"Inartistic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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' ...
— Cato Maior de Senectute • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... 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, ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... not inartistic and she resented the imputation. It was only that her art and Olga's differed by ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs
... different forms of culture, the Greek and the Roman, very much as we now group Hindus, Moslems, and Chinamen together as "Orientals." All that was really great in art was Greek, but they were content to receive it through the tradition of the most inartistic nation that ever lived. Far indeed were the Renaissance humanists from the noble ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... 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
... the celebrants the words, "Zarathustra and we." These words do not prove that the hymns are not by him. As explained by Dr. Mills, the hymns are seen to be very fully charged with meaning and with sentiment. Uncouth and inartistic in expression, and demanding an immense amount of patience and ingenuity to trace their connection of thought, they surprise the reader when once he seizes their meaning, by the depth and spirituality of their contents, and force ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... which belongs to legendary history rather than myth, is in reality quite independent of the Volsung or Nibelung cycle. The connection is loose and inartistic, the legend being probably linked to Gudrun's name because she had become a favourite character and Icelandic narrators were unwilling to let her die. The historic Ermanric was conquered by the Huns in 374; the sixth century historian Jornandes is the earliest authority ...
— The Edda, Vol. 2 - The Heroic Mythology of the North, Popular Studies in Mythology, - Romance, and Folklore, No. 13 • Winifred Faraday
... of 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
... upon her new career, and that her artistic efforts were crowned with success. There were a few Indian-ink sketches, studies made at school and expanded in her own "studio," which were eagerly bought as soon as exhibited in the photographer's window,—notably by a florid and inartistic bookkeeper, an old negro woman, a slangy stable boy, a gorgeously dressed and painted female, and the bearded second officer of a river steamboat, without hesitation and without comment. This, as Mr. Hamlin intelligently pointed out in a letter to Sophy, showed a general and diversified appreciation ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... aloud as he thought of these things; it was so curious that all this should be heaped upon him at once, so inartistic and yet so like life, in which the great events are frequently crowded together without sense ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... when it seemed necessary, he dug. After he had finished helping every one, Wally said that the turkey looked as if a dog had been at it, and the ham was worse, which remarks Jim meekly accepted as his due. Nor did the inartistic appearance of the turkey prevent the critic from coming ...
— A Little Bush Maid • Mary Grant Bruce
... the end in view; in his play with ideas, Dr. 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 clearly the result ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... miniature music drama. It requires the grand 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 ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... by the voice gliding from one tone to another, and is equally available on stringed instruments, the violin or 'cello, the mandoline or zither. It is a grace of style much abused by inartistic singers. Being an ornament, good taste dictates that it be used sparingly. A frequent sliding from one tone to another is a grave fault, and most disagreeable to a cultivated ear. To sing legato is one thing; to sing strisciato is ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... 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 want style—they want elegance. What they ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... with a view to comfort. There are no subtle harmonies in the papers and chintzes; there are no hidden suggestions of form and tone in the cornices and bell handles; all is barren of proportion, concord, and meaning. Still, this poor woman, with her inartistic eye and foolish heart, loves this wretched shelter, and would pour out her idiotic tears if she were leaving ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... us to speak of the Plot; and we are constrained to say that a more inartistic, unfinished piece of work we cannot remember. There is a lamentable waste of capital on Squire Deacon's sportsmanlike propensities. Why not have something come of them? We are not anxious to have the man hanged, or even indicted; but we did expect a magnanimous pardon ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... writing in the past tense, I might pause here to consider whether this emotion was a genuine one or a mere figment for literary effect. As I am writing in the present tense, such a pause would be inartistic, and shall not be made. I must seem not to be writing, but to be actually on the spot, suffering. But then, you may well ask, why should I stay here, to suffer? why not beat a hasty retreat? The answer is that my essay would then ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... 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 ...
— Mary Louise Solves a Mystery • L. Frank Baum
... to show how all nature tends inward to him and he outward to it. Whitman showers the elements of American life upon his reader until, so to speak, his mind is drenched with them, but never groups them into patterns to tickle his sense of form. It is charged that his method is inartistic, and it is so in a sense, but it is the Whitman art and has its own value in his work. Only the artist instinct could prompt to this succession of one ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... two of these methods are Artistic and legitimate: the others are inartistic and misleading. Before treating of the artistic methods it will be well to clear the ground by dismissing ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 829, November 21, 1891 • Various
... only be futile so long as we were not agreed as to what an impression consisted of. Several 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
... 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 were ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh
... spiritual quality. 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 ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... religious sentiment into her singing, and these envious creatures don't know what religious sentiment is, so they think she is all wrong. If she had sung HANDEL with a smile, and a coquettish tossing of her head, they would still have hated her, but they would not have ventured to call her "inartistic."" ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 2, No. 29, October 15, 1870 • Various
... 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
... retouched. In the Urfaust the duel between 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, are ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... 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 ...
— Dubliners • James Joyce
... wall paper 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
... he need not have apologized even indirectly for the freedom of his criticisms, which might well have been much bolder. The real attraction of the work he undertook was, that it would give him scope for widely-ranging comment; and it is the inevitable, by no means inartistic or unhealthy discursiveness of the treatment which makes it difficult to do justice to it. But we will venture upon a point ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... 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 and poetry, and had, ...
— Mrs. Shelley • Lucy M. Rossetti
... sights, sounds, smells, tastes, etc. that made her perceive what others failed to notice. This led to an artistry manifested by her nice work in music and decoration and also by an excessive displeasure at the inartistic. ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... London as in New York, and of what there are none are at once so cheap and so good as ours. The cheaper restaurants are apt to be English, sincere in material, but heavy and unattractive in expression; in everything culinary the island touch seems hopelessly inartistic. One Sunday morning, far from home, when the lunch came prematurely, we found all the English eating-houses devoutly shut, and our wicked hope was in a little Italian trattoria which opened its doors to the alien air with some such artificial effect as an orange-tree in a tub might expand its blossoms. ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... architecture, were the bonds that held him bound to the "old historic Church of England". His emotions, not his intellect, kept him Churchman, and he shrunk with the over-sensitiveness of the cultured scholar from the idea of allowing the old traditions, to be handled roughly by inartistic hands. Naturally of a refined and delicate nature, he had been rendered yet more sensitive by the training of the college and the court; the exquisite courtesy of his manners was but the high polish of a naturally gentle and artistic spirit, a spirit ...
— Autobiographical Sketches • Annie Besant
... 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 as it was found in the writing," and the earlier of these two tales follows this with a blessing ...
— Egyptian Tales, Second Series - Translated from the Papyri • W. M. Flinders Petrie
... '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 as their pipes ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... say, takes most clumsy and hopeless and long-roundabout methods of accomplishing crimes, to which one would have thought a lady of her imputed sagacity would have found much shorter cuts. It is amazing and inartistic, however, that after all her awkwardness she should fail. Given a blockhead like Armadale, and a dreamer like Midwinter, there is no reason in nature, and no reason in art, why a lady of Miss Gwilt's ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... mattered little now whether Seymour blew his brains out, so long as Charles Dickens blew his brains in. The work became systematically and progressively more powerful and masterly. Many critics have commented on the somewhat discordant and inartistic change between the earlier part of Pickwick and the later; they have pointed out, not without good sense, that the character of Mr. Pickwick changes from that of a silly buffoon to that of a solid merchant. ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... reflect the general tongue of the people, the great poets of England have almost always had to struggle against a complete dissonance between their own aims and interests and those of the nation. The result has been that England, the most inartistic of the modern races, has produced the largest number of exquisite literary artists. ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... back lonely and secluded in about a couple of acres of well wooded ground. From a big, rusty iron gate the ill-kept, gravelled drive took a broad sweep up to the front of the house, a large, roomy one with square, inartistic windows and plain front, the ugliness of which the ivy strove ...
— The Doctor of Pimlico - Being the Disclosure of a Great Crime • William Le Queux
... still stayed on 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 ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... representation as possible, and what may be called complete representation is within the range of their resources. Yet unless some individual choice or feeling impresses the work of either kind it is not a re-presentation, but becomes an imitation, and therefore inartistic. ...
— Line and Form (1900) • Walter Crane
... 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 ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement
... advisable, too, to put not-to-be-used damask away rough-dry, otherwise it may crack, in the folds. The use of colored table linens is in the worst possible taste, except on the servants' table. Those flaming ferocities known as "turkey-red" cloths, which seem to fairly fly at one, are not only inartistic but altogether too suggestive of economy in laundering to ...
— The Complete Home • Various
... 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 to shadow ...
— Fra Bartolommeo • Leader Scott (Re-Edited By Horace Shipp And Flora Kendrick)
... is another matter. Corporeally considered, men not infrequently fall in love with their opposites, the phenomenally tall with the painfully short, the unnecessarily stout with the distressingly slender. But even such inartistic juxtapositions are much less common than we are apt at times to think. For it must never be forgotten that the exceptional character of the phenomena renders them conspicuous, the customary more consorted combinations failing ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... 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, ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... surgeon's knife has never been used upon a body; the blood has been smeared on by an inartistic hand. ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch
... 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 ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck
... earned? Either he was right to let CHARLES STUART escape that day in the mist, in return for former generosity, or he was wrong; and one would have expected him to make up his mind and there an end, and not fret himself into a pother and Mr. JOHN FOSTER'S story into a most inartistic anti-climax over such a subtlety. All the same a rattling good tale, full of hard knocks as well as bright eyes, and with more than a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152. January 17, 1917 • Various
... The science of vegetables—those that are not good to eat, as well as those that are. It deals largely with their flowers, which are commonly badly designed, inartistic in color, and ill-smelling. ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... deficiencies, they lack only too frequently the courage to acknowledge them to others. Not until we artists all reach the point when we can take counsel with each other about our mistakes and deficiencies, and discuss the means for overcoming them, putting our pride in our pockets, will bad singing and inartistic effort be checked, and our noble art of singing come ...
— How to Sing - [Meine Gesangskunst] • Lilli Lehmann
... conscientious modern work. There are periods in history at which certain arts, crafts, or industries reached an extremely high level of excellence; and nothing can be more valuable to modern workmen than familiarity with these periods. Well-made replicas have a value that is overlooked only by the inartistic. Nor must it be forgotten that modern objects of modern design will one day become antiquities; and it should be our desire to assist in the making of the period of our lifetime an age to which future generations will look back for guidance and teaching. Every ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... 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 of the Commander-in-Chief. ...
— A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II • William Sleeman
... urging Mr. GREELEY to a wholesome moderation in the use of 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 ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., No. 39., Saturday, December 24, 1870. • Various
... through all my other books and the music and so on, I return gracefully to my original key and write Erewhon Revisited. Obviously, now is the proper moment to come to a full close, make my bow and retire; but I believe I am getting well, after all. It's very inartistic, but I ...
— Samuel Butler: A Sketch • Henry Festing Jones
... square might be 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 must absolutely ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... after this time we hear no more of him. Oligarchical in his sympathies, he offended his own party and was distrusted by the democrats. Andocides was no professional orator; his style is simple and lively, natural but inartistic. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... 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 the writings, for ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... time trying so hard to establish in English prosody; but the experiment, which turned out so badly in the master's hands, fared even worse in those of the disciple, and Stanyhurst's lines will always stand as a noted specimen of inept translation and ridiculous versification. Equally inartistic was his version of some of the Psalms in the same metre. In Latin he wrote a profound commentary on Porphyry, the Neo-Platonic mystic. Stanyhurst, who was uncle to James Ussher, the celebrated Protestant archbishop of Armagh, ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... short of 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
... 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 ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... the Legations are quite comfortable, pretty and unpretentious, with the usual complement of furniture of folding pattern, so convenient but so inartistic, and a superabundance of cane chairs. Really good furniture being very expensive in Teheran, a good deal of the upholstery of the Teheran Legations is conveyed to the country residences for the summer months. Perhaps nothing is more amusing to watch than one of these removals to ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... with Sapoho twice a week by a negro in rubber boots. There was a stable with a tarred roof in the rear, to be discerned beyond the conventional side lawn that was broken into by the bay window of the dining-room. There, in that house, his two children were born: there, within those inartistic walls, Eliza Preston lived a life that will remain a closed book forever. What she thought, what she dreamed, if anything, will never be revealed. She did not, at least, have neurasthenia, and for all the world knew, she may have loved her exemplary and successful husband, with whom ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... plain, inartistic room, and the middle-aged woman whose holy of holies it had been for fifteen years was as old-fashioned and unbeautiful as it; yet there was, somehow, about the place a certain atmosphere of goodness and peace that cannot be described ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten
... Baku looks the inartistic, business-like place it is, occupying the base of brown, verdureless hills. Scarcely a green thing is visible to relieve the dull, drab aspect roundabout, and only the scant vegetation of a few gardens relieves the city a trifle ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... 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 last analysis ...
— Practical English Composition: Book II. - For the Second Year of the High School • Edwin L. Miller
... nineteenth-century life, and embark upon the phosphorescent sea of our sensational novelists—psychological, so-called. It is rather soon for the cabinet to break, however. It suggests an anti-climax, which would be inartistic. But such material was never intended to be thrown away by ...
— What Dreams May Come • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... 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 ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... 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. ...
— The Library • Andrew Lang
... 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 ...
— Spalding's Official Baseball Guide - 1913 • John B. Foster
... a happy one. The elements in some of the Hindoo myths specially repulsive to European taste are their monstrosity, their inartistic and hideous exaggeration, their accumulation of sanguinary horrors, and their childish triviality. Few of the classical myths exhibit these characteristics. The vanity or policy of Tiberius and Alexander in believing themselves to be, or wishing to be believed, divine, has nothing ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... criticisms are shown to be without reason when we understand the wishes of the audience and the manner of presenting the plays. The conditions of the entry or the reentry of a player might explain some of those lengthy monologues that seem so inartistic to modern dramatists. The Elizabethan theaters and the tastes of their patrons had certain important characteristics ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... 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 made many signs of denial.—"Yes," ...
— Albert Savarus • Honore de Balzac
... 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 ...
— A Rebellious Heroine • John Kendrick Bangs
... faces. render ugly &c adj.; deface; disfigure, defigure^; distort &c 23; blemish &c (injure) 659; soil &c (render unclean) 653. Adj. ugly, ugly as sin, ugly as a toad, ugly as a scarecrow, ugly as a dead monkey; plain, bald (unadorned) 849; homely; ordinary, unornamental^, inartistic; unsightly, unseemly, uncomely, unlovely; unshapely; sightless, seemless^; not fit to be seen; unbeauteous^, unbeautiful; beautiless^, semibeautiful; shapeless &c (amorphous) 241. misshapen, misproportioned^; monstrous; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... Meadowcroft herself seized 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 ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... true when he says that "A work of beauty is a joy forever"—a thing that is beautiful to ME, is a joy to ME, as long as it remains beautiful to ME—and if it remains so as long as I live, it is so forever, that is, forever to ME. If he had put it this way, he would have been tiresome, inartistic, but perhaps truer. So we will assume here that this change only goes on in man and nature; and that this eternal process in mankind is paralleled in some way during ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... handling. They are purchased for cooking; and the eating of apples out of hand because they are attractive and really good is an unknown experience with great numbers of our people. The polished shiny apples of the fruit-stands are a delusion. The practice of burnishing the fruits produces a most inartistic result, destroying the natural bloom and violating the appearance of a natural apple. It is one thing to clean a fruit if it is soiled (which is seldom the case with boxed or barreled apples); ...
— The Apple-Tree - The Open Country Books—No. 1 • L. H. Bailey
... "inauspicious stars" which hardly any man, of the many who have handled it in prose and verse, has been able to spoil. Our Middle English form is not consummate, and is in some places crude in manner and in sentiment. But it is notable that the exaggerated and inartistic repulsiveness of Mark, resorted to by later writers as a rather rudimentary means of exciting compassion for the lovers, is not to be found here; in fact, one of the most poetical touches in the piece is one of sympathy for the luckless husband, when he sees the face ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... understanding that the railroad was not to be meddled with. The directors had been paying 100,000 francs a month. As will be easily believed, there was a difficulty in the distribution of the money among so many greedy and inartistic robbers, and the discontented determined to hold up the railroad itself and stop all trains. Unluckily, the train we were on was the one they proposed to experiment on first, and they proposed drastic ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... prospect. Still, it had to be 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 he ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... painter when compared to those of an etcher in colours. There are times when Dickens is consciously "common," and then he is almost unbearable; but this objection cannot be made to the "Pickwick Papers." This book is inartistic; it is made up of unrelated parts; the characters do not grow; they change. But all this makes no difference. They are spontaneous. You feel that for once Dickens is doing the thing he likes to do—and all the world loves a ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... things artistic and beauty-loving. Now look at them as they were three centuries B.C.: plodding, self- contained and self-mastered, square-dealing and unsubtle, above all things contemning beauty, wholly inartistic. But a race may retain the same traits for a very long time, if it remains in a back-water, and is unaffected ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... sculptor of budding fame, had gone onward to the house of his father, an inartistic man of trade and commerce merely, from whom, nevertheless, Jocelyn condescended to accept a yearly allowance pending the famous days to come. But the elder, having received no warning of his son's intended visit, was not at home to receive him. Jocelyn ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... lives of others is some sort of transformation, some evidence of patient struggling with faults, some hint of failings triumphed over, some gain of generosity and endurance and courage. To slur over the faults and failings of the great is not only inartistic: it is also faint-hearted and unjust. It alienates sympathy. It substitutes unreal adoration for wholesome admiration; it afflicts the reader, conscious of frailty and struggle, with a sense of hopeless despair in the presence of anything ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Samuel F. B. Morse
... in the room, men whose faces, despite an inartistic attempt to appear Oriental, he recognized at a glance and knew better than he knew his own. About them lay discarded portions of Cingalese attire, thrown off because of the heat, and waiting to be resumed at any moment. The air was thick with tobacco ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... moment, he resumed. "The singer, though trying to act out the character he assumes, must not forget to sing. The combination of fine singing and fine acting is rare. Nowadays people think if they can act, that atones for inartistic singing; then they yield to the temptation to shout, to make harsh tones, simply for effect." And the famous baritone caricatured some of the sounds he had recently heard at an operatic performance with such gusto, that a member of the household ...
— Vocal Mastery - Talks with Master Singers and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... 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 ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... that the really 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 is unfit, for prudential reasons, for their pages, surely there must ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... tints, calculated to bring out the colour of her glowing tresses. Cecilia, who worshipped colour with every bit of her artist soul, adored her stepmother's hair as thoroughly as she detested her dresses. Bob, who was blunt and inartistic, merely detested her from every point of view. "Don't see what you find to rave about in it," he said. "All the warmth of her disposition has simply gone to ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... question," 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
... 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 ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... hand upon the table, looking down at the carpet. He had known for a long time, in a vague fashion, that he lacked something; that his success—a wholly inartistic one—had yielded him little gratification; that the comfort of his home was a purely monetary product and not in any sense atmospheric. He had schooled himself to believe that he liked loneliness—loneliness physical and mental, and that in marrying a pretty, ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... circus caravan overtook him Uncle Enoch had captured the runaways and was leading them back to where the wrecked wagon lay by the roadside. More or less butter was mixed with the sandy chin whiskers and an inartistic yellow smooch down the front of his coat showed that the eggs had ...
— Horses Nine - Stories of Harness and Saddle • Sewell Ford
... many nails of so many shapes and so many colours in the pig-sty at the back of Coate Farm. They prefer 'their geraniums in the conservatory.' They refuse, in any case, to call a 'picture' that which is only a long-drawn sequence of statements. They are naturally inartistic, but they have the tradition of a long and speaking series of artistic results, and instinctively they decline to recognise as art the work of one who was plainly the reverse of an artist. The artist is he who knows how to select and to inspire the results of his selection. ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... of keeping is observable sometimes in the character of the several pieces of furniture, but generally in their colours or modes of adaptation to use Very often the eye is offended by their inartistic arrangement. Straight lines are too prevalent—too uninterruptedly continued—or clumsily interrupted at right angles. If curved lines occur, they are repeated into unpleasant uniformity. By undue precision, the appearance of many a fine ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... have 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 ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... critics in their depreciation of Chopin's works. Field called his "a talent of the sick chamber." Moscheles, while admitting Chopin's originality, and the value of his pianistic achievements, confessed that he disliked his "harsh, inartistic, incomprehensible modulations," which often appeared "artificial and forced" to him—these same modulations which to-day transport us into the seventh heaven of delight! Mendelssohn's attitude toward Chopin was somewhat vacillating. ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck
... himself, and with a deep love for the picturesque, which often makes men insensible to dirt and discomfort, he expected to Italianize Herminia too rapidly. Herminia, on the other hand, belonged more strictly to the intellectual and somewhat inartistic English type. The picturesque alone did not suffice for her. Cleanliness and fresh air were far dearer to her soul than the quaintest street corners, the oddest old archways; she pined in Perugia for a green ...
— The Woman Who Did • Grant Allen
... is true, in our own case, that you have exclusive monopoly of the ethereal qualities, while to me are given chiefly the physical attributes of the vigorous and healthy male—the animal: my six feet three, my muscular system, my inartistic and pedestrian temperament. Fairly clean-minded, I hope I may be, but beyond all question I am the male animal incarnate. It was, indeed, the thousand slaveries of the senses, individually so negligible, collectively so overwhelming, that forced me upon my knees before her physical loveliness. I ...
— The Garden of Survival • Algernon Blackwood
... beautified the Ohio. Despite their inartistic names, Diamond and Slim are tipped at head and foot with charming banks and willowed sand, and each center is clothed in a luxurious forest, rimmed by a gravelly beach piled high with drift and gnarled roots: the whole, with startling clearness, inversely reflected in the mirrored ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites
... mesh being large and open. This was a favourite lace with the Spaniards for mantillas, and much prosperity resulted to the little town of Chantilly. As with all other laces, the introduction of machinery killed the industry as an art, and the only Blonde laces now made are by machine, and are quite inartistic and inelegant. Hand-made Chantilly in black silk is still manufactured, but it has only a ...
— Chats on Old Lace and Needlework • Emily Leigh Lowes
... are used in preparing it for the four tiny, light bluish-green eggs, which readily fade when exposed to light. The eggs so closely resemble those of the Bluebird as not to be distinguishable with certainty. The nest is an inartistic one for ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photography, Vol. II., No. 5, November 1897 - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... the 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 of tropic nature, the ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... 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 ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe
... 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 enormous energy, in actions whose violence affords scope for the most vehement ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... of a tangible reality having a distinct purpose, that of holding water; and this purposefulness makes of the object a separate, individual thing. Yet a too great distinction of objects and a too great elaboration of detail, as in Meissonier and the English Pre-Raphaelites, is inartistic; the picture breaks up into separate parts and all feeling of unity is lost. In the work of the Flemish and Dutch, on the contrary, we take delight in the perspicuity of things without losing the sense of wholeness; for there is a sameness and simplicity of color tone which unites them. ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... least, Mrs. 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 become "a Sourdough," and his antithesis, the "Tenderfoot," was ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... disinterestedly, but his most intimate associates could not have guessed at the existence of such feelings. Tony Luton was just a merry-eyed dancing faun, whom Fate had surrounded with streets instead of woods, and it would have been in the highest degree inartistic to have sounded him for a ...
— When William Came • Saki
... dramatis personae rarely speak like reasoning human beings: they rant at one another or at the audience with such overwrought subtleties of speech and rhetorical perversions that they give the impression of being no more than mechanical puppets handled by a crafty but inartistic showman. All speak the same strange language, a language born in the rhetorical schools of Greece and Rome. Gods and mortals alike suffer the same melancholy fate. Juno, when she declares her resolve to afflict Hercules with madness, ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... 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 ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... 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
... strings are used—is for the artist to get his audience into the concert hall, and give it a program which is properly balanced. Theodore Thomas first advised me to include in my programs short, simple things that my listeners could 'get hold of'—nothing inartistic, but something selected from their standpoint, not from mine, and played as artistically as possible. Yet there must also be something that is beyond them, collectively. Something that they may need to hear a number of times ...
— Violin Mastery - Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers • Frederick H. Martens
... course mythical. It is held by the surrounding populace to be an infallible remedy in the instance of unfruitful women, and is the constant resort of that class from far and near. These chapels at Guadalupe are decorated in the crudest and most inartistic manner, entirely unworthy of such belief as is professed in the sacredness of the place, or of the virtues attributed by the priests to them as a religious shrine. Money enough has been wasted, but there seems to be an ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... The huge, 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 ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... as readily as to me. Until the actual event comes off we are practically in the position if not of comrades, at least of business partners. Until the event comes off, therefore I should suggest that quarrelling would be inconvenient and rather inartistic; while the ordinary exchange of politeness between man and man would be not only ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... 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. I have translated so as to leave ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... Dennis's uncultivated eye there was an inartistic formality about the whole establishment. His sense of this was at first but a feeling—a vague impression that grew upon him without his quite knowing why. He soon discovered, however, that everything was arranged squarely, according to system, order, ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... should change that in this civilized community, and put up a building that will be not only comfortable and adapted for our necessities, but also artistic, and it will cost us no more than to do it in a slovenly, inartistic way. I imagine we can make good terms with the carpenter and the bricklayer and the decorator so as to reduce the cost as much as possible;" and all ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: The Tribesmen • Roger Finlay
... as a means of assurance is less artistic, as 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, is not far removed from the first-mentioned fault, since ...
— The Poetics • Aristotle
... 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 this we need hardly be astonished, for Heywood was both a player and an excessively ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... decorated with a number of costly jewels; there is a peacock in the middle entirely formed of precious stones; but all these treasures fail to produce any very great effect, from the clumsy and inartistic fashion ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... 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 ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... play, a novel, or a short story with a happy ending is necessarily a commercialized and inartistic piece of work. ...
— The American Credo - A Contribution Toward the Interpretation of the National Mind • George Jean Nathan
... they do. Originality, however, thinks and feels for itself; commonly the original artist does not live the refined, intellectual life that would befit the fancy-man of the cultured classes. He is not picturesque; perhaps he is positively inartistic; he is neither a gentleman nor a blackguard; culture is angry and incredulous. Here is one who spends his working hours creating something that seems strange and disquieting and ugly, and devotes his leisure to simple animalities; ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... not 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 erected ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... been far better had Philip planted the cannas either in the round bed or against the fence as a screen. As a general rule the planting in tubs, kettles, kegs and similar receptacles is not only inartistic, but gives the plant very confined and cramped quarters. When possible plant right out in the ground. Window boxes and roof gardening in ...
— The Library of Work and Play: Gardening and Farming. • Ellen Eddy Shaw
... selected to illustrate the expedient of emphasizing by position have been chosen for convenience from short-stories; but the same principle may be applied with similar success in constructing the chapters of a novel. Certain great but inartistic novelists, like Sir Walter Scott, show themselves to be singularly obtuse to the advantage of placing emphatic material in an emphatic position. Scott is almost always careless of his chapter endings: he allows the sections of his narrative to drift and straggle, instead ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... wall 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 it ...
— The Crucifixion of Philip Strong • Charles M. Sheldon
... "Ballad of Tzar Ivan Vasilievitch, the Young Lifeguardsman, and the Bold Merchant Kalashnikoff," which every one hailed as an entirely new phenomenon in Russian literature, amazing in its highly artistic pictures, full of power and dignity, combined with an exterior like that of the inartistic productions of folk-poetry. This poem was productive of all the more astonishment, because his "The Demon,"[13] written much earlier (1825-1834), was little known. "The Demon" is poor in contents, but surprisingly rich in wealth and luxury of coloring, ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... beauty of the line. Yet Milton must have thought that it was needed, and have only decided by an after-thought that it was better away. If it had been printed so, we should equally have thought its omission barbarous and inartistic. ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... useless of all the uniforms I know. The helmets and cocked hats are of the pattern affected by theatrical managers, the decorations tawdry, the swords absurd, the whole appearance indicative of a taste unmilitary and inartistic. The parade uniform has been designed by a lot of unsoldierly politicians and tailors about Washington. Their notion of military glory is confused with memories of St. Patrick's Day processions and Masonic installations. They have made the patient United ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1178, June 25, 1898 • Various
... marbles, bronzes, pictures, gems, inflaming the magnates, nobles, and nouveaux riches of Rome. How fortunate that influence was in another field, that of literature, we know. In plastic art, by reason of the essentially inartistic spirit of the Roman race, the result was practically small; save indeed in one department, that of portraiture, to which the essential impulse was, as Leighton very suggestively shows, "ethic, not aesthetic." Even in Roman architecture, our critic finds ...
— Frederic Lord Leighton - An Illustrated Record of His Life and Work • Ernest Rhys
... chimneys smoke; they look as if they smoked. Why—as you tell her—the chimneys are the best part of the house. You take her outside and make her look at them. They are genuine sixteenth- century chimneys, with carving on them. They couldn't smoke. They wouldn't do anything so inartistic. She says she only hopes you are right, and suggests ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome
... crowned by arches, but they must be Gothic arches,—doctrine to be received with some grains of allowance. A pointed Gothic arch may be, often is, very beautiful; but, applying our test of utility, it is most obviously out of place, and therefore inartistic, where close economy, convenience, and abundance of light are required. For the sake of strength, if for no other reason, let the top of the openings be arched, but a low arch of one arc or two is often ...
— Homes And How To Make Them • Eugene Gardner
... cynicism will be made bitterer still by the fact that, owing to his being (in all probability) unmusical, inartistic, and unable to amuse himself with any form of handwork, he will have no taste or hobby to distract him from himself. For a time, indeed, the "genial sense of youth" will keep his sinister tendencies in check; and in the middle period ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... Socialist modern civilisation is worse than a failure. "Our civilisation seems all so savage and bestial and filthy and inartistic; all so cowardly and devilish and despicable. We fight by cheatery and underselling, and adulteration and bribery, and unmanly smirking for our bone of a livelihood; all scrambling and biting round the platter when there is ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... of all their worst misdemeanours, and knew the precise number of stones with which they had intended to hit Farmer Britton's ducks. But for all who saw them through a less mythical medium, the Miss Irwines were quite superfluous existences—inartistic figures crowding the canvas of life without adequate effect. Miss Anne, indeed, if her chronic headaches could have been accounted for by a pathetic story of disappointed love, might have had some romantic interest attached to her: but no ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... is an appeal to inartistic people; all means are welcomed which help towards obtaining an effect. It is calculated not to produce an artistic effect but an effect upon the nerves ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... and inartistic symbolism is revolting to a spiritually-unfolded consciousness. True mystic symbolisms must observe accurately the finer law of correspondences or they fail to appeal to such as these, and become to the occult a mild ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... decided character appeared to advantage. But it is not my purpose to write a complete history of Jackson or of his administrations. Those who want fuller information should read Parton's long biography, in which almost every subject under the sun is alluded to, and yet which, in spite of its inartistic and unclassical execution, is the best thesaurus I know of for Jacksonian materials. More recent histories are dissertations in ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XII • John Lord
... which has its rise in the perception that no great art can come into existence among us until the common things of daily living—the furniture, the books, the carpets, the chinaware—are made to express that creative joy in the maker which distinguishes an artistic product from an inartistic one. This creative joy, in howsoever small degree, may be present in most of the things that the child does. If he sets the table, he may set it beautifully, taking real pleasure in the coloring of the china and the shine of the silver and glass. He ought not to be permitted to set it ...
— Study of Child Life • Marion Foster Washburne
... [Footnote: P.P. was a writer whose real name was Rumohr. He wrote a number of historical novels of a patriotic type, but which are only read by children up to 14.] novels, and was incapable of detecting the inartistic quality and unreality of his popular descriptions of the exploits of sailor heroes. As soon as my eyes were opened to the other's advanced acquirements, I opened my heart to him, gave him my entire confidence, and found in my friend a well of knowledge and superior development from which I felt ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... and one boy," he put in. "Well, that is my own opinion, but Jack and Ed are so inartistic. I never can get them to see things ...
— The Motor Girls On Cedar Lake - The Hermit of Fern Island • Margaret Penrose
... intelligible, and with its bluntness could hardly fail to make itself felt. It is when one compares it with similar work of Franklin's, as "The Whistle," for example, that one is reminded of its inartistic form. But Webster was always busy over subjects directly connected with the well-being of the people. His philological work had its origin in this motive, and in his miscellaneous writings he displayed his practical philosophy ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... chair! She was stout and ugly, and had a way of doing her hair which, as a writer says, "alone would have proved impeccable virtue in the face of incriminating circumstantial evidence." For all their "Kultur" Germans are gross, and to the last degree inartistic. Their "nouveau art" is repulsive; their dressing outrageously ugly, and their cooking atrocious. I have watched them here year after year tramping up and down the shady walks stolidly drinking, wearing garments of ingeniously devised ...
— A War-time Journal, Germany 1914 and German Travel Notes • Harriet Julia Jephson
... am an artist, and it seemed inartistic to intervene—to interrupt the action at an inopportune moment—to stultify what promised to be an unusually involved complication. When first I saw and recognized you on the Nevski, it was like ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... inartistic prospect she sauntered out and downstairs to see what her maid might be about. Bowles was sewing; Sybilla looked on for a while with languid interest, then, realizing that a long day of punishment was before her, that she deserved it, and that she ought to perform ...
— The Green Mouse • Robert W. Chambers
... they proclaimed that every government which strives to diminish illiteracy is digging its own grave. Priding themselves on the thoroughness of their own investigations, they belittled the results of learning in others, mocked at the superficial labour of the Benedictines, ridiculed the inartistic surroundings of Sainte-Beuve and Renan, and protested that antiquity was nothing but an inept invention to enable professors to earn their daily bread. Not content with asserting the superiority of ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... the thing is that these flashes, which are not to be found at all before the date of this university school, are to be found constantly in its productions, and that, amorphous, inartistic, incomplete as those productions are, they still show Hamlet and A Midsummer Night's Dream in embryo. Whereas the greatest expert in literary embryology may read Gorboduc and The Misfortunes of Arthur through without discerning the slightest ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... came, like a dark-eyed Flora, her hands loaded with daffodils that might bring a glow of the beauty of spring even to an inartistic spirit. The front door stood open, and a flat has an unrelenting way of laying bare all the skeletons that find no closet room. Mrs. Lenox surprised a scene of domestic economy in the tiny parlor. The ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... she wore it at many fashionable dinners and receptions in Washington. She was bravely sustained, however, by her husband, Colonel Miller, who never flinched in escorting his wife and her coadjutors, however inartistic their costumes might be. To tall, gaunt women with large feet and to those who were short and stout, it was equally trying. Mrs. Miller was also encouraged by the intense feeling of her father on the question of woman's dress. To him the whole revolution in woman's ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... father had given in at last, and gone to the City, so, for a moment, it seemed to Jimmy that he must go. But then he remembered Walter's office, where you could not smoke, and the only spot of colour was that inartistic insurance calendar with ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... pervading 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 ...
— The Indiscretion of the Duchess • Anthony Hope
... it is only too plain that the automobile —like that other inartistic instrument of torture, the grand piano —is not adapted to the drawing-room. It is not quite at home in the stable; it demands a house of its own. If the friend who invites you to visit him has a machine, then accept, ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... hurry over these deportations, for the plea of military exigencies, which had caused the deportations in Armenia itself to be terminated by massacre with a rapidity almost inartistic, did not apply to Armenians so far from the seat of war. Their picnics could be conducted quietly and pleasantly in the leisurely Oriental manner. Even the men need not be murdered absolutely out of hand. Strong young fellows might be stripped and tied down and then beaten to death by bastinadoing ...
— Crescent and Iron Cross • E. F. Benson
... mechanical preparations were clumsy and inartistic, and the final scenes of the execution, therefore, revolting in the extreme. When the death-caps were all drawn over the faces of the prisoners, and they stood in line in the awful suspense between absolute life and immediate ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... phrases, in a sort of 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 ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne |
