Recent Literature

MR. BROOKS’S Lectures on Preaching ¹ are likely to be read by a good many besides the special class of students to whom they are addressed. He is a preacher of repute, and it is hardly to be supposed that he would give eight lectures upon the subject of his profession without betraying something of the sources of his power. The careful reader of this book is not likely to find the explanation in any merely superficial qualities. Mr. Brooks gives a humorous illustration of how a mere imitator may miss the gnuine use of a great model. “ I remember going, years ago, with an intelligent friend to hear a great orator lecture. The discourse was rich, thoughtful, glowing, and delightful. As we came away my companion seemed meditative. By and by he said : ‘ Did you see where his power lay ? ’ I felt unable to analyze and epitomize in an instant such a complex result, and meekly said, ‘No, did you ?' ‘Yes,’ he replied, briskly, ‘ I watched him, and it is in the double motion of his hand. When he wanted to solemnize and calm and subdue us he turned the palm of his hand down; when he wanted to elevate and inspire us he turned the palm of his hand up. That was it.’ And that was all the man had seen in an eloquent speech. He was no fool, but he was an imitator. He was looking for a single secret for a multifarious effect. I suppose he has gone on, from that day to this, turning his hand upside down and downside up, and wondering that nobody is either solemnized or inspired.”It is entirely possible for one in like manner to account to himself for Mr. Brooks’s power as a preacher by some subordinate characteristic, but no one can read these lectures without discovering the ideal which the lecturer exalt., it is this which makes the book worth reading by those who have no professional interest in the subject. A petty curiosity which is concerned about trivial details of method will not be gratified, but the student who wishes to know what an eager preacher thinks about his work, its opportunities and its limitations, will find here an admirable disclosure. What is it which any one of generous nature wishes to know of his fellow’s work? Not the mere mechanism by which he economizes It his strength, the exact number of hours which he gives to this or that section of it, whether or not he takes a cup of coffee when he gets up, or has a horseback ride before breakfast; it is the ideal which the worker holds, the aspect which it bears, looking in the various directions of a common human interest.

We suspect that these lectures have acted as a test for those who heard them, and will serve the same purpose for readers. With some they will be inspiration; from others will come the self-condemnatory criticism, an ideal is set forth which it is folly for any but exceptional preachers to realize. No doubt any preacher will state in words a higher ideal than he himself attaius ; but the sign of a true preacher, as of every honest man, is that he has an ideal and doe not suffer that to be dulled. The enthusiasm for the profession which this book displays has contagion in it, because it is not expended on that which separates the profession from other occupations, but on that which it shares with them. Throughout the book runs a single thought never lost sight of, — the greater the man the greater the preacher; and again and again, when discoursing of practical methods, the lecturer returns in some form to his golden text, that it is the man behind the sermon which makes the sermon a power. The statement in so blunt a form few would be found to deny; yet there is a practical skepticism of this truth which overtakes all ministers at some time, and some ministers always. It is because the lecturer, holding this truth firmly, addresses himself to the living facts of a preacher’s profession rather than to the mechanism or elaborate organization in which he works that his words will he life to the living and glittering generalities to the moribund.

The glow of the orator, the earnestness of the sincere minister, make the current of the book rapid and forcible. Scorn for what is mean and a quiet humor are characteristics which will carry along many readers who would be indifferent to some of the details of which he necessarily treats. The book, in a word, is a large and fruitful treatment of a subject which may easily be taken up in a petty or purely professional manner. It is all the better for being personal and direct rather than literary. The voice of the preacher sounds clearly through it all; the person of the minister, hopeful, eager, passionate and sympathetic, is almost as visible to the reader as it was to the heaver.

—Mr. Tyerman’s Life of George Whitefield ² was written, we are told, because the writer “possessed a large amount of biographical material which previous biographers had not employed, and much of which seems to have been unknown to them.” The reason is a good one, assuming that the subject of the biography is a man whom his fellow-men still care to read about. As Whitefichl could count Bolingbroke, Chesterfield, Ilume, and Garrick among his admirers, extorted a half-reluctant tribute of respect from Dr. Johnson, and enjoyed the hearty friendship of Benjamin Franklin, he cannot have grown uninteresting in a single century. On other and higher grounds he is likely to be interesting to very many for centuries longer,

Mr. Tyerman’s wealth of material there can be no doubt about; he displays it rather too freely. He informs us, it is true, that as a rule Whitefield’s letters are used only to illustrate the narrative, but the perpetual iteration of the same thoughts in the same words illustrates little save the narrowness of the writer’s range. This fact ought to appear, and it helps to explain the effects which Whitefield produced; nevertheless we would cheerfully credit it on slighter evidence. On the other hand, wo doubt whether the biographer’s belief that his hook contains all the accessible information of importance about its subject is quite justified. Besides certain other omissions, to which wo Shall refer presently, these volumes scarcely give us an adequate impression of Whitefield as he appeared in the ordinary intercourse of life. Ilis contemporaries seem, indeed, to have preserved comparatively few specimens of his “table-talk,” while a man who in the very act of asking for a wife could profess himself “ free from that foolish passion which the world calls love, ” and who could attempt to keep little children out of the devil’s hands by forbidding them to play, ought to have succeeded in making himself repulsive. He failed, however, for he is described as an agreeable companion; he had even “ a vast vein of pleasantry,” and the vein comes to the surface here and there in Mr. Tyerman’s twelve hundred pages. But less pretentious and less valuable Lives give us additional illustrations of this trait, and our author, in justice to his subject not less than in mercy to his readers, ought to have given us all that he could find.

The good results of Whitefield’s preaching in America may not be overrated, but due account is not made of the harm which came of it. There was undoubtedly room for improvement in the Christianity of the colonists, though it was of decidedly better quality than that of their brethren across the Atlantic. Reasonably orthodox heads were everywhere to be found in unnatural fellowship with heretical consciences and infidel hearts. The evangelists of the last century did much towards making men wholly loyal to their creed, and thereby did a service to humanity. But in some parts of America, at any rate, perhaps most of all in Connecticut, the change was attended by such disorders that its best results were lost for nearly two generations. These disorders were largely due to Whitefield s unwise and frequently unjust attacks upon the ministers. He himself perceived and tried to correct this mistake along with others, and his biographer might well have gone farther and acknowledged that the mistake was mischievous. With this amendment in him, and the gradual adoption of the leading opinions which he advocated, Whitefield’s relations to the colonial clergy became pleasant, and his influence more purely beneficent. Our author has overlooked one noteworthy illustration of this altered state of tilings ; he seems not to know that the president of Yale College who received Whitefield so cordially in 1764 was the Rector Clap who denounced him in 1745.

Mr. Tyerman undoubtedly means to do everybody justice, but towards the Moravians he is positively spiteful. Those who now speak for the Unitas Fratrum do not deny that there wore mistakes and absurdities in Zinzendorf’s time, but it hardly becomes a disciple of John Wesley to treat as credible, if not as proved, charges against Wesley’s greatest spiritual benefactors which from that day to this have been pronounced slanderous. Mr. Tyerman is particularly displeased with Count Zinzendorf for securing an act of Parliament, in 1749, by which his co-religionists were protected against interference, apparently thinking it a mere vainglorious freak. In fact, the act was asked for chiefly because Moravian missionaries had suffered much ill-usage in the colonies, and had even been expelled from two of them, on suspicion of corrupting the Indians in politics and theology. Whitefield’s rupture with the Brethren at Philadelphia, in 1740, is very imperfectly described. The great preacher, who was then but five and twenty, behaved like a petulant boy, dismissing Peter Bochler, the religions guide of both the Wesleys, with, “ Sic jubeo; stet voluntas pro ratione.”(Memorials of the Moravian Church, i. 165.) Boehler’s name, by the way, is regularly misspelled, both in this work and in the author’s Life of Wesley, and the fact suggests a certain carelessness in the use of authorities. With regard to American affairs, moreover, authorities have been used too sparingly.

Mr. Tyerman’s narrative has the merits of clearness and vivacity, though his style is deformed by stock-phrases, and falls somewhat below the standard of the best English writers. But the work is among the most valuable of its class, and is likely to be for a long time the principal store-house of information about Whitefield.

— Captain Telfer’s two large volumes,³ describing his travels in the Crimea and among the races of Transcaucasia who hold slack and irregular allegiance to the Russians, will be found instructive reading. The author passed through a part of the world which has not been written about to any very great extent, and so he enjoys the advantage of having a fresh subject ; and even if the general interest of the reader in that out-ofthe-way region is but slight, the present condition of affairs in Europe makes what he has to say timely and valuable. A good part of the bulk of the book is made up of historical information, collected, evidently, with considerable pains,from the earliest known dates down to the present day. This is of the kind that is generally found in guide-books, and doubtless saves the painstaking reader much toil, even if it fails to fascinate one looking about for mere amusement. But this plan was of course adopted with deliberation, and there is much to be said in favor of such exhaustive treatment, when it it is as well done as it is here. Take the author’s remarks about the Crimea, for instance, and it is easy to see how hard it would be to collect from the authorities all that is here given. And the remoter the spot he visits, the truer is this statement.

The author’s line of travel led him, at two different times, which are welded together in the single account, through a good part of the Crimea. He visited Sebastopol, finding the town rising slowly from its ruins, and saw also the neighboring battle-field and fortifications. Nor was this all, for Cyclopean remains and dolmens are likewise mentioned side by side with Tartar villages and early Christian churches.

More interesting still than the accouut of the Crimea is that which treats of the author’s journey in Transcaucasia. He reached Poti by sea from Kertch, and then he made his way through Gouria, Mingrelia, and Imeritia to Tiflis, and southward, beyond Erivan, to Mt. Ararat, visiting also Ossefcy and Swannety. Tiflis, in Georgia, he describes as a charming place, where the civilizations of the East and West meet. In some of the wilder spots he came across very untamed tribes, with all the men living in perpetual feud with one another, — such as the independent Swanny, who are refractory subjects of the Czar. Some of tlie incidents of the cases brought before the chief for adjudication show what stubborn material the Russians have to deal with in this semi-civilized country. The Ossets, again, have a faint veneer of devotion to Christianity thrown over their heathen ways and Customs, and many are avowedly pagans. “ At the burial of their dead, the pagan Ossets place by the side of the corpse three loaves of bread and a bottle of spirits, as refreshments on the journey to heaven. A horse is then led to the grave, and the bridle is placed for an instant in the dead man’s hand, that he may claim the animal in the next world; but the same horse is never employed again for a similar purpose, that no dispute may arise hereafter as to the right ownership.” The author has collected various facts like this, which add greatly to the value of the book.

The account of Mt. Ararat is fine. Of the stories told the following is the most amusing : one criminal whom the author saw had escaped three times from Siberia, and had been convicted of seventeen murders. He was a man over seventy years of age, and when asked, once, why he had so cruelly shed so much blood, he piously turned up his eyes, and folding his hand said, “ I thank God, I have never shed any person’s blood ; I only strangled people! ” The book is well illustrated, in good part from the author’s designs.

— The variety and volume of travels coming every year from the press would be things impossible, we suppose, if it were not that outside of the fundamental and exhaustive Books of this class the value depends chiefly on personal characteristics of the author. This being so, it follows that when the author’s personality is even, agreeable, and sustained without effort, his work is already largely a success. This is true of the one before us.⁴ “ A book now Has not the seriousness it once had,” says Mr. Appleton, by way of apology for His latest informal contribution to the library of Eastern voyaging. But, without perverting his remark, we may explain that precisely one of the most agreeable things about Syrian Sunshine is the presence of serious reflection, here and there, in the easy, half-artistic, and pleasantly indolent mood so fortunately transferred to its pages. There is a more changeful and comprehensive strain struck in these chapters than in the author’s Nile Journal which we had occasion to commend last year. Otherwise the attractions of the book are much like those of its predecessor. Mr. Appleton infuses into his narrative and his description the suavity and urbaneness of a mellow culture; he gives it the best coloring derivable from conventional life, yet preserves always the agreeable reaction of a mind which knows how many things have a value denied to the conventional. The chapter on the Mount of Olives develops a passage of noticeable solemnity touched with eloquence, and frequently one is struck by admirable Bits of combination in the writer’s use of descriptive words. Newspaper critics have destroyed the value of the word “readable ; ” but in the best sense of what it once honestly meant, Syrian Sunshine will requite a day of entire leisure given to it.

—Mr. Waring, well known to all the readers of these pages, has rare gifts and rare qualifications for a traveler. It is not often the good fortune of so easy and agreeable a writer as he is to be able to look at strange life and scenery with so many regards,— to see them at once with the soldier’s, the farmer’s, the engineer’s eye. What gives his book its charm is that the artistic sense is uppermost in him, and he is first of all a delightful observer,—as delightful as if he were merely artistic. His Bride of the Rhine⁵ is the loitering and leisurely story of a voyage in a row-boat on the river which we know and like better as the Moselle than the Mosel,—down all its intoxicating zigzags from Trier to Coblentz. He was himself, for the most part, the motive power of this craft, which he stopped at will along shores everywhere rich in historic associations and the interest of a life singularly simple and unvisited. The voyage was made in 1875, when the FrancoPrussian war was more recent than it now is ; but we have not had from later travelers so good an insight as he gives into the feelings of the conquered French of those provinces towards their new masters, whom they regard with a sentimental dislike, hut whom they respect for their justice and liberality. The author’s liking for the Prussians is evident, and it seems indeed hard to find fault with their behavior as conquerors. There is great value in the glimpses he gives of the working of their military system, — so thoroughly democratic in some of its features, and so contradictory of their civil life. But the pleasant little hook is not overburdened with political observation. It turns easily aside to note the facts quite as valuable, of a sunset on the beautiful river; or of the quaint architecture of a mediæval Moselle village, oversleeping itself far into our century ; or of the peculiar agriculture and the strange social conditions. One receives the impression from it of a general prosperity as great as our own, of comfort often as great, and of content far greater among the wine-growers of the Moselle than among our farmers, and to read it is a good corrective of national vanity. These people are as educated as ours; they are well clad and well fed; they live in the midst of a cheap abundance ; it is hard to see how they could better their state by coming to any part of America; and according to Mr. Waring’s testimony there is an abiding sense among them that they are well off at home. Their picturesqueness and quaintness is not therefore at their expense in better things.

We heartily commend Mr. Waring’s charmingly illustrated little volume as so uncommon in many qualities as to be quite unique among recent books of travel.

— Mr. Van Laun’s History of French Literature⁶ by no means improves as it goes on. The reader could endure in the earlier volumes a certain vagueness of reference to tliose writers whose position has long been settled by the universal consent of mankind, and it was easy to judge gently a hasty description of their lives. But in proportion as he comes nearer to our times, more is naturally demanded of the writer, but it is demanded in vain, for anything less exact than this last volume it would be hard to find. He has collected his facts and dates in a satisfactory way, he has chosen the most important men to write about, — though Benjamin Constant should not have been omitted, and there are other less prominent names that deserved at least mention. — and in general everything he says about the writers will meet with universal assent. But it is this very patness of his descriptions and criticisms which wearies the soul of the reader. Who, for instance, can contradict this summing up of Béranger’s merits ? “ His verses resemble nobodyelso’s, his wit is of a peculiar kind, his satire keen, and his heart full of kindness. There was only one Béranger; and conspicuous as was his individuality, it is in no wise intruded into that of others.” And what sort of a notion is given of the lyric poet’s charm, of his goodnatured craftiness, and his mixture of epicureanism and political zeal that is found in his verses ?

On almost every page are to be found similar cases of the author’s good intentions and of his incompetence for his task. His book gives no notion of the magnitude of the work that lay before him; it was his duty to afford English readers some knowledge of the greatness of French literature and of the qualities that went to make it what it is ; but instead of doing this he has written a dull compendium, which is too incomplete to be of use as a hand-book, and too vague and mediocre to direct any one’s literary taste. The work remains to be done over again, and it is to be hoped that it will be undertaken by a more original thinker than the author of this unsatisfactory history.

This little novel,⁷ although it lacks the, divine spark, is yet agreeable and entertaining, and should by no means be overlooked by those who are casting about for something worth reading. The story is a quiet one, describing a number of not uneventful lives, but doing what it has to do soberly and intelligently. The characters are clearly distinguished, and the way in which a few chapters of English life are set before ns is deserving of praise. The heroine is an attractive girl; there is something touching in her mistaken judgment of her uncles, and there is plenty of quiet romance in the book, with quite the proper amount of misunderstanding to cause unhappiness in the breast of the young. It is strange that a novel that is so good is not yet much better, hut, if the truth he told, it is not much above the average in interest, although it has a decided merit of its own in respect of carefulness. Those who take it up, thus warned, will he pretty sure to like it, but those who expect more will be disappointed.

— The success of the series of Ancient Classing for English Readers has boon so great that a new series ⁸ has been devised, which shall give the public a similar exposition of certain modern classics, and enable those who are ignorant of foreign languages or have but a superficial mastery of them to form some adequate notion of those authors whose names, at least, are familiar to every one. The opening volume is Mrs. Oliphant’s Dante. It cannot be denied that the book is interesting enough, so far as that goes, but it is not easy to commend the thoroughness with which the task has been done.

Fully to understand this great poet requires very profound study and satisfactory knowledge of the history, theology, and politics of Dante’s time; but Mrs, Oliphant has slurred over these important matters in a very hasty way. Guelf and Ghibelline, White and Black, are all mentioned, but without the slightest attempt to explain their relative position to one another, or the way in which Dante was connected with the existing events of his own time. It is impossible to praise all that Mrs. Oliphant says concerning the Vita Nuova, although, of course, the comparative simplicity of this earlier book receives fairer treatment. But there would seem to be no reason why one who cared to know anything about this work should not read it, at least, in translation rather than in this scarcely shorter abridgment. Little is said about Dante’s prose writings, but enough, probably, to please the general reader in his most indolent moments. Only ten pages are devoted to the life of Dante, and these, as has been said, throw no satisfactory light on his relation to his times.

1 History of French Literature. By HENRY VAN LAUN. Vol. III. From the End of the Reign of Louis XIV. till the End of the Reign of Louis Philippe. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. 1877.

— In his latest work⁹ Principal Shairp displays the same characteristics as a writer which won him a hearing when he first appeared to American readers in Culture and Religion in some of their Relations. It is not often that a religious writer shows so keen an instinct for the finest side of literature, or that a critic discloses so hearty and unaffected a religious spirit. From certain passages in Mr. Shairp’s former paper on Keble we infer that he has had a singularly broad education, and that the influence of an English university life at a time when the religious world of Oxford was profoundly stirred, superimposed upon Scottish birth and early training, has resulted in a large and human interest in the prevailing currents of literary and religious life. In his previous work he applied himself to the task of showing the true coincidence of culture and religion, in opposition to certain tendencies of modern thought which would antagonize them. In this he meets the silent or polemic interpretation of modern science, which claims that the new knowledge and methods are to dominate or essentially modify the sphere of poetry. Mr. Shairp is no fighter, hut he has the better art of disarming an opponent by his perfect courtesy and fairness. He sees in modern science a leaning toward a mechanical theory of nature, and he meets this by a counter assertion, copiously illustrated, of a long line of poetic interpreters, whose tendency has been towards a view which regards nature as a living organism directly ordered by a living God. By a perfectly open yet ingenious line of argument he makes poetry the shield bearer of religion in its contest with science, and appeals to the common poetic sense, as represented by the masters of poetry, for an answer to materialism and nihilism.

The special illustrations of his views are found by a hasty but felicitous examination of the treatment of nature by the Hebrew poets, by Homer, Lucretius, Virgil, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Allan Ramsay, Thompson, Collins, Gray, Goldsmith, Cowper, Burns, and finally Wordsworth. Always he takes the simplest and not the most recondite view, for he will not lose sight of his main purpose in the book, to remind readers of truisms which are in danger of being slighted. His style is not invariably clear or forcible, and the reader may find some difficulty in keeping his interest during the first pages; but Mr. Shairp is so generous and persuasive in his argument that one parts with him at the end of the book with genuine respect for his honesty and for the purity of his literary taste. The book was meant for the young, and it will Surely bring many suggestions to those who are forming opinions in literature and science.