"Innovator" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sentiments in France is vanity. The wounded vanity of the many induced a thirst for Equality; though, as the most ardent innovator will some day discover, Equality is an impossibility. The Royalists pricked the Liberals in the most sensitive spots, and this happened specially in the provinces, where either party accused the other of unspeakable atrocities. In those days the ...
— The Collection of Antiquities • Honore de Balzac
... the only joy, a true type of the Renaissance spirit, metamorphosed by ironic fate into a monk; he has luminously indicated the true end and aim of art and the false asceticism of so-called "religious" art, in the characteristic comments and confessions of an innovator in ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... was accustomed to be moved. On the other hand, he was filled with a mixture of contempt and hatred for anything which threatened to disturb that arrangement and put him to extra trouble. Contempt would predominate if the innovator had no chance of emerging from obscurity. But if there were any danger of his succeeding, then hatred would predominate—of course until the moment when he had gained ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... services in the temple, and that all his spare time was devoted to works of benevolence and general utility; and as they bent devoutly as he passed through the streets they little dreamed that the high priest of Osiris was regarded by his chief brethren as a dangerous innovator. ...
— The Cat of Bubastes - A Tale of Ancient Egypt • G. A. Henty
... (also J[a]takis. First Part) and Oldenberg (now in second edition). For Northern Buddhism Koeppen's Religion is still excellent, although it is vitiated by the point of view taken by the author, who regards Buddha as an emancipator, a political innovator, etc. Davids has two recent articles on Buddhist sects, JRAS. xxiii. 409; xxiv. 1 (see ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... reposes on some subtlety of feeling, not so much as touched upon in Shakespeare, to express which, like a pioneer, you must venture forth into zones of thought still unsurveyed, and become yourself a literary innovator? For even in love there are unlovely humours; ambiguous acts, unpardonable words, may yet have sprung from a kind sentiment. If the injured one could read your heart, you may be sure that he would understand and pardon; but, alas! the heart cannot be shown - it has to be demonstrated ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... shown when his "Orpheus" was first produced, Oct. 5, 1762. Its success determined him at once to acquaint the musical world with his purpose to reform the opera by making it dramatically musical instead of purely lyric, thus paving the way for the great innovator of Baireuth. "Alceste," produced in 1767, was the first embodiment of these ideas. Strong criticism greeted it, to which he replied with "Iphigenie en Aulide," written in 1772, and performed for the first time in Paris two years later, ...
— The Standard Operas (12th edition) • George P. Upton
... say, fights between two individual ships. In the former the achievements of Nelson stand out with incomparable brilliancy. It would be impossible to describe his method fully in such a paper as this. We may, however, say that Nelson was an innovator, and that his tactical principles and methods have been generally misunderstood down to this very day. If ever there was an admiral who was opposed to an unthinking, headlong rush at an enemy, it was he. Yet this is the ...
— Sea-Power and Other Studies • Admiral Sir Cyprian Bridge
... told so spirited a story, that most of the inhabitants strolled up, one after another, to look at the innovator, while that individual himself, with the modesty which seems inseparable from true greatness, retired to the most secluded of the three apartments into which the cave was divided, and declined all the attentions ...
— Romance of California Life • John Habberton
... creating the taste by which he is to be enjoyed." Wordsworth in his own generation was ridiculed; Millet, when he ceased painting nudes for art-dealers' windows and ventured to express himself, faced starvation. Every artist is in some measure an innovator; for his own age he is a romanticist. But the romanticist of one age becomes a classic for the next; and his performance in its turn gives laws to his successors. Richard Strauss, deriving in some sense from Wagner, makes the older man seem a classic and conservative. Then a new mind again ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... perfectly with the despotism of the Tokugawas, the "Tycoons" who in Yedo ruled from 1603 to 1868. Nothing new was permitted, and any attempt at modification, enlargement, or improvement was not only frowned and hissed down as impious innovation, but usually brought upon the daring innovator the ban of the censor, imprisonment, banishment, or death by enforced suicide.[10] In Yedo, the centre of Chinese learning, and in other parts of the country, there were, indeed, thinkers whose philosophy did not ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... In the great double church of Assisi, built by the Franciscans over the grave of St. Francis within a few years of his death, Giotto has illustrated the whole story of his life. An isolated reproduction of one scene would give you no idea of their power. In many respects he was an innovator, and by the end of his life had broken away completely from the Byzantine school of painting. He composed each one of the scenes from the life of St. Francis in an original and dramatic manner, and so vividly ...
