"Classicism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... among my son's papers a sketch in manuscript of Wagner's life and work. It begins with some observations on Romanticism and Classicism. ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... angry, the French indulged in a furore of welcome. They made feasts and hailed the American as the friend of human kind, as the "ideal of a patriarchal republic and of idyllic simplicity," as a sage of antiquity; and the exuberant classicism of the nation exhausted itself in glorifying him by comparisons with those great names of Greece and Rome which have become symbols for all private and public virtues. They admired him because he did not wear a wig; they ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.
... His "New Gibbon"—a paper which appeared in 'Blackwood's Magazine'—is there to prove so much; but that was not the manner in which he usually wrote about war. He was essentially a man who had visions of things. Without the time to separate his visions into the language of pure classicism—a feat which Tennyson superlatively contrived to accomplish—he yet took out the right details, and by skilful combination built you, in the briefest possible space, a strongly vivid picture. If you look straight ...
— From Capetown to Ladysmith - An Unfinished Record of the South African War • G. W. Steevens
... odd that such points should need mentioning; but Greek drama has always suffered from a school of critics who approach a play with a greater equipment of aesthetic theory than of dramatic perception. This is the characteristic defect of classicism. One mark of the school is to demand from dramatists heroes and heroines which shall satisfy its own ideals; and, though there was in the New Comedy a mask known to Pollux as "The Entirely-good Young Man" ([Greek: panchraestos neaniskos]), such a character is fortunately ...
— Alcestis • Euripides
... however, is not shaped entirely by the law of waste in its first form; the canon is to some extent shaped in conformity to that secondary expression of the predatory temperament, veneration for the archaic or obsolete, which in one of its special developments is called classicism. In aesthetic theory it might be extremely difficult, if not quite impracticable, to draw a line between the canon of classicism, or regard for the archaic, and the canon of beauty. For the aesthetic ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... pretend to revile they owe everything. In vain one looks for a tradition older than Courbet; a few have attempted to stammer in the suave speech of Corot and the men of Fontainebleau; but 1863, the year of the Salon des Refuses, is really the year of their artistic ancestor's birth. The classicism of Lebrun, David, Ingres, Prudhon; the romanticism of Gericault, Delacroix, Decamps; the tender poetry of those true Waldmenschen, Millet, Dupre, Diaz, Daubigny, or of that wild heir of Giorgione and Tiepolo, the marvellous colour virtuoso who "painted music," Monticelli—all these men might ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... the master he honoured above most—in the patter of the latest Lion-comique of the Halls as in the prose of Meredith or Borrow, in the disreputable cat stealing home through the dull London dawn as in the Romanticists emerging from the chill of Classicism—in everything, big and little, in which he felt the life so dear to ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... thought and feeling and conduct which made up his continuing power over generation after generation of readers. This much is clear, that a study of Shakespeare's influence is in part a study of changing ideas and ideals in literature—that as he survived the Restoration taste, so he survived the new classicism of the eighteenth and the romanticism of the early nineteenth century. It is also clear that a full record of the influence of Shakespeare on English-speaking readers would touch on almost all the varied changes of thought and ...
— The Facts About Shakespeare • William Allan Nielson
... wit with fancy gave it a lowly role in Augustan thinking; and also in literary prose, which was supposed to be the language of reason (cf. Donald F. Bond, "'Distrust' of Imagination in English Neo-Classicism," PQ, XIV, 54-69). What of its position in poetry? According to Hobbes, poetry must exhibit both judgment and fancy, but fancy should dominate; and the work of fancy is to adorn discourse with tropes and figures, to please by ...
— Essays on Wit No. 2 • Richard Flecknoe and Joseph Warton
... life and shuns earth-scented facts, had, through the decisive influence of Tegner, been victorious in Swedish literature. I am aware that some will regard this as a questionable statement; for the academicism of Tegner is not the stately, bloodless, Gallic classicism of the Gustavian age, of which Leopold was the last representative. It is much closer to the classicism of Goethe in "Iphigenia" and "Hermann and Dorothea," and of Schiller in "Wallenstein" and "Wilhelm ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... various practical consequences, not all of them good, or at least not all yielding fruit for our own age. Darwin's great influence as a force turning scholarly interest toward naturalism and away from classicism, as a factor in modern materialism and even pessimism, as a background, if no more, for the Haeckels and Ostwalds of science is no inconsiderable factor in the scientific and ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... supported by a channelled column. The capitals of these columns are carved with leaves or with leaves and grotesques; on them round arches rest; and above is a narrow foliated cornice. In relieving contrast to the artificial classicism of the Renaissance of the interior, the feeling of this apse is quite truly ancient and pagan, and it is not less unique nor less charming because it is placed against a plain, uninteresting wall. The eye travelling ...
— Cathedrals and Cloisters of the South of France, Volume 1 • Elise Whitlock Rose
... between Romanticism and Classicism.—The influences of this period were not entirely in the direction of romanticism. Samuel Johnson, the literary dictator of the age, was unsparing in his condemnation of the movement. The weight of his opinion kept many romantic tendencies in check. Even authors ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... ten ago, bore on its foaming crest Victor Hugo, prince of romanticists. Near by was Henri Heine,—he left Heinrich across the Rhine,—Heine, who dipped his pen in honey and gall, who sneered and wept in the same couplet. The star of classicism had seemingly set. In the rich conflict of genius were Gautier, Schumann, and the rest. All was romance, fantasy, and passion, and the young men heard the moon sing silvery—you remember De Musset!—and the leaves rustle rhythms to the ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... Woolner, James Collinson, F. G. Stephens, and his brother, W. M. Rossetti, in the movement called pre-Raphaelite. At the beginning of his career he recognised, in common with his associates, that the contemporary classicism had run to seed, and that, beyond an effort after perfection of technique, the art of the period was all but devoid of purpose, of thought, imagination, or spirituality. At such a moment it was matter for little surprise ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... criticism, and very difficult to define. But in contrast with its opposites it can be made to mean something definite. Now, the romanticism of the juniors is not the opposite of realism; it sometimes embraces realism too lovingly for the reader's comfort. But it is the opposite of classicism. It is emotional expansiveness as contrasted with the classic doctrine of measure and restraint. By this, the older meaning of romanticism, we may put a tag upon the new men that will help to identify them. Their desire is to free their souls from the restraints of circumstance, to break through ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... in the Scipionic circle "pure Latin" had become the cue, and the mother tongue was spoken, no longer in entire naivete, but in conscious contradistinction to the language of the great multitude. This epoch opens with a remarkable reaction against the classicism which had hitherto exclusively prevailed in the higher language of conversation and accordingly also in literature—a reaction which had inwardly and outwardly a close connection with the reaction of a similar nature in the language of Greece. Just about this time ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... in sympathy; but in his own obstinate way, he tried to knock his idol into shape instead of choosing another. He pushed further and further the extravagances of a vivid but very unbalanced and barbaric style, in the praise of a poet who really represented the calmest classicism and the attempt to restore a Hellenic equilibrium in the mind. It is like watching a shaggy Scandinavian decorating a Greek statue washed up by chance on his shores. And while the strength of Goethe was a strength of completion and serenity, which Carlyle not only never found but ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... had abandoned the classicism of his youth for the romanticism now in fashion: he spoke of the soul, of angels, of adoration, of submission, he became ethereal, and of the darkest blue. He took me to the opera, and handed me to my carriage. This old young man went when I went, his waistcoats multiplied, he compressed his waist, ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... art prevalent in London in the beginning of this century, has manifested itself in many vulgarities in his composition pictures, vulgarities which may perhaps be best expressed by the general term "Twickenham Classicism," as consisting principally in conceptions of ancient or of rural life such as have influenced the erection of most of our suburban villas. From Nicolo Poussin and Loutherbourg he seems to have derived advantage; perhaps also from Wilson; ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... the humanities, the joys of life always existed and grew with him as with a good landscape architect who keeps in nature's ways. His departures into the classicism of Stephen Phillips, the romanticism of Shakespeare, or the exotic French society drama were never as valuable and delightful as his treatment of modern sentiment ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... nature: whatever doing of "everything" might have been revealed to me as a means to the end, I would certainly have done it for a sight of Madame Doche and Fechter in Dumas's triumphant idyll—now enjoying the fullest honours of innocuous classicism; with which, as with the merits of its interpreters, Honorine's happy charges had become perfectly and if not quite serenely, at least ever so responsively and feelingly, familiar. Of a wondrous mixed sweetness and sharpness and queerness of uneffaced reminiscence is all that aspect of the ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... from the worlds of nature and of feeling. While seeking this change, it passed through what has been properly called the period of transition,—a period the writers of which are distinctly marked as belonging neither to the artificial classicism of Pope, nor to the simple naturalism of Wordsworth and the Lake school; partaking, indeed, in some degree of the former, and preparing the ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... Stael was right when she asserted in her 'Allemagne' that Paganism and Christianity, the North and the South, antiquity and the Middle Ages, having divided between them the history of literature, Romanticism in consequence, in contrast to Classicism, was a combination of chivalry, the Middle Ages, the literatures of the North, and Christianity. It should be noted, in this connection, that some thirty years later Heinrich Heine, in the book in which he will rewrite Mme. de Stael's, will not give such a very different idea of Romanticism." ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... as late as the eighteenth century. In that century, and indeed in the seventeenth, the best Christmas verses are those of a provincial and rustic character, and especially those in patois; the more cultivated poets, with their formal classicism, can ill enter into the spirit of the festival. Of the learned writers the best is a woman, Francoise Paschal, of Lyons (b. about 1610); in spite of her Latinity she shows a real feeling for her subjects. Some of her Noels are dialogues between ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... bearing the mark of poetic genius, but left lying round for want of the structural instinct, and last of all, that which is, in many respects, first of all, the "Threnody," a lament over the death of his first-born son. This poem has the dignity of "Lycidas" without its refrigerating classicism, and with all the tenderness of Cowper's lines on the receipt of his mother's picture. It may well compare with others of the finest memorial poems in the language,—with Shelley's "Adonais," and Matthew Arnold's "Thyrsis," leaving out of view Tennyson's "In Memoriam" ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... descending for once from the habitual classicism of his phraseology, described The Patriot of Severance's production in two terse and ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... played four times as fast; and next David instructs Walther in the rules to be observed if he wishes to compose a master-song and to be admitted to the guild. Here Wagner indulges in positively uproarious satire of the pseudo-classicism and the school harmony, counterpoint and "composition" of the nineteenth century; and the music is not less ludicrous than the words. It is a parody of the very kind of music Wagner wrote in his Rienzi days, ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... Amsterdam's population, supported by the great merchants, interest in matters of art and science strongly develops, though as we noticed before, in the case of the town-hall architecture, with a marked preference for classicism and all foreign civilization. It seems as though these clever merchants could not understand that their own genial countrymen were sufficiently gifted and quite capable of astonishing the world by their work; this increasing lack of mutual ...
— Rembrandt's Amsterdam • Frits Lugt
... sailed for Italy, which was, sadly enough, to be the Mecca of American sculptors for many years to come. For Italian sculpture was bound hand and foot by the traditions of classicism, to which our early sculptors soon fell captive. Greenough was no exception, and some years of study in the Italian studios ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... philosophers, poets, and historians. He was also a man of uncommon attainments in all the literary knowledge of his time. In some of his tragedies his classic learning was thought to be ostentatiously displayed, but this was not true of his comedy, and on the whole he was too strong to be swamped in pseudo-classicism. For his experience of men and of life was deep and varied. Before he became a public actor and dramatist, and served the court and fashionable society with his entertaining, if pedantic, masques, he had been student, tradesman, and soldier; he had traveled in Flanders and seen Paris, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... really wrote this, the Muses, rewarding him elsewhere for the good things he said in "The Quarrel," must have punished him here for the silly ones. It has, in fact, most of the faults which neo-classicism attributed to its opposite. ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... Germany with their lyric treasures. Presently there began to be a union of efforts for a literary reform, as in the Renaissance, and the Romantic movement began to be defined. Its watchword was freedom in art, and as a reform it was naturally considerably determined by the classicism against which it rebelled. The qualities that it strove to possess were sharply in contrast with those that had distinguished French poetry for two hundred years, if they were not in direct opposition to them: in its matter, breadth and infinite variety took the ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield
... in such a fashion could hardly have coloured mediaeval thought with any real classicism, even if it had been devoted to much more genuine specimens of antiquity than the semi-Oriental medley of the Pseudo-Callisthenes and the bit of bald euhemerism which had better have been devoted to Hephaestus than ascribed to his ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... hundredth, the only capable one among them. If they have the training of others in their hands they will train them consciously or unconsciously after their own image . what then becomes of the classicism of ...
— We Philologists, Volume 8 (of 18) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... "Your classicism is the natural complement of my mediaevalism. The elasticity, the concreteness, of your temperament fertilised the too-brooding introspectiveness of my own. It lightened the reverence which I experience in the contemplation of my own nature. It induced in me the hint of frivolity ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... Two of the most important contrasting tendencies of style in the general sense are Classicism and Romanticism. Classicism means those qualities which are most characteristic of the best literature of Greece and Rome. It is in fact partly identical with Idealism. It aims to express the inner truth or central principles of things, ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher |
