Recent Literature

GENERAL PALFREY has used a wise, discretion in allowing the story of his old friend and companion in arms, General Bartlett,¹ to tell itself almost entirely in the hero’s own words, as set down in his diaries and letters during his army life and the years—ennobled by the manliest endurance and endeavor — that followed till his lamented death. Hardly a page is given to the facts of his history previous to his leaving Harvard in his junior year and going into the war, and after that the biographer’s comments are very sparing, and the thread of narrative by which he connects the notes and letters is made as slight as possible. Not only is General Bartlett’s story told here in his own words, but his character presents itself to the reader almost wholly without critical interpretation or analysis, and without superfluous eulogy. It would be hard to say why this story moves so deeply, or takes so strong a hold upon the imagination. Others gave as much and suffered as much in the war, from motives as pure and high as General Bartlett’s; and he had limitations of sympathy which prevented him from making his self-sacrifice a devotion to its supreme result, — the destruction of slavery and the overthrow of a barbaric social system. Up to the breaking out of hostilities he had been a friend of the South, and a believer in the justice of her cause ; he seems to have had still faith enough in her, after several years’ service, to be surprised that he should, as a maimed and helpless prisoner, be brutally used by people calling themselves chivalrous; and apparently he had little concern for the slaves whom the war was to free. But in spite of these limitations, — so inexplicable now in reference to such a man, but very common in the days when slavery influenced the whole nation, — he was an American of such knightly instincts, such heroic courage, such generous ideals of duty united to so much common sense, that among the names made memorable in the great struggle his remains one of the most representative of the highest American soldiership. Governor Andrew said, “ General Bartlett was the most conspicuous soldier in the Department of the Gulf,” yet history can hardly assign him the fame of the most successful. Indeed, he never had an opportunity of showing what he might have been as a general officer, for it seemed as if his body had some magnetic attraction for shot and shell. In every engagement in which he took part, with the exception of his first at Ball’s Bluff, he was wounded within an hour from the time the first gun was fired. If he had had the good fortune to show his remarkable genius for leadership in the field, as he had already done in camp, or if he had been able to avail himself of his cool nerves and good judgment, it is more than probable that he would have risen to a very high command. But that good fortune he never had. What made his life chiefly valuable as a heritage and an example was his character, which in any and all circumstances shone with a marvelous union of strength and sweetness, far above all the deeds of courage he was permitted to do, all the qualities of generalship that his adverse fate suffered him to display. His military career was brilliant, his political life full of noble purposes; the fortitude with which he met adversity in business and endured years of the keenest physical suffering was sublime. Others dared; others endured; others sank at last under misfortune and pain, underbroken hopes and broken health; but few have left so bright a fame as he in whom all the finest soldierly qualities seemed to meet, and who, with the tenderness of a woman, was always so strongly and greatly a man. As an officer he was the strictest of disciplinarians, and he was reserved to coldness save with his intimate friends, of whom he had very few ; but his letters in this memoir reveal the warmest and tenderest heart. As contributions to the history of the war they are perhaps not of the greatest value, but as records of character they are inestimable, and they bring back, as only such direct and unaffected letters — at once vividly suggestive and wholly unconscious—can bring back, the days and scenes in which they were written. Some wore written to the rhythm of bursting shells and dropping bullets ; to say that others are from the hospital, and others yet from the prison, is best to indicate their character and hint their pathos.

A very interesting part of the book is devoted to his letters written after the war, during his travels in Europe, and to tho story of his political and business life to the time of his death. A few closing pages sum up the biographer’s sense of his friend’s great qualities and noble career in words at once cordial and tempered,— such as would not have vexed the sensitive spirit of such a hero as Bartlett to read. It is an inspiring history fitly, if sometimes a little too succinctly, told. One feels at the end that, if few men have bought renown so dearly, no renown can be dearer to posterity than that of the soldier who never sought renown, but simply dared and suffered all things, even to death itself, for duty.

— The creative faculty antedates the critical faculty. It may be said that the first critic was taken out of the side of the literary man, just as Eve was taken out of the side of Adam. Of course, the hypothesis assumes that criticism is of the weaker sex; indeed, it is only by assuming this that one is able to account for the feminine shrillness and the absence of precision and logic which are occasionally observable in criticism. There is no end to the analogies that might be established — if it were worth while to establish analogies — between criticism and Eve. Eve was a source of great perplexity, to say the least, to Adam, and criticism has ever been a shrewish or a whimsical spouse to the poet: she has either spoiled him with her flattery, or disheartened him with her ill-temper; she has seldom or never been at once his wisest counselor and most appreciative helpmeet. We do not care to carry the parallel further, for our purpose at present is merely to say that since criticism began her career on earth she was never more deeply at fault than when, in the earlier half of this century, she bade John Keats “ back to his gallipots.” She did not dream then, and did not learn until long after the sward was closed over him, that God had given England a new poet.

When we reflect how precious to us is that little volume holding the fragment of Hyperion, The Eve of St. Agnes, Isabella, the Ode on a Grecian Urn, and the sonnet On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer, we find it impossible to explain to ourselves the light in which Keats was seen by his contemporaries. Byron’s contempt for Keats was nearly undisguised; Wordsworth could think of nothing better to say of a certain lyric than that it was a pretty piece of paganism; Shelley was not so near-sighted, but he breathed a different atmosphere from that of Keats, and could have had but an imperfect sympathy with him and his richer dreams, though the Adonais and the indignant preface which accompanied it seem to contradict this. Yet in that preface, which was written in one of Shelley’s white heats, he qualifies his praise of Hyperion by pronouncing it “ second to nothing that was ever produced by a writer of the same years.” That was not too much to say of the noblest piece of blank verse since Milton. As to the critical free-lances and camp-followers of the grand army of literature, the English language broke down when it came to express their scorn of Keats. Leigh Hunt and two or three obscure friends—let us not forget Severn, the artist — appear to have been the only persons who suspected there was really a great soul struggling to get free of that stricken body. The very woman who loved Keats did not suspect it. In 1831 —the poet had then been dead ten years — this lady wrote to Mr. Dilke, who had applied to her for some biographical data: “ The kindest act would he to let him rest in the obscurity to which circumstances have condemned him.” How is it after seven and fifty years ? The colossal shadow of Byron is somewhat shrunken; all those silver-mounted buccaneers who anticipated the heroes of our dime novels, and all those melancholy and wicked young gentlemen who made such havoc of the female heart, once upon a time, have strangely lost their glamour; not a sensible girl loves them now, and not a youth of our period turns down his collar or neglects his hair because of them. Wordsworth at his best — and he is very far from being always at his best — has taken his place among the classics; Shelley is admired by a school, but still remains caviare to the general; Coleridge lives in two or three finely imaginative poems, and Walter Scott in his prose ; Crabbe does not live anywhere. Yet Lord Byron, writing from Ravenna in 1820, called Crabbe the first of living poets ! The gentleman seems to have gone backward. If ten intelligent men were asked to-day to name the poet of 1820, nine out of the ten would probably say John Keats.

His fame came late,—too late for him to know how great it was to be, unless, indeed, the dead have occult cognizance of what is passing on

“ This dim spot Which men call Earth ; ”

if so, how that fine spirit must have shrunk aghast at the indignity which has lately been inflicted on his memory!

Keats’s evil star seems to hang over his very grave. It was not enough that, living, he should be poor, shattered in health, unhappy in love, unrecognized as a poet; it was not enough that he should die in the spring-time of his genius, — a spring-time richer than other poets’ summers; but after his death he must needs fall into the hands of an injudicious biographer, who, in all kindliness, did an enemy’s service in dragging from deserved obscurity Otho the Great the fragment of King Stephen, The Cap and Bells, and the rest of those puerilities which go to the making up of The Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats. “ A biographer,” remarks Mr. Lowell, apropos of this memorial, “is hardly called upon to show how ill his biographee could do anything.” Lord Houghton’s work was full of the best intention, but to his natural lack of literary perception his lordship had added a carefully acquired bad prose style. This biography must ever be considered one of the poet’s misfortunes. It was supposed to be the last; but fate had not dealt its unkindest blow.

Now that nearly sixty springs have whitened Keats’s grave with the flowers he wished to grow over him, we have his troubled heart once more laid open to us under the literary surgeon’s knife. Keats’s letters to Miss Brawne should never have been given to the world;² they should reverently have been permitted to crumble into dust. They refute no charge against his good name or against hers, for no such charge exists; they supply no needed link in the story of the poet’s life; they merely furnish food for an unhealthy appetite which can be cured only by starvation. Mr. Forman has simply helped to betray the secret pangs and writhings of an over-sensitive soul that had grown morbid through illness and sorrow ; complacently, and apparently with no suspicion that his work was odious, he has done the one thing against which Keats would have protested with every fibre of his body. The publication of these Letters would be an impertinence if it were not a cruelty.

— With the editor of the volume of Moore’s hitherto uncollected papers ³ our quarrel is by no means so serious, though we think Mr. Shepherd has done his author no kindly turn. The shade of Thomas Moore is possibly much less willing than we are to pardon Mr. Shepherd for bringing to the surface those very poor satirical verses, and that singularly tiresome farce of The BlueStocking, The perusal of Moore’s critical essays in this volume filled us with a feeling of mingled regret and delight, — regret that he had written them, and delight that he had not written any more. The extracts from his memoranda for his Life of Lord Byron, and the passages omitted from that work for reasons which have now lost point, are of genuine literary interest. The letters to Leigh Hunt are also agreeable reading, though none of them are important, and some of them are trivial to the last degree. Except to illustrate their triviality, who would dream of reprinting this ? —

LETTER VI.

MAYFIELD COTTAGE, Monday Evening, [Post-mark, August, 1813.] }

MY DEAR HUNT,

I hope you see my friend Lord Byron often ; one of the very few London pleasures I envy him is the visit to Horsemonger Line now and then. Faithfully yours,

THOMAS MOORE.

TWO or three hundred pages of matter quite as valuable as this cause the reader finally to suspect that he has been spending his time over a piece of mere book-making.

— It can be stated without hesitation that a new Life of Lessing was a tempting subject for a writer familiar with German literature, and especially for one who writes in English. Mr, Evans’s translation of Stahr’s biography is probably but little known outside of this country, and at the best Stahr gives his readers lavish praise of Lessing rather than careful criticism or unbiased information. Then, too, the superiority of Mr. Lewes’s Life of Goethe to any German books on the same subject naturally inspires an English author with the hope of giving his life of some other great German the same preëminence. The result in this case,1 however, is by no means equally successful. What is striking in Mr. Lewes’s book is its general literary vivacity and entertainingness; it would interest even a man who knew nothing of Goethe. To be sure, the credit of this does not belong to Mr. Lewes alone, but yet, although Goethe covered an enormous amount of ground, his biographer’s unceasing reference, for the sake of comparison, to what is best in other literatures keeps our attention ever alert and fascinated. Mr. Sime’s book has no such charm. Indeed, the fairest thing to say about it is that it is eminently worthy.

The facts of Lessing’s life are collected with great industry and accuracy ; the quotations from his writings are well chosen and carefully selected; there are no omissions of important matters; the analyses of Lessing’s writings are thorough and exact; but with all these good and indeed essential qualities, the lack of anything like charm is but too noticeable. It would be harsh to call the book dull, and it would not be precisely fair, because there is enough quoted from Lessing himself to redeem his biographer’s commonplace; but there is a noticeable want of vivacity and interest in the six hundred and seventy-five pages that form the life. This sobriety is, on the whole, better than Stahr’s fulsome adulation of everything Lessing did, but it makes the book a trifle heavy. Occasionally we come across such dreary passages as this, from vol. i, pages 148, 149. “ Such a journey was made in those days in comfortless carriages, which jolted over uneven and dirty roads ; but it is not in all respects an advantage to whirl in furious haste past mountain and river, hamlet and city. The eighteenth-century traveler had time to form a clear impression of the country through which he went, to exchange words of greeting with people at inns by the roadside, to stop for a day at this town or that if it happened in some unforeseen way to hit his fancy. It was thus that Lessing went with Winkler from Leipzig to Amsterdam.” It should be said that this is not precisely a characteristic specimen of the qualities of the book, although a good one of the prevailing fault, which is a tendency to say what he left unsaid.

It is pleasanter to look on the good side of Mr. Sime’s work, which is the thoroughness and exactness of his analyses of Lessing’s writings. It is well to have a careful statement of some of this author’s less read essays and discussions, especially for us foreigners. The reader will find his work well done for him by Mr. Sime, who has spared no pains in his endeavor to do his subject justice. In a word, any one who is anxious to know about Lessing cannot do better than to consult this new biography. He will find it full and exact. As to the advantage of studying Lessing, this is not the place to speak. He did for German literature a service which cannot he too highly valued, especially by his countrymen, and for the whole world he can serve as an admirable example of intellectual activity and enthusiasm.

— When the observer considers either what Cavour did, or his method of doing his great work, he is sure to feel that the great diplomatist and minister was one of the most remarkable men of modern times. We all remember his building up of Italy, but it is in this book that we perceive more clearly the difficulties in his way, and the union of dexterity and wisdom with which he surmounted them. He early set before himself the regeneration of Italy as the task he was to accomplish, and there is in history hardly a more interesting tale than this of the way in which what seemed the impossible disappeared before him. Piedmont, under his wise guidance, became formidable ; with great discretion he introduced the kingdom among the great powers at the time of the Crimean war; with the aid of Napoleon III. the power of Austria was broken, when it had at last, by uniform ill treatment, welded all the dissensions of Italy into one feeling of wrath with the invading foreigner; and even Garibaldi’s distracting career in Southern Italy Cavour managed to bring into harmony with the general design. When we consider the magnitude of this success, and remember that it was practically the work of one directing mind, which was busying itself at the same time over many perplexing minor cares in the management of the state, it is impossible not to be amazed at the power and versatility of his genius. His versatility has always been acknowledged, but there are many to whom success which is obtained by management, by patience under defeat, by making use of even trifling means, seems like something unenviable, as if the result made us indifferent to what was underhand in these methods. Such was evidently the feeling of the many hot-headed Italian revolutionists, who saw with ill-concealed pain that everything was done over their heads and without their aid by an abler man. If there are any who would so misjudge Cavour now, they would do well to consider his continual adherence to constitutional methods, and his refusal of all requests to assume dictatorial power, which he could have had for the asking. It is this faithfulness to his carefully formed plans which made him a great as well as an able man.

1Lessing. By JAMES SIME. In Two Volumes. With Portraits. Boston : James R. Osgood & Co. 1877.

Surely, the picture this book⁴ gives us of an Italian, without experience in the parliamentary form of government, who rules his country so well and with such moderation amid the most serious troubles, and without flinching from what he had made up his mind was right, even when the temptation was strongest, — such a picture may well serve as a lesson for those ready reasoners who settle the affairs of the rest of the world by some such general principles as that the French, it may be, or, a fortiori, the Italians, cannot know what political wisdom is. To illustrate this is, to a certain extent, the aim of this book. Throughout, it is easy to read between the lines the implied reference to French politics, and no friend of France can wish for that country a better fate than such a man at the head of power there. No earnest friend of republicanism need fear that Cavour, or a man like him, would fail to see what was the present feeling in France with regard to a republic; and of Cavour it may be said with great truth that he always made use of the material that lay at hand.

This book is a useful one, because it is written by a careful political thinker, who understands how to set before the reader not only what Cavour did, but the reasons which led him to his actions, so that this short volume is a valuable contribution to modern history. It is interesting, too, as a book about Cavour could not fail to be. Although it was written for another public, it has a great value for us in this country who have learned from experience some of the dangers of bad government. Anything that shows the advantages of superiority to partisanship, of unfailing observance of right rules, cannot fail to be of service even to a land that prides itself on its superiority to everything European.

— It is with considerable splutter that Mr. Swinburne sings the praises of the famous Brontë sisters,⁵ but in his zeal to redeem their fame from the neglect that has fallen upon at least one of these writers he by no means makes it clear that his good opinion is of so much value as he would like to have it. The faults of his style are as notorious as those of his literary manners. On almost every page are to be found such gems as adorn the passage where, after speaking of the injurious effect upon the book of Maggie Tulliver’s flight with Stephen Guest, in The Mill on the Floss, and comparing it with " two actual and unpardonable sins of Shakespeare, — the menace of unnatural marriage between Oliver and Celia, and again between Isabella and her 'old fantastical duke of dark corners,’ ” — he goes on thus: “ Far otherwise it is with the poor noble heroine so strangely disgraced and discrowned of natural honor by the strong and cruel hand which created her, and which could not redeem or raise her again, even by the fittest and noblest of all deaths conceivable, from the mire of ignominy into which it had been pleased to cast her down, or bid her slip at the beck and call of a counter-jumping Antinous, a Lanzun of the counting-house, as vulgar as Vivien and as mean as the fellow who could gloat on the prospective degradation and anticipated unhappiness of a woman he forsooth had loved, under the wholly impossible condition of an utterly unimaginable hypothesis that the unfortunate young lady, who had at least the good fortune to escape the miserable ignominy of union with such a kinsman, might have declined on a range of lower feelings and a narrower heart than his; a supposition, as most men would think, beyond the power of omnipotence itself to realize. Surely our world would seem in danger of forgetting, under the guidance and example of its most brilliant literary chiefs, that there are characters and emotions which may not he beyond the limits of degraded nature, but do assuredly grovel beneath the notice of undegenerate art; and that of such, most unquestionably, — if any such there be, — are the characters and emotions of such reptile amorists as debase by the indecent exposure of their dastardly and rancorous egotism the moral value of such otherwise admirable masterpieces as Locksley Hall and The Mill on the Floss.” But this is classical conciseness in comparison with sentences like this: “Having no taste for the dissection of dolls, I shall leave Daniel Deronda in his natural place above the ragshop door; and having no ear for the melodies of a Jew’s-harp, I shall leave the Spanish gypsy to perform on that instrument to such audience as she may collect.” Again, he thus delicately alludes once more to George Eliot’s verse-writing as “ the pitiful and unseemly spectacle of an Amazon thrown sprawling over the crupper of her Spavined and spur-galled Pegasus.” Ribaldry like this is especially conspicuous in comparison with his boasts (page 42) of the chivalrous spirit of those “ with French blood in their veins or French sympathies in their hearts.”

In short, Mr. Swinburne may rave and scream at the world till his voice breaks; he is his own worst enemy, and even what is good in his criticism arouses the wrath of those who agree with it by the violence with which it is expressed. While his way of saying what he has to say is most obnoxious, with its noisy, hilarious, pot-house violence, the kernel that is hidden beneath all this is often apt and just. His objection to much of George Eliot’s writing, for instance, has a good ground. Maggie Tulliver’s even reluctant adventure with Stephen Guest does set that heroine in an unfavorable light, and the flaw that he points out in Locksley Hall is one that has been perceived by at least two generations of readers, who, however, did not find it necessary to call the conceited hero a “ reptile amorist.” Then, too, his praise of Charlotte Brontë is in itself discreet, and no greater than that woman’s work deserves. The same is true of what he says about Emily Brontë. But the main result of his willful abuse of a writer’s function, in the way he has of putting down on paper remarks that would seem indecorous in the privacy of conversation, hides the merit that is to be found in this book. Nothing so renews even the halting reader’s allegiance to a writer as wild abuse, and Mr. Swinburne’s billingsgate will tend to turn those who might otherwise see George Eliot’s faults into prejudiced admirers who would consider themselves degraded by sharing his extravagantly expressed views. But the truth is mightier than even Mr. Swinburne’s faults against good taste, and in time the cause of which he has made himself the bombastic champion may find more adherents than it does in these days of cultured uniformity of opinion. In other words, beneath its scurrilousness the book contains some elements of good criticism, but it seems indefinitely to postpone the days when Mr. Swinburne shall cease to mistake expressions of bad temper for literary enthusiasm, and the calling of names for wit.

— In welcoming this translation of the life of Alfred de Musset⁶ we have nothing to add to what we said about the original,⁷ except a word or two of praise for the grace and skill with which this version has been made. The book is an extremely interesting one, telling, as it does, the life of one of the most remarkable of French poets, and written with the most eager sympathy. The accomplished translator has in several instances given us rhymed versions of some of Alfred de Musset’s poems which were quoted in the biography. This is a difficult task which she has accomplished well.

— Upon the title-page of his Windfalls⁸ Mr. Appleton gives us two definitions of the word from different sources, — “Fruit that is blown down from the tree,” and “ A tree that has been prostrated by the wind,” — slyly leaving it to his readers to take their choice whether they shall regard this as a collection of his chance papers in anticipation of a more substantial harvest, or as the last they are likely to get of a fruit which they have tasted before. An examination of the book will be likely to satisfy readers that, whether this be the last of its kind or not, the author has nothing else to give. In saying this we mean no disparagement of the book itself, which is an enjoyable one, but only to indicate its place as among the accidents and not the incidents of literature. Here are eleven papers, including two stories and a reminiscence of wood-life, upon a variety of topics having no more common tie than that of a single authorship. The same characteristics pervade all, — A bonhomie, a half-optimistic philosophy, a cheerful dilettanteism, a knack of saying shrewd things in a bright way, and a general view of things from the safe retreat of a silk wrapper. One constantly catches an echo of after-dinner talk, and misses the art and purpose of a trained writer and scholar. Many things are written which we should have liked to applaud had we heard them with our feet under the mahogany, but sound desultory and incomplete in the more formal essay. Epigrams which tickle the ear have often a duller appearance to the more critical eye, and while there is an air of ease about these papers which makes them almost as agreeable as the talk of a cultivated gentleman, there is an absence of definite aim which makes them quite as difficult to remember.

We ought perhaps to except the story of The Broken Heart. This is a delicate piece of fancy which only just misses, if it miss at all, being a lovely romance. There is an artless artificiality about it which is almost as good as nature, and the refinement with which the dénoûment is handled makes one wish all the more that the author was not so persistently a mere sportsman in literature. The book teases one into making these discriminations between amateur and professional work, yet we can promise cultivated readers much enjoyment if they will take up the book with no purpose to render exact justice to the author, but only entertainment to themselves.

— The series of Landor’s Imaginary Conversations⁹ is completed with the fifth volume, and a survey of the whole increases the admiration, not unmixed with fear, with which one contemplates the range of this extraordinary writer. The greatest of his dialogues are great indeed, but the facility with which he used this form betrayed him into employing it for the venting of mere vagaries and the prolix discussion of topics of contemporary politics and history, by no means of general interest. Still, after all deductions are made, the work as a whole remains great, and there is perhaps no modern work which gives to the reader not familiar with Greek or Latin so good an idea of what we call classical literature. Better than a translation is the original writing of Landor for conveying the aroma which a translation so easily loses. The dignity of the classics, the formality, the fine use of sarcasm, the consciousness of an art in literature, — all these are to be found in the Imaginary Conversations; and if a reader used to the highly seasoned literature of recent times complains that there is rather an absence of humor, and that he finds Landor sometimes dull, why, Heaven knows we do not often get hilarious over our ancient authors, and Landor, for his contemporaries, is an ancient author with a very fiery soul.

We do not know how far the publishers’ enterprise has succeeded. It is one which deserves well of every lover of good literature ; and with a reference, not to this, but to any possible similar enterprise, we express our regret that the book was not subjected to competent editorial supervision. There are often reasons which may cause an English contemporary classic to appear at home in its simplest form, but in reprinting we ought to use our right to improve the work, if possible, and not merely to repeat it. In the present instance, a short introduction to each dialogue and occasional notes would have been of very great service to the ordinary reader. It is too much to expect of any one reader that he shall he familiar with the names of all the characters introduced, much less with the incidents which suggested many of the conversations and are only faintly disclosed in the conversations themselves. Then, the dates of the original appearance of the several dialogues would have added to the interest and value, since so many are not only based on contemporaneous events, but are suggestively prophetic. The index is too meagre; there are a hundred things which one half remembers in Landor, and will hunt for laboriously for lack of a good index. We hope that the remainder of Landor’s writings will follow, and that Forster’s life will be reprinted uniformly with the series. — Doubtless the most important educational work published in this country in the year 1877 is the Cyclopædia of Education,¹⁰ edited by the Hon. Henry Kiddle, superintendent of the public schools of New York city, and by one of his assistant superintendents, Mr. Alexander T. Sehem, We have already paid tribute in these columns to the practical sagacity and competence of the superintendents of the schools of our great metropolis, and the names of these gentlemen upon the title-page of the Cyclopædia in question are in themselves a sufficient guarantee of the intelligence, completeness, and fair-mindedness with which the undertaking has been executed. It is the first cyclopædia of education in the English language, though Germany has long since possessed a number of excellent ones; and it is quite surprising that a branch of knowledge so extensively valued and studied as education should have continued in this country and in England for so many years without its special cyclopædia. The topics interesting and important to the teacher are almost infinitely numerous, yet the information concerning them is scattered through a multitude of volumes usually inaccessible to those by whom it is most needed. The publication of the cyclopædia in question was welcomed, therefore, as the supply of a want that had long been felt.

The work is included in a convenient and well-printed quarto of about eight hundred and seventy pages ; and now that educators are at last in possession of it, they will not begrudge the long delay in its appearance, since many of the topics presented could hardly have received such full and satisfactory treatment, and many others would undoubtedly have been altogether overlooked, had not the wide educational fields been already,so well gone over and harvested in the exhaustive German fashion. A large proportion of the most prominent and valuable articles, however, are from American names of recognized rank in pedagogy, and future editions, it is to be hoped, will call out contributions more brilliant and authoritative still, since in the land of universal education superiority in a work of this kind should be an object of national pride.

The compilation is quite as attractive to the reader who has thought upon or investigated any question of pedagogy as it is valuable to the parent or the professional educator. Everything connected with the architecture and hygiene of the schoolroom, with physical training, with the organization of the school system, and with the motives and characteristics of the scholar may be found under their appropriate headings. The mass of the book is of course historical, and embraces brief accounts of educational methods and development in all past and present civilized nations, and also in our own States and largest cities. Beside these, it contains histories of all living institutions of learning of any note in this country, and of some of those abroad; short biographies of all the leading thinkers and experimenters in education ; and reviews, under their appropriate heads, of philanthropic and charitable and denominational effort in education. The accounts of the Sunday-school system and of the Kindergarten system are good examples of the agreeable yet succinct narrative style of these articles.

As regards the theory and practice of pedagogy, while the Cyclopædia, very properly, does not attempt to solve the educational problems of the day, it exactly photographs the present state of experiment and controversy in regard to them and indicates the probable decisions upon which enlightened sense and experience will finally unite. The weakest group of articles, as was to have been expected, are those on moral and religious culture, these being the directious in which the educational thought and principles of the preseut age are the most unsettled and vague. In the article on Didactics the writer says : “ It is universally conceded that all instruction can be rendered a means of moral education, and that no instruction deserves the name, or can be truly successful, without a corresponding development of moral power.” If this be indeed “ universally conceded,” then also it must be unreservedly admitted that very little of the instruction in the public schools of America “ deserves the name; ” for every one who has paid any attention to the matter knows that with us almost no instruction is “ rendered a means of moral education,” but that quite generally the prescribed lessons are recited strictly within their own technical limits. It is time that this stereotyped phraseology about the paramount necessity of moral education should be given up, unless some practical steps are to be taken toward its rehabilitation in our schools, for it is very misleading to the public. The American parent, hearing the American educator say so much about moral instruction, supposes that something is being done; whereas the wide-spread commercial dishonesty, the dull national honor regarding financial obligations, the enormous brutality and sensuality so ruthlessly revealed by the daily and weekly press, all go to prove the deep lack of adequate instruction in the rules and motives for the best conduct of life, which, as far as we can ascertain, characterizes the American schools beyond any others of the same intellectual rank in Christendom.

The next highest topic of importance in education — the best course of study for schools —is rather feebly treated, also. On the best elementary instruction in reading, grammar, mathematics, history, and geography, teachers and parents will find many valuable ideas and suggestions. In regard to reading, the principle is laid down that “ the teacher must always bear in mind that what the child is learning to pronounce is a symbol of thought; and hence at every step the pupil’s understanding is to be addressed. . . . The lessons at each stage should be adapted to the mental status of the pupil. Moreover, the material should not consist of mere fragments, without any logical continuity, but should be of such a character as to discipline the mind in connected thinking upon suitable subjects, and to awaken an interest in the minds of the pupils. Usually, the essential object of reading in schools is defeated by the use of extracts from essays on difficult abstract subjects, or from authors whose style is too complex and whose vocabulary is too ponderous for children.” If the above theory should inspire the practice of our schools, it would at once sweep away the whole host of classified “ readers ” which now have possession of the schools, and substitute for them narrative and descriptive books upon history, geography, biography,natural history, and art, couched in such progressive language and style as was so happily employed by an English lady so many years ago in the favorite Bible, series, — The Peep of Day, Line upon Line, Precept upon Precept, — and which might well be taken as models of the way in which progressive reading - books for the young, on all subjects suited to their apprehension, should be compiled.

In the article upon geography, the important but universally neglected point, that the shapes of the divisions and subdivisions of the earth’s surface should, from the beginning, be studied proportionally, so that correct ideas of the relative size of the territories inhabited by different nations may be early acquired and indelibly stamped on the mind, has not been forgotten; but the equally necessary principle in history, that the chronological and ethnological method must be combined in every scheme of rational instruction in that study, though alluded to as the practice of Germany, was hardly emphasized as we should have liked to see it. In this country, what little historical instruction is given in our public schools is exactly topsy-turvy. The pyramid is first balanced on its apex (American history), and then its Strata are allowed to come tumbling down, pell-mell, in any order chanced upon by the preference or the convenience of the teacher.

The advice of the Cyclopædia as to the best methods of instruction in algebra, geometry, and the natural sciences is most judicious; and the Scylla and Charybdis of arithmetic and grammar, between which so many childish minds are hopelessly engulfed, would be successfully avoided, and these studies relegated to their proper place and function in common-school education, if the enlightened principles laid down in the articles upon them were universally adopted. The suggestions advanced on the successful study of the modern languages all resolve themselves into two elements,— those of time and of continuity. Americans learn languages as they do the piano, superficially, and this because the study of them is generally too much interrupted, and the years devoted to them too few. The mere reading of a language may be acquired in a very short time by most persons, but a satisfactory mastery of it, as a vehicle of personal thought and expression, involves either the steady work of years, or the going into places where it is spoken.

The articles on Music and on SingingSchools, by Professor George H. Curtis, of New York, are among the most valuable and complete in the book; far more so, it seems to us, than those on Drawing and Art Education. Singing-school teachers will be especially glad of the brief but lucid explanation of the Tonic Sol Fa system of England, of which very few persons have any intelligent idea ; but we almost regret that Professor Curtis’s impartiality did not permit him to pronounce decidedly against the “movable Do” of the Tonic Sol Fa and United States systems. Surely, an artificial plan for singing notes at sight, which originated in two such comparatively unmusical countries as America and England, should not be allowed to make headway against that which grew up as the practice of generations in those birthplaces and homes of music, Italy and Germany. It is entirely unlikely that we shall surpass those countries in musical achievement, and the methods that have sufficed for them are surely illuminating enough for us !

Probably every educator will have additions to suggest in the future editions of this our first cyclopædia of education. For ourselves, we would like to see within its pages an able article on School Committees, one on the Rights and Liberties of Female Teachers, one on Written Examinations in Grades below the High Schools, and one on Training in Courtesy, Chivalry, and Reverence. We find it surprising that, in the article on Kindergartens, Miss Elizabeth Peabody, the veteran educator, is not credited, as she so fully deserves to be, with having been the means of their introduction to this country ; nor can we imagine a work overlooking, among the benefits of the high-school system, the most important one of all, namely, that it is the only system which can furnish anything like the number of teachers needed for the grammar and primary schools. The plan adopted by a few towns of owning their text-books, and of lending them only to the scholars in the public schools, we think also deserved mention, for a publication which commands so wide a circulation as this cyclopædia must do would thus have been the means of suggesting to school committees all over the country this by far the best solution of the text-book difficulty.

— The volume of travels From Egypt to Japan¹¹ is the second part of a record of travel round the world, the first part, From the Lakes of Killarney to the Golden Horn, having been published a year ago. Both volumes are formed from letters written to the journal of which the author is editor and proprietor, and there is a somewhat confidential relation thus established between author and reader, for an editor feels that his subscribers form a semi-private association with him, almost as subtly as a minister, when he talks about “ my congregation, ” distinguishes those particular persons from all others as a peculiar people. The book gains by this something of the familiarity of the friendly letter; it loses something of the critical care which might have been bestowed had the author been appealing to a less partial audience. A journey round the world is not so uncommon an experience as formerly, and the highway which Dr. Field and his party followed is the road over which many observing travelers have passed. To one, therefore, who has no special interest in the personal adventure of the travelers, the questions naturally arise, What unusual opportunities had this party? What particular training did they bring to the sight-seeing? What power of description or of generalization had the author to justify the detailed narrative ?

A faithful reading of the book leaves one with the impression that the party enjoyed itself on the trip, and that it exercised freely an American inquisitiveness and vivacity ; there were many friends on the road to make the journey a succession of visits, and good fortune attended the travelers. Perhaps it is too much to ask that a rapid and extended excursion like this should yield any very substantial fruit; there are indeed many acute observations and some pleasant descriptions, but there is a good deal of hasty generalization and an evident unpreparedness on the part of the writer. He did not carry the wealth of the Indies with him, and so he has not brought it back. In one particular especially we are disappointed. From his training and position, it was natural to expect that he would examine carefully the various missionary undertakings that lay in his way. He was frequently the guest of missionaries, and writes often in sympathy with them, sometimes with an approach to detail in a description of their work, but there is not that close scrutiny and judicious report which his readers might fairly expect. The book is a curious illustration of the anglicizing of the world. The track of this traveler is a belt of Asia and a bit of Africa, and he rarely gets out of the reach of the English tongue and the English law. Unconsciously he records from beginning to end of his book, almost without interruption, the impression made upon an American of English rule in the East; of native life and rule he makes but a superficial study. The course is analogous to the travel of most Americans in Europe, never getting out of the sound of the English-speaking voice, and knowing the country they travel over only by the second-hand report of English and American guide books. From Egypt to Japan, then, while a tolerably readable book to those who find amusement in the ordinary records of travel, has little value for those who would like to learn something substantial of the countries and peoples traversed.

FRENCH AND GERMAN.

The promise made so long ago about Sainte-Beuve'e correspondence¹² is now fulfilled, and the publication of his letters has begun. It has been curious to notice of late years how much the best literature, and not of France alone, has consisted of the work of the great men of an older generation, and this volume is but another example of this truth. Doudan’s, Balzac’s, and now Sainte-Beuve’s letters are about the most important French books published of late years ; Balzac and Sainte-Beuve were famous before the time of the second empire, and it is only now, under a different form of government, that literature, which was repressed like freedom of speech, has begun to show signs of healthy life. It is the work of these older men that interests us; there are no men who can be called products of the empire for whom we can have the same admiration as for them. Our contemporaries gave themselves up to being clever and amusing, like Droz, or clever and more or less disgusting, like Zola,— the literary traditions were almost destroyed by the ruler who so well managed streetcleaning and street-lighting. Of course, every general remark of this kind is to he taken with a very considerable amount of exception, but that it is more true than false can hardly be doubted; scraps from the great men of the past outweighed a great deal of the work of more recent men. We hope shortly to show what are some promising signs of the future.

This volume of Sainte-Beuve’s letters contains selections from those written between the years 1822 and 1865, both inclusive, which cover three hundred and sixtyfive pages. Many years are not represented here at all, and others by only one or two letters. Certainly those of the earlier years which are given do not make us regret this thorough exclusion of a larger number. It is only the later letters that are really interesting, although the bits of information regarding Sainte-Beuve’s life are of undoubted value. In some measure the scantiness of the letters is to be explained by the fact that the famous critic was too busily occupied with his weekly work to find time for correspondence. A man who drives the pen all the time that he is not searching books for facts to write about will not seek for relaxation in sending letters to his friends, and moreover Sainte Beuve’s position as a critic kept him more aloof than most men from forming those ties with literary men which might impair the impartiality of his judgment. Very frequently he wrote hasty notes in which it is easy to detect the tired hand that seeks the swiftest expression of what is to be said, without straying into those side paths of discussion that make the charm of most letters. Hence it is a personal and not a literary interest that the reader takes in this volume at least.

Where there is so much to quote from the selection becomes difficult. There are various records of Sainte-Beuve’s gratitude to those who had been kind to him; of his wrath against those who had offended him; of explanation of vexatious troubles, such as the calumny charging him with receiving the petty sum of one hundred francs from Louis Philippe’s secret fund, —the amount afterwards proved to have been paid for repairing a smoky chimney, — and many things of similar sort. Budding poets kept sending him volumes of their verses, thus securing discreet reply, although Baudelaire received much more than this. SainteBeuve could not approve of Louis Philippe’s government, and he refused to receive from that king the cross of the Legion of Honor, although he was willing to accept the decoration from the emperor, and his letters show anything but hostility to his rule. In one letter (January 12, 1863), he says that he has been a partisan of the empire since the first day, indeed, since the eve of its establishment, and that common sense, more than enthusiasm, is the cause of his devotion ; he adds that he asks from it nothing more than it has given to the whole of France, — security and honor. Naturally, this political bias did not recommend him to all Frenchmen, and when he was appointed a professor in the Collége de France and tried to begin his course, the students expressed their disapprobation in the most violent way by creating a tumult that rendered it impossible for him to continue. It is only fair to say that this action was not entirely the result of pure patriotism. An independent critic, such as Sainte-Beuve was, had excited a great deal of ill-feeling which found an outlet in the first occasion; and there was probably as much ungenuineness in the violence of the young Harmodinses and Aristogeitons who hissed and hooted Sainte-Beuve as in their rapturous applause of every professor who in any remote connection introduced the word liberté into his lecture. Any one who attended lectures to French students during the empire will remember how frequently certain professors, when they found their audience was becoming listless, would lug that word in and thus secure cheap popularity. At any rate, Sainte-Beuve’s volume on Virgil showed those who hated him what excellent instruction it was that they had lost. On the whole, however, we can be glad that he was saved from the distractions of being obliged to teach.

How busy he was kept by the routine of his occupation is clearly shown by various notes to correspondents who were anxious to meet him, to whom he could hold out no better opportunity than an hour or two on Monday, after one week’s work was finished and that of another not yet begun. In many of his letters are passages, though briefly expressed, made up of what has filled his writing for the press ; this is only the natural result of his great interest in his work, and it is the most prominent characteristic of this volume of his letters, which are really notes called forth by some imperative occasion, running on to a greater or less extent, but not letters written in leisure and treating of all kinds of diverse and disconnected subjects. It is not to be imagined, however, that this volume is at all lacking in interest; Sainte-Beuve’s writing is never dull, and the matters that interested him are interesting to every lover of literature.

— A different book is Théophile Gautier’s L’Orient,¹³ which is made up of a series of various sketches recounting various travels of his own and others in different parts of the world.

A good part of the travels described were to no remoter point than London at the time of the Exhibition in 1862, and to the Exposition Building in Paris in 1867. Gautier did not linger in the machinery halls, he went straight to the Oriental departments, and it is safe to say that his visits taught him more about Eastern art than most people would learn from a long residence in those strange countries. In his own words : “ If we were to say that we did not cast a glance at all the rest of the exhibition, we should bring down on our head the scorn of the manufacturers, the business-men, the utilitarians, and the philistines of all sorts. But that is the truth. We passed by, without a look, the troop of copper and steel monsters, the mammoths and mastodons of industry, which toss their mutilated arms, breathe with their iron lungs, and seem to lend to the steam the breath and restlessness of life, in the furious and cold agitation which does not know fatigue. The bobbins whirled like drunken dancers, so swiftly that they could scarcely be seen. Pistons rose and fell with a plaintive wheeze like woodcutters cleaving an oak-tree ; wild pulleys made their leather and india-rubber straps clatter; cog-wheels were turning; rolling-wheels brushed against one another; valves clattered ; springs rattled ; all these metallic and plntonian slaves invented by man’s genius were working busily as we passed by. These machines cried out with their gnashing of teeth, their dull blows, their harsh hissing : ‘ I do the work of six thousand spindles ; I take the place of five hundred smiths’ hammers; I weave an Indian shawl more evenly than a workman in Cashmere on the threshold of his hut; I produce machines which will work as I do; I, with my bronze fingers, fold envelopes as skillfully and as neatly as could any rosyfingered woman : only I make enough in one day to inclose all the love, diplomatic, and business secrets of the world.’ ”

The pen of a translator would lag far behind Gautier’s neat and at times poetical or eloquent expression, for as he described the rich collections of Indian art he always wrote in a style that was so picturesque that it is vain to try to reproduce it in another tongue.

In another paper he has written about a visit to a Chinese junk that was in the Thames at the same exhibition ; he found there the Oriental artist who smiled at the French painter for drawing a man in profile, with the hidden leg and the unseen eye left out of his sketch. The book is for the most part of very light weight, but it has the charm of interest, of literary grace. It is curious to notice that Nicolas’ translation of Omár Khayyám did not escape his observation. In the second volume is to be found an article on the Quatrains taken from the Moniteur Universel of December 8, 1867