Recent Literature

THE new edition of Dickens¹ which has now completely issued from the Riverside Press must take precedence of all others in a feature of unique value. Each novel is introduced with a careful critical essay by Mr. E. P. Whipple, who, we think, has hardly done better work of this kind. He analyzes the structure of the fictions with his characteristic acuteness, and comments with characteristic intelligence upon the different personages and their management by the author. The criticism is thoroughly sympathetic, but is in no wise fond. Mr. Whipple writes with all the hearty enthusiasm of a reader of Dickens’s own generation, who enjoyed and loved each successive creation of the master as it came from his pen; but this enthusiasm is admirably corrected by after-thought and by the cooler sense of the times, which are no longer under the glamour of that great genius. There ensued shortly after Dickens’s death some years of distrust and disparagement, in which Dickens was not much read and was very much undervalued, especially by those who saw him late in life and suffered a certain disillusion. This effect was indefinitely heightened and rendered almost universal by the late Mr. Forster’s vulgar and conceited biography, in which Dickens appeared as hard and strained and exaggerated morally as he looked personally. One could not read his books with the old devotion. But those years were years of great injustice, and they are already past; the most disheartened of his old friends can already find a revival of delight in his wonderful books, and we think that it will be long before a future generation shall neglect them.

Mr. Whipple reflects in some degree the period of reaction which we have mentioned, but he is not unduly affected by it; and he has profited by the flood of anecdote, reminiscence, and biography which ensued upon Dickens’s death to enrich his criticism of each novel with a sketch of the circumstances in which it was written. The gossip about the “originals” of the characters, the author’s contemporaneous quarrels with publishers, his private feeling about his books and his readers, his artistic theories, aims, and errors are all discussed ; and the series of essays really forms a literary life of the novelist very charming in matter and manner. Mr. Whipple has drawn mostly for his material upon Forster, but he has by no means confined himself to that writer. His criticism recognizes other criticism, and shows a full knowledge of Dickens literature, but it strikes us as uncommonly fresh and original; vigorous it always is. We commend especially to the reader’s notice the analysis of Our Mutual Friend, and what may be called in the old-fashioned sense the apology of that greatest and least of Dickens’s works, — a novel in which he assembled all his defeats and retrieved them with such wonderful art of execution that they became an element of his triumph. — The chief value of Mr. Harvey’s memorial² corresponds with its chief aim, that of presenting, more fully and informally than has hitherto been done, the personality of Daniel Webster as it appeared to his most intimate friends. “His sweetness of temper, his kindness of heart, the depth of his friendships, his firm hold upon the facts of the Christian religion, the pathos and humor of his home life, — these,” says the writer, “ought to be known and understood by the world.” Judging from the preface, without other knowledge, one would suppose that Mr. Harvey had not noticed the publication, in 1870, of Mr. G. T. Curtis’s full and well-executed Life of Webster; for, after saying that if he (Mr. Harvey) could have selected one man from among Webster’s friends to he the statesman’s biographer he should have selected Mr. Everett, he observes: “ There were others, then, who could have written his life more worthily than I. It is not my purpose, at this eleventh hour, to write it.” This total ignoring of Mr. Curtis’s work — which, as is well known, was undertaken with reluctance and diffidence only after two of the literary executors had died and the third (George Ticknor) had declined to prepare a biography — certainly wears an uncourteous look; and in view of the fact that some of the anecdotes given by Mr. Harvey are the same that have already been published in Mr. Curtis’s work, we confess it strikes us as especially unbecoming. Without troubling himself about this, however, the reader may find in the present volume a valuable and very entertaining supplement to what has already been published. Many of the anecdotes related by Webster himself are told with great fullness and under the protection of quotation marks, which seem to imply that they were recorded shortly after their utterance. This does not prevent their sometimes sharing the common fate of such reports in conflicting with other accounts of the same matters. In the case of the county clerkship offered to Webster at the time when he was studying with Christopher Gore, Mr. Curtis, compiling from Webster’s autobiography and from a verbal account given by him in 1825, represents the elder Webster as Saying to Daniel that the lucrative office had been offered without any application from himself; whereas Mr. Harvey sets forth emphatically the efforts which Ebenezer Webster made to procure it for his son, a county clerkship being then one of the most profitable positions open to lawyers, with an income equivalent to $10,000 at the present day. A more important discrepancy is that in the tone of disappointment attributed to his father, when the young lawyer refused the place, in order to enter the lists of fame. In Mr. Harvey’s account, Ebenezer Webster repeats his wife’s prediction that Daniel “ would be either something or nothing,” and adds, “You have fulfilled her prophecy, —you have come to nothing.” The story as given by Mr. Curtis says that, although the elder man’s eye flashed at his sou’s announcement, Daniel saw that parental partiality was after all a little gratified at this devotion to an honorable profession; anil instead of condemning the young man, as in Mr. Harvey’s report, Ebenezer merely says, in a thoughtful way, that Daniel is now about to settle his mother’s doubt, — meaning that he is taking a decisivc step, the result of which still remains to be seen. The difference is of some importance as bearing on the relation of father and son ; and we think it likely that Mr. Harvey does the father injustice. This instance and the general atmosphere of the book lead us to believe that the author sometimes puts into Webster’s mouth, by way of amplifying the sense, words which are really nothing but the listener’s impression of what was meant to he conveyed. At the same time, we must not be understood as questioning the general trustworthiness of these reminiscences, which, in the face of an intimacy like that enjoyed by Mr. Harvey, would he presumptuous.

The illustrations of this edition of Dickens are all upon steel, and include not only the originals by Cruikshank and Browne, but some of the best of Dailey’s. They are on the whole highly satisfactory; and so are the print and paper. The volumes, twenty-nine in number, are of very convenient size, and are tastefully and substantially bound. It is, in fact, an edition of most noteworthy excellence.

The same house has reissued the Waverley novels complete in twenty-five volumes, — each containing two volumes of the old Ticknor & Fields library Scott. The paper here, again, is very agreeable, and the print clear and good. An artistic and significant design for the cover gives style and sentiment to the edition, which is of light and handy form, and contains the familiar illustrations on steel by Billings.

Anecdote biography of this sort has an advantage over formal memoirs in being unencumbered with the details of public transaction, which, however interesting in themselves, more or less obscure our view of the man who is engaged in them. In Mr. Harvey’s pages we have the delight of a succession of personal interviews with the great New Englander, running all through his wonderful life, but compressed for us into the space of a few hours. It is hard to say which part of the book is richest, but the chapters on Personal Traits leave, we think, the deepest conviction of the greatness of the subject’s character, so bounteous in its demonstrations of exquisite feeling for nature, so generous and considerate in its attitude towards all men ; for these traits, taken with his profound capacity in other directions, give the completeness which one naturally wishes to see in such a man. This side of Webster has been known, but not enough known. It is a good thing to be reminded of it by pictures of his private and home life, and by incidents like that of his reconciliation of John Wilson of St. Louis with his old enemy Benton, in the chapter on Mr. Webster and his Contemporaries. Even at this day, too, so many share the old misconception of Webster as a temporizer with slavery, for personal ends, illustrated in Horace Mann’s attack upon him as such, that it is not amiss to be reminded of the abhorrence in which the great secretary of state held slavery, and of how he purchased the freedom of a certain colored woman, Monica, before employing her as his cook, and assisted in purchasing the freedom of a man slave who became his valet.

Mr. Harvey also brings his own and others' authority to bear in support of the denials which have before now been made to the charges of intemperance. No man in our history has been more grossly abused than Webster, and, whatever reservations one may have to make in accepting the eulogies of personal friends, it is very probable that as unjust views of his public conduct have survived, misrepresentations of a much less excusable sort have also been mingled with current opinions. At the least, one cannot read Mr. Harvey’s book without getting a closer, more affectionate view of the man than has been vouchsafed before, and a view that increases one’s admiration. It is matter for congratulation that so devoted a friend had so many opportunities of studying Webster, and that he has so candidly and simply put on record the best part of what he saw.

— Mr. Frothingham has had the singular fortune, good or bad, as it may turn out, to write a biography³ in which too much truth is told; and this has made his work unacceptable to those at whose request he undertook it. The controversy thence resulting has again brought forward for discussion the vexed question of John Brown’s plans, when, in 1859, he invaded Virginia, and how far those plans were known to the friends who supplied him with money to carry them out. In this aspect the controversy may interest the readers of The Atlantic, since it was in these pages, three years ago, that Brown’s purposes were first intelligibly explained by one of his friends, to whom, without doubt, they were fully revealed. And it is understood to be The Atlantic and its contributors upon whom Mr. Frothingham has mainly relied for confirmation of the peculiar view he has taken of Gerrit Smith’s relation to John Brown. That is to say, Mr. Frothingham has been led by statements published in these pages, taken in connection with what he has found in the correspondence and other papers of Mr. Smith, to ascribe to the latter a much more complete knowledge of Brown’s purposes and general plans than it has been common of late years to suppose Mr. Smith had. Some of the family of Mr. Smith take issue with his biographer upon this point; and though they no longer claim for him that complete ignorance of Brown’s purpose which was formerly asserted, they deny that he was wholly in accord with the scheme for invading the South and freeing the slaves. This feeling on their part is so strong that it has been said the biography as printed will be withdrawn from circulation, and a revised edition put forth, in which the chapter on Slavery will be materially changed.

It is to be hoped that better counsels will prevail, and that the facts as they are will be allowed to stand recorded, with such hitherto unpublished ones as may hereafter come to light. So long as Gerrit Smith lived there were reasons, which to him seemed sufficient, for withholding the whole history of the John Brown affair. But he did not request that those who knew the facts should continue to withhold them after his death. His exact words, written in October, 1872, to one of The Atlantic contributors, were these: “ If you could defer your contemplated work until after my death (not long hence, as I am approaching seventy-six) you would lay me under great obligations to your kindness. So, too, you would if, in case you write before my death, [you] make as sparing a use of my name as possible.” The wish of Mr. Smith was respected, and it was not till after his death, in December, 1874, that this magazine made any mention of his name in connection with the Virginia campaign of Brown, or attempted to give in detail the secret history of that affair. Even then, our contributor was so careful as to omit all mention of the fact that the first revelation of Brown’s plans to those who afterwards aided them with money was made in Mr. Smith’s house, at Peterboro, February 22, 1858, and that Brown’s remarkable letter, two days later, was written in the same house. Mr. Frothingham, from Mr. Smith’s diary for February, 1858, fixes the place of conference plainly enough ; for it thence appears that John Brown spent the entire week from the 18th to the 25th of February at Gerrit Smith’s house in Peterboro. Mr Frothingham adds these particulars, which did not appear in The Atlantic for March, 1875, where the main result of the conference was stated: “ In Morton’s room, aloof from the other guests of the house, Brown detailed his plan ; Smith going in and out, but being present during the reading of the paper, with which he was probably already familiar, as Brown had been four days his guest, and taking part in the discussion that followed.” This positive declaration perhaps rests for evidence, in part, upon a written statement of Mr. Smith’s, bearing date January 3, 1874. not quite a year before his death, in which he said, “ I was in Mr. Morton’s room a part or all of the time whilst Brown was rending his plan for entering the South and summoning the slaves to the mountains, where they could defend themselves and thence escape to Canada. My heart responded to his merciful interest in the victims of oppression, and he had my warmest wishes for his success. I had but little conversation with Brown respecting his enterprise. He told me he was not yet decided in what State to begin it.” Later in the same statement, Mr. Smith said, “Hearing, some months after April, 1859, through another person, that he was in Chambersburg, and in need of money, I directed a hundred dollars to be sent to him. His being there led me to believe that he was on his way to the mountains of Maryland or Virginia ”

These precise declarations can hardly have been known to Mr. Smith’s nephew, Mr. John Cochrane, when he informed the public, some months ago, that Brown had two distinct plans, a “new plan of invasion,” and an “old plan of escape to the mountains;” and that Mr. Smith favored the latter, but was ignorant of the former. In truth, Brown had but one plan, which, like most military plans, involved an alternative. He was either to advance or retreat, after “ invading,” or, as Mr. Smith

puts it, “ entering ” the South. If he advanced, it was to be along the mountains; if he retreated, it was to be to the mountains; and preliminary to everything he was to make an invasion. The exact place where was unknown to Mr. Smith, and to most of Brown’s friends; but Smith, Stearns, Howe, Sanborn, Parker, Higginson, and Morton all knew that there was to be, at some place, an invasion, which they favored and supported with gifts of money. Brown’s decision to invade at Harper’s Ferry, while it made the plan more hazardous and desperate, did not constitute “ a new plan,” nor materially change the old one. His friends had always agreed to leave the place and time of attack to his own judgment; nor did they wish to have exact information in advance respecting time or place.

We have dwelt on a single feature of this biography because that happens, just now, to be its most interesting feature. In other respects the book is interesting, though it lacks the best biographical method, and is in parts dull, from too full a presentment of Gerrit Smith’s opinions and arguments. What he thought and said was always less important than what he was, — a noble and powerful person, devoted to the cause of the poor, and exerting in their behalf, now in one way, now in another, but always strongly, the great and constant influence which his own character and his father’s wealth gave him. Without Gerrit Smith the emancipation of our slaves would have been longer delayed, and the agitation for it would have lacked one of its most important and most romantic elements.

In his funeral address at the burial of Thoreau, in May, 1862, Mr. Emerson said, “The country knows not yet — or in the least part — how great a son it has lost. It seems a kind of indignity to so noble a soul that it should depart out of nature before yet he has been really shown to his peers for what he is.” And indeed in the sixteen years that have since passed, his country has been slow to gain that knowledge of Thoreau which it did not then possess. His books have been published or republished, but there have been few new readers, and those who knew the man and his genius have been passing away ; while the revival in literature and thought, in which he took part with Emerson, Alcott, Margaret Fuller, and Hawthorne, has diffused itself so far that its active and present force is spent. New England transcendentalism has had its history written and its monument built, when lo! at this late day, an Englishman comes forward with his discovery of what Thoreau said and did,⁴ and how important was his mission in the world. When we last heard from England before, concerning Thoreau, the critics were calling him “an American Rousseau,” a phrase which describes him as clumsily as any that could be invented. But Mr. Page has read his author, is capable of understanding him, and has made a very good and readable book about him, which he first printed in London, and which was immediately republished in Boston by the house which had issued all Thoreau’s volumes.

These volumes are six in number, beginning with A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, first published in 1849, and ending with Letters to Various Persons, printed in 1865, and A Yankee in Canada, with Anti-Slavery and Reform Papers, printed in 1866. They include everything, or nearly everything, that Thoreau published or prepared for publication during his life, and also some papers which he would hardly have printed. Other papers, which in due time he would have wrought into essays and volumes, were made up from his manuscript journals by his friend Mr. Channing, and printed in 1873, in the curious and extremely valuable book called Thoreau the Poet - Naturalist. From all these books Mr. Page has drawn material for his little volume. He has studied them carefully and lovingly, and has cited a great many passages which illustrate Thoreau’s genius and character. These are, no doubt, the best portion of the book; and next to these are the quotations made from what Mr. Emerson and Mr. Channing have said concerning their friend. It is no great compliment to an author to say that the best of his book is its quotations, but in this case it should be no disparagement to Mr. Page. His own work is done well; and it suffers only when brought in comparison with the terse wisdom, broad humor, and poetic insight of Thoreau, Channing, and Emerson. Few of those who have undertaken to write about Thoreau have comprehended him better than this Englishman, who never saw him, and who does not seem to have known those who did see him.

If some of Ins comparisons — as, for example, that between Thoreau and St. Francis d’Assisi — appear fanciful, it may be that this is partly because nobody ever thought of making such a comparison before. The more one attends to the points of resemblance between the Catholic saint and the Concord recluse, the less he is disposed to smile at the parallel. There was the same strange familiarity with nature and its inarticulate citizens; the same tenderness of heart united with austerity of thought, purity of life, and singleness of purpose. The garb and the dialect were not the same ; but the cowl does not make the monk, and Mr. Page may have looked deeper and with a clearer eye than those who saw Thoreau in his every-day walk. It must he deemed a little too fantastic, however, to make Thoreau stand as a sort of middle term between St. Francis and George Sand, for the Concord celibate did not move on the same plane with the passionate granddaughter of Maurice do Saxe. The chief resemblance was in their power to describe the shows of outward nature, a power to which a writer very different from either Thoreau or George Sand has succeeded. The novelist Thomas Hardy'—'in virtue, no doubt, of the same constant familiarity with the landscape and with the face of heaven, by night as well as by day — displays a descriptive talent almost unequaled among living writers of English, and in some of its manifestations reminding us forcibly of Thoreau. But the latter did not write for show or effect so much as to convey truly and clearly what he saw and felt. “No man,” says Mr. Page, “could be more clear, simple, direct, incisive, than he is, when he has a real nature-object before his eye or his mind. His instincts were true; his patience was unbounded; he never flinched from pain or labor when it lay in the way of his object; and complaint he was never known to utter on his own account.” These and many other remarks which we find in the book indicate that the author or editor has made himself familiar with his subject, though at arm’s length and under many disadvantages.

— It is scarcely possible for a stranger to read the Letters of Chauncey Wright1 without a sense of personal loss. To be made acquainted with a character so rare and a mind so masterful, only to learn that the man is just dead, brings a poignancy of regret which springs from a sense of lost opportunity. Many will read the book who will say to themselves, Tuntum Virgilium vidi, and wish in vain that they might have known one who now first stands revealed in his strength and grace. There are many, too, who hearing Wright praised in his lifetime were incredulous of the seemingly extravagant phrase in which he was described, and will read in the letters a full justification of his friends’ eulogies. Yet nothing is more noticeable in the contributions made to an estimate of Wright’s character and genius, contained in this volume, than the restrained terms in which he is mentioned. Something may be referred to the quiet tones which sorrow at his loss would cause, but more to the influence of Wright himself. His own justness of mind, his ambition of exact phrase, his calmness of judgment, have held his friends from heated praise and undi-criminating admiration. It is as if each asked himself, as he recorded his impressions, How would Chauncey have spoken of himself had he been in my place ?

To this sentiment and to Mr. Thayer’s unfailing good taste we owe the atmosphere through which we look upon this remarkable man. Mr. Norton had already dealt with some questions respecting his mental power in his preface to the Philosophical Discussions previously published, and some, doubtless, were disappointed at finding no more biographical facts respecting a person who could not fail to excite a reasonable curiosity. Mr. Thayer has now supplied this want, and by his judicious selection from Wright’s correspondence, and the wise use of contemporary reminiscence, has given a clear and entirely satisfactory picture of a life which needs no adventitious aid to render it extremely interesting and suggestive. The familiar knowledge which the editor had of his subject, in an early and late intercourse on the friendliest terms with Wright, rendered him able to touch with precision and liveliness the outside of Wright’s life. We should not have hesitated to intrust to him also the summing of the forces of his character which he had intended to give in the final chapter, but he is right in setting a high value on the estimate which he substituted from the pen of Mr. Gurney.

The Letters themselves stand as the best evidence of the accuracy with which Mr. Thayer, Mr. Gurney, Mr. Norton, and others in the volume have described Chauncey Wright. In their sustained power, in their playfulness and affectionate feeling, and in their frank confession of limitations, they afford a very intelligible account of the writer. They render the reader humble and ashamed of his petty thoughts, as no doubt the personal presence and conversation of the man did in his life-time. Yet the very heights on which he lived prevent the reader from a low form of envy or discontent, and one can hardly fail to perceive what large tracts of life and experience were scarcely entered upon by this philosopher. It is difficult, besides, if one is not engrossed with metaphysical and psychological studies, to read the book steadily without a sense of mental fatigue, and a desire to find relief in some simple occupation of an earthly sort.

It is not our purpose to set down any but a few impressions suggested by the Letters. The character of the writer is to be reached only by the gradual revelation which the book itself brings, and it would be a vain task to take up here any one of the many topics discussed. It will not be read through except by a few students, but it will be read in parts with great pleasure by many, and a minor satisfaction will be found in the literary presentation of persons and events familiar through common intercourse and knowledge. One may look upon some of his contemporaries and associates, through this book, quite as if they were his ancestors, and his pleasure will be the greater that the editor has shown such true refinement in his use of material. There is nothing to gratify an ignoble curiosity, much to please an amiable one. Prophecy is the safest form of criticism; nevertheless we venture the belief that this privately printed volume, with that which it accompanies, will fill a larger space in our literature than is accorded by contemporaries. Natural selection will be at work, and posterity will not be surprised that Chauneey Wright wrote so little, for what he wrote will be considerable in comparison with the meagre proportions into which much more extended reputations will have shrunk by that time.