Word: spiritlessness
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...studied music in Paris (after Harvard), was an organist, choirmaster and freelance writer on music before he went to the Herald Tribune. He left New York's music public gasping with his very first column, a deft and devastating panning of the sacrosanct Philharmonic-Symphony ("the sombre and spiritless sonority of a German military band"). Thereafter, he shaded old-style critics by his saucy phrases, e.g., hearing Violinist Jascha Heifetz overpower a sonatina "made one feel . . . that one had somehow got on the Queen Mary to go to Brooklyn." His compliments were apt to be delivered off his backhand...
...poorer one of the Democratic Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan ("an amiable, windy creature who knows almost nothing"). When World War I began. Roosevelt was an interventionist. He saw the invasion of Belgium as a desperate threat to the fabric of international law. and denounced Wilson's "spiritless neutrality" in the face of it. ("I should have backed the protest by force.") Repeatedly he offered to furnish and equip a volunteer cavalry division for emergency war service. ("I and my four sons" were to be among its officers.) He was consistently turned down...
...meant not so much to please the eye as to imitate, placate and cajole the gods and ghosts of Africa's numberless tribes. Many of the sculptors underwent long apprenticeships, were often members of an elite in their tribes. Today, too many of them have turned to spiritless apings of their own traditions for the sake of a burgeoning export trade...
Small people too, he might have added. Decent, ineffectual Robert Anderson was no match for his wife Laura when they began squabbling over the children. Laura hated him; she also hated their spiritless daughter Margaret, because she was so much like her father. Thanks to Laura's interventions, Margaret never even got to kiss the cautious clergyman she might have married. Lazy brother Rupert, meantime, whiled away delicious summer nights with a ripe barmaid named Joy. But his mother Laura thought Rupert could do no wrong-not even on the night of Oct. 5, when he picked...
...boycotted the show because they considered the jury too modern, still got their share of space. But, for the most part, they wasted it. Cecil Howard's sleek, plaster Adonis, Sacrifice, and Paul Manship's pair of bare-chested soldiers, striding arm in arm, entitled Buddies, were spiritless war-memorial stereotypes...