Comment on New Books

Holiday and Illustrated Books. The Century Gallery, Selected Proofs from The Century Magazine and St. Nicholas. (The Century Co.) Sixty-four large plates, of exceeding interest not only for the subjects and the artists, but for the technical qualities in the execution. The strength of much of the treatment is very notable. It would be hard to find a more masculine ancl yet refined piece of work than Wyatt Eaton’s painting and T. Cole’s engraving of The Man with a Violin. Now and then one feels as if the printing of a picture had been relied upon almost to efface the engraver’s lines, as in A Dance at the Ranch ; but again one is struck by the admirable manner in which the whole lovely tone of a picture has been secured by the frankest use of the engraver’s tool, as in Alfred Parsons’s In the Beech Woods. Altogether, the collection is the most splendid exhibition we have yet had of American art as expressed through wood engraving. It is an honor to the magazines that called it out, — By an interesting coincidence Messrs. Charles Scribner’s Sons publish at the same time French Illustrators, by Louis Morin, with a Preface by Jules Claretie. There are five parts to the work, containing fifteen plates and a large number of text illustrations. The text is a lively running comment on the men and women here represented, and the work done by them, — Detaille, Leloir, Flameng, Buhot, Renouard, Kaemmerer, Vierge, Mme. Lemaire, Emil Bayard, Giacoinelli, and many others. The book, brilliant in the extreme, offers an admirable opportunity to survey the current French book illustrators. It may be said, in a word, that the comparison shows how much more, specifically, these illustrators form a class in Paris as against the mingling of painters who illustrate with designers who paint in America. We hope to return again to both of these works. — The Christ-Child in Art, a Study of Interpretation, by Henry Van Dyke. (Harpers.) In speaking of this handsome volume as a Christmas book, the word “ Christmas ” must be used in a sense that does not limit its coming strictly to “once a year.” There is necessarily a strong element of permanence in such excellent reproductions of some of the best pictures in the world as the book contains. Whether Dr. Van Dyke’s judicious comments upon their artistic and religious significance are remembered by the readers of Harper’s Monthly, it is tolerably sure that the larger class which looks at the pictures will remember these. And of the two classes into which mankind is divided at Christmas time, it may be said that the Genus recipiens will be glad to find this book among its gifts. — Phillips Brooks Year Book. (Dutton.) This volume of selections from the writings of Bishop Brooks is further enriched by admirable passages from poems by other men and women. These verses form, indeed, a striking commentary on the catholicity of the man whose words they confirm. Browning, Lanier, Walt Whitman, George Herbert, Thomas àa Kempis, John Henry Newman, Lowell, Emma Lazarus, Pusey, Macdonald, — these are some of the names associated with Brooks. But interesting as is this embroidery, the stuff out of which the book is mainly made is royal purple, and it is like the sound of a trumpet or the rush of many waters, as one opens his ear to the impassioned voice that speaks in these pages. — The Van Twiller edition of Irving’s Knickerbocker’s History of New York (Putnams) is a twovolume octavo, with a tinted border to the page, and a goodly number of illustrations, large and small, by Edward W. Kemble ; initial letters, tailpieces, vignettes, and fullpage designs, all of a humorous character, and in keeping with the gravity of Irving’s drollery. One gets a little tired of seeing a not very decorative border repeated seven hundred and forty-four times, and Mr. Kemble’s drawings sometimes have the spots knocked out of them by the insidious process reproduction, but there is a satisfaction in finding a designer who catches the spirit of his author so well. — Columbia’s Courtship, a Picture History of the United States, in twelve emblematic designs in color, with accompanying verses, by Walter Crane. (Prang.) The old rhyme,

“ In 1492

Columbus sailed the ocean blue,” appears to have given Mr. Crane his inspiration as a poet ; but it is not the reader who will find entertainment here so much as the picture-lover. Mr. Crane’s strongest work is hardly seen in this trifle, though one of his designs, showing a group of foreigners, is effective, and he has managed to dress Columbia in the vivid colors of the American flag without distressing the lovers of hunting. —A companion book, The Life of Columbus in Pictures (Prang), has better verse by Emily Shaw Forman, but the pictures, by Victor A. Searles, seem chiefly designed to show how vigorously the artist and lithographer between them can treat color. — Chinese Nights’ Entertainments, Forty Stories told by AlmondEyed Folks, Actors in the Romance of the Strayed Arrow, by Adele M. Fielde. (Putnams.) The story of a man found by apes, and hailed and exalted as their ancestor, reminds us that the Chinese were capable of seeing Darwinism upside down centuries before we found it right side up. The tale makes the same sort of impression upon Occidental senses as the Chinese drawings without perspective which are reproduced to illustrate this book, though not, in any strict sense, its stories. The tales bear but a distant relation to the Romance of the Strayed Arrow, into which they are supposed to be woven, but in themselves have the merit not possessed by all things that are curious, in that they are also interesting. As folk-lore tales, many of them will appeal both to those who desire the lore and to the less scientific who like the mere tales. It is a pity that the book was not made more a unit by a less strenuous effort to make it a unit at all. — The Old Garden, and Other Verses, by Margaret Deland. Decorated by Walter Crane. (Houghton.) Mrs. Deland’s verses, which touch the flowers with a butterfly - like movement, are most aptly set in the frames of color devised by Mr. Crane. The figures, now graceful, now fantastic, now solemn ; the emblems, frank and allusive ; the sweep of line, which sometimes is delicate, and sometimes suggests largeness and breadth, even though the actual space is small ; the color, which calls to mind, as do some of the designs, Blake’s own printing, all conspire to render this a book to delight in when studying, and to study when one’s eye is filled with pleasure. The flower forms are necessarily conventionalized, but one wonders a little if Mr. Crane ever saw the goldenrod, or even — we say it somewhat under our breath— a cow. — With Thackeray in America, by Eyre Crowe, A. R. A. (Scribners.) Except that Mr. Crowe seems to have crossed the Susquehanna in making a direct railroad journey from New York to Philadelphia, the record of his travels is rather disappointing. He was Thackeray’s amanuensis during the American lecturing tour, and made many hasty sketches, somewhat in Thackeray’s own familiar manner. Such of these as were not lost at the time, on their way to a London publisher, are surrounded in this book by a running comment upon the incidents they illustrate. The drawings are not all bad, — some of them are distinctly clever, — but still less can it he said that all of them are good. Indeed, the sketches of some of the distinguished men portrayed are merely ordinary caricatures. On the whole, the book strikes one as rather unnecessary, which could hardly be the case if there were in it a little more of Thackeray himself. — The Autocrat of the BreakfastTable, by Oliver Wendell Holmes. With illustrations by Howard Pyle. In two volumes. (Houghton.) Mr. Pyle has shown an agreeable consistency of plan in his treatment of the Autocrat. In his fullpage photogravures, some of them, as notably The Trotting Match and A Reminiscence of the Marigold, rich in character drawing, he has gently insisted on the historic feature of the book ; it is the Autocrat, not brought down to date, but put carefully in its historic setting. In his shadowy head and tail pieces he has intimated the poetic substratum of the famous work by using always the mythically conceived figure and the emblems of poetry. Perhaps one should not put last, in any mention of a holiday book, the choice typography, which here is clear-cut, and yet not so sharp as to offend the eye. —Mr. Thomas Nelson Page’s story of Meh Lady has been reprinted in a volume by itself, with illustrations by C. S. Reinhart which scarcely do justice to the tale, for Mr. Page’s narrative is marked by naturalness and grace. (Scribners.) —The series of Literary Gems (Putnams), little eighteenmove volumes bound in stamped imitation morocco, and fronted by vignettes, portraits or other, has been increased and enriched this season by De Quincey on Conversation, Rossetti’s sonnet sequence The House of Life, Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer, Keats’s Eve of St. Agnes and Sonnets, Ruskin’s Ideas of Truth, and Matthew Arnold’s Study of Poetry. The attractiveness of these books consists not only in their being giftworthy, but in being at once so clearly printed and so handy that one can carry them about singly with far greater ease than he can carry the daily newspaper, read them more readily, and get out of them much more profit and delight.

Books for the Young. On looking over one of those lists which many of the sophisticated children of the century’s end make for the guidance of their elders (if not their betters) in the selection of Christmas gifts, we were impressed by the closing entry, brief yet comprehensive, —“Any books by Henty.” The writer was a clever, and for his years well-read boy, and so a not unworthy exponent of the sentiment of who shall say how many English-reading lads. These youthful admirers will find no falling off in their author’s latest volumes. (Scribners.) St. Bartholomew’s Eve, a Tale of the Huguenot Wars, follows the fortunes of Philip Fletcher, who serves with his French mother’s kindred in the civil strife which culminated in the great massacre. A Jacobite Exile, being the Adventures of a Young Englishman in the Service of Charles XII. of Sweden, deals with some of the Jacobite plots and counterplots in the reign of William III., and is concerned with the opening years of the Swedish monarch’s career. Through the Sikli War, a Tale of the Conquest of the Punjaub, relates the leading incidents in the hardfought campaigns which resulted in the annexation of the Punjaub. The historical personages introduced are but conventional figures, and no attempt is made to give the coloring of time, place, or condition to the speech of the characters, who usually, one and all, converse in correct and decorous contemporary English ; but due regard is paid to historic truth ; the narratives are well constructed, full of life and movement, and wholesome in tone ; the boy heroes are sturdy, honorable, high-spirited lads ; and the tales, stories of war and adventure though they be, are quite free from vulgar sensationalism. They often create or foster a taste for history, and so lead to better things.—More English Fairy Tales, collected and edited by Joseph Jacobs. (Putnams.) The editor’s preceding volume, English Fairy Tales, in the four years that have passed since its publication, has established itself as the familiar friend of a great company of little readers, or rather hearers, who wall eagerly welcome its successor. Notwithstanding the interesting and valuable notes appended to the Tales, the work must, after all, be regarded more as a delightful story-book for children than as a strictly scientific contribution to folklore. Does not the editor boldly state that he has actually at times introduced or omitted whole incidents, given another turn to a tale, finished one that was incomplete, and softened down over-abundant dialect ? To the orthodox folk-lorist all these things must be anathema, but the children are the gainers. As before, Mr. John D. Batten contributes those admirable illustrations which are at once accepted as an essential part of the Tales. — The Brownies at Home, by Palmer Cox. (The Century Co.) If a thoughtful person were called upon for a reason for the high esteem in which the Brownies are held, he might truly say it is because of their indomitable energy. Their drollery of figure, face, and action is surely something to admire, but it is their energy, their dauntless refusal to be suppressed, that makes them just what they are. And is it too fanciful to imagine that Mr. Palmer Cox shares with his offspring this excellent quality ? When one thinks he has led his children their very last dance, lo and behold ! he and they turn up again ; and then it is all hands round, down the middle, into the secret places of the White House or over the face of the World’s Fair, in just the same amusing, irrepressible swarms as of old. — The Century’s World’s Fair Book for Boys and Girls, being the Adventures of Harry and Philip with their Tutor, Mr. Douglass, at the World’s Columbian Exposition, by Tudor Jenlcs. (The Century Co.) The boys of this book are not little Rollos, any more than their personal conductor is an Uncle George redivivus. Indeed, they and their doings, though brightly enough described, are of less importance in themselves than as an excuse for putting together in a book The Century Magazine’s capital illustrations of the Fair, with reproduced photographs and other little pictures. The world is not to be allowed to forget its exposition, and such books as this will do good service in keeping alive the Fair’s memory in the minds of young and old alike. — The White Conquerors, a Tale of Toltec and Aztec, by Kirk Munroe. (Scribners.) A writer like Mr. Munroe, who can construct tales of thrilling adventure out of the ordinary American boy life of to-day, — stories with a separate excitement for every chapter, — could not fail to succeed, after his manner, when he has such material ready to his hand as is to be found in the annals of the conquest of Mexico. The tale of the young Toltec who, filled with an undying hatred of the blood-stained superstition of the Aztecs to which his father has fallen a victim, escapes from the very altar of sacrifice to lead the Tlascalans in the army of Cortes, is told with the author’s usual swiftness of movement and unflagging spirit. It should be added that he has taken no unreasonable license with historical facts, — The Wreck of the Golden Fleece, by Robert Leighton. (Scribners.) A sea story, following the fortunes of a clergyman’s son who is apprenticed on board a Lowestoft fishing-lugger, in the last years of the eighteenth century. The rough life is vividly and forcibly described, while the crowd of exciting or harrowing incidents which make the substance of the tale are not unskillfully set in order ; but Mr. Leighton’s undeniable gifts as a story-☺ teller should lead him to trust less in this over-lavish use of strong effects and sensational methods.

Fiction. The Rebel Queen, by Walter Besant. (Harpers.) The pleasurable anticipations with which one naturally takes up a new novel by Mr. Besant are mingled, in the case of some readers, — rather frivolous readers, we fear the author would pronounce them, — with regrets that his stories have become so uniformly novels with a purpose. This new tale is no exception to the later rule ; woman’s rights, and, connected therewith in a way, a study of the Hebrew of to-day, are the main motives of the book. No character in Mr, Besant’s hands can be altogether lifeless, but the rebel queen herself — a rich, beautiful, and clever Jewess, who refuses to submit to her husband after the manner of her people, and becomes a champion of the rights of her sex — and most of the other dramatis personæ show an alarming tendency to develop into types, rather than to play the parts of self-acting and occasionally inconsistent human beings. The author’s enthusiasm in his Jewish studies compels the interest of the reader ; but in comparing hiis book with Children of the Ghetto, for instance, one is struck anew by the difference in verisimilitude between outside and inside views. —Social Stragglers, by Hjalmar Iljorth Boyesen. (Scribners.) Mr. Boyesen shows his admiration for Mr. Howells not only in dedicating this novel to him, but in making a manifest attempt at another Silas Lapham. The performances of such acrobats as the Laphams and Mr. Boyesen’s Bulkleys upon the social ladder are endurable only when the humor or the pathos of their situation is clearly brought out. Laughter and tears alike were left out of the making of Social Strugglers. Here and there a smile has crept in, but for the most part one is asked to take the people of the book with all too sad a seriousness. It is us if they were what the French call struggleforlifeurs. — Tanis, the Sang-Digger, by Amélie Rives. (Town Topics Publishing Co.) Tanis, a wild Southern mountain girl, of wonderful physical vigor and beauty, digs the ginseng root until she comes into contact with a civilized family, and learns that love is something better than the passion of her brutal lover, Then, at once for this creature and for the woman who has shown her the way to better things, she makes a sacrifice virtually amounting to the giving of her life. For the greater part the story is told in a distressful dialect, rendered peculiarly bovine in sound by the constant change of my into muh. In spite of the difficulties, however, the reader finds that the narrative possesses some real power, and that the picture of a strong, savage nature fighting against its worst elements is effectively drawn. It is constantly a winning fight that Tanis carries on, and therefore, perhaps, the popularity of the author’s other stories is hardly to be expected for this one. In imagination and in style — so far as it can be discerned through the cloud of barbarous speech — Mrs. Chanler seems, on the whole, to be learning the self-restraint which is better for herself than for the sale of her books. — Nowadays, and Other Stories, by George A. Hibbard. (Harpers.) A very modern young woman in one of the stories of this book announces that she is a “ product ; ” and just as she did grow out of the present social scheme is Mr. Hibbard’s book a “ product ” of the age of magazines. This is to affirm rather than to deny that the stories are in their way skillful, original, and readable. This is what the magazines demand, and the “product” supplies. Above the average in genuineness of impulse, however, stands out the opening story, Nowadays, and below it in originality falls “Guilty Sir Guy,” a tale of a family ghost hired by a parvenu. Funny enough it is in bits, but its whole plan recalls Mr. Stockton’s ghost stories so clearly as to give it a place among those half-successes which possess the one certain merit of making us feel more keenly how real the first whole-success was.

Literature. Introduction to Shakespeare, by Edward Dowden. (Imported by Scribners.) This little volume contains, with revisions and additions, the author’s General Introduction to the Henry Irving Shakespeare. It opens with a sufficiently comprehensive life of the poet, followed by a short account of the rise of the English drama, by brief but often singularly felicitous and suggestive notes on the plays, by a summary of seventeenth-century appreciation and the commentaries of later times, closing with notices of some of the interpretations of Shakespeare by great actors, from Burbage to Macready. An appendix gives the dedication and address prefixed to the First Folio, together with Ben Jonson’s commendatory verses and a note on the early editions. The work, which is done with excellent taste and judgment, is well proportioned and well arranged, and is in every way an admirable example of skillful condensation. The necessarily severe compression has not had an altogether unfavorable effect upon the writer’s style, and the handbook can be heartily commended even to those readers who have been somewhat disinclined to follow the anchor in certain of his more elaborate Shakespearean studies. — The four volumes which open the new edition of Thoreau (Houghton) — Walden, that is, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Cape Cod, and The Maine Woods

— are those which come nearest to finished books. From the nature of his studies and interests Thoreau was a journalizer rather than an artist. The artist faculty for wholes is strongest in Walden, for there again he is dealing with the one subject which possessed anything like unity in his mind, namely, Himself; but no one can read certain fragments of Thoreau’s writing without discovering a singularly artistic power of creating epigrammatic sentences, and there are single scenes and incidents which are instinct with that fidelity to nature which is all the more striking when taken in conjunction with a mind so introspective as that of Thoreau. — An Embassy to Provence, by Thomas A. Janvier. (The Century Co.) The only pity about this book is that it does not contain at least a few of the pictures with which the text was illustrated in The Century Magazine, for it is preëminently of the sort of books to which good pictures are a help. Mr. Janvier’s narrative is charming, as his embassy itself must have been. Accredited by a former American visitor to the Provencal poets living about Avignon, he, with bis ambassadress, presented himself to Mistral and his fellows, and was made one of them, — a Sòci dòm Fèlibrige. No less than for what it tells of this winning band of modern troubadours, the little book is delightful for the manner of its hummor, admirably fitting a description of just such a progress as Mr. and Mrs. Janvier made.

— Safe Studies, by the Hon. Mr. and Mrs. Lionel A. Tollemaehe. Stones of Stumbling, by the Hcui. Lionel A. Tollemaehe. (William Rice, London.) If a word on these two hooks can make them known to those who like fruity books, it will not be misspent. Mrs. Tollemaehe contributes to the former some agreeable verses, but for the most part the books are made up of speculations, biographical and critical studies. One of the most delightful is the paper on Mark Pattison, but all of the writing impresses one as the overheard talk of a delightful conversationalist, whose memory is stored with riches, who knows the best society in men and books, and takes an honest pleasure in human intercourse. — Homer and the Epic, by Andrew Lang. (Longmans.) Mr. Lang, who is a poetical scholar, and at the same time a curious student, brings to a discussion of the personality of Homer and the structure of the Iliad and Odyssey an unusual equipment, and his conclusions thus not only have weight, but are the result both of analysis and of insight. The heartiness of his belief in a one Homer, author of both books, gives also a confidence to his study, and enables him to write with an unfailing freshness and humor. The whole subject is a singular instance of how a secondary question enables one to throw a flood of light on a primary one. In asking Who wrote Homer ? one comes to determine What is the Iliad ? — The forty-fifth volume of The Century covers the months from November, 1892, to April, 1893. (The Century Co.) Due of the most noticeable things about it, to one studying the development of the American magazine, is the decay of the serial and the growth of the group system.— The trim little edition of the works of Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Bronte is" brought to a close with Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfeld Hall in two volumes, making volumes eleven and twelve. It was no doubt worth while to reproduce the writings of the sisters, though it must be confessed that it is not the novel-reader, but the psychologist and the literary historian who take the most interest in the irregular performances which were led off by Jane Eyre. The artist has rejected himself into the period with a somewhat painful conscientiousness. (J. M. Dent & Co., London ; Macmillan, New York.)