Recent Literature

WE believe that the principal American poem of the past month is Mr. Taylor’s “ Masque of the Gods,” which, if not perfectly satisfactory to the average churchgoer, seems fairly expressive of the hopein-doubt animating very many earnest thinkers, or dreamers, about the Divine. The Sea, the Mountains, Rivers, Trees, Serpents, Wolves, Caverns, Rocks, homes and parents of eldest superstition, lament their vanished empire over the fear and imagination of man ; and the great gods of all the old pagan world reason together of what they are and have been, with a misgiving (very comfortable to humanity similarly perplexed) as to their own origin, and an avowed sense of somewhat yet more supernal. They wonder if man, who has adored, did not also make them, in his dim effort towards the highest, and from time to time A Voice from Space breaks in upon their discourse, recognizing the use and truth in each of them, while man as chorus comments upon all. East, after Odin, Baal, Perun, and Manito, whom God permitted; Jove, who was his mighty servant; Ormuzd, the good that came from him ; Ahriman, the evil he suffered ; Apollo, the beauty he bids live, — last appears Immanuel, and him the Voice owns for Son, and Man cries : —

The design of the poem is vast, and something less fulfilling than Mr. Taylor’s effort might very well have been forgiven. There are many noble and beautiful lines, and a deep sense of the majesty of the theme. If we shrink a little from the classification of Christianity with the other religions, even as the first of them, — and we confess we do not like it, — we must recognize nevertheless a devout and reverent spirit throughout the poem. The accents of the gods are difficult; perhaps Mr. Taylor does not always interpret them aright; but—which is also important — he has not erred in writing such passage as this for poetry : —

“ APOLLO.

Yet though there is poetry and thought and a fine music in the “ Masque of the Gods,” we are not sure after all that we have not had greater pleasure in renewing our acquaintance with some of the stories which Mr. Taylor has lately collected in a volume. Our readers will remember that vivid Russian tale of “ Beauty and the Beast,”and those Pennsylvanian romances,

“ The Strange Friend,” “ Jacob Flint’s Journey,” “ Twin Love,” and “ Friend Eli’s Daughter.” Here are also “ Can a Life hide Itself?” “Mrs. Strongitharm’s Report,” a burlesque of woman’s-rights affairs, for which we do not care ; and a wellenough-done mockery of sentimental vegetarian communism, “ The Experiences of the A. C.,” for which we do not care much ; but in the four stories we have named, and especially in “Jacob Flint’s Journey,” and “ Friend Eli’s Daughter,” we find a native charm and a fine local flavor that we should not know where to match outside of Auerbach’s tales. There is, with an utter difference of material, a natural similarity of atmosphere in these Pennsylvanian and German stories. They are alike in rusticity of event and character, and in the country sweetness that hangs about them like an odor of fields and woods, as well as the unpatronizing spirit in which simple people’s life is regarded.

For other poetry we have Mrs. Turner’s book of “ Out-of-Door Rhymes,” in which there is a good deal of the freshness of the open air and something of its sweetness. But there is want of finish in most of the pieces, and, where this has been striven for, want of compression. Many of them afford little or no clew to the author’s motive in writing them; but this is so common a reticence in fugitive poetry, that it is not strictly characteristic of Mrs. Turner’s, and should not be specially urged against it. They have sometimes a humorous quality, as in “ A Housekeeper’s Tragedy ” (which, however, is pushed a little too far), and “ A Little Goose,” which all the children know ; and there is real life and vigor in such pieces. The most carefully wrought poem — or of that effect — is the one we shall give : it is very pretty and has a sweet archness ; we are not certain whether the lingering of the poem and the delaying of the climax helps or hurts it,

“MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING.

“ REFUSAL.

There are some touches in Mr. Venable’s poems which would make us hopeful or despondent for him, according as we knew him to be a young poet or not. There is pleasant music and love of nature in the verse which appears rather to glove its grasp in conventional epithets and phrases, and to hold aloof from its actual business in the formal attitudes of a worn-out school of poetry. We shall best enforce our meaning by giving some lines from his principal poem, “June on the Miami,” where the reader will see how with great good-will towards the modern facts, Mr. Venable’s poetry embraces them with a certain genteel reluctance: —

Yet we must recognize the delicate truth of some little pictures in this poem, and own the tempered pleasure which its perusal had given us. Of the shorter poems, we think “ Child Lost ” the simplest and best; the “ Welcome to Boz ” is very lively and ingenious.

The Preface to “ Imogen and other Poems ” gives its “ excuse for being ” in so straight-forward and simple a fashion, that one who has a feeling for youth, or a memory however faint of his own callow period, would hardly cast the book aside without looking farther into it. Universally condemned by his own “ little circle ” as the author’s venture appears to have been, the reader will feel by this declaration half provoked to examine the book, yet half repelled by this announcement of youthful obstinacy. The author will perhaps learn later in life that the machinery of a true poem, like that of a fine engine, by means of complex subtleties alone, obtains a perfect unity. Aspiration, desire, love itself, cannot produce this miracle, though either of these powers may reveal to a sympathetic observer the ardent spirit of the writer. Our author is not destitute of expression, as when he writes, —

“ Thou wert the sweet disorder of my mind,” but his efforts want harmony and form ; and we are bound to say that he has not many lines like that we have quoted. However, the valuable and poetic quality of sincerity pervades the volume. We take some verses from it, which, if they had been written by William Blake, would be doubtless admired with others no better : —

“ SUCCESS.

Mr. Nevin (whose name our readers will recall as that of the author of a very agreeable sketch, printed in these pages, of Stephen C. Foster and the rise of Negro Minstrelsy) has in his “ Black Robes ” made a very entertaining little book about the missionary efforts of the Jesuits and the Moravians among the Indians, and the ministerial labors of the Methodists and the Presbyterians among the backwoodsmen and early settlers of a now-vanished West. In his chapters on the Jesuits he goes over ground which Mr. Turkman had already made thoroughly his own in “ The Jesuits in North America,” and he can scarcely do more than restate the well-known facts. In philosophizing or sentimentalizing them, he scarcely adds to their force. He is allured by the picturesqueness of the Jesuit self-sacrifice, and writes like their advocate rather than their historian ; but then he does the same for the Moravians, and perhaps the balance is dressed by this counter-admiration of a sect which the good Jesuit Fathers might not have helped to extirpate by fire if they had encountered its members in the wilderness, but which was certainly not commended to the propaganda at Rome by its kindred spirit of heroism and martyrdom. In writing of the Moravians, too, Mr. Nevin is again on ground more or less well trodden; but when he comes to the Methodists, and especially the Presbyterians, he makes the field his own. No one else, we believe, has written so well of the labors of these two great churches among the pioneers of the West; and though the character of the backwoods Methodist apostles, the revivals, the camp-meetings, and so forth, have often been treated of before, no one but Mr. Nevin seems to have presented the history so vividly and succinctly. It is done in a wholly secular spirit, however, and with an unsympathetic mind which takes a tinge of bitterness when the Presbyterians are to be dealt with. Not Boston and not Hartford, but Mr. Nevin’s own Pittsburgh, has been (in theology at least) for seventy years the most Puritanical city of the Union; and it is as if the early Presbyterian success among the hard-fibred Scotch-Irish fathers of the place still rankled as a personal displeasure in him. The sect did a great and ’ good work, doubtless, but it was not lovely in doctrine, and it made life as gloomy as possible in a wilderness where people might naturally have been glad of a little hope or mercy in their creed. The population with which Calvinism wrought there, the typical backwoods minister, a Presbyterian Sabbath, a revival, and biographical notices of “ early laborers in the border vineyard,” form the subjects of different chapters, among which that on “ the Sabbath day, and how it was sanctified,” is best. It is a complete study of the dreary day, — dreariest, of course, in summer, by contrast with the cheerfulness of heaven and earth, — and we wish that we might transfer it bodily to this place. Mr. Nevin describes the log-built meeting-house in a clearing of the woods, the procession of the people thither on foot and on horseback, the minister, the singing, the halfhour prayer, the deadly two or three hours’ sermon, the intermission, the afternoon service, and finally the weary dispersion, with a graphic felicity to which we could not hope to do justice at second-hand. All the less, therefore, can we deny ourselves the pleasure of reproducing this picture of the congregation during intermission, though we are not sure that, good as it is, it is the best example of his singularly faithful art: —

“ Some went to look after their horses, to see that they had not slipped their head-stall, and that their fastenings were secure ; or, perhaps, to ‘piece’ them on nubbins of corn, brought along in their pockets for that purpose, just as on the same grain, ground, and baked into ‘ dodgers,’ did the mothers their children, and from the same tenderly considerate motive. Some withdrew in pairs, or groups of three and four, and, seeking the shade of a tree, whittled with their heavy - bladed, hornhandled jack-knives at the tough knots on their walking-sticks, talking the while of the weather and the crops ; of the flocks and herds that filled their pastures,— their hogs, their cattle, and their horses,—and, as likely as not, going through the preliminary negotiations of a ' swap,’ which to-morrow or next day would see consummated, before all was over. Some retired to the graveyard, picking their course along pathless ways, wading knee-deep in heavy rank grasses, and forcing a passage through thickets of thorn and patches of blackberry-bushes to the spot of their search, where, pausing and leaning over the rough stone planted to mark the place, they paid their tribute of sorrow to the memory of some loved one, — husband, or wife, or child, — whose all of what once had been left — and that was its ashes — lay buried there. Women in couples wandered off, slowly strolling, and pausing often on various trifling pretences, — to reach a leaf, standing on tiptoe to do it, or stooping to pluck a flower, —but quickening their paces as the straggling bushes intervened to veil their retreat, until the utmost limits of the clearing were passed, and themselves, hid from view, were lost amid the cover of the copses. But the centre of general attraction was the ‘Spring.’ Thither, sooner or later during the ‘intermission,’ all were accustomed to repair. Those that thirsted drank of the water, the more attentive youths of the flock standing, gourd or earthern bowl in hand, in turn at the fountain, and dispensing the element to the rest in waiting, — blushing to the brows when the customer happened to be one, young and fair, of the opposite sex, herself crimsoning to the bosom in return as she tremblingly received the proffered vessel from his hand. Lingering as they came and drank, the visitors tarried, so that erelong quite a large proportion of the congregation was assembled at the spot. Seated on stones or reclined on the grass rested the elders, puffing their pipes, and through the smoke looking dreamily on, while their sons and daughters, in separate companies that would not mingle, and yet could not keep apart, found pastime, the former in delving amid the soil for roots of sassafras and calamus, and the latter, perchance, in gathering sprays of spearmint, tramping the beds in which it grew, and crushing the plants as they did so, till all the air around was odorous with their perfume.”

The Lite of John J. Crittenden, by his daughter, is of the same useful and interesting class of books as the Life of Seaton, which we noticed last year. Born in the last century in the early years of the Republic, Crittenden lived to witness great and unforeseen changes, but died too soon to see the successful termination of the civil war which he so earnestly deplored and endeavored to avert. A warmly devoted Kentuckian, he had large sympathies and could embrace the whole Union with his patriotic nature. He received his education at the William and Mary College, commencing the practice of law in his native county, Woodford, Kentucky, in 1807. He early inspired his fellow-citizens with confidence and esteem, became AttorneyGeneral of the Territory of Illinois, and afterwards member of the Kentucky Legislature. He acted as aide-de-camp to Governor Shelby, and creditably made the campaign into Canada in the War of 1812. For more than forty years Mr. Crittenden was one of the prominent leaders in the Senate, and held at different times the office of Attorney-General for his native State ; he was also Attorney-General under Presidents Tyler’s and Millard Fillmore’s administrations, but he only accepted the position from a sense of duty and gladly resigned it.

It is not, however, as Cabinet officer, legal adviser, special pleader, political leader, and Speaker of the Senate, that Crittenden will live in men’s hearts and memory. It is his admirable, consistent, and honorable course during the opening years of the Rebellion which will give him his best fame. Though a Kentuckian and a slave-owner, he was a warm lover of his country ; his patriotism was of the sterling kind that recoiled from any sectional or partisan feeling. He did not at first realize all the treachery and disloyalty of the South, but he never wavered in his own allegiance, and used all his influence for the good work of promoting harmony.

His speeches and public efforts are known. He wrote also an admirable letter to his son George, who held the position of colonel of the Regular troops, counselling him to remain firm in his allegiance to the national flag: “ Be true to the government that has trusted in you, and stand fast to your nation’s flag, the stars and stripes ” ; and terrible was the mortification of the father when his son entered the Confederate service. In 1862, enfeebled with age and disease, so earnest was he, that he made a journey to West Point from Washington, that he might personally influence the cadets of his own State, and perhaps others, from leaving the academy and entering the Confederate service, as too many had done. Of this striking instance of Mr. Crittenden’s devotion to country and his duty, we have a pleasant account in a letter of the Hon, R. C. Winthrop, who was an eye-witness of the scene : “ He spoke, as he always spoke best, from the inspiration of the moment, and out of the fulness of his noble and patriotic heart.” That done the veteran statesman left West Point as quietly as he came there, but having done what he felt was simply a matter of duty.

Patriotic, honest, and sincere in his convictions of duty, he yet could not wholly divest himself of some prejudices, and was greatly opposed to the enlistment of the negroes. He said of it in his last speech in Congress : “ Instead of being a source of power, negroes in your army would be a source of weakness, and their presence would drive men from the field a thousand times more capable of defending the country than they can be made, A negro army unnerves the white man’s hand, the white man’s heart.” Had he been spared a few more years he would probably have been among the first to acknowledge the possibility and hope for the negro under the changes wrought by the war. This is a faithful and pleasant sketch of a good and useful life ; that of a man beloved by his family and honored by his countrymen.

We can fancy the reader of Mr. Clemens’s book finding at the end of it (and its six hundred pages of fun are none too many) that, while he has been merely enjoying himself, as he supposes, he has been surreptitiously acquiring a better idea of the flush times in Nevada, and of the adventurous life generally of the recent West, than he could possibly have got elsewhere. The grotesque exaggeration and broad irony with which the life is described are conjecturably the truest colors that could have been used, for all existence there must have looked like an extravagant joke, the humor of which was only deepened by its nether-side of tragedy. The plan of the book is very simple indeed, for it is merely the personal history of Mr. Clemens during a certain number of years, in which he crossed the Plains in the overland stage to Carson City, to be private secretary to the Secretary of Nevada ; took the silver-mining fever, and with a friend struck “ a blind lead ” worth millions ; lost it by failing to comply with the mining laws ; became local reporter to a Virginia City newspaper; went to San Francisco and suffered extreme poverty in the cause of abstract literature and elegant leisure ; was sent to the Sandwich Islands as newspaper correspondent ; returned to California, and began lecturing and that career of humorist, which we should all be sorry to have ended. The “ moral ” which the author draws from the whole is : “ If you are of any account, stay at home and make your way by faithful diligence ; but if you are of ' no account,’ go away from home, and then you will have to work, whether you want to or not.”

A thousand anecdotes, relevant and irrelevant, embroider the work ; excursions and digressions of all kinds are the very woof of it, as it were ; everything far-fetched or near at hand is interwoven, and yet the complex is a sort of “ harmony of colors ” which is not less than triumphant. The stage-drivers and desperadoes of the Plains; the Mormons and their city; the capital of Nevada, and its government and people ; the mines and miners ; the social, speculative, and financial life of Virginia City ; the climate and characteristics of San Francisco ; the amusing and startling traits of Sandwich Island civilization,—appear in kaleidoscopic succession. Probably an encyclopaedia could not be constructed from the book ; the work of a human being, it is not unbrokenly nor infallibly funny; nor is it to be always praised for all the literary virtues; but it is singularly entertaining, and its humor is always amiable, manly, and generous.

FRENCH AND GERMAN.²

IT will be with sincere regret that our readers will add this, the thirteenth and last volume of Sainte-Beuve’s Nouveaux Lundis to the long series of his essays. In him the present generation has enjoyed the best fruits of civilization, atleast of those literary merits which are more especially dependent upon the culture which is real civilization. Taste, scholarship, a charming style, were the aids that served to render more attractive his wonderful reading of character, his general critical insight. He has been for us not only a wise guide in judging the present, but also, without pedantry or tiresome detail, as well as without shallowness, he has set before us vivid pictures of the past In this narrow space it is impossible to do him justice. Those who are familiar with him will not need the stammering praise of our faded adjectives, but to those to whom he is a stranger we can do no better service than to recommend the study of his writings. Without him one cannot know French literature. In this volume we find his long articles on Jomini and on Ampere, and one might easily do worse that to begin his reading of Sainte-Beuve with this volume. There is the same happy guess at character, the same groping for the truth, the well-known picturesque representation of the person under discussion, that make him the most charming of writers. His artful hesitation makes all assertion seem thick-headed and blundering, he guides us towards the point he wishes to reach as if he too were lost and uncertain. A critic is pretty sure not to be a popular man, for he has to correct readers as well as writers, and both classes are large, but Sainte-Beuve suavely seems to humor every prejudice, never to contradict, but at the end we find that he has done more service with his delicate wit than would a thousand Boanerges railing from the house-top. Besides a bit of autobiography in this volume, we have a book upon him by M. Jules Levallois, his former secretary. This is a volume that need not be sought -with avidity. The writer makes a haughty distinction between books that give us facts and those that ” are destined to complete what one knows about Sainte-Beuve,” like his own, and hence he crams into a couple of lines of a foot-note a few dates of Sainte-Beuve’s life. But, nothwithstanding, he manages, in spite of himself, to tell us more of the facts than he at first proposed, although the greater part of the book is taken up with an account of his opinion of the eminent critic. He gives us a few of SainteBeuve’s letters, but almost entirely those praising M. Levallois’s writings. What he says, although by no means the best that could be said, is often interesting. He shows us Sainte-Beuve’s manner of work, he tells us of his enthusiastic, sudden, short-lived admirations, his self-corrections, and, moreover, considerable light is thrown upon his changes of view in politics, the hostility that so frequently met him in the world. Besides the political opposition and the enmity of those whom he had exposed with his pen, his style, his critical manner, must have been a point of severance from many who, with Gallic art, arranged the world into compartments and then adapted all they saw to fit the pigeon-holes they had already made. His manner was different, more genuine ; every person about whom he wrote he treated as we do our friends. We do not divide them into warriors, all powder and war-paint, lawyers, all red-tape and point-making, or into travellers, philosophers, and humorists; each one has his own separate judgment, and so it is with his criticism, a thousand times better because a thousand times more difficult than the enrolling of men into regiments to be treated collectively as a unit, as is done by certain other French critics.

M. Mezieres’s Goethe is a very interesting book, and promises to be the best of the biographies of this great man. This first volume carries us down to the year 1795, treating very fully of his earlier life, discussing his various writings up to that time. The method that M. Mezieres has adopted is to get his information about Goethe from his writings to a much greater extent than has ever been done before. That Goethe half hid and half gave himself in his books has been well known. There has probably never been a writer who was so personal in his choice of a subject, so impersonal in his treatment. The writer of this life has sought to unravel the real in the writings of Goethe from what was the work of his imagination, and it can be said that he has succeeded well. Moreover, he discusses fully Goethe’s relations to women, a very important element in his life, but one that for one reason or another is strangely slurred over in a most unsatisfactory way by Lewes in his Life of Goethe. It is possible that English prudery may have had something to do with this. Goethe’s scientific work, too, generally a scaled book for the merely literary reader, is lucidly interpreted. On the whole, this is a book that can be most heartily recommended for its thoroughness and wise method and appreciation. That it should say all that can be said about Goethe it is too much to expect of any one book, but every reader will find here a great deal that is new and nothing that is not good. It may be worth while to notice that Goethe’s admiration of France has brought him much admiration in return. Since the time of the “ Globe,” he has never lacked appreciating readers in that country; and if Germans plume themselves overmuch on their appreciation of Shakespeare, it might not be amiss for the puzzled foreigner to point to the books of Lewes and Mezieres on Goethe, — the best that have yet appeared in any language.

In the same line of international civilities we have Mr. Paul Lindau’s essay on Moliere. By a somewhat odd coincidence he, too, gathers information about Moliere’s life from his writings. His book, however, is but a brief sketch. We are glad to see that he promises us a longer and more thorough work on the same subject, for which he has been a long time preparing, and, judging from this that we have before us, is well fitted. In a brief compass he sets before us the tragic side of Moliere’s life, the bitter sadness of his comedies. The main facts of his life are more or less known to us all, but we are confident that every one of his readers will find here some new light thrown upon his plays. Indeed, it is an invaluable commentary upon “ Le Misanthrope,” for instance. The book is beautifully printed, and, it will be heard with pleasure, in Latin type.

If any have been lured by the melancholy charm of our quotations from Schopenhauer and the warmth of our words about Hartmann to read those writers, and now no longer enjoy their meals, nor the advancing spring ; if to any such life seems suddenly a dreary void, religion gross superstition, love a hideous mockery, we hope that their friends will buy and leave at their bedside — for they have probably taken to their beds for more uninterrupted moping —the little war-cry of Dr. J. C. Fischer. This writer has no patience with Hartmann. He shouts out his contempt in every line; he calls him names ; he hoots after him ; he makes fun of his socalled philosophy; he knows no mercy. He is a good old-fashioned critic, whom Dr. Johnson would have fondled on his lap. He shows up his contradictions, his mistakes, his lack of sequence, logic; grammar, indeed, he would add, of sense. He is a terrible foe. Meanwhile the third edition of Hartmann has appeared. Perhaps a specimen of his criticism might not be amiss. We quote from page 137 : “Is it not as if one heard a chorus of ‘ a hundred thousand fools ’ speaking ? Heine says somewhere of somebody, that he is as stupid as ten asses. What Hartmann says is as mad as the words of ten fools. Hartmann acknowledges the possibility that the majority of mankind will determine to wish nothing more. The last wish will be to wish nothing more. Again, to a—I will be polite — to a cloister with such philosophy.” We have not yet heard that Dr. Fischer’s arguments have made an optimist of Hartmann.