Romance literature

“ With that literature in which romance, that is to say humanity, was re-born, there sprang up also a feeling for the romance of external nature, which is surely strong in us now, joined with a longing to know something real of the lives of those who have gone before us ”

“ 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. ”

“ Whatever romance there is the in the story lies less in its plot, which is relatively simple, or in its characters, which are, for the most part, studied under a dry light with a good deal of caustic judgment, than in the essential wonder of a pioneer life. ”

“ Or even of the fountain of wit; for with respect to the sore temptation of novel reading, it is not the badness of a novel that we should dread, so much as its over-wrought interest. The weakest romance is not so stupefying as the lower forms of religious exciting literature, and the worst romance is not so corrupting as false history, false philosophy, or false political essays. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ No; you must listen—for the veil of romance is rent and we are face to face in the living world! Do you think a real man cares what title you wear, if you but wear his name? Countess that you are not—if you say you are not—but woman that you are, is there anything in Heaven or earth that can make love more than love? Veil your beautiful true eyes with romance, and answer me; look with clear, untroubled eyes upon throbbing, pulsating life ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It needed, perhaps, some such unromantic, unruffled, and unvaried existence, with a mind perfectly composed, to produce those six flawless works of art which remain for us the most complete expression of good sense, the most complete triumph over the fanciful exaggerations of romance. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The city and the crowd unidealise love; and love, in the young warm heart of a girl, should be a dream apart from all commoner emotions—as sweet and as ethereal as the blush with which it is born and dies. Beauty gives its own gracefulness to love—there must be romance blended with the passion inspired by the very lovely face which the mirror reflected. ”

“ Oh, those burning moments in love, when romance has just mellowed into passion, and without losing anything of its luxurious vagueness mingles the enthusiasm of its dreams with the ardent desires of reality and earth! ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We stand up for romance as being the bright staircase that leads childhood to reality, and culminates at last in that vision which the eye of man hath not yet seen nor his mind conceived; a vision which transcends all romance is itself the greatest of all realities, and is “laid up for the people of God.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Romance, in a high sense, lies about his greatest poetry. But it is a romance rooted in memory, not in hope—the 'glory of the grass and splendour of the flower' which he had seen in childhood and imaginatively re-created in maturity ”

“ 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.” ”

“ Does the course of human life not singularly resemble the dance of puppets in the hands of a Supreme Romancer? How, then, may any one declare that romance has become antiquated or can ever cease to be indispensable to mortal character and mortal interest? ”

“ 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. ”

“ You discover that romance has a history, and lo! romance has vanished! You are a Werther of science, sad to the heart with a melancholy all your own and dropping inert tears on the shrine of your accumulated facts. ”

“ The romance of their lives, their exposure, their general success, was an element in which they had no conscious share; for all was reality to them, — prose, not poetry: the romantic is for other persons and other times to appreciate. ”

“ Despite the teachings of the dictionaries—which often give us the original and obsolete meaning of words—we maintain that romance signifies the human soul’s aspirations after the high, and the grand, and the good. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I fancy others have experienced the like bewilderment, and happy they, if they fell into such wise and loving hands as those which were held out to me and finally helped me to fix on a study which, far from making the most serious of all subjects dry and unattractive, enriched it with the warmest touches of human feeling—the holy glory of the true romance. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But a romance, such as one can conceive, such as we have some models of, is one of the noblest productions of the human mind, one of the most influential on the hearts of individuals, and which is best fitted in the end to form the morals of nations." [21] It is in this spirit that romance should be written—it is in this spirit that it has been written by some of the masters of the art who have already appeared, during the brief period which has elapsed since its creation. ”

“ Then the romance of life sweeps into the world beyond. But even in that world the duchess will never settle down to a fixed life. She will be, like some of us, a child of the wandering tribes of eternity.
This romantic passion which never dies even in our modern society, is embodied in the gipsy crone who, in rags and scarcely clinging to life, suddenly lifts into youth and queenliness, just as in a society, where romance seems old or dead, it springs into fresh and lovely life. ”