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Updated: May 6, 2025
'Spirited fellow! said Miss Levering, promptly, with an accent that brought down a laugh on the young gentleman's head. He joined in it, but with a naïf uneasiness. What's the matter with the woman? his vaguely bewildered face seemed to inquire. After all, I'm only agreeing with her. 'Few of us have time, I imagine, said Filey, 'to go and listen to their ravings.
Philosophy has only herself to blame if abstractions are in the naif, ordinary mind opposed to realities, for it is unhappily true that nearly the whole of our current philosophy does consist of abstractions which are mere "Hirngespinnste," rooted in words and not in nature; philosophy itself has in art become a term of reproach from being associated with unreality.
She hurried on to say that she had sent him a bouquet, with a piece of poetry, and that he had been heard to exclaim, "How beautiful!" on reading it. "And do you know," she continued, with an air that was meant to be charmingly naïf, but which was not very successful, as naïveté at twenty-nine is rather flat, "I am so much afraid he thinks it original!
He was the real naif, because he was the real child, unaffected and unspoiled, and painting was for him but the key of heaven that he might open another door for the world's weary eye. Where is our once charming acrobat our minstrel of muscular music? What has become of these groups of fascinating people gotten up in silk and spangle?
I walked about for two or three hours, and devoted most of my attention to the old quarter, the town proper, which has a great frowning gate upon the harbor, through which you look along a vista of gaudy house fronts, balconies, and awnings, surmounted by a narrow strip of sky. Here the local color was richer, the manners more naïf.
How great then used to be my naif astonishment to find these murderers, rogues, parricides, habitual forgers of bills of exchange, and so forth, every now and then writing to each other as "my dearest brother," "my dearest sister," and for months at a time living on the most amicable terms!
From Pilgrim's Rest we once more crossed a steep mountain, along a road that for length and height has not its equal. In the neighbourhood of Ohrigstad, a little town that we left to our right, I asked a Boer woman whether the fever did not make one's life impossible there, and I got a very naïf reply: 'No; this year the fever was not so bad. We all got ill, but not one of us died.
If I had gone to see the great apostle of beauty, I should have had to go clandestinely en cachette, as they say here; and that is not my nature; I like to do everything frankly, freely, naivement, au grand jour. That is the great thing to be free, to be frank, to be naif. Doesn't Matthew Arnold say that somewhere or is it Swinburne, or Pater?
Like a learned Abbé I delighted in the confessions of this young man, a naïf young man, a little vicious in his naïveté, who says that his soul must have been dipped in Lethe so deeply that he came into the world without remembrance of previous existence.
But what is tolerable in the quaint and naïf verse of the twelfth or thirteenth century, becomes shocking when deliberately rendered by a grave man into bald unblushing prose of the eighteenth. The humour, the rich sparkle, the wit, the merry gaillardise, have all vanished; we are left with the vapid dregs of an obscene anachronism. Mr.
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