Recent Literature

GRADUALLY, but pretty surely, the whole varied field of American life is coming into view in American fiction ; not the life of this moment, but that of half a score of years ago, or a generation or two generations since ; and though we should like best to have the very present reproduced, we are grateful for what is done, and recognize the value of each sincere performance. Mr. Flagg’s romance is the more welcome because it deals with scenes and people hitherto little known or not known to fiction, and which have something fresh and native in them. They are studied in a sufficiently realistic spirit, and yet there is a glamour of romance over all which gives the book a character and charm of its own, and with which the realism does not discord. Briefly, it is the story of a wild country boy in Southern Ohio, who goes out with the family rifle to have a shot at Morgan’s men on their raid in 1863, and who finds among the spoil of the rebel he shoots the photograph of a beautiful child. When he quits the paternal cabin on Smoky Creek to seek his fortune, Robert Hagan discovers the original of the photograph at the farm-house where he asks for work. She calls herself a prisoner of war, and is in fact a fair and bitterly rebellious young South-Carolinian, whose family is totally dispersed, and who has been sent North by General Damarin to find a borne with his father till the war is over, and she can be restored to her own. It is Robert’s fate to fall in love with her, but not to marry her ; though how he and she are otherwise made happy we have scarcely the right to weaken the reader’s interest in the plot by saying. It is, at best, rather a wandering plot, and the chief merit of the book as a story is the effectiveness with which the successive scenes are painted. One of the best of these is that very vivid scene of Robert lying in wait for Morgan’s men, with all the tragedy of his attack on them, and his escape on the horse of the man he shoots. A lively dramatic force is felt in the scene before the Damarin family, between Bella, still rebellious, and her brother exrebel and acquiescent ; the whole after career of her brothers, in its downward course, being traced with admirable probability and impressiveness. All goes wrong with them in their efforts to regain some property of their father at the North, and they betake themselves to the Oil Regions in Virginia, where they set up a faro-bank. They are generous, not wrong-meaning young fellows at first, but fate and the fatal defects of a slaveholder’s education are against them. One of them shoots a man, and they fly from the law, reaching the Ohio after nightfall with justice at their heels. There is a fight, and then a parley. “ Major Johnston,” calls out the sheriff, with high Southern courtesy, “ I really think you'd better give yourself up, and go back with us. The doctor told me yesterday he thought the wounded gentleman would get well. I tell you the truth, upon my honor.” The Johnstons will not hear reason and renew the fight ; one of them is shot dead ; the other gets the body into a boat, and, under cover of the darkness, pushes off. The dialogue that ensues is colored with a good feeling for Southern character : —

“ Unheeding the few shots they fired at random, Charles Johnston remained for some minutes in convulsive emotion; but presently, rising to his feet, he commanded Robert to hold the boat where she was, as he had something to say. Then, in a perfectly calm and distinct voice, he called across the water, —

“‘Sheriff Brown ! it is you, I believe, who shot my brother ? ’

“A voice as calm, and almost bland in its tone, replied, ‘ I am very sorry. Captain Johnston, for this unpleasant occurrence ; but you and every other gentleman must know an officer is bound to make his arrests without fear or favor of any gentleman ; and if gentlemen will resist, I cannot be responsible for the consequences.’

“ I think I must hold you responsible, however,’ rejoined Johnston, ‘ With your own life, sheriff, you shall answer for this, so help me God ! I was about to quit your State for good ; but now I shall return to it, and never leave it while you live there. Wherever you go, I shall be on your track. You have killed my only brother, and I ’ll have your life, or — ’

“ ‘ — Or else I must take yours : excuse the interruption,’ said the sheriff, still calm and bland. ‘ Very well, captain ; and since you are so frank, allow me to give you notice, in return, that if you and I should ever have the pleasure of meeting again, you must expect me to defend myself Kaintuck fashion, the same as any other gentleman would, without fear or favor, you know.’ ”

Sheriff Brown is somewhat better than his word ; he shoots Johnston on sight, afterwards, just as the latter, who has now become a horse-thief, is about to fire at the owner of a horse he has stolen, — the owner being Robert Hagan.

The life at the Damarin farm is sketched with an idyllic effect which harmonizes well with the soft beauty and richness of the Southern Ohio scenery. For a pendant to this picture the reader must turn to that of the Iowa farm of the Richardsons, where the acres are by thousands and the labor is like that of a vast manufactory, mostly done by machinery, and altogether non-individual. Nothing is better in Mr. Flagg’s hook than the way he has brought before us such widely differing phases of Western life, and nothing is truer than his Study of the semi-savage existence of Robert Hagan’s whiskey-drinking father and scolding, pipe-smoking mother in their cabin on Smoky Creek ; for such people are still common enough in the Virginia Military District of Ohio, in spite of the proximity of such neighbors as the Damarins and of all the cultivation of the cities and towns. Even if Mr. Flagg’s book were not the interesting fiction it is, it would be worth reading for its local truth.

For one of the reasons of our pleasure in this romance we like also an anonymous author’s essays on the “ Pennsylvania Dutch ” and some of the quaint religious sects in Pennsylvania. The principal paper was first published in this magazine, and though it has the faults common to the author’s whole book, namely, incoherence and literary shapelessness, it has some compensating virtues, and tells more than had been told before of the daily life of a very curious population, — a population more wholly cut off than even the Canadian French from the mother country, but retaining as fully as they a national integrity in the midst of an alien race. This paper is followed by a pleasant sketch of “ An Amish Meeting,” the Amish being the sober and conscientious sectaries known also as Mennonites, among whom Miss Chescbro’ found the characters of her exquisite story “ The Foe in the Household ” ; and then there is some account of the Swiss Anabaptists who fled from the persecutions of the Calvinists soon after the foundation of Penn’s Colony, and whose descendants still help to people Lancaster County : “A Dunker Love-Feast,” is simply and interestingly described, and there is something told of the Dunker persuasion, which is common in the older West, as well as Pennsylvania, and numbers in all a hundred thousand adherents ; notices of the German SeventhDay Baptist anchorites of both sexes at Ephrata follow, and then comes an excellent study of a most characteristic Quaker life, and after that a prettily managed little sketch or story about some other Quaker folk. The author’s observation is not very philosophical, but it covers all the familiar and many of the significant traits of the peculiarly varied little world of rural Pennsylvania, and her literary faculty is sufficient to place some very interesting pictures of it before us, which are all the better perhaps for their real artlessness. What a glimpse of odd, un-American, Old-World figures and faces is this, for example : —

“ Our neighbors wore the usual costume of the sect, which is a branch of the Mennonite Society, or nearly allied to it, the men having laid off their round-crowned and remarkably wide-brimmed hats. Their hair is usually cut square across the forehead, and hangs long behind ; their coats are plainer than those of the plainest Quaker, and are fastened, except the overcoat, with hooks and eyes in place of buttons ; whence they are sometimes called Hooker or Hook-and-Eye Mennists. The pantaloons are worn without suspenders. Formerly, the Amish were often called Beardy Men, but since beards have become fashionable theirs are not so conspicuous. The women, whom I have sometimes seen with a bright purple apron, an orange neckerchief, or some other striking bit of color, were now more soberly arrayed in plain white caps without ruffle or border, and white neckerchiefs, though occasionally a cap or kerchief was black. They wear closely fitting waists, with a little basqtiine behind, which is probably a relic from the times of the short-gown and petticoat. Their gowns were of sober woollen stuff, frequently of flannel ; and all wore aprons. But the most surprising figures among the Amish are the little children, dressed in garments like those of old persons. It has been my lot to see at the house of her parents a tender little dark-eyed Amish maiden of three years, old enough to begin to speak ‘ Dutch,’ and as yet ignorant of English. Seated upon her father’s lap, sick and suffering, with that sweet little face encircled by the plain muslin cap, the little figure dressed in that plain gown, she was one not to be soon forgotten.”

The sketch of the Dunker love-feast abounds in descriptions as simple and striking as this, and in the closing essay, “ Cousin Jemima,” a delicate sense of character is shown. Indeed, the book is an attractive and useful one, and we heartily wish it prosperity, with all its defects.

Of a kindred effect with these two books so far as concerns our knowledge of our own country, are Mr. Parkman’s sketches of Prairie and Rocky-Mountain life as it was twenty-five years ago ; though of course his book is in a wholly different key, and has a wholly different value, both as history and as the prelude to the works which have given at least one passage of American story its true place in the annals of civilization. It was in the spring of 1846 that Mr. Parkman and another young Bostonian set out from St. Louis, and crossed the great plains to the Rocky Mountains, where for several months the future historian domesticated himself—though that is hardly the phrase, we suppose, for living en sauvage — among a tribe of Sioux, and returned finally to the settlements by descending the Arkansas. A few forts and tradingposts were then the only holds of the white men in a desolation which is now traversed by the Pacific railways, and dotted with many cities and villages. The people that Mr. Parkman observed there were the savages and the half-savage Frenchmen trading and trapping among them, with an occasional emigrant train, Mormon or Gentile, and once a detachment of Missourians on their way to take part in the Mexican war. This life and the life of nature on the plains and in the mountains yield all their fascination to his page, which is never wanting in some stirring adventure, some sketch of local character, some proof of his singularly sincere and thorough study of the race whose strange inarticulate being he has best interpreted to the race before which it is vanishing. The reader of Mr. Parkman’s histories, as We have hinted, will find here the proper prologue and the key to them all. At another time we hope to develop more fully the unity of his studies in the field he has chosen ; and for the present we must only praise this delightful book for its absolute good qualities, for the unfailing interest of the narrative, for the vivid pictures of such Indian life as rarely reveals itself to white men, for all its stories of the hunt and march and camp, for the calm observation brought to all these wild scenes and primitive personalities, — as quiet as that with which one notes people in the street or in society, yet touched with the imagination that gives lift and scope to philosophy. One after another the phases of savage existence are pictured to us with graphic yet truthful distinctness, characteristic of Mr. Parkman, who knew not only its public features, but the vie intime of the chief’s lodge, in which he had his abode, together with all the chief’s family. It is not easy, without leaving something that afterwards reproachfully seems better, to transfer any of these pictures, but here at a venture is one of breaking camp which is very animated and yet evidently not in the least “composed.”

“At daybreak, as I was coming up from the river after my morning’s ablutions, I saw that a movement was contemplated. Some of the lodges were reduced to nothing but bare skeletons of poles ; the leather covering of others was flapping in the wind as the squaw’s were pulling it off. One or two chiefs of note had resolved, it seemed, on moving ; and so having set their squaws at work, the example was tacitly followed by the rest of the village. One by one the lodges were sinking down in rapid succession, and where the great circle of the village had been only a moment before, nothing now remained but a ring of horses and Indians, crowded in confusion together. The ruins of the lodges were spread over the ground, together with kettles, stone mallets, great ladles of horn, buffalo-robes, and cases of painted hide, filled with dried meat. Squaws bustled about in their busy preparations, the old hags screaming to one another at the stretch of their leathern lungs. The shaggy horses were patiently standing while the lodge-poles were lashed to their sides, and the baggage piled upon their backs. The dogs, with their tongues lolling out, lay lazily panting, and waiting for the time of departure. Each warrior sat on the ground by the decaying embers of his fire, unmoved amid all the confusion, while he held in his hand the long trailrope of his horse.

“ As their preparations were contemplated, each family moved off the ground. The crowd was rapidly melting away. I could see them crossing the river, and passing in quick succession along the profile of the hill on the farther bank. When all were gone, I mounted and set out after them, followed by Raymond, and, as we gained the summit, the whole village came in view at once, straggling away for a mile or more over the barren plains before us. Everywhere the iron points of lances were glittering. The sun never shone upon a more strange array. Here were the heavyladen pack-horses, some wretched old woman leading them, and two or three children clinging to their backs. Here were mules or ponies covered from head to tail with gaudy trappings, and mounted by some gay young squaw, grinning bashfulness and pleasure as the Meneaska looked at her. Boys with miniature bows and arrows were wandering over the plains, little naked children were running along on foot, and numberless dogs were scampering among the feet of the horses. The young braves, gaudy with paint and feathers were riding in groups among the crowd, and often galloping, two or three at once along the line, to try the speed of their horses, Here and there you might see a rank of sturdy pedestrians stalking along in their white buffalo-robes. These were the dignitaries of the villages, the old men and warriors, to whose age and experience that wandering democracy yielded a silent deference. With the rough prairie and the broken hills for its background, the restless scene was striking and picturesque beyond description. Days and weeks made me familiar with it, but never impaired its effect upon my fancy.

“ As we moved on, the broken column grew yet more scattered and disorderly, until, as we approached the foot of a hill, I saw the old men before mentioned scating themselves in a line upon the ground, in advance of the whole. They lighted a pipe and sat smoking, laughing, and telling stories, while the people, stopping as they successively came up, were soon gathered in a crowd behind them. Then the old men rose, drew their buffalo-robes over their shoulders, and strode on as before. Gaining the top of the hill, we found a very steep declivity before us. There was not a minute’s pause. The whole descended in a mass, amid dust and confusion. The horses braced their feet as they slid down, women and children were screaming, dogs yelping as they were trodden upon, while stones and earth went rolling to the bottom. In a few moments I could see the village from the summit, spreading again far and wide over the plain below.”

Mr. Parkman reproduces as interestingly the unpicturesque and even squalid facts of his observation, which seems not to have been interrupted by conditions that might well have disabled him altogether. During his sojourn with the Indians he suffered continually from a disorder that might any day have ended fatally, and that left him to accomplish the historical labors of after years amidst such pains and discouragements of broken health as make his books a double triumph. It is not possible but this fact should lend its personal interest to his histories, and such of his readers as care to learn something more of his career may gratify themselves in the Abbé Casgrain’s biographical and critical notice of him. It is written in a half-colloquial style which the French hit better than we, and it is addressed now to the reader and now to Mr. Parkman himself, with an expansiveness, an effusion, which none but a Frenchman could gracefully indulge. Yet, despite its exuberance, the criticism is as just as it is cordial, except in those passages where the historian is taken to task for his delinquencies concerning the Jesuits and the Catholic faith generally, but even there it is so generous, so rather sorrowful than angry, that one’s heart is still with the Abbé, wherever one’s convictions may be. He expresses the feeling which French Canadians cherish towards the historian who has revived with a master touch the glories of their past, and in literature has perpetuated in its heroic aspect and proportion a national existence forever interrupted by the victory of Wolfe. “ Although,” he says, “from the Catholic point of view there is something to be reprehended in the books of Mr. Parkman, he has won from the gratitude of the Canadians a right that they will never forget. . . . . We do not hes-

itate to say that Canada owes him a testimony of public gratitude. And if we were consulted upon the mode of its expression, we should suggest to the Federal government to cause his portrait to be painted and placed in the parliament library at Ottawa.”

Yet another book of an interest in some sort common to those already mentioned is the life of Henry Dunster, first president of Harvard College, who was compelled to resign because of his views on Pædobaptism, — a question that we suppose would hardly affect President Eliot’s tenure of his office were he ten times as violent an Anti-Pædobaptist as poor Mr. Dunster was. It is, indeed, now so long since Pædobaptism agitated the overseers of Harvard, and the General Court of Massachusetts Bay, that perhaps some ignorant readers do not know that Mr. Dunster suffered for believing and declaring that it was unscriptural for infants to be baptized. He might have thought what he liked on this subject, said his friends then and since ; but he must needs preach upon it. In this Dr. Chaplin rightfully defends him as a truly honest man ; but such devotion to an idea is so foreign to the modern philosophy, that the reader may not agree with the author as to Mr. Dunster’s obligation, till he reflects that it is not ten years since above a million Americans died for an idea. The book is very agreeably written, and will be found entertaining even by those who care for Anti-Predobaptism as little as they know of it, Dunster’s character as a scholar and a man takes hold of the imagination, and amidst the vague outlines of the past he appears a figure of much earnestness and devout erudition. He brought, like many others, all the learning and honors of English Cambridge into our wilderness ; for fourteen years he ruled wisely and well our infant university (once expelling the Devil himself from its precincts by a very potent exorcism), he gently yielded to wrong in relinquishing his place, and his dust lies buried in the old churchyard in Cambridge, whither he desired it to be brought, — as if, suggests his biographer, in sign of his love of the place and his forgiveness of those who banished him thence.

We would defy the coldest cynic, the most experienced novel-reader, to read “ Thrown Together ” through with tranquillity. Many will remember “ Misunderstood,” by the same author, a work which was by no means a screaming farce, and this tale is quite as tearful as that one. The book simply narrates the struggles of a young girl of a sensitive disposition, who is snubbed by her cold-hearted mother and unappreciated by her careless father ; she has a cousin, a boy, who is petted by a doting widowed mother ; and these two children, being thrown together, work upon one another’s characters and give the plot of the story as well as the name. Nina’s reserve and sensitive pride are melted by Mervyn’s —the boy’s — frankness and simplicity ; a series of domestic tragedies softens the flinty hearts of the parents, and we see two peaceful households without any traces of flirtations which are apt to cloy upon the novel-reader, as much as they do in real life upon all except the parties concerned, and sometimes even upon them. The agonies, temptations, and bewilderments of these young people are told with really remarkable power, and when one remembers the widespread delusion of parents, that children have no characters of their own, but are to be manufactured into the resemblance of some favorite model, — which delusion is probably necessary to persuade parents to be unceasing in their care of their children, — it is easy to see that a book of this sort may be of great service. The sufferings of children are often, to our thinking, much greater than those of grown people, their reasons for grieving are so capricious, their reticence so singular, and, moreover, their woe is so total, so absolute, they have not the power of abstracting anything from their suffering which shall console them, and so their feelings are keener then than at any time of their life. That parents forget this and fail to understand their children, is well enough known, and to point this truth out is the design of the story. We hope it may be kept on a high shelf away from the children, who are ready enough of themselves to take morbid views of life, and that it may not turn out to be a sort of “ Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” to be used in the nursery for the propagation of a society for the abolition of parents.

As good a story in a certain way as we have lately read, is the “ Pastor of the Desert,” which is the record of facts in the life of a French minister of the Protestant religion in the times before the great revolution, and while yet the Protestants were denied all rights in France, — even marriage and burial,—and were still subject to the dragunnades. These facts, which are dressed in a little fiction and drama, are very touching, and the experiences of the rustic congregation, always persecuted and sometimes martyred, are affectingly grouped about them. They are full of a picturesqueness not too lavishly employed, and there are certain characters very finely treated, especially that of the simplehearted heroic pastor himself. He has been a famished student of divinity at Geneva ; for want of other rites he has been forced to marry himself to the excellent peasant girl of his choice ; his children are not lawfully his ; he has lived in continual danger and hardship, and has suffered wounds and imprisonment for his religion. At last, he resolves to go to the king and implore relief for his people, and pawning one of his wife’s narrow fields, he procures money enough to get to Paris, where he sees the king and prevails with him slightly to relax the rigor of the laws against the Protestants. All this adventure is charmingly narrated, and the interview with the hapless king, and the encounters with Franklin and Malesherbes and Malesherbes’s niece, the fair Countess Pisani,— one of the lovely aristocrats, who sentimentalizes the revolution forward by their patronage of democratic ideas, — are pictures that commend themselves for truthfulness by the careful soberness of their tone. Here is a sketch of the countess which will at once bring her before us, and show us the author’s agreeable art.

“The breakfast hour had now arrived, and their conversation was interrupted. They proceeded to Malesherbes’s apartment. Either by chance or by design, the pastor found himself seated by the side of a beautiful young woman, a stranger to him, who shone in the double splendor of aristocracy and beauty, profusely adorned with jewels and laces ; her white arms, bare to the elbow, in the classic style of the Homeric times. Pearls studded her powdered hair, and feathers fell back in gentle waves on each side of her head, throwing forth at every movement a faint perfume of violets and iris. The excitement of this proximity entirely took from the pastor whatever appetite he might have retained after the morning’s emotions. He gathered himself into the smallest possible compass on his chair, for fear his elbow should touch even a ribbon of this majestic Olympian goddess. His fair neighbor, to put him at his ease, held her glass towards him with a request for water, accompanying her request with the expressive smile peculiar to the eighteenth century, which has vanished since the French revolution. This smile, in its effects on the pastor, was like the end of the world, and the confusion of the apocalypse. He took the carafe with a trembling hand, and poured half its contents over the table-cloth.

“ ‘ I see, Monsieur Jarousseau,’ she kindly said, ‘that you would find it easier to die even than to serve me.’

“‘Yes,’ the pastor bluntly answered, evading the dread necessity of replying, by uttering the first monosyllable that came uppermost. Eternal mystery of humanity ! He had never trembled at the prospect of martyrdom, but now trembled for the first time in his life, at thought of the woman seated by his side in the overpowering magnificence of wealth. After breakfast he took up hs hat, intending to take leave of Malesherbes, and return at once to Paris. As he advanced towards the minister, the merciless stranger placed herself in front of him, crossed her arms over her chest, and said, ‘Have you read the confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau ? ’

“ ‘ Yes,’ replied the pastor, although his puritan soul had never been able to get beyond the second volume.

“ ‘ Then you must have there seen that a certain Armide, a Genoese, aided by her friend, once stopped the young philosopher in the open country, and authoritatively led him away to gather cherries in her orchard. I intend to profit by the example and make you my prisoner on parole. So I engage you to supper this evening with Dr. Franklin and me. Do not be alarmed ; it will be a family party, for I am one of you ; I am a republican, and if you at all doubt it, I will cry aloud, “Vive la République !” I should like to try the effect of such a cry for the first time within the walls of this château.’ ”

The author of the book is the grandson of the hero, and he writes with an earnestness and tenderness that give it a singular charm.

Mr. Calvert’s essay on Goethe is a little book that ought to approve itself to the large circle of readers liking to be placidly interested and instructed, and not caring to be greatly heated or surprised on any subject. That is to say, the essay deals with Goethe in an earnest way, with a devout but not a blind admiration, and with here and there the fine discrimination that should mark a poet’s study of a poet. Goethe’s life in Weimar and his travels in Italy, his relations to poetry and science, his friendship with Schiller and his other friendships, his loves, his Faust, his character generally, are the points of Mr. Calvert’s contemplation ; and though he cannot be said to set any of them in a new light, there is something on the whole that seems new in the result, or will seem so to such of us as have been wont to consider Goethe a grand, somewhat impassive, somewhat ruthless egoist. We do not say that Mr. Calvert succeeds in making us think otherwise of him ; but it is well to know what can be said for a different conception of him. The chapter on his “ Loves ” is naturally the most attractive in the book, and is most characteristic of Mr. Calvert’s view. The matter is delicately, yet freshly handled, and what is to he said in Goethe’s favor is said very well, though not always. We do not conceive, for example, that his breaking with Frcderika, whom he loved and who loved him so tenderly, is fortunately dealt with : “ How many a Frederika, before and since, has bloomed and loved in rural retirement (or in urban privacy), her love serving only to unfold the girl into the woman, its warm prophecies doomed to exhale in sighs, she living unwedded, her story unbruited and unknown, while the pangs of the pastor of Sesenheim’s daughter have ever the sympathy of the most cultivated hearts in Christendom, a sympathy so close that many have to brace them with the divine precept, Judge not, to keep off hard thoughts about him to whose genius we solely owe our tender, purifying participation in her tears,” It is just to Mr. Calvert to say that he does not often indulge in this strain of heartless sentimentality. In the more strictly literary passages of his essay he is more satisfactory. His observations on the Second Part of Faust we think particularly good and true, as opposed to Mr. Taylor’s view of that wearisome intellectual juggle.

Mazzini’s “Life” has, in the first place, the interest of every autobiography, which must be in great part due to the better understanding the writer has of himself than he might have of outside topics. But in this autobiography Mazzini tells us directly very little about his feelings, reasons, etc., though a great deal about what he did ; and from this we get our impression of the man; and it is valuable, besides, for the light it gives us on the earlier steps of Italy towards liberty. It was certainly an interesting time when Mazzini determined to devote his life to the freedom of his country, He tells us the way in which he was brought to this step, the secret combinations in its behalf, the treachery which so endangered them, the outbreak of insurrections, the cruelty with which they were put down ; he draws a vivid picture of yearning, struggle, defeat, and manly endurance. He speaks thus of the defeat of the ill-fated expedition of Savoy : —

“ Ours was not an enterprise of mere reaction ; nor like the movement of the sick man who strives to ease his sufferings by changing his position. We sought liberty, not as an end, but as a means by which to achieve a higher and more positive aim. We had inscribed the words “ Republican Unity” upon our banner. We sought to found a nation, to create a people. What was a defeat to men with such an aim as this in view ? Was it not a part of our educational duty to teach our party a lesson of calm endurance in adversity ? Could we teach this lesson better than by our own example ? And would not our renunciation have been received as a new argument proving the impossibility of unity? The fundamental vice of Italy, by which she was condemned to impotence, was clearly no lack of desire of freedom : it was a want of confidence in her own strength, a tendency to discouragement, and the want of that constancy of purpose, without which even virtue is fruitless. It was a fatal want of harmony between thought and action. . . . . A living apostolate was necessary ; a nucleus of men strong in determination and constancy, and inaccessible to discouragement ; men capable of defying persecution, and meeting defeat with the smile of faith, in the name of a great idea ; of succumbing one day but to rise again the next ; men ever ready to do battle, and, spite of time or adverse fortune, ever full of faith in the final victory. Ours was not a sect, but a religion of patriotism.”

Of the nobleness and simplicity and. steadfastness of Mazzini’s character no doubt can be felt. He suffered long and much, but he endured everything with dignity. No one can help admiring him. As to his judgment, however, opinions may well vary. One can easily see that he was relentless in his views ; and having made up his mind that Italy should be a republic, he could not look with patience upon the establishment of a monarchy, though whether Italy is ripe for a republic is a question about which grave doubts may still be held. We warmly recommend this book to our readers. They will find in it an eloquent record of a noble life.

We have found Mr. Whymper’s book almost hopelessly defiant of well-meant endeavors to read it in any sort of course; but this may have been owing to something in us like that antipathetic influence which defeats so many experiments in spiritualism, our sphere in respect to the desirability of scrambling among Alps being, we will own, in the last degree one of suspicion. From Mr. Whymper’s efforts we cannot perceive any general result, and his style lacks that charm, that fresh life which made Mr. Clarence King’s “Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada” a joy even to those who devoutly hope never to see anything from mountaintops for themselves. It is perhaps owing to a constant effort for simplicity that Mr. Whymper’s rehearsal of his adventures is so dry; but it is certain that he imparts a full sense of their fatigue and little of their exhilaration, whereas Mr. King did exactly the reverse. He left the reader eager for the next climb ; but at the end of one of Mr. Whymper’s excursions you swear never to look at an Alp again. The book closes with the story of the dreadful accident by which a few years since three comrades of the author — Lord Douglass, Mr. Hudson, and Mr. Hadow — were, with their guide, hurled from the author’s sight, down four thousand feet of precipices in the Matterhorn ; but a more vivid passage, we think, is that describing a fall of Mr. Whymper himself, who slipped in trying to pass the edge of a jutting rock : —

“The knapsack brought my head down first, and I pitched into some rocks about a dozen feet below : they caught something and tumbled me off the edge, head over heels, into the gully. The bâton was dashed from my hands, and I whirled downward in a series of bounds, each longer than the last, — now over ice, now into rocks, — striking my head four or five times, each time with increased force. The last bound sent me spinning through the air, in a leap of fifty or sixty feet, from one side of the gully to the other, and I struck the rocks, luckily, with the whole of my left side. They caught my clothes for a moment, and I fell back on to the snow with motion arrested ; my head fortunately came the right side up, and a few frantic catches brought me to a halt in the neck of the gully and on the verge of the precipice. . . . I fell nearly two hundred feet in seven or eight bounds. Ten feet more would have taken me in one gigantic leap of eight hundred feet on to the glacier below. . . . . I was perfectly conscious of what was happening, and felt each blow, but, like a patient under chloroform, experienced no pain. Each blow was, naturally, more severe than that which preceded it, and I distinctly remember thinking, ‘ Well, if the next is harder still, that will be the end !' Like persons who have been rescued from drowning, I remember that the recollection of a multitude of things rushed through my head, many of them trivialities or absurdities which had been forgotten long before ; and, more remarkable, this bounding through space did not feel disagreeable. But I think that in no very great distance more consciousness as well as sensation would have been lost, and upon that I base my belief, improbable as it seems, that death by a fall from a great height is as painless an end as can be experienced.”

The poetry, the spirit, of the book, however, is really in the pictures, which are chiefly Mr. Whymper’s own designs, and which for fineness and force are beyond all praise. In them the humor of the author abundantly appears, as well his feeling for the sublimities of the Alps, and both of these qualities are pretty successfully excluded from the text. Mr. Whymper as an artist is so good, that if you do not read him too much you can almost praise him as an author.

FRENCH AND GERMAN.*

MANY of our readers will doubtless remember Gustave Droz’s Aatour d’une Source, a novel which was translated into English a few years ago. It was highly praised and widely read, but, we imagine, not very much liked. Of its cleverness there could be but little doubt, but to most of us on this side of the ocean there was a certain dulness in the book, owing, in great measure, to our unfamiliarity with the persons, places, and incidents of the story. A new novel, Babolain, by the same author, has just appeared, and we gladly recommend it to those of our readers who care for French novels. We are sure that this objection of unfamiliarity will not be made against it. The scene is laid in Paris, but while the other novel concerns itself with mercantile intrigue and a social complication which are both foreign to us, or at least to our literature, Babolain simply tells a story of human suffering which may be as true in Prescott, Arizona, as in the “ centre of civilization.”

It might be called the story of a sensitive man, who has not force enough to hide his sensitiveness under an armor of indifference, and who, by his ignorance of the world, falls into those snares and troubles that most people think themselves peculiarly able to avoid. He marries a worthless woman, his child treats him cruelly, his few friends are cold, and his life makes a pitiable story. If this were all, if the novel were a mere morbid study of suffering, there would be a host of objections raised by those readers who are spoiled by sugary endings of most novels, or who feel a fair dislike to tormenting their hearts by wilfully invented misery ; but this story is more than this, it is the study of a complicated character, one honorable, but physically timid, Courageous in the way of perseverance and endurance, humble, and sensitive. His troubles are not thrust upon him, — it is that which makes so much of the suffering in fiction distasteful, the fact that the author aims all his poisoned arrows at his victims, as if he were a wanton boy, — but they follow from his nature, which is one ill-fitted for struggling with the great world of society into which he enters of himself. Then when he is suffering in this way, the author does not take occasion to point out our superiority to such chickenhearted people, who deserve nothing better, but he lets us see the superiority of what is noble in his hero’s character to the sufferings he endures. In short, it is, if we may use the phrase, a book of lofty emotions. It is a sad story, but it is not needlessly sad ; it is redeemed by the poor man’s dignity and unconscious faith from being a mere ingenious device to rack our feelings.

For readers who dread this novel, which certainly will not be read by the young, we can recommend Mme. Craven’s Fleurange, a book that is as innocent as need be, and which wholly escapes any namby-pamby dulness. Indeed it is full of incident, and very well worth reading.

Les jaunes années de C. A. Sainte-Beuve is hardly a fitting title of the small volume of M. Morand, which contains about a hundred of Sainte-Beuve’s letters, most of which were written after he had grown up. But whatever fault may be found with the title, less will be found with the book ; to be fair, one can only regret that it is of so small compass. The books about this great critic which we have had occasion to notice in these pages tell us much less about him than one might have expected. A great deal more light is thrown upon him by these letters, some written to a life long friend the Abbé Barbe, others, apparently, to the compiler of the book. Of these, the letters to the Abbe are by far the most interesting. In many of them the writer states his feelings about religion. In 1830 he writes as follows : —

“ . . . . Literary opinions have a very small place in my life and in my thoughts. What really occupies me is life itself, its aim, the mystery of our own heart, happiness, holiness ; and, sometimes, when I feel a sincere inspiration, the desire of expressing these ideas and sentiments according to the remote type of eternal beauty. If I had more ardor for things above, it would be of great service to me to be detached, as I am, from all the turmoil of the world about me ; to this I am indifferent at all times and places.”

In 1865 he writes to the Abbé, who had just sent him a volume that he had written on the immortality of the soul ; —

“ If you remember our long talks on the ramparts or on the sea-shore, I will confess to you that, after more than forty years, I am still at the same point. I understand, I listen, je me laisse dire ; I answer gently, rather by doubts than by strong arguments ; but in a word, I have never been able to succeed in forming a faith, a belief on this solemn subject, not even a conviction which lasts without falling to pieces the next moment. Your book takes me methodically over the same ground.”

In 1844 he writes about his election to the Academy : —

“ At last, as you see, I have arrived at the point at which I had aimed but very little ; I ought to be very happy and content, at the same time that I ought to feel honored. I say I ought to be, for this only changes the outside of things, true happiness does not lie there : only to take the literary side, it lies in study, in producing such works as one has conceived. . . . . Official literary positions with all their advantages bring duties, subjections, and continual losses of time ; when one reaches them the happy time of free, modest, obscure study is generally over.”

We cannot forbear quoting this little anecdote of his visit to the Tuileries to announce to the Emperor the election to the Academy of M. Prévost-Paradol. The Emperor asked, “ But has M. Prévost-Paradol written anything beside newspaperarticles ? has he written a book ? ” I was on the point of answering, “ Sir, no one writes books nowadays” ; but I fortunately remembered that the Emperor was writing one ; so I answered, “ Sir, we academicians do not write books any more.”

While this book gives us but brief glimpses of Sainte-Beuve, they will be found interesting in lack of more material ; for a fuller treatment we shall probably have to wait until another like him appears.

Not so complicated a character is Lamartine, about whom M. Charles de Mazade has just published an interesting book. It is when the English-speaking person comes across a Frenchman like Lamartine, that he especially recalls Waterloo; the Pilgrim Fathers ; the wonderful power of colonization that the Anglo-Saxon race possesses, so different from that of the flippant Gaul ; Shakespeare ; roast-beef, and all the phenomena by which Mr. Taine explains the peculiarities of our race ; he is apt, too, to recall the universal French habit of eating frogs, of chattering in the market-place, of weeping in public, inferior stature, ignorance of boxing, etc. We need not go on, the feeling is familiar. Lamartine was certainly the spoiled child of the century, vain, self-conscious, weak, theatrical, like others of his fellow-countrymen,— for instance, Victor Hugo ; there is scarcely a Frenchman whom we can recall who is so little likely to have justice done him by a foreigner, especially in these days of reaction from all that he most zealously upheld. Besides, his great fault, his unbounded, colossal conceit, is one that justifies contempt, in that an observer feels as if he had been deprived of what is peculiarly his, the power of awarding praise, and as if by his contempt he not only asserted his own right, but would bring to a greater equality the real position of the man. Still, this justifies no one in remaining in scornful ignorance of Lamartine’s life ; and M. de Mazade’s book will be found exceedingly entertaining. Even conceit docs not blot out every quality of merit.

Our German books this month are few in number. Those who have just finished the “ Reader” and “ Don Carlos,” will not be properly grateful for the recommendation of Röntsch’s Indogermanen und Semitenthum, which is a very interesting discussion of the differences between the Semitic and our own, or, more exactly, our ancestors’ theology, poetry, and philosophy. His referring the monotheism of the Semitic nations to the uniformity of the desert will not be universally received as a satisfactory explanation, but there is much more in the book than that. We feel confident that many who will be frightened by the title will find this a very interesting volume.

Frühlingsfluthen is the title of the German translation of the last of Tourguénieff ’s novels. It is, it goes without saying, very well worth reading. The story we will not abridge, but we will content ourselves with simply recommending it to older readers. As for others, we fancy that opinions might be divided as to its suitableness. Tourguénieff’s treatment is always clean, but occasionally he takes a subject that would not be chosen by one who wrote, as most English novelists do, or are supposed to do, for innocent, inexperienced readers. No one can be harmed by it, there is a solemn note of morality in it, but it may perhaps be distasteful for general reading.

NORWEGIAN.²

IT was but natural that the political and literary dependence on Denmark should, after the separation in 1814, call forth a strong reaction in Norwegian literature in the ultra national direction, and in fact the whole literary history of the nation since that year presents an uninterrupted struggle, in which the various fiercer and gentler aspects of this “ national idea ” have been contending for the supremacy. The question was naturally raised, whether the foreign modes of thought and speech, the foreign traditions, and foreign civilization, which during the union with Denmark had gained a certain naturalization among the so-called “better classes,” but really never penetrated into the heart of the people, were at all a safe foundation whereupon to build, or even the proper material wherewith to build up a national literature. The question was soon settled in the negative ; and during the following decades we find the poets of the land vainly groping for this national idea, while its existence is still clearly felt, but its character only vaguely comprehended. With Welhaven’s clearthoughted lyrics, and perhaps still more by his descriptive poems, redolent of the pine forest, the vista is opened inward to the Norse fjord and valley ; and when Björnson, Landstad, and others took the next Step and pointed to the Saga and the old popular ballad as the true embodiments of Norse spirit and poetry, the victory seemed already won, and the brightest promise to be given for the future. There were some, however, who thought differently ; not because they disapproved of Björnson’s innovations, but because they believed that he had not gone far enough. His writings, although dealing with the life and traditions of the people, were still addressed to the higher classes, and spoke their language, which is not Norwegian, but, at least in writing, nearly identical with the Danish. The popular dialects, on the contrary, have to a great extent preserved the vigor and richness of form of the old Norse or Icelandic tongue ; and in order to be truly national, the poet ought not only to avail himself of the poetic material, found in the national life and traditions, but also adopt the modes of speech and thought peculiar to the people, and descend to the level of their comprehension. These views were first propagated by the talented satirist, Osmund Vinje, and found their full practical realization in Kristofer Janson, the author of “ Sigmund Bresteson.”

The fact that Kristofer Janson writes in a language which is but very imperfectly understood by the majority of the bookreading public, will sufficiently account for the indifferent success of his later writings. As long as his books were regarded in the light of novel experiments, there was no lack of those who, from very curiosity, favored his project ; but there were probably few who dreamed at the time when “ Fraa Bygdom ” (From the Parishes) was the literary sensation of the day in Scandinavia, that it was to be the predecessor of a long series of works, the object of which should, in a certain manner, be a protest against the existing order of society, nay, against the very mother-tongue itself,

“ Sigmund Bresteson ” is an heroic tale from the Saga, told in forty poems of different form and metre. It unfortunately suggests comparison with Tegnér’s “Frithjof’s Saga” to which it is, if not in truthfulness, then at least both in theme and treatment, greatly inferior. The author has shown very little discrimination in the selection of his material, and, without successful transfusion of the heroic spirit of the Saga, has painted the old barbarous age in all its harshness and crudity. Mr. Janson has evidently not comprehended what Tegnér never for a moment lost sight of, and what he so clearly expresses in his well-known letter to the poet Franzén.

“ My object,” he writes, “ was to draw a poetic picture of the old Norse heroic life ; it was not Frithjof as an individual, but the age of which he may be regarded as a representative, I wished to paint. Therefore I retained the fundamental plan and drawing of the Saga, but deemed it my right to make my own additions and to cut away what was not suitable to my purpose. In the Saga there is found much which will appear grand and heroic to all ages, but also some rudeness, wildness, and barbarism, which would either have to be altogether left out, or, at least, considerably tempered.”

If Kristofer Janson had looked upon the Sagas in the same spirit, thus with the eyes of the poet rather than the historian’s, he would surely, without much loss of truthfulness, have succeeded in giving us a more attractive, or at all events a more harmonious picture of the old Saga life in the North. Tegnér produced a finished poem, which, in spite of a prevailing tone of romantic chivalry, totally foreign to Frithjof’s age, will always maintain its place in literature, even when the Scandinavian peninsula shall boast a truer interpreter of its heroic past ; while a work like “ Sigmund Bresteson,” in which artistic regards are sacrificed to an unnecessarily rigid sense of historical fidelity, will stand a decidedly poorer chance in comparison.

The poem opens with a delightful little prelude, which very aptly introduces you to endlessly varying scenes of battle, and nightly affrays and snow-drift and oceanspray. You breathe the fresh, bracing atmosphere of the Faroe Islands ; the seagulls scream round the naked rocks ; the dolphins play in the lucid waves, and shoot high columns of water up into the morning air. Sigmund and Tore, the sons of two chiefs of tho islands, are sold as slaves by the slayers of their fathers, and are brought to Norway, where they regain their liberty. On the mountains of Dovre they are fostered by a peasant, Torkel Turrfrost, between whose daughter, Turid, and Sigmund an attachment springs up. He grows to manhood, but the thought of vengeance on his father’s murderers leave him no rest night or day, and he abandons Turid, after having confessed his love for her to his foster-father. Having reached the court of Haakon Jarl, who was then the ruler of the country, he enters his service, gathers men and ships, and with Tore, his foster-brother, returns to the Faroe Island, where he finds his foes; but, instead of craving blood for blood, agrees to abide in the judgment of the Jarl, and finally has the matter peaceably arranged. It may be, that Sigmund here acts very judiciously, but his wrangling and trading with Trond in Cote is decidedly inartistic in its effect upOn the ensemble of the poem.

Turid, in the mean while, spends her days wearily with the child he has left her, longing for him, loving him and hating him, as the changing moods come and go. This is very prettily expressed in the wayward, rambling melody of her lullaby, a few verses of which we translate : —

While Sigmund looks to his own affairs on the Faroe Island, establishing himself in the new earldom he has lately received from Haakon Jarl, Christianity is first introduced into Norway by Olaf Trygveson, who soon after the murder of the Jarl succeeds him on the throne.

The dramatic motive in Sigmund’s conversion to Christianity, as it appears to us,might have been turned to better account. Had Sigmund before been a zealous heathen, and had he through abhorrence of Haakon Jarl’s faithlessness and unnatural cruelty been led to doubt the divinity of a religion which not only permitted but even required suclt inhumanities, or, still better, had his conversion been psychologically grounded in some soul-felt experience of his own, the reader would have had an assurance of his sincerity, and the monotonous march of the plot would have been enriched with a strong dramatic motive, around which the minor complications would have grouped themselves, like the spires and buttresses round the dome of a cathedral. Any such central idea we have been unable to discover. In “ Frithjof’s Saga” the love-intrigue binds the tale firmly together ; and whether we find the hero roaming among the isles of Greece, burning the temple at Systrand, or coming in disguise to King Ring’s court, we never for a moment doubt his purpose or question its propriety. Sigmund’s love for Turid has no such vital element in it, and is evidently by the author himself intended as a half-accessory interlude between two natural divisions of the poem, rather than the varied theme or keynote of his composition.

Regarded, however, as a collection of unconnected lyric and descriptive poems, “ Sigmund Bresteson ” contains enough of local beauty and admirable situations amply to repay the reader to whom the language is not an insurmountable barrier. The song “ Trond and Havgrim ” has in its quaint laconic refrain and a certain naïve straightforwardness caught one of the most characteristic tones of the old Norse ballad.

It maybe needless to add, that Sigmund in the days of his prosperity returns to Turid, whom he brings home to the Faroe Islands as his wife, that he Christianizes his native country, and that he makes a brave and wise ruler.