"Melodrama" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 ...
— Pathfinders of the West • A. C. Laut
... poor Mr. Dick couldn't keep King Charles's Head out of his manuscript. The Author of No Importance is similarly affected. Left to himself for a plot, he cannot keep melodrama out of his play, and what ought to have been a comedy pure and simple (or the reverse) drops suddenly into old-fashioned theatrical melodrama. During the first two Acts Lady Hunstanton, Lady Caroline Pontefract, Mrs. Allonby, Lord Illingworth, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, May 6, 1893 • Various
... excellent. Brother Barker, of the hard-shell type, is less original, though good; while Captain Simmons, Colonel Ret Roberts, and other village idlers and great men, seem admirably true to nature. Except for some absurd melodrama, the tone of the book is quiet and pleasant, and there is here and there in it a vein of real ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • 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 invitation to ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... Moreau owes something to Segonzac. Of the two first Modigliani is dead and Utrillo so ill that he is unlikely ever to paint again. [E] A strange artist, Utrillo, personal enough, just as Modigliani was handsome enough, to satisfy the exigences of the most romantic melodrama, with a touch of madness and an odd nostalgic passion—expressing itself in an inimitable white—for the dank and dirty whitewash and cheap cast-iron of the Parisian suburbs. Towards the end, when he was already very ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... I were you, when ladies at the play, Sir, Beckon and nod, a melodrama through, I would not turn abstractedly away, Sir, ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... repertoire after all, for whether the piece be melodrama, farce, genteel comedy, or harrowing tragedy, it has to be played by the ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... Yet, perhaps, we may be allowed to add a few words respecting two of the subordinate characters of our drama—melodrama we ought to say—namely Jerry Juniper and the knight of Malta. What became of the Caper Merchant's son after his flight from Kilburn Wells we have never been able distinctly to ascertain. Juniper, however, would seem to be a sort of Wandering Jew, for certain ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... way. But somehow the 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. And I left home for good in a dinner-coat and ...
— The Flying Mercury • Eleanor M. Ingram
... certain death. The beds were made over subterranean caves, the wardrobes were make-believe doors, in every corner was lurking an assassin. This traitorous nation, which was arranging its ground like the scenario of a melodrama, would have to be chastised. The municipal officers, the priests, the schoolmasters were ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... 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 ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... 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 hero may sometimes ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore
... merit his early picaresque stories of the road, such as Pickwick and Nicholas Nickleby. "Youth will be served;" no sedulous care could compensate for the exuberance of "the first sprightly runnings." In the early books the melodrama of the plot, the secrets of Ralph Nickleby, of Monk, of Jonas Chuzzlewit, were the least of the innumerable attractions. But Dickens was more and more drawn towards the secret that excites curiosity, and to the game of hide and seek with ...
— The Puzzle of Dickens's Last Plot • Andrew Lang
... of homely 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 ...
— Shakespeare's Christmas Gift to Queen Bess • Anna Benneson McMahan
... Wimp's melodrama was not going well. He felt like the author to whose ears is borne the ominous sibilance of the pit. He almost wished he had not followed the curtain-raiser with his own stronger drama. Unconsciously the police, scattered ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... lurid melodrama in six stanzas, "The Sisters," has caught the bitter mixture of love and hate, and avoided claptrap ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... alone with an unknown beauty in a hansom cab, for all the world like a mysterious hero of melodrama, and Roger hated melodrama and was never mysterious in all his life, to say nothing of disliking mystery in anyone connected with him. He says he was extremely angry at this juncture and I ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... 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)
... Eleanor, if that is it, of course we wanted Margaret Elizabeth up at the Park; but the young people of this generation like to manage their own affairs, as we did before them." Mr. Pennington looked quizzically at his niece. "She's been getting up a bit of melodrama for our benefit, that's all. If you will pardon the suggestion, my dear, I think possibly it is you who do ...
— The Little Red Chimney - Being the Love Story of a Candy Man • Mary Finley Leonard
... wonderfully as Dickens could have delivered it. However, the story, foreshortened though it was, precisely as he related it, was told with a due regard to its artistic completeness. Margaret and Lilian, the old ticket-porter and the young blacksmith, were the principal interlocutors. Like the melodrama of Victorine, it all turned out, of course, to be no more than "the baseless fabric of a vision," the central incidents of the tale, at any rate, being composed of "such stuff as dreams are made of." How it all came to be ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... unexhausted for two hundred years, securing for them a place in the later forms of drama when the Miracles were supplanted by Moralities and Interludes. The Devil's near cousin, Herod, attained to a similar reputation and longevity. Has even modern melodrama quite lost that immortal type of the ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... confronted the workings of the Revolutionary power. Great masters in many kinds have been inspired by the French Revolution. Human genius might seem to have exhausted itself in the burning political passion of Burke, in the glowing melodrama of fire and tears of Carlyle, Michelet, Hugo; but the ninth, tenth, and eleventh Books of the Prelude, by their strenuous simplicity, their deep truthfulness, their slowfooted and inexorable transition from ardent hope to dark imaginations, sense of woes to come, sorrow ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... 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 ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... was interrupted by a loud knock at the hall door, which he was pleased to associate with the police. It gave him a fine opportunity for melodrama, in the midst of which his wife, rightly guessing that Mrs. Berry had returned according to arrangement, went to the door to admit her. The visitor was only busy two minutes on the door-mat, but in ...
— Light Freights • W. W. Jacobs
... is parallel. And parallel also is their taste for melodrama. Each employed means too great or too violent for the end in view. Gilderoy burnt houses and ravished women, when his sole object was the acquisition of money. Sixteen-String Jack terrified Bagnigge Wells with the dreadful announcement that he was a highwayman, when his ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... much at the nature of the business as at the suddenness of it. I think I remember telling you the last time we met"—he turned to Trent—"that Manderson had rather a fondness for doing things in a story-book style. Other things being equal, he delighted in a bit of mystification and melodrama, and I told myself that this was Manderson all over. I hurried downstairs with my bag and rejoined him in the library. He handed me a stout leather letter-case, about eight inches by six, fastened with a strap with a lock ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... 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 ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... did," said Wesson, "when I thought you had some glimmerings of intelligence. But if it gives you any pleasure to behave like the juvenile lead in a melodrama, by all means do. Personally, I shouldn't have thought the game would be worth the candle. Your keen sense of honor, I understand you to say, will force you to pay your debt. It's an expensive luxury nowadays, ...
— The Gem Collector • P. G. Wodehouse
... for the play alone," said Sir Tom, cheerfully. "Here is Lucy, who is a baby for a play. She likes melodrama best, disguises and trap-doors and long-lost sons, and all the rest ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... and the door. Suddenly he began again. "From our knowledge of 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 endeavor to link up the chain a little. You occupy an upper deck berth; so do I. Experience of the Chinaman has formed a habit in both of us; that of sleeping with closed ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... human land, environed by dangers known or only conjectured, two solitary beings on a tiny island, thrown haphazard from the depths of the China Sea, this young couple, after passing unscathed through perils unknown even to the writers of melodrama, lifted up their voices in the sheer exuberance of good spirits ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... impossible to conceive anything more brilliant and magnificent. I can't go to any more romantic place than Drury Lane to draw my similes from—Drury Lane, such as we used to see it in our youth, when to our sight the grand last pictures of the melodrama or pantomime were as magnificent as any objects of nature we have seen with maturer eyes. Well, the view of Constantinople is as fine as any of Stanfield's best theatrical pictures, seen at the best period of youth, when fancy had all the bloom on her—when all the heroines who danced before the ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... upon the workmen's hands cannot be better illustrated than by a story told me by my father. A master tailor in a country town employed a number of workmen. They had been to see some tragic melodrama performed by some players in a booth at the fair. A very slow, doleful, but catching air was played, which so laid hold of the tailors' fancy that for some time after they were found slowly whistling or humming the ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... of value. City children who have access to the theatre often get their heroes from the stage; and the same thing may be said about the drama as about fiction. It is only the too highly colored and exaggerated melodrama that is likely to be objectionable for the impressionable youth. The moving-picture shows, which are coming to supply so many of the children with their chief opportunity to learn life, have been, on the whole, fairly wholesome; and the movement to secure more adequate censorship of the films ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... and trained to run smoothly on pneumatic tires and to talk more enthusiastically of the different "makes" of cars than of bits and saddles. There are still wide stretches unknown of tourists and movie men hunting locations for Western melodrama where men live in the full flavor of adventure and romance and never know it, because they have never known any other ...
— Rim o' the World • B. M. Bower
... which is half her emotion. If such a woman could exist, and she could not, she would be that, precisely that. But just as we are beginning to believe, not only in her but in the play itself, in comes the spying lady's maid, or the valet who spies on the lady's maid, and we are in melodrama again, and among the strings of the marionettes. Where are the three stages, truth, philosophy, conscience, which Dumas offers to us in his preface as the three stages by which a work of dramatic art reaches perfection? ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... frequently find that the passage of a river, or a chain of mountains, dividing countries of the same natural features, brings us among an entirely new people, and presents us with a fresh scene in the melodrama of life. The inhabitants of Languedoc and Gascony, and the southern parts of France, are the gayest and most lively of the subjects of Charles X.; but the moment we have crossed the Pyrenees, we are among one of the gravest nations in the world, the Spaniards. Again, contrast the solemnity ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 334 Saturday, October 4, 1828 • Various
... real a human being as ever lived—as the present Lord Mayor, or Dandie Dinmont, or Sir Walter himself; but Mrs. Macgregor has obviously just stepped off the boards of a minor theatre, devoted to the melodrama. As long as Scott keeps to his strong ground, his figures are as good flesh and blood as ever walked in the Saltmarket of Glasgow; when once he tries his heroics, he too often manufactures his characters from the materials used by ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... suspension-bridge, and she wished and 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 her anger had crowded out all other possible ...
— Seven Miles to Arden • Ruth Sawyer
... back to the kitchen and slept. That sleep was the end of my melodrama. I was awakened by a rough hand on my shoulder to find it dark beyond the windows and Semyonov ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... sweetheart, but this is the first time I ever heard it." "You forget. At last the consummation unfolds itself as smoothly as the fourth act of a melodrama. My friend and schoolmate, Alma Cutting, of New York, invites a small party of ladies and gentlemen to accompany her in a cruise through the Levant, on her father's new and elegant steam yacht 'Cleopatra'. I have pressing letters ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... have my pity. You have stolen your ideas from cheap melodrama, and you make tragedy ridiculous. Were I a policeman, I would lock you up with pleasure. Were I a man, I should thrash you joyfully. As it is I can only share your infamy. I too, I ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... coming very close 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
... the matter?" asked Mrs. Vervain, putting up her glasses, and trying with graceful futility to focus the melodrama. ...
— A Foregone Conclusion • W. D. Howells
... new tendencies in art. On the whole, the dramatic achievement of the Romantic School was the least valuable part of their work. Hernani, the first performance of which marked the turning-point of the movement, is a piece of bombastic melodrama, full of the stagiest clap-trap and the most turgid declamation. Victor Hugo imagined when he wrote it that he was inspired by Shakespeare; if he was inspired by anyone it was by Voltaire. His drama is the old ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... of music—enough, at least, to know whether incidental or "melodrama" music is congruous with the time, place and occasion of the play, and to be able to identify well-known works. At a time when money is spent very lavishly upon scenery and costumes, he ought to possess some theories, or at least ideas, concerning pictorial art, the history of modern ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... rode on his bicycle off the scene of the one real melodrama of a life spent in inventing fictitious ones; and if you ask what he had to show for his part in it, you may get your answer one day from his work. Not from the masterpiece which he used to talk over ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... of those snaky-looking, black-haired peons, with a wisp of jetty mustache, who serve as the type of Mexican villains in lurid melodrama—and he had the heart ...
— The Mission of Janice Day • Helen Beecher Long
... was called "Pamela Giraud," and the plot is contrived with an ability which proves Balzac's increased knowledge of the art of writing for the theatre. At the same time he has attempted no innovations, but he has kept to the beaten track; and the play is an old-fashioned melodrama with thrilling and heart-rending situations, and virtue triumphant at the end. Owing to Balzac's attack on journalism in the "Monographie de la Presse Parisienne," which had appeared in March, and finished with the words, "Si la presse n'existait ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... case of ordinary individuals, and is known by a very familiar name. That he should tragically declare that only across his bleeding corpse will the Uitlander ever come into his own, is merely the extravagant and regrettable melodrama of an overheated mind. The general desire is quite averse to encountering any stepping-stones of that kind, and most of all averse to Mr. Kruger's taking any such place. Our quarrel is with principles and systems, and never ...
— The Transvaal from Within - A Private Record of Public Affairs • J. P. Fitzpatrick
... slippery—I won't trust anybody but you to tie the knot for me!" That, of course, was what Ascham would think he was wanted for. Granice, at the idea, broke into an audible laugh—a queer stage-laugh, like the cackle of a baffled villain in a melodrama. The absurdity, the unnaturalness of the sound abashed him, and he compressed his lips angrily. Would he take ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... shrine and added to it was an immense relaxing and uplift. A girl of a type entirely different from Robin's might, he knew, have made him feel during the past months as if he were taking part in a melodrama. This she had wholly saved him from by the clear simplicity of her natural acceptance of all things as they were. She had taken and given without a word. He was, as it were, going home to her now, as deeply thrilled and moved as ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Duncombe murmured to himself. He was a newspaper correspondent, and he saw these things with the halo of melodrama around them. And yet—four nights ago. His face was white ...
— A Maker of History • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... who had gone to the 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
... current plucks it softly from below. If a man can communicate to others his amazed bewilderment in the presence of the tragedy, or his exquisite delight in the form and texture and motion of the reed, he is an artist. Of course, there will always be more people who will be affected by a melodrama, by strange and ghastly events, by the extremes of horror and pathos, than will be affected by the delicate grace of familiar things—the tastes of the multitude are coarse and immature. But a man must not measure his success by the ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... a twelve-pounder as fast as he could snap the breech to and lay the gun. His face was distorted with rage, and his black brows met across his nose in a scowl that at any other time would have suggested acute melodrama. Half a mile away the shots were striking the water with little pillars ...
— A Tall Ship - On Other Naval Occasions • Sir Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... lower and lower down the slopes of baseness because he has been false to his one experience of veritable love may remind us also of the melodramatic stage villain; but the tragic and pathetic motives of melodrama, its demonstrative heroisms, its stage generosities, its striking attitudes, are really fictions founded upon fact, and the facts which give some credit to the stage fictions remain for the true creator of tragedy to discover and interpret aright. ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... better call your men off. We have got one of them safe, and hold him as a hostage for our own safety. If your people go on trying to make things unpleasant for us, things will get unpleasant for him. This is not melodrama, but ...
— The Grell Mystery • Frank Froest
... these pages I have been dipping into The Conventionalists. It is full of glow and drama, even melodrama; but somehow it does not recall Hugh to my mind. That seems strange to me, but I think of him as always larger than his books, less peremptory, more tolerant, more impatient of strain. The book is full of ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... shook his head. "No, no," said he, "there was no story prepared in advance in this affair, no big melodrama secretly staged and afterwards performed by more or less unconscious actors. The developments came of themselves, by the sole force of circumstances; and they were always very intricate, very difficult to analyse. Moreover, it is certain that it was Bernadette herself who wished to leave Lourdes. ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... like hardly anybody who has not the artistic quality in him), he taught himself by his failure, even though he sometimes relapsed. Of actual construction he was never a master. The King's Own, with its overdose of history at the beginning and of melodrama at the end, is an example. But his two masterpieces, Peter Simple (1834) and Mr. Midshipman Easy (1836), are capital instances of what may be called "particularist" fiction—the fiction that ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... "Melodrama or not, Doctor Isaacson, I promise you it is a fact that my friends are Nigel's friends, and that my enemies would, at a very few words from me, find that in Nigel ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... those few words how much tragedy lies hidden! What a life of patient heroism do they suggest!—in comparison with which the career of Lamb's huge contemporary, Bonaparte, shrinks into the meanest melodrama; while the misanthropic mouthings of Lord Byron become maudlin when we recall the sweet, life-long, heroic ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... elevated again, tearing downtown. "Don't be a silly. Any one would think you were the leading lady in a melodrama, turned out of the house without your hat, in a snowstorm that followed you round the stage like a wasp! You'll be all right. Miss Ellis told you they loved English girls in New York. Just you wait till to-morrow, ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... trained heroine of melodrama would have ejaculated "Saved!" but I haven't a tragedy nose, and I gave only a stifled squeak, more like the swan-song of a dying ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... melodrama doesn't come off, an indignant Briton demands his money back. Our melodrama has not come off. We were quite ready to give it a favourable reception. The shops were shut, business abandoned. Many had taken secure places the night ...
— Ladysmith - The Diary of a Siege • H. W. Nevinson
... lad, is the dullest Saturday that has befallen me in many a year. John and his bride are over at Hooley's Theatre watching that lachrymose melodrama, "Alone in London." There is nothing worth seeing at any other house. There is nobody for me to visit with, so here I sit in this box trying to kill the time. I see very little of Cowen. A disreputable looking friend ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... 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 no more right to make an arrest than any private citizen—nor has a policeman, for ...
— Courts and Criminals • Arthur Train
... frightened and get a palpitation at the news, dearest; it isn't worth it. There's going to be no flare-up. Of course, if I were the heroine of a really nice melodrama, in such a scene as Dick and I went through, I should have been accompanied by slow music, with lime-light every time I turned my head, which would have heartened me up very much; while Dick would have had villain music—plink, plink, plunk! But I did as well as I could without an accompaniment, ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... this would be forcing the point, find an analogy in the fact that the elder woman (in both plays a strong and determined character) has in Scribe's comedy a cowardly suitor, while in Ibsen's tragedy, or melodrama, she has a cowardly husband. In every other respect the plays are as dissimilar as possible; yet it seems to me far from unlikely that an unconscious reminiscence of the Bataille de Dames may have contributed to the shaping of ...
— The Feast at Solhoug • Henrik Ibsen
... 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 out till ...
— The Missing Link • Edward Dyson
... Campbell had at first suggested our witnessing the afternoon of our stay in New York. Hephzibah's shocked expression and my whispered advice had brought about a change of plans. We saw a perfectly respectable, though thrilling, melodrama instead. I might have relieved my relative's mind by assuring her that all actresses were not necessarily attired as "merry villagers," but the probable result of my assurance seemed scarcely ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... in every way as dramatic as the beginning—a melodrama worthy of the Lyceum at its best—and for thirty hours, as the artillery thundered, the sky was one huge blaze of flame, which, at one time, threatened to engulf the whole northern centre of the city in ...
— Six days of the Irish Republic - A Narrative and Critical Account of the Latest Phase of Irish Politics • Louis Redmond-Howard
... some theatrical spangles seemed to cling about Miss Hunt; she played the guitar and the mandoline; she always wanted charades; and with that great rending of the sky by sun and storm, she felt a girlish melodrama swell again within her. To the crashing orchestration of the air the clouds rose like the curtain ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... valise, or he may have construed into a command, willingly enough, the hint Paoli had dropped to let them know at home how affairs were going. He waited on Chatham with it, and was received pompously but graciously, says the Earl of Buchan who was present, for a touch of melodrama was not uncongenial to the great minister, the 'Pericles of Great Britain,' as the general had styled him. Bozzy thanked him 'for the very genteel manner in which you are pleased to treat me.' In return, Chatham eulogized Paoli as one of Plutarch's men, as Cardinal de Retz had ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask
... respect, Mr. GRUNDY has done well to choose the historical name of the execrable "Abbe DUBOIS," and bestow it on the Cure, who is meant to be the interesting hero of what, without him, would have been a sufficiently strong melodrama. The very A B C of the practice of the confessional being that everything between Priest and Penitent (even when the Penitent is impenitent) is sub sigillo, this Abbe can have, as the Grand Inquisitor in the Gondoliers sings, "No possible probable ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, 19 April 1890 • Various
... but they end happily; the sun shines and the air is clear; if storms appear they are the showers of a summer day, not awful tempests. The comedy descends through various forms to the travesty and farce whose purpose is solely to excite laughter by ludicrous scenes and absurd incidents. The melodrama abounds in thrilling situations and extravagant efforts to excite emotions, but its final outcome is a happy one, and the villain is punished ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... burglars, small boys and lovers, the singular power of the window to control our destiny has not hitherto been recognized. Without windows there would be no ghost stories, for how could the rain beat on the pane, or the wind come in short gusts through the cracks? Neither would there be melodrama, for how could the heroine crouch on the floor if there were no sudden flashes of lighting or falling snow to gaze at through the window? What poems have been written by just looking through a window; and as for literature in general, who does not ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... than need have been, in authentic form only too diffuse, the once world-famous Warkotsch Tragedy or Wellnigh-Tragic Melodrama; which is still interesting and a matter of study, of pathos and minute controversy, to the patriot and antiquary in Prussian Countries, though here we might have been briefer about it. It would, indeed, have "finished the War at once;" and on terms ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... holy week once more—in Mexico a scene of variety in the streets and of splendour in the churches; but in the country a play, a sort of melodrama, in which the sufferings, death, and burial of our Saviour are represented by living figures in pantomime. We have heard a great deal of these representations, and are glad to have the opportunity ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... 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 ...
— The Angel of Terror • Edgar Wallace
... here suggested is no sentimental optimism. The drama of the universe is no comedy or even melodrama, but a tragedy or epic of heroism, and more especially is this the character of the history of the spirit which is in Man and is Man. The evil we enact is real evil, the only real evil, the checks which our disobedience or disloyalty imposes upon the course of good, are genuine retardations ...
— Progress and History • Various
... vice; you in one direction, I 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 ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... fishy-eyed young man, whose height might have been a little over five feet two, "I have the very girl for you—a beauty!" Darting into the group of ladies, he returned with quite the biggest specimen, a lady of magnificent proportions, whom, with the air of the virtuous uncle of melodrama, he bestowed upon the fishy-eyed young man. To the massive gentleman was given a sharp-faced little lady, who at a distance appeared quite girlish. Myself I found mated to the thin lady with ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... 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 England. ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... famous ratheskeller on Kearney Street he saw an artistic-looking youth with curly hair and dreamy eyes sitting in the midst of a group of actors. This youth was David Belasco, who had passed from actor to author-stage-manager and whose melodrama, "American Born," was running at the Baldwin Theater. Frohman had seen this play and was much impressed with it. Thrillers had interested him from ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... get you when you go in for melodrama," she said. "I much prefer your usual way of talking. Translate for me." She spoke scornfully because hitherto she had been able to turn him off ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... said, with a sad smile; "your life is history; mine is drama, melodrama even. There ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie
... was the name of the new requirement, and Jimaboy's gift was glaringly sentimental. When you open your magazine at "The Contusions of Peggy, by James Augustus Jimaboy," you are justly indignant when you find melodrama and predetermined pathos instead of the clever clowneries which the sheer absurdity of the author's ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IX (of X) • Various
... household of his 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 ornaments, seals, ...
— A Start in Life • Honore de Balzac
... merely queer. Hugo's 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 ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... extraordinary!" he drawled. "Is your charming cousin about to entertain us with a bit of wild-West melodrama, Vernie?" ...
— The Fifth Ace • Douglas Grant
... 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 ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... the melodrama of Smyth's invasion of Canada. The whole affair was disgraceful and humiliating. 'What wretched work Smyth and Porter have made of it!' wrote General Wadsworth to General Van Rensellaer from his home at Genesee at the close of the year. 'I wish those who are disposed to find so much fault ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 2 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Edgerton Ryerson
... children of the "prignorant," who babble of Botticelli, and profess to disdain any picture not conceived with "high art" mannerism. Yet even these will forget their pretence, and roar over a Comic Cuts found on the seat of a railway carriage, or stand delighted before some unspeakable poster of a melodrama. It is well to face the plain fact that the most popular illustrated books which please the children are not always those which satisfy the critical adult. As a rule it is the "grown-ups" who buy; therefore with no wish to be-little the advance in nursery taste, ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White
... conception of nemesis and revenge, they gave it its love of introspection and the long passages in which introspection, description or reflection, either in soliloquy or dialogue, holds up the action; contradictorily enough they gave it something at least of its melodrama. Perhaps they helped to enforce the lesson of the miracle plays that a dramatist's proper business was elaboration rather than invention. None of the Elizabethan dramatists except Ben Jonson habitually constructed their own plots. Their method was to take something ready at their hands ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... write another book, I think I will have nothing of what you call 'melodrama'; I think so, but I am not sure. I think, too, I will endeavour to follow the counsel which shines out of Miss Austen's 'mild eyes', 'to finish more and be more subdued'; but neither am I sure of ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... does that,' was her reply; 'the so-called impossibilities of melodrama are in reality ...
— "The Pomp of Yesterday" • Joseph Hocking
... ashamed. The thing is too mean," said Hugh Ritson. "In what turgid melodrama does not just such ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... the point of his beard up and down like a villain in a second-rate melodrama, and shoved off. The current and the wind caught us in their grip, and we swashed out from shore and got ...
— The Range Dwellers • B. M. Bower
... but they conveyed no idea, they awoke no emotion in me; it was like sand, arid and uncomfortable. The story is surprisingly commonplace—the people in it are as lacking in subtlety as those of a Drury Lane melodrama. ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... the fiction, Miss 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 The Field ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 14. Saturday, February 2, 1850 • Various
... 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 with ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... But first they quarrel with my sense of the normal by being too confoundedly picturesque, too rich and brilliant, too sharp and smart and glib, too—well!—theatrical; like characters from the cast of what your American theatre calls a crook melodrama. And then, if their intentions were so blessed pure and praiseworthy, what right had they to make so ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... of the "faux bon," 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; but ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... few people who look their parts in life, but Emile might without addition or alteration, have been transferred to the stage as the typical villain of a melodrama. ...
— The Hippodrome • Rachel Hayward
... bray of discordant music. They caught a glimpse of hideous placards whose crude illustrations showed the quality of the performance to be seen within, girls falling from aeroplanes, demon ghosts with bloody daggers, melodrama unleashed. ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... the Trances of Nourjahad, a melodrama founded on The History of Nourjahad, By the Editor of Sidney Bidulph (Mrs. Frances Sheridan, ne Chamberlaine, 1724-1766), was played for the first time at Drury Lane Theatre, November 25, 1813. Byron was exceedingly indignant at being credited with the authorship ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... "An highly colored melodrama, in four acts, one of which was laid in each of the four quarters of the globe, (and if there had been a fifth, the cunning author would have had an act for it,) was proceeding at a stormy pace, the principal character being personated by a gentleman of color, the audience, I thought, were trying ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... the sun slid into the position described, impressed me very much as I have been impressed, when a boy, by the concluding scene of some well-arranged theatrical spectacle or melodrama. Not even the monstrosity of color was wanting; for the sunlight came out through the chasm, tinted all orange and purple; while the vivid green of the grass in the valley was reflected more or less upon all ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... But how superb it is, this majestic calm and solemnity; how Donatello triumphs over the lack of giving tension to what is quiescent! The Penseroso also sits and meditates, but every muscle of the reposing limbs is alert. So, too, in the Moses, with all its exaggeration and melodrama, with its aspect of frigid sensationalism, which led Thackeray to say he would not like to be left alone in the room with it, we find every motionless limb imbued with vitality and the essentials of movement. The Moses undoubtedly springs from the St. John, ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... 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 ...
— Play the Game! • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... them in the Adelphi stalls one evening, rapt in a sentimental melodrama. I joined them between the acts, and poked fun at the play, as one does at the Adelphi, but Miss Lovell begged me quite earnestly not to spoil her interest, and Billy wanted to enter upon a serious argument as to whether a man was justified in ...
— Sketches in Lavender, Blue and Green • Jerome K. Jerome
... "I ran away from Teddy Hamilton, for all the world like a heroine of melodrama. Do ...
— The Triflers • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... mighty engagement, and William hastened to decorate the Russian loser and the Japanese victor. But the point was strained; the public perceived this. As a result, the incident fell flatter than the anticlimax of a melodrama ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield
... I had once seen a melodrama, and I recollected that the villain of the piece had used the same action, the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... clothes; I am a fitter subject for a tailor than for a surgeon. Come, good people, there is no occasion for melodrama. With aunty's care I shall soon be as sound as ever. Very well, carry me, then. Perhaps I ought not to use my arm yet;" for Hilland, taking in his friend's disabled condition more fully, was about to lift him in his arms without permission or apology. It ended in his making what is termed a "chair" ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... conviction, which 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. Then it seemed as if this delusion in which men indulge, ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, XXII • various
... can't run this college to suit you, Ericson, but as we can't, why, I'm afraid we shall have to ask you not to increase our inefficiency by making all the trouble you can. Wait now; let's not have any melodrama! You may as well pick up that hat again. It doesn't seem to impress me much when you throw it down, though doubtless it was ver-ee dramatically done, oh yes, indeed, ver-ee dramatic. See here. I know you, and I know your type, my young ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... can enjoy The Magic Flute as a more than usually absurd musical comedy with easy, old-fashioned tunes. You can enjoy it anyway, if you are not solemn about it, as you can enjoy Hamlet for a bloody melodrama. But, like Hamlet, it has depths and depths of meaning beyond our full comprehension. Papageno is a pantomime figure, but he is also one of the greatest figures in the drama of the world. He is everyman, like Hamlet, if ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... will often suggest interesting thought," observed the Old Maid, "without being interesting. Often I find the tears coming into my eyes as I witness some stupid melodrama—something said, something hinted at, will stir a memory, start a train ...
— Tea-table Talk • Jerome K. Jerome
... if that is it, of course we wanted Margaret Elizabeth up at the Park; but the young people of this generation like to manage their own affairs, as we did before them." Mr. Pennington looked quizzically at his niece. "She's been getting up a bit of melodrama for our benefit, that's all. If you will pardon the suggestion, my dear, I think possibly it is you ...
— The Little Red Chimney - Being the Love Story of a Candy Man • Mary Finley Leonard
... H. R. Jacob's?" interrupted Carrie, mentioning one of the theatres devoted to melodrama which went by that name at ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... 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 ...
— Mrs. Warren's Profession • George Bernard Shaw |
