"Imitative" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Wright Brothers definitely solved the problem of flight and virtually gave the aeroplane its present place in aeronautics, there were three definite schools of experiment. The first of these was that which sought to imitate nature by means of the ornithopter or flapping-wing machines directly imitative of bird flight; the second school was that which believed in the helicopter or lifting screw; the third and eventually successful school is that which followed up the principle enunciated by Cayley, that of opposing a plane surface to the ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... Stevenson in his Some Technical Elements of Style in Literature, and many other curious searchers into the secrets of words, have attempted to explain the physiological basis of these varying "tone-qualities." Some of them are obviously imitative of sounds in nature; some are merely suggestive of these sounds through more or less remote analogies; some are frankly imitative of muscular effort or of muscular relaxation. High-pitched vowels and low-pitched vowels, liquid consonants and harsh consonants, ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... of Miss Landon's literary popularity upon the mind of Miss Roberts very probably caused that lady to desire similar celebrity. Indeed, so imitative are the impulses of the human mind, that it may fairly be questioned if Miss Landon would ever have attuned her lyre had she mot been in the presence of Miss Mitford's and Miss Rowden's "fame, and felt its influence." ...
— A Walk from London to Fulham • Thomas Crofton Croker
... sympathies are hospitable enough to embrace all his kind, and who, refined though he may be himself, will not sneer at the humble wit or grotesque peculiarities of the boozing mechanic, the squalid beggar, the vicious urchin, and all the motley group of the idle, the reckless, and the imitative that swarm in the alleys and broadways of a metropolis. He who walks through a great city to find subjects for weeping, may find plenty at every corner to wring his heart; but let such a man walk on his course, and enjoy his grief ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... this effort a certain imitative melody, but disapproved of the subject itself as low ...
— A Desperate Character and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... the first time, an opportunity of forming an opinion of French beauty, the assemblage of ladies being very numerous, and all of them most elegantly dressed. Travelling, and the imitative arts, have given a most surprising uniformity to all the fashions of dress and ornament; and, whatever may be said to the contrary, there is a very slight difference between the scenes of a French and English polite assembly. If any thing, however, ...
— Travels through the South of France and the Interior of Provinces of Provence and Languedoc in the Years 1807 and 1808 • Lt-Col. Pinkney
... turned from Greek perfection, from the supremely beautiful but limited representations of the human body, to an attempt to paint the invisible, the spiritual side of man's nature. The work of these artists was great because it was not imitative and because it stretched toward an unending and ideal future. But the idealistic and aspiring temper of early Tuscan art had the defects of its qualities. Its spiritual ecstasy once conventionalized ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... than mine. What I discovered was another face, not in the most remote degree like mine,—as different as it could possibly be,—a face belonging to the carboniferous strata of the human ages. Had it been imitating me? Its race are eminent for imitative genius. A queer sort of a nun it was, wearing neither black nor white, but high tropical hues. Repose of being did not belong to this face. It darted around, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various
... movements. But our poet applied the idea to an individual. To him a rude, uncivil, impolite, ungracious, uncourteous, unpolished, uncouth, boorish, blunt, bluff, gruff, brusk, or burly person was as the unplaned lumber or the unpolished gem; and we imitative moderns still call such a man rough. But we do not think of the man as covered with projections that need to be taken off, unless forsooth we receive rough treatment at his hands. And note how far we have journeyed from the original idea of the word when ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... laugh at this, and Captain Miles hearing what had been said, every word being distinctly audible on the poop, began speaking to Mr Marline about the imitative habits ...
— The White Squall - A Story of the Sargasso Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... evenings merrily. "Proverbs," a game of memory, was very popular, and it was one in which either my aunt or myself was apt to prove winner. Father's annoyance at our failure sometimes was very amusing, but quite genuine. "Dumb Crambo" was another favorite, and one in which my father's great imitative ability showed finely. I remember one evening his dumb showing of the word "frog" was so extremely laughable that the memory of it convulsed Marcus Stone, the clever artist, when he tried some time ...
— My Father as I Recall Him • Mamie Dickens
... in the original means those large hollowed stones on which the women were accustomed to bruise the maize. The imitative sounds for which I have substituted others in English, are in ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... times found a noble expression; and in modern days a perhaps still completer expression in music, which was in pre-Christian days in a very rudimentary condition. But painting is but ill suited to the rendering of these vague aspirations. And still more unsuited is sculpture, the most imitative and objective of all the arts. The attempts which have been made in recent years by some sculptors to give a mystic turn to their art seems to me doomed to failure by the essential nature of sculpture. A Western mind can have little sympathy with the art which ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... all the imitative arts. Foote's mimicry was exquisitely ludicrous, but it was all caricature. He could take off only some strange peculiarity, a stammer or a lisp, a Northumbrian burr or an Irish brogue, a stoop or a shuffle. "If a man," said Johnson, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... imagination. I fought my way thus through Vertot's Knights of Malta—a book which, as it hovered between history and romance, was exceedingly dear to me; and Orme's interesting and beautiful History of Indostan, whose copious plans, aided by the clear and luminous explanations of the author, rendered my imitative amusement peculiarly easy. Other moments of these weary weeks were spent in looking at the Meadow Walks, by assistance of a combination of mirrors so arranged that, while lying in bed, I could see the troops ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... pacific pursuits of an agricultural or commercial country, is religiously banished, and their places supplied by an infinite variety of military toys:—platoons of gens-d'armerie, troops of artillery, tents, waggons, camp equipage, all are arranged in imitative array upon the counter. The infant of the grande nation becomes familiar, in his nurse's arms, with all the detail of the profession to which he is hereafter to belong; and when he opens his eyes for the first time, it is to rest them upon that terrible machinery ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... forgotten, that, after the Battle of Bull Run, we were thrown on the defensive, and the fortifications of our capital were called for in a hurry. There were no models, in this country, from which to copy,—and few, if any, in Europe. Luckily, however, the art of fortification is not imitative; it is based on scientific principles; and we found in General Barnard and his assistants the science to comprehend the problem before them, and the experience and skill to grasp ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... wonderful," said Essper, putting the two middle fingers of his right hand before his mouth and sounding a note so clear and beautiful, so exactly imitative of the fall which Vivian had noticed and admired, that for a moment he imagined that the huntsman ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... little bear-cubs follow their huge mother from the den into the open world, their lessons of life begin. These lessons are acquired partly through imitation and also through design upon the part of the wise old dam. Nearly all small creatures are imitative, so, as the old bear did only those things that were for her good, the cubs soon learned by imitation which of the wild creatures to be upon good terms with and which ...
— Black Bruin - The Biography of a Bear • Clarence Hawkes
... ability of the time, all the contributions of the past, all the hopes of the future. He must he a university of knowledges.... We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe. The spirit of the American freeman is already suspected to be timid, imitative, tame.—The scholar is decent, indolent, complaisant.—The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself. There is no work for any but the decorous and ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... gold and silver, of this splendid coinage. "In his introduction Mr. Lane-Poole deals with various historical, geographical, and other problems suggested by the coinage, and with difficulties of classification presented by the early imitative issues of the East India company and the French compagnie des Indes." This volume, the fourteenth, completes the cataloguing of all the Muhammadan coins in the museum.—Journal Royal ...
— The American Journal of Archaeology, 1893-1 • Various
... step-dance was a great acquisition on a long, dreary, ocean pilgrimage, and his performance always added to the amusement of a Saturday evening when a concert was organized. The songs were mostly comic, and were sung with an imitative touch of the professional dandy. Occasional lapses into sentimentality never failed to strike a penitent chord for some real or supposed sins that had been thoughtlessly committed. But the mood was merely of brief duration, and only required a comic interjection ...
— The Shellback's Progress - In the Nineteenth Century • Walter Runciman
... hardly likely that an observant person will be deceived. It is, however, as well to be carefully on guard against this contingency, for modern photography and process printing have been brought to such a degree of imitative perfection that it is easy for a not too keen-eyed person to experience great difficulty in forming an opinion in the absence of the acid test. Fortunately ...
— The Detection of Forgery • Douglas Blackburn
... Milton, he thought they might; and he went to fetch his MSS. out of his room. He sate down near the fire, trying to study them with a critical eye, to represent public opinion as far as he could. He had changed his style since the Mrs. Hemans' days. He was essentially imitative in his poetic faculty; and of late he had followed the lead of a popular writer of sonnets.' He turned his poems over: they were almost equivalent to an autobiographical passage in his life. Arranging them in their order, they came ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... as well as in the seventh, the child's imitative and inventive powers are obviously more greatly taxed than in the others, and the danger will be, if he is not well trained, that, as he apparently can do anything with the material, he will end by doing nothing. The greater the freedom given to the child, the greater the necessity ...
— Froebel's Gifts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... mine the sweetness or the skill, But mine the love that will not tire, And, born of love, the vague desire That spurs an imitative will. TENNYSON. ...
— Life and Conduct • J. Cameron Lees
... the "mendacious" Pinto on the island, the imitative people made no fewer than six hundred match-locks or arquebuses. Clearing twelve hundred per cent. on their cargo, the three Portuguese loaded with presents, returned to China. Their countrymen quickly flocked to this new market, ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... written down, so as to impress it on our memories, and none of us have yet forgotten it. It was singular, moreover, how the imitative faculty gained strength among us. We children acquired the habit of speaking of all our garden-plants by such outlandish names as father then taught us,—not seriously, of course, but as a capital piece of fun. We knew no more of relations and affinities than he, and so used these names much ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... ventured to attempt national originality; the success is perfect. A sense of fitness always enhances the effect of beauty. I will not attempt a long essay on the subject, but if America, in her vastness, her immense natural resources, and her remote grandeur, would be less imitative, she would be infinitely more ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... strikingly clever and expressive, and were at once very perfect cats and monkeys and very natural men and women. I confess, however, that they failed to amuse me. I was doubtless not in a mood to enjoy them, for they seemed to me peculiarly cynical and vulgar. Their imitative felicity was revolting. As I looked askance at the complacent little artist, brandishing them between finger and thumb and caressing them with an amorous eye, he seemed to me himself little more than ...
— The Madonna of the Future • Henry James
... Imitative as a monkey she went on—with a child's perfect knowledge that it is all make-believe, yet with an entire credence in the power of make-believe: "Naughty child—WILL you be quiet? There! You've frown your counterpane off now. Wonder what next ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... influence not only of Virgil, but also of Arriaza, and of the several poems descriptive of nature written in Latin by Jesuit priests, such as the once famous Rusticatio Mexicana by Father Landivar of Guatemala. And yet there is very little in the Silvas that is directly imitative. The Silva a la agricultura de la zona torrida, especially, is an extraordinarily successful attempt to give expression in Virgilian terms to the exotic life of the tropics, and in this it is unique in Spanish literature. The beautiful descriptive passages ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... prospect; and had done perhaps even more by that chance-medley, as it perhaps was, of attention to the still more internal detail which was to be of such importance in the novel to come. Taking the three together (not without due allowance for the contemporary, if mainly imitative, developments which will be described in the next chapter), they had put prose fiction in a position which it had not attained, even in Spain earlier, even in France at more or less the same time: and had entirely antiquated, on the one hand, the mere fabliau ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... all these imitative virtues are only the virtues of a monkey, and that a good action is only morally good when it is done as such and not because of others. But at an age when the heart does not yet feel anything, you must make children copy the deeds you wish to ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... neither too ascetical nor too jocund; is simply good and jolly; has ever so much vivacity, sprightliness, and poetic warmth in his constitution; can preach a lively, earnest, sermon; has a strong imitative faculty; is brisk in action; can tell a good tale; is fine company; would'nt hurt anybody; would step over a fly rather than kill it unkindly; and is just such a man as we should like for a confessor if we were a believer in his Church. He has been succeeded by Father Pope, who ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... discovered in an adjoining thicket a spring of blandly therapeutic qualities. A complaisant medical faculty of San Francisco attested to its merits; a sympathetic press advertised the excellence of the hotel; a novelty-seeking, fashionable circle—as yet without laws and blindly imitative—found the new hotel an admirable variation to the vulgar ordinary "across the bay" excursion, and an accepted excuse for a novel social dissipation. A number of distinguished people had already visited it; certain exclusive families had secured the best rooms; there were a score of pretty women ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... tasteless structure, with a profusely gilt bell-tower, in the Russian manner; and the walls of the interior are covered with large paintings of no merit. But one must not be too critical: a kindling of intellectual energy ever seems, in most countries, to precede excellence in the imitative arts, which latter, too often survives the ruins of those ruder and nobler qualities which assure the vigorous existence ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... and it should follow that the best art is that which represents most closely and exactly. He recalls, perhaps, the legend of the two Greek painters, one with his picture of the fruit which the birds flew down to peck at, the other with his painting of a veil which deceived his very rival. The imitative or "illusionist" picture pleads its case most plausibly. A further experience of such pictures, however, fails to bring the beholder beyond his simple admiration of the painter's skill; and that skill, he comes gradually to realize, does not differ essentially from the adroitness of the ...
— The Enjoyment of Art • Carleton Noyes
... He was a younger man than Lockwood, with an impressionable erudition. Like his co-workers he had been somewhat stampeded by Dorn's imitative faculties, faculties which enabled the former journalist to bombinate twice as loud in a void three times as great as any of ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... mine applies to it only when it is an imitative art. For in the use of French women, I think it is as innocent as in the use of a wild Indian, who draws a circle round her face, and makes two spots, perhaps blue, perhaps white, in the middle of it. Such are my ...
— Cowper • Goldwin Smith
... over the mill-stream is almost on a level with the clear running water, and I lay there and gazed at the huge wheel which, under multitudinous forms and uses, is one of the world's wonders, because one of the few things we imitative children have not learnt from nature. Is it perchance a memory out of that past when Adam walked clear-eyed in Paradise and talked with the Lord in the cool of the day? Did he see then the flaming wheels instinct with service, wondrous messengers of the Most ...
— The Roadmender • Michael Fairless
... through a puerile ambition on the part of the orator to endow her with an exceptional distinction by senseless rhodomontade, manufactured by the word-machine which he presumes to call his imagination! All imitative imagery ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... poetry, their fame will be established in after years, when no one will ask, ‘What said the reviewers?’” Her remarks as to plagiarism—petty pilferings—and borrowing from others, to be found in her letters, are most interesting. She thought that “imitative traces, of one kind or other, may be found in all works of imagination, up to Homer; and that he is not detected in the same practice, is certainly owing to the little that remains of ...
— Anna Seward - and Classic Lichfield • Stapleton Martin
... nearly all musical, and wonderfully imitative," answered he. "They can catch almost anything they hear." He spoke in a nonchalant tone, but she felt his arm tremble as she leaned upon it. He had never before made such an effort ...
— A Romance of the Republic • Lydia Maria Francis Child
... unpleasant encounter with Major Cragiemuir, Ah Moy arrived at his place of business in Four-and-a-half Street, a mass of bruises, and with a heart full of hatred for his assailant. Perhaps, after all, the fellow had meant no harm. In his guileless, imitative way he had simply tried to do what he had often seen American young men do. Had he not frequently observed big Policeman Ryan kiss the red-haired widow who kept the lodging-house around on Missouri Avenue? Did not Muggsy Walker—across the street—salute his sweetheart ...
— The Statesmen Snowbound • Robert Fitzgerald
... striking figure of Justice surmounting the tomb of Tommaso Mocenigo in the Church of San Giovanni e Paolo at Venice. Mocenigo died in 1423, and the tomb was made by two indifferent Florentine artists, whose poor and imitative work must be referred to later on in connection with the St. George. But the Justice, a vigorous and original figure, holding a scroll and looking downwards, so absolutely resembles the Poggio in conception, attitude, and fall of drapery, that ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... apply during this period, one to the child and the other to the parent: Example and Imitation. No creature under heaven is more imitative than a little child, and its conduct in after years will depend largely upon the example set by its parents during its early life. It is no use to tell the child "not to mind," it has no mind wherewith to discriminate, but follows its natural tendency, ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... frame-house, or store, where there was an extensive display of Indian work. The Lake Superior and Huron Red Indians are particularly noted for the beauty of their embroidery on skins, silk, birch bark, and cloth, in beads, porcupine quills, or silk. Their imitative genius is so great that the squaws can copy anything, and I know people who have had their crests and coats-of-arms embroidered upon their tobacco-pouches and belts, from an impression on paper or ...
— A Trip to Manitoba • Mary FitzGibbon
... the hand which produced them had been guided by a spark of divine genius instead of the finest talent, what glorious works they would have been! The truth is that Andrea's was a receptive, rather than an original and productive mind. His art was more imitative than spontaneous, and this forms perhaps the difference between talent and genius. The art of his time sunk into his mind, and was reproduced. He lived precisely at the time of the culmination of art, when all the highest masters were bringing forth their ...
— Fra Bartolommeo • Leader Scott (Re-Edited By Horace Shipp And Flora Kendrick)
... as he leads them. They would sooner die than think. It is very curious that the universality of an opinion should have so much weight with people, as their own experience might tell them that its acceptance is an entirely thoughtless and merely imitative process. But it tells them nothing of the kind, because they possess no self-knowledge whatever. It is only the elect Who Say with Plato: [Greek: tois pollois polla dokei] which means that the public has a good many bees in its bonnet, ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; The Art of Controversy • Arthur Schopenhauer
... ROMAN TO GREEK LITERATURE: THE POETS OF THE REPUBLICAN ERA.— Latin literature was almost wholly imitative or borrowed, being a reproduction of Greek models; still it performed a most important service for civilization: it was the medium for the dissemination throughout the world of the rich literary ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... has been gradually dwindling away. The Turks are essentially a warlike race, and commerce and art have not flourished with them. Their literature is generally lacking in virility, and is mostly imitative and ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... and the span is sixty feet, in order to allow of future enlargement of the street. Absurd lattice-work, decorative brackets, bronze armorial medallions, and gas lanterns and standards, form a combination that only the unsettled and imitative art of the ruthless nineteenth century could have put together. Think of what the Egyptians in the times of the Pharaohs did with granite! and observe what we Englishmen of the present day do with iron. Observe this vulgar daubing of brown paint and barbaric ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... idea, though I think it is a mistake. It would be an irreparable loss to science if they should get away. The old one is tamer than it was and can laugh and talk like a parrot, having learned this, no doubt, from being with the parrot so much, and having the imitative faculty in a high developed degree. I shall be astonished if it turns out to be a new kind of parrot; and yet I ought not to be astonished, for it has already been everything else it could think of since those first ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... you did but know how refreshing it is to see anything shabby, and dull, and ugly," Mrs. Grinstead answered with imitative inflections, which set Anna Vanderkist off into a fit of laughter, infecting both her uncle and ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the Secretary of Defense in January 1949 committed the Air Force to a limited integration policy frankly imitative of the Navy's. A major improvement over the Air Force's current practices, the plan still fell considerably short of the long-range goals enunciated in the Gillem Board Report, to say nothing of the implications of the President's ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... is the best adapted to Senatorial reading? An imitative style and tone, being careful in the ...
— 1001 Questions and Answers on Orthography and Reading • B. A. Hathaway
... great waste of human power and energy brings me to the only important cause of self-destruction which seems to me removable, and that is newspaper publicity. No argument is needed to prove that man is essentially an imitative animal. In dress, in behavior, in speech, in modes of thought, and in social conventions, we are all prone to do what we see others do; and when unhappy men and women learn, from the newspapers, that scores of other unhappy people are daily escaping from their troubles through the always open ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... that another tree can grow there; and many years will elapse before the new birth can increase and occupy the room the previous one occupied, and flourish anew with a greenness all its own. This on one side. On another; genius is essentially imitative, or rather, as I just now said, gravitative; it gravitates towards that point peculiarly important at the moment of its existence; as air, more rarified in some places than in others, causes the winds to rush towards them as toward a centre: so that if poetry, painting, or music slumbers, ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... literary work was imitative rather than original; even if this be true, it in no measure detracts from her importance, which is based upon the fact that she was the leading spirit of the time and typified her environment. Her followers, and they included all the intellectual spirits, looked up to her as the one ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... contains could be put into a very short lecture, but as a lecture I am confident that it would prove valueless. Boys are benefited little by advice. They seldom listen to it and less frequently make any practical application of it. Imitative by nature, they are easily influenced by those with whom they associate, and no associate, in my opinion, has so strong a grasp upon them as the hero of some much prized book. He becomes a real being to their young, healthy imagination—their ideal of manliness, bravery, generosity, and nobility. ...
— The Boy Broker - Among the Kings of Wall Street • Frank A. Munsey
... must remember that in guiding the child to the formation of these habits, example and practice are far more important than precepts and rules. Example is more important because the child is very imitative; one rude act on the part of some older member of the household will counteract the benefit of many verbal lessons in politeness. Practice is important because it is through constant repetition of an act that it at last becomes automatic, and is performed without thought or attention. ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... not help acquiring, wherever she is! She appears very modest and very attentive to the child as she stands in the drawing-room of her mistress while Dora is exhibiting to the many guests; but her ear is becoming accustomed to a pure language, and her imitative powers soon adopt it. She will make a very lady-like little wife for somebody! Pat sees it, and does what he can to keep up with her. There'll be a struggle for her, though. Mike Dugan goes to Mrs. Minturn's very ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith
... of the gods. The Aeneid, though unfinished at the author's death, became at once what it has always remained—the only ancient epic worthy of comparison with the Iliad or with the Odyssey. Another member of the Augustan circle was Vergil's friend and fellow- worker, Horace. An imitative poet, Horace reproduced in Latin verse the forms, and sometimes even the substance, of his Greek models. But, like Vergil, what Horace borrowed he made his own by the added beauty which he gave to it. His Odes are perhaps the most admirable ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... apprentice-work. In The Two Gentlemen of Verona, also, Loves Labour's Lost, and The Taming of the Shrew, imitation has decidedly the upper hand; though in these plays, especially the latter, we have clear prognostics of the forthcoming dramatic divinity. From thence onward his style kept growing less imitative and more idiomatic till not the least taste or relish of the former remained. So that in this respect his course was in fact just what might be expected from a thoroughly modest, teachable, receptive, and at the same time most living, active, and aspiring ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... girl was one of them. If it weren't for the women, the men would not be so keen on the scent for gain. The women taught the men how to spend, created the needs for their wealth. And the social game they were instituting in Chicago was so emptily imitative, ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... Fisher, and uniformly in those artists and players who have distinguished themselves for their imitative powers, large. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 20, Issue 558, July 21, 1832 • Various
... dresses of modern ladies, 'upholstered like arm-chairs instead of being draped like women,' as he forcibly expressed it, he would hold up for practical imitation the costumes and handicrafts of the Middle Ages. Further than this retrogressive and imitative movement he never seemed to go. Now, the men of the time of Chaucer had many evil qualities, but there was at least one exhibition of moral weakness they did not give. They would have laughed at the idea of dressing themselves in the manner of the bowmen at the battle of Senlac, ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... imitative than most Europeans in this sense—that they are less disposed to apply the administrative and political systems of their own country to the government of backward populations; but in spite of their relatively high degree of political elasticity, they cannot ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... otherwise as commendably useful as those of Scotland; but no quaint ballad or simple song reminds us that men and women have loved, met, and parted on their banks, or that beneath each roof within their valleys the tragedy and comedy of life have been enacted. Our poetry is cold and imitative; it seems more the product of over-strained intellects than the spontaneous outgushing of hearts warm with love, and strongly sympathizing with human nature as it actually exists about us, with the joys and griefs of the men and women whom we meet daily. ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... strong influence exercised by Byron's genius on the imagination of Pushkin is well known. Shakespeare and other English dramatists had also their share in influencing his mind, which, at all events in its earlier developments, was of an essentially imitative type. As an example of his Shakespearian tastes, see his poem of "Angelo," ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... will be news to many non-slaveholders in the gentleman's district. Thomas Jefferson tells us that man is an imitative animal; therefore, if the assertion of the gentleman from Mississippi be correct, we must wonder why slaveholders do not relieve themselves of their negroes, that they may become equally noble, proud, prosperous, ...
— Slavery: What it was, what it has done, what it intends to do - Speech of Hon. Cydnor B. Tompkins, of Ohio • Cydnor Bailey Tompkins
... of us have some comical peculiarity, and we would not want an animal in the house who would be sure, at some time, to expose us to laughter by his imitative powers. ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton
... genius. The first is progressive genius, which always enunciates new and original matter of material benefit to the human race, and which is, consequently, non-atavistic; the second is atavistic or retrogressive genius, which is imitative and which always enunciates dead and obsolete matter long since abandoned and thrown aside as being utterly useless. The doctrines of communism and of nihilism are the products of retrogressive genius and are clearly atavistic, inasmuch as they are a reversion to the mental ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... possible that, centuries hence, the historian of American letters will start with Whitman as the first exponent of an original and democratic literature, disregarding all that has gone before as merely imitative ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... sympathy with all their passion. And in his audible representation of natural sounds and natural sights he does, consummately, what others have only tried, more or less well, to do. When, in the past at least, the critics objected to the realism of his imitative effects, they forgot that all other composers, at one time or another, had tried to be just as imitative, but had not succeeded so well in their imitations. Wagner, in his painting, is the Turner of music. ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... are an imitative people of necessity, and they are apt at this part of imitation, in particular. Then they are less artificial in all their practices, than older and more sophisticated nations; and this company has got that essential part of good breeding, simplicity, ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... to enjoy the patronage of Philadelphus was Theocritus. Many of his poems are lost; but his pastoral poems, though too rough for the polished taste of Quintilian, and perhaps more like nature than we wish any works of imitative art to be, have always been looked upon as the model of that kind of poetry. If his shepherds do not speak the language of courtiers, they have at least a rustic propriety which makes us admire the manners and thoughts of the ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 10 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... naturally imitative, hence the value of example over precept. The children of courteous parents will imbibe courtesy as naturally and unconsciously as the growing plant absorbs oxygen from the air and sunlight that ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... among the people, the Burnses, the Brangers, the Heines are unknown in Russia. I have already stated that originality must not be looked for on Russian soil; that Russian literature is essentially an imitative literature in its forms, hence imitative force must have time to look about, examine, copy, and for ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... M.P., observed that, man being an imitative animal and bishops being regarded by many as good examples, there seemed to him a serious danger of an epidemic of what he might call Brobdingnagitis. Fortunately the results would not be immediately apparent, otherwise he would be compelled to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, April 28, 1920 • Various
... with rapt, adoring eyes; her Pixie, her baby, was now a big girl, almost grown-up, transformed from the forlorn-looking elf to a natty little personage, more like the pictures of jeunes filles on the back of French pattern plates than she could have believed possible for Irish flesh and blood. Imitative Pixie had caught "the air," and the good Therese had evidently taken immense pains with the costume in which her pupil should make her reappearance ...
— More about Pixie • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... Yorkshire name Tankard is identical with Tancred. Stiggins goes back to the illustrious Anglo-Saxon name Stigand, as Wiggins does to wigand, a champion. Cadman represents Caedmon, the name of the poet-monk of Whitby. Segar is an imitative form of the Anglo-Sax. Saegaer, of which the normal modern representative is Sayers. Giblett is not a name one would covet, but it stands in the same relationship to Gilbert as Hamlet ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... have brought back the conversation to the forgotten subject of our meeting. "How could you, Mr. Croftangry, collect all these hard words about India?—you were never there?"—"No, madam, I have not had that advantage; but, like the imitative operatives of Paisley, I have composed my shawl by incorporating into the woof a little Thibet wool, which my excellent friend and neighbour, Colonel Mackerris, one of the best fellows who ever trode a Highland moor, or dived into an Indian jungle, had the goodness ...
— The Surgeon's Daughter • Sir Walter Scott
... whenever he can get them; spending as much time in be-painting his cheeks on a summer morning, as Beau Brummell, of departed memory, ever wasted in tying his cravat. And so it has ever been—so it will ever be; man is not only a two-legged unfledged animal, but he is also a vain imitative ape, fond of his own dear visage, blind to his deformities, and ever desirous of setting himself off to the best advantage. It is of no use quarrelling with ourselves for this physiological fact—for we presume it to be one of the best ascertained phenomena connected with the genus homo—it ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... not so? We are one long street, rambling from sun to sun, inheriting traits of the parent country roads which we unite. And we are cross streets, members of the same family, properly imitative, proving our ancestorship in a primeval genius for trees, or bursting out in inexplicable weaknesses of Court-House, Engine-House, Town Hall, and Telephone Office. Ultimately our stock dwindles ...
— Friendship Village • Zona Gale
... of the lion, the seal and the elephant are all found; indeed, a lively imagination is not needed to discover in this Garden of the Gods an endless variety of imitative forms of human beings, of birds and beasts and reptiles. These figures possess a curious interest and attract wondering attention; but the notable and majestic objects here are the "Great Gateway" and ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... taken her knows also how to give; and this portrait has preserved for you a part of what you loved. This picture, too, may influence Melissa's fate; for Caesar has a fine taste in art, and one of the wants of our time which has helped to embitter him is the paralyzed state of the imitative arts. It will be easier to win his favor for the painter who did this portrait than for a man of noble birth. He needs such painters as this Alexander for the Pinakothek in the splendid baths he has built at Rome. If you would but ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... trace the forms of objects familiar to his eyes. The savage takes a pleasure in depicting and rudely giving shape to objects which constantly meet his view. The artistic instinct is of all ages and of all climes; it springs up naturally in all countries, and takes its origin alike everywhere in the imitative faculty of man. Evidences of this instinct at the earliest period have been discovered among the relics of primitive men; rough sketches on slate and on stone of the mammoth, the deer, and of man, have been found in the caves of France; the American savage traces rude hunting scenes, or the forms ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... Sicilian pastoral: "She is like the rising of the golden morning, when the night departeth, and when the winter is over and gone. She resembleth the cypress in the garden, the horse in the chariots of Thessaly." These figures plainly declare their origin; and others, equally imitative, might be pointed ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... from above or below, radial and encircling), the lines of the warp and the woof. Oblique bands of color are made up of series of rectangles, giving stepped outlines. Although these figures are purely geometric, it is not impossible that in their position and grouping they preserve a trace of some imitative conception modified to this shape by the forces of the art. They serve quite as well, however, to illustrate simple mechanical elaboration as if entirely free from suspicion ...
— A Study Of The Textile Art In Its Relation To The Development Of Form And Ornament • William H. Holmes
... for the worst was yet to come. He lingered, nursing a colossal scruple. Poor Spinks's honour was dear to him because it was less the gift of nature than the supreme imitative effort of his adoring heart. He loved honour because Rickman loved it; just as he had loved Flossie for the same reason. These were the only ways in which he could imitate him; and like all imitators he exaggerated ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... A good instance of this is found in Brihan N[a]rad[i]ya Pur[a]na, X., where the churik[a] and drugha[n.]a (24) appear in an imitative scene of this sort; one of these being later, the other earlier, than ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... insignificant, eyeless face, possesses at his fingers' ends the maximum of dexterity in this art of decoration, light and wittily incongruous, which threatens to invade us in France, in this epoch of imitative decadence, and which has become the great resource of our manufacturers of cheap ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... "In eighty-three American languages examined by Messrs. Barton and Vater, one hundred and seventy words have been found, the roots of which appear to be the same; and it is easy to perceive that this analogy is not accidental, since it does not rest merely upon imitative harmony, or on that conformity of organs which produces almost a perfect identity in the first sounds articulated by children. Of these one hundred and seventy words which have this connexion, three- fifths resemble the Manchou, the Tongouse, the Mongal, and the ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers
... the fact that the little child acts merely as his instinct and feelings prompt, she must make all training at this stage of his life take the form of developing the instincts. Probably the strongest of these at this time is imitation. Consequently most of the teaching must take advantage of the imitative instinct. The first care should be to surround the child with the qualities we desire him to possess. The mother who scolds, gives way to temper, or is unwilling or unable to control her own emotions and acts can hope for little self-control in her child. In the same way the father who kicks ...
— Vocational Guidance for Girls • Marguerite Stockman Dickson
... terrible concentration, their passionless yet poignant objectivity; like them, she seems to allow life to suggest its own mode of presentation; and, like them, she recognises that a frank acceptance of the facts of life is the true basis of all modern imitative art. The scene of Mrs. Woods's story lies in one of the villages near Oxford; the characters are very few in number, and the plot is extremely simple. It is a romance of modern Arcadia—a tale of the love of a farm-labourer for a girl who, though slightly above him in social station and education, ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... times; but we cannot aver that the merit of the verses is inferior. The interest of the subjects is certainly immeasurably less; but, perhaps, not less propitious to the lilts and the luinneags, in which, as in her music and imitative dancing, the Highland border has ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel , Volume I. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... glare upon the astonishment of the spectators from the south window, it is there in imagination that we are irresistibly fixed. Before we dilate upon the delicious peculiarities of the exhibition, we deem it absolutely a matter of justice to the noble-hearted patriot who, imitative of the Greeks and Athenians of old, who gave the porticoes of their public buildings, and other convenient spots, for the display of their artists' productions, has most generously appropriated the chief space of his shop front to the use and advantage of the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 21, 1841 • Various
... far as Latin literature was founded on the Greek, that is, in so far as it was a derivative and imitative literature, it was not very fit for missionary purposes. One people can give to another only what is its own. The Greek gods were useless for export. An example may be taken from the English rule in India. We can give to the peoples of India our own representative institutions. ...
— Romance - Two Lectures • Walter Raleigh
... common-place. In the French, as well as in the Greek, it happens that the same syllabic measure is used in Tragedy and Comedy, which, on a first view, may appear singular. But if the Alexandrine did not appear to us peculiarly adapted to the free imitative expression of pathos, on the other hand, it must be owned that a comical effect is produced by the application of so symmetrical a measure to the familiar turns of dialogue. Moreover, the grammatical conscientiousness of French poetry, which ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... Romance, and knew his Scott and Marryat almost before he could lisp their names." That is typical of Mr. Compton-Rickett's method. Instead of contenting himself with simple and realistic sentences like Mr. Mackail's, he aims at—and certainly achieves—a kind of imitative picturesqueness. We again see his taste for the high-flown in such a paragraph as that which tells us that "a common bond unites all these men—Dickens, Carlyle, Ruskin and Morris. They differed in much; but, like great mountains lying apart in the base, they converge high ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... ambitious, and of whom two-thirds are now native-born,—a novel that would have corrected the too languidly accepted judgments of omniscient elderly gentlemen, who, after a few weeks or months spent among the smallest and most imitative section of Antipodean society, gravely conclude that 'leaves that grow on one branch of an oak are not more like leaves that grow upon another, than the Australian swarm is like ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... said he was totally deficient in the imitative faculty; and the Professor, that he was equally so in the rhythmic, and instanced several consoling false quantities in the few effusions submitted to him. Added to this, Sir Austin told Lady Blandish ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... pleasing shallow-brained and frivolous courtiers, to produce much that was worth while. Great numbers of plays were written, it is true, but they were hopelessly dull imitations of classic models. Imitative and uninspired likewise were statues and paintings and poems. One merit they possessed. If a French painter lacked force and originality, he could at least portray with elegance and charm a group of fine ladies angling in an artificial pool. ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... tradition that she ever capped the climax of ugliness by wearing Bloomers. There were gay colors for holidays, no doubt; but not till 1830, we are told, did the genuine Illinois settler adopt the commonplace dress of this imitative land. What pity when people are in such haste to do away with ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... being given to the most incorrigible members of the book clubs of New York. These had been laboriously employed in puffing each other into celebrity for many weary years, but still remained just as vapid, as conceited, as ignorant, as imitative, as dependent, and as ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... things, in order to find out the way they work and what their possibilities are. And each animal, man, beast, or bird has to do it for himself. Apart from the instinctive actions which the child does without knowing their value at all, and apart from the equally instinctive imitative way of doing them without aiming at learning more by the imitations, he proceeds in all cases to make experiments. Generally his experiments work through acts of imitation. He imitates what he sees some other creature do; or he imitates ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... "Our friendship filled our hearts so amply, that if we were only together, the simplest amusements were a delight." They made kites, cages, bows and arrows, drums, houses; they spoiled the tools of their grandfather, in trying to make watches like him. In the same cheerful imitative spirit, which is the main feature in childhood when it is not disturbed by excess of literary teaching, after Geneva had been visited by an Italian showman with a troop of marionettes, they made puppets and composed comedies for them; ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... origin is a good deal of an accident. What the milliners of Paris, or the demi-monde of Paris, enjoin our English ladies, is (I suppose) a good deal chance; but as soon as it is decreed, those whom it suits and those whom it does not all wear it. The imitative propensity at once insures uniformity; and 'that horrid thing we wore last year' (as the phrase may go) is soon nowhere to be seen. Just so a literary fashion spreads, though I am far from saying with equal primitive ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... with revelation which is one of the most fascinating tricks of the visible world, and which even a harsh town full of chimneys can sometimes take on when seen in given moments and lights. And it was astonishing to see into what lifeless imitative verse his most original and passionate moments ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... is, our institutions are the result of facts and accidents, and, being necessarily an imitative people, there are often gross inconsistencies between our professions and our practice; whereas the French have had to struggle through their apprenticeship in political rights, by the force of discussions and appeals to reason, and theory is still too important to be entirely overlooked. ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... thee back," I in these words Continu'd, "where thou saidst, that usury Offends celestial Goodness; and this knot Perplex'd unravel." He thus made reply: "Philosophy, to an attentive ear, Clearly points out, not in one part alone, How imitative nature takes her course From the celestial mind and from its art: And where her laws the Stagyrite unfolds, Not many leaves scann'd o'er, observing well Thou shalt discover, that your art on her Obsequious follows, as the learner ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... us for a moment to be ourselves. But, still, this momentary relaxation, this momentary "play," this holiday from the surface "I," remains an affair dependent upon suggestive symbols coming from "without." The supreme artist achieves freedom. We, who in matters of art are the imitative mass, can only have "change," a new heaven and ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... said, and then, with a wonderful display of the imitative faculty, he went through a clever pantomime, turning his black face into a grotesque copy of Mallam's, as he made believe to pour rum out of a bottle, drinking again and again, smiling in an imbecile manner at first, and then beginning to grow fierce, while his companions squatted ...
— King o' the Beach - A Tropic Tale • George Manville Fenn
... domestic proprieties and the Nemesis of respectability. It was her refined and severely correct demeanour that gave soul and wings to the wild fun of A Night Off. From Miss Garth to Mrs. Laburnum is a far stretch of imitative talent for the interpretation of the woman nature that everybody, from Shakespeare down, has found it so difficult to treat. This actress has never failed to impress the spectator by her clear-cut, brilliant identification with every type of character that she has assumed; and, back ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... spontaneous reflections. It has been held that all this implies real acts of intelligence. It is, in fact, often very difficult to decide exactly how far it is intelligence and how far memory, instinct, imitative genius, obedience or mechanical impulse, the effects of training, ...
— The Unknown Guest • Maurice Maeterlinck
... was a street by that name until last week when I heard a girl talking to grannie, who said she lived on it. She did her hands, when she talked, just like the girl with you did." Bettina twisted hers in imitative movements. "She didn't keep her ...
— People Like That • Kate Langley Bosher
... be forgotten to mention Red Angel. Over eight months before a baby orang-outan had been captured. He had grown rapidly, and George, the elder of the two boys, had taken a special delight in teaching or training him, and the result was that the imitative quality of the animal made him useful to the party in many ways. Angel was with them also, and was the only amusing element in their days of ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: The Tribesmen • Roger Finlay
... imitative in a high degree. This faculty also it does not share with the lower animals, but does with man, imitation being one of the methods by which he has attained his supremacy. Observation, imitation, education, are the three levers in the ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... very richly coloured; but even their brightest hues—orange, silver, scarlet—have not been given without regard to the colouring of their surroundings. Green-leafed bushes arc frequented by vividly green Epeiras, but the imitative resemblance does not quite end here. The green spider's method of escape, when the bush is roughly shaken, is to drop itself down on the earth, where it lies simulating death. In falling, it drops just as a green leaf would drop, that is, not quite so rapidly ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... powerful story of farm life in the great West, which cannot fail to make a lasting impression on every reader. In this book Mr. Harris has done for the wheat fields what Mr. Westcott has done for rural New York and Mr. Bacheller for the North country. It is in no way imitative of David Harum or Eben Holden; and, unlike each of these books, it is not in the portrayal of a single quaint character that its power consists. Mr. Harris has taken for his story a typical Iowa farmer's family and their neighbours; and, although every one of the characters is realistically ...
— Anting-Anting Stories - And other Strange Tales of the Filipinos • Sargent Kayme
... multiplications as patterns, ensure the wide extension of the prevalent style of imitating past styles, designing patchwork of these; and even admit of its scientific reduction to a definite series of grades, which imitative youth may easily pass onwards from the age of rudest innocence to that of art-knowledge and certificated art-mastery. Our School of Design thus becomes a School of Art, a length a College, dominating the instruction ...
— Civics: as Applied Sociology • Patrick Geddes
... again! Full fain it would delay me! My dear babe, Who, capable of no articulate sound, Mars all things with his imitative lisp, How he would place his hand beside his ear, His little hand, the small forefinger up, And bid us listen! and I deem it wise ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... the end of the heroic age, both in politics and in literature. After the loss of Icelandic freedom there is no more left of Germania, and the Sturlunga Saga which tells the story of the last days of freedom is the last word of the Teutonic heroic age. It is not a decrepit or imitative or secondary thing; it is a masterpiece; and with this true history, this adaptation of an heroic style to contemporary realities, the sequence of German heroic ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... there in an analogy between experimental sciences and imitative arts? Between poetry and a magic-lantern? Is either an argument that is convincing? Are both effective in ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... of MacDowell was, almost from the first, in a wholly different case. In its early phases it, too, was imitative, reflective. MacDowell returned to America, after a twelve years' apprenticeship to European influences, in 1888, bringing with him his symphonic poems, "Hamlet and Ophelia" and "Lancelot and Elaine," ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... no such thing as a dryad," said Diana. Diana's mother had found out about the Haunted Wood and had been decidedly angry over it. As a result Diana had abstained from any further imitative flights of imagination and did not think it prudent to cultivate a spirit of belief even ...
— Anne Of Green Gables • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... ashamed. The sentiments are honest, elevated, and manly, and the political doctrine is sound. Mr. Webster was then a boy of eighteen, and he therefore took his politics from his father and his father's friends. For the same reason he was imitative in style and mode of thought. All boys of that age, whether geniuses or not, are imitative, and Mr. Webster, who was never profoundly original in thought, was no exception to the rule. He used the style of the eighteenth century, then in its decadence, and very florid, inflated, and ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge
... love, the understanding listens furtively and substitutes for the holy child's-play mere memories of former purposes or prospects of new ones. Yes, it even continues to give to the hollow, cold illusions a tinge of color and a fleeting heat; and thus by its imitative skill it tries to steal from the innocent fantasy its ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... the streets to the Italians. This general struggle to rise in life, to be at least politically represented by one of the best, as to occupation and social status, has also its negative side. We must remember that the imitative impulse plays an important part in life, and that the loss of social estimation, keenly felt by all of us, is perhaps most dreaded by the humblest, among whom freedom of individual conduct, the power to give only just weight to the opinion of neighbors, is ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... description in which Elihu is introduced, and the mention of his genealogy, are very unlike the other introductions. The literary art of the section is, speaking generally, inferior to that of the rest of the book. It is imitative rather than creative. Elihu takes about twenty verses to announce the simple fact that he is going to speak, though there might be a dramatic propriety in this, as he is represented as a young man. Further, the language is more Aramaic ...
— Introduction to the Old Testament • John Edgar McFadyen
... perhaps, too, with more real advantage to his auditory. It is, indeed, very difficult happily to excite the passions and draw the characters of men; but our nature leads us more directly to such paintings than to the invention of a story. We are imitative animals; and we are more naturally led to imitate the exertions of character and passion than to observe and describe a series of events, and to discover those relations and dependencies in them which will ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... this simple direction, however, we are confronted by another of the peculiar characteristics of music. Music, in distinction from the static, concrete and imitative arts, is always in motion, and to follow it requires an intensity of concentration and an accuracy of memory which can be acquired, but for which, like most good things, we have to work. We all know the adage that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" and that any work of art must ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... is a freshness and a completeness about the whole performance which entitle it to the fullest praise. As for the whole evening's enjoyment, it may be characterized as novel from the fact that it is native and not imitative, commendable because it is wholly refined, and most pleasant because it is always artistic. The comedians are very numerous, and all unite in giving a perfection to the rendering ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it; for man is an imitative animal. This quality is the germ of all education in him. From his cradle to his grave he is learning to do what he sees others do. If a parent could find no motive either in his philanthropy or his self-love, for restraining the intemperance of passion towards ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 3, 1918 • Various
... three is a great deal of secondary work in pots, and pans, and floors, and carpets, and shawls, and architectural ornament, which ought essentially, to be unlike reality, and to depend for its charm on quite other qualities than imitative ones. But all such art is inferior and secondary—much of it more or less instinctive and animal, and a civilized human creature can only learn those principles rightly, by knowing those of great civilized art first—which ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... confusion, the dogs became affected with the spirit of excitement that filled their masters, and gave vent to their feelings in loud and continuous howling which nothing could check. The imitative propensity of these singular people was brought rather oddly into play during the progress of traffic. Buzzby had produced a large roll of tobacco—which they knew the use of, having been already shown ...
— The World of Ice • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... resemblance which it is so interesting to trace in the characters of men of genius. The German poet, it is said, never perused any work that made a strong impression upon him, without being stimulated to commence one, himself, on the same topic and plan; and in Lord Byron the imitative principle was almost equally active,—there being few of his poems that might not, in the same manner, be traced to the strong impulse given to his imagination by the perusal of some work that had just before interested him. In the history, too, of their lives and ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. IV - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... why a reverential attitude helps to arouse real reverence, and a smiling face and cheery tone actually bring cheerfulness in a case of the blues. Little children are so imitative that they quickly copy the outward manifestations of a feeling, and the inner state tends to follow. This is further a reason for leading them into acts of loving service, that love and kindred gracious ...
— The Unfolding Life • Antoinette Abernethy Lamoreaux
... has been sought by various imitative processes, some of which are indistinguishable from it except by close inspection. In one of these wax, either in its natural state or tinted with an addition of powder colour, was used; in another glue mixed with whiting or plaster, also sometimes ...
— Intarsia and Marquetry • F. Hamilton Jackson
... the Lily came late to the front to inherit and give fresh vigour to the gifts of all. As the effigies of Byzantine art became living men and women beneath the pencil of Giotto, so the mere imitative poetry of the Sicilian Court became Italian literature in Dante and Boccaccio. Freedom, slow as it seemed in awakening, nowhere awakened so grandly, nowhere fought so long and stubbornly for life. Dino Compagni sets us face to face with this awakening, with this patient pitiful struggle. ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... from the gesture of the body to the movement of the tongue, Plato makes a great step in the physiology of language. He was probably the first who said that 'language is imitative sound,' which is the greatest and deepest truth of philology; although he is not aware of the laws of euphony and association by which imitation must be regulated. He was probably also the first ...
— Cratylus • Plato
... We were so young that I think we both felt, beneath our very real and vivid emotions, a gratifying sense of romantic resourcefulness in this prolonged discussion. There is something ridiculously petty and imitative about youth, something too, naively noble and adventurous. I can never determine if older people are less generous and imaginative or merely less absurd. I still recall the autumnal melancholy of that queer, neglected-looking place, in ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... have a charm, either this charm is their good, or they have some accompanying truth or advantage. For example, in eating and drinking there is pleasure and also profit, that is to say, health; and in learning there is a pleasure and also truth. There is a pleasure or charm, too, in the imitative arts, as well as a law of proportion or equality; but the pleasure which they afford, however innocent, is not the criterion of their truth. The test of pleasure cannot be applied except to that which has no other ...
— Laws • Plato
... this sense of obligation to the master, there mixes a less satisfactory reminiscence of youthful excess in imitative phrases, in unseasonably apostolic readiness towards exhortation and rebuke, in interest about the soul, a portion of which might more profitably have been converted into care for the head, is in ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... time when I became her teacher, she had made for herself upward of sixty signs, all of which were imitative and were readily understood by those who knew her. The only signs which I think she may have invented were her signs for SMALL and LARGE. Whenever she wished for anything very much she would gesticulate in a very expressive manner. Failing to make herself understood, ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... motor type, people in whose mental make-up movement plays a minor part in comparison with vision and other sensations, they play a secondary role, or even hardly any role at all. Most spectators, indeed, instead of actually making slight movements imitative of the movements seen or represented, and experiencing the corresponding sensations, make no movements at all and simply experience movement images; this substitution of image for movement probably occurs in the minds of all except the most imitative. ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... her mind that he would improve on acquaintance, and that Gregory would like him, and that the Fairy Godmother business would prove far more entertaining than she had originally anticipated. The boy was distinctly presentable; he knew how to brush his hair, which was possibly an imitative faculty; he knew what colour of tie suited him, which might be intuition; he was exactly the type that Jocantha admired, which of course was accident. Altogether she was rather pleased when the girl looked at the ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... superiors in almost every line, especially in our knowledge and use of electricity and photography, and also in our manufacturing and scientific skill. However, they have decidedly surpassed us in imitative ...
— Life in a Thousand Worlds • William Shuler Harris
... to deal such subserviency a staggering blow. He denounced this "timid, imitative, tame spirit," emphasized the new importance given to the single person, and asked, "Is it not the chief disgrace in the world not to be a unit;—not to be reckoned one character;—not to yield that peculiar fruit which each man was created to bear; but to be reckoned in the ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... and revealed to the world that Shakspere, except as a "phrase-maker" and except as the inventor of "historical fiction" in "Henry IV." and "Henry V.," was "the most skilful and instinctive imitator among the early Elizabethan dramatists," and "remained till the end an instinctively imitative follower of ...
— The Critics Versus Shakspere - A Brief for the Defendant • Francis A. Smith
... performed. This is a religious procedure in which various processes of magic are utilized. This explains the importance of the thunder god as a deity, so clearly illustrated by Miss J. Harrison. The thunder rites are to increase the rain fall, and the magic in such procedures is imitative; that is, a sound similar to thunder is produced, as primitive man believes thunder to cause the rainfall since it often precedes it. Miss Harrison[26] has given a picture of an early thunder god of the Chinese,—a deity surrounded by many ...
— The Sex Worship and Symbolism of Primitive Races - An Interpretation • Sanger Brown, II
... especial manner the braying of an ass: when the fast fellows drive down to the Trafalgar at Greenwich, the Toy at Hampton Court, or the Swan at Henley upon Thames, the bugle-player mounts aloft, the rest of the fast fellows keeping a lookout for donkeys; when one is seen, a hideous imitative bray is set up by the man of music, and his quadrupedal brother, attracted by the congenial sound, rushes to the roadside—mutual recognition, with much ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... and hat on the barrel of the Government revolver, hooking the one to its proper saddle-strap, and clapping on the other at an angle inimitably imitative of ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... imitative phenomenon must once have had its original, and I propose that for the future we keep as close as may be to the more first-hand and original forms of experience. These are more likely to be found in sporadic ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... each word, almost each syllable, inspired its own picture.... He studied his subject as no one else ever studied it.... Then he portrayed it simply and with inimitable vigor, with a fine economy of line and colour; when colour is added, it is mainly as a gay convention, and not closely imitative of nature. ...
— A Mother's List of Books for Children • Gertrude Weld Arnold |
