"Realism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the actual and abiding spirit of love," and by which he "awakens in every man the memories of that immortal instant when common and dead things had a meaning beyond the power of any dictionary to utter." Mr. Chesterton, it is true, speaks of this "astonishing realism" in relation to Browning's love-poetry, and Pippa Passes is not a love-poem; but the insight of the comment is no less admirable when we use it to enhance a passage such as this. Who has not caught the sunbeam asleep in the mere washhand basin as water was poured out for the mere daily ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... quick as a child's, made of the world around him an enchanted pleasance. The realism, as it is called, that deals only with the banalities and squalors of life, and weaves into the mesh of its story no character but would make you yawn if you passed ten minutes with him in a railway-carriage, might well ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Walter Raleigh
... tragedy were he to drop out of the category of poets that are read. A dainty little edition in eight volumes is among my most treasured possessions. I have read it not as we read some so-called literature, from a sense of duty, but with unqualified interest. We have had much pure realism in these latter days; why not let us return to the most realistic of the poets. He was beloved by all the greatest among his contemporaries. Scott and Wordsworth were devoted to his work, and so also was Jane Austen. At a later date ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... open lids she saw the sunlight filtering through the leafy canopy above her—she wondered at the realism of her dream; full consciousness returned and with it the conviction that she was in truth being held close by strong arms against a bosom that throbbed to the beating of ...
— The Monster Men • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... prudence and dexterity of management than I; he was also thinking of his periodical the Horen, about this time, and of course rather wished to attract than repel me. Accordingly he answered me like an accomplished Kantite; and as my stiff-necked Realism gave occasion to many contradictions, much battling took place between us, and at last a truce, in which neither party would consent to yield the victory, but each held himself invincible. Positions like the following grieved me to the very soul: How can there ever be an experiment, ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... is replaced by other qualities and other functions? Not but that these two methods may meet in the same work, not but that they may meet and strengthen each other, as we have before said when glancing at the interesting question, How much, or how little, of realism can poetry capture from the world of prose and weave into her magic woof, and how much of music can prose steal from poetry? But in order to do all that can be done in the way of enriching poetry with prose material without missing the convincement of poetic art, the poet must ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... on an erroneous inference which hegelian idealism makes from the form of the negative judgment. Every negation, it says, must be an intellectual act. Even the most naif realism will hardly pretend that the non-table as such exists in se after the same fashion as the table does. But table and non-table, since they are given to our thought together, must be consubstantial. Try to make the position or affirmation of the table as simple as you can, it is also ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... portrayal of action, Raphael showed himself capable of both. The Hellenic calm of Parnassus is not more impressive than the splendid charge of the avenging spirits upon Heliodorus; the visionary idealism of the angel-led Peter is matched by the vigorous realism of Peter called from his fishing to the apostleship; the brooding quiet of maternity expressed in the Madonna of the Chair has a perfect complement in the alert activity of the ...
— Raphael - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Painter With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... of Pumpkinville, where I lived in my youth, was one of the metaphysical divines of the old school, and could cavil upon the ninth part of a hair about entities and quiddities, nominalism and realism, free-will and necessity, with which sort of learning he used to stuff his sermons and astound his learned hearers, the bumpkins. They never doubted that it was all true, but were apt to say with the old woman in Moliere: "He speaks so well ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... necessary to acquire a strip of country running right back to the coast, if realism should be the aim of the directors, otherwise it would be impossible, to show an A.M.L.O. in action, or some interesting types of Headquarters, or laundry Colonels ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 8, 1919 • Various
... 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:[22] 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, ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Even in its later phases, after it had been partially Hellenised, Jewish idealism tended to crystallise as Chiliasm, or in "Apocalypses," and not, like Platonism, in the dream of a perfect world existing "yonder." In fact, the Jewish view of the external world was mainly that of naive realism, but strongly pervaded by belief in an Almighty King and Judge. Moreover, the Jew had little sense of the Divine in nature: it was the power of God over nature which he was jealous to maintain. The majesty of the elemental forces was extolled ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... musical career so gloriously. Liszt and Gounod differed entirely in their musical temperaments, yet in their oratorios they met on common ground. In both there was the same drawing away from the old forms of oratorio, the same search for realism in the expression of the text in music, the same respect for Latin prosody, and the same belief in simplicity of style. But while there is renunciation in the simplicity of Liszt, who threw aside worldly finery to wear the frock of a penitent, on the contrary Gounod appears to return to his original ...
