Unicorns

_First Scene._ It is snowing on the Strand. Not an American actor is in sight, though voices are wafted occasionally from the bar of the Savoy (remember this is a play, and the...

Once upon a time Maurice Maeterlinck wrote: "Whereas, it is far away from bloodshed, battle-cry, and sword-thrust that the lives of most of us flow on, and the tears of men are...

Stylists in prose are privileged persons. They may write nonsense and escape the castigation of prudish pedants; or, dealing with cryptic subjects, they can win the favour of th...

Dear naughty George Moore--sad, bad, mad--has reformed. He tells us why in his book, Vale, the English edition of which I was lucky enough to read; for, the American edition is...

They order certain things better in France than elsewhere; I mean such teasing and unsatisfactory forms of book-making known as Inquiries ("Enquête," which is not fair to transl...

Time was when a fame-craving young man could earn a reputation for originality by merely going to the market-place and loudly proclaiming his disbelief in a deity. It would seem...

With the hair of the horse and the entrails of the cat, magicians of the four strings weave their potent spells. What other instrument devised by the hand of man has ever approa...

It is a holy and wholesome thought to pray for the dead that they may be loosed from their sins; and it is as holy a prayer that begs from the god of chance his pity for the liv...

Those were days marked by a white stone when arrived in the familiar yellow cover a new book, with card enclosed from "Remy de Gourmont, 71, rue des Saints-Pères, Paris." Someti...

Here lies one whose name is writ on ivory! might be the epigraph of every great pianist's life, and the ivory is about as perdurable stuff as the water in which is written the e...

Who reads George Sand nowadays? was asked at the time of her centenary (she was born, 1804; died, 1876). Paris responded in gallant phrases. She was declared one of the glories...

In company with other distinguished men who have passed away during the progress of the war, the loss of Henry James was passably chronicled. News from the various battle-fields...

Once Swinburne, in a Baudelaire mood, sang: "Shall no new sin be born for men's troubles?" And it was an Asiatic potentate who offered a prize for the discovery of a new pleasur...

When the supreme master of the historical novel modestly confessed that he could do the "big bow-wow strain," but to Jane Austen must be accorded the palm of exquisite craftsman...

That Chopin is a classic need not be unduly insisted upon; he is classic in the sense of representing the best in musical literature; but that he is of a classical complexion as...

Admirers of Edward MacDowell's Sonata Tragica may recall the last movement, in which, after a triumphant climax, the curtain falls on tragic misery. It was the very Greek-like b...

The way the story leaked out was this: A young Irishman from Sligo, as he blushingly admitted, whose face was a passport of honesty stamped by nature herself, had served two cus...

"What's become of Waring since he gave us all the slip?" was quoted by a man at the Painters' Club the other night. What made him think of Browning, he blandly explained to the...

Nothing new in all this talk about a fusion of the Seven Arts; it has been tried for centuries. Richard Wagner's attempt just grazed success, though the æsthetic principle at th...

The case of painter Paul Cézanne. Is he a stupendous nobody or a surpassing genius? The critical doctors disagree, an excellent omen for the reputation of the man from Provence....

A monument should be erected to the memory of the inventor of playing-cards because he did something toward suppressing the free exchange of human imbecility! The Frenchman Huys...

It seems the "dark backward and abysm of time" when writing the name of William Hurrell Mallock, yet not forty years ago he was the most discussed author of his day. The old con...

Hamlet, sometime Prince of Denmark, warned his friend that there were more things in heaven and earth than dreamed of in his philosophy. Now, both Hamlet and Horatio had absorbe...

Who is James Joyce? is a question that was answered by John Quinn, who told us that the new writer was from Dublin and at present residing in Switzerland; that he is not in good...

Israel Zangwill, in the papers he contributed once upon a time to the _Strand Magazine_ and later reunited in a book bearing the happy title Without Prejudice, spoke of women wr...

In his immortal essay on the "flat swamp of convalescence" Charles Lamb speaks from personal experience of the "king-like way" the sick man "sways his pillow--tumbling, and toss...

Music-mad, I arrived in Paris during the last weeks of the World's Fair of 1878, impelled there by a parching desire to see Franz Liszt, if not to hear him. He was then honorary...

It is an enormous advertisement nowadays to win a reputation as a martyr--whether to an idea, a vice, or a scolding wife. You have a label by which a careless public is able to...

After Wagner the deluge? No, Johannes Brahms. Wagner, the high priest of the music-drama; a great scene-painter in tones. Brahms, a wrestler with the Dwellers on the Threshold o...

In the golden book of wit and wisdom, Through the Looking-Glass, the Unicorn rather disdainfully remarks that he had believed children to be fabulous monsters. Alice smilingly r...