"Melodrama" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of melodrama would have ejaculated "Saved!" but I haven't a tragedy nose, and I gave only a stifled squeak, more like the swan-song of a dying frog than ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... and General Lamum, politician pure and simple, is also excellent. Brother Barker, of the hard-shell type, is less original, though good; while Captain Simmons, Colonel Ret Roberts, and other village idlers and great men, seem admirably true to nature. Except for some absurd melodrama, the tone of the book is quiet and pleasant, and there is here and there in it a vein of real pathos ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... slowly so that it will crush me by twelve, when Nellie always brings my dinner. After my death he expects to marry her. Nellie arrives and releases me just in the nick of time. (This story is really a scene from an amateur melodrama.) ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... fishy-eyed young man, whose height might have been a little over five feet two, "I have the very girl for you—a beauty!" Darting into the group of ladies, he returned with quite the biggest specimen, a lady of magnificent proportions, whom, with the air of the virtuous uncle of melodrama, he bestowed upon the fishy-eyed young man. To the massive gentleman was given a sharp-faced little lady, who at a distance appeared quite girlish. Myself I found mated to the thin lady with ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... think I remember telling you the last time we met"—he turned to Trent—"that Manderson had rather a fondness for doing things in a story-book style. Other things being equal, he delighted in a bit of mystification and melodrama, and I told myself that this was Manderson all over. I hurried downstairs with my bag and rejoined him in the library. He handed me a stout leather letter-case, about eight inches by six, fastened ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... of Mr. Leath's opinions was enhanced by the distinction of his appearance and the reserve of his manners. He was like the anarchist with a gardenia in his buttonhole who figures in the higher melodrama. Every word, every allusion, every note of his agreeably-modulated voice, gave Anna a glimpse of a society at once freer and finer, which observed the traditional forms but had discarded the underlying prejudices; whereas the world she knew had discarded many of the ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... along paths that are now no more than rivulets, and across waste clearings where the scattered shells and broken fir-trees tell all too plainly of the cannon in the distance. And meantime the cannon grumble out responses to the grumbling thunder. There is such a mixture of melodrama and sheer discomfort about all this, it is at once so grey and so lurid, that it is far more agreeable to read and write about by the chimney-corner than to suffer in the person. At last they chance on the right path, and make Franchard in the early evening, the sorriest pair of wanderers that ever ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... touching an appeal being plainly an impossibility, an impromptu committee meeting was held in the Vernons' study, when the idea of an open-air melodrama was proposed, and carried with acclamation. A melodrama acted in the back garden, underneath Lavender's window, opened out prospects of amusement for the actors as well as the audience, and a rainy afternoon ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... ready to spring at one another's throats, quietly lock arms and go out to lunch together. It is all in the day's work and they must fortify themselves for the next trial. The shock is something like that when, after a melodrama, the heroine having jumped over the bridge and died in a whirlpool, comes out quietly and, in spite of her suffering, bows smilingly before ...
— The Man in Court • Frederic DeWitt Wells
... to lead the way with Billy, William frenziedly gripped his sister's arm, and hissed in her ear for all the world like a villain in melodrama: ...
— Miss Billy • Eleanor H. Porter
... national manners as having any reference to climate. We frequently find that the passage of a river, or a chain of mountains, dividing countries of the same natural features, brings us among an entirely new people, and presents us with a fresh scene in the melodrama of life. The inhabitants of Languedoc and Gascony, and the southern parts of France, are the gayest and most lively of the subjects of Charles X.; but the moment we have crossed the Pyrenees, we are among one of the gravest nations in the world, the Spaniards. Again, contrast ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 334 Saturday, October 4, 1828 • Various
... proportions him who circumvents the blindness of nature, brings up the weak or faint-hearted who lag behind, and throws himself bravely into the enterprise of steady constructive civilization. Nietsche is beguiled by a love of melodrama. He forgets the real war for the pageantry of an era that will pass. As a misleader of youth he conspires with the writers of dime-novels to fix the imagination on false symbols. The small boy who would ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... I warrant you, on these occasions. No "surprise" parties! You understand these, of course. In the rural districts, where scenic tragedy and melodrama cannot be had, as in the city, at the expense of a quarter and a white pocket-handkerchief, emotional excitement has to be sought in the dramas of real life. Christenings, weddings, and funerals, especially ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... met John Howard Payne, the American dramatist, at Kenney's, in France. "Ali Pacha," a melodrama in two acts, was produced at Covent Garden on October 19, 1822. It ran altogether sixteen nights. William Farren played the hero. Lord Ogleby, an antiquated fop, is a character in "The Clandestine Marriage" by Colman and Garrick. Miss Foote played Helena. ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... meantime, as Gluck was bringing in his reforms, songs were gradually introduced into the Schauspiel or drama, the ill-fated brother of opera in Germany; and just as the grand opera reached its highest point with Gluck, so this species of melodrama grew apace, until we see its ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... in former days been a popular actress at the Konigstadt theatre in Berlin, and it was here, at the time when Henriette Sontag raised it to the height of its fame, that Holtei's style had been formed. The production there of his melodrama Leonore (founded on Burger's ballad) had in particular earned him a wide reputation as a writer for the stage, besides which he produced some Liederspiele, and among them one, entitled Der Alte Feldherr, became fairly popular. His invitation to Riga had been particularly welcome, as it ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... fact, people here are so used to seeing other people in want that it no longer affects them as reality; it is merely dramatic, or hardly so lifelike as that—it is merely histrionic. It is rendered still more spectacular to the imaginations of the fortunate by the melodrama of charity they are invited to take part in by endless appeals, and their fancy is flattered by the notion that they are curing the distress they are only slightly relieving by a gift from their superfluity. The charity, of course, is better than nothing, but it is a fleeting ...
— Through the Eye of the Needle - A Romance • W. D. Howells
... she thought there was a screw loose in my intellects,—and that involved the probable loss of a boarder. A severe-looking person, who wears a Spanish cloak and a sad cheek, fluted by the passions of the melodrama, whom I understand to be the professional ruffian of the neighboring theatre, alluded, with a certain lifting of the brow, drawing down of the corners of the mouth, and somewhat rasping voce di petto, to Falstaff's nine men in buckram. Everybody looked up. I believe ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... and set on fire, to produce a diabolical sputter and flare and bad smell, significant of the blowing up of the mill in "The Miller and his Men," great was our exultation. This piece and "Blue Beard" were our "battle horses," to which we afterwards added a lugubrious melodrama called "The Gypsy's Curse" (it had nothing whatever to do with "Guy Mannering"), of which I remember nothing but some awful ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... good blood gone wrong and trampled under foot of set, sardonic purpose, indicated him a man of culture in a hell of his own choosing. Lounging on his elbow in the flickering shadows, so carelessly insouciant in every picturesque inch of him, he seemed to radiate the melodrama of the untamed frontier, just as her guest of tarnished reputation now at the ranch seemed to breathe ...
— Wyoming, a Story of the Outdoor West • William MacLeod Raine
... and profess to disdain any picture not conceived with "high art" mannerism. Yet even these will forget their pretence, and roar over a Comic Cuts found on the seat of a railway carriage, or stand delighted before some unspeakable poster of a melodrama. It is well to face the plain fact that the most popular illustrated books which please the children are not always those which satisfy the critical adult. As a rule it is the "grown-ups" who buy; therefore ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White
... people! do you expect me to give you low comedy and heavy tragedy all alone? I'm equal to melodrama I think, and I'll give you Miss St. Clair as Juliet, if you wait ...
— Work: A Story of Experience • Louisa May Alcott
... gently shook his head. "No, no," said he, "there was no story prepared in advance in this affair, no big melodrama secretly staged and afterwards performed by more or less unconscious actors. The developments came of themselves, by the sole force of circumstances; and they were always very intricate, very difficult to analyse. Moreover, it is certain that ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... with guts in it. Statesmen assembled together made him yawn. For his part, he wished something would happen during the Assembly worth writing home about—some crime passionnel, some blood and thunder melodrama. "Perhaps," said ...
— Mystery at Geneva - An Improbable Tale of Singular Happenings • Rose Macaulay
... his mental process was keyed to the highest pitch of melodrama. It was not usual for him to indulge in mental abuse. He had never quite understood the dark and moving processes of red-eyed anger. There had been something absurd in the theatrical hauteur of his manner in this last scene with ...
— The Blood Red Dawn • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... great poet but not a great literary {255} artist. He wrote negligently and with the ease of assured strength, his mind gathering heat as it moved, and pouring itself forth in reckless profusion. His work is diffuse and imperfect; much of it is melodrama or speech-making rather than true poetry. But on the other hand, much, very much of it, is unexcelled as the direct, strong, sincere utterance of personal feeling. Such is the quality of his best lyrics, like When We Two Parted, the Elegy on Thyrza, Stanzas to Augusta, She Walks ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... doubt, there is a touch of melodrama; but it is the melodrama of a rhetorician, and, in that fine "She heard it with composure", genius has brushed aside the forced and the obvious, to express, with supreme directness, the anguish of ...
— A Simple Story • Mrs. Inchbald
... to have you ask that question," he said slowly. "We are wary of mock heroics, or even real heroics, men like you and me. And yet there are things which must be explained, things not easy to explain, because they come so close at times to melodrama. I've always had a horror of emotional situations; and, from what I know of you, I'm sure you have, as well. I'd avoid this explanation, if I could—indeed, I've deliberately avoided it, thus far. Yet if ...
— The Lieutenant-Governor • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... said Macey with a scowl such as would be assumed by the wicked man in a melodrama, and then the ...
— The Weathercock - Being the Adventures of a Boy with a Bias • George Manville Fenn
... of daily work at the office, with agreeable companions, and of evenings spent at the theatre or in study. On the first night I went to the Porte-Sainte-Martin Theatre, where a melodrama, "The Vampire," was presented, and fell into conversation with my neighbour, a man of about forty, of fascinating discourse, who was inordinately impatient with the piece, and was at last turned out of the theatre for his expressions ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... gone back to his lean-to, and that Hank and Defago were at it hammer and tongs, or, rather, hammer and anvil, the little French Canadian being the anvil. It was all very like the conventional stage picture of Western melodrama: the fire lighting up their faces with patches of alternate red and black; Defago, in slouch hat and moccasins in the part of the "badlands" villain; Hank, open-faced and hatless, with that reckless fling of his shoulders, ...
— The Wendigo • Algernon Blackwood
... most friendly, sometimes voluble, and she ever dealt with us in a lady-like manner. Again we noted that many a society woman would give much for her well modulated voice and powers of verbal expression. Without any suggestion of melodrama she would rise to strong passages in giving vent to her feelings of indignation and ambition. At this time we were still wondering where she could have obtained her education; it was not until later that ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... almost lurid melodrama in six stanzas, "The Sisters," has caught the bitter mixture of love and hate, and avoided claptrap ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... from classic and more modern literature.[163] That this remains the case is sufficiently evidenced by the fact that the ballet and chorus on the English stage wear yellow wigs, and the heroine of the stage is blonde, while the female villain of melodrama ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... director of the Theatre Lyrique. He, too, liked the idea of the opera, and the librettists went to work. The composer had written nearly half of the score, when M. Carvaiho brought the disconcerting intelligence that a grand melodrama treating the subject was in preparation at the Theatre de la Porte Saint-Martin. Carvalho said that it would be impossible to get the opera ready before the appearance of the melodrama, and unwise to ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... of hysteria and melodrama, eh?" he queried. "Well, never mind. You licked Cheese-Face, and you'll lick the editors if it takes twice eleven years to do it in. You can't stop here. You've got to go on. It's ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... interesting thought," observed the Old Maid, "without being interesting. Often I find the tears coming into my eyes as I witness some stupid melodrama—something said, something hinted at, will stir a memory, start a ...
— Tea-table Talk • Jerome K. Jerome
... Dramatic Group during the winter. One member of this group, Mr. John Glover Drew, was ambitious, and urged the presentation of something more serious and edifying than merely amusing trifles, and, accordingly, an excursion was made into the realm of the melodrama. Glover, as he was called, was intensely Byronic, after the fashion of the times, and he prepared a succession of thrilling scenes from Byron's sensational poem, "The Corsair," for presentation by his fellow players. This melodramatic ...
— My Friends at Brook Farm • John Van Der Zee Sears
... few words how much tragedy lies hidden! What a life of patient heroism do they suggest!—in comparison with which the career of Lamb's huge contemporary, Bonaparte, shrinks into the meanest melodrama; while the misanthropic mouthings of Lord Byron become maudlin when we recall the sweet, life-long, heroic ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... this old lady are the only members of the company who carry away an untarnished reputation from this episode. As for me, I have been made a perfect fool of. As for the rest of them,"—I waited for words to come, and, finally lapsing into melodrama, said—"as for the rest of them, I leave them to the ...
— Mad Shepherds - and Other Human Studies • L. P. Jacks
... This valuable information Wilkinson thought was worth about $111,000; but his aid-de-camp seems to have returned empty-handed from the City of Mexico. His further exploits in New Orleans, which he kept in a state of perpetual alarm and finally put under martial law, read like a chapter from a melodrama. ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson
... like those of a school room. Titles in adult fiction should include as much of Jane Austen as girls will read and an introduction to Barrie in "Peter Pan" and the "Little Minister." "Jane Eyre" will supply the demand for melodrama in its best form, while "Villette," and possibly "Shirley," may carry some girls far enough with Charlotte Bronte to incline them to read her life by Mrs. Gaskell. William Black's "Princess of Thule" and "Judith Shakespeare" will find occasional readers. "Lorna Doone" will be more popular, ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... Lahens and Lilian Dare went off somewhere in a hansom. They often went to the theatre. Sometimes Agnes went with them. She had been twice to the theatre. She had been thrilled by a melodrama and pleased by an operetta. But the rest of the party, mother, Mr. Moulton, Lilian, and Mr. St. Clare had declared that both pieces were ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... Milton as well as the poets of her own century—Mason, Gray, Collins, and once "Ossian"—choosing almost inevitably passages which deal with the terrible or the ghostly. She must have known The Castle of Otranto, and in The Italian she quotes several passages from Walpole's melodrama The Mysterious Mother. But often she may have been dependent on the oral legends clustering round ancient abbeys for the background of her stories. Ghostly legends would always appeal to her, and she probably amassed a hoard of traditions when she visited English castles during her tours ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... strong casts from time to time and exciting performances at our local theatres, no one will deny; but perhaps the inhabitants of Turon never witnessed a more enthralling melodrama than was played during the first two days of our race meeting before a crowded and critical audience, and never, we can state from a somewhat extended experience of matters dramatic, did they gaze on ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood
... popular poets of the earlier Renaissance. But while the traditional octave stanza is used for the main movement of the piece, Poliziano has introduced episodes of terza rima, madrigals, a carnival song, a ballata, and, above all, choral passages which have in them the future melodrama of the musical Italian stage. The lyrical treatment of the fable, its capacity for brilliant and varied scenic effects, its combination of singing with action, and the whole artistic keeping of the piece, which never passes into genuine tragedy, but stays within the limits ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... he was not only ill at ease, but he was angry with himself for what he secretly styled his weakness. "Women are incomprehensible," he thought. "It would be so easy to explain things quietly and properly, but they must always cry and have a sort of melodrama." ...
— Baron Trigault's Vengeance - Volume 2 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... fortune had given me a stage-box at another and grander spectacle, and I had been suffered to see this VENICE, which is to other cities like the pleasant improbability of the theatre to every-day, commonplace life, to much the same effect as that melodrama in Padua. I could not, indeed, dwell three years in the place without learning to know it differently from those writers who have described it in romances, poems, and hurried books of travel, nor help seeing from my point of observation the sham and cheapness ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... this adventure may end disastrously. There are ninety-nine chances against the truth being known, but it is the extra chance that is worrying me. We ought to have settled Lydia more quietly, more naturally. There was too much melodrama and shooting, but I don't see how we could have done anything else—Mordon was ...
— The Angel of Terror • Edgar Wallace
... it is, this majestic calm and solemnity; how Donatello triumphs over the lack of giving tension to what is quiescent! The Penseroso also sits and meditates, but every muscle of the reposing limbs is alert. So, too, in the Moses, with all its exaggeration and melodrama, with its aspect of frigid sensationalism, which led Thackeray to say he would not like to be left alone in the room with it, we find every motionless limb imbued with vitality and the essentials of movement. The Moses undoubtedly springs from the St. John, transcending it as Beethoven ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... not seem strange that mature manhood and extensive travel had never before brought to this man's mind the truths, many of which have been current almost since the curtain first arose on the melodrama of mundane existence. Well nigh impassable limitations had been set to them by his own natal characteristics; by his acutely morbid sense of filial love which bound him, at whatever cost, to observe the bigoted, selfish wishes of his parents; and by the strictness ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... sordid experiences of life in an imperfectly organized country, suppress it for fear of being thought "cranky" or "soft," and then, in their imagination and all that feeds their imagination, give it vent. You may watch the process any evening at the "movies" or the melodrama, on the trolley-car or in the easy chair ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... in L'Homme qui Rit, undertook to create a type after the manner of Iago, and invented Barkilphedro, who embodies disinterested yet active malice, which is the malice of the villain of melodrama. ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... the baronet demanded. "What jugglery is this? Are you dressed for an Eastern dervish in a melodrama, and have you come here to play a practical joke? I am afraid I can not appreciate the humor of the ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming
... tie the knot for me!" That, of course, was what Ascham would think he was wanted for. Granice, at the idea, broke into an audible laugh—a queer stage-laugh, like the cackle of a baffled villain in a melodrama. The absurdity, the unnaturalness of the sound abashed him, and he compressed his lips angrily. Would he take to ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... going a little too far! Look at the cheeks of these ladies, Saton. A little melodrama is all very well, but you are too good an actor. Hinckley, and all of you," he said, looking around, "I propose that we end the strain. Let us go into the billiard-room and have a pool. I presume that the spell will then ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... You have stolen your ideas from cheap melodrama, and you make tragedy ridiculous. Were I a policeman, I would lock you up with pleasure. Were I a man, I should thrash you joyfully. As it is I can only share your infamy. I too, ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... left off fidgeting and became mouse-still, while only the low voice of the girl reading of the helpless lovers, of the terrible smiling Count Fosco and his grim wife, broke the silence. The boys lay, thrilled by the splendid melodrama, their little differences forgotten with the rest of their personal affairs, and so they all stayed, Hilaria as enthralled as they, while unperceived the light began to fade and evening to creep ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... seen the pictures.' The argument is not so childish as it seems; for I doubt if these islanders are acquainted with any other mode of representation but photography; so that the picture of an event (on the old melodrama principle that 'the camera cannot lie, Joseph,') would appear strong proof of its occurrence. The fact amused us the more because our slides were some of them ludicrously silly, and one (Christ before Pilate) was received with shouts of merriment, in which even Maka ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... made such a thing ridiculous, Colonel Edge would obviously consider it unsoldier-like. The chance had been frittered away; life was at its old game of neglecting its own possibilities. There was nothing but to acquiesce; fine melodrama had been degraded into a business interview with two elderly and conscientious gentlemen. The scene in the Long Gallery had at least been different from this! Harry bowed his head; he must ...
— Tristram of Blent - An Episode in the Story of an Ancient House • Anthony Hope
... delivered it. However, the story, foreshortened though it was, precisely as he related it, was told with a due regard to its artistic completeness. Margaret and Lilian, the old ticket-porter and the young blacksmith, were the principal interlocutors. Like the melodrama of Victorine, it all turned out, of course, to be no more than "the baseless fabric of a vision," the central incidents of the tale, at any rate, being composed of "such stuff as dreams are made of." How it all came ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... was once addressed by, and fearless of his feeble thunders and lightnings, they familiarly style him Old Nick. Alas, how are the mighty fallen! The potentate who was more terrible than an army with manners is now the sport of children and a common figure in melodrama. Even the genius of Milton, Goethe, and Byron, has not been able to save him ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... him discover the unknown woman who had had the furious quarrel with Lord Loudwater at about eleven o'clock. Indeed, he regarded the information about that quarrel as a sop to be thrown to them. She afforded just the element of melodrama in the case which would be most grateful to their different newspapers, and provide them with plenty of the kind of headlines which best sold them. It was certain that James Hutchings would also occupy their attention. The fact that he had ...
— The Loudwater Mystery • Edgar Jepson
... pleasant and profitable. The probabilities are that if a certain production had realized the hopes of its authors, he would have continued in the dramatic line. It was the beginning of that evolution of the stage that culminated in the ascendency, for a time, of the melodrama. ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... compromise entitled himself Emperor "by the grace of God and the national will." This infatuation was illustrated at his coronation in ancient Konigsberg,—first home of Prussian royalty, and better famous as birthplace and lifelong home of Immanuel Kant,—when the King enacted a scene of melodrama which might be transferred from the church to the theatre. No other person was allowed to place the crown on his royal head. Lifting it from the altar, where it rested, he placed it on his head himself, in sign that he held it from Heaven and not from man, and next placed another on ...
— The Duel Between France and Germany • Charles Sumner
... boy had not already been bereft of his senses by the melodrama preceding the burlesque, he must have been transported by her beauty, her grace, her genius. He, indeed, gave her and her sister his heart, but his mind was already gone, rapt from him by the adorable pirate who fought a losing fight with broadswords, two up and two down—click-click, ...
— Boy Life - Stories and Readings Selected From The Works of William Dean Howells • William Dean Howells
... it is Christmas Eve—do we live in a melodrama, that I should wander homeless on Christmas Eve? Seriously, you cannot expect a man of taste to lend himself to so hackneyed a situation? Besides, I share this apartment with the composer monsieur Nicolas Pitou. Consider how poignant he ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... first unmasked in Germany, we believe, by Goethe, to whom the secret had been betrayed. Thenceforward the young author was content to publish under his own name works of which he certainly had no reason to be ashamed. One of the earliest of these was, "La Jacquerie"—a sort of long melodrama, or series of scenes, illustrating feudal aggressions and cruelties in France, and the consequent peasant revolts of the fourteenth century. It shows much historical research and care in collection of materials, is rich in references to the barbarous customs and strange manners of the times, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... stinging alkali dust one could get. One could loaf in a hard chair in front of the hotel, lose a dollar or two at the shabby pool-room, or go to a movie show and see pictures of frankly ridiculous Western melodrama. In the real West, the pictures were ridiculous, because romantic shootings-up did not happen. In fact, unless a stubborn labor dispute began, nothing broke the dull monotony of toilsome effort. Romance had vanished with the buffaloes. Lister admitted that ...
— Lister's Great Adventure • Harold Bindloss
... decency, and did their duty in the station to which God or Debrett had called them; not drawing the sword to decide a dispute until they had tried one or two of the less popular expedients, and slighting their obligations to the Melodrama of the future. Which rightly looks for its supplies of copy to persons of high birth ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... clad only in a shirt and trousers, was, single-handed, loading and firing a twelve-pounder as fast as he could snap the breech to and lay the gun. His face was distorted with rage, and his black brows met across his nose in a scowl that at any other time would have suggested acute melodrama. Half a mile away the shots were striking the water with little pillars ...
— A Tall Ship - On Other Naval Occasions • Sir Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... down the stairs, and Sally, rushing through the passage, threw herself on to her friend. They began fooling, in reminiscence of a melodrama ...
— Liza of Lambeth • W. Somerset Maugham
... generally accepted. Here were the time-old elements: two men, one woman—elements so constituted that in other situation they might have brought comedy but upon such a trail must and should pronounce for tragedy, at least for true melodrama. ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... Wagner. His ideas were at once the substance and the inspiration of his music-dramas; but he never dreamed of writing copybook headings. He had in language to make his characters talk about these ideas for two reasons, each sufficient in itself. First, excepting in melodrama and rough-and-tumble farces, the audience must know the motives actuating the personages of the drama—their situation, their emotions, ambitions, fears and what not. Without that all drama would be an incomprehensible jabbering and gesticulating of mummers, fit only to ...
— Wagner • John F. Runciman
... recover my lost tranquillity in some brothel. Perhaps, when our merry race is run, and we become two mouldering skeletons, chance again may bring us together with the most pleasing surprise, and we may, as in a melodrama, recognize each other by a common feature of disease—that mother whom her children can never disavow. Then, perhaps, disgust and shame may create that union between us which could not be effected by the most ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... very tragic you are becoming! That dressing-gown really makes you appear quite like a heroine of provincial melodrama. I ought now to have a revolver and threaten you, and then this scene would be complete for the stage—wouldn't it? But for goodness' sake don't remain here in the cold any longer, my dear little girl. Run off to bed, and forget that ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux
... Williams fails to make us understand how his order could have ever been considered dangerous. It seems a pity that the author should have tried such a wide survey of human nature. Her talent does not carry her into melodrama, to say nothing of tragedy, but there are many evidences in her book of very fair powers in the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... as it was; and the carriage is now undergoing repair, under the window, on the margin of the lake: where a woman in short petticoats, a stomacher, and two immensely long tails of black hair hanging down her back very nearly to her heels, is looking on—apparently dressed for a melodrama, but in reality ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... Plot and melodrama were in every life; in some so briefly as hardly to be recognized, in others—in that of certain men and women in the public eye, for instance—they were almost in the nature ...
— The Avalanche • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... detail the varied course of Naomi's romance, which ends in a perfect orgy of battle, with sheriffs and shooting, redskins and revolvers—in short, all the effects that Mr. HAWTREY not long ago so successfully illustrated on the stage. To sum up, I should describe Naomi of the Mountains as melodrama with a difference—the difference residing in its clever character-drawing and some touches of genuine emotion which lift it above the ordinary. And this from one to whom the Wild West in fiction has long been a weariness is something more ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Aug 29, 1917 • Various
... "Vathek," with such alterations as are necessary to adapt it for representation. We are told that the plot is full of dramatic situations, full of human interest, and that its scenes appeal to all the faculties, ranging through comedy, ballet, and melodrama, and leading to the awful Hall of Eblis at last. The principal characters are the Caliph Omano, baritone; Carathis, his mother, mezzo soprano; Hinda, a slave in his harem, soprano; Rustam, her lover, tenor; and Albatros, basso, a Mephistophelean spirit ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... thing wanted,' said Desmoulin, who generally had some humorous remark in readiness for every situation. 'Yesterday at the Grosvenor we were in the fosse de Vincennes, and now, as they say in the melodrama of "The Knights of the Fog" ("Les Chevaliers du Brouillard"*), we are "homeless wanderers stranded on the ...
— With Zola in England • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... himself. "Was ever a man in such a hellish position, except in melodrama? And what a movie that would have made! And what a shot that girl proved herself to be! Certainly she could have killed me there at Brookhollow! She could have riddled me before I ducked, even with that nickel-plated affair about which I was ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... (No. 148). But the voluptuous nature of some of the descriptions induced the Attorney General to enjoin the sale of the book, and Lewis bowed to public opinion so far as to suppress the objectionable passages in later editions. Lewis' melodrama "The Castle Specter" was first performed December 14, 1797, at Drury Lane, ran sixty nights and "continued popular as an acting play," says the biographer, "up to a very recent period."[36] This is strong testimony to the contemporary appetite for nightmare, for the ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... sweet, so pure, I do not remember it. Yet, Yuki, though she loves Bigelow, does not marry him because she loves him, but because she wishes with the money he gives her to help her brother through college in America. When this brother comes back to Japan—he is the touch of melodrama in the pretty idyl—he is maddened by an acquired Occidental sense of his sister's disgrace in her marriage, and falls into a fever and dies out of the story, which closes with the lasting happiness of the young wife and husband. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... do my bidding.' Mr. Rochester talks about the metal welkin when he means the sky; and as for the mad woman who laughs like a hyena and sets fire to bed curtains and tears up wedding veils and BITES—it's melodrama of the purest, but just the same, you read and read and read. I can't see how any girl could have written such a book, especially any girl who was brought up in a churchyard. There's something about those Brontes that fascinates me. Their books, their lives, their ...
— Daddy-Long-Legs • Jean Webster
... will believe that he could ever be capable of a bad action. But few men can safely be trusted with absolute power. Sometimes this capo-mafioso is a villain who glories in a record of crime, a brow-beating bully who will stick at nothing. Here is a situation for a melodrama—the Wicked Despot. He does as he chooses with those around him, who fear lest he should treat them as Don Toto treated Don Andrea before the opening of Omerta, and as he treats Saru in the course of the play; and they not only fear, they also admire an unscrupulousness ...
— Castellinaria - and Other Sicilian Diversions • Henry Festing Jones
... of a social framework. The other comprises the rapid phases of an internecine struggle of violent and short-lived factions. By an unhappy fatality, due partly to anti-democratic prejudice, and partly to men's unfailing passion for melodrama, the Reign of Terror has been popularly taken for the central and most important part of the revolutionary epic. This is nearly as absurd as it would be to make Gustave Flourens' manifestation of the Fifth of October, or the rising of the Thirty-first ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... the veteran was watching his time." . . . "The Emperor Nicholas was alone in his accustomed writing-room. He took no counsel; he rang a bell. Presently an officer of his staff stood before him. To him he gave his order for the occupation of the Principalities." This overpasses drama—it is melodrama. ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... Miss Cushman personated Meg Merrilies more often than any other character. In America she was also famous for her performance of Nancy, in a melodrama founded upon "Oliver Twist;" but this part she did not bring with her across the Atlantic. She had first played Nancy during her "general utility" days at the Park Theatre, when the energy and pathos of her acting powerfully affected her audience, and the tradition of her ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... witnessed very good acting. The poorer parts in the human comedy were particularly well played, and starving folks were quite dramatic in their demands for food. Note-book in hand, Paul witnessed spectacular shows in the West End, grotesque farces in the Strand, melodrama in Whitechapel and tragedy on Waterloo Bridge at midnight. Indeed, he quite spoiled the effect of a sensation scene by tugging at the skirts of a starving heroine who wished to take a river journey into the next world. But for ...
— The Opal Serpent • Fergus Hume
... be called a hilarious conception. This quality is never wanting in the book, either for the reader's entertainment by the way, or to heighten the pathos of the narrative by contrast. The introduction of Topsy into the New Orleans household saves us in the dangerous approach to melodrama in the religious passages between Tom and St. Clare. Considering the opportunities of the subject, the book has very little melodrama; one is apt to hear low music on the entrance of little Eva, but we are convinced of the wholesome sanity of the sweet child. And it is to be remarked that some ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... and grew from ten slowly upward into the twenties and thirties. Every day in the Stock Exchange hundreds of thousands of shares changed hands back and forth among the professionals who lustily played their parts in this financial melodrama. The good old myths of great fortunes made by lucky investors began to reappear in the papers. Sales increased; values jumped rather than climbed. The trap was set; the market made. The wily manipulators rubbed their hands gleefully. The public ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... was wholly sympathetic. The derision which lurked behind he kept wholly concealed. A strong man so abjectly in the toils, and he to be chosen for his confidant! It was melodrama ...
— The Yellow Crayon • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... under the sun flag. Finally came a mighty engagement, and William hastened to decorate the Russian loser and the Japanese victor. But the point was strained; the public perceived this. As a result, the incident fell flatter than the anticlimax of a melodrama ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield
... humilega. Meet renkonti. Meeting renkonto. Meeting (of club, etc.) kunveno. Meeting-place kunvenejo. Melancholy melankolio. Melancholy melankolia. Mellow matura. Melodious melodia. Melody melodio. Melodrama melodramo. Melon melono. Melt fluidigxi. Member (limb) membro. Member (of club) klubano. Membrane membrano. Memento memorajxo. Memorable memorinda. Memorandum noto. Memorial memorajxo. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... indeed!' cried Pinchas to his garret walls. 'Who ever heard of Ignatz Levitsky? And who wants his music? The tragedy of a thinker needs no caterwauling of violins. Does Goldwater imagine I have written a melodrama? At most will I permit an overture—or the cymbals shall clash as ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... I remember a melodrama visiting a country town where I was staying. The heroine and child were sleeping peacefully in the customary attic. For some reason not quite clear to me, the villain had set fire to the house. He had been complaining through the three preceding acts of the heroine's coldness; maybe ...
— The Angel and the Author - and Others • Jerome K. Jerome
... edition is published with a prologue and an epilogue, like a drama, which indeed it is, with all the ingredients of melodrama—a villain, a mysterious woman, a Grand Duke, a conspiracy to destroy the world, and a saint—Nilus, who convicts himself in his own writings of falsification in the giving of these various accounts of how the Protocols came ...
— The History of a Lie - 'The Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion' • Herman Bernstein
... respective parties to the quarrel were enjoying it so much that it might never have ended if she had not taken the affair into her own hands. She finally followed the ticket-seller back to his desk, to which he retired after each act of the melodrama, and threw her ticket violently down. "Here is your ticket!" she said in English so severe that he could not help understanding and cowering before it. "Give me back my money!" He was too much stupefied by her decision of character to speak; and ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... like delicate curtains tempering the sun's ardor, plantations of almond and palm, through the branches of which the eye could make out the green plain and the distant sea. It was a monument almost in ruins, a monastery suggesting melodrama, gloomy and mysterious, in the cloisters of which camped vagabonds and beggars. To enter it one must cross the old cemetery of the friars with its graves disturbed by the roots of forest trees thrusting bones ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... West is tamed and trained to run smoothly on pneumatic tires and to talk more enthusiastically of the different "makes" of cars than of bits and saddles. There are still wide stretches unknown of tourists and movie men hunting locations for Western melodrama where men live in the full flavor of adventure and romance and never know it, because they have never known ...
— Rim o' the World • B. M. Bower
... did," said Wesson, "when I thought you had some glimmerings of intelligence. But if it gives you any pleasure to behave like the juvenile lead in a melodrama, by all means do. Personally, I shouldn't have thought the game would be worth the candle. Your keen sense of honor, I understand you to say, will force you to pay your debt. It's an expensive luxury nowadays, Spennie. You mentioned the end of the week, ...
— The Gem Collector • P. G. Wodehouse
... all the contents of the mansion, had foolishly forgotten to mention a secret drawer full of Canadian securities. As for the villain, I really hardly dare tell you the impossibly silly way in which he allowed himself to be caught out. But of course all this melodrama is not what matters. The important thing about Miss CONYERS' people is that (whatever their private worries) a-hunting they will go; and Fiona, financed by her paying guests, shows in this respect as capital sport as any of her predecessors. For the rest, I can hardly say ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, January 10, 1917 • Various
... matter?" asked Mrs. Vervain, putting up her glasses, and trying with graceful futility to focus the melodrama. ...
— A Foregone Conclusion • W. D. Howells
... of H.M. ship Tiger. The type of a daring, reckless, dare-devil English sailor. His adventures with Harry Clifton, in Delhi, form the main incidents of Barrymore's melodrama, El Hyder, Chief ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... London. Her mother said that his style and acting suited her better than any artist with whom she had ever sung. He was a young man, much younger than Madame Stock, and a Hungarian. Tall and very dark, he looked unlike the ideal Wagner tenor. Hilda teased him and called him the hero of a melodrama. She grew fond of the young man, who was always doing her some favor. To her mother he was extremely polite; indeed he treated her as ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... effect of this stanza by flinging ourselves on the turf and embracing Sir Patrick's knees, with which touch of melodrama he was enchanted. ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... threshold of the house when an eldritch scream rang through the lofty hall. The detectives hastened from the dining-room, and forthwith witnessed a tableau which would have received the envious approval of a skilled producer of melodrama. The hall measured some thirty-five feet square, and was nearly as lofty, its ceiling forming the second floor. The staircase was on the right, starting from curved steps in the inner right angle and ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... all her life, would he now carry it into death?' 'Because I am resolved you shall remember me.'"[A] The story of his telling her that his eyes would see her through the coffin-lid is well known, and may be apocryphal; but the melodrama is Sheridan ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... doubt. Oh why has God made man such a mixed creature? Was it only to show his supernatural sleight of hand? Only a few minutes ago I had thought that Sandip, whom I had once taken to be a hero, was only the stage hero of melodrama. But that is not so, not so. Even behind the trappings of the theatre, a true hero may ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore
... workers recognize. The sheltered ones and the unfortunates. What about the woman who is neither, but merely out on her own? I try to meet life as an individual and not as a woman. What happens? Doors slam in my face. I can't buy a night's lodging for the child in my arms. It sounds like a thirty-cent melodrama. And now you, whose life study is life—I tell you I won't be turned off. ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... attempt, and the still earlier one of Racine in his Athalie, the eye is now more out of favour than ever with the fashionable critics. Wherever any thing is allowed to be seen, or an action is performed bodily before them, they scent a melodrama; and the idea that Tragedy, if its purity, or rather its bald insipidity, was not watchfully guarded, would be gradually amalgamated with this species of play, (of which a word hereafter,) haunts them as ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... than ever resembled those of an unthinking puppet, although she knew quite well what she was doing; and her gestures might have been the fruit of long lessoning at the hands of some master of stage melodrama, so true were they to ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... the Trances of Nourjahad, a melodrama founded on The History of Nourjahad, By the Editor of Sidney Bidulph (Mrs. Frances Sheridan, ne Chamberlaine, 1724-1766), was played for the first time at Drury Lane Theatre, November 25, 1813. Byron was exceedingly indignant at being credited with the authorship or adaptation. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... civilized conditions combats are notably few and far between. It is difficult for the average man to come to a realization that he must in any circumstances depend on himself for the preservation of his life. Even to the last moment the victim of the real melodrama that occasionally breaks out in the most unlikely places is likely to be more concerned with his outraged dignity than with his peril. That thumb, feeling eagerly for his eye-socket, woke Bob to a new world. A swift anger rushed over him like ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... But when foreign diplomats and native politicians become fused into a happy family, it would be strange, indeed, if irregularities did not occur. The whole of the Greek story is so thoroughly permeated with the spirit of old-fashioned melodrama that no incident, however startling, seems ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott |
