Virginibus Puerisque, and Other PapersStevenson, Robert Louis
General
Virginibus Puerisque, and Other Papers
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Essays
very double chin with an air of intelligence and insight. And all these
portraits are so pat and 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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