Various

“ In this manner the beautiful youth, with silvery wings and his face concealed by a silver gauze, affected an entrance.
“Oh, take the silver gauze from off thy face!” prayed the little Greek maid.
“On a single condition,” answered the youth, “and that is, that I may cover thy face with it. In love, one, or the other, must always wear a silver veil across the eyes.” ”

“ The trail led him through a jungly hollow and across a long ridge into another hollow. Here some clearing for firewood had been made and the trees were scattered at long intervals, with stumps and brush heaps between, transformed by a mantling of snow into strange similitudes. ”

“ It is there he meets Regina, the mistress of the deceased, a wild and beautiful peasant girl, to the portraiture of whom the story owes its chief interest. Regina is a magnificent, unforgettable creature—one of [62] those rich chords that nature but rarely strikes upon the harp of being; she reverberates through one’s senses with a rough sweetness that represents a real experience. Her mould is Homeric; she is a creation of primal days and primal passions. To blame her is to quarrel with nature itself. ”

“ I was going so rapidly that before I had time to think I arrived with a shock against the wall at the farther end. I knocked myself so severely that I raised a big bump upon my forehead, which brought me effectually to my senses. My steed, Sister Rose’s crutch, fatigued by the violence of our course, fell, out of breath, but not without noise, at my feet. The silence of the room sent back from its four corners the echo of the fall. ”

“ We confidently expect the most liberal support from the cultivated class of every state of the South, believing a periodical of this order—a native production having at heart the interests of the Southern people—will meet with an eager and a sincere welcome.
We have thought it best to make a modest beginning rather than to herald our undertaking with a brilliant first number at the cost of strength that might better be reserved for exigencies of the struggle yet to come. We have chosen to build, and would have our success—if success await us—be the result of growth. ”

“ It does amaze—it simply takes one’s breath and keeps it until one has finished the tale. One is amazed at the art, one is amazed at the substance—and one is amazed at Mr. James himself, and that, perhaps, most of all. It is an incredible production for a Bostonian, no matter though he be long acclimated to foreign heaths as in the instances of the author. We know of no other case where Bostonian blood has failed so signally to tell.
One is saved from the supreme shock, however, by one thing—the matter of Maizie. ”

“ To be able to choose correctly, from the many rough little wax and clay suggestions huddled momentarily together, the project which will produce, when it is thrown up on a large scale and carefully finished, the most beautiful and inspiring work of art, requires an experience that is almost invariably lacking in the persons so thoughtlessly given the power to say which theme is to be adjudged the best. ”

“ It is Regina’s dead lips that fate now alone offers Boleslav. Under the charred rafters of his ancestral home that the peasants had burned in their patriotic fury, clasping the girl’s cold body, his mind shivers amidst the phantasmagoria of human existence. The world’s conventions seem to shrivel like a consuming scroll. ”

“ In many instances these painters have had every opportunity for study at home and abroad, and yet seek to degrade a profession they can in no wise benefit. Have the patrons of these men concluded that honesty has lost its worth, and that a bad painter is more useful that a good photographer? An almost hopeless ignorance of art is, in these cases, the true explanation of why this phase of brush-work has not long since disappeared from among intelligent people. As long as men are found willing to pay for a bad thing the parodists of art will continue to flourish. ”

“ But strength alone, not will, failed me. Three times I returned, without being able to approach him closely—and yet, it was necessary to do so! I invoked the memory of Aunt Marie, of my mother, who would forgive me if I could repair my fault, of my father who was said to be so brave, and I made an effort to start again, repeating to myself when I was about to weaken, that the pardon of others, of myself as well, and above all, that of the dead man whom I had offended, could be obtained only at this price. ”

“ The revered canvas is given the place of honor in the most prominent room of the house and there left for the adoration of all who enter—no one daring to call down upon his head, for adverse criticism, the pitying scorn of the deluded family. “It is a speaking likeness rendered with unusual technical skill.” One often wishes, as a relief for tortured eyes, that painters could do without technique altogether, and might be allowed to indulge the wildest flights of imagination conceivable in depicting the features of beloved relatives and friends. ”

“ Tom Westley’s pretty little near-sighted wife secured the sweetest thing in rosebuds on a dark red ground, and stitched away at it energetically. Her baby was nearly three months old now and her interest in the outside world was returning. The grooves of her life were well defined and narrow, so that any extraneous happening became an event charged with unbalancing excitement.
There was to be a big deer hunt with Rice’s hounds, as a preliminary to the ball, and every able-bodied man about the district expected to take part in it. ”

“ The kiss, yes, that was the pardon of Aunt Marie, but it was not only of that which she knew that I needed forgiveness. All was not yet known. I felt that I must make a complete confession, and, in an account, broken by tears and sobs, I told ‘this all’ to Aunt Marie and my mother. I told them all that it had cost me for having lacked proper respect for the dead.
“My confession was not only complete, it was public; the surgeon of the hospital and five or six soldiers were around us. ”

“ Maizie was surely enough—much more than enough.
Can the treatment of such abomination be within the pales of art? One is obliged to admit that it can be, because Mr. James has demonstrated it—demonstrated it as we hope it will not be demonstrated often. It has, however, required all the resources [60] of his skill. The marvel is that he never even falters—makes one false stroke with his brush. As it stands, “The Turn of the Screw” is a masterpiece; one fails to see how it could be improved. Its art gives the envelopment to the subject that saves it superbly. ”

“ Though he is bounded by an infantile horizon his soul is none the less a human one. Two things, although of very different nature, and although they date back to the earliest years of my existence, have left me the remembrance of greater perplexities than those which have assailed my spirit at any other epoch of my life. ”

“ It was still undecided when the baying of hounds came over the ridge and Dan Rice’s pack swept into the hollow in full cry and threw themselves, en masse, upon the quarry.
After them came the hunters, traveling impetuously and in bunches. They found Tom sitting on the bear’s carcass, with a small bundle hugged to his breast and all the dogs squatting on their haunches about him in a sympathetic semi-circle.
They bore home the bear and the baby in triumph and Sue Westley had to stand some rough joking anent her mistake, which she minded no more than the whistling of the wind. Why should she? ”

“ Little Barlow had timidly approached this uncle for help the year before—when he was suffering almost as badly from a similarly acute period of ill-chance—and had received three hundred dollars by cable in return, but, when the American mail arrived a week afterward, it brought with it such an unnecessarily brutal letter that he heartily regretted that by paying his creditors nearly all the money he had rendered himself powerless to send it flying back across the ocean, accompanied by the very choicest anathemas in his vocabulary. ”

“ The reader knew what Maizie knew by a more subtle means of intelligence—by a kind of telepathic communication. The book was a supreme piece of insinuation. Perfectly proper, indeed, as far as the print was concerned, but what scandal between the lines! One finds oneself subject to this same sort of telepathic play in “The Turn of the Screw.” It is all secretive enough—superficially. The nightmare of children’s little obsessed souls is not dragged into the light of day, but the horror is there, nevertheless, patent to the eye and palpable to the touch. Mr. James turns the screw, indeed! ”

“ Regina becomes the refuge of the stricken man whose noble motive of life is to redeem his father’s name from shame, to rebuild the homestead of his race, to face unmerited dishonor with manly dignity. ”

“ Light is a blessing at any age, but for a child it is sometimes a remedy for all ills. Less anxious as to what might happen to me in the room itself, I began to be more uneasy in regard to what would pass when I had left it. What would Aunt Marie think of my disobedience? Truly I was in no great hurry to regain the court, and I said to myself that being there, it would not cost me any more to learn why a white sheet covered that big bench. ”

“ In the recent case to which we have referred, a committee of laymen apparently judged the sketches submitted to them solely from the point of view of finish,—a most immaterial matter in a sketch, as every artist knows,—and consequently one of our great national heroes, instead of being eternally honored as was intended by many of his admirers, is compelled to rest under a mediocre pile of stone and bronze that, while far from being as good as it ought to be, is just good enough to insure its remaining where it is for many years to come. ”

“ What man dare call himself educated who has not sufficiently acquainted himself with the elements of drawing and color to know when he, or some member of his family, is being transferred to canvas for no better purpose than to afford amusement for persons of greater knowledge and judgment. It is true all of us cannot spare the time to acquire even the elements of an art education, but then it is equally true that the upper class of Americans is not truly a cultivated class, is not possessed of the culture of the same class in Europe. ”

“ Midway of the adjoining panel the crust was broken also, but less heavily, and Tom went on his knees and examined the marks with the experienced eye of a hunter. There were faint but plainly perceptible scratches on the snow, as though claws had scraped downward as the crust sagged under weight. Tom examined the fence, holding the lantern close and scanning the rails intently. ”

“ It takes him a long time to realize that dangerous maxim of Nietzche’s: “Passions become evil when they are held to be evil.” And Regina’s passions are as clear-eyed as were the children of Eden before they picked the apple of Original Sin. As he realizes the fact, the girl’s character gradually usurps his soul. A powerful scene is where they struggle together—the master and the slave—for domination; the man’s strength against the peasant’s Boadicean sinew. ”

“ Wister, Clara Bell, and a few other translators, suffice to supply the English-speaking market with all it demands in literature from the land of Goethe and Schiller, while, on the other hand, hundreds can scarcely fill the publishers’ orders for translations from the French. It may be that German novels are too limited in their appeal—too intrinsically German and hearth-centered—too largely lacking in that modern “finish” for which English authors so frantically strive and French authors so frequently attain; too deficient in what we are pleased to regard as the saving sense of “smartness.” ”