"Artlessness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... mean by that emphatic tone? What is all this bombastic sermon about? What manners are these? My friend, you are grotesque. Those lines should be repeated simply, naturally and with the utmost artlessness. Remember that it is the good La Fontaine who speaks! [accenting each syllable] the-good-La-Fon-taine—do you hear? There is but one way possible to render the lines faithfully. ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... galleries, and banquettes, and spoke of a faubou',—without being able to name any street. He asked her what her father used to do, and was assured that he did everything—that there was nothing he could not do. Divine absurdity of childish faith!—infinite artlessness of childish love! ... Probably the little girl's parents had been residents of New Orleans—dwellers of the old colonial quarter,—the faubourg, ...
— Chita: A Memory of Last Island • Lafcadio Hearn
... seventh time it had been said to Betty during the night, and though Mr. Chenoweth's predecessors had revealed their desires in a guise lacking this prodigious artlessness, she already possessed no novel acquaintance with the exclamation. But she made no comment; her partner's style was not a stimulant to repartee. "It would be heaven," he amplified earnestly, "it would be heaven to dance with you forever—on a ...
— The Two Vanrevels • Booth Tarkington
... Sergeant York when among the returning soldiers his troop-ship touched port—the harbor of New York in May, 1919. The story of the man had run ahead—his fight in the forest, that had added to the cubic stature of the American soldier; the artlessness of his life and the genuineness of his character, which as yet showed no alloy; the modest, becoming acceptance of illustrious honors paid to him in France. The people saw in this simple, earnest ...
— Sergeant York And His People • Sam Cowan
... the artist in words, who wrestles for the exact nuance, and will not let a sentence go till he has obtained its blessing. Consequently he is never finicking in his phraseology, and seldom final. The subtle artfulness of Stevenson is beyond him; but he has a rarer quality—that subtler artlessness which has belonged in some measure to all the greater writers of sentiment. It is a quality independent of the mechanics of writing; whether the author echoes the syntax of Addison or the diction of Goldsmith is an indifferent question. All that we know is that, through his use of ...
— Washington Irving • Henry W. Boynton
... independent manners, insolent yet winning, he was a type of the brilliant Bohemian of the Boulevard de Gand; so much so, that Madame de la Baudraye, basing her information on points furnished her by Nathan, one day drew a picture of him, writing a description in which artificiality and artlessness were combined. In this were many interesting touches: La Palferine's contempt shown at all times for the bourgeois class and forms of government; the request for the return of his toothbrush, then in the possession of a deserted mistress, Antonia Chocardelle; his relations with ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... meditation and earnest feeling! How much that he had spoken still echoed in the heart, and rung in the brooding ear of Egremont. And his friend, too, that pale man with those glittering eyes, who without affectation, without pedantry, with artlessness on the contrary and a degree of earnest singleness, had glanced like a master of philosophy at the loftiest principles of political science,—was he too a workman? And are these then THE PEOPLE? If so, ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... character in every fibre of its being, and she embodied it with the affluent vitality of splendid health and buoyant temperament—presenting a creature radiant with goodness and happiness, exquisite in natural refinement, piquant with archness, soft, innocent, and tender in confiding artlessness, and, while gleeful and triumphant in beautiful youth, gently touched with an intuitive pitying sense of the thorny aspects of this troubled world. The giving of the flowers completely bewitched her auditors. The startled yet proud ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... often has all the air, the distraction and restlessness and hurry of feeling of a criminal. A knowledge of the world takes away the freedom and simplicity of thought as effectually as the contagion of its example. The artlessness and candour of our early years are open to all impressions alike, because the mind is not clogged and preoccupied with other objects. Our pleasures and our pains come single, make room for one another, and the spring of the mind is fresh and unbroken, its aspect clear and unsullied. ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... You came to find gold; you brought to bear upon the situation your scientific knowledge instead of a prospector's poor brain; and you have found gold, I am sure!' She smiled upon him brightly as she concluded with a semblance of trustfulness and artlessness: 'Tell me the ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... could move away, I felt some rain-drops, and down in some seconds rushed a shower. I looked, saw that the sky was rapidly darkening, and ran into the nearest of the little cubical houses, leaving her glancing sideways upward, with the quaintest artlessness of interest in the downpour: for she is not yet quite familiarised with the operations of nature, and seems to regard them with a certain amiable inquisitive seriousness, as though they were living beings, comrades as good ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... one most as one reads the accounts of Mrs. Opie is the artlessness and perfect simplicity of her nature. The deepest feeling of her life was her tender love for her father, and if she remained younger than most women do, it may have been partly from the great blessing ...
— A Book of Sibyls - Miss Barbauld, Miss Edgeworth, Mrs Opie, Miss Austen • Anne Thackeray (Mrs. Richmond Ritchie)
... stone as this. In a word, Laura began to be tired of her admired Blanche. She had assayed her and found her not true; and her former admiration and delight, which she had expressed with her accustomed generous artlessness, gave way to a feeling, which we shall not call contempt, but which was very near it; and which caused Laura to adopt towards Miss Amory a grave and tranquil tone of superiority, which was at first by no means to the Muse's liking. Nobody likes to ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Frank; pardon my interruption," said the girl, turning her eyes full upon him with artful artlessness. "You are very good, but it's quite unnecessary. Dr. Heath promised to call again during ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch
... her hands in childish glee. From glee to wonderment her mood changed as they spun along the park roads. A hundred naive questions were asked about the objects unfamiliar to a lady whose habitat was at the bottom of a big pond. Edwin answered faithfully, and had his reward in his enjoyment of her artlessness and winsomeness. Occasionally Tom looked ...
— The Mermaid of Druid Lake and Other Stories • Charles Weathers Bump
... Now in my artlessness I had thought that anyone questioned by an earnest and not indifferent person, about a good acquaintance and dear friend, would manifest pleasure and gladly and heartily give the desired information. But Emmy seemed exceedingly ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... air of candor, of artlessness, of childlike simplicity, as he made his confession, without bitterness, or that philosophy of vice which had hitherto made him so terrible to hear, was like an absolute transformation. He was ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... moment when he turned round, and before I had time to look at him, imagine my astonishment when Nais ran forward and, with the artlessness of a child, flung her arms about his ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... with a naive display of learning; and introduces vulgar details in his most exquisite passages. There is something childish about almost all the thought and art of the Middle Ages—at least outside of Italy, where classical models and traditions never quite lost their hold. But Chaucer's artlessness is half the secret of his wonderful ease in story-telling, and is so engaging that, like a child's sweet unconsciousness, one ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... he spoke, pitying his own artlessness, and then pointed towards the gallery where Prince Buongiovanni was bowing to the King whilst the Princess listened to the gallant remarks of Sacco: a scene full of symbolism, the old papal aristocracy struck down, ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... fraught with unexampled misery as it was. Though well aware, from former experience, of her father's hypocritical disguises, she was too full of generosity and candor to allow her heart to entertain suspicion. Her nature was one of great simplicity, artlessness, and truth. Truth, above all things, was her predominant virtue; and we need not say, that wherever it resides it is certain to become a guarantee for the possession of all the rest. Her cruel-hearted father, himself false and deceitful, dreaded her for ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... but I believe that folk-lorists would discover in the character of the older myths, intrinsic evidence of immense antiquity.—Chinese influence is discernible in both works; yet certain parts have a particular quality not to be found, I imagine, in anything Chinese,—a primeval artlessness, a weirdness, and a strangeness [112] having nothing in common with other mythical literature. For example, we have, in the story of Izanagi, the world-maker, visiting the shades to recall his dead spouse, a myth that seems to be purely Japanese. The ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... lacked but a hair that they should be called belligerents; it were idle to try to deny they were the most dangerous of spies. And yet these two now sailed across the bay and landed inside the Tamasese lines at Salelesi. On the very beach they had another glimpse of the artlessness of Samoan war. Hitherto the Tamasese fleet, being hardy and unencumbered, had made a fool of the huge floating forts upon the other side; and here they were toiling, not to produce another boat on their own pattern in which they had always enjoyed the advantage, but to make a new one the type ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... attempt of a child as compared with his later works. "The Day," he writes in 1620, "has now overtaken the Aurora [the morning glow]; it has grown full daylight and the morning is extinguished."[41] He says, with artlessness, that when he wrote the Aurora, he was not yet accustomed to the Spirit. The heavenly joy, indeed, met him and he followed the Spirit's guidance, but much of his own wild and untamed nature still remained to mar his work. Each successive book marks ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... expression; showing &c. v.; exposition, demonstration; exhibition, production; display, show; showing off; premonstration|. exhibit[Thing shown]. indication &c. (calling attention to) 457. publicity &c. 531; disclosure &c. 529; openness &c. (honesty) 543, (artlessness) 703; panchement. evidence &c. 467. V. make manifest, render manifest &c. adj.; bring forth, bring forward, bring to the front, bring into view; give notice; express; represent, set forth, exhibit; show, show up ; expose; produce; hold up to view, expose to view; set before one, place ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... genius, absorbed in the labors of investigation and discovery, practical in his views of life and upright in all his actions, with an ill-trained and unintellectual beauty, whose perfections of form and face, pretty coquetry, studied artlessness and sweet recognition of the value of masculine knowledge and strength as the proper stay of feminine weakness and the proper organ of the feminine will, assail the superior being just at that point where his perceptions are weakest, and lead him an easy captive. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... considered Molly with anxiety. He had not dared to say a word to her of what her entertainer was, or what her part should be. Premeditation might throw her out of balance, conscious art might exhibit her a scheming courtesan; just in her artlessness lay all her magic. No, no; he trusted her. She was still adorably English—witness her on the ship! He could see how she would do, how the sight would ravish him, lover as he was; for the rest, he must trust to his early calculations. ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... antagonistic in every element of character. But a glance at Pauline's perfectly beautiful face explained the mystery. How could anyone help loving her, she was so radiant and so winning in her unaffected artlessness? ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... she was beautiful, and she was vain. Much of her apparent artlessness was assumed. She was pleased to be admired, and felt gratified to see the effect of her glance, as she favoured one with a languishing look, and another with a haughty stare, or a wicked, sparkling, mischief loving ...
— Yorkshire Tales. Third Series - Amusing sketches of Yorkshire Life in the Yorkshire Dialect • John Hartley
... a rather simple little soul under her casing of Parisian veneer, and was often innocently surprised at the potency of her own charm. That men, big men and wise men, were inclined to take her artful artlessness at its surface value was a continual revelation to her. Like Rachael, she had gone to bed the night before in a profoundly thoughtful frame of mind, a little apprehensive as to Warren's view of her call, ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... thoughtless animal life, provoking indulgent smiles at a great distance. His usual discourses treated of trotting horses, wine-parties in expensive restaurants, and the merits of persons of easy virtue, with a disarming artlessness of outlook. He pounced upon Razumov about midday, somewhat less uproariously than his habit ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... no blind fanatic, however. I admit that artlessness is a charming idea. I admit that it is sometimes charming as a reality. I applaud it (all the more heartily because it is rare) in children. But then, children, like the young of all animals whatsoever, have a natural grace. As a rule, they ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... and directly afterward would sing a few bars of some grave melody with such tenderness of expression that I had to turn away my eyes lest she should see the evidence of her success in art, if art it was, not artlessness, as then I was compelled to think it. And she said the oddest things in the most unconventional way, skirting sometimes unfathomable abysms of thought, where I had hardly the courage to set foot. In short, she was fascinating in a thousand and fifty different ways, and at every step I executed ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... political skies were overcast with the thunder clouds of approaching revolutions; France had just passed through another violent upheaval. Village conditions seemed to offer a veritable haven of refuge. The pristine artlessness of the peasant's intellectual, moral, and emotional life furnished a wholesome antidote to the morbid hyperculture of dying romanticism, the controversies and polemics of Young Germany, and the self-adulation of the society of the salons. Neither could the exotic, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... Sagacious Pioneer of Special Privilege who manufactured the first carload of Public Opinion is lost to posterity; all that is known about him is that he was a close student of the Art of concealing Artifice by Artlessness and therefore wore gum rubbers on his feet and carried around a lot ...
— Deep Furrows • Hopkins Moorhouse
... tone judiciously compounded of feminine artlessness and of forthright British candour, and with a play of the eyebrows that attributed her momentary suscitation to the workings of memory, "of course—Blanchemain. The Sussex Blanchemains. I expect there's only one family of ...
— My Friend Prospero • Henry Harland
... housekeeper, and the introduction of gas into the Executive Mansion, with new furniture and carpets, enabled her to give it a more creditable appearance. It was said that she did the honors of the establishment "with the artlessness of a rustic belle and the grace ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... an invalid and very nervous when he started. But he showed great sporting blood. It was much better having three than two and he furnished us with much amusement at which he never complains. His artlessness and his bad breaks which keep us filled with terror make the most entertaining narratives and he tells them on himself and then keeps on making new ones. One night Jeffs came down with fever through ...
— Adventures and Letters • Richard Harding Davis
... by marriage!" cried the Fuerstin. "And I can assure you I quite understand—about the triumph of it...." She surveyed the achievement of her countrymen. "It is—ungracious. But indeed it's only a sort of artlessness if you see the thing properly.... It's not vulgarity—it's childishness.... They've hardly got over it yet—their intense astonishment at being any good at war.... That large throaty Victory! She's not so militant as she seems. ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... the scenes are characterized by an artlessness and grace that recall Florian's les Deux Billets or Musset's A quoi revent les jeunes Filles. It is the poetry of an epoch of prose. "All the poetry of the first half of the eighteenth century is in Marivaux, as all the poetry ...
— A Selection from the Comedies of Marivaux • Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux
... frequently come to anchor opposite this little town, and never omitted to supply ourselves with fresh bread from this bakery, and enjoy a friendly chat with the three charming sisters. They were very affable, and there was an artlessness about them, combined with self-respect, which was very fascinating. In his daily visits to supply the captain's larder, and probably in part on account of like nationality, Charley Reck lost his heart. Louise, the youngest daughter, and the most beautiful of the three, ...
— The New England Magazine Volume 1, No. 6, June, 1886, Bay State Monthly Volume 4, No. 6, June, 1886 • Various
... disappeared among the trees in the distance. "What a strange mystery is this!" murmured she. "Alfred Royal's child, and yet she bears her mother's name. And why does she conceal from me where she lives? Surely, she cannot be consciously doing anything wrong, for I never saw such perfect artlessness of look and manner." The problem occupied her thoughts for days after, without her arriving at ...
— A Romance of the Republic • Lydia Maria Francis Child
... tree, the two travellers could observe, without being seen, all the actions of the Mussulmans. A number of boys, however, soon intruded themselves upon their privacy; and, in truth, they were more amused by the artlessness and playfulness of their manners, than with all the grave and stupid mummery of the Mahommedan worshippers. Groups of people were continually arriving at the spot, and these were welcomed by an occasional flourish of music from a native clarionet, &c. They were clad in all their finery, ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... Visitation in 1665. Written by a Citizen who continued all the while in London. Never made public before." The story is told with such an air of veracity, the little circumstantial details are introduced with such apparent artlessness, the grotesque incidents are described with such animation, (and relish!) the horror borne in upon the mind of the narrator is so apparently genuine, that we can easily understand how almost everybody not in the secret of the authorship believed he had here ...
— History of the Plague in London • Daniel Defoe
... tailor's dummies. The statue of Diana on the tower of the Garden—its constancy shown by its weathercock ways, its innocence by the coating of gold that it has acquired, its devotion to style by its single, graceful flying scarf, its candour and artlessness by its habit of ever drawing the long bow, its metropolitanism by its posture of swift flight to catch a Harlem train—remained poised with its arrow pointed across the upper bay. Had that arrow sped truly and horizontally it ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... bald. Sometimes, indeed, in the clear-obscure of Emerson's poetry the deep wisdom of the thought finds its most natural expression in the imaginative simplicity of the language. But though this artlessness in him became too frequently in his imitators, like Thoreau and Ellery Channing, an obtruded simplicity, among his own poems are many that leave nothing to be desired in point of wording and of verse. His Hymn Sung at the Completion of the Concord Monument, in 1836, is the perfect model ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... a man; not unusual in any apparent way. He was ready with his words, fairly good-looking, clean and muscular, his evident lack of polish in languages and letters atoned for by his quick wit, and by a certain boyish artlessness and ingenuousness. He represented himself as about to receive an excellent salary at the mine at El Nido, two thousand a year, but also admitted cheerfully that he was always "broke." He had distinguished himself at college, but had left it after only two years, upon ...
— Sisters • Kathleen Norris
... the maiden's hair. This hair, too, was a marvel of the dresser's art—reared straight and tight from the forehead over a high-arched roll, and losing strictness of form behind in ingenious wavy curls, which seemed the very triumph of artlessness; it was less wholly powdered than Lady Berenicia's, so that the warm gold shone through the white dust in soft gradations of half tints; at the side, well up, was a single salmon tea-rose, that served to ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... Pumblechook, with a grave nod. "That's the state of the case, for that much I've seen myself." And then they both stared at me, and I, with an obtrusive show of artlessness on my countenance, stared at them, and plaited the right leg of my trousers ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... how proud you have made me. If I could you would say you were nearly paid for the trouble you took. And then the family: If I could convey the electrical surprise and gratitude and exaltation of the wife and the children last night, when they happened upon that Critic where I had, with artful artlessness, spread it open and retired out of view to see what would happen—well, it was great and fine and beautiful to see, and made me feel as the victor feels when the shouting hosts march by: and if you also could have seen it you would have said the account was squared. For I have brought ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... men, and both of them so Christ-like, that in reading about them one is compelled to acknowledge that something in the temper of that Figure, hitherto concealed from His followers, has been communicated to this Russian. The naive, and yet ironical, artlessness of their retorts to the aggressive Philistines who surround them remind one over and over again of those Divine "bon-mots" with which, to use Oscar Wilde's allusion, the Redeemer bewildered His assailants. Stephan Trophinovitch reading the Miracle of the Swine with his female Colporteur; Raskolnikoff ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... entertaining and edifying literature—a demand which increased rapidly with the cheapening of paper and the invention of printing. They vary greatly in content and have no common character except a certain artlessness, which is sometimes pleasing but often runs into extreme vulgarity. Special favor was enjoyed by certain collections of anecdotes, specimens of which are given in the first three numbers. The text of Nos. 1, 4, and 5 follows Braune's Neudrucke (Nos. 55-6. 34-5, 7-8); that of ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... At that moment there was assuredly for Sophia no creature in the world like Constance. Constance personified for her the qualities of the Baines family. Constance's letter was a great letter, a perfect letter, perfect in its artlessness; the natural expression of the Baines character at its best. Not an awkward reference in the whole of it! No clumsy expression of surprise at anything that she, Sophia, had done, or failed to do! No mention ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... large numbers of Elizabethan lyrics apparently as spontaneous and unfettered as the song of the lark. The seeming artlessness of much of this verse should not blind us to the fact that an unusual number of poets had really ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... what you may see any day, anywhere,—innocent, seemingly artless; but the artlessness of Turner is like the face of Gainsborough's village girl, and ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin
... roar—Of an Assistant-Sub-Inspectorship. Ah, Jim! tentatively beloved (so to speak) by this solitary, but by no means desolate, heart!—setting aside the rises I would take out of thy artlessness, and the way I would whip thy simplicity with my fine wit till thou wert as crestfallen as a dried pear—I confess a spontaneous thought associated with the mental carte-de-visite of thy wholesome avoirdupois. No less, indeed, than the ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... Palisse or Palice, about fifty verses of which are printed in Larousse's 'Grand Dictionnaire Universel du XIXme Siecle', x. p. 179. It is there stated to have originated in some dozen stanzas suggested to la Monnoye ('v. supra', p. 193) by the extreme artlessness of a military quatrain dating from the battle of Pavia, and the death upon that occasion of the famous French captain, Jacques de Chabannes, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... her dialogue with the Indian, even imitating his voice and gestures. And Kemper and I listened and watched her breathlessly, fascinated by her lithe and supple grace as well as by the astounding story she was so frankly unfolding with the consummate artlessness ...
— Police!!! • Robert W. Chambers
... these would mar your fortunes. I will admit that the school is not as retiring and diffident as formerly; for we are all ready enough to say that no times are egual to our own times; but I shall strenuously protest against your interpretation of the nature and artlessness of an American girl." ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... career at Saratoga and Newport. I had no suspicion of you then, but now that I know you better, I see that it was not all childish simplicity which made you smile so graciously upon those who sought your favor. You are a coquette, Katy, and the greater one because of that semblance of artlessness which is the perfection of art. This, however, I might forgive, were it not for one flagrant act, which, if it is not a proof of faithlessness, certainly borders upon it. You know to what I refer, or if you do not, ask your smooth-tongued saint, your companion in the New Haven train; he will ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes
... at the close of his explosions, "the gravest actors of farcical nonsense that the world possesses. May I never be where there are no boys! A couple of boys left to themselves will furnish richer fun than any troop of trained comedians. No: no Art arrives at the artlessness of nature in matters of comedy. You can't simulate the ape. Your antics are dull. They haven't the charming inconsequence of the natural animal. Lack at these two! Think of the shifts they are put to all day long! They know I know all about it, and yet their serenity of innocence is all but ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... by the next apartment, where we discovered for the first time the small button in the wall that, when pressed, opens the street door below. This was quite jolly, and we played with it some minutes, while the colored janitor grinned at our artlessness, and said good things about the place. Our hearts went out to this person, and we would gladly have cast our lot ...
— The Van Dwellers - A Strenuous Quest for a Home • Albert Bigelow Paine
... miracles; and women, even though they have disliked each other, begin to cry when they meet, deploring and remembering the time when they last quarrelled. So, in a word, Briggs told all her history, and Becky gave a narrative of her own life, with her usual artlessness and candour. ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... The sketches in Vanity Fair and in Punch, especially the minor thumb-nail drolleries, are delightful—true caricatures—real portraits of character. It is true they are ill drawn, often impossible, crude, and almost childish in their incorrectness and artlessness. But they have in them the soul of a great caricaturist. They have the Hogarthian touch of a great ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... of love and youth, of silence and dawn, shone in their faces, making a divine picture, with the fleeting spell over it all that belongs only to the earliest days of passion, just as simplicity and artlessness are the peculiar possession of childhood. Alas! love's springtide joys, like our own youthful laughter, must even take flight, and live for us no longer save in memory; either for our despair, or to shed some soothing fragrance over us, ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... first time the awful possibility that these tender privileges might be taken away. There was a trembling all over her, body and soul. She was shaken by the ordeal through which she had come—the ordeal which was not hers but another's: and with the artlessness of the child was mingled that supreme human instinct which struggles to disarm Fate by immediate prostration and submission. She laid herself down at the feet of the Sovereign greatness which could mar all her happiness in a moment, with a feeling ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... ambition, his resolute desire—to use a phrase which we have heard him apply to himself—"to rise above the crowd, and stand when others fall," he chose for his wife a young provincial actress, whom he had once chided for her inattention or inability, but whose artlessness of manner, purity and sweetness of nature and aptness for improvement so enlisted his sympathies that he constituted himself her friend and guide until the death of her father and brother awakened a still warmer solicitude, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... that any but Delvile could have written it? in secret she could not cherish two, and that Delvile was cherished most fondly, the artlessness of her ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... the whole narrative as being an allegory. Adam is the rational part of man; Eve, the sensual; the serpent, external excitements to evil. But the simplicity and artlessness of the ...
— The Great Doctrines of the Bible • Rev. William Evans
... with the spicing of the bay, the brief thrill and tantalization of the stolen kiss still haunted him. Through his long, shy abstention from society, and his two years of solitary exile, the fresh beauty of this young Western wife, in whom the frank artlessness of girlhood still lingered, appeared to him like a superior creation. He forgot his vague longings in the inception of a more tangible but equally unpractical passion. He remembered her unconscious and spontaneous ...
— A Drift from Redwood Camp • Bret Harte
... confreres will smile at the irrationalism of this view, and at the artlessness of my essays in point of technical form. But they should be taken as illustrations of the radically empiricist attitude rather than as argumentations for its validity. That admits meanwhile of {x} being argued ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... ideal peasant maiden, blooming and blithe and fair, of an indefinable simplicity and purity; the genuine peasant of the poetic world, not a fine lady of Marie Antoinette's Petit Trianon playing at rustic artlessness. The voice and the singing were but the natural expression of that charming maidenhood. The full volume, the touching sweetness of tone, the exquisite warble, the amazing skill and the marvellous execution, with the perfect ease and repose of consummate art, and the essential womanliness of ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis
... devastating thought that Elfride's childlike, unreasoning, and indiscreet act in flying to him only proved that the proprieties must be a dead letter with her; that the unreserve, which was really artlessness without ballast, meant indifference to decorum; and what so likely as that such a woman had been deceived in the past? He said to himself, in a mood of the bitterest cynicism: 'The suspicious discreet woman who imagines dark and evil things of all her fellow-creatures is far too ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... or, in other words, a hooked one like a bird of prey, always large; the jaws are large, ears long, hair woolly, abundant and rich (dark); beard rare, canine teeth, very large; the lips are thin. A large number of swindlers and forgers have an artlessness, and something clerical in their manner, which gives confidence to their victims. Some have a haggard look, very small eyes, crooked nose, and the face of an old ...
— A Plea for the Criminal • James Leslie Allan Kayll
... regard me with the formality of a stranger; and insisted that, as she was the cousin of my relation, she was also mine. To this ingenious argument she answered with so much good sense, and at the same time, so much gentleness and artlessness, that I thought I could have listened to her for ever. While I spoke, she continued to move on. I entreated to know if she was satisfied with my apology; repeated that I had not meant to intrude on her privacy. She ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... know myself," said Platonov with artlessness. "You see, I am a vagabond, and am passionately in love with life. I have been a turner, a compositor; I have sown and sold tobacco—the cheap Silver Makhorka kind—have sailed as a stoker on the Azov Sea, have been a fisherman on the Black—on the Dubinin fisheries; I have ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... grows clearer to his mind, plainer and more feasible. There is a gay audacity about the laugh which lingers in Bertie's eyes and on his lips, as if Dan Cupid himself had just been there, whispering some choice scheme of roguish knavery, some artful artlessness, into the young man's ear. Bertie does not acknowledge that his inspiration has come in such a questionable fashion. He says to himself, "It will do: I feel it will do. Isn't it providential? Just when I was in despair!" This is a more suitable sentiment for an organist, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... forgotten and without trial in the pestilential prison of Le Bouffay, Leroy passed on to a recital of his sufferings on that night of terror when he had gone down the Loire in the doomed lighter. He told his tale with an artlessness that rendered it the more moving and convincing. The audience crowding the chamber of justice shuddered with horror, and sobbed over the details of his torments, wept for joy over his miraculous preservation. ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... sometimes hoped that certain qualities in Campion's music might be traced to the fact that his grandfather was "John Campion of Dublin, Ireland." The art—and in Campion it was art, not artlessness—with which he made use of such rhymes as "hill" and "vigil," "sing" and "darling," besides his occasional use of internal rhyme and assonance (he rhymed "licens'd" and "silence," "strangeness" and "plainness," for example), has seemed to ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... with innocence their smile), The (artful) artlessness of all your ways, Your kiss-provoking mouth, its lure, its guile - All these have had my fond and frequent praise. And something more than praise to you I gave - Something which made you ...
— Poems of Purpose • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... latter one of Jasmin's best works. "It is full of pathos," he says, "and rises to the sublime through its very simplicity. It is indeed difficult to exaggerate the poetic instinct and the unaffected artlessness of this amiable bard. "At the same time," he said, "Jasmin still wanted the fire of passion to reach the noblest poetic work. Yet he had the art of style. If Agen was renowned as 'the eye of Guienne,' Jasmin was certainly the greatest poet ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... ladies in the hairdressers' windows?" she asked with assumed artlessness. "Can't you say a kind word for them, good gentleman, and ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... all fine minds, there came to Emerson ways of expression deeply marked with character. On every page there is set the strong stamp of sincerity, and the attraction of a certain artlessness; the most awkward sentence rings true; and there is often a pure and simple note that touches us more than if it were the perfection of elaborated melody. The uncouth procession of the periods discloses the travail of the thought, and that too is a kind of eloquence. An honest reader ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1, Essay 5, Emerson • John Morley
... was Saturday night, and the widow of the Pine Cottage sat by her blazing fagots, with her five tattered children at her side, endeavoring by listening to the artlessness of their prattle to dissipate the heavy gloom that pressed upon her mind. For a year, her own feeble hand had provided for her helpless family, for she had no supporter: she thought of no friend in all the wide, unfriendly ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... the Baroness when Hortense had poured out her poem, of which the morning's adventure was the last canto, "dear little girl, Artlessness will always be the artfulest ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... also that absolute artlessness, to men in any kind of moral health, is impossible; they have always, at least, the art by which they live—agriculture or seamanship; and in these industries, skilfully practised, you will find the law of their moral training; while, whatever ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... to remember faces was allied in Lord John with a curious artlessness of disposition which made it impossible for him to feign a cordiality he did not feel. Once, at a concert at Buckingham Palace, he was seen to get up suddenly, turn his back on the Duchess of Sutherland, by whom ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... Innstetten had overcome his ill-humor and something worse, and Effi was so completely taken up with her feeling of liberation that not only had her power of feigning a certain amount of good humor returned, but she had almost regained her former artlessness. She was still in Kessin, and yet she already felt as though it lay far ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... not of the immoral wenches who work their atrocities under cover of a synthetic blondeness—are quite as shallow and stupid as they look. One seldom hears a blonde say anything worth hearing; the most they commonly achieve is a specious, baby-like prattling, an infantile artlessness. But let us not blame them for nature's work. Why, after all, be intelligent? It is, at best, no more than a capacity for unhappiness. The blonde not only doesn't miss it; she is even better off without it. What imaginable intelligence ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken
... the man, and therefore was interested in its being and its well-being. But besides this, by virtue of His perfect humanity, He was attracted by those peculiar traits which are seen in the earlier years of human life. He loved the artlessness and gentleness, the sense of dependence, the implicit trust, the absence of ostentation and ambition, the unconscious modesty, in one word, ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd
... hope. She was a beauty, he told himself with much satisfaction. Truly the Treumanns were in luck. He entirely forgot the role he was to play of loving son, and devoted himself, with his habitual artlessness, to her. Indeed, if he had not forgotten it, he and his mother were so little accustomed to displays of affection that they would have been but clumsy actors. There is a great difference between affectionate letters written quietly in one's room, and affectionate conversation that has to sound as ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... cover of his errand, continued the discourse without awakening her alarm. He excelled in that specious, though apparently heedless raillery, which is so apt to slip without suspicion into a lady's ear; and he could ply his suit, under this disguise, with such seeming artlessness and unconcern, that a lodgement in the citadel was sometimes effected ere the garrison was ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... without the faintest sense of responsibility. And yet, while Gabriella listened to him, she realized that, in some ways, he might be a less trying companion than poor Jane. His candour was as simple, as unaffected, as the serene artlessness of a child. It was impossible not to believe in his sincerity. Though she "despised him," as she told herself, still she was obliged to admit that there was something to be said on his side. The harsh judgment of youth—of youth that never tries to understand, that never ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... began to regard the conduct of his once idolized Anne Boleyn with an altered eye. That easy gaiety of manner which he had once remarked with delight, as an indication of the innocence of her heart and the artlessness of her disposition, was now beheld by him as a culpable levity which offended his pride and alarmed his jealousy. His impetuous temper, with which "once to suspect was once to be resolved," disdained ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... generosity their beauty to the loneliest spots and most desolate places. Close up to a fence that surrounded a garden where bloomed hundreds of rare and lovely blossoms they crowded, praising with sweet artlessness the grace and fragrance of their more precious sisters, and wondering every morning when the gardener came out at early dawn and collected many young plants together, and gathered roses, and pansies, and gladioles, and verbenas, and pinks, ...
— Harper's Young People, July 27, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... customs of that day, all her native beauties on the altar of fashion. Her hair, which was of a golden richness of color, was left, untortured, to fall in the natural ringlets of infancy, and it shaded a face which was glowing with the united charms of health, youth, and artlessness; her eyes spoke volumes, but her tongue was silent; her hands were interlocked before her, and, aided by her taper form, bending forward in an attitude of expectation, gave a loveliness and an interest to her appearance, that for a moment chained her ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... others by yourself, and putting yourself in another person's place, are not, I am afraid, reliable. I had them dinned into me constantly as a child, and I was constantly trying to obey them, and constantly was astonished at the unexpected results I arrived at; and now I know that it is a proof of artlessness to suppose that other people will think and feel and hope and enjoy what you do and in the same way that you do. If an officious friend had stood in that breathless couple's path and told them in glowing terms how much happier they would be if they lived their life a little more ...
— The Solitary Summer • Elizabeth von Arnim
... love, down to that evening when, naked upon the naked earth of Portiuncula, he breathed out his life, it may be said that all his thoughts went out to this lady of his chaste loves. For twenty years he served her without faltering, sometimes with an artlessness which would appear infantine, if something infinitely sincere and sublime did not arrest the smile upon the most ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... sentiment of which we have made too little. But it is entirely charming to see the way in which small children in the schools will sing these songs with complete natural verve and appreciation. "Oh, no John, no John, No" will be rendered with that Art which only springs from artlessness. Surely it is to the young that we must look if the love of music is to be fostered and encouraged in the coming years. "Let the rising generation become thoroughly well acquainted with the best Musical works through the ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... regard to the form of Christ's sayings; to speak of their artlessness and homely simplicity is to tell only a small part of the truth concerning them. They are, indeed and especially those spoken in Galilee, and reported for the most part in the Synoptists, the perfection of popular speech. How the short, pithy, sententious sayings ...
— The Teaching of Jesus • George Jackson
... surroundings seemed to call for. She was a woman, and a very delightful one. From the old scholar, whom fate or circumstance had sent to preside over the Gullettsville Academy, she had caught something of the flavour and grace of cultivation—a gentle dignity, leaning always to artlessness, and a quick appreciation, which was in itself a ...
— Mingo - And Other Sketches in Black and White • Joel Chandler Harris
... was hungry, and the dinner good. I ate of everything, but can only recall an excellent grill of salmon and a roast haunch of venison: the reason being that Lady Glynn kept me in continued talk. Poor lady!—I had almost said, poor child!—for her desperate artlessness became the more apparent to me the more she persisted. Even I, who, as the reader has been told, have the smallest skill in the ways of women, could see that here was one, of high breeding but untutored, playing at a game at once above and beneath her; almost as far above her ...
— Corporal Sam and Other Stories • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... he put her on her guard! She was not dreaming of love. Saltonstall's fancy had died out—no doubt this would, too. Lad's love. Was it worth ruffling up the sunny artlessness? But he would watch the young men closer now that ...
— A Little Girl in Old Salem • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... room, I saw on her book-shelves, arranged with order and precision, nine little butter plates in the form of pansies. I uttered an exclamation of delight, and she from her corner, with the artlessness of a child, said, "I put them there for you to see." Another time she sprang up with her quick, light step, and ran to the yard to fetch a flower for me to copy, apparently thoughtless of two flights of stairs to tax her ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... court by the beautiful and celebrated Duchess of Hamilton. Shortly before the death of George II., and whilst he was greatly indisposed, Miss Gunning, upon becoming Duchess of Hamilton, was presented to his majesty. The king, who was particularly pleased with the natural elegance and artlessness of her manner, indulged in a long conversation with her grace. In the course of this tete-a-tete the duchess said, with great animation, "I have seen everything! There is only one thing in this world I wish to see, and I ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... Lorry looked at one another and smiled, as age and experience smile at the artlessness of youth. It was an interchange of mutual understanding, a flash of closer intimacy, and as such lifted the young man to ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... with perfect artlessness, ignorant of a world other than her own, innocent of a moral code other than ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... always has a compensation and a soothing balm for every blow that age may deal him. And in the fading embers of the old man's eyes there are, at times, swift flashes and rekindlings of the smiles of youth, and the old artlessness about the wrinkled face that dwelt there when his cheeks were like ...
— Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley
... which she belongs, now virtue is driven, And into politics forced, where she's a troublesome guest. Where are we hastening now? If natural, dull we are voted, And if we put on constraint, then the world calls us absurd. Oh, thou joyous artlessness 'mongst the poor maidens of Leipzig, Witty simplicity come,—come, then, to glad us again! Comedy, oh repeat thy weekly visits so precious, Sigismund, lover so sweet,—Mascarill, valet jocose! Tragedy, ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... the sentimental stories is Goldsmith's 'Vicar of Wakefield' (1766), of which we have already spoken (above, page 244). With its kindly humor, its single-hearted wholesomeness, and its delightful figure of Dr. Primrose it remains, in spite of its artlessness, one of the permanent landmarks of ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... hands with the ritual gestures of the infatuated picture-lover, he praised the artlessness of the clear, wide eyes, the delightful freshness of the complexion, and the charming candour ...
— General Bramble • Andre Maurois
... who has the diffidence of Major Gahagan, has also the engaging artlessness which lends so great a charm to the personal narrative of Mr. Barry Lyndon. He does not reserve from the reader's knowledge such of his exploits as stealing the chaplain's whiskey, and drinking the peach-brandy ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... excellent; but she is too young for suspicion, and has an artlessness of disposition ...
— Evelina • Fanny Burney
... which justly you ascribe to Swift, is vernacularity; he never forgets his mother-tongue in exotic forms, unless we may call Irish exotic; for Hibernicisms he certainly has. This merit, however, is exhibited—not, as you fancy, in a graceful artlessness, but in a coarse inartificiality. To be artless, and to be inartificial, are very different things; as different as being natural and being gross; as different as ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... mirror on the wall. It was the first time Esther had seen her without a hat, and she found her not less lovely. Her golden-brown shining hair waved back from a side parting with that carefully contrived artlessness which is the crowning achievement of a coiffeur, and in colour it exactly matched her soft frock, which was of the sports variety with a finely pleated skirt. The skin of her throat was milky-white and of the fineness of a flower petal. Against it her pearls ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... which seemed to escape her with a recklessness that was not unnatural in so passionate a creature, Corentin flushed, for he was still young; but he gave her a sidelong penetrating look, trying to search her soul. The girl's artlessness was so well played, however, that she deceived the spy, and he answered with crafty good-humor, "Shall I accompany you at a distance? I can take a few solders with me, and be ready to help and ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac
... white gloved hand, which rested upon the chair arm; but she evaded the attempt with seeming artlessness, and stood up. Slattin fixed his ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... liking such a man at first sight; and I believe that no man in London society was more generally liked than Anthony Trollope. There was something pathetic in his attitude as above indicated; and a fresh and boyish quality always invested him. His artlessness was boyish, and so were his acuteness and his transparent but somewhat belated good-sense. He was one of those rare persons who not only have no reserves, but who can afford to dispense with them. After he had shown ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... of all artifice, this artlessness and spontaneity of appearance, is one of the greatest qualities in a composition, any analysis of which is futile. It is what occasionally gives to the work of the unlettered genius so great a charm. But the artist in whom ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed
... excludes foreign appendages and arbitrary suppositions, and yet fully satisfies the wants of the stage, is particularly deserving of admiration. These plays are the very thing itself; and under the apparent artlessness of adhering closely to history as he found it, an uncommon degree of art is concealed. Of every historical transaction Shakspeare knows how to seize the true poetical point of view, and to give unity and rounding to a series of events ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... is too clever he repels. Shakespeare avoids the difficulty, and proves himself the master by keeping out of sight; Renan wins by a great show of modesty and deferential fairness; Boswell assumes an artlessness and ignorance that were really not parts of his nature. Every man who reads Boswell considers himself the superior of Boswell, and therefore is perfectly at home. It is not pleasant to be in the society of those who are much your superiors. Any ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... expressed in a voice, as she expressed in making this reply. It was as if I had seen her admiringly and tenderly embracing Dora, and tacitly reproving me, by her considerate protection, for my hot haste in fluttering that little heart. It was as if I had seen Dora, in all her fascinating artlessness, caressing Agnes, and thanking her, and coaxingly appealing against me, and loving me with ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... condescension, and a charming openness of manner. I have never met with any one so entirely free from personal vanity. He was the first to laugh at himself, at his half intentional blunders, and at the laughable situations into which his artlessness would often land him. Like all the older directors, he had to say the orison in his turn. He never gave it five minutes previous consideration, and he sometimes got into such a comical state of confusion with his improvised address, that ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... voluble chats after the day's study; the cozy dinners and fresh, light breakfasts; the interchange of ambitions—ambitions interwoven each with the other's or else inconsiderable—the mutual help and inspiration; and—overlook my artlessness—stuffed olives and cheese sandwiches at ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... While my cab was taking me through Trafalgar Square I kept laughing and prattling and shaking my spectacle-case as if it were a rattle. And when the maid in my boarding-house had served my meal I kept pouring spoonfuls of soup into my ear with all the artlessness ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... blushing deeply, told him the whole story in a way which quite captivated the listener by its artlessness. ...
— Follow My leader - The Boys of Templeton • Talbot Baines Reed
... I have enumerated; but the connection and the words are lost. And nothing that I can say can give any notion of his eloquence and manner,—of the hold which he soon got on his audience—of the variety of his stores of information—or, finally, of the artlessness of his habits, or the modesty and temper with which he listened to, and answered arguments, contradictory to his own."—J. ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... which compel belief, "I suffer with you; I understand you; come with me; let us weep together beside the brook, beneath the willows." And they follow him! They listen to his empty and sonorous poetry like infants to a nurse's lullaby. Canalis, like Nodier, enchants the reader by an artlessness which is genuine in the prose writer and artificial in the poet, by his tact, his smile, the shedding of his rose-leaves, in short by his infantile philosophy. He imitates so well the language of our early youth ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac |
