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More "Artificiality" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the thirteenth century artificiality and vulgarity began to preponderate, provoking as counterweights didactic works such as Der Krieg auf der Wartburg. The fourteenth century saw the rise of the free cities, literary guilds, and five universities. It also marks the cultivation of political ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... his canons of highest literary or poetical form in giving a Greek shape to his elegy on Keats; but it may be allowed to his English readers, or at any rate to some of them, to think that he hereby fell into a certain degree of artificiality of structure, undesirable in itself, and more especially hampering him in a plain and self-consistent expression both of his real feeling concerning Keats, and of his resentment against those who had cut short, or ...
— Adonais • Shelley
... elevated them, and what follies made them ridiculous. The same naturalness and humor which marked "Don Quixote" and the "Decameron" also are seen in the "Canterbury Tales." Chaucer freed himself from all the affectations and extravagances and artificiality which characterized the poetry of the Middle Ages. With him began a new style in writing. He and Wyclif are the creators of English literature. They did not create a language, but they ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... evening. This beautiful pool—it is hardly more— occupies the crater of a prehistoric volcano, a perfect cup, shaped and smelted by furnace-fires. The rim of the cup, rising high and densely wooded round the placid stone-blue water, has a sort of natural artificiality. The sweep and contour of the long circle are admirable; never was a lake so charmingly lodged. It is said to be of extraordinary depth; and though stone-blue water seems at first a very innocent substitute for boiling lava, it has a sinister ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... much in his life, that he is jealous of anything that might jar or disturb it, even to the length of a sort of insincerity, to which he assigns its quaint "praise;" this lover of stage plays significantly welcoming a little touch of the artificiality of play to sweeten ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... but none came, and the train took up its leisurely progress through the spring wheat-fields and budding copses. She now began to hope that Gannett would speak before the next station. She watched him furtively, half-disposed to return to the seat opposite his, but there was an artificiality about his absorption that restrained her. She had never before seen him read with so conspicuous an air of warding off interruption. What could he be thinking of? Why should he be afraid to speak? Or was it her ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... the war against Jugurtha, in both of which he took great pains with his style. As he witnessed many of the events he described, his books have a great value to the student of the periods. Roman writers asserted that he imitated the style of Thucydides, but there is an air of artificiality about his work which he did not have the skill to conceal. He has the honor of being the first Roman to write history, as distinguished ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... one's own skin is not sufficient protection against the weather. I think the whole organization of everything is abominable and I don't believe it is a necessary stage of development. Most ordinary lives are the quintessence of artificiality and the grossest waste of time. I am more than ever against the 'me' in myself. It is ...
— Nelka - Mrs. Helen de Smirnoff Moukhanoff, 1878-1963, a Biographical Sketch • Michael Moukhanoff
... song, and certain passages of dialogue not remarkable for dramatic force, had predicted that Millicent would inevitably lose ground as the evening advanced. They were, however, deceived. Her delivery of the phrase 'I am miserable beyond description' brought the house down by its coquettish artificiality; and the renowned ballad, 'Love is a plaintive song,' established her unforgettably in the affections of the audience. Her 'exit weeping' was a tremendous stroke, though all knew that she meant them to see that these tears were simply a delightful pretence. The opera came ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... eagerness, some would be facetious and some speak with neuralgic effort, some were impertinent, some propitiatory, some dull, but all were—disappointing, disappointing. God was not in any of them. A platform is no setting for the shy processes of an honest human mind,—we are all strained to artificiality in the excessive glare of attention that beats upon us there. One does not exhibit opinions at a meeting, one acts them, the very truth must rouge its cheeks and blacken its eyebrows to tell, and to Lady Harman it was the acting chiefly and the make-up that was visible. They didn't grip ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... the Californian towns and cities, but never had they known anything approaching the ideal grace of this type of exalted, even if artificial, womanhood. And although in the fierce freedom of their little republic they had laughed to scorn such artificiality, a few yards of satin and lace cunningly fashioned, and thrown over a frame of wood and wire, touched them now with a strange sense of its superiority. The better to show its attractions, Clinton Grey had placed the figure near a full-length, gold-framed ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... his wife discussed the war, and housing problems, and the futility of fixing such a price on meat that it paid farmers to put their calves to the cow, instead of selling the milk. After all, the words had been spoken before, and words are of little account. There are times—not often, for artificiality and civilisation are stern taskmasters—but there are times when a man and woman become as Gods and know. What need of words between them then; a mathematician does not require to consult the multiplication table ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... regular daub of a hat: pity it is that it will never be painted. On Sundays the high silk hat, the glossy black coat of the elder, but there are no gloves to be got on such hands as those; they are too big and too real ever to be got into the artificiality of kid. Everything grew under those hands; if there was a rabbit-hutch in the back yard it became a shed, and a stable sprang up by the shed, and a sawpit out of the stable, and a workshop beyond the sawpit, and cottages to let beyond that; next a market garden and a brick-kiln, and a hop-oast, and ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... verse as a literary form or in thinking of it otherwise than as an exercise in ingenuity, an Oriental puzzle; and this notion is heightened by the prevalence of the couplet-composing contests, which did much to heighten the artificiality of ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... hand again. This time, somehow, the action grated on her. Before, it had seemed impulsive, a mere spontaneous evidence of friendship. Now there was a suggestion of artificiality,—of calculation. She drew back a little in her chair. Deep down in her some watchful instinct had sounded an alarm. She was ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... way to "fast life," through feeling a void in their daily routine of existence that stereotyped fashion is unable to fill. Besides, it would be a perfect godsend to thousands of unhappy bachelors, who sigh for the realities of domesticity amidst the artificiality and rottenness of ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... to be spirit influence. Although speaking in the interest of a faith generally unpopular, and involved in no slight degree in crudities, extravagance, and quackery, she was herself neither fool nor fanatic. She was a true child of nature, direct and simple in her manners, and impatient of the artificiality and formal etiquette of fashionable society.' These poems are characterized by great case of style, flowing rhythm, earnestness in the cause of philanthropy, and frequently contain high moral lessons. But it is somewhat strange that the poems of trance writers and speakers, ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... experiences, which were by no means easy, Pauline Johnson never lost her capacity for getting the best out of life. She was absolutely natural and simple in her love of happiness. She disliked artificiality of any kind. The seasons as they came and went were in themselves a constant source of pleasure to her. She loved the Pacific coast with its ever-changing colors, the sea and the deeply gashed mountains. The wind in ...
— Legends of Vancouver • E. Pauline Johnson
... internal communication assisted the dissemination of books. People read more; many instructive books met with a large sale, and circulating libraries were established in the larger towns. In literature the period is marked by an advance in the transition from artificiality of thought, and still more of expression, to what was natural and spontaneous. Antiquity began to attract, and romanticism gradually gained ground. Thomson, who led the flight of poetry from the gilded house of bondage, wrote at an earlier ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... opens the series, is quite the equal of its companions. Written, as it was, for Countess Anna de Hanska, Balzac's step-daughter of the future, while she was still very young, it partakes necessarily of the rather elaborate artificiality of all attempts to suit the young person, of French attempts in particular, and it may perhaps be said of Balzac's attempts most of all. It belongs, in a way, to the Arcis series—the series which also includes the fine Tenebreuse Affaire and ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... and conquer it: for he has intellect, he has will, force beyond other men. A man not with logic-spectacles; but with an eye! Unhappily without Decalogue, moral Code or Theorem of any fixed sort; yet not without a strong living Soul in him, and Sincerity there: a Reality, not an Artificiality, not a Sham! And so he, having struggled 'forty years against despotism,' and 'made away with all formulas,' shall now become the spokesman of a Nation bent to do the same. For is it not precisely the struggle of France also to cast off despotism; ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... Christian in spirit. He found an admirable solution of his problem in a double invocation—first of the Heavenly Muse of Mount Sinai, second, of the Holy Spirit. In the composition of In Memoriam, Tennyson knew that an invocation of the Muse would give an intolerable air of artificiality to the poem; he therefore, in the introductory stanzas, offered up a prayer to the Son of God. Now it was impossible for Mr. Hardy to make use of Greek Deities, or of Jehovah, or of any revelation of God in Christ; to his mind ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... one being able to say precisely what that something is; the soul becomes restless, and slowly, aided by authors and artists, it sets about investigating the cause of its uneasiness and the object of its secret longings. Barrenness and artificiality are the two traits of this society, the more marked because it is more complete, and, in this one, pushed to extreme, because it has attained to supreme refinement. In the first place naturalness is excluded from it; everything ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... the group of pines by the pole trail the following afternoon because he had said he would, but with a new attitude of mind. He had come into contact with the artificiality of conventional relations, and it stiffened him. No wonder she had made him keep silence the afternoon before! She had done it gently and nicely, to be sure, but that was part of her good-breeding. Hilda found him formal, reserved, polite; and marvelled at ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... lovely nest for a woman) was not in the least like a home for an old trailer and corn-husker like myself. Its gas log and gimcrack mantel, its "Mission" furniture and its "new art" rugs were all of hopeless artificiality, but our sitting-room (on the quiet side of the building) received the sun, and there on the lid of a small desk I took up and carried forward the story of Hesper which my publishers had asked me to prepare ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... unquestionably originated in old superstitions and rites, including incantations of the old magicians and practices of divination by lot. The doggerel of counting-out rhymes is often traceable to old Latin formulas used for these purposes, a fact that shows the absurdity and artificiality of purposely ...
— Games for the Playground, Home, School and Gymnasium • Jessie H. Bancroft
... the cobbles of the courtyard, and the clatter of hoofs; it meant that John-James and Vassie were back, bringing her son. She got to her feet and went through the house to the yard door, already recovering a little of poise, which meant artificiality, but still with something of that real glow about her. She knew a moment of dread lest Ishmael should rebuff it. She held out her arms with an uncontrolled gesture, and heard her own voice call his name on an ugly piping note she could not ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... a sachet. I am always charmed to read beautiful poems about nature in the country. Only, personally, I prefer town to country; and in the town we have to find for ourselves, as best we may, the decor which is the town equivalent of the great natural decor of fields and hills. Here it is that artificiality comes in; and if any one sees no beauty in the effects of artificial light, in all the variable, most human, and yet most factitious town landscape, I can only pity him, and go on my ...
— Silhouettes • Arthur Symons
... compelled, of course, to use much more concrete and vivid terms than the eighteenth century poets had used, because he was dealing with much more concrete and vivid matter; but his language, nevertheless, has a prevailing stateliness, and at times an artificiality, which recommended it to readers tired of the inanities of Hayley and Mason, but unwilling to accept the startling simplicity and concreteness of diction exemplified by the Lake poets at ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... suspicion. The eyelashes were so long and so black, the eyes were so topaz, the hair was so like such a cloud of gold as would be found on Joan of Are as seen by a mediaeval painter, that an air of faint artificiality surrounded what was in every other way a remarkable effort of nature to give this region, where she was so very busy, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... picturesque art, have never been since surpassed. For indeed, they drew from life. The rags and the ruins, material, and alas! spiritual, were all around them; the lands and the creeds alike lay waste. There was ruffianism and misery among the masses of Europe; unbelief and artificiality among the upper classes; churches and monasteries defiled, cities sacked, farmsteads plundered and ruinate, and all the wretchedness which Callot has immortalised—for a warning to evil rulers—in his Miseres de la Guerre. The world was all ...
— The Ancien Regime • Charles Kingsley
... over-inflect. Too much modulation produces an unpleasant effect of artificiality, like a mature matron trying to be kittenish. It is a short step between true expression and unintentional burlesque. Scrutinize your own tones. Take a single expression like "Oh, no!" or "Oh, I see," or "Indeed," and by patient self-examination see how ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... the possibility of illusion in the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth, but in our time it is no longer possible to follow with interest the development of events which one knows could not take place in the conditions which the author describes in detail. The artificiality of the positions, not flowing from the natural course of events, or from the nature of the characters, and their want of conformity with time and space, is further increased by those coarse embellishments which are continually added by Shakespeare and intended to appear particularly touching. ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... sharp wits and good nature, and had been seeing, for years, broad streaks of humanity somewhat out of my latitude. I found that as he took such appearances the inward caste-spirit of European "aristocracy" pervaded rich America, with cynicism and artificiality at the fore. Of the bulk of official persons, Executives, Congressmen, Legislators, Aldermen, Department heads, &c., &c., or the candidates for those positions, nineteen in twenty, in the policeman's judgment, were just ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... in his own lecture, thus: "If the middle tub is contained in the big tub, and the little tub is contained in the middle tub, then the little tub is contained in the big tub." Hegel says: "Common sense in its reaction against such logical formality and artificiality turned away in disgust, and was of the opinion that it could do without such a science as logic." Most true, Philosopher Hegel, you have absurdities of your own on a gigantic scale, but you do well to reject the petty absurdities ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, September 1887 - Volume 1, Number 8 • Various
... matter and in style with nearly all that was best in European literature, and his peculiar subject, with only gods and angels (Adam and Eve are scarcely human, even after the fall) for characters and selected portions of eternity and infinity for time and place, gave him the tendency to artificiality and strain to the outmost verges of sublimity, and to extraordinary involution of phrase and idea—for all of which he must have a suitable prosody. He chose blank verse when the poetical fashion was for rime and described it, in words not altogether clear, as consisting "only ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... beginner who is put on a properly made saddle and suitable horse, and is taught the right principles of riding, will make more progress in a month than she would otherwise do in, say, five years. The artificiality of side-saddle riding extends even to the horse, which must be free from certain faults, such as unsteadiness in mounting, that would not render him unsuitable ...
— The Horsewoman - A Practical Guide to Side-Saddle Riding, 2nd. Ed. • Alice M. Hayes
... another aspect of the dance, which is psychologically perhaps the deepest: the dance is an art, and as such, of deep aesthetic influence on the whole mental life. Whenever the joy in dancing comes into the foreground, this art is developed to high artificiality. No step and no movement is left to the chance inspiration of the moment; everything is prescribed, and to learn the dances not seldom means an almost scientific study. In the great dancing periods of the rococo time the mastery of the exact ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... sur les Sciences et les Arts, the Discours sur l'Inegalite, and the Lettre a D'Alembert sur les Spectacles, Rousseau pleads against the vices, the artificiality, the insincerities, the luxuries, the false refinements, the factitious passions, the dishonest pleasures of modern society. "You make one wish," wrote Voltaire, "to walk on all fours." By nature all men are born free and equal; society has rendered ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... living according to the dictates of our own natures. The command to shun everything contradictory to the simple fundamental traits of our own characters pleased me, and wherever I saw affectation, artificiality, and mannerism I was repelled, while from my grandfather's teaching I drew the principle that I could do nothing better than to remain, so far as life would permit, what I had been as a child ere I had heard the first word ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... as in other cases, to remedy the evils of one artificiality, another artificiality has been introduced. The natural, spontaneous exercise having been forbidden, and the bad consequences of no exercise having become conspicuous, there has been adopted a system of factitious exercise—gymnastics. That this is better ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... memories of phrases heard in the pulpit, they were uttered by Mrs. Ede with a fervour, with a candour of belief, that took from them any appearance of artificiality; and Kate did not notice that her mother-in-law was using words that were ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... be better to say that Horace finally came more fully into his own. This was not because he changed. He did not change. The times changed. The barriers of intellectual sloth and artificiality fell away, and men became accessible to him. Virgil lost nothing of his old-time appeal to the fancy and to the ear, but Horace's virtues also were discovered: his distinction in word and phrase, his understanding of the human heart. ...
— Horace and His Influence • Grant Showerman
... differential evolution. Further study of Messrs. Spencer and Gillen's work, together with the criticisms of various scholars, Mr. Lang, Mr. Hartland, Mr. Frazer, Mr. Thomas, and others, convinces me that the extreme artificiality of the class system is due partly to a want of understanding of the entire facts, and partly to the ad hoc adoption by the natives themselves of new plans to meet difficulties which must arise out of a too close adhesion to their rules. Mr. Lang has allowed me to see a manuscript ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... have been taken from a variety of languages, and simply mixed up together, without any scientific attempt at co-ordination or simplification. The resulting international languages have varied in their degree of artificiality, and in the proportions in which they were consciously or semi-consciously compiled, or else adopted their elements ready-made, without conscious adaptation, from existing tongues. But their production, widespread and continuous use, and ...
— International Language - Past, Present and Future: With Specimens of Esperanto and Grammar • Walter J. Clark
... the Court poetry to all extremes of "false wit," and of glaring pretence and artificiality of style, makes the contrast all the more vivid between its brocaded stiffness and the ease and freedom of the Sagas. But even apart from the Court poetry, it is clear that there was little chance for any development of the Northern heroic poetry into an Homeric ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... call artificiality. By the way, how have you been ruined? Who ruined you? Was it the hated works-manager?" There had been no change in his tone; he spoke ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... spent his life trying to realise in the nineteenth century all the passions and modes of thought that belonged to every century except his own, and to sum up, as it were, in himself the various moods through which the world-spirit had ever passed, loving for their mere artificiality those renunciations that men have unwisely called virtue, as much as those natural rebellions that wise men still call sin. The style in which it was written was that curious jewelled style, vivid and obscure at once, full of argot ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... many of the labored and uninteresting designs which are common. If the Pattern-artist deck-out the old worn-out and common place spirals with leaves and flowers borrowed from Nature—the result is like the "voice of Jacob and the hands of Esau;" it is merely a Disguise of Artificiality. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 829, November 21, 1891 • Various
... abhorred town-life," Mike said, "and all its artificiality and rottenness and needless ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... that. These children knew mobs! A mob to them was a daily sight, and their reproduction of it was a thing to startle you with its realism. Never was it absurd; never was there a single note of artificiality in it. It was Hogarthian ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... The worldliness and artificiality which set us out of tune with all this is worse than paganism.[385] Then this "higher Pantheism" developed into the sense of an all-pervading Personality, "a soul that is the eternity of thought." And ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... pedant. He is fond of airing his classical knowledge; and he is equally fond of quoting this imaginary code which he has had to study so thoroughly and painfully. The effect, however, is to give an air of artificiality to some of his minor characters. They show the traces of deliberate composition too distinctly, though the blemish may be forgiven in consideration of the genuine force and freshness of his thinking. If manufactured articles, they are not second-hand ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... solitary angler. There is nothing but the roughest of tracks to follow, for the carefully-made pathway that used to go right up to the fall was swept away half a dozen years ago, when the stream in a fierce mood cleared its course of any traces of artificiality. We are deeply grateful, and make our among the big rocks and across the slippery surfaces of shale, with the roar of the waters becoming more and more insistent. The sun has turned into the ravine a great ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... everywhere bustle and noise, the antithesis of the life of shade and silence which she led amid the leafy trees of her park. She would show herself everywhere, at races, theatres, parties—as when she accepted the Baroness Dinati's invitation; and, when she became nauseated with all the artificiality of worldly life, she would return eagerly to her woods, her dogs and her solitude, and, if it were winter, would shut herself up for long months in her lonely, ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie
... the country, and I could see that every moment he thought less of the importance of clothes and their makers, and more and more of the qualities essential in woman, simplicity, goodness, frankness, and an absence of artificiality. I saw it all on his face, dawning slowly and surely. By the time we had had tea, I could see it was a matter of mutual satisfaction to both Dick and Pauline to find that they were going to the same dance that night. The responsibility of chaperoning ...
— The Professional Aunt • Mary C.E. Wemyss
... instruct under the cloak of agreeable fiction, or that other species, much cultivated by Dickens in his later works, which attacks antiquated institutions and public abuses in a story so contrived as to expose their absurdity and injustice. There is an air of artificiality about such compositions which damages the artistic illusion, the photographic rendering of actual life, upon which the author relies, because it throws over the stage a shadow of his own personality. For one tendency of excessive realism is to encourage ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... the Ripley sisters well were aware that plain speaking never vexed them. Beating about the bush from artificiality or ignoring a plain issue was the sort of thing they resented. Consequently, the directness of David Walker's sally did not appear to them a liberty, but merely a legitimate summing up of the situation. Miss Rebecca was the ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... heirlooms of the Heyburn family, and in that grey light looked cold and glassy. The powder and the slight touch of carmine upon her cheeks, which at night had served to heighten her beauty, now gave her an appearance of painted artificiality. She was undeniably a pretty woman, and surely required no artificial aids to beauty. About thirty-three, yet she looked five years younger; while her husband was twenty years senior to herself. She still retained a figure so girlish that most people took her for Gabrielle's elder ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux
... view of the terrestrial surface—a very doubtful point indeed. Professor Lowell thinks that the perfect straightness of the lines, and the geometrical manner in which they are arranged, are clear evidences of artificiality. On a globe, too, there is plainly no reason why the liquid which results from the melting of the polar caps should trend at all in the direction of the equator. Upon our earth, for instance, the transference of water, as in rivers, merely follows ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... varying his work by rambling to Pennicote to sketch the village children and improve his acquaintance with the Gascoignes. Hans appeared to have recovered his vivacity, but Deronda detected some feigning in it, as we detect the artificiality of a lady's bloom from its being a little too high-toned and steadily persistent (a "Fluctuating Rouge" not having yet appeared among the advertisements). Also with all his grateful friendship and admiration ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... cruelly true mental vision which pierced through shams, and his capacity for detached observation—which properly applied might have carried him very far, indeed—he perceived the grotesqueness, the artificiality of the emotion which in that moment he experienced, but by which he refused to be possessed. It sprang entirely from the consciousness that she was his mother; as if, all things considered, the more or less ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... which the family was the social unit, in which seniority of age was of more account than superiority of talents, in which natural affections had often to succumb before arbitrary man-made customs. Because of this very artificiality, Giri in time degenerated into a vague sense of propriety called up to explain this and sanction that,—as, for example, why a mother must, if need be, sacrifice all her other children in order to save the first-born; or why a daughter must ...
— Bushido, the Soul of Japan • Inazo Nitobe
... not alone the potential value of boys for the Kingdom of God, and what the minister may do for them; but what may they not do for him? How fatal is the boy collective to all artificiality, sanctimony, weakness, make-believe, and jointless dignity; and how prone is the ministry to these psychological and semi-physical pests! For, owing to the demands of the pulpit and of private and social ...
— The Minister and the Boy • Allan Hoben
... its fling at the artificiality of the eighteenth century, and treated it with contempt as the age of doctrinaires. And now that the twentieth century is coming to the age of discretion, we hear a new term of reproach, Mid-Victorian. It expresses the sum of all ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... Soleil, and where the armchairs and divans were upholstered in yellow and pink satin, and decked out with ribbon bows to resemble Watteau sheep. Oh no; certainly I should not exchange the low living and high thinking of my Anarchist days for such artificiality and vulgar display. Sunday was generally a very busy day with me, almost more so than week-days, for there were meetings to be held, literature to be sold and distributed, and lectures and discussions to be attended. ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith
... them 'a specious and cherche art, demanding, for its appreciation, a certain initiation, a certain special sense.' To realise the full value, the real charm, of A Rebours, some such initiation might be deemed necessary. In its fantastic unreality, its exquisite artificiality, it is the natural sequel of En Menage and A Vau-l'Eau, which are so much more acutely sordid than the most sordid kind of real life; it is the logical outcome of that hatred and horror of human mediocrity, of the mediocrity of daily existence, which we have seen ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... is a laudable one. For the athlete is the product of nature—a step towards the more perfect type of animal, while the scholar is the outcome of artificiality. What, I ask, does the scholar gain, either morally or physically, or in any other way, by knowing who was tribune of the people in 284 BC or what is the precise difference between the various constructions of cum? ...
— Tales of St. Austin's • P. G. Wodehouse
... not the sort of talk she expected from a world which was stranger to her than the movie studio to him. He was perfectly natural, and that threw her into a spasm of artificiality. ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... began a letter to Sidwell, but his difficulty in writing was so great that he destroyed the attempt. In truth, he knew not how to address her. The words he penned were tumid, meaningless. He could not send professions of love, for his heart seemed to be suffering a paralysis, and the laborious artificiality of his style must have been evident. The only excuse for breaking silence would be to let her know that he had resumed honest work; he must wait till the opportunity offered. It did not distress ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... agunt, senectutem oblectant, may be said of them with as much truth as ever now. Yet no analysis will explain their indefinable charm. If the so-called "lyrical cry" be of the essence of a true lyric, they are not true lyrics at all. Few of them are free from a marked artificiality, an almost rigid adherence to canon. Their range of thought is not great; their range of feeling is studiously narrow. Beside the air and fire of a lyric of Catullus, an ode of Horace for the moment grows pale and ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... the good short stories that I meet with in my reading are the trivial ones,—the sketchy, the anecdotal, the merely adventurous or merely picturesque; as they mount toward literature they seem to increase in artificiality and constraint; when they propose to interpret life they become machines, and nothing more, for the discharge of sensation, sentiment, or romance. And this is true, so far as I can discover, of the stories which most critics and more editors believe to be successful, the stories which are most ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... on the reader's patience as to return to the inspiration of the beginning of this sketch for a conclusion? The remark of which I would deliver myself is that the artificiality of which the poet Pope is accused in his natural scenery generally applies to his references to sport. He is more sympathetic with his anglers than with his fowlers, but neither appears to kindle the fire as in the lines in which he traces the name of the Loddon ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... year which was well received. He wrote between thirty and forty separate publications, in addition to editing the Evening Mirror and other periodicals including the Home Journal. Though marred by occasional affectation, the sketches of Willis are light, graceful compositions, but the artificiality of his poems have caused them to be neglected. He died at Idlewild, New York, ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... his novels. The stage, being ever en vedette, is best situated to interpret the signs of the times, and is likewise more open to the solicitations of novelty, more ready to try new methods. A noticeable defect of the French drama, in the first half of the nineteenth century, was the pronounced artificiality of its characters and plots. Whatever the kind of play exhibited, the same stereotyped noble fathers, ingenuous maidens, coquettes, and Lotharios strutted on the boards. Whatever else changed, these did ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... it to some extent in Love's Labour's Lost, and parodied it in Falstaff's speech to Prince Hal, I Henry IV, II, iv. Several of Shakespeare's earlier comedies show Lyly's influence for good and ill—ill, in that it made for artificiality and strained conceits; good, in that it made for perfection of dramatic ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... truth of presentment, is very remarkable. In the early group of his novels he had felt a great difficulty in transcribing conversations so as to produce a natural and easy effect. He no longer, in Coningsby, is confronted by this artificiality. His dialogues are now generally remarkable for their ease and nature. The speeches of Rigby (who represents John Wilson Croker), of Lord Monmouth (who stands for Lord Hertford), of the Young Englanders themselves, of the laughable ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... for the hero of the deluge story. The case is different with Gi-il-ga-mesh, or Gish-g(n)-mash, which represent the popular and actual pronunciation of the name, or at least the approach to such pronunciation. Such forms, stripped as they are of all artificiality, impress one as genuine names. The conclusion to which we are thus led is that Gish-bil(or bl)-ga-mesh is a play upon the genuine name, to convey to those to whom the real name, as that of a foreigner, would suggest no meaning an interpretation fitting in with his character. ...
— An Old Babylonian Version of the Gilgamesh Epic • Anonymous
... by the heavy golden bracelet is cold, yet soft and yielding like a sleep. The face has the natural ease of slumber, and not the rigid artificiality of death. 'Tis true there is no pulse, no beat of heart nor stir of breath, yet neither is there the sombre grotesqueness of the last pose. But the difference between life and death is here so small that it is incommensurable, ...
— The Flutter of the Goldleaf; and Other Plays • Olive Tilford Dargan and Frederick Peterson
... a second a quiver of emotion convulsed Chloe's usually impassive face. Then she laughed, and Anstice thought her laugh almost painful in its artificiality. ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... the reign of Elizabeth England imported almost all "artificiality," as high-grade manufactures of a certain sort were called. A famous Elizabethan play turns on the scarcity of needles, [Sidenote: Gammer Gurton's Needle, c. 1559] the whole household being turned upside down to look for ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... is which gives his books so large an interest for old and young, soldiers and statesmen, the world of society and the recluse, alike. You can hardly read any novel of Scott's and not become better aware what public life and political issues mean. And yet there is no artificiality, no elaborate attitudinizing before the antique mirrors of the past, like Bulwer's, no dressing out of clothes-horses like G. P. R. James. The boldness and freshness of the present are carried back into the past, and you see ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton
... the middle syllable nun signifies 'strength,' whereas the first is the ordinary ideograph for 'water.' Hommel[217] proposed to interpret the name therefore as 'gods of the watery habitation.' The artificiality of this manner of writing points, as in several instances noted, to a mere 'play' upon the real name. Anunna reminds one forcibly of the god Anu and of the goddess Anunit, and the element ak is quite a common afformative in Babylonian substantives, conveying a certain emphatic ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... except that they vied with one another in all those affectations and fatuous insincerities, by which all the men childishly allowed themselves to be duped. One alone was really pretty, said nothing, and gave pleasure by her very lack of artificiality. To her I might have been favourably inclined because of her ignorance, had she not gloried in this, and tried to emphasize her difference from the others by a piquant ingenuousness. One day I discovered that she had plenty of wit, and straightway I ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... oldtime skill, and sometimes sound like Mozart rubbed through the Wagnerian sieve. Finally, to cap the climax, he writes a fugue. A fugue to wind up a comic opera! A fugue—the highest exemplification of oldtime artificiality in music! A difficult fugue to sing, yet it runs out as smoothly as the conventional tag of Shakespeare's own day, whose place, indeed, it takes. It is a tag suggested by "All the world's a stage," and though it is a fugue, it bubbles over ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... men and women, and under windows where sat the sweet and the lovely, and yet never attract a curious eye, never provoke a single remark. Dear, dear, it only shows that there is nothing diviner about a king than there is about a tramp, after all. He is just a cheap and hollow artificiality when you don't know he is a king. But reveal his quality, and dear me it takes your very breath away to look at him. I reckon we are all fools. Born so, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... be noted here that the whole thing is ridiculously stagey and artificial. In spite of the new ideas fermenting in Wagner's brain, he had not yet got away from the stage-trickiness of Scribe. Unreality and artificiality face you at every step. The music is a different matter. No one, not even Mendelssohn in his Hebrides overture, has ever given us the sea, the noise and colour of it, its violence and ruthlessness, as Wagner has here. It is the sea that pervades the whole of the act; but imposed on its ceaseless ...
— Wagner • John F. Runciman
... at Coventry. He said "What shall I lecture on?" They answered "Anything from an elephant to an umbrella." "Very well," he said, "I will lecture on an umbrella." He treated the umbrella as a symbol of increasing artificiality. We wear hair to protect the head, a hat to protect the hair, an umbrella to protect the hat. Gilbert said once he was willing to start anywhere and develop from anything the whole of his philosophy. In ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... case with fighting races capable of cruelty, they were strictly courteous in their intercourse with strangers. Indeed, their code of manners to visitors was so exact and elaborate as to leave an impression of artificiality. No party of wayfarers would approach a pa without giving formal notice. When the strangers were received, they had the best of everything, and the hosts, who saw that they were abundantly supplied, had too much delicacy to watch ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... with his first impetuous transcription of it. But as a sculptor toils over a single vein till it is perfect, the poet may linger over a word or phrase, and so long as the pulse seems to beat beneath his fingers, no one has a right to accuse him of artificiality. Sometimes, indeed, he is awkward, and when he tries to wreathe his thoughts together, they wither like field flowers under his hot touch. Or, in his zeal, he may fashion for his forms an embroidered robe of such richness that ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... to throw myself into that kind of life but was still more conscious of my own weakness and artificiality. I cannot forget myself and my complex, distorted past, and my future appears to me still more hopeless. Every day I have before me the distant snowy mountains and this majestic, happy woman. But ...
— The Cossacks • Leo Tolstoy
... gifted, moreover, in that as in all other matters, with that innate diligence, of which Mr. Carlyle has said, 'that genius is only an infinite capacity of taking pains,' and we can understand somewhat of the causes which produced those statues, human and divine, which awe and shame the artificiality and degeneracy of our modern so-called civilisation—we can understand somewhat of the reverence for the human form, of the careful study of every line, the storing up for use each scattered fragment of beauty of which the artist caught sight, even in his daily walks, and consecrating ...
— Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 • Charles Kingsley
... It did not take many years for her to wheedle most of his money away; but there was no cessation to the demand, no apparent limit to the supply. Both were growing older, and now it became evident that Mrs. Clancy was the elder of the two, and that the artificiality of her charms could not stand the test of frontier life. No longer sought as the belle of the soldiers' ball-rooms, she aspired to leadership among their wives and families, and was accorded that pre-eminence rather than the fierce battle which was sure to follow any ...
— The Deserter • Charles King
... primitive people of the Southern Seas touched Diderot almost as deeply as if he had been Rousseau. As one says so often in this history of the intellectual preparation for the Revolution, the corruption and artificiality of Parisian society had the effect of colouring the world of primitive society with the very hues of paradise. Diderot was more free from this besetting weakness than any of his contemporaries. He never ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... the exhilaration of his more exalted bacchanalian and love songs—the mood, we may infer, of his normal working life. We may again observe the correspondence between the change of dialect and change of tone in stanzas nine and ten, the increase of artificiality coming with his literary English and culminating in the unspeakable "tenebrific scene." His humor returns with his Scots in the ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... her up-to-date air of artificiality, there was something immensely likeable about Audrey Maynard. Behind it all, Sara sensed the real ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... forces at work which were destined to influence the entire vocal world. The subtle influence of these forces was felt so gradually, and yet so surely and powerfully, that while the profession, as one might say, peacefully slept, art was changed to artificiality. Thus arose that which may be called the dark ages of the vocal art,—an age when error overshadowed truth and reason; for while real scientists, after great study and research, discovered much of the true science ...
— The Renaissance of the Vocal Art • Edmund Myer
... to the liturgy. In these Saadiah's poetical range is very varied. Sometimes his style is as pure and simple as the most classical poems of the Spanish school. At other times, his verses have all the intricacy, harshness, and artificiality of Kalir's. Perhaps his mastery of Hebrew is best seen in his "Book of the Exiled" (Sefer ha-Galui), compiled in Biblical Hebrew, divided into verses, and provided with accents. As the title indicates, this book was written ...
— Chapters on Jewish Literature • Israel Abrahams
... inimitable. When the clown laughs, his lips, his eyes, his eye-brows, and eyelids—indeed, all the features of his countenance—are imbued with their appropriate expressions. In both him and his companion, every gesture is so entirely easy, and free from the semblance of artificiality, that, were it not for the diminutiveness of their size, and the fact of their being passed from one spectator to another previous to their exhibition on the rope, it would be difficult to convince any ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... the charm of the portrait of Miss Rose Corder. There every object is born unconsciously beneath the passing of the brush. If not less certain, the touch in the portrait of the mother is less prompt; but the painter's vision is more sincere and more intense. And to those who object to the artificiality of the arrangement, I reply that if the old lady is sitting in a room artificially arranged, Lady Archibald Campbell may be said to be walking through incomprehensible space. But what really decides me to place this portrait ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... is at present. An altogether disproportionate amount of time is now given to it. The time saved ought to go to oral and written expression,—composition, we might call it, except that the word has been spoiled because of the artificiality of the exercises. ...
— What the Schools Teach and Might Teach • John Franklin Bobbitt
... prospects—loved rocks and heights. It is possible that her recollections of the Sherwood country were not agreeable, since she showed herself averse from any allusion in her marvellous letters; but in spite of the artificiality of her period one may be certain that her adventurous spirit prompted her to leave unexplored no portion of the ancient forest. The ruggedness of Wharncliffe Chase was more to her fancy: in her old age, writing from Avignon, she declared this the ...
— The Dukeries • R. Murray Gilchrist
... shoulders and chest. Wonderful work. Each scale was glued on separately, beginning from scales almost microscopic and shading both in size and color exactly into those of the fish hinder portion. The work was so exquisitely done that its artificiality could not be detected. But live mermaids haven't been put in ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... owe their whole power. That is, a writer in this sort is admirable as he subdues language and subordinates thought to his own temper, not as he gives elegant utterance to thought or feeling in their abstracted and general estate. Through a surface artificiality of style, which is far more marked in his earliest work, and from which at times he quite escapes, Irving's personality shines clearly. He has so employed a conventional medium as to make it serve his original purposes. He possessed, to be sure, a faculty of strong ...
— Washington Irving • Henry W. Boynton
... possibilities for accommodating the inner form to new subject matter without conspicuously changing the outer form. For two great simplifying factors have, since Goethe, been predominant in protecting our lyric poetry from unfruitful artificiality; the influence of the folk-song and the connection with music have kept it more full of vital energy than the too literary lyric poetry of the French, and richer in variety than the too cultivated ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... to the conditions of his new life. Being well bred, he respected, outwardly at least, the laws of artificiality and conventionality, and bowed before the idols of ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... he shattered the world she had built up for herself so laboriously to enable her to endure her hard life, the injustice with which he had accused her of affectation, of artificiality, aroused her. ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... scenes are drawn with free, broad touches, without Mr. Buchanan's artificiality, and, if we may venture to say it, with more realism ...
— The White Lie • William Le Queux
... of literary art may be exceedingly complex; but we do not set complexity over against simplicity. For simplicity is a quality essential to true life as it is to literature of the first class; it is opposed to parade, to artificiality, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... higher than a silver dollar, has been the proud ambition of many an artist in botany. In like manner, the Tokugawa Sh[o]guns (1604-1868) determined to so limit the supply of mental food, that the mind of Japan should be of those correctly dwarfed proportions of puniness, so admired by lovers of artificiality and unconscious caricature. Philosophy was selected as a chief tool among the engines of oppression, and as the main influence in stunting the intellect. All thought must be orthodox according to the standards of Confucianism, as expounded by Chu Hi. Anything ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... loosely held together by the rather vague title, is demonstrated by the third, in the key of G. The rippling, rain-like figure for the left hand is in the nature of a study. The melody is delicate in sentiment, Gallic in its esprit. A true salon piece, this prelude has no hint of artificiality. It is a precise antithesis to the mood of the previous one. Graceful and gay, the G major prelude is a fair reflex of Chopin's sensitive and naturally buoyant nature. It requires a light hand and nimble fingers. The melodic idea requires no special comment. Kullak phrases it ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... Steel, with an artificiality which was seldom so transparent; "my only excuse is that you startled me out of my temper and my manners. And I was upset to begin with. I have a poor fellow in rather a bad ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... With his own hands he built a wooden church for his disciples, giving it the name of Troitza or Thrice Holy Trinity. Thither I wandered in thought. A call might be there for me, so weary of the egotism, envy, detraction, greed, grind and battle of the soulless artificiality called society. ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... today is imitative. Once men had convictions, but we have only opinions, and these are usually borrowed. The artificiality of life, and the rush and the worry afford no time for great desires to ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... the truth of acting, the truth of visible presentation on the stage, adds to the wonder of poetry, giving life to its loveliness, and actual reality to its ideal form. And yet, in the 67th Sonnet, Shakespeare calls upon Willie Hughes to abandon the stage with its artificiality, its false mimic life of painted face and unreal costume, its immoral influences and suggestions, its remoteness from the true world of noble ...
— Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories • Oscar Wilde
... The artificiality and unreality of her life overcame her as with stifling fumes. She stopped at a street-corner, drawing long panting breaths as if she had been running a race. Then, slowly and aimlessly, she began to saunter ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... disagree; but I think all will concede that what is notoriously untrue should be attacked, that we should wage uncompromising war on whatsoever maketh or loveth a lie. I think all will agree that this is pre-eminently an age of artificiality—that there is little genuine left in the land but the complexion of the ladies. Even that has been called in question by certain unchivalrous old bachelors, those unfortunates whom the ladies of Boston propose to ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... pansies and heliotrope and brilliant red geraniums. Those are the flowers which suit best the steps down to the water, and the fountains, and the swimming ducks and the birds on the banks. There is the right touch of artificiality about them; the right note of London. The birds are Londoners themselves. The stately brown geese stalk over the lawns careless of poulterers or punt-guns. The cormorant, who most certainly knows he is being watched, ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... which it is possible to exaggerate in statement or, at least, to set forth in all the isolation of their quality as half-truths. But it is hardly possible to exaggerate their significance as a reversal of the immemorial one-sidedness, inadequacy, and artificiality both of the official statement and of the popular apprehension of Christianity. These ideas appeal to men in our time. They are popular because men think them already. Men are pleased, even when ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... come at that precise period of the day to stand there motionless at that particular spot; that this pale city girl in her civilised dress should have in her appearance at that moment no suggestion of artificiality, but should seem a something natural and unadulterated as flowering tree and grass and sunshine, a part of nature, in absolute and perfect harmony with it. The point to which Fan had wandered was a little ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... gayety, and to that very Queen Anne spirit against which the serious and sentimental Thomson began the revolt. There is not only at present a renewed appreciation of what was admirable in the verse of Pope and the prose of Swift, but we discover a quaint attractiveness in the artificiality of Augustan manners, dress, and speech. Lace and brocade, powder and patch, Dutch gardens, Reynolds' portraits, Watteau fans, Dresden china, the sedan chair, the spinet, the hoop-skirt, the talon rouge—all these have receded so far into the perspective as to acquire picturesqueness. ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... this last rendering, which is quite a common expression (see Etain, p. 12), has been adopted in the verse translation. The order of the words in the expression in the text is unusual, and the adoption of them would give an air of artificiality to the description which is otherwise quite ...
— Heroic Romances of Ireland Volumes 1 and 2 Combined • A. H. Leahy
... broken hearts, worry, nervous prostration, because there is idleness, artificiality and aimlessness. In homes we find warm hearts, happiness and love, because those in the ...
— Evening Round Up - More Good Stuff Like Pep • William Crosbie Hunter
... product, The Scarlet Pimpernel, to a similar trial. Whether the result of this renewed dilution is entirely satisfactory I leave you to judge, but certainly at least something of the well-known and popular aroma of romantic artificiality clings about the pages of her latest story, Lord Tony's Wife (HODDER AND STOUGHTON), while at the bottom of the cup there is not a little dash of the old strong flavour. On the other hand, though it may be that one's ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, October 31, 1917 • Various
... the neighbourhood of one another, however, they were wont to assume an elaborate artificiality of speech and manner in communion with their friends, that was designed with each to point the moral of a complete indifference and forgetfulness. But the girl was by far the better actor; and not only did she play her own part convincingly, but she generally ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... her hand, stroked it affectionately. He often laughed at the child's manifold follies, but her prettiness and the naivete which sweetened her inbred artificiality had won his liking. Much as it would have astonished Paula had she known it, his feeling was for the most ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... opened suddenly and ostentatiously, disclosing Phemie, with a taller and slighter young woman, her elder sister, at her side. Perceiving that the room was empty, they both said "Oh!" yet with a certain artificiality of manner that was evidently a lingering trace of some previous formal attitude they had assumed. Then without further speech they each selected a chair and a position, having first shaken out their dresses, and gazed silently ...
— A First Family of Tasajara • Bret Harte
... the first volume of Emily Dickinson's poems has been read shows very clearly that all our alleged modern artificiality does not prevent a prompt appreciation of the qualities of directness and simplicity in approaching the greatest themes,—life and love and death. That "irresistible needle-touch," as one of her best critics ...
— Poems: Three Series, Complete • Emily Dickinson
... or two great souls athirst for pure aesthetic rapture; and this war, strangely enough, is invariably described by the extension lecturer as a fight for Truth and Nature. Never doubt it, in a hundred years or less they will be telling their pupils that in an age of extreme artificiality arose two men, Cezanne and Gaugin, who, by simplicity and sincerity, led back the world to the haunts of Truth and Nature. Strangest of all, some part of what they say will ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... gentle fellowship with a girl like Ruth. His lack of hesitancy was born of his manly view of the outcast's blamelessness, of her dire necessity for help, and of a premonition that Ruth Levice would be as free from the artificiality of conventional surface modesty as was he, through the earnestness ...
— Other Things Being Equal • Emma Wolf
... preacher. It will be generally admitted that these two volumes will furnish means for estimating the character of Mr. Robertson which are not supplied in any or all of his published works.... There was no artificiality or show about the pulpit production, no half-utterances or whispers of solemn belief; but there was the natural restraint which would be imposed by a true gentleman upon his words when speaking to mixed congregations. Many of us wanted to know how he talked and wrote ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... justify his assertions. Fielding has an odd touch of the pedant. He is fond of airing his classical knowledge; and he is equally fond of quoting this imaginary code which he has had to study so thoroughly and painfully. The effect, however, is to give an air of artificiality to some of his minor characters. They show the traces of deliberate composition too distinctly, though the blemish may be forgiven in consideration of the genuine force and freshness of his thinking. ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... often the case with fighting races capable of cruelty, they were strictly courteous in their intercourse with strangers. Indeed, their code of manners to visitors was so exact and elaborate as to leave an impression of artificiality. No party of wayfarers would approach a pa without giving formal notice. When the strangers were received, they had the best of everything, and the hosts, who saw that they were abundantly supplied, had too much delicacy to watch ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... our conception of society has been mostly in terms of political units, largely on account of the lack of any local unit which had social significance to rural people. In recent years, however, students of rural government have become aware of the artificiality and the anti-social character of the township unit. There may be two rival villages within a township, each competing for trade and the support of its associations, and striving for the political domination of the township, ...
— The Farmer and His Community • Dwight Sanderson
... added a new instrument of music to its majestic orchestra, a new weapon of expression to its noble armoury.... But one must admit that to the taste of the present age there occurs a certain coldness and artificiality in his portrayals alike of the face of nature and of the passions of man. He appeals rather to the brain than to the heart. Ideas and not emotions are his province.... To the metric presentment of ideas he imparts ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... composer was called before the curtain, and everything went off well. Hiller thereupon placed his confidence in the verdict on the third performance, according to which his opera was an undoubted success, just as had been the case with my Tannhauser. The artificiality of this proceeding was, however, exposed by this fourth performance, at which I was present, and at which no one was under an obligation to the departed composer to attend. Even my niece was disgusted with it, and thought that the best singer in the world could not make ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... the way of translation. Wordsworth's translation of Virgil was prompted by the same kind of reaction against the reckless laxity of Dryden as that which inspired Cowper against the distorting artificiality of Pope. In each case the new translator cared more for his author and took a much higher view of a translator's duty than his predecessor had done. But in each case the plain and accurate translation was a failure, while the loose and ornate one continued to be admired. We ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... drugs and all the things of life have their uses and dangers, and there is no wholesale truth to excuse us a particular wisdom and watchfulness in these matters. Unless we except smoking as an unclean and needless artificiality, all these matters of eating and drinking and habit are matters of more or less. It seems to me foolish to make anything that is stimulating and pleasurable into a habit, for that is slowly and surely to lose a stimulus and pleasure and create a need that it may become painful to ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... three daughters sitting on a bank, "in the Gainsborough style," and varying his work by rambling to Pennicote to sketch the village children and improve his acquaintance with the Gascoignes. Hans appeared to have recovered his vivacity, but Deronda detected some feigning in it, as we detect the artificiality of a lady's bloom from its being a little too high-toned and steadily persistent (a "Fluctuating Rouge" not having yet appeared among the advertisements). Also with all his grateful friendship and admiration for ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... laudable one. For the athlete is the product of nature—a step towards the more perfect type of animal, while the scholar is the outcome of artificiality. What, I ask, does the scholar gain, either morally or physically, or in any other way, by knowing who was tribune of the people in 284 BC or what is the precise difference between the various constructions of cum? It is not as if ignorance of the tribune's identity caused him any mental ...
— Tales of St. Austin's • P. G. Wodehouse
... upon her were heirlooms of the Heyburn family, and in that grey light looked cold and glassy. The powder and the slight touch of carmine upon her cheeks, which at night had served to heighten her beauty, now gave her an appearance of painted artificiality. She was undeniably a pretty woman, and surely required no artificial aids to beauty. About thirty-three, yet she looked five years younger; while her husband was twenty years senior to herself. She still retained a figure so girlish that most people ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux
... they were always deeply impressive and, indeed, awe-inspiring. The face was not subjected to changes, but remained the same first and last—a ghastly white. To me he was always welcome, he seemed so real—the actual Death, not a play-acting artificiality. He was of a solemn and stately carriage; and he had a deep voice, and used it with a noble dignity. Wherever there was a turmoil of merry-making or fighting or feasting or chaffing or quarreling, or a gilded pageant, or other manifestation of our trivial and fleeting ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... linen of the immaculate bed lay the form of a woman, a beautiful woman she had been, too, though not with the freshness which makes American women so attractive. There was something artificial about her beauty, the artificiality which hinted at a hidden story of ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... wanted to escape somewhere where I might be as far removed from them as possible. Many of my readers have doubtless felt the dissatisfaction with oneself and everybody else that comes over one at times in the midst of the pleasures of life; when one wearies of the shallow artificiality of modern existence; when what was once excitement has become so no longer, and a longing grows up within one to taste a more vigorous unction than that afforded by the monotonous round of society's ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... down upon it ready made. Her own, into which I looked, was clean but very empty, and showed nothing homelike but the burning fire. This extreme newness, above all in so naked and flat a country, gives a strong impression of artificiality. With none of the litter and discoloration of human life; with the paths unworn, and the houses still sweating from the axe, such a settlement as this seems purely scenic. The mind is loth to accept it for a piece of reality; and it seems incredible that life can go on with so few properties, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... acting, the truth of visible presentation on the stage, adds to the wonder of poetry, giving life to its loveliness, and actual reality to its ideal form. And yet, in the 67th Sonnet, Shakespeare calls upon Willie Hughes to abandon the stage with its artificiality, its false mimic life of painted face and unreal costume, its immoral influences and suggestions, its remoteness from the true world of noble ...
— Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories • Oscar Wilde
... aware of the disadvantages connected with thus collecting together a number of separate papers, instead of writing a uniform treatise upon one continuous subject. The picture formed by their union must necessarily have much of the artificiality and clumsiness of the mosaic as compared with the oil or water-colour painting. But only in this form could I have brought together such a great variety of important things. And though I cannot hope that ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... was described to me as nervous and delicate, which is perhaps the right temperament to enable her accurately to depict in her romances the strained artificiality and silken softness of aristocratic existence. Her style also possesses the needful lightness and grace, and she accordingly succeeds admirably in her sketches of high life, with all its elegant nullities and spiritless ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... as the tropics, and are often seen to assume a distinctly green colour. These remarkable changes and the extraordinary phenomena of perfect straight lines crossing each other over a large portion of the planet's surface, with the circular spots at their intersections, had such an appearance of artificiality that the idea that they were really 'canals' made by intelligent beings for purposes of irrigation, was first hinted at, and then adopted as the only intelligible explanation, by Mr. Lowell and a few other persons. This at once seized upon the ...
— Is Mars Habitable? • Alfred Russel Wallace
... he held her hand, stroked it affectionately. He often laughed at the child's manifold follies, but her prettiness and the naivete which sweetened her inbred artificiality had won his liking. Much as it would have astonished Paula had she known it, his feeling was for the ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... the entire vocal world. The subtle influence of these forces was felt so gradually, and yet so surely and powerfully, that while the profession, as one might say, peacefully slept, art was changed to artificiality. Thus arose that which may be called the dark ages of the vocal art,—an age when error overshadowed truth and reason; for while real scientists, after great study and research, discovered much of the true science of voice, many ...
— The Renaissance of the Vocal Art • Edmund Myer
... Velasquez of vegetables, Fortuny is the Rossini of the rococo; such lace-like filigrees, fiorturi, marbles that are of stone, men and women that are alive, not of marble (like Alma-Tadema's). The artificiality of his work is principally in the choice of a subject, not in the performance. How luminous and silky are his blacks may be noted at the Metropolitan Museum in his portrait of a Spanish lady. There is nothing of ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... remarkable. In the early group of his novels he had felt a great difficulty in transcribing conversations so as to produce a natural and easy effect. He no longer, in Coningsby, is confronted by this artificiality. His dialogues are now generally remarkable for their ease and nature. The speeches of Rigby (who represents John Wilson Croker), of Lord Monmouth (who stands for Lord Hertford), of the Young Englanders themselves, of the laughable chorus of Taper and Tadpole, who never "despaired of the ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... seeking everywhere bustle and noise, the antithesis of the life of shade and silence which she led amid the leafy trees of her park. She would show herself everywhere, at races, theatres, parties—as when she accepted the Baroness Dinati's invitation; and, when she became nauseated with all the artificiality of worldly life, she would return eagerly to her woods, her dogs and her solitude, and, if it were winter, would shut herself up for long months ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... into that kind of life but was still more conscious of my own weakness and artificiality. I cannot forget myself and my complex, distorted past, and my future appears to me still more hopeless. Every day I have before me the distant snowy mountains and this majestic, happy woman. But not for me is the only happiness possible in the world; I cannot have this woman! What is ...
— The Cossacks • Leo Tolstoy
... to his canons of highest literary or poetical form in giving a Greek shape to his elegy on Keats; but it may be allowed to his English readers, or at any rate to some of them, to think that he hereby fell into a certain degree of artificiality of structure, undesirable in itself, and more especially hampering him in a plain and self-consistent expression both of his real feeling concerning Keats, and of his resentment against those who had cut short, or were supposed to have cut short, the career and the poetical work of his friend. Moreover ...
— Adonais • Shelley
... relief is chiefly due to the artificiality of the conditions of London or town life, and no doubt varies greatly in strength in town and country-bred persons; in me it is so strong that on first coming out to where there are woods and fields and hedges, I am ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... presentation of the short story is a matter of import. Its very artificiality calls for skilled workmanship; it must be made pleasant and readable by all known devices; its brevity, too, permits and demands a higher finish than is necessary in the novel. And altogether the short story offers ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... taste. A man of accredited taste often seemed to him little more than a man who had the faculty of admiring what it was the fashion to admire. Hugh had been for a short time under the influence of Ruskin, and had tried sincerely to see the magnificence of Turner, and to loathe the artificiality of Claude Lorraine. But when he arrived at his more independent attitude, he found that there was much to admire in Claude; that exquisite golden atmosphere, suffusing a whole picture with an evening glow, enriching the lavish ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... quite unfitted to be the goddess of these rustic beauties, for all her mind could feel in that softness and sleekness and clear calling was their alikeness to artificiality. She felt thin slippers on her feet, rubbed an ecstatic cheek against the sheen of satin, and in her ears echoed no diviner music than the Tol-de-rol Tol-de-rol of the Bugletown band on Flora Day. Save in her sincerity, she was as artificial a goddess as ever graced a Versailles ...
— The White Riband - A Young Female's Folly • Fryniwyd Tennyson Jesse
... being do we really live. The watchword, 'back to nature' may be said to have given the first impulse to the later call of the 'simple life,' which has arisen as a protest against the luxury, ostentation, and artificiality of ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... that artificiality in politics, which I will consider a little further on in studying the relations between the theory of evolution and socialism, and which is common to the ruling classes under the bourgeois regime and to the individualistic ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... cherche art, demanding, for its appreciation, a certain initiation, a certain special sense.' To realise the full value, the real charm, of A Rebours, some such initiation might be deemed necessary. In its fantastic unreality, its exquisite artificiality, it is the natural sequel of En Menage and A Vau-l'Eau, which are so much more acutely sordid than the most sordid kind of real life; it is the logical outcome of that hatred and horror of human mediocrity, of the mediocrity of daily existence, which we have seen to be the special ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... has been the proud ambition of many an artist in botany. In like manner, the Tokugawa Sh[o]guns (1604-1868) determined to so limit the supply of mental food, that the mind of Japan should be of those correctly dwarfed proportions of puniness, so admired by lovers of artificiality and unconscious caricature. Philosophy was selected as a chief tool among the engines of oppression, and as the main influence in stunting the intellect. All thought must be orthodox according to the standards of Confucianism, as expounded by Chu Hi. Anything like originality in poetry, ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... the hunting-field. A beginner who is put on a properly made saddle and suitable horse, and is taught the right principles of riding, will make more progress in a month than she would otherwise do in, say, five years. The artificiality of side-saddle riding extends even to the horse, which must be free from certain faults, such as unsteadiness in mounting, that would not render him unsuitable to ...
— The Horsewoman - A Practical Guide to Side-Saddle Riding, 2nd. Ed. • Alice M. Hayes
... N. cunning, craft; cunningness[obs3], craftiness &c. adj.; subtlety, artificiality; maneuvering &c. v.; temporization; circumvention. chicane, chicanery; sharp practice, knavery, jugglery[obs3]; concealment &c. 528; guile, doubling, duplicity &c. (falsehood) 544; foul play. diplomacy, politics; Machiavelism; jobbery, backstairs influence. art, artifice; device, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... might as well flow in a tunnel, being bridged so much. There remains but the Arc de Triomphe, the only piece of architecture in all modern Paris worth a second look. Even this is spoiled by the same intolerable artificiality. The ridiculous sculpture on the face, the figures blowing trumpets, and, above all, the group on the summit, which the tongue of man cannot describe, so utterly hideous is it, destroy the noble lines of the arch, if any one is so imprudent as to approach near it. Receding down ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... escape, and an overwhelming sense of the inherent rottenness of western civilisation. It was upon such occasions that he saw, or thought he saw, the inevitable tendency of European cities to emasculate and corrupt the rugged nobilities of mankind. A revolt against artificiality had followed. Immediately, there in the heart of the world's greatest city, there had grown up about him the mirage of the primeval forest, whose boughs are steeped in silence, borne up by tall bare trunks, which lured him on to explore and ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... friend in Hobart Town, a freed convict named Wainewright. He provided me with the clothes of a gentleman. The beard I wore, and which has since served me as a disguise in my many enterprises, was given to me in the first place by Wainewright. To perfect that beard and destroy every semblance of artificiality, I had worked at it for three years in the cunning, patient way old prisoners toil at such a task. Wainewright helped me to get to the mainland, and I was safe, with a forged ticket-of-leave in my pocket in case the marks of the chains ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... consciousness, that the individual reason is a miniature of the universal reason, that in fact the history of a philosopher's thinking is an abstract of the history of philosophy. The same holds good in the field of religious thought. Without much artificiality, without forcing the facts, a rational scheme of the Christological heresies might be drawn up. They might be pictorially represented as the rungs of a ladder, which the truth-seeking mind scales rung by rung, pausing at the lower phases of Christological thought, and then ...
— Monophysitism Past and Present - A Study in Christology • A. A. Luce
... and sat near the octagonal water which completes with its fountain of Cupids the enchanting artificiality of the Luxembourg. The sun shone more kindly now, and the trees which framed the scene were golden and lovely. A balustrade of stone gracefully enclosed the space, and the flowers, freshly bedded, were very gay. In one corner they could see the squat, ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... intoxication of the spirit rather than of the senses, no flame of lust but rather a purifying and exalting fire. To feel otherwise has merely been the unhappy privilege of men intoxicated by the stifling and unwholesome air of modern artificiality. To the natural man, always and everywhere, even to-day, nakedness has in it a power of divine terror, which ancient men throughout the world crystallised into beautiful rites, so that when a woman unveiled herself it seemed to them that thunderstorms were silenced, and that noxious ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... eye, and who for that object must remain fixed on shelves, like other marketable wares, avoiding motion to avoid shattering or tarnishing. This is their fate, only in degree less inhuman than that of Hellenic and Trojan princesses offered up to the Gods, or pretty slaves to the dealers. Their artificiality is at once their bane and their source of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... intelligence. When some forgotten inventor of the older world smote his rival or enemy with a branch of wood and found that it was good and thereafter made a practice of smiting rivals and enemies with branches of wood, then, and on that day, artificiality may be said to have begun. Then, and on that day, was begun a revolution destined to change the history of life. Then, and on that day, was laid the cornerstone of that most tremendous ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... of the fiery and inextinguishable nature of Milton's genius that it triumphed over the artificiality of his training; that there is the pulse of a true poetical life in his most highly wrought poems, and that the whole mountain of his learning glows with the strong internal flame. His inspiration was ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... "we are forestalled! See, Mr. Morris is just being presented," and he motioned to where a beautiful young woman sat, before whom Mr. Morris was making a most profound bow. Calvert thought he had rarely seen a more lovely face, though there was a touch of artificiality about it, young as it was, which he did not admire. The soft, fair hair was thickly powdered, the cheeks rouged, and the whiteness of the chin and forehead enhanced by many patches. The eyes were intelligent, but restless and insincere, the mouth ...
— Calvert of Strathore • Carter Goodloe
... Xingu, for instance, with its famous opening sentence—"Mrs. Ballinger is one of the ladies who pursue Culture in bands, as though it were dangerous to meet alone"—has the flash and glitter, and the agreeable artificiality, of polite comedy. Undine Spragg and the many futile women whom Mrs. Wharton enjoys ridiculing more than she gives evidence of enjoying anything else belong nearly as much to the menagerie of the satirist as to the novelist's gallery. ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... name of the great Brighton preacher. It will be generally admitted that these two volumes will furnish means for estimating the character of Mr. Robertson which are not supplied in any or all of his published works.... There was no artificiality or show about the pulpit production, no half-utterances or whispers of solemn belief; but there was the natural restraint which would be imposed by a true gentleman upon his words when speaking to mixed congregations. Many of us wanted to ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... made Mademoiselle de Verneuil unjust, and prevented her from recognizing the real devotion which rendered several of these men remarkable. It is true that most of those now present were commonplace. A few original and marked faces appeared among them, but even these were belittled by the artificiality and the etiquette of aristocracy. If Marie generously granted intellect and perception to the latter, she also discerned in them a total absence of the simplicity, the grandeur, to which she had been accustomed among the triumphant ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac
... POWERFUL ADDITIONAL PROOF OF THE HYPOTHESIS OF ORGANIC PROGRESS BY VIRTUE OF LAW. It establishes the unity of animated nature and the definite character of its entire constitution. It enables us to see how, under the flowing robes of nature, where all looks arbitrary and accidental, there is an artificiality of the most rigid kind. The natural, we now perceive, sinks into and merges in a Higher Artificial. To adopt a comparison more apt than dignified, we may be said to be placed here as insects are in a garden of the ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers
... When the clown laughs, his lips, his eyes, his eye-brows, and eyelids—indeed, all the features of his countenance—are imbued with their appropriate expressions. In both him and his companion, every gesture is so entirely easy, and free from the semblance of artificiality, that, were it not for the diminutiveness of their size, and the fact of their being passed from one spectator to another previous to their exhibition on the rope, it would be difficult to convince any assemblage of persons that these wooden automata were not living creatures. We cannot, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... beguiling with its harmony and beauty." "There is another poetry, natural, rapid, terse, which springs from the soul as an electric spark, which strikes our feelings with a word, and flees away. Bare of artificiality, free within a free form, it awakens by the aid of one kindred idea the thousand others that sleep in the bottomless ocean of fancy. The first has an acknowledged value; it is the poetry of everybody. The second lacks any absolute standard ...
— Legends, Tales and Poems • Gustavo Adolfo Becquer
... armchairs and divans were upholstered in yellow and pink satin, and decked out with ribbon bows to resemble Watteau sheep. Oh no; certainly I should not exchange the low living and high thinking of my Anarchist days for such artificiality and vulgar display. Sunday was generally a very busy day with me, almost more so than week-days, for there were meetings to be held, literature to be sold and distributed, and lectures and discussions to be attended. I was in the habit of rising ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith
... more obvious possibilities for constructive and manual development, Miss Rankin's experiment offers social features of unusual suggestiveness, for the village provides a civic experience fairly comprehensive and free from the artificiality that is apt to characterize attempts to introduce civic content into school and ...
— A Catalogue of Play Equipment • Jean Lee Hunt
... generously. "J. Hamerton Smythe. S-m-y-t-h-e. I didn't change it from Smith, and I don't know what one of my esteemed ancestors did. But I'm glad he did. It gives me a touch of artificiality, don't you think? ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham
... the artificiality is all the greater!" chipped in Austin, tersely. "The more perfect the illusion, the hollower the artificiality. Of course, no one could take Sardanapalus seriously, any more than if he were a marionette pulled by strings ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour
... passions of man under civilization, Conrad fails. "The Return" is a thoroughly infirm piece of writing—a second rate magazine story. One concludes at once that the author himself does not believe in it. "The Inheritors" is worse; it becomes, after the first few pages, a flaccid artificiality, a bore. It is impossible to imagine the chief characters of the Conrad gallery in such scenes. Think of Captain MacWhirr reacting to social tradition, Lord Jim immersed in the class war, Lena Hermann seduced by the fashions, Almayer a candidate for office! As well think ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... senectutem oblectant, may be said of them with as much truth as ever now. Yet no analysis will explain their indefinable charm. If the so-called "lyrical cry" be of the essence of a true lyric, they are not true lyrics at all. Few of them are free from a marked artificiality, an almost rigid adherence to canon. Their range of thought is not great; their range of feeling is studiously narrow. Beside the air and fire of a lyric of Catullus, an ode of Horace for the moment ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... group of pines by the pole trail the following afternoon because he had said he would, but with a new attitude of mind. He had come into contact with the artificiality of conventional relations, and it stiffened him. No wonder she had made him keep silence the afternoon before! She had done it gently and nicely, to be sure, but that was part of her good-breeding. Hilda found him formal, reserved, ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... the process of his reasoning, by seeking to unite its threads and to discover its sources and causes, he concluded that his previous mode of living was derived from the education he had received. Thus, his tendencies towards artificiality and his craving for eccentricity, were no more than the results of specious studies, spiritual refinements and quasi-theological speculations. They were, in the last analysis, ecstacies, aspirations towards an ideal, towards an unknown universe as desirable as ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... nature so unnatural, so singular in quality, as the glittering artificiality of the early morning in the country the day after a heavy, drifting, New England snowstorm. For a day and a night the wildly whirling snow that "driving o'er the fields seems nowhere to alight" has restrained the outlook, and every one has turned depressed from that outside ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... yet never attract a curious eye, never provoke a single remark. Dear, dear, it only shows that there is nothing diviner about a king than there is about a tramp, after all. He is just a cheap and hollow artificiality when you don't know he is a king. But reveal his quality, and dear me it takes your very breath away to look at him. I reckon we are all fools. Born so, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... is contained in the big tub, and the little tub is contained in the middle tub, then the little tub is contained in the big tub." Hegel says: "Common sense in its reaction against such logical formality and artificiality turned away in disgust, and was of the opinion that it could do without such a science as logic." Most true, Philosopher Hegel, you have absurdities of your own on a gigantic scale, but you do well to reject the ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, September 1887 - Volume 1, Number 8 • Various
... exalted bacchanalian and love songs—the mood, we may infer, of his normal working life. We may again observe the correspondence between the change of dialect and change of tone in stanzas nine and ten, the increase of artificiality coming with his literary English and culminating in the unspeakable "tenebrific scene." His humor returns with his ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... possibility of illusion in the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth, but in our time it is no longer possible to follow with interest the development of events which one knows could not take place in the conditions which the author describes in detail. The artificiality of the positions, not flowing from the natural course of events, or from the nature of the characters, and their want of conformity with time and space, is further increased by those coarse embellishments which are continually added by Shakespeare and intended to appear ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... people go to see it, and which certainly has many more lines in its curves and woodwork, but yet did not appeal to me, because it seemed too purposely ornamental. A house designed to look well, even age has not taken from its artificiality. Neither is there any cone nor cart-horses about. Why, even a tall chanticleer makes a home look homely. I do like to see a tall proud chanticleer strutting in the yard and barely giving way as I advance, almost ready to do battle with a stranger like a mastiff. So I prefer the ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... prompted in a measure by that of the audience about him. The emotion of a large assembly was always contagious—sweeping the individual along with it. Whereas, in private, her dancing, lacking the glamour and artificiality of the stage, would be a very different thing. It would appear in a more realistic, commonplace light. Any faults which the atmosphere of the stage might have concealed would immediately become apparent in the light of natural surroundings and her performance ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... have advanced since then, the latter possibly more than the former. Miss Edgeworth, indeed, has been singularly unfortunate. She drew from life, and her talent and observation were worthy of a more lasting shrine, while the artificiality of her books has caused them to decay even faster than those of some of her contemporaries. Her successors in Irish fiction, with no lack of talent, have been too often careless in using it, or have preferred story-telling ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... recovered from her attack of what she had been denouncing to herself as snobbishness. For all the gingham wrapper and spectacles anchored in the hair and general air of hard work and no "culture," she was thinking, as she looked at Mrs. Whitney's artificiality and listened to those affected accents, that she was glad her mother was Ellen Ranger and not Matilda Whitney. "But mother doesn't believe she has a hard time," she answered, "and everything depends on what one believes oneself; don't you think so? I ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... in its relations to society and to the individual. It is always indicative of the temper of the time. This is notably true of the wanton ease of the costume of Charles the Second, and the meretricious artificiality of that of the middle of the last century. And in the deliberate double-skirted costliness of the female fashions of our own day,—fashions not intended for courts or wealthy aristocracies, but for everybody,—contrasted as they are with the sober-hued and unpretending habits which ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... the heavy golden bracelet is cold, yet soft and yielding like a sleep. The face has the natural ease of slumber, and not the rigid artificiality of death. 'Tis true there is no pulse, no beat of heart nor stir of breath, yet neither is there the sombre grotesqueness of the last pose. But the difference between life and death is here so small that it is incommensurable, the point of ...
— The Flutter of the Goldleaf; and Other Plays • Olive Tilford Dargan and Frederick Peterson
... tiny three-room suite (a lovely nest for a woman) was not in the least like a home for an old trailer and corn-husker like myself. Its gas log and gimcrack mantel, its "Mission" furniture and its "new art" rugs were all of hopeless artificiality, but our sitting-room (on the quiet side of the building) received the sun, and there on the lid of a small desk I took up and carried forward the story of Hesper which my publishers had asked me to prepare for ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... part of civilisation's lust of re-arrangement that we should be so ready to conventionalise the beauty of this world into decorative patterns for our pilgrim tents. It is a phase, and will melt into other phases; but it tends to the increase of artificiality, and exists not only in art but in everything. It is no new thing for jaded sentiment to crave the spur of the unnatural, to prefer the clever imitation, to live in a Devachan where the surroundings appear that which we would have them to be; but it is an interesting ...
— The Roadmender • Michael Fairless
... this obvious sort of ministerial considerateness was laid on my heart with special weight. That duty bears in many directions. It is, I venture to say, inconsiderate, on the one hand, when the Clergyman conducts the services of the Church with a disturbing artificiality of performance. It is inconsiderate, on the other hand, when he conducts them with any, even the least, real slovenliness ...
— To My Younger Brethren - Chapters on Pastoral Life and Work • Handley C. G. Moule
... reticent about its real thoughts as it gets accustomed to talk to an appreciative audience. With weighing and measuring, inspecting and reporting, exercising and rapid forcing, and comparing, applauding and tabulating results, it is difficult to see how children can escape self-consciousness and artificiality, and the enthusiasts for "child study" are in danger of making the specimen of the real child more and more rare and difficult to find, as destructive sportsmen in a new country exterminate the ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... such an epithet for the hero of the deluge story. The case is different with Gi-il-ga-mesh, or Gish-g(n)-mash, which represent the popular and actual pronunciation of the name, or at least the approach to such pronunciation. Such forms, stripped as they are of all artificiality, impress one as genuine names. The conclusion to which we are thus led is that Gish-bil(or bl)-ga-mesh is a play upon the genuine name, to convey to those to whom the real name, as that of a foreigner, would suggest ...
— An Old Babylonian Version of the Gilgamesh Epic • Anonymous
... there the story how the Beast obtained his terrible form. I have, however, rejected this form of it as it is not so widespread as "Beauty and the Beast," which is one of the few stories that we can trace, spreading through Europe practically within our own time. The artificiality of the leading motive is sufficient proof of the late origin of the tale. But, after all, tradition does not distinguish between primitive or later strata. Ralston dealt with the whole formula from the sun-moon point of view in ...
— Europa's Fairy Book • Joseph Jacobs
... from a variety of languages, and simply mixed up together, without any scientific attempt at co-ordination or simplification. The resulting international languages have varied in their degree of artificiality, and in the proportions in which they were consciously or semi-consciously compiled, or else adopted their elements ready-made, without conscious adaptation, from existing tongues. But their production, widespread ...
— International Language - Past, Present and Future: With Specimens of Esperanto and Grammar • Walter J. Clark
... considered the successful exemplars in this department of literature, the errors incident to artificiality, the conventional forms of writing, are patent. Only in passages do we recognize that beauty or truth, that reality and genuineness, which so often wholly pervade a poem, a story, a memoir, or even a disquisition: at some point, the flow incident to wilful instead ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... will be noted here that the whole thing is ridiculously stagey and artificial. In spite of the new ideas fermenting in Wagner's brain, he had not yet got away from the stage-trickiness of Scribe. Unreality and artificiality face you at every step. The music is a different matter. No one, not even Mendelssohn in his Hebrides overture, has ever given us the sea, the noise and colour of it, its violence and ruthlessness, as Wagner has here. It is the sea that pervades the whole of the ...
— Wagner • John F. Runciman
... with the luxurious mansions—more luxurious than superb—surrounded with the white cedar, the cocoa-nut tree, and the tall, rich mountain cabbage—the most beautiful of all tropical trees; but perchance it would not require a very long excursion to weary him with the artificiality of the scenery, and cause him to sigh for the "woods and wilds," the "banks and braes," of ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... figure of Karl to that of his brother, one is struck at once with the artificiality of the portrait. We seem to have before us in Franz Moor the result of a deliberate effort to conceive the vilest possible travesty of human nature. Nothing here that was copied from nature, nothing that Schiller found in his own heart. It is all a brain-spun creation, born of ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... quite the equal of its companions. Written, as it was, for Countess Anna de Hanska, Balzac's step-daughter of the future, while she was still very young, it partakes necessarily of the rather elaborate artificiality of all attempts to suit the young person, of French attempts in particular, and it may perhaps be said of Balzac's attempts most of all. It belongs, in a way, to the Arcis series—the series which also includes the fine Tenebreuse Affaire and the unfinished ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... take many years for her to wheedle most of his money away; but there was no cessation to the demand, no apparent limit to the supply. Both were growing older, and now it became evident that Mrs. Clancy was the elder of the two, and that the artificiality of her charms could not stand the test of frontier life. No longer sought as the belle of the soldiers' ball-rooms, she aspired to leadership among their wives and families, and was accorded that pre-eminence rather than the fierce battle which was sure to follow any revolt. ...
— The Deserter • Charles King
... of the thirteenth century artificiality and vulgarity began to preponderate, provoking as counterweights didactic works such as Der Krieg auf der Wartburg. The fourteenth century saw the rise of the free cities, literary guilds, and five universities. It also marks the cultivation of political satire ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... finds the colour of the sun. The successful London actress, my dear—what existence has she? A straight flight across the Atlantic in a record-breaker, so many nights in New York, so many in Chicago, so many in a Pullman car, and the net result in every newspaper—an existence of pure artificiality infested by reporters. It's like living in the shell of your personality. It's the house for ever on your back; at the last you are buried in it, smirking in your coffin with a half-open eye on the floral offerings. There never ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... gathering the fringed gentian just outside the town, interchanging friendly talk with the cheery peasant-folk, the thought arose: What a paradise for weary brain workers! What a perfect summer retreat! Removed from the routine of daily life, escaped for a time from the artificiality of ordinary travel, how happy were the lover of nature, of pastoral existence, of quietude in such a spot! No whistle of railway, no bustle of streets, only the placid rippling of the Tarn and the ...
— The Roof of France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... Republic, and in whose social philosophy the segregation of a "directing class" has been hitherto a dogma. But soon I cared little whether that experiment was to succeed or no in its final effort, or whether the French were to perfect a democracy where wealth has one vast experience of its own artificiality, or to fail. The intellectual interest of such an experiment, when once I seized it, drove out ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... prevalent belief that most of the evils that existed in society were due to the mistakes of civilization, that if men could get back to a "state of nature" and start again, things might be much better. It was felt that there was too much artificiality, too much interference with natural development. Arthur Young condemned the prevailing policy of government, "because it consists of prohibiting the natural course of things. All restrictive forcible measures in ...
— An Introduction to the Industrial and Social History of England • Edward Potts Cheyney
... curious that, throughout his former life, through his boyhood, his years in the Corps, and the brief period of his society life, Ivan should have been on terms of genuine intimacy with himself; whereas, after the dissolution of all artificiality in his surroundings, when at last he stood before himself, face to face with his naked soul, he became suddenly disturbed, uncertain, afraid of that self-confidence on which he had hitherto so prided himself. ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... who knew him more intimately than did the present writer. He was of a singularly agreeable presence, without being in the sense of the painter's model exactly "handsome"; and in particular he could boast a very pleasant and not in the least artificial smile. Some artificiality of manner was sometimes attributed to him, I think rather unjustly; but he certainly had "tricks and manners" of the kind very natural to men of decided idiosyncrasy, unless they transcend all mere trick, after the fashion which we know in Scott, which we are sure of, without knowing, ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... torrent. "What I was then I am to-day. Mentally, I am like an inebriate, who no longer finds satisfaction in plain food and drink, but craves stimulants. I demand activity, excitement, change. In every hour of my life I realize the narrowness and artificiality of it all; but without it I am unhappy. I sometimes think Mother Nature herself has disowned me; when I try to get near her she draws away—I fancy with a shudder. Solitude of desert, of forest, or of prairie is no longer solitude to me. It ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge
... contract her very fancy. No longer pure and fair as the statue of alabaster, her beauty, like that of some painted waxen effigy, is tawdry and meretricious. It is not alone the rouge upon the cheek and the false tresses adorning the forehead, which repel the ardour of admiration; it is the artificiality of mind with which such efforts are connected that breaks ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19. Issue 548 - 26 May 1832 • Various
... signs of the times, and is likewise more open to the solicitations of novelty, more ready to try new methods. A noticeable defect of the French drama, in the first half of the nineteenth century, was the pronounced artificiality of its characters and plots. Whatever the kind of play exhibited, the same stereotyped noble fathers, ingenuous maidens, coquettes, and Lotharios strutted on the boards. Whatever else changed, these did not. Only their costumes differed. Moreover, the adventures in which ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... despondency escaped her. She was always sunny-natured, cheerful, self-sacrificing, resourceful—in short, a delightful companion. Yet—she was a savage, he thought, with a curl of the lip, as before his mind's eye arose the contrast between her and her civilized sisters, with their artificiality and moods and caprices, and petty spites and fictitious ailments, and general contentiousness all around. It was by no means certain he would not have returned to dwell with her among her own people, had that course been open—but it was not. Only the return to civilization lay before him; and what ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... century is spoken of as the period of artificiality, in externals at least; but, indeed, there may be two words about that. In modern speech one uses artificiality as meaning indefinitely a sort of deceit; and the eighteenth century was far too artificial to deceive. It cultivated that completest art that does not conceal the art. ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... exaggerate in statement or, at least, to set forth in all the isolation of their quality as half-truths. But it is hardly possible to exaggerate their significance as a reversal of the immemorial one-sidedness, inadequacy, and artificiality both of the official statement and of the popular apprehension of Christianity. These ideas appeal to men in our time. They are popular because men think them already. Men are pleased, even when somewhat incredulous, to learn that Christianity will bear this social interpretation. Most Christians ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... multitude of stray hints in art and poetry and religious custom, through modern speculation on the tendencies of early thought, through traits and touches in our own actual states of mind, which may seem sympathetic with those tendencies. In such a picture there must necessarily be a certain artificiality; things near and far, matter of varying degrees of certainty, fact and surmise, being reflected and concentrated, for its production, as if on the surface of a mirror. Such concrete character, however, ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... This artificiality, fostered in an earlier period by the Melizim, had by no means disappeared from Hebrew literature. Its most popular devotees in the later day of which we are speaking were, besides Kalman Schulman, A. Friedberg, who wrote a Hebrew adaptation of Grace Aguilar's tale, "The Vale ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... labored and uninteresting designs which are common. If the Pattern-artist deck-out the old worn-out and common place spirals with leaves and flowers borrowed from Nature—the result is like the "voice of Jacob and the hands of Esau;" it is merely a Disguise of Artificiality. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 829, November 21, 1891 • Various
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