| Hee. Sometimes I love nineteenth-century reviews | [Apr. 26th, 2008|01:14 pm] |
They say scathing things in such an uptight manner.
This is from a review by J. W. Marston, in 1862, of Meredith's "Modern Love" (his long poem on the failure of a marriage, based on his own desertion by his wife):
"We are not sure that, after great labour, we have arrived at Mr Meredith’s drift; but we are quite sure that, if we have, we do not care for it…We have already intimated that ‘Modern Love’ contains passages of true beauty and feeling; but they are like the casual glimpses of a fair landscape in some noxious clime, where the mists only break to gather in again more densely. Besides, the best gifts of expression would be wasted on a theme so morbid as the present." |
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