"Realist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the time, Elizabethan prose fiction did not entirely discard the matter and style of the medieval romances. All types of prose fiction were then too prone to deal with exceptional characters or unusual events. Even realists like Greene did not present typical Elizabethan life. The greatest realist in the prose fiction of the Elizabethan Age was Thomas Deloney (1543?-1600), who chose his materials from the everyday life of common people. He had been a traveling artisan, and he knew how to paint "the life and love of the Elizabethan workshop." He wrote The Gentle Craft, a collection ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... philologist, or traveller, or wild missionary, or folk- lorist, or antiquary, that Borrow lives and will live. It is as the master of splendid, strong, simple English, the prose Morland of a vanished road-side life, the realist who, Defoe-like, could make fiction seem truer than fact. To have written the finest fight in the whole world's literature, the fight with the Flaming Tinman, is surely something of an ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... distrust and dislike toward Germany. So great is this antipathy that the Germans imagine there is a malignant conspiracy against them. An upstart nation, suddenly wealthy and powerful, Germany has developed an inordinate self-conceit and self-assertion. The German glories in being a realist. He thinks only of political power and colonial expansion. Might is the supreme test of right. He constantly emphasizes the indelible character of the German race. Germans are suffering from "acute megalomania." They think the English decadent, the French doomed ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... you call yourself a realist, poor child!" said Lotys with a laugh; "I tell you I would sooner starve than accept favour or assistance from ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... illustrates one effect of the War on Paul's mind: he was becoming less of an idealist and more of a realist. ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... of Mr. Martyn and Mr. Yeats, self-confessedly, to have his finger in a new literary pie, really felt the landscape as he says he does in his books, or whether he just momentarily caught the power of seeing it through their eyes. Can one who was once so resolute a realist really appreciate "faint Celtic haze; a vision of silver mist and distant mountain and moor"? Perhaps he can, as a good actor appreciates a part alien to his sympathy, that he is playing. But whether or not Mr. Moore learned to love ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... within the recognizable field of pastoral; but neither of these considerations affects the historical fact. It is commonly admitted that among pastoral writers Theocritus adhered most closely to nature; yet no one has been found to describe him as a realist, whether in method or intention. But though this process of idealization is practically universal, few poets have confessed to it. Only occasionally an author, writing according to the demands of his age or of his individual taste, has been alive to what appeared to be a contradiction between ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... her not inconsiderable charms, and when Napoleon, to change the conversation, praised a superb rose which the Queen was wearing, she said to him, "Would your majesty not accept this rose in return for Magdeberg?" A more chivalrous person might have accepted, but Napoleon was too much of a realist to be won over by a pretty proposition. One may be sure that he restricted himself to admiring the beauty of the rose and also of the hand which proffered it, but he did not take the flower, which brought tears to the Queen's eyes. The conqueror, however, did not seem to ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... Philosophy was designed as a contribution to the History of Modern Philosophy under the heads: first of Different Schools of Thought—Sensationalist, Realist, Idealist, Intuitivist; secondly of different Subjects—Psychology, Ethics, Aesthetics, Political Philosophy, Theology. While much had been done in England in tracing the course of evolution in nature, history, ...
— The Analysis of Mind • Bertrand Russell
... scholar must hear no language but his own; and his whole attention must be concentrated, not on learning words like a parrot, but on the direct study of nature. Comenius has been called the great Sense-Realist. He had no belief in learning second-hand. He illustrated his books with pictures. He gave his scholars object lessons. He taught them, not about words, but about things. "The foundation of all learning consists," he said, "in representing clearly to ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... of their effect, I repeat. If you remember anything of the Lectures I gave you through last year, you must be gradually getting accustomed to my definition of the Greek school in art, as one essentially Chiaroscurist, as opposed to Gothic color; Realist, as opposed to Gothic imagination; and Despairing, as opposed to Gothic hope. And you are prepared to recognize it by any one of these three conditions. Only, observe, the chiaroscuro is simply the technical result of the two others: a ...
— Lectures on Landscape - Delivered at Oxford in Lent Term, 1871 • John Ruskin
... censure and the praise of women. Coquillard, with his railleries assuming legal forms and phrases, laughs at love and lovers, or at the Droits Nouveaux of a happy time when licence had become the general law. Henri Baude, a realist in his keen observation, satirises with direct, incisive force, the manners and morals of his age. Martial d'Auvergne (c. 1433-1508), chronicling events in his Vigiles de Charles VII., a poem written according to the scheme of ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... Florentine history, custom and thought. She is true to every touch of local incident and manner. In Daniel Deronda, she made herself familiar with Jewish life, and has given the race aroma to her portraits and scenes. She is thoroughly a realist, but a realist with a wide and attractive sympathy, a profound insight into motives and impulses, and a strong imagination. She is too great a genius to believe that the novelist can describe life as the geologist describes the strata of the ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... in ordinary to the fair Parisians, whom his admirers christened "a Watteau realist" and his detractors a "photographer of gowns and mantles," often received at breakfast or at dinner the beautiful persons whose feature he had reproduced, as well as the celebrated and the well known, who found very amusing these little ...
— Strong as Death • Guy de Maupassant
... 1852.—Every despotism has a specially keen and hostile instinct for whatever keeps up human dignity, and independence. And it is curious to see scientific and realist teaching used everywhere as a means of stifling all freedom of investigation as addressed to moral questions under a dead weight of facts. Materialism is the auxiliary doctrine of every tyranny, whether of the one or of the masses. To crush what is spiritual, moral, human so to speak, in man, ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... without thereby knowing what each would be if it could be discerned apart from the other. "A direct intuition of things in themselves," according to Kant and Hamilton, is an intuition of things out of space and time. Does Mr. Mill suppose that any natural Realist professes to ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel
... "restraint" may be misunderstood: but it is intended to indicate something of the general difference between "classical" ages on the one side and "romantic" or "realist" on the other. ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... conception" of his "Age of Wordsworth" is romanticism. But if Cowper and Wordsworth and Shelley are romantic, then almost all the literature of the years 1798-1830 is romantic. I prefer to think of Cowper as a naturalist, of Shelley as an idealist, and of Wordsworth as a transcendental realist, and to reserve the name romanticist for writers like Scott, Coleridge, and Keats; and I think the distinction a serviceable one. Again, I have been censured for omitting Blake from my former volume. ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... discernment that Hugo lacks, and he is an artist which Balzac was not.—Is he then more than both? Chi lo sa?—He hasn't let himself out yet. The enormous volume of his brain troubles him. He doesn't know if he is a poet or a realist; and the fact that he is both, hinders him.—He must get straightened out in his different lines of effort. He sees everything and wants to grasp everything at once.—He is not the cut of the public that ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... serious proposition, like the Nebular Hypothesis or Phonetic Reform. The immediate consequence was that, having achieved his success through realism, he placed realism on a pedestal and worshipped it as the only true (literary) god. Severne became a realist of realists. He ran it into the ground. He would not describe a single incident that he had not viewed from start to finish with his own eyes. He did not have much to do with feelings direct, but such as were necessary to his story he insisted on experiencing in his own person; ...
— Blazed Trail Stories - and Stories of the Wild Life • Stewart Edward White
... the mere word-music which makes Shakespeare so irresistible in England.[5] In Tolstoy's estimation, Shakespeare must fall or stand as a thinker, in which capacity I do not think he will stand a moment's examination from so tremendously keen a critic and religious realist. Unfortunately, the English worship their great artists quite indiscriminately and abjectly; so that is quite impossible to make them understand that Shakespeare's extraordinary literary power, his fun, his mimicry, and the endearing qualities that earned him the title of "the gentle ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... In examining into the nature of general propositions, we have adverted much less than is usual with logicians to the ideas of a Class, and Classification; ideas which, since the Realist doctrine of General Substances went out of vogue, have formed the basis of almost every attempt at a philosophical theory of general terms and general propositions. We have considered general names as ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... emerge a menacing and even monstrous thing—we may begin again to behold the English people. If that strange dawn ever comes, it will be the final vindication of Dickens. It will be proved that he is hardly even a caricaturist; that he is something very like a realist. Those comic monstrosities which the critics found incredible will be found to be the immense majority of the citizens of this country. We shall find that Sweedlepipe cuts our hair and Pumblechook ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... far superior to Evelina. The extravagance of the fin-de-siecle society which it represents has probably disguised from not a few readers who do not know the facts, the other fact that it is a real attempt at realist observation of manners: and it has the narrative merit which was Miss Edgeworth's gift of nature. But the hero is patchy and improbable: the heroine, a good and quite possible girl, is not sufficiently "reliefed out"; and ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... one of the eternal conflicts of humanity. It is the conflict of organisation against initiative, of discipline against freedom. It was the conflict of the priest against the prophet in ancient Judaea, of the Pharisee against the Nazarene, of the Realist against the Nominalist, of the Church against the Franciscan and the Lollard, of the Respectable Person against the Artist, of the hedge-clippers of mankind against the shooting buds. And to-day, while we live in a period of tightening ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... and as a man. In his very first effort upon his return to civilisation he proved that the days of aimless fumblings were over: in "Hunger" he stands suddenly revealed as a master of style and description, a bold and independent thinker, a penetrating, keen psychologist, a realist of marked virility. ...
— Shallow Soil • Knut Hamsun
... that has affected his work. I have heard him declare many times how much he was inspired by Crabbe, whereas the later French realists had no influence upon him whatever. "Crabbe was our first great English realist" Mr. Hardy would tell you if only we could persuade him to speak from this platform, ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... was to depict, tramping from one bed to another until he reached the one where the cries and contortions were the most frightful. Such a scene he has reproduced. No hospital physician would have pictured the straggle in such colors. In the same way, that other realist, M. Zola, has painted a patient suffering from delirium tremens, the disease known to common speech as "the horrors." In describing this case he does all that language can do to make it more horrible than the reality. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... two greatest representatives of the new school of realism in fiction are William D. Howells and Henry James. Both have set forth in special essays the realist's art of fiction. The growing interest in democracy was the moving force in realism. In that realist's textbook, Criticism and Fiction (1891), Howells says of the aristocratic ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... and atmosphere and perspective. Every increase in the power to represent nature, every advance in the mastery of the object, adds a new power over the expression of feeling, which varies with the object. The realist is, therefore, right in his demand that nature itself be painted; only he should remember that the nature which presents itself in art is never the naked object, but veiled in feeling; and, as so veiled, may sometimes be seen pretty much as it really is; then again with parts concealed, ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... is a new one will now see what is the point of view of the realist or euhemerist with regard to such traditions. He sees here and there in the past, through much intervening mist, something that looks like a real object, and he tries to define its outlines. He has no intention of ...
— Fians, Fairies and Picts • David MacRitchie
... two jointly. Whoever may be the author, it is the firstling of his dramatic muse, and worth merely a passing mention. How or when their literary friendship began is not known; but since both were friends of Jonson, both prefixing commendatory verses to the great realist's play of 'The Fox,' it is fair to assume that through him they were brought together, and that both belonged to that brilliant circle of wits, poets, and dramatists who made famous the gatherings at the ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... fiction may have seemed before this evening a wilderness without a chart. We are fortunate in having with us a man who has left the 'main travelled roads' of fiction and, to mix metaphors a little, a man who can tell us whether the 'idols' that are 'crumbling' are those of the realist or those of the ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... brutality signified, to us at least, by the flat triangular head and the heavy jaw, but by the look of malevolence and craft signified, to us at least, by the eye and the lip? 'To us at least,' I say. For it is an open question, and will be one, as long as the nominalist and the realist schools of thought keep up their controversy—which they will do to the world's end—whether this seeming hideousness be a real fact: whether we do not attribute to the snake the same passions which we should expect to find—and ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... consonant, when it is not preceded by a single vowel, or when the accent is not on the last syllable, should remain single before an additional syllable: as, toil, toiling; oil, oily; visit, visited; differ, differing; peril, perilous; viol, violist; real, realize, realist; dial, dialing, dialist; equal, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... the stairs, Radbourn called his attention to the paintings, hanging here and there, which he called "hideous daubs" with the reckless presumption of a born realist to whom allegory was a personal affront. Radbourn showed him about the city as much as he could spare time to do, and when he released him, Bradley went back to the capitol, which exercised ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... made, that Galds was a realist, as if he were primarily an observer, a transcriber of life, requires to be modified where the dramas are concerned. Pure realism is present in his dramatic work, but it does not occupy anything like the predominant place which some suppose. A "keen, minute, ...
