Recent Literature

No American story-teller has of late years had greater success, of a good kind, than Mr. Eggleston, who in four years has given us consecutively, The Hoosier Schoolmaster, The End of the World, The Mystery of Metropolisville, and now The Circuit Rider. His books have been read by the hundred thousands; they have been respectfully considered by the most difficult criticism amongst us, they have been translated, we believe, and misunderstood in the Revue dc Deux Mondes, they have enjoyed the immortality of English republication. They merited as much. They were exceedingly well theorized. Mr. Eggleston considered the vast fields of fiction lying untouched in the region of his birth and the home of his early manhood, and for his plots, scenes, and characters, he acted on Mr. Greeley’s famous advice, and went West. It must have been that he truthfully painted the conditions and people whom he aimed to portray, for it was in the West that his popularity began, and it is there doubtless that it is now the greatest. He does not deal with the contemporary West, but with the West of forty or fifty years ago ; and except in The Mystery of Metropolisville he does not leave the familiar ground of the Ohio Valley. The scene of his first two stories is in Southern Indiana, that of the last is in Southern Ohio. On this ground he was at home, yet he was able to view all the people and situations from the outside, and in the light of subsequent life in the East. Some disadvantages came from this advantage. He was too conscious of the oddity of his material, and he placed an inartistic stress upon unimportant details of dialect, customs, and character. Even in The Circuit Rider, he stops from time to time, in the description of some rude or grotesque scene, to make the reader an ironical or defiant apology for treating of such unrefined matters ; or, if he has some wild incident or trait to handle, pauses to expatiate upon it and caress its singularity. This is bad art, as Mr. Eggleston must himself feel, and he ought not to indulge it. The novelist’s business is to paint such facts of character and custom as he finds so strongly that their relative value in his picture will be at once apparent to the reader without a word of comment: otherwise his historical picture falls to the level of the panorama with a showman lecturing upon the striking points and picking them out for observance with a long stick. It is not in this way that the masters of the art which Mr. Eggleston reveres accomplish their results. Björnson does not add a word to impress on our imaginations the Norwegian incidents and characters he sets before us in Arne ; and Turgénieff, in such a Russian tale as The Lear of the Steppes, leaves all comment to the reader. Everything necessary to the reader’s intelligence should be quietly and artfully supplied, and nothing else should be added.

We speak the more frankly of this blemish in Mr. Eggleston’s last work because we find The Circuit Rider such a vast advance upon his former stories. The Mystery of Metropolisville was disappointing; for though it showed a good sense of character and the story was interesting, it was not so fresh as The Hooster Schoolmaster, and it had not such poetic elements as The End of the World. It was not an advance; it was something of a retrogression. But in our pleasure with The Circuit Rider we have been willing to forget this, and we are glad to recognize the author in his most fortunate effort. The story is of backwoods life in Ohio at the time when the Methodists began to establish the foundations of their church in the new land, among the children of the Indian-fighters and pioneers, and the hero of the story is one of those ardent young preachers who throughout the Southwest were known as circuit riders. They were each given a certain field of labor by the Conference, and they traveled on horseback from point to point in this field, preaching, praying, and turning sinners to repentance, and at due seasons assembling their forces in mighty camp-meetings, and gathering whole neighborhoods into the capacious bosom of their church at once. No history is more picturesque or dramatic than theirs, and Mr, Eggleston has well called their time the heroic age.

Thorpe Regis. A Novel. By the author of The Rose-Garden and Unawares. Boston: Roberts Brothers. 1874.

A Satchel Guide for the Vacation Tourist in Europe. A Compact Itinerary of the British Isles, Belgium and Holland, Germany and the Rhine, Switzerland, France, Austria, and Italy. With Maps. Edition for 1874. New York : Hurd and Houghton. 1874.

Baddeck and that Sort of Thing. By CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER. Boston: James R. Osgood & Co. 1874.

French Home Life. Reprinted from Blackwood’s Magazine. New York : D. Appleton & Co. 1874.

Life under Glass. Containing Suggestions towards the Formation of Artificial Climates. By GEORGE A. SHOVE. Boston: J. R. Osgood & Co. 1874. The International Scientific Series. The Conservation of Energy. By BALFOUR STEWART, LL. D., F. R. S., Professor of Natural Philosophy at the Owen’s College, Manchester. With an Appendix treating of the Vital and Mental Applications of the Doctrine New York : Appleton. 1874.

On Missions. A Lecture delivered in Westminster Abbey, on December 3, 1873, by F. Max Müller, M. A., Professor of Comparative Philology at Oxford ; with an Introductory Sermon by Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, D. D., Dean of Westminster. New York: Scribner, Armstrong & Co. 1874.

Lancoön. An Essay upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry. With Remarks illustrative of various Points in the History of Ancient Art. By GOTTHOLD EPHRAIM LESSING. Translated by ELLEN FROTHINGHAM. Boston: Roberts Brothers. 1874.

The Sources of Standard English. By T. L. KINGTON OLIPHANT, M, A., of Balliol College, Oxford. London : Macmillan & Co. 1873.

The tale is a very simple love-story, in which Morton Goodwin, amidst the lawless impulses of his first youth, is converted to Methodism, and becomes the Circuit Rider, and Patty Lumsden, the prettiest and richest and proudest girl of the region, who, preserving in the backwoods the tradition of the Old Virginia Anglicanism of her mother’s family, resents his conversion, and ends by becoming herself a Methodist, and in due course the Circuit Rider’s wife. Abundant incident of many sorts promotes and delays this conclusion, and all the persons of an early Western neighborhood figure before us. The civilizing forces of Methodism in conflict with the native tendencies to horsestealing, counterfeiting, bloodshed, drunkenness, gaming, and dancing are very well and very distinctly studied. The coarseness, touched here and there with inborn delicacy and fineness; the sordid rapacity of some and the barbaric generosity of most; the despotism of public opinion ; the elevation and purifying of popular feeling by the strong religious fervors of Methodism, are facts of the time and place very forcibly seized. The heroine is a real girl, as Mr. Eggleston’s heroines are apt to be, and the hero is a heartily conceived ideal of young manhood submitting itself to duty, and turning its wild tendencies to account in battling with sin and in personal encounter with unrepentant sinners; for Morton Goodwin’s spiritual progress is from the point where he helps to break up a Methodist meeting, to the point where he leads the sheriff’s posse in thrashing and dispersing the interlopers at a camp-meeting in which lie is himself an exhorter. Yet we confess that the glimpse we have of the fair, the wily, and (as it is hinted) the many-experienced Sister Meachem, provokes a greater interest in us than Miss Patty’s fortunes awaken and we fancy that in the adventurous career of the former the social life of the time could have been more vividly painted. We forgive ourselves for liking this sinner because we have so high an estimate of the most sublime character of the book, Kike Lumsden, who is also, to our thinking, the most powerfully presented. He is the cousin of Patty, and her father is about to cheat him out of his property when the story begins. He is “sixteen; one of those sallow-skinned boys with straight black hair, that one often sees in southern latitudes,” and he is of the homicidal southwestern temperament. He defies his uncle and it is in his heart to kill him, when suddenly the circuit rider Magruder appears in the neighborhood, and preaches of each man’s sins, as well as of the common wickedness, to him.

“ When at last he came to speak of revenge, Kike, who had listened intently from the first, found himself breathing hard. The preacher showed how the revengeful man was ‘ as much a murderer as if he had already killed his enemy, and hid his mangled body in the woods, where none but the wolf could ever find him.’ At these words, he turned to the part of the room where Kike sat, white with feeling. Magruder, looking always for the effect of his arrows, noted Kike’s emotion, and paused. The house was utterly still, save now and then a sob from some anguish-smitten soul. The people were sitting as if waiting their doom. Kike already saw the mutilated form of his uncle Enoch hidden in the leaves, and scented by the hungry wolves. He waited to hear his own sentence. Hitherto the preacher had spoken with vehemence. Now he stopped, and began again with tears and a voice broken with emotion, looking in a general way toward where Kike sat: ‘ O young man, there are stains of blood on your hands! How dare you hold them up before the Judge of all ? You are another Cain, and God sends his messenger to you to-day to inquire after him whom you have already killed in your heart. You are a murderer! Nothing but God’s mercy can snatch you from hell! ’ . . . Kike’s . . . frail form shook with fear and penitence, as it had before shaken with wrath. ‘O God, what a wretch I am!’ cried he, hiding his face in his hands.”Kike becomes himself a preacher at once. He meets his uncle shortly afterwards, the old man taunts him with his conversion, and strikes him in the face; the young apostle, in heroic obedience to Scripture, has the force literally to “ offer him the other cheek also.”

He is a sickly, slender boy, and under the hardships of his vocation he breaks down at a camp-meeting, and is carried to the house of the nearest doctor, whose young daughter nurses him through his sickness. They love, and a great struggle takes place in Kike’s heart between this passion and his sense of responsibility in his calling; if he marries he must cease to be a circuit rider, the vineyard must lose a laborer. He leaves his love unspoken, and, rising from his bed, goes forth again upon his mission. In a few years he wears out; he is brought back to the good doctor’s house to die, and on his death-bed he weds with his love. It is a noble tragedy, finely set forth. It is worthy to have formed in itself the substance of a romance. Of all the figures in Mr. Eggleston’s book, Kike stands first in our imagination.

— Thorpe Regis is a novel with a tolerably ingenious plot, carefully drawn characters, and many interesting situations ; it shows no lack of observation on the part of the writer, who, moreover, adds a great many amusing remarks of her own in the pauses of telling her story; but, notwithstanding these merits, which might seem all that was needed to make a novel successful, it must be confessed that the interest is very languid, and that the novel is in this way inferior to the other two from the same lady’s pen. The story suffers from a general dilution of the material which would have made a better short story, but which is made to do duty in the rather bulky form of the present volume, with the aid of some very pleasing descriptions, and some characters, like David Stephens, who have a very disproportionate importance to the story, in spite of the clearing up of Anthony’s character when David is finally made away with. The smoothness with which the filling in is done half hides the fault, but it tells in making the whole novel dull. Perhaps the best thing in the story is the very pleasing description of the heroine, Winifred. She is very well set before us as a young girl with her disappointment, a sorrow which comes to her not, as is so often the case in novels, because she had thrust her love upon a man who rejected it, but because she has shown a reasonable joy at the promise of what she would have gladly received had it not been denied her. That part of the novel is very well done. Almost as good is Marion’s selfishness; and the silliness of Ada, the girl whose character “ was just one which the dullest woman would have fathomed, and scarcely a man have read rightly,”is not made the vehicle of heavy satire. In fact, the novel is remarkably free from striking faults; it has, however, the taint of dullness. Objection might be made to the improbability of the plot with so much depending on the loss of the letter, but the fault seems to us to lie deeper than that. One can allow almost any vagaries in the construction of a plot, if only, when it is chosen, the characters are kept in the proper relation to it and to one another. Thorpe Regis is, in short, a dull novel with a great many good points. It is like certain amiable people who inspire more respect than love.

— To the third annual edition of Hurd and Houghton’s Satchel Guide to Europe have been added three new maps and a calendar of church and popular festivals, pilgrimages, fairs, etc. The Appendix, in which the latest information is embodied, has been rewritten ; and the volume may now be safely praised as one of the best of its kind. We have been unable to convict it of frivolity or bad taste, which is saying much for a sort of literature that is apt in its American phase to be trivial and vulgar ; and its instructions to travelers on the ground most familiar to us strike us as always sensible, comprehensive, and welldirected. In the small space at his command, the author is, of course, not able to mention more than a hundredth or a thousandth part of the things worthy to be seen in the famous places of Europe, and no doubt the traveler who has had time thoroughly to explore them would find this Satchel Guide’s array of objects of interest surprisingly meagre. But this is not the point from which to judge such a book. One must put one’s self in the place of the hurried tourist for whom it is prepared, and who wishes to see the things most worthy to be seen. For him it is a safe guide, and if it has a fault it is likely to be that of superabundance rather than poverty. The amount and the variety of information given is really the occasion for surprise. The chapter of Introductory Hints is very good; and throughout the book the utile of statistics about fares, fees, hotel rates, etc., is artfully combined with the dulce, of opinions upon art and local spirit and character from recent American travelers. Herein, too, the author’s limitations have stayed his scissors, and these quotations are apt rather than profuse. And as to Byron, the tutelar deity of the guide-book makers, we believe there is but a solitary passage from him even in the chapters upon Italy.

— By critics who like their humor thick, it has been objected that Mr. Warner’s humor is “ thin.” We do not well understand this sort of criticism, and we have sometimes suspected it of cheapness. It appears to us that it is better to ask of a man’s humor whether it is funny or not, and not whether it is thick or thin ; and it is by no means certain that the dullness is all in the humorist if one does not enjoy his joke. In his Baddeck, Mr. Warner offers us a pleasure less like that given in My Summer in a Garden, or in Backlog Studies, than that one takes in his Saunterings. There is little interest in the places visited, however, and you must look for your entertainment entirely to the author’s mood. The little book is the history of two weeks’ sojourn in the down-east British Provinces, chiefly at the hitherto unheard-of Baddeck; and its humor is that of the American vacationist dropping a grotesque comment about this or that which he sees, standing the heat, cold, hunger, and vigils of American and Provincial travel with the comical amiability of our race, and taking his revenge of all discomfort in a laugh — amused at his own inability to grumble seriously at anything, and rejoiced at the smallest opportunity to enjoy anything. The character sketched is mostly that of casually seen fellow-sufferers, and this is always lightly done, from the porter who wakes up the wrong Smith, to the paternal bully catechizing his daughter in Greek history in the railroad car. Droll bits abound, as the bragging Irish gentleman who confides his pugnacity to Ids friend on the steamer, the various people who did not know the how or when of the way to Baddeck, the drivers and horses of all the Provincial localities, the sleepy fiddler who bumped his head on the back of the seat in front of him, the solitary prisoner of the Baddeck jail, the balky horse of that strange place, the family on the steamer home whose members kept everybody awake by bidding each other good night. The account of the Gaelic neighborhoods of Baddeck, with their old Scotch Sabbaths and their awful religious solemnities, is both novel and entertaining, and there is a very pleasant foreignness in the scenes and faces in this part of the book, which is altogether a very charming addition to the gentler sort of humorous literature. It does not thrust you in the ribs, nor seek to keep you upon the broad grin, but it can hardly fail to amuse you, unless you are one of those austere spirits who require to have their amusement logically accounted for. In this case, Baddeck will not amuse you, for the author nowhere attempts to defend the manifest impropriety of being simply a good comrade, a shrewd and amiable satirist, a humorous observer of matters which many good people would never have thought droll ; in short, of not being a thick humorist. His easy and graceful style will add to his offense, which you will feel that he ought not to carry off so jauntily.

— Reserve is not commonly taken to be a French characteristic, but yet in many ways it is one that may be fairly ascribed to that people. There is hardly a country in Europe that receives yearly so large a stream of travelers, who all visit Paris, dine at half a dozen different cafés, indulge in the amusements of that city, and perhaps there or in the provinces get a faint insight into the life of some one family, but who in general have to form their opinion of domestic life in France from the novels which avowedly represent but one side of the society of a great country. It is the fashion in this country to bewail the utter lack of home life among the French. The men we imagine to be faithless, and the women too; the corruption of French society is an old story. On the other hand, the French people who see anything of those Americans figuring in Parisian society wonder at the empty lives of the men, and at the heartlessness of the women towards their children, and their wild love of pleasure. We can easily convict them of ignorance; and that we do not see all sides of the question becomes plain enough in the light of so excellent a book as French Home Life, which is evidently written by one who knows well what he writes about. In the chapter on servants, he speaks of the peculiarities of the English serving-man, and into comparison with him he brings the French servant, showing very well the differences between the systems of the two countries. In France are to be found cheery, active, and generally useful servants, on good terms with their masters and mistresses, and free from the aversion to one another’s work which is so often caricatured in the pages of Punch. The reasons of the superiority of the French method the author states to be the feeling of equality which exists in that country, and the kindness generally shown by masters to their servants, who are treated like fellow-beings. Then, too, the adaptability of the French, especially in their personal relations, aids them in getting along well together. Their easy politeness is more useful than the stiff manners of an Englishman.

Perhaps the chapter that will create the greatest interest is that on the children. The French mother devotes herself to her daughters, who, “ as a whole, are singularly docile; most of them obey for the best of all possible reasons — because they love. They live in such unceasing intimacy with their father and mother, that the tie between them indisputably grows stronger than in other lands where there is less constant community of heart and thought. In evidence of this, it is sufficient to point out the numerous examples which are to be found in France of three generations lodging together : the old people, their children, and their grandchildren, all united and harmonious. The fact is — and it is a fact, however prodigious it may appear to people who have always believed the contrary — that the family bond is extraordinarily powerful in France.” While the effect of their method is most salutary on the girls in making them affectionate and domestic, it tends unfortunately towards making the boys girlish, and very often what in English we call sneaks. The notion of manliness among boys is wanting.

— The reader cannot have forgotten that Atlantic paper of Mr. Shove’s, on Life under Glass, which he has now reprinted with some amplifications. There was nothing more taking in this dream of whole communities of invalids and luxurious idlers housed against the vicissitudes of climate, in vast palaces of glass, than the author’s firm belief in its practicality; and this we shall be far from questioning. Too many fantastic visions of the past are now the commonplace facts of the present, to suffer us to sit down among the scornful, when any reverie proposes to become a serious project. In fact, we see no good reason why Mr. Shove’s plan should not be tried by the same generation which puts an electric “ girdle round the earth in forty minutes ” whenever it likes. It would be a grim piece of humor, instead of abandoning this abominable climate of ours, to fence it out, drive it into the ocean and let the Gulf Stream swallow it up, or carry it over and Americanize England with it. At least, ordinary enterprise might act upon our author’s suggestion to roof and inclose city sidewalks with glass, which could be heated by registers in the pavement, so that people from the country, who are now in the habit of trying to warm their feet over the coal-hole gratings, need no longer be disappointed. In the mean time, Mr. Shove’s little book merits perusal.

— The chief infelicity of the very timely and promising enterprise of The International Scientific Series is that it is an attempt to construct a royal road to knowledge, and that this effort must in the nature of the case be something of a failure even when made by royal engineers. The Conservation of Energy and the Correlation of Forces is a topic too intricate, comprehensive, and new to be summarized without vagueness in a treatise of two hundred pages, addressed to readers supposed to be previously uninformed on the theme. We have no hesitation in commending even to popular use Professor Tyndall’s more detailed discussions of Heat as a Form of Motion, or the collection of essays by Grove, Helmholtz, Meyer, Faraday, Liebig, and Carpenter, published in this country by Professor Youmans in a volume on the Correlation and Conservation of Forces, as likely to prove more remunerative reading than this essay by Professor Balfour Stewart. But the style of the latter has great merit, and the enrichment of his treatise in the American edition by essays by Professor Le Conte on the correlation of vital with chemical and physical forces, and by Professor Bain on that of the nervous and mental forces, make the American copy of this number of The International Scientific Se ries an encouraging if not brilliant addition to the list.

Heat, light, electricity, magnetism, chemical affinity, and mechanical force are transmutable into each other, back and forth ; and, amid all these changes, the amount of force remains unchanged; but, if vital force and mental action are to be explained by this law of the mutual convertibility and persistence of forces, evidently the phenomenon of a free will and our consciousness that we originate force must appear to the new philosophy insoluble mysteries. This greatest of the standing objections to the theory of the convertibility of physical, vital, and mental forces is here (on page 194 in Professor Le Conte’s essay) simply skipped.

— Dean Stanley and Professor Müller, speaking on the same day in Westminster Abbey on Christian Missions, treat Keshub Chunder Sen’s famous lecture on Christ and Christianity and the moral theology of the Brahmo Somaj, much as Paul is said, in the ancient Latin hymn, to have treated the tomb of Virgil when he landed at Puteoli and turned aside to the hill of Posilippo to shed a tear over the grave, and thought how much he might have made of that noble soul if he had found him still on earth:

The two lectures are a plea for a broad toleration of variety of means in the prosecution of missions; and they have much local significance as addressed to the church establishment of England from Westminster Abbey, by a dean of the cathedral, and by that professor who is perhaps the best living authority on the history of heathen religions, Müller’s rather hastily written Lectures on the Science of Religion have been accused with some justice of exhibiting the moral theology of paganism with so many omissions of historical facts as to its adulterate elements, that the whole picture is of a partisan tinge. But the shallow error of treating Christian morals patronizingly is not committed in this address in Westminster Abbey ; and, although the production has no great literary merit, it is a valuable appendix to Professor Müller’s previous discussions of Comparative Theology, a theme the literature of which is growing rapidly.

— An English translation of Lessing’s Laocoön has long been needed, and Miss Frothingham is deserving of all praise for filling the gap in our book-shelves. In execution her book is all that could be desired, and it is made of greater practical convenience by the rendering into English of all the quotations from other languages, with the exception of some few unimportant ones. The value of the book has been long since determined. It is a masterly exposition of the boundaries of the different arts, as divided into plastic and descriptive. The influence of the Laocoön was very great at the time of its publication, a little more than a century ago, and although it has served the specific purpose for which it was written, in refuting some errors made by Winckelmann, the liveliness of its style, and the clearness with which the author’s views are expressed, make it a book that is always fresh. Moreover, errors die hard, and need to be overthrown more than once. The printing of the book is also deserving of commendation; it is in every way creditable to the publishers.

— In his little volume Mr. Oliphant has furnished some valuable material toward the history of our language, He traces the growth of English from the earliest times, showing the way in which successive alterations made their appearance, to what influences the changes were due, and what traces of older forms are still to be found in dialectic use. The greater weight of authority he gives: to the northern shires of England. He has prepared a very readable book, which will be found of value by the rapidly increasing class of persons who, inspired by the attractiveness of the subject as it is presented in the many new philological books, are giving their attention to their own language. Like many of his fellow-workers, Mr. Oliphant is full of whims; words from the Latin fill his soul with hot wrath, and the reporter’s English is an object of his bitterest scorn. Besides these reasonable antipathies he shows great zeal in using Teutonic words; for example, “ The first token of the change in English is the everwaxing distaste for words compounded with prepositions.” Another instance is his use of “even as” for “just as,” which seems to savor of affectation, but every page bears the mark of this peculiarity.

OTHER PUBLICATIONS.

J. B. Lippincott & Co., Philadelphia: Philosophers and Fools. A Study. By Julia Duhring. — Plato. By Clifton M. Collins, M. A. (Ancient Classics for English Readers.)—History of the Conquest of Peru, with a Preliminary View of the Civilization of the Incas. By William H. Prescott. New and revised Edition, with the Author’s latest Corrections and Additions. By John Foster Kirke. — The Heir of Malreward; or, Restored. By the Author of Son and Heir, etc.—Memoirs of John Quincy Adams, comprising portions of his Diary from 1795 to 1848. Edited by Charles Francis Adams. Vol. I.

Harper and Brothers, New York: Armadale. A Novel. By Wilkie Collins. — Through Fire and Water. A Tale of City Life. By Frederick Talbot. — Colonel Dacre. A Novel. By the Author of Caste, etc. — The Doctrine of Evolution : its Data, its Principles, and its Theistic Bearings. By Alex. Winchell, LL. D. — The Office and Duty of a Christian Pastor. By Stephen H. Tyng, D. D.

J. R. Osgood & Co., Boston : “ Good

Luck ! ” Translated by Francis A. Shaw from the German of Ernest Werner. — The Rhine from Rotterdam to Constance. Handbook for Travelers. By K. Baedeker. Fifth Edition, revised and augmented.

A. Williams & Co., Boston : The Seven Gray Pilgrims. A Personal Romance. By a Subaltern of Artillery.

Hurd and Houghton, New York: First Steps in General History. A Suggestive Outline. By Arthur Gilman, M. A.

D. Appleton & Co., New York : Responsibility in Mental Disease. By Henry Maudesley, M. D. —A Daughter of Bohemia. A Novel. By Christian Reid.

Roberts Brothers, Boston : Chapters on Animals. By Philip Gilbert Hamerton. With 20 Illustrations by J. Veyrassat and Karl Bodmer.

Henry Holt & Co., New York: A History of American Currency, with Chapters on English Bank Restrictions and Austrian Paper Money. By William G. Sumner. To which is appended “ The Bullion Report.”

Estes and Lauriat, Boston : Religion and the State. Protection or Alliance? Taxation or Exemption ? By Alvah Hovey, D. D. — Guizot’s Popular History of France. Parts VIII., IX., X. — Elena, an Italian Tale. By L. N. Comyn;

Robert Clarke & Co., Cincinnati : Essays on Educational Reformers. By Robert Herbert Quick.

Jansen, McClurg & Co., Chicago : Truths for To-Day. Spoken in the Past Winter. By Rev. David Swing. Lee and Shepard, Boston : The. Italian Girl. By Katharine Sedgwick Washburn.

James Miller, New York: Christ the Spirit: Being an Attempt to state the Primitive View of Christianity. By the Author of Swedenborg an Hermetic Philosopher, etc.

Sheldon & Co., New York: The Wetherel Affair. By J. W. DeForest.

Porter and Coates, Philadelphia : Heroes of the Seven Hills. By Mrs. C. H. B. Laing, Author of The Seven Kings of the Seven Hills.

Dodd and Mead, New York : Our Fred ; or, Seminary Life at Thurston. A Sequel to The Old-Fashioned Boy. By Martha Farquharson.

FRENCH AND GERMAN.²

At length, after the interruption caused by the war and the succeeding troubles of France, there appears one sign of tranquillity which has for a long time been absent, in the shape of the new books, which now almost rival their former profusion. For this month there is nothing so important to record as Mérimée’s Lettres àa une Inconnue or Victor Hugo’s latest novel, but in Théophile Gautier’s Hisloire du Romantisme we have a book which, as its title indicates, is closely connected with Victor Hugo’s earlier work, and, so little has he changed, so constant has he been to his old idols, with what he does now.

The literary revival of 1830 has always rivaled in the minds of Frenchmen the greater revolution which has since been immortalized by Hugo’s last novel; and foreigners have been of different minds about it, varying between that veiled contempt which calls itself impartiality, and lavish adulation. As is well known, the culmination of the great struggle was over Hugo’s Hernani, a play which flew in the face of all the rigid conventionalities that had previously governed poetry and the stage. It broke all the laws of verse-making, and neglected all the theatrical etiquette of formality; there was no web of resounding Alexandrine verse to cover every remark; a line like

“( Est-il minuit ? ’ ‘ Minuit bientô’ ”

excited a tumult, and a three days’ strug-

Histoire du Romantisme. Par THÉOPHLLE GAUTIER. Paris. 1874.

Théophile Gautier. Souvenirs Intimes. Par ERNEST FEYDEAU. Paris. 1874. gle. As Gautier says, it is impossible for us nowadays to understand the bitterness of the dissension. The line quoted above he says “ was considered trivial, familiar, unsuitable; a king asks what o’clock it is like any ordinary man, and he is told, as if he were a country boor, midnight.” While in this way it did good, any amount of opposition to it seems intelligent when we look at it simply with regard to its own merits, and without considering how much deep and more genuine feeling lay behind it in the minds of those who were loudest in their applause of its unrealities. It belongs to that branch of literature of which an exact description sounds like defamatory criticism. If it is said on the one hand that the lash of novelty has to be very cutting to pierce through so many prejudices, it may be answered that a reformation which begins with principles so awry is unlikely to bring forth good fruit. And, in fact, the issue of it all is extremely disappointing. Victor Hugo remains the greatest of all, and almost unchanged. Théophile Gautier, with all his varying merit, nowhere appears so charming as in this little volume with his tender recollections of his hot youth, when at the bringing out of Hernani he was conspicuous for his red waistcoat and his violent applause. He explains, with all the tolerance and wisdom of a kind-hearted man who has outlived the fanaticism of his youth, and can afford to be amused at it, all that the young reformers of that time meant. He draws a picture of the school of worshipers of Victor Hugo, of these youths with their ardent love of Shakespeare, and their intense hatred of the respectability of their own poets, with a great deal of warmth and affection for his old friends. It was one of those rare times when very young men were promoted from their proper obscurity to unusual prominence. He says, “ In the Romantic army, as in that of Italy, every one was young. Most of the soldiers had not attained their majority, and the oldest of the band was the commanderin-chief, aged twenty-eight. This was the age of Bonaparte and of Victor Hugo at that date.”

Not unamusing is his description of his introduction to Victor Hugo in those days. He had earned the right by hard work, applauding at thirty representations of Hernani, and he plucked up courage enough to pay a visit to the object of his adoration. At the door his courage failed him, and in extreme terror he sat down upon the stairs, “and suddenly Victor Hugo appeared in all his glory. Like Esther before Ahasuerus, we nearly fainted. Hugo was not able to hold out the golden sceptre, as did Ahasuerus, to encourage us, because there was no golden sceptre in his hand, which astonished us. He smiled, but he did not seem surprised, for he was in the habit of meeting every day, upon his staircase, terrified young poets, blushing crimson or pale as death, and even grown men, confused and stammering. He received us with the most gracious politeness, and invited us into his parlor.”

With the same half-amused air, sometimes accompanied by a gentle pathos, he gives an account of all the companions of his youth. In no one of his books is there a pleasanter personal flavor than in this. His books of travel are cleverer and more brilliant in every way ; his Capitaine Fracasse, of course, is not nearly rivaled, but the amiability and kindliness of heart which fill this volume are extremely pleasant. He seems absolutely devoid of jealousy, to have been warmly devoted to his friends, and ready to ignore their faults and pick out their virtues, after a fashion which must have made him very dear to them.

— A less agreeable impression is given by Feydeau’s Théophile Gautier, a book which has every fault that a biography can have. It is three quarters Feydeau and the rest very much diluted Gautier. It is to be remembered that it is the last work of a man never conspicuous for intellectual vigor, after he had been seized by a mortal disease, and written when he was more inclined to make than to write books. All of Feydeau’s recent books show the lamentable weakness of a man who was puffed up with every sort of vanity and self-importance, and these qualities sadly disfigure this slight sketch. Underneath all the verbiage we get the same impression of Gautier’s kindliness. In him, and much more in Feydeau, his disciple, we also detect the extreme unsatisfactoriness of that well-worn battle-cry of a certain school of writers of art for art’s sake. Perhaps a rallying shout like that phrase is not to be examined too critically by those who are anxious to find out its meaning, but still, since it is brought forward as a trite argument, such an examination may not be out of place. If there were no other feeling in the mind of men than one for art, it would be only natural and proper that all creative work of the brain should have no other aim than that of gratifying this feeling, but in that case, of course, it could not fail to do it, and the maxim would become a platitude. Since, however, man is a notoriously complex being, it is impossible and so unadvisable for him to try to silence every other demand of his nature, and especially the instinctive utterances of his conscience, for the titillation which the enjoyment of things he cannot approve gives him. Feydeau and Gautier felt themselves sorely pressed by those critics who brought the test of what was decorous to the judgment of literary work. Not that they ignored every sense of propriety, but that their rules were very lax. They fought, or at least Gautier did, for Feydeau need not be counted, against the Philistinism of the every-day world. Yet, while it would be a gloomy world in which all the books were tracts, it is also not hard to imagine a state of things in which men who followed out the most conspicuous tendency of those who advocate “ art for art’s sake,” might make reading a less improving exercise of the mind than it is now customary to regard it.

The most conclusive argument against the fallacy is the decay, the gradual dry-rot, which has infested so much modern French literature. “ Art for art’s sake ” was taken as meaning freedom to use any sort of vileness to lash the jaded appetite which is insatiably demanding more and more highlyspiced food, without the existence of a right to examine the soundness of the enjoyment that may be derived from it. What is the impression made by Victor Hugo? Is it not that of a man who with many and rare talents has spent his life in following chimeras, in continuing as a grown man what was only endurable when part of the aggressive excess of youth ? Like a certain number of musicians he wins our attention by perpetually striking discords. Gautier, while he leaves a melancholy sense of incompleteness, was a master of good writing, and generally of good taste, but as a whole the failure of the school is most noticeable.

At the end of Gautier’s volume is an account of the progress of French poetry since 1848, which is in fact a history of it since 1830. This was a barren subject even for his easy pen. His criticism, or rather, his narration, belongs to the “genial ” style of which he was so accomplished a master. Praise is distributed with a lavish hand. Even when he does his best, the showing is but a poor one. On the whole, the volume is deserving of praise for the light it throws upon the character of the writer, and the information it gives us about the most interesting period in the French literature of this century. In fact, to form an adequate idea of it, it will be absolutely necessary to read this entertaining volume.