Agnes Repplier

“ How would human nature, in the provinces, have supported so novel and hazardous an innovation? Why should human nature, out of the provinces, be assumed to have outgrown its simple, chivalrous instincts? A good, strong, designing, despicable villain, or even villainess, a fair start, a stout fight, an artistic overthrow, and triumphant Virtue smiling modestly beneath her orange blossoms—shall we ever be too old and world-worn to love these old and world-worn things? ”

“ May not his absence from literature be owing as much to the limitations as to the disregard of modern realists? Is he, in truth, so easily drawn as to be unworthy of their subtle and discriminating pens? Is Sir Giles Overreach a mere child's toy in comparison with Consul Bernick, and is Brian de Bois-Guilbert unworthy to rank with Johann Tönnesen and Oswald Alving? A villain must be a thing of power, handled with delicacy and grace. He must be wicked enough to excite our aversion, strong enough to arouse our fear, human enough to awaken some transient gleam of sympathy. ”

“ Amid the universal grayness that has settled mistily down upon English fiction, amid the delicate drab-colored shadings and half-lights which require, we are told, so fine a skill in handling, the old-fashioned reader misses, now and then, the vivid coloring of his youth. He misses the slow unfolding of quite impossible plots, the thrilling incidents that were wont pleasantly to arouse his apprehension, and, most of all, two characters once deemed essential to every novel—the hero and the villain. ”

“ American publishers, however, are as delighted to offer their readers a new cover as a new story, and it is occasionally interesting to follow a magazine through all its outer vicissitudes. There was a time when Saint Nicholas behaved like Harlequin in the pantomime, slipping into fresh costumes with bewildering alertness and rapidity. The Century has adopted a plan eminently fitted to confuse and distress people who are in love with the familiar, and who have barely time to accustom themselves to one of the picturesque young women on its cover, before they are confronted with another. ”

“ Well, it is useless to complain, for around us on every side people are fretting, and have fretted for generations over the unloved monotony of their surroundings. “It is not given to the world to be contented,” says Goethe; and while life can never hurry on fast enough, or assume phases new enough to please the majority of mankind, a few dissatisfied souls will always cling perversely to the things which they have known, and feel more keenly every year that all the vaunted delights of novelty and progress are but a poor substitute for the finer charm of the familiar. ”

“ As for Nada the Lily, its incidents are too monotonously painful to do more than distress the reader. I am inclined to think that a greater number of people die in the course of this tale than in all the rest of English fiction, exclusive of Mr. Haggard’s other novels. They die singly, in pairs, in groups, in armies, in whole tribes. They die in battle, by fire, by torture, by starvation, at the hands of pitiless slaughterers, and under the fangs of ghost wolves. They die for every imaginable cause, and under every conceivable circumstance. ”

“ Thus it is that Marius and Fabian, nestled in the ripened corn amid the cool brown shadows, receive from the Golden Ass of Apuleius a strange keen pleasure; each lad taking from the story that which he is best fitted to absorb; each lad as unmindful of the other’s feelings as of the grosser elements in the tale. For without doubt a book has a separate message for every reader, and tells him, of good or evil, that which he is able to hear. ”

“ Are we not perpetually showing our paces at her command, and under the sharp incentive of her heel? Yet Charles Lamb, in the heart of London, preserved by some fine instinct the same intellectual freedom that Montaigne cherished in sleepy Gascony. He too was fain to read for pleasure, and his unswerving sincerity is no less enviable than the clearness of his literary insight. Indeed, while many of his favorite authors may have no message for our ears, yet every line in which he writes his love is pregnant with enjoyment; every word expresses subtly a delicious sense of satisfaction. ”

“ Those were not days, be it remembered, when people wrote fiction for the sake of introducing discussions. There still lingered in the novelist's mind the time-worn heresy that he had a story to tell, and that his people must act as well as talk. The plot—delightful and obsolete word!—was then in good repute, and conversation was mainly useful in helping on the tale, in providing copious love scenes, and, with really good novelists, in illustrating and developing character. ”

“ With little things as with big ones, this sentiment is the sentiment of our day. "Unrest," says Schopenhauer, "is the mark of existence," and the many trifling details of ordinary life evince on every side the same keen relish for novelty, the same careless disregard of the familiar. Especially is this the case with women, who feel less wistfully than men the subtle charm of association, and who have less sympathy than men for the dear, faulty, unlovely, well-loved things of their youth. ”

“ Poor exile from the rocks and the heath, thy little willow house possesses thee no longer. No more dost thou rustle thy wings in the warmth of the rising sun. A cat has torn off thy head. I seized thy body and rescued it from his cruel jaws. Let the earth lie not too lightly on thee, lest thy enemy discover and drag thee from thy quiet grave."
The second epigram is quite as disconsolate and more vengeful in its tone:
"The domestic cat which has eaten my partridge flatters himself that he is still to live under my roof. ”

“ All of Savarin's apothegms evince the same frank and warm-hearted regard for the welfare of others; the same unremitting anxiety to teach them what to eat and how to eat it. He entreats us never to forget that, when we have invited a man to dine, we have, for a short time at least, his happiness in our hands. The dinner table, he reminds us, is the only place where men are not hopelessly bored for the first hour, and during that hour it is our privilege to make them enamored of life. A cook is, in his eyes, a true scientist, with mighty capacities for good and evil. ”

“ MR. WILDE’S INTENTIONS
Ever since the first printers with misguided zeal dipped an innocent world in ink, those books have been truly popular which reflected faithfully and enthusiastically the foibles and delusions of the hour. This is what is called “keeping abreast with the spirit of the times,” and we have only to look around us at present to see the principle at work. With an arid and dreary realism chilling us to the heart, and sad-voiced novelists entreating us at every turn to try to cultivate indecorous conduct and religious doubts, fiction has ceased to be a medium of delight. ”

“ She can aspire intermittingly to a cleaner life, but she can never hope to reach it. The simple literature of the past is curiously rich in these pathetic transient glimpses into fallen nature's brighter side. Where can we see depicted with more tenderness and truth the fitful relenting of man's brutality, after it has wrought the ruin it devised, than in the fine old ballad of Edom O' Gordon? The young daughter of the house of Rodes is lowered from the walls of the burning castle, and the cruel Gordon spears transfix her as she falls. ”

“ As for the other obstacles, it is hardly possible that they should have been urged seriously by a woman as free from morbid sentiment as was Miss Edgeworth. There is a sweet humility which is born of love, and which whispers to most women—and, probably, to some men—that they are unworthy of the choice which has fallen upon them, of the jewel which has been flung at their feet. ”

“ Certain dark gardens cry aloud for a murder; certain old houses demand to be haunted; certain coasts are set apart for shipwreck. Other spots, again, seem to abide their destiny, suggestive and impenetrable." And is all this fine and delicate sentiment, all this skillful playing with horror and fear, to be lost to fiction, merely because, as De Quincey reluctantly admits, "the majority of murderers are incorrect characters"? ”

“ She had the outward signs of one, indeed, the prim demeanor, the methodical habits, the sarcastic attitude toward the male sex; but burning in every fibre of her being, and evident in every page of her writings, is that fierce unrest, that inarticulate, distressful longing of a woman who craves love. We can easily imagine Elizabeth Bennet, and the very sensible Elinor Dashwood, and even Emma Woodhouse, dearest and brightest of girls, slipping from their lovers’ grasp and growing into old maids as charming as was Miss Austen herself ”

“ It is in the same benevolent spirit that kind-hearted critics are good enough to warn us against the books we love, and to prescribe for us the books we ought to read. With robust assurance they offer to give our tutelage their own personal supervision, and their disinterested zeal carries them occasionally beyond the limits of discretion. I have been both amazed and gratified by the lack of reserve with which these unknown friends have volunteered to guide my own footsteps through the perilous paths of literature. ”

“ As each well-arranged device of flowers or love-birds in a gilded cage is handed decorously forward, the house grows colder and more quizzical, until the débutante sees herself on the extreme verge of failure, and, putting forth all her powers in one appealing effort, she triumphs by dint of sheer pluck and ability over the fatal kindness of her friends. The poor Chevalier, who has in the meantime left the theatre with many bitter self-communings, receives his lesson in a spirit of touching humility, recognizing at once his manifest limitations. ”

“ I can hardly fancy our dear old friend reading and enjoying the delicious war of words in Crotchet Castle, and I should be grieved to think of her suddenly confronted with those scraps of sententious wisdom, in which its author took a truly impish and reprehensible delight. Such a sentiment as "Men have been found very easily permutable into ites and onians, avians and arians," might have sorely puzzled her benign and tranquil soul. ”

“ They do nothing remarkable, these tiny French peasants; they say nothing worth noting; they are clothed in rags; they are alone all day; they are mischievous, healthy, and natural. They hang enchanted, all three, over a wood-louse, their curls touching, their breath suspended, their eyes fixed on the embarrassed insect: and we watch them with a joy and wonder equal to their own. "It is a she-creature," announces René Jean, and Georgette laughs, Georgette who, at twenty months, has not yet acquired the art of conversation. ”