Part 8 (1/2)
Well, it has arrived, though we are none the happier for all that. The Fas.h.i.+onable Novel has ceased to exist, and the place of the fas.h.i.+onable auth.o.r.ess knows her no more. Thackeray plainly detested Lady f.a.n.n.y. He writes about her, her books, her critics, her successes, with a certain bitterness. Can it be possible that a world which rather neglected _Barry Lyndon_ was devoted to _Marchionesses and Milliners_? Lady f.a.n.n.y is represented as having editors and reviewers at her feet; she sits among the flowers, like the Sirens, and around her are the bones of critics corrupt in death. She is puffed for the sake of her bouquets, her dinners, her affabilities and condescensions. She gives a reviewer a great garnet pin, adorned wherewith he paces the town. Her adorers compare her to ”him who sleeps by Avon.” In one of Mr. Black's novels there is a lady of this kind, who captivates the tribe of ”Log Rollers,”
as Mr. Black calls them. This lady appears to myself to be a quite impossible She. One has never met her with her wiles, nor come across her track, even, and seen the bodies and the bones of those who perished in puffing her. Some persons of rank and fas.h.i.+on have a taste for the society of some men of letters, but nothing in the way of literary puffery seems to come of it. Of course many critics like to give their friends and acquaintances an applausive hand, and among their acquaintances may be ladies of fas.h.i.+on who write novels; but we read nowhere such extraordinary adulations as Augustus Timson bestowed on Lady f.a.n.n.y. The fas.h.i.+onable auth.o.r.ess is nearly extinct, though some persons write well albeit they are fas.h.i.+onable. The fas.h.i.+onable novel is as dead as a door nail: _Lothair_ was nearly the last of the species. There are novelists who write about ”Society,” to be sure, like Mr. Norris; but their tone is quite different. They do not speak as if Dukes and Earls were some strange superior kind of beings; their manner is that of men accustomed to and undazzled by Earls, writing for readers who do not care whether the hero is a lord or a commoner. They are ”at ease,” though not terribly ”in Zion.” Thackeray himself introduces plenty of the peerage, but it cannot be said that he is always at ease in their society. He remembers that they are lords, and is on his guard, very often, and suspicious and sarcastic, except, perhaps when he deals with a gentleman like Lord Kew. He examines them like curious wild animals in the Jardin des Plantes. He is an accomplished naturalist, and not afraid of the lion; but he remembers that the animal is royal, and has a t.i.tle. Mr.
Norris, for instance, shows nothing of this mood. Mr. Trollope was not afraid of his Dukes: he thought none the worse of a man because he was the high and puissant prince of Omnium. As for most novelists, they no longer paint fas.h.i.+onable society with enthusiasm. Mr. Henry James has remarked that young British peers favour the word ”beastly,”--a point which does not always impress itself into other people so keenly as into Mr. Henry James. In reading him you do not forget that his Tufts are Tufts. But then Tufts are really strange animals to the denizens of the Great Republic. Perhaps the modern realism has made novelists desert the world where Dukes and Dowagers abound. Novelists do not know very much about it; they are not wont to haunt the gilded saloons, and they prefer to write about the manners which they know. A very good novel, in these strange ruinous times, might be written with a Duke for hero; but n.o.body writes it, and, if anybody did write it in the modern manner, it would not in the least resemble the old fas.h.i.+onable novel.
Here a curious point arises. We have all studied the ingenious lady who calls herself Ouida. Now, is Ouida, or rather was Ouida in her early state sublime, the last of the old fas.h.i.+onable novelists, or did Thackeray unconsciously prophesy of her when he wrote his burlesque _Lords and Liveries_? Think of the young earl of Bagnigge, ”who was never heard to admire anything except a _coulis de dindonneau a la St.
Menehould_, . . . or the bouquet of a flask of Medoc, of Carbonnell's best quality, or a _goutte_ of Marasquin, from the cellars of Briggs and Hobson.” We have met such young patricians in _Under Two Flags_ and _Idalia_. But then there is a difference: Ouida never tells us that her hero was ”blest with a mother of excellent principles, who had imbued his young mind with that morality which is so superior to all the vain pomps of the world.” But a hero of Ouida's might easily have had a father who ”was struck down by the side of the gallant Collingwood in the Bay of Fundy.” The heroes themselves may have ”looked at the Pyramids without awe, at the Alps without reverence.” They do say ”_Corpo di Bacco_,” and the Duca de Montepulciano does reply, ”_E' bellissima certamente_.” And their creator might conceivably remark ”Non cuivis contigit.” But Lady f.a.n.n.y Flummery's ladies could not dress as Ouida's ladies do: they could not quote Petronius Arbiter; they had never heard of Suetonius. No age reproduces itself. There is much of our old fas.h.i.+onable auth.o.r.ess in Ouida's earlier tales; there is plenty of the Peerage, plenty of queer French in old novels and Latin yet more queer; but where is the _elan_ which takes archaeology with a rush, which sticks at no adventure, however n.o.bly incredible? where is the pathos, the simplicity, the purple splendour of Ouida's manner, or manners? No, the spirit of the world, mirroring itself in the minds of individuals, simpered, and that simper was Lady f.a.n.n.y Flummery. But it did many things more portentous than simpering, when it reflected itself in Ouida.
Is it that we do no longer gape on the aristocracy admiringly, and write of them curiously, as if they were creatures in a Paradise? Is it that Thackeray has converted us? In part, surely, we are just as sn.o.bbish as ever, though the G.o.ds of our adoration totter to their fall, and ”a hideous hum” from the mob outside thrills through the temples. In fiction, on the other hand, the world of fas.h.i.+on is ”played out.” n.o.body cares to read or write about the dear d.u.c.h.ess. If a peer comes into a novel he comes in, not as a coroneted curiosity, but as a man, just as if he were a dentist, or a stockbroker. His rank is an accident; it used to be the essence of his luminous apparition. I scarce remember a lord in all the many works of Mr. Besant, nor do they people the romances of Mr.
Black. Mr. Kipling does not deal in them, nor Mr. George Meredith much; Mr. Haggard hardly gets beyond a baronet, and _he_ wears chain mail in Central Africa, and tools with an axe. Mrs. Oliphant has a Scotch peer, but he is less interesting and prominent than his family ghost. No, we have only Ouida left, and Mr. Norris--who writes about people of fas.h.i.+on, indeed, but who has nothing in him of the old fas.h.i.+onable novelist.
Is it to a Republic, to France, that we must look for our fas.h.i.+onable novels--to France and to America. Every third person in M. Guy de Maupa.s.sant's tales has a ”de,” and is a Marquis or a Vicomte. As for M.
Paul Bourget, one really can be happy with him in the fearless old fas.h.i.+on. With him we meet Lord Henry Bohun, and M. De Casal (a Vicomte), and all the Marquises and _Marquises_; and all the pale blue boudoirs, and sentimental d.u.c.h.esses, whose hearts are only too good, and who get into the most complicated amorous sc.r.a.pes. That young Republican, M.
Bourget, sincerely loves a _blason_, a pedigree, diamonds, lace, silver dressing cases, silver baths, essences, pomatums, _le grand luxe_. So does Gyp: apart from her wit, Gyp is delightful to read, introducing us to the very best of bad company. Even M. Fortune du Boisgobey likes a Vicomte, and is partial to the _n.o.blesse_, while M. Georges Ohnet is accused of entering the golden world of rank, like a man without a wedding garment, and of being lost and at sea among his aristocrats. They order these things better in France: they still appeal to the fine old natural taste for rank and luxury, splendour and refinement. What is Gyp but a Lady f.a.n.n.y Flummery _reussie_,--Lady f.a.n.n.y with the trifling additional qualities of wit and daring? Observe her n.o.ble scorn of M.
George Ohnet: it is a fas.h.i.+onable arrogance.
To my mind, I confess, the decay of the British fas.h.i.+onable novel seems one of the most threatening signs of the times. Even in France inst.i.tutions are much more permanent than here. In France they have fas.h.i.+onable novels, and very good novels too: no man of sense will deny that they are far better than our dilettantism of the slums, or our religious and social tracts in the disguise of romance. If there is no new tale of treasure and bandits and fights and lions handy, may I have a fas.h.i.+onable novel in French to fall back upon! Even Count Tolstoi does not disdain the _genre_. There is some uncommonly high life in _Anna Karenine_. He adds a great deal of psychology, to be sure; so does M.
Paul Bourget. But he takes you among smart people, who have everything handsome about them--t.i.tles, and lands, and rents. Is it not a hard thing that an honest British sn.o.b, if he wants to move in the highest circles of fiction, must turn to French novelists, or Russian, or American? As to the American novels of the _elite_ and the _beau monde_, their elegance is obscured to English eyes, because that which makes one New Yorker better than another, that which creates the Upper Ten Thousand (dear phrase!) of New York, is so inconspicuous. For example, the scientific inquirer may venture himself among the novels of two young American authors. Few English students make this voyage of exploration.
But the romances of these ingenious writers are really, or really try to be, a kind of fas.h.i.+onable novels. It is a queer domain of fas.h.i.+on, to be sure, peopled by the strangest aborigines, who talk and are talked about in a language most interesting to the philologist. Here poor Lady f.a.n.n.y Flummery would have been sadly to seek, for her characters, though n.o.ble, were moral, and her pen was wielded on the side of Church and State. But these western fas.h.i.+onables have morals and a lingo of their own, made in equal parts of the American idioms and of expressions transferred from the jargon of Decadence and the _Parna.s.siculet Contemporain_. As one peruses these novels one thinks of a new tale to be told--_The Last of the Fas.h.i.+onables_, who died away, like the buffalo and the grisly bear, in some canon or forest of the Wild West. I think this distinguished being, _Ultimus hominum venustiorum_, will find the last remnants of the Gentlemanly Party in some Indian tribe, Apaches or Sioux. I see him raised to the rank of chief, and leading the red-skinned and painted cavaliers on the war-path against the Vulgarians of the ultimate Democracy. To depict this dandy chief would require the art at once of a Cooper and a Ouida. Let me attempt--
THE LAST FIGHT OF FOUR HAIR-BRUSHES
By this time the Sioux were flying in all directions, mowed down by the fire of Gatling and Maxim guns. The scrub of Little Big Horn Creek was strewn with the bodies of writhing braves. On the livid and volcanic heights of Mount Buncombe, the painted tents were blazing merrily. But on a mound above the creek, an ancient fortress of some long-forgotten people, a small group of Indian hors.e.m.e.n, might be observed, steady as rocks in the refluent tide of war. The fire from their Winchester repeaters blazed out like the streamers of the Northern Lights. Again and again the flower of the United States army had charged up the mound, only to recoil in flight, or to line the cliff with their corpses. The First Irish Cuira.s.siers had been annihilated: Parnell's own, alas! in the heat of the combat had turned their fratricidal black-thorns on M'Carthy's brigade, and these two gallant squadrons were mixed and broken, falling beneath the blows of brothers estranged.
But at last the fire from the Redmen on the bluff slackened and grew silent. The ammunition was exhausted. There was a movement in the group of braves. Crazy Horse and Bald Coyote turned to Four Hair-Brushes, who sat his steed Atalanta, last winner of the last Grand National, with all the old careless elegance of the Row.
”Four Hair-Brushes,” said Crazy Horse (and a tear rolled down his painted cheek), ”nought is left but flight.”
”Then fly,” said Four Hair-Brushes, languidly, lighting a cigarette, which he took from a diamond-studded gold _etui_, the gift of the Kaiser in old days.
”Nay, not without the White Chief,” said Bald Coyote; and he seized the reins of Four Hair-Brushes, to lead him from that stricken field.
”Vous etes trop vieux jeu, mon ami,” murmured Four Hair-Brushes, ”je ne suis ni Edouard II., ni Charles Edouard a Culloden. Quatre-brosses meurt, mais il ne se rend pas.”
The Indian released his hold, baffled by the erudition and the calm courage of his captain.
”I make tracks,” he said; and, swinging round so that his horse concealed his body, he galloped down the bluff, and through the American cavalry, scattering death from the arrows which he loosed under his horse's neck.
Four Hair-Brushes was alone.
Unarmed, as ever, he sat, save for the hunting-whip in his right hand.
”Scalp him!” yelled the Friendly Crows.
”Nay, take him alive: a seemlier knight never backed steed!” cried the gallant Americans.
From their midst rode a courteous cavalier, Captain John Barry, the scholar, the hero of sword and pen.
”Yield thee, Sir Knight!” he said, doffing his _kepi_ in martial courtesy.