Recent Literature

THE verdict which public opinion has pronounced, or, rather, is from time to time pronouncing, on the writings of George Eliot is certainly a very complicated one. That she is an acute delineator of character, a subtle humorist, a master of English, a universal observer and a comprehensive student, a profound moralist, — all this is part of her established reputation. That she is, besides this, a poet of great force and originality would, if we took as the test the most widely published criticism, be also established. That she has also succeeded, — in an age in which the public has been satiated with novels, and critics have begun even to doubt whether novel-writing were not a thing of the past, — if not in founding a new school of novel-writing, at least in proving that this literary form could be adapted, in skilful hands, to purposes which her predecessors had never dreamed of. Thackeray, Dickens, Bulwer, Disraeli, — between them and George Eliot there is no relationship ; and yet George Eliot, in the hold which she maintains upon the public interest, is certainly their successor. But is this all ? Does not every one who reads generalizations like these involuntarily say to himself, this is nothing? To say of an author like George Eliot that she is distinguishable by this or that abstract quality is very much like trying to revive the effect produced upon our imaginations by a broad and majestic river by describing the general direction of a body of flowing water, the height of the banks between which it flows, the measurements of its soundings taken by the latest hydrographical survey. When we think of all the immense variety of her books, from the Scenes from Clerical Life to Middlemarch, of the range of feeling and thought that they cover, and the wonderful manner in which the work has been done, one is tempted to give up the task of studying this student, of observing this author who has devoted her life to observation, or of analyzing this professor of analysis.

Several critics have agreed, and it is almost becoming the fashion to say, that the leading trait in all of George Eliot’s works is the constant presence of the idea of Fate or Destiny, of the helplessness of man in his pitiful attempt to struggle with the eternal forces of nature ; and no one will dispute that both the Mill on the Floss and Middlemarch have given undue reason for this opinion. But the idea of fate is very different in different minds, and it seems to us by no means clear that the fate of George Eliot is of a sort which has hitherto been known to literature. The conception of destiny with which we are most familiar is that of the Grecian tragedies and myths, — an individual fate, or at most a family fate, which attends, during a long succession of years, a particular man or family. They are born into the world together ; they move through life together; perhaps, even, they struggle for the mastery : at last the fate is accomplished, whether for good or evil. In the Arabian Nights we find a conception of somewhat the same kind in the story of the young prince who is fated to die on coming of age, and whom his father, the king, sends out of the kingdom to an island, where he is to live in a subterranean palace until the fatal moment is past ; but to the same island comes by accident a traveller who discovers the prince’s retreat, and lives with him on terms of great intimacy and affection, consoling him for his solitude. At last the prince’s birthday— the last of his imprisonment — arrives, and the king’s vessel is descried above the horizon coming to take his son home in safety. The moment, however, has come ; the prince, reclining on a sofa, asks his friend for a knife from a shelf above ; there is a misstep, and the king arrives to find the fate fulfilled.

Perhaps the destiny which appears in Scott’s novels — in the Bride of Lammermoor, for instance, or Guy Mannering — is of the same essential kind as that of the Greeks, but the coloring is totally different ; while the Mohammedan, with his “ will of God be done,” has given to the idea a religious character, again of a quite opposite kind. The idea takes a thousand different forms, which a scientific treatment of the subject would no doubt show in their real order and historical sequence.

The fate of George Eliot is not one of them. Hers is a more modern and truer conception. The destiny which surrounds her characters, which leads to their several allotted ends the lives of Tito, Maggie Tulliver, Tom, Hetty, Romola, Lydgate, the Vincys, or the poor drunkard whose last agonies are described with such minuteness in Middlemarch, is the compounded destiny of natural laws, character, and accident which we call life. It leaves nothing out of view ; neither the material nor the moral forces ; neither the immutable fixity of physical succession, nor the will. Man is, in these novels, neither a creature who controls us and who controls nor who is controlled by nature ; he is himself part of nature.

We would not, however, overlook the fact, — which is of the first importance, — that George Eliot’s fate is a moral fate, or, to put what we mean in other words, that the moral lessons enforced by life are the most important lessons for her. It is not the strangeness and awfulness of life, it is not the joy of life, it is not the misery of life, nor the absurdity of life, that is first with her: all these she understands and feels ; but what she most keenly understands and most keenly feels are the lessons which all this strangeness, awfulness, joy, misery, and absurdity bring for those who will read them aright, as well as the obligation that she herself is under to help others to read them aright. This is not merely saying over again that she is a moralist. There have been many moralists in literature, particularly English literature, who would have been quite at a loss to understand the meaning of this morality ; moralists to whom the bare idea of fate or destiny was anathema, and who could not have even imagined the connection between it and duty.

That fate should, in English hands, assume a moral color is natural enough ; but if we compare the novels of George Eliot with those of a Continental writer whose novels have a distinctly fatalistic turn, we shall begin to doubt perhaps whether this view of life is the growth of any one soil. Turgénieff’s character, or at least some of his characters, are the playthings of fate quite as much as any of his English contemporary. And Turgénieff, too, is impressed with the moral side of his subject. His Liza, if it were not for the pervading sadness of the book, might be distributed as a tract among refined people. Yet, after all, the sadness is more fundamental than the morality, and perhaps it would be fairer to say that there is a general way of looking at life, peculiar to modern men, which Turgénieff happened to take in Liza, although he certainly did not very distinctly grasp it, as George Eliot always does.

And what is this modern view of life, which is different from all others, — so sad, and so moral, so ironical, so didactic, yet so undogmatically didactic ? M. Taine, in his English Literature, after speaking of Byron’s unhappy career, and that of the poets whom he calls “ romantic,” answers this question in a way that, whatever may be thought of the criticism in other respects, is complete : “ So lived and so ended this unhappy great man ; the malady of the age had no more distinguished prey; around him, like a hecatomb, lie the rest, wounded also by the greatness of their faculties, and their immoderate desires, — some extinguished in stupor or drunkenness, others worn out by pleasure or work ; these driven to madness or suicide ; those beaten down by impotence, or lying on a sick-bed ; all agitated by their acute or aching nerves ; the strongest carrying their bleeding wound to old age, the happiest having suffered as much as the rest, and preserving their scars, though healed. The concert of their lamentations has filled their age, and we have stood around them, hearing in our hearts the low echo of their cries. We were sad like them, and, like them, inclined to revolt. The institution of democracy excited our ambitions without satisfying them ; the proclamation of philosophy kindled our curiosity without contenting it. In this wide-open career the plebeian suffered for his mediocrity, and the sceptic for his doubt. The plebeian, like the sceptic, attacked by a precocious melancholy, and withered by a premature experience, delivered his sympathies and his conduct to the poets, who declared happiness impossible, truth unattainable, society ill-arranged, man abortive or marred. From this unison of voices an idea sprang, — the centre of the literature, the arts, the religion of the age, — that there is, namely, a monstrous disproportion between the different parts of our social structure, and that human destiny is vitiated by this disagreement. “ What advice have they given us for its remedy ? They were great : were they wise ? ‘ Let deep and strong sensations rain upon you ; if your machine breaks, so much the worse ! . . . . Cultivate your garden, busy yourself in a little circle ; re-enter the flock, be a beast of burden. . . . Turn believer again, take holy water, abandon your mind to dogmas, and your conduct to hand-books. . . . . Make your way ; aspire to power, honors, wealth.’ Such are the various replies of artists and citizens, Christians and men of the world. Are they replies ? And what do they propose but to satiate one’s self, to become beasts, to turn out of the way, to forget ? There is another and a deeper answer, which Goethe was the first to give, which we begin to conceive, in which issue all the labor and experience of the age, and which may perhaps be the subjectmatter of future literature. ‘ Try to understand yourself and things in general.’ A strange reply, seeming barely new, whose scope we shall only hereafter discover. For a long time yet, men will feel their sympathies thrill at the sound of the sobs of their great poets. For a long time they will rage against a destiny which opens to their aspirations the career of limitless space, to shatter them, within two steps of the goal, against a wretched post which they had not seen. For a long time they will bear, like fetters, the necessities which they must embrace as laws. Our generation, like the preceding, has been tainted by the malady of the age, and will never more than half be quit of it. We shall arrive at truth, not at calm. All we can heal at present is our intellect; we have no hold upon our sentiments. But we have a right to conceive for others the hopes which we no longer entertain for ourselves, and to prepare for our descendants the happiness which we shall never enjoy.”

But we have not yet reached the fortunate isles. The future may have in store for those who are to come after us a thousand blessings of which we can only dream ; for the present we live in a period of intellectual and moral tumult of revolt against the old, mixed with dread of the new, — indeed, not half understanding the new, but half loving the old. Science has opened the portals of knowledge, and we are not scientific ; science has revealed a new harmony of the feelings, and yet in our dull ears the old, incongruous, sentimental melodies go on ringing. Science offers us the key to the moral law which governs the world, yet we cannot bring ourselves to turn it. Is it any wonder that, amid all this doubt, hesitation, and, it may be, despair, we find a wonderful zest in humor, in analysis, in irony, in the purely critical study of the world ? Such a life as ours is too complicated, too revolutionary, too full of sudden surprises and absurdities, too sad, too merry, too horribly real, too shamefully false, to admit of that repose which furnishes the only sure foundation for happy art. Our business is not creation, but criticism.

When we have said that George Eliot is almost an inspired critic, have we not said what is really the most important thing about her? No doubt at such an opinion thousands of her admirers would hold up their hands in horror. “ Inspired critic! ” they would exclaim ; “ how can an author of singular dramatic power, and of equally singular power of human delineation, be called a critic ? ” This, however, is the question. If George Eliot has real dramatic power, and has imagined real characters, there is no doubt that it is folly to say that she is primarily a critic. But we think she has not. What she has done has been to describe, with such wonderful minuteness and ironical force, the thoughts and feelings which, under given circumstances, a certain kind of person might have, that we are forced to admit the possibility of the picture, or, to speak more accurately, the reality of the report. Besides this, she has a wonderful power of reproducing scenes of every sort, with which she is familiar, or, rather, with which her audience is familiar,— a faculty which seems to us, at least, not a pictorial or imaginative one, but rather that faculty of description which comes of observation and general power of statement. That this is true may be occasionally seen when George Eliot attempts remote studies, like that, for instance, of the mediæval Italian barber-shop in Romola, — a shop in which we feel too acutely sensible of the daylight of the English intellect of the nineteenth century, as well as the keenness of George Eliot’s humor, to make ourselves quite at home. Even in the English scenes, as has been well said by a recent critic, we are from time to time oppressed by a sense that the village worthies who make reflections on life and on each other are, after all, only masks through which George Eliot is ventriloquizing.

To turn to the more noted and distinct characters,— are they characters ? — no one, we suppose, except a woman, would claim actual existence for Adam Bede, or for Felix Holt, or Will Ladislaw ; but there are, besides such failures as these, remarkable successes in Maggie Tulliver, in Arthur Donnithorne, in Hetty, in Tom Tulliver, in Philip, in Tito, in Romola, in Lydgate, in Rosamond Vincy, Dorothea, and a very long list besides. But if an artist were to be asked to illustrate these books, would he not find considerable difficulty in drawing these characters, so that they would be recognized ? Would he not find, for instance, a strange family likeness between Romola and Dorothea ? Would not Rosamond Vincy, with a few slight touches (an alteration of coloring and outline), change into Hetty ? Would not any one of a dozen Englishmen do for Lydgate ? And can the other characters we have mentioned be fastened upon, and their likeness really kept ? Perhaps Maggie, Arthur, Philip, and Tito make more against our theory than the rest; but though their psychological situations are always interesting, they seem always to be doing the work of representation for man or woman, — not that they are types, but that their movements seem a trifle too much in the control of the wonderful exhibitor who is half concealed behind the show. Romola was once illustrated ; but the illustrations were rather of the situations than of the people. Thackeray’s characters and Dickens’s caricatures live and move of their own accord. Compare Becky Sharp with Rosamond Vincy, — both women in whom selfishness is the moving principle, and whose married life is the principal subject of treatment. If we were to meet Becky we should know her at once ; Rosamond we should be perfectly certain to mistake for some one else. The honest farcical countenances of the members of the Pickwick Club are as familiar to us as those of our own acquaintances ; but Mr. Brooke, who is really almost as farcical, would not have the slightest difficulty in proving an alibi at any time.

To be sure, it may be said that Thackeray had been educated as an artist, and that he illustrated his own books. But he was an artist because it was his disposition to see certain things picturesquely or pictorially, and this is not George Eliot’s disposition, Thackeray used to say, in reply to people who complained of Esmond’s “marriage with his mother-in-law,” that he had done nothing to arrange the match ; he could not prevent his characters doing what they chose. Nobody can conceive of George Eliot’s being able to make such a reply as this ; yet both Thackeray and George Eliot are moralists. Thackeray was a moralist of the old school, however ; his vanitas vanitatum was but the echo, after all, of the vanitas vanitatum handed down to us by tradition, — a charming echo, but still an echo. George Eliot is a moralist because her epoch is a moralizing epoch : it is her proession, her life.

The author of these volumes is a critic. Her maxim —“ Know thyself and things in general" — she has taken profoundly to heart, and as a result we have a body of what might be called sympathetic erudition such as no one else ever dreamed of. History, science, art, literature, language, she is mistress of. Upon all these fields she draws. Human life, however, is her interest ; in this all her studies centre. Her observation is always beginning, never ending. Certainly if writers are divided as Goethe somewhere suggests into those who are born to say some one thing, to produce some single literary flower and die, and those whose life is one constant development, like that of Nature herself, in which education and production go on side by side to the end, George Eliot would be included in the latter class. Goethe himself belonged to it, and, as M. Taine says, Goethe was the first of modern men to appreciate the changed relations between man and nature which the new renaissance was to introduce.

It would be a mere waste of time to go into a minute criticism of Middlemarch. The plots are too numerous, the characters too multitudinous, and the whole too complicated. Out of the history of Dorothea’s marriage and domestic life, Lydgate’s marriage and domestic life, Bulstrode’s crimes and hypocrisy, the love-affair of Mary and Fred, and the adventures of Ladislaw, a library of novels might be made ; while on the humor, the observation, reflection, and suggestion contained in the book a regiment of writers of social articles might support themselves for a lifetime. It is an interesting question, whether this Study of Provincial Life is a success or a failure ; whether it is a work which, judged by its own standard, reaches or falls short of that standard. This question, however, we must leave to others to answer, partly because it seems now a little too soon to make up our minds, and partly because we find great difficulty in knowing what the standard is. It is A Study of Provincial Life, but this is about as indicative of the character of the book as romans nationaux are in the case of Erckmann-Chatrian. It is, says one critic, the study of the effects of the narrow English provincial life of forty years ago on the characters of the story which interests the author, and therefore should interest the reader. If this is so, we say that, somehow or other, the effects of this narrow provincial life on the characters is the last thing in the world we should have supposed the central point of interest. In Cranford, this is undoubtedly the main thing, and we think we may with great safety ask any one who has ever lived in a village — a real village, we mean, not a “ quarter section ” of town lots—to say in which book the relation in question is brought out most distinctly. In Cranford, do we not feel in every line the remoteness of the world, the whimsical pettiness of the interests, the eccentricity of the characters, the village life, with the thrill of reality which real art always produces ? Of course, Middlemarch is not Cranford : Middlemarch is a county, Cranford is a village ; but, after all, a county is a place, and there is, for some reason or other, no locality whatever for Middlemarch. Some one else says that it is Dorothea’s life which is the main thing ; the struggle of an ardent, impassioned, and noble nature with surrounding obstacles ; with a pedantic sham of a husband, with her own duty to this husband, with her love for Ladislaw, with her sense of duty to her family, and, in short, with provincial life. But though there is certainly some reason for this opinion, there is just as much for the opinion that Lydgate is the central figure. Probably a good deal of difficulty of the same kind would be found in some of her other books, in Adam Bede, for instance, and The Mill on the Floss. Is Adam the principal figure in the first ? If he is, it is in the same way that the figure-head of a ship is. What is the esoteric meaning of The Mill on the Floss ? Certainly, compared with one or two of the former novels, Middlemarch is not a success. There is no such Satanic omniscience shown as we had in the analysis of Arthur Donnithorne’s unhappy conscience. There is nothing here like Tito or the pathetic yet beautiful description of the gradual alterations in the relations between Maggie and Tom Tulliver. Yet Middlemarch is certainly infinitely more interesting than Felix Holt.

And yet, — and yet these rambling suggestions seem only worth making that we may take them all back in the end. In the attempt to play the critic of such works as these, one cannot help feeling that to properly analyze and explain George Eliot, another George Eliot is needed, and that all suggestion can do is to indicate the impossibility of grasping, in even the most comprehensive terms, the variety of her powers. An author whose novels it has really been a liberal education to read, one is more tempted to admire silently than to criticise at all.

— Among the Charles Lambs of America, whom the book-noticers have given us in such number that we can no longer count the humorous fold upon the fingers of both hands, we believe that we like none so well as Mr. Warner, who indeed need not be “called out of his name,” if one has a desire to praise his talent. Nothing, to be sure, is quite new in literature, which, like the doting diner-out, is apt to repeat its good things ; by the time that an author is perfectly new, he is old, and some young writer is imitating him. But in this apparently hopeless process, original force and beauty get themselves constantly expressed, and we are aware from time to time of a figure that has grown upon us as something quite different from the other figures that it seemed to suggest or resemble. Just now, certainly, any one who reads Mr. Warner’s Backlog Studies must confess that there is no other book, on the whole, like it, though the light, humorous essay is common enough, though Mr. Helps sets his friends dialoguing around him, though Dr. Holmes weaves a thread of love-story into the desultory disquisitions of his characters, and though Mr. Ike Marvel Mitchell mused by wood-fires long ago. The form, after all, must go for very little ; it is the manner, the spirit, that matters, and in Mr. Warner’s latest book this is altogether novel, while the style is peculiarly fresh and charming. There is first a little dissertation about wood-fires; then the company of guests and neighbors talk round the hearth, in conversation that easily lapses into the essayist’s monologue, on all sorts of topics ; and presently the spring has come, and the fire is out, and the book at an end. The people are lightly but distinctly indicated, and the talk is managed with unfailing ease ; but the great pleasure of the book is in the author’s humor, which lies in wait for you round corners and under ambushes of serious observation, and surprises you with some turn so odd, so bright, so unexpected, that you own with gratitude a new touch in literature. Toward the end of the book there are two studies — one of a very old man, and the other of a shiftless man — that seem to us surpassing examples of Mr. Warner’s humor ; but we speak with reservation, for it is hard to name any passage as the best. The humor is far from epigram ; one might say it was a new, strange kind of irony with a very hard outside, but inwardly full of mellow sweetness. It is shrewd, and has its edge of satire, but it leaves particular matters pretty much where it found them, only teaching, as all true humor does, quite as much modesty and mercifulness generally as human nature is capable of learning. You can even read the whole book through, and feel merely that you have been agreeably entertained ; but then you would not be the wisest reader of the book.

We have been thinking that the first paragraph in it is a very felicitous instance of the play of the genuinely humorous mind, and is worthy a little special study on that account. “ The fire on the hearth has almost gone out in New England ; the hearth has gone out ; the family has lost its centre ; age ceases to be respected ; sex is only distinguished by the difference between millinery bills and tailors’ bills ; there is no more toast-and-cider; the young are not allowed to eat mince-pies at ten at night; half a cheese is no longer set to toast before the fire; you scarcely ever see in front of the coals a row of roasting apples, which a bright little girl, with many a dive and start, shielding her sunny face from the fire with one hand, turns from time to time ; scarce are the gray-haired sires who strop their razors on the family Bible, and doze in the chimney-corner.”

In this passage we should say that Mr. Warner wrote the first word about the fire having gone out, with possibly a serious feeling ; then it suddenly occurred to him with a smile that the hearth itself had gone out ; then he mocks the touch of sentiment he has felt by those bits of exaggeration about the family having lost its centre, and about the millinery and tailors’ bills ; then he goes a little further and satirizes the unwholesome habits of the boasted good old times ; then his fancy is lit up with that pretty little picture of the child turning the apples,— doubtless a memory,— and finally with an abrupt laugh we have the grotesque association of the old man stropping his razor on the family Bible. There is no logic in these changing moods ; but they follow each other in perfectly natural, inevitable succession, and the whole passage, in its delightfulness, is curiously harmonious. It is because it is perfect without logic that we like it ; nothing is to be foreseen, or to be argued from what went before, and yet a subtle relation is established between all the ideas, such as exists in a pleasant revery.

On a larger scale the whole of this first essay of Mr. Warner’s has much the same character as the opening paragraph, and it is full of points characteristic of the humorist in particular, as well as of the humorist in general. When he is denouncing the patent sham gas-fire of asbestos-coated iron logs, it is with his own suddenness he asks, “ Do you think a cat would lie down before it ? ” Speaking in another place of a boy’s heroic preoccupation and absorption in his reading about Indian fights, he says with peculiar quaintness, “ There is something about a boy that I like, after all.” and then comes one of the most charming passages of the book, about what, to the boy’s imagination, is in the cellar : “ Who can forget the smell that comes through the open door, — a mingling of fresh earth, fruit exhaling delicious aroma, kitchen vegetables, the mouldy odor of barrels, — a sort of ancestral air, as if the door had been opened into an old romance ? Do you like it ? Not much. But then I would not exchange the remembrance of it for a good many odors and perfumes that I do like,"—a touch of exquisite tenderness.

“I wish,” says Mr. Warner, “I could more fitly celebrate the joyousness of the New England winter,” and you tremble lest he is going to try it, when he adds with a dash of quick sincerity, “ Perhaps I could, if I more thoroughly believed in it.” This is the key-note of the whole ; there is no sentimental feigning, but the humor is never unfriendly to poetic feeling, and it never troubles itself to be bitter. All the good qualities of the author’s two preceding books are here, but there is a riper taste, a smoother flavor in these Backlog Studies, which “ the palate fine ” will not fail to detect. In style, in temper, in material, it is a thoroughly pleasant book.

— There are some silly people who, when they travel abroad, imagine it a sagacious and original thing not to do Europe in the guide-book manner, as they say, and who seek out novelties for themselves at the cost of missing some of the standard objects of interest. But the standard object of interest is always the thing worthiest to be seen, and the traveller who misses it has missed one of the chief ends of travel. His unhackneyed picture, or church, or palace, may be all very well, but it is certain never to be so good as what the common voice of knowledge and experience has pronounced the best. So, concerning the literature of the past, certain facts have been established, and it is idle to pass through it, expecting to discover new things finer than those which long criticism and admiration have consecrated. From Gray what can you choose but The Elegy ? From Goldsmith what but The Deserted Village ? From Coleridge you must take The Ancient Mariner, The Passions from Collins, The Vision of Mirza from Addison, the Essay on Roast Pig from Lamb, Alexander’s Feast from Dryden, Lycidas and II Penseroso and L’Allegro from Milton ; and so on up to the earliest and down to some of the latest authors, their names are connected in a supreme degree with some performance, to reject which, in compiling a hand-book of literature, would be not to represent them. Mr. Underwood abides by tradition in his selections from British authors, and in his work we have the old favorites again, though he has done what he could to enlarge its scope by adding less familiar passages to them. In this effort he has had a varying fortune, and it is quite safe to say that he would not have pleased every critic if he had been constantly inspired in his choice. But we think that he has done very well, and that his book as a volume of extracts leaves little to be reasonably demanded in a volume of its size. It is large enough indeed to contain much more than most pretty well-read people actually know (there is no end to what they suppose themselves to know) of English literature ; and of some authors called classic there is quite as much as any one need know : the truly immortal part of such worthies as Surrey, Marvell, Vaughan, and many others, can be got into very little space indeed ; and of the greatest authors there is at least not everything that one wants to read.

We do not like Mr. Underwood’s introductory chapter and his biographical notices so well as his selections. What he has to say of the origin and growth of the English language is necessarily sketchy for want of space, and elementary because it is addressed to young readers whose philology is small. But a due regard for the tenderness of their years would have induced him to omit from the reporter’s phrases which he quotes that describing “an unchaste woman ” as “a social evil ” ; and generally we may say that Mr. Underwood’s literary taste is better than his other taste, and vastly better than his style, which is apt to be magaziny, not to say newspapery. There is at least a loss of dignity in saying, in the biographical notice of Carlyle, that “ his manners are not gracious, and he is not free from the common errors and prejudices of his countrymen in regard to this country”; and in that of Ruskin, “ of all living Englishmen he has shown the most intense insular prejudice against the free institutions and the people of the United States.” If there were any occasion to touch upon such facts at all, Mr. Underwood might better have told the youth of the high-schools, that, of all the modern English writers from Tennyson down, there were not above two or three (and these of rather secondary importance) who liked us or believed in us ; but that this really made no difference, so far as their literature was concerned, though of course we were at liberty to scorn them politically and personally along with the rest of the English nation. However, these slips are not characteristic of Mr. Underwood’s notices, and their occurrence does not affect the discretion with which he has done his work of selection.

The second volume of the Hand-Book is devoted to American literature, and contains an interesting historical introduction, and a chronological list of American authors, and another list specifying those from whom no selection has been made. Of course Mr. Underwood’s choice has often been determined by the limits of his book. On the whole, however, it cannot be justly blamed, though with his performance of an extremely difficult task it would not be at all difficult to find fault. It is imaginable that each of our younger writers could point out the gross unfairness with which he has been treated, while his unworthy contemporaries have all been overpraised and overquoted. Rising above this low jealousy, we should say that there is perhaps too much space given to the political writers and orators of our earlier period, and that this would be more strictly a hand-book of literature if the struggling votaries of belles-lettres in the remoter epochs had been more fully represented. Some faults of other taste than literary taste are observable here, as in the first volume ; but they are smaller faults, and may easily be condoned. Neither volume is ideally successful ; but the work is done with a real love of literature ; and apart from the sort of blemishes we have noted, we do not see why it does not serve the end for which it was designed. It certainly will serve a good purpose if it is read with anything like the faithfulness with which it is compiled, and the high-school boy who is master of it will be well grounded in a knowledge of English and American literature, with few distorted conceptions of their proportions and relations.

— Mr. Wilson Flagg, in the dedicatory epistle to The Woods and By-Ways of New England, has so sufficiently indicated the scope of the work, that we cannot do better than let him play critic to the extent of a dozen lines : “ Though I have probably passed more time in the woods than any man who is not a woodcutter by trade, I have not been a collector of specimens, nor a dissector of birds and flowers, nor a measurer of trees, nor a hammerer of rocks. I know the value of this kind of research, but my observations are of a different character. . . . . My book differs from learned works as Lavater’s Physiognomy differs from Cheselden’s Anatomy, or as a lover’s description of his lady’s hand would differ from Bell’s anatomical description of it. I mention these things, not with any vulgar depreciation of technical science, but that the reader may not seek in this volume for matters it does not contain.” Yet the reader who has merely a passing acquaintance with the roadsides and trees of New England will find much valuable information in these pages, the manner of which is not unknown to those familiar with this magazine. It is not necessary here for us to say how charmingly and sensibly the author writes on the various aspects of rural scenery in the Eastern States. His hints on landscape gardening, and his severe strictures on the false taste that directs the ornamentation of our suburban cemeteries, are worthy of all the serious attention which they will not be likely to get. The glaring white headstone with which Americans delight to mark their departure for Paris is Mr. Flagg’s especial detestation. But even in his wrath he is graceful, and does not, so to speak, drop too many of his leaves. Imagine an amiable Thoreau, — if you can. And there are many things to vex him. To clip a glorious, full-flowing tree into the shape of a pyramid, is to Mr. Flagg a custom as barbarous as that of the Hottentots, — if it is the Hottentots ; we believe it is not, — who flatten the heads of their progeny. Nature, unadorned by the man-milliner, is quite good enough for him. In his dealings with her he is, as he says, a lover rather than a scientist, though his observation is of the keenest, and is nowhere blunted by sentimentality. His fancy runs along picturesque stone-walls, and clambers up to the mossy eaves of quaint old farmhouses, with vine-like felicity. The pliant parasite that drapes the American elm and makes it the loveliest of trees is not more spontaneous than his love for the natural beauties of meadow, lane, and woodland. To him, the ash, the oak, the pine, the chestnut, and the willow, are so many human beings to be treated with respect and affection according to their individual merits ; and he draws the reader into his mood. Yet we find ourselves constantly quitting this leafy company, to turn back to that page of the volume where Mr. Flagg gives us a glimpse of human character a great deal more interesting than anything in the American flora. It is the page where the writer speaks of himself with a simplicity and modesty that would be difficult to simulate. “My life,” he says, “has been passed with my family in almost entire seclusion, hardly interrupted by a small circle of friends and kinsmen, who, being engaged in trade, have not been my companions ; for men of letters and commercial men, however so much they may hold each other in esteem, are seldom intimate. And as I had no social intercourse with any person who is distinguished in science, literature, the fine arts, or by wealth, politics, or civil position, I have lived almost alone in the world. . . . I have studied Nature more than the library, employing my time in observing her aspects and interpreting her problems more than in reading or hearing the observations of others. . . . I have not been drawn into society by a taste for its amusements or its vices ; I have not joined the crowd either of its saints or its sinners ; I have pursued my tasks alone, except as I have read and conversed with my wife and children. She and they have been the only companions of my studies and recreations during all the prime of my life. But, perhaps from this cause alone, I have been very happy. The study of nature and my domestic avocations have yielded me a full harvest of pleasures, though it was barren of honors.” We are certain that this will send the reader to the volume itself, with its wild-wood odors. Books of this kind are not likely to multiply, for the conditions under which they can alone be produced are becoming every day less possible in New England. Our rural districts are rapidly losing their primitive beauty and seclusion. Elegant AngloGothic villas with Ionic columns and mansard roofs spring up along the byways, and the trail of the railroad is over us all.

— Mr. Kroeger appears not to anticipate an adequate reception of his book from what, in the opening, he calls “ a public so clannish in its literary pursuits as that which speaks the English language.” Notwithstanding this, we are disposed to believe that his small but compendious volume will find many and appreciative readers. He has certainly done our literature a considerable service, in adding to it the best book on this subject which has yet appeared in English. The subject of the Minnesinger is one which can hardly ever lose its interest for students of poetry and romance, offering as it does a finished and beautiful system of lyricism contemporary with that of the troubadours and trouvéres, and connected with the earliest flowerings of poetry in England. Under it is included all that flourishing period known as the Suabian, from the time of Barbarossa, — in the middle of the twelfth century, when Veldig, or Veldeke, first struck the lyre destined to make its sound heard again in these late times, — until the reign of Rudolph of Hapsburg, when poetry began to fall into the hands of mechanics in the now rising cities, and was by them reduced to a trade, with Meister and Lehrling, — a powerful guild of which the masters and apprentices were alike uninspired. It is little more than a century ago, however, that the productions of this period were brought clearly into notice even in Germany ; and not until 1838 did Von der Hagen reproduce from the manuscript the entire Manessian collection of songs, lays, and epics (these latter being a later outgrowth of that period) made towards the close of the Suabian era. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that English writers should have effected but little in this direction. However, it was high time for the appearance of some satisfactory treatise, before Mr. Kroeger supplied our want. A small octavo, published anonymously in 1825, written chiefly by Edgar Taylor, was all that had hitherto been extant. In it, however, the poems are rendered with very little of the fresh grace and variety marking the original forms. One of the chief points of significance in this species of poetry is the indication it affords of the relation between poetry and music at a particular stage of development in language. Von der Hagen points out, in this connection, the tendency to a single-toned accentuation of polysyllables in German, and a similar movement is certainly to be detected in the growth of English. Such words, however, used formerly to be more flexible ; so that, while language has gained in force and precision, it has lost in the singing quality. In relation to this it is interesting to observe that Mr. Kroeger often finds himself obliged to go back to antiquated forms of English, in order to produce effects corresponding with those of his originals.

The translator maintains throughout a most musical consciousness of the relation between words and time, almost tuning his lines, it would seem, to some imaginary melody, — quite in the spirit of his originals, who invariably composed with music, except in the case of Sprüche. As is natural, Mr. Kroeger exaggerates a little the importance and beauty of the minne-song; for it is true, as Bouterwek says, that we miss in it the classic culture in the true sense, “ that thoughtful avoidance of the paradoxical and clumsy, that clearness and certainty of thought and expression, that exemplary purity and firmness of æsthetic forms,” which neither the minnesinger nor the troubadour could bring about, but with which the Italian, later on, crowned the labors of both. Browning and Tennyson are somewhat slighted by the author, who subjects the latter’s treatment of the Arthurian legends to a rather damaging criticism, — apropos of a translation from parts of Gottfried von Strasburg’s Tristan and Isolde, — a perusal of which, it must be confessed, strengthens the impression against the laureate’s handling of that story.

— Islam, common enemy of civilization and Christianity, has been our friend in this one thing, that it has kept for our time and a future time a preserve of voyage and adventure, where tourists will not swarm, and where there will, for a long time yet, be something to explore and discover. And J. Lewis Farley, Consul of the Sublime Porte at Bristol, who writes of Modern Turkey, is not the explorer or the storyteller to diminish the limits of our conserve. After the profuse eulogies of climate and natural advantages with which he opens, and a brief and trifling chapter on the scenery about Beyrout and Lebanon, he engages in a long and labored apology for the Turkish Empire, and the politics, ethics, and social status which it has developed, and to a serious attempt to induce his countrymen to emigrate to the East!

Mr. Farley has a comforting faith in Islam, and a candid preference for it to Christianity, which is refreshing; and he is one of a great many Englishmen — and not very few of other nations — who are incapable of distinguishing varnish from polish, and Turkish laxity from true liberality, and who, measuring the civilization of the world by its deference or subserviency to themselves, individually, find in weakened and sycophantic Stamboul a city of delights and the acme of political goodness, just as another class, mainly of our own people, found Paris the city of the true life. Despotism, corruption, venality, and government by favoritism are all very fine when we are the favorites and protégés ; and the friends of Turkey are generally those who accept the bounty, and make no question whence it came.

Mr. Farley defends polygamy. “Another popular belief is that polygamy is a bar to all human progress,” which he disproves by these “ facts “ that Islamism marched for ten centuries at the head of humanity” ; “ polygamy did not prevent Greece from creating her masterpieces of art ” ; “ while as to the exact sciences, and that which is so proudly called liberty of thought, we owe them to Islamism” ; “ drunkenness and gambling are the destruction of domestic peace, and, in cursing them, Islamism procures for the wife those positive guaranties which are in reality much more efficacious than the platonic recommendation of Christian preachers.”

To this curious line of argument it is needless to append a comment ; but there are certain statements which make one doubt if the author recognizes any measure of mendacity, or if he really knows nothing of Turkey. “ Adultery is exceedingly rare, and there is no divorce court in Turkey,” is one of these; the fact being that adultery in the cities and with wives of the wealthier Mussulmans is the rule and not the exception, and that there is no divorce court because a husband may divorce his wife at any time, without any kind of legal process.

Of all rottenness and dead men’s bones that the world ever saw, the Mohammedan state contains the worst and most. Except under the immediate eye of foreign representatives, there is no law which avails the weak ; the civil service is worse than our own ; public affairs are regulated by bribery, and justice is sold in the eyes of the whole world ; the Mussulman peasantry are honest and truthful, but so are the Christians in most Christian countries ; while the Turk, as he rises in politics, becomes generally the most accomplished of liars, believing no one, and never telling the truth ; brigandage and Bedouinage divide the greater part of the empire between them; and out of the cities no man dare grow rich, because, between the Pasha and the brigand, a small amount of money would endanger his existence. In every province of the empire population diminishes in proportion to its subjection to the government at Constantinople, and every element of prosperity fades and decays day by day, except those which it is the interest of European capital to maintain and cause to be protected. Mr. Farley’s chapter on the British interests in Turkey gives the clew to the intense interest England takes in the maintenance of the Turkish Empire. “ Apart from political considerations, our interests in Turkey consist in the fact that she is one of the best customers we have for our products and manufactures, and that, besides, we are her creditors for loans to a considerable extent.” “ In 1869 they (British exports to Turkey) amounted to about £ 8,000,000.” These are the “ interests Great Britain has in the stability and progress of the Ottoman Empire.”

— At various times we have seen fears expressed that the old-time American traveller was disappearing from the face of the earth, or at least from the face of Europe, and that he had been succeeded by a race infallible in its judgment of works of art, bearing no trace of republican simplicity, hardly to be distinguished from those born beneath the demoralizing influences of monarchy or despotism. To refute these fears we will let Mr. Harmon himself, by means of extracts, tell the story of his journey to Egypt and the Holy Land. On reaching Queenstown, “ the passengers seemed delighted with the sight of land, and even those who lived on the sea rejoiced to see the land, their native element.” On landing at Dieppe, “ we were right in the midst of the French, who were chattering their ‘ Parlez-vous.’ After getting some bread and coffee, I took cars for Paris at twenty minutes past six o’clock A. M. In the morning it began to snow, and before we reached Paris, at noon, the ground was covered. The train stopped for some time at Rouen. I asked a Frenchman whether it was usual to have snow, so early ; he replied, ' Non, non,' — No, no.” The doctor visited the Louvre, “ a kind of museum. Here I saw numberless magnificent paintings, in the examining of which I grew weary.” Florence is vividly described : “ Florence has a population of about one hundred and thirty thousand. The houses are white, with green window-shutters. The streets are paved with flagstones.” On the way to Rome, “ in the car was an Irishwoman, servant in the family of an Italian count who had married an American lady. I saw on my right, miles before reaching Rome, a river; half asleep, I interrogated our Hibernian fellow-traveller as to the name of the river. She answered, 'Tiber.’ Strange feelings did the sound of this name produce. What classic associations cluster around this river ! It could not but remind me that I was rapidly approaching ‘the Eternal City.’” At Alexandria, one “Saturday afternoon, I mounted a donkey, for the novelty of the thing, to ride to the bazaar. It seemed to me that I cut a ridiculous figure. A large man, more than six feet high, riding a little donkey ! I looked around on all sides to see if any one laughed. But it seemed strange to nobody. An American lady, however, who saw me from the hotel-window, laughed, as she afterwards told me.” The historical parts are worth reading : “ Jerusalem next fell into the hands of the celebrated Caliph Omar, after a long siege. He entered the city in his garment of camel’s hair, and conducted himself with much generous forbearance.” The last sentence of the book is this : “ I have not been detained on my journey a single day through sickness. The medicines I took abroad — blue mass and quinine pills — at the advice of my friend, Dr. Henry M. Wilson of Baltimore, I brought back ; had no necessity to use them. A merciful Providence had preserved me.”

— In general, the works which Mr. Fiske’s abridgment of Taine’s English literature is intended to replace are very hasty comp ends with a few biographical facts about each author, a word more or less of criticism, and two or three pages of extracts, for which we have to trust to the taste of the editor or very often of his predecessors in similar undertakings. A student is often stimulated by the passages quoted, but for the practical purpose of giving a broad sketch of English literature they are as ill-adapted for their purpose as would be a specimen brick from the various buildings of the world to teach one architecture. Mr. Taine, in this abridged version of his work, with judicious teachers to select the extracts to be read by the scholars, his ingenious criticism, his novel method and eloquent discussion, will be sure to rouse some interest in even the dullest breast. The others will find so much that is suggestive, they will be able to learn so clearly the difference between receiving a word of criticism applied to some remote author which shall be hallowed with age, and the possibility of making up their minds for themselves, that, by the very method which they will acquire from Taine, they will be able to differ from him, and to differ intelligently. This we think one of the greatest merits of the volume : that it teaches the young reader how to think, how to form his opinion ; it is very far removed from the easy utterance of final judgments. We see everywhere Taine’s mode of thinking ; here we follow him, there we do not ; but he continually claims that you should make clear to yourself the reasons of the difference. Mr. Fiske has done his work with taste and judgment, removing obnoxious passages, curtailing some of the longer historical discussions, and bringing the volume down to a very convenient size. The chronological table adds to the utility of the volume.

— In “Modern Leaders,” a collection of short papers which have appeared in the “ Galaxy ” at intervals during the past three years, Mr. Justin McCarthy defiles before us a number of notable men and women of our time. The selection is made somewhat at haphazard ; but nearly all the persons treated of in the book are those whose lives have not yet been formally written, and about whom we are all anxious to hear what we can. This popular desire is a thing which Mr. McCarthy makes a business of meeting ; and in this case his readiness will no doubt bring success to a book not otherwise entitled to much notoriety or endurance. The author is a skilful collector of opinions, up with the times in the way of knowing something about everything and everybody, and understands how to present his information in a readable fashion. The persons sketched are still living, and naturally but incomplete accounts of them can be furnished. In the way of facts, indeed, little more is presented than may be found in recent editions of the cyclopædias. From this, and from the gossipy mode of treatment, it follows that the articles hardly justify the description of “biographical sketches” given on the title-page, falling as they do rather under the head of brilliant and amplified newspaper notices. As presenting some of the current opinions of average intelligent men about their illustrious contemporaries, they may be taken for “ a fair contribution to history.” Each subject, however, is dealt with, not according to its importance, but primarily with the view of working up a magazine paper of a given length ; so that, of course, nothing like independent investigation is to be found in them. There is too much of the “ everybody knows ” tone in the book to admit of this. Perhaps the article on John Ruskin is the most disagreeable of all, as illustrating how a clever magazinist of not too sensitive fibre may give wide circulation to an utterly inappreciative view of a man of genius, and to a vulgar mistake as to the importance of a movement in art like that known as the pre-Raphaelite.

FRENCH AND GERMAN.<FNREF>*</FNREF>

WE have two volumes, each written by a personal friend, giving a brief history of the life of Henri Regnault, a young French painter of promise, who fell one of the last victims of the war with Germany. Both books are inspired by keen affection, and with the aid of copious extracts from Regnault’s letters they set before us the picture of a very charming, lovable young man. Of his merits as a painter we on this side of the water have to take our opinions from hearsay. Judging from Théophile Gautier’s account, no words of praise could be too high for him ; while Paul de SaintVictor, on the other hand, while giving him credit for great excellence, is by no means blind to what he considers notable faults. It was in 1867 that he was sent to Rome by the École des Beaux Arts ; and in his letters he gives us an account of the disappointment which is so often the first feeling of the enthusiastic visitor who has built for himself an imaginary Rome, all picturesque ruins, without the continuous squalor and mean Italian modernness which mar so sadly our romantic ideal. He says in a letter to a friend : “ You will doubtless experience the impression as I did in my walk, when you come to see me. No one can help walking with a certain religious respect through the streets and the places where every stone tells the story of a triumph or a murder ; but one is continually surprised at the meagre dimensions of all these buildings, to which the imagination had lent a grandeur proportionate to the memories it awakened. The Arch of Titus is but a toy by the side of the Arch of Titus which one had constructed in his head. The Via triumphalis . . . . is only surprising by reason of its narrowness and many windings . . . . . We can hardly understand how the Roman people, who ruled half of the earth, could content themselves with their little Forum, which was still further crowded by the surrounding temples ; nor how these conquerors, these gigantic heroes, could pass beneath such triumphal arches without striking their heads against them, and without crushing against their walls the trophies and the troops of slaves attached to their chariots.” Of St. Peter’s he says : “ One can only appreciate its true grandeur from the Campagna.”All this life at Rome he enjoyed, not only by hasty visits to neighboring places, and sight-seeing within the city, but also by hard work at his painting.

In i868 he was seriously injured by an accident, and in order to facilitate his recovery he went to Spain. In Madrid he found the pictures of a master whom he thoroughly worshipped, Velasquez. His whole busy life in Madrid, his many hours in the magnificent gallery, his acquaintance with the gitanos, his work over his portrait of Prim, one of the best of his pictures, is all told in a series of delightful letters. Later we find him in Granada, living in the garden of the Alhambra, and enjoying keenly the semi-tropical glow and splendor of that fascinating ruin. He had always felt a warm devotion for the East, and for a time this outlying piece of Orientalism contented him. Soon, however, he goes over to Tangiers, where he remained till he felt himself called upon to leave for duty in Paris, then about to be besieged. He enrolled himself at once as a private, and, refusing all proposals of advance, remained in the ranks until his death, at the end of the last sortie of the war. We can most warmly recommend to our readers both of these volumes which are put at the head of our list, but more especially the second, that of M, Dupare. Every one of the letters of Cazalis is interesting, and the whole story of his life, of which we have given the most shadowy outline, is very touching. It shows us how rich in enjoyment life is.

— M. Leroy-Beaulieu’s Le Travail des Femmes an XIXe Stècle shows us, on the other hand, how much misery there is in life for which no relief has yet been found, He discusses in the first of these parts more especially the wages paid women, with the following remarks upon the inferiority of their pay to that received by men. After disproving the explanation of the difference which ascribes it to the difference between the sums needed by each, he repeats the well-known principle of political economy that work is a species of merchandise which is paid higher in proportion of the greatness of the demand and the lack of supply. Men can be employed in almost all varieties of work. In Belgium young men make lace, in Switzerland embroidery, and in the South of France there are nearly as many men employed in the manufacture of silk as there are women. Women, on the other hand, have but a limited field for their activity. Physically hard work is beyond their power; they can only apply themselves to more delicate labor, travaux d’ addresse. So that hitherto fewer fields have been open to them. Then, too, they have been less thoroughly educated. The positions in which they could work being few in number, they have overcrowded some, and are too ignorant to succeed in others for which they would seem naturally fitted. The main reason is that the market is over-stocked. As for the future, with science daily replacing machinery for the physical work of strong men, with a greater call for skilled labor, for which women have often more aptitude than men, it would seem that, with careful management and a thorough education, this inconsistency should cease to exist. Women and men being equally able to do good work, they would be paid alike ; and what seems gross injustice could no longer be charged against the capitalist, who, as it is, is merely following one of the simplest economical laws. In the second part the author discusses legal interference with regard to the regulation of the work of women, with an interesting review of the dangers which beset their physical and moral health. In the third part he treats of certain modifications of industry which result from the introduction of sewing and other machines. There is no pretension on the part of the writer that he has solved one of the knottiest questions which embarrass those who study social laws. He has brought together a great deal of information, and by his earnest appeal for a more general education of working-women to fit them for higher grades of employment he points out one of the surest ways to serve morality and to help the state. All who take an interest in social questions would do well to read the volume, which was crowned by the Acad emy of Moral and Political Sciences.

— A book which may be of interest to some of our readers is Professor Pétrow’s Tableau de la Littérature Russe, translated into French by Alexandre Romald. It is by no means an entertaining volume ; his manner is about as dry as his subject, but his information is of a sort on which one would not be ready at all times to lay one’s hand. He seems to have done his work with great thoroughness, and any one who has taken any interest in Russian novels will be glad to see the connection they have with the rest of the literature of that country, instead of regarding them as perfectly isolated phenomena.

— In Les Temps Nouveaux, M. Henri Nadault de Buffon mourns the misfortunes of his country, and not with the dapper nod with which almost every Frenchman used to refer before the war to recent historical events. Far from it, our writer wrote one book about ten years ago in which he denounced the increasing luxury, and now, like a modern prose Juvenal, armed with statistics, he attacks the wide-spread laxity and points out the better way. He may not be the wisest of counsellors, for he demands first of all obedient, right-loving hearts of all Frenchmen ; such people generally go right of themselves : it is the evil-minded who make all the trouble ; but if he errs in this, he is at least entirely and unselfishly in earnest, and that is more than can be said of a great many people who are trying to set the world right.