Richard Burton

“ He is in his droll way of whimsy a social critic beneath the irresponsible play of a poet's fancy and an idealist's vision. His keen yet gentle interpretations of character are solidly based on truth to the everlasting human traits, and his poetry is all the better for its foundation of sanity and its salt of wit. One has an impulse to call him the Puck of the English theater; then feels compelled to add a word which recognizes the loving wisdom mingling with the pagan charm. Sir James is as unusual in his way as Shaw in his. ”

“ The miser is wooed from his sordid love of gold by the golden glint of a little girl's hair: as love creeps into his starved heart, heartless greed goes out forever: before a soulless machine, he becomes a man. It is the world-old, still potent thought that the good can drive out the bad: a spiritual allegory in a series of vivid pictures carrying the wholesomest and highest of lessons. The artistic and didactic are here in happy union. And as nowhere else in her work (unless exception be made in the case of "Romola") she sees a truth in terms of drama. ”

“ The true dramatist does not tell a story because he has a theme he wishes to impose upon the audience; on the contrary, he tells his story because he sees life that way, in terms of plot, of drama, and in its course, and in spite of himself, a certain notion or view about sublunary things enters into the structure of the whole creation, and emanates from it like an atmosphere. One of the very best comedies of modern times is the late Sidney Grundy's A Pair of Spectacles. It has sound technic, delightful characterization, and a simple, plausible, coherent and interesting fable. ”

“ Had Sarah Gamp been allowed by Dickens to speak as she would speak in life, she would have been unspeakably repugnant, never cherished as a permanently laughable, even lovable figure of fiction. Dickens was a master of omissions as well as of those enlargments which made him carry over the foot lights. Mrs. Gamp is a monumental study of the coarse woman rogue: her creator makes us hate the sin and tolerate the sinner. Nor is that other masterly portrait of the woman rascal—Thackeray's Becky Sharp—an example of strict photography; she is great in seeming true, but she is not life. ”

“ It is plain enough that under these conditions a performance of a play in the particulars of seeing and hearing must have been seriously limited in effect. To reach the audience must have meant an appeal that was broadly human, and essentially dramatic. Fine language was indispensable; and a language drama is exactly what the Elizabethan theater gives us. Compelling interest of story, skillful mouthing of splendid poetry, virile situations that contained the blood and thunder elements always dear to the heart of the groundlings, these the play of that period had to have to hold the audiences. ”

“ There have been in modern fiction a few masters, and but a few, who were natural improvisatori: conspicuous among them are Dumas the elder and Walter Scott. Such writers pour forth from a very spring of effortless power invention after invention, born of the impulse of a rich imagination, a mind stored with bountiful material for such shaping, and a nature soaked with the humanities. They are great lovers of life, great personalities, gifted, resourceful, unstinted in their giving, ever with something of the boy in them, the careless prodigals of literature. ”

“ But she remained splendidly wholesome and inspiring in her fiction, because she clung to her faith in spiritual self-development, tested all life by the test of duty, felt the pathos and the preciousness of inconspicuous lives, and devoted herself through a most exceptional career to loving service for others. She was therefore not only a novelist of genius, but a profoundly good woman. She had an ample practical credo for living and will always be, for those who read with their mind and soul as well as their eyes, anything but a depressing writer. ”

“ It is equally foolish to be unable to give a reason for the preference for a play by Shaw or Barrie over the meaningless coarse farce by some stage hack. It is all in the day's culture and when once the idea that the theater is an art has been firmly seized and communicated to many all that seems bizarre in such a thought will disappear—and good riddance!
The first and fundamental duty to the theater is to attend the play worthy of patronage. If one be a theater-goer, yet has never taken the trouble to see a certain drama that adorns the playhouse, one is open to criticism. ”

“ CHAPTER X GEORGE ELIOT George Eliot began fiction a decade later than Thackeray, but seems more than a decade nearer to us. With her the full pulse of modern realism is felt a-throbbing. There is no more of the ye's and thous with which, when he would make an exordium, Thackeray addressed the world—a fashion long since laid aside. Eliot drew much nearer to the truth, the quiet, homely verity of her scenes is a closer approximation to life, realizes life more vitally than the most veracious page of "Vanity Fair." ”

“ The mere horrible, with this alleviation of beauty, becomes a very different thing, the terrible; the terrible is the horrible, plus beauty, and the terrible lifts us to a lofty mood of searching seriousness that has its pleasure, where the horrible repels and dispirits. Thus, the sympathetic recipient gets a certain austere satisfaction, yes, why not call it pleasure, from noble tragedy. But he asks that the last act pour the oil of peace, of beauty and of philosophic vision upon the troubled waters of life. ”

“ A dozen fictions can be drawn from the body of his production which portray humanity in its more beautiful, idealistic manifestations. Books like "The Country Doctor" and "Eugenic Grandet" are not alone in the list. And how beautiful both are! "The Country Doctor" has all the idyllic charm of setting which a poetic interpretation of life in a rural community can give. Not alone Nature, but human nature is hymned. The kindly old physician, whose model is the great Physician himself, is like Chaucer's good parson, an unforgettable vision of the higher potentialities of the race. ”

“ The rapid growth to-day in what may be called social consciousness has quickened our sense of the social significance of an institution that, whatever its esthetic and intellectual status, is an enormous influence in the daily life of the multitude. Gradually those who think have come to see that the theater, this people's pleasure, should offer drama that is rational, wholesome amusement; that society in general has a vital stake in the nature of an entertainment so widely diffused, so imperatively demanded and so surely effective in shaping the ideals of the people at large. ”

“ Her detached, whimsical attitude of scrutinizing the little cross-section of life she has in hand, is of the very essence of her charm: hers is that wit which is the humor of the mind: something for inward smiling, though the features may not change. Her comedy has in this way the unerring thrust and the amused tolerance of a Moliere whom her admirer Macaulay should have named rather than Shakspere when wishing to compliment her by a comparison; with her manner of representation and her view of life in mind, one reverts to Meredith's acute description of the spirit that inheres in true comedy. ”

“ To be dramatic is thus to be striking, to produce effects by omission, compression, stress and crescendo. To be sure, recent modern plays can be named in plenty which seem to violate this principle; but they do so at their peril, and in the history of drama nothing is plainer than that the essence of good play-making lies in the power to seize the significant moments of the stage story and so present them as to grip the interest and hold it with increasing tension up to a culminating moment called the climax. ”

“ Though the vicious forsake thee, there is yet one in the world who will never forsake thee; though thou hadst ten thousand crimes to answer for, he will forget them all!'"
Set beside this father the fathers of Clarissa and Sophia Western, and you have the difference between the romance and realism that express opposite moods; the mood that shows the average and the mood that shows the best. For portraiture, then, rather than plot, for felicity of manner and sweetness of interpretation we praise such a work;—qualities no less precious though not so distinctively appertaining to the Novel. ”