From The New York Times: “That Yellow Nuisance Again”

THE YELLOW BOOK. An Illustrated Journal.
Vol. IV. January, 1895. Boston: Copeland &
Day.

The character of the Yellow Book may be
generalized as not nice, but nasty. There
is the leading story, the first one, “The Bo-
hemian Girl,” but she is not as Bunn and
Balfe constructed her. Mr. Henry Harland
makes an emancipated young person, who
is a mademoiselle, and mademoiselle is the
mother or the little Camille, and presumably
the papa was a Brazilian. Mademoiselle
Nina went quite wild until she kept a
boarding house for Bohemians in Paris.
Then she intrusted her funds to the Baron
C., and she was so lucky that she has now
an income of not a penny less than £3,000 a
year, and to-day she rides in the Bois in a
“little basket phaeton drawn by two glossy
bays,” and there is a Mossieu who wants
the world to envy him because he can ride
alongside of Mademoiselle Nina, and he ex-
presses his pride, too, in being the means
of explaining exactly what kind of a person
is mademoiselle. Another story is entitled
“The House of Shame,” and Mr. H. B.
Mariott Watson does indeed write a shame-
ful story. Now we question whether any
American magazine or newspaper would
have printed such a shocking thing. Menie
Muriel Dowies, who writes, “Wladislaw’s
Advent,” is supposably a woman.

It is a charge d’atelier of an outrageous char-
acter. It happens that this Wladislaw looks
something like Christ. M. Dufourer, an art-
ist who paints French pictures, produces
the lowest types of fallen women. He takes
the Pole for a model, drapes him as
the Saviour, and manages to thrust the
semblance of the Son of God into the most
bestial of human abominations. If dramatic
effects are to be sought in English words
by means of such a sacrilege, and to be
accepted, then public taste is foul and
reeks of the sewer. A man may not be re-
ligious, but the semblance of a Christ befud-
dled with La Coquelicotte, an abandoned
woman, dawdling on his knee, is inexpressa-
bly revolting.

Mr. Norman Hapgood’s “Henri Beyle” is
a good but narrow study of the author of
“Le Rouge et le Noir,” but this is better
than anything else in the volume. There is
no fault to be found, either, with a childish
story called “A Falling Out.” Mr. Max
Beerbohm‘s “1880” is flat twaddle. The
poetry generally runs like molasses would,
and is just as sticky. Is the much-reviled
George Moore really so dreadful looking as
he is represented? Has he a jowl hanging
in welts? Are his cheeks coagulated, like
an underdone omelet? Could he be scrofu-
lous?