He is a country boy who comes
up to St. Petersburg, and after a course of Russian novels is transformed
into a series of imitations of their heroes. He does nothing, feels
nothing, thinks nothing except after the pattern of these creatures of
the quill.
Well! we are all like that, more or less. Though we may not be as
chivalrously inspired as the Knight of La Mancha, nor run to the extremes
of the simple Russian, we are all to some extent remoulded in imitation
of the Booklanders, and this is the truth in the "decadent" paradox that
nature copies art. There is a drop of ink in the blood of the most
natural of us; we are all hybrids, crossed with literature, and
Shakespeare is as much the author of our being as either of our parents.
The effect of the stage in regulating the poses and costumes of
susceptible souls has not escaped notice; but the effect of novels and
poetry is more insidious. Who ever shuddered with bitter alliterative
kisses before Swinburne, and who has failed to do so since? What poor
little cockney clerk in his first spasms of poetry but has felt, sitting
by his girl in the music hall, that if she walked over the grave in which
he was planted, his "dust would hear her and beat, had he lain for a
century dead" (though how Maud could survive her lover for a century,
Tennyson failed to explain)? _Per contra_, the ingenuous spinster taking
her notions of love from Maupassant's "Bel-Ami," or Gabriele d'Annunzio's
"Trionfo della Morte," becomes a man-hater.
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