"Idealization" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... which laid waste my infancy, and the devotion which nature had made a necessity of my being, were profoundly interfused: the sorrow gave reality and depth to the devotion; the devotion gave grandeur and idealization to the sorrow. Neither was my love for chanting altogether without knowledge. A son of my reverend guardian, much older than myself, who possessed a singular faculty of producing a sort of organ accompaniment with one half of his mouth, whilst he sang with the other half, had given me ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... to idealization. He cannot accept as final the phenomena of the sensible world, but looks behind that world into another which rules the sensible one. From this tendency of the human mind, systems of mythology and scientific theories have equally sprung. By the former the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 365, December 30, 1882 • Various
... much of a farmer, and as extensive a farmer, as himself, her probable whereabouts was out-of-doors at this time of the year. This, and the other oversights Boldwood was guilty of, were natural to the mood, and still more natural to the circumstances. The great aids to idealization in love were present here: occasional observation of her from a distance, and the absence of social intercourse with her—visual familiarity, oral strangeness. The smaller human elements were kept out of sight; the pettinesses that enter so largely into all earthly ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... young girl was attracted to the Lowell mills through her own idealization of the life there, as it had been reported to her. Margaret Foley, who afterwards became distinguished as a sculptor, was one of these. She did not remain many months at her occupation,—which I think ...
— A New England Girlhood • Lucy Larcom
... better man than he was, as they afterwards assigned to Washington an even better cause than he had. Thackeray smiled at Miss Jane Porter's picture of Wallace, going into war weeping with a cambric pocket-handkerchief; but her attitude was more English and not less accurate. For her idealization was, if anything, nearer the truth than Thackeray's own notion of a mediaevalism of hypocritical hogs-in-armour. Edward, who figures as a tyrant, could weep with compassion; and it is probable enough that Wallace wept, with or without a pocket-handkerchief. ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... the highest attainment in the idealization of child beauty, those of Rubens, on the other hand, are the most human and lovable ever conceived in art. Their lovely baby forms cluster in countless numbers about the glorified Virgin, joyously bearing palm and wreath in token ...
— Child-life in Art • Estelle M. Hurll
... beautiful. The more blemishes he can see in men, the more excellence he sees in man, and the more bitterly he laments the fate of each particular soul, the more reverence and love he has for the soul in its ideal essence. Criticism and idealization involve each other. The habit of looking for beauty in everything makes us notice the shortcomings of things; our sense, hungry for complete satisfaction, misses the perfection it demands. But this demand for perfection becomes at the same time the nucleus of our observation; ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... to have been a reciprocal idealization going on in the far-off land of Burgundy. My letters to Hymbercourt, in which you may be sure Max's strength and virtues lost nothing, fell into the hands of Madame d'Hymbercourt, and thus came under the eyes of Princess Mary. That fair ...
— Yolanda: Maid of Burgundy • Charles Major
... is too well known to need illustration. Speaking generally, we may say that in healthy minds the play of these impulses of feeling results in a softening of the harsher features of the past, and in an idealization of its happier and brighter aspects. As Wordsworth says, we may assign to Memory ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... seen Sylvia nor so much as heard her name spoken. When he sang of love and the dawn while striding homeward through the park, he had seen her, yet did not know her, and had no hope of ever seeing her again. When he worked at her picture, he had labored at the idealization of a dream which bade fair to remain a dream. And now by some magic jugglery of ordinary events, each well within the bounds of credibility, yet so overwhelmingly incredible in their sequence and completeness, he was Sylvia's lover, ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... what is at the back of men's brains as well as anybody, writes: "We have grown literally afraid to be poor. We despise any one who elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life. We have lost the power of even imagining what the ancient idealization of poverty could have meant: the liberation from material attachments, the unbribed soul, the manlier indifference, the paying our way by what we are or do, and not by what we have, the right to fling away our life at any moment irresponsibly ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... only Law, Law stretching on into infinitude until the mind shudders at it. Hawthorne knew his Protestant New England through and through. The Scarlet Letter is the most striking example in our national literature of that idealization of physical purity, but hundreds of other romances and poems, less morbid if less great, assert in unmistakable terms the same moral conviction, the ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... than natural, beautiful and more than beautiful, singular and endowed with an enthusiastic life like the soul of the author. The phantasmagoria have been distilled from nature. All the materials with which his memory is crowded become classified, orderly, harmonious, and undergo that compulsory idealization which is the result of a childlike perception, that is to say, of a perception that is keen, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... Father Abraham Favor to Me Would Be Injustice to the Public Fees We Earn at a Distance Gals, Tied as Tight in the Middle General Grant Good, Bright, Passable Lie His Parts Seemed to Be Raised by the Demands of Great Station House Divided Against Itself Cannot Stand I Can't Spare That Man, He Fights! Idealization Which So Easily Runs into the Commonplace If Slavery Is Not Wrong, Nothing Is Wrong Ignored the Insult, but Firmly Established His Superiority Inability to Say "No" as a Positive Weakness Leave Us to Take Care of Ourselves Let Us to the End Dare to Do Our Duty as We Understand It Lincoln-Shields ...
— Widger's Quotations from Abraham Lincoln's Writings • David Widger
... the generative principle has been universal; that it is still practiced by primitive peoples, and that vestiges of it lingered among certain civilized peoples until, comparatively speaking, a recent time. In order to show what a height of idealization and abstraction it had reached at a time when Greece stood at the head of the civilized world, I will close this part of my essay with the following quotation from Knight's strong, erudite, and exhaustive treatise: "The ancient theologists ... finding that they could conceive no idea of infinity, ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... you find in the infancy of man you also find in the infancy of nations. It is the same. In both cases there is the same necessity of idealization, the same tendency to personify the unknown. And it may be said that between Punch and Jupiter, Mother Hubbard and Venus, there is only ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... is very grand, very Webster stern and awful, because he is in the act of meeting a great crisis, and yet with the warmth of a great heart glowing through it. Happy is Webster to have been so truly and adequately sculptured; happy the sculptor in such a subject, which no idealization of a demigod could have supplied him with. Perhaps the statue at the bottom of the sea will be cast up in some future age, when the present race of man is forgotten, and if so, that far posterity will look up to us as a grander race than we find ourselves to be. Neither ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... feelings of disciples standing by—the same feeling which led those who visited St. Simon Stylites on his heap of ordure, and other hermits unwashed and living in filth, to dwell upon the delicious "odour of sanctity" pervading the air. In point, perhaps, is Louis Veuillot's idealization of the "parfum de Rome," in face of the fact, to which the present writer and thousands of others can testify, that under Papal rule Rome was materially one of the most filthy cities in Christendom. For ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... think that of late years, through various reasons which I need not enter, but among which the above-mentioned laxity of opinion in society and the frequent idealization of the subject in current literature and painting may be mentioned, conjugal infidelity has become more common and is considered less reprehensible. I am of opinion that this is not right. The origin of the evil is ...
— The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... work two great achievements were accomplished by Cooper. The first was the idealization of the white hunter whom he had described in "The Pioneers." No one can read the two novels in succession without seeing at once how much Leather-Stocking has gained in dignity. In thought and feeling and habits he is essentially the same; ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... career and was worthy of much longer life, but Babcock had too high an idealization of what San Francisco wanted. He emulated the Parisian restaurants in oddities, one of his rooms being patterned after the famous Cabaret de la Mort, and one dined off a coffin and was lighted by green colored ...
— Bohemian San Francisco - Its restaurants and their most famous recipes—The elegant art of dining. • Clarence E. Edwords
... the modern fondness for adventure and sentimental love, and some classical sanction to the abundant romantic material that was knocking at the doors of comedy. If by romantic we mean what is strange and removed from ordinary experience and what has the attractions of wonder, thrill, and idealization, then for the Elizabethan the world of romance was a wide one. It included the medieval stories of knights and their gests, and also the fresher tales of classical mythology; the Americas and Indies of contemporary ...
— The Facts About Shakespeare • William Allan Nielson
... is something of idealization in all these reminiscences, and of that exaggeration which belongs to the laudator temporis acti. But Charles Emerson was idolized in his own time by many in college and out of college. George Stillman Hillard ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... two good characters, and then, at the fatal bidding of the booksellers, go on manufacturing his yearly volume, and giving us the same character or the same few characters over and over again, we may be sure that he is without the power of idealization. He has merely photographed what he has seen, and his stock is exhausted. It is wonderful what a quantity of the mere lees of such writers, more and more watered down, the libraries go on complacently circulating, and the reviews go on complacently reviewing. Of course, this ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... killeth, but the spirit giveth life. This of course raises issue with the naturalistic school—a school which believes in rendering Nature as she is, without rearrangement, addition, substraction or idealization; a school presuming the artist to be a copyist, and founded not on the principles of design, ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... legend of the symphony is transformed and transfigured in a new, serener mood, and is brought to a full melodic bloom. Indeed, here is the idealization of the original motto. Andante maestoso it begins in the tonic major. When the theme ceases, the brass blow the rhythm on a monotone, midst ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... composition or antique lines of beauty, saw before them with all the varied sentiments of admiration, terror, or dismay, the soldier mounting the breach at the cannon's mouth, or the general, covered with orders, cut short in the midst of his fame. Little of the romantic, little of poetical idealization, little of far-fetched style was there on these canvasses, but the crowd recognized the soldier as they saw him daily, in the midst of the scenes which the bulletin of the army or the page of the historian had just narrated ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... idle and impecunious, justifying by his snatches of song, and flowery rhetoric, his high position as "perpetual grand-master" among the "Glorious Apollers,"—all these, making allowance perhaps for some idealization, were personages of Dickens' own time. But in "Barnaby Rudge," Dickens threw himself back into the last century. The book is a historical novel, one of the two which he wrote, the other being the "Tale of Two Cities," and its scenes are many of them laid among ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... dissociated from observation and faith. But the sort of way in which some would improve the world now, if they might, is not so very far in advance of this would-be glorification of Nature. The barest heath and sky have lovelinesses infinitely beyond the most gorgeous of such phantasmagoric idealization of her beauties; and the most wretched condition of humanity struggling for existence contains elements of worth and future development inappreciable by the philanthropy that would elevate them by ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... face of the materialist influences that have come into their life with the introduction of Western methods of thought and of business? The most careless traveler has it thrust upon him that here is a people artistic to the tips of their fingers, and with childlike power of idealization, although they have been forced to engage in the fierce warfare of modern business competition. What is it that has kept them unspotted from the world of business? What secret source of spiritual force have they been able to draw ...
— The Critic in the Orient • George Hamlin Fitch
... a pattern? How are they distinguished from one another? 2. Which admits of freedom or idealization? ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... This idealization of a language of the past, and of that past itself, produced an enormous effect upon all minds, and it prepared the soil for an abundant harvest. The success won by "The Love of Zion" encouraged Mapu to publish his other historical romance, the action ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... argument. The appeal is usually to what has been finest in the past, and to all that is bad and base in the present. At once the unsoundest and the most attractive argument is to be found in the deliberate idealization of particular ages, the thirteenth century in England, for example, or the age of the Antonines. The former is presented with the brightness of a missal, the latter with all the dignity of a Roman inscription. One is asked to compare these ages so delightfully conceived, ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... of the constitution and ritual will be governed by the age which they seek to serve. Boys from ten to fourteen years may not rise to the splendid formality of the Knights of King Arthur. Possibly the idealization of the best Indian traits will serve them better. From fourteen to seventeen or eighteen the knighthood ideals are most satisfying, while one may question their utility after that when the youth turns to reflection and debate and is suited by civic and governmental forms of organization. It must ...
— The Minister and the Boy • Allan Hoben
... while, as she worked, her eyes grew dreamy: she was making little gay-coloured pictures of herself, unfounded prophecies of how she would look and what would happen to her that evening. She saw herself, charming and demure, wearing a fluffy idealization of the dress her mother now determinedly struggled with upstairs; she saw herself framed in a garlanded archway, the entrance to a ballroom, and saw the people on the shining floor turning dramatically to look at her; then from all points ...
— Alice Adams • Booth Tarkington
... the person to whom they were addressed. Who was the "only begetter" of these passionate offerings of the poet's love? Might he be recognized as he walked, a man among men? or was he the splendid idealization of genius and friendship? There are but faint answers to these questions. After the claims of Mr. Hart, Mr. Hughes, and the Earls of Southampton and Pembroke have been duly examined, there comes the conclusion that we may not know who and what he was towards ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... series we have seen that sentiments of sympathy are derived, in a general way, by phylogeny, from the sentiments of sexual attraction, and we often see in man a sexual love, deceived, despised or transfigured, seek compensation or idealization in the fervor or religious exaltation. The question naturally presents itself whether this compensation or this ideal is indispensable, and if other objects of a human and not mystical nature cannot ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... to nature. For fiction is an art, as painting is, as sculpture is, as acting is. A photograph of a natural object is not art; nor is the plaster cast of a man's face, nor is the bare setting on the stage of an actual occurrence. Art requires an idealization of nature. The amateur, though she may be a lady, who attempts to represent upon the stage the lady of the drawing-room, usually fails to convey to the spectators the impression of a lady. She lacks ...
— Quotes and Images From The Works of Charles Dudley Warner • Charles Dudley Warner
... universal a use of her own strongest gifts, and this is why she cannot be said to excel as a portrait painter. One merit, however, is certain: if her earliest writings were dangerous, it was because of her wonderful power of idealization, not because she filled her pages with the revolting and epicene sensuality of the new Italian, French, and English schools. Intellectual viciousness was not her failing, and she never made the modern mistake of confusing indecency with vigour. She loved nature, air, ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... but more than once I have been touched by the sight of a little one begging piteously to be fed or just to stay, while the mother drove him away impatiently. Moreover, they all kill their weaklings, as a rule, and the burdensome members of too large a family. This is not poetry or idealization, but just ...
— Wilderness Ways • William J Long
... has also another world, of which glimpses have already appeared in the course of this argument, though in the background. In the intellectual sphere evil is as subject to general statement as is good, and there is in the strict sense an idealization of evil, a universal statement of it, as in Mephistopheles, or in more partial ways in Iago, Macbeth, Richard III. In the emotional sphere also there is the throb of evil, felt as diabolic energy and ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... was the interpretation of nature, and legend, which is the idealization of history," are the main elements of the epic. Being the "living history of the people," an epic should have "the breadth and volume of a river." All epics have therefore generally been "the first-fruits of the earliest experience of nature and life on the part of imaginative races"; ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... levels on which this idealization plays its tricks upon our fancy. The Greek, who had studied profoundly what may be called the machinery of art, made use even of mechanical contrivances to delude the imagination of the spectator, and to entice him away ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... represented as happening in accordance with the law of cause and effect which inexorably governs actual life. But it must always be remembered that in such writing as Comedy and Romance the strict rules of motivation must be relaxed, and indeed in all literature, even in Tragedy, the idealization, condensation, and heightening which are the proper methods of Art require them to be ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... her; and I tell you, Sally, that I pity John from the bottom of my heart. I understand it all far better than you can, far better than he does. He loves her at once far more and far less than you believe, and he loves me far more than you believe! You will say, in the absolute idealization of your inexperienced heart, that this is impossible. I know that it is not, and I wish I could make you believe it, for without believing it you cannot be just to John. He loves me to-day, in spite of all this, with a sort ...
— Saxe Holm's Stories • Helen Hunt Jackson
... mind. Fortunately the new ecstasy associated itself with a strong enthusiasm for the simplification of life; for the poetry of nature and of rustic employments; for the sweetness of domestic affection. In Germany public sentiment had already been prepared for a certain idealization of the bourgeoisie. Enlightened rulers and publicists, here and there, were coming to feel that a virtuous yeomanry was the sure foundation of a state's welfare. Countless idyls and pastorals and moralizing romances had thrown a nimbus of poetry about the simple virtues and humble employments ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... senses if we will. Tamburlaine gathers golden fruit, Faustus plucks berries from the same bush as ourselves: only, he must have them from the topmost boughs. The following passage has probably never been surpassed in its magic idealization of that which is ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... simple mother in Fort Lodge, Iowa, about her hopes and her expectations. Her mother had, of course, heard in detail of the rescue; and afterward had heard in still greater detail, as the roseate lime-light of idealization had come to focus more exactly on the scene. She had had also an unaffected appreciation—or several—of Cope's personal graces and accomplishments. She had heard, lastly, of Cope's song to her daughter's obbligato: ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... whiles her imagination asks ours to accompany it on the most extraordinary flights. As a novel of adventure, it is written with unflagging spirit; and in the rites and doctrines of the Illuminati, an idealization of the feature of the secret sects of the last century, she found a new medium of expression for her sentiments regarding the present abuses of society and the need of thorough renovation. Secret societies, at that time, were extremely ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... gods, demons, dwarfs, and giants. What else is all this but old-fashioned Italian opera with a new name? What else but an inartistic mixture of Scribe libretto and Northern mythology? Music-drama—fudge! Making music that one can see is a death-blow to a lofty idealization of the art. ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... Mayberry asked her last night to let you cut it and she said she'd thimbled the rest of us and she reckoned he could stand it too. If it was me, I'd let you cut me wide open and sew me up again if you wanted to," and Eliza beamed upon the Doctor with an affection that was the acme of idealization. She had forgotten that only a few hours ago she had renounced her loyalty at the memory of the oil, but Miss Wingate smiled in appreciation of this ...
— The Road to Providence • Maria Thompson Daviess
... remained one of the guiding influences in his development, one of the standards which he set up before himself, though all too conscious that he could not hope to reach that height. We see their influence in his treatment of drapery, of horses, of the human figure, in his idealization of types, in the flowing lines of his compositions, and in the grouping of his masses. Compared to the hours which he spent in the British Museum, the lessons in the Royal Academy schools seem unimportant. He attended classes there for some months ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... said of Swedish writers that they have a high idea of their calling. Few, if any, have accepted as their sole function the idealization of form. They hold mostly that the highest aim of art should be to teach and elevate, to destroy prejudice and conventionality, and indicate, in so far as it is possible, the solution of moral problems through the creative faculty of inspired productiveness. The wish to ...
— Norwegian Life • Ethlyn T. Clough
... husband's intellectual equal, but vivacious and quick-tempered, with a memory stored with the song and legend of the country-side. Other details can be filled in from the poet's own picture of his father's household as given with little or no idealization in ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... is called Labour have no recognition in the approved teaching. If the work of the school was not to be merely the dead instruction in useless knowledge, if the work was to be directed towards informing the minds of the pupils with ideals and beliefs, it was only in the idealization of the national thought that this ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... transformation: Literature is a fallen and rationalized mythology.—Popular imagination and legends: the legend is to the myth what illusion is to hallucination.—Unconscious processes that the imagination employs in order to create legends: fusion, idealization. 118 ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... surely if it finds it in hymns and prayers and transports partly of the flesh yet touched by the spirit. Further, by faithful masters and mistresses there was given to the slave's religion, in many cases, a clear and strong sense of moral obligation. Uncle Tom in his saintliness may be an idealization, but the elements ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... life—as a sane man builds his foundation before his first story, and so on, putting the observation tower on last of all, instead of making an ass of himself trying to hang his tower to the stars. Our idealization goes forward haltingly and hypocritically because we try to build from the stars down, instead of from the ground up. The place to seek the ideal is in the homely, the commonplace, and the necessary. An ideal that does not spring deep-rooted from ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... caught glimpses of the glory, basked for a season in the brilliancy, tasted the sweetness of the banquet, breathed the exhilarating air, then fell back. By the perfidy of man the vision was shattered and the idealization wrecked. ...
— Sketches of the Covenanters • J. C. McFeeters
... they developed the perilous part of the great Italian tradition. Just as Coleridge recommended young students of dramatic verse to found their style at first on Massinger rather than on Shakespeare, so Reynolds thought that the Caracci were sound models for beginners in the science of idealization. Shakespeare and Michelangelo are inimitable; Massinger and the Caracci exhibit the one thing needful to be learned, upon a scale not wholly unattainable by industry and talent. That was the line of argument; and, granted that the pseudo-grand style is a sine qua non of painting, Reynolds's ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... in terms of strings and winds the emotions roused in me by the sight and thoughts of the Grass, much as LvB took a mistaken idealization of his youth as a startingpoint for Opus 55; but just as no man is an island, so no theme stands alone. There is a cord binding the lesser to the greater; a mystic union between all things. The Grass is not ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... settled down upon the topic of business organization and Sir Isaac, a little warmed by champagne, came out of the uneasily apprehensive taciturnity into which he had fallen in the presence of his wife. Horatio Blenker was keenly interested in the idealization of commercial syndication, he had been greatly stirred by a book of Mr. Gerald Stanley Lee's called Inspired Millionaires which set out to show just what magnificent airs rich men might give ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... even more obviously a poet—subordinating "the shows of things to the desires of the mind"—in his magnificent idealization, or idolization, of the Constitution and the Union. By the magic of his imagination and sensibility he contrived to impress on the minds of a majority of the people of the free States a vague, grand idea that the Constitution was a sacred instrument of government,—a holy shrine of fundamental ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... consonantal element of the words, must know how to use and apply tone color and tone character, the impressive, persuasive, fervent voice. The singer must idealize not only the tone, but the words of the song; "just as the painter idealizes the landscape, so the musical artist must use his powers of idealization in interpreting the work of the composer." To be able to do this, his diction must be as pure, his language as polished, as that ...
— The Renaissance of the Vocal Art • Edmund Myer
... say?—as the Irish are among races. Her father and mother were both born in mud-cabins, and she—she might be the daughter of a hundred kings, except that they seem mostly rather under-witted than otherwise. She always impresses me as a sort of atavistic idealization of the old Kelt at his finest and best. There in Ireland you got a strange mixture of elementary early peoples, walled off from the outer world by the four seas, and free to work out their own racial amalgam on their own lines. They brought with them at the ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... studying his works, Rodin's treatment, while exhausting every contributary detail to the end of complete expression, is never permitted to fritter away its energy either in the mystifications of optical illusion, or in the infantine idealization of what is essentially subordinate and ancillary. This is why he devotes three months to the study of a leg, for example—not to copy, but to "possess" it. Indeed, no sculptor of our time has made such a sincere and, in general, successful, effort to sink the ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... bringing to his aid forces he could not gauge or understand. His crime was that he had made of a woman who could not be his spiritual bride (since her spirit was unawakened, and his was to seek) his body's bride. All the divine paradoxes of sex—the mastery of the lover and his deep humility, his idealization of his bride and her absolute surrender—these he had dragged in the mud. So instead of the mysterious, transcendant illumination that passion brings to a woman, she had only confusion, darkness, and a sense of something dragging at the roots of ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... else should I think, mon ami?" exclaimed Gervase mirthfully. "Of life? It is all Art to me; and by Art I mean the idealization and transfiguration of Nature." ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... upon a flat surface by means of pigments." A sorry life-work! Few people to-day, perhaps, regard art as the close and realistic copy of Nature; photography has at least scotched, if not slain, that error; but many people still regard art as a sort of improvement on or an "idealization" of Nature. It is the part of the artist, they think, to take suggestions and materials from Nature, and from these to build up, as it were, a revised version. It is, perhaps, only by studying those rudimentary forms of art that are closely akin to ritual that we come to see ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison
... last Easter Sunday—how long ago it seems—if I have any power for such idealization it is largely through your influence. My knowledge was much like the trees as they then appeared. I was prepared for better things, but the time for them had not yet come. I had studied the material world in a material sort of way, employing my mind with facts ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe |
