"Inartistic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... glimmer of hope I am delighted to discover. Mr. Chesterton likens Little Bethel to a monstrous mushroom. There can be only one reason for this inartistic mixture of analogy and antithesis. Mr. Chesterton evidently knows that a large mushroom is not so sweet or so toothsome as a small one. A 'monstrous mushroom,' even to those who like mushrooms, is coarse and less tasty. Now the gleam of hope lies in the ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham
... sounding them smoothly, clearly, and rapidly, is not necessarily making music, and a succession of them without warmth and coloring is truly as inartistic as painting without shading. If it were more commonly realized that it is an essential part of the music teacher's vocation to train the mind and the emotions and through them the will and the character, there would be a higher ...
— For Every Music Lover - A Series of Practical Essays on Music • Aubertine Woodward Moore
... not able to seize upon the choicest luxuries of living, as our accommodations, even such as they were, proved to be expensive enough to hamper us. We had all expected to be blissful in Italy, and so the inartistic and inhuman accessories of life were harder to bear there than elsewhere. I remember a perpetual rice pudding (sent in the tin ten-story edifices which caterers supply laden with food), of which the almost daily sight maddened us, and threw us into a Burton's melancholy of silence, for nothing ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... races evolved along similar lines and passed through corresponding stages of nascent culture. Herbert Spencer's Descriptive Sociology presents an unequalled mass of facts regarding existing primitive races, but, unfortunately, its inartistic method of arrangement makes it repellent to the general reader. E. B. Tyler's Primitive Culture and Anthropology; Lord Avebury's Prehistoric Times, The Origin of Civilization, and The Primitive Condition of Man; W. Boyd Dawkin's Cave-Hunting and Early Man in Britain; and Edward Clodd's ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... was to give me an absolutely free hand, also contributed to my present state of mind, and made me feel confidence in everything I undertook. Although my plans for the present seemed to exclude all possibility of being realised, thanks to the indifference of an inartistic public, still I could not help inwardly cherishing the idea that I should not be for ever addressing only the paper on which I wrote. I anticipated that before long a great reaction would set in with regard to the public and ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... despairing soul. Remember that in her secluded existence she had heard only such harmony as Elvira Reynolds evoked from her piano or George Reynolds from his flute, and the Reynolds temperament was distinctly inartistic. ...
— A Village Stradivarius • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... the conception of forms, and the unscumbled character of the strokes of the brush, recall Hals. The same may be observed in two larger pictures with archers in the Town Hall at Haarlem, where the inartistic arrangement and monotony of the otherwise warm flesh tones point to the earlier time of the painter. By about the year 1640 his character was more fully developed. His arrangement of portrait-pieces with numerous figures became very artistic and easy, his tone excellent, ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... close-up was introduced into the technique of the film play rather late, but it has quickly gained a secure position. The more elaborate the production, the more frequent and the more skillful the use of this new and artistic means. The melodrama can hardly be played without it, unless a most inartistic use of printed words is made. The close-up has to furnish the explanations. If a little locket is hung on the neck of the stolen or exchanged infant, it is not necessary to tell us in words that everything will hinge on this locket twenty years later when the girl is grown ...
— The Photoplay - A Psychological Study • Hugo Muensterberg
... express ran into it at the curve just beyond the signal station at Colebridge Junction, owing to some mistake of the signalman, I believe. Anyhow, in the train you wanted to go by there were five people killed outright, and fourteen others crunched up and mangled in a most inartistic style. And if I hadn't locked you up as I did you'd probably be in the County Hospital at this moment in an exceedingly ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour
... shoulder,* these small jars being sometimes interspersed with, and sometimes wholly replaced by, figures of animals.** It is necessary to go to the Etruscan "black ware" to find a parallel to this most inartistic kind of ornamentation. ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... in silver, copper, and brass are many, but their productions are usually rough and inartistic. Genuine old beaten metal-work is almost unobtainable, although occasionally desirable specimens from Leh do find their way into the ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... the faces of the gold something had been scratched with the point of a knife. While the work was inartistic, it was easy to make out ...
— Klondike Nuggets - and How Two Boys Secured Them • E. S. Ellis
... has another claim to our notice beyond the inartistic design. It marks one of the very rare efforts in this ...
— In Search Of Gravestones Old And Curious • W.T. (William Thomas) Vincent
... a poor violin; or should one say nothing of the smoke nuisance in Chicago because more light and heat penetrate its murky atmosphere than are to be found in cities only a few miles farther north? The truth is, we must regard the bad spelling nuisance, the bad grammar nuisance, the inartistic and rambling language nuisance, precisely as we would the smoke nuisance, the sewer-gas nuisance, the stock-yards' smell nuisance. Some dainty people prefer pure air and correct language; but we now recognize that purity is something more than an esthetic fad, that it is essential to ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... the Trojan hero in the leaps across the platform, the sinuous gestures, the rendings of the enemy; until that moment when he drew the bars of hell for the unrepentant, and flung Rome into the abyss. This effective performance, inartistic and almost grotesque, never fell to the level of the ridiculous, for native power was strong in the man. The peroration raised Livingstone to the skies, chained Sullivan in the lowest depths of the Inferno, and introduced as a terrible example a brand just rescued ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... is still to-day, as he was in the days of Madame de Stael, artistic and poetic, brilliant and imaginative—a lover of song and music. The Prussian remains as he has always been, inartistic, dull, and unromantic. Prussia has not produced one of the great composers who are the pride of the German race; and Berlin, with all its wealth and its two million inhabitants, strikes the foreigner as one of the most commonplace capitals ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... first impression created by this perpetual display of crosses, statues, and miniature chapels is not pleasing,—particularly as the work is often inartistic to a degree bordering upon the grotesque, and nothing resembling art is anywhere visible. Millions of francs must have been consumed in these creations, which have the rudeness of mediaevalism without its emotional sincerity, and which—amid the loveliness ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... thought a fine passage by the author, who will doubtless find readers enough to agree with him, if he should not care to accept our estimate of his whole poem. Nevertheless, we must confess that it appears to us puerile in conception, destitute of due motive, and crude and inartistic in treatment. But we should be unjust both to ourselves and our author, if we left his work without some allusion to its highly embellished style, or, having failed to approve the whole design, refused to notice at all the elaborate ornamentation ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... inartistic, rough, coarse, distasteful, harsh, inharmonious, rude, deformed, fulsome, hideous, meretricious, rugged, disgusting, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... that he might have been a helpful factor in the work of the farm but for a number of unforeseen reasons. When he churned the butter never came. The roan cow disliked music and kicked over the milk-pail with inartistic persistence. The sun on the hay made his ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... which the following just condemnation refers: "The moon's influence on parts of the human body, as given in some old-fashioned almanacs, is an entire fallacy; it is most untrue and absurd, often indecent, and is a discredit to the age we live in." [370] Most of these inartistic productions are framed upon the assumption of the old alchymists that the physiological functions were regulated by planetary influence. The sun controlled the heart, the moon the brain, Jupiter the lungs, Saturn the spleen, Mars the liver, Venus the kidneys, and Mercury the reproductive powers. ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... eloquence unlike that of the Englishmen around him, and, sooth to say, comparatively unaccustomed as he must have been to the use of the language, much more handsomely than they. In truth, Redclyffe was struck and amused with the rudeness, the slovenliness, the inartistic quality of the English speakers, who rather seemed to avoid grace and neatness of set purpose, as if they would be ashamed of it. Nothing could be more ragged than these utterances which they called speeches; so patched, and darned; and yet, somehow or other—though dull and heavy ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... people is a liberal education; and if she was only saved from perpetrating some of the school-girl trash in the way of drawing, it was a gain to her intellect, for what can be more lowering to intelligence of perception than the utterly inartistic frivolities which are supposed to inculcate art in a country out of which the sense of it had been all but eradicated in Puritan England, though some great artists had happily reappeared! Mary at least learnt to love literature ...
— Mrs. Shelley • Lucy M. Rossetti
... feature, is in the strongest opposition to the latter part, where marvel is piled on marvel in pointless profusion. In the first few pages there is not a word superfluous or an idea out of place in drawing the picture. That we have to do with an older story lengthened out by some inartistic compiler, seems only too probable. And this is borne out by the colophon. In the tales of the Shipwrecked Sailor, and of Sanehat, the colophon runs—"This is finished from beginning to end, even ...
— Egyptian Tales, Second Series - Translated from the Papyri • W. M. Flinders Petrie
... made him laugh. Napoleon, the pyramids, Waterloo, and a wretched skinny old woman, a pawnbroker with a red trunk under her bed—it's a nice hash for Porfiry Petrovitch to digest! How can they digest it! It's too inartistic. "A Napoleon creep under an old woman's ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... and perhaps a grim, barbaric strength; you must do as Johnson did according to Goldsmith's famous dictum—if your pistol misses fire, you must knock your adversary down with the butt end of it. This procedure, though inartistic to be sure, is in some contingencies the only kind that will serve. But you should cultivate procedure of a type more urbane. Let your very reasonableness be the most potent weapon you wield. To this end you should form ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... literature over life is that its characters are clearly defined, and act consistently. Nature, always inartistic, takes pleasure in creating the impossible. Reginald Blake was as typical a specimen of the well-bred cad as one could hope to find between Piccadilly Circus and Hyde Park Corner. Vicious without passion, and possessing brain without mind, ...
— Sketches in Lavender, Blue and Green • Jerome K. Jerome
... the occasion with inartistic avidity. She had hardly addressed us as yet. At the sound of the magic passport, she pricked up her ears, and turned to me suddenly. "Burma?" she said, as if to conceal the true reason for her change of front. "Burma? I had a cousin there once. He was ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... so good that you can't ever make another equal to it,' suggested I out of my practical but inartistic brain. ...
— Saxe Holm's Stories • Helen Hunt Jackson
... of the Confederacy come back to me whenever I contemplate the history of the Peloponnesian war, which bulks so largely in all Greek studies. And that is all this paper really means. It belongs to the class of inartistic performances of which Aristotle speaks so slightingly. It has no unity except the accidental unity of person. A Southerner in the Peloponnesian War has no more artistic right to be than A Girl in the Carpathians or A Scholar in Politics, and yet ...
— The Creed of the Old South 1865-1915 • Basil L. Gildersleeve
... we generally find the parts come from various sources; and having served last in pagan Rome for pagan purposes, had been slightly refashioned for Christian decorative art,[125] before the Byzantine inartistic taste, and barbaric splendour of metal-work patterns, had extinguished all the gay fancy of the arts ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... perplexed at the mad act, for although her judgment told her they were not worth keeping, she realized that her father must have passed many laborious hours on them. But now that it had dawned on him how utterly inartistic his work was, in humiliation and disgust he had wiped it out of existence. With this thought in mind, the girl was honestly ...
— Mary Louise Solves a Mystery • L. Frank Baum
... called him back, but he had no idea of lending himself to anything so inartistic. With head thrown back, he left the footpath and climbed the hill round which they had been walking. Not once did he look behind. Not once did he turn his head till he stood on the top of the rock-strewn eminence, his figure clearly outlined against ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Though inartistic and uncouth, That effort of a novice hand Exemplifies a striking truth, And may Time's ravages withstand, To be by future ages read, When years and centuries ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... it was the fashion to affect admiration for the Italian school of painting and especially for the great masters of the Renaissance. Whole families of perfectly inartistic English and Americans might then he heard conscientiously admiring the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel or Leonardo's Last Supper (Botticelli had not been invented then) in the choicest ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... indeed are all such as imply reflection; whereas one bringing them in all of a sudden, as in the Bath-story, is of a better order. Next after these are (2) Discoveries made directly by the poet; which are inartistic for that very reason; e.g. Orestes' Discovery of himself in Iphigenia: whereas his sister reveals who she is by the letter, Orestes is made to say himself what the poet rather than the story demands. This, therefore, ...
— The Poetics • Aristotle
... expelled the House was soothed with the strains of Peace, Perfect Peace. But those days were over. A new headmaster had come with an ear for music, and the riot of melody that surged from the V. A table seemed to him not only blasphemous, but also inartistic. And so hymn-singing stopped, and only a few prayers ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh
... congregation was singing, "Safely through another week, God has brought us on our way," and Job thought it was a long, long week since he had sat in the old church and heard that hymn. How natural it looked! The bare white walls, with here and there a crack which had carved a not inartistic line up the sides. The stiff wooden pulpit, almost hid to-day under the June roses. The same preacher who had said that Christmas night, "Wilt thou be baptized in this faith?" The little organ in the corner. ...
— The Transformation of Job - A Tale of the High Sierras • Frederick Vining Fisher
... persons wrote to the author and several others asked to be introduced to him: wasn't that an impression? One of the lively "weeklies," snapping at the deadly "monthlies," said the whole thing was "grossly inartistic"—wasn't that? It was somewhere else proclaimed "a wonderfully subtle character-study"—wasn't that too? The strongest effect doubtless was produced on the publisher when, in its lemon-coloured volumes, like a little dish of three custards, ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... this piece of Heywood is very inartistic, and carelessly finished: instead of duly developing the main action, the author distracts our attention by a second intrigue, which can hardly be said to have the slightest connection with the other. At ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... designs and rug patterns the diagonal line is not always excellent. Diagonal lines are sometimes effective in rugs; but the feeling of energetic movement they produce in wall papers or drop patterns is objectionable. It annoys the eye and is usually inartistic. ...
— Prepare and Serve a Meal and Interior Decoration • Lillian B. Lansdown
... opened pages in Shakespeare's dramas, and without paying any attention to my criticisms as to why the selected ten lines did not satisfy the most elementary demands of esthetic and common sense, they were enchanted with the very thing which to me appeared absurd, incomprehensible, and inartistic. So that, in general, when I endeavored to get from Shakespeare's worshipers an explanation of his greatness, I met in them exactly the same attitude which I have met, and which is usually met, in the defenders of any dogmas accepted not through reason, ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... of Calvary Church there had been painted, when the church was built, a Latin cross. This cross had been the source of almost endless dispute among the church-members. Some said it was inartistic; others said it was in keeping with the name of the church, and had a right place there as part of its inner adornment. Once the dispute had grown so large and serious that the church had voted as to its removal or retention on the wall. A small majority had voted to leave it there, and there ...
— The Crucifixion of Philip Strong • Charles M. Sheldon
... to the student's own time, to help him to see that there is no divorce between classic and modern literature, and, by offering him material structurally good and typical of the qualities represented, to assist him in discriminating between the artistic and the inartistic. The stories have been carefully selected, because in the period of adolescence "nothing read fails to leave its mark"; [Footnote: G Stanley Hall, Adolescence, vol. II.] they have also been carefully arranged with ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... say, or an elopement,—secret correspondences, the surmounting of garden walls, the bribery of servants, are in the picture. But in a small sweet idyll, with no backbone of intention to it, these things are inartistic. And Vernon was, above and before all, an artist. He must go away and he knew it. And his picture was not finished. Could he possibly leave that incomplete? The thought pricked sharply. He had not made much progress with the picture in these last days. It had been pleasanter to work at the portrait ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit
... or of the artist, has been most cunning; to find the most stimulating products of art a mere irritation. And when one's curiosity is in excess, when it overbalances the desire of beauty, then one is liable to value in works of art what is inartistic in them; to be satisfied with what is exaggerated in art, with productions like some of those of the romantic school in Germany; not to distinguish, jealously enough, between what is admirably done, and what is done not quite so well, in ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... in close contact with all kinds of people; there was no man in my regiment who hesitated to come to my tent or to talk confidentially by the campfire, while scores of dying men laid bare to me their hearts. I at least know the nature that exists in the human breast. It may be inartistic, or my use of it all wrong. That is a question which time will decide, and I shall accept the verdict. Over twelve years ago, certain oracles, with the voice of fate, predicted my speedy eclipse and disappearance. Are they right in their adverse ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe
... life-fibres of human sustenance, have been brought to their present perfection and value. The great governments and peoples of the world should give admiring and grateful thought to this fact. Here nature co-works with the most common and inartistic of human industries, as they are generally held, with faculties as subtle and beautiful as those which she brings to bear upon the choicest flowers. The same is true of grains and grasses for man and beast. They come down to ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... of his harsh and vigorous personality, but there is no single lapse from nature when he is speaking. The curates only excepted, Charlotte never swerves from this fidelity. But when she is handling her curates, it is a savage and utterly inartistic humour that inspires her. You feel that she is not exercising the art of comedy, but relieving her own intolerable boredom and irritation. No object could well be more innocent, and more appealing in its innocence, than ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... was intentionally ludicrous. Had Rachel been listening, she would once more have suspected a pose. But already she was deep in the article in the two-year-old magazine, or rather in its not inartistic illustrations. ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... the farm, and dreamed in his studio and tried to teach his little, inartistic Edith to draw, and mourned. As for business, he said, "Go to the devil!"—except as he looked after Maurice Curtis's affairs; this because the boy's father had been his friend. But it was the consciousness of the bartered birthright ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... manner to read it adequately, and the doppio movemento is exciting to a dramatic degree. I fully agree with Kullak that too strict adherence to the marking of this section produces the effect of an "inartistic precipitation" which robs the movement of clarity. Kleczynski calls the work The Contrition of a Sinner and devotes several pages to its elucidation. De Lenz chats most entertainingly with Tausig about it. Indeed, an imposing march of splendor is the second ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... cells are situated right at the end. The Osmia profits by the galleries which have been abandoned either because of their age, or because of the completion of the cells occupying the most distant part; she builds her cells by dividing these corridors into unequal and inartistic chambers by means of rude earthen partitions. The Osmia's sole achievement in the way of masonry is confined to these partitions. This, by the way, is the ordinary building-method adopted by the various Osmiae, who content themselves ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... the designs used on these objects were quaint and even grotesque, while the drawing of the figures and the arrangement of the subjects is often done in the crudest and most inartistic manner. Vessels for church use were made in the shapes of griffins, dragons, cranes, lions, and other curious birds and beasts, while the human faces represented sometimes had enamelled or jewelled eye balls. In one case the eyes of the Saviour were made of large carbuncles; you ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement
... John Donne, so far from serving the end, sometimes obscures it almost hopelessly: the hart escapes while he follows the squirrels and weasels and bats. It is not surprising that, their author being so inartistic with regard to their object, his verses themselves should be harsh and unmusical beyond the worst that one would imagine fit to be called verse. He enjoys the unenviable distinction of having no rival in ruggedness of metric movement and associated sounds. This is ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... faced, and she would face it. He would probably do well as his own master. During a whole horrible week her judgment on him had been unjustly severe, and she did not mean to fall into the same sin again. She thought with respect of his artistic gifts, which she was too inartistic to appreciate. Yes, the chances were that ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... Indian poetry, even when nominally secular, is perhaps too much under religious influence to suit our taste and the long didactic and philosophic harangues which interrupt the action of the Mahabharata seem to us inartistic, yet to those who take the pains to familiarize themselves with what at first is strange, the Mahabharata is, I think, a greater poem than the Iliad. It should not be regarded as an epic distended and interrupted by interpolated sermons but as the scripture of the warrior caste, ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... which falls to the lot of this valley accounts for its verdure. In any event, park, woods, meadow, garden, even the mountain sides are green, a vari-colored green, and interspersed with an abundance of flowers. Nowhere is the eye offended by anything inartistic or unpicturesque, but, on the contrary, the charm is so comprehensive that the visitor looks from place to place, from this bit to that bit, and ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various
... that delightful master of delicate and fanciful prose, is tainted with this modern vice, for we know positively no other name for it. There is such a thing as robbing a story of its reality by trying to make it too true, and The Black Arrow is so inartistic as not to contain a single anachronism to boast of, while the transformation of Dr. Jekyll reads dangerously like an experiment out of the Lancet. As for Mr. Rider Haggard, who really has, or had once, the makings of a perfectly magnificent liar, he is now so afraid ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... first-class magazines would pay an unknown writer at least an equal rate, if not a better one. But the thing was, how to get into the first-class magazines. His best stories, essays, and poems went begging among them, and yet, each month, he read reams of dull, prosy, inartistic stuff between all their various covers. If only one editor, he sometimes thought, would descend from his high seat of pride to write me one cheering line! No matter if my work is unusual, no matter if it ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... scenes of a play, but in the careful working out of each scene. Ab ea must be supplied after descriptae from a qua above. — ACTUM: the common comparison of life with a drama is also found in 64, 70, 85. — INERTI: the sense of 'ignorant' 'inartistic' (in, ars), has been given to this by some editors (cf. Hor. Ep. 2, 2, 126 praetulerim scriptor delirus inersque videri, and Cic. Fin. 2, 115 artes, quibus qui carebant, inertes a maioribus nominabantur), but the meaning 'inactive', ...
— Cato Maior de Senectute • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... hand Wackernagel, who believes that the function of poetry is to convey ideas in concrete and sensuous images and the function of prose to inform the intellect, asserts that prose drama and didactic poetry are inartistic.[5] He thus advocates that present practise be abandoned in favor of the custom of the Greeks. On the other hand Newman, while granting that a metrical garb has in all languages been appropriated to poetry, still urges that the essence of poetry ...
— Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance - A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism • Donald Lemen Clark
... Valentin and Mephistopheles does not occur, and we have only Valentin's soliloquy on the ruin of his sister; and the scenes, Wald und Hoehle, the Walpurgis Nacht, the Walpurgisnachtstraum, generally condemned by critics as inartistic irrelevancies, ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... invading private homes in search after beautifying material. Jim Lane drove his buckboard one hundred and sixty miles to Cheyenne to gather up certain needed articles of adornment, the selection of which could not be safely confided to the inartistic taste of the stage-driver. Upon his rapid return journey loaded down with spoils, Peg Brace, a cow-puncher in the "Bar O" gang, rode recklessly alongside his speeding wheels for the greater portion of the distance, apparently in most jovial humor, and so unusually inquisitive as to make Mr. ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... deal as a pantomime, a distorted caricature of Goethe, and a thoroughly inartistic production. But it proved the greatest of all Henry's financial successes. The Germans who came to see it, oddly enough, did not scorn it nearly as much as the English who were sensitive on behalf of the Germans, and the Goethe Society ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... in the absence of hunger he will eat fruit to gratify taste. A table spread with fruits and nuts and decorated with flowers is artistic; the same table laden with decaying flesh and blood, and maybe entrails, is not only inartistic—it is disgusting. ...
— No Animal Food - and Nutrition and Diet with Vegetable Recipes • Rupert H. Wheldon
... order. The plain tulles and nets, which come in all colors, single and double widths, are always pleasant to wear and less trying to the eyes than the coarser meshes. The veil of Brussels net wrought in sprigged designs is a failure. It is becoming to nobody, and is essentially inartistic. ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... seat, the legs brought together, the bust rising squarely from the hips, the hands crossed upon the breast, in a posture of submission or respectful adoration. The mantle passes over the left shoulder, leaving the right free, and is fastened on the right breast, the drapery displaying awkward and inartistic folds: the latter widens in the form of a funnel from top to bottom, being bell-shaped around the lower part of the body, and barely ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 3 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... me half-a-crown, three two-shilling pieces, and four separate shillings, all the coins being well-worn silver of the realm, the undoubted inartistic product of the reputable British Mint. This seemed to dispose of the theory that he was palming off illegitimate money. He asked me if I were interested in any particular branch of antiquity, and I replied that my curiosity was merely ...
— The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont • Robert Barr
... and I found Harley's heroine to be all that he had told me and a great deal more besides. In fact, so greatly did I enjoy her society that I intentionally prolonged the evening to about three times its normal length—which was a very inartistic bit of exaggeration, I admit; but then I don't pretend to be a realist, and when I sit down to write I can make my evenings as long or as short as I choose. I will say, however, that, long as my evening was, I made ...
— A Rebellious Heroine • John Kendrick Bangs
... throat troubles, and agate was thought to preserve from snake-bites. ELIHU RICH(1) gives a very full list of stones and their supposed virtues. Each sign of the zodiac was supposed to have its own particular stone(2) (as shown in the annexed table), and hence the superstitious though not inartistic custom of ...
— Bygone Beliefs • H. Stanley Redgrove
... acting limits, but of the plays as we know them in the study. It is possible, no doubt, for modern playwrights to let themselves go in the matter of length, and then print their plays with brackets or other marks to show the "passages omitted in representation." This is, however, essentially an inartistic practice, and one cannot regret that it has gone out of fashion. Another point to be considered is this: are Othello and Lear really very complex character-studies? They are extremely vivid: they are projected with ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... toward the celebrated Monkey Temple, a pretentious but inartistic structure of red sandstone, presided over by the monster wife of Siva, the Goddess Kali, who is seated on an interior shrine and almost terrifies the beholder by her demoniacal smile, her neck being wreathed with skulls. The Goddess of Blood demands ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck
... lingered about the rough clay. The maker of the song was a poet, and knew it not. The maker of the bowl was an artist, and knew it not. You will get no finish from either — the lines are often blurred, the design but half fulfilled; and yet the effect is not inartistic. It has been well said that greatness is but another name for interpretation; and in so far as these nameless workmen of old interpreted themselves and the times in which they lived, they have attained ...
— A Lute of Jade/Being Selections from the Classical Poets of China • L. Cranmer-Byng
... thing as robbing a story of its reality by trying to make it too true, and The Black Arrow is so inartistic as not to contain a single anachronism to boast of, while the transformation of Dr. Jekyll reads dangerously like an experiment out of the Lancet. As for Mr. Rider Haggard, who really has, or had once, the makings of a perfectly ...
— Selected Prose of Oscar Wilde - with a Preface by Robert Ross • Oscar Wilde
... difficult to say whether the paragraph of which these lines are the conclusion is a sketch of the history of poetry in general or of lyric poetry in particular. The former would be rather inartistic after the other historical notices of poetry that have occurred in the poem: the latter is not easily reconciled with the mention of Homer. On the other hand, Horace's inexactness elsewhere makes either supposition quite possible. ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... pitiably inartistic little history!" the Duchess protested. "Eh bien, if you must have it! For I was a girl once,—an innocent girl, as given as are most girls to long reveries and bright, callow day-dreams. And there ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... Another knows so little of the art of smoking that he never 'stops' his pipe, and so allows the light dust of the burnt weed to fly about him in flakes and minute particles, to the permanent damage of his own and his neighbors' clothes. But in nothing is the inartistic character of English smoking so conspicuously exemplified as in the use of 'lights.' Those who form the great majority of smokers amongst the English-speaking races seem to consider that, so long ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... where to choose; but the lady is "cabined, cribbed,—confined" possibly: it is in the course of things. But when new fields of employment are thrown open to women, those who cannot marry, or who do not wish to marry, will lead useful and pleasant lives, and cease to be "superfluous existences,—inartistic figures, crowding the canvas of life without adequate effect." But all our reforms centre in one great point, on which our eyes are hopefully fixed,—I mean, the right to vote. Give women a vote, and at once they ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... a bon-bon, and every painted circle a plate. New things receive the names of old ones. And frequently the skill of the criminalists consists in deriving important material from apparently worthless statements, by way of discovering the proper significance of simple, inartistic, but in most cases excellently definitive images. It is of course self-evident that one ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... a little surprised that no more has been said, for it is a remarkable painting. On the same wall are two or three canvases by Velasquez, but none by other artists of repute. On the walls of a large hall, called by the guide the Hall of Battles, is painted a most crude and inartistic series of pictures, only worthy of a Chinese artist, representing a series of battles ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... Sardanapalus?" she asked, in a somewhat hurried voice, making an inartistic attempt to ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... say. The Admiral and his family left Pringle's Mansion the year Letty became Miss South's nurse, and as no one would stay in the house, presumably on account of the hauntings, it was pulled down, and an inexcusably inartistic edifice was ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... himself wishing, not for Mungold's lack of scruples, for he believed him to be the most scrupulous of men, but for that happy mean of talent which so completely satisfied the artistic requirements of the inartistic. Mungold was not to be despised as an apostate—he was to be congratulated as a man whose aptitudes were exactly in line with the taste of the persons he liked ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... apply himself to the study of virtue and wisdom? And I will first show you what I conceive to be the nature of the task, and what sort of a discourse I desire to hear; and if I do this in a very inartistic and ridiculous manner, do not laugh at me, for I only venture to improvise before you because I am eager to hear your wisdom: and I must therefore ask you and your disciples to refrain from laughing. ...
— Euthydemus • Plato
... assurance of national sympathy on the part of the chiefs and troops opposed to us than was generally calculated upon. The fall of Mooltan will have relieved the Governor-General's mind from much of the anxiety caused by the inartistic management ...
— A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II • William Sleeman
... you need be afraid, mother. I love beautiful things, but truly and honestly I believe they are good for me! It is a little difficult to explain, but ugly things—inartistic things, jar! They make me feel cross and discontented, while beauty is a joy! I need not become proud and self-engrossed because the things around me are beautiful and rich with associations. On the contrary, they ought to do me good. I'd love them ...
— Flaming June • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... he did the curious conventional painting of the Trinity on a gold ground. The subject is inartistic, because unapproachable; the attempt to paint that which is a deep spiritual mystery degrades both the art and the subject; the latter because it lowers it to human grasp, the former because it shows its powerlessness ...
— Fra Bartolommeo • Leader Scott (Re-Edited By Horace Shipp And Flora Kendrick)
... brought him nearer to London, farther from his own sober inartistic life. A light began to tremble on the horizon of his mind. He was not so old—thirty-two. His temperament might be said to be just at the point of maturity. There were so many different moods and impressions that he wished to express in verse. He felt them ...
— Dubliners • James Joyce
... it. I have not paid you a compliment since you have been here. How you must have suffered! But it's a pity you couldn't have waited awhile longer, instead of beginning to angle with that very clumsy bait. For an artist, you are very inartistic. Men never know how to wait. 'Have I found you repulsive? haven't I found you sociable?' Perhaps, after all, considering what I have in my mind, it is as well that you asked for your compliment. I have found you charming. I say ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... as a symbol of the possessing and destroying mastery of art and of beauty. But the idea is materialised into a form of grotesque horror, and all the charm of the atmosphere and the grace of the words cannot redeem a conclusion so inartistic in its painfulness. But, all the same, the play is the work of a poet, it brings imagination upon the stage, and it gives Duse an opportunity of being her finest self. All the words she speaks are sensitive words, she moves in the midst of beautiful things, her whole life seems to ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... (and practice will make one more and more critical), it is generally because you have not made sufficient allowance for the power of imagination in your audience. Emphasis in gesture is just as inartistic—and therefore ineffective—as ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... their greatest extent, only where the emotion reaches a climax. The entire contravention of these principles results in bombast or doggerel. The insufficient respect for them is seen in didactic poetry. And it is because they are rarely fully obeyed, that so much poetry is inartistic. ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... be inartistic, but they look mighty touching, pathetic, and wonderful, not only the individual whose legs you step over but that almighty race combine—whatever you call it[4]—which he represents.... Ladies were stealing to their lairs in the zereba on deck, and in the music room; they look ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... book of souvenirs. Assuredly it is not through any arrogant avarice nor through any egotistical pride, that I shall destroy this record of a humble life—it is only because I fear lest those things which are dear and sacred to me might appear before others, because of my inartistic manner of expression, either commonplace ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... the walls were remarkable as being the finest in any private collection in this country. Many were the visits he had made to Italy to acquire those queer-looking old mediaeval plates, with their crude colouring and rude, inartistic drawings, and certainly he was an acknowledged ...
— The Seven Secrets • William Le Queux
... Z., recently a well-known prima donna in the United States, who, although in the zenith of her youthful fame and popularity, had abandoned a brilliant career to share the fortunes of her husband, an official of the "Alaska Commercial Company," in this inartistic land. I found the conditions of travel on the Yukon as completely changed as everything else. Even the technical expressions once used by the gold-mining fraternity were now replaced by others. Thus the "Oldtimer" had ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... chance to escape this house of mourning. All night long old women in the death chamber had mumbled incantations, and the droning was in her ears as she slept. It was not nice. Because she could not blot out the inartistic shock of ugly mortality, in very self-hate she yearned to get away. The evening before, even while she loaned common sense to the crazed household, even while she pressed down the icy eyelids, she wondered—obstinately wondered, despite herself, what the dead girl ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... advertisement. The eye takes in automatically from four to six words at a glance, setting the natural limit of length for strong features in an advertisement. Artistic arrangement helps an advertisement because carefully balanced matter is more attractive than inartistic combinations. A well-balanced advertisement, an advertisement in which the points are properly subordinated, conveys its meaning to the reader more easily than a badly distributed statement of the same arguments. In the ...
— Practical English Composition: Book II. - For the Second Year of the High School • Edwin L. Miller
... is constantly used to keep the audience acquainted with the advance of the plot[137], or to paint in narrative intervening events that connect the loose joints of the action. This is of course wholly inartistic, but may often find its true office in keeping a noisy, turbulent and uneducated audience aware of "what is going on." In many cases the soliloquy is in the nature of a reflection on the action and seems to bear all the ear-marks of a heritage from the original function of the tragic ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • Wilton Wallace Blancke
... French comedy of the best type. Don't you agree, sir, that the police would be an inartistic error?" He was perfectly calm and collected, whereas they were in ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... The English are inartistic for the same reason that they are unsociable. They may make good colonists, sailors, and mechanics; but they do not make good singers, dancers, actors, artistes, or modistes. They neither dress well, act well, speak well, nor write well. They ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... experience. His hands were chapped and cracked, even though his grandmother had knit him a pair of enormous red mittens. He appreciated the warmth of the mittens, but he hated the color. Why in the name of all that was inartistic did she choose red; not a deep, rich crimson, but a screeching vermilion, ...
— The Portygee • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... examination of this subject I desire to very briefly notice it from aesthetic, hygienic, and ethical points of view. It is a singular fact that every effort made toward a healthful and common sense reform in woman's apparel has been assailed as inartistic or immoral; while fashions at once disgusting, indecent, destructive to life and health, and degrading to womanhood have been readily sanctioned by conventionalism. This antagonistic attitude toward any movement for an improvement in ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... theatre to encourage what is best in modern art is due to the fact that the public is unimaginative and inartistic. ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... common in Holland in the seventeenth century. The towns were proud of their newly won liberties, and the town dignitaries liked to see themselves painted in a group to perpetuate remembrance of their tenure of office. But Rembrandt knew that it was inartistic to give each and every person in a large group an equal or nearly equal prominence, although such was the custom to which even Franz Hals' brush had yielded full compliance. For his magnificent picture of the City Guard, Rembrandt ...
— The Book of Art for Young People • Agnes Conway
... that she saw the testatrix sign the will with her own hand, and no amount of the rough-and-ready, inartistic, and disingenuous "Will you swear this?" and "Are you prepared to swear that?" would have been of any avail. She had sworn it, and was prepared to swear it, in her own way, any number of times that ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton
... objurgatory epithets. He is clamorous in his demand that Rip Van Winkle should be transformed into a temperance lecture, but he is entirely satisfied with the preposterous manner in which the clever but inartistic SHAKESPEARE has thought fit to end his two meritorious tragedies, Hamlet and Othello. Now no one at all familiar with either of these two popular plays can fail to perceive the gross faults of construction ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., No. 39., Saturday, December 24, 1870. • Various
... concentrated on the station buildings, until the inartistic surroundings of the little centre became black with men and animals. In appearance it might well be likened to a swarm of bees in temporary possession of a window-frame. Amongst the troops waiting for rolling stock was a wild company of over-sea Colonials—men of independent character ...
— On the Heels of De Wet • The Intelligence Officer
... diagrammatic female with a sail needle, tints her with gunpowder, and labels her with the name of his current lady-love to prevent mistakes. Such crude efforts have their good points; for instance, they promote constancy. But they are hideously inartistic, and, moreover, to a man of ordinarily fickle nature, are apt to bring in very damning evidence at the most inopportune moments. Whereas (still according to Cospatric) the higher types of these human frescoes spell Art, with a very big A, and form a portable ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... of the year; it may be deduced from a visit to any of their cemeteries. These are nearly always picturesquely situated, adorned with beautiful trees, and exquisitely kept in order. Indeed, the cemeteries are in striking contrast to those of European countries. The hideous and inartistic tombstones and monuments, the urns and angels, and the stereotyped conventionalities of graveyards in this country are all absent. There is usually only a simple tablet over each grave bearing the name of the deceased and ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... under another form,—the form of his dead mother, whom he barely remembered, though he cherished her portrait like a sacred treasure. That portrait had been painted in water-colours, in a rather inartistic manner, by a friendly neighbour, but the likeness was striking, as every one averred. The woman, the young girl, whom as yet he did not so much as venture to expect, must possess just such a tender profile, just such kind, bright eyes, ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... strict standpoint that all Base Ball games should be played without mistake or blunder this world's series may be said to have been inartistic, but it is only the hypercritical theorist who would take such a cold-blooded view ...
— Spalding's Official Baseball Guide - 1913 • John B. Foster
... all—Marc Antony's was four; Our army hankered after fame, but Marc's was after gore! And when we reached Philippi, at the outset we were met With an inartistic gusto I can never quite forget. For Antony's overwhelming force of thumpers seemed to be Resolved to do "them Kansas jays"—and that meant Jack and me! My lips were sealed but that it seems quite proper you should know That ...
— Songs and Other Verse • Eugene Field
... she replied with a smile. "I am wrong. It is not good manners; it is vulgar. In French you would call it inartistic. It is better to be frank than to harbor cold or hostile feelings towards a friend, and you have already proved yourself my friend. Perhaps I have gone too far with you. You must take me to be a very ordinary woman."—Rodolphe ...
— Albert Savarus • Honore de Balzac
... pastures, appears here with small bells hanging on a twisted stem, as accurately as the best photograph could give it, although the process of woodcutting, as then practised in England, was very rude, and although almost all other English illustrations of the period are rough and inartistic. It is plain that in every instance the botanist himself drew the form, with which he was already intelligently familiar, on the block, with the living plant lying ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... said Lord Henry, who found an exquisite pleasure in playing on the lad's unconscious egotism—"an extremely interesting question. I fancy that the true explanation is this. It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack of style. They affect us just as vulgarity affects us. They give us an ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... taking her to a small restaurant near and giving her some food, they took a taxi to the Gare du Nord, and half an hour later entered the big convent of the Order, a grey, inartistic, but spacious place, with large shady gardens at the rear, sloping down to ...
— The White Lie • William Le Queux
... Extravagance is inartistic—so for that reason I could wish for moderation in stage dressing. Heavens, what a nightmare dress used to be to me! For months I would be paying so much a week to my dressmaker for the gowns of a play. I thought my heart would break to pieces, when, during the long run of "Divorce," just ...
— Stage Confidences • Clara Morris
... more primitive times its relation was more subordinate. The worship or service of images, even in the highest ages of Greek civilisation, was much more associated with primitive and comparatively inartistic figures than with the masterpieces of sculpture; and even where these masterpieces were actually objects of worship it was often from the inheritance of a sanctity transferred to them from an earlier image rather than for their own artistic qualities. It does ...
— Religion and Art in Ancient Greece • Ernest Arthur Gardner
... with proof or reason; that the very wonders of science were mostly lies, like the wonders of religion. "When astronomers tell me," he says somewhere, "that a star is so far off that its light takes a thousand years to reach us, the magnitude of the lie seems to me inartistic." The paralysing impudence of such remarks left everyone quite breathless; and even to this day this particular part of Shaw's satiric war has been far less followed up than it deserves. For there was present in it an element very marked in Shaw's controversies; I mean that his ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... the book nor any later hand thought it worth while to add three lines to tell the world what became of him. A strange way to write history, and a most imperfect narrative, surely! Yes, unless there be some peculiarity in the purpose of the book, which explains this cold-blooded, inartistic, and tantalising habit of letting men leap upon the stage as if they had dropped from the clouds, and vanish from it as abruptly as if they ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... inartistic, but imposing block of masonry that appears from a little distance to be clinging, after the manner of a swallow's nest, to the precipitous face of the rock, and which is reached from below by more than 200 steps in venerable dilapidation[*], contains ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... around, utterly astonished. The clothes I wore seemed coarse and unfamiliar. My hand went to my chin, when I found that I had grown a beard! My surroundings were strange and mysterious. The houses on either side were white and inartistic, with sloping roofs and square ...
— The Stretton Street Affair • William Le Queux
... grateful to those same elders if we have any good in us, but we are far from feeling a similar interest in them. We see in our imaginations wonderful pictures, and we hear wonderful words, for everything we dream of partakes of an unknown perfection and completely throws into the shade the inartistic commonplaces of daily life. As John Short grew older, he often regretted the society of his old tutor and in the frequent absence of important buttons from his raiment he bitterly realised that there was no longer a motherly Mrs. Ambrose to inspect his linen; but when he took leave of them ...
— A Tale of a Lonely Parish • F. Marion Crawford
... would look very dull in your eyes, I dare say, my dear Ida; you who live in an age of bright, smart story-books, with clear type, coloured pictures, and gorgeous outsides. You don't know what small, mean, inartistic 'cuts' enlivened your grandmother's nursery library, that is, when the books were illustrated at all. You have no idea how very little amusement was blended with the instruction, and how much instruction with the amusement ...
— Mrs. Overtheway's Remembrances • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... wit and humor of the tale, which embodies a study of character as skillful and true as anything we have lately had, but at the same time so simple and unpretentious as to be very welcome indeed amid the flood of inartistic analysis which we are compelled to accept in so many recent ...
— The Indiscretion of the Duchess • Anthony Hope
... its best examples resembles not so much the book of yesterday as that of some earlier days, and we may count this fact a fortunate one, since it relegates to oblivion the books made in certain inartistic periods, notably of the one preceding the present revival. It is rather the best of the whole past of the book, and not the book of to-day alone, that influences the character to be taken by the book of to-morrow. This element is a historical one and a knowledge of it may be ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... Bibliophile," gives some hints on this topic, which may be taken or let alone. M. Uzanne has noticed the monotony, and the want of meaning and suggestion in ordinary half-bindings. The paper or cloth which covers the greater part of the surface of half-bound books is usually inartistic and even ugly. He proposes to use old scraps of brocade, embroidery, Venice velvet, or what not; and doubtless a covering made of some dead fair lady's train goes well with a romance by Crebillon, and engravings by Marillier. "Voici un cartonnage Pompadour de ...
— The Library • Andrew Lang
... familiar friendship had ceased since that rebuff of Saxham's. She had never since set foot in his third-floor bedroom, where Little Miss Muffet and Georgy Porgy and the whole regiment of nursery-rhyme characters, attired in the brilliant aniline hues adored of inartistic, frankly-barbaric babyhood, adorned the top of the brown-paper dado, ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... saying in a lady's hearing may be honourably printed for a lady's reading by a scholar and a sage. It was once thought otherwise, but I am arguing here, not against realism per se, but against the inartistic introduction of gross episodes. Every reader of Mr. Hardy will recognise my meaning, and the passage in my mind seems gratuitously ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray
... however, not in the due arrangement of the different scenes of a play, but in the careful working out of each scene. Ab ea must be supplied after descriptae from a qua above. — ACTUM: the common comparison of life with a drama is also found in 64, 70, 85. — INERTI: the sense of 'ignorant' 'inartistic' (in, ars), has been given to this by some editors (cf. Hor. Ep. 2, 2, 126 praetulerim scriptor delirus inersque videri, and Cic. Fin. 2, 115 artes, quibus qui carebant, inertes a maioribus nominabantur), but the meaning 'inactive', 'lazy', 'slovenly' seems to suit ...
— Cato Maior de Senectute • Marcus Tullius Cicero |
