Quotes4study

Then he recalled the coarseness and bluntness of her thoughts and the vulgarity of the expressions that were natural to her, though she had been brought up in the most aristocratic circles.

Leo Tolstoy     War and Peace

Mrs. Phillips's vulgarity was another, and perhaps a greater, tax on his forbearance; and though Mrs. Phillips, as well as her sister, stood in too much awe of him to speak with the familiarity which Bingley's good humour encouraged, yet, whenever she _did_ speak, she must be vulgar. Nor was her respect for him, though it made her more quiet, at all likely to make her more elegant. Elizabeth did all she could to shield him from the frequent notice of either, and was ever anxious to keep him to herself, and to those of her family with whom he might converse without mortification; and though the uncomfortable feelings arising from all this took from the season of courtship much of its pleasure, it added to the hope of the future; and she looked forward with delight to the time when they should be removed from society so little pleasing to either, to all the comfort and elegance of their family party at Pemberley.

Jane Austen     Pride and Prejudice

>Vulgarity in a king flatters the majority of the nation.

George Bernard Shaw     Maxims for Revolutionists

Mr. St. John came but once: he looked at me, and said my state of lethargy was the result of reaction from excessive and protracted fatigue. He pronounced it needless to send for a doctor: nature, he was sure, would manage best, left to herself. He said every nerve had been overstrained in some way, and the whole system must sleep torpid a while. There was no disease. He imagined my recovery would be rapid enough when once commenced. These opinions he delivered in a few words, in a quiet, low voice; and added, after a pause, in the tone of a man little accustomed to expansive comment, "Rather an unusual physiognomy; certainly, not indicative of vulgarity or degradation."

Charlotte Bronte     Jane Eyre

A sympathetic reader of Aristophanes can hardly fail to perceive that, while his political and intellectual tendencies are well marked, his opinions, in so far as they colour his comedies, are too indefinite to reward, or indeed to tolerate, analysis. Aristophanes was a natural conservative. His ideal was the Athens of the Persian wars. He disapproved the policy which had made Athenian empire irksome to the allies and formidable to Greece; he detested the vulgarity and the violence of mob-rule; he clave to the old worship of the gods; he regarded the new ideas of education as a tissue of imposture and impiety. How far he was from clearness or precision of view in regard to the intellectual revolution which was going forward, appears from the _Clouds_, in which thinkers and literary workers who had absolutely nothing in common are treated with sweeping ridicule as prophets of a common heresy. Aristophanes is one of the men for whom opinion is mainly a matter of feeling, not of reason. His imaginative susceptibility gave him a warm and loyal love for the traditional glories of Athens, however dim the past to which they belonged; a horror of what was ugly or ignoble in the present; a keen perception of what was offensive or absurd in pretension. The broad preferences and dislikes thus generated were enough not only to point the moral of comedy, but to make him, in many cases, a really useful censor for the city. The service which he could render in this way was, however, only negative. He could hardly be, in any positive sense, a political or a moral teacher for Athens. His rooted antipathy to intellectual progress, while it affords easy and wide scope for his wit, must after all, lower his intellectual rank. The great minds are not the enemies of ideas. But as a mocker--to use the word which seems most closely to describe him on this side--he is incomparable for the union of subtlety with riot of the comic imagination. As a poet, he is immortal. And, among Athenian poets, he has it for his distinctive characteristic that he is inspired less by that Greek genius which never allows fancy to escape from the control of defining, though spiritualizing, reason, than by such ethereal rapture of the unfettered fancy as lifts Shakespeare or Shelley above it,-- Entry: A

Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Slice 5 "Arculf" to "Armour, Philip"     1910-1911

In 1821 Mr John Scott, the editor of the _London Magazine_, was killed in a duel, and that periodical passed into the hands of some friends of Hood, who proposed to make him sub-editor. His installation into this congenial post at once introduced him to the best literary society of the time; and in becoming the associate of Charles Lamb, Cary, de Quincey, Allan Cunningham, Proctor, Talfourd, Hartley Coleridge, the peasant-poet Clare and other contributors to the magazine, he gradually developed his own intellectual powers, and enjoyed that happy intercourse with superior minds for which his cordial and genial character was so well adapted, and which he has described in his best manner in several chapters of _Hood's Own_. He had married in 1825, and _Odes and Addresses_--his first work--was written in conjunction with his brother-in-law Mr J. H. Reynolds, the friend of Keats. S. T. Coleridge wrote to Charles Lamb averring that the book must be his work. _The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies_ (1827) and a dramatic romance, Lamia, published later, belong to this time. _The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies_ was a volume of serious verse, in which Hood showed himself a by no means despicable follower of Keats. But he was known as a humorist, and the public, which had learned to expect jokes from him, rejected this little book almost entirely. There was much true poetry in the verse, and much sound sense and keen observation in the prose of these works; but the poetical feeling and lyrical facility of the one, and the more solid qualities of the other, seemed best employed when they were subservient to his rapid wit, and to the ingenious coruscations of his fancy. This impression was confirmed by the series of the _Comic Annual_, dating from 1830, a kind of publication at that time popular, which Hood undertook and continued, almost unassisted, for several years. Under that somewhat frivolous title he treated all the leading events of the day in a fine spirit of caricature, entirely free from grossness and vulgarity, without a trait of personal malice, and with an under-current of true sympathy and honest purpose that will preserve these papers, like the sketches of Hogarth, long after the events and manners they illustrate have passed from the minds of men. But just as the agreeable jester rose into the earnest satirist, one of the most striking peculiarities of his style became a more manifest defect. The attention of the reader was distracted, and his good taste annoyed, by the incessant use of puns, of which Hood had written in his own vindication:-- Entry: HOOD

Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 13, Slice 6 "Home, Daniel" to "Hortensius, Quintus"     1910-1911

The age of Chaucer is of peculiar interest to the student of literature, not only because of its brilliance and productiveness but also because of its apparent promise for the future. In this, as in other aspects, Chaucer (c. 1340-1400) is its most notable literary figure. Beginning as a student and imitator of the best French poetry of his day, he was for a time, like most of his French contemporaries, little more than a skilful maker of elegant verses, dealing with conventional material in a conventional way, arranging in new figures the same flowers and bowers, sunsets and song-birds, and companies of fair women and their lovers, that had been arranged and rearranged by every poet of the court circle for a hundred years, and celebrated in sweet phrases of almost unvarying sameness. Even at this time, to be sure, he was not without close and loving observation of the living creatures of the real world, and his verses often bring us flowers dewy and fragrant and fresh of colour as they grew in the fields and gardens about London, and birds that had learned their music in the woods; but his poetry was still not easily distinguishable from that of Machault, Froissart, Deschamps, Transoun and the other "courtly makers" of France. But while he was still striving to master perfectly the technique of this pretty art of trifling, he became acquainted with the new literature of Italy, both poetry and prose. Much of the new poetry moved, like that of France, among the conventionalities and artificialities of an unreal world of romance, but it was of wider range, of fuller tone, of far greater emotional intensity, and, at its best, was the fabric, not of elegant ingenuity, but of creative human passion,--in Dante, indeed, a wonderful visionary structure in which love and hate, and pity and terror, and the forms and countenances of men were more vivid and real than in the world of real men and real passions. The new prose--which Chaucer knew in several of the writings of Boccaccio--was vastly different from any that he had ever read in a modern tongue. Here were no mere brief anecdotes like those _exempla_ which in the middle ages illustrated vernacular as well as Latin sermons, no cumbrous, slow-moving treatises on the Seven Deadly Sins, no half-articulate, pious meditations, but rapid, vivid, well-constructed narratives ranging from the sentimental beauty of stories like Griselda and the Franklin's Tale to coarse mirth and malodorous vulgarity equal to those of the tales told later by Chaucer's Miller and Reeve and Summoner. All these things he studied and some he imitated. There is scarcely a feature of the verse that has not left some trace in his own; the prose he did not imitate as prose, but there can be little doubt that the subject matter of Boccaccio's tales and novels, as well as his poems, affected the direction of Chaucer's literary development, and quickened his habit of observing and utilizing human life, and that the narrative art of the prose was influential in the transformation of his methods of narration. Entry: II

Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 9, Slice 6 "English Language" to "Epsom Salts"     1910-1911

It was about the 6th century that the genius of the Greeks, almost suddenly, as it seems to us, emancipated itself from the thraldom of tradition, and passed beyond the limits with which the nations of the east and west had hitherto been content, in a free and bold effort towards the ideal. Thus the 6th century marks the stage in art in which it may be said to have become definitely Hellenic. The Greeks still borrowed many of their decorative forms, either from the prehistoric remains in their own country or, through Phoenician agency, from the old-world empires of Egypt and Babylon, but they used those forms freely to express their own meaning. And gradually, in the course of the century, we see both in the painting of vases and in sculpture a national spirit and a national style forming under the influence of Greek religion and mythology, Greek athletic training, Greek worship of beauty. We must here lay emphasis on the fact, which is sometimes overlooked in an age which is greatly given to the Darwinian search after origins, that it is one thing to trace back to its original sources the nascent art of Greece, and quite another thing to follow and to understand its gradual embodiment of Hellenic ideas and civilization. The immense success with which the veil has in late years been lifted from the prehistoric age of Greece, and the clearness with which we can discern the various strands woven into the web of Greek art, have tended to fix our attention rather on what Greece possessed in common with all other peoples at the same early stage of civilization than on what Greece added for herself to this common stock. In many respects the art of Greece is incomparable--one of the great inspirations which have redeemed the world from mediocrity and vulgarity. And it is the searching out and appreciation of this unique and ideal beauty in all its phases, in idea and composition and execution, which is the true task of Greek archaeological science. Entry: FIG

Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 12, Slice 4 "Grasshopper" to "Greek Language"     1910-1911

Doubtless these performances abounded in what seem to us ludicrous features; and, though their main purpose was serious, they were not in England at least intended to be devoid of fun. But many of the features in question are in truth only homely and _naïf_, and the simplicity of feeling which they exhibit is at times pathetic rather than laughable. The occasional grossness is due to an absence of refinement of taste rather than to an obliquity of moral sentiment. These features the four series have more or less in common, still there are certain obvious distinctions between them. The _York_ plays (48), which were performed at Corpus Christi, are comparatively free from the tendency to jocularity and vulgarity observable in the _Towneley_; several of the plays concerned with the New Testament and early Christian story are, however, in substance common to both series. The _Towneley Plays_ or _Wakefield Mysteries_ (32) were undoubtedly composed by the friars of Widkirk or Nostel; but they are of a popular character; and, while somewhat over-free in tone, are superior in vivacity and humour to both the later collections. The _Chester Plays_ (25) were undoubtedly indebted both to the _Mystère du vieil testament_ and to earlier French mysteries; they are less popular in character than the earlier two cycles, and on the whole undistinguished by original power of pathos or humour. There is, on the other hand, a notable inner completeness in this series, which includes a play of _Antichrist_, devoid of course of any modern application. While these plays were performed at Whitsuntide, the _Coventry Plays_ (42) were Corpus Christi performances. Though there is no proof that the extant series were composed by the Grey Friars, they reveal a considerable knowledge of ecclesiastical literature. For the rest, they are far more effectively written than the _Chester Plays_, and occasionally rise to real dramatic force. In the _Coventry_ series there is already to be observed an element of abstract figures, which connects them with a different species of the medieval drama. Entry: 10

Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 7 "Drama" to "Dublin"     1910-1911

When _The Pickwick Papers_ appeared in book form at the close of 1837 Dickens's popular reputation was made. From the appearance of Sam Weller in part v. the universal hunger for the monthly parts had risen to a furore. The book was promptly translated into French and German. The author had received little assistance from press or critics, he had no influential connexions, his class of subjects was such as to "expose him at the outset to the fatal objections of vulgarity," yet in less than six months from the appearance of the first number, as the _Quarterly Review_ almost ruefully admits, the whole reading world was talking about the Pickwickians. The names of Winkle, Wardle, Weller, Jingle, Snodgrass, Dodson & Fogg, were as familiar as household words. Pickwick chintzes figured in the linendrapers' windows, and Pickwick cigars in every tobacconist's; Weller corduroys became the stock-in-trade of every breeches-maker; Boz cabs might be seen rattling through the streets, and the portrait of the author of _Pelham_ and _Crichton_ was scraped down to make way for that of the new popular favourite on the omnibuses. A new and original genius had suddenly sprung up, there was no denying it, even though, as the _Quarterly_ concluded, "it required no gift of prophecy to foretell his fate--he has risen like a rocket and he will come down like the stick." It would have needed a very emphatic gift of prophecy indeed to foretell that Dickens's reputation would have gone on rising until at the present day (after one sharp fall, which reached an extreme about 1887) it stands higher than it has ever stood before. Entry: A

Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 4 "Diameter" to "Dinarchus"     1910-1911

It would, however, be a mistake to imagine that Joinville's book is exclusively or even mainly a chronicle of small beer. If he is not a Villehardouin or a Carlyle, his battlepieces are vivid and truthful, and he has occasional passages of no small episodic importance, such as that dealing with the Old Man of the Mountain. But, above all, the central figure of his book redeems it from the possibility of the charge of being commonplace or ignoble. To St Louis Joinville is a nobler Boswell; and hero-worshipper, hero, and heroic ideal all have something of the sublime about them. The very pettiness of the details in which the good seneschal indulges as to his own weakness only serves to enhance the sublime unworldliness of the king. Joinville is a better warrior than Louis, but, while the former frankly prays for his own safety, the latter only thinks of his army's when they have escaped from the hands of the aliens. One of the king's knights boasts that ten thousand pieces have been "forcontés" (counted short) to the Saracens; and it is with the utmost trouble that Joinville and the rest can persuade the king that this is a joke, and that the Saracens are much more likely to have got the advantage. He warns Joinville against wine-bibbing, against bad language, against all manner of foibles small and great; and the pupil acknowledges that this physician at any rate had healed himself in these respects. It is true that he is severe towards infidels; and his approval of the knight who, finding a Jew likely to get the better of a theological argument, resorted to the baculine variety of logic, does not meet the views of the 20th century. But Louis was not of the 20th century but of the 13th, and after his kind he certainly deserved Joinville's admiration. Side by side with his indignation at the idea of cheating his Saracen enemies may be mentioned his answer to those who after Taillebourg complained that he had let off Henry III. too easily. "He is my man now, and he was not before," said the king, a most unpractical person certainly, and in some ways a sore saint for France. But it is easy to understand the half-despairing adoration with which a shrewd and somewhat prosaic person like Joinville must have regarded this flower of chivalry born out of due time. He has had his reward, for assuredly the portrait of St Louis, from the early collection of anecdotes to the last hearsay sketch of the woeful end at Tunis, with the famous _enseignement_ which is still the best summary of the theoretical duties of a Christian king in medieval times, is such as to take away all charge of vulgarity or mere _commérage_ from Joinville, a charge to which otherwise he might perhaps have been exposed. Entry: JOINVILLE

Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 15, Slice 5 "Joints" to "Justinian I."     1910-1911

In composing these pieces, of very varied character, the jongleurs have practised an art which was in many respects rudimentary, but sincere and simple. The student of language finds the rich vocabulary of the fabliaux much more attractive to him than the conventionality of the serious religious and amatory poems of the same age. The object of the writers was the immediate amusement of their audience; by reference to familiar things, they hoped to arouse a quick and genuine merriment. Hence their incorrectness and their negligence are balanced by a delightful ease and absence of pedantry, and in the fabliaux we get closer than elsewhere to the living diction of medieval France. It is true that if we extend too severe a judgment to these pieces, we may find ourselves obliged to condemn them altogether. An instructed French critic, vexed with their faults, has gone so far as to say that "the subjects of these tales are degrading, their inspiration nothing better than flat and cruel derision, their distinguishing features rascality, vulgarity and platitude of style." From one point of view, this condemnation of the fabliau is hardly too severe. But such scholars as Gaston Paris and Paul Meyer have not failed to emphasize other sides to the question. They have praised, in the general laxity of style and garrulity of the middle ages, the terseness of the jongleurs; in the period of false ornament, their fidelity to nature; in a time of general vagueness, the sharp and picturesque outlines of their art. One feature of the fabliaux, however, cannot be praised and yet must not be overlooked. In no other section of the world's literature is the scorn and hatred of women so prominent. It is difficult to account for the anti-feminine rage which pervades the fabliaux, and takes hideous shapes in such examples as _Le Valet aux deux femmes_, _Le Pêcheur de Pont-sur-Seine_ and _Chicheface et Bigorne_. Probably this was a violent reaction against the extravagant cult of woman as expressed in the contemporary _lais_ as well as in the legends of saints. The exaggeration was not greater in the one case than in the other, and it is probable that the exaltation was made endurable to those who listened to the trouvères by the corresponding degradation. We must remember, too, that those who listened were not nobles or clerks, they were the common people. The fabliaux were _fabellae ignobilium_, little stories told to amuse persons of low degree, who were irritated by the moral pretensions of their superiors. Entry: FABLIAU

Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 10, Slice 1 "Evangelical Church Conference" to "Fairbairn, Sir William"     1910-1911

Such are the decadent aspects of the once rich literature of the Middle High German period in the 14th and 15th centuries. Turning now to the more positive side of the literary movement, we have to note a revival of a popular lyric poetry--the Volkslied--which made the futility and artificiality of the Meistergesang more apparent. Never before or since has Germany been able to point to such a rich harvest of popular poetry as is to be seen in the Volkslieder of these two centuries. Every form of popular poetry is to be found here--songs of love and war, hymns and drinking-songs, songs of spring and winter, historical ballads, as well as lyrics in which the old motives of the Minnesang reappear stripped of all artificiality. More obvious ties with the literature of the preceding age are to be seen in the development of the _Schwank_ or comic anecdote. Collections of such stories, which range from the practical jokes of _Till Eulenspiegel_ (1515), and the coarse witticisms of the _Pfaffe vom Kalenberg_ (end of 14th century) and _Peter Leu_ (1550), to the religious and didactic anecdotes of J. Pauli's _Schimpf und Ernst_ (1522) or the more literary _Rollwagenbüchlein_ (1555) of Jörg Wickram and the _Wendunmut_ (1563 ff.) of H.W. Kirchhoff--these dominate in large measure the literature of the 15th and 16th centuries; they are the literary descendants of the medieval _Pfaffe Amis_, _Markolf_ and _Reinhart Fuchs_. An important development of this type of popular literature is to be seen in the _Narrenschiff_ of Sebastian Brant (1457-1521), where the humorous anecdote became a vehicle of the bitterest satire; Brant's own contempt for the vulgarity of the ignorant, and the deep, unsatisfied craving of all strata of society for a wider intellectual horizon and a more humane and dignified life, to which Brant gave voice, make the _Narrenschiff_, which appeared in 1494, a landmark on the way that led to the Reformation. Another form--the Beast fable and Beast epic--which is but sparingly represented in earlier times, appealed with peculiar force to the new generation. At the very close of the Middle High German period, Ulrich Boner had revived the Aesopic fable in his _Edelstein_ (1349), translations of Aesop in the following century added to the popularity of the fable (q.v.), and in the century of the Reformation it became, in the hands of Burkard Waldis (_Esopus_, 1548) and Erasmus Alberus (_Buch von der Tugend und Weisheit_, 1550), a favourite instrument of satire and polemic. A still more attractive form of the Beast fable was the epic of _Reinke de Vos_, which had been cultivated by Flemish poets in the 13th and 14th centuries and has come down to us in a Low Saxon translation, published at Lübeck in 1498. This, too, like Brant's poem, is a powerful satire on human folly, and is also, like the _Narrenschiff_, a harbinger of the coming Reformation. Entry: III

Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 11, Slice 7 "Geoponici" to "Germany"     1910-1911