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.
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