Listings for Reader:
Arthur Symons
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Miguel de Cervantes : Don Quixote
'Coming upon a copy of "Don Quixote" in a warder's house, he thought it was "the most wonderful book [he] had ever seen". When he refused to give it up, the warder said he might keep it... "Don Quixote" awakened in Arthur a "passion for reading", and before long, he had read Scott, then Byron, who, he had been told was" a very, very great poet, and a very, very wicked man, an atheist, a writer whom it was dangerous to read".'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Arthur Symons Print: Book
Walter Scott : unknown
'Coming upon a copy of "Don Quixote" in a warder's house, he thought it was "the most wonderful book [he] had ever seen". When he refused to give it up, the warder said he might keep it... "Don Quixote" awakened in Arthur a "passion for reading", and before long, he had read Scott, then Byron, who, he had been told was" a very, very great poet, and a very, very wicked man, an atheist, a writer whom it was dangerous to read".'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Arthur Symons Print: Book
George Gordon Lord Byron : unknown
'Coming upon a copy of "Don Quixote" in a warder's house, he thought it was "the most wonderful book [he] had ever seen". When he refused to give it up, the warder said he might keep it... "Don Quixote" awakened in Arthur a "passion for reading", and before long, he had read Scott, then Byron, who, he had been told was" a very, very great poet, and a very, very wicked man, an atheist, a writer whom it was dangerous to read".'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Arthur Symons Print: Book
Henry Fielding : Tom Jones
'In various letters to Osborne he mentions having received "Tom Jones" which he did not care for; "Jane Eyre" he thought a "wonderful book"; in a volume titled "British Dramatists" he thought Webster's "The Duchess of Malfi" "the best by head and shoulders"; Carlyle's "Heroes and Hero Worship" he admired "exceedingly" (he proceeded to write an essay of twenty-six notepaper pages on Carlyle); of Thackeray's "Henry Esmond" he told Osborne that he thought it a "great book", though he disliked its "overelaboration": "perhaps you may say it is merely an additional grace - but I think it stands rather in the way of true eloquence and geninely forceful tragedy, not that I deny there is both eloquence and tragedy in 'Esmond', but I think there might have been more and grander but for that elaborateness".'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Arthur Symons Print: Book
Charlotte Bronte : Jane Eyre
'In various letters to Osborne he mentions having received "Tom Jones" which he did not care for; "Jane Eyre" he thought a "wonderful book"; in a volume titled "British Dramatists" he thought Webster's "The Duchess of Malfi" "the best by head and shoulders"; Carlyle's "Heroes and Hero Worship" he admired "exceedingly" (he proceeded to write an essay of twenty-six notepaper pages on Carlyle); of Thackeray's "Henry Esmond" he told Osborne that he thought it a "great book", though he disliked its "overelaboration": "perhaps you may say it is merely an additional grace - but I think it stands rather in the way of true eloquence and geninely forceful tragedy, not that I deny there is both eloquence and tragedy in 'Esmond', but I think there might have been more and grander but for that elaborateness".'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Arthur Symons Print: Book
John Webster : The Duchess of Malfi
'In various letters to Osborne he mentions having received "Tom Jones" which he did not care for; "Jane Eyre" he thought a "wonderful book"; in a volume titled "British Dramatists" he thought Webster's "The Duchess of Malfi" "the best by head and shoulders"; Carlyle's "Heroes and Hero Worship" he admired "exceedingly" (he proceeded to write an essay of twenty-six notepaper pages on Carlyle); of Thackeray's "Henry Esmond" he told Osborne that he thought it a "great book", though he disliked its "overelaboration": "perhaps you may say it is merely an additional grace - but I think it stands rather in the way of true eloquence and geninely forceful tragedy, not that I deny there is both eloquence and tragedy in 'Esmond', but I think there might have been more and grander but for that elaborateness".'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Arthur Symons Print: Book
Thomas Carlyle : Heroes and Hero Worship
'In various letters to Osborne he mentions having received "Tom Jones" which he did not care for; "Jane Eyre" he thought a "wonderful book"; in a volume titled "British Dramatists" he thought Webster's "The Duchess of Malfi" "the best by head and shoulders"; Carlyle's "Heroes and Hero Worship" he admired "exceedingly" (he proceeded to write an essay of twenty-six notepaper pages on Carlyle); of Thackeray's "Henry Esmond" he told Osborne that he thought it a "great book", though he disliked its "overelaboration": "perhaps you may say it is merely an additional grace - but I think it stands rather in the way of true eloquence and geninely forceful tragedy, not that I deny there is both eloquence and tragedy in 'Esmond', but I think there might have been more and grander but for that elaborateness".'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Arthur Symons Print: Book
William Makepeace Thackeray : Henry Esmond
'In various letters to Osborne he mentions having received "Tom Jones" which he did not care for; "Jane Eyre" he thought a "wonderful book"; in a volume titled "British Dramatists" he thought Webster's "The Duchess of Malfi" "the best by head and shoulders"; Carlyle's "Heroes and Hero Worship" he admired "exceedingly" (he proceeded to write an essay of twenty-six notepaper pages on Carlyle); of Thackeray's "Henry Esmond" he told Osborne that he thought it a "great book", though he disliked its "overelaboration": "perhaps you may say it is merely an additional grace - but I think it stands rather in the way of true eloquence and geninely forceful tragedy, not that I deny there is both eloquence and tragedy in 'Esmond', but I think there might have been more and grander but for that elaborateness".'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Arthur Symons Print: Book
George Borrow : Lavengro
'Arthur became interested in "humanity" when he discovered George Borrow's semi-autobiographical novel "Lavengro" (1851), which contains the author's adventures among gypsies; as a result Arthur began studying Romany. For the remainder of his life he was absorbed by both the gypsies and their language, perhaps because of their rootlessness and wanderings'.
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Arthur Symons Print: Book
Dante Gabriel Rossetti : 'Sister Helen'
'Before leaving BIdeford, he told Osborne, he had read Rossetti's poems "rapturously": "I am mad about Rossetti ever since and I solemnly declare that of all poems that I have read "Sister Helen" is the finest. Never in my life, not in Shakespeare, not even in Browning have I read such superbly passionate, such agonizingly intense accents of unfaltering revenge and implacable hate, creating, surely, a new shudder!"'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Arthur Symons Print: Unknown
Leith Derwent [pseud.] : Circe's Lovers
'In June, a three-volume novel titled "Circe's Lovers" appeared, written by Leith Derwent (the pseudonym of John Veitch), a friend of Osborne. Interested in this novelist principally because Osborne knew him, Arthur wrote a lengthy letter to his friend praising the novel as "a very clever book... powerfully and thrillingly written" but "too sensational" for his taste.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Arthur Symons Print: Book
William Dean Howells : A Modern Instance
'In another letter Arthur praises William Dean Howells's "A Modern Instance" as "a owerful novel - bare, blank, utterly unidealised realism, not by any means the ideal 'imaginative realism', but still, in its lower sphere, what mastery!"'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Arthur Symons Print: Book
Theophile Gautier : Emaux et Camees
'Now he discovered "one of Swinburne's models" - Gautier: "I have just bought is "Emaux et Camees", he told Osborne, "translated several of them, and read a good many. Scarcely since I first came across Rossetti have I received so new, so fresh, so powerful an impression from any work or style of verse. I have added a new string to my bow".'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Arthur Symons Print: Book
George Meredith : Evan Harrington
'In discussing Meredith's "Evan Harrington" (1861) in a letter to Campbell, Arthur reveals his Victorian-orientated interst in the autobiographical element in novels: "... there is really a wonderful sympathy & tenderness towards the suffering Lady Dunstane. Does it not seem as if she may be, at least in some points, his wife? I should like to think so."'
