"Crudeness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... quaint, without any trace of affectation. There was a sturdy genuineness about the man that forbade him to assume, and his phraseology was the natural outgrowth of his mind and his early education. He has not gone to work, like so many of our modern pre-Raphaelite painters, to imitate crudeness of form in the vain hope of acquiring thereby earnestness and innocence of spirit; but he has studied the best tragic models in a reverent spirit, and allowed his muse to work out her own salvation. That grim ironical humor which infuses ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... to the rest of the noise, if he strove to do so, and hear nothing but that harmonious moaning of the strings, steady and clear, like the aspirations of a man divorced from the facts of his weakness and his crudeness in practical life. ...
— Riders of the Silences • John Frederick
... peculiar interest belong more to the earlier stages of the introduction of postage stamps. Local attempts at engraving in some of our own early colonial settlements were of the crudest possible description, and yet they are, because of their very crudeness, far more interesting than the finished product supplied by firms at home, for the local effort truly represented the country of its issue in the art of stamp production. The amusingly crude attempts ...
— Stamp Collecting as a Pastime • Edward J. Nankivell
... spread your picture over all earth; visiting them as Fate allows. Then none can steal or deface, nor any reverse of fortune force a sale; sunshine and tempest warm and ventilate the gallery for nothing, and—in spite of all that has been said of her crudeness—Nature is not altogether a bad frame-maker. The knowledge that you may never live to see an especial treasure twice teaches the eyes to see quickly while the light lasts; and the possession of such a gallery breeds a very fine contempt for painted shows and the smeary ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... hairbreadth escapes so dear to the small boy of all time. The thrilling incidents were further enlivened, moreover, by cuts called by the printer "curious" in the sense of very fine: and curious they are to-day because of the crudeness of their execution and the coarseness of their design. Nevertheless, the grotesque character of the illustrations was altogether effective in impressing upon the reader the doughty deeds of his old friend, ...
— Forgotten Books of the American Nursery - A History of the Development of the American Story-Book • Rosalie V. Halsey
... raise the child to an angelic status, from which it is as far removed as from its opposite. We should be careful not to regard the crude form of the impulse as crude in the sense of an educated humanity, which must see in the crudeness something morally inferior. In robbery and annihilation there exists on the primitive or childish level hardly the slightest germ of badness. There is much to be said about the psychology and morality of the child. I cannot, however, enter very deeply ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... distinction of being the first American to adopt a purely literary career. He wrote several novels, including Wieland (1798), Ormond (1799), Arthur Mervyn (1800-1), and his last, Jane Talbot (1801). With a good deal of crudeness and sentimentality he has occasional power, but dwells too much on the horrible and repulsive, the result, perhaps, of the morbidity produced by the ill-health from which ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... experience with women had not prepared him for a ready understanding and acceptance of a girl like Alice. While he was fully aware of her beauty, freshness, vivacity and grace, this Amazonian strength of hers, this boldness of spirit, this curious mixture of frontier crudeness and a certain adumbration—so to call it—of patrician sensibilities and aspirations, affected him both pleasantly and unpleasantly. He did not sympathize promptly with her semi-barbaric costume; she seemed not gently feminine, as compared with the girls of Virginia ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... slight investigation of those realms that govern professional theatrical engagements. It was a most disturbing experience. The mere color and odor of the stuffy offices, the gauche, material attendants, the impossible aspirants and participants in this make-believe world! The crudeness! The effrontery! The materiality! The sensuality! It came to her as a sickening breath and for the moment frightened her. What would become of refinement there? What of delicacy? How could one rise and sustain an individual ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... stood looking on the scene of splendor, he felt lost, lonely, and for a moment homesick. Here all was formal, stiff repressed; that gayety was real, that merriment was sincere. With all their crudeness, those people in that condition were all human, hearty, strong, real. He wondered if refinement and elegance meant necessarily a suppression of all these. There, men came not only to enjoy but to make others enjoy as well. No stranger could ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page
... back, "let us be tranquil. Is there any reason to bear ill will simply because we each stand on an opposite side of a question of ethics? If you had only been to the wars, how differently you would see it. There hundreds of men stab each other with the best will in the world, none of the crudeness of personal animosity, only the best of good nature. In a little time now we shall part, never, if I can help it, to meet again. You have seen me as a dangerous, reckless man, without any principles worth mentioning. Indeed, I have so few that I shall have recourse ...
— The Unspeakable Gentleman • John P. Marquand
... "you move me to despair. How can an alliance between nations with such contrary ideals be possible? You would desert a beautiful scene like this to gain by vulgar exercise an appetite that you may eat. Can't you realize the crudeness of it? Yet I must remember that you are my guest," he added, striking the bell by his side. "Antoine shall prepare my linen clothes, and I will give you a lesson. Antoine," he added, half turning to the ...
— A Maker of History • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... they turned with a frequency which to-day appears astonishing to the devices of abstract personification and veiled meanings. No doubt this tendency was due in part to an idealizing dissatisfaction with the crudeness of their actual life (as well as to frequent inability to enter into the realm of deeper and finer thought without the aid of somewhat mechanical imagery); and no doubt it was greatly furthered also by the medieval passion for translating into elaborate and fantastic symbolism all ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... was a superstitious man even for a sailor, and his weakness was so well known that he had become a sympathetic receptacle for every ghost story which, by reason of its crudeness or lack of corroboration, had been rejected by other experts. He was a perfect reference library for omens, and his interpretations of dreams had gained for him ...
— Many Cargoes • W.W. Jacobs
... would perhaps be unintelligible to him, but he would look at the pictures with much the same interest that we regard bushmen's drawings or the primitive clay figures of Peru, and though his whole artistic seventy-sixth century soul would be revolted at the crudeness of the colouring, surely he would moralise thus: "Oh, happy race of primitive men, how I, the child of light and civilisation, envy you your long-forgotten days! Here in these rude drawings, which in themselves reveal the extraordinary capacity for pleasure possessed by the early races, ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... Probably another point, too, how we give long preparations for some object, planning and delving and fashioning, and then, when the actual hour for doing arrives, find ourselves still quite unprepared, and tumble the thing together, letting hurry and crudeness tell the story better than fine work. At any rate I obey my happy hour's command, which seems curiously imperative. May be, if I don't do anything else, I shall send out the most wayward, spontaneous, ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... processes; and language, being a chief instrument of culture, has to follow and subserve these multiplied and diversified demands, Any fall, therefore, on its part from the obedient fineness of its modes and modulations back into barbaric singleness and crudeness, any slide into looseness or vagueness, any unweaving of the complex tissue, psychical and metaphysical, into which it has been wrought by the exquisite wants of the mind, will have a relaxing, debilitating influence on thought itself. To use the clear, wise words of Mr. ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... and women possessed of leisure cultivated a humanist state of mind, with which arose a critical spirit, a nicer taste and a cultured discrimination. They were offended by literalism, bored by crudeness however much in earnest, and disgusted with the illogical assertions of pietists. The imperative mandate of the meeting awakened in them only opposition. They found many to sympathize ...
— Quaker Hill - A Sociological Study • Warren H. Wilson
... declared at once that Codd. [Symbol: Aleph]BL[Symbol: Xi] l g^{1} Cyr^{luc}[564], two MSS. of the Bohairic (d 3, d 2), the Lewis, and two cursives (71, 157) are literally the only authority, ancient or modern, for so exhibiting the text [in all its bare crudeness]. Against them are arrayed the whole body of MSS. uncial and cursive, including ACD; every known lectionary; all the Latin, the Syriac (Cur. om. Clause 1), and indeed every other known version: besides ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon
... the little finger-tips in every task! The hands, how smooth and delicate to lull and soothe! And the strange music of her lips! The very crudeness of their speech made chaster yet the childish thought her guileless utterance had caught from spirit-depths beyond our reach. And so her homely name grew fair and sweet and beautiful to hear, blent with the echoes pealing clear and vibrant up the winding stair: "Where—where ...
— Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley
... and pulling on her boots; and it appeared her former sufferings were as naught compared with the pangs of this morning. How she hated the cold, the bleak, denuded forest land, the emptiness, the roughness, the crudeness! If this sort of feeling grew any worse she thought she would hate Glenn. Yet she was nonetheless set upon going on, and seeing the sheep-dip, and riding that fiendish mustang until the ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... took up a collection out of their poverty with which to defray a funeral. The residents of Hull-House were then comparatively new in the neighborhood and did not realize that they were really shocking a genuine moral sentiment of the community. In their crudeness they instanced the care and tenderness which had been expended upon the little creature while it was alive; that it had had every attention from a skilled physician and a trained nurse, and even intimated that the excited members of the group had not taken part ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... plant life bespeaks an unconfined, ungauged potentiality of resource; it unveils an ideographic prophecy, painted by Nature in her Impressionist mood, to be deciphered aright only by those willing to discern through the crudeness of dawn a promise of majestic day. Eucalypt, conifer, mimosa; tree, shrub, heath, in endless diversity and exuberance, yet sheltering little of animal life beyond half-specialised and belated types, anachronistic even to the ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... put in such juxtaposition that the husband has a change of heart. The patients recover and the landlord endows a great sanitarium for the tuberculous. One may easily criticize the crudeness of the plot and the improbabilities with which it bristles. But it sets forth love and death and conversion and an appeal to rescue those who suffer from the great white plague: and this was sufficient for the crowd, for all are ...
— The Minister and the Boy • Allan Hoben
... early morn. The sun, as yet, was only level with the tiled roof. The Kyrie Eleisons rang quiveringly through that sort of whitewashed stable with flat ceiling and bedaubed beams. On either side three lofty windows of plain glass, most of them cracked or smashed, let in a raw light of chalky crudeness. ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... remember that while affectation is odious, crudeness must be overcome. A low voice is always pleasing, not whispered or murmured, but low in pitch. Do not talk at the top of your head, nor at the top of your lungs. Do not slur whole sentences together; on the other hand, do not pronounce as though each syllable were ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... sense of being in some inexplicable fashion dominated by the vision of Nora Costello and her comrades. Not that he experienced any sudden drawing to the Salvation Army; he felt, to the core, its crudeness, its limitations, its social dangers. His reason assured him that its methods threatened socialism and anarchy. He could have demolished all General Booth's pet theories by an appeal to the simplest logical processes, but that it seemed absurd to apply logic to so crude ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... for my baby and a few friends I could love and really enjoy. I was not fitted to be the wife of a public man. It was the poverty and crudeness of my youth that had made me intolerant. One of the big lessons life has taught me is that people can be amiable, tolerant, and even friendly, and still be sincere. The pleasantry of social relations among ...
— The Log-Cabin Lady, An Anonymous Autobiography • Unknown
... another reason why the author of "Sir Launfal," "Hunger and Cold," "The Landlord," and "The Search" should not have emulated Howard or Miss Fry, and have gone into the realms of destitution to relieve its wrongs. He was extremely fastidious, and anything that offended his taste by vulgarity or crudeness repelled him with such force that the work of practical philanthropy would have been impossible to his temperament. The indolence I have above spoken of—which must not be confounded with slothfulness, but is, as the true meaning of ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... aroused immense curiosity by an act so bromidic as to be ridiculous. Were they rank amateurs, doing their simple best, or were they clever artists, simulating the awkward crudeness of country girls? That was the question. In a word, were they Sulphites ...
— Are You A Bromide? • Gelett Burgess
... otherwise engaged. Naturally enough, too, Chichester saw a great deal of Babe. He was interested in her because she was young and beautiful, and because of her quaint individuality. She was not only unconventional, but charmingly so. Her crudeness and her ignorance seemed to be merely phases ...
— Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches • Joel Chandler Harris
... into the song business. That's something that isn't overdone. I composed a perfect little gem lately. It is called "Lines on the death of a child." I chose this subject because it is comparatively new. A few have attempted it, but they betray a crudeness and lack of pathos painful ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 2, No. 29, October 15, 1870 • Various
... the same way yarns which are too brilliant can often be made soft and effective by twisting them together with a paler tint. Minute particles of colour brought together in this way are brilliant without crudeness. It is, in fact, the very principle upon which impressionist painters work, giving pure colour instead of mixed, but in such minute and broken bits that the eye confounds them with surrounding colour, getting at the same time the double impression ...
— How to make rugs • Candace Wheeler
... to run toward it. There! Perhaps there! The painter's steps sounded behind her. He had started from his dejection when he saw her fleeing; he followed her in a frenzy of fear. Concha foresaw that she was going to know the truth; a cruel truth with all the crudeness of a discovery in broad daylight. She stopped, scowling with a mental effort before that portrait which seemed to dominate the studio, occupying the best easel, in the most advantageous position, in spite of the solitary gray of ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... he spent the winter of 1867-68, was a small manufacturing town, with all the crudeness of a new industrial order and without any of the refinement to which Lanier had been accustomed in Macon and elsewhere. Perhaps there was never a time when drudgery so weighed upon him, although his usual playfulness is seen ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... all there is nothing so very dreadful in the commission side of our profession. You do not come into direct relation with the collectors of curios and church ornaments: there is always an agent to break the crudeness of the connexion. And it is a certain and profitable source of income with none of the risks attached to it that the older branches of the profession unfortunately show. Moreover, it affords excellent opportunities for foreign travel, and gives one ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... development, may still be met, but these are merely isolated survivors of a once widespread family. The Americans that one meets to-day in Europe, both those who travel and those who reside there, are of a different conformation and belong to a different type. The crudeness which so shocked Europeans in their predecessors they have, with characteristic adaptability, readily and gracefully outgrown. But whether they have improved in other respects, and whether, on other grounds, we have cause to be ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... would induce a vulgar reader to consider them trite, while they are the expression of a genius so refined as to be all essence of spirit. In Gray, excellent as he is, we continually encounter the marks of labour and effort, and occasional crudeness, which shows that effort had not always succeeded, such as "iron hand and torturing hour;" but nothing of this kind occurs in the principal poems of Collins. There is a fire of mind which supersedes labour, and produces what labour cannot. It has been said that Collins is neither sublime ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... no condition in life that can be called perfect, yet of the two extremes we choose to believe that civilization is preferable to barbarism; but an intermediate state has the advantage over both extremes by avoiding native crudeness upon the one hand and excessive refinement upon the other, ...
— Arizona Sketches • Joseph A. Munk
... himself. He had learned that one must take where and when one can the mysterious mental irritant that rouses one's imagination; that it is not to be had by order. She often wearied him, but she never bored him. Under her crudeness and brusque hardness, he felt there was a nature quite different, of which he never got so much as a hint except when she was at the piano, or when she sang. It was toward this hidden creature that he was trying, for his own pleasure, ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... to meet the needs of these widely different grades of individuals, widely different manners, customs, and institutions are indispensable. Culture, delicacy, and intelligence have their own attractions, which are wholly diverse from those of crudeness, coarseness, and simplicity. The surroundings which would bring happiness to the lover of art or the man of large mental endowment, would render miserable the peasant who still lacked the development to appreciate the elegancies of refinement; while ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... autobiography—and an extraordinarily candid one—of a man whose peculiar temperament found expression in prose-verse. His gentleness, his brusqueness, his egotism, his humility, his grossness, his finer nature, his crudeness, his eloquence, are all here. To him they were the ...
— Walt Whitman Yesterday and Today • Henry Eduard Legler
... slipped out he never knew. How it had been formulated in his brain remained a riddle that he was never able to solve. But there it was, plain and decided. There was no shirking it. It was out in all its naked crudeness. ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... extension of cultivated area, very little was accomplished in the way of agricultural improvement before 1850. With some few exceptions the methods of cultivation were substantially the same as those of colonial days, and were marked by crudeness, waste and a general adherence to rule-of-thumb principles. The year 1850 roughly marks the beginning of a period of improvement and development. The Irish famine of 1846 and the German political troubles of 1848 were followed by an unprecedented emigration to America of highly desirable European ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... of the political action, such as it was, seemed closer, and acquired poignancy by Antonia's belief in the cause. Its crudeness hurt his feelings. He was surprised ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... set in brilliantly; the shadows on roads and pavements had real depth, and the outlines of the houses were hard against a cloudless sky. He kept his eyes fixed on the ground; for the crudeness of the ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... be regarded as a cross, or a compromise, between "Anatol" and "A Piece of Fiction." The crudeness of speech marking the latter play has given room to a very incisive dialogue, that carries the action forward with unfailing precision. Some of the temporarily dropped charm has been recovered, and the gain ...
— The Lonely Way—Intermezzo—Countess Mizzie - Three Plays • Arthur Schnitzler
... Groceries And round she wheels, hot on the track and Millinery, Of Giles the grocer, and from there To Emilie the milliner, There to be tempted by the sight Of hats and blouses fiercely bright. (O guard Miss Thompson, Powers that Be, From Crudeness and Vulgarity.) ...
— Georgian Poetry 1920-22 • Various
... sermon on May the 24th, Rev. Thomas Dixon, one of the Baptist clergymen of New York City, said: The heresy trial is a record of barbarism, a relic of savagery. It belongs to the crudeness, and ignorance, and superstition of barbaric times. It smells ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... Kwaiba's attitude enlightened him. Politeness and a dinner were at stake. Even Natsume and Imaizumi wondered and admired at what followed. The blunder of Iemon was a stroke of genius, the inspiration of an expert player. It was a slight blunder, not obvious to the crudeness of Kwaiba; but it opened up the whole of Iemon's position and put the game in his antagonist's hands. Kwaiba promptly seized the advantage. His triumphant glance shifted continually from Iemon to the onlookers, ...
— The Yotsuya Kwaidan or O'Iwa Inari - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 1 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... Cologne. I did not find it so, and the bright sunshine and the fine colour of the houses might well compensate for some draw-backs. The houses of this regular town are white, and pale yellow, and fine worn-out pink, with narrow green painted verandahs which soon lose crudeness in the intense light. The windows of the larger blocks are numerous and set in long regular lines; the streets if narrow run into open squares blazing with white unsoiled monuments. All day long the ways are full of people who are fairly but unostentatiously ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... all as when old Deacon Swift himself arose to address the assembly. He put Moses Jackson in the chair, and then as he walked forward to the front of the platform a great, white-haired, rugged, black figure, he was heroic in his very crudeness. He wore a long, old Prince Albert coat, which swept carelessly about his thin legs. His turndown collar was disputing territory with his tie and his waistcoat. His head was down, and he glanced out of the lower part of his eyes over the congregation, while ...
— The Strength of Gideon and Other Stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... ambitions too, this bright little girl. They were tinctured with the crudeness of youth, and its boundless vision, it is true; and sometimes the passion of despair seized her soul in a cold grasp, when she felt hemmed in on every side, and longed for some opening, some step in the great world higher than ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... eaglets are reared, made by interlacing branchlets of white mangrove until the mass was sufficient to support his weight. With a double ended paddle rudely shaped from the thin buttress roots of the red mangrove, and comic in the crudeness and disproportion of its parts, he felt himself safe miles out to sea. When he approached a passing vessel he presented the illusion, not of walking, but of sitting on the water, for the float was almost completely submerged. If it became necessary for his wife to attend ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... century, but in 1787-88 the first permanent factory, built of brick, and located in Beverly, Massachusetts, on the Bass river, was put into operation by a group headed by John Cabot and Joshua Fisher. This factory failed to justify itself economically, chiefly because of the crudeness of its machinery. But Samuel Slater, newly come from England with models of the Arkwright machinery in his brain, set up a factory in Pawtucket in 1790. From that time forth the growth was steady and sure, if not ...
— The Fabric of Civilization - A Short Survey of the Cotton Industry in the United States • Anonymous
... unnatural, if these juvenile productions did not often reflect the opinions of favorite instructors and the style of popular authors. A freshman's first essay is like the short gallop of a colt on trial; its promise is what we care for, more than its performance. If it had not something of crudeness and imitation, we should suspect the youth, and be disposed to examine him as the British turfmen have been examining the American colt Umpire, first favorite for the next Derby. But three or four years' study and practice teach the young man his paces, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... so lofty a region may appear impracticable. Difficulties lie on the threshold which may seem, at first sight, insurmountable. But obstacles to a true method only test its validity. And he who honestly faces the task may find relief in feeling that whatever else of crudeness and imperfection mar it, the attempt is at least in harmony with the thought and ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... This is the magical mellow hour to be sought by lovers of the picturesque in all the towns of Italy, the hour which, by its tender blendings of sallow western lights with glimmering lamps, casts the veil of half-shadow over any crudeness and restores the injuries of time; the hour when all the tints of these old buildings are intensified, etherealized, and harmonized by one pervasive glow. When I last saw Piacenza, it had been raining all day; and ere sun-down a clearing ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... Despite its relative crudeness, a fleet possesses, more fully than any other fruit of man's endeavor, the characteristics of an organism, defined by Webster as "an individual constituted to carry on the activities of life by means of parts or organs more or ...
— The Navy as a Fighting Machine • Bradley A. Fiske
... laborers, generally in charge of the machinery or devices which they have improved. When new processes have been invented, these also have usually suggested themselves to the able workmen as they experienced the crudeness of existing methods. Indeed, few important inventions have come from those who have not been thus employed. It is with inventors as with poets; few have been born to the purple or with silver spoons in their mouths, and we shall ...
— James Watt • Andrew Carnegie
... her; there was a moment of backing and wrenching before they glided out smoothly on the white driveway. "What I meant to say was this," he added, suddenly, with a sidewise glance from his wheel. "I—I want you to realize that I appreciate the injustice—the crudeness of my rushing to you in New Jersey that Christmas Day. I realize that we all have imposed on you—we've taken you too much for granted! I was in trouble, and I couldn't think of any other way out of it. But for any man to put a proposition like ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris
... the lack of all reverence for sacred places which could admit such a scene as the scrambling for live fowls and pigs in honour of the twelve Apostles, a pious exercise which is perhaps paralleled, though assuredly not equalled, in crudeness, by the old Highland custom of smoking tobacco in kirk throughout ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... aptitude, have developed great strength and accuracy of wrist, and with this the power of composition and design, purity and accuracy of outline, and good chiaroscuro. But the whole race is deficient in a sense of color. Its work is marked by crudeness and harshness, or at the best reticence—splendor without softness or inoffensiveness without charm. In cases where much is attempted in color—as in what is undoubtedly one of the best of contemporary paintings, Knille's Tannhaeuser ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... Antiquity. Painting lends itself willingly to the consideration of minor episodes, and for that reason is almost as well fitted to be in touch with modern life as the novel itself. Such a treatment saves a picture from looking prepared and cold, just as light and atmosphere save it from rigidity and crudeness. ...
— The Venetian Painters of the Renaissance - Third Edition • Bernhard Berenson
... be thought that these selections of the Psalms have been chosen for their crudeness and grotesqueness. I have tried in vain to find othersome that would show more elegant finish or more of the spirit of poetry; the most poetical lines I can discover are these, which are beautiful for the reason that the noble thoughts ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... the other signs of long-established civilization appeared suddenly to have no meaning save as they lulled Mr. and Mrs. Hilbery into the belief that nothing unusual had taken place. It chanced that Mrs. Hilbery was depressed without visible cause, unless a certain crudeness verging upon coarseness in the temper of her favorite Elizabethans could be held responsible for the mood. At any rate, she had shut up "The Duchess of Malfi" with a sigh, and wished to know, so she told Rodney at dinner, whether there wasn't some young writer with ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... of consideration, or crudeness; any word used to designate action or conduct which may be characterized as careless, inconsiderate, ...
— A Study of Association in Insanity • Grace Helen Kent
... satire abounds throughout its great length with sketches of the most appalling clearness and power, though they tend to crudeness of colour and are few of them suitable ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... diligently improved. Pope has left nothing behind him which seems more the effect of studious perseverance and laborious revisal. Here is particularly observable the curiosa felicitas, a fruitful soil and careful cultivation. Here is no crudeness of sense nor asperity of language. The sources from which sentiments which have so much vigour and efficacy have been drawn are shown to be the mystic writers by the learned author of the "Essays on ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... rugged limbs of the oak. The grace and elegance of the water-willow and the white birch were not for him. It saddened him to conclude that he would have to be for a long time just what he was—crude, awkward, unlearned in the graces and amenities of cultivated people. He rightly judged that his crudeness would be a constant source of irritation to the proud Mary. As their acquaintance progressed the truth of his conviction grew more apparent. This, however, did not so much concern him as her lack of sympathy with some of his deepest motives. He decided that, after all, he did not love her and ...
— A Man for the Ages - A Story of the Builders of Democracy • Irving Bacheller
... this idea off with shame for its crudeness. What vulgar raw things would come into your head when you let your mind roam idly . . . like cheap melodrama . ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... is a brief narrative poem in lyric form. The ballad was originally the production of wandering minstrels, and in its old English form it possessed a simplicity, directness, and charming crudeness that a more cultivated age cannot successfully imitate. The old English ballads, most of which were composed in the north of England, depict the lawlessness, daring, fortitude, and passion characteristic of life along the ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... time were artistic; of those of to-day this statement cannot be truthfully made. The wool is still fine and silky, but there is an element of crudeness of design and a defiance of the laws governing color. A pronounced medallion in the centre is usually seen. This is set in a solid field of a strong contrasting color. Sometimes the field is of a bright red or blue, with the medallion omitted. The ...
— Rugs: Oriental and Occidental, Antique & Modern - A Handbook for Ready Reference • Rosa Belle Holt
... is a severe test of human ability to live peaceably and co-operatively at close quarters. In the country an unfriendly man can live by himself much of the time; in the city he is continually feeling somebody's elbows in his ribs. It is not strange that there is as yet much crudeness about the city. Its growth has been dominated by the economic motive, and everything has been sacrificed to the desire to make money. Dirty slums, crowded tenements, uncouth business blocks, garish bill-boards and electric signs, dumped rubbish on vacant ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... higher forms. They soon awoke to the perception that beauty itself is the true principle of fascination. Reducing their new theory to practise, the Greek artists turned their attention to perfecting the details of the art they had borrowed. To works originally repellant from their very crudeness, they supplied finish and perfection of the parts. The ideal was still before them; the grotesque monsters might fascinate the beholder, but, however skilfully executed, however perfected in finish, the impression ...
— The Evolution of Expression Vol. I • Charles Wesley Emerson
... poster-bedecked billboards-verily, the average American town is not a thing of beauty. Matthew Arnold's judgment is corroborated by every traveler. "Evidently," he wrote, "this is that civilization's weak side. There is little to nourish and delight the sense of beauty there." A certain crudeness is inevitable in a new country, and will be outgrown; age is a great artist. Man usually mars with his first strokes; and it is only when he has met his practical needs that he will dally with aesthetic considerations. Many of our older cities and villages have partly outgrown the awkward ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... in a deep pit among the tumbled grey rocks would be a little vivid green dell, with a fairy ring of cultivated vegetation. This would be guarded, perhaps, by a hut of stone, almost savage in the crudeness of its construction. It was as if the proud people of this remote, mountain world, wishing to owe their all to their own country, nothing to outsiders, had preferred to make their houses with their own hands out of their own rocks, ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... at least I have A certain faint perception of the gilded And quite preposterous crudeness of our days— The sordid sickness of his life, and ours; And that is something to be ...
— Mr. Faust • Arthur Davison Ficke
... down under clear water. They were mysterious as daytime ghosts; and already a heartbreaking picturesqueness had taken possession of the streets, as an artist-decorator comes into an ugly room and mellows all its crudeness with his loving touch. ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... magnifying-glass and through it the clumsy forgery stood out in all its crudeness, showing plainly where other names had been erased ...
— The Master Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve and John W. Grey
... the men of old, according to the counsel of the Wise Man (Eccles. xxxix.): The wise man, he says, will seek out the wisdom of all the ancients, we have not thought fit to be misled into the opinion that the first founders of the arts have purged away all crudeness, knowing that the discoveries of each of the faithful, when weighed in a faithful balance, makes a tiny portion of science, but that by the anxious investigations of a multitude of scholars, each as it were contributing ...
— The Philobiblon of Richard de Bury • Richard de Bury
... crudeness, the administration of seigneurial justice in New France was satisfactory enough. The habitants, as far as the records show, made no complaint. Justice was prompt and inexpensive. It discouraged chicane and common ...
— The Seigneurs of Old Canada: - A Chronicle of New-World Feudalism • William Bennett Munro
... Orange, New Jersey, that he can be said to have given definite shape to his life. He was only forty in 1887, and all that he had done up to that time, tremendous as much of it was, had worn a haphazard, Bohemian air, with all the inconsequential freedom and crudeness somehow attaching to pioneer life. The development of the new laboratory in West Orange, just at the foot of Llewellyn Park, on the Orange Mountains, not only marked the happy beginning of a period of perfect ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... Winterman won't. Howland doesn't take to him. Says he's crude—frightfully crude. And you know how Howland hates crudeness." ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... a likeness even more striking in its crudeness of ink and line and paper than the most finished of portraits could have been. It repelled, and yet it fascinated him. He had not for a moment doubted Herbert's calm conviction. And yet as he stooped in the grass, closely scrutinising the blurred obscure features, ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... Nigel Anstruthers, and, being an American child, did not hesitate to express herself with force, if with some crudeness. "He's a hateful thing," she said, "I loathe him. He's stuck up and he thinks you are afraid of him and he ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... permanent abidence upon the heights of Olympus. She is human, and seeks all human needs. And so she descends, re-creating new civilizations; uplifting the crudeness of laws, giving scientific precision to morals and religion, stimulating enterprise, extending commerce, creating manufactures, expanding mechanism and mechanical inventions; producing revolutions and reforms; humanizing labor; meeting the minutest human needs, even to the manufacturing ...
— Civilization the Primal Need of the Race - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Paper No. 3 • Alexander Crummell
... of scholarly thought. But it is evident, if a new great mood of idealism is to come, one of its popular forerunners must be the demand that the spirit is real in a higher sense than matter, that the mind controls the body, that faith can cure. In such unphilosophic crudeness, no definite thought is expressed, as everything would depend on the definition of spirit, of faith, of mind, of reality. Moreover, every inquiry would prove that the idealistic value of such statements as are afloat among the masses to-day is reached only by a juggling ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... tranquilly. She was not stirred. His touch had no power to thrill her. She was comfortably content that things should be as they were, that was all. Yet her very lack of emotion added to her charm for him. He disliked emotional women. Excess of affection would have bored him. It smacked of crudeness, and he had an ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... the diligence and patience of the deceased occupants was obtained. It was evident that the sea had been largely drawn upon for supplies, if only on account of the many abortive and abandoned attempts at fishhooks in more or less advanced stages of completion. The brittleness of the fabric and the crudeness of the tools employed had evidently put the patience of the makers to severe task, who for one satisfactory hook must have contemplated many disappointments. The art must be judged as critically by the exhibition of its failures as by its perfections, as Beau Nash ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield |
