Recent Literature

THE comparison of M. Taine’s book on England with Hawthorne’s “Our Old Home,” and Emerson’s “ English Traits,” will suggest itself at once to most readers, and is one that it is not perfectly able to bear. It is more like the latter than the former; in fact M. Taine’s literary attitude is so much like that of Emerson, and characteristics of his style so often recall him, that it seems well for Mr. Emerson that he wrote some twenty years before M. Taine. To be sure there is every intellectual disparity, and the grounds of judgment are separated by the immeasurable remove of Paris from Concord. Both have a certain extravagance of expression ; but Emerson’s mood is always philosophical, while that of Taine is artistic ; the excess of the former leads to some deep poetic thought or sense, the excess of the latter is merely exaggeration and ceases with itself. All the time, too, you feel that the Frenchman is looking at England through a colored glass, which imparts a fantastic and erroneous hue to all he sees in spite of him, and sheds upon his heaps of facts and his neatly arranged inferences the weird lustre of an eclipse. This appears most forcibly when, towards the end, he comes to talk of English art and poetry. Then he forever destroys your fond belief that he is a better critic than Ruskin ; and only imagine bis taking up poor, forgotten “ Aurora Leigh,” and telling his French friends that is a type of modern English poetry !

But in observation of the physical aspects of English life, no one, we suspect, has yet surpassed M. Taine, if any one has yet equalled him. This is what makes his book so fascinating that, in spite of its distorted philosophy, it is a positive deprivation to have it end. Some of the chapters are galleries of masterpieces, or, rather, of masterly sketches, fresh, vivid, and most impressive. Such are the chapters on “ Sunday in London, the Streets and Parks,” “ Visit to Epsom and Cremorne Gardens,” “Mansions, Parks, and Gardens,”“Typical English Men and Women,” “Manchester and Liverpool,” in which there are so many brilliant studies that one is hardly able to choose from them. Here is one excellent picture, for a beginning, of rain in London : —

“The rain is small, compact, pitiless; looking at it one can see no reason why it should not continue to the end of all things ; one’s feet churn water, there is water everywhere, filthy water impregnated with an odor of soot. A yellow, dense fog fills the air, sweeps down to the ground ; at thirty paces a house, a steamboat appear as spots upon blotting-paper.”

Then for a proof of his apt sense of the beauty of the English climate, here is another exquisite bit: —

“ The things which please me most are the trees. Every day, after leaving the Athenæum, I go and sit for an hour in St, James’s Park ; the lake shines softly beneath its misty covering, while the dense foliage bends over the still waters. The rounded trees, the great green domes make a kind of architecture far more delicate than the other. The eye reposes itself upon these softened forms, upon these subdued tones.....There are tones like

these in the landscapes of Rembrandt, in the twilights of Van der Neer: the bathed light, the air charged with vapor, the insensible and continuous changes of the vast exhalation which softens, imparts a bluish tint to, and dims the contours, the whole producing the impression of a great life, vague, diffused, and melancholy, — the life of a humid country. At Richmond, I felt this still better. From the terrace can be discerned several leagues of country ; the Thames which is not larger than the Seine, winds through meadows, between clumps of large trees. All is green, of a soft green, almost effaced by the distance; one feels the freshness and the peace of the infinite vegetation ; the gray sky extends over it a low and heavy dome ; at the horizon are whitish mists in floating layers, here and there a darkened cloud, or the violet patch of a shower. From all the ground rises a sluggish mist; one watches it as if it were a piece of muslin drawn between the interstices of the trees, and gradually the floating gauze of the earth reunites with the uniform veil of the sky. How still is the park ! Troops of deer feed in the moist brake; the hinds approach the fence, and gaze on the passer-by without fear. The oaks, the lime-trees, the spreading and huge chestnut-trees, are noble creatures which seem to speak in low tones with majesty and security ; at their feet is thick and tall grass ; the blades of grass, whereon the rain has left its tears, smile with a tender and sad grace. A sort of fond quietude emanates from the air, the sky, and all things ; Nature welcomes the soul, weary and worn with striving. How one feels that their landscape suits them, and why they love it! ”

His portraits of English people of different grades and conditions are insurpassable, we think : —

“ Excepting only the highest class, they [the women] apparel themselves as fancy dictates. One imagines healthy bodies, well built, beautiful at times ; but they must be imagined. The physiognomy is often pure, but also often sheepish. Many are simple babies, new waxen dolls, with glass eyes, which appear entirely empty of ideas. Other faces have become ruddy, and turned to raw beefsteak. There is a fund of folly or of brutality in this inert flesh, too white, or too red. Some are ugly or grotesque in the extreme ; with heron’s feet, stork’s necks, always having the large front of white teeth, the projecting jaws of carnivora. As compensation, others are beautiful in the extreme. They have angelic faces ; their eyes, of pale periwinkle, are softly deep ; their complexion is that of a flower, or an infant; their smile is divine. One of these days, about ten o’clock in the morning, near Hyde Park Corner, I was rooted to the spot motionless with admiration at the sight of two young ladies ; the one was sixteen, the other eighteen years old. They were in rustling dresses of white tulle amid a cloud of muslin; tall, slender, agile, their shape as perfect as their face, of incomparable freshness, resembling those marvellous flowers seen in select exhibitions, the whiteness of the lily or orchis; in addition to all that, gayety, innocence, a superabundance of unalloyed sap and infantine expression, of laughter, and the mien of birds ; the earth did not support them.....Sometimes the excess of feeding adds a variety; this was true of a certain gentleman in my railway-carriage on the Derby day ; large ruddy features, with flabby and pendent cheeks, large red whiskers, blue eyes without expression, an enormous trunk in a short light jacket, noisy respiration ; his blood gave a tinge of pink to his hands, his neck, his temple, and even underneath his hair ; when he compressed his eyelids, his physiognomy was as disquieting and heavy as that seen in the portraits of Henry VIII.; when in repose, in presence of this mass of flesh, one thought of a beast for the butcher, and quietly computed twenty stones of meat. Towards fifty, owing to the effect of the same diet seasoned with port wine, the figure and the face are spoiled, the teeth protrude, the physiognomy is distorted, and turn to horrible and tragical caricature, as, for example, a fat and fiery general at the Volunteer Review in Hyde Park, who had the air of a bulldog and had a brick-dust face, spotted with violet excrescences.....

I have in my mind two or three matrons, broad, stiff, and destitute of ideas; red face, eyes the color of blue china, huge white teeth, — forming the tricolor flag. In other cases the type becomes exaggerated ; one sees extraordinary asparagus-sticks planted in spreading dresses. Moreover, two out of every three have their feet shod with stout masculine boots ; and as to the long projecting teeth, it is impossible to train one’s self to endure them. Is this a cause, or an effect, of the carnivorous régime? The too ornate and badly adjusted dress completes these disparities. It consists of violet or dark crimson silks, of grass-green flowered gowns, blue sashes, jewelry, — the whole employed sometimes to caparison gigantic jades who recall discharged heavy cavalry horses, sometimes vast well-hooped butts, which burst in spite of their hoops. Of this cast was a lady in Hyde Park, one of these days, on horseback, followed by her groom. She was fifty-five, had several chins, the rest in proportion, an imperious and haughty mien ; the whole shook at the slightest trot, and it was hard not to laugh.”

We have selected very much at random from M. Taine’s innumerable pieces, and feel that each of the multitude we have left is better than any we have chosen. But we trust that we have given an idea of his peculiar felicity, and we can assure the reader of his vast scope and variety. There is scarcely a page from which some extraordinary stroke of picturesqueness does not flash out, and dispute your conviction of M. Taine’s inability to judge profoundly of the matter he points so forcibly. Nothing, we suppose, is more unerring than his statistics ; some features of English polity and society seem wonderfully well seen and reasoned upon ; hardly any aspect of English existence is left untouched by the light of his facts, by his guesses, by his lucky thrusts in the dark. We read him with the greatest delight, and we leave him with penitential distrust.

The author of “ Saunterings,” we greatly fear, lacks that earnestness which we all profess to admire, and should all be so sorry to have in large quantity. In fact, simplicity and humor do not agree together ; it is for the heroic moods ; the man who laughs and makes laugh is a hopelessly doubleminded deluder; and in Mr. Warner there is a suddenness of jest which may well dismay the serious reader ; and who at other times has a fineness that leaves you in doubt whether you have really been trifled with or not. What, for example, are we to think of a passage like this in an apparently serious description of a mediæval city gate at Munich? “On one side of the gate is a portrait of the Virgin, on gold ground, and on the other a very passable one of the late Dr. Hawes of Hartford, with a Pope’s hat on.” In a similar spirit we are told that the older parts of the city abound “ in archways and rambling alleys, that suddenly become broad streets and then again contract to the width of an aiderman ” ; so, also, having described a hardfought bargain with an orange-dealer at Sorrento, he tells us : “ A little while after, as I sat upon the outer wall of the terrace of the Camaldoli, with my feet hanging over, these same oranges were taken from my pockets by Americans ; so that I am prevented from making any reflections on the honesty of the Italians.” The chapter on “ The Price of Oranges ” is, by the way, the best of the Italian chapters, which are the best of all. The delicate little pictures of nature and human nature, which succeed each other in this chapter, are as prettily done as anything of the kind that we know, as some of them shall here witness ; —

“ All the highways and the byways, the streets and lanes, wherever I go, from the sea to the tops of the hills, are strewn with orange peel; so that one, looking above and below, comes back from a walk with a golden dazzle in his eyes, — a sense that yellow is the prevailing color. Perhaps the kerchiefs of the dark-skinned girls and women, which take that tone, help the impression. The inhabitants are all orangeeaters. The high walls show that the gardens are protected with great care ; yet the fruit seems to be as free as apples are in a remote New England town about cidertime...The only trouble is to find a

sweet tree ; for the Sorrento oranges are usually sour in February ; and one needs to be a good judge of the fruit, and know the male orange from the female — though which it is that is the sweeter I can never remember (and should not dare to say, if I did, in the present state of feeling on the woman question) — or he might as well eat a lemon. The mercenary aspect of my query does not enter in here. I climb into a tree, and reach out to the end of the branch for an orange that has got reddish in the sun, that comes off easily and is heavy ; or I tickle a large one on the top bough with a cane pole ; and if it drops readily, and has a fine grain, I call it a cheap one. The oranges that you knock off with your stick, as you walk along the lanes, don’t cost anything ; but they are always sour, as I think the girls know who lean over the wall, and look on with a smile : and, in that, they are more sensible than the lively dogs which bark at you from the top, and wake all the neighborhood with their clamor. I have no doubt the oranges have a market price ; but I have been seeking the value the gardeners set on them themselves. As I walked towards the heights, the other morning, and passed an orchard, the gardener, who saw my ineffectual efforts, with a very long cane, to reach the boughs of a tree, came down to me with a basketful he had been picking. As an experiment on the price, I offered him a two-centime piece, — which is a sort of satire on the very name of money, — when he desired me to help myself to as many oranges as I liked. He was a fine-looking fellow, with a spick-span new red Phrygian cap ; and I had n’t the heart to take advantage of his generosity, especially as his oranges were not of the sweetest. One ought never to abuse generosity.....I like better to go to a little

garden in the village of Meta, under a sunny precipice of rocks, overhung by the ruined convent of Camaldoli. I turn up a narrow lane, and push open the wooden door in the garden of a little villa. It is a pretty garden ; and, besides the orange and lemon trees on the terrace, it has other fruit trees, and a scent of many flowers. My friend, the gardener, is sorting oranges from one basket to another, on a green bank, and evidently selling the fruit to some women, who are putting it into bags to carry away. When he sees me approach, there is always the same pantomime, I propose to take some of the fruit he is sorting. With a knowing air, and an appearance of great mystery, he raises his left hand, the palm toward me, as one says hush. Having despatched his business, he takes an empty basket, and with another mysterious flourish, desiring me to remain quiet, he goes to a storehouse in one corner of the garden, and returns with a load of immense oranges, all soaked with the sun, ripe and fragrant, and more tempting than lumps of gold. I take one, and ask him if it is sweet. He shrugs his shoulders, raises his hands, and, with a sidewise shake of the head, and a look which says, How can you be so faithless? makes me ashamed of my doubts.....

When I am alone, I stroll about under the heavily laden trees, and pick up the largest, where they lie thickly on the ground, liking to hold them in my hand and feel the agreeable weight, even when I can carry away no more. The gardener neither follows nor watches me; and I think perhaps knows, and is not stingy about it, that more valuable to me than the oranges I eat or take away are those on the trees among the shining leaves.

The whole of Mr. Warner’s book is very pleasant, even if not all as good as this, and it does not so much matter that its localities are the well-worn routes and the o’erfrequented sojourns of what is now becoming an intolerably Old World: he is as entertaining in England, France, Switzerland, Germany, and Italy, as in the famous garden at Hartford. Much of the material was first printed, we believe, in newspaper letters, and it sometimes refuses to take the polish which authors would fain bestow upon their books ; but if your taste is for light touches, for delicate feeling, for sensible reflection, here are these also; and here is the assurance to the critical reader that, good as Mr. Warner’s work has been, he has not yet done his best, and that the present enjoyment is a foretaste of richer and fuller pleasures from him.

H. H. in her “Bits of Travel” deals with very much the same scenes and places as Mr. Warner, and with a grace and wit worthy to be mentioned in his company. Our readers remember well enough, no doubt, her charming papers on Gastein and the Italian Tyrol and her German Landlady, —who was so delightful in spite of her incredible broken English, — and we hope they have forgotten the “ Encyclical Letters ” In these familiar epistles she does not well observe the bounds that divide gayety from triviality, and vivacity from flippancy ; but these are the besetting faults of all lively lady-writers and even of some men who write. The rest of the book is bright and enjoyable, and if the reader has not always been able to see Europe as H. H. does, he must still allow her a very distinct gift of observation. In fine, “ Bits of Travel” is a pretty volume that the reader may set on his shelf by the side of half a dozen other thoroughly American books of travel,—so thoroughly American that they may be said to give us a Europe of our own.

Whether M. Turgeneff’s story is to be recommended or not as a warm-weather novel, we are not quite certain. The reader, to be sure, will have to make only the initial effort, for the plot and characters are such that once suggested he will not be able to leave them until he knows all about them ; but then, it may be too fatiguing to be so vigorously seized and interested, during the summer heats, “ Smoke ” is a book worthy of one’s best frame of mind, for morally and æsthetically it is a fiction of the highest class. The people are new, though the materials for the construction of the story are old enough. Gregory Mikailovitch Litvinof, a Russian of middle class, loves in his youth Irene Pavlovna, the capricious daughter of a poverty-stricken old Muscovite prince, when the Czar visits Moscow, and Irene, at the urgency of her parents and lover, goes to the court ball. There her beauty wins so much applause that her uncle, a rich courtier, who has hitherto neglected his poor kinsfolk, invites her to live with his family in St. Petersburgh, and her marriage with Litvinof is cruelly broken off. She marries a young general, and two years after, at Baden, she again meets Litvinof, sober now, and instructed by suffering and travel, and tranquilly happy in his betrothal to his cousin Tatiana. The rest is the story of the reviving passion of Litvinof, which Irene, unprincipled, selfish, pitiless, fans into full flame, and then confesses that she also loves him, is wholly his, will fly with him, or whatever he bids her. But at every step she counts the cost, and ends by declaring that she cannot fly with him, cannot give up either him or the world, and that he must come to live near her in St. Petersburgh, where she will find him an office. The insulted Litvinof, who has broken his engagement with Tatiana and has felt every pang of guilt and remorse, has strength left to escape from Baden.

The character of Irene is vividly painted throughout, her passionate fickleness, her selfish calculation, her unscrupulous use of others’ love for herself, her jealousy of the purity of Tatiana, her quickness, her art in overpowering Litvinof’s good purposes, and in luring him back to her again and again. Her beauty is also painted so that she becomes almost a visible presence ; but the intrigue is shown in all the real haggardness of such a passion, full of shame, trouble, fear, unrest. It is with these masterly touches that the author portrays the effect on Litvinof of Irene’s acknowledged love : —

“ A great change had taken place in Litvinof since the day before ; in every attitude and motion, in the very expression of his face, he felt himself another man. All calmness, dignity, and self-respect had vanished ; only the ruins of his moral nature remained ; the indelible impressions of the last few days had entirely blotted out the good resolutions of the past. He experienced a new, strange, and powerful sensation, which was exceedingly painful to him. An evil spirit had penetrated the sanctuary of his soul, and had silently taken possession there ; it had become his master, and he felt its power. Litvinof was ashamed no longer ; he felt the rashness of despair mingled with fear. Those captured in battle are familiar with this conflict of feeling ; the thief experiences it after his first attempt in crime. Litvinof had been taken captive, his honor had been unexpectedly attacked and had not proved equal to the trial. The train was a few minutes behind time.”

He was waiting then for the arrival of Tatiana with his aunt The scenes that follow are extremely touching and fine ; but the little book is full of scenes almost equally good. A marvellous number of figures and characters are sketched, mostly Russian, and related to the most modern aspects of political and social life in Russia. A strain of pitiless sarcasm mocks the national conceit and barbarism ; and one sadly recognizes in the Russians’ grotesqueness, their tall talk, their fondness for all sorts of psychological, social, and political quackery, their likeness to Americans, whom they resemble in their recentness and the geographical vastness of their country. We wish that the likeness held good also in our possession of such a national novelist as Turgeneff.

FRENCH AND GERMAN.²

IF the jests were only a trifle more delicate, or a trifle funnier, we could recommend for those readers who loll in hammocks a little volume of so-called comic sketches entitled Die fromme Helene, which attempt to portray the mischievous tricks of a young girl who ill-treats her uncle and aunt, and who comes to a disproportionately bad end. As it is, however, the book must rest upon its own merits. It bears a certain resemblance to the very amusing little caricatures that used to appear in the German illustrated papers and in the Munich Bilderbogen, most of which contradicted the commonly received opinion about the power of a German to make a joke. Although the name of the illustrator of this book, Busch, is the same as that of one of the most famous caricaturists in Germany, we have no hesitation in saying that the two must be different men.

For more solid reading we have Karl Griin’s Kulturgeschichte des Sechzehnten Jahrhunderts, which seems to be an excellent book. It is a reprint of a course of lectures, and although it is not written in the severest style of the historian, it nevertheless is by no means superficial ; indeed, it may be stated that the true German is never superficial, the only approach, to it being that he is sometimes inaccurate. In this volume we have occasional bursts of eloquence that may make the cool-headed reader smile, but, notwithstanding, the book has a value.

Although it is not one of the latest appearing volumes, a book called Ziveihundert Bildnisse und Lebensabrisse may yet be unknown to some of our readers. It contains the portraits, as its name indicates, of the most famous Germans, and they are all carefully engraved from the best originals. To each, whether his fame is world or province wide, a scanty inch of biography in fine type is given. As a specimen, this notice of Goethe is amusing. We give it in the original. German scholars will see the difficulty of translating it. “ Ein grosser und glückdicher Dichter. Von der Vorsehung mit allen Gaben zur Erreichung des schónsten Erdenlooses ausgestattct, bei vollem, bewussten Gebrauche desselben denr Leben sich ganz hingebend, Natur-Kunst-und Menschenkenner, Staatsman, nach klarer Anschauung besonnen prüfend, der Leidenschaft zugänglich, aber bis zur Gemüthsruhe sich meisternd, fröhlich im Genusse, stark in der Entsagung, unermiidet thätig und bei jeder Thatigkeit durch reichste innerliche und äusserliche Mittel unterstiizt, zog Goethe unendlich viel in den Bereich seines Lebens und producirte das Erlebte in vollendeter Form.” It strikes us that our miniature Boswell has done very well.

Goethe’s Bricfe an Eichstädt consists of a number of letters from Goethe to the editor of the Jenaische Allgemeine Literatitr-Zeitung. They are all brief and business-like, and perhaps of more interest to a biographer of Goethe than to most readers. The book is well edited.

Of French books the most interesting that we have is Ludovic Halévy’s L'Invasion. The author, or, rather, the editor, has collected in one volume different recitals of various experiences in the recent war. There is not one which is not interesting, and interesting from its very simplicity and modesty. As long as an eye-witness does not try to rival the historian in the extent of his field of view, he is sure to be interesting. Here, as elsewhere, honesty is of value. One is averse to be too lavish of his praise of books about the war, but, with all modesty, we have no hesitation in recommending this one. Moreover, one is only too ready to forget the miseries of war; we continually see the glittering uniforms and hear the martial music, so a campaign seems like an adorned picnic ; it is well to bear in mind the horrors that always accompany it. Perhaps it is not Quixotic to hope that at some time in the future it may seem as absurd as the duel does now. While we are on this subject, we may mention Charles de Freycinet’s new book, La Guerre en Province pendant le siége de Paris. This book is more the regular history of martial deeds than the preceding volume; but although it is filled with a natural praise of French deeds, of which posterity may or may not judge differently, it is an important book. It contains many documents, reports, orders, etc., on which it would be by no means easy always to lay the hand.

To return to more peaceful themes, M. Paul Albert has published a book called La Littérature Française, which, it seems to us, would be an excellent textbook for schools. Generally, the amount of information that even good students possess about the richness of French literature is extremely limited ; but this book, although the extracts are few and brief, might well be read in connection with one which contains fuller specimens of the authors mentioned, such a book as Demogeot’s or Henig’s, for example. The criticisms in this volume arc always intelligent and often excellent, and the descriptive, historical part is very good. French literature, if studied at all, should be studied as a whole, and not piecemeal. Of it, as of the history of France, one gets but very unsatisfactory knowledge who starts with the reign of Louis XIV. We recommend this book to all persons who are instructing themselves or others. It should be said that the volume only comes down as far as the beginning of the seventeenth century, but it is of the part before this date that the least is generally known.

Under the title of Les Bourgeois Gentilshommes de 1871, or L'armée d'Henri V., an anonymous author has published some heavy and often grossly unpleasant satires of French provincial society of the present time. No one has done this work better than Gustave Droz, and we cannot help regretting the frivolity, let us call it, that but ill adapt his amusing books for general reading. A satirist who exaggerates is like a surgeon who cuts off our arms to cure troubles at our finger-ends. Droz has a light touch, but his lightness becomes levity of a sort that is but too well known as French.