Recent Literature

MR. WARNER says in the preface to his book of Egyptian travel, called Mummies and Moslems,¹ that he has tried to " look at Egypt in its own atmosphere and not through ours.” In this design he has, we are glad to say, exemplarily failed; and we owe one of the most delightful books of travel we have read to the constantly American quality of the air through which all Egyptian things appear to him. In fact, it is only by carrying his native atmosphere with him that the traveler can make his report of strange lands intelligible to his own countrymen, and Mr. Warner succeeds in representing " Egypt in its true colors and perspective ” simply because he never sees it through its own atmosphere, but always through ours. It is this which we are to thank for all the generous and charming traits of his book: for its quaint and delicate humor ; its humane sympathy with the haplessness, the hopelessness of the life of that old land; the reverence for what is truly venerable in her past; the keen appreciation of the effects of European civilization, artificially induced, upon her; whereas, if he could really have looked at Egypt through an Egyptian atmosphere, he would have seen no more to move him to laughter or compassion or veneration than his dragoman would. We take leave to fancy that he supposed his design after his book was written. We feel pretty sure that no design of any kind produced the fortunate mood which characterizes it throughout; and we certainly detect nothing so disagreeable in the structure of the book. It is the record of events as they happen, thoughts as they occur, things as they appear, day after day, set down clearly and simply, but with all the unconscious charm of a style which is here at its best, and with a touch so light, so brief, so passing, so uninsistent, that from beginning to end the book never wearies. The author’s humor is a delicious light upon it all. He did not go to Egypt to make people laugh; and you laugh all the more contentedly with him because you feel that it is not required of you ; because the traveler, who finds it impossible not to see the fun of Egypt, sees also its vast gravity and sadness, and, while guarding himself a little overscrupulously, perhaps, against poetic or emotional expression, knows how to be satisfactorily serious at the right moment.

The thirty-eight chapters of the book are mostly a record of the Nile voyage in a dahabeëh, or dahabeiah, — for, as Mr. Warner says, “It seems to be the privilege of travelers to spell Arabic words as they please, and no two writers agree on a single word or name,”—but several of the best treat of some preliminary and subsequent days in Cairo. Our readers have already had the chapter concerning the voyage to Egypt and the author’s first days there, with which the book opens, and which he calls At the Gates of the East, as well as that on Passing the Cataracts of the Nile. The latter is rather more elaborate than the rest of the book ; but the former gives a very good notion of its prevailing tone and manner.

The voyager on the Nile cannot hope to see anything novel; he can hardly hope for experiences that differ from those of any other of the hundreds of people who make the voyage in the same season with him, and write or do not write about it. The freshness must be all in the spirit with which he looks at things; the variety in the ideas and associations which they evoke in him. We could not easily give special proof of Mr. Warner’s gift of being constantly entertaining amid scenes which are so pitilessly bewritten in all languages, but his book will afford all the necessary proof. What strikes one most in a critical glance at his work is how unfailingly he keeps, throughout, the happy tone which he falls into at the outset. He makes you free of his dahabeëh at once, with the least possible ostentation of hospitality, and you lead its daily life with him, in a good comradeship which never ceases to be easy. He calls your notice to this or that aspect of life on the shores ; he asks you to view the customary objects of interest with him ; to go with him to such houses as he is invited to visit; he makes his comment, brief, pointed, wittily thoughtful; that is all at which an analysis of his charm arrives, but this does not begin to be all.

The multitude of the pictures in which his pages abound makes it hard to choose any one that shall seem more characteristic than another, but here is one, taken at a venture, that is at least characteristic: —

“ As we lay, windbound, a few miles below Soohag, the Nubian trading-boat I had seen the day before was moored near ; and we improved this opportunity for an easy journey to Central Africa, by going on board. The forward-deck was piled with African hides so high that the oars were obliged to be hung on outriggers ; the cabin deck was loaded with bags of gums, spices, medicines; and the cabin itself was stored so full that, when we crawled down into it, there was scarcely room to sit upright on the bags. Into this penetralia of barbaric merchandise the ladies preceded us, upon the promise of the sedate and shrewd-eyed traveler to exhibit his ostrich feathers. I suppose nothing in the world of ornament is so fascinating to a woman as an ostrich feather ; and to delve into a mine of them, to be able to toss about handfuls, sheafs of them, to choose any size and shape and any color, glossy black, white, gray, and white with black tips — it makes one a little delirious to think of it! . . .

“While the ostrich - trade is dragging along its graceful length, other curiosities are produced : the short, dangerous tusks of the wild boar; the long tusks of the elephant — a beast whose enormous strength is only made a show of, like that of Samson ; and pretty silver-work from Soudan.

“' What is this beautiful tawny skin, upon which I am sitting ? ’

“ ' Lion’s; she was the mother of one of the young lions out yonder. And this,’continued the trader, drawing something from the corner, ‘ is her skull.' It gave a tender interest to the orphan outside, to see these remains of his mother. . . .

“' What’s that thick stuff in a bottle there behind you?'

“ ‘That’s lion’s oil, some of her oil.’ . . .

“ I took the bottle. To think that I held in my hand the oil of a lion ! . . .

“ ‘ And is that another bottle of it ? ’

“ ' Mais, no ; you don’t get a lion every day for oil; that is ostrich - oil. This is good for rheumatism.’

