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BAD RELATIONS.

Metuentes patruae verbera linguae.-HORACE.
Uncle me no uncles.-SHAKESPEARE.

THERE is a familiar proverb, more true than many, which charges human nature with the meanness of hanging the dog to which it has chosen to give a bad name. The applicability of this saying to the arbitrary allotment of so-called Christian names must have occurred, with pain, to every person of sensibility. To be helplessly labelled with a character in one's first infancy, is to be taxed without representation in the most tyrannical sense. For that is what it amounts to. Prescriptive sentiment, based upon the aggregates of qualities observed in the holders of certain names, obliges every Tom, Dick or Harry to adapt his conduct to the part assigned him at his baptism. Tom henceforth can never be Dick, or Harry Tom, in all the life to come. To each is inalienably affixed the qualities associated with his title. Here is a fact, I fancy, patent to every inventor of fictitious persons. Your novelist, excogitating an individuality, must surrender himself, during the process, to a sort of trance, when the fitting name for that individual will occur to him without any effort of his own. Otherwise, supposing that he has predilections in the matter of nomenclature, his selection, fond as it may appear, will commit him mercilessly to developments utterly undesigned by him at the outset. Thus, say, I have a weakness for Augustus, but my theme is the psychology of a grand but unlawful passion. It is obvious that the two are irreconcilable. Augustus is quite incapable of such flights. He is too regardful of his own safety and creature-comforts. He is a petted flabby fellow, a little inclined to over-eating, and is not unwont to shed oily tears of self-pity when his stomach is so full that it presses upon his heart. If I persist, he will come to make a muddle of the business, and-unless the critics read profundity out of my perplexity, which is always possible-will confound the whole course of my character-study. In the end he will prefer celibacy and tepid baths to that stinging plunge into the waters of passion which I had forecast.

Adolphus again? What manly attributes are to be looked

for in that conceited and self-complacent puppy? He has been spoilt by his mother and sisters from the first, and is no more capable of the strength and nobility shown by Norman or Rupert than he is of the saintly self-sacrifices peculiar to Basil. Albertwith all respect be it said—is good and temperate until he becomes Bertie, when he is inclined to trifle weakly with other men's wives; while as Bert he is extremely suitable to the lower form of lioncomique. Arnold is a forcible creature, withal rather bigoted and prosy; Claud, of course, is an artist; Philip is weak, but means well, while Roger is dissipated, with only a fitful desire to reform. Dick drinks shamelessly, but is a good fellow in or out of his cups; Tom is an athlete and philistine, and Harry is apprenticed to an engineer. Algernon can fight nobly for his country, but goes all to pieces when he is abbreviated, and Francis is a red-haired foxy little man, full of guile and cunning, but utterly redeemed when shortened.

Among the women, Annabel is old-fashioned and knits, Bridget cooks, Caroline marries and has pretty children, and Kate is capable of anything but ugliness.

These are but a few, chosen at random. The point is that they and all the rest are characters hall-marked at their christening —a system which, while imposing a limit on human development, has the much more serious consequence of tying the hands of the novelist, of whom everything is expected in these days. Yet how can the poor fellow expand his psychology beyond the types to which he is restricted by the godfathers and godmothers? There are only two ways which I can see one, to enlarge enormously the list of legitimate names; two, to postpone their individual choice until each unit is of an age to select, or invent, his own.

Now, as illustrating my contention that no person, historical or fictitious, could conceivably have been exactly what he was in any other name than his own-consider, pray, the following purely arbitrary list:

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The column might be indefinitely extended, until, indeed, it 'put a girdle round about the earth,' and made us, perchance, liker to Saturn than to the world we know.

Here, however, is only one of several grievances with which the fiction-monger is ridden, and its mention arises from some natural association with the real subject of this paper. As the novelist is bound by conventions of nomenclature, so is he bound by conventions of relationship; though, to be fair, the present age shows some signs of rebelling against its prescriptions. The motherin-law, for instance, is properly, with the bold bad baronet, played out. That is understood; but is it so certain that she was ever understood? For a generation or two we have accepted her, without apparent question, as the embodiment of all that is outrageous and unnatural in human relationship. She has stood a by-word for discord, and a reproach to the British matron-otherwise an example to nations-ever since the time, at least, of Leech and Thackeray. It is very likely that these two great authorities were responsible for the slander, since we find no considerable harping upon it before their time. And since-inasmuch as his failure to identify himself with the age of the giants is perpetually being drummed into the ears of the modern romancer-the pack has followed its leaders, in the hope, no doubt (a somewhat mixed metaphor), of its being accredited with their mantles-and emoluments.

We have accepted the harridan mother-in-law, I say—and I am sure against our better judgment and experience-without apparent question; and the adjective is intentionally qualifying. For I have a confession to make, the fruit of some research. Your novelist is really an insidious fellow, whose worst fault is that he makes too much of a business of studying on which side his bread is buttered. Has he believed in this slander all these years, do you think? Not a bit of it. He has known perfectly well, while subscribing to the popular demand, who is the real bad relation, and has been consistently, if unobtrusively, 'showing him up.' But Prejudice, not to be outdone by Justice, walks with blinded

VOL. XXV.-NO, 146, N,S,

15

eyes; and no doubt there are enough truculent mothers-in-law in the world to make one formidable scapegoat-an illustration which I prefer, for obvious reasons, to the one which leads off this paper. A slander-it is a truism-is far more easily started than laid; and it is only after this long period that the one in question begins to attenuate pour céder le pas à qui? I am half afraid of telling the truth. To popularise the villain is to distribute his profits. Yet sooner or later he must be found out, and the credit for the revelation claimed elsewhere. I will make two words of it and tell. The real bad relation, good people, is—as you might have known long ago if you had not wilfully courted your own obsession-the uncle.

Story claims him to the part, and history authorises. There is no question whatever about it. His remotest antecedents show him an unscrupulous and designing fellow who is for ever seeking to step into dead men's shoes. There was Pelias-but indeed mythology reeks with the rascal. Laban exhibits an early instanc of his cunning, though his son-in-law's successful retaliation proves his bad pre-eminence in that respect to have been open, in those primitive times, to dispute. Rome itself was founded on the fruits of a piece of avuncular treachery; but, after all, what line, patrician or plebeian, in all the world could show its succession undeflected, if not in fact, in design, through the perfidy of an uncle? The great Charlemagne robbed his brother's heir of his moiety of the empire; in Spain there was the five years' struggle by Don Carlos against his niece Isabella; in Italy bad uncles (take Ludovico Sforza as an illustrious example) were so numerous that the cynical estimate in which their guile was held came to crystallise itself in the term Papal Nepotism. But our own history offers some choice examples of the breed, amongst whom King John and King Richard III. will most readily suggest themselves. In Saxon England the claims of uncle and nephew had been most flagrantly jumbled, generally to the detriment of the latter. This, however, had its excuse in those strenuous times, when kingdoms were not sufficiently maintained on the weak knees of youngsters. It was when the succession became fixed and hereditary that the rogue emerged in all his true colours, and pitched poor little Arthur (the name of a good boy, by the way) from the walls of Rouen.

It is, however, with the dealings of the poet and the romancer in the business of bad relations that we are mainly concerned, and it is the uncle, I maintain, who has always, despite all appearances

to the contrary, held the first place for them in that evil category. Shakespeare recognised very clearly the uses of the creature for exhibiting in an acute form the vices of envy and covetousness. The satyr' king, Claudius of Denmark, stands, of course, the pre-eminent figure of the type. But there are lesser examplesAntonio, the breezy scamp of 'The Tempest,' who throws for duchies and wins or loses with a jest-for whom the man i' the moon's too slow' (we have encountered his kind in our own time— the fellow who will cheat his nephew of a shilling one day and take him to the pantomime, on borrowed money, the next); Don John of 'Much Ado '-the Uriah Heep type, fulsome and treacherous, slobbering his 'kill' like the anaconda (which does nothing of the sort really) before swallowing it; and Frederick of As You Like It,' that bad mingling of fraud and religion which is also familiar to our century.

Who was it, again, to glean a new field, delivered the poor babes to their obsequies in the wood, cock-robin attending? There is no more damning indictment of a relation in history.

To come to the romancings of to-day. what other relation has been used, throughout the course of an entire volume, to point the moral of a persistent and awful wickedness, as Uncle Silas has been used by his creator Lefanu? Uncle Silas stands to me for the embodiment of supreme inhumanity. His courtliness, his distinguished air and silvery locks, his subjugation of bodily torments by a demoniac will, his utterly soulless materialism, make of him one of the most terrific figures in fiction. Think of Mrs. Mackenzie by the side of him! It is Whitechapel to all Gehenna.

Uncle Ibbetson again-what suave depravity! The man wantons in his own pollution, rejoicing in the filth he can cast on innocence. What instinct guided du Maurier's hand in his selection and portrayal? It was his first essay in romance, and observe that the uses of the mother-in-law or the bad baronet never occurred to him in the connexion.

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Then we have Ebenezer, the squalid uncle of Kidnapped,' and the oiled and curled' rascal Marmaduke of Vice Versa.' Every type is represented in modern romance, not excluding that sharpest needle, warranted not to cut in the eye,' Uncle Scrooge, whose reformation we decline to accept on any but utilitarian grounds.

It was only Dickens's irreclaimable optimism, indeed, which inclined him to detect redeeming points in the uncle (see old Anthony

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