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The standard of naturalness being thus subjective, and determined by the laws of our imagination, we can understand why a spontaneous creation of the mind can be more striking and living than any reality, or any abstraction from realities.

"But naturalness can be carried to a point where it becomes affectation. This happened in some cases where I thought I was going to have some pleasure of the simplicity, but found at last that the simplicity was a pose. Sometimes there was a great air of being untrammelled. But there is such a thing as being informal, and there is such a thing as being unmannerly." "Yes?"

Speech is so familiar a feature of daily life that we rarely pause to define it. It seems as natural to man as walking, and only less so than breathing. Yet it needs but a moment's reflection to convince us that this naturalness of speech is but an illusory feeling. The process of acquiring speech is, in sober fact, an utterly different sort of thing from the process of learning to walk.

She was thoroughly and consistently good, she was lifelike, amusing, never out of key; only, while she reminded one at times of Réjane, she had none of Réjane's magnetism, none of Réjane's exciting naturalness. The whole company is one of excellent quality, which goes together like the different parts of a piece of machinery. There is Mme.

In her presence, and she knew that she was a very beautiful woman, he appeared, notwithstanding his absence of any knowledge of her sex and his lack of social status, unmoved, wholly undisturbed. He sat there in perfect naturalness. It did not seem to him even unaccountable that she should be interested in his concerns. He was not conceited or aggressive in any way.

I have said so much about 'luck' and about its naturalness before, that I ought to say nothing again. But I must add that the contagiousness of the idea of 'luck' is remarkable. It does not at all, like the notion of desert, cleave to the doer. There are people to this day who would not permit in their house people to sit down thirteen to dinner.

But mannerism can be only avoided by the most thorough practice and knowledge. Half-educated writers are always mannerists; while, as the ancient canon says, "the perfection of art is to conceal art" to depart from uncultivated and therefore defective nature, to rise again through art to a more organised and therefore more simple naturalness.

It was a natural enough outcome of the attraction towards the other sex which, never yet encouraged, was lurking in my mind; but it was not otherwise remarkable for its naturalness. It had its origin partly in my love of adventure, partly in my propensity for trying my powers, but, as love, was without root, inasmuch as it was rooted neither in my heart nor in my senses.

Looking more attentively, she discovered, as it were, trees, shrubs, a running stream of water, and all the accompaniments of a finished landscape painting. Fearful as was her situation, she could not help pausing to admire the beauty, the naturalness, the perfection of the scene. She had never beheld any thing half so vivid, so truthful, from the pencil of the artist.

That is his "stage directions" those artifices which authors employ to throw a kind of human naturalness around a scene and a conversation, and help the reader to see the one and get at meanings in the other which might not be perceived if entrusted unexplained to the bare words of the talk.