"Realism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of his calm and serene compositions Fra Angelico has figures in which a healthy realism is strongly accentuated; figures drawn with decision, strong chiaro-scuro and robust colouring, which show that he did not deliberately disdain the progress made in art by his contemporaries. Indeed we should err in believing that Fra Angelico ...
— Fra Angelico • J. B. Supino
... forgot why he had collected them. He could not remember the design or the object. He piled them all wildly into one heap fifty feet high; and when he had done it all the rich and influential went into a passion of applause and cried, "This is real art! This is Realism! This is things ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... being the center of attention and admiration, even tho it was from a roomful of criminal "Reds." So he told all the picturesque details of how Guffey had twisted his wrist and shut him in a dungeon; the memory of the pain was still poignant, and came out of him now, with a realism that would have moved a ...
— 100%: The Story of a Patriot • Upton Sinclair
... more prudence and dexterity of management than I; he was also thinking of his periodical the Horen, about this time, and of course rather wished to attract than repel me. Accordingly he answered me like an accomplished Kantite; and as my stiff-necked Realism gave occasion to many contradictions, much battling took place between us, and at last a truce, in which neither party would consent to yield the victory, but each held himself invincible. Positions like the following grieved me to the ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... look'd forth from the windows the eyes for nothing, or whose brain held audience with messengers for nothing, Who contains believers and disbelievers, who is the most majestic lover, Who holds duly his or her triune proportion of realism, spiritualism, and of the aesthetic or intellectual, Who having consider'd the body finds all its organs and parts good, Who, out of the theory of the earth and of his or her body understands by subtle analogies ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... the possibility of realizing the dream of a world-State or a collective European State, the Frenchman speaks for his country. France regards the development of European history with simple realism and without ideals. The only weak link in her chain-mail is the belief in the civilizing mission of France. If there is no progress why have ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... 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 of realism, his style would be quite sufficient of itself ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... in treatment, comprehensive in subject, liberal in detail and slate-pencil—it represented Uncle Ben lying on the floor with a book in his hand, tyrannized over by Rupert Filgee and regarded in a striking profile of two features by Cressy McKinstry. The daring realism of introducing the names of each character on their legs—perhaps ideally enlarged for that purpose—left no doubt of their identity. Equally daring but no less effective was the rendering of a limited but dramatic ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... fiction is to be sought. It was not until about the middle of the nineteenth century that modern short stories, novels and plays began to be written on anything like a scale worthy of note. The earliest of these were romantic in spirit, though most of them had a realistic tinge. With Realism, the short story came into its own in the eighties and nineties of the last century. This trend came like a fresh current to take its place side by side with Romanticism, without, however, ousting it from the literary scene. ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... large portion of their narrative to the account of the Death of Christ, they exercised a very great and marked reserve as regards the physical details of the Crucifixion. In this respect the gospels are in harmony with the earliest Christian representations, as distinguished from the repulsive realism in which the medieval ...
— Gloria Crucis - addresses delivered in Lichfield Cathedral Holy Week and Good Friday, 1907 • J. H. Beibitz
... real document, from which I have scarcely varied, ran for one night. I think you seem scarcely fair to Wiltshire, who had surely, under his beast-ignorant ways, right noble qualities. And I think perhaps you scarce do justice to the fact that this is a place of realism A OUTRANCE; nothing extenuated or coloured. Looked at so, is it not, with all its tragic features, wonderfully idyllic, with great beauty of scene and circumstance? And will you please to observe that almost ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... court deception. We shall see the trunk from which he draws his nourishment; but he himself is above and abroad in the green dome of foliage, hummed through by winds and nested in by nightingales. And the true realism were that of the poets, to climb up after him like a squirrel, and catch some glimpse of the heaven for which he lives. And the true realism, always and everywhere, is that of the poets: to find out where joy resides, and give it voice ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... painting—its variety, and its importance as the expression, the mirror, so to speak, of the country. If we except Rembrandt with his group of followers and imitators, almost all the other artists differ very much from one another; no other school presents so great a number of original masters. The realism of the Dutch painters is born of their common love of nature; but each one has shown in his work a kind of love peculiarly his own; each one has rendered a different impression which he has received from nature and all, starting from the same point, which was the worship of material truth, ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... short story about 'Tommy and the Huckleberry-tree.' I don't know whether huckleberries grow on trees or on huckles, but that will make the tale all the more interesting. If they don't grow on trees people will regard the story as romance. If they do grow on trees it will be realism." ...
— The Booming of Acre Hill - And Other Reminiscences of Urban and Suburban Life • John Kendrick Bangs
... motive with arresting episode. It is a difficult thing to do, as I have found. It was not done on my part wholly by design, but rather by instinct, and I imagine that this tendency has run through all my works. It represents the elements of romanticism and of realism in one, and that kind of representation has its dangers, to say nothing of its difficulties. It sometimes alienates the reader, who by instinct and preference is a realist, and it troubles the reader who wants to read for a story alone, who ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... far better represented through an impressionistic sketch, which gives only the significant features, than by a painstaking and detailed drawing. Since, furthermore, the life of things can be conveyed through color and line as such, a certain departure from realism is legitimate for this end. Without some freedom from the exact truth of the colors and lines of things, the artist is unable to choose and compose them for expressive purposes; when exactly like the objects which they represent, they tend to lose all expressive power ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... also, as well as morally, Dante stands between the old and the new, and reconciles them. The theme of his poem is purely subjective, modern, what is called romantic; but its treatment is objective (almost to realism, here and there), and it is limited by a form of classic severity. In the same way he sums up in himself the two schools of modern poetry which had preceded him, and, while essentially lyrical in his subject, is epic in the handling of it. So also he combines ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... with the tools of artistry. On the other hand, he had not sacrificed strength. His conscious aim had been to increase his strength by avoiding excess of strength. Nor had he departed from his love of reality. His work was realism, though he had endeavored to fuse with it the fancies and beauties of imagination. What he sought was an impassioned realism, shot through with human aspiration and faith. What he wanted was life as it was, with all its spirit-groping and ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... of Hawthorne's imaginative writings in the union of profound, keen, psychological development of characters and problems with the most lucid objectivity and a joyous modern realism. Occasionally there appears a light and delicate humor, sometimes hidden in a mere adjective, or little phrase which lights up the gloomiest situation with a gentle ray of hope. Far from unimportant ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... pleasures. It had still less influence on the Roman mind, which was practical and worldly. Platonism opposed the sensualism and materialism of the times, believed in eternal ideas, sought the knowledge of God as the great end of life—a sublime realism which was hardly more appreciated than Christianity itself. Platonism was doubtless the highest effort of uninspired men, under the influence of pagan ideas and institutions, to attain a knowledge of God and the soul. It gloried ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... Minutes later, when they had stopped his horse, and cut him down from the stirrups, and carried him into the shade of a hop-bush off the track, and when Stingaree dared to open his eyes, he was nearer closing them perforce, and the scene swam before him with superfluous realism. ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... palette on the piece of oil-cloth that protected the floor from spots of paint. Dear master! How thankful he was to him for this visit! And he showed him the copy, minutely accurate but without the wonderful atmosphere, without the miraculous realism of the original. Renovales approved with a nod; he admired the patient toil of that gentle ox of art, whose furrows were always alike, of geometric precision, without the slightest negligence or the least attempt ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... with the wanderers swooning in snow storms beneath happy-hued church windows. And a choir within singing "Joy to the World." To Maggie and the rest of the audience this was transcendental realism. Joy always within, and they, like the actor, inevitably without. Viewing it, they hugged themselves in ecstatic pity of their imagined or ...
— Maggie: A Girl of the Streets • Stephen Crane
... story of Foma Gordyeeff is told; his life is finished, as lives are being finished each day around us. Besides, it is the way of life, and the art of Gorky is the art of realism. But it is a less tedious realism than that of Tolstoy or Turgenev. It lives and breathes from page to page with a swing and dash and go that they rarely attain. Their mantle has fallen on his young shoulders, and he promises to wear ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... published by J. Dodsley, Pall Mall, appeared in May 1783, and at once attracted attention by novel qualities. Among these was the bold realism of the village-life described, and the minute painting of the scenery among which it was led. Cowper had published his first volume a year before, but thus far it had failed to excite general interest, and had met with no sale. Burns had as yet published nothing. But two poetic masterpieces, ...
— Crabbe, (George) - English Men of Letters Series • Alfred Ainger
... with the accustomed pro and con upon the wart of Cromwell's nose, Realism rejoicing in ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... when in a lighter. Moreover, the boatmen with whom I had constantly to associate were unintermittently foul-mouthed and blasphemous. I was not easily shocked; the men with whom I had for years foregathered were much given to realism of speech, as well as to picturesquely lurid verbal illustration. But this was different; the language of these men was crammed with filth for filth's sake, and flat, pointless profanity. I have no doubt that my inability to avoid expressing disgust made them worse than they ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... maid, fair-cheeked," "curly-locked," "elf-bright." To the Anglo-Saxon poet, much that we call metaphorical was scarcely more than literal statement. As the object pictured itself to his responsive imagination, he expressed it with what was to him a direct realism. His lines are filled with a profusion of metaphors of every degree of effectiveness. To him the sea was "the water-street," "the swan-path," "the strife of the waves," "the whale-path"; the ship was "the foamy-necked floater," "the wave-farer," "the sea-wood," "the sea-horse"; the arrow ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... wave of civilization is sinking and a new wave rising, while the one has not entirely disappeared and the other is still far from its height. The history of civilization has shown at all times a wavelike alternation between realism and idealism, that is, between an interest in that which is, and an interest in that which ought to be. In the realistic periods, the study of facts, especially of the facts of nature, is prevalent; in idealistic periods, history and literature appeal to the world. In realistic periods, technique ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... attention to historical realism and his use of actual historical models that have helped his work to pass the test of time and have led to his becoming the favorite of a new generation of readers more than ...
— Uller Uprising • Henry Beam Piper, John D. Clark and John F. Carr
... aware of the widespread current distaste for the word "consciousness," with its idealistic associations. The term seems to me too useful to discard; but I wish to point out that, as I use it, it involves no metaphysical viewpoint, but is equally consonant with idealism or realism of any sort.] Primitive man, indeed, imagines inanimate things as having intrinsic goodness or badness, i.e., as feeling happy or unhappy, benevolent or malignant. We still speak of a serene sky, an angry storm cloud, a caressing breeze, and in a hundred ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... father, if she was able to soften him at all it would not be in the least necessary to drive that bad young man, Mr. Faversham, to despair. Compromise—bargaining—settle most things. She fell to imagining—with a Latin clearness and realism—how it might be handled. Only it would have to be done before her father died. For if Mr. Faversham once took all the money and all the land, there would be no dot for her, even if he were willing ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... with an unsparing realism which, in a few instances, is carried beyond the limits of good taste. Such is the case with El Piojoso of the Louvre, which represents a little beggar removing vermin from his body, and which Mr. Ruskin has severely denounced. Another picture in Munich, and ...
— Child-life in Art • Estelle M. Hurll
... their revels from his clear Olympian ether, but he is not troubled by the fumes of intoxication. Michelangelo has altered this conception. Bacchus, with him, is a terrestrial young man, upon the verge of toppling over into drunkenness. The value of the work is its realism. The attitude could not be sustained in actual life for a moment without either the goblet spilling its liquor or the body reeling side-ways. Not only are the eyes wavering and wanton, but the muscles of the mouth have relaxed into ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... Peyton and Claire Morris; how exact Claire had been in the expression of her personality! What, he grasped, was different in her from other women was precisely that; together with an astonishing lack of sentimental bias, it operated with the cutting realism of a surgeon's blade. She ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... done in the drama for which Greece supplied the stage to French statesmen during the last few years; for it is not often that a Government in the pursuit of practical interests overlooks so completely moral principles, flouts so openly national sentiments, and, while priding itself on realism, shuts its eyes so consistently ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... joined the pessimistic camp. His works, at least, indicate other qualities than those which gained for him the favor of the reading public. He becomes a more ingenious romancer, a more delicate psychologist. If some of his sketches are realistic, we must consider that realism is not intended 'pour les jeunes ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... flowery lanes, the rooks cawing among slumberous elms; often had he thought of that village on the hill-top with its grey steeple. Well, he would see them all in a few days. And how would England compare with the tingling realism of Nepenthe? Rather parochial, rather dun; grey-in-grey; subdued light above—crepuscular emotions on earth. Everything fireproof, seaworthy. Kindly thoughts expressed in safe unvarying formulas. A ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... to Billy Durgin, who reported this interview to me in a manner of able realism, that these men were both crooks ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... 'The Trail of '98'. For power and blunt realism there was nothing like it, but the character of the hero was torn in the shreds of debate. There was general agreement on two points: that the portrayal of the desolate Alaskan wild had a touch of "home," and that the heroine was a ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... idea of realism that's killing art!" he shrieked one day, on the rocks at Concarneau. "Who wants things natural? If Jones and Smith could be taught by reiterating life as it is, the race of fools would soon become extinct. My neighbor loves his neighbor's wife, and they go off together and there is ...
— Katrine • Elinor Macartney Lane
... the vast darkening horizon of "The Prairie" and the death of the trapper, and one will feel how natural and inevitable are the fates of the personages and the alterations in the life of the frontier. These books vary in their poetic quality and in the degree of their realism, but to watch the evolution of the leading figure is to see human life ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... scenery or costume the words fail to get home to the audience. In comedies dealing with concrete conditions of modern society, the stage presentation necessarily relies to a very large extent for its success on the realism of the scenic appliances. In plays which, dealing with the universal and less familiar conditions of life, appeal to the highest faculties of thought and imagination, the pursuit of realism in the scenery tends to destroy the full ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... To Miss Forbes the realism of Fred's acting was too convincing. To learn that one is covered with a loaded revolver is disconcerting. Miss Forbes gave a startled squeak, and ducked ...
— The Scarlet Car • Richard Harding Davis
... individual revelation of his country's predicament did not lose its effect. Writing in prose he achieved a style of his own which went as near poetry as narrative prose can do. without using the wrong music: while over his realism or his irony he cast a tinge of that mixed modern and oriental fantasy which belonged to his temperament. He suffered in youth, and suffered badly, from the romantic malady of his century, and that other malady of Russia, both expressed in what M. Haumand terms his "Hamletisme." But ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... of which it became harder and harder as time went on to select one. But her answer was ever the same, a pained but firm refusal. She was happy in her lot. She was greatly needed where she was. She did not wish to marry. She was no longer young. This last reason was an enormous concession to realism on Aunt ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... every floating straw. The innumerable "isms" by which it seeks ever and anon to keep itself afloat are most of them but the sometimes unrecognisable wreckage of the old systems drifting about under very inappropriate names. Such terms as Realism and Idealism are freely used (generally prefixing the adjective "new") by writers in philosophic periodicals in a sense which might make Plato, Aquinas, or ...
— Essays Towards a Theory of Knowledge • Alexander Philip
... about him—and my duty in that respect is clear—it must be out of the fulness of my heart. My earliest recollections of him begin when I was a child and he was a bright, self-reliant lad in the home at Newcastle, the characteristics of which are with artless realism described in the opening pages of this book. It is the simple truth to say that we grew up in an atmosphere of love and duty. Our father was a man of studious habit, passing rich in the possession of a library of dry works on theology which his children never read, and among which they ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... himself pleasure in renewing acquaintance with his old tutor, Mr. Welby,—pleasure in refreshing his own taste for metaphysics and casuistry and criticism. But that accomplished professor of realism had retired from philosophy altogether, and was now enjoying a holiday for life in the business of a public office. A minister in favour of whom, when in opposition, Mr. Welby, in a moment of whim, wrote some very able articles in a leading journal, had, on acceding to power, presented ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... "One sparkling stream, where realism in its sweeter, human and humorous aspects shall appear at its best.... Humor, wisdom, artists' jargon from the studios, psychic phenomena.... All in Mr. De Morgan's best vein.... The advancing chapters ... how realistically modern they are, with the ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... Goethean but of all modern art, was written professedly as an attempt in the Homeric[7] style, motived by Wolf's "Prolegomena" and Voss's "Luise." It is Homeric only in its circumstantiality, in the repetition of the same epithets applied to the same persons, and in the Greek realism of Goethe's nature. The theme is very un-Homeric; it is thoroughly modern and German,— "Germans themselves I present, to the humbler dwelling I lead you, Where with Nature as guide ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... dear public. I expect I can get it into next year's New English Art Club, and if I do it will be the sensation of the show.... I haven't done with it yet. In fact I only started yesterday. There's going to be a lot more realism in it. All those silly Jacobite societies will furiously rage together.... And it's a bit of ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... sums up in the speeches all the potentialities of the situation. All the significance latent in the type of character and environment is somehow heightened and symbolized. All this is put in his own highly individual diction. Yet it can hardly be said that he violates poetic realism in the deeper sense, for he never puts a halo around a situation, never goes counter to its potentialities. Instead he strikes fire from it. He shows what is actually in the situation, but at white heat and laid bare to ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... abruptly in the middle of the stream,—so that, if a cavalcade of the knights and ladies of romance should issue from the old walls, they could never tread on earthly ground, any more than we, approaching from the side of modern realism, can overleap the gulf between our domain and theirs. Yet, if we seek to disenchant ourselves, it may readily be done. Crossing the bridge on which we stand, and passing a little farther on, we come to the entrance of the castle, abutting on the highway, and hospitably ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... admire the more, the appetizing realism in William Worm's account of his infirmity, or the primitive state of his theological views which allowed him to look for special divine favor by virtue of the ecclesiastical ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... play, "Gammer Gurton's Needle" (cir. 1562), is a domestic comedy, a true bit of English realism, representing the life of the ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... off a number of the golden images from the temples. Pursued with relentless vigor at last their escape is effected in an astonishing manner. The story is so full of exciting incidents that the reader is quite carried away with the novelty and realism of the narrative. ...
— Gascoyne, The Sandal Wood Trader - A Tale of the Pacific • R. M. Ballantyne
... Saint at Venice, and that are now preserved in the Accademia. Early Flemish painting, in fact, in addition to its own peculiar charm of microscopic delicacy of finish, is hardly inferior, in contrast with the later strong realism and occasional coarseness of Rubens or Rembrandt, to the tender poetic dreaminess of the primitive Italians. Certainly these pictures, though finished to the minutest and most delicate detail, are lacking in realism ...
— Beautiful Europe - Belgium • Joseph E. Morris
... retail shops. La Joie de Vivre came in 1884. Germinal told of mining and the misery of the proletariat. L'Oeuvre pictured the life of artists and authors. La Terre portrayed, with startling realism, the lowest peasant life. Le Reve, which followed, was a reaction. It was a graceful idyl. Le Reve was termed "a symphony in white," and was considered as a concession to the views of the majority of the ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... has felt a little disposed to clothe herself with all the honors of persecution which belong to the real owner of the name. But the bishops, etc. of the Middle Ages knew that the contest between nominalism and realism, for instance, had a hundred times more bearing upon orthodoxy than anything in astronomy, etc. A wrong notion about substance might play the mischief ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... human garb, converses with it in language such as none save Persius ever dreamed of using, or scourges it with all the heavy weapons of the Stoic armoury. There is at times a certain violence and even coarseness[241] of description which does duty for realism, but the words ring hollow and false. The picture described or suggested is got at second-hand. He lacks the vivacity, realism, and common sense of Horace, the cultured man of the world, the biting wit, the astonishing descriptive ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... west porch. There they struck up a carol in a somewhat lofty key. It was a most doleful ditty. Certainly I have never since heard the like of it. I remember that it told the story of the Crucifixion in startling language, full of realism that must have been horribly ghastly, if it had not been so comic. At the end of each verse the singers made one stride towards the communion. There were some thirty verses, and every mortal verse did these zealous carollers give us. They came to an end at ...
— The Little Manx Nation - 1891 • Hall Caine
... unaware, but I should emphatically suggest his appointment to the post of Official Cheerer-Up. Perhaps (how shall I put it?) the eye-pieces of the writer's mask are a trifle too rose-coloured for strict realism; great-hearted gentlemen as we know our heroes to be, are they always quite so merry and bright as here? One can but hope so. In any case, as special propaganda on the part of the O.C.U., the stories could hardly be bettered. One, called "The Push that ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Dec. 5, 1917 • Various
... sixteenth century succeed in representing with perfect mastery these scenes of country life, as, for instance, Albrecht Durer, in his engraving of the prodigal son. But it is one thing if a painter, brought up in a school of realism, introduces such scenes, and quite another thing if a poet, accustomed to an ideal or mythological framework, is driven by inward impulse into realism. Besides which, priority in point of time is here, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... was much taken with the inlaid wooden stalls in the choir, the subjects were so lively. He and his Aunt Caroline nearly came to words over a monkey regarding its reflection in a looking glass, done with a realism which Mrs. Portheris considered little short of profane, but which poppa found quite an excusable filip to devotions which must have been such an all day business in the sixteenth century. Outside, however, ...
— A Voyage of Consolation - (being in the nature of a sequel to the experiences of 'An - American girl in London') • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... expression. He does not care whether the things he writes about are true, whether his characters are real. What he aims to give is a true impression. And to convey this impression he does not scorn to use mysticism, symbolism, or even plain realism. His favorite characters are degenerates, psychopaths, abnormal eccentrics, or just creatures of fancy corresponding to no reality. Frequently, however, the characters, whether real or unreal, are ...
— Savva and The Life of Man • Leonid Andreyev
... it, too," he said. "Now I think I'd better go—as all things are en regle, even the kiss, which was classical—pure—Louis XVI.... Besides, Scott was idiot enough to shut the door. That's Louis XVI, too, but too much realism is never artistic." ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... entirely new twist is here given to the murder mystery, in that the authors have placed the burden of discovery upon three children whose intelligence and innocence are brought to bear on an adult problem. A most ingenious mystery play worked out, however, in terms of modern theatrical realism. The play has one interior setting and calls for 15 characters, of whom 8 are adult men and 2 young boys, and 4 adult women and one young girl. (Production fee quoted upon request.) Paper bound books, ...
— Class of '29 • Orrie Lashin and Milo Hastings
... place in it became apparent; and it was in this new frame of mind that the monumental series of works by the Webbs came into existence. Wallas's Life of Francis Place shows his power of reconstructing a popular agitation with a realism which leaves the conventional imaginary version of it punctured and flaccid; and it was by doing the same for the Chartist movement that he ...
— The History of the Fabian Society • Edward R. Pease
... 1914 and 1918 in the gradual compiling of a human document of immense historical value. Compared with it, the diaries of Defoe and Pepys would pale and be flavourless. But it must have been begun in June, 1914, and have been written with the casualness of that commonplace realism which is the most convincing realism of all. It is true that the expression of the uncomplex mind is infrequently articulate, but the record which would bring home the clearest truth would be the one unpremeditatedly depicting ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... The photographic realism of the later newspaper correspondent had not come into play in these earlier years of the war, and, as a consequence, the thousands who poured down to the Army of the Potomac beheld the city with something of the incredulous scorn with which the effeminate Byzantines regarded ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... characteristics of the painter's craftsmanship. The inspiration stage was practically passed when he took the crayon in his hand; and to this circumstance probably is to be assigned the absence of realism which arrests ...
— Frederic Lord Leighton - An Illustrated Record of His Life and Work • Ernest Rhys
... square to which it leads), and skirting the Montburon Garden, I reached the Place du Bastion. This is a semicircle now used as the town marketplace. In the midst stands the statue of Bichat by David d'Angers. Bichat, in a frockcoat—why that exaggeration of realism?—stands with his hand upon the heart of a child about nine or ten years old, perfectly nude—why that excess of ideality? Extended at Bichat's feet lies a dead body. It is Bichat's book "Of Life and of Death" translated into bronze. I was studying this statue, ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas, pere
... the picture itself was just. There was nothing ideal in the work. It was simply the representation of a naked woman doing what no woman could like to be seen doing. And a picture of a mere naked woman, however well executed, is never art if art means idealism. The realism of the thing was its offensiveness. Ideal nakedness may be divine,—the most godly of all human dreams of the superhuman. But a naked person is not divine at all. Ideal nudity needs no girdle, because the charm is of lines too beautiful to be veiled or broken. The living real human ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... an ingenious combination of practical realism and imaginative fiction worked out to a thoroughly delightful and ...
— The Passenger from Calais • Arthur Griffiths
... continues: "It is therefore manifest that the fundamental position of a consistent theory of dualistic realism is—that our cognitions of Extension and its modes are not wholly ideal—that although Space be a native, necessary, a priori form of imagination, and so far, therefore, a mere subjective state, that there is, at the same time, competent to us, ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel
... together. The first two have little connection with religion, though they put forward the emancipation of the soul as their object, and I have no space to discuss them. They are however important as showing that realism has a place in Indian thought in spite of its marked tendency to idealism.[738] They are concerned chiefly with an examination of human faculties and the objects of knowledge, and are related to one another. The special doctrine of the Vaiseshika is the theory of atoms ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... the paths of these two young scholars diverged. Emerson became an idealist and an ethical reformer. Elizur Wright became a realist and a political reformer. Realism seems to belong ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... that it is impossible to decide "whether they arise immediately from the object, or are produced by the creative power of the mind, or are derived from the Author of our being," thereby implying that realism and idealism are equally probable hypotheses. But, in fact, after the demonstration by Descartes, that the immediate antecedents of sensations are changes in the nervous system, with which our feelings have ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... of a good story, she has the power of doing what, after all, only a very few indeed of her fellow craftsmen have ever been able to do—she can bring into her pages the living pressure of a human passion, she can invest, if not with realism, with something greater than realism—with the sense of reality itself—the pains, the triumphs, and the agitations of the human heart. "The heart," to use the old-fashioned phrase—there is Mrs. Inchbald's empire, there is the sphere of her glory and ...
— A Simple Story • Mrs. Inchbald
... Tennyson the aged, whose moral eyes were as the physical eyes of Moses on Pisgah, "undimmed." Bless him for his aged anger! Happily, to-day, realism has lost its charm. We have had enough living in sewers, when the suburbs were near with their breezy heights and quiet homes. Stench needs no apostle. The age has outgrown these hectic folk, who, in the name of nature, ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... have in it all the passion of the romantic spirit, all the perfection of the spirit that is Greek. The harmony of soul and body—how much that is! We in our madness have separated the two, and have invented a realism that is vulgar, an ideality that is void. Harry! if you only knew what Dorian Gray is to me! You remember that landscape of mine, for which Agnew offered me such a huge price, but which I would not part with? It is one of the best things I have ever done. And why is it so? ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... few years ago, it made a strong impression on me. I found it suitable for tragedy, and it still makes a sorrowful impression on me to see an individual to whom happiness has been allotted go under, much more, to see a line become extinct." And in defence of his realism he has said further in his preface to "Countess Julie": "The theatre has for a long time seemed to me the Biblia pauperum in the fine arts, a bible with pictures for those who can neither read nor write, and the dramatist is the revivalist, and the revivalist ...
— Plays: The Father; Countess Julie; The Outlaw; The Stronger • August Strindberg
... and passion, the daring realism of St. Teresa reminded Evelyn of Vittoria. She found the same unrestrained passionate realism in both; she thought of Belasquez's early pictures, and then of Ribera. Then of Ulick, who had told her that the great artist dared everything. St. Teresa had dared everything. ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... the clever pleas urged by the lovers of realism for realistic novels, it is easy enough to see that the mass of readers are just as much in love as ever with a high romanticism, and Miss Marlitt's stories still retain the strong hold they first took of the popular heart. The success ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... In that desolate and ghostly spot, the natural color and humors of the landscape and the climate seemed designed to express to the traveler the memories of the ground. A visitor to the salient early in November, 1918, when a few German bodies still added a touch of realism and human horror, and the great struggle was not yet certainly ended, could feel there, as nowhere else, the present outrage of war, and at the same time the tragic and sentimental purification which to the future will in some degree transform ...
— The Economic Consequences of the Peace • John Maynard Keynes
... with salt-water stains, and stiff with tar and grease, big thigh-boots, and worsted caps. A cutlass belted to the waist, and a knife and brace of revolvers in the belt gave the finishing touch of realism to the get-up, and obviated any possibility of doubt as to the seriousness of ...
— The Cruise of the Thetis - A Tale of the Cuban Insurrection • Harry Collingwood
... says Rosalind; for this boy had that terrible power of vivid description which flinches at no realism—seems to enjoy the horror of it; does not really. Probably it was only his intense anxiety to communicate all, struggling with his sense of his lack of language—a privilege enjoyed by guv'nors. But Rosalind feels the earnestness ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... chippendale chair, the sombre Spanish leather screen, which formed the background, and the pot of copper-coloured chrysanthemums, counterparts of the little cluster which Eve wore in the bosom of her gown, on a many-cornered Turkish table at the side: it had all the gay realism of modern Paris without losing the poetry of the old school, or attaining the ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... assembly rooms may be decorated with American and Allied colors, and it would be appropriate and effective to suspend in each window a trio of toy balloons, red, white, and blue in color, respectively. Miniature airplanes hung overhead at intervals down the length of the room would add realism. ...
— Entertaining Made Easy • Emily Rose Burt
... just been pleading in public for more War realism from literary artists, has in preparation a fascinating new romance entitled Marie of Stratford, which depicts, with all this master's restraint, power and genius, various phases in the life of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 15, 1916 • Various
... in or about 1400, and dying in 1443, we owe a great step in art towards realism. It was he, says Vasari, who first attained the clear perception that painting is only the close imitation, by drawing and colouring simply, of all the forms presented by nature showing them as they are produced by her, and that whoever shall most perfectly effect this may ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... lofty presentation of South Pass, and a picture of the alkali desert, so parching, so withering in its choking realism, that it makes the throat ache and the tongue dry to read it. Just a bit of ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... that there is more fact and realism in the wildest and most elegant old fictions about disinherited dukes and long-lost daughters than there is in this Eugenist attempt to make the poor all of a piece—a sort of black fungoid growth that is ceaselessly increasing in a chasm. There is a cheap sneer at poor ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... relief of happy children is very similar, although not, I think, quite so remarkable. It lacks also the peculiarly naturalistic effect gained in the cantoria by setting the dancing boys behind the pillars, which undoubtedly, as comparison with the Luca shows, assists realism. The row of pillars attracts the eye first and the boys are thus thrown into a background which ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... a descriptive realism impossible to reproduce. The poor creature revealed herself to me during the next few minutes as I feel sure she had never revealed ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... was one the details of which were registered with photographic realism in Tarling's mind for the rest of his life. The girl spoke little, and he himself was content to meditate and turn over in his mind the puzzling circumstances which had surrounded Odette ...
— The Daffodil Mystery • Edgar Wallace
... was to take a brand from the lodge and, in the black night outside, make a vivid zigzag in the air a few times, when his plot was obviously a success. But he became so deeply interested in giving realism to his own share of the spree that he forgot about everything else, and the rest of the scheme was omitted, so ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton
... Hume had passed away two years before. Cowper was forty years older than Wordsworth, but Cowper's most delightful work was not produced until 1783. Crabbe, who anticipated Wordsworth's choice of themes from rural life, while treating them with a sterner realism, was virtually his contemporary, having been born in 1754, and dying in 1832. The two great names of his own date were Scott and Coleridge, the first born in 1771, and the second a year afterwards. Then a generation later came another new and illustrious group. Byron was born in 1788, Shelley ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... Treitschke—alternates with a sceptically satiric one—as in Fontane who (like so many writers, in Germany especially) did not belong to his own generation nor even to the immediately succeeding one, but to the next after that! With these are associated preferences for verse or prose; for idealism or realism and naturalism; a falling away from philosophy or an inclination to introduce it into poetry; and numerous other disguises for those antagonistic principles, to which Kuno Francke in a general survey of our literature has sought to trace back ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... my ballads. It is by way of being an experiment. Its theme is commonplace, its language that of everyday. It is a bit of realism in rhyme. ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service
... with him every Sunday morning was full of astute analysis and wit; her little picture of the gloomy young theological student, Latimer, his efforts for his sister, and her innocent, pathetic death in a foreign land had a wonderful realism of touch. She had by pure accident made the child's acquaintance and had been strongly touched and moved. She did not write often, but he read her letters many ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... trying to write "with a purpose," and that later and greater period when he has learned how to treat life sincerely and seriously without other purpose than to present it as it is. That was his starting point in "Anatol," but then he was not yet ready for the realism that must be counted the highest of all: the realism that has no tendency and preaches no lesson, but from which we draw our own lessons as we draw them from life itself ...
— The Lonely Way—Intermezzo—Countess Mizzie - Three Plays • Arthur Schnitzler
... a squad of cavalrymen halted, dismounted, unlimbered their carbines, and began firing at a squad of cavalrymen who galloped toward them from the other extremity of the field. Three of the men fired upon toppled and fell from their saddles to the dust with wonderful realism, while startled "ohs!" came ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys as Sergeants - or, Handling Their First Real Commands • H. Irving Hancock
... father's pupil, Felicia already felt her own personality rebel against any despotic direction. She had those audacities of the beginner, those intuitions of the future which are the heritage of young talents, and, in opposition to the romantic traditions of Sebastien Ruys, a tendency to modern realism, a need to plant that glorious old flag upon some ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... in hand another bottle of the same vintage about Modern Realism and the abuse of the word Law, suggested by a report I read the other day of one of Liddon's sermons. ["Pseudo-Scientific Realism" ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... of pure Realism is due to Plato and his doctrine of 'ideas'; for Idealism, in this sense, is not opposed to Realism, but identical with it. Plato seems to have imagined that, as there was a really existing thing corresponding to a singular term, such as Socrates, ...
— Deductive Logic • St. George Stock
... with her back against the ledge looking rather pale and feeling exceedingly foolish, while Gil Huntley explained to her about the "blood-sponge" and how he had held it concealed in his hand until the right moment, and had used it in the interest of realism and not to frighten her, as she might have reason to suspect. Gil Huntley was showing a marked tendency to repeat himself. He had three times assured her earnestly that he did not mean to scare her ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... an original sea-tale of sustained interest come well-sketched collections of maritime peril and suffering which awaken the sympathies by the realism of fact. Stories of the Sea are a very good specimen of ...
— Captain Bayley's Heir: - A Tale of the Gold Fields of California • G. A. Henty
... ignominious, so sickening, that, if I were not sworn to the utmost possible realism in this record, I should suppress it in the interests ...
— A Journal of Impressions in Belgium • May Sinclair
... nature of poetic irony in the fact that the anarchist should take the very ethics of capitalism and reduce them to an absurdity. It is something in the nature of a satire, sordid and terrible, which the realism of things has here written. The very most cherished ethical ideals of our society are used by the bitterest enemies of that society to arouse the wronged to individual acts of revenge. Quite a number ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... visible art; to architecture with manifolded magnificence free from the curious incompleteness and failings of that which the older times have produced—to painting, uniting to the beauty which mediaeval art attained the realism which modern art aims at; to sculpture, uniting the beauty of the Greek and the expression of the Renaissance with some third quality yet undiscovered, so as to give us the images of men and women splendidly alive, yet not disqualified ...
— Signs of Change • William Morris
... 'Faithful Shepherdess,' etc. Point out any differences you find between Shakespeare's and Spenser's pastoral poetry. Modern literary use of the pastoral element, Wordsworth's 'Michael.' Is the pastoral life of literature always artificial? Can a progress toward realism be shown? The humor of the play. Discuss in particular the humorous comments on contrasts between court and country life. Compare modern instances of the refinements and artifices of city life and the crudeness of work and pleasure in ...
— Shakespeare Study Programs; The Comedies • Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke
... Witney, or Reading, or on the Green at Clerkenwell, we could have seen the appealing spectacle; and though sometimes the actors lapsed into buffoonery, and the red demons carrying souls to hell's mouth created merriment rather than terror, and though realism was carried to such a pitch that Adam and Eve appeared in a state of nature, yet many of the spectators would carry away with them pious thoughts and some grasp of the facts of Scripture history, and of the mysteries ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... power are much more fully visible, and everywhere in the poetry of the Edda there is a force of style and a distinction as unlike as possible to the want of both in the German Nibelungen. {120} At the same time the Scandinavians have a realism, as it is called, in their genius, which abundantly proves their relationship with the Germans; any one whom Mr. Dasent's delightful books have made acquainted with the prose tales of the Norsemen, ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold
... speaking, inclined to be pessimistic, but Mahayanism in the main holds the optimistic view of life. Nihilism is advocated in some Mahayana sutras, but others set forth idealism or realism. ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... vacant corner. So far as I know, with the exception perhaps of STEVENSON's study, there has been no means by which the casual reader, as apart from the student, could correct his probably very vague ideas about the Father of Realism. Mr. H. DE VERE STACPOOLE, approaching the subject not for the first time, here essays a brief life and appreciation of the poet, told in picturesque but simple style. Sometimes indeed the simplicity is apt to appear overdone, so that one gets a suggestion that the story is being presented to us ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, January 3, 1917 • Various
... the career of a man who comes under the influence of a beautiful but evil woman; how she lures him on and on, how he struggles, falls and rises, only to fall again into her net, make a story of unflinching realism. ...
— The Scarlet Feather • Houghton Townley
... avenues of towering trees whose foliage roofed the roadways were sufficient to reanimate recollections of old masters of brush realism. Ploughed fields veiled with the low-hanging mist of evening time, and distant steeples of homely simplicity faintly glazed by the last rays of the setting sun, reproduced the tones of "The Angelus" with the over-generous hugeness ...
— "And they thought we wouldn't fight" • Floyd Gibbons
... of such spectacles—unknown to the earlier ages which they called barbarous—was due to the cold-blooded selfishness, the hideous realism of a refined, delicate, aesthetic age. To please these "lisping hawthorn buds," these debauched and sanguinary dandies, art, forsooth, must know nothing of morality; must accept and rejoice in a "healthy animalism"; must estimate life by the number ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... there is no social intercourse between the professors and their pupils. The reading-rooms at the club are a favourite lounge of a great many of the students, but it must be admitted that the literature supplied there is not always of a very wholesome kind, seeing that it includes 'realism' of the most daring description, with illustrations to match, and obscene Parisian comic papers. Every member of the corps also belongs to one of the minor clubs of which it is made up, and which are apparently ...
— Dutch Life in Town and Country • P. M. Hough
... PCESZY TURGIDOFF (the brilliant young Slav whose canvas has recently been acquired by the Royal Geological Museum) all true artists have striven to adumbrate the eternal conflict between the morbid pathology of Realism and the poignant simplicity of Nihilism. In other and shorter words, chaos must ever be on the side of the angels. But, until the advent of the new Truth, the whole mission of art had trickled into a very delta ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 11, 1914 • Various
... feet, suddenly conscious that she had made a very long visit. Her heart was heavier than when she came. More and more was the terrible realism of city life borne ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... The author makes her people speak the language of every-day life, and a vigorous and attractive realism pervades the book, which provides excellent entertainment from beginning to end."—Boston Saturday ...
— A Little Norsk; Or, Ol' Pap's Flaxen • Hamlin Garland
... then, by Byron. He is full of sentiment, smiles and tears, and passionate enthusiasms. He therefore struck out in a path in which he has had no great followers; for the big men in Russian literature are all Realists. Romanticism is as foreign to the spirit of Russian Realism as it is to French Classicism. What is peculiarly Slavonic about Pushkin is his simplicity, his naivete. Though affected by foreign models, he was close to the soil. This is shown particularly in his prose tales, and it is here that his title as Founder of Russian ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... come to prefer this to any other of his plays; as men in general prefer a triumph over difficulties to a triumph. A similar satisfaction, not in success but in the overcoming of difficulties, leads him to say of the modern play, The Sisters, that it is the only modern English play 'in which realism in the reproduction of natural dialogue and accuracy in the representation of natural intercourse between men and women of gentle birth and breeding have been found or made compatible with expression in genuine if simple blank verse.' This may ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... to escape from the odious monotony and the indecent realism of life—what a relief! How desirable to be confronted no longer by that impassable gulf between one's own soul and all other living souls! How desirable to cross the abyss which separates the "something" which is the substance of our being from the "something" ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... a young man of twenty-nine, and its lively, unstrained realism is so bold, intimate, and delicate as to contradict the flattering compliment that the French have paid to one another—that Turgenev had need to dress his art by the aid of ...
— A Desperate Character and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... 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 his fancy-picture of loveliness than the scenes which opened daily before his eyes. Years later a memory of his early home returns ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... owned much land, mostly in the neighbourhood, and before the dissolution the income through various channels has been calculated at about eighty thousand pounds of our present money. Dr. Jessop has described with wonderful realism the daily routine of the Benedictine monasteries, and the chronicles of Evesham have provided him with some of his most valuable information. In addition to the daily services which occupied much of their time, we find every member of the community busy with some work ...
— Evesham • Edmund H. New
... beyond Bunyan, who made his attributes very like men and called them Mr. or Lord to increase the illusion or diminish the cheat. The drawback to this kind of nomenclature is that it weakens the realism of the story. It also perplexes one a little when one thinks of later generations. Jemima's two brothers, for example, would marry one day, and their children would necessarily be called Placid too. But would they be placid? And was Mr. Piner's father a piner? It is even ...
— Forgotten Tales of Long Ago • E. V. Lucas
... which, in the next picture, lay all scattered over Judy, when she waked and gazed at him dreamily. Jimmie came out strongly at this point, with a prodigious yawn that almost broke him in two, and was so expressive of great weariness that little Bobbie Green, his bosom friend, was carried away by the realism of it, and asked in awe, "Did he really sleep a hundred years?" and was not quite brought back to earth by Tommy Tolliver's exclamation, "Why you saw him awake this morning, Bobbie, ...
— Judy • Temple Bailey |
