'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
'I have had a day of open air; only a little modified by Le Capitaine Fracasse before the dining room fire.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Robert Louis Stevenson Print: Book
'It has the same talent as Emaux et Camees and no other.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Robert Louis Stevenson Print: Book
'I am sending you with my love a pretty edition of "Emaux et Camées" [of Théophile Gautier]. I don't think you have anything on your shelves of the bon poète. I haven't seen these poems since, since the days before the Deluge. How simple they were those great romantics!'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Joseph Conrad Print: Book
'From that time for ten years Conrad followed the sea. The deep sea, reading all sorts of books. Once an officer with quarters of his own he resumed his reading of French along with the English popular works. He read with the greatest veneration Flaubert and Maupassant; with less, Daudet and Gautier; with much less, Pierre Loti. Tormented with the curiosity of words, even at sea, on the margins of the French books he made notes for the translation of phrases. The writer has seen several of these old books of Conrad, notably an annotated copy of "Pêcheur d'Islande" — and of course the copy of "Madame Bovary" upon the endpapers and margins of which "Almayer's Folly" was begun.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Joseph Conrad Print: Book
'In one letter, written in June 1893, he logs Swinburne's Poems and Ballads, Lorna Doone ("seventh or eighth time"), Saintsbury's Essays on French Novelists, Dumas's Tulipe Noire, Maupassant, and some poems of Hugo and Gautier. A month later he is reporting on Andrew Lang's Lectures on Literature ("very good"), P. G. Hamerton's Intellectual Life ("excellent"), the poems of Robert Bridges ("very good") Henry James's Madonna of the Future ("peculiar"), R. L. Stevenson's Kidnapped and Master of Ballantrae ("fourth or fifth time"), Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris, and Ibsen's Doll House, League of Youth and Pillars of Society. "I am beginning to like Ibsen more than I did. I understand him better."'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: John Buchan Print: Book