Partial Portraits

I have left Mr. Stevenson’s best book to the last, as it is also the last he has given (at the present speaking) to the public--the tales comprising _The Merry Men_ having alrea...

The great event of her life was of course her acquaintance with George Henry Lewes. I say “of course,” because this relation had an importance even more controlling than the pub...

Nothing that Turgénieff had to say could be more interesting than his talk about his own work, his manner of writing. What I have heard him tell of these things was worthy of th...

I have hinted that the will, in the old New England society, was a clue without a labyrinth; but it had its use, nevertheless, in helping the young talent to find its mould. The...

The exception that I here allude to is for _Pierre et Jean_, which I have left myself small space to speak of. Is it because in this masterly little novel there is a show of tho...

_Les Rois en Exil_, however, has a greater perfection; it is simpler, more equal, and it contains much more of the beautiful. In _Le Nabab_ there are various lacunæ and a certai...

As I say, however, these are details, and I have touched them prematurely. Alphonse Daudet is a charmer, and the effect of his brilliant, friendly, indefinable genius is to make...

“Ah, les livres, ils nous débordent, ils nous étouffent--nous périssons par les livres!” That cry of a distinguished French novelist (there is no harm in mentioning M. Alphonse...

I am far from intending by this to minimise the importance of exactness--of truth of detail. One can speak best from one’s own taste, and I may therefore venture to say that the...

“But presently the jerky trot of the nag shook the vehicle so terribly that the chairs began to dance, tossing up the travellers to right, to left, with movements like puppets,...

We think we are safe in saying that those ruder forms of incongruity which as a general thing constitute the stock-in-trade of the caricaturist fail to commend themselves to thi...

Though Mr. Stevenson cares greatly for his phrase, as every writer should who respects himself and his art, it takes no very attentive reading of his volumes to show that it is...

But it would be hard to say (within the circle in which he revolved) what material he neglected. I have allowed myself to be detained so long by general considerations that I ha...

I alighted, just now, at a venture, upon the history of Frank Fenwick; it is far from being a conspicuous work in the immense list of Trollope’s novels. But to choose an example...

It is surely by his Norman peasant that his tales will live; he knows this worthy as if he had made him, understands him down to the ground, puts him on his feet with a few of t...

His was not, I should say, predominantly, or even in a high degree, the artistic nature, though it was deeply, if I may make the distinction, the poetic. But during the last twe...

The second of the short essays I have mentioned has a taste of mortality only because the purpose of it is to insist that the only sane behaviour is to leave death and the accid...

When, a few months ago, Anthony Trollope laid down his pen for the last time, it was a sign of the complete extinction of that group of admirable writers who, in England, during...

Du Maurier understands the foreigner as no caricaturist has done hitherto; and we hasten to add that his portraits of continental types are never caricatures. They are serious s...

It must take itself seriously for the public to take it so. The old superstition about fiction being “wicked” has doubtless died out in England; but the spirit of it lingers in...

The following attempts at literary portraiture originally appeared, with three exceptions, in American periodicals--The _Atlantic Monthly_, _The Century_, and _Harper’s Weekly_....

Many people in the United States, and doubtless in other countries, have gathered their knowledge of English life almost entirely from _Punch_, and it would be difficult to imag...

_Theodora._ It is a most beautiful nature. I don’t know anywhere a more complete, a more deeply analysed portrait of a great nature. We praise novelists for wandering and creepi...

And Mr. Cabot chronicles the fact that the _gran’ rifiuto_--the great backsliding of Mr. Webster when he cast his vote in Congress for the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850--was the on...

The first of these were slight and simple, and for the most part cheerful; little anecdotes and legends of Provence, impressions of an artist’s holidays in that strange, bare, l...

In _East Angels_ the sacrifice, as all Miss Woolson’s readers know, is the great sacrifice of Margaret Harold, who immolates herself--there is no other word--deliberately, compl...

The most interesting part of Mr. Besant’s lecture is unfortunately the briefest passage--his very cursory allusion to the “conscious moral purpose” of the novel. Here again it i...