrance of my miseries on the eventful occasion I wish to describe was so strong upon me as I wrote the last ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... money-changers in the great streets are the fine Vienna shops exposing elegant craftsmanship of many kinds. Here you can buy rich glass, leather-work, enamelled silver, worked ivory, lace, beautiful bindings, fans, house-ornaments of every conceivable kind in ultra-perfect taste. All that is for sale suggests a luxurious way of life—aristocratic and cultured existence, and certainly ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... between Joseph and Tom, how many of us might have committed ourselves to some such sentence as this: "In Amelia we see the youthful exuberances of Joseph Andrews corrected by a higher art; the adjustment of plot and character arranged with a fuller craftsmanship; the genius which was to find its fullest exemplification in Tom Jones already displaying maturity"? And do we not too often forget that a very short time—in fact, barely three years—passed between the appearance of Tom Jones and the appearance of Amelia? that ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding
... and wine needing far less labour than grain-crops and offering longer leisure (which for Greeks meant the chance to start doing something else), the contemporary revelation of mineral wealth, and of many forms of craftsmanship, again largely (though not wholly) introduced from oversea, created another source of wealth, no less 'limitless' and dangerously unmanageable, in a world where wealth of any kind was literally 'so little good'. And this industrial ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... and cracked his neighbours' heads with the precision and fineness of touch which only manual craftsmanship can give. The housewives who flatly refused to cook the hot dinner knew how much or how little, cold meat there was in the house. The sailor who defied discipline by mutinying at the Nore did not defy discipline in the sense of falling off the rigging or letting the water ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... is a famous gatherer of clews, losing sight of no significant trifle, as the scout saying is, and a star scout into the bargain, if we are to believe Pee-wee Harris. I am not so sure that the ten merit badges of bugling, craftsmanship, architecture, aviation, carpentry, camping, forestry, music, pioneering and signaling should be awarded this sprightly scout (for Pee-wee is as liberal with awards as he is with gum-drops). But there can be no question as ...
— Tom Slade on Mystery Trail • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... always done good work, had found pleasure in doing it and had been well paid for it. But of late years the number of his customers had dwindled considerably, for there had arisen a new generation which cared nothing about craftsmanship or art, and everything for cheapness and profit. From this man and by laborious study and practice in his spare time, aided by a certain measure of natural ability, the boy acquired a knowledge of decorative painting and design, and graining ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... in early pictures like the Wounded Heron, grows to be often labored and muddy, and his drawing uncertain. That he could draw and paint with the greatest, he every now and then gave proof; but the surety of beautiful craftsmanship deserts those who have not always their eye fixed on an object of vision; and Watts was not, like Blake or Shelley, one of the proud seers whose visions are of "forms more real than living man." He seemed to feel what his effects should be rather than to see them, or else his vision was fleeting ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... all-important homo additus naturae part of Boswell's work: the setting his subject in the light of his own imaginative and emotional insight. But there was more than that. Boswell had not only the temperament of the artist: he had an artist's craftsmanship. The Life makes four large octavo volumes, each of some 500 pages, in the great Oxford Edition by Birkbeck Hill: and the Tour to the Hebrides makes a fifth. That is a big book: yet so perfect an artist is Boswell, ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... didn't seem at all the thing for him; he had very little ability in mathematics, and his bent had always been to liberal studies. But nothing could shake his idea. He had got it into his head that only some such work as engineering—something of a practical kind, that called for strength and craftsmanship—was worthy of a man with his opinions. He would rank with the classes that keep the world going with their sturdy toil: that was how he spoke. And, after a great fight, he had his way. He left Eton to ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing
... insight and sympathy displayed in the analysis of motive are remarkable. The author has a real gift for portraiture. In particular he touches in his minor folk with extraordinarily deft defining lines. Perhaps in general there is a little hesitancy in craftsmanship, a slight quavering between the fashionable modern realism and an older romanticism. But the seriousness of his artistic intention, the solidity of his work (which is by no means to say stodginess, quite the contrary) will commend Mr. AUMONIER to all who care to listen to people who have ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Oct. 10, 1917 • Various
... standpoint (the point of view of ornamental design); and it will be useful to endeavour to trace the principles governing the selection of form and use of line as influenced by some of the different methods and conditions of craftsmanship, and as adapted ...
— Line and Form (1900) • Walter Crane
... that gulf of years, Fronting again those long laid fears. Confess? Why, yes, if I must, I must. Now good Sant' Andrea be my trust! But fill me first, from that crystal flask, Strong wine to strengthen me for my task. (That thing is a gem of craftsmanship: Just mark how its curvings ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... were there buyers, he would not sell them. Only a few, and these peculiarly intimate friends, might even see them, for he disliked to hear the undiscerning criticisms of those who did not understand. Not that he minded laughter at his craftsmanship—he admitted it with scorn—but that remarks about the personality of the tree itself could easily wound or anger him. He resented slighting observations concerning them, as though insults offered to personal friends who could not answer ...
— The Man Whom the Trees Loved • Algernon Blackwood
... for the necessary variation of type and costume in their models and for the difference between an Italian and a northern education, their methods are singularly alike. Raphael has greater elegance and feeling for style, Holbein a richer color sense and, above all, a finer craftsmanship, an unapproachable material perfection. They have the same quiet, intense observation, the same impeccable accuracy, the same preoccupation with the person before them and with nothing else—an individuality to be presented with all it contains, neither more nor ...
— Artist and Public - And Other Essays On Art Subjects • Kenyon Cox
... it," he said, fingering the stuff with the tenderness of an artist contemplating some precious work of delicate craftsmanship. ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... We hail with pleasure the deft literary craftsmanship of the book as a whole, and we welcome such a subtle and striking portrait of ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... extraordinary success was due to his marvelous energy. It was Frohman, and not the dramatist, who introduced the rain-storm scene at the close of the second act which made one of the biggest hits of the performance. Throughout the play there were many evidences of Frohman's skill and craftsmanship. ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... like masks of death; some were smeared with red, some barred with blue. Most, however, showed merely the high-boned, sphinx-like brown of their faces free from war-paint. The costumes of many were extremely beautiful, the wonderful beadwork on tunic and moccasins being a thing of amazing craftsmanship, though the elk-tooth decorations, though of great ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... The distinguishing excellence of craftsmanship in Rossetti's sonnets was early recognised; but the fertility of thought, and range of emotion compassed by this part of his work constitute an excellence far higher than any that belongs to perfection of form, rhythm, or metre. Mr. Palgrave has well said that a poet's story differs from ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... pathos of lyrical carelessness. There have been instances in literature of the music mastering the thought, but in the case under notice the proportions are justly ministered to. There is thought and witchery of measure. The ice of craftsmanship is mingled with the wine of passion."—NORMAN GALE, in The Literary World, March ...
— The Song of the Flag - A National Ode • Eric Mackay
... strength. In hardly any other instance known to me can we trace so clearly the influence of a suitable medium and form on the genius of the artist. There are some writers—Dryden is perhaps the greatest of them—to whom form and medium seem almost indifferent, their all-round craftsmanship being such that they can turn any kind and every style to their purpose. There are others, of whom I think our present author is the chief, who are never really at home but in one kind. In Fielding's case that kind was narrative of a peculiar sort, half-sentimental, ...
— Journal of A Voyage to Lisbon • Henry Fielding
... Greek craftsman to imitate the products of more advanced and finished art which he saw around him. Many of them are derived from Egyptian types; others show the influence of Mesopotamian art, or of the hybrid craftsmanship of Phoenicia. The borrowing or imitation of such foreign types may at first sight appear to show even less promise of artistic progress than variations on the old native images; but it is not in its origins, but in its development and perfection that the chief excellence of Greek ...
— Religion and Art in Ancient Greece • Ernest Arthur Gardner
... I never mind what dost say; but I won't be priest-ridden, nor taught how to behave myself by thee." Only if it is read as a satire on rigorist sermons can there be full appreciation of the cleverness of the "parable of small beer" which Mandeville, with obvious contentment with his craftsmanship, reproduces in the Letter to Dion (pp. 25-29) from The Fable of the Bees. Here the standard rigorist proposition that there is sin both in the lust and in the act of satisfying it is applied to drink, where the thirst ...
— A Letter to Dion • Bernard Mandeville
... I, for one, who was loud in my praise of the fine qualities of her great romance, The Divine Fire, confess to a sense of almost personal sorrow that such high gifts as hers, which still show no trace of decline in craftsmanship, should have suffered so much taint. I sincerely hope that the noble work she is now doing with the Red Cross at the front—where the best wishes of her many friends follow her—may make more clear the claim that ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 11, 1914 • Various
... of the untravelled; but the Christ at Emmaus revealed to him the heart of Rembrandt, and showed him, once and for all, to what heights a painter may attain when intense feeling is allied with superb craftsmanship. ...
— Rembrandt • Mortimer Menpes
... the craftsmanship of one of our most celebrated women- journalists! When such a person, writing over her own name in the columns of a renowned and powerful paper, may thus brazenly ignore the elementary principles of composition, it may be guessed what latitude of carelessness and error is allowed to obscurer ...
— Journalism for Women - A Practical Guide • E.A. Bennett
... volumes of poetry that Tennyson published between 1850 and his death would be impossible within the limits of these pages. In some cases he reverted to themes which he had treated before and he preserved for many years the same skill in craftsmanship. But in Maud, in The Idylls of the King, and in the historical dramas, unquestionably, ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... poet has wrought his stanzas with greater faithfulness to an exacting standard of craftsmanship than Mr. Aldrich, or has known better when to leave a line loosely cast, and when to reinforce it with correction or with a syllable that might seem, to an ear less true, redundant. This gives to his most carefully chiseled productions an air ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... work is not a disparagement of Wagner: one might as well, indeed, disparage Shakespeare, or Beethoven, or the sun and all the stars in heaven. The symphony tells us, as plainly as words could tell, two things. First, that as far as craftsmanship is concerned he fell between two stools: had his aim been lower, it would have been also less confused, and the result would have turned out better. That is, had he thought only of composing a well-constructed symphony, with skilful, easy-running counterpoint, he might have produced ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... was the first to recognize the short-story as having a form and an aim all its own. Moreover, he was willing to admit the public to his laboratory and to explain his process, for he discounted inspiration and emphasized craftsmanship. In "The Philosophy of Composition" he declares that every plot "must be elaborated to its denouement before anything is attempted with the pen. It is only with the denouement constantly in view that we can give a plot its indispensable air of consequence, or causation, by making the incidents ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... life. Offsetting dilettantism, the Museum of New Mexico and associated institutions and artists and other individuals have fostered Indian pottery, weaving, silversmithing, dancing, painting, and other arts and crafts. Superior craftsmanship can now depend upon a fairly reliable market; the taste of American buyers has ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... publishing his admirable collection of drawings of old furniture, Mr. Chancellor secures the gratitude of all admirers of the consummate craftsmanship of the past. His examples are selected from a variety of sources with fine discrimination, all having an expression and individuality of their own—qualities that are so conspicuously lacking in the furniture of our own day. It forms a very ...
— Art in Needlework - A Book about Embroidery • Lewis F. Day
... of creation demand that in so far as possible each man should carry through one entire operation. This is of course now, and always has been under any highly developed civilization, impossible in practice, except along certain lines of art and craftsmanship. The evils of the existing system can in a measure be done away with the moment production for use is the recognized law, for it is only in bulk-production that this intensive specialization can be made to pay. Bulk-production there will always be until, and if, the world is reorganized on ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... the reader of this novel may say, he certainly will be forced to admit that it is highly interesting. Mr. Raine is not only skillful in devising incidents which compel unwearied attention; he also has the rarer and finer craftsmanship which enables him to create characters that have a high degree ...
— The Happy Family • Bertha Muzzy Bower
... to look upon writing as an art, rather than a business? Oh, you silly little man, the touchstone of any artist is the skill with which he adapts his craftsmanship to his art's limitations. He will not attempt to paint a sound or to sculpture a colour, because he knows that painting and sculpture have their limitations, and he, quite consciously, recognizes this fact ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... social element equipped, organized, educated, conscious of itself and of distinctive aims, in the next hundred years? In the first place there is the spirit of trade unionism, the conservative contagion of the old craftsmanship. Trade Unions arose under the tradition of the old order, when in every business, employer and employed stood in marked antagonism, stood as a special instance of the universal relationship of gentle or intelligent, who supplied no labour, and simple, who supplied nothing else. The interest ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... that is great in modern books. Books are better made now than they ever were before—I mean in the way of literary craftsmanship. As far as form goes, there is no author living who would put together such a hodge-podge as Wilhelm Meister, or La Nouvelle Helose. But they all imitate each other; they are all mild and tame; there is no real power, ...
— The Journal of Arthur Stirling - "The Valley of the Shadow" • Upton Sinclair
... of Saragossa by the present of the tunic of St. Vincent, he induced the king to found the abbey and church of St. Vincent (St. Germain des Pres), to receive the relic and a great part of the spoil of Toledo, consisting of jewels, golden chalices, books and crucifixes of marvellous craftsmanship. In the same reign was begun on the site of the present sacristy of Notre Dame a great basilica, dedicated to St. Stephen, so magnificently decorated that it was compared to Solomon's Temple for the beauty and the delicacy of its art. The church of Ste. Marie ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... include two-dimensional and three-dimensional works of fine, graphic, and applied art, photographs, prints and art reproductions, maps, globes, charts, technical drawings, diagrams, and models. Such works shall include works of artistic craftsmanship insofar as their form but not their mechanical or utilitarian aspects are concerned; the design of a useful article, as defined in this section, shall be considered a pictorial, graphic, or sculptural work only if, and only to the extent that, such design incorporates pictorial, ...
— Copyright Law of the United States of America: - contained in Title 17 of the United States Code. • Library of Congress Copyright Office
... and an aesthete may speculate as to how far such objects offend, in expression of blank misery and horror, against the canons of what is held to be artistically desirable. The nearest approach to them in human craftsmanship, and as regards Auffassung, are perhaps some little Japanese wood-carvings whose creators, labouring consciously, likewise overstepped the boundaries of the grotesque and indulged in nightmarish effects of line similar to those which the old Peruvians, ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... Forest Lord, he whom we call the War-smith, he it was who beheld the Burg too much given to pleasure, and delighting in the softness of life; and he took order to harden our hearts, and to cause all freemen to learn the craft of war and battle, and let the women and thralls and aliens see to other craftsmanship and to chaffer; and even so is it done as he would; and ye shall find us hardy of heart enough, though belike not so joyous as might be. Yet at least we shall ...
— The Well at the World's End • William Morris
... felt the swift movement of the canoe. There was no perceptible tremor to its progress. The current and a perfect craftsmanship with the paddles were carrying it along at six or seven miles an hour. He heard the rippling of water that at times was almost like the tinkling of tiny bells, and more and more bell-like became that sound as he listened to it. It struck a certain note for him. And to that ...
— The Flaming Forest • James Oliver Curwood
... like George Minafer, and his final reconciliation with his own sweetheart and her father—the man whom ho has prevented his mother from marrying—leaves us cold. But if the characters are unpleasing the craftsmanship of The Magnificent Ambersons is of Mr. BOOTH TARKINGTON'S best, and his description "of the decline and fall of a locally supreme dynasty of plutocrats before the hosts of the Goths and Huns of spawning industrialism is almost a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156., March 5, 1919 • Various
... characteristics of his native Cote d'Or; that, however, may be simply a desire to frame the picture appropriately. Legrand might have hailed from the south, from Daudet's country; he is exuberant as he is astute. The chief thing is that he has abundant brains and in sheer craftsmanship fears few equals. Like Whistler, his principal preoccupation is to suppress all appearance of technical procedures. His method of work is said to be simplicity itself; obsessed by his very definite ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... certain inconsistency as between the first and last lines of this. I tried, with bent brows, to resolve the discord. But I did not take my failure as wholly incompatible with a meaning in Soames's mind. Might it not rather indicate the depth of his meaning? As for the craftsmanship, "rouged with rust" seemed to me a fine stroke, and "nor not" instead of "and" had a curious felicity. I wondered who the "young woman" was and what she had made of it all. I sadly suspect that Soames could not have made more of it than she. Yet even now, if one doesn't try to ...
— Enoch Soames - A Memory of the Eighteen-nineties • Max Beerbohm
... conception of the way life should be lived, in their discrimination of the beautiful, have still much to teach us. He knows, however much we may have outlived the hierarchy of obedience which constitutes mediaeval social and political life, we should do well to recover the humility in living, the craftsmanship in industry, and precision in thinking which constituted so conspicuous features of mediaeval civilization. He knows that progress is not altogether measured by flying machines and wireless telegraphy. He is aware that speed and quantity, the key values in ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... a certain new force about the story, a kind of master-craftsmanship and mental dominance that ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... therefore, were important enough to have any bearing at all upon the well-defined methods of cookery, we might go into detail analyzing ancient methods from that point of view. To call attention to the "economy," the stewardship, or craftsmanship, in ancient methods and to the truly remarkable intuition that guided the ancient cooks is more important. Without these qualities there can be no higher gastronomy. Without high gastronomy no high civilization is possible. The honest and experienced nutrition expert, though perhaps personally ...
— Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome • Apicius
... the more intelligent men, not only knew little about each other but less about the action of men in groups and the technique of industry in general. They could only apply universal suffrage, therefore, to the things they knew or knew partially: they knew personal and menial service, individual craftsmanship, agriculture and barter, taxes or the taking of private property for public ends and the rent of land. With these matters then they attempted to deal. Under the cry of "Freedom" they greatly relaxed the ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... death was a blow to English literature, James Elroy Flecker, was born in London, November 5, 1884. Possibly due to his low vitality, Flecker found little to interest him but a classical reaction against realism in verse, a delight in verbal craftsmanship, and a passion for technical perfection—especially the deliberate technique of the French Parnassians whom he worshipped. Flecker was opposed to any art that was emotional or that "taught" anything. "The poet's business," he ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... room, full of soft colours and the warm glow of highly polished wood. Walls, curtains, and carpet were all of powder-blue; an old rose fabric covered what seats there were; an apple-green coverlet filled up the symphony. That taper elegance which modern craftsmanship can give mahogany was most apparent, lending the usual suite unusual comeliness. A great pier-glass flashed in a corner, upon a little table beside a deep chair a bowl of roses sweetened the London air, above the well-found ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... spirit would include the names not only of many great men of letters, but of many great men of affairs, whose successes are to be counted among examples of genuine inspiration. Translation at its best is not mere craftsmanship, ...
— Horace and His Influence • Grant Showerman
... bad form. There is a cliche in nearly every line of the Athenaeum's discriminating notice. "Mr. Conrad is not the kind of author whose work one is content to meet only in fugitive form," etc. "Those who appreciate fine craftsmanship in fiction," etc. But there is worse than cliches. For example: "It is too studiously chiselled and hammered-out for that." (God alone knows for what.) Imagine the effect of studiously chiselling a work and then hammering it out! Useful process! I wonder ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... in the painting which evade analysis by a mere amateur, and yet involve supreme craftsmanship—such things as precision of line, perfect mastery of the palette, clever brush-work, management of shadow, perspective, proportion, and relation of the parts to the whole; but I leave all that to the professionals whose business it is to appreciate it; what ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... actual examples) into Germany and being admired there. Our half or wholly imitative products are turned out as cheaply as possible, in substitute-materials, and are made as well or as ill as the relics of our craftsmanship permit, or as our existing machinery for the purpose is capable of. Cheapness and ease of manufacture are the principles aimed at, for even with narrow means no one will want to do without certain things; fashions still prevail, and will have to be satisfied ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau
... watched this oncoming vessel, I took up Don Federigo's sword, and, struck by its beauty, began to examine it as I had not done hitherto. And indeed a very noble weapon it was, the hilt of rare craftsmanship, being silver cunningly inlaid with gold, long and narrow in the blade, whereon, graven in old Spanish, I saw ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol
... Oppenheim's novels may always count on a story of absorbing interest, turning on a complicated plot, worked out with dexterous craftsmanship.—Literary Digest, New York. ...
