"Artificiality" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... latest book is one which will enhance her reputation, and equally please new and old readers of her novels. It is called 'The Gates of Temptation,' and professes to be a natural novel. The story told is one of deep interest. There is no veneer in its presentation, no artificiality ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... of one another, however, they were wont to assume an elaborate artificiality of speech and manner in communion with their friends, that was designed with each to point the moral of a complete indifference and forgetfulness. But the girl was by far the better actor; and not ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... uncorrupted masters of the art. Still more remarkable, the good short stories that I meet with in my reading are the trivial ones,—the sketchy, the anecdotal, the merely adventurous or merely picturesque; as they mount toward literature they seem to increase in artificiality and constraint; when they propose to interpret life they become machines, and nothing more, for the discharge of sensation, sentiment, or romance. And this is true, so far as I can discover, of the stories which most critics and more editors believe ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... and remorse and the exhilaration of his more exalted bacchanalian and love songs—the mood, we may infer, of his normal working life. We may again observe the correspondence between the change of dialect and change of tone in stanzas nine and ten, the increase of artificiality coming with his literary English and culminating in the unspeakable "tenebrific scene." His humor returns with his Scots in the ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... on the tendencies of early thought, through traits and touches in our own actual states of mind, which may seem sympathetic with those tendencies. In such a picture there must necessarily be a certain artificiality; things near and far, matter of varying degrees of certainty, fact and surmise, being reflected and concentrated, for its production, as if on the surface of a mirror. Such concrete character, however, Greek poet ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... something, and got up, a trifle confused. Such perfect candor and lack of artificiality was a revelation to me. She placed her disengaged hand upon my arm at the bottom ...
— The Love Story of Abner Stone • Edwin Carlile Litsey
... them, and what follies made them ridiculous. The same naturalness and humor which marked "Don Quixote" and the "Decameron" also are seen in the "Canterbury Tales." Chaucer freed himself from all the affectations and extravagances and artificiality which characterized the poetry of the Middle Ages. With him began a new style in writing. He and Wyclif are the creators of English literature. They did not create a language, but they ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... an amount of play-acting and pose!" I hear someone complain, referring to the Village with contemptuous irritation. "They pretend to be seeking after truth and liberty of thought, and that sort of thing, and yet they are steeped in artificiality." ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... air of artificiality, there was something immensely likeable about Audrey Maynard. Behind it all, Sara sensed the real ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... are those of this country. The buoyancy and enthusiasm of youth are, indeed, very much the same all over the world. It is only when youth comes to what are very often erroneously described as years of discretion that artificiality begins to assert itself. Base-ball, lawn-tennis, bicycling, and rowing are all extensively patronised by the young men of Japan, and cricket has of recent years come considerably into vogue. The students of the Imperial University ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... passions and modes of thought that belonged to every century except his own, and to sum up, as it were, in himself the various moods through which the world-spirit had ever passed, loving for their mere artificiality those renunciations that men have unwisely called virtue, as much as those natural rebellions that wise men still call sin. The style in which it was written was that curious jewelled style, vivid and obscure ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... a miniature of the universal reason, that in fact the history of a philosopher's thinking is an abstract of the history of philosophy. The same holds good in the field of religious thought. Without much artificiality, without forcing the facts, a rational scheme of the Christological heresies might be drawn up. They might be pictorially represented as the rungs of a ladder, which the truth-seeking mind scales rung by rung, pausing at the lower phases of Christological thought, and then resuming ...
— Monophysitism Past and Present - A Study in Christology • A. A. Luce
... Walpole. She loved great prospects—loved rocks and heights. It is possible that her recollections of the Sherwood country were not agreeable, since she showed herself averse from any allusion in her marvellous letters; but in spite of the artificiality of her period one may be certain that her adventurous spirit prompted her to leave unexplored no portion of the ancient forest. The ruggedness of Wharncliffe Chase was more to her fancy: in her old age, writing from ...
— The Dukeries • R. Murray Gilchrist
... below that in which they themselves moved. In fact, when Mrs. Willoughby had been severely injured in an automobile accident during the previous summer Glenclair had shown real solicitude for her and had forgotten a good deal of its artificiality in genuine ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve
... of the garden covers many pages of the "New Heloisa," pages at once eloquent and interesting. Artificial as are many of its details, the letter is a plea for nature against artificiality. The readers in the eighteenth century were charmed, and hastened to imitate Rousseau's heroine. The straight gravel walks, the formal flower-beds, the clipped hedges of old France, became tiresome in the eyes of their ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... smooth, he never interfered with my wildest pace. I could not extract from him a look of surprise, far less the admiration that I wanted. What was a girl's riding to him? He knew a pace—all the paces—that I could never follow. I felt the absurdity of our mutual position, its utter artificiality, and ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... case with fighting races capable of cruelty, they were strictly courteous in their intercourse with strangers. Indeed, their code of manners to visitors was so exact and elaborate as to leave an impression of artificiality. No party of wayfarers would approach a pa without giving formal notice. When the strangers were received, they had the best of everything, and the hosts, who saw that they were abundantly supplied, had too much delicacy to watch them eat. Maori breeding went so far as to avoid in converse ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... Mentally, I am like an inebriate, who no longer finds satisfaction in plain food and drink, but craves stimulants. I demand activity, excitement, change. In every hour of my life I realize the narrowness and artificiality of it all; but without it I am unhappy. I sometimes think Mother Nature herself has disowned me; when I try to get near her she draws away—I fancy with a shudder. Solitude of desert, of forest, or of prairie is no longer solitude to me. It is filled with voices—accusing ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge
... and the masses of pansies and heliotrope and brilliant red geraniums. Those are the flowers which suit best the steps down to the water, and the fountains, and the swimming ducks and the birds on the banks. There is the right touch of artificiality about them; the right note of London. The birds are Londoners themselves. The stately brown geese stalk over the lawns careless of poulterers or punt-guns. The cormorant, who most certainly knows he ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... poet whose life was short and full of trouble (1695-1723). In an age of poetic artificiality and pretense his verse is generally simple, sincere, and passionate. His work is mainly a record of suffering, the note of joy being relatively infrequent. He is a forerunner of those modern poets of whom one may say with Goethe's Tasso: ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... worthless? And the Professor upsets himself in his own lecture, thus: "If the middle tub is contained in the big tub, and the little tub is contained in the middle tub, then the little tub is contained in the big tub." Hegel says: "Common sense in its reaction against such logical formality and artificiality turned away in disgust, and was of the opinion that it could do without such a science as logic." Most true, Philosopher Hegel, you have absurdities of your own on a gigantic scale, but you do well to reject the petty ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, September 1887 - Volume 1, Number 8 • Various
... the publication was having its effect. The poetry of the schools, the poetry of the intellect, the poetry of art, brought to its highest pitch by writers like Dryden and Pope, was shelved; metrically exact diction, artificiality of expression, carefully balanced antitheses, and all the mechanical devices of the school were placed in abeyance. There was a general return to Nature, to simplicity, to straightforwardness—not without imagination, however. Wordsworth, ...
— Ballads of Romance and Chivalry - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - First Series • Frank Sidgwick
... a case in point. With regard to style, no foreigner can pretend to be a competent judge. Reading the celebrated description of Florence at the opening of Dino's 'Chronicle,' I seem indeed, for my own part, to discern a post-Boccaccian artificiality of phrase. Still there is nothing to render it impossible that the 'Chronicle,' as we possess it, in the texts of 1450(?) and 1514, may be a rifacimento of an elder and simpler work. In that section of my history which deals with Italian literature ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... speaking in the interest of a faith generally unpopular, and involved in no slight degree in crudities, extravagance, and quackery, she was herself neither fool nor fanatic. She was a true child of nature, direct and simple in her manners, and impatient of the artificiality and formal etiquette of fashionable society.' These poems are characterized by great case of style, flowing rhythm, earnestness in the cause of philanthropy, and frequently contain high moral lessons. But it is somewhat ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... were not. With his cruelly true mental vision which pierced through shams, and his capacity for detached observation—which properly applied might have carried him very far, indeed—he perceived the grotesqueness, the artificiality of the emotion which in that moment he experienced, but by which he refused to be possessed. It sprang entirely from the consciousness that she was his mother; as if, all things considered, the more or less accidental fact that she had brought him into the world could establish between ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... first was one of quiet spaciousness became impressive and compelling. Its simplicity was without any of the artificiality that sometimes accompanies an effort to escape over-ornamentation. No one could be in the room without thinking through his eyes and with his imagination. Wherever he sat he would look up to a masterpiece as the ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... expect ever to hear the like again. Talent, taste, feeling, were there, all in superlative degree, and disclosed with the unassuming confidence of power; whilst long and loving practice in solitude had averted a certain artificiality which, in the judgment of the uninitiated, generally accompanies musical skill. His was no triumphant mastery of a complicated and perplexing score; he was a sympathetic interpreter, a life-breathing, magic-lending exponent of his composer's revelations, now his own. Solitary ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... famous product, The Scarlet Pimpernel, to a similar trial. Whether the result of this renewed dilution is entirely satisfactory I leave you to judge, but certainly at least something of the well-known and popular aroma of romantic artificiality clings about the pages of her latest story, Lord Tony's Wife (HODDER AND STOUGHTON), while at the bottom of the cup there is not a little dash of the old strong flavour. On the other hand, though it may be that one's appetite grows less lusty, it does seem that in all the earlier ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, October 31, 1917 • Various
... the figure of Karl to that of his brother, one is struck at once with the artificiality of the portrait. We seem to have before us in Franz Moor the result of a deliberate effort to conceive the vilest possible travesty of human nature. Nothing here that was copied from nature, nothing that Schiller found in his own heart. It is all a brain-spun ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... with an artificiality which was seldom so transparent; "my only excuse is that you startled me out of my temper and my manners. And I was upset to begin with. I have a poor fellow in rather a bad ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... with a certain artificiality of manner that was, under the circumstances, significant. "There is a ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... admirable solution of his problem in a double invocation—first of the Heavenly Muse of Mount Sinai, second, of the Holy Spirit. In the composition of In Memoriam, Tennyson knew that an invocation of the Muse would give an intolerable air of artificiality to the poem; he therefore, in the introductory stanzas, offered up a prayer to the Son of God. Now it was impossible for Mr. Hardy to make use of Greek Deities, or of Jehovah, or of any revelation of God in Christ; to his mind all three equally belonged to the lumber-room of discredited ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... their gardens or along the hillsides even among mists and storms, did something to save him here, reinforcing natural cheerfulness and the warm desire to give pleasure. His excessive elaboration of style, which grew upon him more and more, giving throughout often a sense of extreme artificiality and of the self- consciousness usually bred of it, is but another incidental proof of this. And let no reader think that I wish here to decry R. L. Stevenson. I only desire faithfully to try to understand him, and to indicate the class or group to which ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... seen, the Middle Ages could bequeath to the sixteenth century no ideal of peaceful outdoor enjoyment. Hence, in the poetry of the sixteenth century, still permeated by mediaeval traditions, an appalling artificiality of delightfulness. Fallerina, Alcina, Armida, Acrasia, all imitated from the original Calypso, are not strong and splendid god-women, living among the fields and orchards, but dainty ladies hidden in elaborate gardens, ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... assertions. Fielding has an odd touch of the pedant. He is fond of airing his classical knowledge; and he is equally fond of quoting this imaginary code which he has had to study so thoroughly and painfully. The effect, however, is to give an air of artificiality to some of his minor characters. They show the traces of deliberate composition too distinctly, though the blemish may be forgiven in consideration of the genuine force and freshness of his thinking. If manufactured articles, ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... Italian School, there were forces at work which were destined to influence the entire vocal world. The subtle influence of these forces was felt so gradually, and yet so surely and powerfully, that while the profession, as one might say, peacefully slept, art was changed to artificiality. Thus arose that which may be called the dark ages of the vocal art,—an age when error overshadowed truth and reason; for while real scientists, after great study and research, discovered much of the true science of ...
— The Renaissance of the Vocal Art • Edmund Myer
... the Court poetry to all extremes of "false wit," and of glaring pretence and artificiality of style, makes the contrast all the more vivid between its brocaded stiffness and the ease and freedom of the Sagas. But even apart from the Court poetry, it is clear that there was little chance for any development ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... the experiences of Cowper and Wordsworth in the way of translation. Wordsworth's translation of Virgil was prompted by the same kind of reaction against the reckless laxity of Dryden as that which inspired Cowper against the distorting artificiality of Pope. In each case the new translator cared more for his author and took a much higher view of a translator's duty than his predecessor had done. But in each case the plain and accurate translation was a failure, while the loose and ornate one continued ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... was because, in Paul's world, the natural nearly always wore the guise of ugliness, that a certain element of artificiality seemed to him necessary in beauty. Perhaps it was because his experience of life elsewhere was so full of Sabbath-school picnics, petty economies, wholesome advice as to how to succeed in life, and the unescapable odours of cooking, that he found ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather
... but do chorcor glan would mean "of bright purple"; and this last rendering, which is quite a common expression (see Etain, p. 12), has been adopted in the verse translation. The order of the words in the expression in the text is unusual, and the adoption of them would give an air of artificiality to the description which is otherwise ...
— Heroic Romances of Ireland Volumes 1 and 2 Combined • A. H. Leahy
... today is imitative. Once men had convictions, but we have only opinions, and these are usually borrowed. The artificiality of life, and the rush and the worry afford no time for great ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... apotheosis. She knows that she, though herself must perish, is imperishable; for she sees us, her posterity, gazing fondly back at her. She is touched. And we, a little envious of those who did once see Grisi plain, always shall find solace in this pretty picture of her; holding it to be, for all the artificiality of its convention, as much more real as it is prettier than the stringent ballet-girls ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... manner, the Tokugawa Sh[o]guns (1604-1868) determined to so limit the supply of mental food, that the mind of Japan should be of those correctly dwarfed proportions of puniness, so admired by lovers of artificiality and unconscious caricature. Philosophy was selected as a chief tool among the engines of oppression, and as the main influence in stunting the intellect. All thought must be orthodox according to the standards of Confucianism, as expounded ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... on the cobbles of the courtyard, and the clatter of hoofs; it meant that John-James and Vassie were back, bringing her son. She got to her feet and went through the house to the yard door, already recovering a little of poise, which meant artificiality, but still with something of that real glow about her. She knew a moment of dread lest Ishmael should rebuff it. She held out her arms with an uncontrolled gesture, and heard her own voice call his name on an ugly piping note she could ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... of fixing such a price on meat that it paid farmers to put their calves to the cow, instead of selling the milk. After all, the words had been spoken before, and words are of little account. There are times—not often, for artificiality and civilisation are stern taskmasters—but there are times when a man and woman become as Gods and know. What need of words between them then; a mathematician does not require to consult the multiplication table or look up the rules that ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... deplorable. It involves the introduction of an artificiality into a real natural order. Love is real and positive; chastity is real and positive. But sexual abstinence is unreal and negative, in the strict sense perhaps impossible. The underlying feelings of all those who have emphasized its importance ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... a further check upon the artificiality of the news side of the Press; which is that Reality always comes into its ...
— The Free Press • Hilaire Belloc
... her to take from them, or laid them with a touching humility at her feet. What a wonderful wedding hers was, she thought!—far removed from all the world of fashion, without any of the hypocritical congratulations of "society" friends,—without the sickening, foolish waste, expense and artificiality, which nowadays makes a marriage a mere millinery parade. She had spoken her vows before thousands whom her husband had helped and rescued from heathenism and misery, and all their good wishes and prayers for her happiness ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... she was in her dressing-gown and alone. She flung herself face downwards on the sofa. Her attitude had the touch of artificiality ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... conditions, architectural illustration does not develop so interesting a character nor attain to so high a standard as distinguishes general illustration is not to be wondered at. It is rather an occasion for surprise that it exhibits so little of the artificiality of the fashion-plate after all, and that the better part of it, at least, is not more unworthy than figure illustration would be were it denied the invaluable aid of the living model. So much by ...
— Pen Drawing - An Illustrated Treatise • Charles Maginnis
... of an instantaneous vision of the household thus thrown open to him. Such opportunities for falsity, artificiality, downright humbuggery, for plutocratic upholstery and indecorous statues and light-minded paintings, for cynical and insolent servants, for the deployment of vast gains got by methods that at best were questionable! Could he ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... the Velasquez of vegetables, Fortuny is the Rossini of the rococo; such lace-like filigrees, fiorturi, marbles that are of stone, men and women that are alive, not of marble (like Alma-Tadema's). The artificiality of his work is principally in the choice of a subject, not in the performance. How luminous and silky are his blacks may be noted at the Metropolitan Museum in his portrait of a Spanish lady. There is nothing of the petit-maitre in the sensitive and adroit handling ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... the successful exemplars in this department of literature, the errors incident to artificiality, the conventional forms of writing, are patent. Only in passages do we recognize that beauty or truth, that reality and genuineness, which so often wholly pervade a poem, a story, a memoir, or even a disquisition: at some point, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... mother—and the mothers as a rule, especially the society ladies, who are, however, all alike (Liza's mother, Elena's mother), and Lavretsky's mother, who had been a serf, and the humble peasant woman, all Turgenev's girls and women are insufferable in their artificiality, and—forgive my saying it—falsity. Liza and Elena are not Russian girls, but some sort of Pythian prophetesses, full of extravagant pretensions. Irina in "Smoke," Madame Odintsov in "Fathers and Children," ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... nearly all that was best in European literature, and his peculiar subject, with only gods and angels (Adam and Eve are scarcely human, even after the fall) for characters and selected portions of eternity and infinity for time and place, gave him the tendency to artificiality and strain to the outmost verges of sublimity, and to extraordinary involution of phrase and idea—for all of which he must have a suitable prosody. He chose blank verse when the poetical fashion was for rime and described it, in words not ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... have been amazed could she have guessed that she was actually arousing him to resentment. He felt, somehow, that she was patronizing their hostess, who was a woman of refinement, even if she lacked the artificiality of manner that Helen affected. He was sincerely glad when the visit ...
— Hidden Gold • Wilder Anthony
... wise law of living according to the dictates of our own natures. The command to shun everything contradictory to the simple fundamental traits of our own characters pleased me, and wherever I saw affectation, artificiality, and mannerism I was repelled, while from my grandfather's teaching I drew the principle that I could do nothing better than to remain, so far as life would permit, what I had been as a child ere I had heard the first word of philosophy, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... MANCHESTER EXAMINER.—"Rustic scenes are drawn with free, broad touches, without Mr. Buchanan's artificiality, and, if we may venture to say it, with more realism than ...
— The White Lie • William Le Queux
... argue or instruct under the cloak of agreeable fiction, or that other species, much cultivated by Dickens in his later works, which attacks antiquated institutions and public abuses in a story so contrived as to expose their absurdity and injustice. There is an air of artificiality about such compositions which damages the artistic illusion, the photographic rendering of actual life, upon which the author relies, because it throws over the stage a shadow of his own personality. For one tendency ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... the thirteenth century artificiality and vulgarity began to preponderate, provoking as counterweights didactic works such as Der Krieg auf der Wartburg. The fourteenth century saw the rise of the free cities, literary guilds, and five universities. It also marks ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... may honestly disagree; but I think all will concede that what is notoriously untrue should be attacked, that we should wage uncompromising war on whatsoever maketh or loveth a lie. I think all will agree that this is pre-eminently an age of artificiality—that there is little genuine left in the land but the complexion of the ladies. Even that has been called in question by certain unchivalrous old bachelors, those unfortunates whom the ladies of Boston propose to expel from politics for ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... Bisbee, the southern California oil-magnate, had died suddenly of typhoid fever at the private hospital of Dr. Bell, where he had been taken from his magnificent apartment on Riverside Drive? Kennedy and I had discussed it at the time. We had commented on the artificiality of the twentieth century. No longer did people have homes; they had apartments, I had said. They didn't fall ill in the good old-fashioned way any more, either in fact, they even hired special rooms to die in. They hired halls for funeral services. It was a wonder that ...
— The Silent Bullet • Arthur B. Reeve
... life's blood. It cost him the same agony that parts of "David Copperfield" cost Dickens, while he had none of Dickens's trained fluency or descriptive power. His lack of ease in writing often gives a wrong impression of insincerity or artificiality. Most of his apostrophes, even the most strained, are expressions of genuine feeling, which he was simply incapable of assimilating to the prevailing tone of the book, that of a novela picaresca. His determination to be original and to tell the ...
— George Borrow - Times Literary Supplement, 10th July 1903 • Thomas Seccombe
... we find broken hearts, worry, nervous prostration, because there is idleness, artificiality and aimlessness. In homes we find warm hearts, happiness and love, because those in the home have natural, ...
— Evening Round Up - More Good Stuff Like Pep • William Crosbie Hunter
... on the reader's patience as to return to the inspiration of the beginning of this sketch for a conclusion? The remark of which I would deliver myself is that the artificiality of which the poet Pope is accused in his natural scenery generally applies to his references to sport. He is more sympathetic with his anglers than with his fowlers, but neither appears to kindle the ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... as in other cases, to remedy the evils of one artificiality, another artificiality has been introduced. The natural, spontaneous exercise having been forbidden, and the bad consequences of no exercise having become conspicuous, there has been adopted a system of factitious ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... pronouncing the words which appear upon its pages with a pronunciation never employed under any other circumstances. The newspaper is read, the psalms are intoned. It is a crime to be natural. All the time men are sick of the whole fabric of artificiality, and long for that touch of nature which makes ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson
... "be—Modesty! It's all very well as a pretty, becoming, every-day fashion, but it should be laid aside in the serious matters of life. It is an artificiality; admirable, useful, excellent as a daily conventional rule, but it should yield when there is a great natural question at issue. Modesty! a fictitious, artificial, inculcated shame to intrude itself between two people considering ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
... company—chiefly composed of young men. Her whole establishment, beginning with her own toilette, furniture, and table, and ending with her equipage and staff of servants, bore a certain stamp of inferiority, artificiality, transitoriness ... but neither the Princess herself nor her guests, apparently, demanded anything better. The Princess was reputed to be fond of music and literature, to be a patroness of actors and artists; and she really did take an interest in these "questions," ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... not to over-inflect. Too much modulation produces an unpleasant effect of artificiality, like a mature matron trying to be kittenish. It is a short step between true expression and unintentional burlesque. Scrutinize your own tones. Take a single expression like "Oh, no!" or "Oh, I ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... clogged by a tradition of decorous restraint; so that the effect of his plays is as anomalous as would be—let us say—that of a shilling shocker written by Miss Yonge. His heroines go mad in epigrams, while his villains commit murder in inversions. Amid the hurly-burly of artificiality, it was all his cleverness could do to keep its head to the wind; and he was only able to remain afloat at all by throwing overboard his humour. The Classical tradition has to answer for many sins; perhaps its most infamous achievement was that ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... following mechanically the line of the pavement, without knowing what she was doing, along the long course of Park Lane, and then into the cheerful bustle of Piccadilly, where, with a sense of morning ease and leisure, not like the artificiality of the afternoon, so many people were coming and going, all occupied in business of their own, though so different from the bustle of more absorbing business, the haste and obstruction of the city. Lucy was not beautiful ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... whose boisterous career among the cowherds is an exact reflection of his own attitudes and enthusiasms. To Jamini Roy, the Bengali village with its sense of rude health is infinitely to be preferred to a city such as Calcutta with its artificiality and disease and in a style of bold simplifications, he has constantly celebrated the natural vigour and inherent ...
— The Loves of Krishna in Indian Painting and Poetry • W. G. Archer
... several hymns to the liturgy. In these Saadiah's poetical range is very varied. Sometimes his style is as pure and simple as the most classical poems of the Spanish school. At other times, his verses have all the intricacy, harshness, and artificiality of Kalir's. Perhaps his mastery of Hebrew is best seen in his "Book of the Exiled" (Sefer ha-Galui), compiled in Biblical Hebrew, divided into verses, and provided with accents. As the title indicates, this book was written ...
— Chapters on Jewish Literature • Israel Abrahams
... indeed all drugs and all the things of life have their uses and dangers, and there is no wholesale truth to excuse us a particular wisdom and watchfulness in these matters. Unless we except smoking as an unclean and needless artificiality, all these matters of eating and drinking and habit are matters of more or less. It seems to me foolish to make anything that is stimulating and pleasurable into a habit, for that is slowly and ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... authorize only a natural religion, the acknowledgment in pious living of a God who, having contrived this natural world, has given it over to the rule, not of priests and prophets, but of natural law. The artificiality of its conception of God, and the calculating spirit of its piety, make deism a much less genuine expression of the religious experience than either the moral chivalry of theism or the intellectual and ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... being ever en vedette, is best situated to interpret the signs of the times, and is likewise more open to the solicitations of novelty, more ready to try new methods. A noticeable defect of the French drama, in the first half of the nineteenth century, was the pronounced artificiality of its characters and plots. Whatever the kind of play exhibited, the same stereotyped noble fathers, ingenuous maidens, coquettes, and Lotharios strutted on the boards. Whatever else changed, these did not. ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... marketable wares, avoiding motion to avoid shattering or tarnishing. This is their fate, only in degree less inhuman than that of Hellenic and Trojan princesses offered up to the Gods, or pretty slaves to the dealers. Their artificiality is at once their bane and ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... she "managed it" the more there seemed to be to manage. From the time when she frankly gave herself into the clutches of artificiality the natural physical merit of her seemed to her to deteriorate at a speed which ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... century is spoken of as the period of artificiality, in externals at least; but, indeed, there may be two words about that. In modern speech one uses artificiality as meaning indefinitely a sort of deceit; and the eighteenth century was far too artificial to ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... named Wainewright. He provided me with the clothes of a gentleman. The beard I wore, and which has since served me as a disguise in my many enterprises, was given to me in the first place by Wainewright. To perfect that beard and destroy every semblance of artificiality, I had worked at it for three years in the cunning, patient way old prisoners toil at such a task. Wainewright helped me to get to the mainland, and I was safe, with a forged ticket-of-leave in my pocket in case the marks of the chains should be ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... with his usual artificiality of careless ease, 'I thought Hamilton was here. This is his room, ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... continually of dress and conquests. He did not despise cultivated elegance: in fact, it was a strong point with all the Lawrences; but he knew that a great deal of this much-praised culture ran into artificiality, while Sylvie's elegance had the comprehensiveness of nature. It would be quite impossible for her to do an awkward or ungraceful act; for her innate sense of beauty, harmony, and right guided her. Something higher than ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... then, somewhat curious that, throughout his former life, through his boyhood, his years in the Corps, and the brief period of his society life, Ivan should have been on terms of genuine intimacy with himself; whereas, after the dissolution of all artificiality in his surroundings, when at last he stood before himself, face to face with his naked soul, he became suddenly disturbed, uncertain, afraid of that self-confidence on which he had hitherto so prided himself. For many months he had turned from the self-analysis ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... secret spite of dullness, who interrupted from time to time and always to check or disorder thought; and I noticed with what mastery he was foiled and thrown. I noticed, too, that the impression of artificiality that I think all Wilde's listeners have recorded, came from the perfect rounding of the sentences and from the deliberation that made it possible. That very impression helped him as the effect of metre, or ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats
... were a billiard- board indeed, and these only models that had been set down upon it ready made. Her own, into which I looked, was clean but very empty, and showed nothing homelike but the burning fire. This extreme newness, above all in so naked and flat a country, gives a strong impression of artificiality. With none of the litter and discoloration of human life; with the paths unworn, and the houses still sweating from the axe, such a settlement as this seems purely scenic. The mind is loth to accept it for a piece of reality; and ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... conviction—he says it took him two years to arrive there—that his trouble had not been with life in general, not with the common life of common men, but with the life of the upper, intellectual, artistic classes, the life which he had personally always led, the cerebral life, the life of conventionality, artificiality, and personal ambition. He had been living wrongly and must change. To work for animal needs, to abjure lies and vanities, to relieve common wants, to be simple, to believe in God, ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... half-dozen of champagne was richly paid for by the elan with which everybody played. As to the neophyte, they fed and nursed him, and were in at the close of every speech of his with a spring and a rattle which made the audience half forget the artificiality of the scenes he clouded. Mr. Berry took as much whisky-and-water as was good for him, and perhaps a little more, and Paul in his nervous anxiety lent a helpful hand towards the emptying of the bottle. There was no buzz in the cast-iron ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... in "poetic diction," which thus became offensive, because artificial—because a superadded ornament, and not the natural expression of exalted passion or the emotion which accompanies our passage "behind the veil." Repugnance to this artificiality misled Wordsworth into the celebrated assertion that "between the language of prose and that of metrical composition, there neither is, nor can be, any essential difference:" an assertion which, as prompted by a feeling of the incompatibility of poetic ...
— An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times • Thomas Hill Green
... were heirlooms of the Heyburn family, and in that grey light looked cold and glassy. The powder and the slight touch of carmine upon her cheeks, which at night had served to heighten her beauty, now gave her an appearance of painted artificiality. She was undeniably a pretty woman, and surely required no artificial aids to beauty. About thirty-three, yet she looked five years younger; while her husband was twenty years senior to herself. She still retained a figure so girlish ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux
... presentation on the stage, adds to the wonder of poetry, giving life to its loveliness, and actual reality to its ideal form. And yet, in the 67th Sonnet, Shakespeare calls upon Willie Hughes to abandon the stage with its artificiality, its false mimic life of painted face and unreal costume, its immoral influences and suggestions, its remoteness from the true world of noble action ...
— Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories • Oscar Wilde
... Leslie's. I had correspondence with him a little as a teacher, and had studied his works. He had taught many amateurs, including Mr. Ruskin and a clever friend of mine in the North. I admired his skill, but disliked his extreme artificiality of style, and the more I went to nature the more objectionable did it appear to me. The kind of success which is attained by forcing nature into drawing-masters' set forms never tempted me in the least. Harding was at one time probably the most successful drawing-master in ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... welcome. "Deucalion," they lisped with mincing voices, bowing themselves ridiculously to the ground so that all their ornaments and silks might jangle and swish. Indeed, when Phorenice herself appeared, and all sent up their cries and made lawful obeisance, there was the same artificiality in the welcome. They meant well enough, it is true; but this was the new fashion. Heartiness had come to be accounted a ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... plot in "The Manxman" gives it the effect of a "set piece;" its association with Mr. Wilson Barrett and the boards seems foreordained. It may seem to us that there is a little forcing of the pathos, that a certain artificiality pervades the scene. In a word, we may set down "The Manxman" as melodrama—melodrama at its best, but still melodrama. Its effects are vivid, positive, sensational; its analysis of character is keen, but hardly subtle; it appeals to the British ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... superb—surrounded with the white cedar, the cocoa-nut tree, and the tall, rich mountain cabbage—the most beautiful of all tropical trees; but perchance it would not require a very long excursion to weary him with the artificiality of the scenery, and cause him to sigh for the "woods and wilds," the "banks and braes," of his ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... paths, beguiling with its harmony and beauty." "There is another poetry, natural, rapid, terse, which springs from the soul as an electric spark, which strikes our feelings with a word, and flees away. Bare of artificiality, free within a free form, it awakens by the aid of one kindred idea the thousand others that sleep in the bottomless ocean of fancy. The first has an acknowledged value; it is the poetry of everybody. ...
— Legends, Tales and Poems • Gustavo Adolfo Becquer
... it is, I think we must all detect a certain artificiality in the passage, and confess to some relief when Satan is introduced to us, ten lines lower down, to revivify the story. For let us note that, in the nature of things, the more adorned and involved our style (and Milton's is both ornate and involved) the more difficulty we must find with these flat ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... friends; friendship counting for so much in his life, that he is jealous of anything that might jar or disturb it, even to the length of a sort of insincerity, to which he assigns its quaint "praise;" this lover of stage plays significantly welcoming a little touch of the artificiality of play to sweeten the intercourse ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... appreciation, a certain initiation, a certain special sense.' To realise the full value, the real charm, of A Rebours, some such initiation might be deemed necessary. In its fantastic unreality, its exquisite artificiality, it is the natural sequel of En Menage and A Vau-l'Eau, which are so much more acutely sordid than the most sordid kind of real life; it is the logical outcome of that hatred and horror of human mediocrity, of the mediocrity of daily existence, which we have seen ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... truly I do. You must not think me ungrateful. No one has ever helped me more, and beneath this mask of artificiality she is really a noble-hearted woman. I do not understand the necessity for people to lead false lives. Is it this way in all society—Eastern society, I mean? Do men and women there continually scheme and flirt, smile and stab, forever assuming ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... varying his work by rambling to Pennicote to sketch the village children and improve his acquaintance with the Gascoignes. Hans appeared to have recovered his vivacity, but Deronda detected some feigning in it, as we detect the artificiality of a lady's bloom from its being a little too high-toned and steadily persistent (a "Fluctuating Rouge" not having yet appeared among the advertisements). Also with all his grateful friendship and admiration ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... advance he has made in power, and particularly in truth of presentment, is very remarkable. In the early group of his novels he had felt a great difficulty in transcribing conversations so as to produce a natural and easy effect. He no longer, in Coningsby, is confronted by this artificiality. His dialogues are now generally remarkable for their ease and nature. The speeches of Rigby (who represents John Wilson Croker), of Lord Monmouth (who stands for Lord Hertford), of the Young Englanders themselves, of the laughable chorus of Taper and Tadpole, who never "despaired of the Commonwealth," ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... Continental. The officers are in the truest sense gentlemen free from swagger, and not over-bearing towards their men and their civilian compatriots. They represent a genuine type of manhood, free from artificiality or falsehood. One feels instinctively that they say what they think, and that they will do rather more instead of less than ...
— Dutch Life in Town and Country • P. M. Hough
... from a variety of languages, and simply mixed up together, without any scientific attempt at co-ordination or simplification. The resulting international languages have varied in their degree of artificiality, and in the proportions in which they were consciously or semi-consciously compiled, or else adopted their elements ready-made, without conscious adaptation, from existing tongues. But their production, widespread and continuous use, and great practical utility, showed that they arose in ...
— International Language - Past, Present and Future: With Specimens of Esperanto and Grammar • Walter J. Clark
... sunny-natured, cheerful, self-sacrificing, resourceful—in short, a delightful companion. Yet—she was a savage, he thought, with a curl of the lip, as before his mind's eye arose the contrast between her and her civilized sisters, with their artificiality and moods and caprices, and petty spites and fictitious ailments, and general contentiousness all around. It was by no means certain he would not have returned to dwell with her among her own people, had that course been open—but it was not. ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... generously. "J. Hamerton Smythe. S-m-y-t-h-e. I didn't change it from Smith, and I don't know what one of my esteemed ancestors did. But I'm glad he did. It gives me a touch of artificiality, don't you think? I fear ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham
... considerations arises out of the artificiality of woman's position. It is a less conclusive series than the first, and it opens a number ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... Scillaes Metamorphosis, employs fewer of the epyllionic conventions than Philos and Licia, and uses them less imaginatively. Though it never achieves a style of its own, it is quite successful in recapturing the lachrymose artificiality ...
— Seven Minor Epics of the English Renaissance (1596-1624) • Dunstan Gale
... a laudable one. For the athlete is the product of nature—a step towards the more perfect type of animal, while the scholar is the outcome of artificiality. What, I ask, does the scholar gain, either morally or physically, or in any other way, by knowing who was tribune of the people in 284 BC or what is the precise difference between the various constructions of cum? It is not as if ignorance of the tribune's identity caused him any mental ...
— Tales of St. Austin's • P. G. Wodehouse
... a sincere, natural, sensible kind of life, as compared with that of other bathing-shores. Although there are brass bands at the hotels, and hops in the evening, and an unequal struggle of macassar oil with salt and stubborn locks, yet the artificiality is kept at a minimum. People really do bathe, really do take walks on the beach for the love of the ocean, really do pick up shells and throw them away again, really do go yachting and crab-catching; and if they try city manners ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... phrases heard in the pulpit, they were uttered by Mrs. Ede with a fervour, with a candour of belief, that took from them any appearance of artificiality; and Kate did not notice that her mother-in-law was using words that ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... is especially to be avoided in visualization, since the tone of artificiality is immediately destructive of the reader's confidence in the sincerity of the writer. It betrays the author's purpose of producing an effect. The appearance of truth free from any semblance of over-statement is ...
— The Writing of the Short Story • Lewis Worthington Smith
... virtually the inventor and artificer who added a new instrument of music to its majestic orchestra, a new weapon of expression to its noble armoury.... But one must admit that to the taste of the present age there occurs a certain coldness and artificiality in his portrayals alike of the face of nature and of the passions of man. He appeals rather to the brain than to the heart. Ideas and not emotions are his province.... To the metric presentment of ideas he imparts a charm of musical ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... The artificiality and unreality of her life overcame her as with stifling fumes. She stopped at a street-corner, drawing long panting breaths as if she had been running a race. Then, slowly and aimlessly, she began to saunter along a street of small private houses in damp gardens that led ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... was loyal to the last. The practice of delivering set eulogies to the memory of the departed great is the most difficult that falls to the lot of a Leader on either side of House of Commons. In some hands it has uncontrollable tendency to the artificiality and insipidity of funeral baked meats. DISRAELI was a failure on such occasions; GLADSTONE at his best. PRINCE ARTHUR, usually supreme, did not to-day reach his accustomed ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, July 15, 1914 • Various
... unaccustomed pleasure mantling her neck and cheeks the girl was certainly a pretty picture. The plain and simple costume was of the cut of the provinces rather than that of Paris, but it set off the lithe and graceful figure that needed no artificiality of the dressmaker to enforce its ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... obvious possibilities for constructive and manual development, Miss Rankin's experiment offers social features of unusual suggestiveness, for the village provides a civic experience fairly comprehensive and free from the artificiality that is apt to characterize attempts to introduce civic content ...
— A Catalogue of Play Equipment • Jean Lee Hunt
... primitive people of the Southern Seas touched Diderot almost as deeply as if he had been Rousseau. As one says so often in this history of the intellectual preparation for the Revolution, the corruption and artificiality of Parisian society had the effect of colouring the world of primitive society with the very hues of paradise. Diderot was more free from this besetting weakness than any of his contemporaries. He never fell into Voltaire's ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... and have lots of pluck, are poor performers, particularly in the hunting-field. A beginner who is put on a properly made saddle and suitable horse, and is taught the right principles of riding, will make more progress in a month than she would otherwise do in, say, five years. The artificiality of side-saddle riding extends even to the horse, which must be free from certain faults, such as unsteadiness in mounting, that would not render him unsuitable to carry a ...
— The Horsewoman - A Practical Guide to Side-Saddle Riding, 2nd. Ed. • Alice M. Hayes
... shoulders" in the most cavalier but also the most successful fashion. In the novel as Richardson knew it and was thinking of it, when he began Pamela, you were, as a rule, in an artificial world altogether—a world artificial with an artificiality only faintly and occasionally touched with any reality at all. In Pamela itself there is perhaps nothing, and certainly not much, that is wholly unreal: but the reality is treated and rendered in an artificial way. In Joseph Andrews, though its professed genesis and procedure are artificial ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... alone the potential value of boys for the Kingdom of God, and what the minister may do for them; but what may they not do for him? How fatal is the boy collective to all artificiality, sanctimony, weakness, make-believe, and jointless dignity; and how prone is the ministry to these psychological and semi-physical pests! For, owing to the demands of the pulpit and of private and social intercourse, the minister finds it necessary to talk more ...
— The Minister and the Boy • Allan Hoben
... stirred me to a new activity was the sound of the stable-clock striking twelve. Its horrible bell still had the same note of intrusive artificiality that had vexed me on the previous night, but it no longer thrilled me with any sense of stage effect. It was merely a mechanical and inappropriate invasion ...
— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford
... congenital differences of taste is idle; but it is not idle to observe that when Lamb is read, as he surely deserves to be, as a whole—letters and poems no less than essays—these notes of fantasy and artificiality no longer dominate. The man Charles Lamb was far more real, far more serious, despite his jesting, more self-contained and self- restrained, than Hazlitt, who wasted his life in the pursuit of the veriest will-o'-the-wisps that ever danced over the most miasmatic of swamps, who ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... turned to Prince Andrew the firm, intelligent expression on his face changed in a way evidently deliberate and habitual to him. His face took on the stupid artificial smile (which does not even attempt to hide its artificiality) of a man who is continually receiving many petitioners one ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... personality of the author. I found it difficult to believe that he was in earnest. The book seemed to me to betray the whimsical sans-culottism of a man of pleasure who, when the ball is at an end, sits down with his gloves on, and philosophizes on the artificiality of civilization and the wholesomeness of honest toil. An indigestion makes him a temporary communist; but a bottle of seltzer presently reconciles him to his lot, and restores the equilibrium of the universe. He loves the people ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... or thinker from the wrongs of ignorance or prejudice or falsehood; sometimes in fishing a manuscript out of the ooze of oblivion, and giving it, after a critical cleansing, to the world. Now and then he warmed himself and kept his muscle in trim with buffeting soundly the champions of that shallow artificiality and unctuous wordiness, one of which passed for orthodox in literature, and the other in theology. True religion and creative genius were both so beautiful to him that he could never abide the mediocre counterfeit of either, and he who put so much of his own ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... pretty reminiscence of the age of artificiality!" said Ella; "and what an apt commentary upon the subject we were talking about, Phyllis! We were discussing the merits of directness in speech and straightness in every way. We were ridiculing the timid maid—all sandals and simper—of forty ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... of picture-painting. The change of feeling towards the end is superb: a sense of foreboding and dread comes into the music and prepares us for the coming disaster. But when the curtain rises on the hall of the Gibichungs we at once get more artificiality and theatricality. In using the word theatrical I do not mean there is any return to, for instance, the Rienzi style: the music is theatrical in Wagner's own later way: it seems to fit the situation, but the appearance is an appearance only: the stuff is superficial: the feeling ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... created new possibilities for accommodating the inner form to new subject matter without conspicuously changing the outer form. For two great simplifying factors have, since Goethe, been predominant in protecting our lyric poetry from unfruitful artificiality; the influence of the folk-song and the connection with music have kept it more full of vital energy than the too literary lyric poetry of the French, and richer in variety than the too cultivated lyric of the English. Whoever shut the ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... live in a place where one's own skin is not sufficient protection against the weather. I think the whole organization of everything is abominable and I don't believe it is a necessary stage of development. Most ordinary lives are the quintessence of artificiality and the grossest waste of time. I am more than ever against the 'me' in myself. It is the ...
— Nelka - Mrs. Helen de Smirnoff Moukhanoff, 1878-1963, a Biographical Sketch • Michael Moukhanoff
... the disadvantages connected with thus collecting together a number of separate papers, instead of writing a uniform treatise upon one continuous subject. The picture formed by their union must necessarily have much of the artificiality and clumsiness of the mosaic as compared with the oil or water-colour painting. But only in this form could I have brought together such a great variety of important things. And though I cannot hope that the ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... consistent and hardly less continuous than the narrative itself. To the illustration and carrying out of this interior meaning even the minutest details of external incident are made to contribute, with an appropriateness of significance, and with a freedom from forced interpretation or artificiality of construction such as no other writer of allegory has succeeded in attaining. The poem may be read with interest as a record of experience without attention to its inner meaning, but its full interest is only felt when this inner meaning is traced, and ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell [The Inferno] • Dante Alighieri
... tower of Capluc, gathering the fringed gentian just outside the town, interchanging friendly talk with the cheery peasant-folk, the thought arose: What a paradise for weary brain workers! What a perfect summer retreat! Removed from the routine of daily life, escaped for a time from the artificiality of ordinary travel, how happy were the lover of nature, of pastoral existence, of quietude in such a spot! No whistle of railway, no bustle of streets, only the placid rippling of the Tarn and the wind gently swaying ...
— The Roof of France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... was thus working out the task of her organic self-development there was within her, or rather by her side, a people with whom every process tended to take a mechanical form. Artificiality marked the creation of Prussia; for she was formed by clumsily sewing together, edge to edge, provinces either acquired or conquered. Her administration was mechanical; it did its work with the regularity of a well-appointed ...
— The Meaning of the War - Life & Matter in Conflict • Henri Bergson
... brought up on the poets of the eighteenth century, in the very best of whom the qualities which Crabbe lacks had been but sparingly and not eminently present. It must be remembered too, that from the great vice of the poetry of the eighteenth century, its artificiality and convention, Crabbe is conspicuously free. The return to nature was not the only secret of the return to poetry; but it was part of it, and that Crabbe returned to nature no one could doubt. Moreover ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... by the heavy golden bracelet is cold, yet soft and yielding like a sleep. The face has the natural ease of slumber, and not the rigid artificiality of death. 'Tis true there is no pulse, no beat of heart nor stir of breath, yet neither is there the sombre grotesqueness of the last pose. But the difference between life and death is here so small that it is incommensurable, the point of the mathematicians only. I shall hold this ...
— The Flutter of the Goldleaf; and Other Plays • Olive Tilford Dargan and Frederick Peterson
... With the artificiality, the stiltedness of the foregoing contrast the simplicity, the sincerity of these two extracts from ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... branching trees, the arches of flowering creepers, the thickets of flowers, shrubs, and tall reeds, which in every direction imitated so perfectly the natural forms that the closest scrutiny would have been required to detect their artificiality. The general form, however, seemed to be that of a square entered by a very short, narrow passage, and divided by broad paths, forming a cross of equal arms. At the central point of this cross was placed on a pedestal ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... colour of the sun. The successful London actress, my dear—what existence has she? A straight flight across the Atlantic in a record-breaker, so many nights in New York, so many in Chicago, so many in a Pullman car, and the net result in every newspaper—an existence of pure artificiality infested by reporters. It's like living in the shell of your personality. It's the house for ever on your back; at the last you are buried in it, smirking in your coffin with a half-open eye on the floral offerings. ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... not myself think that Pierrette, which opens the series, is quite the equal of its companions. Written, as it was, for Countess Anna de Hanska, Balzac's step-daughter of the future, while she was still very young, it partakes necessarily of the rather elaborate artificiality of all attempts to suit the young person, of French attempts in particular, and it may perhaps be said of Balzac's attempts most of all. It belongs, in a way, to the Arcis series—the series which also includes the fine ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... an appreciative audience. With weighing and measuring, inspecting and reporting, exercising and rapid forcing, and comparing, applauding and tabulating results, it is difficult to see how children can escape self-consciousness and artificiality, and the enthusiasts for "child study" are in danger of making the specimen of the real child more and more rare and difficult to find, as destructive sportsmen in a new country exterminate the choice species ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... see through it, and conquer it: for he has intellect, he has will, force beyond other men. A man not with logic-spectacles; but with an eye! Unhappily without Decalogue, moral Code or Theorem of any fixed sort; yet not without a strong living Soul in him, and Sincerity there: a Reality, not an Artificiality, not a Sham! And so he, having struggled 'forty years against despotism,' and 'made away with all formulas,' shall now become the spokesman of a Nation bent to do the same. For is it not precisely the struggle of France also to cast off despotism; to make away with her old formulas,—having ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... best, all their graces of style, and he has, at all times, the grace of Purity, to which they laid no claim. With the exception of Carew (whom, we dare say, he has never read), Mr. Winter is the daintiest and sweetest of amatory poets. He has the fancy of Carew, without his artificiality; he has Carew's sweetness, ...
— The Aldine, Vol. 5, No. 1., January, 1872 - A Typographic Art Journal • Various
... Others drew to him. With his own hands he built a wooden church for his disciples, giving it the name of Troitza or Thrice Holy Trinity. Thither I wandered in thought. A call might be there for me, so weary of the egotism, envy, detraction, greed, grind and battle of the soulless artificiality called society. ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... presentation of the short story is a matter of import. Its very artificiality calls for skilled workmanship; it must be made pleasant and readable by all known devices; its brevity, too, permits and demands a higher finish than is necessary in the novel. And altogether the short story offers a writer who is not exactly a genius a rare chance to show his ability ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... it's gone," he said, "you can't tell what a relief!" He laughed, but his laugh did not deceive her; her musical ear recognised its artificiality in a moment. She could feel rather than see he was suffering, ...
— The Music Master - Novelized from the Play • Charles Klein
... go to see it, and which certainly has many more lines in its curves and woodwork, but yet did not appeal to me, because it seemed too purposely ornamental. A house designed to look well, even age has not taken from its artificiality. Neither is there any cone nor cart-horses about. Why, even a tall chanticleer makes a home look homely. I do like to see a tall proud chanticleer strutting in the yard and barely giving way as I advance, almost ready to do battle with a ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... yet, as he chatted and smirked and acted, there was a sort of fascination in him, too. Some original force and fire of nature still glowed and flickered in his old carcass; something human stirred dimly under the crust of self-consciousness and artificiality. Rose's adamantine seriousness finally relaxed in a faint smile, upon which he threw up his hands, emitted a hoarse cackle of triumph, and exclaimed, "There—there it is! I knew I'd get it; she loves ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... of the great Brighton preacher. It will be generally admitted that these two volumes will furnish means for estimating the character of Mr. Robertson which are not supplied in any or all of his published works.... There was no artificiality or show about the pulpit production, no half-utterances or whispers of solemn belief; but there was the natural restraint which would be imposed by a true gentleman upon his words when speaking to mixed congregations. Many of us wanted to ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... earnest; crude, perhaps; bare, certainly; the scars of its recent battle with the wilderness still fresh upon its person; lacking the finish that only time can give to a landscape or a civilization; but lacking also the mouldiness, the mustiness, the insufferable artificiality of older communities. And the atmosphere! Day after day brought its cloudless sky, the weather, for once, having failed to observe the rule of contraries; evening after evening flooded valley and hilltop with its deluge of golden glory; night after night a crisp temperature ...
— The Cow Puncher • Robert J. C. Stead
... the reign of Elizabeth England imported almost all "artificiality," as high-grade manufactures of a certain sort were called. A famous Elizabethan play turns on the scarcity of needles, [Sidenote: Gammer Gurton's Needle, c. 1559] the whole household being turned upside down to look for {536} the one lost by Gammer Gurton. These articles, as well as knives, nails, ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... the conditions of his new life. Being well bred, he respected, outwardly at least, the laws of artificiality and conventionality, and bowed before the idols of the cave he ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant |
