"Realism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... For purposes of realism, this was an enormous improvement over the old black-line woodcut. Natural tones and textures could be imitated. The engraver was no longer a mere mechanical craftsman cutting around existing lines; special skill was ...
— Why Bewick Succeeded - A Note in the History of Wood Engraving • Jacob Kainen
... donna, Milka Ternina, whose art ranges from Tosca to Isolde, sings (in "Tosca") the invocation to the Virgin which precedes the killing of Scarpia, with a wealth of voice combined with a power of dramatic expression that simply is overwhelming; and she acts the scene of the killing with sufficient realism to raise her entire performance to the highest level of vocal dramatic art. An Italian prima donna who has been heard in the same role at the same opera house sings the invocation wretchedly, but acts the following scene, the killing of ...
— The Voice - Its Production, Care and Preservation • Frank E. Miller
... suffices to show not only what the complete work would have been, but what would have inevitably followed it. It shows the turning-point, and the way that was to be followed at the cross-roads—the way into a bigger, realer, grander world, where realism, freed from the dream, and fancy, and prejudice of youth, would glory in achieving the more enduring romance of manhood, maturity ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... have substance, real character painting, true psychological penetration, and realism in observation," while previously the novel, under such men as Gomberville and La Calprenede, was imaginative and full of fancy. Her talent, then, in that field, lay in the analysis and development of sentiments, in delineation ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... that govern psychical phenomena are as occult as the abstraction of the "fourth division of space"; and they defy the realism of common-place probability, mock all analysis, and annihilate distance. When Beryl had first met the keen scrutiny of Mr. Dunbar's glittering blue eyes, their baleful influence made her shiver slightly; and now at the instant in which he approached, and inspected her closely, ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... story that had been told to her the night she and Annie Gray had sat by the dying fire, told it, with many a touch of pathos and realism, which made it live before him. His eyes never left her face, though he could not discover how much she knew, and yet the very fact of her coming to him seemed to prove ...
— Purple Springs • Nellie L. McClung
... the sailor and almost gentleman who was Jenny's lover, seemed to me out of place. The little scene in the cabin of the yacht between Jenny and Keith is a quite brilliant study in selective realism. Take the trouble to look back on the finished chapters and see how much Mr. SWINNERTON has told you in how few strokes, and you will realise the fine and precise artistry of this attractive volume. I can see the lights, the silver and the red glow of the wine; and I follow ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, August 1, 1917. • Various
... science, he created the memorable super lock-picker Giles Habilula as the major attraction in a rousing trio of space operas, The Legion of Space, The Cometeers and One Against the Legion. When grim realism was the order of the day, he produced Crucible of Power and when they wanted extrapolated theory in present tense, he assumed the disguise of Will Stewart and popularized the concept of contra terrene matter ...
— The Cosmic Express • John Stewart Williamson
... now come for a fundamentally different approach for a new realism that is true to the great principles upon ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... wears woollen garments, a devotee, a Santon; from wise; from pure, or from Safahe was pure. This is not the place to enter upon such a subject as "Tasawwuf," or Sufyism; that singular reaction from arid Moslem realism and materialism, that immense development of gnostic and Neo-platonic transcendentalism which is found only germinating in the Jewish and Christian creeds. The poetry of Omar-i-Khayyam, now familiar to English readers, is a fair specimen; and the student will consult the last chapter of the Dabistan ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... that it is not material things which engage him, but human sentiment and the development of the passions wherever the human being is placed. He belongs to the romantic school less perhaps than to any other, because, if romanticism appears in his book, as does realism, it appears only in some ironical expressions here and there, which the public attorney has taken seriously. What M. Flaubert especially wished was to take a subject of study from real life, creating from it some true ...
— The Public vs. M. Gustave Flaubert • Various
... glories of this archaic American opera. The people employed in the representation rivaled in numbers those who constituted the veritable Cortez's army, while the horses came within three of the number that the Spaniard took into Mexico. This was carrying realism pretty close to historical verity. A finer sense of dramatic propriety, however, was exhibited in the care with which the pictures and paraphernalia of the opera were prepared. The ancient architecture of Mexico, ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... and vivid that if I am to write at all about him—and my duty in that respect is clear—it must be out of the fulness of my heart. My earliest recollections of him begin when I was a child and he was a bright, self-reliant lad in the home at Newcastle, the characteristics of which are with artless realism described in the opening pages of this book. It is the simple truth to say that we grew up in an atmosphere of love and duty. Our father was a man of studious habit, passing rich in the possession of ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... door of the west porch. There they struck up a carol in a somewhat lofty key. It was a most doleful ditty. Certainly I have never since heard the like of it. I remember that it told the story of the Crucifixion in startling language, full of realism that must have been horribly ghastly, if it had not been so comic. At the end of each verse the singers made one stride towards the communion. There were some thirty verses, and every mortal verse did these zealous carollers give us. They came to an end at length, and then another ...
— The Little Manx Nation - 1891 • Hall Caine
... reviews show a knowledge of technique which could be accepted at any time as a text-book for the critics and the criticised. She knew exactly how artistic effects were obtained, how and why certain things were done, why realism, so-called, could never be anything but caricature, and why over-elaboration of small matters can never be otherwise than disproportionate. Nothing could be more just than her saying about Balzac that he was such a ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... animals as they know them in Bermondsey. She began with a dancing bear, and you know Agatha doesn't approve of dancing, except at Buckingham Palace under proper supervision. And then she got up on the piano and gave them an organ monkey; I gather she went in for realism rather than a Maeterlinckian treatment of the subject. Finally, she fell into the piano and said she was a parrot in a cage, and for an impromptu performance I believe she was very word-perfect; no one had heard anything like it, except Baroness Boobelstein who has attended sittings of the ...
— Reginald • Saki
... modify any of my characters? And wouldn't it aggravate, not lessen, my artistic crime if I made the anarchists related to my heroine? Of course it would. Very well, then. And I am afraid our author can't claim the privileges of a lawless realism, for she distinctly doesn't belong ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, September 23, 1914 • Various
... of Bragdon's realism in telling his story of Venice was reached when, diving down into the innermost recesses of his vest pocket, he brought forth a silver filigree effigy of a gondola, which he handed me with the statement that ...
— The Water Ghost and Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... stress not only on our own defense but on our vital foreign assistance program. Your recent passage of the Foreign Assistance Act sent a signal to the world that America will not shrink from making the investments necessary for both peace and security. Our foreign policy must be rooted in realism, ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Ronald Reagan • Ronald Reagan
... were laboriously cultivated at the expense of art. Each, unguided except by his own sense of dissatisfaction with his surroundings, found a way through the sloughs of romance and the deserts of realism, to the high country beyond them. Both sought and both found the same thing—the thing above literature and painting, the stuff out of which great literature ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... general insanity than the aspect of the crowd on the streets of Chicago?" Why is it that the poems that have lived for centuries, and the masterpieces of the world's great painters and sculptors are not being equaled in the dawn of the twentieth century? The answer lies in the widespread devotion to realism instead of idealism. The immortals have joined the mortals in search for the Fleece of Gold. And Wordsworth's oft-quoted lines were never more applicable to ...
— A Fleece of Gold - Five Lessons from the Fable of Jason and the Golden Fleece • Charles Stewart Given
... clear to Billy Durgin, who reported this interview to me in a manner of able realism, that these men were both crooks of the ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... most of the literary lions of the day—Flaubert, with whom he became very intimate; Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, the two gifted brothers who may be said to have founded the realistic school of fiction years before Emile Zola came forward as the apostle of realism; Tourguenieff, the two Dumas, and many others who welcomed enthusiastically the young Southern ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III., July 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... influence of imaginative work. And as regards a bad play, have we not all seen large audiences lured by the loveliness of scenic effect into listening to rhetoric posing as poetry, and to vulgarity doing duty for realism? Whether this be good or evil for the public I will not here discuss, but it is evident that the playwright, at any rate, ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... Rachel Cohen was "that kind of girl," and that it is a kind which deliberately rejects life-buoys when flung out to them. The second mistake, as it seems to me, in a novel which is in many ways a very clever piece of realism, is a strong feminist or, at any rate, anti-masculine bias. Against the cunning dissection of the character of Charles Giddey, a worthless and conceited egotist, I have no complaint to make. It is one of the best things of its kind that I have read for a long time. But it ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 25, 1914 • Various
... if the plainer term be inadequate to express his lofty condition, is the hero of democratic America. He has won the allegiance and captured the imagination of the people. His antics are watched with envy, and described with a faithful realism of which statesmen are thought unworthy. He is hourly exposed to the camera; he marches through life attended by a bodyguard of faithful reporters. The trappings of his magnificent, if vulgar, existence are familiar to all the readers of the Sunday papers. His silver cars and marble ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... interest and value. It contains fascinating accounts of the habits of some of our common birds and descriptions of the largest bird colonies existing in eastern North America; while its author's phenomenal success in photographing birds in Nature not only lends to the illustrations the charm of realism, but makes the book a record of surprising achievements with the camera. Several of these illustrations have been described by experts as "the most remarkable photographs of wild life we have ever seen." The book is practical ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... called "a Virginia realist." To him, receiving his first views of life from the foot of the Blue Ridge, one realism of the external world was too beautiful to admit of his finding in the ideal anything that could more nearly meet his fancy-picture of loveliness than the scenes which opened daily before his eyes. Years ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... a suspicion of disingenuousness and affectation should force itself upon one's thoughts in connection with the French enthusiasm over Moussorgsky; but it cannot be avoided. So far as Moussorgsky reflects anything in his art, it is realism or naturalism, and the latter element is not dominant in French music now, and is not likely to be so long as the present tendency toward sublimated subjectivism prevails. Debussy acclaimed Moussorgsky enthusiastically a dozen years ago, but for all that Moussorgsky and Debussy are antipodes ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... blighted and apathized moods would permit a word to pass now and then. It is very fine for you to tax yourself with all those incompatibilities. I like that Thor should make comets and thunder, as well as Iduna apples, or Heimdal his rainbow bridge, and your wrath and satire has all too much realism in it, than that we can flatter ourselves by disposing of you as partial and heated. Nor is it your fault that you do a hero's work, nor do we love you less if we cannot help you in it. Pity me, O strong man! ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... which recalls him to himself, the fine touch by which this kiss, while arousing in him the stormiest feelings, causes a sharp pain, as of Amfortas's own wound, piercing his very heart—all this is realistic, if you will, but it is realism raised ...
— Parsifal - Story and Analysis of Wagner's Great Opera • H. R. Haweis
... the aesthetic subtilty of the Greek, the legal breadth and sensual recklessness of the Roman, the martial frenzy of the Goth, the chivalric and dark pride of the Spaniard, the treacherous blood of the Italian, the mercurial vanity of the Frenchman, the blunt realism ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... I think of her (though it makes me feel old when I so think) as Lucy Austin. She was a brilliant girl, reported to keep a rifle and a skull in her bedroom. She once startled the sense of propriety of her elders by performing in our house a charade, in which she represented a dying woman with a 'realism'—to use the modern phrase—worthy of Madame Sarah Bernhardt. Other visitors were occasionally attracted. My father knew John Mill, though never, I fancy, at all intimately. He knew politicians such as Charles Greville, the ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... than the root, old Paul Arenski, K.C., idealist and orator—is uncannily good. There's wit and humour and diversity of gifts. What suggested the "first book" idea was an uncertainty of method, a hesitation between the new realism and the older romanticism. In both moods the author is successful, but the joints show something clumsily. This, however, is technical merely. I commend the book to all who are interested, approvingly or critically, in the Jew. ...
— Punch, 1917.07.04, Vol. 153, Issue No. 1 • Various
... methods of treating Natural foliage. These may be arranged in a Chart, according to their relation to the two poles of Art and Science; from Realism (which is all Art and no Science) to the "Botanical Analysis" method (in which is a little Science but ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 829, November 21, 1891 • Various
... both popular authors in this department. The leading poets are the song-writer Beranger, Lamartine, Victor Hugo, and Alfred de Musset. With the close of the first half-century romanticism began to give way before realism, from which, however, there was a reaction before the century closed. Among the greater poets are Sully-Prudhomme and Coppee; among the novelists, Daudet, Zola, Maupassant, and Bourget. In history ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... began to live the crime with fearful realism—the journey past the hotel to make sure the victims had gone to their home; the visit to Aunt Cindy's cabin to find her there; lying in the field waiting for the last light of the village to go out; gloating with vulgar exultation over their plot, and planning other ...
— The Clansman - An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan • Thomas Dixon
... play, "Gammer Gurton's Needle" (cir. 1562), is a domestic comedy, a true bit of English realism, representing the life ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... parade-ground on which he had been reviewing his troops, he was struck down by paralysis, and, after lingering in a hopeless condition for a day or two, died a baffled and disappointed man. The irony of the situation was reflected with sombre and dramatic realism in a political cartoon which appeared in 'Punch.' It represented a skeleton in armour, laying an icy hand, amid the falling snow, on the prostrate Czar's heart. The picture—one of the most powerful that has ever appeared, even in this remarkable mirror of the times—was entitled, ...
— Lord John Russell • Stuart J. Reid
... away two years before. Cowper was forty years older than Wordsworth, but Cowper's most delightful work was not produced until 1783. Crabbe, who anticipated Wordsworth's choice of themes from rural life, while treating them with a sterner realism, was virtually his contemporary, having been born in 1754, and dying in 1832. The two great names of his own date were Scott and Coleridge, the first born in 1771, and the second a year afterwards. Then a generation later came another new and illustrious group. Byron was born ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... in the senatorial benches between two consulars, who trembled lest he should take one of them for a ram and apply the lash. The spectators were divided between wonder and amusement; and some there were who suspected that his ultra-realism had culminated in reality. However, it seems that when he came to his senses again he bitterly repented of this exploit, and was quite ill from grief, regarding his conduct as that of a veritable madman, as is clear from his own words. For when his partisans begged him to repeat the ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... said, that the great additions which have been made by realism to the territory of literature consist largely in swampy, malarious, ill-smelling patches of soil which had previously been left to reptiles and vermin. It is perfectly easy to be original by violating the laws of decency and the canons of good taste. The general consent ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... later text in the field. There is a general agreement in these three texts as to the content of such a course; viz., a general survey of education in the successive periods of history, including primitive, oriental, Greek, Roman, Early Christian and medieval, renaissance, reformation, realism, Locke and the disciplinary tendency, Rousseau, the psychologists, and the scientific, sociological, and eclectic tendencies. All are written from the standpoint of the conflict between the interests ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... dress for the part by turning his dress-coat inside out, and putting on a turban and a Liberty sash, by way of indicating the eccentricity of genius; the Ladies adorn themselves with a similar regard to realism, and even ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., January 3, 1891. • Various
... the Limelight presents candidly a typical actress of the Musical Comedy Stage, treating of her career and her love affairs with a realism that is convincing, but free of offence. The heroine allures and for a long time retains the devotion and affection of a typical solitary Londoner, who is not less devoted to the bon motif; but the inevitable break occurs. There is plenty of humour and of first-hand knowledge in this study ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... problem outside the subject of their art, and the art has suffered in consequence; for only disinterested art has the power to move us. In some cases they have failed because the authors have held theories which I believe to be fatal to literature. The narrow view of what is called Realism has been an adjunct to intellectual faddism and propagandism, and has served to sterilise literature. The great Realists have never been mere Realists; they have never thought that to produce art it is sufficient merely to reproduce ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... could not be technically proved that he had assailed the gods, for he was exact in his legal worship; but really and virtually there was some foundation for the accusation, since Socrates was a religious innovator if ever there was one. His lofty realism was subversive of popular superstitions, when logically carried out. As to the second charge, of corrupting youth, this was utterly groundless; for he had uniformly enjoined courage, and temperance, and obedience to the ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... TURGIDOFF (the brilliant young Slav whose canvas has recently been acquired by the Royal Geological Museum) all true artists have striven to adumbrate the eternal conflict between the morbid pathology of Realism and the poignant simplicity of Nihilism. In other and shorter words, chaos must ever be on the side of the angels. But, until the advent of the new Truth, the whole mission of art had trickled into a very delta of arid sentiment. The critic could walk all the galleries of Europe and find ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 11, 1914 • Various
... often been told by famous women of the past that the beautiful Mrs. Russell, then of Wallack's Theatre, was the originator in this country of richly elegant realism in stage costuming. When it was known that the mere linings of her gowns cost more than the outside of other dresses; that all her velvet was silk velvet; all her lace to the last inch was real lace; that no wired nor spliced feathers curled about her splendid leghorns, ...
— Stage Confidences • Clara Morris
... the most famous of the Dutch painters of the seventeenth century, notable for the strong realism of his work. ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... in George Crabbe, who turned to paint the life of the poor with patient realism; in Burns, who poured out in his songs the passion of love, the passion of sorrow, the passion of conviviality; in Blake, who tried to reach across the horizon of visible fact to mystical heavens of more enduring reality. Following close ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... which is sometimes full of the innocent realism of childhood, she is always pathetically eager to say the right thing and ...
— The Aran Islands • John M. Synge
... stopped his horse, and cut him down from the stirrups, and carried him into the shade of a hop-bush off the track, and when Stingaree dared to open his eyes, he was nearer closing them perforce, and the scene swam before him with superfluous realism. ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... father's example and instruction, and at the age of 15 was taught by philosophers of the Stoic, Platonist, Peripatetic, and Epicurean schools. He became initiated, writes Dr. Moore, into "the idealism of Plato, the realism of Aristotle, the scepticism of the Epicureans, and the materialism of the Stoics." At the age of 17 he was destined for the profession of medicine by his father in consequence of a dream. He studied under ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... high-strung, neuropathic women of the upper class, who neither understand themselves nor are wholly comprehensible to others. In 'Monsieur de Camors', crowned by the Academy, he has yielded to the demands of a stricter realism. Especially after the fall of the Empire had removed a powerful motive for gilding the vices of aristocratic society, he painted its hard and selfish qualities as none of his contemporaries could have done. Octave Feuillet was elected to the ...
— Monsieur de Camors, Complete • Octave Feuillet
... if it's realism they want I'm still waiting to see something more realistic than Pew or Long John Silver. Realism may depend as truly on a blind man's tap with his stick upon the ground as on any number ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... skin; and the top of the cane was carved in conformity, to represent the head of what I took to be a puff-adder, fragments of stone, or beads, being inserted to represent the eyes, and the whole thing being finished with an artistic realism almost startling. ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... environment of a cultured, prosperous, Quaker family, of Moorestown, New Jersey, for the rigors of a ceaseless drudgery and frequent imprisonment. A flaming idealist, conducting the fight with the sternest kind of realism, a mind attracted by facts, not fancies, she has led fearlessly and ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens
... enthusiasm surged and chafed and broke over this man's stern, flinty realism, like the warm, blue waters of the Gulf Stream that throw their silvery spray and foam against the glittering walls of sapphire icebergs sailing slowly southward. Her glowing imagery fell upon the bristling points of his close phalanx of arguments, as gorgeous tropical garlands ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... H. H. Murray, in both which appears John Norton, the trapper, a character that promises to become as much of a favorite as is the hero of the Leather Stocking novels. These stories have a bracing outdoor freshness and a delightfully crisp realism: are vigorous in tone, and strong and picturesque in the relation. Taken altogether, they may be pronounced in the most artistic of Mr. Murray's excursions into the realms of fiction, and fascinating ...
— The Busted Ex-Texan and Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... golden images from the temples. Pursued with relentless vigor at last their escape is effected in an astonishing manner. The story is so full of exciting incidents that the reader is quite carried away with the novelty and realism of ...
— Robert Coverdale's Struggle - Or, On The Wave Of Success • Horatio, Jr. Alger
... and knowledge of human nature make him immortal in spite of many defects. It forgets that Dickens' humor, joy of living and keen desire to help his fellow man will bring him thousands of readers after all the apostles of realism are buried ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... manner. Scarcely at his very best, scarcely in the very greatest monologues of the central series of Men and Women, or in these only, has Browning written a finer or a more characteristic poem. As a study in human nature it has all the concentrated truth, all the biting and imaginative realism, of a scene from Balzac's Comedie Humaine: it is as much a fact and a creation. It is, moreover, as Ruskin has told us, typical not only of a single individual but of a whole epoch; while, as a piece of metrical ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... and Scott is a very interesting witness on account of the principles and presuppositions employed by him. In the last hundred years or so the problems of realism and naturalism have been canvassed almost too thoroughly between disputants who seem not always to know when they are wandering from the point or wearying their audience with verbiage and platitudes. But out of all the controversy there has emerged at least ...
— Sir Walter Scott - A Lecture at the Sorbonne • William Paton Ker
... expression. He does not care whether the things he writes about are true, whether his characters are real. What he aims to give is a true impression. And to convey this impression he does not scorn to use mysticism, symbolism, or even plain realism. His favorite characters are degenerates, psychopaths, abnormal eccentrics, or just creatures of fancy corresponding to no reality. Frequently, however, the characters, whether real or unreal, are as such of merely secondary ...
— Savva and The Life of Man • Leonid Andreyev
... the curious to study the beautiful interior of the church of St. Anatole dominating the town, also the equestrian statue of St. Maurice in the church of that name. The effect of this bit of supreme realism is almost ludicrous. The good old saint looks like some worthy countryman trotting off to market, and not at all like a ...
— Holidays in Eastern France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... be afraid that we should drift away into a discussion of realism in Art. So, to recall the conversation to the point at issue, I turned to Bartlett, ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson
... cannot know. But it is just because they are strange to our experience that they are dear to our imagination. The justification of romance is its unfamiliarity—"strangeness added to beauty"—"the pleasure of surprise" as distinguished from "the pleasure of recognition." Again and again realism returns to the charge and demands of art that it give us the present and the actual; and again and again the imagination eludes the demand and makes an ideal world for itself in the ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... perhaps the most characteristic and certainly the most famous, he revealed an unrivalled insight into the soul of the Southern German country folk, and especially of the peasants of the Black Forest and the Bavarian Alps. His descriptions are remarkable for their fresh realism, graceful style and humour. In addition to these qualities, his last books are marked by great subtlety of psychological analysis. "On the Height" was first published at Stuttgart in 1861, and has been translated ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... servile copyists of the greater masters, Or of th' archangels, Raphael and Michael; But such as paint our cheap and daily marvels. Sometimes I fear lest they degrade our art To a nice craft for plodding artisans— Mere realism, which they mistake for truth. My soul rejects such limits. The true artist Gives Nature's best effects with far less means. Plain black and white suffice him to express A finer grace, a stronger energy Than she attains with all the aid of color. I argue thus and work ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... wit and insight and subtlety of our modern novelists to the old uncomplicated tales of faerie or romance, and find them after all more moving, more tender, even more real, than all the laboured realism of these photographic days. And here before us is of all pretty love-stories perhaps the prettiest. Idyllic as Daphnis and Chloe, romantic as Romeo and Juliet, tender as Undine, remote as Cupid and Psyche, yet with perpetual touches of actual life, and words that raise pictures; and lightened ...
— Aucassin and Nicolette - translated from the Old French • Anonymous
... of the stream,—so that, if a cavalcade of the knights and ladies of romance should issue from the old walls, they could never tread on earthly ground, any more than we, approaching from the side of modern realism, can overleap the gulf between our domain and theirs. Yet, if we seek to disenchant ourselves, it may readily be done. Crossing the bridge on which we stand, and passing a little farther on, we come to the entrance of ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... now in vogue. But all we have to do, I believe, is to wait. Nominalism, and that "Sensationalism" which has sprung from Nominalism, are running fast to seed; Comtism seems to me its supreme effort: after which the whirligig of Time may bring round its revenges: and Realism, and we who hold the Realist creeds, may have our turn. Only wait. When a grave, able, and authoritative philosopher explains a mother's love of her newborn babe, as Professor Bain has done, in a really ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... foliated ornament; but the objects which are exhibited with most pride and with evident expectation of the stupefaction of the tourist are a ewer and dish of silver-gilt, which are covered with representations of sea creatures and weeds, worked with the most extraordinary realism and fineness, and proving very satisfactorily that the copying of nature and the production of a work of art are not necessarily connected. They are kept in leather cases, and the tourist generally makes the expected ...
— The Shores of the Adriatic - The Austrian Side, The Kuestenlande, Istria, and Dalmatia • F. Hamilton Jackson
... swiftly as it has done in the drama for which Greece supplied the stage to French statesmen during the last few years; for it is not often that a Government in the pursuit of practical interests overlooks so completely moral principles, flouts so openly national sentiments, and, while priding itself on realism, shuts its ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... may be content to spend their lives for things only half believed in, and for causes that are contrived. But that is not our quality. We want reality because we have faith, we seek the beginning of realism in social and political life, we seek it and we are resolved to ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... an unsparing realism which, in a few instances, is carried beyond the limits of good taste. Such is the case with El Piojoso of the Louvre, which represents a little beggar removing vermin from his body, and which Mr. Ruskin has severely denounced. Another picture in Munich, ...
— Child-life in Art • Estelle M. Hurll
... still, small voice of realism, intense longing is always followed by disappointment. Nothing should have happened that summer, and Providence should not have come disguised as the postman. It was a sultry day in early September-which is to say that it was comparatively ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... had told the story, Denzil's body seemed to contract; his face took on an insane expression. It was ghastly pale, but his eyes ware aflame. His arms stretched out with grim realism as he told of the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... traditions and legend, even thus to-day may the name of Realist be so fixed in Pseudopolis, by your deeds to-day, that no one shall ever dare again even to look askance at a Philistine. Open the door for Realism, ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... the hollow like a pipe. The water was full of iron pyrites, and had first lined the tube with iron crystals and then filled up the whole hollow with a frosted network of the same. There is a striking contrast between the presence and realism of these once living things still preserving the outer forms of life and the vast and inconceivable distances of ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish
... breast and cry, "Me miserable! Whither shall I flee?" This has been, through all time, the experience of the men that have sought sanctity in seclusion. The saints, the hermits in their caves, the monks in their cells, could never escape the obsessions of memory which with horrible realism and scorching vividness revived past ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... believe in the natural immortality of man, he held with an almost naive realism that man would be raised from the dead by a direct exertion of the power of God, and thenceforward be immortal. And it may be as well for those who may be shocked by this doctrine to know that views, substantially identical with Priestley's, ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... a striking book—clever, unpleasant, realistic.... No one who wishes to examine the subject of realism in fiction, with regard to English novels, can afford to ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... perfectly consistent naturalness Mrs. Sangster has produced two pieces of realism of a most healthy sort, demonstrating conclusively that novels may be at once clean and wholesome yet most thoroughly alive and natural. As with all her work, Mrs. Sangster exhibits her splendid skill and excellent taste, and succeeds in winning and holding her readers in these two books which ...
— St. Cuthbert's • Robert E. Knowles
... story of Foma Gordyeeff is told; his life is finished, as lives are being finished each day around us. Besides, it is the way of life, and the art of Gorky is the art of realism. But it is a less tedious realism than that of Tolstoy or Turgenev. It lives and breathes from page to page with a swing and dash and go that they rarely attain. Their mantle has fallen on his young shoulders, and he ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... All the significance latent in the type of character and environment is somehow heightened and symbolized. All this is put in his own highly individual diction. Yet it can hardly be said that he violates poetic realism in the deeper sense, for he never puts a halo around a situation, never goes counter to its potentialities. Instead he strikes fire from it. He shows what is actually in the situation, but at white heat and laid bare to ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... thing in a man's portrait is to catch the likeness—we all know that; but with a woman's it's different—a woman's picture has got to be pleasing. Who wants it about if it isn't? Those big chaps who blow about what they call realism—how do THEIR portraits look in a drawing-room? Do you suppose they ever ask themselves that? THEY don't care—they're not going to live with the things! And what do they know of drawing-rooms, anyhow? Lots of them haven't even got a dress-suit. There's ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... characterization. Through the representative nicety of his themes, through his inordinate capacity for thematic variation and transformation, his playful and witty and colorful instrumentation, Strauss was able to impart to his music a concreteness and descriptiveness and realism hitherto unknown to symphonic art, to characterize briefly, sparingly, justly, a personage, a situation, an event. He could be pathetic, ironic, playful, mordant, musing, at will. He was sure in his tone, was low-German in "Till Eulenspiegel," ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... shows the globe of Earth revolving in the Infinite. Streams of water by day, clouds of luminous steam by night, give it the effect of swimming out of chaos. The powerful panels of Earth are boldly modeled in pierced relief, giving statuesque realism as well as the picturesqueness demanded of a panel. They follow in a natural sequence as regards their deep and arresting symbolism. The order is, first, the Southern, then the Western, Northern and Eastern panels as the fountain lies. The panel here illustrated is third in the sequence. In the ...
— The Sculpture and Mural Decorations of the Exposition • Stella G. S. Perry
... carries him beyond the melodramatic to the Realistic; and Volume IV., in which his dawning perception of that higher service resulting from the truthful Relationship of the Parts leads him beyond realism ...
— The Evolution of Expression Vol. I • Charles Wesley Emerson
... other object than to brush aside the utilitarian symbols, the conventional and socially accepted generalities, in short, everything that veils reality from us, in order to bring us face to face with reality itself. It is from a misunderstanding on this point that the dispute between realism and idealism in art has arisen. Art is certainly only a more direct vision of reality. But this purity of perception implies a break with utilitarian convention, an innate and specially localised disinterestedness ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... authority. They knew that he wanted to be irritated, and they gave him no chance to be irritated. Their insight into his psychology was uncanny. They knew that he was beaten on the main point, and with their detestable feminine realism they exquisitely yielded on all the minor points. Eve, fresh as a rose, bent over him and bedewed him, and said that she was going out and that ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... away by enrapt enthusiasm, would unwittingly sustain his part even to the lamentable though natural DNOUEMENT. Baal Burra was, of' course, the engaging and guileless victim, while Sultan, with triumphant realism, rehearsed a ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... a mere writer of magazine fiction. He had sought to equip himself with the tools of artistry. On the other hand, he had not sacrificed strength. His conscious aim had been to increase his strength by avoiding excess of strength. Nor had he departed from his love of reality. His work was realism, though he had endeavored to fuse with it the fancies and beauties of imagination. What he sought was an impassioned realism, shot through with human aspiration and faith. What he wanted was life as it was, with all its spirit-groping and soul-reaching ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... ideals, flashes of dubious enlightenment. The blue canvas that bulked so largely in his first impression of the city ways appeared again and again as the costume of the common people. He had no doubt the story was contemporary, and its intense realism was undeniable. And the end had been a tragedy that oppressed him. He sat ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... S. Vanderpoel wore made it an agreeable thing to talk—to go on. He evidently cared to hear. So Selden did his best, and enjoyed himself in doing it. His style made for realism and brought things clearly before one. The big-built man in the rough and shabby shooting clothes, his way when he dropped into the grass to sit beside the stranger and talk, certain meanings in ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... branches of which almost completely shade it. The cathedral houses, among other disturbing, disgusting, and positively indecent representations of the Crucifixion and various martyrdoms done in the Aztec style of bloody realism, a life-size Cristo with masses of long real hair and a pair of knee-length knit drawers for decency's sake. One might fancy the place weighed down by a Puritan censorship. The local museum contains among other rubbish of the past the keyhole through which Josefa whispered ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... the distinguishing excellence of Hawthorne's imaginative writings in the union of profound, keen, psychological development of characters and problems with the most lucid objectivity and a joyous modern realism. Occasionally there appears a light and delicate humor, sometimes hidden in a mere adjective, or little phrase which lights up the gloomiest situation with a gentle ray of hope. Far from unimportant do I rate the charm of his ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... that need the heat of the furnace so that they may be moulded into shape. Genius is that furnace, and in its heat and glow and flame these pieces, these fragments, become molten and are cast into noble and heroic forms. Realism ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... Rome, with a reality livelier than any description. The homely sentiments for which he has found place in his learned paintings are hardly more lifelike than the great public incidents of the show, there depicted. And then, with all that vivid realism, how refined, how dignified, how select in type, is this reflection of the old Roman world!—now especially, in its time-mellowed red and gold, for the modern visitor to ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater
... leads), and skirting the Montburon Garden, I reached the Place du Bastion. This is a semicircle now used as the town marketplace. In the midst stands the statue of Bichat by David d'Angers. Bichat, in a frockcoat—why that exaggeration of realism?—stands with his hand upon the heart of a child about nine or ten years old, perfectly nude—why that excess of ideality? Extended at Bichat's feet lies a dead body. It is Bichat's book "Of Life and of Death" translated into bronze. I was studying ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... such spectacles—unknown to the earlier ages which they called barbarous—was due to the cold-blooded selfishness, the hideous realism of a refined, delicate, aesthetic age. To please these "lisping hawthorn buds," these debauched and sanguinary dandies, art, forsooth, must know nothing of morality; must accept and rejoice in a "healthy animalism"; must estimate ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... of the century did not allow for the inadequacies of the physician, and imparted a grim note of realism to the satire of the dramatist. Infant mortality was high and the life expectancy low. Hardly a household escaped the tragedy of death of the young and the robust; historians have sensed the influence omnipresent death had upon ...
— Medicine in Virginia, 1607-1699 • Thomas P. Hughes
... Same, in the secondary sense, admits, according to popular usage, of degrees: we speak of two things being nearly the same, but not entirely: personal identity does not admit of degrees. Nothing, perhaps, has contributed more to the error of Realism than inattention to this ambiguity. When several persons are said to have one and the same opinion, thought, or idea, many men, overlooking the true simple statement of the case, which is, that they are all thinking alike, look for something more abstruse and mystical, and imagine there ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... that year there appeared in London a novel that created a sensation, the like of which had not been known since the publication of 'Waverley.' Its stern and paradoxical disregard for the conventional, its masculine energy, and its intense realism, startled the public, and proclaimed to all in accents unmistakable that a new, strange, and splendid power had come into literature, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... of literature, because it is a hierarchy of beauties more and less essential, exists in all varieties and in all shades. If the old comparison and contrast of idealism and realism is referred to here, it is because that ancient controversy seems not even yet entirely outworn. If realism means close observation of facts and neglect of ideas, and idealism, neglect of prosaic facts and ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... to drift no longer. We are going to be drawn into the maelstrom of life. What it may mean for you and for me and for the boy, I do not know. It will change us—it must change our work. I shall paint no more guesses at realism—after someone else; and you will write no more of princesses, or pull the strings of tinsel-decked puppets, so that they may dance their way through the pages of your gaily-dressed novels. And an end has come to these things, Arnold. No, I am not raving, ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Things become known which were formerly unknown and, though this brings us no nearer to ultimate universal truth, yet it shows us that many of our guesses were wrong. Everything that catches on to realism and naturalism as much as Christianity does must be affected by any profound modification in our ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... later joined the pessimistic camp. His works, at least, indicate other qualities than those which gained for him the favor of the reading public. He becomes a more ingenious romancer, a more delicate psychologist. If some of his sketches are realistic, we must consider that realism is not intended 'pour ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... audience. The dramatic manner in which, after a series of humorous complications, the Mystery was run to earth and unmasked by "Deadlock Jones, the King of Detectives," was portrayed by David with "startling realism" and ...
— Grace Harlowe's Second Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... betrays, to those who look carefully at her, her innocence and simplicity, by the trouble in her face and eyes, and the wrong which is done to her in making her swear and in proclaiming her publicly as an adulteress. Giotto has also expressed with great realism a man afflicted with sores, as all the women who are about him, disgusted by the stench, turn away with various contortions in the most graceful manner imaginable. Then again the foreshortening in a picture containing a number of lame beggars is highly praiseworthy, and should be much ...
— The Lives of the Painters, Sculptors & Architects, Volume 1 (of 8) • Giorgio Vasari
... not often that young men err on the side of originality and singularity," she said; "I have always considered realism the sin of the age. I am quite curious to ...
— The Coquette's Victim • Charlotte M. Braeme
... to receive in this age of realism a novel that is frankly romantic. Miss KAYE-SMITH in Three against the World (CHAPMAN AND HALL) colours up life with lavish brush. We have a returned convict who fiddles in the rain for the benefit of dancing village ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 3, 1914 • Various
... out survivors of the contest. The first is the noble cast of the column of Trajan, vast in dimensions, crowded with history in its most striking and enduring form; a long array of figures representing in unquestioned realism the military aspect of a Roman army. The second case of survival is thus described in the catalogue: "An altar or shrine of a female saint, recently acquired from Padua, is also ascribed to the same sculptor [Donatello]. This very valuable work of art had for many years been used as a drinking-trough ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... (considered apart from a person—as his thought) is anything: the realist is right in so far as he affirms that law, apart from {64} any particular manifestation, is an eternal reality. The reconciliation of nominalism and realism is found in God. Applying this to the case in hand—you admit that the Ten Commandments are the ground of morality; therefore, I say, they must be an expression of a thought of God, the Author of morality. But you are puzzled to find that the most trivial sanitary arrangements are ...
— Letters to His Friends • Forbes Robinson
... Nobody ever did believe us, though some of us wrote the truth from first to last as far as the facts of war go apart from deeper psychology, and a naked realism of horrors and losses, and criticism of facts, which did not come within ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... romance are naturally justified in describing. Can they go beyond it with safety, with propriety? That depends very much upon whether they go up or down. By going up I mean keeping within the region of moral idealism. By going down I mean descending to the level of merely animal realism. In this realism there is nothing deserving the highest effort of ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... one—as in Fontane who (like so many writers, in Germany especially) did not belong to his own generation nor even to the immediately succeeding one, but to the next after that! With these are associated preferences for verse or prose; for idealism or realism and naturalism; a falling away from philosophy or an inclination to introduce it into poetry; and numerous other disguises for those antagonistic principles, to which Kuno Francke in a general survey of our literature has sought to trace ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... sense in which the order in man's breast is more real than he is, in whom it is manifest, for the form of ideas, the mould of law, are permanent, but their expression in us transitory. It is this higher realism, as it was anciently called, that the mind strives for in idealism,—this organic form of life, the object of all rational knowledge. Types, under their concrete disguise, are thus only a part of the general notions of the mind ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... and moon and all the stars to entertain his darling for an hour.) Romantic hyperbole is the realism of love. The lover is blind as to the beloved's faults, and color-blind as to her merits, seeing them differently from normal persons and all in a rosy hue. She really seems to him superior to every one in the world, and he would be ready any moment to join the ranks of the mediaeval knights ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... singular vitality and realism, and also a distinct interest for those who are "in the know," for Boz himself at the time was a dramatic and interesting figure, and this story of his struggle out of a state of squalid misery ...
— Pickwickian Studies • Percy Fitzgerald
... Minister to Chile. The set is engraved with emblems of the United States, Chile, the U.S. Army, and the U.S. Navy. The monograms on the individual pieces are in gold of four colors. More than any other silver service in the Museum this one may be said to epitomize the elaborate realism so popular during the height of ...
— Presentation Pieces in the Museum of History and Technology • Margaret Brown Klapthor
... not at all astonishing that in these conditions we find no national epic and no national drama, but a gradual growth of a poetry saturated with physical realism and the final appearance of a dramatic form equipped with the most potent charms of sensuous art. It was in such a period that a special kind of public was developed. The "Cortegiano" of Castiglione, Bembo's "Asolani," the "Camaldolese Discourses" of Landino could have been addressed ...
— Some Forerunners of Italian Opera • William James Henderson
... prefer a triumph over difficulties to a triumph. A similar satisfaction, not in success but in the overcoming of difficulties, leads him to say of the modern play, The Sisters, that it is the only modern English play 'in which realism in the reproduction of natural dialogue and accuracy in the representation of natural intercourse between men and women of gentle birth and breeding have been found or made compatible with expression in genuine if simple blank verse.' This may ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... chippendale chair, the sombre Spanish leather screen, which formed the background, and the pot of copper-coloured chrysanthemums, counterparts of the little cluster which Eve wore in the bosom of her gown, on a many-cornered Turkish table at the side: it had all the gay realism of modern Paris without losing the poetry of the old school, or attaining the hardness ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... Walter wishes you to tell Allen that the greatest disappointment of all is that there is no oak forest anywhere near Plessis from whose boughs the victims of Louis were wont to hang "like so many acorns," one of Scott's bits of realism that ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton
... family could live in such cramped, airless quarters. Never had she thought that filth, such as she saw in the room, was possible. It all seemed, somehow, an unbelievably bad dream—a dream in which she was appearing, with startling realism. Her comfortable picture of a home was vanishing—vanishing as suddenly and completely as a soap bubble vanishes, if pricked by ...
— The Island of Faith • Margaret E. Sangster
... something enormous. Of operas and dramatic works there are twelve, several of which, such as "The Tower of Babel," "Paradise Lost" and "Moses," are biblical operas, a type of dramatico mystical work created by Rubinstein. It contains the gravity and depth of oratorio combined with the intense realism of the stage. There are six symphonies, of which the famous and several times enlarged "Ocean" symphony is perhaps best known, a "Heroic Fantasia" for orchestra, three character pieces for orchestra, ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... photography be considered as irrefutable evidence? The realism may convince all, will convince all, except the expert and the initiated after careful study. A shrewd judge will insist that in every case the negative be submitted and examined for possible alterations by a ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... all German novels of importance are reviewed in our papers. So English people who read German know what a strong reaction there is against the moonshine of fifty years ago. The novels most in vogue exhibit the same coarse, but often thoughtful and impressive, realism that prevails on the stage and in the conversation and conduct of some sets of people in the big cities. The Tagebuch einer Verlorenen has sold 75,000 copies, and it is the story of a German Kamelliendame compared with whom Dumas' lady is moonshine. It is a haunting picture of ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... miscellany known as the Satyricon, ascribed by tradition to that Petronius who, at the court of Nero, acted as arbiter of elegance and dictator of fashion. The flashing, wit, the masterly touches which bring out the characters with all the detail of a fine old copper etching; the marvelous use of realism by this, its first prophet; the sure knowledge of the perspective and background best adapted to each episode; the racy style, so smooth, so elegant, so simple when the educated are speaking, beguile the reader and blind him, ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... [16] This is Realism. Cf. "Sed si rerum ueritatem atque integritatem perpendas, non est dubium quin uerae sint. Nam cum res omnes quae uerae sunt sine his quinque (i.e. genus species differentia propria accidentia) esse non possint, has ipsas quinque res uere intellectas esse non dubites." Isag., Porph. ed, ...
— The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy • Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius
... be a pretty fairy-tale, but in the realism of practical life it assumes the guise of a tragedy that makes the looker-on shudder with disgustful pity. My heart aches when I think of the women who began the work of reformation with hope and laid it down ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... which to admire the more, the appetizing realism in William Worm's account of his infirmity, or the primitive state of his theological views which allowed him to look for special divine favor by virtue of the ecclesiastical conspicuousness ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... the most important literary qualities also are Idealism, Romance, and Realism. Realism, in the broad sense, means simply the presentation of the actual, depicting life as one sees it, objectively, without such selection as aims deliberately to emphasize some particular aspects, such as the pleasant or attractive ones. (Of course all ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... life, with its ceremonials, scandals, intrigues, and follies; but no such pictures of the lives of the people, their social conditions, and the methods of labor and commerce which obtained. He will be unable to visualize the life of the period. In other words, the histories lack realism; they are unreal, and, therefore, deceptive. The new spirit, in the development of which the materialist conception of Marx and Engels has been an important creative influence, is concerned less with the chronicle of notable ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... think basely; there was no help for it. Those whom she would make her friends would know very well for what purpose she wanted money, power, and the support of such a man, and such a marriage. Her modern realism played with the thought quite freely; her maidenliness, proud and pure as it was, being nowise ashamed. Oh! for something to carry her deep into life; into the heart of its widest and most ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... that there is more fact and realism in the wildest and most elegant old fictions about disinherited dukes and long-lost daughters than there is in this Eugenist attempt to make the poor all of a piece—a sort of black fungoid growth that is ceaselessly ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... enthusiasts: this is the look of Luther, even of the hard-headed Calvin, as seen from the Roman-Catholic side. Hence, also, every epoch of revolution in Art seems to the preceding like an irruption of frivolity and profanity. Christian Art would have seemed so to the ancients; the Realism of the fourteenth century must have seemed so to the Giotteschi and the Renaissance, to both. The term Pre-Raphaelitism, though it seems an odd collocation to bring together such men as Fra Angelico, Filippo Lippi, and Luca Signorelli, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... seems, on the whole, to be the best basis for the teaching now of international morality. The teaching of pacifism, enlarging upon the biological waste of war, trying to present the realism of war in its worst light in order to overcome the warlike spirit and to assist the doctrines of internationalism to take effect upon the mind seems to be the wrong way of teaching peace. We seem to be obligated to teach war ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... Barbusse is one of the most distinguished contemporary French writers of short stories, he has found in the novel form the most fitting literary medium for the expression of his philosophy, and it is to realism rather than romanticism that he turns for the exposition of his special imaginative point of view. And yet this statement seems to need some qualification. In his introduction to "Pointed Roofs," by Dorothy Richardson, Mr. J.D. Beresford points ...
— The Inferno • Henri Barbusse
... for the picture itself was just. There was nothing ideal in the work. It was simply the representation of a naked woman doing what no woman could like to be seen doing. And a picture of a mere naked woman, however well executed, is never art if art means idealism. The realism of the thing was its offensiveness. Ideal nakedness may be divine,—the most godly of all human dreams of the superhuman. But a naked person is not divine at all. Ideal nudity needs no girdle, because the charm is of lines too beautiful to be ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... that arrive to fill a long vacant corner. So far as I know, with the exception perhaps of STEVENSON's study, there has been no means by which the casual reader, as apart from the student, could correct his probably very vague ideas about the Father of Realism. Mr. H. DE VERE STACPOOLE, approaching the subject not for the first time, here essays a brief life and appreciation of the poet, told in picturesque but simple style. Sometimes indeed the simplicity ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, January 3, 1917 • Various
... Broad in treatment, comprehensive in subject, liberal in detail and slate-pencil—it represented Uncle Ben lying on the floor with a book in his hand, tyrannized over by Rupert Filgee and regarded in a striking profile of two features by Cressy McKinstry. The daring realism of introducing the names of each character on their legs—perhaps ideally enlarged for that purpose—left no doubt of their identity. Equally daring but no less effective was the rendering of a limited but dramatic ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... observer (poor soul, with his documents!) is all abroad. For to look at the man is but to court deception. We shall see the trunk from which he draws his nourishment; but he himself is above and abroad in the green dome of foliage, hummed through by winds and nested in by nightingales. And the true realism were that of the poets, to climb up after him like a squirrel, and catch some glimpse of the heaven for which he lives. And the true realism, always and everywhere, is that of the poets: to find out where joy resides, and give it a ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... you do as I did, you will suddenly turn and go out into the fresh air—the fearful realism of the marble will for ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... shall often have to repeat, the remark, that the philosophers who overthrew Realism by no means got rid of the consequences of Realism, but retained long afterward, in their own philosophy, numerous propositions which could only have a rational meaning as part of a Realistic system. It had been handed down from Aristotle, and probably ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... a realism about his manner that was awfully impressive, and the detective involuntarily shuddered as he looked into those gleaming eyes, in which murder was clearly reflected. All doubts were removed from his mind—the murderer of Henry ...
— Bucholz and the Detectives • Allan Pinkerton
... left one streaked with a dash of gray— And yellow boots. Not that Jones Has anything in particular to do with the story; But a descriptive phrase Like the above shows that the writer is A Master of Realism. ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... and that is doubtless why the art of Echegaray held its own so long, for it was neither novel nor especially perfect. In spite of the solitary and unrewarded efforts of Enrique Gaspar, a Spanish John the Baptist of realism in the drama, the reaction was slow in coming, and the year 1892 may be said to mark its arrival. That was the date of Realidad, Prez Galds' first drama. Two years later Jacinto Benavente made his dbut with El nido ajeno. In 1897 the brothers ...
— Heath's Modern Language Series: Mariucha • Benito Perez Galdos
... ability, and not a little analytical insight, the progress of jealousy in the breast of a woman who is born with a very 'intense,' although not a very deep, nature.... There is in Mr Vert's work a certain tendency towards realism which has its due effect in making his characters real. They are no loosely-built fancies of the journalistic brain, but portraits—almost snapshot portraits—of men ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... before the morning, it was the sign—and the hour—for stories of many kinds—tales of weather and adventure, humorous lowland escapades and dismal mountain realities. Or stranger still, there would come the odd, half-believed legends of the glen, told shamefully yet with the realism of men for whom each word had a power and meaning far above fiction. Lewis listened entranced, marking his interest now by an exclamation, ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... by sunlight, moisture, seeds, fertilizer, and cultivation. [Footnote: Ferenczi, being a pathologist, does not describe this maturer period where experience is organized as equations, the phase of realism ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... editorial staffs to gray hairs; and saw picture after picture taken with their own camera and sent across many a continent in the form of undeveloped film, now to bring before their eyes once more the realism of the moment when they were taken. There were photographs of themselves collectively and individually in many a place now far distant; views of the machine at rest, and of parts of it among the clouds ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser
... which poetry, charm, tenderness and humor are combined into a clever and entertaining book. Her characters are delightful and she always displays a quaint humor of expression and a quiet feeling of pathos which give a touch of active realism to all her writings. In "A Spinner in the Sun" she tells an old-fashioned love story, of a veiled lady who lives in solitude and whose features her neighbors have never seen. There is a mystery at the heart of the book that throws over ...
— The Evidence in the Case • James M. Beck
... phrasing Burns is here at his best. His description of the horrible is worthy of Shakspeare; and it is questionable if even the imagination of that master ever conceived anything more awful than the scene and circumstance of the infernal orgies of those witches and warlocks. What Zolaesque realism there is! In the line, 'The grey hairs yet stack to the heft,' all the gruesomeness of murder is compressed into a distich. Yet the horrible details are controlled and unified in the powerful imagination of the poet. We believe Dr. Blacklock ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... and 1918 in the gradual compiling of a human document of immense historical value. Compared with it, the diaries of Defoe and Pepys would pale and be flavourless. But it must have been begun in June, 1914, and have been written with the casualness of that commonplace realism which is the most convincing realism of all. It is true that the expression of the uncomplex mind is infrequently articulate, but the record which would bring home the clearest truth would be the one unpremeditatedly depicting the effect produced upon the wholly unprepared and undramatic personality ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... art, again, makes a romance of all things. It reaches into the highest abstraction of the ideal; it does not refuse the most pedestrian realism. ROBINSON CRUSOE is as realistic as it is romantic; both qualities are pushed to an extreme, and neither suffers. Nor does romance depend upon the material importance of the incidents. To deal with strong and deadly elements, banditti, pirates, ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... given have been selected with the purpose of showing the sculpture of the Old Empire at its best. The all-important fact to notice is the realism of these portraits. We shall see that Greek sculpture throughout its great period tends toward the typical and the ideal in the human face and figure. Not so in Egypt. Here the task of the artist was to make a counterfeit presentment of his subject and he has achieved his task at times with marvelous ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... time the paths of these two young scholars diverged. Emerson became an idealist and an ethical reformer. Elizur Wright became a realist and a political reformer. Realism seems to belong ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... Esmond and explain Thackeray's realism. What is there remarkable in the style of this novel? Compare it with Ivanhoe as a historical novel. What is the general character of Thackeray's satire? What are the chief characteristics of his novels? Describe briefly the works which ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... natural color and humors of the landscape and the climate seemed designed to express to the traveler the memories of the ground. A visitor to the salient early in November, 1918, when a few German bodies still added a touch of realism and human horror, and the great struggle was not yet certainly ended, could feel there, as nowhere else, the present outrage of war, and at the same time the tragic and sentimental purification which to the future will in some ...
— The Economic Consequences of the Peace • John Maynard Keynes
... Intellectual, scientific, and commercial pursuits have thus largely absorbed those energies which in other ages found exercise in the creation of artistic forms and objects. The critical and sceptical spirit, the spirit of utilitarianism and realism, has checked the free and general development of the creative imagination, at least in the plastic arts. While in poetry and music there have been great and noble achievements, the plastic arts, including architecture, have only of late years attained a position at all ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... The photographic realism of the later newspaper correspondent had not come into play in these earlier years of the war, and, as a consequence, the thousands who poured down to the Army of the Potomac beheld the city with something of the incredulous scorn with which the effeminate Byzantines regarded the ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... the pathetic eagerness with which it clutches at every floating straw. The innumerable "isms" by which it seeks ever and anon to keep itself afloat are most of them but the sometimes unrecognisable wreckage of the old systems drifting about under very inappropriate names. Such terms as Realism and Idealism are freely used (generally prefixing the adjective "new") by writers in philosophic periodicals in a sense which might make Plato, Aquinas, or Kant turn ...
— Essays Towards a Theory of Knowledge • Alexander Philip
... Tump Pack detached himself from the group and gave a pantomime of thrusting. He was clearly reproducing the action which had won for him his military medal. Then suddenly he fell down in the dust and writhed. He was mimicking with a ghastly realism the death-throes of his four victims. His audience howled with mirth at this dumb show of the bayonet-fight and of killing four men. Tump himself got up out of the dust with tears of laughter in his eyes. Peter caught the end of his sentence, "Sho put it to 'em, ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... Only accidentally can it be described as his mission to preach 'the desolation of modern life,' or in the gracious phrase of De Goncourt, fouiller les entrailles de la vie. Of the confident, self-supporting realism of Esther Waters, for instance, how little is there in any of his work, even in that most gloomily photographic portion of it which we ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... if we were as clever as he is. As we are not nearly so clever, we are left with a chastened sense of our inferiority, which is doubtless good for us. And all this groping for the un-obvious is connected with an equally insistent demand for realism. The novel must not only be as real as life, but it must be more so. For life, as it appears in our ordinary consciousness, is full of illusions. When these are stripped off and the residuum is compressed into a book, we have that which is at once ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers |
