[372] Rhoda Fleming, 108.
[373] Ibid., 307.
[374] Ibid., 337.
[375] Dr. David Starr Jordan. As to Thackeray, the analysis made by Trollope is very much to the point,—that he mustered all his dislikes and animosities under that caption. See the Biography, 82.
[376] This character makes a shrewd comment, which indicts English society for being a promoter of snobbishness: “They call me a parvenu, and borrow my money. They call our friend the wit, a parvenu, and submit to all his insolence * * * provided they can but get him to dinner. They call the best debater in the Parliament of England a parvenu, and will entreat him, some day or other, to be prime minister, and ask him for stars and garters. A droll world, and no wonder the parvenus want to upset it.” My Novel, II, 130.
[377] Sense and Sensibility, II, 85.
[378] This conception of sentimentality has many illustrations, expressed and implied. Chesterton describes the sentimentalist as “the man who wants to eat his cake and have it,” who “has no sense of honour about ideas,” and who keeps a quarreling “intellectual harem.” Crotch, in his Pageantry of Dickens, remarks that the English “prefer a plaster of platitudes to the x-rays of investigation.” Meredith in his Up to Midnight, observes that liberty is one of the phrases we suck like sweetmeats, and adds, “We read the newspapers daily, and yet we surround ourselves with a description of scenic extravaganza conjured up to displace uncomfortable facts. The image of it is the Florentine Garden established in the midst of the Plague.”
See also Butler’s Notebooks, Anatole France’s essay on Dumas, and Bailey’s biography of Meredith.
[379] Melincourt, 23.
[380] North and South, 9. Cf. Kingsley’s crude and literal handling of the same theme. Anna Maria Heale was always talking of her nerves, “though she had nerves only in the sense wherein a sirloin of beef has them.” Two Years Ago, 85.