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    Old Friends, Epistolary Parody
    Old Friends, Epistolary Parody
    Old Friends, Epistolary Parody
    Ebook154 pages1 hour

    Old Friends, Epistolary Parody

    By Andrew Lang

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    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArchive Classics
    Release dateNov 15, 2013
    Old Friends, Epistolary Parody
    Author

    Andrew Lang

    Andrew Lang (March, 31, 1844 – July 20, 1912) was a Scottish writer and literary critic who is best known as a collector of folk and fairy tales. Lang’s academic interests extended beyond the literary and he was a noted contributor to the fields of anthropology, folklore, psychical research, history, and classic scholarship, as well as the inspiration for the University of St. Andrew’s Andrew Lang Lectures. A prolific author, Lang published more than 100 works during his career, including twelve fairy books, in which he compiled folk and fairy tales from around the world. Lang’s Lilac Fairy and Red Fairy books are credited with influencing J. R. R. Tolkien, who commented on the importance of fairy stories in the modern world in his 1939 Andrew Lang Lecture “On Fairy-Stories.”

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      Book preview

      Old Friends, Epistolary Parody - Andrew Lang

      The Project Gutenberg eBook, Old Friends, by Andrew Lang

      This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with

      almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or

      re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included

      with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

      Title: Old Friends

             Essays in Epistolary Parody

      Author: Andrew Lang

      Release Date: March 1, 2013  [eBook #1991]

      [This file was first posted on April 16, 1999]

      Language: English

      Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

      ***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OLD FRIENDS***

      Transcribed from the 1890 Longmans, Green, and Co. edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org

      OLD FRIENDS

      ESSAYS IN EPISTOLARY PARODY

      BY

      ANDREW LANG

      LONDON

      LONGMAN’S, GREEN, AND CO.

      AND NEW YORK: 15 EAST 16th STREET

      1890

      All rights reserved

      PRINTED BY

      SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE

      LONDON

      TO

      MISS RHODA BROUGHTON

      PREFACE

      The studies in this volume originally appeared in the St. James’s Gazette.  Two, from a friendly hand, have been omitted here by the author of the rest, as non sua poma.  One was by Mr. Richard Swiveller to a boon companion and brother in the lyric Apollo; the other, though purporting to have been addressed by Messrs. Dombey & Son to Mr. Toots, is believed, on internal evidence, to have been composed by the patron of the Chicken himself.  A few prefatory notes, an introductory essay, and two letters have been added.

      The portrait in the frontispiece, copied by Mr. T. Hodge from an old painting in the Club at St. Andrews, is believed to represent the Baron Bradwardine addressing himself to his ball.

      A. L.

      CONTENTS

      FRIENDS IN FICTION

      Every fancy which dwells much with the unborn and immortal characters of Fiction must ask itself, Did the persons in contemporary novels never meet?  In so little a world their paths must often have crossed, their orbits must have intersected, though we hear nothing about the adventure from the accredited narrators.  In historical fiction authors make their people meet real men and women of history—Louis XI., Lazarus, Mary Queen of Scots, General Webbe, Moses, the Man in the Iron Mask, Marie Antoinette; the list is endless.  But novelists, in spite of Mr. Thackeray’s advice to Alexandre Dumas, and of his own example in Rebecca and Rowena, have not introduced each other’s characters.  Dumas never pursued the fortunes of the Master of Ravenswood after he was picked up by that coasting vessel in the Kelpie’s Flow.  Sometimes a meeting between characters in novels by different hands looked all but unavoidable.  Pendennis and David Copperfield came out simultaneously in numbers, yet Pen never encountered Steerforth at the University, nor did Warrington, in his life of journalism, jostle against a reporter named David Copperfield.  One fears that the Major would have called Steerforth a tiger, that Pen would have been very loftily condescending to the nephew of Betsy Trotwood.  But Captain Costigan would scarcely have refused to take a sip of Mr. Micawber’s punch, and I doubt, not that Litimer would have conspired darkly with Morgan, the Major’s sinister man.  Most of those delightful sets of old friends, the Dickens and Thackeray people, might well have met, though they belonged to very different worlds.  In older novels, too, it might easily have chanced that Mr. Edward Waverley of Waverley Honour, came into contact with Lieutenant Booth, or, after the Forty-five, with Thomas Jones, or, in Scotland, Balmawhapple might have foregathered with Lieutenant Lismahagow.  Might not even Jeanie Deans have crossed the path of Major Lambert of the Virginians, and been helped on her way by that good man?  Assuredly Dugald Dalgetty in his wanderings in search of fights and fortune may have crushed a cup or rattled a dicebox with four gallant gentlemen of the King’s Mousquetaires.  It is agreeable to wonder what all these very real people would have thought of their companions in the region of Romance, and to guess how their natures would have acted and reacted on each other.

      This was the idea which suggested the following little essays in parody.  In making them the writer, though an assiduous and veteran novel reader, had to recognise that after all he knew, on really intimate and friendly terms, comparatively few people in the Paradise of Fiction.  Setting aside the dramatic poets and their creations, the children of Molière and Shakspeare, the reader of novels will find, may be, that his airy friends are scarce so many as he deemed.  We all know Sancho and the Don, by repute at least; we have all our memories of Gil Blas; Manon Lescaut does not fade from the heart, nor her lover, the Chevalier des Grieux, from the remembrance.  Our mental picture of Anna Karénine is fresh enough and fair enough, but how few can most of us recall out of the myriad progeny of George Sand!  Indiana, Valentine, Lélia, do you quite believe in them, would you know them if you met them in the Paradise of Fiction?  Noun one might recognise, but there is a haziness about La Petite Fadette.  Consuelo, let it be admitted, is not evanescent, oblivion scatters no poppy over her; but Madame Sand’s later ladies, still more her men, are easily lost in the forests of fancy.  Even their names with difficulty return to us, and if we read the roll-call, would Horace and Jacques cry Adsum like the good Colonel?  There are living critics who have all Mr. George Meredith’s heroines and heroes and oddities at their finger ends, and yet forget that musical name, like the close of a rich hexameter, Clare Doria Forey.  But this is a digression; it is perhaps admitted that George Sand, so great a novelist, gave the world few characters who live in and are dear to memory.  We can just fancy one of her dignified later heroines, all self-renunciation and rural sentiment, preaching in vain to that real woman, Emma Bovary.  Her we know, her we remember, as we remember few, comparatively, of Balzac’s thronging faces, from La Cousine Bette to Séraphitus Séraphita.  Many of those are certain to live and keep their hold, but it is by dint of long and elaborate preparation, description, analysis.  A stranger intermeddleth not with them, though we can fancy Lucien de Rubempré let loose in a country neighbourhood of George Sand’s, and making sonnets and love to some rural châtelaine, while Vautrin might stray among the ruffians of Gaboriau, a giant of crime.  Among M. Zola’s people, however it may fare with others, I find myself remembering few: the guilty Hippolytus of La Curée, the poor girl in La Fortune des Rougon, the Abbé Mouret, the artist in L’Oeuvre, and the half idiotic girl of the farm house, and Hélène in Un Page d’Amour.  They are not amongst M. Zola’s most prominent creations, and it must be some accident that makes them most memorable and recognisable to one of his readers.

      Probably we all notice that the characters of fiction who remain our intimates, whose words come to our lips often, whose conduct in this or that situation we could easily forecast, are the characters whom

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