Word: realist
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Author Gorky, Russian realist, feels beneath the surface of an episode for its obscure, its real causes. To him, reason is no sinew flexing and supporting life, but a scalpel for cutting into it. That he makes his most satisfactory discoveries among abnormal patients is not surprising in a man who experimented on himself as a boy by lying beneath freight trains...
...militarist of the old school must remember that the powers of Germany's president are so limited that even if this were a great national attempt to throw off the Allied yoke, it could result in nothing but failure. Von Hindenburg is too much of a political realist not to see that submission is the only salvation of Germany. He will adhere more closely to the Versailles Treaty than Europe half realizes...
...Then discontent plagued him sore. He pickaxed through Main Street, spitted Babbitt. Now, slightly relieved but no whit satisfied, he hammers out a harsh heroism and lays it, hissing hot, to the flabby flank of Medicine. While he is thus occupied, his fancy is caught by a realist's dream of fair woman - wry little Leora. The satire is swift, sure, great in its age, and Leora, being of life, will outlive...
...smacked his lips over life. In Art, he belonged to the school of gusto. Wharf-rats, city parks, snowy clustered roofs, great clumping dray horses, seamy faces of dock laborers, pale ladies, prizefighters, gentle landscapes-he painted all with the impulse of a poet and the hand of a realist. To form he gave a significance from which modernists shrink because it is obvious, conservatives because it is daring and which many art-lovers admire because it is both...
...deplored the custom" of giving tips; that his visits to churches "commonly involved the Baedeker rather than the Prayerbook. . . . He distrusted Eddyism [Christian Science] . . . recoiled from what seemed to him tasteless and tawdry in the external fashions of the Salvation Army [in England] . . ." Philosophically, Mr. Howells was a benevolent realist; economically, a Utopian. His humor was courtly; and though others have thought that it sometimes trailed off into tenuous banality, Mr. Firkins will not admit a fault here. He calls it "irony of the salon." The Howells whimsy was multiform and pervasive, given to grotesque impersonations and rollicking image-jugglery...