International Weekly Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science — Volume 1, No. 3, July 15, 1850Various
Science
International Weekly Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science — Volume 1, No. 3, July 15, 1850
Various
Art -- Periodicals; Literature -- Periodicals; Science -- Periodicals
Mr. G.P.R. James arrived in New York on the Fourth, and "landed amid
discharges of artillery, the huzzas of assembled thousands, and such
an imposing military display as is rarely seen in this country except
on occasions of great moment and universal interest." He is certainly
entitled to all the ceremonious honors he will receive during his
summer in America, for no man living, probably, has contributed
more to the quiet and rational pleasure of the people here than this
prolific but always intelligent and gentlemanly author. We have it
from the best authority that Mr. James does not intend in any way
whatever to meddle with the copyright question, and that he will
not write a book about us on his return to England. He visits the
United States for a season's agreeable relaxation, with his family,
comprising his wife and daughter and three sons. The London _Morning
Chronicle_, in a review of one of his recent compositions, has
the following piece of criticism, in contemplation of the present
interruption of Mr. James's labors:--
"A season without two or three novels from Mr. James would
be a marked year in the world of letters. There is not a
power-loom in all Manchester which works with more untiring,
unswerving regularity. Does Mr. James ever stop to think,
to eat, to drink, to sleep? Is he ever sick? Has he ever a
headache? Is he ever out of sorts, even as other men are, when
they turn away from the inkstand as from a bottle of physic?
We do not believe it. We sometimes doubt whether Mr. James be
a man at all. Is he mortal? Has he flesh and blood, or is he
some indefinite unheard-of machine, some anomaly of nature,
some freak of creation, whose mission is to make novels--and
who accordingly spins, spins away, and never leaves off for
a moment--never! We know how M. Dumas manages to rear his
wonderful literary offspring. With all Mr. James's fertility,
however, the Frenchman has a thousand times Mr. James's
invention. The romances of the latter are simply a series
of ever-changing, yet never novel variations upon the one
original theme furnished by Sir Walter Scott. Dumas, with his
eighty volumes a year, yet manages to be ever fresh, ever
new. Nobody knows, till he reads it, what a novel of the
Frenchman's will be. Everybody, even before he cuts open
page one, can tell you the certain features, the stereotyped
characters, which flourish in eternal youth in the
never-ending productions of James. It is only calling them
by other names, and dressing them in different
costumes--altering, in the description of a castle, the dais
from the one end of the great hall to the other, or some such
important revolution--and _presto_, Mr. James can whip the
personages and the places who flourished in one country and
in one century right slap into another generation and another
land.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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