"Melodramatic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... footlights of a Paris theatre, and not under the homely lamp of an actual country house, that one expects to see a girl leading her friend on to spit upon the portrait of a father who has lived and died for nothing and no one but herself; and when we find in real life a desire for melodramatic effect, it is generally the 'sadic' instinct that is responsible for it. It is possible that, without being in the least inclined towards 'sadism,' a girl might have shewn the same outrageous cruelty as Mlle. Vinteuil in desecrating the memory and defying the ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... her on the palm of my hand. It was melodramatic, probably; but I was very young, and by that time wildly in love with her. I thought, for a moment, that she would take it; but she only drew a deep breath and pushed my ...
— The After House • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... depicted it; and he did not even develop and heighten its beauty, but substituted for the real charm an almost grotesque personal mannerism. Turner's idea of nature seemed to Hugh often purely theatrical and melodramatic, wanting in restraint, in repose. The appeal of Turner seemed to him to be constantly an appeal to childish and unperceptive minds, that could not notice a thing unless it was forced upon them. Some of the earlier pictures indeed, such as that of the frost-bound lane, with the boy blowing ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... of the guidons as they fluttered away over the "divide" towards Lodge Pole, and with these afflicted ones Mrs. Whaling, the "commanding officer's lady," would fain have lavished hours of time in sympathizing converse. She loved the melodramatic, and was never so happy, said Blake, as when bathed in tears. Detractors of this estimable woman, indeed, were wont to complain that she was too easily content with these pearly but insufficient aids to lavatory process; and her propensity for adhering for weeks at a time ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... one who spoke to you of me," she continued calmly. "You need not trouble to contradict me. Hadn't you better hurry away before I have the chance to do you any harm? There is one young man I know, of a melodramatic turn of mind, who persists in looking upon me as a sort of siren, calling my victims on to the rocks. I expect that is the person with whom you have been talking. Douglas Jesson, I think that I am a little ...
— The Survivor • E.Phillips Oppenheim
... it, and swiftly, in the light of the visit he had had from Trowbridge. The cattleman had left him with a distinct feeling that every word spoken had been meant. "If we can prove it against you, we'll ride you to hell on a rail." The language was melodramatic, but it seemed very suggestive as the Senator called it to mind. He regretted that he had supported Moran in his lust for revenge. The lawless spirit of the West seemed to have poisoned his own blood, but somehow the feeling of indifference as ...
— Hidden Gold • Wilder Anthony
... the young artists. An Irishman and a Corkman had gone out from them, and amazed men by the grandeur and originality of his works of art. He had thrown the whole of the English painters into insignificance, for who would compare the luscious commonplace of the Stuart painters, or the melodramatic reality of Hogarth, or the imitative beauty of Reynolds, or the clumsy strength of West, with the ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... lay sunning themselves upon the beach. The ambuscade now prepared to attack the enemy. Creeping stealthily down as near as possible without being discovered, they simultaneously rushed upon the astonished animals; and the tragic scene of slaughter, mingled with melodramatic and comic incidents, that ensued, baffles all description. In one place might be seen my friend Jordan swinging a huge club round with his powerful arms, and dealing death and destruction at every blow; while in another place ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne
... are absurd to-day; you are hurting me. This melodramatic pose approaches the ludicrous, and I have really no patience with your folly. A little period of calm reflection may prove beneficial, and I will leave you to it. Clara is ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... making an ass of yourself. If you had taken more time to think it over you wouldn't have followed me up with any such melodramatic intention as murder. Good God! Haven't you seen enough of murder in the past four years? I could readily fancy you going in for some sort of revenge but I should have expected something ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... melodramatic, "Death before Slavery!" may be applicable—when "Slavery" becomes a conceivable, proximate probability, or "Death" a possible alternative. Then let us have "Death before Slavery," by all means. At present, Punch would say, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, March 25, 1893 • Various
... The words have a melodramatic look on paper. But he spoke them not only with his lips, but with his whole self. They were not out of keeping with his nature. There is no more desperate blood in the world's veins than that of the Celt ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... has been engaged in a melodramatic role created by himself. He is painfully undecided whether the hisses of the orchestra attest his success as a villian; whether the whistling up in the gallery demands an encore, or heralds an offering of cabbages and ripe poultry fruit. I myself did not witness the production, but I did ...
— Rim o' the World • B. M. Bower
... there was a man shattered and with memory lost in a base hospital who might possibly be the brother-in-law whom she so emphatically didn't want. What happens upon this you shall find out for yourself. Mrs. HUMPHRY WARD, as you will notice, has no fear of a dramatic, even melodramatic, situation; handles it, indeed, with a skill that the most popular might envy. Thence onwards the story, perhaps a trifle slow in starting, gathers force. The two visits to the camp at X—— (a very thin disguise for a place that no Englishman of our time will ever ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Nov. 28, 1917 • Various
... district or Central Park, his roving inclination leading him to obtain as much out-door life as possible. His evenings were spent at home with his books, his pictures, and his family, and usually with them alone; for, in spite of the melodramatic declarations of various English gentlemen, Melville's seclusion in his latter years, and in fact throughout his life, was a matter of personal choice. More and more, as he grew older, he avoided every action on his part, and ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... it was like a movie in five reels. Never before did I believe such things happened outside a Yonkers studio. But they do, Naia. And I've learned that the world is full of more excitingly melodramatic possibilities than any novel or ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... landscapes—true integral decorations—and of the casual movements and gestures of common folk, Degas is also a psychologist, an ironical commentator on the pettiness and ugliness of daily life, of its unheroic aspects, its comical snobberies and shocking hypocrisies; and all expressed without a melodramatic elevation of the voice, without the false sentimentalism of Zola or the morbidities of Toulouse-Lautrec. There is much Baudelaire in Degas, as there is also in Rodin. All three men despised academic rhetoric; all three dealt with new material in a ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... Germany would fight at about the 1899 level, would be lavish with cavalry and great attacks, that it would be reluctant to entrench, and that the French and British had learnt the lesson of the Boer war better than the Germans. I trusted to the melodramatic instinct of the Kaiser. I trusted to the quickened intelligence of the British military caste. The first rush seemed to bear me out, and I opened my paper day by day expecting to read of the British ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... the eyes of Pierre moved away from him and returned to the figure of Carlos Diaz. The Mexican was a perfect model for a painting of a melodramatic villain. He had waxed and twirled the end of his black mustache so that it thrust out a little spur on either side of his long face. His habitual expression was a scowl; his habitual position was with a cigarette ...
— Riders of the Silences • John Frederick
... Norfolk Giant; the Pig-faced Lady, the Spotted Boy, and the Calf with Two Heads; while high over even these edifices, and occupying the most conspicuous vantage-ground, a lofty stage promised to rural playgoers the "Grand Melodramatic Performance of The Remorseless Baron and the Bandit's Child." Music, lively if artless, resounded on every side,—drums, fifes, penny-whistles, cat-calls, and a hand-organ played by a dark foreigner, from the height of whose shoulder ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... perseveringly, without any striking results; that the pupil afterwards boasted of having successfully perused Phaedrus in the original is in itself significant. So little was talent expected from him that when, at the age of about fifteen, he composed a rather melodramatic description of a dream, the schoolmaster looked at him gloomily, and said he must have copied it out of some book! One can imagine the shocked silence of the author, "passive at the nadir ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... the strange scene out on the bank, and is now his escort to Frederick. The sergeant of the guard has been besieged with questions, for several of the men saw the doctor drop upon the bench and were aware of the melodramatic nature of the meeting. Lieutenant Abbot with a face paler than before, with a strange look of perplexity and smouldering wrath about his handsome eyes, has gone over to his own tent, where the surgeon ...
— A War-Time Wooing - A Story • Charles King
... of the make-up pot and painstaking searchings through a great number of trunks had blended a picture that was all but melodramatic. ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... truthfulness. But for the precious salt of his humor, which compels him to reproduce external traits that serve in some degree as a corrective to his frequently false psychology, his preternaturally virtuous poor children and artisans, his melodramatic boatmen and courtesans, would be as obnoxious as Eugene Sue's idealized proletaires, in encouraging the miserable fallacy that high morality and refined sentiment can grow out of harsh social relations, ignorance, and want; or that the working-classes are ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... boy," said Gordon. "I don't mean to blaspheme; but Job is not in it with me just now. You cannot imagine what I had to contend with before this melodramatic villain appeared on the stage. Sometimes I think this is the finish," Gordon's mouth contracted. He looked savage. James continued to stare at him. Gordon laid his hand on James's shoulder. "Thank the Lord for one thing," he said almost tenderly, "that he sent you here. Between ...
— 'Doc.' Gordon • Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman
... also and drove the girls away, when Moses, true to his nature, took the part of the young ladies, to the chagrin and embarrassment of the male rustics who had left their manners at home. The story forms a melodramatic stage-setting which the mummers have not been slow to use, representing the seven daughters as a ballet, the shepherds as a male chorus, and Moses as basso-profundo and hero. We are told that the girls went home and told their father ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... under various disguises) and they picture him as a proud, mysterious stranger, carelessly generous, fiendishly wicked, profoundly melancholy, irresistibly fascinating to women. Byron is credited with the invention of this hero, ever since called Byronic; but in truth the melodramatic outcast was a popular character in fiction long before Byron adopted him, gave him a new dress and called him Manfred or Don Juan. A score of romances (such as Mrs. Radcliffe's The Italian in England, and Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland in America) had used ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... a deeper meaning, than evidently is intended, in the statement that, as Bjarki was about to attack the dragon, his sword stuck fast in the scabbard.[104] There is no reason, however, for regarding it as anything more than a melodramatic incident characteristic of medieval romances. It reminds one of the following statement by Wilbur L. Cross, which, with the omission of the reference to "giants" and "Merlin," characterizes the Hrlfssaga quite accurately and shows how it harmonizes with the ...
— The Relation of the Hrolfs Saga Kraka and the Bjarkarimur to Beowulf • Oscar Ludvig Olson
... his life to his enemy and preserver, giving him his horn and promising to come to meet his death at its summons. There is the same fault here which is felt in Hugo's novels. Motives are exaggerated, the dramatis personae strut. They are rather over-dramatic in their poses—-melodramatic, in fact—and do unlikely things. But this fault is the fault of a great nature, grandeur exalted into grandiosity, till the heroes of these plays, "Hernani," "Marion Delorme," "Le Roi d'Amuse," loom and ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... to the open square, each of them bearing upon his breast a white placard with this inscription, in black letters: "Guilty of high treason." Then the wretched General shivered from head to foot. Every detail of the melodramatic execution seemed burned into his brain as with a red-hot iron. He fancied he could see the procession and the three gibbets, painted black; beside each gibbet was an open ditch and a black coffin covered with a dark gray pall. He saw, in the hollow square ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie
... and emperor, of positive law and law divine. The famous civil constitution of the clergy (1790), which was the expression of Rousseau's principle as formulated by his disciples in the Constituent Assembly, was the revolutionary conclusion to the world-wide dispute, whose most melodramatic episode had been the scene in the ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... brains are gangrenous with memories of cancelled malice. They suspect hero-worship; it smacks to them of sentiment. They examine, but never praise. Being incapable of sacrifice, they find something meretriciously melodramatic about men and nations who are capable. Had they lived nineteen hundred years ago, they would have ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... of angel she is too, but an audience that loves Melodrama is above indulging in uncharitable analysis of motive,—a town swell in the country, a more or less unscrupulous land-agent, and a genuine, honest "heavy father," of the ancient type, with a good old-fashioned melodramatic father's curse ready at the right moment, the last relic of a bygone period of the transpontine Melodrama, which will bring tears to the eyes of many an elderly playgoer on hearing the old familiar formula, in the old familiar situation, reproduced on the ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., Jan. 31, 1891 • Various
... I, "doesn't it strike you that your language partakes, to a slight extent, of the melodramatic? Don't get ...
— The Lady of the Ice - A Novel • James De Mille
... contradicted everywhere. And I assure you it wrenched the imagination to see tidy nursemaids wheeling perambulators and children playing diavolo on the very square where Bloody Sunday had gone into history. It takes a long perspective and no very vivid acquaintance with revolution to be melodramatic about it. So much is left out of history and biography which would spoil the effect. The anti-climax is ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... of this person's familiar contour, I was irresistibly moved to step over the intervening benches, lay my hand on his shoulder, put my mouth close to his ear, and address him in a sepulchral, melodramatic whisper: "Hollingsworth! where ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Trent referred to the American's theory. "I don't find myself convinced by it, because it doesn't really explain some of the oddest facts. But I have lived long enough in the United States to know that such a stroke of revenge, done in a secret, melodramatic way, is not an unlikely thing. It is quite a characteristic feature of certain sections of the labor movement there. Americans have a taste and a talent for that sort of business. ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... reason why women should be trained, by the perusal of a higher, broader, deeper literature, to distinguish the good novel from the bad, the moral from the immoral, the noble from the base, the true work of art from the sham which hides its shallowness and vulgarity under a tangled plot and melodramatic situations. She should learn—and that she can only learn by cultivation—to discern with joy, and drink in with reverence, the good, the beautiful, and the true; and to turn with the fine scorn of a pure and strong womanhood from the bad, ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... the 'Minister of Justice' were employing Maillard the 'hero of the Bastile' and his salaried cut-throats to promote public economy and private liberty by emptying the prisons of Paris, certain agents of Marat made a notable effort in behalf of the 'moral unity of France.' To this effort the melodramatic historians of the French Revolution have done scant justice. Mr. Carlyle, for example, alludes to it only in a casual half-disdainful way, which would be almost comical were the theme less ghastly. 'At Reims,' ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... she went home, a little amused by her melodramatic conduct, but much comforted by the fact that Charles, though ignorant of his part, was with her in this conspiracy. She was met by reproaches ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... is "refinement every inch from brow to boot-heel"; and in this respect it cannot be said that Browning's villain departs widely from the conventional, melodramatic villain of the stage. He has perhaps like the stage villain a little too much of that cheap knowingness, which is the theatrical badge of the complete man of the world, but which gentlemen in actual life do not ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... Michael go with Harry Del Mar. Like a burglar the man came, with infinite caution of silence, to the outhouse in Doctor Emory's back yard where Michael was a prisoner. Del Mar knew the theatre too well to venture any hackneyed melodramatic effect such as an electric torch. He felt his way in the darkness to the door of the outhouse, unlatched it, and entered softly, feeling with his hands for ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... during which Mr. Ross diverted himself by making appointments, postponing them, forgetting them, telephoning, telegraphing, sending special-delivery letters, being paged at hotels, and doing all the useless melodramatic things he could think of, except using an aeroplane or a submarine, he decided to make her his secretary at twenty dollars a week. Two days later it occurred to him to test her in regard to speed in dictation and typing, and ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... the can opener around the edges of one corner of the zinc box, inserted the claws of the hammer into the opening, and with a quick, melodramatic twist, bent ...
— Captain Scraggs - or, The Green-Pea Pirates • Peter B. Kyne
... then, on the whole, may be regarded as a crude novel of a common melodramatic type. What is painful about it is its style, which is slipshod and careless. To describe a honeymoon as a rare occurrence in any one person's life is rather amusing. There is an American story of a young couple who had to ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... ambitions of art. Mentality, feeling, spirit, all reveal themselves in the canvases. Crudity is apparent, but it comes more from an untutored hand than from failure to grasp the significance of the subject. Many pictures are flamboyant, some are melodramatic, nearly all are big subjects handled with great boldness; what they lack in finish they make up in sincerity. Felix R. Hidalgo's contributions (10-20) ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... of the necessity of replying by a diversion without the door. Two male voices were heard declaiming in a sort of mock-melodramatic duet, "Are you at home, are you at home? May ...
— A Day with Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy • George Sampson
... from room to room, waiting patiently while I scrutinised the panelled walls and stared at the attenuated old furniture. I was determined to observe George Sheldon's advice to the very letter, though I had little hope of making any grand melodramatic discovery in the way of documents hidden in old cabinets, or ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... minute looking at the other curiously, with something of a melodramatic pose. Rainham had his face turned rather away, and was gazing at the pale reflection of the moonlight in one ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... Galley-on-land was held to decide the course to be taken. The yellow light of the dip threw their shadows into the recesses and shed its flicker on their faces. Gougeon sat picking at the candle-grease in his apathetic way. Hache cheerfully threw himself on a long box. The Admiral stood wrapped in his cloak, melodramatic as usual. ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... want to talk with Hauck to-night. He wanted to turn over in his mind what he had learned from Brokaw, and to-morrow act with the cool judgment which was more or less characteristic of him. He did not believe even now that there would be anything melodramatic in the outcome of the affair. There would be an unpleasantness, of course; but when both Hauck and Brokaw were confronted with a certain situation, and with the peculiarly significant facts which he now held in his possession, he ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood
... trivial. A comedy is spoken of as 'degenerating into farce'; it would be fair criticism to speak of it 'changing into farce'; but as for degenerating into farce, we might equally reasonably speak of it as degenerating into tragedy. Again, a story is spoken of as 'melodramatic,' and the phrase, queerly enough, is not meant as a compliment. To speak of something as 'pantomimic' or 'sensational' is innocently supposed to be biting, Heaven knows why, for all works of art are sensations, and a good pantomime ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... dear boy, a thousand times; only I hope you will allow me to remark that your style is altogether a new one, and during the whole course of our acquaintance I do not remember seeing it before. You have a melodramatic way that is overpowering. Still I don't see why you should swear at yourself in a place like Naples, where there are so many other things to swear at. It's a waste of human energy, and I don't understand it. We usedn't to indulge ...
— The American Baron • James De Mille
... attribute this fact to the detestable influence of the theatre, to which nearly all these artists are attached as Kapellmeister, or directors of opera. To this they owe the melodramatic character of their music, even though it is on the surface only—music written for show, and aiming ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... a doubt that he meant this melodramatic twaddle. It did not seem twaddle or melodramatic to her—or, for that matter, to him. She clasped him more closely. "What's the matter, dear?" she asked, her ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... through the door, and then turning peremptorily desired Meryon not to follow them. Philip hesitated, and yielded. He stood in the doorway, his hands in his pockets, watching them, a splendid figure, with his melodramatic good looks ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... intelligence he fainted away, and remained for some time unconscious. He continued, indeed, his grossness and frivolity, but the wildest and fiercest schemes chased each other through his melodramatic brain. He would slay all the exiles; he would give up all the provinces to plunder; he would order all the Gauls in the city to be butchered; he would have all the senators invited to banquets, and would then poison them; he would have the city set on fire, and the wild beasts of the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... youthful exaggeration, he has made her a beautiful monster with no redeeming touch, and, therefore, of little human interest. Such a character was essentially alien to Goethe's own nature, and so are the melodramatic scenes which depict her desperate attempts to escape from her toils and the proceedings of the avenging tribunal that ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... Dickens evidently prided himself, I must confess, never laid hold of me. He is a melodramatic young man. The worst I could have wished him would have been that he should marry Rose Dartle and live with his mother. It would have served him right for being so attractive. Old Peggotty and Ham are, of course, impossible. One must accept ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome
... resounding torrent which was poured forth by Byron and Scott. The social earnestness of our time colours our literature, and almost distorts our literature; while, on the other hand, our practical and scientific genius scorns the melodramatic imagery with which our grandfathers were delighted. Gibbon would have smiled a cruel epigram, if he had been expected to thrust a Latter-Day Pamphlet on the social question into one of his chapters on the Fall of Rome. But ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... sometimes licking his lips gently, listening to Lund as he might have listened to the rantings of a melodramatic actor. But Rainey sensed that he was making a mistake. He was letting Lund go too far. The men were listening to Lund, and he knew that the giant was talking for a specific purpose. Just to what end he could not guess. The big booming voice held ...
— A Man to His Mate • J. Allan Dunn
... Pavlovna none the less assiduously attended the theatres. She went into raptures about Italian music, and laughed over the ruins of Odry, yawned in a becoming manner at the legitimate drama, and cried at the sight of Madame Dorval's acting in some ultra-melodramatic piece. Above all, Liszt played at her house twice, and was so gracious, so unaffected! ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... dramatic critic. If I do, God help the next play he produces. I'm a hurt man, and I shall let the world know about it. I'm half-way through another piece which will take some place by storm, I hope. It's a very bright play, much better than the muck Oscar Wilde wrote, not so melodramatic, and tons better than anything Bernard Shaw has written. It's all ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... toward the gallant though small band of stage artists who are striving to realize a harmony of lighting, setting, and drama in the so-called modern theater. Unappreciated by a public which flocks to the melodramatic movie, whose scenarios produced upon the legitimate stage would be jeered by the same public, the modern stage artist is striving to utilize the potentiality of light. But even among these there are impostors ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh
... like the way the whole Branchell business was being handled. It seemed slipshod and hurried, and, worse, it was entirely too mysterious and melodramatic. ...
— Unwise Child • Gordon Randall Garrett
... antique altar, column or cippus. On an ancient pillar was found an amusing grafita, the sketch of some Roman schoolboy, showing an aquarius (or water-carrier) loaded with his twin buckets. Philippeville, nursed among these glowing African hills, has the look of some bad melodramatic joke. Its European houses, streets laid out with the surveyor's chain, pompous church, and arcades like a Rue de Rivoli in miniature, make a foolish show indeed, in place of the walls, white, unwinking and mysterious, which ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... that the only person I could incriminate you to would be Mr. Piper, and not even there very much, due to Sargent's melodramatic appearance in the middle of dinner. But I shan't even there—it would mean incriminating myself a little too much too, don't you know? and even if the apartment here does get a trifle lonely one evening and another, I have ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... Bradbury of Christ Church, who saw him week after week a regular attendant, undaunted and sleepless though the sermon should be divided into seven heads. Mr. Bradbury preached terribly, in a voice which sometimes died mournfully away or hissed in a melodramatic whisper, and then rose suddenly in a threatening cry. Miss Macgregor sat in front of a gallery and looked down on the top of her pastor's head. The double row of little boys who were marshalled at her side grew drowsy in the hot weather, blinked feebly ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... shock it was to find her there and so very much at home! I could have killed her! But I did nothing melodramatic, believe me. I was too stunned. Instead, I boiled with the desire for a reprisal. Since I could not fight her like a savage, being, of course, a highly civilised person, I fought her with the only weapons at my command. ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... sword. A hundred thoughts chased each other through her mind. She wondered if the King would be sorry afterwards; she wondered what the minstrels would sing of her, and if her diary would ever be made public; most of all she wondered why she had been such a fool, such a melodramatic fool. ...
— Once on a Time • A. A. Milne
... that in many robust and energetic people the sense of what is beautiful is so far atrophied that it can only be aroused by scenes and places of almost melodramatic picturesqueness, by ancient buildings clustered on craggy eminences, great valleys with the frozen horns of mountains, wind-ravaged and snow-streaked, peering over forest edges, the thunder and splendour of great sea-breakers ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... possible," said he to De Montaigne, "that these works are admired and extolled; but how they can be vindicated by the examples of Shakspeare and Goethe, or even of Byron, who redeemed poor and melodramatic conceptions with a manly vigour of execution, an energy and completeness of purpose, that Dryden himself never surpassed, is to me ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book VI • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... not go back. She could not. The words she had used in her letter to Mr. Scobell were no melodramatic rhetoric. They were a plain and literal statement of the truth. Death would be infinitely preferable to life at Mervo ...
— The Prince and Betty - (American edition) • P. G. Wodehouse
... malice that inspired them and the nature of the evidence upon which they rest, to the eternal shame alike of those pretended writers of fact and those avowed writers of fiction who, as dead to scruples as to chivalry, have not hesitated to make her serve their base melodramatic or pornographic ends. ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... let me be your confessor. Have you never thought and acted like this hero of mine? Haven't you been just as melodramatic and ridiculous? It is nothing to be ashamed of. For my part, I should confess to it with the same equanimity as I should to the mumps or the measles. It comes with, and is part and parcel of, all that strange medley we find in the Pandora box of life. ...
— The Man on the Box • Harold MacGrath
... universe, he entered the village fair, and was a little disappointed at his first glimpse of the village-green. Certainly his expectations had not been very exalted; but there had run through them a hope of something melodramatic, dreams of May-pole dancing and athletic games, somewhat of village-belle rivalry, of the Corin and Sylvia school; or, failing that, a few Touchstones and Audreys, some genial earnest buffo humour here and there. But there did not seem much likelihood of it. Two or three ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... the rest of Hawthorne's works is an intricate plot, with passages of open humor, and a rather melodramatic tone in the conclusion. These are the result in part of the prevalent fashion of romance, and in part of a desire to produce effects not quite consonant with his native bent. The choice of the title, "Fanshawe," too, seems to show a deference to the then prevalent taste for ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... with shoulders back and stood there, a splendid figure of a man. His face was flushed and working, showing plainly the jealous passions and the intolerable longing for the girl's approval which had whipped him into this melodramatic outburst. Ruth faced him with silent, contemptuous scorn. Martin's gorge rose to fever pitch. With difficulty he restrained himself from slipping the cuffs and springing ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer
... reluctance to trust themselves to their emotions proceeds in great part from the absence of this instinct, he is proof against the approaches of the charlatan, and has never debased the word "art" by applying it to a mere melodramatic mechanism. But he rightly considers the office of the detector as insignificant in comparison with that of the discoverer, and his glow of satisfaction is reserved for the nobler employment. The points on which he insists are the obligation of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... and selfish woman, passing falsely as a widow, and playing a double game between the attentions of foolish but honourable young men, and the fitful appearances of a wandering and good-for-nothing sailor-husband; a man prepared to act that most well-worn of melodramatic roles, the conjugal bully and blackmailer, the man who uses marital rights as an instrument for the worse kind of wrongs. Or, again, if we had the story of the fall of King Arthur told from the stand-point of Mordred, it would only be a matter of a word or two; in a turn, in the twinkling ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... really her niece, where is the family resemblance? Why has she never spoken of you? Why have you never been here before? Why are her letters to you sealed with red wax, bought especially for the purpose? Why does she go away before you come? Lady Gwendolen Hetherington," he demanded, with melodramatic fervour, "answer me these things if ...
— Lavender and Old Lace • Myrtle Reed
... had he pieced together so broken a chain. He could not resist the unique opportunity of setting a sensational scheme in a sensational frame-work. The dramatic instinct was strong in him; he felt like a playwright who has constructed a strong melodramatic plot, and has the Drury Lane stage suddenly offered him to present it on. It would be folly to deny himself the luxury, though the presence of Mr. Gladstone and the nature of the ceremony should perhaps have given him pause. Yet, on the other hand, these were the very factors of ...
— The Big Bow Mystery • I. Zangwill
... teeth. "Even under a microscope," she muttered, "no perceptible reaction for fortyeight hours. Laboratory conditions? Or my own idiocy? But I approximated ..." Her voice trailed off and for a full minute the absolute silence of the kitchen was broken only by the melodramatic dripping ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... bore little relation to his period, and so far as he was influenced, it was for the worse; he transcended the period, essentially, in all his creative work. He chose for a form of expression the sketch, tale or short story, and he developed it in various ways. From the start there was a melodramatic element in him, itself a southern trait and developed by the literary influence of Disraeli and Bulwer on his mind. He took the tale of mystery as his special province; and receiving it as a mystery that was to be explained, after the recent masters of it, he saw its fruitful lines ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... seen me was when I sat down to Harry Miller's lecture. He was a facetious dog, this Harry Miller; he had a gallant way of skirting the indecent which (in my case) produced physical nausea; and he could be sentimental and even melodramatic about grisettes and starving genius. I found he had enjoyed the benefit of my correspondence with Pinkerton: adventures of my own were here and there horridly misrepresented, sentiments of my own echoed and exaggerated till I blushed to recognise them. I will do Harry Miller justice: ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... effect of a spray. The irritability of the one active cell subsided, that of the others was aroused. Somnambulism ceased. The entire brain awoke. But the truth had not yet fully permeated all the cerebral convolutions and the fact that it had not, manifested itself in the melodramatic phrase which, a week previous, Lennox had uttered, which all have uttered, all at least before whom the ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... almost absurd. Chauvelin was not the man for such a mock-heroic, melodramatic situation. Commonsense, reason, his own cool powers of deliberation, would soon reassert themselves. But for the moment he was dazed. He had worked too hard, no doubt; had yielded too much to excitement, to triumph, and to hate. He turned to Hebert, who was standing ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... seized with a strong impulse to say to him entreatingly: 'Leave me,' as though she were a person on the stage. She thought of other phrases, such as 'Please go away,' and 'Do you mind leaving me for a while?' but her tongue, somehow insisting on the melodramatic, would not utter these. ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... large parties of Boers fleeing for life up dongas and over plains, the phantom carriage-and-four driving hastily north-westward after an urgent warning, and other such melodramatic incidents, which escaped my notice. The position of the falling shells, and the movement of those minute black specks were to me enough of drama for ...
— Ladysmith - The Diary of a Siege • H. W. Nevinson
... 2. E.), while THOMAS proceeds to scale the wall and climb the boughs of the nearest pear-tree. Melodramatic Music. The Monster Man-trap stealthily emerges from long grass below, and fixes a baleful eye on the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98 January 11, 1890 • Various
... I admit, but warmed up later! What I seem to need at the moment is a restorative stroll along the Embankment. Do you know, Sir Portwood Chester didn't like the title of my play. He said 'Tried by Fire' was too melodramatic. Well, he can't say now it ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... less warning than any earthquake on the doomed community around,—and who, when that time arrived, took the life of man, woman, and child, without a throb of compunction, a word of exultation, or an act of superfluous outrage? Mrs. Stowe's "Dred" seems dim and melodramatic beside the actual Nat Turner. De Quincey's "Avenger" is his only parallel in imaginative literature: similar wrongs, similar retribution. Mr. Gray, his self-appointed confessor, rises into a sort of bewildered enthusiasm, with the prisoner ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... him. The interviews took place almost daily for four years, without any one knowing of them. Some hours before dawn La Farina ascended the narrow secret staircase which led directly to Cavour's bedroom, and he was gone when the city awakened. In spite of the almost melodramatic complexion of these secret meetings, it must not be supposed, as some have supposed, that Cavour pulled the wires of all the conspiracies in Italy. His visitor kept him informed of the progress made, the propaganda carried on, but he rarely interfered. He still thought ...
— Cavour • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... never tell her that, for she is a Frenchwoman, and wouldn't believe it. I'll tell her something more melodramatic. I'll say that Mr. Nokes is my father, who has suddenly recognized and discovered his long-lost child.—Madame, c'est mon pere longtemps absent, qui vous en prie d'accepter ses remerciments pour ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... accordingly, an excursion was made into the realm of the melodrama. Glover, as he was called, was intensely Byronic, after the fashion of the times, and he prepared a succession of thrilling scenes from Byron's sensational poem, "The Corsair," for presentation by his fellow players. This melodramatic production was staged with all the pasteboard pomp and secondhand circumstance the little workshop theater could afford and was given with all the fire the high-toned author could impart to his ...
— My Friends at Brook Farm • John Van Der Zee Sears
... knew (who were anybody) to Mrs. Warrender between the acts, and enjoying the sight of Chatty's absorption in the play, which made it twice as interesting to himself. The play was one in which there was a great deal of pretty love-making along with melodramatic situations of an exciting kind. The actors, except one, were not of sufficient reputation to interest any reader save those with a special inclination to the study of the stage. But though the performance was not on the very highest level, there was a great ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... the stupid, silly, melodramatic slip of Cecil Winwood. Next morning, when he encountered the Captain of the Yard, he was triumphant. His imagination took the bit ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... immoral, hasty and violent: his two spouses are rivals in abominations as his sons, Amjad and As'ad, are examples of a fraternal affection rarely found in half- brothers by sister-wives. There is at least one fine melodramatic situation (iii. 228); and marvellous feats of indecency, a practical joke which would occur only to the canopic mind (iii. 300-305), emphasise the recovery of her husband by that remarkable "blackguard," the Lady Budur. The interpolated tale of Ni'amah and Naomi (iv. I), a simple and pleasing ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... ever a troublesome puppet was jerked suddenly off the stage—if ever a long-winded orator was effectively snuffed out—I was that puppet and that orator. I stop and think—shall I describe how I paced up and down the pier, respectfully but emphatically watched by the secretary? And all the melodramatic plots I conceived, the muffled oars and the midnight visits to my Sylvia? My sense of humour forbids it. For a while now I shall take the hint and stay in the background of this story. I shall ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... a long and expressive breath, and, with melodramatic movements of the shoulders, he sighed. "I have not seen you since. Oh, I had terrible scenes with the father. They had a house up the river. I followed them, and put up at the Angler's Hotel. She told her father ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... situation. It seemed incredible, melodramatic, unreal, in sight of the crawling freight train ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... defeated, and England saved. But such great undertakings seldom end in one grand melodramatic explosion of fireworks, through which the devil arises in full roar to drag Dr. Faustus forever into the flaming pit. On the contrary, the devil stands by his servants to the last, and tries to bring off his shattered ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... efforts of poets, novelists, and dramatists, in a variety of forms of fiction and romance, came to the front, to lead them to the goal through a lot of questionable by-lanes, queer places, and artificial lights, the result being that these melodramatic personages have left the Gipsies in a more pitiable condition than they were before they took up their cause, although they, in doing so, put "two faces under one hat," blessing and cursing, smiling and frowning, all in one breath, praising ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... stories is romantic, melodramatic, often almost shocking. He handled it, however, with humor, irony, or pathos. He was a realist who pictured, marvelously, the life about him as he ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... is this to blast mine eyes?" ejaculated Charlie, as he pointed to the glove with a melodramatic start, for, like most accomplished amateur actors, he was fond of introducing private theatricals into ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott
... An Enemy of Society; the last act is melodrama with a large admixture of remarkably interesting social philosophy; the intervening acts betray the poet that always underlay the dramatist in Bjornson. The crudity, again, of the melodramatic appearance of the wraith of Clara's father in the third act, contrasts strangely with the mature thoughtfulness of much of the last act and with the tender charm of what has gone before: And—strangest incongruity of all in a play so essentially "actual"—there is ...
— Three Dramas - The Editor—The Bankrupt—The King • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson
... and Shelley, which Disraeli was thought indiscreet in publishing so soon after Byron's death. In the story the heroine Venetia is the daughter of Shelley (Marmion Herbert) and the bride of Byron (Lord Cadurcis). Marmion is a most melodramatic figure, but the indiscretions are not noticeable nowadays, while the courage with which the reviled and hated Shelley is described in the preface to Lord Lyndhurst as one of "the most renowned and refined spirits ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... hospitality is also illustrative of the anomalous life of those times, when good faith had as little to do with the intercourse of nations as at present; but good fortune, when she appeared in the world, liked to put on a romantic and melodramatic guise. An ambassador from the Grand Turk on his way to Rome was taken by an enemy of the Pope, despoiled of all his money, and left planted, as the Italians expressively say, at Ancona. This ambassador ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... a touch of the melodramatic in my pose and voice, for Maud smiled. Her appreciation of the ridiculous was keen, and in all things she unerringly saw and felt, where it existed, the touch of sham, the overshading, the overtone. ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... that he might readily become melodramatic in the few words that he purposed to say to the men, and so when he began talking he adopted a low, even tone, confidential, serious. He told them that the things he had written in his salutatory in the Kicker, months before, had been an honest declaration of the principles ...
— The Coming of the Law • Charles Alden Seltzer
... country. We feel that there is a wide field here laid open for the exercise of British talent, and have therefore, made a few desultory mems. on the subject, which we subjoin; intended as modest hints for the guidance of composers of melodramatic music. The situations we have selected from the most popular Melos. of the day; the music to be employed in each instance, we have endeavoured to describe in such a manner as to render it ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... beyond the recollection of that guilt that was really shocking in the woman—between the extravagant extremes of hope and fear suggested by their words, there was something so grotesquely absurd in the melodramatic chorus that she with difficulty ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... West, Junius Brutus Booth did a series of kindnesses to a particularly undeserving fellow, the name of him unknown to us. The man, as it seemed, was a combination of gambler, horse-stealer, and highwayman—in brief, a miscellaneous desperado, and precisely the melodramatic sort of person likely to touch the sympathies of the half-mad player. In the course of nature or the law, presumably the law, the adventurer bodily disappeared one day, and soon ceased to exist even as a reminiscence in the florid mind ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... he spoke somewhat artificial, and chosen from the vocabulary which he had heard all his life from the painted lips of the orators before the stage-lamps. But he was not acting or masquerading, as Pen knew very well, though he was disposed to pooh-pooh the old fellow's melodramatic airs. "Come along, sir," he said, "as you are so very pressing. Mrs. Bolton, I wish you a good day. Good-bye, Miss Fanny; I shall always think of our night at Vauxhall with pleasure; and be sure I will remember the theatre tickets." And he took her hand, pressed ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... ruddy lake below. Our black boat was the only dark spot in this sphere of splendour. We seemed to hang suspended; and such as this, I fancied, must be the feeling of an insect caught in the heart of a fiery-petalled rose. Yet not these melodramatic sunsets alone are beautiful. Even more exquisite, perhaps, are the lagoons, painted in monochrome of greys, with just one touch of pink upon a western cloud, scattered in ripples here and there on the ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... bring about the downfall of the house. No dramatic author cared to quarrel with a prosperous theatre for the sake of the Panorama-Dramatique, whose existence was, to say the least, problematical. The management at this moment, however, was counting on the success of a new melodramatic comedy by M. du Bruel, a young author who, after working in collaboration with divers celebrities, had now produced a piece professedly entirely his own. It had been specially composed for the leading lady, a young actress who began her ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... matter as this it was not safe to take chances. Varney had a curious feeling that young Mr. Smith's melodramatic warnings had been offered in a spirit of friendliness, rather than of hostility. Nevertheless, the eccentric young man had unmistakably threatened them. While Varney had been more interested by the man, personally, than by his whimsical menaces, ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... mystery. I had heard from Akshay Chowdhury the story of the English boy-poet Chatterton. What his poetry was like I had no idea, nor perhaps had Akshay Babu himself. Had we known, the story might have lost its charm. As it happened the melodramatic element in it fired my imagination; for had not so many been deceived by his successful imitation of the classics? And at last the unfortunate youth had died by his own hand. Leaving aside the suicide part I girded up my loins to emulate ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... it over to the precinct station-house. But as the darkness changed to gray, and the black bulk of the Cafe Ducrot came into view, his interest quickened. He encouraged himself with the thought that while in New York the wording of the note would be improbable, hysterical, melodramatic, in hot, turbulent Venezuela it was in keeping with the country and ...
— The White Mice • Richard Harding Davis
... her face—what would any lover,—nay, any respectable young man do in the premises? Surely, stanch her wounds, dry her eyes, comfort her with a homely necessary handkerchief. But not so Jones: he is not a real man but a melodramatic lay-figure, playing to the gallery as he spouts speeches about the purely metaphoric bleeding of his heart, oblivious of the disfigurement of his sweetheart's visage from real blood. He insults her by addressing her in the third ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... the door with a gesture that would have been melodramatic, had she not been so desperately in earnest. The soft black sleeve fell away from her soft white arm, and her out-stretched hand was steady and unwavering as she stood silent, but quivering ...
— Raspberry Jam • Carolyn Wells
... murderously, opposes the natural desires of a child whom he has promised to another. Where Maria is idyllic, poetic, flowing smoothing along the current of a realism tempered by sentimentalism, Innocencia (by no means devoid of poetry) is romantic, melodramatic, rushing along turbulently to the outcome in a death as violent as Maria's is peaceful. There is in each book a similar importance of the background. In Innocencia the "point of honor" is quite as strong and vindictive as in any play of the Spanish ...
— Brazilian Tales • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
... American girl, and here we don't have to marry to amalgamate business interests. I won't do it. I'd rather be—" She gave a little shrug of her shoulders. The passion died out of her voice. "Oh, well! No need getting melodramatic about it. Just the same, I won't do it. My mind's ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... whitewashed, without any decoration. Here and there are several pale marks, indicating the places of objects that had been removed. In one part is painted on the plaster a false door partially open, behind which is seen the figure of Tasso about to enter; but every person of good taste must condemn the melodramatic exhibition, and wish that he could obliterate it with a daub of whitewash. The custode directed my attention to it with an air of great admiration, and could not understand the scowl with which I turned ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... The melodramatic lover was not content with a simple promise, though wrung from the heart with sobs. "Swear it to me!" he said, in a hoarse stage-whisper; and Zelma, again laying her hand upon his head, and looking starward, swore to be his, to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... Hervey's rage was melodramatic. But the girl, even in the depths of her misery and distraught feelings, was impressed. Her heart cried out for her lover, and proclaimed his innocence in terms which would not be silenced. His image rose before her mind's eye, and she looked upon that kindly, strong face, the ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... George did not know she was the widow of the murdered Lemuel Krill, whose name had been so widely advertised. But Hay spoke before anyone could make a remark. "What an unpleasant subject," he said, with a pretended shudder, "let us talk of less melodramatic things." ...
— The Opal Serpent • Fergus Hume
... from his works that he gave before vast audiences all over the United Kingdom, and in his two visits to America. It is not surprising, either, to learn that upon the stage his preference was for melodrama and farce. His own serious writing was always dangerously close to the melodramatic, and his humor to the farcical. There is much false art, bad taste, and even vulgarity in Dickens. He was never quite a gentleman, and never succeeded well in drawing gentlemen or ladies. In the region of low comedy he is easily the most original, the most inexhaustible, ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... whole was, in his opinion, his by right, was naturally exasperated in the highest degree by the terms of the indiscreet testament, and on the day of the funeral he parted from the son of his step-mother, swearing, in a somewhat melodramatic manner, that he would be revenged. Hugo was then twenty-one, and for twenty-five years he had waited in vain for ...
— Hugo - A Fantasia on Modern Themes • Arnold Bennett
... are melodramatic; you should have been an actress instead of a singer. But you waste your talent out here on me. Do you imagine I fear either you, or your precious brother? Why, I could ...
— Keith of the Border • Randall Parrish
... manner and ruddy healthy face seemed to be a positive insult to me in my present condition. Had I been a courageous or a muscular man I could have struck him. As it was, I treated the honest sailor to a melodramatic scowl which seemed to cause him no small astonishment, and strode past him to the other side of the deck. Solitude was what I wanted—solitude in which I could brood over the frightful crime which was being hatched before my very eyes. One of the quarter-boats was ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... woman still said nothing. The old sadness was in her eyes, but it certainly had become more natural—more human, as it were—and the melodramatic gloom in which she had hitherto appeared was ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... my pilgrimages I came upon one obscure church which had broken out in the melodramatic style, and was got up with various tawdry decorations, much after the manner of the extinct London may-poles. These attractions had induced several young priests or deacons in black bibs for waistcoats, and several young ladies interested ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... will be vexed with me for having abused your hospitality to such an extent. I must go!" He appeared not to notice the sigh of relief that broke from her, but went on in a melodramatic tone. "I shall take my departure, not through the window like a lover, nor up the chimney like a thief, nor yet through a secret door behind the arras like a brigand of romance, but like a gentleman who has come to pay his tribute of homage and respect to the most enchanting woman in the ...
— Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... examine in this manner every statement made by Iago. But it is not necessary to do so in public, and I proceed to the question what impression he made on his friends and acquaintances. In the main there is here no room for doubt. Nothing could be less like Iago than the melodramatic villain so often substituted for him on the stage, a person whom everyone in the theatre knows for a scoundrel at the first glance. Iago, we gather, was a Venetian[108] soldier, eight-and-twenty years of age, who had seen a good deal of service and had a ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... for you, Darling." And listening to that dominant voice in the next room, she slowly grew crimson before a vision of herself in the middle of a country road, appealing to a stranger for succor, like the heroine of melodramatic fiction. Decidedly, she would never see Lestrange, never ...
— The Flying Mercury • Eleanor M. Ingram
... of both sexes, though this is not the rule, as we will readily agree, thinking over the great portrait painters of character. To state a single illustrative case: Hall Caine must be allowed to have framed some mighty men, tragic, or melodramatic sometimes, somber always, but men of bulk and character. Pete, in "The Manxman," is a creation sufficient to make the artist conceiving him immortal; and Red Jason is no less real, manly, mighty, self-mastering, self-surrendering. Caine's men are giants; but ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... largely for its interest on the element of diablerie, which is very skilfully manipulated. Here, however, the supernatural appearances are never explained away, and the ghostly agencies are introduced in the spirit of serious, if somewhat melodramatic, romance. Marryat's personal experience enabled him, with little research, to produce a life-like picture of old Dutch seamanship, and his powers in racy narrative have transformed the Vanderdecken legend into a stirring tale of terror. The plot cannot be called original, but it is more carefully ...
— The Phantom Ship • Captain Frederick Marryat
... the title of MASCAGNI'S new Opera. The title, anglicised, would be suitable for an old-fashioned transpontine melodramatic tragedian, who could certainly say of himself, "I ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, November 19, 1892 • Various
... Tourgueneff, and none in whose personality I felt so profound an interest. Tourgueneff is far from being a model novelist, but his tales are written with wonderful power, and yet are neither indecent nor melodramatic nor rasping to the nerves. That the burden of strong natures is in proportion to their strength, that human nature in general is weak, and that the Devil still sometimes appears incarnate in the person of lovely woman, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... considerations, and to strike the correct mean betwixt the sublime patriot and the unsanctified incendiary, while I could find no refuge from weak contrition save in greater and greater depths of courtesy; and so melodramatic became our interview that some of the soldiers still maintain that "dem dar ole Secesh women been a-gwine for kiss de Cunnel," before we ended. But of this monstrous accusation I wish to register an explicit denial, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... "That's a melodramatic speech which is not true," replied the other coldly. "For I want to save you, or, rather, our name, from disgrace. I won't call in the police"—Garvington winced at this word—"because I wish to hush the matter up. But since Chaldea and Silver accuse me and accuse Agnes of getting rid of Pine ...
— Red Money • Fergus Hume
... partly also to unfavorable circumstances, the recognition of them was tardy and grudging. For many years after his debut on the London boards he, who at a later period was almost disparaged as a pre-eminently intellectual actor, owed his chief successes to his performance of melodramatic parts like Rob Roy and William Tell, for which his mental as well as physical endowments were considered especially to qualify him. When at length he had reached his full maturity, he stood without ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... Switzerland as the warm, greasy, indigestible fare of the elaborate table-d'hotes at Lucerne and Interlaken serve us now. But we, in our "superior" condition, pooh-pooh the Byronic spirit of indifference to events and scorn of trifles,—we say it is "melodramatic," completely forgetting that our attitude towards ourselves and things in general is one of most pitiable bathos. We cannot write Childe Harold, but we can grumble at both bed and board in every hotel under the sun; we can discover teasing midges in the air and ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... sit down, both of you, and, Malcolm Stratton, don't put on that wicked, melodramatic frown; it does not become you. You're a pair of impostors. Think I'm blind? You don't come here to call upon a poor old woman like—Quick, Percy, my dear boy! Blow it out; we shall have the room in ...
— Witness to the Deed • George Manville Fenn
... was new. What the music sought to do almost immediately, beginning with Monteverde himself in his opera "Tancred," was to represent the feeling of the dramatic moment. Almost at the very first they began to use music in the melodramatic way for accompanying the critical moments of the action, when the performers were not singing, and the forms of the singing utterance differentiated themselves into recitatives for the explanatory parts and arias ...
— The Masters and their Music - A series of illustrative programs with biographical, - esthetical, and critical annotations • W. S. B. Mathews
... has the true newspaper thrill in it from beginning to end. The intense desire to "cover" one's assignment completely and well is brought out in the midst of the melodramatic atmosphere in which a modern newspaper woman must live. The stories are all true to life, and mixed with the excitement there is a ...
— The False Gods • George Horace Lorimer
... literary organ of the Revolution was unquestionably Byron, whose genius, daring, and melodramatic lawlessness, exercised what now seems such an amazing fascination over the least revolutionary of European nations. Unfitted for scientific work and full of ardour, Mr. Carlyle found his mission in rushing with all his might to the annihilation ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... and shown to be abnormal beyond any possibility of dispute. Mostly the samples selected were men of exceptional artistic and literary power. The book was pretentious and inconsistent—the late Lord Tennyson was quoted, I remember, as a typically "sane" poet in spite of the scope afforded by his melodramatic personal appearance and his morbid passion for seclusion—but it did at least serve to show that if we cannot call a man stupid we may almost invariably call him mad with some show of reason. The public ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... painted, not so black as he painted himself; but he was far from being a Joseph. It is easy to minimize the importance of the part he played in the national militia. Doubtless much of his plotting was puerile and melodramatic. His activities as a revolutionist cannot have greatly affected the course of events. But it is unfair to deny him credit for constant willingness to risk his life in any cause which seemed noble. That his conduct was inconsistent merely proves that he followed ...
— El Estudiante de Salamanca and Other Selections • George Tyler Northup
... the theme has been a personal one. He was so frantic, as he is wont to be, that, to calm him, I told him about Paul,—which, under the circumstances, to him I felt myself at liberty to do. In return, he was melodramatic; hinting darkly at I know not what, I ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... put in order; the useless thought swept out; foolish fancies dusted away; newly furnished with good resolutions. But she was not a good housekeeper; cobwebs got in, and it was hard to rule. She was smitten with a mania for the stage, and spent most of her leisure in writing and acting plays of melodramatic style ad high-strung sentiment, improbable incidents, with no touch of common life or sense of humor, full of concealments and surprises, bright dialogues, and lofty sentiments. She had much dramatic power and loved to transform herself into Hamlet and declaim in mock ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... gentleman—what business had he with a lot of South American Republicans? What did he want among such people? Why should he care about them? Why should he want to govern them? And if he did want to govern them, why did he not stay there and govern? The thing was in any case mere bravado, and melodramatic enterprise. ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... answered. "I'm hiding. I know that sounds mysterious, or melodramatic, or something silly, but it's only disagreeable. And it's what I want to ask your advice about." Then, shamefacedly when it came to the point, I unfolded the tale of ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... bit of a girl not more than twenty, and a minister's daughter, brought up in reverence of the leading member—any resistance on her part seemed really incredible. He could not contemplate the idea of giving up all the cherished plans of his life by a melodramatic renunciation of his son. To give up Clarence whom he had trained to be the very apex and crowning point of his grandeur, was intolerable to him. But Mr. Copperhead had heard before now of young women, who, goaded to it, had been known ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... fun is the single trait which relieves the colossal turpitude of Gilderoy. And, though even his turpitude was melodramatic in its lack of balance, it is a unity of character which is the foundation of his greatness. He was no fumbler, led away from his purpose by the first diversion; his ambition was clear before him, and he never fell below it. He defied Scotland for fifteen ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... the people in the court-room were beginning to believe in this new witness. They were amused by his melodramatic action in thus fixing the hour; but they seemed to have confidence in the outcome. As for the President, it looked as if he also had made up his mind to take the young man in the same way. He had certainly been impressed by Rouletabille's explanation ...
— The Mystery of the Yellow Room • Gaston Leroux
... despair at the piano! O God, move the earth, that it may swallow the humanity of this century! May the most cruel fortune fall upon the French, that they did not come to our aid." All this sounds a trifle melodramatic and quite ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... said quickly. "Remember I owe him everything. All I am. All I have I would gladly—gladly—I sound melodramatic, don't I. But I don't often inflict this on you. You know what I mean. If I ...
— The Fur Bringers - A Story of the Canadian Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... gallows. This was the demand of Panna's passionate heart, but also of her peasant-logic, which could comprehend the causal relation between sin and expiation clearly and palpably, only when both were united in a single melodramatic effect. Why was nothing heard of a final trial, of a condemnation? For what were the legal gentlemen waiting? Surely the case was as clear as sunlight, with no complication whatever, the criminal had acknowledged everything. Even if he had not, there were three witnesses who had all been ...
— How Women Love - (Soul Analysis) • Max Simon Nordau
... permission, nor was it necessary. Sam and the melodramatic atmosphere was as oil and water. It was impossible to blend them. I laid the pistol on the table and sat down. Buck, after one wistful glance at the weapon, did the same. Sam was already seated, and was looking so cosy and ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse |
