entering the golden world of rank, like a man without a wedding
garment, and of being lost and at sea among his aristocrats. They
order these things better in France: they still appeal to the fine
old natural taste for rank and luxury, splendour and refinement.
What is Gyp but a Lady Fanny Flummery reussie,--Lady Fanny with the
trifling additional qualities of wit and daring? Observe her noble
scorn of M. George Ohnet: it is a fashionable arrogance.

To my mind, I confess, the decay of the British fashionable novel
seems one of the most threatening signs of the times. Even in
France institutions are much more permanent 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