— The Lighted Way • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... paint, in a word, every attempt at artistic representation by the hand of man after a brief lapse of time loses its truth and becomes motionless and impassive like the face of a corpse. So far superior to all pictorial art in respect of truthful representation is the craftsmanship of the smooth mirror and ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... third place, we would have this series put artistic craftsmanship before people as furnishing reasonable occupation for those who would gain a livelihood. Although within the bounds of academic art, the competition, of its kind, is so acute that only a very few per cent. can fairly hope to succeed as painters and sculptors; yet, as artistic ...
— Bookbinding, and the Care of Books - A handbook for Amateurs, Bookbinders & Librarians • Douglas Cockerell
... disengaged himself, not because he did not believe in his principles, but because he saw that the difficulties were insuperable. He came back to the old life; he flung himself with renewed ardour into art and craftsmanship. He began to write the beautiful and romantic prose tales, with their enchanting titles, which are, perhaps, his most characteristic work. He learnt by slow degrees that a clean sweep of an evil system cannot be made in a period or a lifetime by an ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... writer of best sellers, reflected that Life does not divide its chapters by the measure of the calendar, nor does it observe that rule of literary craftsmanship which seeks to distribute the drama of a narrative into a structural unity of form with ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... his wife, he resolved to submit the nugget to some man renowned for probity and wisdom. He brought it, therefore, to Elias, who believed it to be gold, but, loth to trust his judgment, advised Mansur to show it to a certain jeweller of high repute, as well for virtue as for craftsmanship; and Mansur did so. The jeweller asked Mansur to leave it with him for a day or two, that he might apply certain tests, and when asked for a receipt, appeared so hurt, called so loudly upon Allah and the neighbourhood ...
— The Valley of the Kings • Marmaduke Pickthall
... the hall as he spake, and came back bearing with them a throne fashioned most goodly of ivory, parcel-gilt and begemmed, and adorned with marvellous craftsmanship: and they set it down amidst of the hall-floor and went aback to their places, while the Erne sat and smiled kindly on the folk and on Hallblithe. Then arose the sound of fiddles and the lesser harp, and the doors of the screen were opened, and there flowed into the hall a company of fair damsels ...
— The Story of the Glittering Plain - or the Land of Living Men • William Morris
... type of the practically executive craftsman, and the inventor of expedients in craftsmanship, (as distinguished from Prometheus, the institutor of moral order in art). Daedalus ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... an unevenness of texture and arrangement, good ideas and salient thoughts floundering in a vapid and inferior substance; it is often not appreciated by amateurs how much depends on craftsmanship. I have known brilliant and accomplished conversationalists who have been persuaded, perhaps in mature life, to attempt a more definite piece of writing; when it is pathetic to see suggestive and even brilliant thought hopelessly ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... for authority has served French art well. It is the source of that traditionalism, that tradition of high seriousness, craftsmanship, and good taste, which, even in the darkest days of early Victorianism, saved French painting from falling into the pit of stale vulgarity out of which English has hardly yet crawled. French revolutions in painting are fruitful, English barren—let the Pre-Raphaelite ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... related parts—the balance of shaft and handle or the geometry of the twist—makes the auger a decorative object. This is not to say that the ancient woodworker's tool is not a document attesting a society's technical proficiency—ingenuity, craftsmanship, and productivity. It is only to suggest again that it is something more; a survival of the past whose intrinsic qualities permit it to stand alone as a bridge between the craftsman's hand and his ...
— Woodworking Tools 1600-1900 • Peter C. Welsh |