— Heath's Modern Language Series: Mariucha • Benito Perez Galdos
... qualities of the realist and the idealist which Dickens possessed to a remarkable degree, together with his naturally jovial attitude toward life in general, seem to have given him a remarkably happy feeling toward Christmas, though the privations and hardships of his boyhood ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... the few persons who can handle pitch without being defiled by it. While he runs Zola close as a realist, his thoughts and language are as pure as those of Miss ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... example, were arranged by Pope and Gray as followers of Chaucer, Spenser, Donne, Dryden, and so forth; and, in later days, we have such literary genera as are indicated by the names classic and romantic or realist and idealist, covering characteristic tendencies of the various historical groups. The fact that literary productions fall into schools is of course obvious, and suggests the problem as to the cause of their rise and decline. Bagehot treats the question in his Physics and Politics. Why, he asks, ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... out and the summer had bloomed itself in. The holiday up the river was a thing of the past; the dreams of the Dreamer had given place to those sterner phases of life which must be coped with by the Realist; and Cleek was ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew
... the full expression of what I knew best; namely, that all "things," many or few, which we ought to paint, must be first distinguished boldly from the nothings which we ought not; and that a faithful realist, before he could question whether his art was representing anything truly, had first to ask whether it meant seriously to represent ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... and character creation than the best. Indeed, the humor is too abundant. Mysteries should be sedate and sober. There should be a pervasive atmosphere of horror and awe such as Poe manages to create. Humor is out of tone; it would be more artistic to preserve a somber note throughout. But I was a realist in those days, and in real life mysteries occur to real persons with their individual humors, and mysterious circumstances are apt to be complicated by comic. The indispensable condition of a good mystery is that ...
— The Big Bow Mystery • I. Zangwill
... of London life, despite his trend towards caricature, Jonson has shown himself a genuine realist, drawing from the life about him with an experience and insight rare in any generation. A happy comparison has been suggested between Ben Jonson and Charles Dickens. Both were men of the people, lowly born and hardly bred. Each knew the London of his time as few men knew it; and each represented ...
— Epicoene - Or, The Silent Woman • Ben Jonson
... more significant, more moving, than to search for an exclusive beauty, based upon rules, and inspired by the Greco-Latin ideal. Like the Flemings, the Germans, the Spaniards, and in opposition to the Italians whose influence had conquered all the European academies, the French Realist-Impressionists, relying upon the qualities of lightness, sincerity and expressive clearness which are the real merits of their race, detached themselves from the oppressive and narrow preoccupation with the beautiful and with ...
— The French Impressionists (1860-1900) • Camille Mauclair
... Romance" of the life at Brook Farm that the principal interest of most readers centres. This work has come to be regarded as the epic of the community, and it is now generally conceded that Hawthorne was in this novel far more of a realist than was at first admitted. He did not avoid the impulse to tell the happenings of life at the farm pretty nearly as he found them, and substantial as the characters may or may not be, the daily life and doings, the scenery, the surroundings, and even trivial details ...
— The Romance of Old New England Rooftrees • Mary Caroline Crawford
... the naive and sentimental poets are contrasted. The former, Schiller contends, is concerned with the definite, the latter with the infinite. From the realist we turn easily and with pleasure to actual life; the idealist puts us for the moment out of humor with it. The one follows the laws of nature, the other those of reason. The one asks what a thing is good for, the other whether it is good. Withal, ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... full upon the lake, and the calm breath, pure light, and the deep voice, harmonized well with the thought of the Flemish hero. When will this country have such a man? It is what she needs—no thin Idealist, no coarse Realist, but a man whose eye reads the heavens while his feet step firmly on the ground, and his hands are strong and dexterous in the use of human instruments. A man, religious, virtuous, and—sagacious; a man of universal sympathies, but self-possessed; a man who knows the region of ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. I, No. 6 - Of Literature, Art, And Science, New York, August 5, 1850 • Various
... successfully handled. And although there is, by measure, much serious talk, yet so skilfully does he bring in minor characters, with their transient sidelights, that the total impression is that of a book in which much happens. No realist could exceed the fidelity with which Signor Fogazzaro outlines a landscape, or fixes a passing scene; yet being an idealist through and through, he has produced a masterpiece in which ...
— The Saint • Antonio Fogazzaro
... observable, tempered, however, in the case of Mahony, with a vein of tender pathos which emerges in his delightful "Bells of Shandon." Maginn was a wit, Mahony was the hedge-schoolmaster in excelsis, and Carleton was the first realist in Irish peasant fiction. But all alike drew their best inspiration from essentially Irish themes. The pendulum has swung back slowly but steadily since the days when Irish men of letters found it necessary ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... national woe, much outwardly expressed and inwardly burning rage over the sufferings of his native land; yet they do not carry with a positive reality like that which in a Beethoven Sonata will often call words to our lips." Which means that Chopin was not such a realist as Beethoven? Ehlert is one of the few sympathetic German Chopin commentators, yet he did not always indicate the salient outlines of his art. Only the Slav may hope to understand Chopin thoroughly. But these Ballades are more truly touched by the universal than any other ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... phrase or term under which we can justly represent it. The first great master of the new world was Dante, but not the Dante of the exquisite sentiment but artificial form of the Vita Nuova, but the great imaginative realist of the Divine Comedy, the artist who could portray the passion and pain of Francesca and her lover, and with equal power the masterful figure of Farinata, whose dauntless soul not hell itself could quell; who could pass from the vivid drama of the fierce contemporary life of Italy to the infinite ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... dark confused death-wrestle, this of the six weeks. Formalist frenzy against Realist frenzy; Patriotism, Egoism, Pride, Anger, Vanity, Hope and Despair, all raised to the frenetic pitch: Frenzy meets Frenzy, like dark clashing whirlwinds; neither understands the other; the weaker, one day, will understand that it is verily swept down! Girondism ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... their convictions. One of them whom I have specially in view at this moment suffered patiently for years from the utter shipwreck of his generous illusions, and when he could no longer hope to see the dawn of a brighter day, he ended by committing suicide. Yet that man believed himself to be a Realist, a Materialist, and a Utilitarian of the purest water, and habitually professed a scathing contempt for every form of romantic sentiment! In reality he was one of the best and most sympathetic men I have ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... desillusionne. Once over-romantic, his character now was so entirely imbued with the neutral tints of life that romance offended his taste as an obtrusion of violent colour into a sober woof. He was become a thorough Realist in his code of criticism, and in his worldly mode of action and thought. But Parson John did not perceive this, for Welby listened to that gentleman's eulogies on the Ideal school without troubling himself to contradict them. He had grown too indolent to be combative in conversation, ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... ordinary mortals are incapable of such Protean versatility and are sure to find points, often many and important points, where we are strongly repelled by his teachings and his personality. The idealist is scandalized by his vigorous realism, the realist and materialist by his idealism, the dogmatist by his free thought, the free-thinker by his reverence towards religion, while the scientific expert is apt to regard him as a mere poet, oblivious or ignorant of the fact that, although ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... that I may find sympathy and comprehension among some, at least, of my audience, as I proceed to examine the ancient realist schools of Alexandria, on account of their knowledge of the modern realist schools of Germany. For I cannot but see, that a revulsion is taking place in the thoughts of our nation upon metaphysic subjects, and that Scotland, as usual, is taking the lead therein. That most illustrious Scotchman, ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... of many novels, still considered himself a realist. He affected to say that he did not write his books; that he merely transcribed them from life as he saw it, and he insisted always that he saw life as ...
— A Rebellious Heroine • John Kendrick Bangs
... accordance with Christophe's, who, at that stage in his career, was inclined towards a collective art, in communion with other men. Francoise's experience helped him to grasp the mysterious collaboration which is set up between the audience and the actor. Though Francoise was a realist, and had very few illusions, yet she had a great perception of the power of reciprocal suggestion, the waves of sympathy which pass between the actor and the multitude, the great silence of thousands of men and women from which arises the single voice ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... and hearing him. And it is just this that makes life so hard to value, and the delight of each so incommunicable. And it is just a knowledge of this, and a remembrance of those fortunate hours in which the bird has sung to us, that fills us with such wonder when we turn to the pages of the realist. There, to be sure, we find a picture of life in so far as it consists of mud and of old iron, cheap desires and cheap fears, that which we are ashamed to remember and that which we are careless whether we forget; but of the note of that ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... set off, after the man, who was a born realist, had tried to snatch a kiss from the skipper on the threshold. Fortunately for the success of the venture, it was pelting with rain, and, though a few people gazed curiously at the couple as they went hastily along, they were unmolested, and gained the wharf in safety, arriving just ...
— Many Cargoes • W.W. Jacobs
... lawlessness, its love of novelty, experiment, "strangeness added to beauty," contrast with the classical respect for rules, models, formulae, precedents, conventions; so, in another way, its discontent with things as they are, its idealism, aspiration, mysticism contrast with the realist's conscientious adherence to fact. "Ivanhoe" is one kind of romance; "The Marble Faun" ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... courage, meekness, and dignity. The charges brought against him were various; some so far-fetched as that urged by a Nominalist from the University of Paris—for Paris was Nominalist now—namely, that as a Realist he could not be sound on the doctrine of the eucharist. Others were vague enough, as that he had sown discord between the church and the state. Nor were accusations wanting which touched a really weak point in his teaching, namely, the subjective aspect which ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... formula can always be imagined or even understood. We shall be in accord with idealism by the use of this easy little formula, "If some one had been there," or even by saying, "For a universal consciousness...." The difference of the realist and idealist theory becomes then purely verbal. This amounts to saying that it disappears. But there is always much verbalism ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... de Maupassant is the greatest realist that ever lived. All other realists seem idealists in comparison. Many of the situations he describes are situations doubtless in which he himself "had a hand." Others are situations which he came across, in his enterprising debouchings ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... submits itself to an order, it is because the absence of every kind of order appears possible or conceivable. It is this absence of order that realists and idealists alike believe they are thinking of—the realist when he speaks of the regularity that "objective" laws actually impose on a virtual disorder of nature, the idealist when he supposes a "sensuous manifold" which is coordinated (and consequently itself without order) under the organizing influence of our understanding. The idea of disorder, in the ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... generally and perhaps rightly regarded as the trappings of fiction. Thus he was of heroic stature, a handsome red-bearded man of great personal strength and daring; and he was himself the first man over the wall of Jerusalem, like any boy hero in a boy's adventure story. But he was also, the realist will be surprised to hear, a perfectly honest man, and a perfectly genuine practiser of the theoretical magnanimity of knighthood. Everything about him suggests it; from his first conversion from the imperial to the papal (and popular) cause, to his great refusal of the kinghood of the ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... bank-account, the man with the hat and the boots, and the privilege of voting and not carrying his candidate at the general elections—I am sometimes tempted to suppose is no story-teller at all, but a creature as matter of fact as any cheesemonger or any cheese, and a realist bemired up to the ears in actuality; so that, by that account, the whole of my published fiction should be the single-handed product of some Brownie, some Familiar, some unseen collaborator, whom I keep locked in a back garret, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... need faith. He's a realist from the old school. He knows that we have no choice and all that's left is to come up with a formula for living with the situation. It doesn't bother him a bit how we figure this one. He knows we have to ...
— The Thirst Quenchers • Rick Raphael
... or pistol. If you read one of his chapters in "Hunting the Grizzly" and ask yourself wherein its animation and attraction lie, you will find that it is because every sentence and every line report things seen. He does not, like the Realist, try to get a specious lifelikeness by heaping up banal and commonplace facts; he selects. His imagination reminds one of the traveling spark which used to run along the great chandelier in the theatre, and light each jet, so that its passage seemed a flight from point ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... production of a new race of Roman youths for a revived Latin scholarly world, while the new humanistic realists wanted to use the old literatures as a means to a new end—that of teaching knowledge that would be useful in the world in which they lived. Monroe has so well expressed the humanistic-realist attitude that a passage from his History is worth ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... the Provencal poets, who know the Cigale as Anacreon never did, are scarcely more careful of the truth in celebrating the insect which they have taken for their emblem. A friend of mine, an eager observer and a scrupulous realist, does not deserve this reproach. He gives me permission to take from his pigeon-holes the following Provencal poem, in which the relations between the Cigale and the Ant are expounded with all the ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... the actual significance of Gogol's masterpiece differ. Some consider the author a realist who has drawn with meticulous detail a picture of Russia; others, Merejkovsky among them, see in him a great symbolist; the very title Dead Souls is taken to describe the living of Russia as well as its dead. Chichikov ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... which rents are to be sent up and wages down, while the old feuds of Wales and Ireland, ancient theological and sectarian jealousies and babyish loyalties, and so forth are to be waved in the eyes of the no longer fascinated realist. ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... discernment of realities in their relation to the whole order of things, which characterises true Idealism, and which makes all the greater writers Idealists in the fundamental if not in the technical sense. Tolstoi has often been called a Realist by those who are eager to label everything and everybody succinctly; but Tolstoi is one of the representative Idealists of his time, and his "Master and Man" is one of the most touching and sincere ...
— Books and Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... as one who aims at reproducing the external phenomena of nature, while the idealist is the man who 'imagines things of fine interest.' Yet, while he defined them he would not separate them. The true artist is a realist, for he recognises an external world of truth; an idealist, for he has selection, abstraction and the power of individualisation. To stand apart from the world of nature is fatal, but it is no less fatal merely ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... general ideas of life and thought as clearly as he could. All of philosophy, all of metaphysics that is, seems to him to be a discussion of the relations of class and individual. The antagonism of the Nominalist and the Realist, the opposition of the One and the Many, the contrast of the Ideal and the Actual, all these oppositions express a certain structural and essential duality in the activity of the human mind. From an imperfect recognition of that duality ensue great masses of misconception. ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... the "romantic romance," which every one in these days advises us to write—as if that style did not begin as far back as the birth of romance itself: as if the Princess of Cleves had not written, and as if Balzac himself, the great realist, had not invented, the finest "romantic romances" that can be found—for example, the amorous adventure of General de Montriveau and the ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... not true," Jurgen protested. "What you have shown me is a pack of nonsense. It is the degraded lunacy of a so-called Realist. It is sorcery and pure childishness and abominable blasphemy. It is, in a word, something I do not choose to believe. You ought to be ashamed ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... realist (we have a painful suspicion) if he were describing this pleasant man would deal rather roughly with him. You know exactly how it would be done. He would be a weary, saddened, shabby figure: his conscientious attention to the jewels ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... language even more violent than that of Vicente, we need not doubt the truth of his sketches. He was perhaps more vivid than the other critics and his satire penetrated deeply for the very reason that he was a realist. There was no doubt some professional exaggeration in the language of his beir[a]o rustics, but his sympathy with the peasants and his wide knowledge of the province of Beira prove that his object was not merely ...
— Four Plays of Gil Vicente • Gil Vicente
... to be the home of the ideal; in a word, the imagination should have full sway. The great dramatist is a creator; he is the sovereign, and governs his own world. The realist is only a copyist. He does not need genius. All he wants is industry and the trick of imitation. On the stage, the real should be idealized, the ordinary should be transfigured; that is, the deeper meaning of things should be given. As we make music ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... his idea of the actual surroundings of the characters he portrays, any more than they are your idea, or mine, of those surroundings. Is it to be supposed that he thought the dwellings of our Lord were palaces? Or that he could not paint a stable? Those who maintain that Holbein was a Realist in the modern sense of the word must reconcile as best they can the theory with the facts. But when we see the stage set with every stately circumstance,—the Babe amid the fading splendours of earthly palaces, our Lord mocked by matter as well as man,—I ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... place of the squalor that stretches Unchanged o'er the realist's page, The sunshine that glows in your Sketches Is potent our griefs to assuage; And when, on your mettlesome charger, Full tilt against reason you go, Your Lunacy's finer and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, February 14, 1917 • Various
... very life-blood of Chaucer, of Shakespeare, of Burns, of Villon, of Heine—and of all those who were not only great artists but great humanists. As a purely descriptive poet, he can take his place with the masters of sea and landscape. As an imaginative realist, he showed those who were stumbling from one wild eccentricity to another to thrill them, that they themselves were wilder, stranger, far more thrilling than anything in the world—or out of it. Few things in contemporary poetry are as powerful ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... why a Realist or an Idealist, a Monist or a Dualist, one who holds to an immediate perception of an external world or one who regards our acquaintance with it as a matter of inference, should refuse to go with me so far. Nor do I see any reason why a believer in God, one who bows at the shrine of Mind-Stuff, ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... novelist, born at Koenigsberg, of Jewish parents; professed Christianity and was married to Adolf Stahr; was a realist in art and a ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... vogue. But all we have to do, I believe, is to wait. Nominalism, and that "Sensationalism" which has sprung from nominalism, are running fast to seed; Comtism seems to me its supreme effort: after which the whirligig of Time may bring round its revenges; and Realism, and we who own the Realist creeds, may have our turn. Only wait. When a grave, able, and authoritative philosopher explains a mother's love of her newborn babe, as Professor Bain has done, in a really eloquent passage of his book ...
— Scientific Essays and Lectures • Charles Kingsley
... agility. It is a very carnival of contortion. Mr. Widgery Pimble transcribes very searchingly the post-prandial lethargy of a boa-constrictor, the process of deglutition being indicated with great dignity and delicacy, as might be expected from so austere a realist. From one angle the figure might be taken for a Bengal tiger, and from another for a zebra—a good proof of the suggestiveness of the artist's method. But, whether it be reptile or quadruped, the spirit of repletion broods over the canvas with irresistible force. Mr. Thaddeus ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, April 5, 1916 • Various
... nations, which are always the literature of reason, or the statements of an absolute truth without qualification. Proverbs, like the sacred books of each nation, are the sanctuary of the intuitions. That which the droning world, chained to appearances, will not allow the realist to say in his own words, it will suffer him to say in proverbs without contradiction. And this law of laws, which the pulpit, the senate and the college deny, is hourly preached in all markets and workshops by flights of proverbs, whose teaching is as true ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... deviation. Perhaps in extreme cases no art is equal to this; but then such self-imposed problems should not be worked by the artist; these out-of-the-way and detestable subjects should be let alone by him. It is rather characteristic of Mr. Browning to neglect this rule. He is the most of a realist, and the least of an idealist of any poet we know. He evidently sympathizes with some part at least of Bishop Blougram's apology. Anyhow this world exists. 'There is good wine—there are pretty women—there are comfortable benefices—there is money, and it is pleasant ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... chansons. Their age and history. Their distinguishing character. Mistakes about them. Their isolation and origin. Their metrical form. Their scheme of matter. The character of Charlemagne. Other characters and characteristics. Realist quality. Volume and age of the chansons. Twelfth century. Thirteenth century. Fourteenth, and later. Chansons in print. Language: oc and oil. Italian. Diffusion of the chansons. Their authorship and publication. Their performance. Hearing, ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... such, in the sense just indicated, is not in itself a very difficult or transcendental theory; but rises, again and again, at least in a particular class of minds, quite naturally, as the answer to a natural question. Taking our own stand as to this matter somewhere between the realist and the conceptualist:—See! we might say, there is a general consciousness, a permanent common sense, independent indeed of each one of us, but with which we are, each one of us, in communication. It is in that, those common or general ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... is content to call existing constitutions perversions of the true form. But we cannot read the Politics without recognising and profiting from the insight into the nature of the state which is revealed throughout. Aristotle's failure does not lie in this, that he is both idealist and realist, but that he keeps these two tendencies too far apart. He thinks too much of his ideal state, as something to be reached once for all by knowledge, as a fixed type to which actual states approximate or from which they are perversions. But if we are to think of ...
— Politics - A Treatise on Government • Aristotle
... materialist in the ardent pursuit of knowledge soon experience the necessity of indulging in assumptions concerning force and matter, the hypothetical ether and molecules, atoms and vortices, which are as purely metaphysical as any assumptions concerning the soul. The distinction between the realist and the idealist is a matter of temperament. All that separated Huxley from Gladstone was a word; each argued from the unknowable, but disputed over the name and attributes of the inconceivable. Huxley said he did not know, which was equivalent to the dogmatic assertion ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... other two were as completely unaware of his existence as they well could be in the same carriage. For a time, as I talked in commonplaces, Mr. Mafferton in monosyllables, and Mr. Dod and Miss Portheris in regards, the most sordid realist would have hesitated ...
— A Voyage of Consolation - (being in the nature of a sequel to the experiences of 'An - American girl in London') • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... task to say that this book determined my career—it would form a delightful literary assumption, but I cannot claim it. As a realist I must remain faithful to fact. I did not then and there vow to be a romantic novelist like Hawthorne. On the contrary, I realized that this great poet (to me he was a poet) like Edgar Allan Poe, was a soul that ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... less tragic; indeed, in a sense it was comic. Wellington, himself an Irishman though of the narrower party, was preeminently a realist, and, like many Irishmen, was especially a realist about Englishmen. He said the army he commanded was the scum of the earth; and the remark is none the less valuable because that army proved itself useful enough to be called the salt of the earth. But in truth ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... countrymen with a sense of freshness and strength. They felt as though they heard Danish for the first time spoken in its fulness. The poet Aarestrup (in 1848) declared that Blicher had raised the Danish language to the dignity of Icelandic. Blicher is a stern realist, in many points akin to Crabbe, and takes a singular position among the romantic idealists of the period, being like them, however, in the love of precise and choice language, and hatred of the mere ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... into art. Donne is intent on the passion itself, the thought, the reality; so intent that he is not at the same time, in that half-unconscious way which is the way of the really great poet, equally intent on the form, that both may come to ripeness together. Again it is the heresy of the realist. Just as he drags into his verse words that have had no time to take colour from men's association of them with beauty, so he puts his 'naked thinking heart' into verse as if he were setting forth an argument. He ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... Henry is romantic; in his settings he is a realist. Della and Jim are romantic lovers, they are not prudent nor calculating, but act upon impulse. In his descriptions, however, he is a realist. The eight-dollar-a-week flat, the frying pan on the back of the stove, the description of Della "flopping ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... him. And no man ever lived, I suppose, easier for every little creature crawling about the earth in self-satisfied futility to criticise and ridicule. For myself, I can do nothing but admire, revere, honour, and love this extraordinary old realist, who saved so many thousands of human beings from utmost misery; who aroused all the Churches of the Christian religion throughout the world; who communicated indirectly to politics a spirit of reality which ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton
... the tale as stoutly, at the least, as if they were propped up on half-a-dozen chapters by a dryer annalist, and the whole thing has the merit of those cabinet pictures in which the artist has been able to make his persons look the size of life. Hawthorne, to say it again, was not in the least a realist—he was not to my mind enough of one; but there is no genuine lover of the good city of Boston but will feel grateful to him for his courage in attempting to recount the "traditions" of Washington Street, the main thoroughfare of the Puritan capital. The four Legends of the Province House ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... original is not as wide. That delicacy of sentiment which is inseparable from Ingeborg and guides her right in the great crisis is not, he maintains, a trait merely of the woman of ancient Scandinavia but is inherent in each noble female, no matter when or where she lives. And Tegnr, who surely was no realist after the fashion of Strindberg, chooses to picture woman as she appears in ...
— Fritiofs Saga • Esaias Tegner
... man is a realist. That is to say, he believes in a world which is not to be identified with his own ideas or those of any other mind. At the same time, as we have seen (section 12), the distinction between the mind and the world is by no means clear to him. It is not difficult, by ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... human passion nor realized anything of the mystery of the world. His reader never derives from him the consciousness, that he so often derives from Vergil, of a 'deep beyond the deep, and a height beyond the height'. He has neither the virtues of the mystic nor of the realist. Ultimately, life is for him a pageant with intervals for sentimental threnodies ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... upon the brilliance of his portraits, the combined vigour and intimacy of his painting, his amazing knowledge, and his unerring fidelity to truth. M. Lemaitre, in fact, goes so far as to describe Racine as a supreme realist, while other writers have found in him the essence of the modern spirit. These are vague phrases, no doubt, but they imply a very definite point of view; and it is curious to compare with it our English conception ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... 237 I. Divergent psychical tendencies of Browning—"romantic" temperament, "realist" senses—blending of their donnees in his imaginative activity—shifting complexion of "finite" and "infinite" 237 II. His "realism." Plasticity, acuteness, and veracity of intellect and senses 239 III. But his realism qualified by energetic individual preference along certain well-defined ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... real they are natural. To me the spiritistic 'demonstrations' are intensely human and absorbingly interesting as dramatic material, and yet I hope I am sufficiently the scientist to be alive to the significance of these telekinetic happenings, and enough of the realist to remain critical in the midst of the wildest carnival ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland
... would think of comparing Charlotte Yonge with Charlotte Bronte. This is absurd. Whatever may be Tourgeniev's general inferiority (and I do not admit it), he was a great artist and a complete artist. And he was a realist. There is all earth and heaven between the two Charlottes. One was an artist, the other was an excellent Christian body who produced stories that have far less relation to life than Frith's "Derby Day" has to the actual ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... fixed on the artist's bold, proud features with singular curiosity. "The French Academy, I presume, are individually as appreciative of human weaknesses as most men; but taken collectively, some spirit higher and stronger than their own keeps them unanimous in their rejection of the notorious Realist who sacrifices all the canons of art and beauty to the discussion of topics unmentionable ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... two babes, collaborating with four small Sullivans, had by child magic, which is the only true magic, transformed this box into a splendid express train. The train now sped across country at such terrific speed that the small Sullivan at the throttle, an artist and a realist, crouched low, with eyes strained upon the track-head, with one hand tightly holding ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... feet; but in a buttonhole of his tunic was stuck the inevitable toothbrush, which continued even to the end of the war to be the distinguishing mark of gentle nurture,—the souvenir that the Confederate so often received from fair sympathizers in border towns. I am not a realist, but I would not exchange that homely toothbrush in the Confederate's buttonhole for the most angelic smile that Rothermel's brush could have ...
— The Creed of the Old South 1865-1915 • Basil L. Gildersleeve
... speaker and the listener that certain objections shall not be raised. The most realistic art in the world is open to realistic objection. Against the most exact and everyday drama that ever came out of Norway it is still possible for the realist to raise the objection that the hero who starts a subject and drops it, who runs out of a room and runs back again for his hat, is all the time behaving in a most eccentric manner, considering that he is doing these things in a room in which one of ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... all the personages in this story are models of virtue. To some of them has been given a part which severe morality reproves. But I am a realist and not an idealist, and for that I beg the reader a thousand pardons. I have tried to paint what I saw and not that of which I dreamed. If my figures are not chaste, the fault is not mine, but of those who passed before me and whose features I sketched ...
— The Grip of Desire • Hector France
... a Lapide, a former head of a house in Paris, migrated to Basle, in order to lend his influence and authority to the Realist party in that rising university. Trithemius says of him: "Hic doctrinam eorum Parisiensium qui reales appellantur primus ad Basiliensium universitatem transtulit, ibidemque plantavit, roboravit et auxit." This Johannes Heynlin a Lapide, ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... the ordinary man. If it be adequate, it will inevitably transcend this; but must not be in hopeless conflict with it. The stretched-out, graded, striving world of biological evolution, the many-faced universe of the physical relativist, the space-time manifold of realist philosophy—these great constructions of human thought, so often ignored by the religious mind, must on the contrary be grasped, and accommodated to the world-view which centres on the God known in religious experience. They are true within their own systems ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... sources, can only be explained by the assumption of an infinite personality and an absolute standard of right. Or, if to some all this appears but wire-drawn metaphysical subtlety, they are welcome to the definition of the realist, that the idea of God is the sum of those intelligent activities which the individual, reasoning from the analogy of his own actions, imagines to be behind and to bring about natural phenomena.[44-1] If either of these be correct, it were hard to conceive how any tribe or even any sane man could ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... a widow are like getting a rose some other fellow have clipped and thorned to wear in your buttonhole, Crabtree; they ain't nothing like 'em." Thus poet and realist made acknowledgment each after his and her own order of mind, but actuated by the identical ...
— Rose of Old Harpeth • Maria Thompson Daviess
... by degrees—I count myself among this tardy company—to realize their truth, sincerity, and humanity, in spite of the pessimism with which so many of them are tinged; their beauty also, notwithstanding the clashing discords that a poet, who is also a realist, cannot fail to strike; their permanence in English literature; and the greatness of Mr. Hardy's genius! Personally, I would make only one exception. I wish Mr. Hardy had not written Jude the Obscure! On the other hand, in the ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... academic or civil presidents, or senators, or professors, or great lawyers, and impose on the frivolous, and a good deal on each other, by these fames. At least, it is a point of prudent good manners to treat these reputations tenderly, as if they were merited. But the sad realist knows these fellows at a glance, and they know him; as when in Paris the chief of the police enters a ballroom, so many diamonded pretenders shrink and make themselves as inconspicuous as they can, or give him a supplicating look as they pass. "I had received," ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... End are told with an unshrinking fidelity, which yet has nothing mawkish or prurient in it. Edith Sichel was too good an artist to be needlessly disgusting. "It might," she said, "be well for the modern realist to remember that literalness is not the same as truth, nor curiosity ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... the realist and not the idealist who is generally justified by events. We forget that the human spirit, the spirit of goodness and truth in the world, is still only an infant crying in the night, and that the struggle with darkness is as yet mostly ...
— Woodrow Wilson's Administration and Achievements • Frank B. Lord and James William Bryan
... near to him, and talked in her most charming way of such things as she knew interested him. Biffen's deferential attitude as he listened and replied was in strong contrast with the careless ease which marked Jasper Milvain. The realist would never smoke in Amy's presence, but Jasper puffed jovial clouds even whilst she ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... you follow down the mystery of some brown brook, Little Fiery Gizzard Creek, let us say, for love of the name, you may very soon precipitate yourself into such a maze of coves, such a tangle of tough, tearing shrubbery (the term "laurel hell" is the mountaineer as realist), that you will regret, perhaps, the day you abandoned what in this region is euphemistically called a road. But you will hardly forget the view from some inland point, where you look, not out over the Tennessee plains, but over a branching canyon of coves, cut like the Grand Canyon out ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... upon the expression of a purely personal feeling—his own enjoyment in the weaving of the unsubstantial webs of improbable adventure that fill the preceding pages. With an ironic satisfaction was it that a writer who is not unaccustomed to be called a mere realist here attempted fantasy, even though the results of his effort may reveal invention only and not imagination. It may even be that it was memory (mother of the muses) rather than invention (daughter of necessity) ...
— Tales of Fantasy and Fact • Brander Matthews
... The realist, if he is an artist, will endeavor not to show us a commonplace photograph of life, but to give us a presentment of it which shall be more complete, more striking, more cogent than reality itself. To tell everything is out of the question; it would require at least a volume ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... and Kandinsky make an interesting parallel, in that they have developed the art respectively of Cezanne and Gauguin, in a similar direction. On the decision of Picasso's failure or success rests the distinction between Cezanne and Gauguin, the realist and the symbolist, the painter of externals and the painter of religious feeling. Unless a spiritual value is accorded to Cezanne's work, unless he is believed to be a religious painter (and religious painters need not paint ...
— Concerning the Spiritual in Art • Wassily Kandinsky
... freedom for the purpose of condemning it. Such a writer is a moralist, and there is no better example than Richardson. Again, it is possible to draw vice with neither sympathy nor disapprobation, but simply as a fact which is there. Such a writer is a realist, and such was Fielding. Once more, it is possible to draw vice in order to extract amusement from it. Such a man is a coarse humorist, and such was Smollett. Lastly, it is possible to draw vice in order to show sympathy with it. Such a man is ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... bitter buffoonery, the harsh sentiment of human baseness', and he demonstrates that, however odious and painful the episodes of senator and whore may be, they are true to the uttermost. Even the great nineteenth-century realist Zola did not disdain to take a hint thence for his chapters in Nana of the masochist Count Muffat and ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. II • Aphra Behn
... Realist, in his use of the novel as a vehicle for the description of real struggling life; with money and position, the principal desiderata of modern civilisation, powerful as determining factors in the moulding of men's ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... which science looms as the sacrilegious ogre who devours romance. Without spending space upon the ravages of the sentimental idealist, certainly responsible for as much human disaster as the brutal realist, it is manifest that a revolution in sex standards and relations is inevitable as soon as the new doctrines filter down as matters of fact to the levels of the common intelligence. And surely, nothing else could be wished for in the world desired by all of us, the world ruled by ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... literary school of which he was, and, in so many of his sympathies, is still a pupil, a school which regards M. Zola as one of its leading lights. En Route, and its sequels, portray in the colours of realism, in the language of decadence, the conversion of a realist, nay, of a decadent, to mysticism and faith. "The voice indeed is the voice of Jacob, but the hands are the hands of Esau," and according as the critic centres his attention too exclusively on one or the other, such ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... us be careful not to see in all this anything more than symbolical language, semantics[6] an opportunity to speak in parables. It is only on the theory that no work is to be taken literally that this anti-realist is able to speak at all. Set down among Hindus he would have made use of the concepts of Sankhya,[7] and among Chinese he would have employed those of Lao-tse[8]—and in neither case would it have made any difference to him.—With ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... little realist, who had already had all manner of experiences. But now the fear had at last curdled his blood, and he accepted the supernatural without a protest. The world had evidently perished, and he himself was drifting—drifting out into space, and space was terribly cold. Father Lasse, and the workshop, ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... celebrated by Mark Twain, whose favourite disguise was that of an itinerant preacher, cherished no less a project than an insurrection of negroes and the capture of New Orleans. The robber of to-day is a stern realist. He knows nothing of romance. A ride under the stars and a swift succession of revolver-shots have no fascination for him. He likes to work in secret upon safe or burglar-box. He has moved with the times, and has at his hand all the resources of modern science. If ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... masterpieces were perceived as the expression of the national life. He appreciated language as the wonderful medium through which the more wonderful life of the versatile Greek expressed itself. The reason he was such a great philologist was because he was so great a realist, a man who was intensely interested in the Greek people, their history and life. Words alone had little charm for him. No great teacher has ...
— The Elements of General Method - Based on the Principles of Herbart • Charles A. McMurry
... their prevalence at different times in Russian literature. Believe it not! The Russian author who is at all worth classifying is slave of no school; he is free, for he is a worshipper of the truth which alone maketh men free, he is a school unto himself. Is Gogol a realist? He gives you indeed the reality, but he breathes into it a beauty only visible to idealizing eyes. Is Turgenef a realist? When thrilled with the unspeakable beauty of the sky, he depicts it so as to realize for you the ideal. And when Tolstoy is thrilled with a moral emotion, he depicts it so as ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... idealistic novels, and one of these I have read, and it tired me very much. It was called "Marianela," and it surprised me the more because I was already acquainted with his later work, which is all realistic. But one does not turn realist in a single night, and although the change in Galdos was rapid it was not quite a lightning change; perhaps because it was not merely an outward change, but artistically a change of heart. His acceptance in his quality of realist was much more instant than his conversion, ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... vividly set forth in all its sordid details? And yet see how art steps in, with the wand of genius, to make literature! Over the whole the author has cast an ideal light; over a picture that, in the hands of a bungling realist, would have been repellent he has thrown the idealizing grace that makes it one of the most charming sketches in the world. Here is nature, as nature only ought to be in literature, ...
— Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley
... his eyes all its customs and manners, he makes him a witness to all its superstitions, fanaticism, and sordidness of every kind, a physical and social abasement that has no parallel. A faithful observer, an impressionist, an unemphatic realist, he discloses on every page misunderstood lives, extravagant beliefs, movements, evils, greatnesses, and miseries, of which the civilized world had not the slightest suspicion. It is the Odyssey of the ghetto adventurer, the life and journeyings of the author himself, ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... of the sort were pitched overboard long ago. I suppose one is bound to be illogical on one point, if only to prove to oneself the absolutism of one's logic on all others. Thus do I, otherwise sane and consistent realist, materialist, pessimist, cling to my one dream and ideal—take it out, dandle it, nourish and cherish it, with weakly sentimental faithfulness. To do so is ludicrous. But then my being here at all, calmly considered, is ludicrous. And it, too, ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... Argos. There is nothing more to tell by way of positive detail of this so famous [285] artist, save that the main scene of his activity was Athens, now become the centre of the artistic as of all other modes of life in Greece. Multiplicasse veritatem videtur, says Pliny. He was in fact an earnest realist or naturalist, and rose to central perfection in the portraiture, the idealised portraiture, of athletic youth, from a mastery first of all in the delineation of inferior objects, of little lifeless or living things. Think, however, for a moment, how winning such ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... been called "a Virginia realist." To him, receiving his first views of life from the foot of the Blue Ridge, one realism of the external world was too beautiful to admit of his finding in the ideal anything that could more nearly meet ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... right in so far as he denies that law as an abstract thing (considered apart from a person—as his thought) is anything: the realist is right in so far as he affirms that law, apart from {64} any particular manifestation, is an eternal reality. The reconciliation of nominalism and realism is found in God. Applying this to the case ...
— Letters to His Friends • Forbes Robinson
... of argument can be used by the Realist who believes matter to be a thing-in-itself; but it fits in much better with the Idealistic view of the relations between mind and matter, and with the tendency of modern physics to resolve ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... "help;" the race of coast-wise captains and traders, from Maine to Florida, as acute as they were ignorant; the rovers of the Atlantic and the Pacific, were gone not to return. If with these characters I have deserved the name of "realist," I have also clothed my skeletons with the robe of romance. "The Morgesons" completed, and no objections made to its publication, it was published. As an author friend happened to be with us, almost on the day it was out, ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... and if it should ever lead him to play the part of a satirist, the satire must needs be rather that of love than of malice. One who esteemed so highly the work of Balzac and of Flaubert might well be surmised to have something in his composition of what we now call the realist in art; and the work of the realist might serve to sustain and vindicate the idealist's ventures of imaginative faith. The picture of the lath-and-plaster entry of "Mount Zion" and of the pious sheep—duly indignant at the interloper in their midst—who one ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... Shakespeare—Touchstone, I think—talks about a man who is always breaking his shins over his own wit, and it seems to me that this might serve as the basis for a criticism of Meredith's method. But whatever he is, he is not a realist. Or rather I would say that he is a child of realism who is not on speaking terms with his father. By deliberate choice he has made himself a romanticist. He has refused to bow the knee to Baal, and after all, even if the man's fine spirit did not revolt against the noisy assertions ...
— Selected Prose of Oscar Wilde - with a Preface by Robert Ross • Oscar Wilde
... The extreme realist or detailist of the Ruskin type has for years been insisting that a spade was a spade and should be painted to look like a spade; that a spade was not a spade until every nail in the handle and every crack in the ...
— Outdoor Sketching - Four Talks Given before the Art Institute of Chicago; The Scammon Lectures, 1914 • Francis Hopkinson Smith
... It would have been the most infamous sacrilege." Unconsciously insincere, like the majority of people in their justificative confessions, Balzac often allowed his heart to intrude where it had no business to be present. Nevertheless in his realist pictures he exercised himself with all the cold delight of the anatomist, and with none of the warm emotion that might have become communicative. This Brunetiere implicitly admits when he says that most of Balzac's novels are, so to speak, ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... disregard the comfort, not to speak of the niceties, of the reader, that "the young realists" has seemed a fair, although, as I think, a misleading title, for their authors. To a critic they are most interesting, for the novel of the alleged young realist is like a fresh country boy on a football field, powerful, promising, and utterly wasteful ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby |
