"Inartistic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... I chose would look very dull in your eyes, I dare say, my dear Ida; you who live in an age of bright, smart story-books, with clear type, coloured pictures, and gorgeous outsides. You don't know what small, mean, inartistic 'cuts' enlivened your grandmother's nursery library, that is, when the books were illustrated at all. You have no idea how very little amusement was blended with the instruction, and how much instruction with the amusement in our playbooks ...
— Mrs. Overtheway's Remembrances • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... of the keep, in 1840, which was described at that time as "a picturesque ruin." It was entirely rebuilt on its original plan. The gateway to the courtyard was repaired and modernised by Bishop Barrington, with the existing inartistic result. ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Durham - A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief History of the Episcopal See • J. E. Bygate
... transformation, some evidence of patient struggling with faults, some hint of failings triumphed over, some gain of generosity and endurance and courage. To slur over the faults and failings of the great is not only inartistic: it is also faint-hearted and unjust. It alienates sympathy. It substitutes unreal adoration for wholesome admiration; it afflicts the reader, conscious of frailty and struggle, with a sense of hopeless despair in the presence of anything so supremely high-minded ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Samuel F. B. Morse
... deal as a pantomime, a distorted caricature of Goethe, and a thoroughly inartistic production. But it proved the greatest of all Henry's financial successes. The Germans who came to see it, oddly enough, did not scorn it nearly as much as the English who were sensitive on behalf of the Germans, and the Goethe Society wrote ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... utterly astonished. The clothes I wore seemed coarse and unfamiliar. My hand went to my chin, when I found that I had grown a beard! My surroundings were strange and mysterious. The houses on either side were white and inartistic, with sloping roofs and square windows. They were ...
— The Stretton Street Affair • William Le Queux
... resumed. "The singer, though trying to act out the character he assumes, must not forget to sing. The combination of fine singing and fine acting is rare. Nowadays people think if they can act, that atones for inartistic singing; then they yield to the temptation to shout, to make harsh tones, simply for effect." And the famous baritone caricatured some of the sounds he had recently heard at an operatic performance with such gusto, that a member of the household came ...
— Vocal Mastery - Talks with Master Singers and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... glimmer of hope I am delighted to discover. Mr. Chesterton likens Little Bethel to a monstrous mushroom. There can be only one reason for this inartistic mixture of analogy and antithesis. Mr. Chesterton evidently knows that a large mushroom is not so sweet or so toothsome as a small one. A 'monstrous mushroom,' even to those who like mushrooms, is coarse and less tasty. Now the gleam of hope lies in the circumstance that Mr. Chesterton knows the ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham
... colours in the pig-sty at the back of Coate Farm. They prefer 'their geraniums in the conservatory.' They refuse, in any case, to call a 'picture' that which is only a long-drawn sequence of statements. They are naturally inartistic, but they have the tradition of a long and speaking series of artistic results, and instinctively they decline to recognise as art the work of one who was plainly the reverse of an artist. The artist is he who knows how ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... science closely in our use of poisons. Mr. Trollope's "Gemma" is an instance in point, where every one will feel that the spectacle of the heroine going seasick to death, owing to the administration of tartar emetic, is as disgusting and inartistic a method as fiction presents. Why not have made it croton oil? More and worse of this hideous realism is to be found in About's books, such, for instance, as "Germaine"; but from which censure I like to exclude the rollicking fun ...
— Doctor and Patient • S. Weir Mitchell
... on the farm, and dreamed in his studio and tried to teach his little, inartistic Edith to draw, and mourned. As for business, he said, "Go to the devil!"—except as he looked after Maurice Curtis's affairs; this because the boy's father had been his friend. But it was the consciousness ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... the lot of this valley accounts for its verdure. In any event, park, woods, meadow, garden, even the mountain sides are green, a vari-colored green, and interspersed with an abundance of flowers. Nowhere is the eye offended by anything inartistic or unpicturesque, but, on the contrary, the charm is so comprehensive that the visitor looks from place to place, from this bit to that bit, and ever ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various
... film play rather late, but it has quickly gained a secure position. The more elaborate the production, the more frequent and the more skillful the use of this new and artistic means. The melodrama can hardly be played without it, unless a most inartistic use of printed words is made. The close-up has to furnish the explanations. If a little locket is hung on the neck of the stolen or exchanged infant, it is not necessary to tell us in words that everything will hinge on this locket twenty ...
— The Photoplay - A Psychological Study • Hugo Muensterberg
... background" is a common fault with story writers. In many of the Italian operas, everybody who does not appear in the final scene is killed off in the middle of the last act. This wholesale slaughter is useless as well as inartistic. The true artist does not, in order that his central figure may stand out prominently, make his background a solid wall of gloom. Yet gloom has its proper ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... working gold was developed and perfected; and we have abundance of beautiful gold-work from remote times, of such fine design and execution that there is nothing in the world to equal it. The modern work of countries where gold is found in quantities is commonplace, vulgar and inartistic, when compared with the work of the old Irish period. Torques, or twisted ribbons of gold, of varying size and shape, were worn as diadems, collars, or even belts; crescent bands of finely embossed sheet-gold were worn above ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
... exercise, with a view to health, used to be the privilege of the upper class; we have been teaching the people to play games and go in for healthy sports. At the same time there has been considerable aesthetic progress. England is no longer the stupidly inartistic country of early Victorian times; there's a true delight in music and painting, and a much more general appreciation of the good in literature. With all this we have been so busy that politics have fallen into the background—politics in the proper sense of the word. Ideas of national ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... all freedom of action, and, we must say, takes most clumsy and hopeless and long-roundabout methods of accomplishing crimes, to which one would have thought a lady of her imputed sagacity would have found much shorter cuts. It is amazing and inartistic, however, that after all her awkwardness she should fail. Given a blockhead like Armadale, and a dreamer like Midwinter, there is no reason in nature, and no reason in art, why a lady of Miss Gwilt's advantages should not marry both of them; and the author's overruling ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... good heed that even that should serve the end in view; in his play with ideas, Dr. John Donne, so far from serving the end, sometimes obscures it almost hopelessly: the hart escapes while he follows the squirrels and weasels and bats. It is not surprising that, their author being so inartistic with regard to their object, his verses themselves should be harsh and unmusical beyond the worst that one would imagine fit to be called verse. He enjoys the unenviable distinction of having no rival in ruggedness of metric ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... impression consisted of. Several persons wrote to the author and several others asked to be introduced to him: wasn't that an impression? One of the lively "weeklies," snapping at the deadly "monthlies," said the whole thing was "grossly inartistic"—wasn't that? It was somewhere else proclaimed "a wonderfully subtle character-study"—wasn't that too? The strongest effect doubtless was produced on the publisher when, in its lemon-coloured volumes, like a little dish of three custards, the book was at last served cold: ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... gauds, the illusion being aided by panoramic scenery; scenery that acted in company with toads, dragons, horses, snakes, crazy valkyrs, mermaids, half-mad humans, gods, demons, dwarfs, and giants. What else is all this but old-fashioned Italian opera with a new name? What else but an inartistic mixture of Scribe libretto and Northern mythology? Music-drama—fudge! Making music that one can see is a death-blow to a lofty idealization ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... writer of the book nor any later hand thought it worth while to add three lines to tell the world what became of him. A strange way to write history, and a most imperfect narrative, surely! Yes, unless there be some peculiarity in the purpose of the book, which explains this cold-blooded, inartistic, and tantalising habit of letting men leap upon the stage as if they had dropped from the clouds, and vanish from it as abruptly as if they had fallen through ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... if about to sail out of the calm, prosaic waters of this every-day nineteenth-century life, and embark upon the phosphorescent sea of our sensational novelists—psychological, so-called. It is rather soon for the cabinet to break, however. It suggests an anti-climax, which would be inartistic. But such material was never intended to be thrown away by ...
— What Dreams May Come • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... did the curious conventional painting of the Trinity on a gold ground. The subject is inartistic, because unapproachable; the attempt to paint that which is a deep spiritual mystery degrades both the art and the subject; the latter because it lowers it to human grasp, the former because it shows its powerlessness ...
— Fra Bartolommeo • Leader Scott (Re-Edited By Horace Shipp And Flora Kendrick)
... lack only too frequently the courage to acknowledge them to others. Not until we artists all reach the point when we can take counsel with each other about our mistakes and deficiencies, and discuss the means for overcoming them, putting our pride in our pockets, will bad singing and inartistic effort be checked, and our noble art of singing come ...
— How to Sing - [Meine Gesangskunst] • Lilli Lehmann
... sin, ugly as a toad, ugly as a scarecrow, ugly as a dead monkey; plain, bald (unadorned) 849; homely ; ordinary, unornamental[obs3], inartistic; unsightly, unseemly, uncomely, unlovely; unshapely; sightless, seemless[obs3]; not fit to be seen; unbeauteous[obs3], unbeautiful; beautiless[obs3], semibeautiful; shapeless &c. (amorphous) 241. misshapen, misproportioned[obs3]; monstrous; gaunt &c. (thin) 203; dumpy &c. (short) 201; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... seize upon the choicest luxuries of living, as our accommodations, even such as they were, proved to be expensive enough to hamper us. We had all expected to be blissful in Italy, and so the inartistic and inhuman accessories of life were harder to bear there than elsewhere. I remember a perpetual rice pudding (sent in the tin ten-story edifices which caterers supply laden with food), of which the almost daily sight maddened ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... occupying the corner of a lounge, shifted uneasily. Evidently to put forth truths so baldly was inartistic. ...
— Suzanna Stirs the Fire • Emily Calvin Blake
... and inartistic symbolism is revolting to a spiritually-unfolded consciousness. True mystic symbolisms must observe accurately the finer law of correspondences or they fail to appeal to such as these, and become to the occult a mild form ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... satisfy you (and practice will make one more and more critical), it is generally because you have not made sufficient allowance for the power of imagination in your audience. Emphasis in gesture is just as inartistic—and therefore ineffective—as emphasis in ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... beautified the Ohio. Despite their inartistic names, Diamond and Slim are tipped at head and foot with charming banks and willowed sand, and each center is clothed in a luxurious forest, rimmed by a gravelly beach piled high with drift and gnarled roots: the whole, with startling clearness, inversely reflected in the mirrored flood. ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites
... familiar friendship had ceased since that rebuff of Saxham's. She had never since set foot in his third-floor bedroom, where Little Miss Muffet and Georgy Porgy and the whole regiment of nursery-rhyme characters, attired in the brilliant aniline hues adored of inartistic, frankly-barbaric babyhood, adorned the top of the brown-paper dado, and flourished ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... a full expression of their feelings, but they affected no undue delight at the presence of their new-found relative—whom they had very sincerely forgotten, along with many other details of a somewhat inartistic youth—and turned to their other guests with a frank relief when they had established him, with a cup of tea, a sandwich, and Aunt Julia, in ...
— Julia The Apostate • Josephine Daskam
... straight he did; at other times he sawed; and, when it seemed necessary, he dug. After he had finished helping every one, Wally said that the turkey looked as if a dog had been at it, and the ham was worse, which remarks Jim meekly accepted as his due. Nor did the inartistic appearance of the turkey prevent the critic from ...
— A Little Bush Maid • Mary Grant Bruce
... Baku looks the inartistic, business-like place it is, occupying the base of brown, verdureless hills. Scarcely a green thing is visible to relieve the dull, drab aspect roundabout, and only the scant vegetation of a few gardens relieves the city a trifle itself. To the left of the city the slopes ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... master. During a whole horrible week her judgment on him had been unjustly severe, and she did not mean to fall into the same sin again. She thought with respect of his artistic gifts, which she was too inartistic to appreciate. Yes, the chances were ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... the Legations are quite comfortable, pretty and unpretentious, with the usual complement of furniture of folding pattern, so convenient but so inartistic, and a superabundance of cane chairs. Really good furniture being very expensive in Teheran, a good deal of the upholstery of the Teheran Legations is conveyed to the country residences for the summer months. Perhaps nothing is more amusing ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... to me. Until the actual event comes off we are practically in the position if not of comrades, at least of business partners. Until the event comes off, therefore I should suggest that quarrelling would be inconvenient and rather inartistic; while the ordinary exchange of politeness between man and man would be not ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... half-a-crown, three two-shilling pieces, and four separate shillings, all the coins being well-worn silver of the realm, the undoubted inartistic product of the reputable British Mint. This seemed to dispose of the theory that he was palming off illegitimate money. He asked me if I were interested in any particular branch of antiquity, and I replied that my curiosity was merely general, and exceedingly ...
— The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont • Robert Barr
... I have been through all that. But you yourself are making statues of ancients instead of beautiful nymphs and swains. And Ecrasia is right about the ancients being inartistic. ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... to illustrate the expedient of emphasizing by position have been chosen for convenience from short-stories; but the same principle may be applied with similar success in constructing the chapters of a novel. Certain great but inartistic novelists, like Sir Walter Scott, show themselves to be singularly obtuse to the advantage of placing emphatic material in an emphatic position. Scott is almost always careless of his chapter endings: he allows the sections of his narrative ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... interposed, "can't you see that I'm not angry? I blab about you to the King? What do you take me for? I am your pal, now and always, in affairs liable to prove inartistic to the King's, or Prince George's, stomach. To begin with, what has an elephant to do with supping with a ...
— Secret Memoirs: The Story of Louise, Crown Princess • Henry W. Fischer
... It was a plain, inartistic room, and the middle-aged woman whose holy of holies it had been for fifteen years was as old-fashioned and unbeautiful as it; yet there was, somehow, about the place a certain atmosphere of goodness and peace that cannot ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten
... confusing together under the term "classic" two very different forms of culture, the Greek and the Roman, very much as we now group Hindus, Moslems, and Chinamen together as "Orientals." All that was really great in art was Greek, but they were content to receive it through the tradition of the most inartistic nation that ever lived. Far indeed were the Renaissance humanists from the noble simplicity of ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... trying circumstances. While her father was in Congress, she wore it at many fashionable dinners and receptions in Washington. She was bravely sustained, however, by her husband, Colonel Miller, who never flinched in escorting his wife and her coadjutors, however inartistic their costumes might be. To tall, gaunt women with large feet and to those who were short and stout, it was equally trying. Mrs. Miller was also encouraged by the intense feeling of her father on the question of woman's dress. To him the whole revolution in woman's position turned ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... me see you explaining to the young man how he is to apply himself to the study of virtue and wisdom? And I will first show you what I conceive to be the nature of the task, and what sort of a discourse I desire to hear; and if I do this in a very inartistic and ridiculous manner, do not laugh at me, for I only venture to improvise before you because I am eager to hear your wisdom: and I must therefore ask you and your disciples to refrain from laughing. And now, O son of Axiochus, let me put a question to you: ...
— Euthydemus • Plato
... it was there. Just as his father had given in at last, and gone to the City, so, for a moment, it seemed to Jimmy that he must go. But then he remembered Walter's office, where you could not smoke, and the only spot of colour was that inartistic insurance calendar with ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... fell to Watts, hitherto unknown beyond the narrow circle of his friends, for a design displaying 'Caractacus led in triumph through the streets of Rome'. This cartoon, however, was not employed for its original purpose: it fell into the hands of an enterprising, if inartistic, dealer, who cut it up and sold such fragments as he judged to be of value in the state of the picture market at the time. What was far more important was the encouragement given to the artist by such a success at a critical time ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... and most useless of all the uniforms I know. The helmets and cocked hats are of the pattern affected by theatrical managers, the decorations tawdry, the swords absurd, the whole appearance indicative of a taste unmilitary and inartistic. The parade uniform has been designed by a lot of unsoldierly politicians and tailors about Washington. Their notion of military glory is confused with memories of St. Patrick's Day processions and Masonic installations. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1178, June 25, 1898 • Various
... and without paying any attention to my criticisms as to why the selected ten lines did not satisfy the most elementary demands of esthetic and common sense, they were enchanted with the very thing which to me appeared absurd, incomprehensible, and inartistic. So that, in general, when I endeavored to get from Shakespeare's worshipers an explanation of his greatness, I met in them exactly the same attitude which I have met, and which is usually met, in the defenders of any dogmas accepted not ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... with the strains of Peace, Perfect Peace. But those days were over. A new headmaster had come with an ear for music, and the riot of melody that surged from the V. A table seemed to him not only blasphemous, but also inartistic. And so hymn-singing stopped, and only a ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh
... in its best examples resembles not so much the book of yesterday as that of some earlier days, and we may count this fact a fortunate one, since it relegates to oblivion the books made in certain inartistic periods, notably of the one preceding the present revival. It is rather the best of the whole past of the book, and not the book of to-day alone, that influences the character to be taken by the book of to-morrow. This element is a historical one and a knowledge of it ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... with proof or reason; that the very wonders of science were mostly lies, like the wonders of religion. "When astronomers tell me," he says somewhere, "that a star is so far off that its light takes a thousand years to reach us, the magnitude of the lie seems to me inartistic." The paralysing impudence of such remarks left everyone quite breathless; and even to this day this particular part of Shaw's satiric war has been far less followed up than it deserves. For there was present ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... their greatest extent, only where the emotion reaches a climax. The entire contravention of these principles results in bombast or doggerel. The insufficient respect for them is seen in didactic poetry. And it is because they are rarely fully obeyed, that so much poetry is inartistic. ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... possible; but in the intercourse which is going on continually between writers and readers, affairs of all degrees of complication are continually being discussed, of a nature so complicated that the inexperienced writer is puzzled at every turn to express himself, and the altogether inartistic writer fails to do so. Who among writers has not to acknowledge that he is often unable to tell all that he has to tell? Words refuse to do it for him. He struggles and stumbles and alters and adds, but finds at last that he has gone either too far or not quite ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... serpent's) must have been humiliating to him who uttered it, and a fatal example to those who heard; but mankind soon grew used to the new fashion. I pass over the rude barbarian ages, whose gross and inartistic lying offers no claim to respectful and sympathetic interest, and no excuse but the lame one of selfish depravity, common to the race. But with the inroads of civilization Life became complex, and Truth was found too simple and rigid to fit with all its varied intricacies. That is, when Truth ...
— A Pessimist - In Theory and Practice • Robert Timsol
... story, which belongs to legendary history rather than myth, is in reality quite independent of the Volsung or Nibelung cycle. The connection is loose and inartistic, the legend being probably linked to Gudrun's name because she had become a favourite character and Icelandic narrators were unwilling to let her die. The historic Ermanric was conquered by the Huns in 374; the sixth century historian Jornandes ...
— The Edda, Vol. 2 - The Heroic Mythology of the North, Popular Studies in Mythology, - Romance, and Folklore, No. 13 • Winifred Faraday
... carpenter's trade was not confined to inartistic work. From the earliest age of Babylonian history he was skilled in making household furniture, which was often of a highly artistic description. On a seal-cylinder, now in the British Museum, the King is represented as seated on a chair ...
— Babylonians and Assyrians, Life and Customs • Rev. A. H. Sayce
... cook; and all these things cannot be properly performed, without being learned. The art of good living alone, though all those things I have mentioned only exist on its account, is untaught, unmethodical, inartistic, and supposed to come by the light ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... day he could shut his eyes and summon back with distinctness the smallest detail of the interview. He went over again his tedious wait in the outer office—the scattered magazines upon the table, the utterly inartistic prints upon the wall, the ticking of the tall bronze clock on the mantel, and even the number of the page he had been reading in a periodical, for—following a methodical habit—he had unconsciously made a mental note of the figures when he laid the magazine aside to face ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... tints, calculated to bring out the colour of her glowing tresses. Cecilia, who worshipped colour with every bit of her artist soul, adored her stepmother's hair as thoroughly as she detested her dresses. Bob, who was blunt and inartistic, merely detested her from every point of view. "Don't see what you find to rave about in it," he said. "All the warmth of her disposition has ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... was sitting at his desk working on the plan of a bungalow with Gothic windows and a stumpy tower like the lookout of a fire-station—an immensely stiff and inartistic design. As I entered the study I stood so that I could not help seeing the plan. I did not know why I had come to my father, but I remember that when I saw his thin face, red neck, and his shadow on the wall, I wanted to throw my arms round him and, as Akhsinya had bid me, to beg his pardon ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff
... stately architecture, were the bonds that held him bound to the "old historic Church of England". His emotions, not his intellect, kept him Churchman, and he shrunk with the over-sensitiveness of the cultured scholar from the idea of allowing the old traditions, to be handled roughly by inartistic hands. Naturally of a refined and delicate nature, he had been rendered yet more sensitive by the training of the college and the court; the exquisite courtesy of his manners was but the high polish ...
— Autobiographical Sketches • Annie Besant
... suitable mount for small heads, fish and birds. Artificial branches and trees for mounting birds should be avoided if possible; they are made by wrapping tow around wires, coating with glue and covering with moss or papier mache and painting. The result I consider unnatural and inartistic. ...
— Home Taxidermy for Pleasure and Profit • Albert B. Farnham |
