A Trip to Cuba
By . Boston: Ticknor & Fields. 1860. pp. 251.
FOR readers of the “ Atlantic,” this little volume will need no further commendation than the mere statement that nearly a quarter of it is made up of hitherto unpublished material. Here and there it seems to us a little too personal, and the public is made the confidant of matters in which it has properly no concern. This, perhaps, is more the fault of the present generation than of the author; but it is something we feel bound to protest against, wherever we meet it. In other respects, the book is one which we may thank not only for entertainment, but for instruction. In its vivid picturesqueness, it furnishes the complement to Mr. Dana’s “ To Cuba and Back.” Mrs. Howe has the poet’s gift of making us see what she describes, and she is as lively and witty as a French Marquise of the seventeenth century, when a De in the name, petticoats, and Paris were an infallible receipt for cleverness. Toward the end of her volume, Mrs. Howe enters a spirited and telling protest against a self-constituted censorship, which would insist on a traveller’s squaring his impressions with some foregone, theory of right and wrong, instead of thankfully allowing facts to rectify his theory. A traveller is bound to tell us what he saw, not what he expected or wished to see ; and it is only by comparing the different views of many independent observers that we who tarry at home can arrive at any approximate notion of absolute fact. The general inferiority of modern books of travel is due to the fact that their authors write in the fear of their special fragment of a public, and report of foreign countries as if they were drummers for Exeter Hall or the Southern Planters Association, rather than servants of Truth.