The editor of a great American newspaper once offered the author of these
lines a commission to explore a lost country, the seat of a fallen and
forgotten civilisation. It was not in Yucatan, or Central Africa, or
Thibet, or Kafiristan, this desolate region, once so popular, so gaudy,
so much frequented and desired. It was only the fashionable novels of
the Forties, say from 1835 to 1850, that I was requested to examine and
report upon. But I shrank from the colossal task. I am no Mr. Stanley;
and the length, the difficulties, the arduousness of the labour appalled
me. Besides, I do not know where that land lies, the land of the old
Fashionable Novel, the Kor of which Thackeray's Lady Fanny Flummery is
the Ayesha. What were the names of the old novels, and who were the
authors, and in the circulating library of what undiscoverable watering-
place are they to be found? We have heard of Mrs. Gore, we have heard of
_Tremayne_, _and Emilia Wyndham_, and the _Bachelor of the Albany_; and
many of us have read _Pelham_, or know him out of Carlyle's art, and
those great curses which he spoke. But who was the original, or who were
the originals, that sat for the portrait of the "Fashionable Authoress,"
Lady Fanny Flummery? and of what work is _Lords and Liveries_ a parody?
The author is also credited with _Dukes and Dejeuners_, _Marchionesses
and Milliners_, etc. Could, any candidate in a literary examination name
the prototypes? "Let mantua-makers puff her, but not men," says
Thackeray, speaking of Lady Fanny Flummery, "and the Fashionable
Authoress is no more. Blessed, blessed thought! No more fiddle-faddle
novels! When will you arrive, O happy Golden Age!"
Well, it has arrived, though we are none the happier for all that. The
Fashionable Novel has ceased to exist, and the place of the fashionable
authoress knows her no more. Thackeray plainly detested Lady Fanny. 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 Fanny
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 fashion 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 fashion who write novels; but we read
nowhere such extraordinary adulations as Augustus Timson bestowed on Lady
Fanny. The fashionable authoress is nearly extinct, though some persons
write well albeit they are fashionable. The fashionable 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 title. 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 fashionable 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 nobody
writes it, and, if anybody did write it in the modern manner, it would
not in the least resemble the old fashionable 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 fashionable 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
Fanny 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 fashionable authoress 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 nobly 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 Fanny 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 snobbish as
ever, though the gods 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 fashion is "played out." Nobody
cares to read or write about the dear duchess. 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 fashion,
indeed, but who has nothing in him of the old fashionable novelist.
Is it to a Republic, to France, that we must look for our fashionable
novels--to France and to America. Every third person in M. Guy de
Maupassant'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
fashion. 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 Duchesses, whose hearts are only too good, and who get
into the most complicated amorous scrapes. 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 _noblesse_, 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 Fanny Flummery _reussie_,--Lady Fanny with the trifling
additional qualities of wit and daring? Observe her noble scorn of M.
George Ohnet: it is a fashionable arrogance.
To my mind, I confess, the decay of the British fashionable novel seems
one of the most threatening signs of the times. Even in France
institutions are much more permanent than here. In France they have
fashionable 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
fashionable 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--titles, and lands, and rents. Is it not a hard
thing that an honest British snob, 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 fashionable novels. It is a queer domain of fashion, 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 Fanny
Flummery would have been sadly to seek, for her characters, though noble,
were moral, and her pen was wielded on the side of Church and State. But
these western fashionables 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 _Parnassiculet Contemporain_. As one
peruses these novels one thinks of a new tale to be told--_The Last of
the Fashionables_, 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--