"Naturalism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the lives of those who have gone before us; of these feelings united you will find the broadest expression in the pages of Walter Scott: it is curious as showing how sometimes one art will lag behind another in a revival, that the man who wrote the exquisite and wholly unfettered naturalism of the Heart of Midlothian, for instance, thought himself continually bound to seem to feel ashamed of, and to excuse himself for, his love of Gothic Architecture: he felt that it was romantic, and he knew that it gave him ...
— Hopes and Fears for Art • William Morris
... in Christianity. 10. The Faith Party in Religion. 11. Truth in the Orthodox Idea. 12. Error in the Orthodox Principle. 13. Faith, Knowledge, Belief, Opinion. Chapter III. The Orthodox Idea Of Natural And Revealed Religion; Or, Naturalism And Supernaturalism. 1. Meaning of Natural and Supernatural. 2. The Creation Supernatural. 3. The Question stated. 4. Argument of the Supernaturalist from successive Geologic Creations. 5. Supernatural Argument from Human Freedom. 6. Supernatural Events not necessarily Violations of ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... not be advised,' a gentleman beside her said after a delicate pause to let her impulsive naturalism ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... natural, and the natural runs itself. Hence, if we are to find anything supernatural, we must look for it in the abnormal, the chaotic, the lawless, or that which defies all reduction to order that may be depended on. This notion underlies the traditional debate between naturalism and supernaturalism.... This unhappy misconception of the relation of the natural to the supernatural has practically led the great body of uncritical thinkers into the grotesque inversion of all reason—the ...
— Miracles and Supernatural Religion • James Morris Whiton
... reaches are familiar to evangelical Christianity and to what is nowadays becoming known as 'mind-cure' religion or 'new thought.' The phenomenon is that of new ranges of life succeeding on our most despairing moments. There are resources in us that naturalism with its literal and legal virtues never recks of, possibilities that take our breath away, of another kind of happiness and power, based on giving up our own will and letting something higher work for us, and these seem to show a ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... originally produced by sculpturing the sides of a four-sided pyramid, and afterwards brought more or less into a true image of leaves, but deriving all its beauty from the botanical form. In the present instance only two leaves are set in each cluster; and the architect has been determined that the naturalism should be perfect. For he was no common man who designed that cathedral of Dunblane. I know not anything so perfect in its simplicity, and so beautiful, as far as it reaches, in all the Gothic with which I am acquainted. And just in proportion to his power of mind, that man was ...
— Lectures on Architecture and Painting - Delivered at Edinburgh in November 1853 • John Ruskin
... Foundations of Belief, being Notes Introductory to the Study of Theology, by the Right Hon. Arthur James Balfour London, 1895: "So it is with those persons who claim to show by their example that naturalism is practically consistent with the maintenance of ethical ideals with which naturalism has no natural affinity. Their spiritual life is parasitic: it is sheltered by convictions which belong, not ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... accepted Zola as his master, and the same influence is also apparent in the work of George Douglas, a brilliant young Scotsman whose premature death left only one book, The House with the Green Shutters, as an indication of what might have sprung from the methods of modified naturalism. M. Edouard Rod, an able critic, writing in the Contemporary Review (1902), pointed out that the influence of Zola has transformed novel writing in Italy, and that its effect in Germany has been ...
— A Zola Dictionary • J. G. Patterson
... and Carmen Sylva's poems, of Bourget's romances, and Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal. It is the spiritual bond that connects Wagner's operas with Turgenieff's novels, Amiel's journal with Marie Bashkirtseff's diary. Naturalism in fiction, "decadence" in poetry, realism in art, tragedy in music, scepticism in religion, cynicism in politics, and pessimism in philosophy, all spring from the same root. They are the means by which the age ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... people amounted to something socially. They all had substantial homes and substantial incomes, so that they were worthy of consideration. The difference between Aileen and most of the women involved a difference between naturalism and illusion. But this calls ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... forms, of pure naturalism and pure salvationism, the two types are violently contrasted; though here, as in most other current classifications, the radical extremes are somewhat ideal abstractions, and the concrete human beings whom we oftenest meet are intermediate varieties and mixtures. Practically, however, ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... magnificent attempt to show us how, in the words of George Meredith: "Men have come out of brutishness." His theory of evolution is separated from Naturalism by his insistence on human freedom and on the supra-consciousness which is the origin of things; on the other hand, he is separated from the Idealists by his insistence upon the reality of la duree. He contrasts ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... Background.—The closing decades of the nineteenth century saw a curious state of affairs in the drama of Spain. They were years when dogmatic naturalism, with its systematically crude presentation of life, was at its height in France, and France, during the nineteenth century, had more often than not set the fashion for Spain in literary matters. The baldness of Zola and the pessimism ...
— Heath's Modern Language Series: Mariucha • Benito Perez Galdos
... Gothic niches traced above them; and what is left of arabesque on their armour. They are far more beautiful and tender in chivalric conception than Donatello's St. George, which is merely a piece of vigorous naturalism founded on these older tombs. If you will drive in the evening to the Chartreuse in Val d'Ema, you may see there an uninjured example of this slab-tomb by Donatello himself; very beautiful; but not so perfect as the earlier ones on which it is founded. And you may see some ...
— Mornings in Florence • John Ruskin
... Berlichingen are at once apparent to the reader. But Arnim's city of the sixteenth century does not look backward only; the conflicts in it point forward also. Its abbess is not the traditional pious, fat old lady, but a tall, thin, practical and active woman. Its Faust is a figure of aggressive naturalism, a charlatan and quack who practises blood-transfusion on the hero and who lies drunk in a pig-sty—a scene which shows Arnim's power of drastic contrast at its best. The hero, Berthold, does not sit back and wait ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... sombre landscapes, stormy and tragical. The entire romantic school was born from him, Victor Hugo and George Sand, Theophile Gautier who draws from the French tongue resources unequalled in wealth and colour, and even M. Zola himself, whose naturalism, after all, is but the last form and, as it were, the end of romanticism, since it would be difficult to discover in him any characteristic that did not exist, as a ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... see that though Burns admired unaffectedly the "classic" writers, his native realism and his melody made him a potent agent in the cause of naturalism and romance. In his ideas, even more than in his style, he belongs to the oncoming school. The French Revolution, which broke upon Europe when he was at the height of his career, found him already ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... are, it is amazing, one might almost say amusing, to note how easily they eluded many artists of the earlier periods, whose work technically is valuable, and how the new school of Impressionism or Naturalism has assumed their non-importance. That all Impressionists do not agree with the following is evidenced by the good that comes to us with their mark,—"Opposed to the miserable law of composition, symmetry, balance, ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... monument of Mycenaean plastic art that has come down to our time. The rendering of the bull, for which the artists of the period showed so great a predilection, is full of life and spirit. It combines in a high degree naturalism with grandeur, and it is no exaggeration to say that no figure of a bull, at once so powerful and so true, was produced by later classical art.'[*] Plate XIII. shows that this high praise is not undeserved; to match the naturalism of this magnificent Minoan monster one must turn to the Old Kingdom ...
— The Sea-Kings of Crete • James Baikie
... for dinner in the courtyard, with one person sitting at it in order to show the proportion, and photographed it from a window of the house at the necessary elevation.[65] But for his love of accuracy he would not have done these things; nor, but for his love of naturalism, could he have given us his numerous fine studies of Nature. And but for this, Mr. Punch would never have printed one or two of his Norwegian sketches, such as "The Church-going Bell," in which there was not ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... with Ezekiel's look forward, so here with these Priests' look backward, we have to recognize much schematic precision of dates, genealogies, and explanations instinct with technical interests. The unity of sanctuary and the removal from the feasts and the worship of all traces of naturalism, which in Jeremiah, Deuteronomy, and the Second Book of Kings appear still as the subject-matters of intensest effort and conflict, are here assumed as operative even back to patriarchal times. Yet it can reasonably be pleaded that the life-work of ...
— Progress and History • Various
... up into the "gods many" and the "lords many," into the thirty thousand divinities of the pagan pantheon. This completes the process. God now gives his guilty creature over to these vain imaginations of naturalism, materialism, and idolatry, and to an increasingly darkening mind, until in the lowest forms of heathenism he so distorts and suppresses the concreated idea of the Deity that some speculatists assert that it does not belong to his constitution, and that his Maker never endowed him with ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd
... the important cities were full of great painters whose hearts were aglow with the sacred fire of genius. In the host of beautiful works which were produced in the next three centuries, every type of treatment was exemplified, varying from the most simple naturalism to the loftiest idealism. The naive realism of Filippino Lippi's chubby baby, placidly sucking his thumb as he looks out of the picture, is matched in the frolicsome boys of Andrea del Sarto's many paintings, smiling mischievously from ...
— Child-life in Art • Estelle M. Hurll
... visionary gives to the world a resuscitated God.' If this be indeed the Life of Jesus, well may we exclaim with the apostle: 'If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are, of all men, the most miserable.' And is this all that the most advanced naturalism can do? All that human genius and erudition can offer us? All that artistic grace and tenderness can win for us? Clouds and darkness rise before us as we read, the mother of our Lord loses her sanctity, Jesus becomes an impostor, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... had a fault, it was that he regarded all modern philosophy as sensuous naturalism; and if reason sometimes seemed to him suspicious, it was because he often confounded it with sophistry, which reasons indeed, but is far from ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... of a charge of iteration and monotony, I reaffirm that here is the great antidote for the many kindred difficulties of our troubled time. From how many sides comes the strain! Sometimes from that of an open naturalism; sometimes from that of a partial yet far-reaching "naturalism under a veil" which some recent teachings on "The Being of Christianity" may exemplify, with principles and presuppositions which largely underlie the extremer forms, certainly, of the modern ...
— Messages from the Epistle to the Hebrews • Handley C.G. Moule
... but to humanity as such. So Strauss reaches the same thought that Gregg expresses—so far as the relation of Christ to Godhead is concerned. While he and Strauss differ upon the subject of the Godhead, one being a Deist and the other a Pantheist, they find their agreement in naturalism, that is to say, they account for the Christ character upon the score of his being more finely organized and endowed by relation to the Godhead; Gregg claims that this is attributable to an all-wise Godhead, and Strauss claims that it is attributable to the all-pervading life, or Pantheistic Godhead, ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, - Volume I, No. 9. September, 1880 • Various
... talk. Why is it that many of us find this old-fashioned elegance of Irving and Hawthorne irritating? Is it the fault of the writer or of the reader? Partly of the former, I think: that anxious finish, those elaborately rounded periods have something of the artificial, which modern naturalism has taught us to distrust. But also, I believe, the fault is largely our own. We have grown so nervous, in these latter generations, so used to short cuts, that we are impatient of anything slow. Cut out the descriptions, cut out the reflections, coupez vos phrases. Hawthorne's style ...
— Four Americans - Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman • Henry A. Beers
... was virtue, and that bad writing was bad feeling."] Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats was unflinching in this particular. The Brownings subscribed to the doctrine. Tennyson's allegiance to scientific naturalism kept him in doubt for a time, but in the end his faith in beauty triumphed, and he was ready to praise the poet as inevitably possessing a nature exquisitely attuned to goodness. One often runs across dogmatic expression of the doctrine in minor ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... for the argumentative tone of all his utterances on such subjects which I have collected in Subdivision III of this section. To these I have added some passages which throw light on Leonardo's personal views on the Universe. They are, without exception, characterised by a broad spirit of naturalism of which the principles are more strictly applied in his essays on Astronomy, and still ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... is wholly uncertain. These anomalous compositions represent a boar-hunt and other sports, with groups of musicians, dancers, and jugglers, intervening. In accord with the secular character of the subjects is the rude naturalism of the style. Positive knowledge as to date being wanting, it is impossible to speak of these works otherwise than to say that they cannot be of Byzantine origin. If of real antiquity they will have to join company with other ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... Gallery, where some remarkable specimens of ancient art will be found among the Egyptian Antiquities. The painted statue (Hall III.) of the Seated Scribe is one of the most precious examples the world possesses of an art admirable in its naturalism and power of vivid portraiture, and the charming figure of a priestess, known as Dame Toui, exquisitely wrought in wood, is equally noteworthy. A superb example of a royal papyrus of the Book of the Dead will also invite attention. We pass ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... This example, Fig. 2 in Plate 27 is sufficiently characteristic of the purist mediaeval landscape, though there is somewhat more leaning to naturalism than is usual at the period. The next example, Fig. 3, is from Turner's vignette of St. Anne's Hill (Rogers's Poems, p. 214). Turner almost always groups his trees, so that I have had difficulty in finding one on a small scale and isolated, ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... effective. On the modern stage, produced in the modern manner, they are less effective. There are many reasons why they should be less effective on the modern stage. During the last thirty years there has been a tendency towards naturalism in the theatre. Modern audiences have learned not to care for poetry on the stage unless it is made "natural" by realistic scenery. Modern audiences are accustomed to the modern forms of dramatic construction, which are unlike the Elizabethan forms. ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield
... a third time I experienced the pain and joy of a sudden and inward light. Naturalism, truth, the new art, above all the phrase, "the new art," impressed me as with a sudden sense of light. I was dazzled, and I vaguely understood that my "Roses of Midnight" were sterile eccentricities, dead flowers that could not be galvanised ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... as a rule, of general conceptions, of which every age sees the birth and disappearance; examples in point are the theories which mould literature and the arts—those, for instance, which produced romanticism, naturalism, mysticism, &c. Opinions of this order are as superficial, as a rule, as fashion, and as changeable. They may be compared to the ripples which ceaselessly arise and vanish on the surface of ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... suspicion on it, by putting it into some odious category; even though the connection is only apparent, or else of a loose character. You can say, for instance, "That is Manichasism," or "It is Arianism," or "Pelagianism," or "Idealism," or "Spinozism," or "Pantheism," or "Brownianism," or "Naturalism," or "Atheism," or "Rationalism," "Spiritualism," "Mysticism," and so on. In making an objection of this kind, you take it for granted (1) that the assertion in question is identical with, or is at least contained ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; The Art of Controversy • Arthur Schopenhauer
... the one unified science. Earnest objections have, however, been made to the tendency to regard nature as a mechanism. To one of the most curious of them we have been treated lately by Dr. Ward in his book on "Naturalism ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... philosophy was empirical, is proved by his "Essay on Man," which, notwithstanding all its brilliant rhetoric, is the shallow version of a shallow system of naturalism. And one may accommodate to him the well-known saying of Lyndhurst about Lord Brougham, "who would have made a capital Chancellor if he had had only a little law;" so Pope was very well qualified to have ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... who could endure this stringent test. Some critics, indeed, while praising him, scoff at his chaste and surprising optimism; but it is refreshing to recommend to English readers, in these days of Realism and Naturalism, the works of a recent French writer which do not require maturity of years in the reader. 'Une Tache d'Encre', as I have said, was crowned by the French Academy; and Bazin received from the same exalted body the "Prix Vitet" for the ensemble of his writings in 1896, ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... the poetry and romance, almost all the interest and grandeur and blessedness of human life, have no foundation in truth. To persons who believe in a Fatherly God, and in human immortality, pure naturalism is terribly uninviting. It was always so to me. I well remember the mingled horror and pity with which, when a Christian, I regarded the man who had no personal God, and no hope of a future life. I remember ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... pages. Such sources of suggestion and insight have been indicated wherever they could be identified. In especial I must record my grateful sense of obligation to Professor Irving Babbitt's Rousseau and Romanticism. The chapter on Naturalism owes much to its brilliant and ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... of 1601 a very smart and fascinating performance, carried over almost to grotesqueness just to show it was not done for mere delight in the frank naturalism of the functions with which it deals. That Mark Twain had made considerable study of this frankness is apparent from chapter four of 'A Yankee At King Arthur's Court,' where he refers to the conversation at ...
— 1601 - Conversation as it was by the Social Fireside in the Time of the Tudors • Mark Twain
... the temporary formulas of his craft. The enduring part of them—the truth which each only imperfectly veils—should abide with him as the most precious of his possessions, but they all: Realism, Romanticism, Naturalism, even the unofficial sentimentalism (which, like the poor, is exceedingly difficult to get rid of), all these gods must, after a short period of fellowship, abandon him—even on the very threshold of the temple—to the stammerings of his conscience and to the outspoken consciousness of the difficulties ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... comes at once into mind the sublimination of this longing in the lovely myth of Endymion which so powerfully affected Keats, and fascinated even Browning. Appeal might also be made to the sweet naturalism of St. Francis with his endearing name, "Our ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... present the principles which it was the object of the Vatican Council to carry into practical effect. The Syllabus stigmatizes pantheism, naturalism, and absolute rationalism, denouncing such opinions as that God is the world; that there is no God other than Nature; that theological matters must be treated in the same manner as philosophical ones, that ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... science one has to deal with a body of knowledge which is frequently regarded as the only knowledge. To write a chapter about science from a philosophical stand-point is, in the present state of opinion, to undertake a polemic against exclusive naturalism, an attitude which is itself philosophical, and as such is well known in the history of philosophy as positivism or agnosticism. I have avoided the polemical spirit and method so far as possible, but have, nevertheless, here taken sides against ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... country, let alone others. He knew many enlightened and refined districts which had never heard the principles of this society, much less felt them. They were not popular anywhere in the age in which they were inaugurated. Therefore they were not founded in nature, and the claim of naturalism must fall to the ground. The taste for the beautiful, and the love of right, were innate faculties of the mind, because they existed everywhere; not so with the recognition of the claim of Woman's ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... about a practical antagonism. From the earliest times of which we have any knowledge, Naturalism and Supernaturalism have consciously, or unconsciously, competed and struggled with one another; and the varying fortunes of the contest are written in the records of the course of civilisation, from those of Egypt and Babylonia, ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... borne no considerable fruit. The evangelical party, or Methodists, as they are called, are accused by the rest of being the cause of their present melancholy state. The rationalism of the indifferens generally prevails among the clergy, either in the shape of the naturalism of the eighteenth century (Coquerel), or in the more advanced form of modern criticism, as it is carried out by the faculty of Strasburg, with the aid of German infidelity. Payment by the State and hatred of Catholicism ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... get in some day, you may be sure," he answered. "There is no spirit higher and stronger than the spirit of naturalism in man; and in time, when a few prejudices have died away and mawkish sentiment has been worn threadbare, Zola will be enrolled as the first of the French Academicians, with even more honors than if he had succeeded in ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... Paris the first comrade to greet him was Zola. The pair became inseparable; they fought for naturalism, and it was to Cezanne that Zola dedicated his Salons which are now to be found in a volume of essays on art and literature bearing the soothing title of Mes Haines. Zola, pitching overboard many friends, wrote his famous ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... stresses of the eighteenth century, that finds its early scarce differentiated expression in Harrington's Oceana, and after fresh draughts of the tradition of Brutus and Cato and some elegant trifling with noble savages, budded in La Cite Morellyste, flowered in the emotional democratic naturalism of Rousseau, and bore abundant fruit in the French Revolution. These are two very distinct strands. Directly they were freed in America from the grip of conflict with British Toryism, they came apart as the Republican and Democratic parties respectively. Their continued ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... the man of his period, and his period was that of Naturalism. In "Les Soirees de Medan," the volume in which "Boule de Suif" appeared, there is another story called "Sac au Dos," in which another novelist made his appearance among the five who "publicly affirmed their ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... broad and clear-cut channel of naturalism, down which will course a drama poignantly shaped, and inspired with high intention, but faithful to the seething and multiple life around us, drama such as some are inclined to term photographic, deceived by a seeming simplicity into ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... one-sidedness. The two chief currents were, on the one hand, the objectivity of the Pushkin school, artistic contemplation of everything poetical in Russian life; and on the other hand, the negatively satirical current of naturalism, of the Gogol school, whose principal attention was directed to the imperfections of Russian life. To these were added, by the writers of the '40's, a social-moral movement, the fermentation of ideas, which is visible in the educated classes of Russian society ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... premisses of Positivism we can never prove the existence of other minds or find a place for such conceptions as cause and substance; for into these premisses the existence of our own mind and its self-activity have not entered. And accordingly we have seen Naturalism led on in perfect consistency to resolve man into an automaton that goes of itself as part of a still vaster automaton, Nature as mechanically conceived, which goes of itself. True, this mechanism goes of itself ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... dolce Napoli! I wonder if it is as delightful as it's said to be in that cholera breeding fishing harbor. Blague, no doubt! Blague! Blague! Naples—bridal couples, love, joy of life, antiquities, modernity, liberalism, conservatism, idealism, realism, naturalism,—blague, blague, the ...
— Plays: Comrades; Facing Death; Pariah; Easter • August Strindberg
... Speaking then of the gradual decay of the various pagan faiths of the Aryan races, Renan continues: "It is precisely at this epoch that the civilized world finds itself face to face with the Jewish faith. Based upon the clear and simple dogma of the divine unity, discarding naturalism and pantheism by the marvelously terse phrase, 'In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,' possessing a law, a book, the depository of grand moral precepts and of an elevated religious poetry, Judaism had an incontestable superiority, and it might have been foreseen ...
— Who Wrote the Bible? • Washington Gladden
... nature be there only for our minds, as idealists contend, or not. Our minds in any case would have to record the kind of nature it is, and write it down as operating through blind laws of physics. This is the complexion of present day materialism, which may better be called naturalism. Over against it stands 'theism,' or what in a wide sense may be termed 'spiritualism.' Spiritualism says that mind not only witnesses and records things, but also runs and operates them: the world being thus guided, not by its lower, but by its ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... Zola was fully launched on his great career as a writer of the school which he called "Naturalist." Therese Raquin was a powerful study of the effects of remorse preying upon the mind. In this work the naturalism was generally characterized as "brutal," yet many critics admitted that it was absolutely true to nature. It had, in fact, all the gruesome accuracy of a clinical lecture. In 1868 came Madeleine Ferat, an exemplification of the doctrine of heredity, as inexorable ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... supernatural began in primitive delusion. How comes it that this idea has not by now disappeared from civilised society? What are the causes that have given it such a lengthy lease of life? Experience has shown that all really verifiable knowledge counts as an asset of naturalism, and is so far opposed to supernaturalism. Moreover, the history of science has been such that one feels justified in the assumption that, given time and industry, there are no phenomena that are not susceptible to a naturalistic ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... the influence. Balzac brought to fiction a greater franchise of theme: Zola taught it to regard a human being—individual or collectively social—as primarily animal: that is, he explains action on this hypothesis. And as an inevitable consequence, realism passed to the so-called naturalism. Zola believed in this view as a theory and his practice, not always consistent with it, was sufficiently so in the famous Rougon-Macquart series of novels begun the year of the Franco-Prussian war, to establish it as a method, ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... yet, while Christians sleep, become one of the greatest, if not the greatest, antagonism in the land to all evangelical instruction and piety. But how long before they will be so,—when they shall have become the mere creatures of the State, and, under the plea of no sectarianism, mere naturalism shall be the substance of all the religious, and the basis of all the secular teaching which they shall give? And let it not be forgotten that strong currents of influence, in all parts of the country, acting in ...
— American Scenes, and Christian Slavery - A Recent Tour of Four Thousand Miles in the United States • Ebenezer Davies
... and Victor Cherbuliez, with his Comte Kostia, endeavoured to perpetuate idealism or at least to recreate it in other forms. And then there were independents, like Flaubert who, with Madame Bovary, passed realism by on his way to naturalism. Yet it is worth remarking that Flaubert made a sort of volte face in 1869, and wrote his Education Sentimentale, in which, under the pressure of simple circumstance, the hero descends gradually from the soaring of youth's hopes and ambitions to the dull, dun monotony of mature ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... at the same time an attack upon him; and in either capacity it covers a great deal of ground. For the dispute does not lie simply between comedy and tragedy—which latter, with the old tragedians, was often only the naturalism of comedy on a larger scale—but between naturalism and humanity, as more advanced thinkers understood it; between the old ideas of human and divine conveyed by tragedy and comedy alike, and the new ones which Euripides, the friend of Socrates, had imported into them; and the question ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... formally declined to stretch your matter out, here and there, "with solemn specious nonsense about something unconnected with the story." No "padding" for Miss Austen! in fact, madam, as you were born before Analysis came in, or Passion, or Realism, or Naturalism, or Irreverence, or Religious Open-mindedness, you really cannot hope to rival your literary sisters in the minds of a perplexed generation. Your heroines are not passionate, we do not see their red wet cheeks, and ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... movement dominated literature for a few years. Then, in Hauptmann's own temper and in his own work, arose a vigorous idealistic reaction which, blending with the severe technique and incorruptible observation of naturalism, went far toward producing—for a second time—a new vision and a new art. The conditions amid which this development originated are essential to a full understanding ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume I • Gerhart Hauptmann
... discussion of these views I may be allowed to refer to my' Ethics of Naturalism,' chap. viii. (chap. ix. in the new edition). The same volume contains a more exhaustive examination than is possible in this lecture of the whole ...
— Recent Tendencies in Ethics • William Ritchie Sorley
... naturalism is essentially calculated to collide with the popular belief. It seeks a natural explanation of the world, first and foremost of its origin, but in the next place of individual natural phenomena. As to the genesis of the world, speculations of a mythical kind had already developed on the basis of ...
— Atheism in Pagan Antiquity • A. B. Drachmann
... a well-known philosopher, in this line, is, however, sufficiently noteworthy for special mention here. Jacobi, in his intense theism, protests against the unqualified idealism of Fichte, and the indefinite naturalism of Schelling; and, in his famous Letter to Fichte,[1] he says vehemently: "But the Good what is it? I have no answer if there be no God. As to me, this world of phenomena—if it have all its truth in these phenomena, and no more profound significance, if it have nothing beyond itself ...
— A Lie Never Justifiable • H. Clay Trumbull
... specially with sex. It presents an average picture of Russian society. But it presents the picture with such exact, uncompromising truthfulness that the members of the Stage Society mistook nearly all the portraits for caricatures, and tedious caricatures. In naturalism the play is assuredly an advance on any other play that I have seen or that has been seen in England. Its naturalism is positively daring. The author never hesitates to make his personages as ridiculous as in life they would be. In this he differs from every other playwright that ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... 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 ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... been delicate in childhood, and the stage of hardy naturalism which interposes itself between tender juvenility and the birth of self-consciousness did not in his case last long enough to establish his frame in the vigour to which it was tending. There was nothing sickly about him; it was ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... apprehended with a strong, masculine joy in life and nature seen in all their aspects. The lack of these elements in the conventional poets seems to him and his disciples like leaving out the salt from the ocean, making poetry merely pretty and blinking whole classes of facts. Hence the naturalism and animalism of some of the divisions in Leaves of Grass, particularly that entitled Children of Adam, which gave great offense by its immodesty, or its outspokenness, Whitman holds that nakedness is chaste; ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... lessons of all the 'mysteries' of the East—mysteries which it was the peculiar destiny of the Hebrew race to resist through ages of struggle. It was through the teaching of such mysteries of pantheistic naturalism that, as the unflinching Jewish deists and anthropomorphists believed, man fell, and their belief was set forth in their very first religious tradition—the history of the apple, the serpent, and the Fall. And it is to the very extraordinary nature of the Hebrew race, by which ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Hoffding, Gizycki, Alexander, Ree. As works which criticise evolutionistic ethics from an intuitive point of view and in an instructive way, may be cited: Guyau "La morale anglaise contemporaine" (Paris, 1879.), and Sorley, "Ethics of Naturalism". I will only mention some interesting contributions to ethical discussion which can be found in Darwinism besides the idea of struggle ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... often shade into one another, and it is not always easy to draw the lines between them. It is worth while, however, to keep them separate, because they represent different stadia of religious and general culture; the nature gods are found in societies which have risen above the old crude naturalism, but have not yet reached the higher grade of intellectual and ethical distinctness. But as they are in a real sense dissociated from natural objects, they tend to expand as society grows, and it is unnecessary to ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... a slight set back and disappointment. An upstart impresario brought over from Germany a production in which form and design had broken down naturalism. This was presented at one of the Halls, and was an instantaneous success, and Charles, in a fit of jealousy, wrote an unfortunately spiteful attack on the German producer, accusing him of stealing his ideas. Sir Henry, a born publicist, was enraged, and threatened to ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan
... Duke of Argyll, "to observe the language which this most advanced disciple of pure naturalism instinctively uses, when he has to describe the complicated structure of this curious order of plants (the Orchids). 'Caution in ascribing intentions to nature,' does not seem to occur to him as possible. Intention is the one thing which he does ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... which is, in truth, the essence of all poetry. The introduction of the chorus would be the last and decisive step; and if it only served this end, namely, to declare open and honorable warfare against naturalism in art, it would be for us a living wall which tragedy had drawn around herself, to guard her from contact with the world of reality, and maintain her own ideal soil, her ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... ensure her fame. She denied ever having written for posterity, and she predicted that in fifty years she would be forgotten. It may be that there has been for her, as there is for every illustrious author who dies, a time of test and a period of neglect. The triumph of naturalism, by influencing taste for a time, may have stopped our reading George Sand. At present we are just as tired of documentary literature as we are disgusted with brutal literature. We are gradually coming back to a better comprehension of what there is of "truth" in George Sand's ...
— George Sand, Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings • Rene Doumic
... unknown in Assyrian art. And then, the effect of this Daedal skill in them was, that they came nearer to the proper form of humanity. It is the wonderful life-likeness of these early images which tradition celebrates in many anecdotes, showing a very early instinctive turn for, and delight in naturalism, in the Greek temper. As Cimabue, in his day, was able to charm men, almost as with illusion, by the simple device of half-closing the eyelids of his personages, and giving them, instead of round eyes, eyes that seemed to be in some degree sentient, ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... the temperaments that are most allured and terrified by this art of the bogey and the background that most feel the need of and best appreciate the calm and level, rational dignity of Greek naturalism and especially the naturalism of ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison
... propose to try to produce a faint echo of one of them by speaking successively of the lamps of Greek art, lamps which give us light and serve to show our way. I find in Greek art eight notable features: (1) Humanism, (2) Simplicity, (3) Balance and Measure, (4) Naturalism, (5) Idealism, (6) Patience, ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... visitor's attention by the brilliancy of their black and white. On the writing-table were piles of paper-covered French books, representing for the most part the palmy days of the Romantics, though every here and there were intervening strata of naturalism, balanced in their turn by recurrent volumes of Sainte-Beuve. The whole had a studious air. The books were evidently collected with a purpose, and the piles of orderly MSS. lying on the writing-table seemed to sum up and ...
— Miss Bretherton • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the world. Mechanism applied to the world gives materialism; applied to knowledge, sensationalism of a mathematical type; applied to the will, determinism; to morality and the state, ethical and political naturalism. Nevertheless, the empirical tendency of his nation has a certain power over him; he holds fast to the position that all ideas ultimately spring from experience. With his energetic but short-breathed ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... singular lack of sympathy with actors. Nor was he able to win great success with his first book of importance, Le Petit Chose, delightful as that mixture of autobiography and romance must prove to any sympathetic reader. He was essentially a romanticist and a poet cast upon an age of naturalism and prose, and he needed years of training and such experience as the Prussian invasion gave him to adjust himself to his life-work. Such adjustment was not needed for Tartarin de Tarascon, begun shortly ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... was never meant to be this. The sudden and universal Naturalism, or inclination to copy ordinary natural objects, which manifested itself among the painters of Europe, at the moment when the invention of printing superseded their legendary labors, was no false instinct. It was misunderstood and misapplied, but it came at the right time, and has maintained ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... of the same period, but showing still more advanced naturalism, from a very early group of third order windows, near the Church of St. Eustachio on ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... relation to consciousness, but the very tools with which the scientist works—e.g. space and time—become so puzzling that only by a return to a metaphysic do they become partially explainable. And thus we are landed in a region of idealism in the very midst of the work of natural science. Naturalism has arisen only because the subject was forgotten in the enchantment of the object. The attention has been turned so long on the object that the nature and the results of the attention itself are quite left out of account. We can all believe in what naturalism has to say concerning ...
— An Interpretation of Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy • W. Tudor Jones
... reference to science and scientific men, there is much to criticize and condemn. It is often snappish, petulant, ill-humored, unfair, and sometimes malicious in the extreme. Such opprobrious terms as infidelity, irreligion, rationalizing tendencies, naturalism, contempt for the Scriptures, etc., are freely used. Scientific men are called infidel pretenders, and are charged with a secret conspiracy to overthrow the faith of the Christian world. A respectable religious weekly paper in this country, in noticing Sir Charles ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... Pretenders, perhaps, usurpers of the titles of others, men to whom literature is nothing but merchandise. These may be totally free from the impulse. Tolstoy, Ibsen, Hauptmann, Hugo are reformers of the first order, whose words are charged with revolt. The transcendentalism of Emerson, the naturalism of Zola, the cynicism of La Rochefoucauld are all convergent streams in the torrent of reforming words which make the ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... man. When a virgin finds an "affinity" she should steer it against a marriage contract at the earliest possible moment; when a wife discovers one to whom she is not wedded she should employ a bread and water diet to subdue her "natural super-naturalism"— and reinforce her religion with a season of ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... appearance of O Mulato by Aluizio Azevedo (1857-1912), the literature of Brazil, prepared for such a reorientation by the direct influence of the great Portuguese, Eca de Queiroz, and Emile Zola, was definitely steered toward naturalism. "In Aluizio Azevedo," says Benedicto Costa, "one finds neither the poetry of Jose de Alencar, nor the delicacy,—I should even say, archness—of Macedo, nor the sentimental preciosity of Taunay, nor the subtle irony of Machado de Assis. His phrase is brittle, lacking lyricism, tenderness, ...
— Brazilian Tales • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
... an apparently objective but gloomy depiction of life in the garrisons, as through the nourishment that it gave to the torturing doubts which during the last decades of the nineteenth century grew rank as a fatalistic pessimism. The very principle of naturalism as a form of art, with its one-sided preference for disease, crime, and weakness, flourished on the offal of a materialistic philosophy of life, which viewed the vanity of existence with weary resignation. But this disease of the times was as little a specifically German malady as the naturalism ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... sense, have made humanity, viz., the Indo-European and the Semitic races. The first religious intuitions of the Indo-European race were essentially naturalistic. But it was a profound and moral naturalism, a loving embrace of Nature by man, a delicious poetry, full of the sentiment of the Infinite—the principle, in fine, of all that which the Germanic and Celtic genius, of that which a Shakespeare and a Goethe should ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... otherwise. "Painting," they say, "which seeks to learn from an age when art was, however sincere, incompetent and uneducated, deliberately rejects the knowledge and skill of centuries." It will be no easy matter to conquer this assumption that Primitive art is merely untrained Naturalism, but until it is conquered there seems little hope for a sympathetic understanding of the ...
— Concerning the Spiritual in Art • Wassily Kandinsky
... so-called entities—personality, consciousness, self—but symbols, as Professor Mach says, useful in so far as they help us to express our physical sensations, but which with further research must be pronounced illusions?[1] Monistic naturalism, which would explain all psychical experiences in terms of cerebral action, must not be allowed to arrogate to itself powers which it does not possess, and quietly brush {86} aside facts which do not fit into its system. The moral sanctions ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... Scott is a very interesting witness on account of the principles and presuppositions employed by him. In the last hundred years or so the problems of realism and naturalism have been canvassed almost too thoroughly between disputants who seem not always to know when they are wandering from the point or wearying their audience with verbiage and platitudes. But out of all the controversy there has emerged at least one plain probability—that there ...
— Sir Walter Scott - A Lecture at the Sorbonne • William Paton Ker
... the human mind against the Manichaeism of monkery: then the severity and exclusiveness of Puritanism was a natural and necessary revolt against that luxury and immorality; a protest for man's God-given superiority over nature, against that Naturalism which threatened to end in sheer animalism. While Italian prelates have found an apologist in Mr. Roscoe, and English playwrights in Mr. Gifford, the old Puritans, who felt and asserted, however extravagantly, that there was an eternal law which was above all Borgias ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... no guile, no coquetry, no deceit. So perfect was her naturalism that often by those who knew her least she was considered affected. Her trust in whomever she found herself with attained so directly its reward; her unconsciousness of pose was so rhythmically graceful; her ignorance and innocence so triumphantly effective, that the mind ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... and ethics than it could find in the official churchmanship and the formal morality of the time. Mr. Leslie Stephen[3] points out the connection between the three currents of tendency known as sentimentalism, romanticism, and naturalism. He explains, to be sure, that the first English sentimentalists, such as Richardson and Sterne, were anything but romantic. "A more modern sentimentalist would probably express his feelings[4] by describing some past state of society. He would paint some ideal society in ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... may at all, in His most merciful hands, promote the holy cause of such a hidden life and its fruitful issues, it will indeed be happiness to the writer. In these days of stifling materialism in philosophy, and withering naturalism in theology, but in which also the Holy Spirit, far and wide, is breathing upon us in special mercy from above, there is no duty more pressing on the Christian than to seek, in the world of work, after that life which is "lived in ...
— To My Younger Brethren - Chapters on Pastoral Life and Work • Handley C. G. Moule
... culture and differentiated it from all Orientalism, including even the loftiest Indian philosophy. Every attempt to substitute for this fundamental concept and its emotional content something else—whether it be pantheism, Buddhism, or naturalism—will always ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... L'Education Sentimentale, while his very style, with its sumptuous verbal echoes, its resonant, rhythmic periods—is not all this the beginning of that symbolism carried to such lengths by Verlaine and his followers? Shakespeare himself ranged from gross naturalism ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... book and what it is all about, I frankly am at a loss. That's the difficulty of being too near it. Whether it is realism, naturalism, or merely restrained romanticism, I simply do not know. It is awkward not knowing, for in the battle of the schools now raging I should like to take sides. I should like either to charge with the romantics, ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis
... approached a woman who possessed this power at once of fascinating his senses and controlling his intellect to a glad reverence. Whether in her presence or musing upon her in solitude, he found that the unsparing naturalism of his scrutiny was powerless to degrade ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... explain the scene of events, or as a sacred symbol, has forced the sculptors of all ages to the invention of some type or letter for it, if not an actual imitation. We find every degree of conventionalism or of naturalism in these types, the earlier being, for the most part, thoughtful symbols; the latter, awkward attempts at portraiture.[65] The most conventional of all types is the Egyptian zigzag, preserved in the astronomical sign of Aquarius; but every nation, with any capacities of thought, has given, ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... lay in their power of execution, and in a certain 'bold naturalism, or rather animalism,' which they added to their able imitations, for their pictures are not so much their own, as 'After Titian,' 'After Correggio,' etc. In this intent regard to style, and this perfecting of means to an end, thought ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... truth is enlarged. Things become known which were formerly unknown and, though this brings us no nearer to ultimate universal truth, yet it shows us that many of our guesses were wrong. Everything that catches on to realism and naturalism as much as Christianity does must be affected by any profound modification in our ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... quantity—colloquial speech, raised to the level of consummate art. The famous ecriture artiste remained an unfulfilled ideal. The expression, first used in the preface to Les Freres Zemganno, merely foreshadows a possible development of style which shall come into being when realism or naturalism, ceasing to describe the ignoble, shall occupy itself with the attempt to render refinements, reticences, subtleties, and half-tones of a more elusive order. It is an aspiration, a counsel of perfection ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... to prove that a belief in purpose as the causal reality of which Nature is an expression is not inconsistent with a full and whole-hearted acceptance of the explanations of naturalism. ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... obscure, and thus present the greatest difficulty to the advancing explanations of science. Now, in our own day there are but very few of these strongholds of the miraculous left. Nearly the whole field of explanation is occupied by naturalism, so that no one ever thinks of resorting to supernaturalism except in the comparatively few cases where science has not yet been able to explore the most obscure regions of causation. One of these cases is the origin of life; ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... Wales has disappointed me a little. That vile modernist naturalism is creeping back even into our painted glass. I could have wished that the artist's designs for the windows had been a ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... misleadingly—"romantic" incident in addition to purely novel-character and presentation. But his general manner of dealing reproduces itself, almost more than that of any of his contemporaries, in those novelists of the last quarter of the century who do not bow the knee to Naturalism: and one finds some actual recognition of the fact in dedications to him by younger novelists such ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... when it is not the cunning device of those who, uncertain of their talent, would seek to add lustre to it by the authority of a school. Such, for instance, are the high priests who have proclaimed Stendhal for a prophet of Naturalism. But Stendhal himself would have accepted no limitation of his freedom. Stendhal's mind was of the first order. His spirit above must be raging with a peculiarly Stendhalesque scorn and indignation. For the truth is that more than one kind of intellectual cowardice ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... it than that," said Austen Mitchell. "We're out against the damnable affectations of naturalism and humanism. If I draw a perfect likeness of a fat, pink woman I've got a fat, pink woman and nothing else but a fat pink woman. And a fat, pink woman is a work of Nature, not a work of art. And I'm lying. I'm presenting as a reality what is only an appearance. The better the likeness ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair
... in their naturalism than is Taillefer's picture of the sufferings of the sailors to whom he ministered. Their skin became covered with tumours, which left ugly black patches; where hair grew appeared sores "the colour of ...
— Terre Napoleon - A history of French explorations and projects in Australia • Ernest Scott
... valuable contribution to biological psychology, which is a field of modern naturalism in which ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... words, Greek art expressed the rare quality of Greek life; its naturalism, its compactness, its clearness. And it did so instinctively both to the artist and the spectator. We are not to think that because, in order to understand ancient art, it may be necessary for us first to obtain a conception of life and then to match it in art, this is essential ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... contrary, in face of every effort to conciliate the naturalism in man, men look upon these churches, and the Christianity they advocate, with suspicion. They see these churches have their goods still marked with the words, "supernatural," "miraculous." It is true, these churches ...
— Christ, Christianity and the Bible • I. M. Haldeman
... former shrunk, grown vague and questionable; as the one has more and more filled the sphere of action, so has the other retreated into the region of meditation, or vanished behind the screen of mere verbal recognition. Whether this difference of the fortunes of Naturalism and Supernaturalism is an indication of the progress, or of the regress of humanity, of a fall from or an advance towards the higher life, is a matter of opinion. The point to which I wish to direct attention is that ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... dogmas taken over naively by Luther, that of the existence of a personal, ethical God. Finely contrasting the ideals of Renaissance and Reformation, [Sidenote: Renaissance vs. Reformation] he shows that the former was naturalism, the latter an intensification of religion and of a convinced other-worldliness, that while the ethic of the former was based on "affirmation of life," that of the latter was based on "calling." Even as compared with Catholicism, Troeltsch ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... middle of the fifteenth century he had already anticipated much of that meditative subtlety, which is sometimes supposed peculiar to the great imaginative workmen of its close. Leaving the simple religion which had occupied the followers of Giotto for a century, and the simple naturalism which had grown out of it, a thing of birds and flowers only, he sought inspiration in what to him were works of the modern world, the writings of Dante and Boccaccio, and in new readings of his own of classical stories: or, if he painted religious incidents, painted them with an ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... could still return to a stylistic management of the falling folds of drapery, after the naturalistic drapery of Phidias, and in Egypt the same age that saw the village Head-man carved in wood for burial in some tomb with so complete a naturalism saw, set up in public places, statues full of an august formality that implies traditional measurements, a philosophic defence. The spiritual painting of the 14th century passed on into Tintoretto and that of Velasquez into modern painting with no sense of loss to weigh against the gain, ...
— Certain Noble Plays of Japan • Ezra Pound |
