In spite of their obvious differences, folk art and popular art have much in common; they are easy to understand, they are romanti...c, patriotic, conventionally moral, and they are held in deep affection by those who are suspicious of the great arts. Popular artists can be serious, like Frederick Remington, or trivial, like Charles Dana Gibson; they can be men of genius like Chaplin or men of talent like Harold Lloyd; they can be as uni versal as Dickens or as parochial as E.P. Roe; one thing common to all of them is the power to communicate directly with everyone.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
a painful privacy learning to live without words.... E.P. "It looks like dying"MWilliams: "I can't describe to you what has been happening to me"-- H.D. "unable to speak."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We tried pathetic appeals to the wandering waiters, who told us "they are coming, Sir" in a soothing tone--and we tried stern remo...nstrance, & they then said "they are coming, Sir" in a more injured tone; & after all such appeals they retired into their dens, and hid themselves behind sideboards and dish-covers, still the chops came not. We agreed that of all virtues a waiter can display, that of a retiring disposition is quite the least desirable.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"Five o'clock tea" is a phrase our "rude forefathers," even of the last generation, would scarcely have understood, so completely ...is it a thing of to-day; and yet, so rapid is the March of the Mind, it has already risen into a national institution, and rivals, in its universal application to all ranks and ages, and as a specific for "all the ills that flesh is heir to," the glorious Magna Charta.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
PLAIN SUPERFICIALITY is the character of a speech, in which any two points being taken, the speaker is found to lie wholly with re...gard to those two points.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What side of American life is not touched by this antithesis? What explanation of American life is more central or more illuminati...ng? In everything one finds this frank acceptance of twin values which are not expected to have anything in common: on the one hand, a quite unclouded, quite unhypothetical assumption of aesthetic theory ("high ideals"), on the other a simultaneous acceptance of catchpenny realities. Between university ethics and business ethics, between American culture and American humour, between Good Government and Tammany, between academic pedantry and pavement slang, there is no community, no genial middle ground. The very accent of the words "Highbrow" and "Lowbrow" implies an instinctive perception that this is a very unsatisfactory state of affairs. For both are used in a derogatory sense. The "Highbrow" is the superior person whose virtue is admitted but felt to be an inept unpalatable virtue; while the "Lowbrow" is a good fellow one readily takes to, but with a certain scorn for him and all his works.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have been told lately that Fuseli was travelling by coach and a gentleman opposite him said: "I understand, Mr. Fuseli, that you... are a painter; it may interest you to know that I have a daughter who paints on velvet." Fuseli rose instantly and said in a strong foreign accent, "Let me get out."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »