Old Friends, Epistolary Parody | Page 5

were to young readers of 1860? It may very
well be so, and we seniors will not regret our choice, and the young
men and maids will be pleased enough with theirs. Yet it is not
impossible that the old really are better, and do not gain all their life
and permanent charm merely from the unjaded memories and
affections with which we came to them long ago.
We shall never be certain, for even if we tried the experiment of
comparing, we are no longer good judges, our hearts are with our old
friends, whom we think deathless; their birth is far enough off in time,
but they will serve us for ours.
These friends, it has been said, are not such a very numerous company
after all. Most of them are children of our own soil, their spirits were
made in England, or at least in Great Britain, or, perhaps, came of
English stock across the seas, like our dear old Leather Stocking and
Madam Hester Prynne. Probably most of us are insular enough to
confess this limitation; even if we be so unpatriotic to read far more
new French than new English novels. One may study M. Daudet, and
not remember his Sidonie as we remember Becky, nor his Petit Chose
or his Jack as we remember David Copperfield. In the Paradise of
Fiction are folk of all nations and tongues; but the English (as
Swedenborg saw them doing in his vision of Heaven) keep very much
to themselves. The American visitors, or some of them, disdain our old
acquaintances, and associate with Russian, Spanish, Lithuanian,
Armenian heroes and heroines, conversing, probably, in some sort of
French. Few of us "poor islanders" are so cosmopolitan; we read
foreign novels, and yet among all the brilliant persons met there we
remember but a few. Most of my own foreign friends in fiction wear
love-locks and large boots, have rapiers at their side which they are
very ready to draw, are great trenchermen, mighty fine drinkers, and

somewhat gallant in their conduct to the sex. There is also a citizen or
two from Furetiere's "Roman Bourgeois," there is Manon, aforesaid,
and a company of picaroons, and an archbishop, and a lady styled
Marianne, and a newly ennobled Count of mysterious wealth, and two
grisettes, named Mimi and Musette, with their student-lovers. M.
Balzac has introduced us to mystics, and murderers, and old maids, and
doctors, and adventurers, and poets, and a girl with golden eyes, and
malefactors, and bankrupts, and mad old collectors, peasants, cures,
critics, dreamers, debauchees; but all these are somewhat distant
acquaintances, many of them undesirable acquaintances. In the great
"Comedie Humaine" have you a single real friend? Some of Charles de
Bernard's folk are more akin to us, such as "La Femme de Quarante
Ans," and the owner of the hound Justinian, and that drunken artist in
"Gerfaut." But an Englishman is rather friendless, rather an alien and an
outcast, in the society of French fiction. Monsieur de Camors is not of
our monde, nor is the Enfant du Siecle; indeed, perhaps good Monsieur
Sylvestre Bonnard is as sympathetic as anyone in that populous country
of modern French romance. Or do you know Fifi Vollard?
Something must be allowed for strange manners, for exotic ideas, and
ways not our own. More perhaps is due to what, as Englishmen think,
is the lack of HUMOUR in the most brilliant and witty of races. We
have friends many in Moliere, in Dumas, in Rabelais; but it is far more
difficult to be familiar, at ease, and happy in the circles to which
Madame Sand, M. Daudet, M. Flaubert, or M. Paul Bourget introduce
us. M. Bourget's old professor, in "Le Disciple," we understand, but he
does not interest himself much in us, and to us he is rather a curiosity, a
"character," than an intimate. We are driven to the belief that humour,
with its loving and smiling observation, is necessary to the author who
would make his persons real and congenial, and, above all, friendly.
Now humour is the quality which Dumas, Moliere, and Rabelais
possess conspicuously among Frenchmen. Montaigne has it too, and
makes himself dear to us, as the humorous novelists make their fancied
people dear. Without humour an author may draw characters distinct
and clear, and entertaining, and even real; but they want atmosphere,
and with them we are never intimate. Mr. Alfred Austin says that "we
know the hero or the heroine in prose romance far more familiarly than
we know the hero or heroine in the poem or the drama." "Which of the

serious characters in Shakspeare's plays are not indefinite and shadowy
compared with Harry Esmond or Maggie Tulliver?" The SERIOUS
characters--they are seldom very familiar or definite to us in any