The Sieur de Maletroit's Door embodies the same idea as a well-known
French play in verse and in one act. The version of Stevenson is like an
exquisite water-color copy, almost as good as the original.
The Isle of Voices is the production of a man of genius. No one can too
much admire the legerdemain of the magician who could produce this
thing; for it is a story out of the Arabian Nights, told with a
perfection of mannerism, a reproduction of the English in which the
later translators of the Arabian Nights have seen fit to deal, a
simulation of the movement and detail of the Eastern stories which
fairly takes our breath away.
It is "ask and have" with this man. Like Mephistopheles in the
Raths-Keller, he gives us what vintage we call for. Olalla is an
instance in point. Any one familiar with Merimee's stories will smile at
the naivete with which Stevenson has taken the leading idea of Lokis,
and surrounded it with the Spanish sunshine of Carmen. But we have
"fables," moralities, and psychology, Jekyl and Hyde, Markheim, and Will
O' the Mill.
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