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 e 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.
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