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More "Conventionality" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Mrs. Talcott, that we are so late," Karen said. Her composure was kept only by an effort that gave to her tones a stately conventionality. ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... style, he avoided its affectations, and seemed to take departure for a higher flight from the most exquisite among his teacher's early paintings. Later on, while still a lad, he escaped from Umbrian conventionality by learning all that was valuable in the art of Masaccio and Fra Bartolommeo. To the latter master, himself educated by the influence of Lionardo, Raphael owed more, perhaps, than to any other of his teachers. The method ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... and the rate of respiration, the learned pundit passes them over without a word. Mrs. Elsie Clews Parsons would be a good one to write a sober and accurate treatise upon kissing. Her books upon "The Family" and "Fear and Conventionality" indicate her possession of the right sort of learning. Even better would be a work by Havelock Ellis, say, in three or four volumes. Ellis has devoted his whole life to illuminating the mysteries of sex, and his collection of materials is unsurpassed in the ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken
... through that superb young body. But," Ferrall reined in to listen, "but if ever a man awakens her—I don't care who he is—you'll see a girl you never knew, a brand-new creature emerge with the last rags and laces of conventionality dropping from her; a woman, Kemp, heiress to every generous impulse, every emotion, every vice, every virtue of all that brilliant ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... promise, and who may yet achieve great places in the world's Pantheon. Indeed, it would almost seem that a renascence of American art is at hand. The country has emerged from the crudities of its first years, and from the mediocre conventionality of its middle period, without having lost the freshness and enthusiasm conducive to high achievement. Its ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... that is commonplace in the verse occur not a few graceful passages, while Daniel is at times rather happy in the introduction of certain sententious utterances in keeping with the conventionality of the pastoral form. Thus a caustic swain remarks of a ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... fellow-phantoms fled before the dawn of the new poetry in England, and the depressing influences of a common form—a conventional stock of images, personages, and almost language—disappeared. No doubt there was conventionality enough in the following of the Petrarchian model, but it was a less stiff and uniform conventionality; it allowed and indeed invited the individual to wear his rue with a difference, and to avail himself at least ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... and decency and conventionality and all the rest of it!" he vociferated as some of the ladies, quite warrantably hung back. "Get at the acid before it gets at you! Don't you—can't you understand? It'll burn into your skin in ...
— Mr. Hawkins' Humorous Adventures • Edgar Franklin
... of means to an end, thought and in a manner neglected. Yet to the Carracci, and their school, is owing a certain studied air of solemnity and sadness in 'Ecce Homos,' and 'Pietas,' which, in proportion to its art, has a powerful effect on many beholders, who prefer conventionality to freedom; or rather, who fail to distinguish conventionality in its traces. Annibale was the most original while the least learned of the Carracci; yet, even of Annibale, it could be said that he lacked ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... that I take the four preconceived ideas of the Commission too seriously. On the first reading of the report they aroused no more interest in me than the ordinary lip-honor we all do to conventionality—I had heard of the great fearlessness of this report, and I supposed that this bending of the knee was nothing but the innocent hypocrisy of the reformer who wants to make his proposal not too shocking. But it was a mistake. Those four idols really ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... use of certain methods of war, and a total renunciation of the use of others.... If in the following work the expression "the law of war" is used, it must be understood that by it is meant only ... a limitation of arbitrary behaviour which custom and conventionality, human friendliness and a calculating egoism have erected, but for the observance of which there exists no express sanction, but only "the fear of reprisals" decides.—G.W.B., pp. ...
— Gems (?) of German Thought • Various
... slander the emotions by calling people emotional because they are always talking about their feelings; but deep feeling is always silent. It is not fashionable to feel deeply, and we are dwarfed by this conventionality. We have almost ceased to wonder, and hence we have almost ceased to learn; for the wise old Greeks knew that wonder is the mother ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... of more pretention and inevitable ugliness range themselves decently and in order along two parallel roads. Aloof as this village is from "the madding crowd's ignoble strife," it has yet been touched to its undoing by the ruthless finger of conventionality. The inevitable Kur-Haus and bandstand and Anlagen are here; worst of all, a Trink-Halle! The Trink-Halle stands a mute and awful warning to the vaulting ambition which overleaps itself, since a classic temple in the heart of Liebenstein is surely ...
— A War-time Journal, Germany 1914 and German Travel Notes • Harriet Julia Jephson
... of whom Solomon was the Biblical prototype, Prometheus the mythological, Manfred and Don Quixote the predecessors in modern literature. Also that Mephistopheles is as inexhaustible as a type of evil as Faust is as a type of virtue, and therefore that this picturesque stage devil, with all his conventionality, is akin to the serpent which tempted Eve, the Thersites of Homer, and—mirabile ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... time for conventionality. She did not ask why the solicitor was there. It was enough that ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson
... cease from leering through their shuttered windows; a city born in delirium and nourished on crime, whose very atmosphere was electrified and whose very foundations were restless, would take a quarter of a century at least to manufacture a decent thick surface of conventionality, and its self-conscious respectable wing could no more escape its spirit than its fogs and winds. But evil excitement was tempered to irresponsible gaiety, a constant whirl of innocent pleasures. When the spirit passed the portals untempered, and drove women too highly-strung, ...
— Sleeping Fires • Gertrude Atherton
... accurate and irreproachable evening dress of civilization. There is not a man in the group who is not quite at his ease in ball-room attire; most of them have held acquaintance time and again with the white tie and stiff "choker" of conventionality, but the average gallant of metropolitan circles would turn up his supercilious nostrils at the bare suggestion were he to see them now. The —th is in its element, however, for the order has come, and with the coming ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... for the first few hours, I was sublimely happy, and then a strange restlessness seized me. I was obsessed with a wish to see the flower-garden. For some minutes, stimulated by a dread of what my aunts would think of such a violation of conventionality on the part of a child, I combated furiously with the desire; but at length the longing was so great, so utterly and wholly irresistible, that I succumbed, and, getting quietly out of bed, made my way noiselessly ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... a white-faced girl and a big, apoplectic turfman, were forgetting dignity, decorum, and conventionality as hand in hand they stormed through the surging eruption of humanity fighting to get a chance at little Billy ...
— Garrison's Finish - A Romance of the Race-Course • W. B. M. Ferguson
... was to reform the whole structure of opera, using the last or "Beethoven" development of instrumental music as a basis, and freeing it from the fetters which conventionality had imposed, in the shape of set forms, accepted arrangements, and traditional concessions to a style of singing now happily almost extinct. The one canon was to be dramatic fitness. In this "Art Work of the Future," as he called it, the interest of the drama is to depend not ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... rather slender man, measuring almost exactly six feet, with sloping shoulders, and he stood so straight, as almost to be the personification of uprightness. No soldier was ever more erect, and this without the least stiffness or conventionality. His head was not large at the base, but high-crowned and finely arched. His eyes were magnificent, and can only be compared to Hawthorne's eyes, though not so clear. Marshal von Moltke had eyes like two brilliant ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... kind, I am sure," she murmured; and the very conventionality of her tones and words, with the host of associations it aroused of the old life on the other side of the world, gave me a quick thrill—rich with remembrance but stinging ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... theory and lesson (if I may briefly state it so) of the exclusive sufficiency of artistic, scientific, literary equipment to the character, irrespective of any strong claims of the political ties of nation, state, or city, could have answer'd under the conventionality and pettiness of Weimar, or the Germany, or even Europe, of those times; but it will not do for America to-day at all. We have not only to exploit our own theory above any that has preceded us, but we have entirely different, and deeper-rooted, ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... she reproached herself for having put such a question to him. At the pass things had reached, it was surely best for him to go through with his infatuation, and get over it. Whereas she, in a spasm of conventionality, had pointed him out the sure road to perdition; for the worst thing that could happen would be for him to bind himself to Louise, in any fashion. As if her reputation mattered! The more rapidly she got rid of what remained to her, the better it would be for every ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... moral code, or the want thereof, of the frail one, just as other towns, in later days, have looked with equal benevolence upon the peccadillos of some petted favourite. The times were not of the straightlaced order and no one expected from an actress wonders of chastity or conventionality. Are we ourselves exacting where ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... bred up in Arnold's school of indifference to dogma and strictness in morals, finds himself oppressed by the hollow conventionality of religious and social ideas at home, and sees no prospect of a higher level in the ordinary English professions. He leaves Oxford abruptly for an Indian cadetship, and sets out with the hope of finding wider scope for work and the earnest pursuit ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... obtained for him in addition an adjacent benefice, and he also became a prebendary of York. It was not until 1760 that the first two vols. of his famous novel, Tristram Shandy, appeared. Its peculiar and original style of humour, its whimsicality, and perhaps also its defiance of conventionality, and even its frequent lapses into indecorum, achieved for it an immediate and immense popularity. S. went up to London and became the lion of the day. The third and fourth vols. appeared in 1761, the fifth and sixth in 1762, the seventh and eighth in 1765, and the last ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... she had been to break through the conventionality which surrounded her—and it had required some nerve—so as to be able to come here alone, on this one of her last ...
— His Hour • Elinor Glyn
... persons lose all the zest of living. The existing world seems to them brutal, its order, tyranny; its morality, organized selfishness; its accepted religion, a shallow conventionality. In such a world as this, the good man stands like a gladiator who has suddenly become a Christian. He is overwhelmed with horror at the bloody sports, yet he is forced into the arena and must fight. That is his business, and he cannot ...
— By the Christmas Fire • Samuel McChord Crothers
... any creed and shout for all hands—including Old Nick if he happened to come along. There's the shearer, half-drunk and inclined to be nasty, who has got the wrong end of all things with a tight grip, and who flings a shilling in the face of out-back conventionality (as he thinks) by chucking a bob into the Salvation Army ring. Then he glares round to see if he can catch anybody winking behind his back. There's the cynical joker, a queer mixture, who contributes generously and tempts the reformed boozer afterwards. ...
— Children of the Bush • Henry Lawson
... attitude she was forced to admit the plea of Alec's own bewildering lack of conventionality. If half the stories in the newspapers were true, he was the most original minded monarch that ever reigned. She was quite sure that his answer to any evasive reply on her part would be a public announcement of the fact that his promised bride was a young lady in ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... marked as he could; to each scale or leaf he gave a raised edge to mark its contour and distinguish it from the rest. The general effect was thus obtained by deliberate exaggeration of the relief and by a conventionality that was justified by the conditions of ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... signboards of this country has taught me that its conventional gardeners are always jolly, and always three in number. Whether that conventionality has reference to the Three Graces, or to those very significant letters, L., S., D., I do not know. Those mystic letters are, however, most important, and no society can have officers of more importance than its Treasurers, nor can ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... But she is British conventionality to the core. I have heard people say that she hasn't the courage of her opinions; but that is precisely what she has, and every page of her work declares it flagrantly. She might have been a great power—she might have speeded the revolution ...
— Denzil Quarrier • George Gissing
... remote enchantment, even to the most unimaginative. And to Hanson the world outside became as unreal as a dream that is past. Here was beauty, and the wide, free spaces of nature, where every law of man seemed puny, ineffectual and void. In this unbounded, uncharted freedom the shackles of conventionality fell from him. Here was life and here was love. He was a primitive man, and here, before him in visible form, stood the world's desire. Barriers there were none. A man and woman, both as vital as the morning, and love ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... scheme might not fail, but what each one had to consider was the question, "Shall it fail through my cowardice, my greed, my supineness, my prudential cautiousness, my petty prejudices, my selfish conventionality?" ...
— Darkest India - A Supplement to General Booth's "In Darkest England, and the Way Out" • Commissioner Booth-Tucker
... urged her to grant it. She knew that if she refused he would get up and go away, cut to the heart. She seemed to feel him pleading with her, earnestly beseeching her, reasoning against prejudice, against the shackles of conventionality, against reason itself. And through it all her love for the man throbbed at the very heart ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... more. The conventionality of his tone was not to be mistaken. Our conversation on the veranda was to be ignored. I did not know whether to feel relief at this or an added distress. I was in a whirl of emotion which robbed me of all discrimination. As I realised my own condition, I concluded that my wisest move would ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... position as yourself! Artists who live only by and for the public, carry nothing home to their hearth but fatigue from glory, or the melancholy of their disappointments. An ill-regulated existence, without compass or rudder, subversive ideas contrary to all social conventionality, contempt of family life and its happiness, cerebral excitement sought for in the abuse of tobacco and strong drink, without mentioning anything else, this constitutes the terrible artistic element from which your dear Aunt is desirous of withdrawing ...
— Artists' Wives • Alphonse Daudet
... how difficult it is for me?" I said. "Things have happened so strangely,—and we are surrounded here by influences that compel conventionality. I cannot speak to you as frankly as I would under other circumstances. It is easy for YOU to be yourself;- -you have gained the mastery over all lesser forces than your own. But with me it is different—perhaps when I am away I shall be able to ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... not all a conventionality, for it is the best proof of their proper nature. The tribune stopped, because they fled from him—not with fear, be it said, but shame; nor yet, O reader, from shame alone! From the obscurity of their partial hiding he heard ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... the banks of streams in patent-leather shoes or crepitating silks. Corduroy and home-spun and flannel are the stuffs that suit this region; and the frequenters of these paths go their natural gaits, in calf-skin or rubber boots, or bare-footed. The girdle of conventionality is laid aside, and the skirts ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... that the French had carried conventionality further than anyone, and that consequently they see a great merit in the return to realism. In the fact of not ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... the woman who is about to become a mother. Most of these questions are reasonable and natural, and should be frankly answered; but a false conventionality has—until recently, at least—forbidden any open discussion of facts connected with childbirth. The inevitable result has been that, without experience of their own to guide them, prospective mothers have sought ...
— The Prospective Mother - A Handbook for Women During Pregnancy • J. Morris Slemons
... English family, some member of which would occasionally turn up in Florence and try to put in claims upon him—claims which infuriated him? He was the most wilful and incalculable of men; caring nothing, apparently, one day for position and conventionality, and boasting extravagantly of his ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... as much as was absolutely necessary, and with as little meaning as conventionality required, Nekhludoff rose and went up to Meslennikoff. "Can you give me a ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... remains unanswered because its pray-ers never do anything to fulfil their prayers. I do not say they are hypocrites; certainly they are not consciously so, but I do say that there is a large measure of conventionality that means nothing, in the prayers of average Christian people for more holiness and likeness ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... weaknesses, weighing accurately the deeds and words of men and women, recognizing all there was in position and tradition, seeing with her father's clear eyes the practical meaning of any divergence from that conventionality which as a woman of the world she valued, she returned again and again to the trembling joy of that intoxicating moment. She though of her mother and sisters, of Raymond and Garnier, of Aladdin—she even forced herself to think of Carroll—only to shut her eyes, with a faint smile, and dream again ...
— Maruja • Bret Harte
... lucky adventurers. Was he not one himself? And then the Nabob amused him; his accent, his unvarnished manners, his flattery, a trifle unblushing and impudent, gave him a respite from the everlasting conventionality of his surroundings, from that scourge of administrative and court ceremonial which he held in horror,—the conventional phrase,—in so great horror that he never finished the period he had begun. The Nabob, for his part, ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... played their parts in the drama of Royal Courts, but scarcely one, not even those Messalinas, Catherine II. of Russia and Christina of Sweden, conducted herself with such a shameless disregard of conventionality as Marie Louise Elizabeth d'Orleans, known to fame as the Duchesse de Berry, who probably crowded within the brief space of her years more wickedness than any woman who was ever cradled ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... believe I am quite all right," she said, in answer to a question. "I shall not even have a suspicion of a limp." She held out her hand to me, and did not try to draw it away, though I grasped it rather longer and more tightly than conventionality might have approved. "You will come—soon—to see Lady ...
— The House by the Lock • C. N. Williamson
... jocose allusion. From force of habit, and for the sake of consistency, some of the more conservative theologians continued to repeat the old arguments, and there were many who insisted upon the belief as absolutely necessary to ordinary orthodoxy; but it is evident that it had become a mere conventionality, that men only believed that they believed it, and now a reform seemed possible in the treatment of ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... are conveyed to the cemetery, where they are allowed to rot on top of the grave. To me there is no more mournful sight than a visit to a great London cemetery, where one sees these rotting emblems, which quite palpably meant nothing save the practice of a conventionality. The Japanese, however poor his worldly circumstances may be, is not content with flowers, costly flowers on the day of the funeral; he places his vase alongside the grave of the departed, and by keeping that vase filled with fresh ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... and she has entirely captivated me. She is really wonderful, with wonderful possibilities. She is more than pretty, she is talented and she possesses character in a marked degree that sets her aside from the rest. It is this difference, this broadness of view, perhaps a certain intolerance of conventionality, that make me feel that, much as it has done for her, and that has been largely due to her own endeavors, this school, or any school, is not the place for ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... Child would seem to have been the first to break down this barrier and establish more friendly relations with his classes. He was naturally well adapted to this. Perfectly frank and fearless in his dealings with all men, he hated unnecessary conventionality, and at the same time possessed the rare art of preserving his dignity while associating with his subordinates on friendly terms. Always kindly and even sympathetic to the worst scapegraces in the division, he could assert the superiority of his position with a quickness ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... only keep from untwisting the morning-glory, only be willing to let the sunshine do it! Dickens said real children went out with powder and top-boots; and yet the children of Dickens's time were simple buds compared with the full-blown miracles of conventionality ...
— Children's Rights and Others • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... contented acquiescence in God's will rebukes our incessant restlessness; above all, their constant elevation shames that multitude of little vices, and little meannesses, which lie like a scurf over the conventionality of modern life. But this earlier chapter has also a special value for the young. It offers a picture which it would indeed be better for them and for us if they could be induced to study. ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... on the Dresden china prophetess of conventionality. "When alliances are arranged for women of our position, we must content ourselves with the hope that love may come after marriage. Or if not, we must go on doing our duty in that state of life to which ...
— The Princess Virginia • C. N. Williamson
... for a moment throw conventionality aside; will you for that brief space of time let me speak truly and freely to you, as one might speak who has passed ...
— Elster's Folly • Mrs. Henry Wood
... spirits so irresistible, that Miss Hargrove found her own nerves tingling with pleasure. The episode was novel, unexpected, and promised so much for the future, that in her delightful excitement she cast conventionality to the winds, and yielded to his sportive mood. They had not gone a mile together before one would have thought they had been acquainted for years. Burt's frank face was like the open page of a book, and the experienced society girl saw nothing ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... can survive, and recognizing himself as a failure, her calm assurance and self- certainty offended him vaguely. It seemed as if she were succeeding where he had failed, which rather jarred his sense of the fitness of things. Then, too, conventionality is a very agreeable social bond, the true value of which is not often recognized until it is found missing, and this ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... you to hope that the tale may improve upon further perusal. From these three paragraphs you can construct the whole story: you know that the "dependent cousin" and the girl with the "handsome brunette features" will be rivals for the affections of some "nice young man" of corresponding conventionality, and that the poor relation will finally win him—chiefly because it always happens so in stories and seldom in real life. And you know from these specimen paragraphs that there will be nothing in the handling of this poor old ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... individualism, that could not come into being in a feudal civilization in which every respectable man carried two swords with which to take instant vengeance on whoever should malign or doubt him. Universal secretiveness and conventionality, polite forms and veiled expressions, were the necessary shields of a military feudalism. Both the social order and the language were fitted to develop to a high degree the power of attention to minutest details of manner ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... meanness and all unworthy acts and appliances to compass a selfish or sordid end. On these occasions, as may well be imagined, many curious incidents occurred. Lincoln was usually clad "in a black broadcloth suit, nothing in his dress betokening disregard of conventionality, save perhaps his neat cloth slippers, which were doubtless worn for comfort. He was seated beside a plain cloth-covered table, in a commodious arm-chair." As each visitor approached the President he was greeted with an encouraging nod and smile, and a few moments ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... that!" cried Archie hastily. "She just fancies the life—thinks it offers me a good chance to prove my mettle. She hates conventionality." ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... confessed, makes it almost as hard to read a good many of his verses as to consume large quantities of suet pudding, and has probably destroyed his popularity with the present generation. Still, Crabbe's influence was powerful as against the old conventionality. He did not, like his predecessors, write upon the topics which interested 'persons of quality,' and never gives us the impression of having composed his rhymes in a full-bottomed wig or even in a Grub ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... a very decided and attractive character of its own. A familiar example of this can be seen in the XVIIIth century samplers. Its peculiar character is perhaps due to the fact that it cannot break away from a certain conventionality due to constant use of the same stitch, and its dependence upon the web of the fabric. This regularity prevents the work from showing certain faults of design that other methods may exaggerate. It is hardly possible to copy a natural spray of flowers in cross ...
— Embroidery and Tapestry Weaving • Grace Christie
... airily; "I see that conventionality and I are to be more two than ever henceforth, so I am going to yield up ...
— A Woman's Will • Anne Warner
... in debauchery resemble vertigo, for one feels a sort of terror mingled with sensuous delight, as if peering downward from some giddy—height. While shameful, secret dissipation ruins the noblest of men, in the frank and open defiance of conventionality there is something that compels respect even in the most depraved. He who goes at nightfall, muffled in his cloak, to sully his life in secret, and clandestinely to shake off the hypocrisy of the day, resembles an Italian who strikes his enemy from behind, ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... glared at me when I said something about good manners. Leaning over the table with his eyes set and his fist clenched he shouted at me, "I am a boor and the son of a boor".' So ready as he was to challenge anything which smacked of conventionality or pretension, he was not quite a safe poet to lionize or ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... "The whole question has come up again—the feeling that Henry tried to think dead, or at least dying, has revived, through the—I hardly know what to call it, but I really may say the unexpectedly great effect of her appearance here. She was really wonderful on Wednesday evening; prejudice, conventionality, every presumption there might be against her, had to fall to the ground. I expected a success, but I didn't expect what you gave us," Mrs. Burrage went on, smiling, while Olive noted her "you." "In short, my poor boy flamed up again; and now I see that he will never again care for any girl as ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. II (of II) • Henry James
... him was the slow daily influence of a large number of trifling habitual duties none of which fully strained his faculties, and the monotony of them, and the constant watchful conventionality of his deportment with customers. He was still a youth, very youthful, but you had to keep an eye open for his youthfulness if you wished to find it beneath the little man that he had been transformed into. He now took his watch out of his pocket with an absent gesture and look ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... it was proposed to examine any of the Government officials as witnesses before a Parliamentary committee. It had been customary to specify, in the address of notification, the subject on which it was intended to take evidence. This, however, had been a mere matter of courtesy and conventionality, upon which nobody had any right to insist; and the practice had not been uniform or consistent, various instances having occurred where Crown officers had been summoned and examined as witnesses without any such notification having been given. Upon such a flimsy pretext, however, ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... company. At the appointed hour no Julia appeared. In her stead, Mrs. Marrable portentously approached the stage, with an open letter in her hand. She was naturally a lady of the mildest good breeding: she was mistress of every bland conventionality in the English language—but disasters and dramatic influences combined, threw even this harmless matron off her balance at last. For the first time in her life Mrs. Marrable indulged in vehement gesture, and used strong language. She handed the letter sternly, ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... only because he hated the present that he idealized the past. His primitive Golden Age was an imaginary refuge from the actual world of the eighteenth century. What he detested and condemned in that world was in reality not civilization, but the conventionality of civilization—the restrictions upon the free play of the human spirit which seemed to be inherent in civilized life. The strange feeling of revolt that surged up within him when he contemplated the drawing-rooms of Paris, with their brilliance and their philosophy, ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... the breakers, and as the result of an all-night's struggle with the muse of conventionality Corkey has seven columns ...
— David Lockwin—The People's Idol • John McGovern
... became engaged and after a suitable time intend to marry. Cece wanted to apologise for the conventionality of this story, but I begged him not to trouble; if unassisted nature were to be always original, the occupation of poets and romancers ...
— Castellinaria - and Other Sicilian Diversions • Henry Festing Jones
... but we think there ought to be another, and we try to be he. The attempt is always a failure. The worst of it is that in our effort to be another we have ceased to be ourselves, and after such a loss what do we still possess? Perhaps the disaster comes in another way. Conventionality has certain curious notions about the pulpit, the fulfilment of which it paradoxically despises as it demands it. The preacher is expected to speak in a different voice and wear a different expression in the "sacred desk" from his voice and expression in other places. ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson
... towards either obscurity—the vice of Elizabethan sonnets, or obviousness—the vice of Wordsworth's sonnets after 1820. The obscure sonnet, while it may tempt the reader's intellectual ingenuity, affords no basis for his emotion, and the obvious sonnet provides no stimulus for his thought. Conventionality of subject and treatment, like the endless imitation of Italian and French sonnet-motives and sonnet-sequences, sins against the law of lyric sincerity. In no lyric form does mechanism so easily obtrude itself. A sonnet is ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... cause of the difference must be sought in the different nature of the two subjects, for one of Browning's most eminent qualities is his care in harmonising treatment with subject. King Victor and King Charles is a modern play, dealing with human nature under all the restrictions of a pervading conventionality and an oppressive statecraft. It deals, moreover, with complex and weakened emotions, with the petty and prosaic details of a secondary Western government. The Return of the Druses, on the other hand, treats ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... best and noblest of our times makes for the strongest individualities. Every sensitive being abhors the idea of being treated as a mere machine or as a mere parrot of conventionality and respectability, the human being craves recognition of ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 2, April 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... early in life he conceived a decided antipathy to the prosaic and the commonplace, and his career up to this point furnishes abundant evidence that he hated with a genuine hatred to keep in the ruts of custom and conventionality, as if bound to do so because such was prescribed by custom and conventionality. His sentiments he never concealed, and his actions harmonised, almost without exception, strictly with his sentiments; ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... expense of caste; who delights in promising experiments in politics, sociology, and education; who is not thrown off his balance by the shifting of the centre of gravity of honour and distinction; who, in a word, is not congealed by conventionality, but is ready to accept novelties on their merits,—he, unless I am very grievously mistaken, will find compensations in the United States that will go far to make up for Swiss Alp and Italian lake, for ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... in the way of burning or boiling people, or throwing them out of window, or cutting them up; was often very droll; was always liberally got up, and cleverly presented. I noticed that the people who kept the shops, and who represented the passengers in the thoroughfares, and so forth, had no conventionality in them, but were unusually like the real thing- -from which I infer that you may take that audience in (if you wish to) concerning Knights and Ladies, Fairies, Angels, or such like, but they are not to be done as to anything in the streets. I noticed, also, that when two young men, dressed in exact ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... friend, you shut up," said the dragon severely. "Believe me, St. George," he went on, "there's nobody in the world I'd sooner oblige than you and this young gentleman here. But the whole thing's nonsense, and conventionality, and popular thick-headedness. There's absolutely nothing to fight about, from beginning to end. And anyhow I'm not going to, ...
— Dream Days • Kenneth Grahame
... of a cool observer, nor as a samaritan,—he came as man to man, with no appearance of one stooping to poor Lazarus. Indeed, it seemed as though Hauptmann walked with a much steadier gait in the path of human misery, than on the road of conventionality. ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 3, May 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... He rose hastily, and leaning on a low wall which stood near, looked down at the bright little girl at his feet. "Fluff," he said, "should you greatly mind if I threw conventionality to the winds, and ...
— Frances Kane's Fortune • L. T. Meade
... fell into quite a friendly and familiar groove, for Sara and Morva knew nothing of the restraints of class and conventionality. ...
— Garthowen - A Story of a Welsh Homestead • Allen Raine
... art is of value only to the extent that it speaks to us. It might be a universal language if we ourselves were universal in our sympathies. Our finite nature, the power of tradition and conventionality, as well as our hereditary instincts, restrict the scope of our capacity for artistic enjoyment. Our very individuality establishes in one sense a limit to our understanding; and our aesthetic personality seeks its own affinities in the creations of the past. It is true that with cultivation ...
— The Book of Tea • Kakuzo Okakura
... can lodge on the top of a dome, not on the ridge of a gable. And thus, as far as roofing is concerned, the gable is a far more essential feature of Northern architecture than the pointed vault, for the one is a thorough necessity, the other often a graceful conventionality: the gable occurs in the timber roof of every dwelling-house and every cottage, but not the vault; and the gable built on a polygonal or circular plan, is the origin of the turret and spire;[69] and all the so-called aspiration of Gothic ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... of "attempting to set up a new school in poetry," and he never throughout his life violated the conventions, literary or social, if he could possibly avoid doing so. This bias toward conservatism and conventionality shows itself particularly in the language of his poems. He was compelled, of course, to use much more concrete and vivid terms than the eighteenth century poets had used, because he was dealing with much more concrete ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... to the Memory" Is clearly carven there I own, And all may think that on the stone The words have been inscribed by me In bare conventionality. ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy
... change from fierce earnestness to this subdued conventionality of tone bewildered her ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... there is always a tendency for Army life to be merely a continuation of public-school existence. Eton merges into Sandhurst, and Sandhurst merges into the regiment. One's companions are all the time men of the same class and of the same ideas. The discipline is the same, the conventionality and the presiding fetish of Good and Bad Form. So many, generals are perennial school boys. They lose their ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... conviction which to you is palpably a limited one; imperfect, what we call an error. But would it be a kindness always, is it a duty always or often, to disturb them in that? Many a man, doing loud work in the world, stands only on some thin traditionality, conventionality to him indubitable, to you incredible: break that beneath him, he sinks to endless depths! "I might have my hand full of truth," said Fontenelle, "and open only ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... are understood. To say that Scott had more than any other man that ever lived a sense of the romantic seems, in these days, a slight and superficial tribute. The whole modern theory arises from one fundamental mistake—the idea that romance is in some way a plaything with life, a figment, a conventionality, a thing upon the outside. No genuine criticism of romance will ever arise until we have grasped the fact that romance lies not upon the outside of life, but absolutely in the centre of it. The centre of every ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... afterwards what had been her emotions during these early talks. It was the first time in her life that she had ever listened to ideas that were hostile to her order, and she did so with tremblings and hesitations, combating at every step an impulse to flee to the shelter of conventionality. She was more shocked by my last revelation than she let me suspect. It counted for little that I had succeeded in trapping her in proposing for herself the economic programme of Socialism, for what terrifies her class is not our ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... which sailors love, games, gayety, and flirtation. There is no such social freedom to be enjoyed anywhere as on board an ocean steamer. The breaking-up of old associations, the opening of a fresh existence, the necessity of new relationships,—this fuses the crust of conventionality, quickens the springs of life, and renders character sympathetic and fluent. The past is easily put away; we become plastic to new influences; we are delighted at the discovery of unexpected affinities, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... to say—in words. In a picture I would put it like this—a blue sky, a meadow of rank green grass, a stream full of forget-me-nots, and a girl bending over it, with eyes the color of the flowers. Conventionality would compel me to call it Spring or Youth!" He spoke fast ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... conventionality; he mingled the Florentine and Greek schools; he sought the ideal not outside of reality but in its very essence, in the reconciliation of style with nature. Color he considered of secondary importance; he not only subordinated it voluntarily to drawing, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... bethought me how I should next present myself before her. In accordance with the usages of conventionality, it would be right for me to make an early call at Mrs Clyde's, in recognition of her late assembly; and, unless I should chance to meet Min out alone, I would have no chance of making my apology before then, ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... register herself as standing for justice, law, and humanity against organized barbarity, injustice, illegality, and inhumanity, which, if victorious, would not rest until it had conquered the world. He calls the peace propaganda at this time a "vile lie of conventionality" because its success could only mean the victory of those forces which all honest nationalities ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... gave to one of his creatures," said Mme. du Deffand, who was far from being able to pose, herself, as a model of virtue or decorum. But sin has its degrees, and the woman who errs within the limits of conventionality considers herself entitled to sit in judgment upon her sister who wanders outside of the fold. Measured even by the complaisant standards of her own time, there can be but one verdict upon the character of Mme. de Tencin, ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... made to make it like a common statue; no attempt to carve the mane into curls, or to distinguish the monster minutely from the earth out of which he rises, shaking the world. The face of the lion has something of the bold conventionality of Assyrian art. The mane of the lion is left like a shapeless cloud of tempest, as if it might literally be said of him that God had clothed his neck with thunder. Even at this distance the thing looks vast, and in some sense prehistoric. Yet it was carved only a little while ago. It ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... that civilization, by the many false practices which it has introduced, by the facilities which its very complexity affords to the concealment of crime, and by the monstrous systems of corruption which fashion, caste, and conventionality are enabled to shelter, is the direct means of rendering many individuals miserable in the extreme; but these are the necessary incidents to its struggles to advance under the ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... disreputable women, who conduct themselves with appropriate freedom from the restraints of conventionality. FERNANDE, who is too lachrymose to be a cheerful feature, is wisely placed on guard at the outer door. The company proceed to play at faro, the bank being the loser. There is a false alarm of police, and the game is suddenly stopped. The Banker, being naturally indignant, ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 15, July 9, 1870 • Various
... instincts guided me—to burst asunder the bonds both of conventionality and of religion that might have restrained me, to make suspicion of some vague unseen danger stifle within my breast every tender thought of awakening love. But in my surge of excitement love and faith were alike forgotten. I ...
— Tales of Destiny • Edmund Mitchell
... order to the waiter. His movements were always picturesque, and in the presence of Englishmen he had a habit of accentuating those characteristics of speech and manner which are held by our countrymen to be native to the Peninsula. There is nothing so disarming as conventionality—and nothing less suspicious. Larralde seemed ever to be a typical Spaniard—indolently polite, gravely indifferent—a cigarette- ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman
... the people who go to the Haverstocks don't wear evening dress on principle. That's their way of showing their contempt for conventionality. I suppose you'll come with me?" John nodded his head. "Good! We'll start off immediately after we've had our dinner. You'll get a good dose of Truth to-night, my son. There was a couple went there ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... listened to those who are said to intoxicate him with such exaltation, verses, and rhymes, as they had never demonstrated to others; because this work shines more by its originality than by its conventionality. ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... saying of the Siberian priests and the mad Cossack answer: "Therefore let us ride fast!" The swaying of the yacht was like the rhythmic motion of his Arab through the long grass beyond the Dnieper, in that wild land where conventionality and ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... specialty, Au Telescope. "But at Paris all these maisons chaudes," says an expert in these matters, Rodolphe Darzens, "have a special physiognomy,—they are not, as in the provinces, discreet localities, with an atmosphere of familiar conventionality, in which the father brings his eldest son to pass the evening with the notary of the quarter and the pharmacien of the public square, in an interminable game of billiards or of piquet voleur. Houses very ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton
... words of the minister's prayer. The words are not the prayer. Mr. Drake's words were commonplace, with much of the conventionality and platitude of prayer-meetings. He had always objected to the formality of the Prayer-book, but the words of his own prayers without book were far more formal; the prayer itself was in the heart, not on the lips, and was far better than the words. But ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... or shop-keeping class which in England, according to Matthew Arnold, has "the sense of conduct—and has but little else." This class hated and feared him; feared him for his intellectual freedom and his contempt of conventionality, and hated him because of his light-hearted self-indulgence, and also because it saw in him none of its own sordid virtues. Punch is peculiarly the representative of this class and of all English prejudices, and Punch jeered at him now in prose, now in ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... stay here—in your house—hating. I'll make it so easy. It's done every day, only we don't happen to hear of it. That's what makes our kind the marrow of society. We're too immorally respectable to live honestly. We build a shell of conventionality over the surface of things and rot underneath. Nature doesn't care how she uses us. It's the next generation concerns her. She has to drug us or we couldn't endure. We're drugged on respectability. On a few of us the drug won't react. I'm ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... once more washed, wrapped in clean linen cloths, and thus lowered into the earth. And this is as it should be. Why should the pomp and extravagance of man accompany him to his last resting-place? Were it not well if in this matter we abated something of our conventionality and ostentation? I do not mean to say that interments need be stripped of every thing like ornament; in all things the middle way is the safest. A simple funeral has surely in it more that awakes true religious feeling than the pomp and splendour which are too frequently ...
— A Visit to the Holy Land • Ida Pfeiffer
... been able to look back upon it with complete satisfaction, as having been carried on, on her part, according to her best knowledge of befitting dignity; but, unfortunately for her, the young American was of an outspoken disposition, and utterly untrammelled by those instincts of conventionality which Eliza had, not by training, but by inheritance from her law-abiding ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... beings. Achievement proclaims ability to support, defend, bring credit and even fame to the object of future choice, and no good point is lost. Physical force and skill, and above all, victory and glory, make a hero and invest him with a romantic glamour, which, even though concealed by conventionality or etiquette, is profoundly felt and makes the winner more or less irresistible. The applause of men and of mates is sweet and even intoxicating, but that of ladies is ravishing. By universal acclaim ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... quietly, to perform the greater service—that of presenting the fresh-coloured, discreetly-smiling vision called 'the typical English girl.' Miss Heriot fulfilled to a nicety the requirements of those who are sensibly reassured by the spectacle of careful conventionality allied to feminine charm—a pleasant conversability that may be trusted to soothe and counted on never to startle. Hermione would almost as soon have stood on her head in Piccadilly as have said anything ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... soldiers to sing together at work and play and on the march. The renascence of poetry can be interpreted as a revulsion against the prevailing prosiness; the amateur theatre is equally a protest against the inanity and conventionality of the commercial stage; while the Community Chorus movement is an evidence of a desire to escape a narrow professionalism in music. A similar situation has arisen in the field of domestic architecture, in the form of an ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... guilty of breaking certain laws of ours based upon the laws of Moses, and while we do not stone the life out of those women—not men—whom we prove guilty of breaking the seventh commandment, we do build up against them walls of conventionality, and of uncharity harder than the rocks once used for the ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... "Now, that's sheer conventionality," he insisted. "You would really like to come in and have a talk, but for the melancholy reason ...
— Enter Bridget • Thomas Cobb
... the lady, "has as little conventionality about it as had yours. The magnitude of the danger which prompted yours must also excuse mine; I am come to repay the debt I ...
— The Nameless Castle • Maurus Jokai
... she?" Lord Torrington's tone suggested that this was a distinct advantage to Frank. "According to Miss Lentaigne then, the girl has asserted her right to live her own life untrammelled by the fetters of conventionality. That's the way she put it, isn't ...
— Priscilla's Spies 1912 • George A. Birmingham
... five. "Where do my thoughts go to when I do not think them?" was the problem he floored a learned uncle with a year later. This type of curiosity is not uncommon in children; in fact, it is the conventionality and laziness of the elders that stops children in their study of the fundamentals. H. was not stopped, for the zeal of his interest was heightened as time ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... Politics, it is said, came to mingle in the controversy; and those who held by the king's Opera were as certainly Tories, as those who went to the nobility's were Whigs. Of course all this was very foolish, and very wrong; yet in our days of stately conventionality, when perfect impassibility is deemed the highest style of breeding, there is something refreshing in reading of such animated scenes in high life. The crowning act of hostility to Handel, was when the Earl of Middlesex himself assumed the profession ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 455 - Volume 18, New Series, September 18, 1852 • Various
... but Barbara stopped and brooded. She was angry and humiliated, but perhaps the worst was she had a vague notion Cartwright might be justified. It was very strange Shillito had gone. All the same, she did not mean to submit. Her mother's placid conventionality had long irritated her; one got tired of galling rules and criticism. She was not going to be molded into a calculating prude like Grace, or a prig like Mortimer. They did not know the ridiculous good-form they cultivated was out of date. In fact, ...
— Lister's Great Adventure • Harold Bindloss
... were a remarkable family. They had strong characters and decided tastes, but they had not their father's conventionality and preference for the high roads of life. They were devoted to sport, and at the same time abounded in mental vigour. All the brothers had the gift of drawing. John, though forced into a lawyer's ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... had come to Middelburg. I looked out again. Nell was on deck alone. Doubtless Alb had at last gone below to the motor-room, and was exchanging the blue overalls for something more decorous. Would he, even for the sake of conventionality, have left her at such a moment unless ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... and the time for revolutions, ecclesiastical and civil, must come. Truth, independent of doctrines or time-honored systems, stands at the threshold of history. Contentment with the past, or the cold conventionality of custom, may no longer shut the door on science; though empires fall, "He whose right it is shall reign." Ignorance of God should no longer be the stepping-stone to faith; understanding Him, "whom to know aright is Life eternal," is the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... impatient of conventionality. How was it possible for these people to look so quietly, eye to eye, upon the most vitally perfect of living beings? How could they turn from me to orange ...
— The Bacillus of Beauty - A Romance of To-day • Harriet Stark
... on. In a moment mere pride and conventionality resumed sway, and she smiled bitterly, saying to herself, "What a weak fool I am to-night! Of all things let me not become ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... drawled Mrs Skewton, pinching her shrivelled throat, 'is heart.' It was frightfully true in one sense, if not in that in which she used the phrase. 'What I want, is frankness, confidence, less conventionality, and freer play of soul. We are ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... quickened her imagination. Secretly Charmian was romantic, though she seldom seemed so. She longed after wonders, and was dissatisfied with the usual. Yet she was capable of expecting wonders to conform to a standard to which she was accustomed. There was much conventionality in her, though she did not know it. "The Brighton tradition" was not a mere phrase in her mother's mouth. Laughingly said it contained, nevertheless, particles of truth. But at this moment it seemed far away from Charmian, quite foreign to ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... agreed to become his spokesman in the Senate. As the third person of the Jacobin brotherhood, Lyman Trumbull had always been out of place. He had gone wrong not from perversity of the soul but from a mental failing, from the lack of inherent light, from intellectual conventionality. But he was a good man. One might apply to him Mrs. Browning's line: "Just a good man made a great man." And in his case, as in so many others, sheer goodness had not been sufficient in the midst of a revolution to save his soul. To quote one of the greatest ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... day at the ranchhouse was the beginning of a new existence for Ruth. Bound for years by the narrow restrictions and conventionality of the Poughkeepsie countryside, she found the spaciousness and newness of this life inviting and satisfying. Here there seemed to be no limit, either to the space or to the flights that one's soul might take, and in the solemn grandeur of the open ...
— The Range Boss • Charles Alden Seltzer
... in the balance and find wanting. How rashly she had condemned this training, how effectually her experiment had cured her of radicalism, she herself now saw clearly. The problem of liberty within conventionality was still unsolved, and she had beaten her wings against the ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... topsy-turveydom may be attained with comparative ease, it performs a lofty philosophical function. Everything rusts by use. Our moral ideals grow mouldy if preached too much; our stories stale if told too often. Conventionality is but a living death. The other side of everything must be shown, the reverse of the medal, the silver side of the shield as well as the golden. Convex things are equally concave, and concave things convex. The world ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... relations: I shall not embarrass you with my society again. I hoped to find you a woman capable of appreciating a man's passion, even if you should be unable to respond to it. But I perceive that you are only a girl, not yet aware of the deeper life that underlies the ice of conventionality." ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... Brown murmured a conventionality concerning his delight at meeting the pair, and once more headed for the door. But Mrs. Bascom's curiosity would not permit him to escape ...
— The Woman-Haters • Joseph C. Lincoln
... artist makes one out of fictitious material. More might develop out of this love of form and drama in life. We have it to a certain degree of cultivation in picturesque and refined manners, dress, and ceremonial, but even there it is hampered through conventionality and want of invention; further evolved and extended into the deeper strata of life, it would lead to a more interesting and productive existence. Surely, if God is an artist as well as a judge, he will welcome into heaven not only those who have lived ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... purport of his wanderings through the streets of the city,—gaining new experience with every hour, and studying the needs and complaints of his people for himself;—but if we should be told of a modern monarch doing likewise in our own day, we should mount on the stiff hobby-horse of our ridiculous conventionality, and accuse him of having brought the dignity of the Throne into contempt. Yet nothing perhaps can be more contemptible than a monarch who is too surrounded by flunkeyism to be a Man,—and, on the other hand, nothing could be more beneficial than the feeling that perhaps a monarch ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... "new." The natural result was the production either of heavy and ugly, or flimsy and inappropriate furniture, which has been condemned by every writer on the subject. In some of the designs selected from the exhibits of '51 this desire to leave the beaten track of conventionality will be evident: and for a considerable time after the exhibition there is to be seen in our designs, the result of too many opportunities for imitation, acting upon minds insufficiently trained to exercise careful judgment ...
— Illustrated History of Furniture - From the Earliest to the Present Time • Frederick Litchfield
... strings of a harp; when the hot blood runs wild through the veins, suffusing lip and cheek and brow; and the eyes look out upon the roseate world through a mist of tears that are pleasureable pain and painful pleasure inexplicably blended, then there is no force of cold conventionality to check the outcomes of the spirit, no bolts or bars or chains to fetter the bounding limbs that go forth rejoicing through the enchanted landscape which the good God has opened to all of us, at least once in life, as an ...
— The Bastonnais - Tale of the American Invasion of Canada in 1775-76 • John Lesperance
... service—that of presenting the fresh-coloured, discreetly-smiling vision called 'the typical English girl.' Miss Heriot fulfilled to a nicety the requirements of those who are sensibly reassured by the spectacle of careful conventionality allied to feminine charm—a pleasant conversability that may be trusted to soothe and counted on never to startle. Hermione would almost as soon have stood on her head in Piccadilly as have said anything original, though to her private consternation such perilous stuff ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... rushed into talk with Eagle before we stopped shaking hands; but he had not been able to answer the call of conventionality so soon; and it was not till after we were seated at table that he could control himself to speak. On his other side was Prince Paul's elderly dinner companion. On my other side was the new military attache who had taken ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... an act would condone her trespass in the eyes of the world. She might meet some of her invisible admirers, or even her companions; and, with all her erratic impulses, she was, nevertheless, a woman, and did not entirely despise the verdict of conventionality. She smiled sweetly, and assented; and in another moment the two were lost in the ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... I didn't quite understand," he said in a new tone which she had not heard before. Mr. Balm of Gilead, alias Peter Pan, had suddenly grown up, and as Peter Rolls, Jr., was all politeness and conventionality. ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... old-timers speak of it, and there is a fond pride in their voices when they allude to the subject; the same sort of pride one betrays when he tells of the wild oats sowed by a gray-haired friend during his lusty youth. For Tombstone has settled down to middle-aged conventionality and is peaceable enough ...
— When the West Was Young • Frederick R. Bechdolt
... for the sake of consistency, some of the more conservative theologians continued to repeat the old arguments, and there were many who insisted upon the belief as absolutely necessary to ordinary orthodoxy; but it is evident that it had become a mere conventionality, that men only believed that they believed it, and now a reform seemed possible in the treatment of ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... world.... Dante was his friend and Titian copied him.... His rules in art were: You shall see things as they are; and the least with the greatest, because God made them; and the greatest with the least, because God made you, and gave you eyes and a heart; he threw aside all glitter and conventionality, and the most significant thing in all his work is his choice of moments." Cimabue still painted the Holy Family in the old conventional style, "but Giotto came into the field, and saw with his simple ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... hates the "stuffy" life of a hausfrau, but marriage makes no appeal, since the breaking of her engagement with Alfred—who is also a man with punctual business habits. She despises conventional men, and is herself compact of conventionality. In her most rebellious moods the leaven of Philistia (or the British equivalent, Suburbia) comes to the surface. She dares, but doesn't dare enough. "It needs both force and earnestness to sin." As in the case of Hedda Gabler, it is her social conscience that keeps her ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... compelling magnetism of his gaze. She loved this man. In all the world no other could so move her. She loved—yet feared him. The very strength of him—the overmastering force of his personality—his barbaric disregard of conventionality at once attracted ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... brushed back in long curls. She had as her only ornament a pale gold band in her hair, and wore a simple dress of light-flowered material, the high waistband fitting close to the girlish figure. Conventionality began to assert its rights over nature, and the girl too felt confused at finding herself in the middle of a conversation with a strange man, suddenly shot down at her very feet. Wilhelm understood and shared her embarrassment, and bowing, ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... women have played their parts in the drama of Royal Courts, but scarcely one, not even those Messalinas, Catherine II. of Russia and Christina of Sweden, conducted herself with such a shameless disregard of conventionality as Marie Louise Elizabeth d'Orleans, known to fame as the Duchesse de Berry, who probably crowded within the brief space of her years more wickedness than any woman who was ever ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... be done. The duchess herself did not propose to defy conventionality to the extent of inviting me to stay. To do her justice, as soon as the inevitable was put before her, she accepted it with good grace, and, after supper, busied herself in discovering the time and manner in which her guests ...
— The Indiscretion of the Duchess • Anthony Hope
... their side. They were succeeded by inferior craftsmen, Francois Marchant of Orleans, and Nicolas Guybert of Chartres; and after them art went on sinking lower and lower, down to one Sieur Boudin, who had dared to sign his miserable puppets, down to the stupid conventionality of Jean de Dieu, Legros, Tuby, and Mazieres, to the cold and pagan work of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But there was an improvement in the eight last groups opposite the Virgin of the Pillar—some simple figures ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... Quixote the predecessors in modern literature. Also that Mephistopheles is as inexhaustible as a type of evil as Faust is as a type of virtue, and therefore that this picturesque stage devil, with all his conventionality, is akin to the serpent which tempted Eve, the Thersites of Homer, and—mirabile dictu!—the ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... further perusal. From these three paragraphs you can construct the whole story: you know that the "dependent cousin" and the girl with the "handsome brunette features" will be rivals for the affections of some "nice young man" of corresponding conventionality, and that the poor relation will finally win him—chiefly because it always happens so in stories and seldom in real life. And you know from these specimen paragraphs that there will be nothing in the handling of ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... tended to standardise opera libretti under the influence of Racine, and it was really a movement towards dignity and dramatic unity after the monstrous confusion of the earlier Venetian operas. As to the conventionality of the music, and its forms of air and recitative, it can only be said that all serious Italian music was written in these forms; it was simply the normal musical style of the period, and must have been as natural to its own audiences as the style of Puccini ...
— Handel • Edward J. Dent
... the confusion of controversies, the cowardice of conventionality, the vanity of declarations, the inanity of proofs. He saw himself bruised and thrust aside by the reflections of everybody, obliged henceforward to advance or retire, dispute or hold ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... of all. Then there is the atmosphere of the home, the real reverence for higher things, if it exists, affects even a little child more than is usually supposed, but children are quick to distinguish reality from mere conventionality though the distinction is only half conscious. Reality impresses, while conventionality is apt to bore. Even to quite young children Froebel's ideal mother would begin to show God in nature. Some one put into the flowers the scent and colour that delight the child—some ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... been disingenuous. But she had sheltered Nan from the cave-man that dwelt in Roger—oddly at variance with the streak of conventionality which lodged somewhere in his temperamental make-up. And she was quite sure that, if Lord St. John knew, he would be glad that his death should have succoured Nan, just as in life he had ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... separated Gregory from his secretary could enjoy his toleration, but Fran had struck far below the surface of likings and dislikings. She had turned back the covering of conventionality to lay bare the quivering heartstrings of life itself. There was no time to hesitate. The stone ax which on other occasions might be a laughing elfish face was now ...
— Fran • John Breckenridge Ellis
... the words of the minister's prayer. The words are not the prayer. Mr. Drake's words were commonplace, with much of the conventionality and platitude of prayer-meetings. He had always objected to the formality of the Prayer-book, but the words of his own prayers without book were far more formal; the prayer itself was in the heart, not on the lips, and was far better than the words. But poor Dorothy heard only the words, and they ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... gathering, both in point of attendance and of general interest. The business of the association was transacted under the direction of the president, Miss Kate Sanborn, whose free construction of parliamentary law and independent adherence to common sense as against narrow conventionality, results in satisfactory progress and rapid action. The 150 or more ladies present were more convinced than ever that Miss Sanborn is the right woman in the right place, although she herself indignantly repudiates the notion that she ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... calls the maniac-frown. It was with this expression of face that I should have liked to paint him; but I felt that he would not have liked it, that it was more fair to him to represent him in his mere wholesome pink and white and blond conventionality. I was perhaps rather unconscientious about the likeness of Mr. Oke; I felt satisfied to paint it no matter how, I mean as regards character, for my whole mind was swallowed up in thinking how I should paint Mrs. ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... Christian feeling to tinge the fancy with a grave and sweet romance. The sculptor had the skill and mastery to express his slightest shade of thought with freedom, spirit, and precision. Yet his work showed no sign of conventionality, no adherence to prescribed rules. Every outline, every fold of drapery, every attitude was pregnant, to the artist's own mind at any rate, with meaning. In spite of its symbolism, what he wrought was never mechanically figurative, but gifted with the independence of its own ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... would apply to the priesthood with still more imperious force; such of them as were actually sincere would be found at their post at the hour of trial, in obedience to no form, but influenced by their own conscientiousness. Such of them as were insincere would be true to no obligation imposed by conventionality. Untrue to their convictions, they could not be faithful to their words. And finally—an argument which appears unanswerable and insuperable—Mr. John O'Connell and his immediate followers had so solemnly ...
— The Felon's Track • Michael Doheny
... Croyden was a marvelous comrade for a boy, a strange mixture of youthfulness and maturity; of feminine charm and masculine freedom from conventionality. She loved boys and understood how to be one with them, and in consequence the friendship that at first had extended only to Mr. Croyden Theo now stretched to include her. Nor did the stretching demand effort. Who could have resisted the sweet wholesome interest of this fascinating ...
— The Story of Porcelain • Sara Ware Bassett
... self sacrificing attitude she was forced to admit the plea of Alec's own bewildering lack of conventionality. If half the stories in the newspapers were true, he was the most original minded monarch that ever reigned. She was quite sure that his answer to any evasive reply on her part would be a public announcement ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... have reduced unconventionality in morals to a kind of spurious conventionality; in some of them the idea of marriage as a preliminary to connubial relations is regarded as rather shocking. Some day Madame Granier will hide her face in her hands, shameful at the insult of "married woman" hurled at her; and our youthful critic will admire the audacity. Caution requires ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... prove it otherwise." He looked into the softest of brown eyes, and his voice trembled. "Beside you the world is nothing. Its approval or its condemnation are things to be laughed at. With you I challenge conventionality—society—everything." He bent over her hand almost reverently and touched it softly ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... of this country has taught me that its conventional gardeners are always jolly, and always three in number. Whether that conventionality has reference to the Three Graces, or to those very significant letters, L., S., D., I do not know. Those mystic letters are, however, most important, and no society can have officers of more importance than its Treasurers, nor can it possibly ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... of kings and queens, grand and splendid as they are, have not such spiritual fragrance as these village queen-makings; soft glimmerings and shinings-through of the light of a better world—a world with which man, let conventionality disguise him as it may, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 427 - Volume 17, New Series, March 6, 1852 • Various
... not her equal in energy and beneficence, and I was younger when you came. But I feel for her longing to be up and doing, and her puzzled chafing against constraint and conventionality, though it breaks ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... changed him was the slow daily influence of a large number of trifling habitual duties none of which fully strained his faculties, and the monotony of them, and the constant watchful conventionality of his deportment with customers. He was still a youth, very youthful, but you had to keep an eye open for his youthfulness if you wished to find it beneath the little man that he had been transformed into. He now took his watch out of his pocket with an absent gesture ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... the stone walls, huckleberry pies, and johnny cakes of Rhode Island, and I love the associations of my childhood and my family tree, but there is something in the air of this part of the world that enchants me. It is a certain "Why not?" that leads me into all sorts of delightful experiences. Conventionality does not hold us as tightly as it does in the East, and a certain tempting feeling of unlimited possibilities in life makes waking up in the morning a small adventure in itself. It isn't necessary to point out the dangers of an unlimited "Why not?" cult—they are too obvious. "Why not?" ...
— The Smiling Hill-Top - And Other California Sketches • Julia M. Sloane
... letters like the c, the a, and so on, an ugly pear-shaped swelling defacing the form of the letter: in short, it happens to this craft, as to others, that the utilitarian practice, though it professes to avoid ornament, still clings to a foolish, because misunderstood conventionality, deduced from what was once ornament, and is by no means useful; which title can only be claimed by artistic practice, whether the art in ...
— The Art and Craft of Printing • William Morris
... Sir Charles, and he was not afraid to say so. But his liberty of appreciation owed something also to the circumstances of his education. The fact that he had never been at a public school—thus missing, in the plastic years of a sensitive boyhood, the influences which make most strongly for conventionality of outlook among men of a certain class—made it easier for him than it might otherwise have been to examine literary questions with his own eyes, and not through the medium of special glasses imposed by authority. By the time he went up to Cambridge this habit of judging ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... stagger to its doom. The familiar proverb which declares that the gods make mad those whom they would destroy has a significance not always considered. For when a man loses his intellectual equilibrium, a baseness of character which never broke through the crust of conventionality may be suddenly revealed; and when a wicked system goes mad, such depths of perfidy are disclosed as few imagined to exist. During the last two years, while our Southern sky has been aglow with the red light of the slave-masters' insurrection, few of us could probe and pry about among details ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... guise than when in the glitter of parade uniform or the accurate and irreproachable evening dress of civilization. There is not a man in the group who is not quite at his ease in ball-room attire; most of them have held acquaintance time and again with the white tie and stiff "choker" of conventionality, but the average gallant of metropolitan circles would turn up his supercilious nostrils at the bare suggestion were he to see them now. The —th is in its element, however, for the order has come, and with the coming dawn it will be on the march ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... has social engagements outside of certain disreputable establishments, where a genial personality or an over-burdened pocketbook gives entree, and the rules of conventionality have never even been whispered. His love affairs, confined to this class of women, have seldom lasted more than a week or ten days. His editors know him as a brilliant genius, irresponsible, unreliable, but at ...
— The Easiest Way - Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911 • Eugene Walter
... been more sophisticated, it might have struck him as exceptional that a princess who been brought up in the strictest conventionality should have granted the privilege of such intimate association even to so exalted a personage as the Earl of Essex. He believed her confidence due to girlish innocence, and was more than ever determined to protect her from ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... the controversy; and those who held by the king's Opera were as certainly Tories, as those who went to the nobility's were Whigs. Of course all this was very foolish, and very wrong; yet in our days of stately conventionality, when perfect impassibility is deemed the highest style of breeding, there is something refreshing in reading of such animated scenes in high life. The crowning act of hostility to Handel, was when the Earl of Middlesex ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 455 - Volume 18, New Series, September 18, 1852 • Various
... conscientious, ignorant and gentle persons. In chronicle or fiction I have never been fortunate enough to meet with anything which resembled them. The caricatures of enmity and worldly scorn are as crude, to my memory, as the unction of religious conventionality is featureless. ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... the strong can survive, and recognizing himself as a failure, her calm assurance and self- certainty offended him vaguely. It seemed as if she were succeeding where he had failed, which rather jarred his sense of the fitness of things. Then, too, conventionality is a very agreeable social bond, the true value of which is not often recognized until it is found missing, and this ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... he had gone, she reproached herself for having put such a question to him. At the pass things had reached, it was surely best for him to go through with his infatuation, and get over it. Whereas she, in a spasm of conventionality, had pointed him out the sure road to perdition; for the worst thing that could happen would be for him to bind himself to Louise, in any fashion. As if her reputation mattered! The more rapidly she got rid of what remained to her, the better it ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... lived a sense of the romantic seems, in these days, a slight and superficial tribute. The whole modern theory arises from one fundamental mistake—the idea that romance is in some way a plaything with life, a figment, a conventionality, a thing upon the outside. No genuine criticism of romance will ever arise until we have grasped the fact that romance lies not upon the outside of life, but absolutely in the centre of it. The centre of every man's existence is a dream. Death, disease, insanity, are merely material accidents, ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... nature. The artist's eye is always on the object, and, though he represents it in his own style, that style is always normal and temperate, free from affectation, free from exaggeration or morbidity and, in the earlier periods, free from conventionality. It is art without doubt; but it is natural and normal art, such as grew spontaneously when mankind first tried in freedom to express beauty. For example, the language of Greek poetry is markedly different from ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... the stage now, it was true, but there was something warm and human and ragged about the performance. Flint was not a mere spiritless allegory in red-satin doublet and hose to give flame to his conventionality. Instead, she saw sitting opposite her a ponderous, quick-breathing, drunken male, handsome in a coarse, rough-hewn way, speaking in the quick, clipped speech of passion and striking her to the ground with the energy of his stage business. She was afraid, almost for the first time in her life, ...
— The Blood Red Dawn • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... noted in the second instant of his observation was that Sally was not at all loath to waste her time on the stranger. She was eating with a truly formidable conventionality of manner, and a certain grace with which she raised the ponderous coffee cup, made of crockery guaranteed to resist all falls, struck awe through the heart of the cowpuncher. She was bent on another conquest, beyond all doubt, and that she would ...
— Trailin'! • Max Brand
... picturesque, and in the presence of Englishmen he had a habit of accentuating those characteristics of speech and manner which are held by our countrymen to be native to the Peninsula. There is nothing so disarming as conventionality—and nothing less suspicious. Larralde seemed ever to be a typical Spaniard—indolently polite, gravely ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman
... regular and strongly marked as he could; to each scale or leaf he gave a raised edge to mark its contour and distinguish it from the rest. The general effect was thus obtained by deliberate exaggeration of the relief and by a conventionality that was justified by the conditions of the problem to ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... a friendly and familiar groove, for Sara and Morva knew nothing of the restraints of class and conventionality. ...
— Garthowen - A Story of a Welsh Homestead • Allen Raine
... do, I do!" exclaimed Dennis impulsively; then, with a realization of the thin surface over which he was making such rapid strides despite the danger signals of conventionality, and with a diplomacy born of his native good sense, he glided, with cheerful Celtic sagacity, to safer footing by asking abruptly: "May I recommend myself"—as if he had not already done ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder
... been to break through the conventionality which surrounded her—and it had required some nerve—so as to be able to come here alone, on this one of her last nights ...
— His Hour • Elinor Glyn
... the conditions of his new life. Being well bred, he respected, outwardly at least, the laws of artificiality and conventionality, and bowed before the idols of ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... her beauty, secure in her selfishness, strong over others' weaknesses, weighing accurately the deeds and words of men and women, recognizing all there was in position and tradition, seeing with her father's clear eyes the practical meaning of any divergence from that conventionality which as a woman of the world she valued, she returned again and again to the trembling joy of that intoxicating moment. She though of her mother and sisters, of Raymond and Garnier, of Aladdin—she even forced herself to think of Carroll—only to shut her eyes, with ...
— Maruja • Bret Harte
... himself was doubtful whether he could handle, an atmosphere confronts us as mediaevally German as the "Der arme Heinrich" of Hartmann von Aue, which was the inspirational source for Longfellow's "The Golden Legend." Uhland shows heaviness in conception, and a conventionality, thoroughly at variance with the tragedy's original passion. Romantic as he is, he has robbed the story of its warm southern nature, and has thrown his Dante aside to deal with false situation. He seems willing to let ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Francesca da Rimini • George Henry Boker
... Archie hastily. "She just fancies the life—thinks it offers me a good chance to prove my mettle. She hates conventionality." ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... even fame to the object of future choice, and no good point is lost. Physical force and skill, and above all, victory and glory, make a hero and invest him with a romantic glamour, which, even though concealed by conventionality or etiquette, is profoundly felt and makes the winner more or less irresistible. The applause of men and of mates is sweet and even intoxicating, but that of ladies is ravishing. By universal acclaim the fair belong to the brave, strong, and victorious. This stimulus is wholesome ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... the Letters ought not to be in the slightest degree softened (which it has hitherto been, owing to false views of propriety and morality), for it is no moral deformity here displayed. Indeed, even when the irritable master has recourse to expressions repugnant to our sense of conventionality, and which may well be called harsh and rough, still the wrath that seizes on our hero is a just and righteous wrath, and we disregard it, just as in Nature, whose grandeur constantly elevates us above the inevitable ...
— Beethoven's Letters 1790-1826, Volume 1 of 2 • Lady Wallace
... was much less particular in his social habits than I was. He was engaged to a young lady all the time I was with him, and wrote letters to her constantly; but this fact did not prevent him from paying attentions to other young women, and I was aware that he was more familiar with them than conventionality would warrant. In fact he made no attempt to be secret in the matter, and often poked fun at me for my over sensitivity on the subject. Here was the key to a whole lot of meaning. The first year I was with him, I had no sweetheart ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... that the true state of the case was impressed on the minds of the company. At the appointed hour no Julia appeared. In her stead, Mrs. Marrable portentously approached the stage, with an open letter in her hand. She was naturally a lady of the mildest good breeding: she was mistress of every bland conventionality in the English language—but disasters and dramatic influences combined, threw even this harmless matron off her balance at last. For the first time in her life Mrs. Marrable indulged in vehement gesture, and used strong language. ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... had passed on. In a moment mere pride and conventionality resumed sway, and she smiled bitterly, saying to herself, "What a weak fool I am to-night! Of all things let me not ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... all. People do not mince along the banks of streams in patent-leather shoes or crepitating silks. Corduroy and home-spun and flannel are the stuffs that suit this region; and the frequenters of these paths go their natural gaits, in calf-skin or rubber boots, or bare-footed. The girdle of conventionality is laid aside, and the skirts rise ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... done last eve, A timid, shrinking love to grieve. And ought he not to disregard The poet's madness? for 'tis hard At eighteen not to play the fool! Sincerely loving him, Eugene Assuredly should not have been Conventionality's dull tool— Not a mere hot, pugnacious boy, But man of ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... King was sure to astonish those around him by some breach of Court conventionality, little or great. He was liable to strong likings and dislikings, and he took no pains to conceal his sentiments in either case. He seems to have had an affectionate regard for his young niece, the Princess Victoria, ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume IV (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... 'Jacques' when he is just about to fling himself down an Alpine precipice that his wife and Octave may have their way undisturbed. And all the time, what poetry and passion in the presentation of these things! Beside them the mere remembrance of English ignorance, prudishness, and conventionality would set the lad swelling, as he read, with a sense of superior scorn, and of wild sympathy for a world in which love and not law, truth and not legal fiction, ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... well," Francesca assured her soothingly. "We shall be pardoned much because we are Americans, and will not be expected to know any better. Besides, the gifted Miss Hamilton is an artist, and that covers a multitude of sins against conventionality. When the castle people 'tirl at the pin,' I will appear as the maid, if you like, following your example at Mrs Bobby's cottage ...
— Penelope's Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... white-faced girl and a big, apoplectic turfman, were forgetting dignity, decorum, and conventionality as hand in hand they stormed through the surging eruption of humanity fighting to get a chance at ...
— Garrison's Finish - A Romance of the Race-Course • W. B. M. Ferguson
... climbing mist between the trees; the gas-lamps were twinkling everywhere. I could hear the ringing of some church bell; there was space, freedom for thought, a vague, uncertain prospect, out of which figures were looming curiously,—a delightful sense that I was sinning against conventionality ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... generally) was to reform the whole structure of opera, using the last or "Beethoven" development of instrumental music as a basis, and freeing it from the fetters which conventionality had imposed, in the shape of set forms, accepted arrangements, and traditional concessions to a style of singing now happily almost extinct. The one canon was to be dramatic fitness. In this "Art Work of the Future," as he called it, the ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... the President of the Republic. For such is the law as embodied in Article 8 of the Constitution." Now nobody believed that this was the true ground for his refusal. His explanation, however, was construed as a courteous conventionality, and as such was accepted. But once alleged, the fiction should have been respected, at any rate by its authors. It was not. A few weeks later the Premier ordered the publication of the text of the Treaty, although, in the meantime, ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... active power of the arts at this time was the conscious or unconscious resort of those who practised them to the springs of Nature, from which the streams of all true Art proceed. Dante was the first of the moderns to seek Poetry at the same fountain, and to free her from the chains of conventionality which had long bound her. In this he shows his close relation to his times. It is his fidelity to Nature which has made him a leader for all successive generations. The "Vita Nuova" was the beginning of a new school of poetry and of prose as completely as Giotto's ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... noble and passionate and full as the poem is in other ways. But there is no story, no manners, no modern allusion, except in the grand general adjuration to the 'Mother-age,' and no approach to the treatment of a conventionality. But Crabbe, as you say, has done it, and Campbell in his 'Theodore' in a few touches was near to do it; but Hayley clearly apprehends the species of poem in his 'Triumphs of Temper' and 'Triumphs of Music,' and so ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... mistake to think that the children of the poor are the only ones who need the physical and moral benefit of normal childish play. One is forced to the conclusion that many children of the rich are even more to be pitied, for the shackles of conventionality enslave them from the outset. Many are blase with opera and picture exhibits—typical forms of pleasure for the adult of advanced culture—without ever having had the free laughter and frolic of childhood. That part of the growing-up ...
— Games for the Playground, Home, School and Gymnasium • Jessie H. Bancroft
... Browne's work is most astonishingly unequal, though the general level of Britannia's Pastorals is distinctly higher than that of the Shepherd's Pipe. The author passes at times abruptly from careful and loving realism to the most stilted conventionality, and from passages of impassioned eloquence to others grotesquely banal. In some of his peculiarities, as in the perpetuai use of elaborate similes and in the indulgence in inflated paraphrases, he anticipates some of the worst faults ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... in the hard-shut lips of Hercules. Otherwise, [267] these figures all smile faintly, almost like the monumental effigies of the Middle Age, with a smile which, even if it be but a result of the mere conventionality of an art still somewhat immature, has just the pathetic effect of Homer's conventional epithet "tender," when he speaks of the flesh ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... be attained with comparative ease, it performs a lofty philosophical function. Everything rusts by use. Our moral ideals grow mouldy if preached too much; our stories stale if told too often. Conventionality is but a living death. The other side of everything must be shown, the reverse of the medal, the silver side of the shield as well as the golden. Convex things are equally concave, and concave things convex. The world was made round so that one ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... conventionalized music. They had set it down in rules and men like Beckmesser could not imagine that there was any music permissible outside the regulations. Then came Walter von Stolzing. Music to him was not a conventionality but a passion—not a rule, but a life—and, when he sang, his melodies reached heights of beauty that Beckmesser's rules did not provide for. It was Walter von Stolzing who sang the Prize Song, and as the hearts of the people were stirred in answer to its spontaneous melody, until ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... and you don't know me. That is why I want to tell you about it. I must tell somebody, and if I told anybody I knew, they'd tell it all over Halifax. It is dreadful to be talking to you like this. Beatrix would have three fits, one after the other, if she saw me. But Beatrix is a slave to conventionality. I glory in discarding it at times. You don't ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... as I afterwards discovered. He was in good circumstances, and always glad to receive us at his house, as this made him, virtually, the chief of our tribe, and the outlay for refreshments involved only the apples from his own orchard and water from his well. There was an entire absence of conventionality at our meetings, and this, compared with the somewhat stiff society of the village, was really an attraction. There was a mystic bond of union in our ideas: we discussed life, love, religion, and the future state, not only with the utmost candor, but with a ...
— Beauty and The Beast, and Tales From Home • Bayard Taylor
... wherewith to console him, he listened to those who are said to intoxicate him with such exaltation, verses, and rhymes, as they had never demonstrated to others; because this work shines more by its originality than by its conventionality. ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... reserving my necklace of pearls for some more brilliant occasion. Aunt Helen, who supervised my toilet, was greatly distressed at my obstinacy. Nevertheless I left the house with it on. But at the last moment my courage failed me; I slipped it off and put it in my pocket,—thus making a courtesy to conventionality on the threshold ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... wild associations gave a singular interest to the view; for here each man lives by the strength of his arm and the valor of his heart. Here society is reduced to its original elements, the whole fabric of art and conventionality is struck rudely to pieces, and men find themselves suddenly brought back to the wants and resources of ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... nature of the droppers-in at the Ark—the children and all the young men and maidens making their appearance with a promiscuousness which precluded the possibility of design—but to-night the Wallencamp mind had evidently aimed at some great system of conventionality, and had been eminently ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... idiotic conventionality of the last words her companion had disappeared and she was left alone. He had not gone back in the direction whence they had come, but had taken the deserted windward side of the ship, doubtless with the intention of avoiding ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford
... that marriage take precedence of schooling," said Mrs. Sproul, as her mischievous old eyes snapped at Mrs. Cockrell's placid conventionality. "The correct order is for women to take husbands and then school children should be the inevitable outcome. They are not, however, in this day and generation, which is about to ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... very inconveniently across Christina's principles; yet she was afraid of saying too much. She reflected that her friend was breathing the soft air of luxury, which is not strengthening, and enveloped in a kind of mist of conventionality, through which she could not see. With herself it was different. She had been thrown out of all that; forced to do battle with necessity and difficulty, and so driven to lay hold of the one hand of strength and deliverance that she could ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... required more courage to face than people accustomed to the present-day use of gay tennis garb can easily imagine. It was fortunate that nerve to return the salutation smilingly was not wanting, or Mr Stevenson would certainly have pitilessly chaffed the timid victims of conventionality afterwards. ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Margaret Moyes Black
... no such social freedom to be enjoyed anywhere as on board an ocean steamer. The breaking-up of old associations, the opening of a fresh existence, the necessity of new relationships,—this fuses the crust of conventionality, quickens the springs of life, and renders character sympathetic and fluent. The past is easily put away; we become plastic to new influences; we are delighted at the discovery of unexpected affinities, and astonished to find in ourselves so much wit, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... outworn platitudes again find their constant lover in Alfred Austin, Tennyson's successor as poet laureate. Austin brought the laureateship, which had been held by poets like Ben Jonson, Dryden, Southey and Wordsworth, to an incredibly low level; he took the thinning stream of garrulous poetic conventionality, reduced it to the merest trickle—and ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... Lettice mechanically. The change from fierce earnestness to this subdued conventionality of tone bewildered her ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... chin and looked at her companion over the barricade of conventionality that lay between them with the air of one whose position is unassailable. The old woman sighed with much the same air, but with none of her daughter-in-law's satisfaction ...
— The Wizard's Daughter and Other Stories • Margaret Collier Graham
... the last. When such men as John Stuart Mill, Charles Kingsley, Prof. Newman, and their peers, put the shoulder to the wheel, a cause is bound to move on and crush all obstacles in the way of its progress. No old stumbling blocks of prejudice, or deep ruts of conventionality can impede the onward movement. As in America, I find that intellect, genius, wealth, and fashion even, are beginning in England to fall into the ranks and push on the woman suffrage question. Miss Frances ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... decency and conventionality and all the rest of it!" he vociferated as some of the ladies, quite warrantably hung back. "Get at the acid before it gets at you! Don't you—can't you understand? It'll burn into your skin in a little while! ...
— Mr. Hawkins' Humorous Adventures • Edgar Franklin
... We have seen how that early in life he conceived a decided antipathy to the prosaic and the commonplace, and his career up to this point furnishes abundant evidence that he hated with a genuine hatred to keep in the ruts of custom and conventionality, as if bound to do so because such was prescribed by custom and conventionality. His sentiments he never concealed, and his actions harmonised, almost without exception, strictly with his sentiments; for ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... stopping. We had come to Middelburg. I looked out again. Nell was on deck alone. Doubtless Alb had at last gone below to the motor-room, and was exchanging the blue overalls for something more decorous. Would he, even for the sake of conventionality, have left her at such a moment unless everything ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... adjust a discordant character with the conditions of blessedness so as to reinstate an exile of heaven. To imagine that God will, in consideration of some technical device, place in heaven a man whose character fits him for hell, or, in default of that conventionality, place in hell a man whose character fits him for heaven, is to represent him as acting on an eccentric whim. And surely every one who has a worthy idea of God must find it much easier to believe that men have mixed mythological ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... had been his grandson's governess, she was a welcomed and honoured acquisition to the family. Perhaps too he perceived the error of his middle age, when he contrasted that former wedding, the work of worldly conventionality, with the present. In the first, an unformed, undeveloped lad, unable to understand his own true feelings and affections had been passively linked to a shallow, frivolous, ill- trained creature, utterly incapable of growing into a helpmeet for him; whereas ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Everything lacked conventionality, and was accepted as a matter of course; and although at times Sam sorely taxed my gravity by using the bed for a temporary dumb waiter, the bushmen showed no embarrassment, simply because they felt none, and retained their self-possession with unconscious dignity. They ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... alpenstock, and hastened swiftly forward. The path soon afterward emerged on the public road. The breeze cooled her hot cheeks, kissed away her tears, and half an hour later they approached the hotel, chatting as quietly as the strictest conventionality would require. ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... and disreputable women, who conduct themselves with appropriate freedom from the restraints of conventionality. FERNANDE, who is too lachrymose to be a cheerful feature, is wisely placed on guard at the outer door. The company proceed to play at faro, the bank being the loser. There is a false alarm of police, and the game is suddenly ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 15, July 9, 1870 • Various
... I'm a total failure! I hate conventionality! And lines of least resistance! And practical things! It is the men who are the real sticklers for convention. The same kind of men that follow the lines of least resistance and build their railroads ...
— The Texan - A Story of the Cattle Country • James B. Hendryx
... stomach, with a lofty forehead, with a smooth double chin resting pulpily on a white cravat. Everything in harmony about him except his eyes, and these were so sharp, bright and resolute that they seemed to contradict the bland conventionality which overspread all the rest of the man. Eyes with wonderful intelligence and self-dependence in them; perhaps, also, with something a little false in them, which I might have discovered immediately under ordinary circumstances: but I looked at the doctor through the medium ...
— A Rogue's Life • Wilkie Collins
... and according to the picture's truth, but in its essence just as real and permanent as the artistic worth of romance. "Seen from afar," writes Mr. Moore, "all things in nature are of equal worth; and the meanest things, when viewed with the eyes of God, are raised to heights of tragic awe which conventionality would limit to the deaths of kings and patriots." On such a lofty theory they built their treatment and their style. It is a mistake to suppose that the realist school deliberately cultivates the sordid or shocking. Examine in this connection Mr. Moore's Mummer's Wife, ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... depends on some conviction which to you is palpably a limited one; imperfect, what we call an error. But would it be a kindness always, is it a duty always or often, to disturb them in that? Many a man, doing loud work in the world, stands only on some thin traditionality, conventionality to him indubitable, to you incredible: break that beneath him, he sinks to endless depths! "I might have my hand full of truth," said Fontenelle, "and open ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... the same quiet comfort, the same air of repose, and the same absence of library conventionality about. ...
— The Private Library - What We Do Know, What We Don't Know, What We Ought to Know - About Our Books • Arthur L. Humphreys
... the fact that this country girl, in the coarse dress and sunbonnet, whom he had whimsically likened to a rustic lass, to be helped across a brook for a kiss, had instantly, by a mere glance, clothed the situation in an impregnable mantle of conventionality. He took her basket and held out his hand, feeling as though he were about to assist a princess from her carriage. With a touch she sprang past him and stepped quietly up the bank. "Thank you," she said, sedately, as she took the basket from him. "I think it is Dr. Allen ...
— Treasure Valley • Marian Keith
... same way," I said, "heroic hearts may be beating under the trappings of conventionality and great ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... bride) that the hotel people absolutely deny that she came with a husband at all. A punctilious if sceptical American senator (refreshingly guiltless of accent) and his enthusiastic son and daughter take pity on her, and the rest of the book resolves itself into a detective story, saved from conventionality by the pleasantly distinguished style in which the author writes and the intimate knowledge which she appears to possess of the Paris prefecture de police. Gerald Burton, the young American, not entirely platonic in his solicitude, is baffled; ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, May 20, 1914 • Various
... of the literary Trinity, the Second and Third being Custom and Conventionality. Imbued with a decent reverence for this Holy Triad an industrious writer may hope to produce books that will live as long as ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... conveyed to the cemetery, where they are allowed to rot on top of the grave. To me there is no more mournful sight than a visit to a great London cemetery, where one sees these rotting emblems, which quite palpably meant nothing save the practice of a conventionality. The Japanese, however poor his worldly circumstances may be, is not content with flowers, costly flowers on the day of the funeral; he places his vase alongside the grave of the departed, and by keeping that vase filled with fresh and beautiful ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... delirium and nourished on crime, whose very atmosphere was electrified and whose very foundations were restless, would take a quarter of a century at least to manufacture a decent thick surface of conventionality, and its self-conscious respectable wing could no more escape its spirit than its fogs and winds. But evil excitement was tempered to irresponsible gaiety, a constant whirl of innocent pleasures. When the spirit passed the portals untempered, and drove women ...
— Sleeping Fires • Gertrude Atherton
... an artist by instinct and habit, though a lawyer by profession. He painted pictures for love and practised law for money, or conventionality, or to please his mother and sisters, or from some reason which, however indefinite, had been strong enough to predominate over the longing he had always had to go to Paris, live in the Latin Quarter, and be simply and honestly what his taste dictated. Few people, perhaps, ...
— A Beautiful Alien • Julia Magruder
... which has not been in use for hundreds of years; and to say that such material begins to lose its freshness is not putting the case too strongly. He has not been able to detach himself from the paralyzing background of English conventionality. The vein was rich, but it is worn out; and the half-dozen ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... knew but little, least of all where his affections were concerned, but there was the ring of noble metal in his self-assertion. He would never consciously act or speak a falsehood, and was intolerant of the lies, petty or great, which conventionality and warped habits of thought encourage in ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... however, that art is of value only to the extent that it speaks to us. It might be a universal language if we ourselves were universal in our sympathies. Our finite nature, the power of tradition and conventionality, as well as our hereditary instincts, restrict the scope of our capacity for artistic enjoyment. Our very individuality establishes in one sense a limit to our understanding; and our aesthetic personality seeks its own affinities in the creations of the past. It is true that with ...
— The Book of Tea • Kakuzo Okakura
... would forget the look in that man's eyes. The look might have been in other men's eyes, but conventionality had always veiled it; she had ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath
... speech of Lady Mary. I will not deny that I purposed on a near day to scale the garden wall and hold speech of my sweetheart as she walked alone among the flowers. For my success I depended upon the absolute conventionality of the idea. In all history no lover has even been chased out of a garden by ...
— The O'Ruddy - A Romance • Stephen Crane
... temperature, the pulse and the rate of respiration, the learned pundit passes them over without a word. Mrs. Elsie Clews Parsons would be a good one to write a sober and accurate treatise upon kissing. Her books upon "The Family" and "Fear and Conventionality" indicate her possession of the right sort of learning. Even better would be a work by Havelock Ellis, say, in three or four volumes. Ellis has devoted his whole life to illuminating the mysteries of sex, and his collection of materials is unsurpassed in the world. Surely ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken
... step; even the shops have a Bohemian aspect, for trade is nowhere so much the victim of chance as here. You see no breach of the public peace, no indecorous act offends you; but the people you meet have a certain air of independence, of scorn, of conventionality, a certain carelessness which mark them as very different from the throng you have just left on Broadway. They puzzle you, and set you to conjecturing who they are and what they are, and you find yourself weaving a romance about nearly every ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... poet discloses fitfully on this side and that. None of these things are to be found in The Ring and the Book The action of Caponsacchi, though noble and disinterested, is hardly heroic in the highest dramatic sense, for it is not much more than the lofty defiance of a conventionality, the contemplated penalty being only small; not, for example, as if life or ascertained happiness had been the fixed or even probable price of his magnanimous enterprise. There was no marching to ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... declared that the weather was beastly, the reply did not matter. It did not matter to her; it did not matter to him. She was thinking of something else and he was also. He was thinking of Margaret, wondering whether he might not go to her. Were it not for the strait-jacket that conventionality is and which pinions the sturdiest, he would have gone. He was a little afraid of Mrs. Austen, as an intelligent man sometimes is afraid of an imbecile woman. But his fear of her fainted beside the idea that if, disregarding ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... handsome and attractive; her pronounced originality lends her a peculiar charm. She has many admiring friends who are true to her, and I must say that when she is a friend she is a true one, and never fails you. Her originality frequently leads her beyond conventionality; for instance, the other day she took it into her head to dine out of doors. If she wanted to picnic al fresco, why did she not choose some pretty place in the park or in the woods? But no, she had the usual elaborate dinner served directly ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... with every hour, and studying the needs and complaints of his people for himself;—but if we should be told of a modern monarch doing likewise in our own day, we should mount on the stiff hobby-horse of our ridiculous conventionality, and accuse him of having brought the dignity of the Throne into contempt. Yet nothing perhaps can be more contemptible than a monarch who is too surrounded by flunkeyism to be a Man,—and, on the other hand, nothing could be more beneficial than the feeling that perhaps a ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... water. The black sough of wind from it lifted her hair, and dampened her forehead. The man's brain grew clearer, stronger, somehow, as he looked at her; as thought does in the few electric moments of life when sham and conventionality crumble down like ashes, and souls stand bare, face to face. For the every-day, cheery, unselfish Grey of the coarse life in yonder he cared but little; it was but the husk that held the woman whose nature grappled ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... extraordinarily one of ingenuousness. Of course they are not in the least ingenuous, as a fact, but self-conscious and elaborate to the highest degree. The progress of every art is an apparent progress from conventionality to realism. The basis of convention remains, but as the art develops it finds more and more subtle methods fitting life to the convention or the convention to life—whichever you please. Tchehkoff's tales mark a definite new conquest in this long struggle. As you read him ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... I grew impatient of conventionality. How was it possible for these people to look so quietly, eye to eye, upon the most vitally perfect of living beings? How could they turn from me to orange frappe ...
— The Bacillus of Beauty - A Romance of To-day • Harriet Stark
... I saw that the struggle between us had begun—the struggle against her timidity and conventionality. "No, not tonight." This ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... the absolute lack of a sense of humor. His path through life is about three feet wide and bordered with rock-ribbed conventionality. If a man has a joke in his system, Graves doesn't understand it and is suspicious. I tell, you, Kuhn, there's more honest common sense and ability in the right hand of this Down-East salt than there ever was in ...
— Cap'n Warren's Wards • Joseph C. Lincoln
... having left some words about dinner ringing in his ears, and he was sitting before a hearth-fire in a large leather easy-chair. Then he looked about the room in much the same dazed fashion in which he had contemplated the woman. He had never seen a room like it. He was used to conventionality, albeit richness, and a degree even of luxury. Here were absolute unconventionality, richness, and luxury of a kind utterly strange to him. The room was very large and long, extending nearly the whole length of the house. There were many ...
— 'Doc.' Gordon • Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman
... conventionalist. It is because we are at this hour so preoccupied with Sex, in our desire to readjust the conventions of Society and Morality towards it, that a great artist, who simply leaves it out altogether, or treats it with a mixture of the conventionality of the preacher and the worst foolishness of the crowd, is an artist whose ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... "Essay on Beethoven," says: "We declare that the work of art, which was formed and quickened entirely by that deed, must present the most perfect artistic form, i.e., that form in which, as for the drama, so also and especially for music, every conventionality would be abolished." Beethoven is asserted to have founded the new musical school, when he admitted, by his recourse to the vocal cantata in the greatest of his symphonic works, that he no longer recognized absolute ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... you would have nothing to do; but everything about him enflames his imagination. He is swept along on the torrent of conventional ideas; to rescue him you must urge him in the opposite direction. Imagination must be curbed by feeling and reason must silence the voice of conventionality. Sensibility is the source of all the passions, imagination determines their course. Every creature who is aware of his relations must be disturbed by changes in these relations and when he imagines or fancies he imagines others better adapted to his nature. It is the errors ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... repose of his youth had returned to his mind, while the faculties of imagination and execution appeared in renewed strength; all conventionality being done away by the force of the impression which he had received from the Alps, after his long separation from them. The drawings are marked by a peculiar largeness and simplicity of thought: most of them by deep serenity, passing into melancholy; all by a ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... foreign origin, though in this case an English development, known as the pre-Raphaelite theory, with Millais, Holman Hunt, and Rossetti as its leaders, was already at work. This year there was a picture by Millais—still a lad of twenty-one—in support of the protest against conventionality in the beautiful, which did not fail to attract attention, though it excited as much condemnation as praise. The picture was "Christ in the House of His Parents," better known as "The ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen, (Victoria) Vol II • Sarah Tytler
... you let me for a moment throw conventionality aside; will you for that brief space of time let me speak truly and freely to you, as one might speak who has passed the ...
— Elster's Folly • Mrs. Henry Wood
... is not in him alone that I find this fault, but in nearly all foreign actors. There seems to be a limit of passion within which they remain true in their rendering of nature; but beyond that limit they become transformed, and take on conventionality in their intonations, exaggeration in their gestures, and mannerism in their bearing. I left my box saying to myself: "I too can do Hamlet, and I will try it!" In some characters Irving is exceptionally fine. I am convinced that it would be difficult to interpret Shylock ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles
... been published under the Irish name Seosamh Maccathmhaoil, writes both regular and free verse. He is close to the soil, and speaks the thoughts of the peasants, articulating their pleasures, their pains, and their superstitions. No deadness of conventionality dulls the edge of his art—he is an original man. His fancy is bold, and he makes no attempt to repress it. Perhaps his most striking poem is I am the Gilly of Christ—strange that its reverence has been mistaken for sacrilege! And in the ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... to be out alone," she said, and the girl seemed to perceive dimly a hedge of conventionality which she had not hitherto known. She had often taken a car when she was alone of an evening, without a thought of anything questionable. Some of the conductors lived near Ellen, and she felt as if she were under personal friendly escort. "I know the conductor on ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... Sismondi for having taught that landed property has no other basis than law and conventionality; and he says himself, speaking of the respect which people feel for property, that "their good sense reveals to them the nature of the ORIGINAL CONTRACT made between society ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... the first few hours, I was sublimely happy, and then a strange restlessness seized me. I was obsessed with a wish to see the flower-garden. For some minutes, stimulated by a dread of what my aunts would think of such a violation of conventionality on the part of a child, I combated furiously with the desire; but at length the longing was so great, so utterly and wholly irresistible, that I succumbed, and, getting quietly out of bed, made my way ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... the idea that thoughts and opinions could not be forced, like sheep, to go in a particular track, but that every one should be free to hold what convictions his reason dictated, untrammelled by conventionality or creed of any kind. Miss Beauchamp professed to be of a like mind, and agreed to allow him to educate the boys (if any), while she would look after the female issue of their marriage. With this ridiculous understanding they got married, and for a time things went pleasantly along, Mrs. ...
— The Mysteries of Montreal - Being Recollections of a Female Physician • Charlotte Fuhrer
... knew her to be, he hesitated whether he should call her by her given name, and was taken aback when she smilingly thanked him for doing so, with the assurance that she was often bored with the eternal conventionality of ...
— Philip Dru: Administrator • Edward Mandell House
... I stand above the servants; above me stands Your Grace, but above us all stands—Conventionality. Its laws are perpetual, for they have their foundation both in common sense and in what ...
— Lucky Pehr • August Strindberg
... real meaning of the pictures was that supplied something else, something hidden and desperate that pulsed in them all. How she remembered the first time that she had drawn away when Gerald kissed her, putting up between them the shield of a lightly yet decisively accepted conventionality. They were 'growing up'; this was her justification. How she remembered what it had cost her to keep up the lightness of her smile so that he should not guess what lay beneath. Her nature was all passion, ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... however, sang the praises of the poem lustily. Even Jeffrey—perhaps because it was purely Scottish (he had thought Marmion not Scottish enough), perhaps because its greater conventionality appealed to him, perhaps because he wished to make atonement—was extremely complimentary. And certainly no one need be at a loss for things to commend positively, whatever may be his comparative estimate. The fine Spenserian ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... according to his impudence, and the words would not come. The greatness of the required sacrifice came over her and therewith the desire to temporise. The voice of many Knickerbocker ancestresses spoke in her, and between herself and a real emergency she interposed the impenetrable buckler of a conventionality. She wrote: ...
— The Collectors • Frank Jewett Mather
... on her part, according to her best knowledge of befitting dignity; but, unfortunately for her, the young American was of an outspoken disposition, and utterly untrammelled by those instincts of conventionality which Eliza had, not by training, but by inheritance from her law-abiding and custom-loving ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
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