United States or Tajikistan ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
If he lacked the air of aristocratic calm which gave distinction to Judge Bannister, he supplied in its place a sophistication due to his contact with a world which moved faster than the Judge's world in Virginia. He adored Becky, and resented her long sojourn in the South.
And I know that it is equally foolish to neglect the popular elements in the developing American genius that genius which is so colloquial now, and yet so inventive; so vulgar sometimes, and yet, when sophistication is not forced upon it, so fresh.
His sophistication was progressing, but it had not reached that point. He wanted something I flew instantly to the mad conclusion that he wanted Dora. I did not pause to inquire why he should ask her of me. It had seemed for a long time eminently proper that anybody who wanted Dora should ask her of me. The application was impossible, but applications nearly always were impossible.
One whose most intense conviction was faith in the goodness of all things and creatures as they are first produced by nature, and so long as they remain unsophisticated by the hand and purpose of man, was in some degree bound to show a way by which this evil process of sophistication might be brought to the lowest possible point, and the best of all natural creatures kept as near as possible to his high original.
His love for manhood in its most primitive attainable types, those furnished by the peasant, was the outcome of his conception of art, such as the Greek of the early schools conceived it, the expression of humanity in a simple and therefore noble state, and of the honest, open, healthy nature of the man himself, averse to all sophistication of society, reverent of an ideal in art, and intolerant of affectations.
Unless his characters act and think at all points consistently with the laws of their imagined existence, and unless these laws are in harmony with the laws of actual life, no amount of sophistication on the part of the author can make us finally believe his story; and unless we believe his story, his purpose in writing it will have failed.
He laughed slyly as one who is getting even with an old enemy and drank, with every evidence of delight, the second glassful of wine. Niebeldingk considered. Whether unfathomable stupidity or equally unfathomable sophistication lay at the bottom of all this the business was a wretched one.
She rehearsed it with far eyes. She laughed at old delights, drooped at old fears. She told about her little daughter who had died at sixteen a tragedy such as once would have been renewed in a vital ballad. At the end she yawned frankly as if, in some terrible sophistication, she had been telling the story of some one else. "Give us one more piece," she said. "Can we?" Cornish asked.
The young men naturally wished to be invited to these functions, the increasing elaborateness of which kept pace with the increasing sophistication of life in La Chance and the increasing cost of which made the parents of the girls groan. Consequently each masculine fraternity took care that it did not incur the enmity of the organized and socially powerful sororities.
It is worth while to remark and proclaim such a conviction as this only because mankind has so treacherous a memory, and so fatuous a habit of disowning its most precious and dearly won possessions. Cardinal truths are periodically overlaid with sophistication, blended with tentative opinion, and identified with the instruments of the day.
Word Of The Day