"Melodrama" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of the lawless under such a system of non-resistance; and we may be sure that Jesus had no intention of tearing down the social structure or destroying vested rights. Those who demand a literal construction of the parable of Dives and Lazarus must look for it in the Bowery melodrama, wherein the wealthy only are vicious ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... Bertram 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
... tall trees, elms most of them, towering and feathering away up into the black mistiness that trees seem to gather about them at night; the silhouettes of those two upon the seat; the beams of light coming from the Casino, the woman all in black peeping with fear behind the tree-trunk. It is melodrama; but I ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... 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 ...
— The Duel Between France and Germany • Charles Sumner
... City children who have access to the theatre often get their heroes from the stage; and the same thing may be said about the drama as about fiction. It is only the too highly colored and exaggerated melodrama that is likely to be objectionable for the impressionable youth. The moving-picture shows, which are coming to supply so many of the children with their chief opportunity to learn life, have been, ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... fine "barber chords" in this popular ditty, and the words are so touching that it is repeated over and over again. Then it is sung softly like the farmhand quartettes do in the rural melodrama outside the old homestead in harvest time. Oh! I tell you it's a truly rural octette. Listen to that exhibition bass voice of Jimmy Sands and that wandering tenor of Tommy Whiteing, and as the last chord ...
— The Real Latin Quarter • F. Berkeley Smith
... Lizzie,) but who was afterwards Mrs. E. L. Davenport and then, sequently to some public strife or chatter, Mrs. Charles Matthews—in a version of Nicholas Nickleby that gracelessly managed to be all tearful melodrama, long-lost foundlings, wicked Ralph Nicklebys and scowling Arthur Grides, with other baffled villains, and scarcely at all Crummleses and Kenwigses, much less Squeerses; though there must have been something of Dotheboys Hall for the proper tragedy of Smike and for the broad ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... poet himself. Here may be traced, though softened by the charm of genius, (which softens all things,) the splendid errors that belong to a passionate youth, and that give such distorted grandeur to the giant melodrama of "The Robbers." But here are to be traced also, and in far clearer characters, the man's strong heart, essentially human in its sympathies—the thoughtful and earnest intellect, not yet equally developed with the fancy, but giving ample promise of all it was destined to receive. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... Morland saw nature with the same kindly eyes as Mark Fisher. I would have another word on that point. Mark Fisher's painting is optimistic. His skies are blue, his sunlight dozes in the orchard, his chestnut trees are in bloom. The melodrama of nature never appears in his pictures; his lanes and fields reflect a gentle mind that has found happiness in observing the changes of the seasons. Happy Mark Fisher! An admirable painter, the best, the only landscape-painter of our time; the one who continues the tradition of ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... compliment to English gentlemen by providing the Captain with a dull boor for his rival. The contrast was a little too patent. Even so Mr. FRANKLIN DYALL might perhaps have made the role of Sir Nevil Moreton appear a little less impossible. But, however good he may be in character parts or where melodrama is indicated, he never allowed us to mistake him for a British Baronet. The only person (apart from le Briquet) who contributed nothing to the general gloom was the Dean's wife, played with the most attractive grace and humour by ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 8th, 1920 • Various
... it is all true; these things all happened, we have 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 ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... relieved and exasperated. Her manner did not tend to remove his irritation. Leaning against the table, her face very white, she looked at him without speaking. Had not the sight of her just then been extremely unwelcome, the melodrama of the whole thing—the veil, the pallid face, the dramatic silence—would have amused him. As it was he looked anything but amused, rising from the armchair, his brows drawn together in ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... manifold. In the first place, the private detective has neither the general authority nor the facilities for the manual detention of a criminal. A blue coat and brass buttons, to say nothing of a night stick, are often invaluable stage properties in the last act of the melodrama. And as the criminal authorities are eventually to deal with the defendant anyway, it is just as well if they come into the case as soon as may be. It goes without saying, of course, that a detective per se has no more right to make an arrest than any private citizen—nor has a policeman, ...
— Courts and Criminals • Arthur Train
... enlarge to truly heroic 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
... through both legs by a sniper, and otherwise injured—carried back to hospital, and after a few hours' vain hope, sank peacefully into eternity, knowing only that he had done his duty and fearing nothing. "Romance and melodrama," says Professor Gilbert Murray, in one of the noblest and most moving utterances of the war, "were once a memory—broken fragments living on of heroic ages in the past. We live no longer upon fragments and memories, ...
— The War on All Fronts: England's Effort - Letters to an American Friend • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... trained heroine 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
... women rush screaming on to the stage) subtle enough to do duty for aesthetic emotions. It is hard to believe that these refined stimulants are precisely the same in kind as the collisions and avalanches of melodrama; but they are. ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... 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 ...
— A Simple Story • Mrs. Inchbald
... to feel that we had wandered enough? Was it the awful cinematograph show which led us through an hour and a half of melodrama without our grasping the plot, or was it that the large copper tray we bought filled us with a sense ...
— The Luck of Thirteen - Wanderings and Flight through Montenegro and Serbia • Jan Gordon
... said Patty, laughing, "are you rehearsing for melodrama, or what? For, if so, you don't know your lines, and you're 'way off on your gestures, and—and, as a whole, ...
— Patty's Butterfly Days • Carolyn Wells
... 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, ...
— Through the Eye of the Needle - A Romance • W. D. Howells
... spent an hour with Jose's father, Francisco Mercado, and heard the old man descant, with pride, on the intellectual progress of his son at the Jesuits' school in Manila. Before he was fourteen years of age he wrote a melodrama in verse entitled Junto al Pasig ("Beside the Pasig River"), which was performed in public and well received. But young Jose yearned to set out on a wider field of learning. His ambition was to go to Europe, and ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... vanquishers of the Bastille, or some other troop, with a band of music which continues playing even into the hall. The meeting is not a conference for business, but a patriotic opera, where the eclogue, the melodrama, and sometimes the masquerade, mingle with the cheers and the clapping of hands.[2112]—A serf of the Jura is brought to the bar of the Assembly aged one hundred and twenty years, and one of the members of the cortege, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... themselves so seriously that they become a laughing-stock for the world. It is the sense-of-humor that makes the master of comedy, that helps him to see things in due proportion and perspective, that keeps him from exaggeration and emphasis, from sentimentality and melodrama and bathos. It is the sense-of-humor that prevents our making fools of ourselves; it is humor itself that softens our laughter at those who make themselves ridiculous. In his serious stories Daudet employs this negative humor chiefly, as though he had in memory La Bruyere's ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... engine, and starts it moving 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
... hissed Hicks, after the fashion of a "Ten-Twent'-Thirt'" melodrama-villain, while from the exuberant youths in the grandstand, who really wanted Hicks to clear the bar, but who jeered at his failure, ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... Nicholas Danver's own choosing? He dismissed the idea. It savoured too much of early Victorian melodrama for the prosaic twentieth century. The support of some antediluvian servant or pet? Possibly. But then it would hardly be necessary to require verbal communication of such a condition; a brief written statement to the effect would have ...
— Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore
... touched vitally the subject of Captain Jerry's thoughts. From a placid, easygoing retired mariner, recent events had transformed the Captain into a plotter, a man with a "deep-laid scheme," as the gentlemanly, cigarette-smoking villain of the melodrama used to love to call it. To tell the truth, petticoat government was wearing on him. The marriage agreement, to which his partners considered him bound, and which he saw no way to evade, hung over him always, but he had put this threat ...
— Cap'n Eri • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... the threshold of life as she does, she may be a little too eager to prove that she is fit for the game, fit for the thrills and throbs of the great melodrama. Out of sheer anxiety therefore, without any genuine desire to gratify a passion, but simply with the view of giving her self-esteem the proof that she is mature, she may behave very much as if her heart and passions ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... thought that his carefully plotted scenario was going to break up into melodrama with the reticent, composed and sympathetic Elinor's suddenly rising and slapping his face. Then he heard her say in ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... 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 ...
— Wagner • John F. Runciman
... ecstasies. Crude and rough and jagged and pitiless, the style of this astounding book seems to rend and tear, like a broken saw, at the very roots of existence. In some curious way, as in Balzac and Dostoievsky, emotions and situations which have the tone and mood of quite gross melodrama are so driven inwards by sheer diabolical intensity, that they touch the granite substratum of what is eternal in human passion. The smell of rain-drenched moors, the crying of the wind in the Scotch firs, the long lines of black rooks drifting across ...
— One Hundred Best Books • John Cowper Powys
... disqualifications as well as qualifications. "Every kind of uncouth roughness [toutes les rudesses sauvages] inspired him with aversion," says Liszt. "In music as in literature and in every-day life everything which bordered on melodrama was torture to him." In short, Chopin was an aristocrat with all the exclusiveness ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... interpretation of lines 126-143 is most dubious, and at best we are in a region of melodrama: cf., however, i.425, etc. from which it appears that there was a tower in the outer court, and that Telemachus used to sleep in it. The [Greek] I take to be a door, or trap door, leading on to the roof ...
— The Odyssey • Homer
... morrow, Fitzgerald recounted the adventure in a semi-humorous fashion, making a brisk melodrama out of it, to the quiet amusement ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... which the text of "Cavalleria Rusticana" is based is taken from a Sicilian tale by Giovanni Verga. It is peculiarly Italian in its motive, running a swift, sure gamut of love, flirtation, jealousy, and death,—a melodrama of a passionate and tragic sort, amid somewhat squalid environments, that particularly lends itself to music of Mascagni's forceful sort. The overture graphically presents the main themes of the opera, ...
— The Standard Operas (12th edition) • George P. Upton
... getting," he remarked, "a little like melodrama. I have no objection to being abused, even in my own garden, but there are limits to my patience. Come to the point, if you ...
— The Malefactor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... decency in him would stop him. I can imagine a man threatening to do it as a piece of bluff—by the way, the letter doesn't actually say anything of the sort, though I suppose it hints at it—but I can't imagine anybody out of a melodrama doing it." ...
— The Gold Bat • P. G. Wodehouse
... smooth the paving stones of Paris, was written as a sort of warning to the families of the eighty-six departments of France: but read these two letters which lately passed between two girls differently married, and you will see that it was as necessary as the narrative by which every true melodrama was until lately expected to open. You will divine the skillful manoeuvres of the Parisian peacock spreading his tail in the recesses of his native village, and polishing up, for matrimonial purposes, the rays of his glory, which, like those of the ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Second Part • Honore de Balzac
... Brought up strictly, by Moreau's advice, he seldom went to the theatre, and then to nothing better than the Ambigu-Comique, where his eyes could see little elegance, if indeed the eyes of a child riveted on a melodrama were likely to examine the audience. His step-father still wore, after the fashion of the Empire, his watch in the fob of his trousers, from which there depended over his abdomen a heavy gold chain, ...
— A Start in Life • Honore de Balzac
... of melodrama, you see," she confessed. "It goes with my character and nationality. But seriously, now that that is over, I do not consider myself in the slightest danger. The poor fellow who was shot this morning belongs to a different ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... 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
... Occasionally signs are detectable that the whole thing is a practical joke; still more occasionally it even promises to become mildly amusing; and then again one is confronted with an incident (such as the visit of the armed maniac to the house of Isambard Flanders) serious to the point of melodrama. Not for pages and chapters did I discover any excuse for the title; and even then not much. But it appeared eventually that Isambard Flanders was jealous of the friendship between his wife, Cicely, and Stephen, a young man who produced film-dramas; and that in order to score off ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 17, 1914 • Various
... reader will forgive a very lame pun. And the spot where the Striped Beetle had been (figuratively) shot from under the girls could not have been selected better if it had been made to order for a writer of melodrama. There was not a house in sight nor a telephone wire. The dust in the road was three inches deep and the temperature must have been close to a hundred. They were at least five miles from the nearest town. ...
— The Campfire Girls Go Motoring • Hildegard G. Frey
... appropriated to the protestant worship, and there is service on Sundays, and festivals at half past 12. On the southern side of the Boulevard St. Antoine is the Theatre St. Antoine, erected in 1836; the performances are vaudevilles, little melodrama, and farces. The admission is from 6d. to 2s. 6d. It contains 1,226 places. The Place de la Bastille is now before us, and still may be seen the desolate remains of the great plaster cast of the enormous elephant, ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve
... in every way as dramatic as the beginning—a melodrama worthy of the Lyceum at its best—and for thirty hours, as the artillery thundered, the sky was one huge blaze of flame, which, at one time, threatened to engulf the whole northern centre of the city in a sea ...
— Six days of the Irish Republic - A Narrative and Critical Account of the Latest Phase of Irish Politics • Louis Redmond-Howard
... 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 production was staged with all the pasteboard ...
— My Friends at Brook Farm • John Van Der Zee Sears
... produced at the Gaite. It was called "Pamela Giraud," and the plot is contrived with an ability which proves Balzac's increased knowledge of the art of writing for the theatre. At the same time he has attempted no innovations, but he has kept to the beaten track; and the play is an old-fashioned melodrama with thrilling and heart-rending situations, and virtue triumphant at the end. Owing to Balzac's attack on journalism in the "Monographie de la Presse Parisienne," which had appeared in March, and finished with the words, "Si la presse n'existait pas, il faudrait ne ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... no," said Mr. Magee. "Critics exaggerate. Two months will do. They say I am a cheap melodramatic ranter. They say I don't go deep. They say my thinking process is a scream. I'm afraid they're right. Now, I'm going to go up to Baldpate Inn, and think. I'm going to get away from melodrama. I'm going to do a novel so fine and literary that Henry Cabot Lodge will come to me with tears in his eyes and ask me to join his bunch of self-made Immortals. I'm going to do all this up there at the inn—sitting on the mountain and looking down on this little ...
— Seven Keys to Baldpate • Earl Derr Biggers
... Will O' the Mill. We have the pasteboard feudal style, in which people say, "Ye can go, boy; for I will keep your good friend and my good gossip company till curfew—aye, and by St. Mary till the Sun get up again." We must have opera bouffe, as in Prince Otto; melodrama, as in The Pavilion on the Links; the essay of almost biblical solemnity in the manner of Sir Thomas Browne, the essay of charming humor in the style of Charles Lamb, the essay of introspection and egotism in ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... cornice, and which emerge from a great moat full of water, over which one enters by a protected bridge. The castle, built wholly of brick or of stones reddened by the sun, has a vermilion tint which deprives it of its imposing effect. It is too much like a decoration of a melodrama. ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... to see me about, I think—any more," she said with a little laugh. "The game is up—isn't that what they say in melodrama? My mother has told me ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... tragedy, comedy, opera, vaudeville, comedietta^, lever de rideau [Fr.], interlude, afterpiece^, exode^, farce, divertissement, extravaganza, burletta^, harlequinade^, pantomime, burlesque, opera bouffe [Fr.], ballet, spectacle, masque, drame comedie drame [Fr.]; melodrama, melodrame^; comidie larmoyante [Fr.], sensation drama; tragicomedy, farcical-comedy; monodrame monologue; duologue trilogy^; charade, proverbs; mystery, miracle play; musical, musical comedy. [movies] ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... ordinary country-house raided by masked men can raise the countryside in pursuit, a schoolmaster must do precisely the opposite. From his point of view, the fewer people that know of the affair the better. Parents are a jumpy race. A man may be the ideal schoolmaster, yet will a connection with melodrama damn him in the eyes of parents. They do not inquire. They are too panic-stricken for that. Golden-haired Willie may be receiving the finest education conceivable, yet if men with Browning pistols are familiar objects at his shrine of learning they will remove him. Fortunately for ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... condemned to death for highway robbery at ten o'clock on the Friday morning. All London knew that his hanging would quickly follow its decree, and all London, apparently, was determined to see, at least, the first act in the melodrama. The court was crowded with society's wits and beaux, with society's belles, many of the latter hooded and masked, but many revealing to all the world their ardent sympathy for ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... 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 ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Aug 29, 1917 • Various
... Lane melodrama of a season or two ago gave us a "thrillin' hair-bre'dth 'scape," wherein an automobile plunged precipitately— with an all too-true realism, the first night—down a lath and canvas ravine, finally saving the heroine from the double-dyed villain ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... will often suggest 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 ...
— Tea-table Talk • Jerome K. Jerome
... is known is that the landlady saw Walcott returning by himself two or three hours later, and that when she questioned him he replied that madame had taken her departure. What do you think of that for a bit of suggested melodrama?" ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... got rather giddy from looking out of the window, a boy (exactly like the boys in melodrama who begin by selling papers and end by saving the heroine from the villain) came into the car, piled up to his head with novels and magazines. He scattered a lot over us, like manna, without asking us to pay, but ...
— Lady Betty Across the Water • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... had at first suggested our witnessing the afternoon of our stay in New York. Hephzibah's shocked expression and my whispered advice had brought about a change of plans. We saw a perfectly respectable, though thrilling, melodrama instead. I might have relieved my relative's mind by assuring her that all actresses were not necessarily attired as "merry villagers," but the probable result of my assurance seemed scarcely worth ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... 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 ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... of the more important of the Parisian theatres, about fifteen in number, is under four heads: opera—tragedy, comedy, and drama—vaudeville—melodrama. The first division includes the French opera, the Italians, the Opera Comique; the second, the Francais and the Odeon; at the Porte St. Martin and Ambigu Comique, melodrama is the staple commodity, varied, however, with performances of a lighter ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... detail in the expression of sorrow: there was only the utter misery of it,—yours, mine, everybody's, of being face to face with a misfortune which falls or may fall to the lot of everybody. The soul, prostrate in its grief, from which Christophe had banned the usual effects of sniveling melodrama, recovered bit by bit, in a sorrowful effort, to offer its suffering as a sacrifice to God. Once more it set bravely out on the road, in the next movement, which was linked with the second,—a headstrong ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... more 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 ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... woman's heart to indignation rather! Marry that man! I would have cut off my own right hand, or burnt it to a cinder like Scaevola; sooner gone out to service—played chambermaid on the boards, or the tragedy-queen of the commonest melodrama, far rather! It was all insult, injury, degradation, in whatever light I could view it, and every feeling in my ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... all this might have produced in literature and art nothing but pomp and show, or amusement more or less vulgar. In the theatre it might have ended in farce or melodrama. But happily, along with prosperity and the feeling for enjoyment, conditions were at work which made for the keenest activity of mind and every form of intellectual expansion. It would be to enlarge upon a trite theme indeed, if one dwelt upon the enterprise and discovery of bold spirits like ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... 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 ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... that the funeral pile does not catch fire, and that the Curtain does not descend on a sensational scene, for which Captain SHAW and his Merry Men would have to be in attendance. The cast good all round, but it's more of an Opera, or a religious play, than a Melodrama. GOUNOD'S music not particularly striking, and the March sounds familiar. SARAH JEANNE holds the audience spell-bound to the end, rather by what she doesn't than by what she does, except in the great scene already mentioned. Jeanne d'Arc ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, July 5, 1890 • Various
... study of social life. This romance can die, and these books be as dead as Hugh Conway's "Called Back" in less than ten years. I am perfectly willing to admit all these mutations of taste, but there is something deeper than that. Do you know, I have a notion that the reign of cheap melodrama and farce-comedy on our stage and of the "shilling shocker" during the last two years is due largely to our financial condition. Many of you are business men, and I know how you talk. I ask you to go to see a serious play, and you say: "Well, I will tell you; I am pretty well worn out ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... 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 any other way ...
— Rim o' the World • B. M. Bower
... head" as he himself owned, "might err," but "whose heart could not deceive." Traveling by packet from New Orleans, this essential witness was heralded by the impatient prosecution, till at last he burst upon the stage with all the eclat of the hero in a melodrama—only to retire bated and perplexed, his villainy guessed by his ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin
... life in Italy, visualizing the country and its people, and warm with the red blood of romance and melodrama."—Boston Transcript. ...
— Getting Acquainted with the Trees • J. Horace McFarland
... posters of "The Leopardess." He leaned out to study one of them; a tall, wild-eyed woman crouched to spring upon a man who stared at her in fear. Prosper dropped back with a gleaming smile of amused excitement. "They've made it look like cheap melodrama," he said to himself; "and yet it's a good thing, the best thing I've ever done. Yet they will vulgarize the whole idea with their infernal notions of 'what the public wants.' Morena is as bad as the rest of them!" He expressed ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... be there," said Macey with a scowl such as would be assumed by the wicked man in a melodrama, and then the workshop ...
— The Weathercock - Being the Adventures of a Boy with a Bias • George Manville Fenn
... and vaulted roofs resembling the crypt of some conventual building. Others of ancient date are less regular in their form, being merely so many narrow low winding corridors, varied, perhaps, by recesses hewn roughly out of the chalk, and resembling the brigands' cave of the melodrama, while a certain number of the larger cellars at Reims are simply abandoned quarries, the broad and lofty arches of which are suggestive of the nave and aisles of some Gothic church. In these varied vaults, lighted ...
— Facts About Champagne and Other Sparkling Wines • Henry Vizetelly
... 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 a more finished actor than the gentleman who performed the leading ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood
... Milt! I shall never, in my oldest grayest year, in a ducky cap by the fireplace, forget the half-second when your hand came flashing along, and caught that man on the running-board. But it wasn't just that melodrama. If that hadn't happened, something else would have, to symbolize you. It's that you—oh, you took me in, a stranger, and watched over me, and taught me the customs of the country, and were never impatient. No, I shan't forget that; ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... was more than she was worth. He achieved the sale more readily because of the newspaper controversy aroused by the Nixie. Was this picture a satire on life, or on the celebrated Miss Berber? Was it great art, or merely melodrama? Were Byrd's effects of river-light obtained in the old impressionist manner, or by a subtler method of his own? Was he a master or ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... two days dizzyingly, terrifyingly much had happened. The pleasant little comedy of life at El Pozo had changed to melodrama, crude and strident. They had been attacked by a band of insurrectos, a wing of Villa's hectic army, presumably; the peons, with the exception of the house servants and Yaqui Juan, had gone gleefully over to the enemy; Richard King had been wounded ...
— Play the Game! • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... wiser still, perhaps, to have sought an interview openly, and to have made sure of the facts before seeming to encourage what might easily prove to be a girl's more or less romantic illusions. A midnight interview savoured too much of melodrama to appeal to a middle-aged lawyer like myself, however great its appeal might be to youthful lovers. At any rate, I would be certain that the need was very great before I ...
— The Gloved Hand • Burton E. Stevenson
... said, "I ran away from Teddy Hamilton, for all the world like a heroine of melodrama. Do ...
— The Triflers • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... elevated again, tearing downtown. "Don't be a silly. Any one would think you were the leading lady in a melodrama, turned out of the house without your hat, in a snowstorm that followed you round the stage like a wasp! You'll be all right. Miss Ellis told you they loved English girls in New York. Just you wait till to-morrow, ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... Falconer commenced. I had just come out of one of the theatres in the neighbourhood of the Strand, unable to endure any longer the dreary combination of false magnanimity and real meanness, imported from Paris in the shape of a melodrama, for the delectation of the London public. I had turned northwards, and was walking up one of the streets near Covent Garden, when my attention was attracted to a woman who came out of a gin-shop, carrying a baby. She ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... 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
... sake of his friendship with Jim, but really to leave himself free for his evening's amours with a waitress at the Kenora—offered to allow Jim to go home if he would promise to show up at the Court in the morning, but Jim was too fond of experience and too susceptible of melodrama to pass up so golden an opportunity;—he refused to give his parole and in consequence slept soundly and innocently on a little camp bed, in a ten by five cell, at the expense of ...
— The Spoilers of the Valley • Robert Watson
... presented a melodrama, whose action dragged out at great length and with great gusto the misfortune and gruesome murder of an innocent youth. At the close of the last act a woman disguised as a man appeared upon the scene; she wore a pointed ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... was like an idyll after a farcical melodrama. They played it with an astounding delicacy. Through the latter half of the movement I could hear Mr Brindley breathing regularly and heavily through his nose, exactly as though he were being hypnotized. I had a tickling sensation in the small of my back, a sure sign of emotion in ...
— The Grim Smile of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... on slowly together and in silence. The feeling uppermost in Angelica's mind was one of resentment. Her aunt had appeared in the same unexpected manner at the outset of her acquaintance with the Tenor, and she objected to her reappearance now, at the conclusion. It was like an incident in a melodrama, the arrival of the good influence—it was absurd; if she had done it on purpose, it ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... 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 ...
— Work: A Story of Experience • Louisa May Alcott
... being your brother I should marry you to the young Marquis de Cinq-Cygne, who seems to me a lively young scamp who will make the money dance, and will laugh at his mother's prejudices against the actors in the famous Simeuse melodrama." ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... Jacob's?" interrupted Carrie, mentioning one of the theatres devoted to melodrama which went by that name ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... follows. The tradesmen and tinkers of Athens are planning to turn actors and to play "Pyramus and Thisbe" for the Duke's wedding feast. It is full of "local hits," which are not lost upon the audience. In the practical jokes, the melodrama, the ranting bombast, and Bottom's ambition to play "a tyrant's vein," they recognise a satire on the amateur theatricals of the trades-guilds, the clownish horseplay of the "moralities" so-called. These crude plays, ...
— Shakespeare's Christmas Gift to Queen Bess • Anna Benneson McMahan
... Comedy. In the prose play which followed, The Pretenders, which is the dramatisation of an inner problem in the form of a historical drama, there is a much nearer approach to poetry. The stagecraft is still too obvious; effect follows effect like thunder-claps; there is melodrama in the tragedy; but the play is, above all, the working-out of a few deep ideas, and in these ideas there is ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... is a live wire, then his confrere, Emile Francqui, is a whole battery. Here you touch the most romantic and many-sided career in all Belgian financial history. It reads like a melodrama and is packed with action and adventure. I could almost write a book about any one ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... kill Adelphi Melodrama. But I have a piece of advice to offer to the Italian gentlemen who have done so much for our stage. It is, that they run their theatre on a principal of duality befitting their joint management. Let it be the home of Melodrama and Burlesque, the same play ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... 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 and ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... You can't impose on me that way. I haven't watched you play football all the fall to be taken in now by your melodrama. But after to-day you will find me quite at your service, Mr.—Coward. And meanwhile we'll call this interview off, if you please. The ...
— The New Boy at Hilltop • Ralph Henry Barbour
... hour. Shipwrecked, remote from human land, environed by dangers known or only conjectured, two solitary beings on a tiny island, thrown haphazard from the depths of the China Sea, this young couple, after passing unscathed through perils unknown even to the writers of melodrama, lifted up their voices in the sheer exuberance of ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... grandmother, Marie-Aurore, was very musical, she sang operatic songs, and collected extracts from the philosophers. Maurice Dupin was devoted to music and to the theatre. Even Sophie-Victoire had an innate appreciation of beauty. She not only wept, like Margot, at melodrama, but she noticed the pink of a cloud, the mauve of a flower, and, what was more important, she called her little daughter's attention to such things. This illiterate mother had therefore had some influence on Aurore and on her ...
— George Sand, Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings • Rene Doumic
... comedy, but presenting nevertheless, its varieties of character, its vicissitudes, its moral lessons—in a word, its humanity. She has painted it as it was, in all its features the most tragic as well as the most comic, avoiding only melodrama. "In all the important preparations of the mind, she (Miss Bertram) was complete, being prepared for matrimony by a hatred of home, restraint and tranquillity, by the misery of disappointed affection and contempt ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... in Abdelazer; in November, Roxana in Pordage's tumid The Siege of Babylon, a play founded upon the famous romance, Cassandra. In January, 1678, she played Priam's prophetic daughter, a very strong part, in Banks' melodrama, The Destruction of Troy; August of the same year, Elvira in Leanerd's witty comedy, The Counterfeits, whence a quarter of a century later Colley Gibber borrowed pretty freely for She Wou'd and She Wou'd Not. That autumn Mrs. Lee acted Eurydice in Dryden and Lee's Oedipus. ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. II • Aphra Behn
... silly rebel guns from across the river); its shady avenues of alluring bungalows, and its parks—all so gay and peaceful in the warm spring sunshine that the very suggestion of war within a thousand miles seemed fantastic melodrama, despite the shouting newspaper boys with a fearsome "extra" coming out every fifteen minutes. There was new Fort Bliss, the cavalry post, and old Fort Bliss, famous, they told me, as long ago as the days of Indian ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... first word Pendleton had whirled about in astonishment, and faced the speaker, who stood in the doorway, pointing with one hand in the attitude of melodrama. ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Investigator • John T. McIntyre
... one placid and beautiful girl, a passion which leads to fratricide and madness. That it is a very melancholy and tragical story is obvious from this brief sketch of its contents, but it is remarkable for coherence and self-restraint no less than for vigor of treatment. Toru Dutt never sinks to melodrama in the course of her extraordinary tale, and the wonder is that she is not more ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... Those theatrical chaps are so slippery—I won't trust anybody but you to 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
... dinner. And yet, what would she appear to her husband, to Lady Maria, to anyone in the decorous world, if she told them that she believed that in a dignified English household, an English gentleman, even a deposed heir presumptive, was working out a subtle plot against her such as might adorn a melodrama? She held her head in her hands as her mind depicted to her Lord Walderhurst's countenance, ...
— Emily Fox-Seton - Being The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... plan something splendid, a 'grand combination,' as you used to call your droll mixtures of tragedy, comedy, melodrama and farce," answered his sister, with her head already full ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. V, August, 1878, No 10. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... doubt 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 theater, alluded, with a certain lifting of the brow, drawing down of the corners of the mouth and somewhat rasping voce di petti, to Falstaff's nine men in buckram. Everybody looked up. I believe the old gentleman opposite ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IV. (of X.) • Various
... There was no melodrama in the situation. It was a commonplace peril of the coast; it was a reasonable endeavor. It was thrilling, to be sure—the conjunction of a living peril with the emergency of the message. Yet the dusk and sweeping drizzle of rain, the vanishing ...
— Harbor Tales Down North - With an Appreciation by Wilfred T. Grenfell, M.D. • Norman Duncan
... thanks," will "King Helge" look down upon all the other wares in Schuberth's shop. Somewhat as the hippopotamus looks on toads and frogs.—But it is quite right to let the Ballade come out, and I am impatiently awaiting my copy.—[Liszt subsequently formed out of Draseke's song the melodrama of the ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: - Years of Travel as a Virtuoso" • Franz Liszt; Letters assembled by La Mara and translated
... leaving her 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
... time cannot, let us hope, last for ever and a day. Honest old Laughter, the true LUTIN of your inspiration, must have life left in him yet, and cannot die; though it is true that the taste for your pathos, and your melodrama, and plots constructed after your favourite fashion ("Great Expectations" and the "Tale of Two Cities" are exceptions) may go by and never be regretted. Were people simpler, or only less clear-sighted, as far as your pathos is ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... gave it its love of introspection and the long passages in which introspection, description or reflection, either in soliloquy or dialogue, holds up the action; contradictorily enough they gave it something at least of its melodrama. Perhaps they helped to enforce the lesson of the miracle plays that a dramatist's proper business was elaboration rather than invention. None of the Elizabethan dramatists except Ben Jonson habitually constructed their own plots. Their method was to take something ready at their ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... Edward Bulwer Lytton professed themselves ready to administer any amount of food to the craving appetite of the age—but all in vain. Tragedy was not what we wanted—nor comedy—no, nor even passable melodrama. We sighed for something of a more ethereal sort, and—laud we the gods!—the manna has descended in showers. Go into any of the London theatres now, and the following is your bill of fare. Fairies you have by scores ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... musket was still levelled. His men were ready to dash forward. The English put their heads together and decided that discretion was the better part of valor. Governor Bridgar meekly requested permission to land and salute the commander of the French. Then followed a pompous melodrama of bravado, each side affecting sham strength. Radisson told the English all that he had told the New Englanders, going on board the Company's ship to dine, while English hostages remained with his French followers. For reasons which he did not reveal, ...
— Pathfinders of the West • A. C. Laut
... some knowledge of music—enough, at least, to know whether incidental or "melodrama" music is congruous with the time, place and occasion of the play, and to be able to identify well-known works. At a time when money is spent very lavishly upon scenery and costumes, he ought to possess some theories, or at least ideas, concerning pictorial art, the history ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... volumes of more real power than these, or whose force is so artistically masked under ease and playfulness. We prefer the "Old" part of the book to the "New." It seems to us to show a better style of handling. There is something of melodrama in the style of the California stories,—a flavor of blue lights and burnt cork. At the same time, we must admit that there is a melodramatic taint in our American life:—witness the Sickles vulgarity. Young America is b'hoyish rather than boyish, and perhaps ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... 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 ...
— Boy Life - Stories and Readings Selected From The Works of William Dean Howells • William Dean Howells
... afterpiece[obs3], exode[obs3], farce, divertissement, extravaganza, burletta[obs3], harlequinade[obs3], pantomime, burlesque, opera bouffe[Fr], ballet, spectacle, masque, drame comedie drame[Fr]; melodrama, melodrame[obs3]; comidie larmoyante[Fr], sensation drama; tragicomedy, farcical-comedy; monodrame monologue[obs3];duologue trilogy; charade, proverbs; mystery, miracle play; musical, musical comedy. [movies] western, horse opera; flick [coll.]; spy film, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... friendliest and most obvious collusion. But he was incapable of fixing his attention very closely on any single fragment of Herbert's apology, or of rousing himself into being much more than a dispassionate and not very interested spectator of the little melodrama that Fate, it appeared, had at the last moment decided rather capriciously to twist into a farce. He turned with a smile to the face so keenly fixed and enthusiastic with the question it had so laboriously led up to: 'But surely, I don't ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... inherited idealism into the necessarily 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 ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... Countess who stopped the fun, by hurling herself between us, quite like the heroine of old-fashioned melodrama. "Oh, for my sake, for my sake!" she was wailing. "It wasn't his fault. Wait and let him have ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... before we pass on. In spite of the horror and misery that pervade all of his later work, there is in it much less of actual melodrama than here, and rarely, I should say never, that sort of brutality, that useless insufferable violence to the feelings, which is the last distinction between melodrama and true tragedy. Now, in NOTRE ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... happiness of telling about one's happiness," he returns, darting at her a glance worthy of the tyrant in a melodrama. ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... Warb, don't be a damfool! Lay off the melodrama. I do love you—at least, I love ninety-five pounds of you. Now, will ...
— Ptomaine Street • Carolyn Wells
... in making a hero of me, doesn't she?" he observed. "Red hair turns dusky before the camera, luckily for me. I look as if there wasn't much of anything I couldn't do, including playing leading man in a melodrama—eh?" ...
— Mrs. Red Pepper • Grace S. Richmond
... 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 ...
— The History of a Lie - 'The Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion' • Herman Bernstein
... be that, precisely that. But just as we are beginning to believe, not only in her but in the play itself, in comes the spying lady's maid, or the valet who spies on the lady's maid, and we are in melodrama again, and among the strings of the marionettes. Where are the three stages, truth, philosophy, conscience, which Dumas offers to us in his preface as the three stages by which a work of dramatic art reaches perfection? Shown ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... than those, you know," pacing slowly up and down the room with the action of the leading lady in a melodrama; but her pain or vision, whatever it was, had been real enough. The cold drops stood on her forehead, her lips quivered, the brown eyes turned from side to side asking for help. "When he is near shall I not know it?" ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... 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 ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... die, to bring, as he might say, "the eternal note of sadness in." All this to show how "Nature" holds men in her powerful hands and tortures them when they struggle to follow the mind to liberty! To prove a thesis so profoundly true and tragic Mr. Allen can do no more than borrow the tricks of melodrama. ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... he was a magician, and used exaggeration in high lights and low lights on his crowded canvas. Say what you will of all these defects, of his lack of classic literary training, of his tendency to melodrama, of his tricks of style, even of a ray of lime-light here and there, it remains that he is a great power, a tremendous force in modern life; half an hour of him is worth a lifetime of his self-conscious analyzers, and the world ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... to strive for the very best it offers. Have confidence in yourself, little girl, in your ability, your power, your spark of genius touched by suffering. Every hour you pass now in hideous, misshapen melodrama is worse than wasted. You have that within you well worthy of better setting, nobler environment, and you wrong yourself to remain content with less. You are mine now wherever you go, whatever triumphs you win; mine in spite of the law, because I possess your heart. I should ...
— Beth Norvell - A Romance of the West • Randall Parrish
... laughing ruefully at the difference between it and the one of his day-dreams. He was too much of a Westerner not to see the humor of the comedy in which he had been forced to take a leading part, but he had insight enough to divine that it was much more likely to prove melodrama than farce. ...
— A Daughter of the Dons - A Story of New Mexico Today • William MacLeod Raine
... wonderfully as Dickens could have 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 to be evolved by the "Chimes" from the ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... a tide of rich sweetness began to course through her heart and break in splendid expectation from her eyes, as they looked through the little unglazed window toward the fort. Nor had she long to wait. He came up the narrow wet street, striding like a tall actor in the height of a melodrama, his powerful figure erect as an Indian's, and his face glowing with the joy of a genuine, impatient lover, who is proud of himself because of the image he ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... I can depend upon you. All this seems like a scene out of a melodrama, but it's wretchedly real for all that. Ray, I am just waking up to a knowledge of how much plotting and wickedness there is in this world; even in our little world ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch
... soar into the realms of melodrama and forget the garden you had asked her to show you, she sensibly tried to amuse herself. She is in ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe
... I had once seen a melodrama, and I recollected that the villain of the piece had used the same action, the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... great merit in Pantomimic performances of a different character, which all are aware of, who have ever seen him in the melodrama, called "Perouse," and other ...
— A History of Pantomime • R. J. Broadbent
... appellation of irregular. 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, ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... six evenings and two matinees, she was booked to take the stage from the rise of the curtain and leave it for scarcely more than two minutes at a time until the fall. This was by no means her first show. Before that she had been pantomime fairy, orphan child in melodrama, waif in a music-hall sketch, millionaire's pet in a Society play, a mischievous boy in a popular farce, dancer in a big ballet, and now the lead in a famous fairy play, at a salary of ten pounds a week. No wonder Dad ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... 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 ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 334 Saturday, October 4, 1828 • Various
... image in his memory, a face he would have difficulty in forgetting. It was a long, chalk-white face, topped by a black fedora hat—a face garnished at the thin gray lips by a mustache, black and spikelike, resembling nothing more closely than the coal-black mustache affected by the old-time melodrama villains. ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... 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. See notes to the letter ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... needed, he left his frogs and rabbits to some repose under their trying and mysterious dispensation of unexplained shocks, and went to finish his evening at the theatre of the Porte Saint Martin, where there was a melodrama which he had already seen several times; attracted, not by the ingenious work of the collaborating authors, but by an actress whose part it was to stab her lover, mistaking him for the evil-designing duke of the piece. Lydgate was in love with this actress, as ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... exaggerating, Duncombe murmured to himself. He was a newspaper correspondent, and he saw these things with the halo of melodrama around them. And yet—four nights ago. His face was ...
— A Maker of History • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... both by friends and foes. His friends depict him as a strenuous man of action; his opponents depict him as a coarse man of business; when, as a fact, he is neither one nor the other, but an admirable romantic orator and romantic actor. He has one power which is the soul of melodrama—the power of pretending, even when backed by a huge majority, that he has his back to the wall. For all mobs are so far chivalrous that their heroes must make some show of misfortune—that sort of hypocrisy is the ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... eighties; steel assumed the appearance of life 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 began to bite, to buy. It was ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... 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 ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... the old offices of Good Words, so frequently made use of by Dickens in the later years of his life), and "The Vaudeville," were given over to musical comedy and farce. "The Adelphi," though newly constructed at that time, was then, as now, the home of melodrama. ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... most scurvy trick we are playing on the Dons, friend Benteen," he murmured smiling easily, while peering about him in the darkness. "And now, what is the next act in this midnight melodrama, most cautious youth?" ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... German entering therein was going to certain death. The beds were made over subterranean caves, the wardrobes were make-believe doors, in every corner was lurking an assassin. This traitorous nation, which was arranging its ground like the scenario of a melodrama, would have to be chastised. The municipal officers, the priests, the schoolmasters were directing ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... the melodrama of Smyth's invasion of Canada. The whole affair was disgraceful and humiliating. 'What wretched work Smyth and Porter have made of it!' wrote General Wadsworth to General Van Rensellaer from his home at Genesee at the close of the year. 'I wish those who are disposed to find so much fault ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 2 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Edgerton Ryerson
... actor, was born in Chelsea, and made his first appearance on the stage at Bath in 1806, and his first London appearance in 1808. At Covent Garden in 1813, in light comedy and melodrama, he made his first decided success. He Was Pylades to Macready's Orestes in Ambrose Philips's Distressed Mother when Macready made his first appearance at that theatre (1816). He created the parts of Appius Claudius in Sheridan ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... scenes of the drama probably none plays a part more useful than the village festival. This merrymaking appears twice or thrice in an ordinary pantomime, regularly adorns the melodrama, is almost an essential of the opera, could not be dispensed with in the plays of the Fanchon type, and may even relieve the sombre tints of dire tragedy. We all know the charming spectacle: peasant youths and maidens, clad in all the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various
... of his tale. In Canticles we have a contrasted picture between the simplicity of shepherd-life and the urban voluptuousness which was soon to attain its climax in the court of the Ptolemies. So the poet chose the luxurious reign of Solomon as the background for his exquisite "melodrama." Both Ruth and Canticles are home-products, and ancient Greek literature has no real ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... disguised as a knight, fights a duel with her lover Tancredi, who, not knowing his opponent, gives her a fatal wound. The strokes of the sword are accompanied by the pizzicati of the violins, and the suspense when Clorinda falls is characterized by the tremolo—two devices universal in melodrama to the present day. ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews |
