Old Friends, Epistolary Parody | Page 4

her way by that good man? Assuredly
Dugald Dalgetty in his wanderings in search of fights and fortune may
have crushed a cup or rattled a dicebox with four gallant gentlemen of
the King's Mousquetaires. It is agreeable to wonder what all these very
real people would have thought of their companions in the region of
Romance, and to guess how their natures would have acted and reacted
on each other.
This was the idea which suggested the following little essays in parody.
In making them the writer, though an assiduous and veteran novel
reader, had to recognise that after all he knew, on really intimate and
friendly terms, comparatively few people in the Paradise of Fiction.
Setting aside the dramatic poets and their creations, the children of
Moliere and Shakspeare, the reader of novels will find, may be, that his
airy friends are scarce so many as he deemed. We all know Sancho and
the Don, by repute at least; we have all our memories of Gil Blas;
Manon Lescaut does not fade from the heart, nor her lover, the
Chevalier des Grieux, from the remembrance. Our mental picture of
Anna Karenine is fresh enough and fair enough, but how few can most
of us recall out of the myriad progeny of George Sand! Indiana,
Valentine, Lelia, do you quite believe in them, would you know them if
you met them in the Paradise of Fiction? Noun one might recognise,
but there is a haziness about La Petite Fadette. Consuelo, let it be
admitted, is not evanescent, oblivion scatters no poppy over her; but

Madame Sand's later ladies, still more her men, are easily lost in the
forests of fancy. Even their names with difficulty return to us, and if we
read the roll-call, would Horace and Jacques cry Adsum like the good
Colonel? There are living critics who have all Mr. George Meredith's
heroines and heroes and oddities at their finger ends, and yet forget that
musical name, like the close of a rich hexameter, Clare Doria Forey.
But this is a digression; it is perhaps admitted that George Sand, so
great a novelist, gave the world few characters who live in and are dear
to memory. We can just fancy one of her dignified later heroines, all
self- renunciation and rural sentiment, preaching in vain to that real
woman, Emma Bovary. HER we know, her we remember, as we
remember few, comparatively, of Balzac's thronging faces, from La
Cousine Bette to Seraphitus Seraphita. Many of those are certain to live
and keep their hold, but it is by dint of long and elaborate preparation,
description, analysis. A stranger intermeddleth not with them, though
we can fancy Lucien de Rubempre let loose in a country
neighbourhood of George Sand's, and making sonnets and love to some
rural chatelaine, while Vautrin might stray among the ruffians of
Gaboriau, a giant of crime. Among M. Zola's people, however it may
fare with others, I find myself remembering few: the guilty Hippolytus
of "La Curee," the poor girl in "La Fortune des Rougon," the Abbe
Mouret, the artist in "L'Oeuvre," and the half idiotic girl of the farm
house, and Helene in "Un Page d'Amour." They are not amongst M.
Zola's most prominent creations, and it must be some accident that
makes them most memorable and recognisable to one of his readers.
Probably we all notice that the characters of fiction who remain our
intimates, whose words come to our lips often, whose conduct in this or
that situation we could easily forecast, are the characters whom we met
when we were young. We may be wrong in thinking them the best, the
most true and living of the unborn; perhaps they only seem so real
because they came fresh to fresh hearts and unworn memories. This at
least we must allow for, when we are tempted to say about novelists,
"The old are better." It was we who, long ago, were young and better,
better fitted to enjoy and retain the pleasure of making new visionary
acquaintances. If this be so, what an argument it is in favour of reading
the best books first and earliest in youth! Do the ladies who now find
Scott slow, and Miss Austen dull, and Dickens vulgar, and Thackeray

prosy, and Fielding and Richardson impossible, come to this belief
because they began early with the volumes of the circulating library?
Are their memories happily stored with the words and deeds of modern
fictitious romps, and passionate governesses, and tremendous
guardsmen with huge cigars? Are the people of--well, why mention
names of living authors?--of whom you will--are those as much to the
young readers of 1890 as Quentin Durward, and Colonel Newcome,
and Sam Weller, and Becky Sharp, and Anne Elliot, and Elizabeth
Bennett, and Jane Eyre