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More "Realism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in my thinks. When I came to I was pretty busy putting my lunch," explained the other with simple realism. "One of Mr. Pullman's seats butted me in the stomach. They ain't upholstered as soft as you'd think to look at 'em. I went reeling around, looking for Miss I. O. W., she being alone, you know, ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... tries to get the New Yorker to tell us all about what a good play this is so we'll feel more entertained. So the lad tells us the leading woman is a sterling actress of legitimate methods—all too hard to find in this day of sensationalism, and the play is a triumph of advanced realism written by a serious student of the drama that is trying to save our stage from commercial degradation. He explained a lot about the lesson of the play. Near as I could make out the lesson was that divorce, nowadays, is darned near as uncertain as ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... the picture I have just spoken of is the only one of his in which I ever saw any sign of delicacy or tenderness, any appeal to the deeper and more exquisite emotions. Nevertheless, by degrees his genius helps one to surmount his realism. On my first visit to Antwerp I looked for a few minutes—which was as long, as I could bear it—at the great Descent from the Cross in the cathedral, and turned away with the conviction that I could never have anything but distressing and disagreeable impressions from that ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... had stopped his horse, and cut him down from the stirrups, and carried him into the shade of a hop-bush off the track, and when Stingaree dared to open his eyes, he was nearer closing them perforce, and the scene swam before him with superfluous realism. ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... 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 ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... with various police organizations." The stories are a decided contribution to sociology, and yet, viewed as stories, they have unusual interest because of their remarkable vigor and their intense realism. ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... 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
... frankly farcical. Encouraged by the huge demand for Maxim Gorky's book, Mr. Alston Rivers is publishing in the same form (1/- nett, paper, and 1/6 cloth) "Publican and Serf," by Skitaletz, a Russian Author, who, while by no means behind Gorky in point of realism, possesses in the opinion of some critics a still greater measure of literary ability. Other items of Mr. Alston Rivers' Shilling Library, which has prospered as only the result of the most careful selection could prosper, are "Lovers ...
— More Cricket Songs • Norman Gale
... themselves to a devoted—almost obscene—study of corpses and carnage generally; and they lack the American's instinct for the rowdy commonplace, the natural, the irreverent, which so materially aids his realism. In "The Red Badge of Courage" invariably the tone is kept down where one expects a height: the most heroic deeds are accomplished ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... "your Excellency," and so on. But I'll tell you something; the man has been writing on art for twenty-five years, and he doesn't know the very first thing about it. For twenty-five years he has been chewing on other men's thoughts about realism, naturalism, and all such foolishness; for twenty-five years he has been reading and writing things that clever men have long known and stupid ones are not interested in; for twenty-five years he has been making his imaginary mountains out of molehills. And just think ...
— Uncle Vanya • Anton Checkov
... know, with the exception perhaps of STEVENSON's study, there has been no means by which the casual reader, as apart from the student, could correct his probably very vague ideas about the Father of Realism. Mr. H. DE VERE STACPOOLE, approaching the subject not for the first time, here essays a brief life and appreciation of the poet, told in picturesque but simple style. Sometimes indeed the simplicity is apt to appear overdone, so that one gets a suggestion that the story is ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, January 3, 1917 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... 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 Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... speaking the last word in human bravery, industry, determination and endurance—this might one day be not only the monument to the positions of all the battalions that had fought, its copses, its villages, its knolls famous to future generations as is Little Round Top with us, but in its monstrous realism be an immortal expression, unrealized by those who fought, of a commander's iron will and foresight in gaining that supremacy in arms, men and material which was the genesis of the ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... upon the mysteries before them. The glow of the firelight was upon them, the shadows behind held the small sturdy figures in an exquisitely soft embrace. It was such a photograph as combines the workings of the most delicate art with the unconscious posing of absolute realism. ...
— Mrs. Red Pepper • Grace S. Richmond
... Notya was still the cruel stepmother and Miriam's eyes were eager on a horizon against which the rescuer should stand. At one time he had been splendid and invincible, a knight to save her, and if his place had now been taken by the unknown Uncle Alfred, it was only that realism had influenced her fiction, and with a due sense of economy she used the materials ...
— Moor Fires • E. H. (Emily Hilda) Young
... when Guido of Siena was painting his Madonna, the improvement in Painting was rather a stirring within the cerements of conventional types, a flush on the cheek of the still rigid form,—while in the bas-reliefs of the Pisan sculptors we meet already a realism as much in excess of the antique as the Byzantine fell short ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... hearty, vivid, flesh and blood realism, which makes the book readable even to those who disapprove most conscientiously of many things ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... 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 from ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... single hair threaded into the needle instead of silk. In one case which I remember, the yellow hair of a child was knotted into a bunch of solid looking curls covering the head of a small figure, while the face of the mother was surmounted by bands of a reddish brown. This little touch of realism gave a curious note of pathos to the picture of a life separated from the present by time and outgrown habits, but linked to it by this one tangible ...
— The Development of Embroidery in America • Candace Wheeler
... portrayed the lower bourgeoisie and their servants. Au Bonheur des Dames treated of the great retail shops. La Joie de Vivre came in 1884. Germinal told of mining and the misery of the proletariat. L'Oeuvre pictured the life of artists and authors. La Terre portrayed, with startling realism, the lowest peasant life. Le Reve, which followed, was a reaction. It was a graceful idyl. Le Reve was termed "a symphony in white," and was considered as a concession to the views of the majority of the French Academy. La Bete Humaine exhausted the details of railway life. L'Argent ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... she paused and peered into the unshaded window. These householders had no fear of peeping neighbors, for only the moon and the night moths found them out, and the simple bedroom was framed like some old naive interior, realistic with the tremendous realism ...
— While Caroline Was Growing • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... Pre-Raphaelites have all about equal power over color in the abstract, Rossetti and Holman Hunt are distinguished above the rest for rendering color 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 ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... 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 importance, the chief aim being the interpretation of an idea or ...
— Savva and The Life of Man • Leonid Andreyev
... lamp, Janet had her turn at reading. From the first she had been quick to note Mrs. Maturin's inflections, and the relics of a high-school manner were rapidly eliminated. The essence of latter-day realism and pragmatism, its courageous determination to tear away a veil of which she had always been dimly aware, to look the facts of human nature in the face, refreshed her: an increasing portion of it she understood; and she was constantly under the spell of the excitement that partially grasps, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... he worked from observation, or utilized his own experiences, a piece of drastic realism results. The suicide of Zenobia is transferred, with the necessary changes, from a long passage in "The American Note Books," in which he tells of going out at night, with his neighbors, to drag for the body of a girl who had drowned herself in the ...
— Four Americans - Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman • Henry A. Beers
... 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
... 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
... Tartars, while not exhibiting the highest achievement of the author's power, nevertheless belongs in the group of writings wherein his peculiar excellences are fairly manifested. The obvious quality of its realism has been pointed out already; the masterly use of the principles of suspense and stimulated interest will hardly pass unnoticed. A negative excellence is the absence of that discursiveness in composition, that tendency to ...
— De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars • Thomas De Quincey
... representing it, but the assignment of the pageant in which God warns Noah to make an ark to the shipwrights, and of its successor, in which the patriarch appears in the Ark, to the "pessoners" and mariners has an obvious propriety, and must have conduced to the—not historical, but conventional—realism which was the aim of ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell
... impressed me favourably. He was an old duffer and pedant, but behind these things he was a country-bred man and gentleman, and had showed courage and a sporting instinct in the hour of desperation. He had told his story with many quaint formalities of diction, but also with a very convincing realism. ...
— The Club of Queer Trades • G. K. Chesterton
... side of Carlyle. There is another as strongly marked, which is his second note; and that is what he somewhere calls 'his stubborn realism.' The combination of the two is as charming as it is rare. No one at all acquainted with his writings can fail to remember his almost excessive love of detail; his lively taste for facts, simply as facts. Imaginary joys and sorrows may extort from ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... is known to the world in general as a novel-writer, a producer of romances, in which begin the reign of realism in French fiction. His Comedie Humaine is a description of French society, as it existed from the time of the Revolution to that of the Restoration. In this series of stories we find the author engaged in analyzing the manners, motives and ...
— Introduction to the Dramas of Balzac • Epiphanius Wilson and J. Walker McSpadden
... that inevitably followed, when realism was tabooed in fiction, and sickly romance possessed the field. The Yellow Book and similar strange exotics of the first period withered and died, and the cult of literature (!) for the British Home was shortly afterwards ...
— Modern marriage and how to bear it • Maud Churton Braby
... 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
... battle scene, standing alone in literature for its carefully detailed delineation- -its persistent minuteness, its rapidity of movement, its balanced effects, its energetic purpose—and surpassing everything in modern verse for its vivid Homeric realism. Fifteen years before, as we have seen, Scott had the progress of the battle in his mind's eye, and at length he produced his description as if he had been present in the character of a skilful and interested spectator. There are ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... book by Mr. Becke has become an event of note—and very justly. No living author, if we except Mr. Kipling, has so amazing a command of that unhackneyed vitality of phrase that most people call by the name of realism. Whether it is scenery or character or incident that he wishes to depict, the touch is ever so dramatic and vivid that the reader is conscious of a picture and impression that has no parallel save in the records of ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... 'realistic' subjects are taught! Besides this, only think how immature and uninformed one must be in the company of such teachers when one actually misunderstands the rigorously defined philosophical expressions 'real' and 'realism' to such a degree as to think them the contraries of mind and matter, and to interpret 'realism' as 'the road to knowledge, formation, and ...
— On the Future of our Educational Institutions • Friedrich Nietzsche
... in spirit the cross of Jesus, for every day we need the merit of the atonement, and the stimulus of that example of self- forgetfulness. Let us turn away from the so-called realism which would hang the world in black, and, at the same time let us avoid those who would make this a day of revelry. There is a middle path, one upon which Christ smiles, and a path we can tread any day, and thus make it GOOD—we ...
— Broken Bread - from an Evangelist's Wallet • Thomas Champness
... story.... The author makes her people speak the language of every-day life, and a vigorous and attractive realism pervades the book, which provides excellent entertainment from beginning to ...
— A Little Norsk; Or, Ol' Pap's Flaxen • Hamlin Garland
... As., etc., etc. It is understood, we presume, that the modern farce occupies no exalted position in the comic scale, is distinguished by the grotesquerie of its characters, incidents and dialogue, and is indulgently permitted to stray far from the paths of realism. Even in Shakespearian farce, note the exaggerated antics of the two Dromios in "The Comedy of Errors." It is significant then that farce is ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • Wilton Wallace Blancke
... picture of an actual grisette, drawn by perhaps the greatest master of artistic realism (adjective and substantive so seldom found in company!) who ever lived, see that Britannia article of Thackeray's before referred to—an article, for a long time, unreprinted, and therefore, till a comparatively ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... 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 ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... Realism in style has not all the ease which seems to belong to it. It is the object of the author who affects it so to communicate with his reader that all his words shall seem to be natural to the occasion. We do not think the language of Dogberry natural, when he tells ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... mind dominion over matter is shown equally in all his tastes, all his preferences. Beauty in art consisted wholly for him in the expression of heart and soul. He had a horror of realism in art; the Flemish school inspired him with a sort of nausea. Certain material points of beauty in women, that are generally admired, had no beauty for him. The music he liked, and of which he never grew tired, was not brilliant or difficult, but simple; that which awakens the most ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... think I shall ask Cuthbert's opinion, as an artist, of a brother artist who himself does perfectly unrecognisable sketches of farm-yards"—he waved a golden-syrup spoon towards the Colonel and the manure-heap—"and yet demands a finnicking and altogether contemptible realism in the matter of trench maps. Pass ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Oct. 10, 1917 • Various
... the new movement in art, on the new illustrations of the Bible by a French artist. Vorkuev attacked the artist for a realism carried to the ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... realists are all men. If a woman ventures to write a book which may fitly be classed under the head of realism, the critics charitably unite upon insanity as the cause of it and lament the lost womanliness ...
— The Spinster Book • Myrtle Reed
... languidly. He was realizing that there was little pretense of secrecy about the power of The Master's deputy here. Police and soldiers.... But Paraguay, of all the nations of the southern continent, has learned a certain calm realism about ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science July 1930 • Various
... waited much longer she would have seen a similar display of realism on mine. But I went back and sat the interval out, and listened critically to the classical selection of chamber-music from the orchestra, and saw the rest of the play, though I have ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... 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 out ...
— The Inferno • Henri Barbusse
... the paper that Talbot Potter was to put on a play you'd written. I congratulate you. That man's a great artist, but he never seems to get a good play; he's always much, much greater than his part. I'm sure you've given him a real play at last. I remember your principles: Realism; no compromise! The truth; no shirking it, no tampering with it! You've struck ...
— Harlequin and Columbine • Booth Tarkington
... to a volume which ought to be popular with Scots in every part of the world, are full of pawky humour, and their realism is so pronounced that we seem to have known the models ...
— A Versailles Christmas-Tide • Mary Stuart Boyd
... 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 ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel
... 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 degrades and ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... episode. It is a difficult thing to do, as I have found. It was not done on my part wholly by design, but rather by instinct, and I imagine that this tendency has run through all my works. It represents the elements of romanticism and of realism in one, and that kind of representation has its dangers, to say nothing of its difficulties. It sometimes alienates the reader, who by instinct and preference is a realist, and it troubles the reader ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... in dreams, in the reality of visions that appear to the slumbering senses. To Clancy's, awake, on this night, there seems a horrid realism, almost a certainty, of some dread danger. And too certain it is. If endowed with the faculty of clairvoyance, he would know it to be so—would witness a series of incidents at that moment occurring up the river—scarce ten miles ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... after the miracle or mystery plays, though contemporary in their popularity, came what we called "moralities" or "moral interludes"—pieces designed to enforce a religious or ethical lesson and perhaps to get back into drama something of the edification which realism had ousted from the miracles. They dealt in allegorical and figurative personages, expounded wise saws and moral lessons, and squared rather with the careful self-concern of the newly established Protestantism than with the frank and joyous jest in life which was more characteristic ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... of the Chinese campong, the open houses displaying the lighted altars and tutelary gods of Buddhist and Taoist creed, for the mystic philosophy of the Eastern sages materialises into grossest realism by passing through the ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... of humour. Perspectives there were none for him, and due proportions did not exist. He took life hard. He looked upon himself gravely as a serious proposition, like the Nebular Hypothesis or Phonetic Reform. The immediate consequence was that, having achieved his success through realism, he placed realism on a pedestal and worshipped it as the only true (literary) god. Severne became a realist of realists. He ran it into the ground. He would not describe a single incident that he had not viewed from start to finish with his own eyes. ...
— Blazed Trail Stories - and Stories of the Wild Life • Stewart Edward White
... against the Prince and set a price upon his head. Many attempts against his life were made by assassins eager for the promised reward. How the treacherous end was finally compassed is told by Motley with all the dramatic realism necessary for a faithful description ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... grandeur and power are much more fully visible, and everywhere in the poetry of the Edda there is a force of style and a distinction as unlike as possible to the want of both in the German Nibelungen. {120} At the same time the Scandinavians have a realism, as it is called, in their genius, which abundantly proves their relationship with the Germans; any one whom Mr. Dasent's delightful books have made acquainted with the prose tales of the Norsemen, will be struck ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold
... 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 it the ...
— The Evidence in the Case • James M. Beck
... is rendered with an unsparing realism which, in a few instances, is carried beyond the limits of good taste. Such is the case with El Piojoso of the Louvre, which represents a little beggar removing vermin from his body, and which Mr. Ruskin has severely denounced. ...
— Child-life in Art • Estelle M. Hurll
... be enjoyed in single great passages, of which there are more in the "Inferno" than in the other sections of the poem. His peculiar quality is a certain blending of mordant realism with a high and penetrating beauty. There is no need in reading him to vex oneself with symbolic interpretations. He is at his best, when from behind his scholastic philosophy, bursts forth, in direct personal betrayal, ...
— One Hundred Best Books • John Cowper Powys
... seen that solipsism, when its implications are followed out strictly, coincides with pure realism. The self of solipsism shrinks to a point without extension, and there remains the ...
— Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus • Ludwig Wittgenstein
... to the modern realism which makes so unlikely a material for serious opera, the fantastic irresponsibility of The Magic Flute came as a great relief. Its simpler music, serenely sampling the whole gamut of emotions, grave to gay, offered equal chances (all taken) to the pure love-singing of Miss AGNES ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Apr 2, 1919 • Various
... intensity from time to time. They themselves have recorded that there are three distinct stages in their intellectual evolution. Beginning, under the influence of Heine and Poe, with purely imaginative conceptions, they rebounded to the extremest point of realism before determining on the intermediate method of presenting realistic pictures in a poetic light. Pure imagination in the domain of contemporary fiction seemed to them defective, inasmuch as its processes are austerely logical, while life itself is compact of contradictions; and their first reaction ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... very much resembles the Iliad, not only in the uncertainty of its origin and the impersonality of its author, but also in its objectivity, its realism, the primitive passions of its heroes, and the wondrous acts of valor performed by them. It contains many passages of wonderful beauty, and gives a striking picture of the social customs and the religious ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... at this consciousness by means of the dialogue, of social conversation. And it is profoundly significant that the doctrine of innate ideas, of the objective and normative value of ideas, of what Scholasticism afterwards knew as Realism, should have formulated itself in dialogues. And these ideas, which constitute reality, are names, as Nominalism showed. Not that they may not be more than names (flatus vocis), but that they are nothing less than names. Language is that which gives us reality, and not as a ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... with the legend of S. John, show a remarkable advance; and they are luckily in better preservation. A soldier lifting his two-handed sword to strike off the Baptist's head is a vigorous figure, full of Florentine realism. Also in the Baptism in Jordan we are reminded of Masaccio by an excellent group of bathers—one man taking off his hose, another putting them on again, a third standing naked with his back turned, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... only is Duerer praised for "great thoughts," but he is praised for realism, and sometimes accused of having delighted in ugliness; or, as it is more cautiously expressed, of having preferred truth to grace. This is a point which I consider may better be discussed in respect to his drawings than his pictures, which nearly ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... those only who were worthy of that splendid name, so bandied by the Press and the Academies and doled out to divers windbags greedy of money and flattery—the poets, despising impudent rhetoric and that slavish realism which nibbles at the surface of things without penetrating to reality, had intrenched themselves in the very center of the soul, in a mystic vision into which was drawn the universe of form and idea, like a torrent falling into a lake, ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... stage manager, was a stickler for realism. In the burlesque of "The Lime Kiln Club," one climax was the sound of a cat fight on the roof. The cats were supposed to fall through the skylight. Every member of the lodge was supposed to have ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... employed by art to produce illusion entirely disappears. If the work is a picture, the figures represented seem to speak and walk; the shade is shadow, the light is day; the flesh lives, eyes move, blood flows in their veins, and stuffs have a changing sheen. Imagination helps the realism of every detail, and only sees the beauties of the work. At that hour illusion reigns despotically; perhaps it wakes at nightfall! Is not illusion a sort of night to the mind, which we people with dreams? Illusion then unfolds its wings, it bears the ...
— The Purse • Honore de Balzac
... Cataraqui at a place which later took the name of La Famine from the fact that during the council the French supplies ran low and the troops had to be put on short rations. After negotiations which the cynical chronicler La Hontan has described with picturesque realism, an inglorious truce was patched up. The new governor was sadly deficient in his knowledge of the Indian temperament. He had given the Iroquois an impression that the French were too proud to fight. ...
— Crusaders of New France - A Chronicle of the Fleur-de-Lis in the Wilderness - Chronicles of America, Volume 4 • William Bennett Munro
... 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 conversation between ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... correctness, correctitude^. accuracy, exactitude; exactness, preciseness &c adj.; precision, delicacy; rigor, mathematical precision, punctuality; clockwork precision &c (regularity) 80; conformity to rule; nicety. orthology^; ipsissima verba [Lat.]; realism. plain truth, honest truth, sober truth, naked truth, unalloyed truth, unqualified truth, stern truth, exact truth, intrinsic truth; nuda veritas [Lat.]; the very thing; not an illusion &c 495; real Simon Pure; unvarnished tale, unvarnished truth; the truth the whole truth and nothing but ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... With this spirit of realism which pervades Books IV., V., and VI. the idealism of Books I., II., VII., and VIII. is never reconciled. Aristotle is content to call existing constitutions perversions of the true form. But we cannot read the Politics without recognising and profiting ...
— Politics - A Treatise on Government • Aristotle
... we take our stand. We have no positive tests nor standards. Realism in art: realism in science—they pass away. In 1859, the thing to do was to accept Darwinism; now many biologists are revolting and trying to conceive of something else. The thing to do was to accept it in its day, but Darwinism of course was ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... us poke fun at our public, my dear,' she protested. 'I personally do not believe that your books are harmful, though their originality is certainly daring, and their realism startling; but there exists a considerable body of opinion, as you know, that strongly objects to your books. It may be reactionary opinion, bigoted opinion, ignorant opinion, what you like, but it exists, and it is not afraid to ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... Thomas. An entirely new twist is here given to the murder mystery, in that the authors have placed the burden of discovery upon three children whose intelligence and innocence are brought to bear on an adult problem. A most ingenious mystery play worked out, however, in terms of modern theatrical realism. The play has one interior setting and calls for 15 characters, of whom 8 are adult men and 2 young boys, and 4 adult women and one young girl. (Production fee quoted upon request.) Paper ...
— Class of '29 • Orrie Lashin and Milo Hastings
... annoyance—it requires constant attention. Until one can ride with one hand, and search for, secure, and use a pocket handkerchief with the other, cycling is necessarily a constant series of descents. Nothing can be further from the author's ambition than a wanton realism, but Mr. Hoopdriver's nose is a plain and salient fact, and face it we must. And, in addition to this inconvenience, there are flies. Until the cyclist can steer with one hand, his face is given over to Beelzebub. Contemplative ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells
... one of the obvious defects I was talking about. Delancey has missed his failures. He has fought and been defeated but he has never longed and been frustrated. In his case, romance is realism. He ...
— Balloons • Elizabeth Bibesco
... reminiscent of Dickens, but delightfully compact and laconic, describes the miserable dwelling of the Ginx's with a bitterness of humor that mocks the sentiment of Howard Payne's song. As a specimen of clean realism, this description is more effective than anything of Zola's; for Zola's realism is idealism gone mad. The squalor of the slum is heightened by the associations that cling to the name Rosemary. A bit of sermonizing upon the responsibilities of landlords for the souls in that slum, ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... The gloomy realism of this prophecy was not without effect upon the seer's mother. "Oh, no!" she exclaimed, protestingly. "We really can't manage it. I'm sure Cora won't ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington
... Pardo-Bazan thinks, he has comprehended that "the novel of to-day must take note of the ambient truth, and realize the beautiful with freedom and independence." This valiant lady, in the campaign for realism which she made under the title of "La Cuestion Palpitante"—one of the best and strongest books on the subject—counts him first among Spanish realists, as Clarin counts him first among Spanish novelists. "With a certain fundamental humanity," she says, "a certain magisterial ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... allowed to enter, are the chief characteristics of the painter's craftsmanship. The inspiration stage was practically passed when he took the crayon in his hand; and to this circumstance probably is to be assigned the absence of realism which arrests the attention ...
— Frederic Lord Leighton - An Illustrated Record of His Life and Work • Ernest Rhys
... review had taken the utmost pains (pages 16-39, especially page 39) to distinguish "realism" from "idealism," and to argue for the former in opposition to the latter, on the ground of the absolute incompatibility of the latter with the scientific method of investigation. It had taken the utmost pains to make the contrast broad and deep, and to point out ...
— A Public Appeal for Redress to the Corporation and Overseers of Harvard University - Professor Royce's Libel • Francis Ellingwood Abbot
... show that Saxo, who, with this story, begins to set the stage, so to speak, for the last grand act of King Hrolf's life, concluded to insert it at this juncture as the most appropriate and effective place he had for it, and then, to add a touch of realism and supply a retreat where the bear would be unobserved by the men, and unwarned of their approach, until they were close upon it, said that Bjarki met it in a thicket. The idea of supplying a motive and observing such consistency as we find in connection with the corresponding story ...
— The Relation of the Hrolfs Saga Kraka and the Bjarkarimur to Beowulf • Oscar Ludvig Olson
... the great mass of humanity throughout the civilized world, which, if measured in terms of affection, sympathy, and spontaneous enjoyment, is without a parallel. The robust nationalism of Kipling challenges the defiant opposition of foreigners; whilst his reportorial realism offends many an inviolable canon of European taste. With all his incandescent wit and comic irony, Bernard Shaw makes his most vivid impression upon the upper strata of society; his legendary character, moreover, is perpetually standing in ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... 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, ...
— The Bag of Diamonds • George Manville Fenn
... than realism was the controlling element of archaic decoration. Thus, while objects of beauty, like flowers and leaves, were rarely depicted, and human forms are most absurd caricatures, most careful attention ...
— Archeological Expedition to Arizona in 1895 • Jesse Walter Fewkes
... 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
... dragged in everyday happenings, so petty in its rendering of petty things, that it bewildered and repelled her: why, some one might just as well write a book about Mother or Sarah! Her young, romantic soul rose in arms against this, its first bluff contact with realism, against such a dispiriting sobriety of outlook. Something within her wanted to cry out in protest as she read—for read she did, on three successive days, with an interest she could not explain. And that was not all. It was ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... 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
... Modern Thought Eucken deals, in the first part of the book, with the fundamental concept of spiritual life as this reveals itself in the meanings of Subjective—Objective, Theoretical—Practical, Idealism—Realism. The middle portion of the book deals with the Problem of Knowledge as this is shown in Thought and Experience (Metaphysics), Mechanical—Organic (Teleology), and Law. The third portion of the volume deals with the Problems of Human Life as ...
— An Interpretation of Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy • W. Tudor Jones
... 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, "Faust," "Don Quixote" and "Ivan"; three concert overtures, a quantity of chamber music, ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... the imagination are helpless when in presence of the fact," said James Russell Lowell. In answer to which I'll point you "The Open Boat," the sternest, creepiest bit of realism ever penned, and Stevie was in ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... Forbes the realism of Fred's acting was too convincing. To learn that one is covered with a loaded revolver is disconcerting. Miss Forbes gave a startled squeak, and ducked ...
— The Scarlet Car • Richard Harding Davis
... 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 ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... In October of 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, "but ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... see, and is no profound 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 great gift ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... Ariadne is really asleep, and Hercules, in wine, really sinks to the ground; the dancing girl floats in the air as though in her native element; the centaur gallops without an effort; it is simple reality—the very reverse of realism—nature such as she actually is when she is pleasant to behold, in the full effusion of her grace, advancing like a queen because she is a queen, and because she could not move in any other fashion. In a word, these second-rate painters, poor daubers of walls as ...
— The Wonders of Pompeii • Marc Monnier
... weapons for the fray. Myth and realism are strangely intertwined in the description of these weapons. Bow and quiver, the lance and club are mentioned, together with the storm and the lightning flash. ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... the principal traits of this type of imagination: clearness of outline, both of the whole and of the details. It is not identical with the form called realistic—it is more comprehensive; it is a genus of which "realism" is a species. Moreover, the latter expression being reserved by custom for esthetic creation, I purposely digress in order to dwell on this point: that the esthetic imagination has no essential character belonging exclusively to it, and that it differs ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... romanticist, a Young German, and a political poet; and he was a true prophet; for, though he did not himself enter the promised land, he lived to see, in the more refined romanticism of the Munich School and the poetic realism of Hebbel and Ludwig, the dawn of a new day in the ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... facts; a book, as I apprehend it, should be—a book. That is my quarrel with this Tunisian literature; many of the things that have been written about the country are not books at all; while others are full of mistakes. Look at these two volumes, for instance! Impressionistic realism, I suppose they would call it, scrawled down by an excitable female journalist who, I am sorry to say, has created quite a rage for European and American lady tourists among these Arabs, to the ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... of '98'. For power and blunt realism there was nothing like it, but the character of the hero was torn in the shreds of debate. There was general agreement on two points: that the portrayal of the desolate Alaskan wild had a touch of "home," and that the heroine was ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... Gustave Droz 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 les ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... Thackeray have made of an age in which a man in the position of Lord Kew may actually be the born brother of Mr. Moss of Wardour Street? Nor does this apply merely to Thackeray, but to all those Victorians who prided themselves on the realism or sobriety of their descriptions; it applies to Anthony Trollope and, as much as any one, to George Eliot. For we have not only survived that present which Thackeray described: we have even survived that future to which George Eliot looked forward. It ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... 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 is preserved to us in the written text, ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... masters of the sea in libraries. I have, however, made two ocean trips from Norfolk to New York, time 23 hours. On both occasions I went sound asleep at the end of the first hour and woke up at the end of twenty-third hour. Under such circumstances I may have missed many important details of realism. I have also visited often the tomb of that fine old patriot-pirate and ex-Alderman, Dominique You, in the old French cemetery at New Orleans. As chief gunner for Jean Lafitte, he was some pirate; as chief artilleryman for Gen. Andrew Jackson at the ...
— The Dead Men's Song - Being the Story of a Poem and a Reminiscent Sketch of its - Author Young Ewing Allison • Champion Ingraham Hitchcock
... essential burden of Gissing's long-drawn lament. 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 ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... marred by too much realism or sentiment or moralizing, older children will respond with interest to a discussion of human reproduction. Even when a child is approachable, if your own emotional balance is insecure, it is, perhaps, well to ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various
... sickness has never troubled me on board ship, I was constantly ill when in a lighter. Moreover, the boatmen with whom I had constantly to associate were unintermittently foul-mouthed and blasphemous. I was not easily shocked; the men with whom I had for years foregathered were much given to realism of speech, as well as to picturesquely lurid verbal illustration. But this was different; the language of these men was crammed with filth for filth's sake, and flat, pointless profanity. I have no doubt that my inability to avoid expressing disgust ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... 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 to be a pupil of Pelops, the ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... 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 ...
— The Sculpture and Mural Decorations of the Exposition • Stella G. S. Perry
... graceful open space about Madison Square there stood the massive Arch of Victory, under which America's soldiers had swung when they returned from the front. It was a temporary arch constructed with realism and ingenuity; the Prince passed under it on his way up ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... story about the King was related, eagerly listened to, and commented on by Wikkey with such familiar realism as often startled Lawrence, and made him wonder whether he were allowing irreverence; but which at the same time, threw a wondrously vivid light on the histories which, known since childhood, had lost so much of their interest for himself: and certainly, as far awakening ...
— Wikkey - A Scrap • YAM
... are placed in the mouth of an imagined sailor, but they are none the less diverting. The stanza containing the distich ends with a striking piece of realism: ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... to-day is a strong appetite for sadism; and a novel to be successful must bear the stamp of society rather than the approval of the critic. The reader has gone slumming, and must be shocked in order to be amused. Reviewers tell us of a revolt against realism, that we no longer fawn upon a dull truth, that we crave gauze rather than substance. In fact, realism was never a fad. Truth has never been fashionable; no society takes up ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... by Hermogenes, Socrates, Cratylus, may be described as the conventional, the artificial or rational, and the natural. The view of Socrates is the meeting-point of the other two, just as conceptualism is the meeting-point of nominalism and realism. ...
— Cratylus • Plato
... industry, and enthusiastic admiration of his hero—were all that he needed for the production of a great book; for Dr. Johnson was so unaffected, so outspoken, and so entertaining a man, and every sentence he uttered was so characteristic, that realism was a far better method for his biographer than analysis. Perhaps it is always better when the subject is strongly marked. That Dr. Johnson was a good subject is so evident that the mere statement is sufficient. Mrs. ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... excesses of nature worship. He took from nature its rich, subtle, elaborate forms, but his aim was always to work them into a whole that should have the thrilling simplicity and formality of an idea; to combine prodigious realism with prodigious simplification. Memories of Caravaggio's portentous achievements haunted him. Forms of a breathing, living reality emerged from darkness, built themselves up into compositions as luminously simple and single ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... origin of pure Realism is due to Plato and his doctrine of 'ideas'; for Idealism, in this sense, is not opposed to Realism, but identical with it. Plato seems to have imagined that, as there was a really existing thing corresponding to a singular term, such as Socrates, so there must be a really ...
— Deductive Logic • St. George Stock
... mission, and that of his poets, to satirise all the things of Life, so must Death also be satirised in his person and with his aid. The branch, though it is probably not a very early one, is of an admirable humour, and an uncompromising truth after a fashion, which makes the elaborate realism and pessimism of some other periods look singularly poor, thin, and conventional. The author, for the keeping of his story, begins by showing the doomed fox more than a little "failed"—the shadow of fate dwelling coldly beforehand on him. He is badly mauled at the ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... work of the great Renaissance artists. The 'ghastly glories of saints' the Tuscan revels in. The most famous portion of the most famous Tuscan poem is the 'Inferno'—the part that gloats with minute and truly Tuscan realism over the torments of the damned in every department of the mediaeval hell. And, as if still further to mark the continuity of thought, here in Orcagna's frescoes at Santa Maria Novella you have every horror of the heathen religion ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... 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, the sculptures, the symbols of various ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... Tennyson the aged, whose moral eyes were as the physical eyes of Moses on Pisgah, "undimmed." Bless him for his aged anger! Happily, to-day, realism has lost its charm. We have had enough living in sewers, when the suburbs were near with their breezy heights and quiet homes. Stench needs no apostle. The age has outgrown these hectic folk, who, in the name ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... Master," began one note, "but distinctly foreshadows that later method which made him at once the hope and despair of his contemporaries. In the 'Portrait of the Artist by Himself' we have a canvas that well repays patient study, since here is displayed in its full flower that ruthless realism, happily attenuated by a superbly subtle delicacy of brush work——" It was really quite amazing, and I perceived for the first time that Cousin Egbert must be "a diamond in the rough," as the well-known saying has it. I felt, indeed, that ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... obsolete as our knowledge of truth is enlarged. 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 views of realism ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... boasted of realism will fail chiefly through lack of reality. Never, I fancy, has there been so grave and startling a divorce between the real way a thing is done and the look of it when it is done. I take the nearest and most topical instance to hand a newspaper. Nothing looks ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... dignity. This mean, commonplace, ugly kind of subject had a strange attraction for Browning, as we see in The Inn Album, in Red Cotton Nightcap Country, and elsewhere. I may add that it is curious to find him, in 1841, writing exactly like a modern realist, nearly fifty years before realism of this kind had begun. And this illustrates what I have said of the way in which he anticipated by so many years the kind of work to which the literary world should come. The whole scene between Sebald and Ottima might have been written by a ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... the myths in a way natural to a man who owed more to Greek art and to his own musings than to the close study of Greek literature. His pictures of the infancy of Jupiter, of the deserted Ariadne, of the tragedy of Orpheus and Eurydice, have no elaborate realism in detail. The Royal Academy walls showed, in those days, plenty of marble halls, theatres, temples, and classic groves, reproduced with soulless pedantry. Watts gave us heroic figures, with strong masses and flowing lines, simply grouped and charged with emotion—the ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... imagination are helpless when in presence of the fact," said James Russell Lowell. In answer to which I'll point you "The Open Boat," the sternest, creepiest bit of realism ever penned, and Stevie was ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... 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 out that a new objective ...
— The Inferno • Henri Barbusse
... tardily was something like justice done to Kean's influence on the drama of our time, by Punch, who had been one of the first to sound the note of warning about that 'stage-upholstery' which was the first sign of the growth of realism in dramatic art." Punch loved to contrast the younger Kean with his more gifted father, and had no patience with the raucous voice and bad enunciation of the son; but his sketch of the actor as Sardanapalus (1853), "with a wine-cup of the period," sets on record one of the ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... 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 was right in thinking that this poem, though Burns ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... and whose frown death, and who was the fount of wisdom and 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 Sissie ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... the war correspondents. 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
... an open boat in order to study the effects of tempests. His compositions, which are very numerous, are nearly all variations of one subject, and in a style peculiarly his own, marked by intense realism or faithful imitation of nature. In his later years Backhuysen employed his time in etching and calligraphy. He died in Amsterdam on the 17th ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... an extremest in everything, and he went so far as to denounce Raphael's "Charge to Peter" on the grounds that the Apostles are not dressed as men of that time and place would have been when going out fishing. He held to an almost brutal realism in everything, and preached his doctrine whether men would hear or whether they would forbear. He soon rallied a little coterie of artists about him, and formed a school styled the Pre-Raphaelites. The principal founder of the school was Dante Gabriel ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... asked Kennedy, "can photography be considered as irrefutable evidence? The realism may convince all, except the expert and the initiated after careful study. A shrewd judge will be careful to insist that in every case the negative be submitted and examined for possible ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve
... in the extravagant passion of the second story, but until sensationalism cloyed the public palate, realism was an unnecessary labor. By placing the events in some romantic country like Spain, Portugal, Italy, or even France, any narrative of excessive love could be made to pass current. The Latin countries were vaguely imagined by romantic novelists as a sort ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... colors, and it would be appropriate and effective to suspend in each window a trio of toy balloons, red, white, and blue in color, respectively. Miniature airplanes hung overhead at intervals down the length of the room would add realism. ...
— Entertaining Made Easy • Emily Rose Burt
... in 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 ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford
... interest to Grace, who sought to trace in them the working of his mind in regard to herself. She found it difficult, for his letters were exceedingly impersonal, while the men and things he saw often stood out upon his page with vivid realism. It seemed to her that he grew more shadowy, and that he was wandering rather than travelling, drifting whithersoever his fancy or circumstances pointed the way. It was certain he avoided the beaten paths, and freely indulged his taste for regions remote and comparatively unknown. ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... after tea she either went to see her neighbors or had them come to see her. When it was really dark she lighted the lamp in her parlor and read for an hour, and if it happened to be one of Miss Mary Wilkins's books that she read she expressed doubts as to the realism ...
— The Magic Egg and Other Stories • Frank Stockton
... and is almost if not quite as perfect a short story as any that has since been written in France. 'La Maison du chat-qui-pelote' has been mentioned already on account of its importance in the evolution of Balzac's realism, but while a delightful novelette, it is hardly great, its charm coming rather from its descriptions of bourgeois life than from the working out of its central theme, the infelicity of a young wife married to an unfaithful artist. 'Modeste Mignon' is interesting, and more romantic ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... plays; as men in general prefer a triumph over difficulties to a triumph. A similar satisfaction, not in success but in the overcoming of difficulties, leads him to say of the modern play, The Sisters, that it is the only modern English play 'in which realism in the reproduction of natural dialogue and accuracy in the representation of natural intercourse between men and women of gentle birth and breeding have been found or made compatible with expression in genuine ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... England at least, has felt a little disposed to clothe herself with all the honors of persecution which belong to the real owner of the name. But the bishops, etc. of the Middle Ages knew that the contest between nominalism and realism, for instance, had a hundred times more bearing upon orthodoxy than anything in astronomy, etc. A wrong notion about substance might ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... following estimate of his music by F. Baldensperger is worthy of citation. "The contemplative character of Franck's music which explains his entire technique is rare at the epoch in which his life was cast, an epoch of realism, generally inspired by a taste for the picturesque and the dramatic. Posterity will place Cesar Franck in a niche similar to that of Puvis de Chavannes, whose inspiration, indifferent to all worldly solicitations, flowed ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... 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 ...
— Ralph Gurney's Oil Speculation • James Otis
... which have resulted in the triumphs of modern science. This tendency has pervaded all the channels of human industry. Its effect upon works of fiction has been to introduce into that department of literature, a spirit of realism, and a love of investigating the problems of life and character, which have resulted in the modern novel. Henceforth we shall meet no more ideal beings, but men or women, more or less true to nature. In the fiction of the Restoration are ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... always side by side with more earthly and faulty representatives such as Corilla and Anzoleto, or Julia and Albany, in Narcisse, incarnations of the vanity and instability that are the chief dangers of the profession, drawn with unsparing realism. In Le Chateau des Desertes we find further many admirable theories and suggestive ideas on the subject of the regeneration of the theatre. But it fared with her theatrical as with her political philosophy: she failed in its application, ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... systematic baseness of the former, it is in order to remind her that she once thought them right, and now confesses that they were cruelly wrong. We Irish are realists, and we hold the problems of the present as of more account than any agonies or tyrannies of the past. But our realism has the human touch in it, and that constitutes the second impossibility in the invitation tendered us. Que messieurs les assassins commencent! The anti-Irish legend is not dead nor even sleeping, nor are the resources of calumny yet exhausted. An instance is immediately ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... degree of deception which is the highest form of art. Often we feared lest Sultan, carried 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
... real champagne in "Don Giovanni," in order that Leporello may have opportunities for "comic business" in the supper scene, are demanded by the customs of the operatic stage. Realism generally, indeed, is greatly affected in the modern theatre. The audiences of to-day require not merely that real water shall be seen to flow from a pump, or to form a cataract, but that real wine shall proceed from real bottles, and be fairly swallowed by the performers. ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... takes place in the underworld. The chorus of Furies is both picturesque and effective, and the barking of Cerberus which sounds through it is a touch, which though its naivete may provoke a smile, is characteristic of Gluck's strenuous struggle for realism. Orpheus appears and pleads his cause in accents of touching entreaty. Time after time his pathetic song is broken by a sternly decisive 'No,' but in the end he triumphs, and the Furies grant him passage. The next scene is in the Elysian fields. After an introduction of ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... of amor senilis, and right here if Mansfield took one step more his realism would be appalling, but he stops in time and suggests what he dares not express. This tottering, doddering, slobbering, sniffling old man is in love—he is about to wed a young, beautiful girl. He selects jewels for her—he makes remarks about what would become her beauty, ...
— Love, Life & Work • Elbert Hubbard
... think—talks about a man who is always breaking his shins over his own wit, and it seems to me that this might serve as the basis for a criticism of Meredith's method. But whatever he is, he is not a realist. Or rather I would say that he is a child of realism who is not on speaking terms with his father. By deliberate choice he has made himself a romanticist. He has refused to bow the knee to Baal, and after all, even if the man's fine spirit did not revolt against the noisy assertions of realism, his style would be quite sufficient of itself ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... age; it is even claimed that the tower is the original Saxon. The circumstance that in the representation of the edifice in the Bayeux tapestry there is no tower has been urged against this theory, although architectural realism in embroidery has never been very noticeable. The bells (it is told) were once carried off in a Danish raid; but they brought their captors no luck—rather the reverse, since they so weighed upon the ship that she sank. When the present ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... books. Not so much in modern books as in the books that were written by really poetical and imaginative people sixty or seventy years ago. Nowadays, the authors that are most praised go in for what they call 'realism'—and their realism is very UNreal, and very nasty. For instance, this garden,—these lovely trees,—this dear old house—all these are real—but much too romantic for a modern writer. He would rather describe a dusthole and enumerate ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... exploits supply an episodic story line. Shark attacks, giant squid, cannibals, hurricanes, whale hunts, and other rip-roaring adventures erupt almost at random. Yet this loose structure gives the novel an air of documentary realism. What's more, Verne adds backbone to the action by developing three recurring motifs: the deepening mystery of Nemo's past life and future intentions, the mounting tension between Nemo and hot-tempered ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... 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 ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks
... Piper's attention to historical realism and his use of actual historical models that have helped his work to pass the test of time and have led to his becoming the favorite of a new generation of readers more than twenty-five years ...
— Uller Uprising • Henry Beam Piper, John D. Clark and John F. Carr
... 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 of ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... 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 ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... dolls' furniture, and the dolls, dishes, and there was a counter with dolls' cooking-stoves and ranges bristling with the most delightful realism of pots and pans, at which she gazed so fixedly and breathlessly that she looked almost stupid. Her elders watched half in delight, half with pain, that they could not purchase everything at which she looked. Mrs. Zelotes bought some things surreptitiously, hiding the parcels ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... for ever in judgment upon every impulse of the heart of Adrienne, and makes of pain a stinging poison, and of pleasure but a poor potentiality. Her death-scene is singular and awful—awful in its physical adherence to realism, and singular in that it does not disgust, or even horrify, but leaves a memory of peace with the listener, who has not failed to catch the last strain for sight of the divine and dying eyes." So the critic of the London oracle wrote of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... eternal law." He combines both the romantic and the realistic elements of naturalism, both flames with elemental passion and parades his cynicism, is forever snapping his mood in Don Juan, alternating extravagant and romantic feeling with lines of sardonic and purposely prosaic realism. Shelley is a naturalist, too, not in the realm of sordid values but of Arcadian fancy. The pre-Raphaelites belong here, together with a group of young Englishmen who flourished between 1890 and 1914, of whom John Davidson and Richard Middleton, both suicides, are striking ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... meant for as pernicious a bravo as ever infested the pages of romantic fiction. Cleggett had been slaying these gentry a dozen times a day for years. He had pinked four of them on the way across the bridge, before McCarthy, with his stomach and his realism, stopped the lunge intended for the fifth. But this is not exactly the sort of thing one finds it easy to confide to a policeman, be he ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... Feeling. Thinks he knows the world, from having sifted and sorted a lot of our dustbins; as the modern Realists imagine it's an exposition of positive human nature when they've pulled down our noses to the worst parts—if there's a worse where all are useful: but the Realism of the dogs is to have us by the nose:—excite it and befoul it, and you're fearfully credible! You don't read that olfactory literature. However, friend Carling is a conciliatory carle. Three or four days of the week the lady, he says, drives to her chemist's, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the Tartars, while not exhibiting the highest achievement of the author's power, nevertheless belongs in the group of writings wherein his peculiar excellences are fairly manifested. The obvious quality of its realism has been pointed out already; the masterly use of the principles of suspense and stimulated interest will hardly pass unnoticed. A negative excellence is the absence of that discursiveness in composition, that tendency to digress into superfluous ...
— De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars • Thomas De Quincey
... any, was thrown to the winds. Fear of the consequences—the clink, or maybe the gallows for a last land-fall—which had restrained him in less critical moments when he had both room to run and opportunity, sat lightly on him now. In red realism there flashed through his brain the example of some doughty sailor, the hero of many an anchor-watch and forecastle yarn, who had fought the gang to its last man and yet come off victor. The swift vision fired his blood and ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... narrative; in fiction he may be a romanticist or a realist; in poetry he may be subjective or objective in his treatment of themes. Scott's romanticism, for instance, which delights in mediaeval scenes and incidents, is very unlike Dickens's realism, which depicts the scenes and incidents of actual contemporary life. George Eliot's psychologic novels are different from those of either Scott or Dickens. Bryant's clear descriptions of nature stand in striking contrast ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... 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 in ...
— Essays Towards a Theory of Knowledge • Alexander Philip
... 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
... the first time seems to have become 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 the beauty of the world laid bare, ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... the most characteristic, of the splendours of imperial 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 the ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater
... 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 death of ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... in their descriptions; Milton's Chaos, Shakespeare's Dover Cliff; Johnson's comments; the besetting sins of the two schools; Milton's physical machinery justified; his use of abstract terms; the splendid use of mean associations by Shakespeare; Milton's wise avoidance of mean associations, and of realism; nature of his similes and figures; his use of proper names; his epic catalogues; his personifications; loftiness of his perfected style; the popularity of Paradise Last; imitations, adaptations, and echoes of Milton's style during the 18th ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... of justice 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 as it is. We cannot conceal its heroic side for fear of perpetuating ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... of realizing the dream of a world-State or a collective European State, the Frenchman speaks for his country. France regards the development of European history with simple realism and without ideals. The only weak link in her chain-mail is the belief in the civilizing mission of France. If there is no progress why have a mission ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... centurion, he turns with kindling cheek to his scared mistress—"Come, let us drink and dash the posts with wine!" Then he discourses on the blessings of death; he begins in a semi-ironical vein, but soon, forgetful of his auditors, is borne away on the wings of ecstacy. The intense realism of the writing is appalling. He speaks as a "prophet new inspired," and we listen in wonderment and awe. The language is amazingly strong and ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various
... been humorously said that the French pray to Poe as a literary saint. They have never ceased to wonder at the unusual combination of his analytic reasoning power with his genius for imaginative presentation of romantic materials,—at the realism of his touch and the romanticism of his thought. It is true that many foreign critics consider Poe America's greatest author. An eminent English critic says that Poe has surpassed all the rest of our writers in playing the part of the Pied Piper of Hamelin ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... 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
... character. Her literary essays and 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 logician that he ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... 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
... are as they seem. In art and literature it is the tendency to conceive and represent things as they are, however unsightly and immoral they may be, without any respect to the beautiful, the true, or the good. In Ruskin's teaching mere realism is not art; according to him art is concerned with the rendering and ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... named by Dion Boucicault; by the resuscitation of the spectacle play, with its lavish tinsel and calcium glare and its multitudinous nymphs; by the opera bouffe, with its frequent licentious ribaldry; by the music-hall comedian, with his vulgar realism; and by the idiotic burlesque; with its futile babble and its big-limbed, half-naked girls. Nevertheless there are just as good actors now living as have ever lived, and there is just as fine a sense of dramatic art in the community ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... of hypocrisy with which she covers herself. So I admire Siegfried, and at the same time enjoy Tolstoy's satire; for I like the latter's sturdy humour, which is one of the most striking features of his realism, and which, as he himself noticed, makes him closely resemble Rousseau. Both men show us an ultra-refined civilisation, and both are uncompromising apostles of a return ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... 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 conversation between the parties by ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... the voyages to Lilliput and Brobdingnag, to the flying island of Laputa and the country of the Houyhnhnms, as they read Robinson Crusoe, as stories of wonderful adventure. Swift had all of De Foe's realism, his power of giving veri-similitude to his narrative by the invention of a vast number of small, exact, consistent details. But underneath its fairy tales, Gulliver's Travels is a satire, far more radical than any of Dryden's or Pope's, ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... 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, "Faust," "Don Quixote" and "Ivan"; three concert overtures, a quantity of chamber music, ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... 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.—San Francisco Chronicle. ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... like it for all that, as it was needed to set the School on fire. Then came the other, a stout workman—that one, the truest painter of the century, and altogether classical besides, a fact which not one of the dullards understood. They yelled, of course; they shouted about profanation and realism, when, after all, the realism was only in the subject. The perception remained that of the old masters, and the execution resumed and continued the best bits of work one can find in our public galleries. Both Delacroix and Courbet came at the proper time. Each made a stride ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... Indians, and with the help of a faithful Indian ally carry off a number of the golden images from the temples. Pursued with relentless vigor at last their escape is effected in an astonishing manner. The story is so full of exciting incidents that the reader is quite carried away with the novelty and realism of the narrative. ...
— Gascoyne, The Sandal Wood Trader - A Tale of the Pacific • R. M. Ballantyne
... but of a good many other nations besides," said Villiers—"or if not actual downfall, change and terrific upheaval. France and England particularly are the prey of the Demon of Realism,—and all the writers who SHOULD use their pens to inspire and elevate the people, assist in degrading them. When their books are not obscene, they are blasphemous. Russia, too, joins in the cry of Realism!—Realism! ... Let us have the filth of the gutters, the scourgings ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... front rank of the realistic dramatists of the Irish Theatre.... As a veracious study of life and character among Irish working classes ... it is superior to anything written by Synge, Yeats, or Shaw.... The piece, in its realism, earnest purpose, and dramatic force, is worthy of John Galsworthy, and has the additional merit of being almost entirely free from anything like special pleading. Never prolix or oratorical, the compact ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... itself first 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 ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... Wife' is 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
... them. I fear the day is breaking, and the broad daylight of tradition and ancient truth is coming to end all this delightful nightmare of New York at night. Peasants and priests and all sorts of practical and sensible people are coming back into power, and their stern realism may wither all these beautiful, unsubstantial, useless things. They will not believe in the Seventh Heaven Cigar, even when they see it shining as with stars in the seventh heaven. They will not be affected by advertisements, ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... ripple on a wave; the wave—the large movement which began at the end of the nineteenth century in a reaction against realism and scientific paganism—still goes forward. The wave is essentially the movement which one tends to associate, not very accurately perhaps, with the name of Cezanne: it has nothing to do with Jazz; its most characteristic manifestation is modern painting, which, be it noted, ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... feeling of the artist has not much more to do than the "passions" of an auctioneer's clerk have to do with the compilation of his inventory. A poet himself, Horace wrote for poets; to him the pathetic implied the ideal, the imaginative, the rhetorical; he lived before the age of Realism and the Realists, and would scarcely have comprehended either the men or the method if he could have come across them. Had he done so, however, he would have been astonished to find his canon reversed, and to have perceived that the primary condition of the realist's success, and ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... tears, and passionate enthusiasms. He therefore struck out in a path in which he has had no great followers; for the big men in Russian literature are all Realists. Romanticism is as foreign to the spirit of Russian Realism as it is to French Classicism. What is peculiarly Slavonic about Pushkin is his simplicity, his naivete. Though affected by foreign models, he was close to the soil. This is shown particularly in his prose tales, and it is ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... 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
... 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 ...
— Presentation Pieces in the Museum of History and Technology • Margaret Brown Klapthor
... music in connection with his one opera "Fidelio." I refer to the third "Leonora" overture, and to the music in the prison scene, where the digging of the grave is depicted in the orchestra with a realism worthy of Wagner, and where the music when Leonora levels her pistol at the villain reaches a climax as thrilling as is to be found in any dramatic work, musical or literary. Obviously, it was the intensely dramatic situation which here inspired Beethoven to the grandest effort ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck
... and elegance of form every one hastens to concede. But who would hesitate to give up a part of what the Greeks have bequeathed us rather than lose the marvellous filigree in clay of "Henri Deux," the rich realism of Palissy or the wild and delightful riot of line and color and unequalled delicacy of manipulation presented to us by the Japanese? One and the same eye, as highly and soundly educated as you please, may be charmed almost equally by works of each of these schools and of others not here ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... looked small. Believe me, the tourist looked much smaller. There is indeed another type of traveller, who is not at all small in the moral mental sense, who will confess such disappointments quite honestly, as a piece of realism about his own sensations. In that case he generally suffers from the defect of most realists; that of not being realistic enough. He does not really think out his own impressions thoroughly; or he would generally find they are not so disappointing ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... surely the story of Foma Gordyeeff is told; his life is finished, as lives are being finished each day around us. Besides, it is the way of life, and the art of Gorky is the art of realism. But it is a less tedious realism than that of Tolstoy or Turgenev. It lives and breathes from page to page with a swing and dash and go that they rarely attain. Their mantle has fallen on his young shoulders, and he promises to ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... and with it the romance of the unknown and unexpected. Was it because, at half-past four, one's charm is at lowest ebb? The janitor was sweeping down the hall stairs. The very air was filled with dusty realism—Fran was no longer pretty; ...
— Fran • John Breckenridge Ellis
... learned much from his 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 the most eminent men of his day. ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... difficult thing to do, as I have found. It was not done on my part wholly by design, but rather by instinct, and I imagine that this tendency has run through all my works. It represents the elements of romanticism and of realism in one, and that kind of representation has its dangers, to say nothing of its difficulties. It sometimes alienates the reader, who by instinct and preference is a realist, and it troubles the reader ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... she visited hospitals for consumptives, and even ran up to Davos one winter, when she was preparing to play La Dame aux Camelias. Theo would have done all that if she had been an actress. She was fond of realism in every form, and did not ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... directed his thoughts to Peyton and Claire Morris; how exact Claire had been in the expression of her personality! What, he grasped, was different in her from other women was precisely that; together with an astonishing lack of sentimental bias, it operated with the cutting realism of a surgeon's blade. She had, as ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... you who remember the cold shudder of your childhood, when you heard the elders discussing a prospective dose—intensified by all the horrors of imagination when the discussion was veiled in the "decent obscurity" of French—imagine the grim realism of a language containing words expressive of ...
— International Language - Past, Present and Future: With Specimens of Esperanto and Grammar • Walter J. Clark
... before he dies; no, three—three is more natural—uneven number. Now what shall Tomkins say? Yes. Ah—hum—what the deuce shall I make him say? It must not be too much like what a dying man would say, because the British public is dead against realism. It must not either show any strong contempt for religion; a little mild contempt, of course, goes down and is fashionable, but I must not express it forcibly. He must not either evince a disbelief in immortality—at least that's dangerous ground. Some publishers will accept it and some won't.—Better ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
... nature of poetic irony in the fact that the anarchist should take the very ethics of capitalism and reduce them to an absurdity. It is something in the nature of a satire, sordid and terrible, which the realism of things has here written. The very most cherished ethical ideals of our society are used by the bitterest enemies of that society to arouse the wronged to individual acts of revenge. Quite a number of notable anarchists have been the product of misery and oppression. Their souls were warped, ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... them with greater skill, but equal repulsiveness, in the work of the great Renaissance artists. The 'ghastly glories of saints' the Tuscan revels in. The most famous portion of the most famous Tuscan poem is the 'Inferno'—the part that gloats with minute and truly Tuscan realism over the torments of the damned in every department of the mediaeval hell. And, as if still further to mark the continuity of thought, here in Orcagna's frescoes at Santa Maria Novella you have every horror of the heathen religion ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... first place, Dr. Kramar was attacked as the veritable leader of the Czech nation. In return for his valuable services for this state and for his nation, in return for his endeavours to educate the Czech nation towards realism in politics, he was recompensed by being arrested, imprisoned and sentenced to death, although a member of the delegations and therefore enjoying immunity. He was not brought up before the ordinary tribunal, but before a judge who was absolutely ignorant ...
— Independent Bohemia • Vladimir Nosek
... reality, it is bound to say of the other percept, that, though it may INTEND that reality, and prove this by working change upon it, yet, if it do not resemble it, it is all false and wrong. [Footnote: The difference between Idealism and Realism is immaterial here. What is said in the text is consistent with either theory. A law by which my percept shall change yours directly is no more mysterious than a law by which it shall first change a physical reality, and then ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... the gravity effect, a positive or | | negative acceleration could be given | | out. | | | | This instalment retains its easy | | flow of language and continues to | | develop surprise episodes with a | | remarkable degree of realism. | ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby
... foreshadows that later method which made him at once the hope and despair of his contemporaries. In the 'Portrait of the Artist by Himself' we have a canvas that well repays patient study, since here is displayed in its full flower that ruthless realism, happily attenuated by a superbly subtle delicacy of brush work——" It was really quite amazing, and I perceived for the first time that Cousin Egbert must be "a diamond in the rough," as the well-known saying has ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... 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 ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... interest is unflagging throughout. Never has Mr. Crawford done more brilliant realistic work than here. But his realism is only the case and cover for those intense feelings which, placed under no matter what humble conditions, produce the most dramatic and the most tragic situations.... This is a secret of genius, to take the most coarse and common material, the meanest surroundings, the most sordid material ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... a series of books, to popularize the new realism as Schopenhauer had popularized ...
— Flappers and Philosophers • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... you'd written. I congratulate you. That man's a great artist, but he never seems to get a good play; he's always much, much greater than his part. I'm sure you've given him a real play at last. I remember your principles: Realism; no compromise! The truth; no shirking it, no tampering with it! You've struck out ...
— Harlequin and Columbine • Booth Tarkington
... 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 ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... spread the epic table of sorrow without finding a place upon it for scraps of the hoggish anatomy which are not nameable except in strictly scientific or wholly boorish speech. But it seems necessary to the new realism that its devotee should be able to write for the perusal of gentlemen and ladies about things he dared not mention orally in the presence of either; so that what a drunken cabman would be deservedly kicked for saying in a lady's hearing may ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray
... of my ballads. It is by way of being an experiment. Its theme is commonplace, its language that of everyday. It is a bit of realism ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service
... portrayal 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 Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... appear more entirely apart from the every-day world, for it ends abruptly in the middle of the stream,—so that, if a cavalcade of the knights and ladies of romance should issue from the old walls, they could never tread on earthly ground, any more than we, approaching from the side of modern realism, can overleap the gulf between our domain and theirs. Yet, if we seek to disenchant ourselves, it may readily be done. Crossing the bridge on which we stand, and passing a little farther on, we come to the entrance of the castle, abutting on the highway, and hospitably ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... "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 ...
— The Voice - Its Production, Care and Preservation • Frank E. Miller
... he not?" "A question, that, of temperament," or "A matter of the definition of words"; and other charming generalities, which sound well, and seem to go far, and are pleasingly irrefutable. Sometimes the discussion turned on Art—on points of colour or technique; whether realism was quite justified; and should we be pre-Raphaelites? When these discussions started, Christian's eyes would grow bigger and clearer, with a sort of shining reasonableness; as though they were trying to see into the ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... is unreal in the commonplace of ordinary life. Its very effectiveness is too apt for the dramatist, who can ill afford to tamper further with the indifferent banalities of actual existence. The poet, unhampered by the exigencies of dramatic realism, can safely, and artistically, achieve an equally exact, even a higher verisimilitude, by means which are, or should be, beyond adoption by ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... destroyed. Shaw is more moderate; and only asks that they should be desecrated. Upon this note, both about sex and conflict, he was destined to dwell through much of his work with the most wonderful variations of witty adventure and intellectual surprise. It may be doubted perhaps whether this realism in love and war is quite so sensible as it looks. Securus judicat orbis terrarum; the world is wiser than the moderns. The world has kept sentimentalities simply because they are the most practical things in the world. ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... 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 degrades ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... upon that story, Mr. Pater has deliberately omitted this episode, which is indeed like a spot of blood-stained mud upon some perfect tissue of silver flowers on silver ground. It is a piece of cruellest realism, because quite quiet and unforced, in the midst of a kind of fairy-land idyl of almost childish love, the love of the beautiful son of the lord of Beaucaire for a beautiful Saracen slave girl. For, although ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... (Gerberding, l.c., 77.) Ordination, Dr. Haas declares, is "the prerogative of the whole Church." It includes "the separation for the ministry with invocation of blessing and consecration under divine approval." For this reason "ordination is not repeated." (112.) "This realism of a divine gift [in ordination] was apparently not held by Luther.... He declares the right of all believers to the office, because of the spiritual priesthood, and sees the consecration (Weihe) in the call. 'Ordo est ministerium et ...
— American Lutheranism - Volume 2: The United Lutheran Church (General Synod, General - Council, United Synod in the South) • Friedrich Bente
... brother artist who himself does perfectly unrecognisable sketches of farm-yards"—he waved a golden-syrup spoon towards the Colonel and the manure-heap—"and yet demands a finnicking and altogether contemptible realism in the matter of trench maps. Pass ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Oct. 10, 1917 • Various
... as I did, you will suddenly turn and go out into the fresh air—the fearful realism of the marble will for the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... 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 ...
— Prose Fancies (Second Series) • Richard Le Gallienne
... into a ghost or a shadow. The African spirit, in the fiery words of a Tertullian and an Augustine, ran into a materialism, which, opposed to the opposite extreme of idealism, saved to the Church its healthy realism. ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... politics was no small factor in bringing about civil service reform. They established German newspapers by the hundreds and maintained many German schools and German colleges. They freely indulged their love for German customs. But while their sentimentalism was German, their realism was American. They considered it an honor to become American citizens. Their leaders became American leaders. Carl Schurz was not an isolated example. He was associated with a host of ...
— Our Foreigners - A Chronicle of Americans in the Making • Samuel P. Orth
... attempt in the Homeric[7] style, motived by Wolf's "Prolegomena" and Voss's "Luise." It is Homeric only in its circumstantiality, in the repetition of the same epithets applied to the same persons, and in the Greek realism of Goethe's nature. The theme is very un-Homeric; it is thoroughly modern and German,— "Germans themselves I present, to the humbler dwelling I lead you, Where with Nature as guide man is ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... times doubling, jumping, even standing on eminences and crowing insultingly, like a cock, and not until he had only breath left to chuckle did the stout man vanish from the Den. Elspeth, now a cabin-boy, was so shaken by the realism of the night's adventures that Gavinia (able seaman) took her home, and when Mr. Sandys and his Boatswain met at the Cuttle Well neither could ...
— Sentimental Tommy - The Story of His Boyhood • J. M. Barrie
... the eyes for nothing, or whose brain held audience with messengers for nothing, Who contains believers and disbelievers, who is the most majestic lover, Who holds duly his or her triune proportion of realism, spiritualism, and of the aesthetic or intellectual, Who having consider'd the body finds all its organs and parts good, Who, out of the theory of the earth and of his or her body understands by subtle analogies all other theories, ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... about 1400, and dying in 1443, we owe a great step in art towards realism. It was he, says Vasari, who first attained the clear perception that painting is only the close imitation, by drawing and colouring simply, of all the forms presented by nature showing them as they are produced by her, and that whoever shall ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... Greece supplied the stage to French statesmen during the last few years; for it is not often that a Government in the pursuit of practical interests overlooks so completely moral principles, flouts so openly national sentiments, and, while priding itself on realism, shuts its eyes ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
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