ent 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
Coop