“All the characters are bizarre—as bizarre as the style.”
“He has a certain gift for inconsequence and highly etherealised frivolity.”
“There is no particular plot.”
“It is a weird medley of Beardsleyesque chatter.”
“This is the real decadence: Huysmans and his friends were muscular giants, playing at bizarre senility, compared with Mr Firbank.”
“Had Shelley written nothing butJulian and MaddaloandThe Cenci, we might have called Mr Firbank a prose Shelley.”
“Mr Firbank, who can write really witty nonsense.”
“But Mr Firbank has talents—a gift of style, a capacity to write dialogue, an appreciation of the beautiful and the absurd. With such gifts he might produce a real comedy of manners. It is to be hoped that he will.”
“In taking to play-writing he has obviously done the right thing.The Princess Zoubaroffis artificial comedy of the uncommonly successful sort.... The brilliancy, suavity and vim of the dialogue.... No present-day social-satirist has parodied more cruelly the elegant verbal affectations, the malicious chatter and fashionable slang that passes for wit and wisdom in Mayfair.”
“Mr Firbank has an extraordinary knack of writing dialogue, and his entirely odious people move and breathe and are completely real. Perhaps some day Mr Firbank will give us a comedy that is not all satire; when he does it might prove an exceedingly brilliant acting play.”
“Possibly someone familiar with the English colony at Florence would regard it as aroman à clef.”
“He is a portent ... a black sheep among white ones....”
“A continuous sparkle of crisp dialogue.”
“Mr Firbank’s endeavours to be wicked are almost pathetic.... Young men with side-whiskers and maids in Assyrian jumpers are raving about Mr Firbank’s audacities....”
“The short story here published reveals a delicate descriptive power, a fine perception of the value of colour, and that restraint which is indispensable to the making of a good short story.”
Out of Print.
“Mr Firbank always had a sense of style and a feeling for the mannered beauty of arranged words.... InSantalthe passion for beautiful writing is still evident, but it is used with greater simplicity to achieve an effect such as a more reticent Pierre Loti might manage.... Mr Firbank has emotion rather than passion, and his East is viewed through a slight haze of sentiment; but it is a real country, and has its own spiritual excitements.”
“Mr Firbank has acquired a reputation as a stylist which this work will enhance. Within its brief compass there is all the glamour, the colour, the heat, the smells, the vileness, the beauty, and the fervour of Islam. It is the sort of thing that Loti does on a grander scale, and, like Loti, Mr Firbank is an adept at the creation of atmosphere. He is guilty of a few affectations perhaps, but these are like precious flaws in a wondrous Turkish carpet—they are lost in the beauty of the design as a whole.”
“Mr Ronald Firbank has always had his own manner, and a very modish one. InSantalthe elegance, almost dandyism, of his style has given just a faint hint of flippancy to a tale in itself very dignified, and full of an unexpected warmth and delicacy of feeling. It is anouvelle—who could call a thing of such distinction a long short story?—with the vivid richly-coloured background of the East.... Something there is, too, of irony and detachment, as though the Mr Firbank ofValmouthand ofThe Princess Zoubaroffwere secretly smiling a little cynically at his unexpected tumble into sentiment.”
“The incense of Santal pervades the book throughout. Mr Firbank is a discriminating artist; he has an exotic sense of words and of colour. Seldom have we met in so short a space so intense a characterisation of pilgrimage or so vivid a picture of the Algerian scene.”
“Mr Firbank here drops his artificiality and gives a vividly real study of an Eastern city ... a vivid glimpse of a world strange—to a European—but convincingly true.”
FOOTNOTES:1The name by which the future saint was sometimes called among her friends.2Always a humiliating recollection with her in after years.Vide: ‘Confessions.’3Winds, pronounced as we’re told, “in poetry.”4The Capital of Pisuerga.5The recollection of this was never quite forgotten.6VideBotticelli.7In Pisuerga compliments are apt to rival in this respect those of the ardent South.8The missing articles were:—5 chasubles.A relic-casket in lapis and diamonds, containing the Tongue of St Thelma.4¾ yards of black lace, said to have “belonged” to the Madonna.9Although the account of Princess Elsie’s arrival in Kairoulla is signed “Green Jersey,” it seems not unlikely that “Eva Schnerb” herself was the reporter on this eventful occasion.10The Théâtre Diana; a Music Hall dedicated to Spanish Zarzuelas and Operettes. It enjoyed a somewhat doubtful reputation.11The Hon. ‘Eddy’ Monteith had succumbed: the shock received by meeting a jackal while composing a sonnet had been too much for him. His tomb is in the Vale of Akko, beside the River Dis. Alas, for thetristeobscurity of his end!12Author ofIn the Dusk of the Dawn.
1The name by which the future saint was sometimes called among her friends.
1The name by which the future saint was sometimes called among her friends.
2Always a humiliating recollection with her in after years.Vide: ‘Confessions.’
2Always a humiliating recollection with her in after years.Vide: ‘Confessions.’
3Winds, pronounced as we’re told, “in poetry.”
3Winds, pronounced as we’re told, “in poetry.”
4The Capital of Pisuerga.
4The Capital of Pisuerga.
5The recollection of this was never quite forgotten.
5The recollection of this was never quite forgotten.
6VideBotticelli.
6VideBotticelli.
7In Pisuerga compliments are apt to rival in this respect those of the ardent South.
7In Pisuerga compliments are apt to rival in this respect those of the ardent South.
8The missing articles were:—5 chasubles.A relic-casket in lapis and diamonds, containing the Tongue of St Thelma.4¾ yards of black lace, said to have “belonged” to the Madonna.
8The missing articles were:—
5 chasubles.A relic-casket in lapis and diamonds, containing the Tongue of St Thelma.4¾ yards of black lace, said to have “belonged” to the Madonna.
5 chasubles.A relic-casket in lapis and diamonds, containing the Tongue of St Thelma.4¾ yards of black lace, said to have “belonged” to the Madonna.
9Although the account of Princess Elsie’s arrival in Kairoulla is signed “Green Jersey,” it seems not unlikely that “Eva Schnerb” herself was the reporter on this eventful occasion.
9Although the account of Princess Elsie’s arrival in Kairoulla is signed “Green Jersey,” it seems not unlikely that “Eva Schnerb” herself was the reporter on this eventful occasion.
10The Théâtre Diana; a Music Hall dedicated to Spanish Zarzuelas and Operettes. It enjoyed a somewhat doubtful reputation.
10The Théâtre Diana; a Music Hall dedicated to Spanish Zarzuelas and Operettes. It enjoyed a somewhat doubtful reputation.
11The Hon. ‘Eddy’ Monteith had succumbed: the shock received by meeting a jackal while composing a sonnet had been too much for him. His tomb is in the Vale of Akko, beside the River Dis. Alas, for thetristeobscurity of his end!
11The Hon. ‘Eddy’ Monteith had succumbed: the shock received by meeting a jackal while composing a sonnet had been too much for him. His tomb is in the Vale of Akko, beside the River Dis. Alas, for thetristeobscurity of his end!
12Author ofIn the Dusk of the Dawn.
12Author ofIn the Dusk of the Dawn.
Transcriber’s Note:Obvious printer errors corrected silently.Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation are as in the original.
Obvious printer errors corrected silently.
Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation are as in the original.