“ It ought to be. There is nothing rheumatic about the ostrich. When I have tasted sufficiently the barbaric joys of the cabin, I climb out upon the deck to see more of this strange craft.

“Upon the narrow and dirty bow, over a slow fire, on a shallow copper dish, a dark and slender boy is cooking flap-jacks as big as the flap of a leathern apron He takes the flap-jack up by the edge in his fingers and turns it over, when one side is cooked, as easily as if it were a sheepskin. There is a pile of them beside him, enough to make a whole suit of clothes, burnous and all, and very durable it would prove. Near him is tied, by a cotton cord, a half-grown leopard, elegantly spotted, who has a habit of running out his tongue, giving a sidelick of his chops, and looking at you in the most friendly manner. If I were the boy, I would n’t stand with my naked back to a leopard which is tied with a slight string.

“ On shore, on the sand and in the edge of the wheat, are playing in the sun a couple of handsome young lions, gentle as kittens. . . . The two play together very prettily, and when I leave them they have lain down to sleep, face to face, with their arms round each other’s necks, like the babes in the wood. The lovely leopard occasionally rises to his feet and looks at them, and then lies down again, giving a soft sweep to his long and rather vicious tail.”

Then here is a pretty study, of a kind whose humorous compassion always tinges Mr. Warner’s contemplation of modern Egyptian life: —

“ I encountered here a little boy who filled my day with sunshine. He was a sort of shepherd boy, and I found him alone in a field, the guardian of a donkey which was nibbling coarse grass. But his mind was not on his charge, and he was so much absorbed in his occupation that he did not notice my approach. He was playing, for his own delight and evidently with intense enjoyment, upon a reed pipe, an instrument of two short reeds, each with four holes, bound together, and played like a clarionet. Its compass was small, and the tune ran round and round in it, accompanied by one of the most doleful drones imaginable. Nothing could be more harrowing to the nerves. I got the boy to play it a good deal. I saw that it was an antique instrument (it was in fact Pan’s pipe unchanged in five thousand years), and that the boy was a musical enthusiast, a gentle Mozart, who lived in an ideal world which he created for himself in the midst of the most forlorn conditions. The little fellow had the knack of inhaling and blowing at the same time, expanding his cheeks, and using his stomach like the bellows of the Scotch bagpipe, and producing the same droning sound as that delightful instrument. But I would rather hear this boy half a day than the bagpipe a week.

“ I talked about buying the pipe, but the boy made it himself, and prized it so highly that I could not pay him what he thought it was worth, and I had not the heart to offer its real value. Therefore I left him in possession of his darling, and gave him half a silver piastre. He kissed it and thanked me warmly, holding the unexpected remuneration for his genius in his hand and looking at it with shining eyes. I feel an instant pang, and I am sorry that I gave it to him. I have destroyed the pure and ideal world in which he played to himself, and tainted the divine love of sweet sounds with the idea of gain and the scent of money. The serenity of his soul is broken up, and he will never again be the same boy, exercising his talent merely for the pleasure of it.”

The sketches of life and character in the book are often of the airiest slightness, but they never fail of an effect, taken with the context, which we are not sure they would have without it. In Mr. Warner’s writing, the insidious approach to the reader’s sense of the ridiculous is what gives much of his humor its delightfulness, and the unexpectedness of many of these little glimpses or pictures seems great part of their value; they are like those bits and scraps in an artist’s portfolio, which lurk about among the larger drawings, and which, as you seize upon them, you rather pride yourself on not letting escape you. For all that, they are too slight to be separately shown and boasted of. It is with an infinite number of touches, occurring at most uncertain intervals, that the characters of Abd-el-Atti, the dragoman, and his subordinates, are drawn, and it is not till far on in the book that we fully realize the discipline of the crew when Mr. Warner tells us that “ the boat might as well be run by ballot.” In most cases Mr. Warner has no opportunity to recur to his subject, but then, he contrives to make a few graphic lines efficiently record it, as in the case of the venerable sheik who takes the boats up the cataract, and who, being bribed with a piece of cotton cloth by the owners of the author’s dahabeëh to delay its ascent, incorruptibly appropriated the cloth and earned the usual fee besides, by promptly taking the dahabeëh up the cataract.

At Luxor an Arab performs the duties — such as they may be at Luxor—of American consul, and he hospitably entertained Mr. Warner and his friends at dinner.

“There is no difficulty in getting at the meats; we tear off strips, mutually assisting each other in pulling them asunder; but there is more trouble about such dishes as pease, and a purée of something. One hesitates to make a scoop of his four fingers, and plunge in ; and then, it is disappointing to an unskilled person to see how few peas he can convey to his mouth at a time. I sequester, and keep by me the breast-bone of a chicken, which makes an excellent scoop for small vegetables and gravies, and I am doing very well with it, until there is a universal protest against the unfairness of the device.

“ Our host praises everything himself in the utmost simplicity, and urges us to partake of each dish ; he is continually picking out nice bits from the dish and conveying them to the mouth of his nearest guest. My friend who sits next to Ali ought to be grateful for this delicate attention, but I fear he is not. The fact is that Ali, by some accident, in fishing, hunting, or war, has lost the tip of the index finger of his right hand, the very hand that conveys the delicacies to my friend’s mouth. And he told me afterwards that he felt each time he was fed that he had swallowed that piece of the consul’s finger.”

It is at the house of this officer of our government — whose taste in entertainments might well be made a subject of congressional investigation — that the American traveler is enabled to see the dance of the Ghawazees, a demoralizing spectacle which has its absurdities. But it is now a thoroughly stale subject, both in its sadness and its absurdity, and what will more interest the reader are the glimpses of life in Cairo, presenting some of those points at which Egyptian and European civilization meet to corrupt each other.

One has reason to be thankful to Mr. Warner that he does not affect to be very instructive, still less to be prophetic concerning the Khedive’s attempts to Europeanize his people, but one cannot read what he says without a better sense of the situation. The experiment is in most respects superficial, and it involves the most grotesque anomalies. The Khedive has a model farm and model manufactures ; but the labor in these is the old underpaid, enforced labor that built the pyramids. His wives and concubines are indulged in the Paris fashions, and are guarded in the harems by black eunuchs out of the Arabian Nights. The same incongruity runs through all phases of the scheme ; and yet some little good is slowly accomplished ; at least matters are changed, and no change can be for the worse, in Egypt. At present the taxes are enormous and lay the final burden upon agriculture, which sinks under it. But untaxed agriculture could hardly flourish in the hands of the fellahs, who do every year what has been done for five thousand years, planting and reaping from the same soil the same crops, till at last the life - sustaining principle is so enfeebled in the superannuated grain, that the bread made from it fills without nourishing the consumer; though as for that, in Egypt it is no small matter merely to be filled.

Something is done for reform in Egypt by the army under the control of American officers, who introduce an enlightened discipline and some small measure of education. But after all, this is a slight affair. Nothing can be done for Egypt except through the relief and emancipation of the women ; and nothing can be done for the women except through Christianity. This is the sum of all intelligent thinking about the East, and this is the end at which Mr. Warner, who writes so compassionately of women throughout his book, always arrives. He gives some pages to an account of the Presbyterian mission school at Assiout, where a small beginning is made in the right direction : —

“ The school for girls, small as it is, impressed us as one of the most hopeful things in Egypt. I have no confidence in any scheme for the regeneration of the country, in any development of agriculture, or extension of territory, or even in education, that does not reach woman and radically change her and her position. It is not enough to say that the harem system is a curse to the East; woman herself is everywhere degraded. Until she becomes totally different from what she now is, I am not sure but the Arab is right in saying that the harem is a necessity; the woman is secluded in it (and in the vast majority of harems there is only one wife), and has a watch set over her, because she cannot be trusted. One hears that Cairo is full of intrigue, in spite of locked doors and eunuchs. The large towns are worse than the country ; hut I have heard it said that woman is the evil and plague of Egypt — though I don't know how the country could go on without her. Sweeping generalizations are dangerous, but it is said that the sole education of most Egyptian women is in arts to stimulate the passion of men. In the idleness of the most luxurious harem, in the grim poverty of the lowest cabin, woman is simply an animal.

“ What can you expect of her ? She is literally uneducated, untrained in every respect. She knows no more of domestic economy than she does of books, and she is no more fitted to make a house attractive, or a room tidy, than she is to hold an intelligent conversation. Married when she is yet a child, to a person she may have never seen, and a mother at an age when she should be in school, there is no opportunity for her to become anything better than she is. . . .

“ On our return to the river, we passed the new railway station building, which is to be a handsome edifice of white limestone. Men, women, and children are impressed to labor on it, and, an intelligent Copt told us, without pay. Very young girls were the mortar-carriers, and as they walked to and fro, with small boxes on their heads, they sang, the precocious children, an Arab love-song: —

“ We have seen little girls, quite as small as these, forced to load coal upon the steamers, and beaten and cuffed by the overseers. It is a hard country for women. They have only a year or two of time in which all-powerful nature and the wooing sun sing within them the songs of love, then a few years of married slavery, and then ugliness, old age, and hard work.

“I do not know a more melancholy subject of reflection than the condition, the lives, of these women we have been seeing for three months. They have neither any social nor any religious life. If there were nothing else to condemn the system of Mohammed, this is sufficient. I know what splendors of art it has produced, what achievements in war, what benefits to literature and science in the dark ages of Europe. But all the culture of a race that in its men has borne accomplished scholars, warriors, and artists has never touched the women. The condition of woman in the Orient is the conclusive verdict against the religion of the prophet.”

The Nile Notes of a Howadji gave merely the sentiment of Nile travel, and we know of no book on the same subject which is charming in so many different ways as Mr. Warner’s, which, while so informal and desultory, is so honest in material, and tells so much that one cares to know in the fashion one cares to learn it. If this book can make its way among the subscription-book public, it will do a vast service to literature in educating the popular taste to the appreciation of good reading, and the time will yet come when the book-agent will be welcomed at all our doors instead of warned from them by every prohibitory device.

— No one need be deterred from reading Mr. Hamerton’s volume, Etching and Etchers,² by the fear that it will have no interest except to those especially seeking information upon the subjects. In spite of the attention given to technical details, it will be found to deal even more extensively with general principles, applicable to all the arts of design, and interesting to all students and lovers of art. Besides, it is well worth while to study for its own sake a form of art which was the favorite mode of expression of some of the greatest of the old masters, and though as yet but little practically known among ourselves, is giving employment in Europe to much of the best artistic talent of the day.

Mr. Hamerton’s book was first published in London in 1868, almost simultaneously with the beginning of the recent revival of etching in England. While intended in part as a manual of practical instruction, it had for its higher and chief purpose to stimulate and guide the newly awakened interest in an art which, though practiced by Albert Dürer and brought to perfection by Rembrandt, had, in England at least, fallen into almost total neglect. This first edition was embellished by thirty-six etchings — ancient as well as modern — printed, with the exception of two copies from Ostade, from plates actually executed by the artists whose names they bore. Among them were specimens of the genuine handiwork of such illustrious masters as Rembrandt and Paul Potter. This little collection of etchings at once attracted the attention of connoisseurs; the edition, to which it gave in their eyes an exceptional value, was soon exhausted, and copies can now be obtained only of dealers in rare books, and at extravagant prices. But the author had a still better evidence of success in the numerous letters he received from artists and amateurs, not in England alone, but in foreign countries, including our own, asking for further enlightenment, and submitting to him specimens of the etchings which the perusal of his book had led them to attempt The present edition is substantially the same as the first, excepting a few omissions and the addition of more than two hundred pages of new matter. But the number of plates has been reduced to twelve, and of these only two are original etchings: a sketch from nature by the author, and another by the French etcher, Lalanne. All the rest are copies, made by Mr. Hamerton himself, of plates, or parts of plates, by various masters, " selected in almost every instance for some special reason, and not to make the book look pretty.”They are given “ not at all as embellishments, but simply to make the text more intelligible,” and with the same view each plate is accompanied by a page of letterpress, printed in red, noting the processes employed in its production. The book in its present form will be less attractive to the mere connoisseur, but equally valuable and instructive to the practical student; while the reader who may feel the want of a collection of original etchings is furnished in the appendix with a plan for making one for himself.

Though the author disclaims any “ prettiness " for his copies of other etchers’ work, it would be a mistake to suppose that they have no artistic merit or attractiveness. Several of them are from originals by masters of the highest reputation, and reproductions of the works of Rembrandt, Ostade, and Haden cannot but retain something of the charm of the originals, even when interpreted by a less skillful etcher than Mr. Hamerton. Something, perhaps, of the “thinness and hardness ” to which, the author tells us, the art has a natural tendency, may be observed in these copies, and more especially in Mr. Hamerton’s original work, in this as in other volumes illustrated by him; but this is a fault easily pardoned, as being rather the coming short of a true aim than a false direction in the aim itself. Although as cosmopolitan in his tastes and as free from prejudice as a writer can well be, our author has, as an artist, an undisguised preference for what are sometimes called “artist’s etchings,”that is, for the free and unconstrained expression of an artist’s thought, by his own hand, on the copper. The influence of this preference can be detected in these copies. In one or two instances where an opportunity of comparison with the originals has been possible, it is plain that, while keeping sufficiently near to his model for the purpose he had in view, he has not attempted to reproduce it line for line. In the copy of a part of one of Waterloo’s plates, for example, it has apparently been impossible for him to follow exactly the somewhat too classical and conventional forms of the masses of foliage. He has, consequently, substituted for the old etcher’s rounded and graceful curves the angular and “scratchy " method of indicating leafage which may be remarked in his own studies from nature. The result, while not altogether satisfactory as a copy, has at least this advantage over the original, that it looks much more like an actual transcript from nature, and less like an imitation of an oil-painting or a steel engraving.

But though Mr. Hamerton’s own position as an etcher may not be in the very front rank, he is a most instructive as well as entertaining writer upon art. The subject, indeed, is one upon which it is very difficult to write well, though by some unfortunate fatality it seems to be the one topic most often selected by the merest tyro for the exercise of his skill in the utterance of sounding phrases and glittering generalities, or else as a fair field for sharp criticism and dogmatic assertion. But Mr. Hamerton is no tyro. His qualifications, for which his whole life has been a preparation, are numerous and of a high order, and not the least among them is a practical knowledge of his subject. He is a painter in oil and in water - colors, as well as an etcher. In early life a disciple of Ruskin, and beginning the practice of art under the influence of the pre-Raphaelite school, he has gradually thrown off whatever was vicious in the theory and practice of his teachers, and has learned to look at nature synthetically instead of analytically. He has also had the opportunity of personal acquaintance with some of the most eminent artists of the day, both at home and abroad, while his long residence in France has made it easy for him to place himself in a truly cosmopolitan position with regard to art and artists, a stand - point outside of all cliques and nationalities. Nor has he been so bound up in art as to have no thought for other subjects ; as the readers of his numerous publications well know.

The book is written in sound English prose, simple, vigorous, and manly, occasionally becoming a little confused when the author ventures too far into philosophic depths, but often rising into heights of true and unexaggerated eloquence. The development of his analytic faculty by his early studies stands Mr. Hamerton in good stead in the critical examination of different masters and schools. It is perhaps to be regretted that more of the synthetic faculty had not been displayed in binding together the component parts of his work. Scarcely a topic is touched upon which is not referred to again and again in scores of widely separated pages. But a more methodical arrangement might have impaired the readableness of the book, which nowha has the unconstraint and desultory freedom of an evening talk by the fireside.

We must content ourselves with calling attention to the first of the five books into which the volume is divided, as in a general way containing the pith and kernel of the whole, though the topics discussed in its several chapters are by no means exhausted there, but are referred to again and again in the succeeding books. These chapters, and all in other parts of the work relating to the same subjects, will be found to have an interest and an application far beyond the limits of any special branch of art. They may be read with profit by art students in whatever department, and by that large class who desire to obtain a true understanding of the principles of art as a part of the general culture which the age more and more demands. Above all, they may be recommended to the art critic. The discouraging view the author gives of the probability of pecuniary success for those who practice the art in strict accordance with its central idea will be likely to deter our professional artists from engaging in it, while the difficulties it presents to the amateur will probably incline him to prefer some of the other methods of working which the author recommends to beginners, especially the newly developed art of charcoal drawing, so ably practiced by our own Hunt, and in which he has so successfully trained his pupils. It is true that the great success in etching attained by amateurs in a few exceptional cases has given rise to the impression that etching is a particularly easy art. But it is only the mechanical part of it that is easy ; the intellectual, the truly artistic part of it demands greater and more concentrated mental power and more thorough knowledge than almost any other of the arts.

Although Mr. Hamerton in speaking of etching has, as a rule, always in view its employment in a strictly artistic way, he expressly recommends (page 286) a certain kind of etching for the illustration of scientific works by their authors themselves. He regrets “ that De Saussure, for example, had not been trained to work of this kind, instead of being dependent upon the feeble draughtsman ship of his assistants, and the miserable engravers who reproduced their drawings.” Any one who ever saw Agassiz draw upon the blackboard can imagine what admirable illustrations to his own works he might have etched. And what an advantage would be gained to students in medicine, if, to the skill in drawing by no means uncommon in the profession, the authors of works on anatomy should join a proficiency in the use of the etching-needle.

Another application of the process, and one for which it is peculiarly adapted, will be suggested to the reader of antiquarian tastes by the chapter on the French etcher, Méyron (page 167), whose remarkable talent owed its development to " his passionate wish to preserve some adequate memorial of that picturesque old city of Paris which has disappeared before the constructive activity of Haussmann and Louis Napoleon.” It is not impossible that some Yankee Méyron may arise to secure for us “some adequate memorial ” of the historic edifices and picturesque nooks and corners of the fast disappearing old city of Boston.

Another field, indeed, has been opened for the etcher, and it is the only one, according to our author, in which he can earn a livelihood, by the quite recent application of etching to the copying of pictures. This new branch of the art, which has in Europe now become the principal one, has there been fostered by the establishment of art journals, such as the Gazette des Beaux Arts and L'Art, in France, and The Portfolio in England, which largely employ it in the illustration of their pages. How admirably successful this new development of the art has become iu the hands of the few talented and well-trained Frenchmen who are almost exclusively its practitioners may be seen by these periodicals. Another example is the series of etchings by the Frenchman Jacquemart from pictures belonging to the Metropolitan Museum of New York. It will be long, however, before we can hope to have native etchers competent to render adequately our own precious Copleys and Allstons and Stuarts.

— This volume³ comes to supplement the Memoirs and Correspondence of Ma-

dame Récamier, which, although a lively and exceedingly entertaining sketch of the society of the Abbaye-aux-Bois, occasioned very general dissatisfaction among both its French and American readers; for, being made up of letters which were written to her, and not of those which she had herself penned, it did not leave upon the mind any clear, definite impression of the real character of Madame Récamier, into whose secret history all the world was curious to inquire. The failure of that copious work in its main purpose is the ostensible cause of the existence of this after-volume, in which are introduced over forty of the private notes and letters of Madame Récamier; these are as graceful, genial, and chatty as any of the gossip, legitimized under the name of memoirs, recollections, correspondence, or what not, which we have met with, but they hardly fill the gap which was left in the previous volumes.

A faithful autobiography of this brilliant woman, narrating the various changes in her feelings during her strangely romantic life, the story of her fortunate and cloudy days, with their delight and passion, if she ever felt passion, most of all the ceaseless interplay of motive in her who kept so many lovers at her feet and yet never acknowledged one as her master, would have been an invaluable contribution to literature, could she have written it. This loss is poorly supplied by the history of her relations with Camille Jordan, of whom she was hardly more than the esteemed friend, and with her niece, Madame Lenormant, of whom she was the faithful guardian. In the life of the unfortunate J. J. Ampère, however, who occupies here the place which Châteaubriand filled in the former work, we get some glimpses of her real social relations ; for his experience serves to formulate and throw out in sharp outline some vague misgivings which we have always felt in regard to the career of this charming woman. Pure, intelligent, of surpassing beauty, which retained until late in life all the freshness and bloom of girlhood, yet dignified, withal, with womanly grace and sweetness, facile and entertaining in conversation, of gentle and attractive manners, she won by such spells all who came near her, and none ever broke the spell. But her fascinations awoke in men a sense of want, a passion which mere friendship is impotent to satisfy; the attraction which she exercised was essentially that of sensuous beauty, and her position forbade her to yield to the love which she enkindled. Many of her friends outlived their passion, and time transmuted it into friendship. But with Ampère, whose experience this little volume narrates, the case was otherwise. Introduced to her when he was on the verge of twenty, before long he fell upon his knees before her in her gardens, his declaration was made, and, Sainte-Beuve touchingly adds, “ she never cured him.” His life after that was one long travel; he visited Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, Greece, Egypt, and America, but in all his wanderings he remained faithful to the woman who had won him. He became eminent in letters and scholarship ; his restless spirit fled from one province of learning to another, nor did he ever know calm until he died. Here was a life made miserable by the incapacity of a shallow woman to love the man whom she had charmed. She never loved, it is said, she was a woman of friendships; and one relents when he sees how warm were those friends of her salon whose wit and learning were in the service of beauty. “ She was a coquette,” says Sainte - Beuve, and coquetry is ever hand and glove with danger; “but,” he adds, “ if the ministers will let me say so, she was an angel of a coquette.”

We notice here and there a few inelegancies in the translation, but as a whole the book is very readable; those who like to discover the secret business and foibles of the great will find food for their curiosity, and if they make no attempt to separate the wheat from the chaff, they will lay the volume down with a feeling of quiet satisfaction.

— There is no period of English literature which appeals to us with so personal an interest as that which derived its main impulse from the French Revolution. We recognize its somewhat hectic life, and acknowledge that it was consciously, in certain phases, a reflection of the greater Elizabethan epoch, yet it is bound to us by political and personal ties which make us willing to indulge in the minutiæ of biographical details respecting the men and women who formed the very animated literary circle in London and Westmoreland at that time, giving a degree of attention to the literature then produced somewhat out of proportion to its intrinsic worth. Every new book concerning Charles Lamb, for example, has been sure of an intelligent and somewhat eager audience any time the past forty years, and this not merely because of the personal affection which Lamb excites, but because he was one of many centres about which revolved the intense life, large and petty, of a crowd of men and women whose shadows, cast under the light of the lurid, angry political heavens, look mightier than a close acquaintance with their real persons would seem to justify.

Of these people William Godwin⁴ enjoys a singular reputation. Judged by the fears and admiration of his contemporaries, he has always seemed to readers of the history and literature of the period to be an intellectual bowlder, yet on reading his Caleb Williams and St. Leon, and on dipping into his Political Justice, it has been difficult to account for his great reputation. The only theory which has appeared tenable has been that Political Justice was precipitated from the fluid notions of the day, and, by its presentation in solid form of what seemed lawless and reckless, assumed at once an importance which in steadier days it inevitably lost. The breaking of popular talk and sentiment against this book produced a sort of foam which rendered it very conspicuous for a while; the prominence of Godwin lent its force to his novels and other writings, and gave them a reputation which has scarcely proved enduring. Caleb Williams, indeed, contains a certain fascination by its steel-cold force, and all of Godwin’s works merit praise for their vigorous English, but it is useless to count upon his retaining in public estimation anything like the relative importance which he held during his lifetime.

Mr. Paul’s work will be gratefully received by all who own to an interest in the period to which it refers, and such readers will find in it some explanation from Godwin’s own character, as displayed in his friendships and experience, of the singular mark which he made. Those who take up the book with little previous acquaintance with the persons about whom it is concerned, will be in some perplexity to know why it was written. That is to say, Mr. Paul has performed his task of biographer under such strict limitations that he has hardly provided the reader with sufficient account of the historical entourage of Godwin’s life. As a psychological revelation it strikes us as admirable, and hence we say that to readers and students of the pe riod he has rendered substantial service.

Godwin appears in this portrait as a man of intellectual force which is bounded by high walls of conceit and ignorance. Within the channel hewed out for him his life flowed with a certain depth of purpose and singleness of aim which unquestionably separated him from more timid, irresolute, and selfish men. It is not to be wondered at that he excited the admiration of young men, nor that he turned to their enthusiasm for the sympathy which discreeter or more careless men withheld from him; yet he had his warm friends among his associates. Coleridge and Lamb both respected and admired him, and we are indebted to their friendship for some entertaining and characteristic letters. His most intimate friends, however, were not among the better known Englishmen of the period, but were found in a half-educated class who were impressed by the calm audacity of his principles and speculations. With them he was perpetually quarreling and perpetually renewing friendship. His almost unbounded self-conceit was sure to tempt disagreements, and his steadfastness to make him after all a good rock for vacillating minds to anchor under. His family relations were from first to last of a troubled character. His mother, as seen in her letters, was the original fountain, plainly, of much of his temper, and Mr. Paul has introduced no one more striking in personality than this shrewd, tenacious, illiterate, affectionate, and iron-bound old lady. Mary Wollstonecraft and her squalid kin have a positive interest for the reader, and make large claim upon his affection; and the second Mrs. Godwin suggests family squabbles which leave one with a substantial pity for Godwin himself.

Godwin moves throughout the book, among the figures who surround him, with a kind of tragical pain on his countenance, which deepens as mean losses and ignoble failures close in his life. It is a dismal book, and few, we suspect, will fail to recognize in its suggestion of unhappiness the moving cause in Godwin’s self-centred, unhopeful nature. Indeed, he seemed always to be recoiling from the logical results of his own life and doctrines. Sometimes those results struck him with all the force with which personal disaster can strike, sometimes they were sharply visible to him in the conclusions drawn by others from premises which he had supplied, and sometimes they appeared in the absolute refusal of his principles to maintain themselves in the presence of obstinate conditions. De Quincey, in his somewhat contemptuous notice of Godwin, represents him as shrinking from the consequences of his Political Justice and really appalled by the sound of his own challenge to the world. “The second edition,” he says, — on which, by the bye, Mr. Paul is absolutely silent, — as regards principles is not a recast, but absolutely a travesty, of the first; nay, it is all but a palinode.” Other illustrations will be found in Godwin’s dismay at finding one of his young disciples rejoicing in converting a friend to atheism ; in the necessity he was under to be inconsistent with his own views respecting marriage, and the ceremonies at death. There is frequently displayed an uneasiness respecting religion which leads one to suspect that he was less of a stoic than he or his biographer would have us believe. Godwin began life as a dissenting minister, but soon abandoned the views which he began to preach. There is nothing in his life as set forth in these two volumes which would lead one to fall iu love with the views which he afterwards adopted; so far as he seems to have been guided by them, he was led into cold, damp regions, scarcely penetrated by any brighter rays than those which issue from a dreary slavery to a sense of duty.

FRENCH AND GERMAN.⁵

Mr. Hillebrand is a writer who has perfect command of four languages, German, French, English, and Italian, and he has the rarer faculty of writing nothing in any one of these tongues which is not entertaining as well as linguistically correct. To France, a country which he knows very well, he devoted the first volume of this series ; the second was made up of a variety of miscellaneous papers about other parts of the Continent, notably Italy and Germany, while this volume⁶ deals entirely with English affairs. It really consists of an agreeable gossiping account of certain English sights, with the moralizing upon them that suggests itself to an observer both intelligent and practiced, who draws his comparisons from a large number of cases, and who is enough of a cosmopolitan to be above a good many of the prejudices which characterize most travelers and writers. That this book is a profound one it would be hard to say, but it is interesting, and it will, perhaps, be found of greater importance at some future time, when there will be a demand for contemporary criticism of England in its present condition. It is for supplying just that want that Mr. Hillebrand is peculiarly fitted.

He notices the indifference of the English public to what is going on in Germany in comparison with its keen interest in the condition of France, and he explains this by the well-known intimacy that has long existed between France and England, and the hardly obsolete provincialism of Germany, and he might have added the slowness of the English in receiving new impressions. He says, “ In spite of all the translations, how remote Goethe and Schiller are from the Anglo - Saxons, who are yet allied to them by race. The only thing in our literature which they really understand and love is the sentimental, that is to say, our lyrical poetry. This is encouraged by their kinship. One of the Latin or Celtic races neither understands the language, nor feels the melody, nor imagines the feeling, which combine to form a song. An Englishman is very quick to enjoy it. But, on the other hand, everything fantastic, speculative, or mystical in our literature is for him a closed volume. All our idealism is to him a puzzle, because our idealism is metaphysical, while his is practical.” This is not the only acute comparison he makes between the English and the Germans. He even asserts that the two Germanic races are about to interchange their rôles, and that the philosophizing nation is about to turn its attention to politics, while the nation exercised in politics is about to take up philosophy, which, he takes the precaution of adding, in no way means that both the politics and the philosophy will not be very unlike what they have been before. And elsewhere he throws a great deal of ridicule on the general ignorance in England of Kant and his philosophy. This is in a chapter on John Stuart Mill and his school of thinkers, a school which has not earned his thorough approval. Of Mill’s autobiography he gives a clear and interesting account, closing with the statement (made in 1873) that there are signs in England of the beginning reaction in favor of Cæsarean conservatism, and that Mill is more responsible for this than is any other man. He then takes up Mr. Fitzjames Stephen’s Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, and gives it warm praise. However one may disagree or agree with Mr. Hillebrand’s judgments, it is necessary to credit him with giving in a clear way the core of this book, as it stands opposed to the essence of what Mill teaches. The two books of course represent conflicting elements, and Mill’s theoretical, impracticable system of social philosophy naturally called forth a speedy and truculent reply from the Englishman, who was frightened, as Mr. Hillebrand has shown, into clutching at conservatism to save himself. In English literature he has observed a peculiarity which is only of modern growth, namely, its inclination to fantastic refinement. After praising a tolerably unknown poem. The Charm and the Curse, a Tale dramatized from the Edda, by Charles Grant, he says that its simplicity is really delightful after the affected parlor and nursery language, the neck - breaking syntax and decorative word-painting, the artificial excess of words and the attempted imitation of Milton, which characterize modern English poetry. It is, he goes on, as if it were going back to the good old fashion of facilitating the comprehension of the thought by means of the rhythm and expression, instead of, like the modern school, making it more difficult, or instead of making good the absence of thoughts by the clatter of sesquipedalian words. ” This tendency of European taste in all the arts is not the work of chance alone ; the example of Théophile Gautier and of Baudelaire has been followed in Germany and Italy as well as in England, in music, painting, and sculpture, as well as in poetry, not from conscious imitation, but from the general demand of the times. Sensuousness and extravagance in thoughts and images, as in method and expression, accumulation of material, regard for the form as an end, rule everywhere, and the controlling intelligence, pure and chaste perception, are equally wanting in our popular artists. For in addition to this brilliant coloring which rejoices so much in costume-painting, in addition to the endless amplification of a few thoughts, and the ever-increasing obscurity of expression, and the Bernini-like restlessness of forms, there is also the willful effort to be concrete which marks a period taught to be abstract, as well as a certain morbid inclination to voluptuousness, au un-naïve paganism, which has as little to do with the simple, frank enjoyment the ancients had in nakedness, as certain oracular, symbolical verse-making has with the granite lines of Æschylos, or a certain dazzling extravagance of color has with Paul Veronese’s generous richness.”

This long quotation will perhaps show that Mr. Hillebrand does not join in any hue and cry simply because it happens to be popular ; when he proceeds to examine the English, for instance, he brings to bear an experienced eye that has looked at other people, and he does not stand in awe of the objects he is studying. Elsewhere in the book he writes with equal intelligence. He treats at some length of Bulwer, who has always had more admirers among cultivated foreigners than he has found among cultivated Englishmen and Americans, who refuse to take him quite as seriously as he took himself or as German critics seem disposed to take him. If we make allowance for what seems to us the usual exaggeration, no further fault cau be found. Dickens comes in too for admiration ; and it must be said that Mr. Hillebrand seems to have enjoyed Forster’s life of him more than most of its readers did. Of Morley’s Voltaire, and Rousseau, he speaks with fitting praise, without overlooking the shortcomings of these remarkable books. He corrects Mr. Morley’s denunciation of Frederick the Great, and points out cases in which the biographer errs by too great devotion to views better fitted for the scholar’s closet than to the every-day world ; but be is emphatic in approving what is good.

These chapters, which apparently are letters about three years old, reprinted, compose all that he has to say about England in its present condition, and although they by no means go over the whole field of active English thought, they take up many of its interesting sides. Before leaving this part of the book it may be worth while to turn to Hillebrand’s defense of Bulwer, which is certainly interesting reading : “He has always seemed to me to be a good example of the English aristocrat, such as was frequently to be seen in the last century, a combination of Walpole and Chesterfield, with a little German metaphysics added, and a Byronic pose. Bulwer is decidedly an attractive nature, whose affectation is rendered tolerable by his innate grace. For Bulwer is affected; not in his old-school, French airs, which are those of the cultivated French nobleman of the century of enlightenment who has come down to our day; he is affected when he assumes the ways of the fashionable dandy, or plays the profound philosopher, or coquettes with his stores of learning, or sets out to be the earnest, romantic poet of melancholy despair. He cannot help it, he must always pretend to be some one else ; but his easy, attractive form is to be seen beneath the artificial, fashionable veil, and it is impossible to be angry with him. Everything about the man is noble; he has no hidden vein of commonness. All the qualities which one associates with the cavalier are united in him; one can see in the author how courageous, high-hearted, and knightly he was in his life, and what facility he had in everything, in writing as well as in speaking. Hence it is that for us Germans his somewhat abstract idealism brings him nearer to us than to his practical countrymen and contemporaries. His philosophy is not original, but he has an understanding of philosophy. To a scholar of Waitz or Giesebrecht his study of history may seem insufficient and uncertain, but they are enough for a man of the world, and they offer him a tolerable insight into historical sequence,and into the community of our European culture. In Bulwer there was no poet, but he was a poetic soul, and he could revel in the enjoyment of poetry and poetic things.” After speaking of his lack of humor and of the heaviness of his satire, Mr. Hillebrand goes on, “ One gets to love the author; one often shares with approval in his views of life ; one likes the thoroughly gentlemanly society one meets in his books; one gives him applause when he protests against the wisdom of this work-day world, when he steps forward in defense of the great glories of humanity, for the idols which rude hands would destroy, and in his Quixotic enthusiasm breaks a lance for what Goethe called the ahnungsvoll.” To be sure, this outburst is tempered by a speedy enumeration of Bulwer’s faults, of his lack of skill in drawing real human beings, of the unsoundness of the situations he invents, and of the sluggish movement of the action in his stories,— a tolerably complete list, which covers a good part of the ground covered by the novelist; but on the whole he admires Bulwer. It is hard to see how any one can like characters which are unlifelike even if they are gentlemanly, as also to understand how any one can sympathize with Bulwer’s loudly professed adoration of the ideal. In fact, that novelist was always trifling with the popular taste, and imitating what was good in a palpably insincere fashion. To say that he was not admired in England because he was averse to preaching a practical philosophy seems to be a rather hasty judgment. He was much read and admired, but for the most part only by young people, who were unable to discriminate between what was genuine and what ungenuine. Others could not help being conscious of his deficiencies, of the emptiness of his various pretenses, and of his incessant assumption of all manner of virtues and excellences. Why he has been so much admired by Germans is still a puzzling question. An advocate of Schopenhauer certainly would not seem likely to be the prey of false sentimentality, unless it be that Schopenhauer’s philosophy exists in Germany only as a sort of bulwark against the softer trait which has so long marked that country.

As a sort of postscript to the book, two agreeable chapters are inserted, one on Tom Jones, to which Mr. Hillebrand gives fitting praise, and the other on Sterne, of whom he writes entertainingly.

On the whole, this volume will be found interesting, bright, and readable. That it gives a complete picture of modern England cannot be affirmed. Like the second volume of this series, reviewed last October in The Atlantic, it is somewhat superficial, and hardly comes up to the promise of the title or of the first book, Frankreich und die Franzosen, noticed some three years ago. The author’s position is that of a cosmopolitan, with its advantages in the way of brilliancy and facility of expression; but there is also a less attractive side, that of superficiality in spite of the great acuteness of part of the book. Nevertheless, it is well worth reading.