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Many customs, many dresses, many works of art are branded with artificiality because they exhibit vanity and self-consciousness: as if vanity were not a deep and elemental thing, like love and hate and the fear of death. Vanity may be found in darkling deserts, in the hermit and in the wild beasts that crawl around him.

It is to be noted, too, that the form of artificiality of truth varies not only with the type and quality of the drama but with the nature of the audience.

The safety of this method was its artificiality; between the King and his public image there was really no relation. But the moderns have invented a much subtler and more poisonous kind of eulogy.

Yes, with all that hair it was white, but a little dye would change it. What was a little dye compared with the profound artificiality of his own outer man? How the old fellow's deep voice rang, loud and clear, from his broad chest! How strong he was, with his firm step, and his broad brown hands, and his fiery black eyes!

In a sumptuous purple alcove, a man in evening clothes, with sunken eyes and drawn features, was smoking a fat cigar, his whole life concentrated in the fragrant glow of his tobacco. His companion, her bare elbow on the table, enveloped in perfume and sparkling with jewels, and overloaded with the heavy artificiality of luxury, turned her simple moon-like face toward the speaker.

So it came to pass that an unnatural pair continued to meet and mystify and misunderstand each other to the great content of the high gods and of one unimportant human philosopher who looked on. "I told you all this artificiality was spoiling her," Jaffery growled, one day. "She's as prim as an old maid. I can't get anything out of her." "That's a pity," said I. "It is." He reflected for a moment.

Once more he gives us the contrast between artificiality and reality. This novel, like all of Tolstoi's, is by no means a perfect work of art. Its outline is irregular and ragged; its development devious. It contains many excrescences, superfluities, digressions. But it is a dictionary of life, where one may look up any passion, any emotion, any ambition, any weakness, and find its meaning.

Her heart rose from its late sadness like a released spring; her senses revelled in the sudden lapse back to nature unadorned. The consciousness of having to be genteel because of her husband's profession, the veneer of artificiality which she had acquired at the fashionable schools, were thrown off, and she became the crude, country girl of her latent, earliest instincts.

Artificiality, affectation, pomposity, mouthing, undue vehemence, monotony, intoning, and everything that detracts from the simplicity and genuine fervor of the speech should be avoided. Too much emphasis may drive a thought beyond the mark, and a conscious determination to make a "great speech" may keep the speaker in a state of anxiety throughout its entire delivery.

Her neck, soft with the gentle fulness of youth. The masses of ruddy brown hair coiled on her bare head without any of the artificiality of the women he encountered in Leaping Horse. The delicate complexion of her oval cheeks, untouched by the fierce climate in which she lived. To him she had become a perfect picture of womanhood.