Romance (genre)

“ Why, asks the impatient reader, should not a romance be always full of this glow, and colour, and passion? The warm light that touches the oval outline of a tender woman's face is a beautiful thing, and even the sadness of love is beautiful: why should not a romance be full of these supreme elements? Why should not the romancist cut out the long prose passages of a man's life, and give us only those wonderful moments in which being glows with a sort of transformation? ”

“ What are the indescribable effects that romance, casting far beyond problems of character and conduct, seeks to realise? What is the nature of the great informing, underlying idea that animates a truly great romance—The Bride of Lammermoor, Monte Cristo, Les Misérables, The Scarlet Letter, The Master of Ballantrae? ”

“ It is therefore in science and statesmanship that the romantic quality of the future will be found. Romance is a maligned word, debased to fit any calf-love; romance is pinkish, or bluish, tender, feeble, and ends in orange blossom, or, as the case may be, tears by the side of mother's grave. That is the romance of the provincial touring company. True romance is virile, generous, and its voice is as that of the trumpet. Romance is the wage of the watcher, who with ever-open eyes scans the boundless air in eternal expectation that a thing unknown will appear. ”

“ What is romance? I think it is the instinctive recognition of a certain poetic glamour which an especial kind of grouping of persons and things—of persons and things seen under a particular light—is able to produce. It does not always accompany the expression of passionate emotion or the narration of thrilling incidents. These may arrest and entertain us when there is no romance, in my sense at any rate of that great word, overshadowing the picture. ”

“ The most amorous appealing eyes, in their moments of apparent inspiration, were usually, if the truth should be confessed, an index of thoughts dreamily loitering through visions of flint-locks, steeple-chases, and even vulgar tankards of small-beer. Now-a-days, whatever savour of romance clung about the creatures, was from their persistent contact, through every phase of evolution, with the finer feminine clay. Yet, could a soul completely gross and commonplace find its expression in a personality so melancholy and so noble? ”

“ I plead guilty myself to a most passionate love of romance—that is, romance which teaches, elevates, and ennobles—the soul of poetry, the high and noble faculty that teaches one to appreciate the beautiful and true. ”

“ This big, correct young woman, with the beautiful inexpressive face and the ugly inexpressive manners, carrying through life a rather exotic little romance which no one must suspect, possessed a charm for the imagination, a decided value. ”

“ But she was one of those creatures who yet look upon the world as a fresh green garden, and had not yet lost that romance of existence which the world and its ways soon banish from the breasts of all. ”

“ What spirit of romance, to be sure, might lurk unsuspected under the hard official rind. Here was the last man in the world whom one would have credited with a sense of beauty, and he was wrought to emotion by a landscape!
“You talk,” said he, “of your profession not affording you many such moments as this. Now, to my mind, it seems the profession for a man romantically inclined.”
“Does it, indeed, sir?”
“Why, don’t you live in a perpetual atmosphere of romance? Think of the mysteries which are your daily food.” ”

“ I only roused myself to see the various characters, [Pg 23] that had presented themselves on the stage of my mind, return again into their everyday costumes. They passed out of the focus of my observation into their several forms in which they walk through common life. Putting on their opera-cloaks, their paletots, they put on, for me, that mark that hides the inner life, and the veil that conceals all hidden passions.
It is said that there is, no longer, romance in real life. But the truth is that we live the romance that former ages told and sang. ”

“ XV There are few episodes in a man’s life that plunge him into that dim forest world of romance where the woodways are full of whisperings and elfin music, and the gleam of moonlight upon the smooth trunks of mighty trees. In youth romance is a habit; in maturity, a mere digression. The boy is naturally an imaginative creature; he dreams dreams of beauty and strangeness, and of women whose lips suck the blood from the heart. ”

“ Only people will not believe this when you tell them. They are too near things and a great deal too well fed. So they say of the most cold-blooded realism: 'This is romance. How interesting!' And of over-handled, thumb-marked realism: 'This is indeed romance!' It is the next century that, looking over its own, will see the heroes of our time clearly. ”

“ She gazed with enthusiasm upon its magnificent monuments, and her memory was filled with the traditional tales and ballads of Moorish chivalry. Indeed, the solitary life she had led, and the visionary turn of her father’s mind, had produced an effect upon her character, and given it a tinge of what, in modern days, would be termed romance. All this was called into full force by this new passage; for, when a woman first begins to love, life is all romance to her. ”

“ Nevertheless, the very name of romance has wielded such a power in human affairs, and has so habitually impressed the human imagination, that time is not misspent in exhibiting its historical bearings. These great vague words, invented to facilitate reference to whole centuries of human history—Middle Ages, Renaissance, Protestant Reformation, Revival of Romance—are very often invoked as if they were something ultimate, as if the names themselves were a sufficient explanation of all that they include. ”

“ She indeed pictures life as it should, and might, be; but she also describes it as she sees it; she feels what she writes; she reads and interprets the "never-changing language of nature"; she recognizes that the romance must be human before all else, and assumes that true reality consists in a mixture of good and evil. ”

“ How we glow over these novels of passion, when the story is told with any spark of truth and nature! And what fastens attention, in the intercourse of life, like any passage betraying affection between two parties? Perhaps we never saw them before, and never shall meet them again. But we see them exchange a glance, or betray a deep emotion, and we are no longer strangers. We understand them, and take the warmest interest in the development of the romance. All mankind love a lover. ”

“ But my dear boy, we are surrounded by romance; the newspapers are full of it; the houses all around us are full of it. The slums you describe with so much bitterness are full of it. Let me ask you this: have you ever been in love? ”

“ But the day comes sooner or later to the married pair, when the prose pages must be turned, and poetry relegated to the background, days on which the reality of life, in all its grim nakedness, seems to banish romance, and when love needs all its strength and staying power for the fight. ”

“ But a race may surely find springing up in itself a fresh love of romance, in the high sense of that word, which can keep it active, hopeful, ardent, progressive. Perhaps the novel is to be, in the next decades, part of the outward manifestation of a new birth of this love of breadth and happiness. ”

“ It is not the least of their merits that the romances are founded on fact—or what, at least, has been handed down for truth by long tradition—and the romance of reality far exceeds the romance of fiction."—Standard. ”

“ I've had enough of romance, thank you," she said scornfully.
"Only of the Family Herald kind," I said. "You've just assured me that you are a seeker after real romance, the unexpected, wonderful adventure." ”

“ Sometimes, after reading some very noble or beautiful poem, some very striking and powerful novel, she had, it is true, wondered a little if life was ever to contain any romance for her, and had thought that such a romance would be pleasant. ”

“ How offensive to the delicate admirer of a maudlin romance, in which only handsome boys and pretty girls are supposed to be capable of playing at the game of Love, must be the statement which we are now about to make. ”

“ Romantic in its preferential appeal to emotion rather than to pure intelligence; above all, Romantic in its quest—often no doubt ill-guided and unsuccessful, but always more or less present—for that element of strangeness which, though invisible to many who live, is a pervading character of Life itself, and the presence of which it is the glory of Romance itself, from its earliest to its latest manifestations, to have recognised and to some extent fixed, in artistic representation. ”

“ I bit my lip and didn't mind, but somehow the glamor of romance was beginning to recede from the scene, and I was beginning only to see a roomful of people, strange to me, and none too affectionate to each other, flirting, dancing, quizzing each other; dowagers in velvet watching daughters in tarletan, young beaux elbowing old beaux, and every man showing himself unmistakably for himself. ”

“ It would be tedious, and, for the many young men who carry a redundance of such sweet memories in their hearts, it were superfluous to follow the story step by step—the progress of a romance growing in those hours spent together, a romance controlled entirely by a woman's will. ”

“ The fun has gone out of Vanity Fair, and the House of the Seven Gables is an hotel with seven hundred beds.
Comfort, electric light, railway sleeping-cars, and equality are excellent things, but they are the death of romance. The essence of romance is variety, contrast, individuality, the eccentric, the unconventional. Level up society, put nineteen out of every twenty on fairly equal terms, popularise literature, and turn the Ten Commandments into a code of decorum, and you cut up by the roots all romantic types of life. ”

“ If by romantic we mean what is strange and removed from ordinary experience and what has the attractions of wonder, thrill, and idealization, then for the Elizabethan the world of romance was a wide one. ”

“ Considering how rich in material, incident, and character the whole subject is for the literature of romance, it is surprising how little it has prompted of that character. Probably this is to be accounted to the stern reality in fact and record, which has disinclined writers and readers to idealize its actors and incidents. ”

“ Had you left the girl to herself, this romantic fancy for her early playmate had soon been forgotten, or merged in a woman's love for Cosmo, and his proposal had been accepted, as I hope it yet shall be. Women change, don't they, sometimes? ”

“ And then I'll explain to you why Romance is dead—oh, shove that anywhere; on the floor—and what the matter is with us modern girls. Fact is, we're losing our Femininity. We're losing the power, dear Miss Williams, to please Men. ”

“ Now, it is precisely in these effects that the chief excellence of romance resides; it was the discovery of a world of these effects, insusceptible of treatment by the drama, neglected entirely by the character-novel, which constituted the Romantic revival of the end of last century. ‘The artistic result of a romance,’ says Stevenson, ‘what is left upon the memory by any powerful and artistic novel, is something so complicated and refined that it is difficult to put a name upon it, and yet something as simple as nature. ”

“ The result of his labour is a volume, which combines the scrupulous exactness of conscientious research with the richness and glamour of a romance. In the place of the beautiful heroic but purely imaginary figure of popular tradition, we behold a woman, dowered indeed with incomparable loveliness, but utterly unmoral, devoid alike of heart and soul, who readily and repeatedly prostituted her personal charms for the advancement of her selfish and ignoble aims. ”

“ And Dame Fate alone can tell why she chose me of all persons to be the hero of a romance, when there were so many well-educated and handsome young men who had read all the eastern and western romances to be had for the mere asking. ”

“ Again, the freer intercourse between the sexes tends incalculably to smooth that course of true love once so proverbially rough, but now indeed in danger of being made too unexcitingly smooth. Yet if, as a result, certain old combinations of romance are becoming obsolete, new ones, no less picturesque, and even more vital in their drama, are being evolved every day by the new conditions. ”

“ There are several kinds of romance: the most abundant species, I think, is that in which the events of modern life are related with so much fidelity that in every page men and women do exactly what we see them doing elsewhere. ”

“ The romance of the Middle Ages comes to an end, in one of the branches of the family tree, by the production of a romance that has all the freedom of epic, that comprehends all good and evil, and excludes nothing as common or unclean which can be made in any way to strengthen the impression of life and variety. ”

“ She should move through his story diffusing an atmosphere of sweetness and saintliness, but he could not bring himself to provide her with a lover, and to conclude his romance with her union to a being of the male sex. ”

“ The reaction from romance, therefore, real as it is, and dead weight as it lies upon the soul of the nation, often breeds the very forces which destroy it. In other words, the reaction against one type of romance produces inevitably another type of romance, other aspects of wonder, terror, and beauty. Following the romance of adventure comes, after never so deep a trough in the sea, the romance of science, like the crest of another wave ”

“ This is as true in those characterizations that are the veritable creatures of realism as of those that are wrought in the mood of romance. The burden upon your romancer lies, in fact, more heavily, for in his work the spectator, the auditor, the reader, can assist him little. ”