Books New And Old

I

IT is remarkable that with all our diligence in resuscitating such of our early literary works as are from time to time discovered to be still breathing, two books which we have in hand¹ should have been so long out of print and nearly inaccessible. Of the merits of one, at least, we have been sufficiently advised by literary historians. Yet, though during the five years after its first publication it went through two English editions, and, as translated by the author himself, through two French editions, the latest version, till the present moment, has remained that published by Carey in Philadelphia, in 1793. These letters are in some danger of confusion with those Letters from a Farmer of Pennsylvania, which are also celebrated by historians and ignored by the laity. Dickinson wrote for an immediate and partisan effect; Crèvecœur’s theme is political only in the vaguest sense. A book published, and in part, no doubt, written, not long after the outbreak of the Revolution, contains, until its final chapter is reached, no allusion to the possibility of such a conflict. The author is speaking in the name of the private citizen or subject, and his plea is for personal, not political, liberty. His theme in the last chapter is therefore not the beauty of independence, but the useless horror of warfare from the point of view of the individual: “It is for the sake of the great leaders on both sides, that so much blood must be spilt; that of the people is counted as nothing. Great events are not achieved for us, though it is by us that they are principally accomplished; by the arms, the sweat, the lives of the people. . . . After all, most men reason from passions; and shall such an ignorant individual as I am decide, and say this side is right, that side is wrong ? ” The means of escape from these difficulties which he proposes to himself is characteristic of the man and of his school: to abandon civilization to its own resources and seek peace and simple happiness in the bosom of an Indian tribe. This impassioned farmer belongs, in fact, with Rousseau, Châteaubriand, St. Pierre, and Goldsmith. The curious thing is that experience should have done for him what inexperience did for the others. Crèvecœur actually was for many years a farmer in Ulster County, New York, and came out of the experience as enthusiastic and eloquent as any of those urban rhapsodists — and infinitely more healthyminded than any of them but Goldsmith. They were sufficiently in love with the return-to-simplicity idea, but he put it to the test of sober wedlock.

But it must not be suggested that he is always in this lofty vein. He has a good deal of range as a descriptive writer. A chapter on the customs of Nantucket is followed by a gruesome description of the torture of a slave at Charleston, and this in turn by a charming discursus “On Snakes and on the Humming-bird.” In short, while Crèvecœur moralizes too much for the taste of this impatient day, he has a charm of essential simplicity which ought to give him place on our shelves beside the more sophisticated sentimentalists of his time.

This is equally true of Mrs. Grant’s Memoirs of an American Lady. The observations upon which her reminiscences are based were made at no great distance in time or space from Crèvecœur’s. Otherwise the conditions were utterly different. The youthful daughter of an English army officer could not very well see American life from the point of view of a frontier farmer. It is the Knickerbocker society, of which Albany had already come to be the centre, that she interprets best. Madame Schuyler is properly the central figure rather than the subject of these memoirs. The narrative possesses a certain pleasant garrulity readily to be connected with the strong and kindly features of the portraits which really adorn the present reprint. Her style is not always free from the conventional rhetoric of that age. She has also her chapters of Indian lore, without which no book on America was considered complete till, say, the third decade of the nineteenth century. Her good breeding keeps her in the main within bounds of taste. But her sense of humor is not proof against her reverence for her heroine; the fact is, Madame Schuyler, with all her relatives and social connections to the third and fourth generation, is now and then in danger of becoming a bore. It is a good deal to be asked to look solemn over a passage like that which describes the worthy Colonel Schuyler’s fatal seizure: “He began the day, as had for many years been his custom, with singing some verses of a psalm in his closet. Madame observed that he was interrupted by a most violent fit of sneezing; this returned again a little after, when he calmly told her that he felt the symptoms of a pleuritic attack, which had begun in the same manner with that of his friend; that the event might possibly prove fatal; but that, knowing as she did how long a period of more than common felicity had been granted to their mutual affection, and with what tranquillity he was enabled to look forward to that event which is common to all, and which would be earnestly desired if withheld, he expected of her that, whatever might happen, she would look back with gratitude, and forward with hope; and in the meantime honor his memory, and her own profession of faith, by continuing to live in the manner they had hitherto done, that he might have the comfort of thinking that his house might still be an asylum to the helpless and the stranger, and a desirable place of meeting to his most valued friends; this was spoken with an unaltered countenance, and in a calm and even tone.”

II

It was not to be expected that a new collection of letters by Thackeray would materially add to our knowledge of him. These letters ² were written to an American family who had made him feel at home in a strange land, and of whom he had in consequence become genuinely fond. Thackeray had few, if any, spiritual intimacies, and the bond that held him to his friends was the bond of common affection rather than of what used to be called “affinity.” There is something very engaging in this; there is something also which corroborates our sense of his limitations. We feel more plainly than ever his extreme worldliness, his extreme susceptibility. This correspondence is, in effect, the latest exhibit in evidence of Bagehot’s contention that Thackeray has more in common with Sterne than with any other English writer. The earlier letters in themselves constitute a record of a species of modern sentimental journey. The great novelist has more to say of the pretty girls he is meeting and of the pretty girls he has left behind than of the new country and sensible people with whom he is making acquaintance. He carols much of the personal charms of the Misses Baxter, to whom most of the letters are addressed. He is jealous of the attentions of younger bucks. He carries his middleaged coquetries even farther, as these passages indicate with sufficient clearness: “I hope you young ladies were not offended by that parting benediction the other day — could n’t help myself. I was n’t in the least aware of it, and was so astonished when I had done it, that I hardly knew where I was. I never will do it again, young ladies, unless you let me, — and upon my word, Mr. and Mrs. Baxter, I ask your pardon; but I did n’t mean any harm, and I hope Mr. Baxter shall kiss my daughters, though they are not so pretty as his.” And later he writes to Miss Lucy Baxter, the editor of the letters as now published: “Well, I’m not at all frightened now that I had that little parting — ahem! dass ich dich, mein liebes schönes Mädchen, so herzlich einmal geküsst habe — that’s between you and me, is n’t it ? though you may show it to your mamma, if you like.”

As for the great writer’s worldliness, it is here displayed in the fullness of its amiable frailty. By his own frank admission, he writes and lectures in the hope, not so much of producing work excellent in its kind, as of securing his daughters a competency. One grows in the end a little weary of his insistence upon this as the chief motive of his labors. It was, at all events, a fruitful motive, perhaps the most fruitful motive by which it was possible for him to be actuated. Thackeray was not precisely an heroic figure, and there may have been more truth than he fancied in the admission with which this little dialogue (now first reported in Miss Baxter’s Introduction) concludes: “Turning over the pages of Pendennis, as it lay on the table beside him, he said, smiling from time to time: —

“‘Yes, it is very like — it is certainly very like.’

“‘Like whom, Mr. Thackeray?’ said my mother.

“‘Oh, like me, to be sure; Pendennis is very like me.’

‘“Surely not,’ objected my mother, ‘ for Pendennis was so weak! ’

“‘Ah, well, Mrs. Baxter,’ he said, with a shrug of his great shoulders and a comical look, ‘your humble servant is not very strong.”’

But a robust personality (so much we must concede to the theory of the “ artistic temperament”) is not always the effective personality in art. Thackeray’s work stands, and it is the destiny of sentimentalists who are also artists to be loved somewhat beyond their fellows. We are grateful for these newly unearthed relics of one of the best-cherished of that favored class.

III

Even in these piping times of commerce, life has still its sentimental commentators. Here, for example, is Mr. Darrow’s Farmington ³ The writer’s account of the origin of his book is interesting; and I, for one, am compelled to think it ingenuous. A man beyond the prime of life determines to write a kind of informal autobiography. Actually, he does not succeed in getting beyond the record of his early boyhood. This fact surprises him, but he is not disposed to take it to heart, for facts have always surprised him. “Even now,” he says in abrupt and yet most effective conclusion, — “Even now I might sum up my story in a few short words. All my life I have been planning and hoping and thinking and dreaming and loitering and waiting. All my life I have been getting ready to begin to do something worth the while. I have been waiting for the summer and waiting for the fall; I have been waiting for the winter and waiting for the spring; waiting for the night and waiting for the morning; waiting and dawdling and dreaming, until the day is almost spent and the twilight close at hand.” In fact, the writer must have felt that his immediate task was accomplished. Improvising in the elegiac strain, he has been unable to abandon the child-motive, in developing which he is able, at least, to suggest the character of a more profound theme. Mr. Darrow is, we understand, not only a man of brilliant professional achievement, but has chosen to ally himself with movements which have their origin in a deeper faith in human nature than respectability is able to countenance. This book makes no distinct allusion to such experiences, it is not a socialistic tract; it is, in its simple way, a threnody of unattained ideals. It cannot, therefore, despite points of superficial resemblance, be fairly compared with other books of childish reminiscence that come to mind; they are more coolly analytical or more whimsical, or, in one sense or other, more artificial.

In Miners’ Mirage-Land⁴ likewise brings forth treasures from a much worked claim; two distinct veins are, in fact, reopened, and with surprisingly good results. The desert has had not a few celebrators of late, among them such writers as Mr. Muir, Professor Van Dyke, and Mrs. Austin. Mrs. Strobridge is a less finished writer, and her work differs in other ways. Intimate as she is with the desert, and much as she loves it for its own sake, it appeals to her most of all as a human scene; and she is successfully daring in harking back to the more picturesque aspects of that scene: to the forty-niners and to their immediate successors. This is a book of yarns, a kind of treasury of fables handed down along the camp-fires of half a century. It is, moreover, a book of frank moralizing; the tales are interspersed with little essays: “The Charm of the Desert,” “The Myths of the Desert,” “The Toll of the Desert,” and so on. The essays strike one, perhaps, as a little less happy, a little less spontaneous, than the fables; but the book as a whole is fascinating: it somehow gives one the impression of firsthand contact with a phase of the national experience which we are already half inclined to regard as mythical.

IV

The Mountains⁵ is also a record of adventures in the far West, but they are adventures of a very different kind. Mr. White has established himself as one of the most popular of our out-door writers, and this book is in his usual vein. He has apparently found it pretty safe to address himself to the ignoramus; we set out from the pleasing assumption that nobody but the author knows anything. We learn what a trail is, what a bronco is, that it is better to use dry wood in building a fire, that “open-air cooking is in many things quite different from indoor cooking. You have different utensils, are exposed to varying temperatures, are limited in resources, and pursued by the necessity of haste. Preconceived notions must go by the board.” That is, our preconceived notions have probably been that wet or green wood makes the best fire, that a large cooking-range is ordinarily a part of the camp equipage, and so on. We feel humble, we peruse our author with care, and, it is to be hoped, we learn. This is, in short, a book of out-door sport addressed by the amateur to the tyro. The writer does not neglect his descriptive passages, and he has some sensible instructions on scenery, which we may trust will be attended to in the proper quarter. But in the ordinary course of routine he regards the desert simply as a hot place (Inferno is the word he aptly uses), and the mountains as a means of exercise. His main concern is with the process of getting nowhere in particular by the hardest possible road; which is to be strenuous, and a sportsman!

There are, at all events, other forms of sport which seem to entail not only a process but an end. It is a pity if that fine old word cannot be applied in any sense to the true naturalist — not the mere birdglass marksman, but the Gilbert White or the Jefferies, the John Muir or the John Burroughs. One is impressed anew in reading two recent out-door books of this class,⁶ with the pure zest which has attended the pursuit and the record of those studies. These men study nature because they love it, not because they want to write about it. They take pains, they have adventures, they are distinctly rewarded. The first part of Mr. Burroughs’s present book will be, although reprinted, fresher to most of his readers than the rest. In its original form as part of an elaborate work on the Harriman Alaska Expedition, it was comparatively inaccessible; and it records the more general impressions in a new field of an observer whose work has been mainly intensive. Mr. Burroughs’s descriptions happily lack the sensational “vividness” which is now so much the fashion with us, but they are clear and vigorous, they are likely to bear a second reading. The unusual situation does not deprive him of his balance; here is an illustration to the point: —

“ In crossing the Rockies I had my first ride upon the cowcatcher, or rather upon the bend of the engine immediately above it. In this position one gets a much more vivid sense of the perils that encompass the flying train than he does from the car window. The book of fate is rapidly laid bare before him and he can scan every line, while from his comfortable seat in the car he sees little more than the margin of the page. From the engine he reads the future and the immediate. From the car window he is more occupied with the distant and the past. How rapidly those two slender steel rails do spin beneath us, and how inadequate they seem to sustain and guide this enormous throbbing and roaring monster which we feel laboring and panting at our backs. The rails seem ridiculously small and slender for such a task; surely, they will bend and crumple up or be torn from the ties. The peril seems imminent, and it is some time before one gets over the feeling.”

Of similar interest for its unfamiliarity of theme is the final paper of the collection, “A Lost February,” the story of a month spent in Jamaica; but the rest of the book, in which the good naturalist deals with more familiar material, will be hardly less delightful to many of his audience who have come to possess a comfortable feeling of joint-proprietorship in “Slabsides” and its environment.

Mr. Torrey has also made profitable excursions into regions somewhat remote from his native habitat; and some of his present chapters succeed in giving those ornithological, botanical, and humane charms to Florida and Texas and Arizona which his skillful and sympathetic interpretation has already given to Massachusetts and New Hampshire. His is the best of out-of-door talk, always provided that we are willing and able to put aside our hurries and our mechanical habits of being busy, and to enter into his mood of casual inquiry and genial rumination.

V

The season is, we are told, to produce an unusual number of books of essays; several of those which have already been issued are of uncommon interest.⁷ Air. More’s work is of a finished and at times somewhat formal order. His subjects are of considerable range, from English Verse to Tolstoy, and from Arthur Symons to Humanitarianism. To say that these papers lack discursive charm is to say nothing to their disadvantage. A sensible man does not deck his brow with roses, and caper, however gracefully, to a tune of his own inventing, while he is delivering a public discourse on a serious theme. This essayist has some sober criticism to present to us, and he presents it suitably. It is reassuring to note that two of the best of the purely literary papers belong to that criticism of contemporaries which, we have been assured, is nothing better than conversation. The essays on Arthur Symons and on the Irish Movement seem to me remarkably keen and remarkably sound, — quite as keen and sound as the equally valuable paper on Hawthorne and Poe, which nobody would think of calling mere talk. The best and the worst that can be said of Mr. Symons is said here; perhaps the sum of it is most nearly expressed in these two sentences: “Mr. Symons impresses us as being absolutely sincere, as being the only genuine and adequate representative in English of that widespread condition which we call decadence. And sincerity in verse is a quality of inestimable value.” We confess to having read the two volumes of Mr. Symons’s collected poems upon which this essay is based, with an eye to reviewing them; and we confess to having laid them down in despair of being able to speak of them adequately. Mr. More has not needed to despair. In the paper on Mr. Yeats and his associates in the “Irish Alovement,” there is nothing more suggestive than the opening sentence: “If one were to ask Mr. W. B. Yeats what he considered the chief characteristic of the movement he so ably represents, no doubt the last word to come to him would be defeat, and yet, if properly considered, this so-called Gaelic Revival, this endeavour to resuscitate a by-gone past and to temper the needs of the present to outworn emotions, is, when all is said, just that and nothing more — a movement of defeat.” The volume concludes with two striking and somewhat extended papers on Tolstoy and on humanitarianism as Tolstoy and others conceive it.

To pass from this book to Imaginary Obligations is to take something of a step, for Mr. Colby’s method is primarily personal, uncompromising, whimsical, brilliant. The worst fate that is likely to befall him among reviewers is to be dubbed the American Chesterton; and there are worse fates than that. There exist, indeed, not a few points of resemblance between that Englishman and this American. They are parallel, if not equal, in audacity, saliency, wit. Mr. Colby’s essays, many of them of extreme brevity, have, like Mr. Chesterton’s, been written mainly for newspapers. They are often brusque and sharp in substance and form. There is, perhaps, a personal note in one of the concluding sentences: “It is just the place for a writer to go and forget his minor literary duties, the sense of his demanding public, the obligation of the shining phrase, the need of making editorial cats jump, the standing orders for a jeu d’esprit.” Mr. Colby may very well have been exposed to the pressure of such an order; and it is a wonder that his book does not show more traces of haste and scrappiness. The defect of the book is that it contains too much; not in bulk, but in material. There is stuff in these fifty little essays to have made half a dozen volumes. Not that we wish to see a good idea or fancy coddled and padded into folio; but there is something a little suggestive of waste or of indolence in a prodigality of suggestion like Mr. Colby’s. It may be that he has hit upon a form of expression which is not only good in itself, but absolutely the best for him. The world may be moved by a series of jolts from a hand whose steady pressure is ineffective. He is a brisk tonic force, and his book is “a good place” for a writer who, incapable of jeux d’esprit, is inclined to take himself and his work a little too seriously, and needs a thorough shaking up. Let us take our medicine and be thankful. There may be a wry twist to the beaming look with which we try to conceal our momentary discomfiture; but we shall be all the better for it in the end. We should mightily like to be given a chance to feel Mr. Colby’s steady pressure. As it is, he has produced a book more brilliant, more pregnant of suggestion, than anything of the kind which has so far been done by an American,

The Queen’s Progress is a book of essays in the less formal sense; the author prefers to call them sketches. They constitute a record of certain minor adventures in a favorite region. Students of the Elizabethan period are already acquainted with Professor Schelling’s more formal studies in that field. They are all of humane interest. The latest and perhaps the most valuable of them was, as the author put it in his sub-title, “a study in the popular historical literature environing Shakespeare.”⁸ That was a work of minute scholarship. The present book, though it could have been written only by a scholar, is for the general reader rather than for the student. It is a kind of byproduct, lighter, but in its way not less worthy of acceptance, than the solid literary merchandise which preceded it. Though these papers are properly to be called sketches, they are finished sketches. In each instance the subject is firmly if lightly handled. Such gleanings can hardly be too often made by scholars who have the exceptional fortune to be also men of letters. One comes upon no especially quotable passages, but as a whole the book will be felt to possess, both as to substance and as to form, a quiet distinction which is rare enough in this day.

VI

This is precisely the quality which we continue to find lacking in the casual work of Professor Matthews. Outside his own special field, in which his accomplishment is indubitable, he seems too often a kind of lesser Andrew Lang. He is amiable, he is indefatigable, he produces very many informing articles upon very many interesting subjects. He is a capable editor and an assiduous collector. Whether or not his talk is illuminating, it is always ingenious and always audible. In his Recreations of an Anthologist⁹ he is at his best. How varied in substance these relics of a collector’s zeal are is indicated by the titles of his chapters: “The Uncollected Poems of H. C. Bunner,” “The Strangest Feat of Modern Magic,” and “Carols of Cookery,” for example. (It is remarkable, by the way, if it can be said ever to be remarkable that there should be specific omissions from any anthological performance, that Burns’s luscious description of the haggis should not be noted in a paper which records Barlow’s celebration of hasty - pudding and Thackeray’s of bouillabaisse.) Two or three of the present essays have, as the author intimates, been suggested by a late research of his into American light verse. The main product of that research has, it happens, just been put before us in a volume which, with two others,¹⁰ inaugurates a new series of American anthologies that bids fair to be more extensive than any similar enterprise which has been thus far undertaken. Professor Matthews is the general editor; two of these initial volumes are by other hands. The plan is that the Introduction shall in each instance trace the history of the given form in universal literature, and that there shall follow a series of examples taken by the editor to be the best in the several types which America has produced. The work of writers born after the middle of the nineteenth century is excluded. As applied to the short story, this plan does not work very well. The Introduction is excellent in substance, but overloaded with detail, and the selection of examples seems to me amazingly maladroit. Half the stories in the book are classics in their kind, and the rest are simply insignificant. But what we are looking for is, we are warned, not stories, but exhibits, — of “narrative adjustment,” of “imaginative realization,” or what not. The volume on American Literary Criticism is admirable, the introduction compact and untechnical, the selections valuable for their own sake as well as in their representative character. The same remark may be made of the work of Professor Matthews himself. He prefers the term “familiar verse” to the exotic and misleading phrase vers de société, or to Mr. Stedman’s “patrician rhymes.” He makes a composite of Locker-Lampson’s definition and of Tom Hood’s: “Brevity, brilliancy, buoyancy, — these are qualities we cannot fail to find in the best of Locker-Lampson’s own verses, in Praed’s, in Prior’s, — and also in Lowell’s, in Holmes’s, in Bret Harte’s.” For the substance of the historical sketch which follows one has only praise; for its form only that toleration which is possible toward a writer who is so blunt of ear as to say “to happen on the happy mean,” and so barbaric in diction as to discourse of “Herrick’s brightsome balladry.”

The taste, or the market, for minor anthologies appears to be increasing. We had occasion not long since to mention a Treasury of Humorous Poetry and a Nonsense Anthology. We have before us two books of a similar nature.¹¹ Apparently no distinct plan has been followed in the compilation of “humorous verse.” Rollicking verse, nonsense verse, rhymed satire, parody, familiar verse, all have a share in these pages; and as is ordinarily true of such collections, the individual reader is likely to find here and there a number which seems to him not humorous in any sense; it may be facetious, it may be serious, it may be simply dull. As a whole the collection seems a good one, though in its character of anthology it is somewhat overbalanced by the large representation of very recent work. Miss Wells has had a less dubious field to work in, and has made a good companion volume for her Nonsense Anthology. We wish there were a little more of Calverley and Owen Seaman in it, — but perhaps nothing less than the whole of them would have satisfied us. And we note a sin or two of commission. There is a flat piece of doggerel after “Beautiful Snow;” and a fanciful chronological arrangement gives unfortunate prominence to a bit or two of ribaldry at the expense of a notable English (not Persian) masterpiece. These errors are few; it is to be hoped that Miss Wells will some day be moved to make an anthology of rhymed satire of the less bookish kind. It would not be a simple task, but it would be worth doing.

Parody and caricature are forms of satirical expression of which parody is far the narrower. Now and then a given caricature turns out to be nothing but a parody made visible; but as a rule it scores its success, not by subtle reminders of objects which have stirred the imagination, but by direct pictorial commentary upon special persons and events. We confess that on first turning over the pages of a new book which has succeeded in making a serious study of caricature,¹² we had small expectation .of finding it anything but an amusing picture-book, furnished with a more or less perfunctory commentary on the prints. A glance at the text proved this inference to be hasty. The substance of the book is to be found in the careful and interesting critical narrative; the pictures are really illustrations of it. The first part goes a little back of the general title. It presents a compact but valuable account of the beginning of political caricature in England, of the work of Hogarth, and of the caricature of “the Napoleonic era.” The authors are to be congratulated, not only upon having produced a very attractive book, but upon having made a distinct contribution to the general knowledge of an art which has too often been considered a trivial exercise of inferior talents or a mere byplay and diversion on the part of draughtsmen of real power.