— Musical Memories • Camille Saint-Saens
... care about a thing being life-like? Down with Realism! 'Tis the spirit that must be portrayed by the painter! Let me alone! I am going to try to conjure up what it ought ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... approved of Philips' efforts to create a fresh and simple pastoral manner. As a poet, Purney moved sharply away from the classical pastoral by curiously blending an entirely original subject matter with a sentimentalized realism and a naive, diffuse expression; and as a critic he pointed in the direction of Shenstone and Allan Ramsay by emphasizing the tender, admitting the use of earthy realism in the manner of Gay, and recommending for pastoral such "inimitably pretty and delightful" tales as The Two Children in ...
— A Full Enquiry into the Nature of the Pastoral (1717) • Thomas Purney
... compelled to tell tales that rang true. At the back door, out of inexorable necessity, is developed the convincingness and sincerity laid down by all authorities on the art of the short-story. Also, I quite believe it was my tramp-apprenticeship that made a realist out of me. Realism constitutes the only goods one can exchange at the kitchen door ...
— The Road • Jack London
... Harriet Beecher Stowe's pianist who played "with an airy and bird-like touch?" Or to our own clever painter-novelist who, in "Snubbin' through Jersey," has Brushes bring out his violoncello and play "the symphonies of Beethoven" to entertain his fellow canal-boat passengers? The tendency toward realism, or "veritism," as it is called, has brought out a rich crop of blunders. It will not do to have a character in a story simply sing or play something; we must have the names of composers and compositions. The genial gentleman who enriched musical literature with arrangements ...
— How to Listen to Music, 7th ed. - Hints and Suggestions to Untaught Lovers of the Art • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... was gentle as he continued, "Your mother is a rare and beautiful spirit, sir. Knowing her regard for the true and genuine,—her love for the pure and beautiful,—I scarcely expected to find her son interested in the realism of my fiction. I congratulate you, young man"—he paused; then added with indescribable bitterness—"that you have not read ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright
... 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 ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, September 23, 1914 • Various
... the programme to show that the play was in four Acts. "The Time is the present-day and the Scene is in Sir Geoffrey Throssell's town-house," was all it said. And the gentleman in the gallery, thinking it was all over, and being pleased with the play and particularly with the realism of the last moment of it, shouted. "Author." And suddenly everybody else cried, "Author! Author." The ...
— Happy Days • Alan Alexander Milne
... inversion of proprieties. Cynthia wooing Endymion shows us woman in her frailty; Lucrece violated by Tarquin is woman in her dignity. The ironical poet had to adorn the first story with his choicest flowers of style and feeling, to burlesque the second with his grossest realism. ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... still charm even after she had ceased to desire to. Neither in the new fiction nor in the old was there a place for the unhappy woman who desired to charm but could not; she remained what she had always been—a tragic perversion of nature which romance and realism conspired to ignore. Women in novels had revolted against life as passionately as she—but one and all they had revolted in graceful attitudes and with abundant braids of hair. A false front not only extinguished sentiment—it ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... observing also, that 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 ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... answered, however, that there is "that kind of girl," and that 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 ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 25, 1914 • Various
... deep problems that have set us all adrift. In every age, whatever is astir, literature, theology, all intellectual activity, takes one and the same drift, and approximates in color. The bent of Irving's spirit was fixed in his youth, and he escaped the desperate realism of this generation, which has no outcome, and is likely to produce little ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... female puppet, who is angel or devil, may still continue to flourish among us; for it still satisfies the natural craving for romance, ideality, which the drama is bound to supply. But these things belong to a decaying phase of romance; and our so-called realism is but the first wave of a new romantic movement, on the stage as elsewhere. For when the old ideals become decrepit, we must go back to nature to get the stuff ...
— The Black Cat - A Play in Three Acts • John Todhunter
... and an ultra-mysterious shuffle was received with shrieks of laughter by the 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 elicited ...
— Grace Harlowe's Second Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... history is begun in several poems which, though Propertius has not the story-telling gift of Ovid, showed the way to the delightful narratives of the Fasti. A few of the more personal elegies have a new and not very agreeable kind of realism, as though Musset had been touched with the spirit of Flaubert. In one, the ninth of the fourth book, the realism is in a different and pleasanter vein; only Herrick among English poets has given ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... other hand, instead of regarding all attempts to pass beyond logical forms of thought to be mental impotence, the mind follows its own instincts, and, relying upon the same natural realism which justifies its belief in the immediate character of its sensitive perceptions, ventures to depend with equal firmness on the reality of its intuitional consciousness, religion, natural or revealed, wears another aspect; and both the advantages ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... the rites and ceremonies of the various Hindoo castes, and could act the part of a fakir or a bazaar-wullah with wonderful realism. ...
— At Suvla Bay • John Hargrave
... 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 ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... people, when such fantastic unreality as this is the truest realism. Matthew and I talked like this with our brains, because we hadn't the courage to allow our hearts to break in upon the conversation. Had I dared to say some real emotional thing, what effect would it have had but to set poor tired Matthew a-coughing? and it was our aim that he should die ...
— Prose Fancies (Second Series) • Richard Le Gallienne
... physical summer, who living on the edge of the desert under a downright sun drew breath (as Isaiah puts it) in the fear of the Lord and saw the world in the blaze of His justice, Jeremiah brings home to the hearts of his people the truths and judgments, with which he was charged, in the hard, hot realism of their austere world. Through his verse we see the barer landscapes of Benjamin and Judah without shadow or other relief, every ugly detail exposed by the ruthless noon, and beyond them the desert hills shimmering ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... everywhere around, the comments of the workmen as they saw the show of oil, the ringing blows of axes, and shouts of the teamsters, all lent an air of realism to Bob's words which Ralph had failed to see ...
— Ralph Gurney's Oil Speculation • James Otis
... will read it because it paints faithfully the life which they know so well, and because it gives us three big, manly fellows, fine types of the cowboy at his best. Eastern readers will be attracted by its splendid realism." ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... should have entered their daughter's bedroom would have seemed little short of profanation to both the rector and Mrs. Pendleton. The sacred shelves of that bookcase (which had been ceremoniously presented to her on her fourteenth birthday) had never suffered the contaminating presence of realism. The solitary purpose of art was, in Mrs. Pendleton's eyes, to be "sweet," and she scrupulously judged all literature by its success or failure in this particular quality. It seemed to her as wholesome to feed her daughter's growing fancy on an imaginary line of pious heroes, as it ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... the mixture of allegory and realism that we see in these murals and in so much of the art here? Don't you find ...
— The City of Domes • John D. Barry
... to contravene these opinions, the conversation came to a pause, which was at length interrupted by Mr. Brookes, who through the folds of his handkerchief declared again that it would be all the same a hundred years hence. Even Aunt Mary's realism did not offend Aunt Hester as did this un-Christian philosophy; she gathered her strength for a grave reproof, but was cut short by her sister's laughter. All the teeth were glittering now, and peal after peal of laughter came. Aunt Hester's ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... 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
... the moment when the improvised tourniquets could be removed and some relief afforded to their sufferings. The brigadier, his khaki coat stained with the blood from a wound on his head, was talking to his only staff-officer, whose helmet displayed a bullet-hole. The most ardent lover of realism would have been satisfied. Food, doolies, and doctors soon arrived. The wounded were brought to the field hospitals to be attended to. The unwounded hurried back to camp to get breakfast and a bath. In half an hour, the ill-omened spot was occupied ...
— The Story of the Malakand Field Force • Sir Winston S. Churchill
... 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 ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... Santo. There are, of course, enough poor falterings of allegory and tradition in the marble walls and floors of this vast residence of the dead (as it gives you the cheerful impression of being), but the characteristic note of the place is a realism braving it out in every extreme of actuality. Possibly the fact is most striking in that death-bed scene where the family, life-size and unsparingly portraitured, and, as it were, photographed in marble, are gathered in the room of the dying mother. She lies on a bedstead which bears ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... up with her back against the ledge looking rather pale and feeling exceedingly foolish, while Gil Huntley explained to her about the "blood-sponge" and how he had held it concealed in his hand until the right moment, and had used it in the interest of realism and not to frighten her, as she might have reason to suspect. Gil Huntley was showing a marked tendency to repeat himself. He had three times assured her earnestly that he did not mean to scare her so, when the voice of the chief reminded him that ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... will notice that there was little effort to attain realism in the presentation of an Indian play. He need not be surprised therefore to find (page 145) that Viraka leaves the court-room, mounts a horse, rides to the suburbs, makes an investigation and returns—all within the limits of a stage-direction. The simplicity ...
— The Little Clay Cart - Mrcchakatika • (Attributed To) King Shudraka
... with the vast darkening horizon of "The Prairie" and the death of the trapper, and one will feel how natural and inevitable are the fates of the personages and the alterations in the life of the frontier. These books vary in their poetic quality and in the degree of their realism, but to watch the evolution of the leading figure is to see human life in its ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... 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 Schulte stood before him—and ...
— Bucholz and the Detectives • Allan Pinkerton
... Written with the careful realism which distinguishes all Arnold Bennett's work, it is curious to note the fine use that he makes of his realistic genius in the handling ...
— Mental Efficiency - And Other Hints to Men and Women • Arnold Bennett
... finite, the variable, the contingent, the relative, but only of the absolute, the unchangeable, and the infinite. To constitute this science, the doctrine of "identity" is indispensable; the subject and the object of thought, knowledge and being, must be reduced to scientific unity. Realism and Idealism are thus blended together, or rather identified in the philosophy of the "absolute." The idea of the "absolute," in which being and thought are identical, is the only foundation of science, and the ultimate ground of all certitude. And Pantheism is inferred from ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... The face is, possibly enough, as well done as the material would allow, but the hair is made in small curls of gold thread, and the feathers of the wings are rendered in a naturalistic way with pieces of flat gold braid. This kind of realism is out of place in embroidery, and it is unfortunately characteristic of the English embroidered work of about this period, occurring generally on boxes, mirror frames, or the like, but only rarely on book-covers. The design is the same on both sides; ...
— English Embroidered Bookbindings • Cyril James Humphries Davenport
... birth and childhood of Jesus, or directly from their own quaintly simple souls, the poets from early times have been making Christmas songs—noels, or nouve as they are called in Provencal—in which new subordinate characters have been created in a spirit of frank realism, and these have materialized in new figures surrounding the creche. At the same time the fancy of the people, working with a still more naive directness along the lines of associated ideas, has been making the most ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier
... with his Roman nose, His eyebrows—the 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
... in the square to which it leads), and skirting the Montburon Garden, I reached the Place du Bastion. This is a semicircle now used as the town marketplace. In the midst stands the statue of Bichat by David d'Angers. Bichat, in a frockcoat—why that exaggeration of realism?—stands with his hand upon the heart of a child about nine or ten years old, perfectly nude—why that excess of ideality? Extended at Bichat's feet lies a dead body. It is Bichat's book "Of Life and of Death" translated ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... particular being may come into the world; and the way and manner in which it is accomplished is a secondary consideration. However much those of lofty sentiments, and especially of those in love, may refute the gross realism of my argument, they are nevertheless in the wrong. For is not the aim of definitely determining the individualities of the next generation a much higher and nobler aim than that other, with its exuberant sensations and transcendental soap-bubbles? Among all earthly aims is there ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... approached the dock and those on shore thrilled with a fearful realism as the swimmers reared up their heads and blew jets of water out through their mouths and noses just like sea horses. As the boat passed the dock the watchers with one accord stood and sang "America," and kept on singing until it had vanished from ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Maine Woods - Or, The Winnebagos Go Camping • Hildegard G. Frey
... two centuries. Nor have M. de Careil's countrymen in times past shared all his enthusiasm for the genial Saxon. The barren Psychology of Locke obtained a currency in France, in the last century, which the friendly Realism of his great contemporary could never boast. Raspe, the first who edited the "Nouveaux Essais," takes to himself no small credit for liberality in so doing, and hopes, by rendering equal justice to Leibnitz and to Locke, to conciliate those "who, with the former, think that their wisdom ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... the consummate realism of the cheap photographer show its babies of yester-year, clothed now in the raiment of mature years ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... of the career of a man who comes under the influence of a beautiful but evil woman; how she lures him on and on, how he struggles, falls and rises, only to fall again into her net, make a story of unflinching realism. ...
— The Scarlet Feather • Houghton Townley
... psychologist, yet he tells what he sees and what he imagines with delightful spirit and delightful wit, and tinges the fabric of his fancy with the ever-changing colors of his own versatile personality, fanciful suggestions, homely realism, and bright antithesis. Above all, he has the ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... He made it gripping—the supreme heart-interest drama of his season a big thing done in a big way, and yet censor-proof. Not even the white-souled censors of the great state of Pennsylvania could have outlawed its realism, brutal though this was in such great moments as when Gashwiler carved the roast beef. So able was his artistry that Merton's nostrils would sometimes betray him—he could swear they caught rich aromas from ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... Sketches taken on the spot they depict, sometimes by a hand that had momentarily laid down a rifle to take them, and always by a draughtsman who drew in overt or covert peril of his life, gain in verisimilitude what they must lose in elaboration or embellishment; are the richer in their realism by reason of the absence of the imaginary and ...
— A Soldier's Sketches Under Fire • Harold Harvey
... towering trees whose foliage roofed the roadways were sufficient to reanimate recollections of old masters of brush realism. Ploughed fields veiled with the low-hanging mist of evening time, and distant steeples of homely simplicity faintly glazed by the last rays of the setting sun, reproduced the tones of "The Angelus" with the ...
— "And they thought we wouldn't fight" • Floyd Gibbons
... his own name. How he would plume his feathers over virtues which would have gladdened the heart of Caesar or St. Paul; and anon, complete his own portrait with one of those touches of pitiless realism which the satirist so often seeks ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson
... influence on the Roman mind, which was practical and worldly. Platonism opposed the sensualism and materialism of the times, believed in eternal ideas, sought the knowledge of God as the great end of life—a sublime realism which was hardly more appreciated than Christianity itself. Platonism was doubtless the highest effort of uninspired men, under the influence of pagan ideas and institutions, to attain a knowledge of God and the soul. It gloried in immortality, and claimed for man a nature akin to the deity, ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... yet instructive history of the English novel beyond the time of Walter Scott, with whom, he says, 'the wheel has come full circle,' the Romantic revival was victorious, prose finally superseded verse as the vehicle of adventurous story, and realism was wedded to romance. We trust that in some future work he will carry on up to a later date his survey of the course and currents of imaginative fiction. In the meantime, it may not be irrelevant to ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... continues: "It is therefore manifest that the fundamental position of a consistent theory of dualistic realism is—that our cognitions of Extension and its modes are not wholly ideal—that although Space be a native, necessary, a priori form of imagination, and so far, therefore, a mere subjective state, that there is, at the same time, competent to us, in an immediate ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel
... sixteenth century succeed in representing with perfect mastery these scenes of country life, as, for instance, Albrecht Durer, in his engraving of the prodigal son. But it is one thing if a painter, brought up in a school of realism, introduces such scenes, and quite another thing if a poet, accustomed to an ideal or mythological framework, is driven by inward impulse into realism. Besides which, priority in point of time is here, as in the descriptions of country life, on the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... Treitschke—alternates with a sceptically satiric one—as in Fontane who (like so many writers, in Germany especially) did not belong to his own generation nor even to the immediately succeeding one, but to the next after that! With these are associated preferences for verse or prose; for idealism or realism and naturalism; a falling away from philosophy or an inclination to introduce it into poetry; and numerous other disguises for those antagonistic principles, to which Kuno Francke in a general survey of our literature has sought to trace ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... that Part I of The Road to Damascus is at the same time a free creation of fantasy and a drama of portrayal. The elements of realism are starkly manifest, but they are moulded and hammered into a work of art by a force of combinative imagination rising far above the task of mere descriptive realism. The scenes unroll themselves ...
— The Road to Damascus - A Trilogy • August Strindberg
... writer at once so pitiless and so just as Shakespeare? Did ever any other mingle the grotesque and the pathetic with a realism so daring and yet so true to 'the ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... satisfy himself about the edge before commencing the operation, with great gusto, cutting the string that bound the hearthrug, making an incision, and extracting the heart. Next the place was sewn up, the cover replaced, the knives put away with horrible realism, the patient's pulse felt and a little stimulus administered—the boy taking this himself—to wit, a little ammonia ...
— The Bag of Diamonds • George Manville Fenn
... 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 ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... an original sea-tale of sustained interest come well-sketched collections of maritime peril and suffering which awaken the sympathies by the realism of fact. 'Stories of the Sea,' are a very good specimen of the ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks
... But let a worker and an educated man sit opposite each other in a railway carriage without exchanging a word, as is the fashion with the English, and which of their two silent judgments on the other will be superior? I am not sure, but I rather think the worker's. It will have a kind of deadly realism. In camp and dept life the mind standing-at-ease from many civilian frictions and needs for decision, however petty, and shaken away from civilian ruts, will do a good deal of thinking of a sort, be widened, and probably re-value many things—especially ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... seems without passion or subtlety or depth or magnificence. Thus it had hardly any higher than a negative merit, but it was the necessary preparation for the acceptance of a more positive style, that should replace both the elaborate false art of the older French composers and the too colourless realism of the pastoral comic opera, by the austere loveliness and elevation of ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... sure of itself. The humanists, the architects, the sculptors, the painters are, as it were, seized with a fury of creation; they discover new forms, and express themselves completely, with beauty and truth. For a moment realism and beauty have kissed one another: for reality is not enough, as Alberti will find some day, it is necessary to find and to express the beauty there also. It was an age that was learning to enjoy itself. The world and ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... readily carried. Training makes a small boy the equal or superior of an untrained boy much larger and of greater strength, and the way to learn to carry a drowning person is to carry a boy who is not drowning to get used to handling the weights. A little struggle now and then lends realism to the work and increases the skill of the scout candidate for a life saver's rating. Speed swimming for itself alone is a very selfish sport so that the scout should develop his ability to make it ...
— Boy Scouts Handbook - The First Edition, 1911 • Boy Scouts of America
... have all about equal power over colour in the abstract, Rossetti and Holman Hunt are distinguished above the rest for rendering colour under effects of light; and of these two, Rossetti composes with richer fancy and with a deeper sense of beauty, Hunt's stern realism leading him continually into harshness. Rossetti's carelessness, to do him justice, is only in water-colour, ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... Fichte, who created the universe by means of the Ego, thus transforming the earlier objective myth into one which was wonderfully subjective. Descartes doubted about everything beyond the range of his own thought, and was the first to overthrow the former ideal realism, and to lead the way to science, and to more rational analysis. To him the teaching of Spinoza and Kant was really due, as well as the English schools which had so much to do with the destruction of the earlier mythical edifice ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... 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 the most eminent men of his day. He went to Smyrna ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... shrewd, stirring common-sense which is New England's strong point. Here is hinted, also, that philosophic humor which is the one ray lightening her intense realism. ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 4, April, 1886 • Various
... 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
... sentiment, as far as it is not simply human, is more manly than womanly); but the Christ of Luke has made possible those pictures which now hang in many ladies' chambers, in which Jesus is represented exactly as he is represented in the Lourdes cinematograph, by a handsome actor. The only touch of realism which Luke does not instinctively suppress for the sake of producing this kind of amenity is the reproach addressed to Jesus for sitting down to table without washing his hands; and that is retained because an interesting discourse hangs ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... himself of peasant stock, and all his boyhood life had been spent in close association with men who wrested a scanty living from an ungrateful soil. Although a poet by instinct, he was not afraid of realism, and did not shrink from giving the brutal aspects of peasant life a place upon his canvas. In emphasizing the characteristics of reticence and naivete he really discovered the Norwegian peasant for literary purposes. Beneath the words spoken ...
— Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson • William Morton Payne
... Topolski alone has a talent, but what does he do with it? . . . A bandit, a Singalese, who goes into epileptic fits on the stage, who is ready to put a barn on the stage if those new authors require it. They call that realism, while in truth it is nothing but roguery! . ...
— The Comedienne • Wladyslaw Reymont
... shape to ourselves real objective existence? Is it something wholly independent of the mind (realism)? and if so, is this known to be what we—meaning here common people and men of science alike—represent it as being (natural realism), or something different (transfigured realism)? Or is it, on the contrary, something involving mind (idealism)? and ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... conflagration. We could hear the crackling of flames, the shouts of the people, the clang of bells, and the hasty tread of the firemen as they advanced and put out the blaze. The film play was one of those which never fail to attract, where the makers had gone to the utmost extent of realism and had actually set fire to a house to get ...
— Guy Garrick • Arthur B. Reeve
... view of that poet's rancor against him, are almost defiant in their magnanimity. His adverse judgments, moreover, are as permanent as his favorable ones. He pronounced the verdict against the naked realism of Crabbe's poetry, which persons like Jeffrey thought superior to Wordsworth's, and he pricked the bubble of Edward Irving's popularity while it was at its pitch of highest glory. If he was often bitter toward men whom he at other times ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... I wanted her so badly, so very badly, to be what I needed. I wanted a woman to save me. I forced myself to see her as I wished to see her. Her tepidities became infinite delicacies, her mental vagueness an atmospheric realism. The harsh precisions of the Baileys and Altiora's blunt directness threw up her fineness into relief and made a ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... theatrical management, and was ready to provide his audiences with anything in the way of startling sensation. One of his most famous operas was on the subject of Stoertebeker, a notorious highwayman (1704), in which murders were represented with the most disgusting realism. ...
— Handel • Edward J. Dent
... would not share her opinion, when the discussion had begun, for he never did, and she was glad of it. She also knew that her smile irritated him, for he did not resemble her in the very least. He was slightly aggressive, as shy persons often are: and yet, like a good many men who profess 'realism,' brutal frankness and a sweeping disbelief of everything not 'scientifically' true, Mr. Lushington was almost morbidly sensitive to the opinion of others. Criticism hurt him; indifference wounded him to the quick; ridicule ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford
... 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 Sculpture and Mural Decorations of the Exposition • Stella G. S. Perry
... and customs of the Moslem East. Hence not unfrequently, they made ludicrous blunders and in no instance did they supply anything like the explanatory notes which have added so greatly to the value of this issue of "Alf Laylah wa Laylah." Some of these are startling in their realism, and often the traveller who believed that he knew something of the East, winces at the plainness with which the Wazir's daughter tells her tales to Shahryar, King of the Banu Sasan. The language is, however, more ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... close of the Middle Ages, narrative, lyric and dramatic poetry seemed firmly established among the people. Not unmindful of romance, it was grounded in realism and sought to interpret the life of the peasant and the artisan of fifteenth-century England. The Renaissance follows, and a profound change comes over poetry. The popular note grows fainter and fainter, till at last it becomes inaudible. Poetry leaves the farmyard ...
— Songs of the Ridings • F. W. Moorman
... centre of the Universe, and God, who comes under the Non-Ego, lies somewhere on the circumference, and is only yielded to us as the product of our moral instinct. Sir William Hamilton, following Reid, asserts a natural Realism, or noumenal existence within the phenomenal; but he utterly denies that either of these authenticates the Infinite and Absolute. He and his disciple, Dr. Mansel, labor immensely to prove that there can be no such thing as a philosophy of the Infinite, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... principal novel-writers of the age. Eugene Sue and Balzac are 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 some writers, as Villemain, are remarkable for their power of descriptive narrative; ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... pathos, tenderness 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 under the ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... an eminent surgeon of Rouen, Gustave Flaubert may have acquired from his father something of that scientific precision of observation and that cutting accuracy of expression, by which he gained his place at the head of modern French realism and won the discipleship of the Goncourts, Daudet, Zola, and Maupassant and the applause of such connoisseurs of technique as Walter Pater and Henry James. From his mother's Norman ancestry he inherited the physique of a giant, ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... for school, and the old lady to call on Mrs. Harper and vanquish her realism with Tom's marvellous dream. Sid had better judgment than to utter the thought that was in his mind as he left the house. It was this: "Pretty thin—as long a dream as that, without any mistakes ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Laprade is to defend what he calls "Spiritualism in Art." He wages an unrelenting war against the modern school of Realism. It is not the representation of visible Nature that the artist must seek; his aim must be "the representation of the invisible." He grows eloquent when he develops his favorite theories, and always succeeds in interesting ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... heroes and martyrs. He has done this with the most unusual power of conviction. The story, as he tells it, inevitably and irresistibly displaces all the vulgar, mean, purblind, spiteful versions. There is a precise realism and an unsmiling, measured, determined sincerity which gives a strange dignity to the work of one whose fixed practice and ungovernable impulse it is to kick conventional ...
— Dark Lady of the Sonnets • George Bernard Shaw
... before leaving the subject of the realities of life. Worn time to time a rather emphatic school lifts up its voice in the name of plain speaking and asks for something beyond reality—for realism, for anticipated instruction on the duties and especially on the dangers of grown-up life. It will be sufficient to suggest three points for consideration in this matter: (1) That these demands are not made by fathers and mothers, but appear to ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... measure would have been obscured by a rapid and conversational delivery. The representation would thus become moving sculpture to the eye, and to the ear, as it were, a sleep of music between the intenser interludes of the chorus; and the spectator without being drawn away by an imitative realism from the calm of impassioned contemplation into the fever and fret of a veritable actor on the scene, received an impression based throughout on that clear intellectual foundation, that almost prosaic lucidity of sentiment and plot, which ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson |
