The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. 02Stevenson, Robert Louis
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The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. 02
Stevenson, Robert Louis
English literature -- 19th century
telling, and look at you so spiritedly from the walls, that, compared
with the sort of living people one sees about the streets, they are as
bright new sovereigns to fishy and obliterated sixpences. Some
disparaging thoughts upon our own generation could hardly fail to
present themselves; but it is perhaps only the _sacer vates_ who is
wanting; and we also, painted by such a man as Carolus Duran, may look
in holiday immortality upon our children and grandchildren.
Raeburn's young women, to be frank, are by no means of the same order of
merit. No one, of course, could be insensible to the presence of Miss
Janet Suttie or Mrs. Campbell of Possil. When things are as pretty as
that, criticism is out of season. But, on the whole, it is only with
women of a certain age that he can be said to have succeeded, in at all
the same sense as we say he succeeded with men. The younger women do not
seem to be made of good flesh and blood. They are not painted in rich
and unctuous touches. They are dry and diaphanous. And although young
ladies in Great Britain are all that can be desired of them, I would
fain hope they are not quite so much of that as Raeburn would have us
believe. In all these pretty faces you miss character, you miss fire,
you miss that spice of the devil which is worth all the prettiness in
the world; and, what is worst of all, you miss sex. His young ladies are
not womanly to nearly the same degree as his men are masculine; they are
so in a negative sense; in short, they are the typical young ladies of
the male novelist.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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