"Crudity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... can buy, may control. And Germany, in her long scheming against her individualist rivals, has not simply set herself to buy and hold the keys and axles of their economic machinery. She has set herself, it must be admitted, with a certain crudity and little success, but with unexampled vigour, to buy the minds of her adversaries. The Western nations have taken a peculiar pride in having a free Press; that is to say, a Press that may be bought by anyone. Our Press is constantly bought and sold, in gross and detail, by financiers, ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... celebrating the attainment of the baccalaureate degree at the University of Norway. The orator on this occasion was a tall, handsome, distinguished-looking young man named Alexander Kielland, from the little coast-town of Stavanger. There was none of the crudity of a provincial dither in his manners or his appearance. He spoke with a quiet self-possession and a pithy incisiveness ...
— Tales of Two Countries • Alexander Kielland
... side of Shelley's creed had the moral value which attaches to all earnest conviction, plain speech, defiance of convention, and enthusiasm for intellectual liberty at any cost. It was marred, however, by extravagance, crudity, and presumption. Much that he would fain have destroyed because he found it customary, was solid, true, and beneficial. Much that he thought it desirable to substitute, was visionary, hollow, and pernicious. He lacked the touchstone of mature philosophy, whereby to separate the ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... selection must positively be issued in volume form. Mr. Frank Swinnerton approved the selection and added to it slightly. In my turn I suggested a few more additions. The total amounts to one-third of the original matter. Beyond correcting misprints, softening the crudity of several epithets, and censoring lines here and there which might give offence without helping the sacred cause, I have not altered the articles. They appear as they were journalistically written in Paris, London, Switzerland, and ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... seemed an absolute sandbed, capable of absorbing any given quantity of liquid, without being either vivified or overflowed. He drank off the ale to quench a thirst which, as he said, kept him in a fever from morning to night, and night to morning; tippled off the sack to correct the crudity of the ale; sent the spirits after the sack to keep all quiet, and then declared that, probably, he should not taste liquor till post meridiem, unless it was in compliment to some especial friend. Finally, he intimated that he was ready to proceed on the business which brought him ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... are inclined to suggest that Mr. Stephen, who does little more than glance at Coleridge's position, has underestimated his influence upon the intellectual direction of politics in the first half of this century. Coleridge certainly provided an antidote to the crudity of eager Radicalism in Church and State, and his ideas may be recognised not only in the great High Church movement that was stirred up by the Tractarians, but also in the larger comprehension of the duties and attributes of the State that has been slowly gaining ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... profuse use of visiting-cards indicates crudity. The trend of fashion is toward restricting the quantity of paste-board, and employing cards always when they are required, never when they ...
— Etiquette • Agnes H. Morton
... the legend of the Garden of Eden. I exploit the eternal interest of the philosopher's stone which enables men to live for ever. I am not, I hope, under more illusion than is humanly inevitable as to the crudity of this my beginning of a Bible for Creative Evolution. I am doing the best I can at my age. My powers are waning; but so much the better for those who found me unbearably brilliant when I was in my prime. It is my hope that a hundred apter and more elegant parables by ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... free unfolding of all that is in man and that ripening of knowledge, taste, and character, which are summed up in culture, work finds its true interpretation. A man puts himself into his work in order that he may pass through an apprenticeship of servitude and crudity into the freedom of creative power. He discovers, liberates, harmonises, and enriches himself. Through work he accomplishes his destiny; for one of the great ends of his life is attained only when he makes himself skilful and creative, masters the secrets of his ...
— Essays On Work And Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... ignorance, hopeless want of critical discernment, or idle paradox to mistake, in the direction of belittlement, that of the eighteenth. By common consent of all opinion worth attention that century was, in the two European literatures which were equally free from crudity and decadence—French and English—the very palmiest day of the art. Everybody wrote letters: and a surprising number of people wrote letters well. Our own three most famous epistolers of the male sex, Horace Walpole, Gray and Cowper—belong wholly to it; and "Lady ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... endeavours to examine impartially the history of dogma, and to acquire the historic stand-point between the estimate of the orthodox dogmatists and that of Gottfried Arnold Mosheim, averse to all fault-finding and polemic, and abhorring theological crudity as much as pietistic narrowness and undevout Illuminism, aimed at an actual correct knowledge of history, in accordance with the principle of Leibnitz, that the valuable elements which are everywhere to be found in history must ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... neutral,' replied Watson with a decisiveness that one would hardly have suspected to lie beneath the calm exterior and the veneer of good-breeding polished by Cambridge associations—a veneer that made his occasional lapses into crudity of language seem oddly out of place. 'The German-Americans, the Irish-Americans, the Jewish-Americans, the God-knows-who-else-Americans may be neutral, but the America of Washington and Lincoln, the America of Lee and Grant, isn't neutral. Not by a ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... interview with Paulina, however, his rage passed all bounds, and it was only Paulina's tearful entreaties that induced him to continue to act as her agent, and not even her tears had moved him had not Paulina solemnly sworn that never again would she allow her blundering crudity to insert itself into the delicate finesse of Rosenblatt's financial operations. Thenceforward all went harmoniously enough, Paulina toiling with unremitting diligence at her daily tasks, so that she might make ...
— The Foreigner • Ralph Connor
... precious above all price? Are there any authentic portions of them that any man can afford to despise? Is not every step in the progress of this people out of savagery into a spiritual faith, matter of the profoundest interest to every human soul? Even the dullness and ignorance and crudity of this people,—even the crookedness and blindness of their leaders and teachers, are full of instruction for us; they show us with what materials and what instruments the divine wisdom and patience wrought out this great result. What other ...
— Who Wrote the Bible? • Washington Gladden
... in going about to prove, but in the outset confiding in the testimony of others.' 'The more you set yourself to argue and prove, in order to discover truth, the less likely you are to reason correctly.'[87] The amazing crudity of this avowed obscurantism is likely to make the orthodox apologist writhe, and to move the rationalist to contemptuous laughter. In this and many other cases, Newman seems to love to caricature himself, and to put his beliefs in that form in which they outrage ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... contain the gist of his teachings, and is worthy of study. We find in this work most of the precepts which his disciples have preserved and recorded. They form a code remarkable for simplicity, even crudity, and we are compelled to admire the force of character, the practical sagacity, the insight into the needs of the hour, which enabled Confucius, without claiming any Divine sanction, to impose this system ...
— Chinese Literature • Anonymous
... come over him a desire that this winsome girl,—winsome in spite of her crudity,—would say she did. Wonder, love, sympathy, were alive in her eyes. ...
— Rose O'Paradise • Grace Miller White
... gathered so ruthlessly elsewhere was thrown about with a lavish hand. Nothing that wealth could provide was denied Mrs. Willoughby or her boy; and though she had been poor when she married, money, in the mere crudity of having it to spend, had long since lost its novelty. To-day, beyond the pride of having it, and beyond the luxury and ostentation it could buy, money possessed for her a far greater significance in its power to make one powerful. In that she had already tasted the illogical enjoyment ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... the front desks, sat a boy, slender and undersized for his thirteen years. The ill-fitting crudity of his neatly patched clothes gave him a certain uniformity with his fellows, yet left him as unlike them as all things else could conspire to make him. The long hair that hung untrimmed over his face seemed a ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... The crudity, the primitive savagery of the scene gripped Hedin as nothing had gripped him before. He was astonished that the setting held for him so little of surprise. He fitted into the life naturally and perfectly as though to the manner born. But his own astonishment was as nothing ...
— The Challenge of the North • James Hendryx
... which, while absolutely free from flimsy caprice and disordered eccentricity, are ever surprising our attention by an unsuspected word of calm judgment or fertile energy, a fresh interest or an added sympathy, by the disappearance of some crudity or the assimilation of some new and richer quality. Of such gradual rise into full maturity we have here nothing to record. As a student Turgot had already formed the list of a number of works which he designed to execute; poems, tragedies, philosophic romances, vast treatises on physics, history, ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Turgot • John Morley
... the grilled wicket read a spirit as swift to resent ridicule as that of d'Artagnan had been when he rode his orange-colored nag into the streets of Paris. His face sobered, and his manner became attentive. He was wondering what complications lay ahead of this raw creature whose crudity of appearance was so at odds with the compelling ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... sense that the English gentleman wishes to have enough money to be able to forget it. But it may be questioned whether he does entirely forget it. As against this weakness the American has succeeded, at the price of a great deal of crudity and clatter, in making general a very real respect for work. He has partly disenchanted the dangerous glamour of the gentleman, and in that sense has achieved some degree of democracy; which is the most ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... over his life, how improbable it seemed, this happy issue out of crudity, turbulence, lack of purpose, weakness, insincerity, ignorance. First and foremost he had to thank good old Dr Harvey, of Greystone; then, his sister, sleeping in her grave under the old chimes she ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... must submit, and when she would rather be gazing at flowers. Clara had shame of her sex. They cannot take a step without becoming bondwomen: into what a slavery! For herself, her trial was over, she thought. As for herself, she merely complained of a prematureness and crudity best unanalyzed. In truth, she could hardly be said to complain. She did but criticize him and wonder that a man was unable to perceive, or was not arrested by perceiving, unwillingness, discordance, dull compliance; the bondwoman's due instead ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... dinner with the Whylands was that Medora, thus formulated by the sympathetic and appreciative Edith, now became definitely crystallized in his mind; the second was that he changed his boarding-house. Mere crudity for its own sake no longer charmed. The curtains and bedspreads at the farm had served as the earliest prompters to this step, and the furnishings of the Whyland interior now decided him to take it. Mrs. Cole's stained and spotted lambrequin became more offensive than ever, and ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... Would Gentleman Laroque never get through! Sonnino was not only likely to return in a very few minutes now, but was almost certain to do so. Under his breath Jimmie Dale cursed the gangster's bungling methods—and not for their crudity alone. His first impulse had been to surprise the two, hold them up at the revolver point, but the result of such an act would have been abortive, for the disfigured safe would stand a mute, incontrovertible witness to the fact that an attempt to force it had ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... intelligent and serious people are now inspired by the idea of a new order of things in the world, of a world-wide establishment of peace and mutual aid between nation and nation and man and man. But, chiefly because of the elementary crudity of existing electoral methods, hardly anywhere at present, except at Washington, do these great ideas and this world-wide will find expression. Amidst the other politicians and statesmen of the world President Wilson towers up with an effect almost divine. But it is no ingratitude to him ...
— In The Fourth Year - Anticipations of a World Peace (1918) • H.G. Wells
... plethoric, hypertrophied heart is shaking the head with its power. Many an individual of a delicate frame, has overpowered by firmness and courage stout, muscular men of far larger hearts. That the brain is the organ of thought alone, is a very old crudity. It contains every human emotion and passion, which we may stimulate in the impressible, or suspend instantly by a slight pressure on the brain. There is no intense exercise of any of the emotions or passions without a corresponding ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, October 1887 - Volume 1, Number 9 • Various
... the fifteenth century, and again at the end of the eighteenth, when Rousseau prescribed a return to Nature as the panacea for all defect, in Art as elsewhere. Then Winckelmann and his successors triumphed over it for a while,—showed at least the crudity of that statement. This is the purpose of much of Sir Joshua Reynolds's lectures. Now it seems to be coming up again,—thanks partly to Mr. Ruskin, though he might be quoted on both sides,—and this time with some ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... glamour and romance upon him like a light. Miss Hopkins had seen him on the streets, but hadn't met him personally. I don't think she relished the fact that she had to come to Hynds House to do so. Nor could she save herself from the crudity of staring with all her eyes at this handsome offshoot of the Hyndses, with what in a less polite person might well have been called ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... had not been so lucky as to "secure the Prince"—it was then only that the lady showed, not indeed anything so simple and unprepared as embarrassment, but a faint play of wonder, an under-flicker of amusement, as though recognizing that, by some odd law of social compensation, the crudity of the talk might account for the complexity of ...
— Madame de Treymes • Edith Wharton
... light arches, light capitals, airy traceries, and spaces of the hue of old ivory, held in heavenly quiet. The sense of colour, colour both captive and atmospheric, was a new and persistent delight, for it was colour purified, specialized, and infinitely extended in either direction from the crudity of the seven-winged spectrum. The room was like an alcove of outdoors, not divorced from the open air and set in contra-distinction, but made a continuation of its space and order and ancient repose—a kind of exquisite porch ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... of all others, he betakes himself to the drinking of spirits. Drink is the only thing which makes the Irishman's life worth having, drink and his cheery care-free temperament; so he revels in drink to the point of the most bestial drunkenness. The southern facile character of the Irishman, his crudity, which places him but little above the savage, his contempt for all humane enjoyments, in which his very crudeness makes him incapable of sharing, his filth and poverty, all favour drunkenness. The ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... friends is, to throw the weight of their interest into the scale of the popular party. For myself, I condescend to no dissimulation; nor do I at present see the party or the scheme that commands my full assent. In all alike there is crudity and confusion of ideas, and of all the twenty men who are my colleagues in the present crisis, there is not one with whom I do not find myself in ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... he began to paint again—even to paint such pitiful little pictures as these—the same familiar experience repeated itself, the unwillingness of his fingers, their failure to rightly interpret his ideas, the resulting crudity of his work, the sudden numbness in his brain, the queer, tense sensation behind his eyes. But Vandover had long since become accustomed to these symptoms and would not have minded them at this time had it not been that they were occasionally ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... a human being that isn't that—more or less secretly? But whatever their secret, it was manifest to me that it was neither subtle nor profound. They were a good, stupid, earnest couple and very much bothered. They were that—with the usual unshaded crudity of average people. There was nothing in them that the lamplight might not touch without the slightest ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... ties and the women moisten their lips? How, when the new person is a self-made man, with his newness so apparent that he seems to exhale the odor of varnish and gilt—how all repose vanishes, and whatever of crudity there is anywhere suddenly makes itself known, and rushes forth to meet the wave of self-boasting which sweeps all before it when ...
— From a Girl's Point of View • Lilian Bell
... the lady in question should be young and pretty; for it was a sad proof of the crudity of human nature that the mere residence of a free man and a free woman under the same roof could not pass without comment among their friends. For himself it was a matter of no importance; and as for her, a woman who has her living to earn ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... emphasizing the immense energies devoted to artistic enterprises is to lead us to consider what is the end of all this labor. He points out scathingly the ugliness, frivolity, and crudity of much that passes for drama in the theater, for music in the concert hall, and for literature between covers. He pleads for a simple art that shall express with sincerity the genuine emotions of ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... the composite character of our American civilization, in which so many different nationalities are mingled, several of which maintain as long as possible their own language and customs, there is a certain crudity in the national life and a want of ripeness which as yet has prevented the development of what properly can be called an American school of musical composition. Almost all our composers have been educated in Germany, many of them at Leipsic, and their compositions do not differ in a striking ...
— The Masters and their Music - A series of illustrative programs with biographical, - esthetical, and critical annotations • W. S. B. Mathews
... d'art, and though the furniture dated from the time of Alexander II., and even a little earlier—when a flood of frightful taste pervaded all Europe—still the stuffs and the colors were beautiful and rich, and time had softened their crudity into a harmonious whole. ...
— His Hour • Elinor Glyn
... advantages as well as its drawbacks, certainly. It saved French painting an immense amount of fumbling, of laborious experimentation, of crudity, of failure. But it stamped it with an essential artificiality from which it did not fully recover for over two hundred years, until, insensibly, it had built up its own traditions and gradually brought about its own inherent development. ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... and remorseless, his boyish crudity of assertion telling sharply against Morell's oratory). It does not make me tremble. It is the want of it in ...
— Candida • George Bernard Shaw
... with her late employer, Samuel Povey. There was no truth whatever in this accusation (which everybody, however, took care not to mention to Constance); it merely indicated, perhaps, the secret aspirations of Maria Insull, the virgin. The assistant was properly scandalized, more by the crudity of Mrs. Critchlow's language than by the alleged sin buried in the past. Goodness knows what the assistant would have done! But two hours later Maria Critchlow tried to commit suicide by stabbing herself with a pair of scissors. There was ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... youth and a certain natural crudity; and what he lacked in experience and development she easily balanced with the extraordinary physical attraction that had ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... the recesses of the shell from which it had been peeping. His soul was tremendous, in solitude; but even the rumour of society intimidated it. His father and another were walking about the ground floor; the rough voice of his father echoed upwards in all its crudity. He listened for the other voice; it was his Auntie Clara's. Darius too had taken his Saturday afternoon for a leisurely visit to the house, and somehow he must have encountered Mrs Hamps, and brought her ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... white-domed mosque flanked by the tall minaret contrasting with its formal French colonnaded facades, its groupings of majestic white-robed forms and commonplace figures in caps and hard felt hats; the mystery of its palm trees, and the crudity of its flaring electric lights, it gave an impression of unreality, of a modern contractor's idea of Fairyland, where anything grotesque might assume an air of normality. The moon shone full in the heavens, and as I crossed the Place I saw the equestrian statue of the Duke of Orleans silhouetted ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... sound. They dragged our talk down to a lower plane, to a plane merely utilitarian, almost squalid by comparison with the roseate heights we had been easily skimming. That was how the sound of my own poor words struck me; but my companion was not so easily dashed. My crudity could not fret his accomplished savoir-faire. (Mr. Rawlence impressed me as the most finished man of the world I had ever met, with the single exception of my father; and, indeed, the Sydney artist did shine brightly beside the sort of people I ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... more unchanged than his body. The same hilarious atheism, the same dogmatic disbelief, the same conviction of human folly combined as illogically, as of yore, with schemes of perfect states: time seemed to have mellowed no opinion, toned down no crudity. He was coming, he said, to make a last hopeless call on his famous pupil, the others were working. The others—he explained—were his little Klaartje and his newest pupil, Kerkkrinck, a rich and stupid youth, but honest and good-hearted withal. He had practically turned ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... delineations of life based on direct observation and vivid sympathy and imagination are impeccable. His theories may be false, but these will always be true. Nothing can take their place in fiction. It is they which give enduring value to such tales as Morte d'Arthur, despite all the crudity of the intellectual background. ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... the word "amateur" fails to do full credit to amateur journalism and the association which best represents it. To some minds the term conveys an idea of crudity and immaturity, yet the United can boast of members and publications whose polish and scholarship are well-nigh impeccable. In considering the adjective "amateur" as applied to the press association, we must adhere to the more basic ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... is pretty near all you know of the great, marvellous, multitudinous town you live in—a city full of strange people, of strange occupations, of strange habits of life, of strange contrasts of wealth and poverty; of a new life of an indescribable crudity, and of an old life that breeds to-day the very atmosphere of the historic past. Your feet have never strayed in the side paths where you might have learned something of the infinite and curious ...
— Jersey Street and Jersey Lane - Urban and Suburban Sketches • H. C. Bunner
... sense. It is idle to pretend that the wide-spread agnosticism of this period had its root either in lack of morality or in deliberate crookedness of mind. Everyone who carefully studies the phenomena presented will admit that men of strong intellect have been driven out of Christianity by the crudity of the religious ideas set before them, the contradictions in the authoritative teachings, the views as to God, man, and the universe that no trained intelligence could possibly admit. Nor can it be said that any kind of moral degradation lay ...
— Esoteric Christianity, or The Lesser Mysteries • Annie Besant
... there is a loss of emphasis upon skill and good workmanship in much of the modern Trade Union influence as compared with the Guild ranking of older craft-unions, but there is a type of education for citizenship which, with all its crudity and coarseness of ideal, inheres in the Trade Union as in few other organizations. To emphasize class feeling, it is said, is to work against democracy. True, but to have a political system in which one class is ignored, ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... of course Mary wrote without restraint. All her letters to me were destroyed after our crisis, but some of mine to her she kept for many years; at last they came back to me so that I have them now. And for all their occasional cheapness and crudity, I do not find anything in them to be ashamed of. They reflect, they are chiefly concerned with that search for a career of fine service which was then the chief preoccupation of my mind, the bias is ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... elementary crudity or barbarism which the human spirit often betrays when it is deeply stirred. Not only are chance and divination welcomed into the world but they are reverenced all the more, like the wind and fire of ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... speech and stammering tongue of men who have gone before them, they have taken up the unfinished form and completed it; they have, as it were, rescued the soul of meaning from its prison of uninformed crudity, where it sat like the Prince in the "Arabian Nights," half man, half marble; they have set it free in its own form, in a shape, namely, which it could "through every part impress." Shakespere's keen eye suggested many such a rescue ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... as outlined above are sometimes criticized because of the crudity of the results. It is sometimes argued that the crude work establishes low standards and that better finished work of a more useful type is more desirable in school projects. Certainly everything which ...
— Primary Handwork • Ella Victoria Dobbs
... black mantel-piece, in a ruddy glow of sunset light striking through the window, hung one which caught and held Eric's attention to the exclusion of everything else. It was the enlarged "crayon" photograph of a young girl, and, in spite of the crudity of execution, it was easily the center of interest ...
— Kilmeny of the Orchard • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... on principle, and the Indian Army should be considerably reduced. The student was not, however, prepared with answers to Mr. Pagett's mildest questions on these points, and he returned to vague generalities, leaving the M.P. so much impressed with the crudity of his views that he was glad on Orde's return to say goodbye to his ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... placing heavy orders I began to attract general attention. My reputation for selling "first-rate stuff" for the lowest prices quoted spread. Buyers would call at my rookery of a shop before I had time to seek an interview with them. The appearance of my place and the crudity of my office facilities, so far from militating against my progress, helped to accelerate it. Skeptical buyers who had doubted my ability to undersell the old-established houses became convinced of it when they inspected my ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... view that, could she but have produced a cleaner slate, she might by this time have pulled it off with Mr. French. Yes, he let her in that way sacrifice her honorable connection with him—all the more honorable for being so completely at an end—to the crudity of her plan for not missing another connection, so much more brilliant than what he offered, and for bringing another man, with whom she so invidiously and unflatteringly compared him, ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... to this or that object a refined and intelligent preference; but what I really most had before me was the chorus of abjection, as I might well have called it, led, at the highest pitch, by Honorine and vaguely suggesting to me, by the crudity, so to say, of its wistfulness, a natural frankness of passion—goodness knew in fact (for my small intelligence really didn't) what depths of corruptibility. Droll enough, as I win them again, these queer dim plays of consciousness: my sense that my innocent companions, Honorine en tete, ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... A dilapidated old cornfield character in all the crudity of flapping black was brought in and established in the center of the floor. In his shabby hat fluttered a handful of rusty crow feathers, and the feature of the dance was for each boy to secure one of them in passing for his partner. The poor old fellow was nearly ...
— Entertaining Made Easy • Emily Rose Burt
... noted ministers. For the rest, he learned that Lemuel was very much interested in the city, and appeared to be rapidly absorbing both its present civilisation and its past history. He was unsmilingly amused at the comments of mixed shrewdness and crudity which Lemuel was betrayed into at times beyond certain limits of diffidence that he had apparently set himself; at his blunders and misconceptions, at the truth divined by the very innocence of his youth and inexperience. He found ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells
... In art its taste is rich and of fine quality,—at once unrestrained and complex, ancient and modern, special to itself and original. In the region of morals it is unequal and mixed. It was an age of contrasts, of contrasts in all their crudity, an age of philosophy and fanaticism, of scepticism and strong faith. Everything was at strife and in collision; nothing was blended and united. Everything was in ferment; it was a period of chaos; every ray of light caused a storm. It was not a gentle age, ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... meanwhile using him for their own ends, no doubt, he cures himself of his dyspepsia, the globe acquires a faint blush on one or both of its cheeks, as if it were beginning to be ripe, and life loses its crudity and is once more sweet ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... the charming Berceuse (Op. 57). The Rondo, Op. 14, has the character of a Krakowiak, a dance in 2-4 time which originated in Cracovia. In no other compositions of the master do the national elements show themselves in the same degree of crudity; indeed, after this he never incorporates national airs and imitates so closely national dances. Chopin remains a true Pole to the end of his days, and his love of and attachment to everything Polish increase with the time of absence from his native country. ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... history had happened. Consequently some localities kept their reputation of sanctity. That they were really the abiding-places of the gods the common people would not cease to hold, whatever might be taught or held by those who had renounced that crudity. And, indeed, it may be doubted whether anybody ever renounced it altogether. Probably, at all events, most persons would see no difficulty in believing that the god dwelt on the sacred spot of earth and also at the same time in heaven. They ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... was about ready to start on her daily trip when the stranger designated as Lord Montague had appeared. As he stood against the tender bar and seemed to commune with himself on the crudity of American locomotive cabs, Ralph leaned from the ...
— Ralph on the Overland Express - The Trials and Triumphs of a Young Engineer • Allen Chapman
... also, thought he was a trained domestic whose duty it was to present dishes to the attention without any apparent mental processes. Certainly it was not his business to listen, and gaze fascinated. This he did, however, actually for the time unconscious of his breach of manners. The very crudity of the language used, the oddly sounding, sometimes not easily translatable slang phrases, used as if they were a necessary part of any conversation—the blunt, uneducated bareness of figure—seemed to Penzance ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... personal experiences in German schools. He determined to make a real university in the West; he fixed his glance upon the opportunities for future development rather than the bareness and inevitable crudity of pioneer life. For the first time he found his cherished ideas embodied in the provision for a state university; and though he realized they had not been made effective, he believed that in the West, if anywhere, was his opportunity to put them into actual practice, unhampered by the traditions ...
— The University of Michigan • Wilfred Shaw
... would have said; but she often succeeded in contradicting Henry, in his absence, and invariably paid her partner at dinner, or the kind old lady who remembered her grandmother, the compliment of believing that there was meaning in what they said. For the sake of the light in her eager eyes, much crudity of expression and some untidiness of person were forgiven her. It was generally felt that, given a year or two of experience, introduced to good dressmakers, and preserved from bad influences, she would be an acquisition. ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... age she was writing fairly creditable poems, but was afraid to offer them for publication, lest in after years she might regret their almost inevitable crudity. So she did not publish anything until after ...
— Flint and Feather • E. Pauline Johnson
... throughout the vast field of lighting, but the stage offers great opportunities which have been barely drawn upon. When one has awakened to the vast possibilities of light, shade, and color as a means of expression it is difficult to suppress a critical attitude toward the crudity of lighting effects on the present stage, the lack of knowledge pertaining to the latent possibilities of light, and the superficial use of this potential medium. The crude realism and the almost total absence of deep insight into the attributes of light ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh
... study the tuneful art, and enabled him to learn all that could be learned without a master. He began to make tunes and publish them, and his first book, the New England Psalm-singer was a curiosity of youthful crudity and confidence, but in considerable numbers it was sold, and sung—and laughed at. He went on studying and composing, and compiled another work, which was so much of an improvement that it got the name of Billings' Best. A third singing-book ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... me of all influence in the lobbies, it may serve me well in the tribune, where I shall be able to speak with strength and freedom. Being bound by no promises and by no party trammels, nothing will prevent me from being the man I am, and expressing, in all their sacred crudity, the ideas which I think sound and just. I know very well that before an audience plain, honest truth may fail to be contagious or even welcome. But have you never remarked that, by using our opportunities wisely, ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... to think of this small panorama of life that moved before him, rather than of himself. The woman was young, and pretty in a slovenly way. The man was much older, and silent. He was of better class than the woman, and underlying his assumption of crudity there were occasional outcroppings of some cultural background. Not then, nor at any subsequent time, did he learn the story, if story there was. He began to see them, however, not so much pioneers as refugees. The cabin was, he thought, a haven ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... it hard to account for the crudity of our intercourse, not with officials only, but with the vast world which lies outside our narrow circle of associates. We have no human relations where we have no social relations; we are awkward and constrained in ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... misty joinings-on and spreadings-out into the distance, nothing of that art of air and light by which the face of nature explains and veils itself in climes which we may be allowed to think more lovely. A glaring piece of crudity, where everything that is not white is a solecism and defies the judgment of the eyesight; a scene of blinding definition; a parade of daylight, almost scenically vulgar, more than scenically trying, and yet hearty and healthy, making the nerves to tighten and the mouth to smile: such is the winter ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... work produced in consequence of the assiduous following of models. And we shall seldom be very wide of the mark if in our estimation of youthful productions we place more reliance on their departures from what has been already done, than on their resemblances to the best artists. An energetic crudity, even a riotous absurdity, has more promise in it than a clever and elegant mediocrity, because it shows that the young man is speaking out of his own heart, and struggling to express himself in his own way rather than in the way he finds in other ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... trying to emerge from the awkward age. Its body is full-grown. Its spirit is still crude with a juvenile crudity. What does this spirit need? Next to contact with true religion, it most needs contact with true poetry. It needs to absorb the grace, the wisdom, the idealistic beauty of the art, and thrill in rhyme with poetry's ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... charm of things unacknowledged and clandestine. Mrs. Levitt was unique; irreplaceable. He couldn't think of any other woman who would be a suitable substitute. There was little Barbara Madden; she had been afraid of him; but his passions were still too young to be stirred by the crudity of a girl's fright; if it came to that, he preferred the reassuring ease ...
— Mr. Waddington of Wyck • May Sinclair
... me. He had a shock of jet black hair, tumbled all over his head, a pair of bright eyes, round full face, not over clean, strong limbs and a well knit body. His clothes hung on him like gunny sacks, and the crudity of the many various patches indicated that they had not been put on by woman's deft fingers. He didn't wait for me to speak, ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady
... quiet, orderly thing, so immense was the theatre for effort and movement. In these wide streets, almost as wide as a London square, there was room to move; nothing seemed huddled, pushing, or inconvenient. Even the disorder of building lost its ugly crudity in the space and ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... "blocking out" the voice note there are only five notes left, thus I know there were five "Quills" in the set. I thought a tune played on a "Big Set" might be of interest and so I am giving one of those also. If there be those who would laugh at the crudity of "Quills" it might not be amiss to remember in justice to the inventors that "Quills" constitute a pipe organ in ...
— Negro Folk Rhymes - Wise and Otherwise: With a Study • Thomas W. Talley
... liked him," Billy said gloomily, "but the show would have started her arguing about this whole moving-picture proposition,—its crudity, and its tremendous sacrifice of artistic values, and so ...
— Outside Inn • Ethel M. Kelley
... is a beautiful and poetic creation. She has produced this effect by a literary instinct which is fine and mainly cultivated. Its native vigor carries the reader past an occasional crudity, which it would seem to be hypocritical to notice. The sweep of passion in the drama is elemental. She has connected the story of a girl-woman with the most woeful of earthly tragedies, namely the crime of a great nation against ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... that crudity of yours, Hera, which has before now made your position in Olympus so untenable. You lack the art of ...
— Hypolympia - Or, The Gods in the Island, an Ironic Fantasy • Edmund Gosse
... expected to throng to the opening. The logs had been cut along the river—they were that gnarled cottonwood which grows, leaning always toward the northeast, in that land of bitter extremes—the bark stripped from them until they gleamed yellowly, and fitted together with studied crudity. Upon the projecting end of the ridge-pole rode a spreading ...
— Claim Number One • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... greater affection for the lucubrations of Amiel than for Count Tolstoi's dealings with that odd compound of crudity and rottenness, the Russian nature; but Mr Arnold's "Amiel" is admirable. Never was there a more "gentlemanly correction," a more delicate and good-humoured setting to rights, than that which he administers to Amiel's two great panegyrists (who happened ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... Jackson's work clearly suggests that at a very early period in human history, long before the ideas that found expression in the Osiris story had materialized, men entertained in all its literal crudity the belief that the external organ of reproduction from which the child emerged at birth was the actual creator of the child, not merely the giver of birth but also the ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... official costume for the first time, as if ironical Fortune had desired to give to the representative on probation a foretaste of all parliamentary joys. The friends of the dead man, who followed, formed a rather small group, singularly well chosen to exhibit in its crudity the superficiality and the void of that existence of a great personage reduced to the intimacy of a theatrical manager thrice bankrupt, of a picture-dealer grown wealthy through usuary, of a nobleman of tarnished reputation, and of a few men about town without distinction. ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... broken; and no discriminating care in the handling of crops could be had except at a cost of supervision which was generally prohibitive. The whole establishment would work with success only when the management fully recognized and allowed for the crudity of the labor. ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... an opinion on my literary venture, of course the youthful state of our country will be taken into consideration, for it is a state which necessarily tinges all of our productions, literary or otherwise, with a certain amount of crudity. Consequently, reasonable men will not expect that felicity of expression, and that ripeness and happiness of thought, which would be expected in the productions of an older country, although they may be aware that true poetry is not the result of education, or even the refinements ...
— Canada and Other Poems • T.F. Young
... all such characteristics were fused into her general magnificence; in Mary and Alice they seemed to exist at random, failing to give any sense of harmony, but only one of irritation. The airs and graces they assumed did but emphasise their crudity. It was, indeed, an illumining perception when it struck Morgan that their absurd movements and struttings and the queen-like way in which they tried to hold their heads bore a singular resemblance to the stage-gestures of "The Basha's Favourite." At the same time they possessed a large fund ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... borrow a term from dramatic criticism, it is "well made," and that is what makes it so thin, so bloodless, and so unprofitable to remember, in spite of its easy narrative and its "punch." Its success as literature, curiously enough for a new literature and a new race like ours, is limited, not by crudity, or inexpressiveness, but by form, by the very rigidity of its carefully perfected form. Like other patent medicines, ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... yourself for insight and for a lofty morality. It becomes a kind of blasphemy to suggest that your great man, who thus stands for an inspired leader dropped straight out of heaven, was probably at best very imperfect, one-sided, and at least as much of a product as a producer. The crudity of the method is even regarded as a proof of its morality. Your common-place moralist likes to call everything black or white; he despises all qualifications as casuistical refinements, and plumes himself on the decisive verdict, saint or sinner, with which he labels ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... the same thing. Now, if anyone thinks these two instances extravagant, I will refer to two actual cases from the Eugenic discussions. When Sir Oliver Lodge spoke of the methods "of the stud-farm" many Eugenists exclaimed against the crudity of the suggestion. Yet long before that one of the ablest champions in the other interest had written "What nonsense this education is! Who could educate a racehorse or a greyhound?" Which most certainly either means nothing, or the human stud-farm. Or ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... explaining that a man who has been imprisoned for blasphemy must not be released because his remarks were painful to the feelings of his pious fellow townsmen. Now it happens that this very Home Secretary has driven many thousands of his fellow citizens almost beside themselves by the crudity of his notions of government, and his simple inability to understand why he should not use and make laws to torment and subdue people who do not happen to agree with him. In a word, he is not a politician, but a grown-up schoolboy who has at last got a cane in his hand. And as all the rest of ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... that he had "all but" got a customer for her. The customer was a wealthy old gentleman, who had a passion for collecting china, and, in special, liked the work of beginners. The old gentleman had looked at Primrose's plates, and had said that they were very fine, and had a certain crudity or freshness about them, which, for his part, he took to; and if she had three or four more lessons he felt morally certain that he ...
— The Palace Beautiful - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade
... genius, arose primarily from her want of humor. Her severities of judgment—and who more severe than she?—were due to the same melancholy cause; for humor is the kindliest thing alive. Compare the harshness with which she handles her hapless curates and the comparative crudity of her treatment, with the surprising lightness of Miss Austen's touch as she rounds and completes her immortal clerical portraits. Miss Bronte tells us, in one of her letters, that she regarded all curates as "highly ...
— Masterpieces Of American Wit And Humor • Thomas L. Masson (Editor)
... crudity, as we are fain to call it, of the notions thus rhetorically set forth must be obvious to every reader acquainted with the history of the rise and growth of states in general, however little attention he may have given to those of Russia in particular. The institutions of Russia ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885 • Various
... abundance of not altogether stagey noble sentiment, an agreeable presentment of fresh and gallant youths, still smacking rather of Fletcher's madcap but heart-sound gallants, and not anticipating the heartless crudity of the cubs of the Restoration, a loveable feminine character, and so forth. But hardly a clever boy at school ever devised anything so extravagantly puerile as the plot, which turns on a set of banished men playing at hell and devils in caverns close to a populous ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... beginning at the top; she was only sixteen years of age and had never received any practical stage training; her experience of life was narrow and provincial—and yet, when the curtain rang down for the last time, the discerning ones in that audience knew that, despite the crudity of the performance, a new star had arisen and a great career begun. For that "young lady of Louisville" was Mary Anderson. Her story is unique in the ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... body. It was there unscathed. I stared at the broad line of his shoulders, his dark head, the amazing immobility of his limbs. At his feet the veil dropped by Miss Haldin looked intensely black in the white crudity of the light. He was gazing at it spell-bound. Next moment, stooping with an incredible, savage swiftness, he snatched it up and pressed it to his face with both hands. Something, extreme astonishment perhaps, dimmed my eyes, so that he seemed to vanish before ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... her good news. It may be imagined with what sentiments toward his wife Benyon had emerged from this episode. To-night his memory went further back,—back to the beginning and to the days when he had had to ask himself, with all the crudity of his first surprise, what in the name of wantonness she had wished to do with him. The answer to this speculation was so old,—it had dropped so ont of the line of recurrence,—that it was now almost new again. Moreover, it was only approximate, for, as I have already ...
— Georgina's Reasons • Henry James
... freedom of the press as freedom to say and write what one pleases, is parallel to the one of freedom in general, viz., as freedom to do what one pleases. Such views belong to the uneducated crudity and superficiality of naive thinking. The press, with its infinite variety of content and expression, represents what is most transient, particular, and accidental in human opinion. Beyond the direct incitation ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... types is discontinuous, and implies a compromise between the two conditions which in literature correspond to conservatism and radicalism. The conservative work is apt to become a mere survival: while the radical may include much that has the crudity of an imperfect application of new principles. Another point may be briefly indicated. The growth of new forms is obviously connected not only with the intellectual development but with the social and political state of the nation, and there comes into close connection ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... methods proposed by my learned friend display a certain crudity inappropriate to the character of a man of science; to say nothing of the disadvantage of letting the enemy into our counsels. No, no, Jervis; we can do something better than that. Just excuse me for a minute while I run up to ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... imperfect. He thought this must be why the Lord seems to regard with so much indifference the many falsehoods uttered of and for him. When a man, he said, agonized to get into other hearts the thing dear to his own, the false intellectual or even moral forms in which his ignorance and the crudity of his understanding compelled him to embody it, would not render its truth of none effect, but might, on the contrary, make its reception possible where a truer presentation would ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... there is nothing comparable. "All the differences," he is reported to say, "which divide orthodox folks, heretics, schismatics, in our own day, are as nothing compared with the dissension between Peter and Paul." It is, as every one knows, no new story; but there it is in M. Renan in all its crudity, as if it were the most manifest and accredited of truths. M. Renan first brings St. Paul to Rome. "It was," he says, "a great event in the world's history, almost as pregnant with consequences as his conversion." How it was so M. Renan does not explain; but he brings St. Peter to ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... unrequited attachment by him as men keep a well-smoked pipe—for comfort's sake, and because it had grown dear in the using. It brought him happily through one Simla season. Hannasyde was not lovely. There was a crudity in his manners, and a roughness in the way in which he helped a lady on to her horse, that did not attract the other sex to him. Even if he had cast about for their favor, which he did not. He kept his wounded heart all ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... will go well, but I have been endeavoring for the last half-hour to find Mrs. Perkenpine, and have utterly failed. I am very hungry, but I can discover nothing to eat. All our stores appear to be absolutely raw, or in some intermediate state of crudity. I intend to order some provisions in cans or boxes which will be at all times available, but I have not done so yet, and so I have come over to speak to you about the matter. Did your guides prepare ...
— The Associate Hermits • Frank R. Stockton
... d'Holbach himself; but again he falls into and sports himself in the slime of the age, consisting of obscenity, and into the beaten track of declamation. In his leading novels he dwells a long time on salacious equivocation, or on a scene of lewdness. Crudity with him is not extenuated by malice or glossed over by elegance. He is neither refined nor pungent; is quite incapable, like the younger Crebillon, of depicting the scapegrace of ability. He is a new-comer, a parvenu in standard society; you see in him a commoner, a powerful reasoner, an ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... Peggy. It certainly seemed to him in some ways the most finely expressive of the churches; but equally certainly it often expressed the wrong things, and (like all other churches) left whole worlds unexpressed. And so much of its expression had a crudity.... It kept saying too little ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... alone—everything he needed must be manufactured by his own hands, from its original sources. He had known that progress would be slow and he had been prepared for that; but he had not pictured, even to himself, half of the maddening setbacks which occurred time after time because of the crudity of the tools and equipment he was forced to use. All too often a machine or part, the product of many hours of grueling labor, would fail because of the lack of some insignificant thing—some item so common as to be taken for granted in all terrestrial ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... she can find time to do so. Sophocles' Clytemnestra is a woman, lost as soon as she begins to reason out her misdeeds. She prays to Apollo in secret, for fear lest Electra may overhear her prayer and make it void. But the crudity of Aeschylus' resources did not satisfy Sophocles, whose taste demanded a contrast to heighten the character of his heroine and found one in the Homeric story that Agamemnon had a second daughter. Aeschylus' stern nature ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... candles or so in the sconces, on the panelled walls, and in the chandelier hanging from the decorated ceiling, and despite the assiduous snuffing by the servants, was dim. The subdued illumination was not without its advantage. It was merciful to the painted faces and softened the crudity of their raw colouring. A mixture of odours offended the nostrils. Powder came off in clouds, not only from the hair of the belles but also from the wigs of the beaux. Its peculiar scent mingled with ...
— Madame Flirt - A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera' • Charles E. Pearce
... Teachings, that the Church built upon Jesus' ministry has adopted and insisted upon the acceptance of such dogmas. But this baneful cloud of ignorance and barbaric thought is gradually lifting, until even now the intelligent minds in the Church refuse to accept or teach the doctrine in its original crudity, they either passing it over in silence, or else dressing it in ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka
... people could really, almost always, hurry better without help than with it. Still, she could actually hardly have made him take more time than he struck her taking, though it must indeed be added that there was now in this much-thinking little person's state of mind no mere crudity of impatience. Something had happened, rapidly, with the beautiful sight of him and with the drop of her fear of having annoyed him by making him go to and fro. Subsidence of the fearsome, for Maggie's spirit, was always, at first, positive emergence of the sweet, and it was long ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... of his published visions is that in which he relates his journeys through the Astral Regions; his descriptions cannot fail to astonish the reader, partly through the crudity of their details. A man whose scientific eminence is incontestable, and who united in his own person powers of conception, will, and imagination, would surely have invented better if he had invented at all. The fantastic literature of the East offers nothing that can give an idea ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac
... full. Every ugliness was turned to beauty. Vile things were transfigured in that softening light. "Christianity," he said, "is the moonlight of the soul." It was note a complete saying, but Dawson was a creature of intimations. He startled one sometimes by an intellectual crudity, but he ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... the third, completion of the grammar, difficult Latin authors, rhetoric, and logic. Williams calls this "Melanchthon's somewhat artless ideas of a proper school system," which he excuses as being "marked possibly by the crudity of a first effort at organization, but more probably controlled in form by the fewness of teachers in the ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... modern literary history. At this time of day it all seems ancient and distant enough; the book has been praised, blamed, lifted up, hurled down a thousand times, and has finally been discovered to be a book of promise, of natural talent, with a great deal of crudity and melodrama and a little beauty. It does not stand of course in comparison with Peter Westcott's later period and yet it has a note that his hand never captured afterwards. How incredibly bad it is in places, the Datchett incidents, with their flames and screams ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... 40', west of Cadiz. In this observation there is an error of eighteen degrees, the true longitude of the island of Saona, where the observation was taken, being 62 deg. 20' west of Cadiz; and the error is accounted for partly by the inaccuracy of the tables of Regiomontanus and partly by the crudity and inexactness of the Admiral's methods. On the 24th of September they at last reached the easternmost point of Espanola, named by Columbus San Rafael. They stood to the east a little longer, and discovered the little island of Mona, which ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... commonly a good appetite for his breakfast, but now he let his coffee stand long un-tasted. There were several things about this note that touched him—the childlike simplicity and directness, the generous courage, even the imperfection and crudity of the literature. However he saw it afterward, he saw it then in its true intention. He respected that intention; through all the sophistications in which life had wrapped him, it awed him a little. He realised ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells
... baccalaureate degree at the University of Norway. The orator on this occasion was a tall, handsome, distinguished-looking young man named Alexander Kielland, from the little coast town of Stavanger. There was none of the crudity of a provincial either in his manners or his appearance. He spoke with a quiet self-possession and a pithy incisiveness which ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... holds in the case of the mind-cure message, foolish as it may sound upon its surface; and seeing its rapid growth in influence, and its therapeutic triumphs, one is tempted to ask whether it may not be destined (probably by very reason of the crudity and extravagance of many of its manifestations[53]) to play a part almost as great in the evolution of the popular religion of the future as did those ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... unhappy, gentle, quiet men with ties like oriflammes, breasts like a kingfisher's, and cataclysmal trouser patterns. Even so, if the shopkeeper had his will, should we all be. Those poor withered maiden ladies, too, who fill us with a kind of horror, with their juvenile curls, their girlish crudity of colouring, their bonnets, giddy, tottering, hectic. It overcomes me with remorse to think that I myself have accused them of vanity and folly. It overcomes me with pain to hear the thoughtless laugh aloud after them, in the public ways. For they are simply short-sighted trustful people, the myopic ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... hysterical women who threaten to die or go mad unless they get married—a very unpleasant fact for a young doctor to have to discuss with her sister, and for us to read about. Indeed, if I were to tell in all its incredible crudity the story of the relations of this gently-bred girl with the drunken farmer who, to her knowledge, had previously betrayed her own servant-girl, I think even Miss SINCLAIR would be revolted. Her exposure of certain secret things which common decency agrees to leave in silence is a treachery ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 11, 1914 • Various
... in his use of titles is interesting. Compare the crudity of "Vagaries vs. Spiritualism," and "Deep," for example, with those he selects when he begins to publish his books. "Wake-Robin," "Winter Sunshine," "Locusts and Wild Honey," "Leaf and Tendril,"—how ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... not sure of the feelings of the others, but there could be no mistake in what she read in Huntington's black countenance. She was not only frightened, but surprised and pained. For all his coarseness and crudity, she had until to-day believed him to be innately gentle, with only a rough and ungracious exterior. She had seen him always tender with Claire, whom undoubtedly he loved with all the best there was in him. But now she perceived the other side ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham
... the enormous shoulder of the world, a little air came breathing over me as if it had just blown from the mysterious regions where space and time are not, or are in different forms from those we know. A sense of the crudity of these great expanses of sea-becoming-land took possession of me; the horizon stretched away like a mere endless continuation of marshes and streams; the face of my companion was turned off sea-ward with an ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... choose to so put it," answered the Father Superior, "that is so. But again I must protest against the extreme crudity, the—" ...
— The Cruise of the Nonsuch Buccaneer • Harry Collingwood
... cold. He had promptly set up a life-sized figure which he called an "Adam," and was pushing it rapidly toward completion. There were naturally a great many wiseheads who smiled at his precipitancy, and cited him as one more example of Yankee crudity, a capital recruit to the great army of those who wish to dance before they can walk. They were right, but Roderick was right too, for the success of his statue was not to have been foreseen; it partook, really, ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... his life. Let him make him put what he has learned into a hundred several forms, and accommodate it to so many several subjects, to see if he yet rightly comprehends it, and has made it his own, taking instruction of his progress by the pedagogic institutions of Plato. 'Tis a sign of crudity and indigestion to disgorge what we eat in the same condition it was swallowed; the stomach has not performed its office unless it have altered the form and condition of what was committed to it to concoct. Our minds work only upon trust, ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... the conversation and watching the road. He seemed to have forgotten that an uncouth mountaineer had been talking; he seemed not to have heard the low drawl, or in any way have been affected by its musical crudity, but only by the man's point ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris
... digestion, crudity, wind, dry brains, hard belly, thick blood, much waking, heaviness, and palpitation of heart, leaping in ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... The crudity of American life and manners had been sarcastically described by Ashe, Fearon, Davis, and other European travellers. American writers countered these attacks by comparing the treatment of the slaves in America with the condition of British paupers and ...
— The United States of America Part I • Ediwn Erle Sparks
... by the white marble which has been mixed with them. The glaring white marble in the floor of the presbytery has been inlaid with biblical scenes filled in with black cement. It is possible from the triforium to get a general idea of the crudity and tastelessness of the pavement, which is so composed and arranged that time—the softener of all things—can never make it look ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Gloucester [2nd ed.] • H. J. L. J. Masse
... little play of the same year, 1902, a play that for all its crudity and incompleteness is full of insight into Catholic Ireland, youth is again the theme, or the intolerance and self-righteousness of youth. "Eoghan's Wife" (1902) is only a monologue, only the old story of the woman who finds her home lonely and depressing because ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... rhapsodically expressed. He who takes for his hypothesis the notion that it is the permanent form of the world is what I call a radical empiricist. For him the crudity of experience remains an eternal element thereof. There is no possible point of view from which the world can appear an absolutely single fact. Real possibilities, real indeterminations, real beginnings, real ends, real evil, real crises, catastrophes, and escapes, ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... greatest care the boys went over the lines of the graven ivory comparing the figures with the carvings of the hieroglyphics which the "chief" had carved on his totem pole, and found them to be almost identical, except for a few minor particulars caused by the relief work on the totem, and less crudity in the carvings. ...
— The Boy Scouts on the Yukon • Ralph Victor
... and so has Massachusetts. The appendix will be removed, black and white—and I shouldn't much fear surgery. We're not nearly civilized enough yet to have lost the power Of recuperation, and in spite of our express-train speed, I doubt if we shall travel from crudity to rottenness without a pause ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... rustic crudity," said Matt. "But if Jack Wilmington ever cared anything for the girl, now's his chance to be a man and ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... a Farm near the Dikanka (Veillees de l'Ukraine)," appeared early in the thirties, and, with all its crudity and excrescences, was a literary sunrise. It attracted immediate and wide-spread attention, and the wits of Petersburg knew that Russia had an original novelist. The work is a collection of short stories or sketches, introduced with a rollicking ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... only would the rich plainly pay less in proportion than the poor, but a Government official drawing L600 a year, but owning no land, would pay just half the sum exacted from a settler who, having invested L1,000 in a farm, was struggling to make L200 a year thereby. The mere prospect of this crudity caused such a feeling in the Colony that he was obliged to levy the Customs duties once more. His next error was the abandonment of the Government monopoly of land purchase from the Maoris. As might be expected, the pressure upon all rulers in New Zealand to do this, and ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... at his best when he lets his youthful, high spirits have full play. His boyish exaggeration makes Leonella, Antonia's aunt, seem like a pantomime character, who has inadvertently stepped into a melodrama, but the caricature is amusing by its very crudity. She writes in red ink to express "the blushes of her cheek," when she sends a message of encouragement to the Conde d'Ossori. This and other puerile jests are more tolerable than Lewis's attempts to depict passion or describe character. Bold, ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... making a concession which he had expressly resolved to guard against; but Joseph's designs ripened, lost their crudity, as he saw more and more of his daughter's disposition. He was again grateful to her; she had made things smoother than he ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... composition,—you will see extravagance and bombast, where once you saw only eloquence and graphic power. And as for the graver and more important matter of the thought of the discourse, I think you will be aware of a certain undefinable shallowness and crudity. Your growing experience has borne you beyond it. Somehow you feel it does not come home to you, and suit you as you would wish it should. It will not do. That old sermon you cannot preach now, till you have entirely ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... After four years the crudity of it all astonished her—the stark vulgarity of Main Street in the sunshine, every mean, flimsy architectural detail revealed—the dingy trolley poles, the telegraph poles loaded with unlovely wires and battered ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... room through the open door, so kind and gentle his voice, that, though the girl started, she felt no fear until her eyes fell upon the speaker. Boswell waited. He knew what must follow. Readjustment always took time. In this case the time might be longer because of the crudity of ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... of the scientific bearings of sex relations and more clearly defined guidance of their rightful purport and practice. They are imperfectly provided with both. We talk about instructing the young when we are neither clear nor agreed amongst ourselves, and the young are endangered as much by crudity as by ...
— Love—Marriage—Birth Control - Being a Speech delivered at the Church Congress at - Birmingham, October, 1921 • Bertrand Dawson
... been, made there, and now especially, for fitting patrons, religious pictures in the old Umbrian manner. In quiet nooks of the Apennines Giovanni's works remain; and there is one of them, worth study, in spite of what critics say of its crudity, in the National Gallery. Concede its immaturity, at least, though an immaturity visibly susceptible of a delicate grace, it wins you nevertheless to return again and again, and ponder, by a sincere expression of sorrow, profound, yet ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... the cause of his introduction to the lady of his heart, had not the true spirit of romance in him. We meet our old acquaintances, the thinly disguised Vice and the rude clown of uncouth dialect, under the names of Subtle Shift and Corin; abstractions also reappear in Rumour and Providence. The crudity of the verse will be sufficiently illustrated in the ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... becoming so intimate? It's usually, with people, the very first thing I get my impression of." There came into her face for another glance at their friend no crudity of curiosity, but an expression more tenderly wistful. "He must have some mysterious box under ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... sap-fed trees which lined the unpaved streets transparent balls of glass were suspended, from which, as twilight deepened, a brilliant artificial light shot its rays, the perfection of modern invention, over the primitive, unfinished little town of Perry, which was all contrast and energy, crudity and progress. ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst
... prepared in a hurry. Still, much of it was very good indeed: the first scene especially, with its graceful trees and open forge and cottage porch, though the roses were dreadfully out of tone and, besides their crudity of colour, were curiously badly grouped. The last scene was exceedingly clever and true to nature as well, being that combination of lovely scenery and execrable architecture which is so specially characteristic of a German spa. As for the drawing-room scene, I cannot regard it as in any way a success. ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... music might better convey; and the latest whims are apparently to abandon painful observation altogether, to be merely decorative or frankly mystical, and to be satisfied with the childishness of hieroglyphics or the crudity of caricature. The arts are like truant children who think their life will be glorious if they only run away and play for ever; no need is felt of a dominant ideal passion and theme, nor of any moral interest in the interpretation of nature. ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... truths, and, it must be owned, mingled here and there with them the old errors. Time has, however, its recompenses, and if the freshness of youth seemed to be wanting in the address of the Rector, so also was its crudity. There was a singular mellowness in Mr. Carlyle's speech, which was reflected in the homely language in which it was couched. The chief lessons he had to enforce were to avoid cram, and to be painstaking, diligent, ...
— On the Choice of Books • Thomas Carlyle |
