Some Opinions of Mr. Kernahan’s Published Work
Saturday Review.—“There is a touch of genius, perhaps even more than a touch, about this brilliant and original booklet.”
Times.—“A writer of much insight and originality.”
Spectator.—“Truly as well as finely said.”
Contemporary Review.—“A brilliantly versatile novelist and a charming essayist.”
Sir J. M. Barrie, in the British Weekly.—“The vigour of this book is great, and the author has an uncommon gift of intensity. On many readers, it may be guessed, the book will have a mesmeric effect.”
Sir A. Quiller-Couch.—“It is, as is every story which Mr. Kernahan writes, vivid, and effectively told.”
Daily Chronicle.—“Of haunting beauty.”
Academy.—“His book is a fine one, and we think it will live.”
Bookman.—“Work which deserves to live.”
Punch.—“Rises are freely predicted in Kernahans.” (Mr. Punch on “The Literary Stock Exchange.”)
Mr. I. Zangwill.—“A genius for poetical and spiritual allegory.”
Truth.—“No one approaches Mr. Kernahan in the sincerity and intensity of his imaginative flights. For myself I can say that I have read Visions with the keenest pleasure. They have the penetrating and the revealing power of Ithuriel’s spear.... Extraordinarily powerful.”
Morning Post.—“The prose is fascinating, the matter is important to every thinking man, the treatment is so attractive that one is compelled to read the book from cover to cover at once. Studies in which the imagination takes strong wings, written in prose that is both masculine in quality and haunting.”
Globe.—“A brilliant success.”
Daily Telegraph.—“Great reverence and much literary power.”
Athenæum.—“Of singular beauty and tenderness, but at the same time full of critical insight.”
St. James’s Gazette.—“It would seem as if the author of A Dead Man’s Diary and A Book of Strange Sins had found for the weird moods and impulses, the sighs and sobs from a hidden world, which he has before controlled in the realm of fiction, a local habitation and a name in the personalities of the actual mortals he delineates in these luminous sketches.”
Mr. Eden Phillpotts.—“These scholarly papers. His essay on Heine shows a wonderfully accurate estimate of that fantastic genius, while his Rossetti shows critical insight of a high order.”
Pall Mall Gazette.—“If one of the wholesome offices of tragic literature be to purify the soul by terror, Mr. Kernahan has done something towards the purification of the world.”
Daily Mail.—“Crowded with pictures of great imaginative beauty.... There can be no doubt that this little book must make a very deep and abiding impression upon the hearts and minds of all who read it.”
Mr. T. P. O’Connor.—“I do not remember to have read for a long time a study of the deadliness to soul and body—of what I may even call the murderousness of purely sensual passion—in which the moral is so finely, and I must use the word, awfully conveyed.”
Evening News.—“The revelations are those of a man of genius. Callous or brainless must the man or woman be who can rise from its perusal without tumultuous and chastening thought.”
The Daily Chronicle.—“A writer possessing not only a fine literary gift, and a marvellous power of intense emotional realisation, but a fresh, strange, and fascinating imaginative outlook. We know of nothing published in recent years which, in lurid impressiveness and relentless veracity of rendering, is to be compared with this.”
The Sketch.—“The daring freshness of his thought, his great ability in expressing it, his contempt for common tradition, the sincerity which exudes from every page of his work, captivate the reader. I do not know any piece of prose which opens up so many great questions in so few lines.”
The Star.—“Palpitating with life. Terrible in their intensity and vivid vivisection of human mind and character. In dealing with such subjects as these, any one but Mr. Kernahan would be morbid, perhaps revolting. Mr. Kernahan writes of them with a power which is often genius. The work of a man who, seeing beneath the crust of life, had the courage and the power to write what he saw.”
Mr. Barry Pain.—“We find beautiful and appreciative writing in these pages.”
The Illustrated London News.—“All must recognise the boundless charity, the literary power, and the intense sincerity of one of the most interesting works of the year.”
The late Mr. B. Fletcher Robinson, in Daily Express.—“There are two Coulson Kernahans. The one is a novelist who loves a good plot, and a dashing adventure; the other a serious thinker who rises to imaginative heights in his efforts to pierce the mystery that cloaks the future life of us poor mortals.”
The Times.—“He is perhaps the hundredth individual who in recent fiction has devoted himself to amateur detection, and he is certainly ’one in a hundred’ as regards his exceptional success.... This simple sample must suffice for extract, but we may assure the reader that there are plenty more where it came from.”
World.—“A writer of fiction who has come among us carrying Aladdin’s lamp—imagination.... Bold and brilliant in inception.... Deep and tender humanity pervades the whole work.”
Literary World.—“A man with a command of beautiful English with exquisite insight into the poetry of life and with the delicate touch of the rare literary critic.... A volume of delightful essays, almost Lamblike in their tender pathos and humour.”
New York World (U.S.A.).—“The strongest stories that have been written in many a long day. No one who is guilty of sin can read these stories without realising their truth. They are like Conscience sitting alone with him staring him steadily sternly in the face.... This spiritual rhapsody shows you one facet of this brilliant Irishman’s genius. Turn to the Literary Gent, and you will see another utterly different—fearful, almost cruel.”
Boston Herald (U.S.A.)—“A book which must certainly be accounted one of the pronounced literary successes of the time. It has gone through various editions in America, as well as in England, and I think no one who has read it could ever quite escape from its haunting spell. It contains passages of poetic prose, which no lover of the beautiful will overlook, and its appeal to the consciences of men is even more strenuous. I am not surprised to hear that the first English edition of 2000 copies was exhausted a few days after publication.”
Louise Chandler Moulton (U.S.A.) in Syndicate Article, “Four Modern Men.”—“A story which Hawthorne might have been content to sign.... Two prose-poems which to my mind far surpass the prose-poems of Turgenieff.... This has been compared to Mrs. Gatty’s Parables from Nature, but Mrs. Gatty has never written anything to rank with it for poetic charm. To find this exquisite and tender idyl among these tragedies of shipwrecked souls is like hearing the divine note of the nightingale through the stress and clamour of a tempest.”
[In collaboration with the late Mr. Frederick Locker-Lampson.]
Mr. Edmund Gosse, C.B., in the Illustrated London News.—“Where so many skilful hands have tried to produce rival anthologies, these two, each in its own class, preserve their unquestionable superiority. Mr. Locker-Lampson has been helped in re-publication by Mr. Coulson Kernahan, who has entered into the elegant spirit of the Editor, and has continued his labours with taste and judgment.”
Mr. A. C. Swinburne, in his volume, Studies in Prose and Poetry.—“There is no better or completer anthology in the language. I doubt, indeed, if there be any so good or so complete. No objection or suggestion which can reasonably be offered can in any way diminish our obligation, either to the original Editor, or to his evidently able assistant, Mr. Coulson Kernahan.”
THE WORKS OF
Oscar Wilde
Pall Mall Gazette.—“It is hard to decide which is more pleasing in this book—the text or the illustrations. The Senior Pepys has transmitted something of all his wonderful and divers qualities to the descendant—his ubiquitous eye, his garrulousness, his exuberant egoism and perfect selfishness, and his humour.”
Star.—“A more agreeable gallery of diverting worldlings we have seldom met.”
Westminster Gazette.—“Being absolutely inimitable, Pepys has had many imitators. But none with whom we are acquainted has succeeded so well in a most difficult task as ‘Samuel Pepys, Junr.’”
Land and Water.—“Great events have crowded so quickly on one another that already we find it difficult to arrange our recollections rightly. In this diary, flavoured with Attic salt, we are carried back to hours and controversies which seem to-day almost to belong to a previous life. Into whatever page one may choose to dip, there is something to arrest attention, to encourage reading and to awaken mirth.”
To-Day.—“Here at length we have an imitation of Pepys’ Diary which is as perfect and satisfying as such a thing could well be. Samuel Pepys, Junior, knows the original with uncanny exactitude.”
British Weekly.—“A book of genius. In many ways it is the most wonderful book that this war has produced.”
Daily Mail.—“It is the most diverting book that has appeared for many a day. Laughable though the book is, it has the seriousness and the acid of all good satire, and is as faithful a history withal of these days as any that the serious historians have penned.”
UNDER THE TRICOLOUR
Morning Post.—“The most hilarious of all the stories... would make the sides of an archbishop ache with laughter; it is an irresistible thing.”
Sunday Times.—“The stories are veritable gems. No student of the soldier spirit or of the psychology of our gallant allies should miss this book. Admirably translated and excellently illustrated.”
Evening Standard.—“We commend the book to the ordinary man... the tales are well told and abound in happy touches.”
BARNAVAUX
Those who have read “Under the Tricolour” will recognise Barnavaux at an old friend, as he is the “hero” of many of the stories in both works. All the stories are entirely original, and they are striking in different ways, many of them being worthy of comparison with the works of the greatest French short-story writers.
LOUISE AND BARNAVAUX
There is yet another volume of short stories dealing mostly with the French Colonial soldiery, and the ever delightful Barnavaux is again one of the most conspicuous figures.
Some of these stories are undoubtedly among the best that Mr. Mille has written.
C THE RED LILY
MOTHER OF PEARL
THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS
C THE CRIME OF SYLVESTRE BONNARD
THE WELL OF ST. CLARE
THAIS
THE WICKER-WORK WOMAN
THE WHITE STONE
PENGUIN ISLAND
BALTHASAR
THE ELM-TREE ON THE MALL
ON LIFE AND LETTERS. 2 vols. 1st and 2nd Ser.
THE MERRIE TALES OF JACQUES TOURNEBROCHE
AT THE SIGN OF THE REINE PEDAUQUE
JOCASTA AND THE FAMISHED CAT
THE ASPIRATIONS OF JEAN SERVIEN
THE OPINIONS OF JEROME COIGNARD
MY FRIEND’S BOOK
THE GODS ARE ATHIRST
THE REVOLT OF THE ANGELS
CRAINQUEBILLE
THE PATH OF GLORY. With Illustrations. Written by Anatole France to be sold for the benefit of French disabled soldiers.
THE AMETHYST RING [In the Press
PIERRE NOZIÈRE
FOUR PLAYS [In Preparation