"Melodrama" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in my chair and to say, not without a semblance of lightness, "Aha, come in!" Dread was indeed rather blunted in me by his looking so absurdly like a villain in a melodrama. The sheen of his tilted hat and of his shirt-front, the repeated twists he was giving to his mustache, and most of all the magnificence of his sneer, gave token that he was there only ...
— Enoch Soames - A Memory of the Eighteen-nineties • Max Beerbohm
... she had belonged to a company on tour in the northern counties. In accordance with the modern custom—so beneficial to actors and the public—their repertory consisted of one play, the famous melodrama, 'A Secret of the Thames,' recommended to provincial audiences by its run of four hundred and thirty-seven nights at a London theatre. These, to be sure, were not the London actors, but advertisements in local newspapers gave it to be ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... 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 ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... is most extraordinary!" he drawled. "Is your charming cousin about to entertain us with a bit of wild-West melodrama, Vernie?" ...
— The Fifth Ace • Douglas Grant
... 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 to a finish, ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... flabbergasted 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 Stanislaws ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... 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
... help him discover the unknown woman who had had the furious quarrel with Lord Loudwater at about eleven o'clock. Indeed, he regarded the information about that quarrel as a sop to be thrown to them. She afforded just the element of melodrama in the case which would be most grateful to their different newspapers, and provide them with plenty of the kind of headlines which best sold them. It was certain that James Hutchings would also occupy their attention. ...
— The Loudwater Mystery • Edgar Jepson
... Kiowa game on which all our young hearts were set, and before he would consent to go back and leave some more of his priceless foot-tracks on the opposition we had to pledge him to three of our proudest fraternities. Talk of wedding a favorite daughter to the greasy villain in the melodrama in order to save the homestead! No crushed father, with a mortgage hanging over him in the third act, could have felt one-half so badly as we Eta Bita Pies did when we had pledged Ole and realized that all the rest of the year we would have to climb over him in our beautiful, ...
— At Good Old Siwash • George Fitch
... kill Adelphi Melodrama. But I have a piece of advice to offer to the Italian gentlemen who have done so much for our stage. It is, that they run their theatre on a principal of duality befitting their joint management. Let it be the home of Melodrama and ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... that lead to scared pocket-books! Always, in everything! And I don't have any of the fine melodrama of fiction: the dictagraphs and speeches by torchlight. I'm merely blocked by stupidity. Oh, I know I'm a fool. I dream of Venice, and I live in Archangel and scold because the Northern seas aren't tender-colored. But at least they sha'n't keep me ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... did their duty in the station to which God or Debrett had called them; not drawing the sword to decide a dispute until they had tried one or two of the less popular expedients, and slighting their obligations to the Melodrama of the future. Which rightly looks for its supplies of copy to persons of ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... something and it may not. They're keen about their bit of melodrama, these chaps. My El Paso paper says that there is a rumor again about troops having been ordered in from Chihuahua. That looks as though they were ...
— Across the Mesa • Jarvis Hall
... 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 persecutor ever since the ground-swell, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... 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 owned ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... one strange story the dramatic element gives place after Sterne's very burial to melodrama of the darkest kind. The funeral, which pointed, after all, a far sadder moral than the death, took place on Tuesday, March 22, attended by only two mourners, one of whom is said to have been his publisher Becket, and the other probably Mr. James; and, thus duly neglected by the whole crowd of boon ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... particular line, one of the best delineators of Irish character on the stage. He played chivalrous parts that BOUCICAULT would not have attempted. There are historical Irish types still to be represented; and when Irish melodrama, with its secret plots, murders, wicked land-agents, jovial muscular-christian priests, comic male peasants, and pretty and virtuous female ditto, shall have taken a rest for a while, Irish Comedy may yet ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, August 16, 1890 • Various
... life in Italy, visualizing the country and its people, and warm with the red blood of romance and melodrama."—Boston Transcript. ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... repertoire after all, for whether the piece be melodrama, farce, genteel comedy, or harrowing tragedy, it has to be played by ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... 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 ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... the 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 by her decision of character to speak; and he returned her centimes ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... 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
... 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
... tone of this conversation takes one back to the atmosphere of the dear old Drury Lane melodrama. I feel, somehow or other," he went on, looking into Katharine's eyes, "that our friend here has cast me for the part of the villain and you for the injured heroine. I am wondering whether I dare ask you for ...
— The Box with Broken Seals • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... 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 performed by it. There are ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... 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 ...
— Courts and Criminals • Arthur Train
... was rather like the setting of the last act in a melodrama of a theater on the Surrey side of the Thames—the act in which the injured heroine, with her child, sinks down fainting as the folk are going to church in the old village on a June evening among the trees—leading up to moonlight effects and reunion. There was no organ to play "off," ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... slipping into a morbid state. A mother collecting Doctors! It is a most fascinating kind of connoisseurship, grows on one like Drink; like Polemics; like Melodrama; like the Millennium; like ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... by the other side and to indulge in small talk when they should be most splendid. And the majority of the other figures follow suit. On the face of it the volume is stuffed with all the material of melodrama; but somehow the authoress seems to strive after effects that don't come naturally to her. What does come naturally to her is seen in a background sketch of the unhappy countries of Asia Minor in the hands of the Turk and the Hun, which is so much the abler part ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 7, 1919. • Various
... Germany. No unofficial Englishman worth his salt wanted to snivel hypocritically about our love of peace and our respect for treaties and our solemn acceptance of a painful duty, and all the rest of the nauseous mixture of school-master's twaddle, parish magazine cant, and cinematograph melodrama with which we were deluged. We were perfectly ready to knock the Kaiser's head off just to teach him that if he thought he was going to ride roughshod over Europe, including our new friends the French, and the plucky little Belgians, he was reckoning without old ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... 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
... 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 staring ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... 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. ...
— Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore
... Fu-Manchu—and of the group surrounding him (and, don't forget, surviving him)—we may further assume that the wireless message was no gratuitous piece of melodrama, but that it was directed to a definite end. Let us endeavour to link up the chain a little. You occupy an upper-berth; so do I. Experience of the Chinaman has formed a habit in both of us: that of sleeping with closed windows. Your port ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... not touched. Kisotchka's tears, her trembling, and the blank expression of her face suggested to me a trivial, French or Little Russian melodrama, in which every ounce of cheap shallow feeling is washed ...
— Love and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... two days dizzyingly, terrifyingly much had happened. The pleasant little comedy of life at El Pozo had changed to melodrama, crude and strident. They had been attacked by a band of insurrectos, a wing of Villa's hectic army, presumably; the peons, with the exception of the house servants and Yaqui Juan, had gone gleefully over to the enemy; Richard King had ...
— Play the Game! • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... France. His musket was still 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
... The kitchen, with its two box-beds hung with clean check curtains, with its wide stone chimney, its chimney-shelf four yards long and garnished with lanterns and religious statuettes, its array of chests and pair of ticking clocks, was the very model of what a kitchen ought to be; a melodrama kitchen, suitable for bandits or noblemen in disguise. Nor was the scene disgraced by the landlady, a handsome, silent, dark old woman, clothed and hooded in black like a nun. Even the public bedroom had a character of its own, with the long deal tables and benches, where fifty might have ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... do was to be magnanimous; to admit that he was the defeated lover, and to say something that would prove how splendid he could be in the moment of disaster. The traditions of Harrow, Oxford, and the melodrama united to give him an indication of the proper conduct of the situation, and against them was ranged nothing more than one feral impulse to take Banks by the throat and settle his blasphemous ...
— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford
... eighty-six departments of France: but read these two letters which lately passed between two girls differently married, and you will see that it was as necessary as the narrative by which every true melodrama was until lately expected to open. You will divine the skillful manoeuvres of the Parisian peacock spreading his tail in the recesses of his native village, and polishing up, for matrimonial purposes, ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Second Part • Honore de Balzac
... Emperor Nicholas was alone in his accustomed writing-room. He took no counsel; he rang a bell. Presently an officer of his staff stood before him. To him he gave his order for the occupation of the Principalities." This overpasses drama—it is melodrama. ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... there, it 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
... approval. Together they went to see M. Carvalho, who was then director of the Theatre Lyrique. He, too, liked the idea of the opera, and the librettists went to work. The composer had written nearly half of the score, when M. Carvaiho brought the disconcerting intelligence that a grand melodrama treating the subject was in preparation at the Theatre de la Porte Saint-Martin. Carvalho said that it would be impossible to get the opera ready before the appearance of the melodrama, and unwise ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... sensational romance [Sue], the creaking machinery of melodrama [Boucicault], with which it has been attempted in our own day to portray certain tableaux of the life of the people, only succeed, owing to the extravagance of their construction, in demonstrating the ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... the first act in this nice little melodrama was the knocking down of Sling, so that he could not know what happened after, and the police would not be so soft as to tell him why they wanted such information until ...
— The Red Eric • R.M. Ballantyne
... seen a good deal of Miss Jane in the next week or so. We keeps Jerry under—what's it the heroine says in the melodrama? "Oh, cruel, cruel, S.P. something." Espionage, that's it. We keeps Jerry under espionage, and whenever he goes trickling round after the girl, we goes trickling ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... part of the cost? Ask yourself that of the 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 fruit passed through a mouldy cellar, ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... 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
... 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 take ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... was impervious to the finer feelings of the heart. He disbelieved her story from beginning to end, and was of the opinion that she was trying to hoax him with a concoction as crude as the vain imaginings of melodrama or the cinema. It was more with the intention of trapping her into a contradiction than of eliciting anything of importance that he ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... of Nourjahad, a melodrama, was performed at Drury Lane, November 25, 1813. It was anonymous, but it was attributed by some reviewers to Byron, a charge which he indignantly denied. See Byron, Letters and Journals, ed. by Rowland E. Prothero (6 vols. London: ...
— Mathilda • Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
... a moment of gorgeous abandon, a flash of melodrama such as he found in traffic-driving, when he laid out a clean collar, discovered that it was frayed in front, and tore it up ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... diseased times upon which the country has fallen. It recalls forcibly to mind, it reproduces the opening scenes and the progress, the men and the machinery, of the first French Revolution, the precursor of so many more, upon the last act of the last fashioned melodrama of which the curtain has not yet probably descended. How then the meaner spirits succeeded in the whirlwind of change, to the mightier minds which first conjured and hoped to control it; how the Mirabeaux, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... 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
... understand that 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
... 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 streetcar. Even in the wilds of Western melodrama one could hear the clang of street-car gongs warning careless ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... 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 ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... in such schemes as should have nerved her 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 ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... finished skill was reinforced by a quite admirable make-up, though only a policeman of very melodrama could have missed that brilliant pate as it shone balefully over the inadequate chair in which he sat concealed while his subordinate was bullying the hapless Anna. Also I doubt whether so stout a ruffian would have succumbed so promptly ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 19, 1917 • Various
... wit, habitual dexterity, and dashing verbiage of France have all been thrown into the novel. Even the French drama, once the pride of the nation, has perished under this sudden pressure. A French modern tragedy is now only a rhymed melodrama. Even French history attracts popular applause only as it approaches to a three volume romance. Every man of name in French modern authorship has attained it only by the rapid production of novels. But no language can be too contemptuous, or too ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... pieces and condemned, and it is not a safe one to imitate. No doubt he wrought for effects, for he was a magician, and used exaggeration in high lights and low lights on his crowded canvas. Say what you will of all these defects, of his lack of classic literary training, of his tendency to melodrama, of his tricks of style, even of a ray of lime-light here and there, it remains that he is a great power, a tremendous force in modern life; half an hour of him is worth a lifetime of his self-conscious analyzers, ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... in another. Perhaps I may recover my lost tranquillity in some brothel. Perhaps, when our merry race is run, and we become two mouldering skeletons, chance again may bring us together with the most pleasing surprise, and we may, as in a melodrama, recognize each other by a common feature of disease—that mother whom her children can never disavow. Then, perhaps, disgust and shame may create that union between us which could not be effected by the most ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... expression was wholly sympathetic. The derision which lurked behind he kept wholly concealed. A strong man so abjectly in the toils, and he to be chosen for his confidant! It was melodrama ...
— The Yellow Crayon • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... course of that walk near Culoz? All that is known is that the landlady saw Walcott returning by himself two or three hours later, and that when she questioned him he replied that madame had taken her departure. What do you think of that for a bit of suggested melodrama?" ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... 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 ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... wished it might be 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 ...
— Seven Miles to Arden • Ruth Sawyer
... defective sense of humour is shown in the way in which he frequently takes that one step which, Napoleon said, separates the sublime from the ridiculous—exaggerating character and motive till the heroic passes into melodrama and melodrama into absurdity. This fault is felt in his great prose romance "Notre-Dame de Paris" (1831), a picture of mediaeval Paris, in which the humpback Quasimodo affords an exact illustration of what the author meant by the grotesque; another of the same kind is furnished by the hero of his ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... nothing better than get up this little melodrama, and then hasten back to his elegant home," she said, ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... and there is service on Sundays, and festivals at half past 12. On the southern side of the Boulevard St. Antoine is the Theatre St. Antoine, erected in 1836; the performances are vaudevilles, little melodrama, and farces. The admission is from 6d. to 2s. 6d. It contains 1,226 places. The Place de la Bastille is now before us, and still may be seen the desolate remains of the great plaster cast of the enormous elephant, intended by Napoleon to have been placed on this spot, ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve
... "by the grace of God and the national will." This infatuation was illustrated at his coronation in ancient Konigsberg,—first home of Prussian royalty, and better famous as birthplace and lifelong home of Immanuel Kant,—when the King enacted a scene of melodrama which might be transferred from the church to the theatre. No other person was allowed to place the crown on his royal head. Lifting it from the altar, where it rested, he placed it on his head himself, in sign that he held it from Heaven and not from man, and next ...
— The Duel Between France and Germany • Charles Sumner
... say, ridiculous. But notwithstanding this attempt, and the still earlier one 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 them as a ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... nature. In her attempt to express extreme 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 ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... expressive are the terra-cotta images of Spain! What a climax of absurdity teases the eye in the monstrosities in stone which draw travellers in Sicily to the eccentric nobleman's villa, near Palermo! Who does not shrink from the French allegory and horrible melodrama of Roubillac's monument to Miss Nightingale, in Westminster Abbey? How like Horace Walpole to dote on Ann Conway's canine groups! We actually feel sleepy, as we examine the little black marble Somnus of the Florence Gallery, and electrified with the first sight of the Apollo, and won ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... by 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 ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, May 27, 1914 • Various
... in former days been a popular actress at the Konigstadt theatre in Berlin, and it was here, at the time when Henriette Sontag raised it to the height of its fame, that Holtei's style had been formed. The production there of his melodrama Leonore (founded on Burger's ballad) had in particular earned him a wide reputation as a writer for the stage, besides which he produced some Liederspiele, and among them one, entitled Der Alte Feldherr, became fairly popular. His ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... immoderately. I cannot blame him. Morning exercise is incompatible with the maintenance of parental dignity. Were I a child again I could neither love nor respect a father who placed two chairs at a considerable distance from each other and mounted them horizontally like the human bridge in a melodrama. ...
— The Patient Observer - And His Friends • Simeon Strunsky
... towering and feathering away up into the black mistiness that trees seem to gather about them at night; the silhouettes of those two upon the seat; the beams of light coming from the Casino, the woman all in black peeping with fear behind the tree-trunk. It is melodrama; but I can't ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... Lopez he was at once relieved and exasperated. Her manner did not tend to remove his irritation. Leaning against the table, her face very white, she looked at him without speaking. Had not the sight of her just then been extremely unwelcome, the melodrama of the whole thing—the veil, the pallid face, the dramatic silence—would have amused him. As it was he looked anything but amused, rising from the armchair, his brows drawn together ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... to the effect of this stanza by flinging ourselves on the turf and embracing Sir Patrick's knees, with which touch of melodrama he was enchanted. ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... Saved!" cried the financier, for all the world as though he had been in a melodrama; ...
— The Admirable Tinker - Child of the World • Edgar Jepson
... 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
... understand. Her dialect must come from the worst class of Parisian thieves. I 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 ...
— Esther • Henry Adams
... gulfs, no defined beginnings and endings. The book of their sojourn in this world has neither chapters nor headings; the page runs on without hindrance from tragedy to comedy, comedy to farce, farce to melodrama, and thence to tragedy again—always it returns to tragedy. They stride round the Circle of the Emotions without halting, merging from joy into sorrow without preface, till one day the feet grow wearier and lag, the eyes grow clear and, almost without knowing it, as did Strangeways, their dream ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... probabilities are that if a 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
... of Evelyn Johnson, actress, may be praised just because it is so true and so wholly free from melodrama and the claptrap which we have come to think inseparable from any narrative which has to do with theatrical experiences."—Professor Harry Thurston ...
— The Bright Face of Danger • Robert Neilson Stephens
... when it comes proves the same thing as applause does everywhere; that if you want to drive home your points in a large assembly you must be condensed and simple, using broad, slashing arguments. This is precisely what distinguishes melodrama from drama, and which explains why excessive analysis is no argument in the popular mind. Generally, however, there is not much applause and the voice of the speaker wanders through the hall uninterrupted ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... 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 been ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux
... (which made me shiver with the wildly 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
... Heaven-gate and Hell-gate of man: his sensuous life is but the small temporary stage (Zeitbuehne), whereon thick-streaming influences from both these far yet near regions meet visibly, and act tragedy and melodrama. Sense can support herself handsomely, in most countries, for some eighteenpence a day; but for Fantasy planets and solar-systems will not suffice. Witness your Pyrrhus conquering the world, yet drinking no better red wine than he had before.' ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... commenced at 5 P.M., and lasted till 7. It consisted of a melodrama, full of awful crimes, and the most pathetic sentiment. The audience, chiefly composed of "the people," was, from beginning to end, in an extraordinary state of excitement, fizzing, like the perpetual going off of ...
— The Foreign Tour of Messrs. Brown, Jones and Robinson • Richard Doyle
... rendezvous; wiser still, perhaps, to have sought an interview openly, and to have made sure of the facts before seeming to encourage what might easily prove to be a girl's more or less romantic illusions. A midnight interview savoured too much of melodrama to appeal to a middle-aged lawyer like myself, however great its appeal might be to youthful lovers. At any rate, I would be certain that the need was very great before I ...
— The Gloved Hand • Burton E. Stevenson
... I were to furnish it seemed to be generally accepted. Here were the time-old elements: two men, one woman—elements so constituted that in other situation they might have brought comedy but upon such a trail must and should pronounce for tragedy, at least for true melodrama. ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... Maud, a lyrical melodrama, paints the changing emotions of a lover who passes from morbid gloom to ecstasy. Then, in a moment of anger, he murders Maud's brother. Despair, insanity, and recovery follow, but he sees Maud's face no more. While ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... old prescriptive respectability. But for a 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, Mr. ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... but they cause physical 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
... 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, the anguish ...
— A Simple Story • Mrs. Inchbald
... conventual building. Others of ancient date are less regular in their form, being merely so many narrow low winding corridors, varied, perhaps, by recesses hewn roughly out of the chalk, and resembling the brigands' cave of the melodrama, while a certain number of the larger cellars at Reims are simply abandoned quarries, the broad and lofty arches of which are suggestive of the nave and aisles of some Gothic church. In these varied vaults, lighted by solitary lamps in front of metal ...
— Facts About Champagne and Other Sparkling Wines • Henry Vizetelly
... an agitating adventure. Apart, however, from the mere physical nervousness against which, as I say, I fought, there was another element in my feelings with regard to Boyce's summons. If I talk about the Iron Hand of Fate you may think I am using a cliche of melodrama. Perhaps I am. But it expresses what I mean. Something unregenerate in me, some lingering atavistic savage instinct towards freedom, rebelled against this same Iron Hand of Fate that, first clapping me on the shoulder long ago in Cape Town, was now dragging me, against my ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... He leaned out to study one of them; a tall, wild-eyed woman crouched to spring upon a man who stared at her in fear. Prosper dropped back with a gleaming smile of amused excitement. "They've made it look like cheap melodrama," he said to himself; "and yet it's a good thing, the best thing I've ever done. Yet they will vulgarize the whole idea with their infernal notions of 'what the public wants.' Morena is as bad as the rest ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... no first-rate novelist in Europe; there is no first-rate poet; without disrespect to D'Annunzio, Shaw, or Claudel, it may be said that Ibsen was their better. Since Mozart, music has just kept her nose above the slough of realism, romance, and melodrama. Music seems to be where painting was in the time of Courbet; she is drifting through complex intellectualism and a brilliant, exasperating realism, to arrive, I hope, at greater purity.[26] Contemporary painting is the one manifest triumph of the young age. Not even the oldest and wisest dare ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... strong casts from time to time and exciting performances at our local theatres, no one will deny; but perhaps the inhabitants of Turon never witnessed a more enthralling melodrama than was played during the first two days of our race meeting before a crowded and critical audience, and never, we can state from a somewhat extended experience of matters dramatic, did they gaze on a more finished ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood
... at Saratoga, except such as the hotels supply; but a series of Salvation Army meetings did duty as amusements, and there was one theatrical performance—a performance of East Lynne entirely by people of colour. The sentiments and incidents of the heart-breaking melodrama, as the coloured mind interpreted them, were of very curious effect. It was as if the version were dyed with the same pigment that darkened the players' skins: it all came out negro. Yet they had tried to make ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... sometimes, I hope, in the Courts of Justice, but forever out of them. I am no longer indifferent as to whether men do good or evil so long as they do not cross my path. I am a hunter of sin. I am out to destroy. There's a touch of melodrama in this for you, Andrew," he concluded, with a little laugh, "but, my God, ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... 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 ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... Wrenn had been indifferent, for they showed no imagination. But when he saw Big Business glorified by a humorous melodrama, then The Job appeared to him as picaresque adventure, and he was in peril ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... 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
... 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, Volume III - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... little laugh. It sounded to her as if her own ghost—the ghost of her former self—were laughing in satire. There was a devilish, mischievous joy in battling to outwit Bouchard more than in her deceit of Westerling. Satire, yes—needle-pointed, acid-tipped! Melodrama done in burlesque, too. In the name of the noble art of war, a bit of fooling about ghosts in a tunnel might influence the fate of armies that were the last word in modern equipment. And men played at killing ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... 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 ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 14. Saturday, February 2, 1850 • Various
... beforehand, and assist 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
... in those days had to reckon with his audience. Gallery and Pit took an interest in his work such as Galleries and Pits no longer take. I recollect witnessing the production of a very blood-curdling melodrama at, I think, the old Queen's Theatre. The heroine had been given by the author a quite unnecessary amount of conversation, so we considered. The woman, whenever she appeared on the stage, talked by the yard; she could not do a simple little thing like ...
— The Second Thoughts of An Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... by popular poets of the earlier Renaissance. But 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 ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... 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 theater, alluded, with a certain lifting of the brow, drawing down of the corners of the mouth and somewhat rasping voce di petti, to Falstaff's nine men in buckram. ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IV. (of X.) • Various
... had helped to generate that impression. It seemed to her more than probable that with a little instruction as to technical stage business she could gain fame and fortune almost at once as an actress of tragedy or melodrama. Comedy she despised as unworthy of her. But the stage appealed to her only on the ground of income. The life of an actress lacked the ethical character which she liked to associate with whatever she did. To be sure, a great ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... rather like a bit out of a melodrama. Convict son totters up the steps of the old home and punches the bell. What awaits him beyond? Forgiveness? Or the raspberry? True, the white-haired butler who knew him as a child will sob on his neck, but what of the old dad? How will ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... are asked to send a fellow human being to the scaffold? Think calmly, gentlemen, is he such a man as you can readily believe? Is his highly coloured story credible? Are you so gullible as to be taken in with this melodrama? Gentlemen, I know you, I know my fellow citizens too well to think that ...
— The Foreigner • Ralph Connor
... days was produced successfully by Macready after Griffin's death. His fame, however, depends on his pictures of Irish life, and they are concentrated best in the literary accessories of the present melodrama. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... life in this mad way," he blurted; "any moment he 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 come ...
— The Missing Link • Edward Dyson
... he almost made practical; nay, he seemed to realize a kind of poetic pleasure from reveries, which represented to him the universe, with the sun and the stars, and all living creatures—walking, flying, swimming, or crawling—going through their parts in the great melodrama of destiny, no one knowing how, or why, or wherefore, yet every human being believing that he is master of his actions, at the very moment that he might be conscious that his belief is only a part of the great law of necessity. ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, XXII • various
... assured when she came up to the spot where he fell, that there was no danger; he had but dislocated his shoulder, and bruised his head a little. Hearing this, she rose out of her clamorous heart, and seized the opportunity for a small burst of melodrama. Unhappily, Lady Jocelyn, who gave the tone to the rest, was a Spartan in matters of this sort; and as she would have seen those dearest to her bear the luck of the field, she could see others. When the call for active help reached her, you beheld a ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... 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
... from Shakespeare's. I can't understand either reason; but Spedding is (as Carlyle {75a} wrote me of his Bacon) the 'invincible, and victorious.' At any rate, I can't beat him. Irving I never could believe in as Hamlet, after seeing part of his famous Performance of a Melodrama called 'The Bells' three or four years ago. But the Pollocks, and a large World beside, think him a Prodigy—whom Spedding thinks—a Monster! To this Complexion is ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald to Fanny Kemble (1871-1883) • Edward FitzGerald
... her grizzled locks streaming, her garments loose and tattered, all which became suddenly visible as she set fire to a great wisp of straw, and another and another she plucked from her bundle and lighted, and waved the light above and underneath. It was like a scene in a melodrama of Cavern and Witch—the best cavern scene I ever beheld. As she continued to throw down, from the height where she stood, the lighted bundles of straw, they fell on the surface of the dark stream below, and sailed down the current, under the arch of the cavern, lighting its roof at the vast opening, ...
— The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... voice nor gesture, can express two opposite ideas on the same subject; this necessarily involves a resort to speech. Human language is composed of gesture, speech and singing. The ancient melodrama owed its excellence to a union of these ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... Maurice, "thank you. But why not complete the melodrama by striking, since you have doubled ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... of 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 desperate resistance when they found ...
— Scotland Yard - The methods and organisation of the Metropolitan Police • George Dilnot
... one thing—what is going to happen the day after tomorrow. How the devil can it have got known? That is ugly enough in itself. But all this about war and the Black Stone—it reads like some wild melodrama. If only I had more confidence in Scudder's judgement. The trouble about him was that he was too romantic. He had the artistic temperament, and wanted a story to be better than God meant it to be. He had a lot ...
— The Thirty-nine Steps • John Buchan
... idea off with shame for its crudeness. What vulgar raw things would come into your head when you let your mind roam idly . . . like cheap melodrama . ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... take you into 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
... about it at the time. The rest of the evening was devoted to pleasure. After dinner they took in a moving picture show. The first film was a Western melodrama and it pleased ...
— Crooked Trails and Straight • William MacLeod Raine
... he said, stepping back and leaning his back against the door, "what melodrama! The ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... be found, with reverence be it said, among the works of nature. The stagey is its generic name; but it is an old, insular, home-bred staginess; not French, domestically British; not of to-day, but smacking of O. Smith, Fitzball, and the great age of melodrama; a peculiar fragrance haunting it; uttering its unimportant message in a tone of voice that has the charm of fresh antiquity. I will not insist upon the art of Skelt's purveyors. These wonderful characters that once so thrilled our soul with their bold attitude, array ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... nightingale notes among the canvass groves and hollyhock gardens of Drury Lane and Covent Garden; or to sup on the frowning woes of tragedy, the intrigues of an interlude dished up as an entremet, or a melodrama for a ragout; or the wit and waggery of a farce, sweet and soft-flowing like a petit-verre, to finish the repast. They go, and between the acts try to count the wax and gas, the feet, and foot lights till they are purblind; they return home and dream of Desdemona, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 360 - Vol. XIII. No. 360, Saturday, March 14, 1829 • Various
... 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 way ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... a scene in a melodrama, isn't it, Ware," he whispered, "but I know a little about Sylvanus Power. It's only a ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... 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, ...
— The Mutineers • Charles Boardman Hawes
... prose follows. The tradesmen and tinkers of Athens are planning to turn actors and to play "Pyramus and Thisbe" for the Duke's wedding feast. It is full of "local hits," which are not lost upon the audience. In the practical jokes, the melodrama, the ranting bombast, and Bottom's ambition to play "a tyrant's vein," they recognise a satire on the amateur theatricals of the trades-guilds, the clownish horseplay of the "moralities" so-called. These crude plays, once so popular, have become the jest of an audience who pride themselves ...
— Shakespeare's Christmas Gift to Queen Bess • Anna Benneson McMahan
... glowed with living fire. The fire in him is true, that is 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 ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore
... great 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 When We ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... grew less. The longer he contemplated the slip of paper in his hand, the more he became convinced that the inscrutable Shan Tung was the last individual in the world to stage a bit of melodrama without some good reason for it. There was but one conclusion he could arrive at. The Chinaman was playing a game of his own, and he had taken this unusual way of advising Keith to make a getaway while the going was good. It was ...
— The River's End • James Oliver Curwood
... those, you know," pacing slowly up and down the room with the action of the leading lady in a melodrama; but her pain or vision, whatever it was, had been real enough. The cold drops stood on her forehead, her lips quivered, the brown eyes turned from side to side asking for help. "When he is near shall I not know it?" she said ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... "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 ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 2 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Edgerton Ryerson
... thought to himself. "Was ever a man in such a hellish position, except in melodrama? And what a movie that would have made! And what a shot that girl proved herself to be! Certainly she could have killed me there at Brookhollow! She could have riddled me before I ducked, even with that nickel-plated affair about which I was ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... cavalryman and his horse, both dying of thirst and wounds, were to be lost on a Soudanese desert, and in the middle distance on a ridge of sand a lion should be drawing in upon them, crouched on his belly, his tail stiff, his lower jaw hanging. The melodrama of the old English "Home Book of Art" still influenced Vandover. He was in love with this idea for a picture and had determined to call it "The Last Enemy." The effects he wished to produce were isolation and intense heat; as to the soldier, he was as yet undecided ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... frantic confession of sin, of a horror of conscience in which the power of distinguishing between the work of art on the stage and the real life of the spectator is confused and overwhelmed, will ever care for the stereotyped compliments which every successful farce or melodrama elicits from the newspapers. Give me that critic who rushed from my play to declare furiously that Sir George Crofts ought to be kicked. What a triumph for the actor, thus to reduce a jaded London journalist to the condition of the simple sailor ...
— Mrs. Warren's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... kicking as quietly as if it were part of the programme in the last act of a melodrama in which he was the villain. He was kicked entirely across the room and his head was driven violently into the half-open door of the side-board. Here it came in contact with one of Cook-mother's freshly baked hams, set aside for the morrow's ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... off fidgeting and became mouse-still, while only the low voice of the girl reading of the helpless lovers, of the terrible smiling Count Fosco and his grim wife, broke the silence. The boys lay, thrilled by the splendid melodrama, their little differences forgotten with the rest of their personal affairs, and so they all stayed, Hilaria as enthralled as they, while unperceived the light began to fade and evening to creep ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... befuddle our thinking. For if politics is merely a guerilla war between the bribed and the unbribed, then statecraft is not a human service but a moral testing ground. It is a public amusement, a melodrama of real life, in which a few conspicuous characters are tried, and it resembles nothing so much as schoolboy hazing which we are told exists for the high purpose of detecting a "yellow streak." But even though we desired ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... is never probable, but in his first novel, 'Clara Vaughan,' published in 1864, it impairs belief in the general reality of the book; and though there is hint of the power to excite sympathy of which his latter novels prove him so great a master, the intelligence refuses such shrieking melodrama. 'Lorna Doone' therefore came unheralded. It was published in London in 1869 and slowly grew in favor, then leaped into popularity. In 1878 ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... ridiculous, Colonel Edge would obviously consider it unsoldier-like. The chance had been frittered away; life was at its old game of neglecting its own possibilities. There was nothing but to acquiesce; fine melodrama had been degraded into a business interview with two elderly and conscientious gentlemen. The scene in the Long Gallery had at least been different from this! Harry bowed his head; he must be thankful for small blessings; it was something that they had remembered ...
— Tristram of Blent - An Episode in the Story of an Ancient House • Anthony Hope
... reporters got affairs mixed and published me as the bridegroom. Have you got a cigar? I smoke about three times a year, and this is one of them. Yes, there was a fine scene when I went home that night, a Broadway melodrama. I lost my temper easier then; by the time my father and uncle gave me time to speak, I was too angry to defend myself and set them right. I supposed they would learn the truth by the next day, anyhow. ...
— The Flying Mercury • Eleanor M. Ingram
... a mood of melodrama. Windows glint evilly. Doorways grin with rows of electric teeth. This, Jonnerrvetter! is the Great City of the old-time ten-twenty-thirty thrillers. The devourer of innocence, ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... furnished few picturesque incidents. I have, however, some readers to think of, who care little for melodrama, and expect a quiet peep at what passes inside a man, To such students things undramatic are often vocal, denoting the progress of ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... more composed, matter-of-fact state of mind, this play which she was staging would have seemed the crudest, most impossible melodrama—a thing both too absurd and too dangerous for her to risk. But Maggie was just then living through one of the highest periods of her life; she cared little what happened to her. And it is just such moods that transform ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... yours yet," began Rose, much moved, though all the while she felt as if she were on a stage and had a part to play, for Charlie had made life so like a melodrama that it was hard for him to be quite simple ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott
... not one to indulge in melodrama. For a long moment he sat looking into the black eyes of Von Stein. Then ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... plan. But Payne, a professional murderer, stood "game," and fought his way over prostrate figures to his sick victim's bed. There was great confusion and terror among the tacit and rash conspirators on Thursday night. They had looked upon the plot as of a melodrama, and found to their horror that John Wilkes ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... 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 ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... At first I thought the quarrel genuine, but after a moment or so I could not avoid a sort of reminiscent impression of the cheap melodrama. It seemed incredible, but soon I could not dodge the conclusion that it was a made-up quarrel designed to ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... that. You 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 were giving ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland |
