"Classicism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... mistake to assume, as has been assumed only too often, that, after the great epoch of Classicism and Romanticism in the early decades of the nineteenth century, Germany produced but little of universal significance, or that, after Goethe and Heine, there were but few Germans worthy to be mentioned side by side with the great writers of other European countries. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... Rome must be due that sudden enlarging of style, that kind of new classicism, which distinguishes the work of fifteenth-century masters after their visit to the Eternal City, enabling Ghirlandaio, Signorelli, Perugino, and Botticelli to make the Sixtine Chapel, and even the finical Pinturicchio, the Vatican library, into centres of fresh ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... his idol into shape instead of choosing another. He pushed further and further the extravagances of a vivid but very unbalanced and barbaric style, in the praise of a poet who really represented the calmest classicism and the attempt to restore a Hellenic equilibrium in the mind. It is like watching a shaggy Scandinavian decorating a Greek statue washed up by chance on his shores. And while the strength of Goethe was a strength of completion and serenity, which Carlyle not only ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... "everything" might have been revealed to me as a means to the end, I would certainly have done it for a sight of Madame Doche and Fechter in Dumas's triumphant idyll—now enjoying the fullest honours of innocuous classicism; with which, as with the merits of its interpreters, Honorine's happy charges had become perfectly and if not quite serenely, at least ever so responsively and feelingly, familiar. Of a wondrous mixed sweetness and sharpness and queerness of uneffaced reminiscence ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... ROMANTICISM. Two of the most important contrasting tendencies of style in the general sense are Classicism and Romanticism. Classicism means those qualities which are most characteristic of the best literature of Greece and Rome. It is in fact partly identical with Idealism. It aims to express the inner truth or central principles ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... which has had various practical consequences, not all of them good, or at least not all yielding fruit for our own age. Darwin's great influence as a force turning scholarly interest toward naturalism and away from classicism, as a factor in modern materialism and even pessimism, as a background, if no more, for the Haeckels and Ostwalds of science is no inconsiderable factor in the scientific and objective spirit ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... finally presented to the Court in A.D. 711. By a comparison of this work with Nihongi, or Chronicles of Japan, which was completed A.D. 720, only nine years after the other, we are convinced that the era of Chinese classicism had not yet fallen upon the country. The style of the older book is a purer Japanese, and imparts to us the traditions of Japanese history uncolored by Chinese philosophical ideas and classic pedantry which shortly after overwhelmed Japanese ...
— Japan • David Murray
... wholeness of effect, determines his preference for classic, especially for Greek poetry. He thus represents a reaction against the romantic movement, yet has experienced the emotional deepening which that movement brought with it. Accordingly, he finds a shallowness in the pseudo-classicism of Pope and his contemporaries, and turns rather to Sophocles on the one hand and Goethe on the other for his exemplars. He feels "the peculiar charm and aroma of the Middle Age," but retains "a strong ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... they had to teach and, choosing from the elements of their art those which were suited to his purpose, formed a perfectly balanced and noble style which was immediately accepted as the only style suitable to the expression of lofty ideas in monumental form. He became the lawgiver, the founder of classicism, the formulator of the academic ideal. Not to admire him was to confess oneself a barbarian, and even those who did not really care for his art hardly dared to say so. As long as the academic ideal retained any validity his supremacy endured, and it was only with the definitive turning of ...
— Artist and Public - And Other Essays On Art Subjects • Kenyon Cox
... actress. But while the high-comedy theatres and those of the melodrama flourish, there can be no doubt but that the highest type of acting finds no chance for development in France. The actor who possesses one spark of genius soon escapes from the galling fetters of classicism and tradition, and takes refuge in comedy or in melodrama. Thus did Frederic Lemaitre in his prime, and thus, too, in later days, did the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... than Nikolai Vasil'evich Gogol (1809-1852), who has done for the Russian novel and Russian prose what Pushkin has done for Russian poetry. Before these two men came Russian literature can hardly have been said to exist. It was pompous and effete with pseudo-classicism; foreign influences were strong; in the speech of the upper circles there was an over-fondness for German, French, and English words. Between them the two friends, by force of their great genius, cleared away ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... Goethe, too, a tyrant in power, had thrown his weight into the classic scale, and, much to the chagrin of the young painter, declared that the highest Christian Art was but the perfecting of humanity. Moreover, classicism had been brought within the painter's home by a five years' sojourn in Lubeck of Carstens, the Flaxman of Germany. The father befriended the poor artist, and being well-read in Greek and Roman authors, supplied him, among other needs, ...
— Overbeck • J. Beavington Atkinson
... department, we find that the study of the history and literature of Poland had received a vigorous impulse, folk-songs were zealously collected, and a new school of poetry, romanticism, rose victoriously over the fading splendour of an effete classicism. The literature of the time of Stanislas was a court and salon literature, and under the influence of France and ancient Rome. The literature that began to bud about 1815, and whose germs are to be sought for in the preceding revolutionary time, was more of a people's literature, and under the ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... process, very much, that makes the heir to a great capitalist rich. Our early start, our roundabout descent from Posilippo by shining Baire for avoidance of the city, had been an hour of enchantment beyond any notation I can here recover; all lustre and azure, yet all composition and classicism, the prospect developed and spread, till after extraordinary upper reaches pf radiance and horizons of pearl we came at the turn of a descent upon a stalwart young gamekeeper, or perhaps substantial young farmer, who, well-appointed and blooming, had unslung his gun and, ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... "idealizes" life and shuns earth-scented facts, had, through the decisive influence of Tegner, been victorious in Swedish literature. I am aware that some will regard this as a questionable statement; for the academicism of Tegner is not the stately, bloodless, Gallic classicism of the Gustavian age, of which Leopold was the last representative. It is much closer to the classicism of Goethe in "Iphigenia" and "Hermann and Dorothea," and of Schiller in "Wallenstein" and "Wilhelm Tell." ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... papers a sketch in manuscript of Wagner's life and work. It begins with some observations on Romanticism and Classicism. ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... forth early in 1667, and a commission, consisting of Levau, Lebrun, Claude Perrault and others, appointed to report on its practicability. Levau promptly produced his own discarded designs, and both were submitted to the king for a final decision on 13th May. Louis was fascinated by the stately classicism of Perrault's design, and this was adopted. "Architecture must be in a bad state," said his rivals, "since it is put in the hands of a physician." Colbert seems, however, to have distrusted Claude's technical powers and on his brother Charles' advice a council of specialists, ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... word," continued his father. "When you do get down to working with your hands, don't forget repression. Classicism bears the relation to art that religion does to the world's progress. It's a drag-anchor—a sound measure of safety—despised when seas are calm, but treasured against the hour of stress. Let's go ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... wit with fancy gave it a lowly role in Augustan thinking; and also in literary prose, which was supposed to be the language of reason (cf. Donald F. Bond, "'Distrust' of Imagination in English Neo-Classicism," PQ, XIV, 54-69). What of its position in poetry? According to Hobbes, poetry must exhibit both judgment and fancy, but fancy should dominate; and the work of fancy is to adorn discourse with tropes ...
— Essays on Wit No. 2 • Richard Flecknoe and Joseph Warton
... as people always are after the stress of any great emotional crisis. Between them, they made very short work of a cold chicken, a salad, a gooseberry-tart and a Camembert. The Duke filled his glass again and again. The cold classicism of his face had been routed by the new romantic movement which had swept over his soul. He looked two or three months older than when first I showed ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... "Your classicism is the natural complement of my mediaevalism. The elasticity, the concreteness, of your temperament fertilised the too-brooding introspectiveness of my own. It lightened the reverence which I experience in the contemplation of my own nature. It induced in me the hint of frivolity ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... own faults; but for the moment he seemed to have leaped directly from Corinth and Syracuse and Venice, over the heads of London and New York, to impose classical standards on plastic Chicago. Critics had no trouble in criticising the classicism, but all trading cities had always shown traders' taste, and, to the stern purist of religious faith, no art was thinner than Venetian Gothic. All trader's taste smelt of bric-a-brac; Chicago tried at least to give her ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... twenty-five years of the Third Republic dominated the musical situation in his country, got himself acclaimed everywhere, not only in Paris, but also in Berlin, the modern French master, and to-day at the ripe age of one hundred and forty still persists in writing string-quartets with the same frigid classicism that distinguished his first efforts, is obviously a compromise resulting from the conflict of two equally strong impulses—that of making music and that of fending off musical expression. For years this man has been going through all the gestures of the most serious sort of composition without ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... Church; its immorality—the bishop's death-bed is surrounded by his natural sons and the wealth he leaves has been purchased by every kind of iniquity—its pride of life; its luxury; its semi-Paganism; its imitative classicism; its inconsistency; its love of jewels, and fine stones, and rich marbles; its jealousy and envy; its pleasure in the adornment of death; its delight in the outsides of things, in mere workmanship; its loss of originality; its love of scholarship for scholarship's sake alone; its contempt of the ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... unreal, is not the same as the intellectual man's appreciation of the unreal in imagination and fancy. The German novel had passed its time of service under the wild, extraordinary and grotesque. The crudities of such tales of adventure were softened and eliminated by the culturing influence of formal classicism and by a newly won admiration for the everyday element in life, contemporaneous with and dependent upon the gradual appreciation of middle-class worth. At this point the English novel stepped in as a guide, and the gradual shaping of the German ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... honoured above most—in the patter of the latest Lion-comique of the Halls as in the prose of Meredith or Borrow, in the disreputable cat stealing home through the dull London dawn as in the Romanticists emerging from the chill of Classicism—in everything, big and little, in which he felt the life ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... has conceived or felt it. The perception of what is beautiful varies from age to age and with each person. So, too, standards of beauty in art change with each generation; commonly they are deduced from the practice of preceding artists. Classicism formulates rules from works that have come to be recognized as beautiful, and it requires of the artist conformity to these rules. By this standard, which it regards as absolute, it tries a new work, and it pretends to adjudge the work good or bad ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... the new French school of classicism in painting, died at the close of the year at Brussels. Many of his paintings were on exhibition before the fall of the old regime in France. In the days of the French Revolution, David was a Jacobite and friend of Robespierre, and ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... as the big-wigged classicism of the Elzevir vignettes, in an age when Louis XIV. and Moliere (in tragedy) wore laurel wreaths over vast perruques, are the early frontispieces of Moliere's own collected works. Probably the most interesting ...
— Books and Bookmen • Andrew Lang
... each side seems supported by a channelled column. The capitals of these columns are carved with leaves or with leaves and grotesques; on them round arches rest; and above is a narrow foliated cornice. In relieving contrast to the artificial classicism of the Renaissance of the interior, the feeling of this apse is quite truly ancient and pagan, and it is not less unique nor less charming because it is placed against a plain, uninteresting wall. The eye travelling upward, above the choir-dome, meets the ...
— Cathedrals and Cloisters of the South of France, Volume 1 • Elise Whitlock Rose
... are such ardent devotees of love as their muse, simply because, in spite of other short-lived fads, the temper of the last century has remained predominantly romantic. It is obvious that the idea of love as a distraction and a curse is the offspring of classicism. If poetry is the work of the reason, then equilibrium of soul, which is so sorely upset by passionate love, is doubtless very necessary. But the romanticist represents the poet, not as one drawing upon the resources within his mind, but as the vessel filled from without. His afflatus comes ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... imitate the ancients; we only imitate each other. On the whole, we wish there was rather more sense of the tradition in contemporary writing. The danger of arbitrary egoism is quite as great as the danger of classicism. Luckily, Young, in stating the case against the classicists, has at the same time stated perfectly the case for familiarity with the classics. "It is," he declares, "but a sort of noble contagion, from a general familiarity with their writings, and not by any particular sordid theft, ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... offended, and he allied himself with Mary Morrison on the way to the concert. Kate walked with Honora and David until they met with Professor Wickersham, who was also bound for Mandel Hall and the somewhat tempered classicism which the Theodore Thomas Orchestra offered to ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... century, at the high point of anti-classical revolt, a wonderful group of symphonies, by Berlioz, Mendelssohn, Schumann, and Liszt, were presented to the world. With the younger Brahms on a returning wave of neo-classicism the form became again distinctively a personal choice. Finally, in the spontaneous utterance of a national spirit on broad lines, as in the later Russian and Finnish examples, with the various phases of surging resolution, of lyric contemplation and of rollicking humor, ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... word "law-wolf," thus supplying Alfred Henry Lewis with a phrase that was to be sent clattering down the corridors of time. That Alfred Henry may have been absolutely innocent of the truth that he was using a classicism and not a Kansas mouth-filler is quite probable. In London, Oliver took unto himself a wife, he being twenty-one and three weeks over. The lady was the daughter of a client of the firm for which Oliver Cromwell was a process-server. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... were angry, the French indulged in a furore of welcome. They made feasts and hailed the American as the friend of human kind, as the "ideal of a patriarchal republic and of idyllic simplicity," as a sage of antiquity; and the exuberant classicism of the nation exhausted itself in glorifying him by comparisons with those great names of Greece and Rome which have become symbols for all private and public virtues. They admired him because he did not wear a wig; they lauded his spectacles; they were overcome with enthusiasm as they ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.
... the English Renaissance 1. The Rhetorical Period of English Criticism 2. The Influence of Horace 3. The Influence of Aristotle 4. Manuals for Poets 5. Rhetorical Elements in Later English Classicism ...
— Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance - A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism • Donald Lemen Clark
... interesting, because it is clear that the author is doing little more than translate in his head, instead of on the paper, good current Latin (such as it would have been "more easier" for him to write) into current English. He does not indulge in any undue classicism; he takes few of the liberties with English grammar which, a little later, it was the habit to take on the strength of classical examples. But, on the other hand, he does not attempt, and it would be rather unreasonable ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... than four hundred years. Egyptian paintings of the third century bear less positive witness to the fumblings of a new spirit. But at the beginning of the fourth century Diocletian built his palace at Spalato, where we have all learned to see classicism and the new spirit from the East fighting it out side by side; and, if we may trust Strzygowski, from the end of that century dates the beautiful church of Kodja-Kalessi in Isauria. The century in which the East finally ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... abandoned the classicism of his youth for the romanticism now in fashion: he spoke of the soul, of angels, of adoration, of submission, he became ethereal, and of the darkest blue. He took me to the opera, and handed me to my carriage. This old young man went when I went, his waistcoats multiplied, he compressed his waist, ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... introduction to the study of languages, and as if Homer were lacking in only one respect, namely, not being written in pre-Indogermanic. Whoever is acquainted with our present public schools well knows what a wide gulf separates their teachers from classicism, and how, from a feeling of this want, comparative philology and allied professions have increased their numbers to such an ...
— On the Future of our Educational Institutions • Friedrich Nietzsche
... thing. In his character of poet he set as little store by useless learning as Shakespeare did. He learned to write hexameters, not from Homer, but from Voss, and Voss found them faulty; yet somehow Hermann und Dorothea is more readable than Luise. So far as all the classicism then attainable was concerned, Shakespeare got it as cheap as Goethe did, who always bought it ready-made. For such purposes of mere aesthetic nourishment Goethe always milked other minds,—if minds those ruminators and digesters of antiquity into asses' milk may be called. ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... it is true that the archaic quality, the pseudo-classicism of this pastoral seems at first artificial. "It has only so much of rustic nature as suits a graceful urban fancy." Arcadia is a no man's land, so far from our desires that we cannot picture it even in imagination; but to one who knows how sincere was the ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... notions of Greek art prevalent in London in the beginning of this century, has manifested itself in many vulgarities in his composition pictures, vulgarities which may perhaps be best expressed by the general term "Twickenham Classicism," as consisting principally in conceptions of ancient or of rural life such as have influenced the erection of most of our suburban villas. From Nicolo Poussin and Loutherbourg he seems to have derived advantage; perhaps also from ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... secrets of philosophy, languages, and other sciences. Within the leading classes of Amsterdam's population, supported by the great merchants, interest in matters of art and science strongly develops, though as we noticed before, in the case of the town-hall architecture, with a marked preference for classicism and all foreign civilization. It seems as though these clever merchants could not understand that their own genial countrymen were sufficiently gifted and quite capable of astonishing the world by their work; this increasing lack of mutual ...
— Rembrandt's Amsterdam • Frits Lugt
... higher degree of passion in literature. The end of the eighteenth century, swept by vast disturbing currents, experienced an excitement of spirit of which one note was a reaction against an outworn classicism severed not more from nature than from the genuine motives of ancient art; and a return to true Hellenism was as much a part of this reaction as the sudden preoccupation with things medieval. The medieval tendency is in Goethe's ...
— Aesthetic Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... portraiture and the constant patronage of the government, the material conditions of his life, which was of a simple character, befitting a man who viewed his mission as that of an apostle preaching the doctrine of pure classicism, were made easy; and the official titles of Member of the Institute, Grand Officer of the Legion of Honor, and Senator of the Empire all came to him with the lapse ...
— McClure's Magazine, March, 1896, Vol. VI., No. 4. • Various
... need mentioning; but Greek drama has always suffered from a school of critics who approach a play with a greater equipment of aesthetic theory than of dramatic perception. This is the characteristic defect of classicism. One mark of the school is to demand from dramatists heroes and heroines which shall satisfy its own ideals; and, though there was in the New Comedy a mask known to Pollux as "The Entirely-good Young Man" ([Greek: panchraestos neaniskos]), such a character is fortunately ...
— Alcestis • Euripides
... the madrigals of Shakespeare himself than by Petrarch's sonnets; and after such a long lapse of time we still discover something that comes from us even in the Wagnerian drama, for instance in 'Parsifal' or in 'Tristan and Isolde.' A long time later, in a Europe belonging entirely to classicism, from the beginning of the seventeenth to the end of the eighteenth century, during one hundred and fifty years or even longer, French literature possessed a real sovereignty in Italy, in Spain, in England, and in Germany. Do not the ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... of irony," and into the hands of persons of this merciless tribe she seems to have been perpetually falling. We must content ourselves, however, with referring to but one example more; a conversation between herself and a young Frenchman, about Romanticism and Classicism, which she has detailed in her first volume. This is a subject, which, as every one must know, has set all Paris by the ears, and attracts almost as much attention there as the overthrow of one dynasty and the creation of another. Lady Morgan, of course, is a thorough-going romantique, and ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... which these charms fail to work on our spirits at all, because they fail to excite us. "Romanticism," says Stendhal, "is the art of presenting to people the literary works which, in the actual state of their habits and beliefs, are capable of giving them the greatest possible pleasure; classicism, on the contrary, of presenting them with that which gave the greatest possible pleasure to their grandfathers." But then, beneath all changes of habits and beliefs, our love of that mere abstract proportion—of music—which what is classical in literature possesses, still maintains itself ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... inclinations; and in this way they tyrannise over the hundredth, the only capable one among them. If they have the training of others in their hands they will train them consciously or unconsciously after their own image . what then becomes of the classicism ...
— We Philologists, Volume 8 (of 18) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... what directness and modest sufficiency of utterance distinguishes the dock compared with the fumbling prolixity of the old gentleman on the bench! It is the trite story,—romanticism forced to plead at the bar of classicism fallen into its dotage, Keats judged by Blackwood, Wordsworth exciting the pained astonishment of Miss Anna Seward. Accuser and accused alike recognise that a question of diction is part of the issue between them; hence the picturesque confession ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... of a Jean-Jacques Evangel, suddenly plump down out of its cloud-firmament; and from a theorem determine to make itself a practice. But just so do all creeds, intentions, customs, knowledges, thoughts and things, which the French have, suddenly plump down; Catholicism, Classicism, Sentimentalism, Cannibalism: all isms that make up Man in France, are rushing and roaring in that gulf; and the theorem has become a practice, and whatsoever cannot swim sinks. Not Evangelist Jean-Jacques alone; there is not a Village Schoolmaster but ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... were given pretty feminine names by the old Creole gallants: Suzette, Celeste, Estelle, Angelie, and the like. The devout doubtless had their share in the naming of Religious Street, Nuns Street, Piety Street, Assumption Street, and Amen Street. The taste for Greek and Roman classicism which developed in France at the time of the Revolution, found its way to Louisiana, and is reflected in New Orleans by streets bearing the names of gods, demi gods, the muses and the graces. The pronunciation given to some of these names is curious: Melpomene, instead of being ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... London, then—rushing from concert to concert, and opera to opera—from severe classicism to the most miscellaneous omnium gatherum—from solemn ecclesiastical harmonic assemblages to the chanting of merry glees, and the warbling of sentimental ballads. Let us, then, contemplate a little closer the different kinds of concerts—their features ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 436 - Volume 17, New Series, May 8, 1852 • Various
... cursed them roundly when they failed to point out to him a given number of chords of the ninth and seventh, augmented or diminished, in a selected fugue of that mad iconoclast Bach; or to mark two dozen examples of canon and counterpoint in the first act of the latest opera by the staid pillar of classicism, Richard Wagner! After which betrayal of his mental state, the master leaped to his feet, jammed his ancient hat over his eyes, called out that his classes for the next three days were to take their instruction ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... of Gericault, whose Raft of the Medusa had already caused a flutter in 1819, Delacroix was left at the head of the revolt against this pseudo-classicism; and amid the storm that greeted the Dante and Virgil it is interesting to find Thiers writing of him in the following strain:—"It seems to me that no picture [in the Salon] reveals the future of a great painter better than M. Delacroix's, ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... of Romanticism (1789-1837) called the Age of Revolution? Give some reasons for the influence of the French Revolution on English literature, and illustrate from poems or essays which you have read. Explain the difference between Classicism and Romanticism. Which of these two types of literature do ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... held the field the taste of the Court for personal satire and magnificent show could scarcely appreciate at its true value the lyrical gift of Vicente; and later, after King Manuel's death, Vicente found himself confronted by a new school in which classicism carried the day, the long Italian metres superseded the merry native redondilha of eight syllables, and the latinisers began to transform the language and shuddered like femmes savantes at Vicente's barbarisms and uncouth voquibles. His ...
— Four Plays of Gil Vicente • Gil Vicente
... especially suttee; of the self-mutilation and immolation of Indian fanatics; and of Indian magic, navigation ("they are not acquainted with the compass"), justice, &c. Several venerable legends are reproduced; and Conti's name-forms, partly through Poggio's vicious classicism, are often absolutely unrecognizable; but on the whole this is the best account of southern Asia by any European of the 15th century; while the traveller's visit to Sokotra is an almost though not quite unique performance for a Latin Christian ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 7, Slice 2 - "Constantine Pavlovich" to "Convention" • Various
... to build their homes like Doric temples, and you may imagine what a Doric temple freely adapted to domestic purposes must be. But are these attempts to revive the past very successful anywhere? We regard as a decided mistake the revived classicism of the last generation. May not our revived mediaevalism be regarded as a mistake by the generation that follows us? We could all probably point to some case in which the clashing of mediaeval beauties with modern requirements has produced sad and ludicrous results. There is our ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... the century was the victory of romanticism (p. 88) over classicism. Pope's polished satiric and didactic verse, neglecting the primrose by the river's brim, lacking deep feeling, high ideals, and heaven-climbing imagination, had long been the model that inspired cold intellectual poetry. In the latter part of the century, romantic feeling and imagination ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... one of their number, the novelist and dramatist Karl Gutzkow, found the name "Young Germany." Just as the "Storm and Stress" of 1770 to 1780, and the Romantic movement of the opening nineteenth century, represented a spirit of sharp revolt against the then dominant pseudo-classicism and rationalism, so "Young Germany" reacted passionately against the moonlight sentimentality of the popular romantic poets, as well as against the stupid political conservatism of the time. The aim of the Young Germans ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... man of very great personal influence, and highly respected, probably counted for more. In his lectures and his books, one of which, Valgius, a member of the circle, translated into Latin, he preached the doctrines of a chaste and dignified classicism. His creed fortunately fell in with the tendencies of the time, and whether this teaching be called a cause, or whether the popularity of it be an effect of pre-existing causes, we know that this man came to represent many of ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... three guardians whose care and intentions he afterwards placed in an unfavourable light. How far he exaggerated their treatment of him it is difficult to decide. That the guardians, among whom one Peter Winckel, schoolmaster at Gouda, occupied the principal place, had little sympathy with the new classicism, about which their ward already felt enthusiastic, need not be doubted. 'If you should write again so elegantly, please to add a commentary', the schoolmaster replied grumblingly to an epistle on which Erasmus, then fourteen years old, ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... case of the book-designer, however, is not shaped entirely by the law of waste in its first form; the canon is to some extent shaped in conformity to that secondary expression of the predatory temperament, veneration for the archaic or obsolete, which in one of its special developments is called classicism. In aesthetic theory it might be extremely difficult, if not quite impracticable, to draw a line between the canon of classicism, or regard for the archaic, and the canon of beauty. For the aesthetic purpose such a distinction need scarcely be drawn, and indeed it need not exist. For ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... two things dearest to his heart, and sees them both at one time! And he must be excused for his sudden night into the regions of classicism. ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 19, August 6, 1870 • Various
... to argue about classicism and romanticism again,' Zinaida interrupted him a second time.' We'd ...
— The Torrents of Spring • Ivan Turgenev
... classicism. The epithets are not far-sought. They come naturally to the mind. The hero's shield is round and white; his lance is tall; long are the scalp-locks of his enemies. Thus would Homer and Virgil have heightened the picture, and Park-man is clearly attentive to the best ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... Arcadian day. It was evening. There was no wind. Somewhere a temple, opalescent in the sunset, suggested rather than defined itself. A landscape developed such as Turner in a quiet mood might have evolved, and with it a feeling of fantasy, of remoteness, of pure, true classicism. A note of pipes was in the air, sheep bleated, and Daphne, knee-deep in the grass, surging an answer to the pipes, went ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... wrote an original Essay on Translated Verse. Of the same kind were Addison's epistle to Sacheverel, entitled An Account of the Greatest English Poets, and Pope's Essay on Criticism, 1711, which was nothing more than versified maxims of rhetoric, put with Pope's usual point and brilliancy. The classicism of the 18th century, it has been said, was a classicism in red heels and a periwig. It was Latin rather than Greek; it turned to the least imaginative side of Latin literature and found its models, not in Vergil, Catullus, and Lucretius, but in the satires, epistles, and didactic ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... form, Zola is classic, that is regular, symmetrical, seeking the beauty of the temple rather than the beauty of the tree. If the fight in his day had been the earlier fight between classicism and romanticism, instead of romanticism and realism, his nature and tradition would have ranged him on the side of classicism, though, as in the later event, his feeling might have been romantic. I think it has been the error of criticism not to take due account of his Italian origin, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... more inconvenient, uncomfortable and ridiculous than those of any previous or later times; it delighted in the impossibly nonsensical 'pastoral' verses which we find too silly to read; and in place of wit, it clothed gross and cruel sayings in a thin remnant of worn-out classicism. It had not the frankly wicked recklessness of the French aristocracy between Lewis the Fourteenth and the Revolution, nor the changing contrasts of brutality, genius, affectation and Puritanical austerity which ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... training saved him from the inanity of repeating the old decorative devices—trophies, cartouches, classical figures, Roman ruins, and other international conventions that had lost their significance by the 1780's, although a spurious classicism was still kept alive for genteel consumption and the romantic picturesque still persisted in ...
— Why Bewick Succeeded - A Note in the History of Wood Engraving • Jacob Kainen
... between Romanticism and Classicism.—The influences of this period were not entirely in the direction of romanticism. Samuel Johnson, the literary dictator of the age, was unsparing in his condemnation of the movement. The weight of his opinion kept many romantic tendencies ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... de Stael was right when she asserted in her 'Allemagne' that Paganism and Christianity, the North and the South, antiquity and the Middle Ages, having divided between them the history of literature, Romanticism in consequence, in contrast to Classicism, was a combination of chivalry, the Middle Ages, the literatures of the North, and Christianity. It should be noted, in this connection, that some thirty years later Heinrich Heine, in the book in which he will rewrite ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... remembered the struggles he had seen, he felt a bitter admiration for the undying faith of humanity. Ideas succeeded the ideas most directly opposed to them, reaction followed action:—democracy, aristocracy: socialism, individualism: romanticism, classicism: progress, tradition:—and so on to the end of time. Each new generation, consumed in its own heat in less than ten years, believed steadfastly that it alone had reached the zenith, and hurled its predecessors down and stoned them: each new generation bestirred itself, and shouted, and ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... Chopin's arrival in Paris the political effervescence of the recent revolution had passed into art and letters. It was the oft-repeated battle of Romanticism against Classicism. There could be no truce between those who believed that everything must be fashioned after old models, that Procrustes must settle the height and depth, the length and breadth of art-forms, and those who, inspired with the new wine of liberty and free creative thought, held that the rule of ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... nature had wished a contrast to this coldly intellectual type that there should have existed at the same time a painter who, seeking at the same inexhaustible fountain-head of classicism, found inspiration for an art almost morbid in excess of sentiment. Pierre Prud'hon was born at Cluny in Burgundy, April 4, 1758, the son of a poor mason who, dying soon after the boy's birth, left him to the ...
— McClure's Magazine, January, 1896, Vol. VI. No. 2 • Various
... capacities, however, Pope is really admirable. Nobody, for example, has ridiculed more happily the absurdities of which we sometimes take him to be a representative. The recipe for making an epic poem is a perfect burlesque upon the pseudo-classicism of his time. He sees the absurdity of the contemporary statues, whose grotesque medley of ancient and modern costume ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... therefore struck out in a path in which he has had no great followers; for the big men in Russian literature are all Realists. Romanticism is as foreign to the spirit of Russian Realism as it is to French Classicism. What is peculiarly Slavonic about Pushkin is his simplicity, his naivete. Though affected by foreign models, he was close to the soil. This is shown particularly in his prose tales, and it is here that his title as ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... practice, frankness and force before all'. His two chief disciples, D'Annunzio and Pascoli, antithetical in almost all points, may be said to have divided his inheritance in this; Pascoli's Vergilian economy contrasting with the exuberance of D'Annunzio somewhat as with us the classicism of the present poet-laureate with that of Swinburne. In Germany the Parnassian reserve, concentration, and aristocratic exclusiveness was to reappear in the lyrical group ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... enchaining rules, while Mozart, in his operas at least, had a large amount of Romance worked into his music. On the other hand, by its very nature the Romance style is occasionally apt to slip into what is pre-eminently Classicism. ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... epic, his Pelayo. Like many another ambitious project, this was never completed. The few fragments of it which have been printed date mostly from this time. The style is still classic, but it is the pseudo-classicism of his model, Tasso. The poet had taken the first step leading to Romanticism. Hence this work was not so sterile as his earlier performances. Lista, on seeing the fragments, did much to encourage the young author. Some of the octaves included ...
— El Estudiante de Salamanca and Other Selections • George Tyler Northup
... Renaissance, however, the purest classic forms were revived; and indeed the Italian Renaissance seems to have been the golden age of lettering. With the old Roman fragments of the best period constantly before their eyes the Renaissance artists of Italy seem to have grasped the true spirit of classicism; and their work somehow acquired a refinement and delicacy lacking in even the best of the Roman examples. As much of the Italian Renaissance lettering was intended for use on tombs or monuments where it might be seen at close range, and was cut in fine marble, ...
— Letters and Lettering - A Treatise With 200 Examples • Frank Chouteau Brown
... at one hearing of those obscure, lofty and tremendous poems, should have appreciated them, and with enthusiasm. Try to imagine Samson Agonistes put on the stage today; with no academical enthusiasts or eclat of classicism to back it; but just put on before thirty thousand sight-seers, learned and vulgar, statesman and cobbler, tinker and poet; the mob all there; the groundlings far out-numbering the elite:—and all not merely sitting out the ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... it—he spent in dandification. But he never moved with the times. His foppishness was the foppishness of his youth, and to the last he wandered through Paris clad in the splendour of the days when young men were "lions," and when the quarrel between classicism and romanticism was vital. He wrote a book about Beau Brummell and a very curious little book it is, with its odd earnest defence of dandyism, with its courageous championship of the arts which men of letters so largely ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton |
