Word: patterning
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...that this is their kind of book. It is true that Mr. Maugham's material has served many a dingy charlatan; true also that his style is undistinguished. But he has a rare grace: humility. He wants to tell a good story, but he does not distort the pattern thrt life imposes upon even the most shoddy events. He writes sensationism with an air of having his manner dictated absolutely by his material. His story is as compact as a surgical dressing...
...period" fiction, whose attitude to ward their material is merely that of a theatrical customer toward sale able properties, Mr. Marquand is workmanlike; he has made an at tempt to catch the temper of the proud and hazardous times of bad Eliphalet. His novel is too neat in pattern, too nervous in action, to find a place in the three-masted, damn-your-eyes tradition of sea-fiction which Captain Marryat, Cooper, Melville and, later, R. L. Stevenson adorned; but it affects, with latter-day sprightliness, the manner of that tradition. It is meritorious for being a good story...
...adventures of poor Pierrot who runs away with one Phrynette, returns home in tears, no player speaks a word. Miss Taylor's face is a painted mask of eternal, baffled laughter, of moon-blanched sorrow; her gestures are eloquent, her insight unfailing. George Copeland, famed pianist, upholds the glittering pattern of gesture with subtle rhythms...
Clearly, they saw, these pictures could not be measured against tradition. The eye sees a head, a landscape, a pattern of concrete objects. All traditional Art, admitting as important this thing seen, accents the reaction of the artist to what he sees, recognizes as an accidental requisite to the presentation of subject and the personality of the artist, the element of style-form, line, color. The artist, running at tradition's stirrup, has employed style as a thrilling, necessary but irrelevant mechanism for the exaltation of personality, of subject; yet it is only by virtue of this mechanism that...
...touched them. Of their relation to the college it might be said: "They are in it but not of it." Mediaeval monks possessed all the knowledge of their day; yet the conviction is now widespread that their's was a terribly warped and limited existence, and not a pattern to be copied. It would be a mistake to attribute too much sour-grape sentiment to the average undergraduate who refuses to do obeisance to a pure "Rank List" ideal. The ideal college man is an earnest student--but he is more than that. He would be a man--full...