_ It has become the fashion among novelists to introduce their
hero in knee pants, their heroine in pinafore and pigtails.
Time was when we were rushed up to a stalwart young man of
twenty-four, who was presented as the pivot about whom the
plot would revolve. Now we are led, protesting, up to a
grubby urchin of five and are invited to watch him through
twenty years of intimate minutiae. In extreme cases we have
been obliged to witness his evolution from swaddling clothes
to dresses, from dresses to shorts (he is so often English),
from shorts to Etons.
The thrill we get for our pains is when, at twenty-five, he
jumps over the traces and marries the young lady we met in
her cradle on page two. The process is known as a
psychological study. A publisher's note on page five
hundred and seventy-three assures us that the author is now
at work on Volume Two, dealing with the hero's adult life.
A third volume will present his pleasing senility. The
whole is known as a trilogy. If the chief character is of
the other sex we are dragged through her dreamy girlhood, or
hoydenish. We see her in her graduation white, in her
bridal finery. By the time she is twenty we know her better
than her mother ever will, and are infinitely more bored by
her.
Yet who would exchange one page in the life of the boy,
David Copperfield, for whole chapters dealing with Trotwood
Copperfield, the man? Who would relinquish the button-
bursting Peggotty for the saintly Agnes? And that other
David--he of the slingshot; one could not love him so well
in his psalm-singing days had one not known him first as
the gallant, dauntless vanquisher of giants. As for Becky
Sharp, with her treachery, her cruelty, her vindicativeness,
perhaps we could better have understood and forgiven her had
we known her lonely and neglected childhood, with the
drunken artist father and her mother, the French opera girl.
With which modest preamble you are asked to be patient with
Miss Fanny Brandeis, aged thirteen. Not only must you
suffer Fanny, but Fanny's mother as well, without whom there
could be no understanding Fanny. For that matter, we
shouldn't wonder if Mrs. Brandeis were to turn out the
heroine in the end. She is that kind of person. _