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The nineteenth century had its fling at the artificiality of the eighteenth century, and treated it with contempt as the age of doctrinaires. And now that the twentieth century is coming to the age of discretion, we hear a new term of reproach, Mid-Victorian. It expresses the sum of all villainies in taste.
It is found in nearly all Elizabethan prose writers, and partially accounts for their general tendency to artificiality. Shakespeare satirizes euphuism in the character of Don Adriano of Love's Labour's Lost, but is himself tiresomely euphuistic at times, especially in his early or "Lylian" comedies. Lyly, by the way, did not invent the style, but did more than any other to diffuse it.
How few there are in the world who retain, after a certain age, the character originally natural to them! We all get, as it were, a second skin; the little foibles, propensities, eccentricities, we first indulged through affectation, conglomerate and encrust till the artificiality grows into nature.
"Three months of every year almost." "Three months when they played hostess to each other. It was really Valerie who was the guest in the house when Imogen and her father were there. The relation was never normal. Now that poor Everard is gone, the necessary artificiality can cease. Valerie can try her hand at being a mother, not a guest. It will do both her and Imogen good."
Enough has now been said to show that troubadour lyric poetry, regarded as literature, would soon produce a surfeit, if read in bulk. It is essentially a literature of artificiality and polish. Its importance consists in the fact that it was the first literature to emphasise the value of form in poetry, to formulate rules, and, in short, to show that art must be based upon scientific knowledge.
The triple contrast in the book is powerfully shown: first, the contrast between the majesty of the mountains and the pettiness of man; second, the contrast between the noble simplicity of the Cossack women and the artificiality of the padded shapes of society females; third, the contrast between the two ways of life, that which Olenin recognises as right, the Christian law of self-denial, but which he does not follow, and the almost sublime pagan bodily joy of old Uncle Yeroshka, who lives in exact harmony with his creed.
With the exception of the omission of the prologue the version keeps pretty faithfully to its original, but it does no more than emphasize the tedious artificiality of the Italian, while whatever charm and perhaps over-elaborated grace of language Guarini infused into his verse has entirely evaporated in the process of translation.
Cramped by the artificiality of a town, far from action, or nature, or any strong or real life, we expanded under the influence of this noble music music which flowed from a heart filled with understanding of the world and the breath of Nature. In Die Meistersinger, in Tristan, and in Siegfried, we went to find the joy, the love, and the vigour that we so lacked.
In this encampment of wooden pavilions is lived the peculiar life of the place. We are sure it is a sincere, natural, sensible kind of life, as compared with that of other bathing-shores. Although there are brass bands at the hotels, and hops in the evening, and an unequal struggle of macassar oil with salt and stubborn locks, yet the artificiality is kept at a minimum.
A straight flight across the Atlantic in a record-breaker, so many nights in New York, so many in Chicago, so many in a Pullman car, and the net result in every newspaper an existence of pure artificiality infested by reporters. It's like living in the shell of your personality.
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