"Artificiality" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... realise in the nineteenth century all the 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 at once, full of argot and of archaisms, of technical expressions and of elaborate ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... as ever now. Yet no analysis will explain their indefinable charm. If the so-called "lyrical cry" be of the essence of a true lyric, they are not true lyrics at all. Few of them are free from a marked artificiality, an almost rigid adherence to canon. Their range of thought is not great; their range of feeling is studiously narrow. Beside the air and fire of a lyric of Catullus, an ode of Horace for the moment grows pale and heavy, cineris specie decoloratur. Beside one of the pathetic half-lines of Virgil, ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... 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 they didn't ...
— The Silent Bullet • Arthur B. Reeve
... Harun al-Rashid, interceded for him. Having offended the caliph, he was in prison for a short time. The latter part of his life was more ascetic. He died in 828 in the reign of al-Ma'mun. The poetry of Abu-l-'Atahiya is notable for its avoidance of the artificiality almost universal in his days. The older poetry of the desert had been constantly imitated up to this time, although it was not natural to town life. Abu-l-'Atahiya was one of the first to drop the old qasida (elegy) ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... notice how the truth of acting, the truth of visible 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 ...
— Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories • Oscar Wilde
... throw myself into that kind of life but was still more conscious of my own weakness and artificiality. I cannot forget myself and my complex, distorted past, and my future appears to me still more hopeless. Every day I have before me the distant snowy mountains and this majestic, happy woman. But not for ...
— The Cossacks • Leo Tolstoy
... style," and 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 for Deronda, Hans ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... "directing class" has been hitherto a dogma. But soon I cared little whether that experiment was to succeed or no in its final effort, or whether the French were to perfect a democracy where wealth has one vast experience of its own artificiality, or to fail. The intellectual interest of such an experiment, when once I seized it, drove out every ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... she led amid the leafy trees of her park. She would show herself everywhere, at races, theatres, parties—as when she accepted the Baroness Dinati's invitation; and, when she became nauseated with all the artificiality of worldly life, she would return eagerly to her woods, her dogs and her solitude, and, if it were winter, would shut herself up for long months in her ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... better to say that Horace finally came more fully into his own. This was not because he changed. He did not change. The times changed. The barriers of intellectual sloth and artificiality fell away, and men became accessible to him. Virgil lost nothing of his old-time appeal to the fancy and to the ear, but Horace's virtues also were discovered: his distinction in word and phrase, his understanding of the human heart. Virgil lost ...
— Horace and His Influence • Grant Showerman
... responsibilities may be full of complexity; the subject of literary art may be exceedingly complex; but we do not set complexity over against simplicity. For simplicity is a quality essential to true life as it is to literature of the first class; it is opposed to parade, to artificiality, to obscurity. ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... HARDING, as Flambeau, veteran of NAPOLEON'S Army, introduced a faint suggestion of badly-needed humour, and relieved the general atmosphere of Court artificiality by a touch of nature which almost reconciled us to the improbable burst of eloquence that ROSTAND, with his reckless prodigality, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 18, 1919 • Various
... lips the unalterability of her determination. It was on his tongue to suggest that it was easy to compromise, but there was that about her which checked him. Above all things there was a naturalness about her, an absence of artificiality, the emanation of a strong and vigorous womanliness. The very freedom of her speech was purity itself. The dark places of life had been bared to her and she did not conceal the fact or minimise it but she spoke of ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller
... common sense. These 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 ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... 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 ...
— Tales of St. Austin's • P. G. Wodehouse
... light of a penance adjusted to the foregoing lapses, and by the very contrast they offer call up a keener memory of the wrong they atone for. They are not a spontaneous prompting of goodwill, but an elaborate compensation. And, in fact, Dion's atoning friendliness has a ring of artificiality. Because he formerly disguised his good feeling towards you he now expresses more than he quite feels. It is in vain. Having made you extremely uncomfortable last week he has absolutely diminished his power of making you happy ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... Helen had been pleased to call "amiable," and which fretted her by being conventional and not wholly sincere. She liked the artist best when he spoke without restraint, even though she might not agree with his extravagances and often detected a trace of artificiality in his clever epigrams. It seemed to her that the whole tendency of Edith's influence upon her husband was towards restraint, yet she could not be sure whether the ultimate result upon Fenton's character might not ...
— The Pagans • Arlo Bates
... against inequality and artificiality—particularly his startling treatise On the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men (1754)—and his fervent preaching of the everlasting superiority of the heart to the head, constitute the most important factor ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... very high excellence. I do 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 Tenebreuse Affaire and the unfinished ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... laughs, his lips, his eyes, his eye-brows, and eyelids—indeed, all the features of his countenance—are imbued with their appropriate expressions. In both him and his companion, every gesture is so entirely easy, and free from the semblance of artificiality, that, were it not for the diminutiveness of their size, and the fact of their being passed from one spectator to another previous to their exhibition on the rope, it would be difficult to convince any assemblage of persons that these wooden automata ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... 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 ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... the 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, ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... is luxuriant. I think it is artificial to 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 source of ...
— Nelka - Mrs. Helen de Smirnoff Moukhanoff, 1878-1963, a Biographical Sketch • Michael Moukhanoff
... 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 exercise—gymnastics. ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... 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 ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... 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. Only their costumes differed. ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... trespass so far 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 fire as in the lines ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... hostess to each other. It was really Valerie who was the guest in the house when Imogen and her father were there. The relation was never normal. Now that poor Everard is gone, the necessary artificiality can cease. Valerie can try her hand at being a mother, not a guest. It will do both her ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... 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, besides insisting, in a famous passage, the Preface ...
— Ballads of Romance and Chivalry - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - First Series • Frank Sidgwick
... "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 ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... 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 ...
— Monophysitism Past and Present - A Study in Christology • A. A. Luce
... Heine 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 door on the influences spoken of, as ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... literary form or in thinking of it otherwise than as an exercise in ingenuity, an Oriental puzzle; and this notion is heightened by the prevalence of the couplet-composing contests, which did much to heighten the artificiality ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... forgotten inventor of the older world smote his rival or enemy with a branch of wood and found that it was good and thereafter made a practice of smiting rivals and enemies with branches of wood, then, and on that day, artificiality may be said to have begun. Then, and on that day, was begun a revolution destined to change the history of life. Then, and on that day, was laid the cornerstone of that ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... white stone, 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 is being watched, dives to show off before admiring children. Even the blackbirds ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... 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 have not only shown no disinclination, but, on the contrary, ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... 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 ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson
... escape, and an overwhelming sense of the inherent rottenness of western civilisation. It was upon such occasions that he saw, or thought he saw, the inevitable tendency of European cities to emasculate and corrupt the rugged nobilities of mankind. A revolt against artificiality had followed. Immediately, there in the heart of the world's greatest city, there had grown up about him the mirage of the primeval forest, whose boughs are steeped in silence, borne up by tall bare trunks, which lured him on to explore and adventure through untried lands, ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... what animosities moved them, what sentiments elevated 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 formed and ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... that forerunner could never have reached: he "stood upon his 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 ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... luxurious mansions—more luxurious than 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," ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... to have old Saracinesca's strength and fresh vitality—old Saracinesca whom he hated! Yes, with all that hair—it was white, but a little dye would change it. What was a little dye compared with the profound artificiality of his own outer man? How the old fellow's deep voice rang, loud and clear, from his broad chest! How strong he was, with his firm step, and his broad brown hands, and his fiery black eyes! He hated him for the greenness of his age—he hated him for his stalwart son, another of those long-lived ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... interest for her. It was hardly wonderful that Lord Rosmore should pronounce her adorable, or that Judge Marriott should forget that his youth was a thing of the past. Indeed, she had come as a revelation to the men whose lives were made up of Court intrigue and artificiality. ...
— The Brown Mask • Percy J. Brebner
... 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 ...
— The White Lie • William Le Queux
... Mayfield there is a timber house which is something of a show place, and people 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 stranger like a ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... the Book. In spite of the conventionality inseparable from the pastoral form, and the obvious artificiality of the style in which it is written, "Rosalynde" is really charming. Its charm is much like that of Watteau's landscapes. Like them, it is an idyll in court dress, a fete elegante, a kind of elegant picnic. Yet, like Watteau's pictures it is of more than merely historic ...
— Rosalynde - or, Euphues' Golden Legacy • Thomas Lodge
... of society has been mostly in terms of political units, largely on account of the lack of any local unit which had social significance to rural people. In recent years, however, students of rural government have become aware of the artificiality and the anti-social character of the township unit. There may be two rival villages within a township, each competing for trade and the support of its associations, and striving for the political domination of the township, while some of the farmers in a far corner of the township may trade ...
— The Farmer and His Community • Dwight Sanderson
... largely based upon this habit of pretense. "Courses" are offered in this or that field of human learning frankly appealing to the victim's desire to shine at a party. Books are sold, clothes and cosmetics are peddled, by playing continually upon this desire to appear what we are not. Artificiality is one curse that will drop away the moment we kneel at Jesus' feet and surrender ourselves to His meekness. Then we will not care what people think of us so long as God is pleased. Then what we are will be everything; what we appear will take its place far down the scale of interest ...
— The Pursuit of God • A. W. Tozer
... 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 ...
— The Horsewoman - A Practical Guide to Side-Saddle Riding, 2nd. Ed. • Alice M. Hayes
... should be given by some one who knew him more intimately than did the present writer. He was of a singularly agreeable presence, without being in the sense of the painter's model exactly "handsome"; and in particular he could boast a very pleasant and not in the least artificial smile. Some artificiality of manner was sometimes attributed to him, I think rather unjustly; but he certainly had "tricks and manners" of the kind very natural to men of decided idiosyncrasy, unless they transcend all mere trick, after ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... 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, ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... avail to ward off the artificiality of the reign of Pope. Here are two lines from the "Essay ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... 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 possessors. A dreamer had told them ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... demonstrated by the third, in the key of G. The rippling, rain-like figure for the left hand is in the nature of a study. The melody is delicate in sentiment, Gallic in its esprit. A true salon piece, this prelude has no hint of artificiality. It is a precise antithesis to the mood of the previous one. Graceful and gay, the G major prelude is a fair reflex of Chopin's sensitive and naturally buoyant nature. It requires a light hand and nimble fingers. The melodic idea requires no special comment. ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... to his canons of highest literary or poetical form in giving a Greek shape to his elegy on Keats; but it may be allowed to his English readers, or at any rate to some of them, to think that he hereby fell into a certain degree of artificiality of structure, undesirable in itself, and more especially hampering him in a plain and self-consistent expression both of his real feeling concerning Keats, and of his resentment against those who had cut short, or were supposed to have cut short, the career and the ...
— Adonais • Shelley
... artificiality which set us out of tune with all this is worse than paganism.[385] Then this "higher Pantheism" developed into the sense of an all-pervading Personality, "a soul that is the eternity of thought." And with this heightened consciousness of the nature of ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... 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 voice, ...
— The Renaissance of the Vocal Art • Edmund Myer
... not sure enough, perhaps, what is so. What does dominate us is a passion for nature; for the sea, for the sky, for the mountain, for the forest, for the evening storm, for the break of day. Perhaps when we are thoroughly steeped in this we shall reach greatness once more. But the artificiality of all modern life is against it; so is its cynicism. Sadness and sarcasm make a great Lucretius as a great Juvenal, and scorn makes a strong Aristophanes; but they do not make a Praxiteles and an Apelles; they do not even make ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... I said impatiently, "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 gravely the vital matter of their love, ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
... and follies had made old her loving heart - sweet as she was in those bygone days when, a new-made mother, she nursed us, her children, upon her own deep breast - ere the wiles of painted civilization had lured us away from her fond arms, and the poisoned sneers of artificiality had made us ashamed of the simple life we led with her, and the simple, stately home where mankind was born ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... 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 how ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... the foolish little song, "Beware," just as she had sung it over the telephone, coquettishly, but without artificiality or forced effect. ...
— Patty's Suitors • Carolyn Wells
... she can afford to buy something genuinely good, and then buy it with the conviction that she is laying up treasures of future happiness and contentment. The "good" piece is exactly what it claims to be, without pretense or artificiality, of hardwood of course, of simple construction, and graceful, artistic lines, its few ...
— The Complete Home • Various
... perhaps have yawned at these shepherds' quarrels, relieved not at all by the parvo's wit or the hermit's grossness and only occasionally by a touch of lyric poetry; but perhaps these simple scenes were welcome to the growing artificiality of the Court. For us the beautiful cossante Um amigo que eu havia stands out like a single orange gleaming from a dark-foliaged tree. The interest lies in the customs of the shepherds and their snatches ...
— Four Plays of Gil Vicente • Gil Vicente
... her up-to-date air of artificiality, there was something immensely likeable about Audrey Maynard. Behind it all, Sara sensed the real woman—clever, tactful, and ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... 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. There never was reward so qualified ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... 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 ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... noted here that the whole thing is ridiculously stagey and artificial. In spite of the new ideas fermenting in Wagner's brain, he had not yet got away from the stage-trickiness of Scribe. Unreality and artificiality face you at every step. The music is a different matter. No one, not even Mendelssohn in his Hebrides overture, has ever given us the sea, the noise and colour of it, its violence and ruthlessness, as Wagner has here. It is the sea that pervades the whole of ...
— Wagner • John F. Runciman
... 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 ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... pervade and nourish our being do we really live. The watchword, 'back to nature' may be said to have given the first impulse to the later call of the 'simple life,' which has arisen as a protest against the luxury, ostentation, and artificiality ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... apathy was shaken off, and his words came in a torrent. "What I was then I am to-day. 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 voices; ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge
... 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 at a distance, ...
— Tales of Two Countries • Alexander Kielland
... after a certain age, the character originally natural to them! We all get, as it were, a second skin; the little foibles, propensities, eccentricities, we first indulged through affectation, conglomerate and encrust till the artificiality grows ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... adventures of Pierre and his people I came, as I think, to a certain command of my material, without losing real sympathy with the simple nature of things. Dexterity has its dangers, and one of its dangers is artificiality. It is very difficult to be skilful and to ring true. If I have not wholly succeeded in A Romany of the Snows, I think I have not wholly failed, as the continued appeal of a few of the stories would ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... it is not 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 ...
— The Minister and the Boy • Allan Hoben
... hands of the mob. Never in the history of the stage has there been assembled a mob more wonderful than that. These children knew mobs! A mob to them was a daily sight, and their reproduction of it was a thing to startle you with its realism. Never was it absurd; never was there a single note of artificiality in it. It was Hogarthian in ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... 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 to be successful, the stories which are most ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... having the work sung instead of simply having it printed as an antiquarian curiosity. The music does not suggest the eighteenth century with its jangling harpsichords, its narrow, dirty streets, its artificiality, its brilliant candle-lighted rooms where the wits and great ladies assembled and talked more or less naughtily. There is indeed a strange, pathetic charm in the eighteenth century to which no one can be indifferent: it is a dead century, with the dust upon it, and yet a faint lingering aroma ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... for instance, with its famous opening sentence—"Mrs. Ballinger is one of the ladies who pursue Culture in bands, as though it were dangerous to meet alone"—has the flash and glitter, and the agreeable artificiality, of polite comedy. Undine Spragg and the many futile women whom Mrs. Wharton enjoys ridiculing more than she gives evidence of enjoying anything else belong nearly as much to the menagerie of the satirist as to the novelist's gallery. It is only in these moments of satire that Mrs. Wharton reveals ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... feeling of sickness that though this might be true to some extent, for all that he knew, many unsophisticated girls would and did go to towns and remain there for years without losing their simplicity of life and embellishments. Others, alas, had an instinct towards artificiality in their very blood, and became adepts in counterfeiting at the first glimpse of it. However, perhaps there was no great sin in a woman adding to her hair, and he resolved to think no more ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... She loved humor in a man, and this one with the yellow hair and blue eyes seemed to possess a fund of the dry sort. All this was very wrong, she knew, but she wasn't going to be the princess this morning; she was going to cast off the shell of artificiality, of etiquette. ...
— The Princess Elopes • Harold MacGrath
... roughest of tracks to follow, for the carefully-made pathway that used to go right up to the fall was swept away half a dozen years ago, when the stream in a fierce mood cleared its course of any traces of artificiality. We are deeply grateful, and make our among the big rocks and across the slippery surfaces of shale, with the roar of the waters becoming more and more insistent. The sun has turned into the ravine a great searchlight that ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... the 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 of emerald a statue in gold, which recalled at once the features of the Founder. ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... freedom of movement is gained through shunning the contractions. And this should always be kept in mind to avoid the self-consciousness and harm which come from a studied movement, not to mention the very disagreeable impression such movements give to all who appreciate their artificiality. ...
— Power Through Repose • Annie Payson Call
... drive in a governess-cart is synonymous with being buried. Many girls marry just as servants change their places—in order "to better themselves;" and alas! that parents encourage this latter-day craze for artificiality and glitter of town life that so often fascinates and spoils a bride ere the honeymoon is over. The majority of girls to-day are not content to marry the hard-working professional man whose lot is cast in the country, ...
— The Seven Secrets • William Le Queux
... 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
... in a rather obvious way. If there had been less artificiality there would have been more charm; of middle height, she was slim and dark, and her hair, parted in the middle, fell in waves over her temples. She affected a rather simple, aesthetic manner that suited her dark eyes and rather pale complexion. You said that she was ...
— The Wooden Horse • Hugh Walpole
... none came, and the train took up its leisurely progress through the spring wheat-fields and budding copses. She now began to hope that Gannett would speak before the next station. She watched him furtively, half-disposed to return to the seat opposite his, but there was an artificiality about his absorption that restrained her. She had never before seen him read with so conspicuous an air of warding off interruption. What could he be thinking of? Why should he be afraid to speak? Or was it ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... elegant idlers had nothing good to offer. "This class," I said to myself, "is false from head to foot. They live an artificial, unnatural life. I see in them only artifice, or an art dishonored by using it to mask their insincerity and artificiality." ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... sensible to her. She went on for what seemed to be a long time, 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 enough or splendid enough to attract much attention from the ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... 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 ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... them 'a specious and cherche art, demanding, for its 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 ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... their observations poetry they clothed them 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
... "the very wise one," is such an epithet for the hero of the deluge story. The case is different with Gi-il-ga-mesh, or Gish-g(n)-mash, which represent the popular and actual pronunciation of the name, or at least the approach to such pronunciation. Such forms, stripped as they are of all artificiality, impress one as genuine names. The conclusion to which we are thus led is that Gish-bil(or bl)-ga-mesh is a play upon the genuine name, to convey to those to whom the real name, as that of a foreigner, would suggest no meaning an interpretation fitting in with his character. In other words, ...
— An Old Babylonian Version of the Gilgamesh Epic • Anonymous
... however, all the hypocrisies of society are intensified threefold when heterogeneous people are thrown into the enforced contact of a Sunday together in the country; but the artificiality and insincerity of smart society is far less offensive than the pretentiousness ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... so much that is manly about the lives of those who follow the sea, so much less artificiality than in many other callings, and with our fishermen so many fewer of what we call loosely "chances in life," that to sympathize with them was easy—and sympathy is a long step toward love. Life at sea also gives time and ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... narrative, the 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 ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... rites, including incantations of the old magicians and practices of divination by lot. The doggerel of counting-out rhymes is often traceable to old Latin formulas used for these purposes, a fact that shows the absurdity and artificiality ...
— Games for the Playground, Home, School and Gymnasium • Jessie H. Bancroft
... rural vitality, a figure 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 dignity of ...
— The Loves of Krishna in Indian Painting and Poetry • W. G. Archer
... 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, therein lay ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... the country. Only, personally, I prefer town to country; and in the town we have to find for ourselves, as best we may, the decor which is the town equivalent of the great natural decor of fields and hills. Here it is that artificiality comes in; and if any one sees no beauty in the effects of artificial light, in all the variable, most human, and yet most factitious town landscape, I can only pity him, and go on ...
— Silhouettes • Arthur Symons
... 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, ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... quite unfitted to be the goddess of these rustic beauties, for all her mind could feel in that softness and sleekness and clear calling was their alikeness to artificiality. She felt thin slippers on her feet, rubbed an ecstatic cheek against the sheen of satin, and in her ears echoed no diviner music than the Tol-de-rol Tol-de-rol of the Bugletown band on Flora Day. Save in her sincerity, she was as artificial ...
— The White Riband - A Young Female's Folly • Fryniwyd Tennyson Jesse
... multitude of stray hints in art and poetry and religious custom, through modern speculation 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 Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... 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 ...
— The Flutter of the Goldleaf; and Other Plays • Olive Tilford Dargan and Frederick Peterson
... where he read to the friends assembled at its banquets his new production, "Emile,"—a singular treatise on education, not so faulty as his previous works, but still false in many of its principles, especially in regard to religion. This book contained an admirable and powerful impulse away from artificiality and towards naturalness in education, which has exerted an immense influence for good; we shall ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... it is 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 ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... war against Jugurtha, in both of which he took great pains with his style. As he witnessed many of the events he described, his books have a great value to the student of the periods. Roman writers asserted that he imitated the style of Thucydides, but there is an air of artificiality about his work which he did not have the skill to conceal. He has the honor of being the first Roman to write history, as distinguished ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... 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; ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... fling at the artificiality of the eighteenth century, and treated it with contempt as the age of doctrinaires. And now that the twentieth century is coming to the age of discretion, we hear a new term of reproach, Mid-Victorian. It expresses the sum of all villainies in taste. For some ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... to the group of pines by the pole trail the following afternoon because he had said he would, but with a new attitude of mind. He had come into contact with the artificiality of conventional relations, and it stiffened him. No wonder she had made him keep silence the afternoon before! She had done it gently and nicely, to be sure, but that was part of her good-breeding. Hilda found him formal, reserved, polite; and marvelled at it. In her was no coquetry. ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... that the time and the place are essential conditions and that Israelites alone are privileged in this respect, he is giving up, it seems to us, all that he previously attempted to explain. This is only one of the many indications which point to the essential artificiality of all the medival attempts to harmonize a given system of philosophy with a supernaturalistic standpoint, such as is that of the Bible. It is not in this way that the Bible is to be saved if ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... to 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 ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... stimulus of continual novelty in current literature. The natural result was preciosite, hyperbole, falsetto sentiment, which ranked the unusual above the natural, clever conceit above careful workmanship. It was tainted with artificiality, and now seems mawkish ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... appointment in Mauritius, a spot which was the subject of his first book (see TRAVEL AND ADVENTURE, Vol. XIX), and which was afterwards made the scene of "Paul and Virginia." In his "Nature Studies," 1783, he showed an enthusiasm for nature that contrasted vividly with the artificiality of most eighteenth-century writers; but his fame was not established until he had set all the ladies of France weeping with his "Paul and Virginia," perhaps the most sentimental book ever written. It was published in 1787, and although it does not cause in modern readers ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VII • Various
... Pushkin is his simplicity, his naivete. Though affected by foreign models, he was close to the soil. This is shown particularly in his prose tales, and it is here that his title as Founder of Russian Literature is most clearly demonstrated. He took Russia away from the artificiality of the eighteenth century, and exhibited the possibilities of native material ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... union of the syllables A-nun-na-ki[216] represents a compound ideograph, the middle syllable nun signifies 'strength,' whereas the first is the ordinary ideograph for 'water.' Hommel[217] proposed to interpret the name therefore as 'gods of the watery habitation.' The artificiality of this manner of writing points, as in several instances noted, to a mere 'play' upon the real name. Anunna reminds one forcibly of the god Anu and of the goddess Anunit, and the element ak is quite a common afformative in ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... all the greater!" chipped in Austin, tersely. "The more perfect the illusion, the hollower the artificiality. Of course, no one could take Sardanapalus seriously, any more than if he were a marionette pulled by strings instead of the sort of live marionette he really is. But where the acting and the situations are so perfect, ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour
... the Californian towns and cities, but never had they known anything approaching the ideal grace of this type of exalted, even if artificial, womanhood. And although in the fierce freedom of their little republic they had laughed to scorn such artificiality, a few yards of satin and lace cunningly fashioned, and thrown over a frame of wood and wire, touched them now with a strange sense of its superiority. The better to show its attractions, Clinton Grey had placed ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... sincere, 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 sent her reaching ...
— The Cow Puncher • Robert J. C. Stead
... by a doctor is thereby damnable and damned. But 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 surely to lose ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... PROOF OF THE HYPOTHESIS OF ORGANIC PROGRESS BY VIRTUE OF LAW. It establishes the unity of animated nature and the definite character of its entire constitution. It enables us to see how, under the flowing robes of nature, where all looks arbitrary and accidental, there is an artificiality of the most rigid kind. The natural, we now perceive, sinks into and merges in a Higher Artificial. To adopt a comparison more apt than dignified, we may be said to be placed here as insects are in ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers
... battle. The tiny Seine might as well flow in a tunnel, being bridged so much. There remains but the Arc de Triomphe, the only piece of architecture in all modern Paris worth a second look. Even this is spoiled by the same intolerable artificiality. The ridiculous sculpture on the face, the figures blowing trumpets, and, above all, the group on the summit, which the tongue of man cannot describe, so utterly hideous is it, destroy the noble lines of the arch, if any one is so imprudent as to approach near it. Receding down ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... Steel, 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 ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... Plania, [14] and we gather from more than one notice in the poems that she was married [15] when Tibullus paid his addresses to her. If the form of these poems is borrowed from Alexandria, the gentle pathos and gushing feeling redeem them from all taint of artificiality. In no poet, not even in Burns, is simple, natural emotion more naturally expressed. If we cannot praise the character of the man, we must admire the graceful poet. Nothing can give a truer picture of affection than the following tender and ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... aspect of the dance, which is psychologically perhaps the deepest: the dance is an art, and as such, of deep aesthetic influence on the whole mental life. Whenever the joy in dancing comes into the foreground, this art is developed to high artificiality. No step and no movement is left to the chance inspiration of the moment; everything is prescribed, and to learn the dances not seldom means an almost scientific study. In the great dancing periods of the rococo time the mastery ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... a further check upon the artificiality of the news side of the Press; which is that Reality always comes into its own ...
— The Free Press • Hilaire Belloc
... we should be so ready to conventionalise the beauty of this world into decorative patterns for our pilgrim tents. It is a phase, and will melt into other phases; but it tends to the increase of artificiality, and exists not only in art but in everything. It is no new thing for jaded sentiment to crave the spur of the unnatural, to prefer the clever imitation, to live in a Devachan where the surroundings appear that which we would have them to be; but it is an interesting ...
— The Roadmender • Michael Fairless
... 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 ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... Discours sur les Sciences et les Arts, the Discours sur l'Inegalite, and the Lettre a D'Alembert sur les Spectacles, Rousseau pleads against the vices, the artificiality, the insincerities, the luxuries, the false refinements, the factitious passions, the dishonest pleasures of modern society. "You make one wish," wrote Voltaire, "to walk on all fours." By nature all men are born free and equal; society has rendered them slaves, and impounded them in classes ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... neighbourhood 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 only did she play her own part convincingly, ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... 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 ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... officer set her widow's cap for him and won. It did not take many years for her to wheedle most of his money away; but there was no cessation to the demand, no apparent limit to the supply. Both were growing older, and now it became evident that Mrs. Clancy was the elder of the two, and that the artificiality of her charms could not stand the test of frontier life. No longer sought as the belle of the soldiers' ball-rooms, she aspired to leadership among their wives and families, and was accorded that pre-eminence rather than the fierce battle which was sure ...
— The Deserter • Charles King
... motives of human conduct, and his characteristics just those which have always excited the distrust, if not the scorn, of the more practical and vigorous order of minds. Probably, too—especially in his later years—there was a certain amount of self-consciousness and artificiality in his attitude toward the outer world, which was the result partly of the social difficulties we have described, partly of his own sense of difference from his surroundings, and partly again of that timidity of nature, that self-distrust, which is revealed to us in the Journal. ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... in its relations to society and to the individual. It is always indicative of the temper of the time. This is notably true of the wanton ease of the costume of Charles the Second, and the meretricious artificiality of that of the middle of the last century. And in the deliberate double-skirted costliness of the female fashions of our own day,—fashions not intended for courts or wealthy aristocracies, but for everybody,—contrasted as ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... and the best way of accounting for this dualism is, I submit, that of differential evolution. Further study of Messrs. Spencer and Gillen's work, together with the criticisms of various scholars, Mr. Lang, Mr. Hartland, Mr. Frazer, Mr. Thomas, and others, convinces me that the extreme artificiality of the class system is due partly to a want of understanding of the entire facts, and partly to the ad hoc adoption by the natives themselves of new plans to meet difficulties which must arise out of a too close adhesion to their rules. Mr. ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... 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, ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... this artificiality was spoiling her," Jaffery growled, one day. "She's as prim as an old maid. I can't get anything out ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... Mach and the Intuitionist Bergson, do indeed attempt to construct systems composed solely of direct Experience and pure Intuition; and, at the same time, almost ceaselessly insist upon the sheer novelty, the utter unexpectedness of all direct Experience, and the entire artificiality of the constructions of Thought—constructions which alone adulterate our perceptions of reality with the non-realities repetition, uniformity, foreseeableness. Yet the amazing success of the application of such ...
— Progress and History • Various
... prompted her 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 ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham
... influence in the same direction was the prevalent belief that most of the evils that existed in society were due to the mistakes of civilization, that if men could get back to a "state of nature" and start again, things might be much better. It was felt that there was too much artificiality, too much interference with natural development. Arthur Young condemned the prevailing policy of government, "because it consists of prohibiting the natural course of things. All restrictive forcible measures in domestic policy are bad." Regulation was unwise because ...
— An Introduction to the Industrial and Social History of England • Edward Potts Cheyney
... French dramatists; and no one can fail to see the reflection of Balzac in the 'Maitre Guerin' of Augier and in the 'Ami des femmes' of Dumas. And, in their turn, these plays and their fellows supplied a pattern to the novelist—to Daudet especially. A certain lack of largeness, a certain artificiality of action in Daudet's 'Fromont jeune et Risler aine,' is probably to be ascribed to the fact that the story was first conceived in the form of a play, altho it was actually written as ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... into the flames. The hall of the Gibichungs catches fire, as most halls would were a cremation attempted in the middle of the floor (I permit myself this gibe purposely to emphasize the excessive artificiality of the scene); but the Rhine overflows its banks to allow the three Rhine maidens to take the ring from Siegfried's finger, incidentally extinguishing the conflagration as it does so. Hagen attempts to snatch the ring from the maidens, who promptly drown him; and in the distant heavens the ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... good temper disarmed difference of opinion of anything harsh or unpleasant, and formed another credential for the prominence she attained in society. The absence of all artificiality in sentiment and manners, when contrasted with the straining after effect acquired by fashionably-bred ladies, also added to her attractions in the eyes ...
— Excellent Women • Various
... Elsa Galafres by name, whose methods are Gallic, whose personality is charming. Critical Berlin has taken her to itself, and her theatrical fortune is made. It may be confessed that her part, despite its artificiality, is one that any actress in the world would jump at. Sudermann is a conjurer. His puppets are all agreeable, and, in one instance, vital: the father of the baroness, a financier, who could be easily turned into a "heavy" conventional father, but, as played by Hermann Nissen, is a positively original ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... flung open, interrupting Constance's reading, and Sybil Brainard entered. The artificiality of the beauty parlor was all gone. She was a woman, who had been wronged ...
— Constance Dunlap • Arthur B. Reeve
... of the Catholic practices are what he calls "ossified organisms." Why did he set up a lay monk as a model for 20th century Christians who long to devote their lives to uplifting their fellow-men? Did he not note the artificiality of asceticism—the waste of energy that comes with fasts and mortification of the flesh and morbidly pious excitement? When asked these questions by his followers he replied that he did not mean to preach asceticism as a rule for ...
— The Saint • Antonio Fogazzaro
... 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 not have ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... GREAT WATER. This expression has occasioned much unnecessary comment on the score of its alleged artificiality. There might be a gain in definiteness in substituting "lake," or "river," as the case might be, but there would be a corresponding loss in poetry and in meaning at this particular place. "Had 'a great lake' been substituted for it, the phrase would have needed to ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... 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 of the antithetical prose of the seventeenth century, ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats
... 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 ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... something of wistfulness, something that speaks of a sore and wounded heart—though it is sufficiently evident that this organ is kept under admirable control. A girl who has been placed in a position of life where artificiality rules, who has been taught to be artificial and has thoroughly learned her lesson; yet one who would unhesitatingly know the proper thing to do did a camel bolt with her in the desert, or an eastern potentate invite her to become his two hundred and fifty-seventh wife. ...
— Five Little Plays • Alfred Sutro
... in form and Christian in spirit. He found an 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 ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... special work being given to the earlier parts of the Old Testament: he acted, however, as a sort of general editor. He was considered as, next to Ussher, the most learned churchman of his day, and enjoyed a great reputation as an eloquent and impassioned preacher, but the stiffness and artificiality of his style render his sermons unsuited to modern taste. His doctrine was High Church, and in his life he was humble, pious, and charitable. Ninety-six of his sermons were published in 1631 by ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin |
