"Grotesqueness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... remission of sins. But they had some lamentable results. Those who, like many among the Methodists,[241:1] found in them the direct work of the Holy Spirit, were thereby started along the perilous incline toward enthusiasm and fanaticism. Those, on the other hand, repelled by the grotesqueness and extravagance of these manifestations, who were led to distrust or condemn the good work with which they were associated, fell into a graver error. This was the error into which, to its cost, the ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... daughter, who was in love with the handsome captive. These fruits of his skill were less beautiful in workmanship, though marked by wonderful sweetness and power of tone. Mr. Charles Reade, a great violin amateur as well as a novelist, says of these "prison" fiddles, referring to the comical grotesqueness of their form: "Such is the force of genius, that I believe in our secret hearts we love these impudent fiddles best, they are so full of chic." Paganini's favorite was a Guarnerius del Jesu, though he had no less than seven instruments of the greatest Cremona masters. Spohr, the celebrated ...
— Great Violinists And Pianists • George T. Ferris
... Fairservice is driven out at the kitchen door, never to be heard of more, while Richie rises into Sir Richie of Castle-Collop—the reader may perhaps at the moment think by too careless grace on the King's part; which, indeed, Scott in some measure meant;—but the grotesqueness and often evasiveness of Richie's common manner make us forget how surely his bitter word is backed by his ready blow, when need is. His first introduction to us (i. 33), is because his quick ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... operation than a stranger would suppose. Over a high, narrow forehead she wore thin bands of tan-colored hair, somewhat grizzled, and forming a coil at the back of her head, barely strong enough to hold the teeth of an enormous tortoise-shell comb. Yet her grotesqueness had nothing repellant; it was a genial caricature, at which no one could take offence. "The very person I wanted to see!" cried Sally. "Father and mother are going up to Uncle John's this afternoon; Aunt Eliza has an old woman's quilting-party, ...
— The Story Of Kennett • Bayard Taylor
... light diffused itself through the room, mingling ironically with the pretty glow cast by the pink-shaded electric globes, while the two forlorn grotesques regarded each other, unconscious of each other's grotesqueness, the girl disheveled and haggard, the man with rough gray coat unbuttoned, showing the rumpled evening dress; her toque miserably awry, his black tie riding above his collar, the bow somewhere behind his ear. And the tragedy of tragedies of ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... had raised himself into an upright attitude, and the moonlight falling upon him showed his shape in all its grotesqueness of outline. This, with his words, at once recalled their having seen him before. Yes; it was the enano, whom the big Texan had swung up to the ...
— The Free Lances - A Romance of the Mexican Valley • Mayne Reid
... struck with the singularity of Caleb's appearance, and later by the expression of his eyes. A very tall, big-boned, lean, round-shouldered man, he was uncouth almost to the verge of grotesqueness, and walked painfully with the aid of a stick, dragging his shrunken and shortened bad leg. His head was long and narrow, and his high forehead, long nose, long chin, and long, coarse, grey whiskers, worn like a beard on his throat, ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... forward, as it does with us, illuminating the path one is to take, rather than backward, as with you, revealing only the course you have already trodden, and therefore have no more concern with? But it is no doubt a merciful provision of Providence that renders you unable to realize the grotesqueness of your predicament, ...
— The Blindman's World - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... attendre," which draws forth the natural excuse "I did can't to come rather." Passing by a number of good things which one would like to analyse if space permitted, we arrive at "For to ride a horse," a fine little bit of word painting almost Carlylean in its grotesqueness. "Here is a horse who have a bad looks. He not sail know to march, he is pursy, he is foundered. Don't you are ashamed to give me a jade as like? he is unshoed, he is with nails up; it want to lead to the farrier." "Let us ...
— English as she is spoke - or, A jest in sober earnest • Jose da Fonseca
... down on top of me. And then the grotesqueness of it—to begin all of a sudden at ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... which she would receive from her sisters. Presently Thurston House came in view, and, sure enough, there were four excited heads bobbing to and fro at the window, four broad beams of amusement to testify to the grotesqueness of her appearance. Nan lifted a solemn glance in return, and Chrissie, seized with a sudden demon of mischief, pointed a forefinger at the door opposite, and gesticulated violently in its direction. As plainly as words could speak, that forefinger ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... keeping back the winds that they blow not, the four riders, the loosing of the angels of the Euphrates to slay the third part of men—these and others are conceptions of such force, such grave or tempestuous grandeur, in the midst of grotesqueness, as the art of no other age or ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... intrusion, that led from the cemetery to the settlement. In the dim twilight, against a sunset sky, they beheld a pale-faced girl riding slowly toward them. With a delicate instinct, new to those rough men, they drew closer in the shadow of the bushes until she passed. There was no mistaking the familiar grotesqueness of Jinny; there was no mistaking the languid grace of Miss Lawton. But a wreath of wild roses was around Jinny's neck, from her long ears floated Miss Jessie's hat ribbons, and a mischievous, girlish smile was upon Miss Jessie's ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... chamber. Early as it was, Mrs. Payne had already apparelled herself in her paint and powder and driven down. Seen by the morning sunlight, her smeared face with its brilliant artificial smile revealed a pathos which was rendered more acute by its effect of playful grotesqueness. She was like a faded and decrepit actress who, fired by the unconquerable spirit of her art, forces her wrinkled visage to ape the romantic ecstasies of passion. Age which is beautiful only when it has become expressive of repose—of ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... crimson, white and blue, these small scions stand up in their ruffs and fardingales in dimpled serenity, squaring their infantine stomachers at the spectator with an innocence, a dignity, a delightful grotesqueness, which make the picture a thing of close truth as well as of fine decorum. You might kiss their hands, but you certainly would think twice before pinching their cheeks—provocative as they are of this tribute of admiration—and ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... poor temple, to what strange uses are you come. . . . This excess of grotesqueness in profanation is more insulting surely than to be sacked by barbarians! Behold a table set for some thirty guests, and the guests themselves—of both sexes—merry and lighthearted, belong to that special type of humanity which patronises Thomas Cook & Son (Egypt ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... the overture and the commencing scenas. An ominous buzz circulated round the house: the singers, the orchestra,—electrically sensitive to the impression of the audience,—grew, themselves, agitated and dismayed, and failed in the energy and precision which could alone carry off the grotesqueness of ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... grotesque deformity by the dog-fancier are in good faith accounted beautiful by many. These varieties of dogs—and the like is true of other fancy-bred animals—are rated and graded in aesthetic value somewhat in proportion to the degree of grotesqueness and instability of the particular fashion which the deformity takes in the given case. For the purpose in hand, this differential utility on the ground of grotesqueness and instability of structure is reducible to terms of a greater scarcity and consequent expense. ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... of 1601 a very smart and fascinating performance, carried over almost to grotesqueness just to show it was not done for mere delight in the frank naturalism of the functions with which it deals. That Mark Twain had made considerable study of this frankness is apparent from chapter four of 'A Yankee At King Arthur's Court,' where he refers to ...
— 1601 - Conversation as it was by the Social Fireside in the Time of the Tudors • Mark Twain
... cluttered table at Storch's. He smiled grimly as he pocketed the money. He was to have not a care in the world. Like a perfect youth of the ancients marked for a sweet-scented offering to the gods, he was to go his way in perfect freedom until his appointed time. There was an element of grotesqueness in it all that dulled the edge of horror which ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... first view of Giotto's frescoes, where men and women with bodies of board, long jointless fingers, rigid plastered hair, and dark-rimmed slits for eyes whose oblique glance imparts an air of suspicion to the whole assembly, will suggest merely a notion of their grotesqueness. By and by we shall grow used to the deformities, and recognize the primitive truthfulness of attitude and expression, the spirit which animates these ungainly forms and faces, until at length we look at the painter with the eyes of his contemporaries, and judge him by the standards ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... colours, laced with gold, together with a speech and an ode. Late at night, at last, the waggon was heard rumbling into the courtyard, with the guest arrived in safety, but, if one must confess one's self, perhaps forbidding at first sight. From a comfortless portico, with all the grotesqueness of the Middle Age, supported by brown, aged bishops, whose meditations no incident could distract, Our Lady looked out no better than an unpretending nun, with nothing to say the like of which one was used to hear. Certainly one was not stimulated by, enwrapped, absorbed ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Pater
... birdlike face, framed by the silk quilling of her old lady's bonnet, broke into a hundred cheerful wrinkles at the sight of Gabriella. Even the grotesqueness of her appearance—of her fantastic mantle trimmed with bugles, made from her best wrap in the 'seventies, of her full alpaca skirt, with its wide hem stiffened by buckram, of her black cotton gloves, ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... consequence of the character thus imparted to its sculpture, I have called grotesque; but it must be our immediate task, and it will be a most interesting one, to distinguish between this base grotesqueness, and that magnificent condition of fantastic imagination, which was above noticed as one of the chief elements of the Northern Gothic mind. Nor is this a question of interesting speculation merely: for the distinction between the true and false grotesque is one which the ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... these selections of the Psalms have been chosen for their crudeness and grotesqueness. I have tried in vain to find othersome that would show more elegant finish or more of the spirit of poetry; the most poetical lines I can discover are these, which are beautiful for the reason that the noble thoughts of the Psalmist cannot ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... hospitable, courteous, and even playful. His humour, which was of a crabbed kind quite peculiar to himself, found its best vent in his sermons. I often wondered whether he realized that the extreme grotesqueness of his preaching was the spell which drew undergraduates to the Sunday evening service at ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... pipes on board, and were making the fantasia. Some of them, too, were dancing. Against a strong light on the lower deck, Isaacson saw black figures, sometimes relieved for a moment, moving with a wild grotesqueness, like crazy shadows. ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... picturesqueness of Mountain Street, and they both admired the huge shoulder of rock near the gate, with its poplars atop, and the battery at the brink, with the muzzles of the guns thrust forward against the sky. She could not move him to her pleasure in the grotesqueness of the circus-bills plastered half-way up the rock; but he tolerated the levity with which she commented on them, and her light sallies upon passing things, and he said nothing to prevent her reaching home ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... dress. Our Master does not require of us to dress grotesquely, or to attract notice by the singularity and grotesqueness of our attire. We must dress suitably and in conformity with that station in life to which He has called us. But what a difference there is between making our dress our main consideration, and considering first and foremost the attire of the soul in meekness and truth, purity ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer
... be shabby, or even shabbier still, and he that had allowed himself to be thrust into the straitened trousers and scanty coatee of last year should continue to exhibit his proportions long after the grotesqueness of his figure had been recognised ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... wedding-party. As Emma Campbell stepped into the one that was to convey her and Peter to the boat, Nancy saw her stoop and lift a large bird-cage containing, of all things, an immense black cat, which mewed plaintively at sight of her. It was the final touch of grotesqueness upon her impossible wedding. The two Champneyses wrung hands silently. The older man said a few words to the colored woman, and shook ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... no wonder every one stopped to look at them. Ernest observed that no one seemed fonder of them than a great lubberly butcher boy, who leaned up against the railings with a tray of meat upon his shoulder. He was looking at this boy and smiling at the grotesqueness of his admiration, when he became aware that he was being watched intently by a man in coachman's livery, who had also stopped to admire the lambs, and was leaning against the opposite side of the enclosure. Ernest knew him in a moment as John, ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... my dear Madame; it is all exceedingly painful to me, but I cannot help realizing the grotesqueness of the situation. Pardon me,—and ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... and yet it is as true as ever that he is, if not the greatest of German writers, at least the most German among the great ones of his fatherland. And it is here that the drawback lies—he carried to such excess all the peculiarities of his very peculiar country, and was a giant of grotesqueness. No one can really know German literature who ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... this I have experienced, yet all the time have been under contract to furnish "humorous" matter, once a month, for this magazine. I am speaking the exact truth in the above details. Please to put yourself in my place and contemplate the grisly grotesqueness of the situation. I think that some of the "humor" I have written during this period could have been injected into a funeral sermon without disturbing the ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... accidental; they really do suit the sort of spiritual experiment Browning was making in each case. Browning, then, was not chaotic; he was deliberately grotesque. But there certainly was, over and above this grotesqueness, a perversity and irrationality about the man which led him to play the fool in the middle of his own poems; to leave off carving gargoyles and simply begin throwing stones. His curious complicated puns are an example of this: Hood had used the pun to make a sentence or a sentiment ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... the poetry of minnesingers and troubadours, become thoroughly enjoyable; that only when the conventionality of feeling and imagery is corrected by the freshness, the straightforwardness, nay, even the grotesqueness of rural likings, dislikings, and comparisons, can the dainty beauty of mediaeval Courtly poetry ever really satisfy our wishes. Comparing together Tigri's collection of Tuscan folk poetry with any similar anthology that might be made of middle-high German and Provencal, ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... evil-visaged to a point of gargoyle hideousness. The other was little better, and he raised a face to inspect the man in the door which some malignant sculptor might have modeled in pure spite, pinching it viciously here and there into sharp angles of grotesqueness. Yet in the eyes Brent recognized keenness ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... Where the gables cross each other are carved heads and figures. The sculpture of the arcade as a whole is the finest in the cathedral, and some of the finest in England; but the art of the Gothic sculptor reaches its culmination in these heads. In grotesqueness, fertility of invention, and perfect fitness as decoration they could hardly be surpassed. The canopies are decorated at the top with a cornice of carved grapes and vine leaves. Above them is a passage running round the whole chapter-house ...
— The Cathedral Church of York - Bell's Cathedrals: A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief - History of the Archi-Episcopal See • A. Clutton-Brock
... the Assyrian arrangement of hair, Assyrian earrings, and wings nearly like those of the ordinary winged bull or lion. [PLATE CXLVI., Fig. 2.] The figures near the lions were mythic, and exhibited somewhat more than usual grotesqueness, as we learn from the representations of them ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 2. (of 7): Assyria • George Rawlinson
... nature. The peevish mouth and the fallen eye of the plaice, the helpless rotundity of the sunfish, the mournful gape and rolling glance of the goldfish, the furious and ineffective mien of the barndoor fowl, the wild grotesqueness of the babyroussa and the wart-hog, the crafty solemn eye of the parrot,—if such things as these do not testify to a sense of humour in the Creative Spirit, it is hard to account for the fact that in man a perception is implanted which should ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... interpret the meaning of these prejudices. Landor hates and despises the romantic and the mystic. He has not the least feeling for the art which owes its powers to suggestions of the infinite, or to symbols forced into grotesqueness by the effort to express that for which no thought can be adequate. He refuses to bother himself with allegory or dreamy speculation, and, unlike Sir T. Browne, hates to lose himself in an 'O Altitudo!' He cares nothing for Dante's inner thoughts, and sees only a hideous chamber of horrors in ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... of clapping his hands in applause. This description of the Foul Fiend has an element of grotesqueness which is rather Christian ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... brilliance gave to all things a strange nightmare grotesqueness: and a blinding, stifling shroud of smoke whirled and billowed ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... the world with the lightnings of their chance collision. His humor is rather latent than striking. It does not gleam through showy words, the paraphernalia of a harlequinade, but peeps out from the homeliest phrases, and convulses some simple law of our nature with laughter at its own grotesqueness. Formerly, imprisoned as it was within unyielding limits, it was as imposing as a miniature Gothic cathedral in a dark cave, but now the queen-rose of the architrave blows fresh and sweet in the sunny air. Step by step Emerson has traveled ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... horrible. Some were amusing, some almost beautiful, and one, a woman all drawn out of shape, hurt the old man by her grotesqueness. When she passed he made a noise like a small dog whimpering. Had you come into the room you might have supposed the old man had unpleasant ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... the land rose in a gentle, gradual swell, smooth, verdant and treeless, perhaps to the height of a hundred and fifty feet. Down this declivity they were descending, with their horses and their pack mules, in a long line of single file. They were way-worn pilgrims, and the grotesqueness of their attire, and their unshaven, uncut, and almost uncombed locks, ...
— Christopher Carson • John S. C. Abbott
... guard, was highly indignant at the way some Boston newspaper described him. "The Princeton men were giants, one in particular was picturesque in his grotesqueness. He was 6 feet 5 and, when he ran, his arms and legs moved up and down like the piston rods ...
— Football Days - Memories of the Game and of the Men behind the Ball • William H. Edwards
... stone basin, surrounded with vases of flowering plants, in the centre. Two large lemon trees shade the entrance, and a vine, climbing to the top of the house, makes a leafy arbor over the flat roof. The walls of the house are painted in horizontal bars of blue, white, orange and white—a gay grotesqueness of style which does not offend the eye under an eastern sun. On the southern side of the court is the liwan, an arrangement for which the houses of Damascus are noted. It is a vaulted apartment, twenty feet high, entirely ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... grotesqueness of the affair, and the laughter mixed itself up with the choke—and the Major said that we ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... nearing the conception of a God who was both personal and material, but who could not be made to square with pantheistic notions inasmuch as no provision was made for the inorganic world; and, indeed, they seem to have become alarmed at the grotesqueness of the position in which they must ere long have found themselves, for in the autumn of 1879 the boom collapsed, and thenceforth the leading reviews and magazines have known protoplasm no more. About the same time bathybius, which at one time bade fair to supplant ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... laughed at him, absurd as he must have seemed; but perhaps this was because under the grotesqueness of his appearance they recognised something of his quality. Or they might have heard rumours of his sword-play at the inn and on the ship. At any rate, their attitude was that of courteous dislike ...
— Fair Margaret • H. Rider Haggard
... this result is not belittled by the fact that that standard was pitched above the possibility of human attainment. Chivalry was the spontaneous expression of what was best in the time, and gave sentiment and charm to lives otherwise hard and barren. Its very exaggerations and grotesqueness illustrate the eagerness with which it was received, and the greatness of the want which it supplied. This was an ideal, too, separate and distinct from any that had been known before, possessing enduring characteristics ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... sarcastic, but the grotesqueness of the situation as he had sketched it was apparent. She remembered now that she had felt something incongruous in it when Mr. Brandreth ...
— Annie Kilburn - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... deal astounded. I was also very near laughing, for there was a sort of importance in her plump countenance, and an indescribable grotesqueness in the fashion of her garments, which heightened the outlandishness of her talk, in a way which I cannot at ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... Mrs. Marshall-Smith put her hand to the helm, and addressed herself to Morrison with a plain reminder of the reason for the grotesqueness of his irritability. "Where's Molly keeping herself nowadays?" she inquired. "She hasn't come over with you, to tea, for ever so long. The pergola isn't ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... grotesqueness, he took it off and put it on the ground beside him, standing ready ...
— Lazarre • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... uncontrollable laughter. "That is the best thing I ever heard in all my life. I don't think I ever heard anything that amused me more. The grotesqueness of the whole thing." Seeing that Mike was annoyed he hastened to explain his mirth. "The inexplicableness of human action always amuses me; the inexplicable is romance, at least that is the only way I can understand romance. ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... stood beside the couch, holding her hand; he was still in full fig as Polichinel; and the grotesqueness of his attire contrasted strangely with the anguish depicted on his countenance. As I came forward, he slowly made way for me—looked in my face imploringly, as if to gather from its expression ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, November 20, 1841 • Various
... adventure, with a capsicum or two of tragic story, shall stand for the curry; the customs of the country may represent the familiar rice; a whiff of freshness and fragrance from the Mofussil will be as the mangoes and the dorians; in the piquancy and grotesqueness of the first pure Orientalism that may come to hand we shall recognize the curious chow-chow of the chutney; and as for the beer,—why, we will ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... the God of heaven to look down upon them, to bestow his mercy upon master, to incline his ways in the paths of good; and to protect these, his unfortunate children, and guide them through their separate wayfaring. The ardour, grotesqueness, and devotion of this poor forlorn group, are painfully touching. How it presents the portrait of an oppressed race! how sunk is the nature that has thus degraded it! Under the painful burden of their sorrow they yet manifest the purity of ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... actor kept a corner of one eye on Ramsey and as the hymn's last line rolled away he stood up. She had not sung, but neither had she laughed. No one could have seen the moment's huge grotesqueness larger, yet to the relief of many she had kept her poise. In her mind was the bishop, overhead in the texas, consciously imperilling his life to save her brother's soul, and in the face of all drolleries she strenuously kept her ardor centred on the gravest significancies of the hour, as if ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... persistently obsessed me: with these obviously compensatory differences, why might not the girl and I effect some sort of copulation? This fantasy, drawn exclusively from that unique experience, charmed with its grotesqueness only, for at that time my sense of sex was but inchoate and my knowledge of it was nothing. The bizarre conceit, submitted to the equally ignorant girl and approved, was borne to the paternal hay-loft and there, with much bungling, brought to ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... I calmly recall this scene in that sheep pasture, its dramatic grotesqueness rather appeals to me. Here were three young ladies, all of them pretty, all wealthy and holding high social positions, watching with bated breath a farmhand of unknown birth in the act of striking a golf ball. Surely golf is the great leveller! Perhaps it is the hope ...
— John Henry Smith - A Humorous Romance of Outdoor Life • Frederick Upham Adams
... are due to fancies which, though called superstitious, inculcate in simplest form the sublime truth of the Unity of Life. And even when considering beliefs less attractive than these,- superstitions of which the grotesqueness may provoke a smile—the impartial observer would do well to bear in mind the ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... valuable in Browning's poetry, and indeed in all poetry. To present a matter in a grotesque manner does certainly tend to touch the nerve of surprise and thus to draw attention to the intrinsically miraculous character of the object itself. It is difficult to give examples of the proper use of grotesqueness without becoming too grotesque. But we should all agree that if St. Paul's Cathedral were suddenly presented to us upside down we should, for the moment, be more surprised at it, and look at it more than we have done all the centuries during which it has rested ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... to-day, while listening to the poems, bad to the point of grotesqueness, that have been sent for the competition of 1847, M. de Barante remarked: "Really, in these times, we no longer know how to ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo
... he had thus distorted, and so to enhance yet further the suffering that produced the distortion, he would often represent attendant demons, whom he made as ugly as his imagination could compass; avoiding, however, all grotesqueness beyond what was sufficient to indicate that they were demons, and not men. Their ugliness rose from hate, envy, and all evil passions; amongst which he especially delighted to represent a gloating exultation over human distress. And often in the midst of his clouds ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... to the size of a pea. Beneath Paragot's grotesqueness ran an unprecedented severity. I was conscious of the accusing glare of every eye. In my blind bolt to the door I had the good fortune to run headlong into a tray of drinks which ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... grateful interruption to a situation that was rapidly assuming in Sally's esteem the grotesqueness of a dream. Remembering that this was Gosnold House, the focal point of America's most self-sufficient summer colony, and that all these subdued and inarticulate masqueraders were personages daily exploited by the press as the brightest stars in the social ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... respect resembled a crocodile's. His regular teeth were white with a china whiteness, more than that of ivory, and there was a genuine good-tempered look about his features which even the distortion produced by anger did not take away. It was only the rather comic grotesqueness seen sometimes in the face of a little child when he is what his mother calls a naughty boy, and distends his mouth and closes his eyes for a ...
— Bunyip Land - A Story of Adventure in New Guinea • George Manville Fenn
... to peer at me more wistfully, and his eyes grew more luminous than ever. This man, in spite of his grotesqueness, was quite in earnest, there was no ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... him thyroid gland. Mind you, the dried substance of the glands, not of human beings, but of mere sheep. The cretin begins to grow mentally and physically and loses to a large extent the grotesqueness of his appearance. He grows taller; his tongue no longer lolls in his mouth; the hair becomes finer, the hands less coarse, and the patient exhibits more normal human emotions, purposes, intelligence. True, he ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... fashion; his figures became silhouettes and quite flat. There was also a singular carelessness in finish—a mere outline served for a face. The result was a monotony and similarity of treatment, with a certain unreality and grotesqueness which are like nothing in life. In this, however, he may have been inspired by the grotesque personages he was put to illustrate—the ...
— Pickwickian Manners and Customs • Percy Fitzgerald
... practical unpleasantness; ... direct the attention to the features 'objectively' constituting the phenomena—the veil surrounding you with an opaqueness as of transparent milk, blurring the outlines of things and distorting their shapes into weird grotesqueness; observe the carrying power of the air, producing the impression as if you could touch some far-off siren by merely putting out your hand and letting it lose itself behind that white wall; note the curious creamy smoothness ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison
... incongruous, so perkily smart, and yet so feeble and helpless lying there, so ghastly ludicrous in its very appropriateness and incapacity to adjust itself to the surrounding landscape, that it affected him with something more than a sense of its grotesqueness, and he could only stare at ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... CARLYLE well, one should have outgrown a love for him. Then, and not till then, will the reader ace him as he is—a genius obscured and belittled by eccentricity in judgment and grotesqueness in literary art; a man who must be seen, out of whom much may be taken, but not with profit unless we leave much behind; a writer who was ahead of his age in 1830, but who is wellnigh thirty years ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... dream, to which Euphra listened with an interest uninjured by the grotesqueness of its fancy. Each interpreted ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... she had been married eighteen years. In another seven she would be able to celebrate her silver wedding, an anniversary she had always associated with old age. The horror of the situation was not lessened by its grotesqueness. ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... earliest Italian and Flemish painters, Albrecht Duerer had much of their singleness of purpose, assiduity of application, and profound feeling. He had to labour against a tendency to uncouthness in stiff lines and angular figures; to petty elaboration of details; and to that grotesqueness which, while it suited in some respects his allegorical engravings, marred his historical paintings, so that he was known to regret the wasted fantastic crowding and confusion of his earlier work. From the Italians and Flemings ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... the words conveyed no meaning to Ralph; then they surged up into his brain and flung him forward with half-raised arm. But he felt the grotesqueness of the gesture and his arm dropped back to his side. A series of unimportant and irrelevant things raced through his mind; then obscurity settled down on it. "THIS man...THIS man..." was the one fiery point in ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... your own look indecent. You appear as a creature shameful, under a grotesqueness of apparel striving ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... followed the runner along the dark and tangled pathway. They had not gone far when they heard the sounds of a horse's hoofs behind them, and presently there dashed up to their side a singular-looking person, with extraordinary long thin legs, an emaciated body, and an enormous head. The grotesqueness of his figure was enhanced by a sky-blue coat and a soiled vest of embossed silk embroidered with tarnished silver lace. Coming up with the party, he declared his intention of accompanying them to Fort William Henry. Refusing to listen ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... drawn involuntarily to the portrait of the unsightly dwarf, painted by Velasquez. The broad shaft of sunlight had crept backward, away from it, leaving the canvas unobtrusive, no longer harshly evident either in violence of colour or grotesqueness of form. It had become part of the great whole, merely modulated to gracious harmony with the divers objects surrounding it, and like them softly overlaid by ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... to be Aunt Olivia; if she were being burned at the stake I verily believe she would have dragged some grotesqueness into the ...
— Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... good looking—are thin, hungry, weird-looking animals, appear to have had a hard time of it somewhere, and to be doing their best to escape from the stone whence they are protruding. But the pinnacles placed above have completely taken away their grotesqueness, their malicious, suspicious appearance, and the tower now looks beautiful. There are three entrances to the church—one at the back, another at the north-western corner, and the third beneath the tower on the south- western ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... melody with the intervening airy interludes are very lovely. These are the principal features, to describe all the whims is of course impossible. You may call this work an extravaganza, and point out its grotesqueness; but you must admit that only by this erratic character of the form and these spasmodic movements, could be expressed the peculiar restiveness, fitfulness, and waywardness of thought and feeling that characterise Chopin's individuality. To these unclassical qualities—for ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... In the costumes and in the faces of figures or busts, produced in the highly ornamental oak chimney pieces of the time, or in the carved portions of the fourpost bedsteads, the national characteristics are preserved, and, with a certain grotesqueness introduced into the treatment of accessories, combine to distinguish the English school of Elizabethan ornament from ...
— Illustrated History of Furniture - From the Earliest to the Present Time • Frederick Litchfield
... the grotesqueness of the situation appealed to his whimsical sense of humor, Clay forthwith proceeded to pose as an anatomy demonstrator addressing a class, and expounded the whole art of amputation, handling the utensils of the surgeon's craft with ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... tribes. The dances of the Moros and Igorrotes at the St. Louis Exposition partook, in a similar way, of the nature of the gymnastic dance. The war dances of the plains Indians of America are celebrated for their grotesqueness. The green-corn dance and the cachina of the Pueblos and the snake dance of the Moqui all have an economic foundation. In all, however, the play element in man and the desire for dramatic expression ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... enter into the Divine purpose and have its place in the Destiny of Man. For my own part, I shall always believe that the Heathen Mythology shows a superiority to any other, in one conception—that of Loki, who into the tremendous upturnings of the Universe always inspires a grim grotesqueness; a laughter either diabolic ...
— The English Gipsies and Their Language • Charles G. Leland
... Catholic church, as churches go to-day, is certainly the most spectacular; but it must feel that it has a great fund of impressiveness to draw upon when it opens such sordid little shops of sanctity as this. It is impos- sible not to be struck with the grotesqueness of such an establishment, as the last link in the chain of a ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... close of Fixlein, especially the passage, "Then begun the AEolian harp of Creation," recalls the deepest pathos of Sartor. The two writers, it has been observed, had in common "reverence, humour, vehemence, tenderness, gorgeousness, grotesqueness, and pure conduct of life." Much of Carlyle's article in the Foreign Quarterly of 1830 might be taken for a criticism ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... century she had followed. Old Captain Peleg, many years her chief-mate, before he commanded another vessel of his own, and now a retired seaman, and one of the principal owners of the Pequod,—this old Peleg, during the term of his chief-mateship, had built upon her original grotesqueness, and inlaid it, all over, with a quaintness both of material and device, unmatched by anything except it be Thorkill-Hake's carved buckler or bedstead. She was apparelled like any barbaric Ethiopian emperor, his neck heavy with pendants of polished ivory. She was a thing of trophies. A cannibal ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... flame shot upward, first in fine quivering flashes, then in long, curling wreaths of fire, that the wind seized upon and tore into hot, red tatters, laughing and wrangling among them with fearful grotesqueness. ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... use of the acanthus leaf conventionalized in a strictly primitive fashion characterizes most of the Byzantine work in Italy. With these are combined delightful stiff peacocks, and curious bunches of grapes, rosettes, and animal forms of quaint grotesqueness. Such work exemplifies specially what has been said regarding the use of flat thin slabs for sculptural purposes in the South of Europe. Nearly all these carvings are executed in fine marbles and alabasters. ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... reached the top of the stairs leading to the garret, still on hands and knees, the old furniture, odds and ends piled around indiscriminately, took on the grotesqueness of imps, demons and other fantastic figures. So wrought up was his imagination that nothing but the fear of ridicule from his confederates forced him on. Crawling along the dirty, sooty, begrimed floor, he soon located the old ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... upon several relics of antiquity,—a loop-holed and battlemented gateway; and at various points fragments of the old Gothic stone-work, built in among more recent edifices, which themselves were old; grimness intermixed with quaintness and grotesqueness; old fragments of religious or warlike architecture mingled with queer domestic structures,—the general effect sombre, sordid, and grimy; but yet with a fascination that makes us fain to linger about such scenes, and come ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... time to lose. I had been delayed; Margaret Murchie might regain her senses. And yet, when I had signaled to Estabrook, when he, without a word, had come, and when I felt the excitement most keenly, I found myself impressed not with the necessities of the moment, but rather with the extraordinary grotesqueness ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... fierce-looking effigy of a daimio in armor. There is not the slightest hint of a mercenary thought about his actions; plainly enough, he hasn't the remotest wish to sell me anything—he merely wants to call my attention to the grotesqueness of this particular figure. He is only playing curio-dealer; he doesn't try to sell anything, but would do so out of the abundance of his good-nature if requested to, no doubt. A pair of little old-fashioned fire-engines repose carelessly against the side of a municipal building. They have grown ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... cable-like braids of hair stood out well below the cap, giving her head an appearance of denseness and solidity, but the rambling curls were still blowing about her face, perhaps adding to the sum total of grotesqueness. She wore a man's shirt of gray flannel, well open at the neck, from which the bronzed column of the throat rose in austere dignity. A pair of Mr. Yellett's trousers, stuffed into high, cow-puncher's boots, that ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... His theory of verse is simple, in fact too simple to account for all of the facts. The aim of poetry, according to Poe, is not truth but pleasure—the rhythmical creation of beauty. Poetry should be brief, indefinite, and musical. Its chief instrument is sound. A certain quaintness or grotesqueness of tone is a means for satisfying the thirst for supernal beauty. Hence the musical lyric is to Poe the only true type of poetry; a long poem does not exist. Readers who respond more readily to auditory than to visual or motor stimulus are therefore ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... "motives," into fancying that all these tales are only the after colours and pictorial metaphors of sentimental piety. They are either plain truth or black lies; take your choice,—but don't tickle and treat yourselves with the prettiness or the grotesqueness of them, as if they were Anderssen's fairy tales. Either the King did carry the beggar on his back, or he didn't; either Godiva rode through Coventry, or she didn't; either the Earl Leofric saw the vision of the bright child at the altar—or ...
— The Pleasures of England - Lectures given in Oxford • John Ruskin
... performance had evidently been very easy to her, and there might have been a kind of impertinence in her air of not having suffered from an exertion which had wrought so powerfully on every one else. Ransom broke into a genial laugh, which he instantly swallowed again, at the sweet grotesqueness of this virginal creature's standing up before a company of middle-aged people to talk to them about "love," the note on which she had closed her harangue. It was the most charming touch in the whole thing, and the most vivid proof of her innocence. She had had immense success, and Mrs. Tarrant, ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... and stood a second, fronting the evil silence of the other, his boyish face deeply flushed. Perhaps the grotesqueness of that former scene was in his mind. Moreover, the vestry meetings had furnished Henslowe with periodical opportunities for venting his gall on the rector, and they had never been neglected. But he ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... this, I travelled to Bayreuth with an ideal in my breast, and was thus doomed to experience the bitterest disappointment. The preponderance of ugliness, grotesqueness and ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... was the parrot-phrase flung in answer. The waving of crooked, false-jewelled fingers gave grotesqueness to ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... woman, eh?" repeated Mrs. von Minden. "Why it's paradise compared to some of the places Otto von Minden has kept me in." She rose suddenly and began to pace the sandy floor, a majestic figure in spite of her grotesqueness. "What was I when he found me, an unsophisticated girl of twenty, living in my quiet New Hampshire home. He promised me everything—travel, court life, the emperor's favor. What does he give me but desert camps? Camps where ...
— The Forbidden Trail • Honore Willsie
... wishbone for target will make the sport, at fifty paces; if at home, some great extravagance or some humble gift or some poignant wish will point the day; if at church, then mass and carol; in certain hearts, reverence,—everywhere the time takes hold of folk and receives whatever of greatness or grotesqueness they choose to give it.... So, too, the actual and vital experience which it brings to humanity is universal, is offered with cosmic regularity, cannot be escaped. Through all the tumult of the time, ...
— Christmas - A Story • Zona Gale
... be dead for aught I know, With that red gaunt and colloped neck a-strain, 80 And shut eyes underneath the rusty mane; Seldom went such grotesqueness with such woe; I never saw a brute I hated so; He must be wicked to ...
— Dramatic Romances • Robert Browning
... French heroine of all time as she is described in Hall and in Holinshed, and to believe that he left the play—originally written, we think, by Greene—very much as he found it. It is not indeed till the fifth act, when Joan is represented as a magician, and when the grotesqueness of the author passes even the limits of burlesque, that we fail to see a shred of the poet's skill. Nothing in Shakespeare is at once so unpoetical as well as so untrue to history as the last scene, in which Joan repudiates ...
— Joan of Arc • Ronald Sutherland Gower
... up for the horrors of the scene and of the statues, to mitigate the grotesqueness of the inn-servants, who had beards like sappers and clothes like little boys—the caps, and holland blouses with belts, and shiny black breeches, like cast iron, of the children at the Saint Nicolas school in Paris—extraordinary ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans |
