"Melodrama" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... entrance of which are the old offices of Good Words, so frequently made use of by Dickens in the later years of his life), and "The Vaudeville," were given over to musical comedy and farce. "The Adelphi," though newly constructed at that time, was then, as now, the home of melodrama. ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... rather giddy from looking out of the window, a boy (exactly like the boys in melodrama who begin by selling papers and end by saving the heroine from the villain) came into the car, piled up to his head with novels and magazines. He scattered a lot over us, like manna, without asking us to pay, but just as I had got passionately interested in a short story he came back and began ...
— Lady Betty Across the Water • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... number of plays adapted from popular novels. In the "dramatization" of these stories, pretty much everything is left out of the higher sort that the reader has valued in the story. The romance of "Monte Cristo" is an illustration of this. The play is vulgar melodrama, out of which has escaped altogether the refinement and the romantic idealism of the stirring romance of Dumas. Now and then, to be sure, we get a different result, as in "Olivia," where all the pathos and character of the "Vicar of Wakefield" are preserved, and the effect of the play ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... are inevitable. They abide, and form a glowing background for all subsequent pictures, toned more austerely, and painted in more lasting hues of truth upon the brain. Those have never felt Venice at all who have not known this primal rapture, or who perhaps expected more of colour, more of melodrama, from a scene which nature and the art of man have made the richest in these qualities. Yet the mood engendered by this first experience is not destined to be permanent. It contains an element of unrest and unreality which vanishes upon ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... that I can't remember his words. But they were those of the noble, misunderstood hero of melodrama to his ungrateful sweetheart and her ruined father who have never appreciated his sterling worth. He let them jolly well know, and rubbed it in, that he would never have spent such an enormous sum on anything for himself: that indeed, though he ought to have received ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... under the same circumstances. Whenever he wanted anything he paid the price, even if it took his last cent. It was no incentive to action now, as he would have gladly paid for the privilege of playing this big part in this wonderful melodrama—a melodrama which he was prepared at any time to see change into a tragedy, ...
— L. P. M. - The End of the Great War • J. Stewart Barney
... apparently, because they are strongly dramatic in certain scenes. Thus, again, genuine farce (as distinguished from "slap-stick" comedy), social comedy, burlesque and extravaganza are all classed under the head of "comedy," just as comedy-drama, tragedy, melodrama, and historical plays are classed as "dramatic." These two broad classifications will be used throughout this work except where finer distinctions are needed in order to treat varieties of subjects. The regular spoken ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... closed for repairs—something, anything to bring to an end this hideous, nightmarish ride. She groaned inwardly at the thought of it all. She—Patricia O'Connell—who would have starved rather than play cheap, sordid melodrama—had been tricked by chance into becoming an actual, living part of one. She wondered a little why she felt no fear—she certainly had nothing but distrust and loathing for the man beside her—and these are breeders of fear. Perhaps her anger had crowded ...
— Seven Miles to Arden • Ruth Sawyer
... ordinary country-house raided by masked men can raise the countryside in pursuit, a schoolmaster must do precisely the opposite. From his point of view, the fewer people that know of the affair the better. Parents are a jumpy race. A man may be the ideal schoolmaster, yet will a connection with melodrama damn him in the eyes of parents. They do not inquire. They are too panic-stricken for that. Golden-haired Willie may be receiving the finest education conceivable, yet if men with Browning pistols are familiar objects at his shrine of learning they will remove him. Fortunately for schoolmasters ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... arrest. The reasons for this are manifold. In the first place, the private detective has neither the general authority nor the facilities for the manual detention of a criminal. A blue coat and brass buttons, to say nothing of a night stick, are often invaluable stage properties in the last act of the melodrama. And as the criminal authorities are eventually to deal with the defendant anyway, it is just as well if they come into the case as soon as may be. It goes without saying, of course, that a detective per se has no more right to make an arrest than any private citizen—nor has a policeman, for ...
— Courts and Criminals • Arthur Train
... was written "expressly for the occasion" by a gentleman who had produced one melodrama at a Bowery theatre, and failed to produce a large number of melodramas at all the theatres in Broadway. Mrs. Slapman, a true patroness of genius, kindly permitted this gentleman to prepare all her charades, and gratified him, on several occasions ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... better than any artist with whom she had ever sung. He was a young man, much younger than Madame Stock, and a Hungarian. Tall and very dark, he looked unlike the ideal Wagner tenor. Hilda teased him and called him the hero of a melodrama. She grew fond of the young man, who was always doing her some favor. To her mother he was extremely polite; indeed he treated her ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... London, passed his youth as a pedlar, and as a Newmarket stable boy. A charitable person having given him some education he became a schoolmaster, but in 1770 went on the provincial stage. He then took to writing plays, and was the first to introduce the melodrama into England. Among his plays, The Road to Ruin (1792) is the best, and is still acted; others were Duplicity (1781), and A Tale of Mystery. Among his novels are Alwyn (1780), and Hugh Trevor, and he wrote ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... shoulders the whole way to Chew Magna to be buried there in the Strachey Chapel. The event set down in cold print does not sound of very great interest or importance. It will seem, indeed, at first hearing to partake a little too much of the countryman of the melodrama, or of the comic papers, who always talks about funerals and corpses. As a matter of fact, however, Israel Veal has so little self-consciousness and possesses such a gift for dignified narration that, told by him, the story, if indeed it can be called a story, always seems ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... quite agree with Joe, however. Once, lying in my tent across the river, I looked out over the breaks through that strange purple moonlight, such as I had always believed to exist only in the staging of a melodrama, and saw four thousand ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... might round on you, and then they'd pinch me for manslaughter. Here is your pound, madam; go, and thank God you have been permitted to live through this fearful experience." He paid with the grand air of a hero of melodrama. His manner was so impressive it almost restored confidence, but Mahdi, the monster, remained crouched at the back of his cage, his face hidden in the straw, and nothing would induce him to ...
— The Missing Link • Edward Dyson
... scene in a melodrama, isn't it, Ware," he whispered, "but I know a little about Sylvanus Power. It's only a last ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... then let it be the stage; only I ask you to strive for the very best it offers. Have confidence in yourself, little girl, in your ability, your power, your spark of genius touched by suffering. Every hour you pass now in hideous, misshapen melodrama is worse than wasted. You have that within you well worthy of better setting, nobler environment, and you wrong yourself to remain content with less. You are mine now wherever you go, whatever triumphs you win; mine in spite of the law, because I possess your heart. I should doubt myself ...
— Beth Norvell - A Romance of the West • Randall Parrish
... therein was going to certain death. The beds were made over subterranean caves, the wardrobes were make-believe doors, in every corner was lurking an assassin. This traitorous nation, which was arranging its ground like the scenario of a melodrama, would have to be chastised. The municipal officers, the priests, the schoolmasters were directing and ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... other little and enormous thing. When the general urged them to their chivalric charge he half drew his sword from the scabbard; and then, as if ashamed of such melodrama, thrust it back again. The sword ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... were the posters advertising a popular musical comedy which Campbell had at first suggested our witnessing the afternoon of our stay in New York. Hephzibah's shocked expression and my whispered advice had brought about a change of plans. We saw a perfectly respectable, though thrilling, melodrama instead. I might have relieved my relative's mind by assuring her that all actresses were not necessarily attired as "merry villagers," but the probable result of my assurance seemed scarcely worth ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... Gilpin never threw the Wash about on both sides of the way more like unto a trundling mop or a wild goose at play than did Henry Kingsley the decent flow of fiction when the mood was on him. His notion of constructing a novel was to take equal parts of wooden melodrama and low comedy and stick them boldly together in a paste of impertinent drollery and serious but entirely irrelevant moralizing. And yet each time I read Ravenshoe—and I must be close upon "double figures"—I like ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... appeal being plainly an impossibility, an impromptu committee meeting was held in the Vernons' study, when the idea of an open-air melodrama was proposed, and carried with acclamation. A melodrama acted in the back garden, underneath Lavender's window, opened out prospects of amusement for the actors as well as the audience, and a rainy afternoon was passed in the merriest ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... the mood just now for a whole evening of exotic melodrama might look in at the Globe Theatre about 9.15, and derive a few moments' distraction from a Zulu wedding dance. I found it a better show than anything I have ever seen in the native compounds at Earl's Court. The company, of course, was mixed, ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 7, 1914 • Various
... the usual parade of authors! But it is peculiar to modesty to do all things without noise or pomp! I have some suspicion it will appear in public on Wednesday next, for W. says in his note, it is so forward that if wanted it may come out next week, and a new melodrama is announced for every day till then; and "a new farce is in rehearsal," is put up in the bills. Now, you'd like to know the subject. The title is "Mr. H.," no more; how simple, how taking! A great H. sprawling over the play-bill and attracting ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... moment he thought that his carefully plotted scenario was going to break up into melodrama with the reticent, composed and sympathetic Elinor's suddenly rising and slapping his face. Then he heard her say in a voice ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... forces in Germany," Benham wrote, "that will struggle very powerfully to avoid a war. And these forces increase. Behind the coarseness and the threatenings, the melodrama and the display of the vulgarer sort there arises a great and noble people.... I have talked with Germans of the better kind.... You cannot have a whole nation of Christophes.... There also the true knighthood discovers itself.... I do not believe ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... offered by the Dramatic Group during the winter. One member of this group, Mr. John Glover Drew, was ambitious, and urged the presentation of something more serious and edifying than merely amusing trifles, and, accordingly, an excursion was made into the realm of the melodrama. Glover, as he was called, was intensely Byronic, after the fashion of the times, and he prepared a succession of thrilling scenes from Byron's sensational poem, "The Corsair," for presentation by his fellow players. This melodramatic production was staged with all the pasteboard pomp and secondhand ...
— My Friends at Brook Farm • John Van Der Zee Sears
... Did you ever see such magnanimity? Can anybody say anything against such sentiments? Thank heaven that I am not as other men, nor even as this Unionist." He is plausible, but no more. The mob which applauds the hero and hisses the villain of a melodrama pats him on the back, while he looks upward with his hand on his heart and a heaven-is-my-home expression in his eye. Put him under the microscope—he needs it, and you will see him as he is. The platitudes in which ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... melodrama of Smyth's invasion of Canada. The whole affair was disgraceful and humiliating. 'What wretched work Smyth and Porter have made of it!' wrote General Wadsworth to General Van Rensellaer from his home at Genesee at the close of the year. 'I wish those who are ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 2 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Edgerton Ryerson
... by silly rebel guns from across the river); its shady avenues of alluring bungalows, and its parks—all so gay and peaceful in the warm spring sunshine that the very suggestion of war within a thousand miles seemed fantastic melodrama, despite the shouting newspaper boys with a fearsome "extra" coming out every fifteen minutes. There was new Fort Bliss, the cavalry post, and old Fort Bliss, famous, they told me, as long ago as the days of Indian warfare. There was the concentration camp where ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... household of his mother. Brought up strictly, by Moreau's advice, he seldom went to the theatre, and then to nothing better than the Ambigu-Comique, where his eyes could see little elegance, if indeed the eyes of a child riveted on a melodrama were likely to examine the audience. His step-father still wore, after the fashion of the Empire, his watch in the fob of his trousers, from which there depended over his abdomen a heavy gold chain, ending in a bunch of heterogeneous ...
— A Start in Life • Honore de Balzac
... met John Howard Payne, the American dramatist, at Kenney's, in France. "Ali Pacha," a melodrama in two acts, was produced at Covent Garden on October 19, 1822. It ran altogether sixteen nights. William Farren played the hero. Lord Ogleby, an antiquated fop, is a character in "The Clandestine Marriage" by Colman and Garrick. Miss Foote played Helena. See notes to the letter ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... he said, stepping back and leaning his back against the door, "what melodrama! The truth! ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... woman's heart to indignation rather! Marry that man! I would have cut off my own right hand, or burnt it to a cinder like Scaevola; sooner gone out to service—played chambermaid on the boards, or the tragedy-queen of the commonest melodrama, far rather! It was all insult, injury, degradation, in whatever light I could view it, and every feeling in my nature was ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... he built up his fake case against Perry Carpenter, his use of the buttons, his creeping about at night, like a villain in cheap melodrama, dropping pieces of the jewelry where they would incriminate the negro most surely, and his exploitation of the 'winning clue,' the finger ...
— The Winning Clue • James Hay, Jr.
... a melodrama is that it always begins at 7.30. The idea, no doubt, is that one is more in the mood for this sort of entertainment after a high tea than after a late dinner. Plain living leads to plain thinking, ...
— If I May • A. A. Milne
... poet but not a great literary {255} artist. He wrote negligently and with the ease of assured strength, his mind gathering heat as it moved, and pouring itself forth in reckless profusion. His work is diffuse and imperfect; much of it is melodrama or speech-making rather than true poetry. But on the other hand, much, very much of it, is unexcelled as the direct, strong, sincere utterance of personal feeling. Such is the quality of his best lyrics, like ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... surprised to see the men who have been shaking their fists and ready to spring at one another's throats, quietly lock arms and go out to lunch together. It is all in the day's work and they must fortify themselves for the next trial. The shock is something like that when, after a melodrama, the heroine having jumped over the bridge and died in a whirlpool, comes out quietly and, in spite of her suffering, bows smilingly before ...
— The Man in Court • Frederic DeWitt Wells
... beyond doubt. Oh why has God made man such a mixed creature? Was it only to show his supernatural sleight of hand? Only a few minutes ago I had thought that Sandip, whom I had once taken to be a hero, was only the stage hero of melodrama. But that is not so, not so. Even behind the trappings of the theatre, a true hero ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore
... picaresque stories of the road, such as Pickwick and Nicholas Nickleby. "Youth will be served;" no sedulous care could compensate for the exuberance of "the first sprightly runnings." In the early books the melodrama of the plot, the secrets of Ralph Nickleby, of Monk, of Jonas Chuzzlewit, were the least of the innumerable attractions. But Dickens was more and more drawn towards the secret that excites curiosity, and to ...
— The Puzzle of Dickens's Last Plot • Andrew Lang
... foot to induce Mr. CHARLES GARVICE to change the name of his play, A Heritage of Hate, as so many patrons of melodrama have experienced difficulty in pronouncing the title as ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, July 15, 1914 • Various
... this pretence at ranching was one of the many adventures dotted along his career; one act in the melodrama of which he delighted to be the leading actor. His own love of luxury and charming surroundings was enough to account for the improvements he hastened to ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... of a common romantic type, neither better nor worse than hundreds of others of which the literary archives of the first half of the present century are full. It required all the aid that fine literary treatment could give it to raise it above the level of vulgar melodrama and turn it into tragedy. But fortune had been kind to it; the subject had been already handled in the Italian sketch with delicacy and a true tragic insight, and Edward Wallace had brought all the resources of a very evenly-trained and critical mind to ...
— Miss Bretherton • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the simple facts in the life of Garibaldi lays himself open to the charge of evolving melodrama, wild and riotous. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... Belmont and Mr. Pank are?' And then, as she shook her head, he continued in his impassive, precise way: 'Mr. Belmont is one of the principal theatrical managers in the United States. Mr. Pank is one of the principal playwrights in the United States. Mr. Pank's melodrama 'Nebraska' is now being played at the Regency by Mr. Belmont's own American company. Another of Mr. Belmont's companies starts shortly for a tour in the provinces with the musical comedy 'The Dolmenico Doll.' I believe that Mr. Pank and Mr. Belmont are now writing a new melodrama, and as ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... a palpitation at the news, dearest; it isn't worth it. There's going to be no flare-up. Of course, if I were the heroine of a really nice melodrama, in such a scene as Dick and I went through, I should have been accompanied by slow music, with lime-light every time I turned my head, which would have heartened me up very much; while Dick would have had villain music—plink, plink, plunk! But ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... boy had not already been bereft of his senses by the melodrama preceding the burlesque, he must have been transported by her beauty, her grace, her genius. He, indeed, gave her and her sister his heart, but his mind was already gone, rapt from him by the adorable pirate who fought a losing ...
— A Boy's Town • W. D. Howells
... change of Government is a great result. It has a hundred ramifications; it runs through society; it gives hope to many, and it takes away hope from many. It is one of those marked events which, by its magnitude and its melodrama, impress men even too much. And debates which have this catastrophe at the end of them—or may so have it—are sure to be listened to, and sure to sink deep into the national mind. Travellers even in the Northern States ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... levelled. His men were ready to dash forward. The English put their heads together and decided that discretion was the better part of valor. Governor Bridgar meekly requested permission to land and salute the commander of the French. Then followed a pompous melodrama of bravado, each side affecting sham strength. Radisson told the English all that he had told the New Englanders, going on board the Company's ship to dine, while English hostages remained with his French followers. For reasons which he did not reveal, he strongly ...
— Pathfinders of the West • A. C. Laut
... (Letter to his father, 13 October, 1781). Despairing probably at being unable to obtain this obedience, Mozart thought seriously of breaking up the form of opera, and of putting in its place, in 1778, a sort of melodrama (of which Rousseau had given an example in 1773), which he called "duodrama," where music and poetry were loosely associated, yet not dependent on each other, but went side by side on two parallel roads (Letter of 12 ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... and melodrama, eh?" he queried. "Well, never mind. You licked Cheese-Face, and you'll lick the editors if it takes twice eleven years to do it in. You can't stop here. You've got to go on. It's ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... scenes from their own drawing-rooms transferred to the stage. They like it because it is pretty and familiar. And people pretend to be very cynical at present—they like things with 'no nonsense about them;' and I suppose this son of comedy is the natural reaction from the rant of the melodrama. Still, if you happen to be ambitious—or perhaps it is mere vanity?—if you would like to try what is ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... efforts to restore the dignity of the theatre, and revive the sway of the legitimate drama, in which Mr Macready has so long borne so conspicuous a part, Tragedy in the metropolis is almost banished from the stage. It has been supplanted by the melodrama, dancing, and singing. It has been driven off the field by Timour the Tartar. Drury-Lane, sanctified by so many noble recollections, has become an English opera-house. Covent-Garden is devoted to concerts, and hears the tragic muse no ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... edition is published with a prologue and an epilogue, like a drama, which indeed it is, with all the ingredients of melodrama—a villain, a mysterious woman, a Grand Duke, a conspiracy to destroy the world, and a saint—Nilus, who convicts himself in his own writings of falsification in the giving of these various accounts of how the Protocols came ...
— The History of a Lie - 'The Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion' • Herman Bernstein
... write another book, I think I will have nothing of what you call 'melodrama'; I think so, but I am not sure. I think, too, I will endeavour to follow the counsel which shines out of Miss Austen's 'mild eyes', 'to finish more and be more subdued'; but neither am I sure of that. When authors write best, or at least, when they write most fluently, an influence ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... tightened on his club and Ricky choked back a cry as her brother crept toward the corner of the cabin. Their melodrama was fast taking on the color ...
— Ralestone Luck • Andre Norton
... Upper Montague Street; and, profiting by the fiction, Miss Porter and her sister produced an ingenious romance thereon, entitled, Coming Out, or the Forty Footsteps. The Messrs. Mayhew also, some twenty years back, brought out, at the Tottenham Street Theatre, an excellent melodrama piece, founded upon the same story, entitled The Field of ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 14. Saturday, February 2, 1850 • Various
... stories of the natives, especially in the plays, for in them the hero is often a Christian prince who defeats a strong and wicked Mohammedan ruler, and releases an injured maiden. Change the names and the play becomes a modern English melodrama. In several of the islands, however, the impress of Spanish occupancy is slight, and customs are still in force that have existed for hundreds of years. On Mindanao are still to be found the politic devil-worshippers, who, instead of seeking ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... his imagination and inspired him to martyrdom might have made a plot for some old-fashioned melodrama, but Max began to realize that there was nothing in fiction so incredible as the things which happen in life: things one reads about any day in newspapers, yet which in a novel would be laughed at by critics. He would say to Edwin Reeves that, shortly before her death, Rose had ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... in the preparations; for charades were to be enacted, and he was reported skilful in the arrangement of these saturnalia of civilised society, or, as he himself expressed it, he was "up to all the dodges connected with the minor domestic enigmatical melodrama". By Harry's recommendation I despatched a letter to Mr. Frampton, claiming his promise of visiting me at Heathfield Cottage, urging as a reason for his doing so immediately, that he would meet four of his old Helmstone acquaintance, viz., Oak-lands, ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... Nicholas Danver's own choosing? He dismissed the idea. It savoured too much of early Victorian melodrama for the prosaic twentieth century. The support of some antediluvian servant or pet? Possibly. But then it would hardly be necessary to require verbal communication of such a condition; a brief written ...
— Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore
... conventional unified drama, state religion, a pseudo-democracy based on slavery he fearlessly criticised. Rationalism, humanism, free speculation were his watchwords; he was always trying new experiments in his art, introducing politics, philosophy, melodrama and trying to get rid of the chorus wherever he could. He was a living and a contemporary Proteus, pleading like an advocate in a lawsuit, discussing political theory, restating unsolved problems in modern form and seasoning his work with his own peculiar ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... carriage is now undergoing repair, under the window, on the margin of the lake: where a woman in short petticoats, a stomacher, and two immensely long tails of black hair hanging down her back very nearly to her heels, is looking on—apparently dressed for a melodrama, but in reality a ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... technical standpoint, moreover, "The Doss-house" is full of defects. The great catastrophe is brought about by eavesdropping. As in the worst melodrama, the intrigante of the piece, the lodging-house keeper and mistress of the thief, appears in the background just at the most critical point of the confabulation between Pepel and his allies, and the ...
— Maxim Gorki • Hans Ostwald
... her threshold and it had also been the power which had prevented his disengaging himself with more incisive finality when he found himself ridiculously clasped about the knees as one who played the part of an obdurate parent in a melodrama. ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... native politicians become fused into a happy family, it would be strange, indeed, if irregularities did not occur. The whole of the Greek story is so thoroughly permeated with the spirit of old-fashioned melodrama that no incident, however ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... that's a rather shabby trick. Still, I suppose the tired business man has got to have his little melodrama. What do I do? H'm? Beat my breast and howl? Or ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... Shortly after, dinner over, we left the table, and went to the theatre, where we saw what the programme called the "latest London realistic success," in which three of the four acts of an intensely exciting melodrama depended upon a woman's not seeing a large navy revolver, which lay on the table directly before her eyes in the first. The play was full of blood and replete with thunder, and we truly enjoyed it, only Harley would not talk much between the acts. He was unusually moody. After the play ...
— A Rebellious Heroine • John Kendrick Bangs
... artlessness was a drug on the market. Cleverness was the name of the new requirement, and Jimaboy's gift was glaringly sentimental. When you open your magazine at "The Contusions of Peggy, by James Augustus Jimaboy," you are justly indignant when you find melodrama and predetermined pathos instead of the clever clowneries which the sheer absurdity of ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IX (of X) • Various
... had written, and afterwards dramatised a terrific legend describing the circumstances, and the punishment of the Briton by a knight of the Castillonnes family. A more awful coward never existed in a melodrama than that felon English knight. His blanche-fille, of course, died of hopeless love for the conquering Frenchman, her father's murderer. The paper in which the feuilleton appeared died at the sixth ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... faith by not choosing one of the addresses sent in by competitors. (See references to Dr. Busby in 'Poems', vol. i. pp. 481 and 485, 'note' 1.) Dr. Thomas Busby (1755-1838) composed the music for Holcroft's 'Tale of Mystery', the first musical melodrama produced on the English stage (Covent Garden, November 13, 1802). He was for some time assistant editor of the 'Morning Post', and Parliamentary reporter for the 'London Courant'; wrote on musical subjects, taught languages and music, and translated ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... is a more or less lurid eastern melodrama, based on the Arabian Nights. A hunchback is in love with a beautiful young dancer, who hates him. He sells her to a fierce old sheik, to get her out of the way of another lover, the sheik's son. Then he takes poison. Sumurun, the sheik's chief wife, favors a handsome cloth ...
— Poet Lore, Volume XXIV, Number IV, 1912 • Various
... of the actress in Laura had fostered in her a curious penchant toward melodrama. She had a taste for the magnificent. She revelled in these great musical "effects" upon her organ, the grandiose easily appealed to her, while as for herself, the role of the "grande dame," with this wonderful house for background and environment, came to be for her, quite unconsciously, ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... beautiful girl, a passion which leads to fratricide and madness. That it is a very melancholy and tragical story is obvious from this brief sketch of its contents, but it is remarkable for coherence and self-restraint no less than for vigor of treatment. Toru Dutt never sinks to melodrama in the course of her extraordinary tale, and the wonder is that she is not ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... doubt, there is a touch of melodrama; but it is the melodrama of a rhetorician, and, in that fine "She heard it with composure", genius has brushed aside the forced and the obvious, to express, with supreme directness, ...
— A Simple Story • Mrs. Inchbald
... of his youngest days, which has a direct significance in the case of ordinary individuals, and is known by a very familiar name. That he should tragically declare that only across his bleeding corpse will the Uitlander ever come into his own, is merely the extravagant and regrettable melodrama of an overheated mind. The general desire is quite averse to encountering any stepping-stones of that kind, and most of all averse to Mr. Kruger's taking any such place. Our quarrel is with principles and systems, and never yet has a note of personal vengeance been sounded whilst we have endeavoured ...
— The Transvaal from Within - A Private Record of Public Affairs • J. P. Fitzpatrick
... my engine, and starts it moving slowly so that it will crush me by twelve, when Nellie always brings my dinner. After my death he expects to marry her. Nellie arrives and releases me just in the nick of time. (This story is really a scene from an amateur melodrama.) ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... enter the room; strained whisperings and now and again little uncontrollable giggles of ecstatic anticipation from Joan minor—these are the signs that I have learned to look for, and, being well versed in my part, to ignore with a sublime unconsciousness which should make my fortune in a melodrama of stage asides. And then, on the morning of my birthday, the solemn ceremonial of revelation, I would come in to breakfast, to find a parcel lying by my plate. At first I would not see it. In a tense and unnatural ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 20, 1917 • Various
... impossible to conceive anything more brilliant and magnificent. I can't go to any more romantic place than Drury Lane to draw my similes from—Drury Lane, such as we used to see it in our youth, when to our sight the grand last pictures of the melodrama or pantomime were as magnificent as any objects of nature we have seen with maturer eyes. Well, the view of Constantinople is as fine as any of Stanfield's best theatrical pictures, seen at the best period of youth, when fancy had all the bloom on her—when all the heroines ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... new author to aim at being literary's rather presumptuous; now tell me yourself, isn't it? Seems as if he was setting himself up for a heaven-sent genius, and trying to sit upon the older dramatists of the present generation. Melodrama, sensation, burlesque—that's all right enough—perfectly legitimate; but a real literary comic opera, with good words and good music—it IS a little strong, for a beginner, ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... there," said Macey with a scowl such as would be assumed by the wicked man in a melodrama, and then the workshop was ...
— The Weathercock - Being the Adventures of a Boy with a Bias • George Manville Fenn
... Fabriano, penetrated some of the secrets of the world of colour. But what are the purples and scarlets and blues of iris, anemone, or columbine, dispersed among deep meadow grasses or trained in quiet cloister garden-beds, when compared with that melodrama of flame and gold and rose and orange and azure, which the skies and lagoons of Venice yield almost daily to the eyes? The Venetians had no green fields and trees, no garden borders, no blossoming orchards, to teach them the ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... rich uncle, in leaving her all the contents of the mansion, had foolishly forgotten to mention a secret drawer full of Canadian securities. As for the villain, I really hardly dare tell you the impossibly silly way in which he allowed himself to be caught out. But of course all this melodrama is not what matters. The important thing about Miss CONYERS' people is that (whatever their private worries) a-hunting they will go; and Fiona, financed by her paying guests, shows in this respect as capital sport as any of her predecessors. For the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, January 10, 1917 • Various
... do write another book, I think I will have nothing of what you call "melodrama." I think so, but I am not sure. I think, too, I will endeavour to follow the counsel which shines out of Miss Austen's "mild eyes," to finish more, and be more subdued; but neither am I sure of that. ...
— Memoir of Jane Austen • James Edward Austen-Leigh
... to me as if fortune had given me a stage-box at another and grander spectacle, and I had been suffered to see this VENICE, which is to other cities like the pleasant improbability of the theatre to every-day, commonplace life, to much the same effect as that melodrama in Padua. I could not, indeed, dwell three years in the place without learning to know it differently from those writers who have described it in romances, poems, and hurried books of travel, nor help seeing from my point of observation the sham and cheapness with which Venice is usually brought ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... colored melodrama, in four acts, one of which was laid in each of the four quarters of the globe, (and if there had been a fifth, the cunning author would have had an act for it,) was proceeding at a stormy pace, the principal character being personated by a gentleman of color, the audience, I ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... of Scotland, hitherto Unpublished, with Explanatory Notes," Edinburgh, two vols. 8vo. This work occupied upwards of ten years in preparation. Among his other publications may be enumerated, a volume of "Poems and Songs," printed in 1814; "The Peterhead Smugglers, an original Melodrama," published in 1834; "The Eglinton Tournament, &c.;" "Gleanings of Scarce Old Ballads;" and the "Wanderings of Prince Charles Stuart and Miss Flora Macdonald," the latter being published from an ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... blood, and possessed considerable property. As a child he gave evidence of extraordinary precocity. He is said to have written poetry in his native tongue at eight years of age, produced a successful melodrama at fourteen, and later to have won prizes in literary contests with ...
— Friars and Filipinos - An Abridged Translation of Dr. Jose Rizal's Tagalog Novel, - 'Noli Me Tangere.' • Jose Rizal
... went to see I Spettri, expecting some good, crude melodrama. The theatre is an old church. Since that triumph of the deaf and dumb, the cinematograph, has come to give us the nervous excitement of speed—grimace agitation, and speed, as of flying atoms, chaos—many an old church in Italy has taken a new ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... hissed Hicks, after the fashion of a "Ten-Twent'-Thirt'" melodrama-villain, while from the exuberant youths in the grandstand, who really wanted Hicks to clear the bar, but who jeered at his ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... GRUNDY has done well to choose the historical name of the execrable "Abbe DUBOIS," and bestow it on the Cure, who is meant to be the interesting hero of what, without him, would have been a sufficiently strong melodrama. The very A B C of the practice of the confessional being that everything between Priest and Penitent (even when the Penitent is impenitent) is sub sigillo, this Abbe can have, as the Grand Inquisitor in the Gondoliers sings, "No possible probable shadow of doubt, No possible doubt ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, 19 April 1890 • Various
... very grateful they were to him—he would carry the rest of the money home, sometimes with a bouquet for his wife or a little present for Desiree, a nothing, a mere trifle. What would you have? Those are the customs of the stage. It is such a simple matter in a melodrama to toss a handful of louis through ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... murmured to himself. He was a newspaper correspondent, and he saw these things with the halo of melodrama around them. And yet—four nights ago. His face was ...
— A Maker of History • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the way arrests for great crimes are effected if possible. Yet, sometimes circumstances force melodrama on the detectives. Another arrest which was watched by the writer took place at dead of night in a dirty lodging-house in an East End street. A house-to-house search had been instituted by forty or fifty armed detectives. They expected ...
— Scotland Yard - The methods and organisation of the Metropolitan Police • George Dilnot
... you see, it isn't the skeleton that makes the difference; it's the kind of meat you put on the bones! Paradise Lost would be a howling melodrama, if some of you picture-people tried to make it. You'd take this plot of mine and make it just like these pictures I've been working in, Mr. Burns: Exciting and all that, but not the real West after all; spectacular without ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... in one's mind as one listened. The day was fiercely cold, and this seemed to add to the horror of it all—to the Hoffmannesque fantasy of the party, the lights, the supper, and the women, the murder with its mixture of religion and superstition and melodrama, the body flung out at last so easily and swiftly, on to the frozen river. How many souls must have asked themselves that day—"Why, if this is so easy, do we not proceed further? A man dies more simply than you ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... James (mak-fer'son) Magazines, the modern Maldon, The Battle of Malory Mandeville's Travels Manfred Marlowe; life; works; and Milton; and Shakespeare Marmion Marvell, Andrew Massinger, Philip Matter of France, Rome, and Britain Melodrama Memoirs of a Cavalier Meredith, George Merlin and the Gleam Metaphysical poets Metrical romances Middleton, Thomas Miles Gloriosus (m[e]'les gl[o]-r[)i]-[o]'s[u:]s) Mill on the Floss Milton; life; early or Horton poems; prose works; later poetry; and Shakespeare; Wordsworth's ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... a fever of enthusiasm lent glamour to the scenes which were daily enacted on the Place de la Revolution, turning the final acts of the tragedies into glaring, lurid melodrama, almost unreal in its poignant appeal to ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... cousin Jack has a meaning to his melodrama," said Eve, as they entered the forest, "and I dare say, dearest father, that you are behind the scenes, though I perceive determined secrecy in ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... stopped the fun, by hurling herself between us, quite like the heroine of old-fashioned melodrama. "Oh, for my sake, for my sake!" she was wailing. "It wasn't his fault. Wait and let him have the chance ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... especially fine "barber chords" in this popular ditty, and the words are so touching that it is repeated over and over again. Then it is sung softly like the farmhand quartettes do in the rural melodrama outside the old homestead in harvest time. Oh! I tell you it's a truly rural octette. Listen to that exhibition bass voice of Jimmy Sands and that wandering tenor of Tommy Whiteing, and as the last chord dies away (over the fields presumably) a shout ...
— The Real Latin Quarter • F. Berkeley Smith
... a man as black as the bottom of his iron pot, whose frown, engraved deeply in his low forehead, might have marked him in my eyes as the villain of some melodrama of the sea, had I not known him for many years to be one of the most generous darkies, so far as hungry small boys were concerned, that ever ruled a galley. The second mate, who was now in the waist, I had never seen before—to tell the truth, I was glad that he held no better berth, ...
— The Mutineers • Charles Boardman Hawes
... his head. "No, no," said he, "there was no story prepared in advance in this affair, no big melodrama secretly staged and afterwards performed by more or less unconscious actors. The developments came of themselves, by the sole force of circumstances; and they were always very intricate, very difficult to analyse. Moreover, it is certain that it was Bernadette herself who ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... ordinary mortal doesn't wish to be reminded of. Some day—if I don't turn stoker or acrobat beforehand, and give up peddling in the emotions—some day I shall write music to it. That would be a melodrama worth making." ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... to his feet. When he spoke again his voice carried a note of whimsical lightness that was a little forced. "But I must go—else you will take them from me, and with good reason. And please don't let your kind heart grieve too much—over me. I'm no deep-dyed villain in a melodrama, nor wicked lover in a ten-penny novel, you know. I'm just an everyday man in real life; and we're going to fight this thing out in everyday living. That's where your help is coming in. We'll go together to see Mrs. Bertram Henshaw. She's ...
— Miss Billy Married • Eleanor H. Porter
... my wits, it—it happened! I had supposed Simon had gone to bed when his light went out, but now he appeared from around the corner of the house. It was obvious that he was stalking the monk. It was like watching a scene in a melodrama, and I couldn't have moved hand or foot to save my life. All of a sudden, Varr rushed him. I thought the fellow would run, but instead of that he waited. When Simon got close, the monk appeared to raise a sort of mask ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... course, his plan would be to wait until night and then, sheltered by the darkness, to approach the house, like a hero of melodrama, and in some way secure entrance. But even as this ready-made campaign presented itself, a dozen objections to it reared up in his mind. The first, of course, was the delay. It was not yet two o'clock in the afternoon, ...
— The Girl in the Mirror • Elizabeth Garver Jordan
... Count in possession happens to be a Countess—the grand-daughter of the original usurper, whose male line is extinct. Oh, the history of Sampaolo has been highly coloured. A writer in some English magazine once described it as a patchwork of melodrama and opera-bouffe. It ended, if you like, in melodrama and opera-bouffe, but it began ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... aside, sprang up, and away from him. But he was between her and the exit from the dell; he crouched with the impressive deliberation of a villain in a melodrama for another spring, and ...
— The Admirable Tinker - Child of the World • Edgar Jepson
... "have you ever realized that under certain circumstances the most awful things would happen to me that ever befell the hero of a melodrama? Just take the train of events. Effie has an illegitimate child. She writes ...
— If Winter Don't - A B C D E F Notsomuchinson • Barry Pain
... nature, and human life. Scott, in rich and careless fashion, dealt in every kind of material that came his way. He described his own country and his own people with loving care, and he loved also the melodrama of historical fiction and supernatural legend. "His romance and antiquarianism," says Ruskin, "his knighthood and monkery, are all false, and he knows them to be false." Certainly, The Heart of Midlothian and The Antiquary are better than Ivanhoe. Scott's love for the knighthood and ...
— Romance - Two Lectures • Walter Raleigh
... way back, we took a pleasant course inside the Hook, which brought the charming scenery of the Jersey shore and of Staten Island before us, as a pleasant drop-curtain on the melodrama just closed. The music again struck up, and dancing was resumed with fresh vigor,—the waltzing of all other couples being quite eclipsed by that of Young New York and little Straw-Goods, who had effectually got rid of her tipsy ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... I can depend upon you. All this seems like a scene out of a melodrama, but it's wretchedly real for all that. Ray, I am just waking up to a knowledge of how much plotting and wickedness there is in this world; even in our little ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch
... Wardour thus taxed herself with wayward caprice, she, beheld advancing down the avenue, not her younger and more dreaded preserver, but the old beggar who had made such a capital figure in the melodrama ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... pictures.' The argument is not so childish as it seems; for I doubt if these islanders are acquainted with any other mode of representation but photography; so that the picture of an event (on the old melodrama principle that 'the camera cannot lie, Joseph,') would appear strong proof of its occurrence. The fact amused us the more because our slides were some of them ludicrously silly, and one (Christ before Pilate) was received with ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to lead the way with Billy, William frenziedly gripped his sister's arm, and hissed in her ear for all the world like a villain in melodrama: ...
— Miss Billy • Eleanor H. Porter
... there was a pleasant clank of stout crockery as occasional customers came in and ordered their victuals. Aubrey began to feel a relaxation swim through his veins. Gissing Street was very bright and orderly in its Saturday evening bustle. Certainly it was grotesque to imagine melodrama hanging about a second-hand bookshop in Brooklyn. The revolver felt absurdly lumpy and uncomfortable in his hip pocket. What a different aspect a little hot supper gives to affairs! The most resolute idealist or assassin had better write his poems ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... some knowledge of music—enough, at least, to know whether incidental or "melodrama" music is congruous with the time, place and occasion of the play, and to be able to identify well-known works. At a time when money is spent very lavishly upon scenery and costumes, he ought to possess some theories, or at least ideas, concerning pictorial art, the history ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... the same kind of humor too, and the same girding at the stock tricks of stage-craft—in H.M.S. Pinafore at the swapping of children in the cradle, and in Tricoche et Cacolet at the "portrait de ma mere" which has drawn so many tears in modern melodrama. But MM. Meilhac and Halevy, having made one success, did not further attempt the same kind of pleasantry—wiser in this than Mr. Gilbert, who seems to find it hard ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... she cried, passionately. "Can you never be serious? Must you joke about everything? I believe you will find something to laugh at in the marriage service. That thing I have told you is the most serious and horrible experience of my life, and yet you treat it as if I were acting a part in a melodrama in a third-rate theatre! Sometimes I think ...
— What Dreams May Come • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... and an historian; a writer who, in the words of his epitaph,—written by Dr. Johnson, and with no extravagant eulogium,—touched all subjects, and touched none that he did not adorn,—nullum quod tetigit non ornavit. His life was a strange melodrama, so varied with laughter and tears, so checkered with fame and misfortune, so resounding with songs pathetic and comic, that, were he an unknown hero, his adventures would be read with pleasure by all persons of sensibility. ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... enough.... Freddie," she explained, "has a delicate constitution and has seen little of the world. Such melodrama as to-night's is apt to shock him severely. We must make ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... Miss Cushman personated Meg Merrilies more often than any other character. In America she was also famous for her performance of Nancy, in a melodrama founded upon "Oliver Twist;" but this part she did not bring with her across the Atlantic. She had first played Nancy during her "general utility" days at the Park Theatre, when the energy and pathos of her acting powerfully affected her audience, and the ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... were sung by his wife, to the delight of the public. The Irish drama served his purpose for many years, but he varied that form of art by occasional resort to burlesque and by incursions into the realm of melodrama. One of his best performances was that of O'Bryan, in John Brougham's play of Temptation, or the Irish Emigrant, with which he often graced the stage of the Winter Garden. In that he touched the extremes of gentle humour and melting pathos. He was delightfully humorous, ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... while the traditional octave stanza is used for the main movement of the piece, Poliziano has introduced episodes of terza rima, madrigals, a carnival song, a ballata, and, above all, choral passages which have in them the future melodrama of the musical Italian stage. The lyrical treatment of the fable, its capacity for brilliant and varied scenic effects, its combination of singing with action, and the whole artistic keeping of the piece, which never passes into genuine tragedy, but stays within the limits of romantic pathos, distinguish ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... a popular form and style that would furnish information as attractively as possible. The perennial appeal of fiction gave them a suggestion for the popularization of facts. The methods of the short story, of the drama, and even of the melodrama, applied to the presentation of general information, provided a means for catching the attention of the ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... fights a duel with her lover Tancredi, who, not knowing his opponent, gives her a fatal wound. The strokes of the sword are accompanied by the pizzicati of the violins, and the suspense when Clorinda falls is characterized by the tremolo—two devices universal in melodrama ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... than need have been, in authentic form only too diffuse, the once world-famous Warkotsch Tragedy or Wellnigh-Tragic Melodrama; which is still interesting and a matter of study, of pathos and minute controversy, to the patriot and antiquary in Prussian Countries, though here we might have been briefer about it. It would, indeed, have "finished the War at once;" and on terms delightful to Austria and its ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... was only because the paper would not fit in. The footman had certainly read the interview, and followed the "Northmorland Case" with passionate interest, for months, from the time it began with melodrama, and turned violently to tragedy, up to the present moment when (as the journalists neatly crammed the news into a nutshell) "it bade fair ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... securing for them a place in the later forms of drama when the Miracles were supplanted by Moralities and Interludes. The Devil's near cousin, Herod, attained to a similar reputation and longevity. Has even modern melodrama quite lost that immortal type of the ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... and honest! Ah! I was a fool! I was absurd! what was that I was saying about denouncing myself? I really must pay attention and not be precipitate about anything. What! because it would have pleased me to play the grand and generous; this is melodrama, after all; because I should have thought of no one but myself, the idea! for the sake of saving from a punishment, a trifle exaggerated, perhaps, but just at bottom, no one knows whom, a thief, a good-for-nothing, evidently, a whole country-side must perish! a poor woman must die in the hospital! ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... priest, Father Leoncio Lopez, spent an hour with Jose's father, Francisco Mercado, and heard the old man descant, with pride, on the intellectual progress of his son at the Jesuits' school in Manila. Before he was fourteen years of age he wrote a melodrama in verse entitled Junto al Pasig ("Beside the Pasig River"), which was performed in public and well received. But young Jose yearned to set out on a wider field of learning. His ambition was to go to Europe, and at the age of twenty-one he went to Spain, ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... over the border of a canal behind it, not far from Rauch's great statue of the great Frederic. To come to it from the simplicity and quiet of that noble work is like passing from some exquisite masterpiece of naturalistic acting to the rant and uproar of melodrama; and the Marches stood stunned and bewildered ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... The Magic Flute as a more than usually absurd musical comedy with easy, old-fashioned tunes. You can enjoy it anyway, if you are not solemn about it, as you can enjoy Hamlet for a bloody melodrama. But, like Hamlet, it has depths and depths of meaning beyond our full comprehension. Papageno is a pantomime figure, but he is also one of the greatest figures in the drama of the world. He is everyman, ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... thing is too mean," said Hugh Ritson. "In what turgid melodrama does not just such ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... ship Tiger. The type of a daring, reckless, dare-devil English sailor. His adventures with Harry Clifton, in Delhi, form the main incidents of Barrymore's melodrama, El Hyder, Chief ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... Dickens could have delivered it. However, the story, foreshortened though it was, precisely as he related it, was told with a due regard to its artistic completeness. Margaret and Lilian, the old ticket-porter and the young blacksmith, were the principal interlocutors. Like the melodrama of Victorine, it all turned out, of course, to be no more than "the baseless fabric of a vision," the central incidents of the tale, at any rate, being composed of "such stuff as dreams are made of." How ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... a pleasant smile, as he put back the letter and pencil, 'hot water fomentations are what you need. Wonderful cure. Will bring you to life again though you were at your last gasp. Ha!' struck with a sudden idea, '"His Last Gasp", good title for a melodrama—mustn't forget that,' and out came the letter and ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume |
