What shall we say of a man who quotes one of the best things in the Scènes de la Vie de Bohême and then blandly remarks that he does not see anything funny in it?
That is precisely what Mr. Rhodes does. He prints the program of the soirée given by Rodolphe and Marcel, and then observes, with the solemnity of a Central Park pelican: “There is nothing very humorous in this, as will be observed, and yet it may be regarded as one of the best specimens of Murger’s genre.”
Well, I can inform Mr. Rhodes, and also the simple-minded folk who believed in him because he wrote for the magazines, that if that chapter of the Vie de Bohême is not funny, there is nothing funny in the world. It begins with the “opening of the salons and entry and promenade of the witty authors of the Mountain in Labor, a comedy rejected by the Odéon Théâtre,” and closes with the significant warning that “persons attempting to read or recite poetry will be cast into outer darkness.”
The gifted Mr. Rhodes was probably in doubt as to the humor of this passage because it is not prefixed with “Our friend K—— sends the ‘Drawer’ the following good one,” and because its point is not indicated by italics after the fashion of humor of the Ayer’s Almanac school; but he can rest assured that that brief quotation from Murger is the funniest thing in his essay, always excepting his own bovine lack of perception. It is particularly funny to me because I have sometimes witnessed the “entry and promenade” through the salons of the witty authors of stories that have been accepted by magazines—a spectacle calculated to produce prolonged and hilarious merriment—and I have often wished that the recitation clause in the Bohemian’s program could be enforced in every house in the town.
I have devoted a good deal of space to this long-forgotten article because it is a fair sample of the sort of stuff that is offered to us from time to time, prepared especially for us, like so much baby’s food, by men and women who are carefully selected by the magazine barons, and who generally rival Mr. Rhodes in point of simian incompetence and utter lack of all appreciative or perceptive qualities.
But let us turn from the awful spectacle of Mr. Rhodes standing like a lone penguin in the very midst of the Latin Quarter of Paris, and wailing mournfully about the poor girl who “sometimes compels the young man to marry her.” A far brighter picture is that presented by the distinguished English gentleman who, having won the highest distinction with his pencil, takes up his pen with the air of one who is enjoying a holiday fairly earned by a lifetime of toil, and portrays the real Quartier Latin of the Second Empire with a humor that makes us think of Henri Murger, and with a delicacy of touch, a human sympathy, and a tendency to turn aside and moralize that place him very near to Thackeray.
If you wish to read a story which is at once human, truthful, and interesting, read George Du Maurier’s “Trilby,” and note the skill with which he has caught the very essence of the spirit of student life, preserved it for a third of a century, and then given it to us in all its freshness, and with the fire of an artistic youth blended with the philosophy and worldly knowledge that belong only to later life.
To read “Trilby” is to open a box in which some rare perfume has been kept for thirty odd years, and to drink in the fragrance that is as pervading and strong and exquisite as ever.
And while we are enjoying this charming story, let us not forget to give thanks to the Harpers for the courage which they have shown in publishing it, for if there is anything calculated to injure them in the eyes of the gas-fitters and paper-hangers it is a novel in which the truth is told in the high-minded, cleanly, and straightforward fashion in which Mr. Du Maurier tells it here. Fancy the feelings of a Christian Endeavorer—the modern prototype of the Levite who passed by on the other side—on finding in a publication of the sort which he has always found as soothing to his prejudices and hypocrisy and pet meannesses as the purring of a cat on a warm hearthstone—fancy the feelings of such an one as he finds the mantle of charity thrown over the sins and weaknesses of the erring, suffering, exquisitely human Latin Quarter model.
One need not read more than a single instalment of “Trilby” to realize that its author never learned the trade of letters in either the Ledger primary school or the Dr. Holland academy, for there is scarcely a chapter that does not fairly teem with matter that has long been forbidden in all well-regulated magazine offices, and I know that a great many experienced manufacturers of and dealers in serial fiction believe that it marks a new era in literature.