"Melodrama" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... German entering 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
... it might be, and was too much given to addressing her husband as 'Willis;' but her undeniable prettiness in low-necked evening dress condoned what was amiss in manner. Mr. Rodman looked too gentlemanly; he reminded one of a hero of polite melodrama on the English-French stage. The Captain talked stock-exchange, and was continually inquiring about some one or other, 'Did ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... "a little like melodrama. I have no objection to being abused, even in my own garden, but there are limits to my patience. Come to the ...
— The Malefactor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... love turns to hate!" mimicked Myra, and trilled out a laugh. "You are talking like a character in an old-fashioned melodrama. Should I play up to you by crying, 'Unhand me, villain,' turning deathly pale, and screaming for help. Don't be absurd! ... We won't dance the encore. But if you will promise to be sensible and refrain ...
— Bandit Love • Juanita Savage
... melodrama!" said Mrs. Shiffney. She was standing on the balcony of a corner room on the second floor of the Grand Hotel at Constantine, looking down on the Place de la Breche. Evening was beginning to fall. The city roared a tumultuous serenade ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... beyond belief. John 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 it better. Henry did my green unknowing youth engage, and I find it ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... ceased to tempt him in proportion as he reasoned himself into the stern wisdom of avoiding all that could revive her grief for him. At the commencement of this tale, in the outline given of that grand melodrama in which Juliet Araminta played the part of the Bandit's Child, her efforts to decoy pursuit from the lair of the persecuted Mime were likened to the arts of the skylark to lure eye and hand from the nest of his young. More appropriate that illustration now to the parent-bird ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... shirt and trousers, was, single-handed, loading and firing a twelve-pounder as fast as he could snap the breech to and lay the gun. His face was distorted with rage, and his black brows met across his nose in a scowl that at any other time would have suggested acute melodrama. Half a mile away the shots were striking the water with little pillars ...
— A Tall Ship - On Other Naval Occasions • Sir Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... of Tennyson's almost lurid melodrama in six stanzas, "The Sisters," has caught the bitter mixture of love and hate, and ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... in Italy, visualizing the country and its people, and warm with the red blood of romance and melodrama."—Boston Transcript. ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... unfortunates. What about the woman who is neither, but merely out on her own? I try to meet life as an individual and not as a woman. What happens? Doors slam in my face. I can't buy a night's lodging for the child in my arms. It sounds like a thirty-cent melodrama. And now you, whose life study is life—I tell you I won't be turned off. You must ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... his aid-de-camp seems to have returned empty-handed from the City of Mexico. His further exploits in New Orleans, which he kept in a state of perpetual alarm and finally put under martial law, read like a chapter from a melodrama. ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson
... was once addressed by, and fearless of his feeble thunders and lightnings, they familiarly style him Old Nick. Alas, how are the mighty fallen! The potentate who was more terrible than an army with manners is now the sport of children and a common figure in melodrama. Even the genius of Milton, Goethe, and Byron, has not been able to save ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... in melodrama. And this is certainly some ten-twenty-thirty show! Wise people occasionally ...
— Little Miss Grouch - A Narrative Based on the Log of Alexander Forsyth Smith's - Maiden Transatlantic Voyage • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... to melodrama, I perceived. I sat dismayed at what I had done. "Of course, dear girl," I said, at last, "you understand that I had no idea who ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... within the chambers of her own bosom there were complaints made that the play which had been played between him and her during the last few months should for her have been such a very tragedy, while for him the matter was no more than a melodrama, touched with a pleasing melancholy. He had not been made a waif upon the waters by the misfortune of a few weeks, by the error of a lawyer, by a mistaken calculation,—not even by the crime of his father. His manhood was, at any rate, perfect to him. Though he might be ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... acquaintance with were probably those whose works were appearing and attracting notice during his school-days—Pigault-Lebrun, Ducray-Duminil, and that Guilbert de Pixerecourt who for a third of the nineteenth century was worshipped as the Corneille of melodrama. These men were favourite authors of the nascent democracy; and, in an age when reprints of older writers were much rarer than to-day, would be far more likely to appeal to a boy's taste than seventeenth- and eighteenth-century ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... plan something splendid, a 'grand combination,' as you used to call your droll mixtures of tragedy, comedy, melodrama and farce," answered his sister, with her head ...
— Under the Lilacs • Louisa May Alcott
... He was inimitable in "The Stolen Mail." A tragedian called Izmailoff was in the same company, I remember, who was also quite remarkable. Don't hurry, madam, you still have five minutes. They were both of them conspirators once, in the same melodrama, and one night when in the course of the play they were suddenly discovered, instead of saying "We have been trapped!" Izmailoff cried out: "We have been rapped!" [He ...
— The Sea-Gull • Anton Checkov
... eldritch scream rang through the lofty hall. The detectives hastened from the dining-room, and forthwith witnessed a tableau which would have received the envious approval of a skilled producer of melodrama. The hall measured some thirty-five feet square, and was nearly as lofty, its ceiling forming the second floor. The staircase was on the right, starting from curved steps in the inner right angle and making a complete turn from a half landing to reach a gallery which ran around three sides ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... The troupe presented a melodrama, whose action dragged out at great length and with great gusto the misfortune and gruesome murder of an innocent youth. At the close of the last act a woman disguised as a man appeared upon the scene; she wore ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... than ever resembled those of an unthinking puppet, although she knew quite well what she was doing; and her gestures might have been the fruit of long lessoning at the hands of some master of stage melodrama, so true ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... this adventure may end disastrously. There are ninety-nine chances against the truth being known, but it is the extra chance that is worrying me. We ought to have settled Lydia more quietly, more naturally. There was too much melodrama and shooting, but I don't see how we could have done anything else—Mordon was ...
— The Angel of Terror • Edgar Wallace
... something quite new.... Ossian's images were far from "nature methodized." His imagination illumined fitfully a scene of mountains and blasted heaths, as artificially wild as his heroines were artificially sensitive; to modern readers they resemble too much the stage-settings of melodrama. But in 1760, his descriptions carried with them the thrill of the genuine ...
— Fragments Of Ancient Poetry • James MacPherson
... early days on the boards he remarked: "Then a young actor had to play a varied round of parts in a single season. To-night it would be farce, to-morrow tragedy, the next night some such melodrama as 'Ten Nights in a Bar-room.' This not only taught an actor his business, it gave him a chance to find out where his strength lay, whether as ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles
... a very amateur romance as between a young American and the niece of an hotel-keeper; also by a slab of melodrama (dealing with the girl's parentage) which only escaped from pure banality by the too brief glimpse it gave us of that admirable actress, Miss ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, May 27, 1914 • Various
... doubt she thought there was a screw loose in my intellects,—and that involved the probable loss of a boarder. A severe-looking person, who wears a Spanish cloak and a sad cheek, fluted by the passions of the melodrama, whom I understand to be the professional ruffian of the neighboring theatre, alluded, with a certain lifting of the brow, drawing down of the corners of the mouth, and somewhat rasping voce di ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... to himself, and again I had that strange sense of unreality, as indeed I well might, for this was the Third Act of True to the Death, a melodrama in the pavilion at the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, February 28, 1917 • Various
... that this book is rank melodrama. It has scant literary quality. It is not planned to edify. Its only mission is to entertain you and,—if you belong to the action-loving majority, to give ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune
... "save that the 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 in pure ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... you, Mr. Woods, for none of us knew of these secret drawers. Here is the key to the central compartment, if you will be kind enough to point out the other one. Dear, dear!" Margaret concluded, languidly, "all this is quite like a third-rate melodrama. I haven't the least doubt you will discover a will in there in your favour, and be reinstated as the long-lost heir and all that sort of thing. How tiresome that will be for ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... 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 ...
— The Mutineers • Charles Boardman Hawes
... of his tale. In Canticles we have a contrasted picture between the simplicity of shepherd-life and the urban voluptuousness which was soon to attain its climax in the court of the Ptolemies. So the poet chose the luxurious reign of Solomon as the background for his exquisite "melodrama." Both Ruth and Canticles are home-products, and ancient Greek literature has no real parallel ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... you the last time we met'-he turned to Trent—'that Manderson shared the national fondness for doings things in a story-book style. Other things being equal, he delighted in a bit of mystification and melodrama, and I told myself that this was Manderson all over. I hurried downstairs with my bag and rejoined him in the library. He handed me a stout leather letter-case, about eight inches by six, fastened with a strap with a lock on it. I could just squeeze it into my side-pocket. Then I went ...
— Trent's Last Case - The Woman in Black • E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley
... into the record of the struggle which gave birth to our republic, yielded another and more attractive element to the fancy portrait. Then, as our reading expanded, came the tragic chronicle of the first French Revolution and the brilliant and dazzling melodrama of Napoleon, the traditions so pathetic and sublime of gifted women, the tableaux so exciting to a youthful temper of military glory. And thus, by degrees, we found ourselves bewildered by the most vivid contrasts and apparently irreconcilable traits, until the original idea of a Frenchman expanded ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... me," I said, with the air of a tyrant in a melodrama; and, by the way, I have always thought it would be very pleasant being a tyrant by profession, like Him of Syracuse, for instance. You could do all the things you wanted to do, without consulting the convenience ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... Queen in Abdelazer; in November, Roxana in Pordage's tumid The Siege of Babylon, a play founded upon the famous romance, Cassandra. In January, 1678, she played Priam's prophetic daughter, a very strong part, in Banks' melodrama, The Destruction of Troy; August of the same year, Elvira in Leanerd's witty comedy, The Counterfeits, whence a quarter of a century later Colley Gibber borrowed pretty freely for She Wou'd and She Wou'd Not. That autumn Mrs. Lee ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. II • Aphra Behn
... theatre at the back—a very gloomy-looking edifice, with high pews. A placard announced that Dickens' 'Hard Times,' which it appears from this has been dramatised, was about to be acted. The plays are said to be highly moral, but in the melodrama religion and buffoonery are often intermingled; and I confess that I did not approve of this mode of solacing the consciences of those who object to ordinary theatricals, for the principle involved remains ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... 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, ...
— Memoir of Jane Austen • James Edward Austen-Leigh
... playing, were disqualifications as well as qualifications. "Every kind of uncouth roughness [toutes les rudesses sauvages] inspired him with aversion," says Liszt. "In music as in literature and in every-day life everything which bordered on melodrama was torture to him." In short, Chopin was an aristocrat with all the ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... is commended for giving us ghosts without furnishing explanations. Indeed the Castle of Otranto is highly praised;[212] but so also is Mrs. Radcliffe's work, except on the one point of the attempt to rationalize mysteries. The kind of romance which she "introduced"[213] is compared with the melodrama, and its particular mode of appeal is analyzed in very interesting fashion. In the Life of Clara Reeve the proper treatment of ghosts is discussed at length, for that author had contended that ghosts should be very mild and of "sober demeanour." Scott justifies her practice, ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... some time before—I had scarce called at Meyrick Place more than civility required. The young lady was so inclined to exaggerate the circumstance, to hail me as her deliverer, that I felt like the hero of a melodrama whenever we met. And after I had met Bessie there were pleasanter things to think ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... The man of imagination must take especial delight in the advertising columns. What splendid feasts they afford him to banquet upon! Some of them, in a few pithy lines, contain the plot of a three-volume novel or the materials for a grand sensation melodrama. What tragedies and what comedies he may weave out of one or two mysterious and almost unintelligible sentences! What reveries he may indulge in, what castles in the air—the most harmless and inexpensive ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... and get 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 I ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... 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 ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... Macey with a scowl such as would be assumed by the wicked man in a melodrama, and then ...
— The Weathercock - Being the Adventures of a Boy with a Bias • George Manville Fenn
... 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
... current plucks it softly from below. If a man can communicate to others his amazed bewilderment in the presence of the tragedy, or his exquisite delight in the form and texture and motion of the reed, he is an artist. Of course, there will always be more people who will be affected by a melodrama, by strange and ghastly events, by the extremes of horror and pathos, than will be affected by the delicate grace of familiar things—the tastes of the multitude are coarse and immature. But a man must not measure his success ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... giving a sort of strangled shout—"All gone! All gone!" When each had rested awhile he would ask gently for a little more coffee, rub his eyes, and disappear into the column to tramp through the night to Saint Quentin. It was the purest melodrama. ...
— Adventures of a Despatch Rider • W. H. L. Watson
... indeed!' cried Pinchas to his garret walls. 'Who ever heard of Ignatz Levitsky? And who wants his music? The tragedy of a thinker needs no caterwauling of violins. Does Goldwater imagine I have written a melodrama? At most will I permit an overture—or the cymbals shall clash as ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... It sends us sharply to the days of the older melodrama—days when we exchanged a ten-cent piece for a gallery seat and hissed the villain. Do you recall the breathless moment when the heroine implored the villain to give her back her stolen child? For answer the cruel fellow tied the darling to the buzz-saw. Or that ...
— Wappin' Wharf - A Frightful Comedy of Pirates • Charles S. Brooks
... "An highly 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, ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... gently shook 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 ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... alien to the taste, not only of Aeschylus, but of Sophocles. He gives them plenty of politics, plenty of rhetoric, plenty of discussion, political and moral, plenty of speculation, which in those days was novel, now and then a little scepticism. His "Alcestis" is melodrama verging on sentimental comedy, and heralding the sentimental comedy of Menander known to us in the versions of Terence. The chord of pathos he can touch well. His degradation, as the old school thought it, of the drama of Aeschylus and Sophocles, and what they deemed his pandering to vulgar taste, ...
— Specimens of Greek Tragedy - Aeschylus and Sophocles • Goldwin Smith
... could do nothing better than get up this little melodrama, and then hasten back to his elegant home," she ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... prisoner in the witness-box, obtained the most widespread and scandalous publicity, which I would beg you most earnestly, members of the jury, to forget." I cannot help thinking that the deplorable atmosphere of sentimental melodrama which has pervaded this trial has made the theatre a more fitting background for it than a court of law; but we are in a court of law, nevertheless, and the facts have been placed before the court. A remarkable and in ...
— Night Must Fall • Williams, Emlyn
... pantomime 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, ...
— Poet Lore, Volume XXIV, Number IV, 1912 • Various
... pity. You have stolen your ideas from cheap melodrama, and you make tragedy ridiculous. Were I a policeman, I would lock you up with pleasure. Were I a man, I should thrash you joyfully. As it is I can only share your infamy. I too, I suppose, am ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... Wimp's melodrama was not going well. He felt like the author to whose ears is borne the ominous sibilance of the pit. He almost wished he had not followed the curtain-raiser with his own stronger drama. Unconsciously the police, scattered about ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... writing a fervid letter to Rosalind Jemmett, let us say, the ink would not dry for ever so long:—why, it is true that in these circumstances you would feel a shade too like the wicked Lord So-and-So of a melodrama to be comfortable. ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... some notion still of what a portrait ought to be. If he once begins by attempting passing expressions of passion, which is all stage portraits can give, he will find them so much easier than honest representations of character, that he will end, where all our moderns seem to do, in merest melodrama." ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... Personality of the Playwright. Themes and Stories of the Stage. Plausibility in Plays. Infirmity of Purpose. Where to Begin a Play. Continuity of Structure. Rhythm and Tempo. The Plays of Yesteryear. A New Defense of Melodrama. The Art of the Moving-Picture Play. The One-Act Play in America. Organizing an Audience. The Function ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... what we would further observe of the Psalms of David, let us again call attention to the ancient chorus,—how it was a species of melodrama, how it sang its parts, and comprised distinct vocalists and musicians, who pursued the piece in alternate rejoinder. What we would observe is, that many of the Psalms were written for the chorus, and, so to speak, were ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... All this to show how "Nature" holds men in her powerful hands and tortures them when they struggle to follow the mind to liberty! To prove a thesis so profoundly true and tragic Mr. Allen can do no more than borrow the tricks of melodrama. ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... architectural evidence of Spain's ultimate victory, after numerous and heart-breaking failures, in establishing a fort at Sulu. Above this watch-tower, which might have been taken bodily from the stage-setting for a melodrama, floated Old Glory against the sunset sky; Moro fishing-boats, the breeze in their crimson sails, dotted the flushed bay; and to the north and east small, detached islands, tinged with a translucent purple like the skin of a grape, faded into ...
— A Woman's Journey through the Philippines - On a Cable Ship that Linked Together the Strange Lands Seen En Route • Florence Kimball Russel
... resentfully. "I'm so sick of people being thrilled I don't know what to do. I'm not thrilled. . . . I might have known it. It's just the sort of thing Lucille would be crazy over doing. I suppose she feels as if she were in the middle of a melodrama." ...
— I've Married Marjorie • Margaret Widdemer
... side, the former did not regret. One incident of the passage derives interest from its possible consequence. Taking up, and unsheathing, a yataghan which he found on the quarter deck, ho remarked, "I should like to know how a person feels after committing a murder." This harmless piece of melodrama—the idea of which is expanded in Mr. Dobell's Balder, and parodied in Firmilian—may have been the basis of a report afterwards circulated, and accepted among others by Goethe, that his lordship had committed a murder; hence, obviously, the character ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... ideas were at once the substance and the inspiration of his music-dramas; but he never dreamed of writing copybook headings. He had in language to make his characters talk about these ideas for two reasons, each sufficient in itself. First, excepting in melodrama and rough-and-tumble farces, the audience must know the motives actuating the personages of the drama—their situation, their emotions, ambitions, fears and what not. Without that all drama would be an incomprehensible jabbering and gesticulating ...
— Wagner • John F. Runciman
... "Thus ended the 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 disposed to find so much fault ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 2 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Edgerton Ryerson
... 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 persecutor ever since the ground-swell, and was keeping rather in the ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... of Jesuitical casuistry and social wiles. Certainly, Father Williams fails to make us understand how his order could have ever been considered dangerous. It seems a pity that the author should have tried such a wide survey of human nature. Her talent does not carry her into melodrama, to say nothing of tragedy, but there are many evidences in her book of very fair powers in the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... Infant Phenomenon. With his own hands he had helped to adjust the immortal real pump and tubs. He was still in the days when there was a farce in an evening's performance to play the people in, and a solid five-act melodrama for the public's solid fare, and a farce to play ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... the fate of Pippa herself. The whole central and splendid idea of the drama is the fact that Pippa is utterly remote from the grand folk whose lives she troubles and transforms. To make her in the end turn out to be the niece of one of them, is like a whiff from an Adelphi melodrama, an excellent thing in its place, but destructive of the entire conception of Pippa. Having done that, Browning might just as well have made Sebald turn out to be her long lost brother, and Luigi a husband to whom she was secretly married. Browning made this mistake when ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... of Mr. Leath's opinions was enhanced by the distinction of his appearance and the reserve of his manners. He was like the anarchist with a gardenia in his buttonhole who figures in the higher melodrama. Every word, every allusion, every note of his agreeably-modulated voice, gave Anna a glimpse of a society at once freer and finer, which observed the traditional forms but had discarded the underlying prejudices; whereas the world ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... 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 and tells you ...
— If Winter Don't - A B C D E F Notsomuchinson • Barry Pain
... some lady of 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 statement to the effect would have sufficed. The house ghost-haunted; ...
— Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore
... unfair. But first they quarrel with my sense of the normal by being too confoundedly picturesque, too rich and brilliant, too sharp and smart and glib, too—well!—theatrical; like characters from the cast of what your American theatre calls a crook melodrama. And then, if their intentions were so blessed pure and praiseworthy, what right had they to make ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... should have been glad to understand less than I did. Every now and then she interrupted this Billingsgate, and seemed to think that her dignity required a loftier style, and she poured out on us whole pages of cheap melodrama. She began by flinging her fur cap and cloak on the floor and striking a stage attitude. She wanted to know who we were; by what right did we mix ourselves in this affair and come between a villain and his victim! Then she turned on Wharton and began gesticulating ...
— Esther • Henry Adams
... read the pages again ... did I understand? Yes, I understood every sentence, but they conveyed no idea, they awoke no emotion in me; it was like sand, arid and uncomfortable. The story is surprisingly commonplace—the people in it are as lacking in subtlety as those of a Drury Lane melodrama. ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... having, like delicate curtains tempering the sun's ardor, plantations of almond and palm, through the branches of which the eye could make out the green plain and the distant sea. It was a monument almost in ruins, a monastery suggesting melodrama, gloomy and mysterious, in the cloisters of which camped vagabonds and beggars. To enter it one must cross the old cemetery of the friars with its graves disturbed by the roots of forest trees thrusting bones up to the very surface. On moonlight nights a white phantom stalked ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... actor, was born in Chelsea, and made his first appearance on the stage at Bath in 1806, and his first London appearance in 1808. At Covent Garden in 1813, in light comedy and melodrama, he made his first decided success. He Was Pylades to Macready's Orestes in Ambrose Philips's Distressed Mother when Macready made his first appearance at that theatre (1816). He created the parts of Appius Claudius in Sheridan Knowles's Virginius ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... irregular. But when foreign diplomats and 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
... you're en route and the next minute you're rooted, if the reader will forgive a very lame pun. And the spot where the Striped Beetle had been (figuratively) shot from under the girls could not have been selected better if it had been made to order for a writer of melodrama. There was not a house in sight nor a telephone wire. The dust in the road was three inches deep and the temperature must have been close to a hundred. They were at least five miles from the nearest town. Chapa looked at Medmangi, ...
— The Campfire Girls Go Motoring • Hildegard G. Frey
... as well as of Bad; and if they cannot get the Bad they will sometimes take the Good. Newspapers, probably, could exist, even under democratic conditions, by maintaining a certain standard of intelligence and morals. But it is easier to exist on melodrama, fatuity and sport. And one or two papers adopting that course force the others into line; for here, as in so many departments of modern life, "The Bad drives out the Good." This process of deterioration of the press is proceeding rapidly in England, ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... much of the symphony is derivative. One glimpses the influence of Liszt and Tchaikowsky and Strauss in it. So too with the opera "Macbeth," written a few years after the composition of the symphony, when the composer was twenty-four. Despite the effectiveness of the setting it gives the melodrama cleverly abstracted from Shakespeare's tragedy by Edmond Flegg, the score bears a still undecided signature. One feels that the composer has recently encountered the personalities of Moussorgsky and Debussy. No doubt, one begins to sense the proper personality of Bloch in the ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... New System" (1879), a five-act play of great power and beauty. By power I do not mean noise, but convincing impressiveness and concentration of interest. One could scarcely imagine anything farther removed from the ha! and ho! style of melodrama. ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... of set, sardonic purpose, indicated him a man of culture in a hell of his own choosing. Lounging on his elbow in the flickering shadows, so carelessly insouciant in every picturesque inch of him, he seemed to radiate the melodrama of the untamed frontier, just as her guest of tarnished reputation now at the ranch seemed to breathe ...
— Wyoming, a Story of the Outdoor West • William MacLeod Raine
... respective parties to the quarrel were enjoying it so much that it might never have ended if she had not taken the affair into her own hands. She finally followed the ticket-seller back to his desk, to which he retired after each act of the melodrama, and threw her ticket violently down. "Here is your ticket!" she said in English so severe that he could not help understanding and cowering before it. "Give me back my money!" He was too much stupefied ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... of daily work at the office, with agreeable companions, and of evenings spent at the theatre or in study. On the first night I went to the Porte-Sainte-Martin Theatre, where a melodrama, "The Vampire," was presented, and fell into conversation with my neighbour, a man of about forty, of fascinating discourse, who was inordinately impatient with the piece, and was at last turned out of the theatre for his expressions of disapproval. His talk, far more interesting ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... 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 ...
— Boy Life - Stories and Readings Selected From The Works of William Dean Howells • William Dean Howells
... bar. Eight times a week, six evenings and two matinees, she was booked to take the stage from the rise of the curtain and leave it for scarcely more than two minutes at a time until the fall. This was by no means her first show. Before that she had been pantomime fairy, orphan child in melodrama, waif in a music-hall sketch, millionaire's pet in a Society play, a mischievous boy in a popular farce, dancer in a big ballet, and now the lead in a famous fairy play, at a salary of ten pounds a week. No wonder Dad ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... must hold up your hand." She recited the oath of the Horatii. She made him promise to write a play for her, a melodrama, which could be translated into French and played in Paris by her. She was going away next day with her company. He promised to go and see her again the day after at Frankfort, where they ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... I shall never, in my oldest grayest year, in a ducky cap by the fireplace, forget the half-second when your hand came flashing along, and caught that man on the running-board. But it wasn't just that melodrama. If that hadn't happened, something else would have, to symbolize you. It's that you—oh, you took me in, a stranger, and watched over me, and taught me the customs of the country, and were never impatient. No, I shan't forget that; ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... 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 ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, January 10, 1917 • Various
... fishy-eyed young man, whose height might have been a little over five feet two, "I have the very girl for you—a beauty!" Darting into the group of ladies, he returned with quite the biggest specimen, a lady of magnificent proportions, whom, with the air of the virtuous uncle of melodrama, he bestowed upon the fishy-eyed young man. To the massive gentleman was given a sharp-faced little lady, who at a distance appeared quite girlish. Myself I found mated to the thin lady ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... with 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
... Odessa, Kiev, and Warsaw. The plays performed are adaptations of the best dramatic works of all modern nations. We outside of Russia have been made acquainted with the character of these performances by the melodrama "Shulammith," enacted at various theatres by a Jewish-German opera bouffe company from Warsaw, and the writer once—can he ever forget it?—saw "Hamlet" played by jargon actors. When Hamlet offers advice to Ophelia in the words: "Get thee to a nunnery!" she promptly retorts: Mit Eizes bin ich ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... into the background the author who achieves it. If indeed the historian, forsaking his high function and austere reserve, succumbs to the temptations that beset his path, and turns history into political pamphlet, poetic rhapsody, moral epigram, or garish melodrama, he may become conspicuous to a fault at the expense of his work. Gibbon avoided these seductions. If the Decline and Fall has no superior in historical literature, it is not solely in consequence of Gibbon's profound learning, ...
— Gibbon • James Cotter Morison
... a man of spirit, and his appeal to God is quite Italian. There must have been a touch of local color in this romance. Why, what with brigands, and a cavern, and one Lamberti who could foresee future possibilities—there is a whole melodrama in that page. Add to these elements a little intrigue, a peasant maiden with her hair dressed high, short skirts, and a hundred or so of bad couplets.—Oh! the public will crowd to see it! And then Rinaldo—how well the name ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... 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 vigour of treatment. Toru Dutt never sinks to melodrama in the course of her extraordinary tale, and the wonder is that she is not more ...
— Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan • Toru Dutt
... regular approved fashion of English novels, Gogol added after the tenth chapter a defiant epilogue, in which he explained his reasons for dealing with fact rather than with fancy, of ordinary people rather than with heroes, of commonplace events rather than with melodrama; and then suddenly he tried to jar the reader out of his self-satisfaction, like Balzac in ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... more clearly than pages of argument the native heroism of the man. He was scarce out of his cradle when he began to amass vast sums of money, and he is now, after many years of adventure, a king upon Wall Street. He represents the melodrama of wealth. He seems to live in an atmosphere of mysterious disguises, secret letters, and masked faces. His famous contest with Mr H. H. Rogers, "the wonderful Rogers, the master among pirates, whom you have to salute even when he has the point of his ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... childish intrigue in Russia and Poland and thereabouts are the favorite indulgence at present of those Englishmen and Frenchmen who seek excitement in its least innocent form, and believe, or at least behave as if foreign policy was of the same genre as a cheap melodrama. ...
— The Economic Consequences of the Peace • John Maynard Keynes
... Milman's last years the Oxford movement had begun to assume its ritualistic form, and questions of vestments and ceremonies and candles came to the forefront. With all this Milman had no sympathy. 'After the drama,' he said of it, 'the melodrama!' ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... said aloud, as I opened it and put in my head, but all was silent: so I went forward, not without some apprehension, I confess; but it was that sort of pleasing terror one feels when witnessing a good melodrama. I was now in a tolerably-sized hall, supported by four stone pillars, and on each side of it were two doors. I spoke again, and knocked against them, but nobody answered; then I turned the handles. The first two I tried were locked, but ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... 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 ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... Great Expectations, none of his later tales rivals in merit his early 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 game of hide and seek with the reader who ...
— The Puzzle of Dickens's Last Plot • Andrew Lang
... he determined to change his tactics; or whether he had no sinister motives, I could not then determine; suffice it to say, he evacuated the disputed territory, and with a measured and majestic step, moved away some eight or ten paces, reminding me of a stage bandit, in some Bowery melodrama. ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... very,' said the Manager. 'He was rather a low sort of pony. The fact is, he had been originally jobbed out by the day, and he never quite got over his old habits. He was clever in melodrama, too, but too broad, too broad. When the mother died he took the port ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... terror at the fearful visions that her excited imagination conjures up, she loses herself in a wild whirlwind of vociferation, accompanied by frantic looks and gestures. All the loud artillery of old melodrama seems at once to be unlimbered and brought into action, with so much noise and smoke that one can neither hear the signals of the bugle nor see the manoeuvring of the guns. Of course, even to this part a superior actress like Miss Neilson can impart a certain dignity and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... to take what he could get. This time it was a leading part; but a leading part in a crude melodrama in a fit-up company. They had played in halls and concert rooms, on pier pavilions, in wretched little towns. It was glorious July Weather and business was bad—so bad that the manager abruptly closed the treasury and disappeared, leaving the company stranded a hundred and fifty ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... don't really know, any of us. But few, except such as you, believe it—few except such as you—and the Master who taught you. . . . And that is all, I think. . . . I can't thank you; I can't even try. . . . It is too close to melodrama now—not on your side, dear ...
— The Gay Rebellion • Robert W. Chambers
... winter of '76 that Bret Harte came to Hartford and collaborated with Mark Twain on the play "Ah Sin," a comedy-drama, or melodrama, written for Charles T. Parsloe, the great impersonator of Chinese character. Harte had written a successful play which unfortunately he had sold outright for no great sum, and was eager for another venture. Harte had the dramatic sense and constructive invention. He also had ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... She was sitting beside him on the sofa. Gently and tentatively she put her hand on his. "Take it away," he said roughly, miserably, conscious that he was behaving like a hero of melodrama, and then more quietly, "can't you ...
— Balloons • Elizabeth Bibesco
... poet himself. Here may be traced, though softened by the charm of genius, (which softens all things,) the splendid errors that belong to a passionate youth, and that give such distorted grandeur to the giant melodrama of "The Robbers." But here are to be traced also, and in far clearer characters, the man's strong heart, essentially human in its sympathies—the thoughtful and earnest intellect, not yet equally developed with the fancy, but giving ample promise of all it was destined to receive. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... back curtain, or Orion blazing in the ultramarine blue. According to the stage directions, he was to steal along the trees at the wings, and listen to the talk of the men at the fire plotting against him, who were presently to pretend good comradeship to his face. It was a vigorous melodrama with some touches of true Western feeling. After listening for a moment, O'Ryan was to creep up the stage again towards the back curtain, giving a ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... for all the relief from labor in the stinging alkali dust one could get. One could loaf in a hard chair in front of the hotel, lose a dollar or two at the shabby pool-room, or go to a movie show and see pictures of frankly ridiculous Western melodrama. In the real West, the pictures were ridiculous, because romantic shootings-up did not happen. In fact, unless a stubborn labor dispute began, nothing broke the dull monotony of toilsome effort. Romance had vanished ...
— Lister's Great Adventure • Harold Bindloss
... coincidences. The only demand that we can make of the artist in this regard is that he do not give us so many of these that his work will seem unreal. We must not feel that he is making the story in order to surprise us and thrill us—the purpose of melodrama; the story should make itself. Hardy's The Return of the Native is an illustration of failure here; the coincidences are so many that it seems magical, the work of a ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... certain production had realized the hopes of its authors, he would have continued in the dramatic line. It was the beginning of that evolution of the stage that culminated in the ascendency, for a time, of the melodrama. ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... said her mother tartly, "a fly has no property—your Aunt Selina had. Oh, my dear," she added, darting away at a tangent, "to think that last night you and Basil should have been witnesses of a melodrama at the Marlow Theatre, at the very time this real tragedy was taking place in ...
— The Secret Passage • Fergus Hume
... reactions (as when Jocasta's women rush screaming on to the stage) subtle enough to do duty for aesthetic emotions. It is hard to believe that these refined stimulants are precisely the same in kind as the collisions and avalanches of melodrama; ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... little while ago Cissie's imagination might have been captured by so romantic a dream. She was still but a year or so out of the stage of melodrama. But she was out of it. She was growing up now to a subtler wisdom. People, she was beginning to realise, do not do these simple things. They make vows of devotion and they are not real vows of devotion; they love—quite ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... long after this, not more than five or six years ago in fact, that I read "Notre Dame de Paris." This book I secured from the ship's library of some transatlantic liner and the fantastic horrors it contains, carried to a point of almost intolerable melodrama, harmonised well enough with the nightly thud of the engines and the daylong ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... "this is going a little too far! Look at the cheeks of these ladies, Saton. A little melodrama is all very well, but you are too good an actor. Hinckley, and all of you," he said, looking around, "I propose that we end the strain. Let us go into the billiard-room and have a pool. I presume that the spell will ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... activity acting upon the workmen's hands cannot be better illustrated than by a story told me by my father. A master tailor in a country town employed a number of workmen. They had been to see some tragic melodrama performed by some players in a booth at the fair. A very slow, doleful, but catching air was played, which so laid hold of the tailors' fancy that for some time after they were found slowly whistling or humming the doleful ditty, the movement of their needles keeping time to it; the result was ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... He was a tall, heavy, dark young man, with immense sloping shoulders, a black moustache, and incandescent eyes, which he used as though he were somewhat suspicious of the world in general. If his dress had been less untidy, he would have made a perfect villain of melodrama. He smiled the unsure smile of a villain as he awkwardly advanced, with out-stretched ...
— Helen with the High Hand (2nd ed.) • Arnold Bennett
... presence; they are absorbed in the perfections of the Son. On the lintel just below is the Last Judgment, where Saint Michael reappears, weighing the souls of the dead which Mary and John above are trying to save from the strict justice of Christ. The whole melodrama of Church terrors appears after the manner of the thirteenth century, on this church door, without regard to Mary's feelings; and below, against the trumeau, stands the great figure of Christ,—the whole Church,—trampling on the lion and dragon. On either side ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... fact. I have often since his fall heard his Majesty called an usurper: but the only effect of this on me is to provoke a smile of pity; for if the Emperor usurped the throne, he had more accomplices than all the tyrants of tragedy and melodrama combined, for three-fourths of the French people were in the conspiracy. As is well known, it was on May 18 that the Empire was proclaimed, and the First Consul (whom I shall henceforward call the Emperor) received at Saint-Cloud the Senate, led by Consul Cambaceres, who became, a few hours later, ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... could not deceive." Traveling by packet from New Orleans, this essential witness was heralded by the impatient prosecution, till at last he burst upon the stage with all the eclat of the hero in a melodrama—only to retire bated and perplexed, his villainy guessed ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin
... on his own Times', by S. T. Coleridge, edited by his daughter Sara. A melodrama on the story of the Maid of Buttermere was produced in all the suburban London theatres; and in 1843 a novel was published in London by Henry Colburn, entitled 'James Hatfield and the Beauty of Buttermere, a Story of Modern Times', ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... about that wretched bank business. But poor father thought you quite disinterested. He did not see the little game behind your melodrama. He would have torn up your check on the instant if he had suspected you were trying to buy ...
— Brewster's Millions • George Barr McCutcheon
... person of a cattle-king father, but whatever it was she did not find it. No father, of any type whatever, came forward to claim her. In spite of her "Western" experience she looked about her for a taxi, or at least a street car. Even in the wilds of Western melodrama one could hear the clang of street-car gongs warning careless autoists off ...
— The Quirt • B.M. Bower
... of Racine in his Athalie, the eye is now more out of favour than ever with the fashionable critics. Wherever any thing is allowed to be seen, or an action is performed bodily before them, they scent a melodrama; and the idea that Tragedy, if its purity, or rather its bald insipidity, was not watchfully guarded, would be gradually amalgamated with this species of play, (of which a word hereafter,) haunts ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... 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 ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume III - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... looked around the dim place with its little crowd of still, silent, armed men, and chuckled again. "Darned if it isn't as good as a melodrama!" he said. ...
— The Fur Bringers - A Story of the Canadian Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... tainted news you read every day. Ask why those who recognize the lie do not brand it as such; why those who are uncertain do not verify before they repeat and credit; and you will probably have some clue to the little melodrama of dishonor enacted in the office of a legal luminary at Smelter City that sweltering hot July day. When you come to observe it, Bat's recital contained nothing that might not have been posted in eminent respectability on a church warden's door. Like fresh ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... Trembling of a Leaf"; Norwegian, Frenchman, and Spaniard are among us, as before; Bercovici's gypsies from the Roumanian Danube, now collected in "Ghitza," flash colourful and foreign from the Dobrudja Mountains and the Black Sea. In one remarkable piece of melodrama, "Rra Boloi," by the Englishman Crosbie Garstin (Adventure), and the African witch doctor of the Chwene ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... preface to all his works. The silk hat of Mr. Whistler is a real nocturne, his linen a symphony en blanc majeur. To have seen Mr. Hall Caine is to have read his soul. His flowing, formless cloak is as one of his own novels, twenty-five editions latent in the folds of it. Melodrama crouches upon the brim of his sombrero. His tie is a Publisher's Announcement. His boots are Copyright. In his hand he holds the staff ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... theatre, and they look for importations of star actors from this country as regularly as they do for our manufactured goods, or the fashions from Paris. In most of the large cities they have two theatres; one for legitimate drama, and the other for melodrama, as the Bowery Theatre at New York, and the Walnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia; these latter are seldom visited by the aristocratical portion of ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... said Ortiz seriously. "I shall die, Senor Bell. There is nothing else for me to do. But I wish to die with Latin melodrama." He managed a smile. "I will give you ten minutes more. I can hold off the police themselves for so long. But you must hasten, because ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various
... 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 ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet
... is it, of course we wanted Margaret Elizabeth up at the Park; but the young people of this generation like to manage their own affairs, as we did before them." Mr. Pennington looked quizzically at his niece. "She's been getting up a bit of melodrama for our benefit, that's all. If you will pardon the suggestion, my dear, I think possibly it is you who do ...
— The Little Red Chimney - Being the Love Story of a Candy Man • Mary Finley Leonard
... 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 ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... my confidence, at any rate," he promised, "and you shall decide afterwards. I warn you, you will think that I have drunk deep of the Bowery melodrama." ...
— The Profiteers • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... majestic calm and solemnity; how Donatello triumphs over the lack of giving tension to what is quiescent! The Penseroso also sits and meditates, but every muscle of the reposing limbs is alert. So, too, in the Moses, with all its exaggeration and melodrama, with its aspect of frigid sensationalism, which led Thackeray to say he would not like to be left alone in the room with it, we find every motionless limb imbued with vitality and the essentials of movement. The Moses undoubtedly springs ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... SAPRISTI, COMME VOUS Y ALLEZ! Richard III. and Dumas, with all my heart; but not Hamlet. Hamlet is great literature; Richard III. a big, black, gross, sprawling melodrama, writ with infinite spirit but with no refinement or philosophy by a man who had the world, himself, mankind, and his trade still to learn. I prefer the Vicomte de Bragelonne to Richard III.; it is better done of its kind: I simply do not mention the Vicomte in the same part of the building ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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
... absurd thought of their being smashed 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 ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... Hotel de Ville, crying, "Down with Trochu!" "Long live the Commune!" A short colloquy was then held between several of the National Guards and some officers of the Mobiles, who spoke with perfect calmness. Suddenly, a shot is fired, and at the same moment, as in the grand scene of a melodrama, the windows and the great door are flung open, and two lines of Mobile Guards are seen, the front rank kneeling, the second standing, and all levelling their muskets and prepared to fire. Then came a volley which spread terror amidst the crowds of people in ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... one 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
... ago you used to go to melodramas, real melodramas. There are aesthetic revivals of melodrama in Boston, I hear. There was nothing aesthetic about the ones I mean, and the enjoyment of them was untainted by the malady of thought. Come along now. We'll dive through Park Row and turn here down Frankfort Street. Few do turn down Frankfort Street, and I ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... will often suggest interesting thought," observed the Old Maid, "without being interesting. Often I find the tears coming into my eyes as I witness some stupid melodrama—something said, something hinted at, will stir a memory, ...
— Tea-table Talk • Jerome K. Jerome
... thought of trying to find out. One merely accepted it, enchained by that uplifted finger and "Leave it to me!" For a time we talked under the dining-room light, with doors bolted and wooden shutters on street and courtyard closed, as if we were conspirators in Russian melodrama, and then ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... demand of seeing him, which was thus expressed in moderate terms, and obviously essential to his safe keeping, was answered in the lofty style of a melodrama. "Count Bertrand and myself have both informed you, sir, that you should never violate the Emperor's privacy without forcing ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... he sneered, "how very tragic you are becoming! That dressing-gown really makes you appear quite like a heroine of provincial melodrama. I ought now to have a revolver and threaten you, and then this scene would be complete for the stage—wouldn't it? But for goodness' sake don't remain here in the cold any longer, my dear little girl. Run off to bed, and forget that to-night you've ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux
... to face with the austere terrors of Fate, Comedy, which turns the light inward and dissipates the mists of self-affection and self-esteem, have long since given way on the public stage to the flattery of Melodrama, under many names. In the books he reads and in the plays he sees the average man recognises himself in the ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... can return to you to-night after dark. Our business will keep. I want a long talk, and a quiet talk; but I must suit my convenience to yours. It's the dee-yuty of the poor-r-r dependant to wait upon the per-leasure of his patron," exclaimed Major Vernon, in the studied tones of the villain in a melodrama. ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... me taken off, like Polonius 'say, he made a good end,'—for a melodrama. The principal security is, that he has not the courage to spend twenty scudi—the average price of a clean-handed bravo—otherwise there is no want of opportunity, for I ride about the woods every evening, with one servant, and sometimes ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. IV - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... as anything in modern fiction; and Fagin and Bill Sikes, Smike and Poor Jo, the Gordon riots and the storms at sea, may stand beside some tableaux of Victor Hugo for lurid power and intense realism. But it was only at times and during the first half of his career that Dickens could keep clear of melodrama and somewhat stagey blue fire. And at times his blue fire was of a very cheap kind. Rosa Dartle and Carker, Steerforth and Blandois, Quilp and Uriah Heep, have a melancholy glitter of the footlights over them. We cannot see what the villains ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... said Maurice, "thank you. But why not complete the melodrama by striking, since you ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath |
