Word: workmanship
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1930-1939
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...There is something tremendously courageous, almost sadistically so, in this attitude. It is probable, with him, that reality itself is an escape from something he fears more--sentiment, romance, mysticism... "Mencken never describes anything, he tears it to pieces and throws it in your face... His aesthetic is Good Workmanship. His Muse is Technique...
...continues sterile . . . from a variety of causes. One ... is the want of really compelling leaders, of men of genius having the warrant of creative artists. The other causes embrace an only fitful instinct for truth, an almost fantastical indifference to beauty, and a deplorable neglect of the fundamentals of workmanship. . . . There have been arid epochs before this, such as the Victorian and its equivalent across the Channel in the Paris of Napoleon III. . . . Mediocrity in those days had a stupendous vogue. Modernism is but repeating history. It will someday prove a kind of Victorian 'dud,' with a difference...