Comment on New Books

POETRY.

Poems and Ballads, by Robert Louis Stevenson. (Scribners.) This complete collection of Stevenson’s verse is as distinct an acquisition as anything the publishers have given us in a long day. As the intimate spirit of the man spoke through his letters, so the note of personality rings clear through this volume, all too small. The true friend of men and children, the brave sufferer, the artist striving to finish his work before nightfall, and first and last the man, speak here in a way we cannot soon forget. — Robert Louis Stevenson, an Elegy, and Other Poems mainly Personal, by Richard Le Gallienne. (Copeland & Day.) In the Vailima Letters Stevenson is found protesting that nobody cares much for his writings but boys and journalists. It would not prove the truth of this statement, nor would it be without interest for its own sake, to count the numbers of threnodies his death has called forth from the younger generation of writers. Mr. Le Gallienne’s is as good as many, but not the most memorable of its sort. Many of his other poems are graceful and bright, yet “mainly personal ” so well describes them that one is a little surprised at their being thought suited to the formation of a large part of a book. Not often does he print a line of such doubtful taste as one in his Free Worship, at the point where a human corpse is supposed once to have swung from this new kind of a Talking Oak which is only talked to : “ His eighteenth century flesh hath fattened nineteenth century cows.”—The Purple East, a Series of Sonnets on England’s Desertion of Armenia, by William Watson. (Stone & Kimball.) The disciple of Wordsworth has seldom struck his master’s note more clearly than Mr. Watson has done it in these sonnets. They tell England her duty in a way which cannot be quite comfortable reading for statesmen bound about byexpediency and circumstance. It is the poet’s power to see through and beyond these things ; and as Wordsworth saw, and called to Milton, “England hath need of thee,”so Mr. Watson sees, and speaks to his countrymen themselves. He has a vigorous word, too, for his fellow-singer, the new Laureate, whom in verse he designates as “ Treachery’s apologist,” and in his prose Preface handles with a scorn which one can understand after seeing the features of Mr. Watson as they are presented in the frontispiece of his other recent volume, The Father of the Forest. — Mr. W. B. Yeats, who shares with Mr. John Davidson, Mr. William Watson, and Mr. Francis Thompson the chief honors of the “new school” in British poetry, has brought together all that he cares to preserve from his previous volumes of verse in an attractively printed volume of Poems. (T. Fisher Unwin, London ; Copeland & Day, Boston.) The long poems, The Wanderings of Usheen and The Princess Cathleen appear again, the latter rew ritten and considerably lengthened. The Wanderings of Usheen is in form a dialogue between St. Patrick and Usheen, the mythic here of Ireland, who is carried off by the “pearl-pale Neave ” to fairy-land, where he “knows three centuries of dalliance with a demon thing.” Not only is Mr. Yeats drenched with the eerie folk-lore of Ireland, but his wayward and passionate fancy is of the very stuff out of which the first Celtic bards were made. Accordingly, when he turns to these old myths, with his native sympathy reënforced by the subtleties of modern technique, he touches them to fine issues. In The Princess Cathleen he is on the track of Maeterlinck, and something of the hectic intensity and sick insistent horror of that writer enters in to lay a numbing hand on the poet’s vital fancy. 舒 Amercan poets have been, to an extent unparalleled in any literature of the same bulk, lovers and celebrants of Nature, lyrists of the woods and fields. The one instrument that we have learned to sound quite clearly and sweetly is the syrinx. One has only to turn the pages of Mr. Archibald Lampman’s Lyrics of Earth (Copeland & Day), to find how genuine has been this apprenticeship. Hardly a hint of the street or the roof-tree, the great human moil left far behind, with only a sigh of happy release, and then a day-long, night-long communion with the spirit of trees, a hearkening to the rare note of birds in the “ heart of the sensitive solitudes,” a stooping with Pan above brown pools “ simmering in the sun ” to watch the water-bugs voyaging about the tremulous floors of their “ frail lucid worlds.” Perhaps we demand something more than this from our poets, perhaps we grow intolerably lonely in these wide busy solitudes, where human feet come not. But that is our fault more than Mr. Lampman’s. He for one does not grow lonely, and the celebration which he makes of his delight has almost always the tremulous, vivid lover’s note. —Poems and Pastels, by William Edward Hunt [Keppell Strange]. (William Briggs, Toronto.) — Songs of December and June, by Walter Malone. (Lippincott.)

FICTION.

Casa Braccio ; The Ralstons ; by F. Marion Crawford. (Macmillan.) The dedication tells us that Casa Braccio is its author’s twenty-fifth novel ; and no one of its predecessors shows more strikingly Mr. Crawford’s rare constructive skill, or his power of exciting and holding the interest of his reader. We snatched the story — to use Dr. Holmes’s happy word referring to a greater romance — when it appeared serially, though even then there was no thought of placing it with the Saracinesca books, and two or three shorter tales which so far, to us, indicate Mr. Crawford’s highwater mark as a novelist. Casa Braccio is riqt, like them, a story to return to, so to speak, in cold blood. We are quite as much impressed by the extreme cleverness of the work in certain directions ; but we are less than ever inclined to regard the chain of events as the logical and inevitable consequence of Maria Braccio’s “ deadly sin.”(By the bye, what small account in this reckoning is taken of the cruel wrong, as it seems to most English or American readers, done to the hapless girl by her parents.) It is the author who devises and controls the course of events, and the characters, the most living of them, are but means to his ends. To trace in Walter Crowdie’s tragic fate the final working-out of the peasant girl’s curse, we must go to The Ralstons, but this is the least convincing part of the entire scheme. — Cinderella and Other Stories, by Richard Harding Davis. (Scribners.) Mr. Davis’s familiar habit of building skillfully upon foundations of unreality is well displayed in the four stories of this book. The stories are perhaps even less illustrative of real life than his previous tales, but admitting the situations upon which they turn, one must also admit, especially in the case of Miss Delamar’s Understudy, a sprightliness and confidence of manner, a spirit of vigor and good-nature, which go far in pleading forgiveness for the more fundamental faults. — The Red Republic : A Romance of the Commune, by Robert W. Chambers. (Putnams.) Both as an historical novel and as a story of adventure, The Red Republic deserves praise, but we think the latter element detracts a little from the book’s entire success as a realistic picture of the Second Terror, for no actual hero could possibly escape, even by accident, from such a rapid and varied succession of deadly perils. Accepting this, however, the tale depicts with exceeding vividness and truth the Paris of the Commune and the sort of men who ruled therein. The writer shows himself an admirable storyteller, and most readers will reach the last of the many pages before they think of criticism. It is of necessity a history of cruelty, treachery, battle, and murder, though the love story is idyllic, — hardly a French idyl, but then the hero is an American. — Mr. Chambers’s later book, A King and a few Dukes (Putnams), is disappointing. It is one of the numerous offspring of The Prisoner of Zenda, but, on the whole, Ruritania is a much more satisfactory country of romance than Bosnovia. In this fantasy, the writer shows a genuine feeling for nature, and, as in his earlier tale, a pleasing kindness for humble fourfooted friends. — In a Dike Shanty, by Maria Louise Pool. (Stone & Kimball.) Of the same general character as this author’s Tenting on Stony Beach, but written with more vigor and compactness. Each of the persons in this outing-sketch is strongly individualized, and an effective little love story is inwoven. The author has a certain hardness of tone which gives strength to her work, but deprives it of the one touch needed to make it first-rate literature. A little dash of poetry, and the book would be quite out of the common. — The Dream-Charlotte, a Story of Echoes, by M. Betham-Edwards. (Macmillan.) Another addition to the large company of tales of the French Revolution, but one in which the writer sedulously avoids beaten tracks. Indeed, the effect of that great convulsion upon the Huguenot remnant has seldom engaged the novelist’s attention. Their sufferings even to the last days of the old order, and the emancipation which came with the dawn of the new, are graphically and sympathetically indicated. Otherwise the feeling and spirit of the time are described rather than revivified, nor do we hear very clearly the echoes of the national tumult, which must have been often painfully audible, even in a little Norman village. The Dream-Charlotte is of course Charlotte Corday, who in her own person is scarcely introduced to the reader, but whose influence is constantly present in the thought and life of her humbly-born fostersister. — A Gentleman’s Gentleman: Being Certain Pages from the Life and Strange Adventures of Sir Nicolas Steele, Bart., as related by his Valet, Hildebrand Bigg, by Max Pemberton. (Harpers.) This may be said to be the adventures of the hero of a seventeenth or eighteenth century picaresque novel in the costume of today, so little does the contemporary world appear to be the proper dwelling-place of the reckless, conscienceless Sir Nicolas, who lives by his wits, with the efficient assistance of his more astute, if quite as rascally servant. After their manner, the sketches which make up the book are very well done, and show a good deal of inventive as well as narrative skill. — In the Village of Viger, by Duncan Campbell Scott. (Copeland & Day.) A little volume of French stories, graceful and entertaining, but not calculated to add substantially to the reputation which the author has already won by his verses. — Excellent for vacation reading are the volumes of a series, Stories by English Authors, issued in attractive form by the Messrs. Scribners. Most of the tales are of recent publication, and many contemporary English story-tellers are represented in the collection, which also embraces, from older writers, a few tales which have become classics. The stories have been grouped acaccording to their localities, England, Scotland, Ireland, London, France, Italy, Africa, and The Orient having appeared. Each volume contains a portrait. The plan of the compilers to bring together stories of genuine value and interest has been generally well carried out, though, of course, each experienced reader will note certain sins of omission and commission. For instance, Mrs. F. A. Steel does not appear in The Orient, while Netta Syrett is to be found there. — Trains that met in the Blizzard, a Composite Romance : Being a Chronicle of the Extraordinary Adventure of a Party of Twelve Men and One Woman in the Great American Blizzard, March 12, 1888, by R. Pitcher Woodward. (Salmagundi Publishing Co., New York.) —The Iron Pirate, by Max Pemberton. Globe Library ; Checked Through, by Richard Henry Savage. Rialto Series. (Rand, McNally, & Co.)

HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY.

Lectures on the Council of Trent, Delivered at Oxford, 1892-3, by James Anthony Froude. (Scribners.) The last to be published of Mr. Froude’s three courses of lectures at Oxford is the one earliest delivered. We infer, however, that, unlike the others, these lectures had been in no way revised by their author, and come to us practically as spoken by him. All the more noteworthy is it to discover no sign of age or failing power in the lucid, vigorous, graphic style, with its living warmth and glow, of this master of English. For instance, the sketch of Luther’s early career, culminating in the momentous scene at Worms, is of the briefest,— it is simply a re-telling of facts familiar to commonplaceness; and yet it compels our interest as many eloquent recitals of things new and strange quite fail to do. All readers of Froude will know before they open this book precisely the attitude of the writer,— with which, broadly speaking, probably the large majority of them will not quarrel. They will look for and find the prepossessions and also the ardor of the thoroughgoing partisan. Some of them will hardly recognize the Emperor Charles in the glorified presentment of him in these pages, a portrait which Mr. Froude’s art can make vivid, though the picture is absolutely without shadows. The volume, which like its two companions is for the general reader rather than the student, ends with the peace of Passau. Evidently the author had intended later to follow his hero’s career to its close, and to consider the work of the Council at its final assembling.— Books and their Makers during the Middle Ages, a Study of the Condition of the Production and Distribution of Literature from the Fall of the Roman Empire to the Close of the Seventeenth Century, by George Haven Putnam, A. M. Vol. I. (Putnams.) This sumptuous volume will be read with delight by all good bibliophiles. It is seldom that such wide learning, such historical grasp and insight, have been employed in their service. The volume at hand covers the period from 476 to 1500 A. D. The second volume (in press) will continue the study down to 1709. — Madame Roland, a Biographical Study, by Ida M. Tarbell. (Scribners.) This biography really deserves the name of study, wherein it differs from most estimates of its subject of English and American origin. The writer has not only consulted the rather large library of Roland literature, but she has also carefully examined the unpublished letters, which, eight years ago, were deposited in the Bibliothèque Nationale of Paris, as well as others of less importance that still remain in the hands of Madame Roland’s descendants. The book is a result of a genuine knowledge of its heroine and her world, and its insight and good sense are a pleasing contrast to the fervent and emotional partisanship of some of Madame Roland’s biographers. From first to last, that brilliant, passionate, and devoted disciple of Rousseau was given to posing, and yet that very obvious fact has been curiously often unperceived or ignored. Some really new matter in this volume are the letters showing the ardent love of Mademoiselle Phlipon for Roland, forming in every way an extreme contrast to the account of the courtship and marriage in her autobiography ; and the history of her attempts in 1784 to secure a title and its privileges for her husband. The book is liberally illustrated, and contains reproductions of several portraits of Madame Roland, only one of which, however, is surely authentic.

LITERATURE.

The Colour of Life and other Essays of Things Seen and Heard. By Alice Meynell. (Way & Williams, Chicago.) Mrs. Meynell seems likely to be the proud inspirer of a cult. Her essays are so freighted with choice thought, and yet so unobvious, that they almost require the initiation of the reader. Now and then she gives expression to a profound criticism, as in her comparison of Greek and Japanese art ; occasionally she is enigmatical, as in her Donkey Races ; and she is at her best in her rendering of phenomena in nature, where her large imagination is at work on elemental themes and her wit finds language which is fine without being finicking. Altogether we advise fastidious readers to cultivate Mrs. Meynell. — Mr. Le Gallienne has gone far to remove the traditional stigma which rests upon journalistic criticism, by collecting his contributions to the periodic press for the past five years into two volumes of Retrospective Reviews. (Copeland & Day.) The sub-title, A Literary Log, shows the author’s intention to make the volumes serve as a gossipy survey of literary activity in England dining the interval covered, and so they do, in satisfying if not perfect measure. They have of course the piquancy that always attaches to criticism of contemporaries ; but they have something better, too, a rare distinction, gentleness, and fine breeding, a gracious eagerness to praise, which makes even the least significant of these tiny essays delightful reading. Not that the critic loses himself in the panegyrist. Mr. Le Gallienne has standards and is quietly faithful to them. But he holds the happy doctrine that it is the critic’s business to deal with literature as Stevenson said the poet should deal with life, to “find out the joy, and give it a voice beyond singing.”It is this particular critic’s good fortune to have an instinct for “ the joy,” and a gift of phrase that helps him to voice it.— The eighth volume of the new edition of Pepys’s Diary (Bell, London ; Macmillan, New York) brings the journal to its end, and, as always, with the last pages comes the sharp regret that the ever-to-be-lamented malady of the eyes, which compelled the writer to bid farewell to the confidential volume, could not have been delayed for twenty or ten years, or even for a single twelvemonth, as in the latter case we should at least have followed Mrs. Pepys’s brief story to its close, and known the inner history of a memorable epoch in the diarist’s life. It is well to remember that when the final entry was written, Pepys had but just passed his thirty-sixth birthday, so that the Diary to the last can be called a young man’s record, in the beginning, that of a very young man. Would that he could have shown himself, and the momentous chances and changes of his world, in his middle or old age, even if only in a fragmentary fashion. We are glad that Mr. Wheatley, whose work in these volumes has been so admirable, hints that he may at some future time annotate his author’s letters,as a “sorry substitute” for the journal that might have been. This volume contains a portrait of General Monk, Duke of Albemarle, after Lely ; and one of Charles II., from the painting by Greenhill in the National Portrait Gallery. — The new edition of what are without doubt Galt’s six best novels, is brought to a close by the publication of the seventh and eighth volumes, which contain The Provost and The Last of the Lairds. The former is, we think, outranked only by The Annals of the Parish, and the autobiographic notes of that successful practical politician, the chief magistrate of Gudetown, give quite as masterly a piece of self-portraiture as that to be found in the records of the minister of Dalmailing. Indeed we have so much pleasure in following Mr. Pawkie’s career, that we willingly assist at the presentation of that “very handsome silver cup, bearing an inscription in the Latin tongue ” which the provost ingeniously contrives shall be given to himself on his retirement from civic life. The Last of the Lairds, a book almost unknown to the present generation, was, Mr. Crockett tells us, included in this edition at his special request, whereby he has earned the thanks of its readers. With some judicious skipping, — less than is needed in Sir Andrew Wylie, — the story will be found instructive and entertaining, the first for its pictures of a bygone life, the second by reason of some humorous character sketches. (Roberts.) — The fifth volume of the new edition of Wordsworth, by William Knight (Macmillan), is devoted to The Excursion and appendices. It is interesting to observe that Mr. Henry Reed of Philadelphia, son of Wordsworth’s friend and introducer to America, has been able to add to his father’s services. The portrait used in this volume is that by Margaret Gillies. — Antony and Cleopatra and Macbeth are the two latest numbers of the serviceable Temple Shakespeare. (Macmillan.) The good text, the handy glossary, and pertinent notes and introduction render this edition distinctively the readers’ edition.

NATURE.

Riverside Letters: A Continuation of “ Letters to Marco,” by George D. Leslie, R. A. With illustrations by the Author. (Macmillan.) Certainly no less entertaining than the former Letters. Though the author’s modesty deprecates a comparison of his books with White’s Selborne, yet one cannot help being struck by a certain resemblance in spirit as well as in form. It is easy to see that Mr. Leslie is no scientist, but this does not prevent his raising many a question about birds and flowers which we suspect it would puzzle the scientists to answer. His hearty sympathy with nature, his intelligent curiosity about out-of door things, and his sane and healthy attitude towards everything he approaches are delightful to meet with, while there is a certain sweet simplicity in his manner which is wholly charming. In this book he has a little more to say about his garden than in the other, and it is refreshing to see that the perfect taste which shows itself in other things presides over his flowers also. Beauty, simplicity, and naturalness must reign in a garden superintended by one who has so truly the artist’s eye and heart. These letters, like the former series, were written originally to the author’s friend Mr. H. Stacy Marks, R. A., and being genuine letters they naturally do not confine themselves entirely to birds, flowers, trees, and country lore. Indeed, one of the most interesting is devoted to reminiscences of Sir Edwin Landseer. Mr. Leslie was a neighbor and friend of Landseer, and often helped him by painting certain details in his pictures. — Bar Harbor is another of the trifles included in American Summer Resorts. (Scribners.) It is a light sketch by Mr. Crawford, with agreeable pictures by Mr. Reinhart, a book which one discovers he has finished almost before he has begun it. — Missouri Botanical Garden, Seventh Annual Report (published by the Board of Trustees) contains, beside the annual reports, scientific papers (illustrated) by William Trelease, A. Isabel Mulford, and Charles Henry Thompson; an address on the Value of a Study of Botany by Henry Wade Rogers; and an article on the Sturtevant Prelinnean Library.

PHILOSOPHY.

The celebrated Case of Wagner has been chosen as the opening volume in a translation of the complete works of Friedrich Nietzsche. (Macmillan.) The widespread interest in Nietzsche’s thought, together with the inaccessibility of his writings to English readers, justify the publishers in their large undertaking. There is room for doubt, however, as to the wisdom of opening the series with the volume in question, both because the piquancy of Nietzsche’s attack on Wagnerism has been largely destroyed by Nordau’s much more wily and formidable onslaught, and because the peculiar philosophic tenets which form the groundwork of Nietzsche’s thought are presented in this volume with more than his usual quotum of insolent nonchalance, wild paradox, and ferocious dogmatism. One closes the volume with a feeling of wonder that a set of ideas so disproportioned and incoherent should have been granted the title of a philosophic system, and yet with a profound interest in the author as a philosophic figure. — Genetic Philosophy, by David Jayne Hill. (Macmillan.) — Basal Concepts in Philosophy, by Alexander T. Ormond, Ph. D., Professor of Philosophy in Princeton University. (Scribners.) — Search-Lights and Guide-Lines; or, Man and Nature, What they Are, What they Were and What they Will Be, by Edgar Greenleaf Bradford. (Fowler & Wells Co., New York.) — Philosophy of Mind : An Essay in the Metaphysics of Psychology, by George Trumbull Ladd, Professor of Philosophy in Yale University. (Scribners.)—Evolution and Effort, and their Relation to Religion and Politics, by Edmond Kelly. (Appletons.) — The Essential Man. A Monograph on Personal Immortality in the Light of Reason, by George Croswell Cressey, Ph. D. (Geo. H. Ellis, Boston.) — Pan-Gnosticism: A Suggestion in Philosophy, by Noel Winter. (The Transatlantic Publishing Co., New York.)