— The Book of Art for Young People • Agnes Conway
... rawness of a grey December day held sway over St. James's Park, that sanctuary of lawn and tree and pool, into which the bourgeois innovator has rushed ambitiously time and again, to find that he must take the patent leather from off his feet, for the ground on which he stands is ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... one-tenth of Vachel Lindsay's work. However radical in subject, they are conservative in form, following the precedents of the ode from its origin. It is necessary to insist that while the material is new, the method is consciously old. He is no innovator in rime or rhythm. But the chants, while few in number, are the most individual part of his production; and up to the ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... than a deep and earnest thinker." The words as they stand would be a good description of a certain type of politician; they would fit, for instance, very well on Mr. Gladstone; but they do Burke less than justice. He was an innovator in modern political thought, and his application of the historical method to the study of institutions is in its way a not less epoch-making achievement than Bacon's application of the inductive method to science. At a time when current political ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... speak, on their own ground, recognizing that the subjects of which they discoursed were, indeed, matter for scientific investigation. His attitude seemed to many conservative persons in his day a dangerous one; he was regarded as an innovator; he taught men to think and to raise questions where, before, the traditions of the fathers had seemed a sufficient guide to ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... this latter statue the god stands erect with the left foot slightly advanced, and the hands outstretched. The socket of the eye is hollow and was probably filled with some bright substance. Canachos was undoubtedly an innovator, and in the stronger modelling of the head and neck, the more vigorous posture of the body of his statue, he shows an advance on the more conventional and limited art ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... from Constantinople, who covered the churches of Italy with a sublime monotony of Byzantine traditions. But the Gothic blood was burning in the Italian veins; and the Florentines and Pisans could not rest content in the formalism of the Eastern splendour. The first innovator was, I believe, Giunta of Pisa, the second Cimabue, the third Giotto; the last only being a man of power enough to effect a complete revolution in the artistic ...
— Giotto and his works in Padua • John Ruskin
... which shall become a mighty river. Not less casual perhaps, certainly not less momentous in its consequences, was the first attempt, by some enterprising ecclesiastic, to enliven the hardly understood Latin service of the Church. Who the innovator was is unrecorded. The form of his innovation, however, may be guessed from this, that even in the fifth century human tableaux had a place in the Church service on festival occasions. All would be simple: a number of the junior clergy grouped ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... the New World who looks more with eagerness to the future than with satisfaction on the past, and whose pre-eminent optimism is inspired by his ardent appreciation of the living present. Walt Whitman stood forth as an innovator into such realms, where the rigor of conditions demanded an abstract compliance with rules which were based on absolute truths, and where a swerving from them was evidence of impotence. His unconventional forms, the rhymeless rhythm of his verses, which, in appearance, resembled ...
— The Writer, Volume VI, April 1892. - A Monthly Magazine to Interest and Help All Literary Workers • Various
... rebellion and treason; a rejection of the determinations of the church in matters of doctrine was identified in most men's minds with rejection of the authority of the civil magistrate;[250] and every one who dared to dispute the jurisdiction of Rome was regarded as a dangerous (p. 326) innovator, and an enemy to his ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 2 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... a futile Mrs. Partington, an isolated antagonist of the inevitable, and only mentioned here for the sake of dramatic effect. Not at all! So far from being laughed at everywhere as an absurd reactionary he was held in the highest Buda-Pest circles to be a perilous innovator. He actually spoke about conciliating the Austro-Hungarian Slavs: not so Count Tisza. "What is happening in Austria," exclaimed the grim Calvinist a few months before, "are strange, grotesque displays of the ridiculous symptoms of the presumptuous ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein
... his under-sheriff not to give white gloves on the occasion of a maiden assize at Carlisle, and also through the mouth of his subordinate, declined to pay the officers of the circuit certain customary fees. To put the innovator to shame, Sir William Gascoigne, the judge before whom the case was laid, observed in open court, "Though I can compel an immediate payment, it being a demand of right, and not a mere gift, yet I will set him an example by gifts which ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... less. Among his bitter opponents at first was Dr. Rigollot, who in 1855, searching earnestly for materials to refute the innovator, dug into the deposits of St. Acheul—and was converted: for he found implements similar to those of Abbeville, making still more certain the existence of man during the Drift period. So, too, Gaudry a year later made ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... the formidable array of Facts with which the work bristled, by sciolistic criticisms, bigoted denunciations, or timid, faint praise. Conservatives in Politics and Religion exhibited him as a dangerous innovator, a social iconoclast, the would-be destroyer of all that was sacred in Institutions and in Religion. Theologians branded him as immoral and atheistic, and poured upon him a torrent of ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... about the minutiae of ritual, appears as a personality with certain traits that are probably historical. Many remarks attributed to him are abrupt and scornful and the legend indicates dimly that he was once thought a dangerous innovator. But, as has happened so often since, this early heretic became the corner stone of later orthodoxy. He belonged to the school of the Yajur Veda and was apparently the main author of the new or White recension in which the prayers and directions are more or less separate, ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... meant as a cut to the reverend Farniente. He looked blank, but evidently wanted the boldness and ingenuity to frame an answer to this redoubtable innovator. At last he gaped at me to help ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... theology, or startles them with a new idea in his interpretation of Scripture, it is not unlikely that their suspicions of his orthodoxy will be awakened. If he does any thing out of the common course, he is an innovator. If, from the multiplicity of his cares and engagements, he is now and then obliged to preach an old sermon, or does not visit so much as might be expected, he is lazy. For these and for other delinquencies, as adjudged by these associates, it becomes their conscientious duty to admonish ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... capable of divining the man of the future in this modest thinker who would not accept the word of the masters interested, but in opposing the theory of transformation, far from being reactionary, Fabre revealed himself, at least in the domain of animal psychology, as an innovator, a true precursor. ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... was not an innovator—he simply expressed what the many wished to hear—he was caught in the current of the time: he was part and parcel of the Renaissance. And he was a loyal Churchman. None of his diatribes were against the Church itself—he wished to benefit the Church by freeing it from the faults that he ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... prescribed rhythms and duration. Little by little the emotions, the natural expression of which is music, could no longer be restricted to these dance forms and rhythms; and gradually the latter were modified by each daring innovator in turn. This "daring" of human beings, in breaking through the trammels of the dance in order to express what lay within their souls in the language that properly belonged to it, would seem almost ludicrous to us, were we ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... condiments, but such as we use are the best that man has invented. And we know how to use them. I have heard an impatient innovator scoff at the English law on the subject of mustard, and demand why, in the nature of things, mustard should not be eaten with mutton. The answer is very simple; this law has been made by the English palate—which ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... was a firm believer in new and higher destinies for women. He went farther than she could concede the right of human speculation to go; he was, in fact, as Radical there as Nevil Beauchamp politically; and would not the latter innovator stare, perchance frown conservatively, at a prospect of woman taking counsel, in council, with men upon public affairs, like the women in the Germania! Mr. Austin, if this time he talked in earnest, deemed that Englishwomen were on the road to win such a promotion, and would win it ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... he fled into the camp of the Semi-Judaising party, publishing a book De Christo non invocando, which was answered by Faustus Socinus, the founder of Socinianism. The Prince of Transylvania, Christopher Bathori, condemned David as an impious innovator and preacher of strange doctrines, and cast him into prison, where he died in 1579. There is extant a letter of David to the Churches of Poland concerning ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... Thus, if the innovator be a religious soul, grown conscious of some new spiritual principle, he will try to find support for his inspiration in some lost book of the law or in some early divine revelation corrupted, as he will assert, by wicked men, or even in some direct voice from heaven; no delusion ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... all things he and they were liberals, and, as was natural at this stage, democrats; contemplating root-and-branch innovation by aid of the hustings and ballot-box. Hustings and ballot-box had speedily to vanish out of Sterling's thoughts: but the character of root-and-branch innovator, essentially of "Radical Reformer," was indelible with him, and under all forms could be traced as his character ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... for assuming that the Church at Rome probably had Adoptionist proclivities is the undeniable fact that early in the second century Hermas held this view, and there is no evidence that he was an innovator. ...
— Landmarks in the History of Early Christianity • Kirsopp Lake
... first innovator in education, and, glaring as his faults were, he succeeded in effecting radical changes in the entire circle of youthful training. Sprung from a degraded class, addicted to vulgar habits, and dissipated beyond the countenance of good society, ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... then, when Judaea fell, did the Jews remain? Greek culture does not need Greeks to carry it on; why does Jewish culture need Jews? The first suggestion to be offered is this:—Israel is the protestant people. Every religious or moral innovator has also been a protestant. Socrates, Jesus, Luther; Isaiah, Maimonides, Spinoza; all of them, besides their contributions—very unequal contributions—to the positive store of truth, assumed also the negative attitude of protesters. ...
— Judaism • Israel Abrahams
... to a mother's heart,' said Portia, 'to know that her two sons, and her only sons, are, one the open enemy of his country, the other—what shall I term you, Lucius?—an innovator upon her ancient institutions; and while he believes and calls himself—sincerely, I doubt not—the friend of his country, is in truth, as every good Roman would say—not an enemy, my son, I cannot use that word, but as it were—an unconscious ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... that, when once the equality of conditions has become the old and uncontested state of society, and has imparted its characteristics to the manners of a nation, men will easily allow themselves to be thrust into perilous risks by an imprudent leader or a bold innovator. Not indeed that they will resist him openly, by well-contrived schemes, or even by a premeditated plan of resistance. They will not struggle energetically against him, sometimes they will even applaud him—but they do not follow him. ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... might not be honoured with, though it was in his mind, because he shed blood abundantly and made great wars." The new Protector was a weak and worthless man; but the bulk of the nation were content to be ruled by one who was at any rate no soldier, no Puritan, and no innovator. Richard was known to be lax and worldly in his conduct, and he was believed to be conservative and even royalist in heart. The tide of reaction was felt even in his Council. Their first act was to throw aside one of the greatest of Cromwell's reforms, and to fall back in the ...
— History of the English People, Volume VI (of 8) - Puritan England, 1642-1660; The Revolution, 1660-1683 • John Richard Green
... Crood's niece away from under his very nose," said Tansley. "But now that you've brought personal matters into the quarrel, the old chap'll move every piece he has on the board to checkmate you. It won't do to have you on the Council, Brent, you're too much of an innovator. Now this town—the real town!—doesn't want innovation. Innovation in an ancient borough like this ...
— In the Mayor's Parlour • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... it aroused them from ambrosial slumbers, with biting sarcasm, and most disagreeably told truths. And most heartily did a certain proportion of their lordships curse the owner of that voice, for a talented, eloquent, meddlesome innovator. But on all his great estates he was adored by the labourers and town's-folk, though hated by the farmers and country 'squires; for he was the earliest and fiercest of the reform ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... accumulation tend to make the man a conservator. Once let him possess an abundance of the world's goods and his chief object is to hold what he has gained. The instincts which urge toward construction and creation tend to make man an innovator, initiator, an improver. The side of man's nature that urges him to possess, directs him toward wealth and power. The side of his nature that leads him to create points to invention, to craftmanship, to artistry. Thus the possessive and the creative instincts ...
— The Next Step - A Plan for Economic World Federation • Scott Nearing
... his poetry are noble and on the whole clear. He was an independent thinker, though not an innovator, a conservative liberal, and was so widely popular because he expressed in frank but reverent fashion the moderately advanced convictions of his time. His social ideals, in which he is intensely interested, are ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... thoughts ran furiously all over the place to avoid that pit. And now he found himself flashing at moments into wild and hopeless rebellion against the institution of marriage, of which he had hitherto sought always to be the dignified and smiling champion against the innovator, the over-critical and the young. He had never rebelled before. He was so astonished at the violence of his own objection that he lapsed from defiance to an incredulous examination of his own novel attitude. "It's not true marriage I object to," he told himself. "It's this marriage like ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... the last judgment—all of which was foreign to them; not one word of all that had their Master told them, and they knew only what he did tell them. They naturally looked upon him as an unscrupulous innovator. They had not experience and forethought enough to understand that Paul's success among the heathens depended on that means. They were pious men who prayed much, believed seriously, and had no knowledge of the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... creature, too, like all of his tribe, speaks of the medical profession as a great confederation of bigoted monopolists. He, too, says that "If an innovator should appear, holding out hope to those in despair, and curing disorders which the faculty have recorded as irremediable, he is at once, and without inquiry, denounced as an empiric and an impostor." He, too, cites the inevitable names of Galileo and Harvey, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... Griffin and Young, at least, are of the distinctly modern school; but note how individually each has utilized his inheritance of vibrating color and light. On wall A are two fine figure studies by Robert Reid, an innovator and a really great painter, though he did not show it when he painted the panels ...
— An Art-Lovers guide to the Exposition • Shelden Cheney
... occupant are very likely to fall victims to a rapid consumption." In this way did Crony contrive to beguile the time, until we found ourselves entering the arena in front of the Dean's house, Westminster. "Here, alone," said my old friend, "the hand of the innovator has not been permitted to intrude; this spot remains unpolluted; but, for the neighbourhood, alas!" sighed Crony, "that is changed indeed. The ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... he was persecuted. They laid plots to take his life. He sought shelter in the castle of his uncle, Abu Taleh; but he died. Then Mohammed's wife Cadijeh died. The priests of an idolatrous religion became furious. He had laid his hands on their idols. He was regarded as a disorganizer, an innovator, a most dangerous man. His fortunes became darker and darker; he was hated, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume V • John Lord
... stand unrelated. He is the product of his age, is articulated with its life, performs an office which is of consequence to it. He is the connecting link between the past and the future. He takes what was and so combines it anew as to produce what is to be. He is the innovator, the initiator, the agent of transformation, the creator of a new order. Hence he is the exceptional man. The masses of men are imitators. They make nothing new, add nothing to the mechanism of social structure, introduce no new functions, produce no achievements, do nothing which changes the order ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... in his allegorical pieces, Giotto appears as a great innovator, a number of situations suggested by the Scriptures being now either represented for the first time or seen in a totally new form. Well-known subjects are enriched with numerous subordinate figures, making the picture more truthful and more intelligible; as in the Flight ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... Innovator! Wahhabi! Slay him! Kill him!"—Are these likely to subside the while thou wait? By the tomb of St. John there, get thee down, and quickly. Bravo, Shakib!—He rushes to the tribune, drags him down by the jubbah, and, with the help of another friend, hustles him out of the Mosque. But the thirst for ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... to the first charge, it could not be technically proved that he had assailed the gods, for he was exact in his legal worship; but really and virtually there was some foundation for the accusation, since Socrates was a religious innovator if ever there was one. His lofty realism was subversive of popular superstitions, when logically carried out. As to the second charge, of corrupting youth, this was utterly groundless; for he had uniformly enjoined courage, and temperance, and obedience to the ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... ardent lover of the stage; thus symbolizing at once with the most conservative and the most radical tendencies of the age: for, strange as it may seem, the Drama then led the van of progress; Shakespeare being even a more audacious innovator in poetry and art than Bacon was in philosophy. Be this as it may, Forman evidently took great delight in the theatre, and he kept a diary of what he witnessed there. Not many years ago, the manuscript of this diary was discovered by Mr. Collier in the Ashmolean Museum, ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... writer—now, unhappily, lost to us—about the inevitable incompatibility of law and gospel. Both of them had seats in the Executive Council, and, under the then-existing state of things, were official but irresponsible advisers of the Crown's representative. More than one would-be innovator of those days had been made to feel the weight of their hands, without in the least knowing, or even suspecting, whence the blow proceeded. They were the head and front of the junto of oligarchs who formed the Vehmgericht known as the Family Compact, and for all practical purposes their ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... life, was to regenerate European culture. In the first period of his relationship with Wagner, he thought that he had found the man who was prepared to lead in this direction. For a long while he regarded his master as the Saviour of Germany, as the innovator and renovator who was going to arrest the decadent current of his time and lead men to a greatness which had died with antiquity. And so thoroughly did he understand his duties as a disciple, so wholly was he devoted to this cause, that, in spite ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... world. The misfortune of his brothers, of the whole species, appeals loudly to the heart of the man of feeling; their abasement appeals still louder: enthusiasm is inflamed, and in souls endowed with energy the burning desire aspires impatiently to action and facts. But has this innovator examined himself to see if these disorders of the moral world wound his reason, or if they do not rather wound his self-love? If he does not determine this point at once, he will find it from the impulsiveness with which he pursues ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... the masterpiece of Hume's close friend, Adam Smith, it must be remembered, did not appear before 1776, so that, in political economy, no less than in philosophy, Hume was an original, a daring, and a fertile innovator. ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... reflection and memory, had led to Wilhelm von Osten turning his thoughts towards this work of animal tuition. Public opinion was divided; there were some who took the subject seriously and who were grateful to this innovator for thus opening a new path of inquiry; yet many were sceptical—and the scientific commission called together in 1904 to investigate the subject, finally knew no better than to heap their ridicule on ...
— Lola - The Thought and Speech of Animals • Henny Kindermann
... hope to escape the fate of all other ideas of innovation. Indeed, as the most revolutionary and uncompromising innovator, Anarchism must needs meet with the combined ignorance and venom of the world it aims ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... later. It is commonly said that Racine wrote in the conventional and courtly taste of his own day. In reality his presentation of tragic passions in their terror and their truth shocked the aristocratic proprieties which were the mode. He was an innovator, and his audacity at once conquered and repelled. It was known that Racine was engaged on Phedre. The Duchesse de Bouillon and her brother the Duc de Nevers were arbiters of elegance in literature, and decreed that it should fail. A rival play on the same ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... was room for Crabbe as a poet, and there was still more room for him as an innovator in the art of fiction. Macaulay, in his essay on Addison, has pointed out how the Roger de Coverley papers gave the public of his day the first taste of a new and exquisite pleasure. At the time "when Fielding was birds-nesting, and Smollett was unborn," ...
— Crabbe, (George) - English Men of Letters Series • Alfred Ainger
... of classical art with care. His unerring sense of form, his artistic restraint in a day when caprice was the ruling fashion, and the conciseness of his expression, are doubtless due to classical influence. But, at the same time, he was an innovator, one of the first forerunners of modern realism. He describes and characterizes with careful, often microscopic detail; his psychological analysis is remarkably exact and incisive; and he fearlessly uses the ugly or the trivial when either better ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... Plato's splendid imaginings had yielded neither a secure basis to the thinker nor a moral guidance to the common man. Lucretius's interpretation of all events as the product of material law had small power to sustain or cheer when the intellectual glow of the bold innovator had subsided. Thoughtful men sought as their one supreme necessity an adequate and worthy rule of life. So there was wrought out, or grew, the Stoic philosophy. Based on an intellectual theory, its working strength lay in its consonance with the best habits and aptitudes engendered in the world's ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... his struggle for an education. At the age of thirty-three he took his seat on the school-bench at Barcelona. In 1526 he entered the University at Alcala. He was here looked upon as a dangerous innovator, and was imprisoned six weeks, by order of the Inquisition, for preaching without authority, since he was not in holy orders. After his release he attended the University of Salamanca, but he finally took his degree ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart
... vigorous partisan of the cross-God men, and an innovator of ritual, found amusement in watching the Baptist missionaries standing knee-deep in the river washing the souls of ...
— The Keepers of the King's Peace • Edgar Wallace
... been ordered by the authorities to remove a lightning-conductor from his house within three days, as being a mischievous practical paradox, as well as a danger and an annoyance to his neighbours. Robespierre pleaded the innovator's case on appeal, and won it. He defended a poor woman who had been wrongfully accused by a monk belonging to the powerful corporation of a great neighbouring abbey. The young advocate did not even shrink ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... to leave France for three years, under the pretext of visiting some of the places rendered celebrated during the late wars; but that if he preferred a diplomatic mission I would make a suitable provision for his expenses; and the great innovator, Time, might effect great changes during the period of his absence. But my foolish Council affirmed to me that his guilt, as a principal, being evident, it was absolutely necessary to bring him to trial; and now his sentence is only that of a pickpocket. What ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... sense of life; and it faced eagerly questions of religion, of philanthropy, of education, of trade, as one after another they presented themselves before it. Above all it clung to the young minister whose ideas were its own, who, alien as his temper seemed from that of an innovator, came boldly to the front with projects for a new Parliament, a new finance, a new international policy, a new imperial policy, a new humanitarian policy. It was this oneness of Pitt's temper with the temper of the men he ...
— History of the English People, Volume VIII (of 8) - Modern England, 1760-1815 • John Richard Green
... universal literary fashion of his day. However, he already gave strong indication of the peculiarly Russian genius for naturalness or realism, and was a true Russian in his simplicity of style. In no sense an innovator, but taking the cue for his poetry from Byron and for his prose from the romanticism current at that period, he was not in advance of his age. He had a revolutionary streak in his nature, as his Ode to Liberty and other bits of verse and his intimacy with the Decembrist rebels show. ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... will apply perfectly well to our table-lands, mesas, the mountains of our bad-lands, even to our Catskills and to many elevations of this nature in France and in northern Africa. But Lamarck unfortunately does not stop here, but with the zeal of an innovator, by no means confined to his time alone, claims that the mountain masses of the Alps and the Andes were carved out of plains which had been raised above the sea-level to the present heights of ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... the study of more recent turpitude, is preparing an analytical memoir on the first murder, that of ABEL by CAIN. With all his well-known thoroughness he reconstructs the crime and shows in what particulars CAIN, although an innovator, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, March 19, 1919 • Various
... the minds of both as the innovator, for though not a farmer he was closely leagued with farming operations. And as if in response to their thought he came up at that moment, looked at the machine, walked round it, and handled it as if he knew something about its make. The two watchers ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... engaged in: He in a while arrived to that height of folly and wickedness that he wrote and published a large book, in five parts, to which he maliciously gave for a title, "The Christian Quaker distinguished from the Apostate and Innovator," thereby arrogating to himself and those who were of his party the topping style of Christian Quaker, and no less impiously than uncharitably branding and rejecting all others, even the main body of Friends, for apostates ...
— The History of Thomas Ellwood Written by Himself • Thomas Ellwood
... is a drastic repression of any incipient rebelliousness, through the enforcement of custom or explicit law in the ways we have indicated; the fear of a heavy discouragement to any innovator. If men dared to defy the community morals, they were very likely to be put to death before the habit of free judgment had much time to spread. There was thus a sort of artificial selection for survival of the conventional type, and weeding-out of the freethinker and moral genius. Even in historic ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... individuality and, perhaps, his chief excellence as a story-writer lay in his use of strictly logical methods, in his ability to make the most impossible yarn seem real by his reasonable way of telling it. Moreover, he was a discoverer, an innovator, a maker of new types, since he was the first to introduce in his stories the blend of calm, logical science and wild fancy of a terrifying order; so he served as an inspiration as well as a point of departure ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... are the natural products of the individual character and the social environment. One is born a conservative or an innovator just as one is born a painter or a surgeon. Therefore the socialists have no contempt for or bitterness toward the sincere representatives of any faction of the conservative party, though they combat their ideas unrelentingly. ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... first public appearance eleven years before Chateaubriand found a publisher for his Essai sur les Revolutions, wherein the great innovator first used the American materials that he worked over more effectively in his travels, tales, and memoirs. In Saint-John de Crevecoeur, we have a contemporary—a correspondent, even—of Franklin; but if our author shared many of poor Richard's interests, ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... of its creeds and mysteries with practical life, in the new meaning given to the old and familiar, in the acceptance in thorough earnest, and with keen purpose to call it into action, of what had been guarded and laid by with dull reverence. Dr. Newman can hardly be called in these sermons an innovator on the understood and recognised standard of Anglican doctrine; he accepted its outlines as Bishop Wilson, for instance, might have traced them. What he did was first to call forth from it what it really meant, the awful heights and ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... such an innovator,' Elena was saying to Donna Francesca, as she dipped her fingers into warm water in a pale blue finger-glass rimmed with silver, 'Why do you not revive the ancient fashion of having the water offered to one after dinner with a basin and ewer? The modern ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio |
