Recent Literature

MR. HENRY JAMES, JR., has so long been a writer of magazine stories, that most readers will realize with surprise the fact that he now presents them for the first time in book form. He has already made his public. Since his earliest appearance in The Atlantic people have strongly liked and disliked his writing; but those who know his stories, whether they like them or not, have constantly increased in number, and it has therefore been a winning game with him. He has not had to struggle with indifference, that subtlest enemy of literary reputations. The strongly characteristic qualities of his work, and its instantly recognizable traits, made it at once a question for every one whether it was an offense or a pleasure. To ourselves it has been a very great pleasure, the highest pleasure that a new, decided, and earnest talent can give ; and we have no complaint against this collection of stories graver than that it does not offer the author’s whole range. We have read them all again and again, and they remain to us a marvel of delightful workmanship. In richness of expression and splendor of literary performance, we may compare him with the greatest, and find none greater than he ; as a piece of mere diction, for example, The Romance of Certain Old Clothes in this volume is unsurpassed. No writer has a style more distinctly his own than Mr. James, and few have the abundance and felicity of his vocabulary ; the precision with which he fits the word to the thought is exquisite; his phrase is generous and ample. Something of an old-time stateliness distinguishes his style, and in a certain weight of manner he is like the writers of an age when literature was a far politer thing than it is now. In a reverent ideal of work, too, he is to be rated with the first. His aim is high ; he respects his material; he is full of his theme ; the latter-day sins of flippancy, slovenliness, and insincerity are immeasurably far from him.

In the present volume we have one class of his romances or novelettes : those in which American character is modified or interpreted by the conditions of European life, and the contact with European personages. Not all the stories of this sort that Mr. James has written are included in this book, and one of the stories admitted — The Romance of Certain Old Clothes — belongs rather to another group, to the more strictly romantic tales, of which the author has printed several in these pages; the scene is in America, and in this also it differs from its present neighbors. There is otherwise uncommon unity in the volume, though it has at first glance that desultory air which no collection of short stories can escape. The same purpose of contrast and suggestion runs through A Passionate Pilgrim, Eugene Pickering, The Madonna of the Future, and Madame de Mauves, and they have all the same point of view. The American who has known Europe much can never again see his country with the single eye of his old ante-European days. For good or for evil, the light of the Old World is always on her face; and his fellow-countrymen have their shadows cast by it. This is inevitable ; there may be an advantage in it, but if there is none, it is still inevitable. It may make a man think better or worse of America ; it may be refinement or it may be anxiety; there may be no compensation in it for the loss of that tranquil indifference to Europe which untraveled Americans feel, or it may be the very mood in which an American may best understand his fellow-Americans. More and more, in any case, it pervades our literature, and it seems to us the mood in Which Mr. James’s work, more than that of any other American, is done. His attitude is not that of a mere admirer of Europe and contemner of America — our best suffers no disparagement in his stories; you perceive simply that he is most contented when he is able to confront his people with situations impossible here, and you fancy in him a mistrust of such mechanism as the cis-Atlantic world can offer the romancer.

However this may be, his hook is well worth the carefullest study any of our critics can give it. The tales are all freshly and vigorously conceived, and each is very striking in a very different way, while undoubtedly A Passionate Pilgrim is the best of all. In this Mr. James has seized upon what seems a very common motive, in a hero with a claim to an English estate, but the character of the hero idealizes the situation : the sordid illusion of the ordinary American heir to English property becomes in him a poetic passion, and we are made to feel an instant tenderness for the gentle visionary who fancies himself to have been misborn in our hurried, eager world, but who owes to his American birth the very rapture he feels in gray England. The character is painted with the finest sense of its charm and its deficiency, and the story that grows out of it is very touching. Our readers will remember how, in the company of the supposed narrator, Clement Searle goes down from London to the lovely old country-place to which he has relinquished all notion of pretending, but which he fondly longs to see; and they will never have forgotten the tragedy of his reception and expulsion by his English cousin. The proprietary Searle stands for that intense English sense of property which the mere dream of the American has unpardonably outraged, and which in his case wreaks itself in an atrocious piece of savagery. He is imagined with an extraordinary sort of vividness which leaves the redness of his complexion like a stain on the memory ; and yet we believe we realize better the dullish kindness, the timid sweetness of the not-at-once handsome sister who falls in love with the poor American cousin. The atmosphere of the story, which is at first that of a novel, changes to the finer air of romance during the scenes at Lockley Park, and you gladly accede to all the romantic conditions, for the sake of otherwise unattainable effects. It is good and true that Searle should not be shocked out of his unrequited affection for England by his cousin’s brutality, but should die at Oxford, as he does, in ardent loyalty to his ideal; and it is one of the fortunate inspirations of the tale to confront him there with that decayed and reprobate Englishman in whom abides a longing for the New World as hopeless and unfounded as his own passion for the Old. The character of Miss Searle is drawn with peculiar sweetness and firmness; there is a strange charm in the generous devotion masked by her trepidations and proprieties, and the desired poignant touch is given when at the end she comes only in time to stand by Searle’s death-bed. Throughout the story there are great breadths of deliciously sympathetic description. At Oxford the author lights his page with all the rich and mellow picturesqueness of the ancient university town, but we do not know that he is happier there than in his sketches of Lockley Park and Hampton Court, or his study of the old London inn. Everywhere he conveys to you the rapture of his own seeing; one reads such a passage as this with the keen transport that the author felt in looking on the scene itself: —

“ The little village of Hampton Court stands clustered about the broad entrance of Bushey Park. After we had dined we lounged along into the hazy vista of the great avenue of horse-chestnuts. There is a rare emotion, familiar to every intelligent traveler, in which the mind, with a great. passionate throb, achieves a magical synthesis of its impressions. You feel England ; you feel Italy. The reflection for the moment has an extraordinary poignancy. I had known it from time to time in Italy, and had opened my soul to it as to the spirit of the Lord. Since my arrival in England I had been waiting for it to come. A bottle of excellent Burgundy at dinner had perhaps unlocked to it the gates of sense; it came now with a conquering tread. Just the scene around me was the England of my visions. Over against us, amid the deep-hued bloom of its ordered gardens, the dark red palace, with its formal copings and its vacant windows, seemed to tell of a proud and splendid past; the little village nestling between park and palace, around a patch of turfy common, with its tavern of gentility, its ivy-towered church, its parsonage, retained to my modernized fancy the lurking semblance of a feudal hamlet. It was in this dark, composite light that I had read all English prose; it was this mild, moist air that had blown from the verses of English poets; beneath these broad acres of rain-deepened greenness a thousand honored dead lay buried.”

A strain of humor which so pleasantly characterizes the descriptions of the London inn, tinges more sarcastically the admirable portrait of the shabby Rawson at Oxford, and also colors this likeness of a tramp — a fellow-man who has not had his picture better done: —

“ As we sat, there came trudging along the road an individual whom from afar I recognized as a member of the genus ‘tramp.’ I had read of the British tramp, but I had never yet encountered him, and I brought my historic consciousness to bear upon the present specimen. As he approached us he slackened pace and finally halted, touching his cap. He was a man of middle age, clad in a greasy bonnet, with greasy earlocks depending from its sides. Round his neck was a grimy red scarf, tucked into his Waistcoat; his coat and trousers had a remote affinity with those of a reduced hostler. In one hand he had a stick; on his arm he bore a tattered basket, with a handful of withered green stuff in the bottom. His face was pale, haggard, and degraded beyond description, — a singular mixture of brutality and finesse. He had a history. From what height had he fallen, from what depth had he risen ? Never was a form of rascally beggarhood more complete. There was a merciless fixedness of outline about him, which filled me with a kind of awe. I felt as if I were in the presence of a personage— an artist in vagrancy.

“ ‘ For God’s sake, gentlemen,’he said, in that raucous tone of weather-beaten poverty suggestive of chronic sore-throat exacerbated by perpetual gin, — 'for God’s sake, gentlemen, have pity on a poor ferncollector ! ’— turning up his stale dandelions. ‘Food has n’t passed my lips, gentlemen, in the last three days.’

“We gaped responsive, in the precious pity of guileless Yankeeism. ' I wonder,’ thought I, ‘ if half a crown would be enough ? ’ And our fasting botanist went limping away through the park with a mystery of satirical gratitude superadded to his general mystery.”

Mr. James does not often suffer his sense of the ludicrous to relax the sometimes over-serious industry of his analyses, and when he has once done so, he seems to repent it. Yet we are sure that the poetic value of A Passionate Pilgrim is enhanced by the unwonted interfusion of humor, albeit the humor is apt to be a little too scornful. The tale is in high degree imaginative, and its fascination grows upon you in the reading and the retrospect, exquisitely contenting you with it as a new, line, and beautiful invention.

In imaginative strength it surpasses the other principal story of the book. In Madame de Mauves the spring of the whole action is the idea of an American girl who will have none but a French nobleman for her husband. It is not a vulgar adoration of rank in her, but a young girl’s belief that ancient lineage, circumstances of the highest civilization, and opportunities of the greatest refinement, must result in the noblest type of character. Grant the premises, and the effect of her emergence into the cruel daylight of facts is unquestionably tremendous : M. le Baron de Mauves is frankly unfaithful to his American wife, and, finding her too dismal in her despair, advises her to take a lover. A difficulty with so French a situation is that only a French writer can carry due conviction of it to the reader. M. de Mauves, indeed, justifies himself to the reader’s sense of likelihood with great consistency, and he is an extremely suggestive conjecture. Of course, he utterly misconceives his wife’s character and that of all her race, and perceives little and understands nothing not of his own tradition : —

“ They talked for a while about various things, and M. de Mauves gave a humorous account of his visit to America. His tone was not soothing to Longmore’s excited sensibilities. He seemed to consider the country a gigantic joke, and his urbanity only went so far as to admit that it was not a bad one. Longmore was not, by habit, an aggressive apologist for our institutions ; but the baron’s narrative confirmed his worst impressions of French superficiality. He had understood nothing, he had felt nothing, he had learned nothing ; and our hero, glancing askance at his aristocratic profile, declared that if the chief merit of a long pedigree was to leave one so vaingloriously stupid, he thanked his stars that the Longmores had emerged from obscurity in the present century, in the person of an enterprising lumber merchant. M. de Mauves dwelt of course on that prime oddity of ours, the liberty allowed to young girls ; and related the history of his researches into the ‘ opportunities ’ it presented to French noblemen, — researches in which, during a fortnight’s stay, he seemed to have spent many agreeable hours. ' I am bound to admit,’he said, ‘ that in every case I was disarmed by the extreme candor of the young lady, and that they took care of themselves to better purpose than I have seen some mammas in France take care of them.' Longmore greeted this handsome concession with the grimmest of smiles, and damned his impertinent patronage.”

This is all very good character, and here is something from the baron that is delicious : —

“ I remember that, not long after our marriage, Madame de Mauves undertook to read me one day a certain Wordsworth, — a poet highly esteemed, it appears, chez vous. It seemed to me that she took me by the nape of the neck and forced my head for half an hour over a basin of soupe aux choux, and that one ought to ventilate the drawingroom before any one called.”

The baron’s sister, in her candid promotion of an intrigue between Madame de Mauves and Longmore, we cannot quite account for even by the fact that she hated them both. But Madame de Mauves is the strength of the story, and if Mr. James has not always painted the kind of women that women like to meet in fiction, he has richly atoned in her lovely nature for all default. She is the finally successful expression of an ideal of woman which has always been a homage, perhaps not to all kinds of women, but certainly to the sex. We are thinking of the heroine of Poor Richard, of Miss Guest in Guest’s Confession, of Gabrielle de Bergerac in the story of that name, and other gravely sweet girls of this author’s imagining. Madame de Mauves is of the same race, and she is the finest, — as truly American as she is womanly; and in a peculiar fragrance of character, in her purity, her courage, her inflexible high-mindedness, wholly of our civilization and almost of our climate, so different are her virtues from the virtues of the women of any other nation.

The Madonna of the Future is almost as perfect a piece of work, in its way, as A Passionate Pilgrim. It is a more romantic conception than Madame de Mauves, and yet more real. Like A Passionate Pilgrim, it distinguishes itself among Mr. James’s stories as something that not only arrests the curiosity, stirs the fancy, and interests the artistic sense, but deeply touches the heart. It is more than usually relieved, too, by the author’s humorous recognition of the pathetic absurdity of poor Theobald, and there is something unusually good in the patience with which the handsome, common-minded Italian woman of his twenty years' adoration is set before us. Our pity that his life should have slipped away from him in devout study of this vulgar beauty, and that she should grow old and he should die before he has made a line to celebrate her perfection or seize his ideal, is vastly heightened by the author’s rigid justice to her; she is not caricatured by a light or a shadow, and her dim sense of Theobald’s goodness and purity is even flattered into prominence. In all essentials one has from this story the solid satisfaction given by work in which the conception is fine, and the expression nowhere falls below it — if we except one point that seems to us rather essential, in a thing so carefully tempered and closely wrought. The reiteration of the Italian figure-maker’s philosophy, “ Cats and monkeys, monkeys and cats; all human life is there,” is apparently of but wandering purport, and to end the pensive strain of the romance with it is to strike a jarring note that leaves the reader’s mind out of tune. Sometimes even the ladies and gentlemen of Mr. James’s stories are allowed a certain excess or violence in which the end to be achieved is not distinctly discernible, or the effect so reluctantly responds to the intention as to leave merely the sense of the excess.

Eugene Pickering is, like Madame de Mauves, one of those realistic subjects which we find less real than the author’s romantic inspirations. There is no fault with the treatment; that is thoroughly admirable, full of spirit, wit, and strength ; but there is a fancifulness in the outlines of Pickering’s history and the fact of his strange betrothal which seems to belong to an oldfashioned stage-play method of fiction rather than to such a modern affair as that between the unsophisticated American and Madame Blumenthal; it did not need that machinery to produce this effect, thanks to common conditions of ours that often enough keep young men as guileless as Pickering, and as fit for sacrifice at such shrines as hers. However, something must always be granted to the story-teller by way of premises ; if we exacted from Mr. James only that he should make his premises fascinating, we should have nothing to ask here. His start, in fact, is always superb; he possesses himself of your interest at once, and he never relinquishes it till the end ; though there he may sometimes leave your curiosity not quite satisfied on points such as a story-teller assumes to make clear. What, for example, were exactly the tortuous workings of Madame Blumenthal’s mind in her selfcontradictory behavior towards Pickering? These things must be at least unmistakably suggested.

Since Hawthorne’s Donatello, any attempt to touch what seems to be the remaining paganism in Italian character must accuse itself a little, but The Last of the Valerii is a study of this sort that need really have nothing on its conscience. It is an eminently poetic conceit, though it appeals to a lighter sort of emotions than any other story in Mr. James’s book ; it is an airy fabric woven from those bewitching glimpses of the impossible which life in Italy affords, and which those who have enjoyed them are perfectly right to overvalue. It has just the right tint of ideal trouble in it which no living writer could have imparted more skillfully than it is here done. If the story is of slighter material than the others, the subtlety of its texture gives it a surpassing charm, and makes it worthy to be named along with the only other purely romantic tale in the book.

To our thinking, Mr. James has been conspicuously fortunate in placing his Romance of Certain Old Clothes in that eighteenthcentury New England when the country, still colonial, was no longer rigidly puritanic, and when a love of splendor and accumulating wealth had created social conditions very different from those conventionally attributed to New England. It is among such bravely dressing provincials as Copley used to paint, and as dwelt in fine town mansions in Boston, or the handsome country-places which still remember their faded grandeur along Brattle Street in Cambridge, that Mr. James finds the circumstance and material of his personages ; and we greatly enjoy the novelty of this conception of what not only might, but must have existed hereabouts in times which we are too prone to fancy all close-cropped and sad-colored. The tale is written with heat, and rapidly advances from point to point, with a constantly mounting interest. The sisterly rivalry is shown with due boldness, but without excess, and the character of Viola is sketched with a vigor that conveys a full sense of her selfish, luxurious beauty. The scene between her and Perdita when the engagement of the latter is betrayed, the scene in which she unrolls the stuff of the wedding-dress and confronts herself in the glass with it falling from her shoulder, and that in which she hastily tries the garment on after her sister’s marriage, are pictures as full of character as they are of color. The most is made of Perdita where she lies dying, and bids her husband keep her fine clothes for her little girl; it is very affecting indeed, and all the more so for the explicit human-nature of the dying wife’s foreboding. In the whole course of the story nothing is urged, nothing is dwelt upon; and all our story-tellers, including Mr. James himself, could profitably take a lesson from it in this respect. At other times he has a tendency to expatiate upon his characters too much, and not to trust his reader’s perception enough. For the sake of a more dramatic presentation of his persons, he has told most of the stories in this book as things falling within the notice of the assumed narrator; an excellent device; though it would be better if the assumed narrator were able to keep himself from seeming to patronize the simpler-hearted heroes, and from openly rising above them in a worldly way.

But this is a very little matter, and none of our discontents with Mr. James bear any comparison to the pleasure we have had in here renewing our acquaintance with stories as distinctly characteristic as anything in literature. It is indeed a marvelous first book in which the author can invite his critic to the same sort of reflection that criticism bestows upon the claims of the great reputations ; but one cannot dismiss this volume with less and not slight it. Like it or not, you must own that here is something positive, original, individual, the result of long and studious effort in a wellconsidered line, and mounting in its own way to great achievement. We have a reproachful sense of leaving the immense suggestiveness of the book scarcely touched, and we must ask the reader to supply our default from the stories themselves. He may be assured that nothing more novel in our literature has yet fallen in his way ; and we are certain that he will not close the book without a lively sense of its force. We can promise him, also, his own perplexities about it, among which may be a whimsical doubt whether Mr. James has not too habitually addressed himself less to men and women in their mere humanity, than to a certain kind of cultivated people, who, well as they are in some ways, and indispensable as their appreciation is, are often a little narrow in their sympathies and povertystricken in the simple emotions; who are so, or try to be so, which is quite as bad, or worse.

— Mr. Emerson himself supplies us with a “ coigne of vantage ” from which to regard his anthology, in the first words of his preface : “ This volume took its origin from an old habit of copying any poem or lines that interested me into a blank book. In many years my selections filled the volume, and required another ; and still the convenience of commanding all my favorites in one album, instead of searching my own and other libraries for a desired song or verse, and the belief that what charmed me probably might charm others, suggested the printing of my enlarged selection.” That Parnassus should thus have a special interest to the collector, and certainly be more convenient for use than two manuscript albums, cannot be denied; but the question which confronts us upon opening the book, and reading this account of its origin, is how far this or any similar collection is a mere private convenience, and how far it is a public service. Undoubtedly a collection of poems made by a man of taste and generous reading, especially if it grew under his hand rather than was manufactured to order, must contain a large number of verses that will charm others as they charmed him ; but the worth of the collection to the collector will be quite out of proportion to its worth to all other lovers of poetry. To him it is a store-house into which he has gathered treasures, of which the gathering is a large part, and its chief use to others is to stimulate them to similar collections. It is a great gain, we believe, for every one who has an ear for verse to make a collection, saving thus what might otherwise be lost to him ; it is an outside memory, if his own is fickle and incapacious; he may carry it with him when he must leave his library behind, and the transcribing is itself an act of courtesy toward his favorites which brings a gracious return. He may even share it with a friend, as he shares his table or his daily walk, but it is because he gives so much of himself with it that the sharing has worth.

On the other hand, he who turns to a book of selections in expectation of satisfying his thirsty soul, or sends others to it with a charitable purpose, is doomed to disappointment. Mr. Emerson hints at this in his essay on the Poet, when after giving a glimpse at the latent poetry in American life, still unsung,he says, “If I have not found that excellent combination of gifts in my countrymen which I seek, neither could I aid myself to fix the idea of the poet by reading now and then in Chalmers’s collection of five centuries of English poets.” We may add that it is not in the order of nature that a desultory reading of Parnassus should cultivate a true knowledge of and love for poetry. If we may humbly interpret the bee’s wisdom by our own experience, its flight from flower to flower has a good deal to do with its pleasure in sipping. It is a delusion to place such a book as this in the hands of a girl or boy and count upon it for an inspiration of poetic feeling. Indeed, it seems as though such collections inevitably forced the editor into a mechanical habit of mind in regarding poetry in general; else why the attempt at a scientific classification which runs through this and similar volumes ? It can at best be but the rudest boundaries that separate the several pastures on Parnassus, faint lines only to the gods on the summit, and easily overpassed by Pegasus. Yet here we have twelve separate books, with suggested subdivisions marked over each. We open to Nature, and find Wordsworth’s poem To Joanna. It is true that in Wordsworth’s poetry human figures look at a distance very much like bushes, yet this poem, as others, is penetrated with a subtle breath of human life — here, Joanna’s movement to the poet’s side — which at once lifts the whole scene into a tender human place, and we should have had no reason to complain of a classification which cast this poem under the head of Friendship. Indeed, our first impulse is to erase all the distinctions that are made; they only embarrass us and tend to make our first attitude toward poetry a critical rather than a receptive one. So from this point also we find ourselves returning to our first proposition, for, getting rid of all the divisions in the book we easily reach the conclusion of getting rid of the book itself.

We have hinted above, however, at a reason which may seem to suffice for the book’s existence, in its being in some sense an opportunity given to the public to share Mr. Emerson’s scrap-books with him, and be taken into his confidence as regards his special favorites in poetry. It would seem to be an excellent chance for discovering what are the poems which a poet treasures, and the collection is manifestly not one made to give specimens of all fine poets, but examples of fine poetry. Yet we fear that any one who set out to discover Mr. Emerson’s judgment of poetry by this book would have to be satisfied with a very general induction. There may be noted the large preponderance of poems which appeal to the intellect rather than to the emotions; a curious paucity, as compared with other collections, of love poems; the presence of enigmatical poetry, represented by H. H.’s verses, George Herbert, and Donne; the limited showing of comic and humorous poems, drawn mainly from Holmes, Lowell, and Harte, with nothing from Hood, who, by the way, is not represented at all in the volume; the omission of certain poems which one would have supposed quick to find their way to Mr. Emerson’s scrap-book, such as some of Hake’s Parables, and at any rate Whitman’s burst of sorrow, My Captain, O my Captain! which makes the remorseful threnody on Lincoln by Tom Taylor, given in this volume, seem an intrusion; the general adherence to wellknown poets, there being few names which had not already received a tolerably secure place on the real Parnassus ; and the general freedom from commonplace, there being very few poems which could be so characterized, though we should hardly have looked for the tinsel majesty of Mrs. Alexander’s Burial of Moses or the cheap fun of Derby’s A Collusion between a Alegaiter and a WaterSnaik. A few poems also have been rescued from partial oblivion and helped, some of them, into a well-deserved fame. Among these may be named Miss Palfrey’s Sir Pavon and St. Pavon, Walter Mitchell’s Tacking Ship off Shore, Messenger’s Give me the Old, Jones Very’s The Strangers, and Blake’s A Little Boy Lost, which Mr. Emerson renames Orthodoxy. We wonder indeed that so few of Blake’s lyrics are given. The few pages of preface by Mr. Emerson will be welcome to all readers for the sketches in charcoal, so to speak, which he draws of the chief poets represented in his collection. The collection itself, as wo have intimated, will be found interesting by those who already have an acquaintance with its contents, and a matter of convenience to them; it is moreover exclusive enough to satisfy a poet, but we can find but a barren use for such a book, and would rather set a boy or girl upon some one poet nearest akin to their mental aptitude, and leave them by this clew to grope their way into the secret place where Poetry dwells.

— Captain Bogardus has, it is to be feared, not been entirely successful in the selection of an editor for his book. It is difficult not to suppose that a man as skillful as Bogardus is known to be with his gun, and who, as his book announces, has for a quarter of a century supported his family by its successful use, would have a vast deal to say about the habits of game and the best way and circumstances under which to shoot it, which less proficient persons would be glad to hear. Yet there is so much personal experience and autobiographical sketch, so many stories of successful days and of men less successful, and such numerous offers to bet accepted or still open for acceptance, compared with what should properly belong to the book, that the genera] effect is very far from being satisfactory. Even the plan of the book is not to be commended : it treats of field, cover, and trap shooting as though the subjects were cognate ; to a sportsman they certainly are not. That great skill may be reached in killing pigeons according to the rules in such cases provided, and that Bogardus is perhaps unequaled in this direction, may be admitted ; but it is not sport; indeed, it is scarcely any training for it — certainly not the best. Many are very successful pigeon shots, and yet very unsuccessful in the field. The reason is not far to seek : in all pigeon shooting there is the assurance that from a particular, welldefined spot in full view, or from one of several such spots, the birds will rise; the similarity between this and the shooting of grouse, Virginia partridges, and most game is very faint indeed. Generally game rises while the sportsman is walking up to the point, ignorant of the place (excepting in a very general way where it is, which in the most open shooting is from cover of grass, bush, and brier, more or less close ; and which in cover is from the thickest tangles of vine and bush and branch. The gunner does not know at what moment it will rise ; and when it does the game is usually in some numbers, which confuse the shot of the brace singled for the two barrels.

Much the best part of Bogardus’s book is the chapter on the Art of Shooting: all that can be learned from a book and without practice is here given, though very much the same appeared in The Dead Shot, published ten years since.

The reader will learn with some surprise of a way of breaking dogs to their work which it is believed is at least new. Hitherto the heedlessness and faults of dogs in the field have been corrected by rating or whipping, or both, unless their owners were fortunate enough to know and use the more reasonable and less troublesome method detailed in Dinks on the Dog. It was the lot of Bogardus to buy from the widow of a deceased butcher a setter heretofore used as a watch-dog, which, when taken afield, fell to chasing the birds as doubtless he had his former owner’s sheep and cattle. The dog in his pursuit took no notice of the hallooing, and was thereupon shot by Bogardus with small shot from the right and left barrel; a subsequent shooting converted this watch-dog into an excellent sporting dog. This success was so marked that the shooting was not confined to the watch-dogs of deceased butchers, as the reader might not unnaturally hope, but it was adopted as part of a system of training, and is so recommended by Bogardus. Those who have neither seen nor used this system might not unreasonably suppose that after being shot, a dog would be demoralized into yelping and headlong flight, and that every report of the gun afterwards would set him in retreat. But it will comfort such as are inclined to shoot their dogs into obedience, to learn that “the dog knows in a moment what this is for,” and that “ one lesson is generally enough, and the second is always effectual; ” though it is to be observed that the butcher’s dog required

three lessons, which it is equally true he survived. — The author of Prairie and Forest would seem to have been in all those parts of the United States and the British Possessions to the north where the large game of North America is to be found, and to have intended to describe it. It may not safely be said that he has not succeeded, for few sportsmen have been in the vast country to the northward of Washington Territory, in the outlying tracts of the Hudson Bay country, and in the Black Hill region lately traversed by General Custer, and comparatively little is known of the musk sheep, the big horn sheep, or the ptarmigan ; but it may truly be said that the descriptions are so general, and present their subjects in such vague and spiritless form, that they inspire a depression of feeling not exceeded by that received from reading a child’s natural history of fifty years ago.

The close, careful, unflagging attention to the feeding, sleeping, resting, and roaming of large game, which goes before every hunter’s success, has always made sportsmen more or less naturalists; and it is unfortunate that one who can write at all, and who has pursued such game as the elk or beautiful wapiti deer, the antelope, mountain and musk sheep, should not have added more to the slender information with regard to them, and that he should have found it possible to pass through the wild lands in which they are to be found without an attempt at a sketch or an account. The personal adventures of the author, which have relieved the readers of so many sporting books from weariness, are plentiful enough in Prairie and Forest, but they afford little relief here : they seem to have been almost purposely denuded of interest, and to stare at the reader from the pages in a lifeless and unnatural way; they rarely have the merit of illustrating any usual or ordinary trait or habit of game. Most readers will wonder why the portion of the book relating to game birds should have been written at all: less than a page is devoted to the spruce grouse, six lines to the sage grouse of the great alkali plains, two pages and a half to the ptarmigan, — which probably not a dozen sportsmen of the United States ever saw, —and three pages to the Virginia partridge, whose habits (slightly changing with the various countries it makes glad with its presence) and whose willful ways at times and seasons might fill a volume. With an instinct of true sportsmanship, however, the author again and again, but none too often, points attention to the shameless, reckless, and wanton waste of game which is going on over our whole country, as well with regard to birds as animals, in most places with no opposition, and in but a few with any that is efficient. His only suggestion of relief is laws whose violation shall be punished by fines. Probably in Illinois, where the author found a party of men shooting from twenty to thirty brace of grouse a day in warm weather for nearly a week, and who disposed of their game by directing the landlord of the inn to “ throw it into the hog-pen,” the game laws were framed and admirably well fortified by heavy penalties.

To explain why game laws in the United States are not enforced requires an understanding of the feeling about game among people living on the land — the farmers — not easily attained or expressed. Such persons are rarely sportsmen, and yet if unsportsmanlike practices (that is, devices in which the game is not allowed fair play in the war between its natural resources and the gunner’s skill) and waste of game life can be prevented, it must be in great part by their aid. A sportsman, therefore, in seeking to enlist the services of the farmers, is unable to use that love of sport as an argument that so moves his own feelings, and other arguments seem, as in fact they are, far-drawn and of weakened force; and underlying all that he can say he feels there are against him two unexpressed but honestly maintained opinions : one, that so far as a man is getting game for the market (a man not beloved of sportsmen) he is doing a matter of business, and if he can get more birds by snares and traps than by shooting, or at a less cost (as often he may), why, it would be the height of folly not to snare and trap them; another, that a man who is shooting for pleasure is a fellow with plenty of time and money, and quite as lucky as he should be without further help, and that after all, his pleasurable life has the flavor of disdain of the busy folk about him. This is bad enough, but the case is made worse when it is found that through indifference to trespass or owing to the national good-nature, not even a sense of injured ownership can be enlisted among the farmers on behalf of game.

— Happily there is game in the land able to protect itself; year after year wild fowl in countless numbers return from their distant wanderings to the Atlantic, Western, and Gulf States; not even their ceaseless pursuit in the Chesapeake Bay and its inlets, along the coast and rivers of eastern Virginia, nor their destruction in the open ponds and overflowed bottoms of the West, seems to lessen the vast flocks of a new season. Wild-fowl shooting in the middle Western States is the subject of Mr. Long’s book; and glorious is the shooting and sport when in the ponds of wild rice mallard are flying from before dawn until late in the morning, at which time they seek shelter in the overflowed bottom-lands covered with timber, where they may be shot until evening sends them again to the feeding-grounds of rice. That Mr. Long has keenly and intelligently watched the rising up and settling down of Western ducks is plain throughout the book, and what is directed about placing decoys in position and making blinds with reference to wind and sun is the result of judicious observation and experience. Many of the observations are simple enough, but attention to even such not unfrequently makes, as the author says, the difference between the lucky and the unlucky man,and in duck shooting the causes that mar success are so many and minute that luck is the only solution reasonably to be offered. There is scarce anything connected with ducking in the Western States too small for the author’s care; even as to the handling of the boat when gathering the killed and wounded, there are suggestions which well deserve to be remembered, and throughout this small volume is shown a habit of constant attention to every movement of game, which, if followed by the reader, will not fail to add to his resources and pleasure as a sportsman.

— Professor Adams’s Democracy and Monarchy in France is a work of conspicuous ability, in method and manner at least, fully worthy of the important and somewhat painfully interesting theme of which it treats. The author says in his preface that it has been his “ effort to show that the present political character of the French people is the legitimate result of certain doctrines and habits that have been taking root in the nation during the past hundred years ; ” and furthermore he expresses the conviction : “ Every one who follows these pages through, and assents to the positions taken, will agree with me in the belief that the great present need of France is the destraction of what I have called the revolutionary spirit; and that if this destruction is impossible (as very likely it is), the next need in importance is the establishment of such a government as will render the revolutionary spirit powerless.”

The quiet confidence here expressed is abundantly justified by the power of the pages that follow, their lucid arrangement of chaotic material, the vigor of their logic, their vivid presentation, and, we must add, their ingenious selection of facts. From the philosophers of the eighteenth century Professor Adams selects for especial discussion, as most noteworthy and influential upon their time, Helvetius, Condillac, Voltaire, and Rousseau. He finds the reasonings of Helvetius in his work De l’Esprit, and of Condillac in his memorable Traité des Sensations, entirely harmonious, and a logical deduction from them all in the following paradox : “We are morally bound to obey the impulses created within us by the objects with which we come in contact; ” that is, “ the only moral obligation which rests upon us is to be immoral.” The work of Voltaire, whose prodigious power he admits, and whose political influence he even commends, is compared with that of Erasmus. It was the mission of both “ to ridicule that which existed and prepare the way for that which was to come.” These three writers, Helvetius, Condillac, and Voltaire, typify the negative and destructive philosophy of the last century. Rousseau represents its positive teachings, which may be summed up as follows: “ Every man is his own absolute master, and the only legitimate law for a man is his individual will. At no time has any one a right to control him, if he does not give his consent. This will cannot be delegated, for the reason that it cannot cease to reside with himself. The consequence is that, strictly speaking, there can be no representative government. The laws may indeed be framed by deputies, but they must all be submitted to the people before they can have binding force. If an attempt be made to enforce a statute which the people have not consented to, it is the right and duty of the people to resist it. If an attempt be made to force away your property, it is cowardly not to resist; if the government attempt to take away your liberty by imposing upon you laws to which you do not consent, it is the more cowardly not to resist by so much as liberty is better than earthly possessions. Thus it will be seen that these doctrines not only make revolution a right, but impose it upon the people as a duty.” Professor Adams justly adds that these conclusions are manifestly destructive not only of all political governments, but also of all social and commercial life, and he finds in them the natural antecedents and full theoretic justification of the shameless license and unmatched atrocities of the Great Revolution.

The summing up in chapter four of the career and character of the first emperor is very masterly, and shows him grimly in that worst moral light which the most faithful of modern researches tend more and more to convince us is the true one. But we think that our author underrates the hold of this stupendous sinner on the heart — or was it only the imagination ? — of the French people; as he certainly does not fairly represent the enthusiasm which attended him during the Hundred Days. He is doubtless right, however, in saying that in the last days of the Empire, Napoleon was very generally abandoned by the intelligence and especially the wealth of the nation. The government of Louis Philippe he considers by far the best which France has enjoyed for a century, and Guizot is the solitary French statesman whom Professor Adams can heartily admire; but the régime and the minister were both too good for the people, which, after fretting for eighteen years under the restraints of law and decorum, reverted to the principles of Rousseau and broke forth into a transport of anarchy, the natural reaction of which was again quietude under a second Napoleonic despotism. Professor Adams attempts no analysis of the character of the second Napoleon. He barely even proffers a guess at that oft - essayed but never fairly deciphered riddle. But he shows with great force, and abundant citation of irrefragable authority, the immense corruptions and deceptions of his rule, and, in particular, the delusive nature of his ostentatious appeal to the popular voice in the various plébiscites. In the end, Louis Napoleon became insufferable to the great middle class, as his uncle had done before him, and it was in the vain hope of propping his waning power and diverting the nation by foreign conquest, that he precipitated the Prussian war.

This is a disheartening story. But there are considerations which induce the hope that the case may not be after all so desperate as this latest and most severe historian of French democracy seems to believe, and the chief of them is this : It is a historic fact that times of national struggle, distress, and seeming disorganization are often the very times when the nation is exerting a peculiarly powerful influence, through the ideas which are struck out in such seasons of stress, and the new and noble types of individual character in which they are ever fruitful. And that France, during this very last century of commotion, blunder, defeat, and ultimate disgrace, has led the thought of the world on political subjects, and furnished mankind with its most conspicuous and affecting examples of civic virtue, we think no unprejudiced student will deny. Our author perpetually quotes, in condemnation of their country, the warnings, reproofs, and vaticinations of such eminent patriots as De Tocqueville, De Broglie, and Guizot, without seeming to perceive that the keen consciences and unsparing rebukes of statesmen like these are themselves an earnest of health in a nation, or at least of recuperative power. On the other hand, his consistent hostility to whatever is distinctively French in character leads him into curious inconsistencies, as where he laments on one page the lack of public spirit which renders political meetings in France impossible, and denounces on another the Political Banquets of 1817 as having hastened the disastrous revolution of the ensuing year. It is singular, however, that while treating the revolution of ’48 as a mere ebullition of Gallic madness, instead of the universal blind movement toward freedom which it undoubtedly was, and in which France merely bore her part, our author should render unusual justice to Lamartine, of whose fascinating and foolish History of the Girondists he gives a most discriminating and brilliant criticism. Professor Adams’s prevailing and doubtless constitutional dislike of Frenchmen and things French has its natural correlative in an enthusiasm for all things German, and he even quotes with approval the absurd epigram of Professor Seeley,

“ As a rule, good books are German.” To which there can be but one appropriate response : “ And consequently unreadable.” Nor is this any mere idle retort. The collocation of facts, however patient and laborious, is certainly no more important to the diffusion of knowledge than their organization ; nay, it is even useless and fruitless without the latter. And if Germany has been foremost in gathering the material of modern learning, it is France which has given it form, and adapted it to the uses of mankind.

— It is curious to notice how minds with a different motive impulse will use the same premises to enforce the most opposite conclusions. Professor Jevons’s book on scientific method is no unworthy compeer of the famous treatises of Whewell and Mill on similar subjects; and with many differences both of form and of matter from that of Mill, it yet resembles it in continually insisting on the most thorough - going empiricism. Both writers think we know only what we have experienced, and as that is but a vanishing mote in the space of all that is, our affirmations concerning the Necessary or the Possible are well-nigh worthless. Both keep reminding us of the plus ultra which surrounds our intelligence. But Mill, who got from his father such a strong anti-theologic bias, used this plus ultra for smiting the conceit of metaphysical knowledge in conservatives and theosophists; while Jevons rebukes by its means the arrogance of materialistic assumptions. Mill said, You shan’t affirm ; Jevons says, You shan’t deny. This thread through Jevons’s book is what is best calculated to give it general interest. For the rest of it is so technical as only to appeal to special students of logic, and indeed to debar us from trying to give anything like an exact account of it in these pages, destined as they are for the information of the non-professional reader. A slight account may however be ventured on. Professor Jevons has recast the whole of formal logic in a very simple and what will probably be recognized as a much improved shape, by the adoption of two principles: that of the quantification of the predicate, and that which he calls the Substitution of Similars. By the first he writes every proposition as an identity or algebraic equation. Thus all A’s are some B’s is written by him: A = AB. For instance: “Mammalia = mammalian vertebrata asserts identity between a part of the vertebrata and the mammalia. If it is asked, What part ? the proposition affords no answer except that it is the part which is mammalian ; but the assertion 'mammalia = some vertebrata' tells us no more.” The second principle declares that whatever is true of anything (or can be equated with it in the author’s system of notation) is true of its like or equivalent, which equivalent we may then substitute for it in the equation. By means of the arithmetic of combinations and permutations he calculates the number of different combinations into which a given number of terms may possibly fall. Each of these cases is expressed in his notation, and, being then confronted with the data or premises from which the terms were derived, is either canceled as incompatible therewith, or stands as a consistent deduction therefrom. This sounds laborious enough, and in all but the simplest real cases it would be quite unpractical; but it unifies so thoroughly the formal theory of reasoning, doing away with the tedious scholastic classification of syllogisms and rules for conversion, that it has actually enabled the author to construct a logical machine out of which, when the keyboard is manipulated, all the conclusions consistent with given premises will at once appear.

Professor Jevons’s account of induction differs considerably from that of Mill, though less than its author seems to suppose. Mill is everywhere in his treatment of logic more psychological than other writers, the question with him being, How do men actually reason? while with Jevons it is mainly, How can the essence of critically unassailable reasoning be most simply expressed and symbolized? Thus Mill finds fault with Hamilton’s quantification of the predicate as psychologically false, but admits it to have a symbolic utility. When Jevons attacks him for asserting our ordinary reasoning from one particular to another, or by analogy, to constitute the real act of induction, he forgets that while Mill paid most attention to this, he yet expressly admitted that the more complete process of ascending to the general law and thence deducing the other particular is a form always possible, and necessary when assurance of scientific accuracy is desired.

Professor Jevons’s account of the mode of ascent to the general law, or character common to all of a concrete group of phenomena, is highly suggestive and valuable, but we cannot touch it in detail. Suffice it to say that the ascent is always made by a guess, which is then confronted with the facts given and with new facts, and so made more probable, or less so, but never certain; for we can never be sure that some other common character, even more general, may not lie concealed in the facts, which some future genius may be able to see, or that a future instance may not shatter our law. The account given of discovery as based wholly on this quick invention of hypothesis and subsequent verification is in the highest degree valuable and interesting, from the historic examples which illustrate it. Bacon’s method of cataloguing instances and expecting the law passively to emerge at the end is shown to be ludicrously impotent, while Newton’s and Faraday’s practice of incessant guessing and testing are described as models. “It is wholly a mistake to say that modern science is the result of the Baconian philosophy; it is the Newtonian philosophy and the Newtonian method which have led to all the great triumphs of physical science, and I repeat that the Principia forms the true Novum Organum.”

Of the wealth of examples drawn from physical science, with which this book abounds, it is impossible to speak in too high terms. The work is a most original and solid contribution to logic and to much besides; not faultless, —we think in particular that Mr. Mill has been unjustly treated by the author, and that from dwelling too much on the mathematical side of things he has exaggerated the amount of our ignorance of nature as far as quality goes, — but indispensable to every student.

— It is not necessary that a great book should be openly constructive; it may even appear, just as a great man may appear (to his contemporaries), destructive ; but it needs to be, as a condition of greatness, exactly what a great man needs to be, exactly what a law needs to be, — fruitful, humane, significant, prophetic. In the preface to his book, Dr. Draper has given us in two sentences a picture of our times.

“ Whoever,” he says, “whoever has had an opportunity of becoming acquainted with the mental condition of the intelligent classes in Europe or America, must have perceived that there is a great and rapidly increasing departure from the public religious faith, and that, while among the more frank this divergence is not concealed, there is a far more extensive and far more dangerous secession, private and unacknowledged. So wide-spread and so powerful is this secession that it can neither be treated with contempt nor with punishment.

It cannot be extinguished by derision, by vituperation, or by force. The time is rapidly approaching when it will give rise to serious political results.” What has brought about this condition of things? “ What is God ? What is the soul ? What is the world ? How is it governed ? Have we any standard or criterion of truth?” These are the questions about which the old philosophers of Greece disputed, and these are the questions with which this little book is concerned.

It is extremely fortunate that to the solution of these problems the author brings so varied a culture and experience. As he is himself a brilliant discoverer in the domain of exact physics, in chemistry, and in physiology, science is ready to accept him as a fit exponent of her high mission : turned by what science considers a misfortune to herself to the new field of history and the laws of mind, he has previously proved his fitness to treat the great phenomena there presented. The discovery of truth has been kept steadfastly in view, and it has been sought by a philosophical method, free from triviality or petulance.

It will be said that this book comes in a fortunate time — when Mill and Tyndall and Gladstone have prepared the way. To this science answers that truth or the seeker for truth has no need for appropriate occasions : these are created when the time and the man have come. The importance and the gravity of the subjects considered are recognized in the almost judicial tone of the investigation, and whether we agree or dissent, it is impossible not to attend.

But let us turn and examine what is the argument of the book. This the author has himself given to us in his preface : —

“ I first direct attention to the origin of modern science as distinguished from ancient, by depending on observation, experiment, and mathematical discussion, instead of mere speculation. . . . Then with brevity I recall the well-known origin of Christianity, and show its advance to the attainment of imperial power, the transformation it underwent by its incorporation with paganism, the existing religion of the Roman Empire. - . . The parties to the conflict thus placed, I next relate the story of their first open struggle ; it is the first or Southern Reformation. The point in dispute had respect to the nature of God. It involved the rise of Mohammedanism. . . . This political event was followed by the restoration of science, the establishment of colleges, schools, libraries, throughout the dominions of the Arabians. Those conquerors . . . rejected the anthropomorphic ideas of the nature of God remaining in their popular belief, and accepted other more philosophical ones, akin to those that had long previously been attained to in India. The result of this was a second conflict, that respecting the nature of the soul. . . . Meantime, through the cultivation of astronomy, geography, and other sciences, correct views had been gained as to the position and relations of the earth, and as to the structure of the world; and since religion . . . insisted that the earth is the central and most important part of the universe, a third conflict broke out. ... Its issue was the overthrow of the church on the question in dispute. Subsequently a subordinate controversy arose respecting the age of the world. . . . In this she was again overthrown. . . . Then arose the fourth conflict, known to us as the Reformation. . . . The special form it assumed was a contest respecting the standard or criterion of truth, whether it was to be found in the church or in the Bible. . . . We are now in the midst of a controversy respecting the mode of government of the world, whether it is by incessant divine intervention, or by the operation of primordial and unchangeable law.”

Dr. Draper’s book is primarily a history of the conflict of science and religion ; but we feel that the conclusions which the author himself draws from his study are in favor of the latter of the two systems formulated below : “ Philosophy has never proposed but two hypotheses to explain the system of the world : first, a personal God existing apart, and a human soul called into existence, or created, and thenceforth immortal; second, an impersonal intelligence, or indeterminate God, and a soul emerging from and returning to him. As to the origin of beings, there are two opposite opinions: first, that they are created from nothing ; second, that they come by development from preëxisting forms. The theory of creation belongs to the first of the above hypotheses, that of evolution to the last.”

Here then are the old foes of the church under a new dress: but her old weapons will not avail against the new form; for men to-day will be satisfied only by their reason, which is their sole guide to judge of right and wrong. No matter what the outcome of this conflict may be, men of intelligence all over the world will welcome any earnest attempt to reach the truth. Such au attempt is contained in the book before us : it deserves a careful, frank, and catholic attention.

— The growth in the number of books about Africa is most noticeable. Only a few months ago we had Dr. Schweinfurth’s interesting record of his adventures, and now we have Sir Samuel Baker’s report of what was done by his expedition, which had for object the extirpation of the slave-trade in Central Africa. It will be remembered that he started out in the employ of the government of Egypt, apparently with the full support of the Khedive, and having carte blanche with regard to the preparations to be made. But no dream of perpetually baffled attempts to start upon a journey ever equaled the number and ingenuity of the delays that were continually embarrassing Sir Samuel Baker. His troubles began at Khartoum, where the officials were thoroughly opposed to the undertaking; he was not to be discouraged, however, and he pushed on, although with less material than he had hoped to collect. Ten months later, that is to say, in December, 1870, and after all manner of disheartening accidents and delays, the mission station of Gondokoro was reached.

The native tribes surrounding this station were hostile, and after some negotiation hostilities fairly began. He had a small force of trained men with which to oppose the savages, but the contest was very wearisome. The way that peace was brought about was very characteristic, and is worthy of mention as a specimen of the politics of the country. One day he shot some of a herd of elephants, and the recently hostile natives from the surrounding country gathered about, in readiness to conclude peace and get some elephant’s meat which they saw given away to a friendly tribe.

Being now in possession of a peaceful base of operations, Sir Samuel Baker determined to penetrate further into the south, and if possible to open communication with the Albert N’yanza. But the promised supplies had not been sent on to him from Khartoum, and the treachery of the native tribes was again apparent. Nothing daunted, however, he set out with only two hundred and twelve officers and men. Naturally this was no simple campaign he undertook : he found much of the country that had once been fertile and populous now devastated and deserted on account of the frequent incursions of the slave-hunters; and it was only by his own indomitable energy, the devotion and discipline of his men, and Lady Baker’s tact, that the expedition came out successfully from its constant perils. His well-trained men always fought well; their record is a very honorable one. So far as concerns the destruction of the slave-trade, the expedition was not without important result. The first step was taken towards showing the hostility of the government to that infamous traffic, but the completion of that great reform has yet to be made. The one man, Abou Saood, who was the most persistent enemy Baker met, has since been rewarded and promoted by the Egyptian government. Baker has shown at least the practicability of the reform and the proper measures to be taken to bring it about. His expedition also shows how possible it will be to bring Central Africa into communication with the rest of the world. The countless anecdotes of hunting and curious adventure make the book entertaining, and those who read between the lines will find in Sir Samuel Baker’s modest narration plenty of proof of the existence in his party, both leaders and men, of that sort of selfrestraint and energy which must, if anything can, especially strike the savage mind.

— Mr. Rice’s History of the First Parish in Danvers is an admirable specimen of a kind of book of which there are very few produced among us; while it is no less certain that we shall never deserve to be called a lettered nation until such books are common. The best qualifications of the formal historian — delicate judgment, a sympathetic imagination, and a seemingly inexhaustible power of patient research and verification — are not thought by the author to be unworthily employed in shedding light on the social and spiritual life of an obscure locality during a period of two centuries. This sort of thorough and self-denying literary work is common enough in older and more cultivated lands, and notably in France, where, under the head of mémoires pour servir, it embraces some of the most delightful reading in the language. But our own countrymen are, for the most part, so naïvely bent on securing a prompt return, in money or in notoriety, for what they do, that it is rather refreshing to find a book which can hardly be remunerative in either of these ways, so excellently made. The only circumstance which links the history of the Danvers parish with that of the great world is the strange and painful episode of the witchcraft trials and executions in 1692. On this wretched matter Mr. Rice dwells but lightly for the alleged reason that it has already been so completely illustrated by Mr. Upham in a more elaborate work of precisely the kind which we are praising. He says with great justice that “ the most of those who suffered death exhibited throughout their trial and imprisonment, and to the last, a genuinely Christian combination of meekness and courage. Their conduct reflected honor upon that humanity whose nobler traits, in that time of darkness, were visible upon themselves almost alone.”

Yet the new facts which our author unearths, bearing upon the warping and depressing conditions of early colonial life, all tend to increase our charity for the farmers of Salem, the judges, and even the clergy of the time; albeit he does admit that while reviewing the history of the Rev. Mr. Parris’s ministrations, he frequently wished “that that worthy were personally present, that he might lay hands upon him in other than apostolic fashion.”

Mr. Rice has a style of singular vigor and vivacity, and his humor overflows in abundant foot-notes, which are often full of gossiping details, and very pleasant reading.

— Mr. Mahaffy’s Social Life in Greece is a volume both interesting and valuable. The spirit with which school-boys approach any subject of study, as if it were something lying outside all limits of human sympathy, is often imitated by their elders, who, even when they have to do with the Greeks, —the most fascinating people the world has ever seen, — treat them as if they were graven images, or marble fragments, classifying them and putting them before us properly clad, in good imitations of Greek houses, but in no way using them like human beings. One can have as much sympathy with a collection of wax-works as with the representations of Greek life in Becker’s Charicles, for instance. As Mr. Mahaffy says, “The social life of the Greeks has often been handled, especially by German and French authors. But the ponderous minuteness and luxury of citation in the works of the former have obscured the general effect, and leave the ordinary reader with no distinct impression on his mind. . . . The French essays on Greek life are of an opposite description. They aim at brilliancy and esprit alone, and gain these qualities at the frequent sacrifice of accuracy and critical research.” In this book, however, there is neither superficiality nor pedantry. The author refers freely to Greek writers for example and corroboration of his statements, but he limits himself to the discussion of broad questions, such as the standard of morality, the condition of women, the methods of education, the theory of manners, and such matters.

The sole light thrown on these subjects is by contemporaneous literature, or by that literature which is most nearly contemporaneous. One learns not so much what was the exact condition of opinion with regard to morality, as how lofty was the conception of ideal morality in the mind of the ancient writer, who will uniformly strike higher than the truth, so that we nowadays can compare the relative importance of different virtues in the eyes of the ancients with more exactness than we can decide upon the actual condition of society. Thus from the Iliad and Odyssey, for instance, we learn what virtues were admired, and what were less rigidly insisted upon. We find many tributes to hospitality, many proofs of intellectual quickness, but also a tendency to treachery, falsehood, and what we should consider occasional unmartial timidity.

Mr. Mahaffy says with great truth that the Homeric picture of Olympus is of value as showing the poet’s notion of a society freed from religious restraints, and that Pallas Athene embodies all the qualities most highly thought of in those days, which make but a poor showing from our point of view. The standards change slowly, and with our love of antiquity we are more likely to exaggerate the virtues of the golden past than we are to depreciate. Writers like Mr. Gladstone, in his Homer and the Homeric Age, paint those days as almost faultless, and many thanks are due to Mr. Mahaffy for his fairer, yet perfectly friendly view.

For knowledge of the Greeks of the Lyric age we have only few and rather vague authorities ; when we come to the Attic age it is different. Mr. Mahaffy claims that at this period the condition of women was inferior to any that had yet existed in Greece, that the Asiatic policy of secluding them had been introduced, and that thereby their influence had been diminished. Some of his arguments, however, seem to us ineffective. He quotes from Thucydides — against whom he has a special spite — these words put into the mouth of Pericles, as proof of the degradation of women : “ That woman is best who is least spoken of among men, whether for good or for evil; ” but in our opinion that remark was wise then and is wise now, and for Mr. Mahaffy to demand of Thucydides, who wrote a political history, the same sort of gossiping prattle that we find in Herodotus, is like being vexed with Gibbon for not writing like Froissart. That there was a change in the treatment of women, and one not for the better, we think our author makes clear. And we agree with him in declining to give too much weight to Sophocles’s delineations of women, and in preferring the testimony of Euripides. More use, we think, might have been made of Aristophanes.

In his descriptions of certain trades and professions Mr. Mahaffy is very happy. When he comes to particulars, his scholarship and familiarity with Greek literature serve him admirably. He shows the business habits of the Greeks in one chapter, their religious feelings in another, and everywhere he is returning to the points of similarity and dissimilarity of Greek and modern life. He takes his reader into very tempting fields, especially in the chapter on religion in the Attic age. A noticeable case is that where he speaks of the love of mystery in our modern religions, and its absence in the religion of the Greeks, and points out the same absence in Greek art. “ The great reason why the Greek chefsd'æuvre have been everlasting, and have spoken to all cultivated men in all ages, is their conception was everywhere clear and precise.” The limitations of the statement are also interesting.

The whole book will be found well worth reading; the writer’s knowledge and intelligence are put to the best of purposes, namely, the discovery of the human heart beneath all the dusty facts exhumed by arid scholarship.

— The report sent to the Department of State by Mr. C. C. Andrews, Minister Resident at Stockholm, contains in a brief form much information about Norway and Sweden, for which it is not impossible that some of our readers may in vain consult many books of travel in those comparatively unknown countries. In a very condensed form we have statistics about the climate of those lands, the chief occupations of the inhabitants, the condition of educational and religious matters, the division of taxes, the poorer classes, their manner of living, their wages, the regard paid to sanitary laws, etc., etc. In fact, most statistical questions one would be likely to ask may be found briefly but authoritatively answered here. Details are not forgotten ; for instance, the stoves commonly used in Sweden are described, and we are told, besides, that there is a damper in the chimney to prevent the heat from escaping. The same care is shown with regard to more important matters. This little pamphlet will be found of value by all who care to get knowledge of the internal affairs of these two countries.

FRENCH AND German.²

In our last number mention was made of the very interesting fourth volume of Julian Schmidt’s essays, and of the one on Tourguéneff and Pisemski a brief abstract was given. Of the others, perhaps the one which will first attract attention is that on the English novel. In a few pages the essayist brings the history of the novel, from its rise in the sketches of the Spectator, through its wonderful career under Richardson, Fielding, and Smollet, with some good, though too brief, criticism of each of these writers, down to the present day. A few pages devoted to Sterne are especially worthy of notice. What strikes Schmidt in the contemporary English novel, and indeed in that of the past, is its lumbering, inartistic form. The novelist seems to lack more than anything the gift of compression. He draws his characters with great fullness, and then drifts through a sea of incidents without any clearly conceived plan, and ends his story much more according to the demands of the book-seller than according to the necessities of a dramatic plot. Characters are lugged in to gratify the author’s desire of describ ing them ; and they are never drawn with a few hints that would suffice to make the requisite impression on the reader, but with exhaustive and superfluous thoroughness. An example of this quality is found by Schmidt in George Eliot’s treatment of Mr. Brooke, in Middlemarch, whose incessant mediocrity finally wears out the reader’s patience. The description is true to life, but it is not the less tiresome on that account. Schmidt’s discussion of this novel will be found to be of great interest. Both the English and the American public are too much weighed down by George Eliot’s greatness to be able to define her position with exactness. We have put her on a pedestal, and yet we stand too near her to get an accurate view. Mr. Schmidt brings to the study of her last and perhaps most remarkable novel a strong and well-trained mind, and the fact that he is a foreigner gives him an advantage that will only be enjoyed by our posterity : he has the right perspective. His criticism is more reasonable than any we have read. Naturally he notices the depressing effect the story produces, and he accounts for this, since apparently it was not the intention of the author to accomplish that result, in the following way. He says the writer errs in treating what is essential and what is not essential with the same fullness ; that the question, Who is to be accounted happy ? is often answered carelessly; that in every man’s life there are times of real enjoyment, or of contented activity, and other times of real unhappiness, but that the greater part of one’s life is a period of indifference, a state of neither happiness nor unhappiness; that to add in one column the happy, and in another the unhappy moments, and to compare the sums of both, would be unfair, because an hour of despair outweighs years of indifference, and a moment, say of the joy of invention, overbalances years of dull, monotonous toil. To disregard these truths is the fault of excessive analytical and critical reflection. Now this is what George Eliot has done. She has represented a series of unhappy marriages, but instead of showing clearly in the various marital dissensions how much the fault arises from pardonable misunderstanding and how much from real perversity, which would be a fair subject of analysis, she credits one side or the other with the blame, leaving to the reader, as Mr. Schmidt says, the possibility of a difference of opinion, as if it were an actual scene in life, of which the facts were known equally well by both sides. For example he takes Rosamond and Lydgate, and asks why, if Lydgate were the energetic man we are told he is, and loved her as he is said to have done, he failed to have any influence on his wife. He says George Eliot tells us the story at great length, but one cannot withstand the feeling that there is some point unexplained. In Lydgate and in the author he finds an aversion to anything that would call forth a catastrophe, which fact may serve to show the reason of this omission. How serious the fault is in the novelist may be seen in the way in which the chapters treating of the mysterious death of Raffles slur over the exact criminality of Bulstrode and Lydgate, and instead of our being told what Bulstrode’s wife actually thought of him, we have the information given us that before she went to visit her husband she changed her clothes, to convey to him the fact that now they were to commence another life. “ This act may have been perfectly natural to this woman, and it would not mar the impression, if too much were not made of it; but that at the moment when one awaits an answer to far more important questions, the attention should be distracted by the exaggerated importance given to this change of raiment, reminds one of the humor of Sterne, which delights in contrasts and in forever mingling important with unimportant matters in order to be able to smile while weeping,”

In speaking of Dorothea Mr. Schmidt says that George Eliot puts us off with a mere statement that her marriage with Ladislaw was a happy one, “which the reader would have been glad to see for himself. How much more thankful a task it would have been to show how each of these two natures learned to recognize what was good in the other, than to drag us through all the misery of the uncomfortable existences which fill the eight volumes ! George Eliot considers that she has done all that is needful when she tells us that they were happy, but this is a bit of childishness of which so intelligent a woman ought to be ashamed.” Again : “ In everything she has written she has undertaken to show that men are unwise in looking for so-called womanliness, that a genuine and powerful nature is more likely to be without womanliness. For example, Esther and Romola. Lydgate is punished for trying to find womanliness; under the guise of womanliness he finds a she-devil, who gets him completely under her thumb. But, my dear lady, pretended womanliness and real womanliness are by no means the same thing! If Lydgate was in error in fancying that he had found womanliness when in fact there was only coquetry, a docile will when there was one much stronger than his own, this was a mistake due in some measure to his exaggerated estimate of his own will. Casaubon made the same mistake, for he was attracted by the apparent womanliness and devotion of Dorothea. Rosamond and Dorothea are, to be sure, very different beings, and I can perfectly understand that you should prefer the latter ; but all the good lessons you preach to the poor Rosamond about the heart’s illusions would have done Dorothea no harm. I think she would have listened to them, for her defiance of the world was in part the result of her consciousness of superiority to it.”

These words may well be pondered for the light they throw on the undefined dissatisfaction so many have felt after reading Middlemarch; indeed, the whole essay is worthy of study, although it is perhaps to be regretted that Edmund Yates should receive as much attention as he does. Mr. Schmidt says he came across Yates’s novels by accident. It is to be hoped that a luckier chance may bring into his hands some of the novels of a writer who breathes life into close realism by the introduction of the natural amount of idealism, who has a fine eye for character, who does not concern herself too much with offenses in criminal law, but has regard for the higher moral code, who besides has a charming, delicate humor, and who has yet to receive the reward she deserves for her delightful writing. The writer we mean is Mrs. Oliphant. This indefatigable author outweighs a dozen clever manufacturers of novels like Yates. She is not always at her best, but when she is, as in the Chronicles of Carlingford, or in Miss Majoribanks, she shows that the art of writing English novels still has a vigorous existence even in other hands than those of the present master of fiction, George Eliot.

Another interesting essay is that on Otto Ludwig, whose thoughtful and suggestive Shakespeare-Studien were noticed in these pages two or three years ago. Mr. Schmidt gives us the sad facts of his life, and confirms the impression derived from his book, that Ludwig must have been a very fascinating man. For the greater part of his life he was the victim of a serious nervous illness, which was continually interrupting his work. He was obliged wholly to give up music, to which he had devoted much attention, and his literary endeavors were made brief and unsatisfactory to himself. The tension required to produce any serious work brought on his illness, and when he returned to it on recovery he found that his first plan had been so modified by delay and involuntary reflection that he had, practically, to set to work again. Whatever the merit of his original productions, it is more especially as a critic that he is deserving of praise. It would be hard to lay one’s hand on a book which so well gives the reader not only the results but almost the processes of thought on Shakespeare, and on tragedy generally, as do his Studien. The book is, too, perfectly free from the dialect of the schools. We have an intelligent, sensitive, thoughtful man reflecting on the highest questions of literary art, with sincerity and wise enthusiasm, not for the purpose of giving answers that shall sound epigrammatic and complete, but to find the real principles of the best work.

Many pages of this volume of essays are devoted to a thorough examination of Auerbach. Apropos of this novelist’s Waldfried, Schmidt gives his former verdict, as expressed in his History of German Literature, careful revision. This is done in his best manner. The full essay does not admit of condensation; the critic shows clearly the influence of Auerbach’s religion and of the political conditions of Germany upon his novels. He balances the success and the occasional lack of success of this celebrated author, and his article is a tribute of warm and deserved praise. The praise, however, is not unmixed with discriminating mention of Auerbach’s faults.

There is another valuable essay in this volume, that on David Strauss, the author of the Life of Jesus, and of The Old Faith and the New. Mr. Schmidt opens no theological discussion in what he says ; he points out the similarity between the position taken by Strauss and that held by free-thinkers in the last century, and takes the ground, which indeed every one must take who is not run away with by subtleties of thought, that Christianity holds a place outside of which it is very hard to go. It cannot be ignored. Its existence is stronger than the fragments of evidence on which it rests. He says, “ We are Christians, because the loftiest ideals of our soul have their root in the historic soil of Christianity.”

The remainder of the volume discusses some German writers who are less well known outside of their own country. It is to be noticed with pain that many of these are obituary notices, as of Fritz Reuter, Grillparzer, Hoffmann von Fallersleben, and Friedrich Halm. One does not hear of new men rising to fill their places, but Germany is not the only country of which this remark can be made.

PUBLICATIONS RECEIVED.

D. Appleton & Co., New York : Hearts and Hands. A Story in Sixteen Chapters. By Christian Reid.— The Doctrine of Descent and Darwinism. By Oscar Schmidt, Professor in the University of Strasburg. With Twenty-six Wood-cuts. —A Reply to the Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone’s Political Expostulation. By the Right Rev. Monsignor Capel, D. D. Reprinted, with Additions, from The Weekly Register and Catholic Standard.

J. B. Lippincott & Co., Philadelphia: The History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles the Fifth. By William Robertson, D. D. With an Account of the Emperor’s Life after his Abdication. By William H. Prescott. New Edition. In Three Volumes. Volume I.

Robert Clarke & Co., Cincinnati: Generalship; or, How I managed my Husband. A Tale. By George Roy.

S. S, Scranton & Co., Hartford: The Political, Personal, and Property Rights of a Citizen of the United States. How to Exercise and how to Preserve them. Together with I. A Treatise on the Rules of Organization and Procedure in Deliberative Assemblies; II. A Glossary of Law Terms in Common Use. By Theophilus Parsons, LL. D., ExProfessor of Law in Harvard College.

Macmillan & Co., New York: Nature Series. On British Wild Flowers considered in Relation to Insects. By Sir John Lubbock. With Numerous Illustrations.

William Blackwood and Sons, Edinburgh: The Tower of Babel. A Poetical Drama. By Alfred Austin. — Baby Died To-day, and other Poems. By the late William Leighton.

Roberts Brothers, Boston : Recollections and Suggestions, 1813-1873. By John Earl Russell. — Social Pressure. By Sir Arthur Helps. — The Morality of Prohibitory Liquor Laws. An Essay. By William B. Wee den.

John P, Morton & Co , Louisville, Ky.: The First Principles of Geology ; Presenting the Science in its Physical and Moral Aspects; and Exhibiting its Application to the Arts of Mining, Agriculture, Architecture, and Engineering. With a Geological Map of the United States. By William J. Barbee, A. M., M. D., Member of the American Association for the Promotion of Science. For the Use of High Schools and Colleges. Enlarged and Revised.

Tuttle & Co., Rutland : Sixteenth Report of the Vermont Board of Education, with the Report of the Secretary made to the Board, October, 1874, Being the Second Biennial Report of the Board.

Henry Holt & Co., New York: Mistress Judith A Cambridgeshire Story. By C. C. Fraser-Tytler.

Catholic Publication Society, New York : The Vatican Decrees in their Bearing on Civil Allegiance. By Henry Edward, Archbishop of Westchester.

Harper and Brothers, New York : Sports that Kill. By T. DeWitt Talmage. Phonographically Reported and Revised.