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TERMS OF SUBSCRIPTION, $2.00 a year in advance, postage ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. prepaid in the United States, Canada, and Mexico; in other countries comprised in the Postal Union, 50 cents a year for extra postage must The death of Robert Louis Stevenson, on the be added. Unless otherwise ordered, subscriptions will begin with the current number. REMITTANCES should be by check, or by express or third of December, in his South Sea Island postal order, payable to THE DIAL. SPECIAL RATES TO CLUBS and home, is a grief to the whole English-speaking for subscriptions with other publications will be sent on application ; and SAMPLE Corr on receipt of 10 cents. ADVERTISING RATES furnished world. Wherever our tongue is spoken, in on application. All communications should be addressed to England and in America, in India, Australia, THE DIAL, 315 Wabash Ave., Chicago. and South Africa, his name has been a house- No. 205. JANUARY 1, 1895. Vol. XVIII. hold word for at least ten years past, and his books have brought delight into countless lives, CONTENTS. young and old. Now, that rare spirit has left its too frail tenement, and only a memory re- ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON mains with those who loved him. Even the IBSEN'S NEW PLAY, “LILLE EYOLF." William healing airs of the Pacific availed to prolong Morton Payne only for a few brief years the precious existence JANUARY (Poem). John Vance Cheney 6 upon which disease had already fastened when COMMUNICATIONS 7 Bournemouth was exchanged for Samoa ; but English Literature in American Libraries. F. I. those years, few as they have been, have proved Carpenter. the most richly productive of his career, and The Perilous Use of Unknown Tongues. W. H. Johnson. our grief becomes the more poignant when we realize that he has been stricken in the very MORE MEMORIES OF LITERARY LONDON. E. G. J... fulness of his powers, and when we think of what treasures one more decade of his life might MIRABEAU AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. D. L. Shorey. have added to our literature. 10 As it is, the list of Mr. Stevenson's books is A NEW BOOK ON SHAKESPEARE. Edward E. Hale, Jr. a long one, longer than stands to the credit of many a writer who rounds out the scriptural SOCIAL PROGRESS IN ENGLAND. Arthur B. Woodford. And when we consider, on the 15 one hand, the physical disabilities under which EDWIN BOOTH'S LETTERS. Elwyn A. Barron 17 the author labored, and, on the other, the fault- RECENT POLITICAL DISCUSSIONS. Harry Pratt less workmanship as well as the prevailing man- Judson. 20 Hoffmann's The Sphere of the State.- Borgeaud's liness and sanity of his output, we must reckon Modern Democracy in Old and New England. --Ster him among the most remarkable literary fig- ens's Sources of the Constitution.-Prothero's Select ures of the time. He served a long and pain- Statutes.- Mary Putnam-Jacobi's Woman Suffrage. -Remsen's Primary Elections.-Douglas's Canadian ful apprenticeship to his art; he waited until Independence. he felt himself well in hand ; and then, in spite BRIEFS ON NEW BOOKS. 22 of bodily conditions that would have daunted Memorials of St. James's Palace.-More of the writ the will and quenched the ambition of the great ings of Jefferson. - English - German Comparative majority of men, he began that steady stream Grammar.-Snake Dance of the Indians.-The liv- ing composers of Germany.-"Prose Fancies."-Re of literary production whose flow was to cease petitions and parallelisms in English verse.- Histor only with his life. He would seem to have ical studies of the English language.— The Cross as a religious symbol. - Stratford described and pic- taken deeply to heart Spinoza's noble maxim tured.-Character studies of literary folk. that the free man thinks of nothing less than BRIEFER MENTION . of death, and, with death for years staring him 25 in the face, he asserted his spiritual freedom NEW YORK TOPICS. Arthur Stedman 27 by writing volume after volume, in which the LITERARY NOTES. 28 predominant note is one of cheer and in which TOPICS IN LEADING PERIODICALS 29 the morbid finds scarcely a foothold. One LIST OF NEW BOOKS 29 thinks of Condorcet in prison, waiting for the 13 tale of years. . . . . THE PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY 4 [Jan. 1, THE DIAL summons of the executioner, yet living in an tion of an adult into a youthful mind, and the elysium that his reason has known how to cre collection called “Underwoods,” containing ate for itself, and that his love for humanity many charming poems of nature and of friend- adorns with all purest delights.” ship, written in English and in Scots, and from Mr. Stevenson, in spite of his excursions into which we must select as the writer's own sin- other fields of literature, will be best remem- gularly fitting epitaph this lovely “ Requiem ": bered as a novelist. He has seemed, indeed, “Under the wide and starry sky, of late years to recognize that this was his true Dig the grave and let me lie, vocation ; and most of his recent work, as well Glad did I live and gladly die, as most of that planned for the immediate fu- And I laid me down with a will. ture, was in fiction. His novels are far from “This be the verse you grave for me, being of equal excellence. Some of them Here he lies where he longed to be, “ Prince Otto," "The Black Arrow," "The Home is the sailor, home from sea, And the hunter home from the hill." Wrong Box,” “ The Wreckers," " The Ebb- Tide,” must be regarded as relative failures He has his wish now, for with the news of his with some insistence upon the relativity. The death came the statement that he had been “Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," buried upon the summit of a mountain over- with all its fantastic psychological strength, is looking his Samoan home. hardly to be ranked among the masterpieces. The story of the dead writer's life may be But of “The Master of Ballantrae,” of “ Kid simply told, and for it he has himself supplied napped” and its sequel “ Catriona,” and of the the facts. Born in Edinburgh, November 13, best of the “ New Arabian Nights” stories, 1850, of a family of lighthouse engineers, he there can be no question ; nor can there be any was destined for the ancestral calling. He of " Treasure Island,” equally good reading for attended school and university in Edinburgh, young and old. Little fiction of the last ten discovered that he did not want to be a civil yeare has so fair a chance of immortality as engineer after all, tried the law, finding that these books. equally distasteful, and determined to train Of the many volumes of miscellaneous prose himself for the profession of letters. At the other than fiction, it is hard to single out those age of twenty-three he began those wanderings most likely to live. Hardly one of them is in search of health that were to end only in the without its admirers if not its zealous partisans. antipodes. We can trace these wanderings in Among the collections of essays, the “ Virgin his books, beginning with “ Ordered South,” ibus Puerisque” volume has perhaps the warm and continuing the series through “ Travels est place in the affections of the most discrim- with a Donkey, with a Donkey,” “An Inland Voyage,"“Across inating readers. But let no one on this account the Plains,” and “ The Silverado Squatters.” neglect the " Familiar Studies of Men and The latter two books resulted from a steer- Books," the Memories and Portraits," or the age trip to America in 1879, and a journey papers gathered under the title of “ Across the to the Pacific Coast on an emigrant train. Plains.” As for the altogether delightful books While in San Francisco he married Mrs. Os- of travel, we find it impossible to choose be bourne. During the ensuing years, he lived tween “An Inland Voyage” and “ Travels with at Bournemouth, in Scotland, and in various In 1887 he made a sec- special word must be given to the group of ond visit to America, and spent a winter in the books that deal with life in the Southern Seas, Adirondacks. The summer following, he went to the fiction of the “ Island Nights Entertain to the Samoan islands, became so fascinated ments,” to the fact of “ A Footnote to History,” | with the place that he purchased an estate, and and to the stirring verse of the “ Ballads.” In settled down for the remainder of his days. this connection, we instantly associate Mr. Stev- | How few those days were to be, we now know. enson with Melville, and · Pierre Loti,” and But six years of domestic happiness and of Mr. Charles Warren Stoddard; and he seems healthful activity were no small boon for a man to head the list. whose whole adult life had been a struggle for As for Mr. Stevenson’s verse, while it is of existence, and we doubt not he appreciated the no great consequence, yet it cannot be left un blessing to the full. At all events his best was mentioned. Besides the “ Ballads ” already done in that peaceful retreat, and he himself alluded to, there is “A Child's Garden of was probably glad to accept it as his final rest- Verse,” that unique illustration of the projec- | ing-place. a Donkey in the Cévennes.” And of course a Continental resorts. 1895.] 5 THE DIAL ? mers. The one is his wife, the other Asta Allmers, IBSEN'S NEW PLAY, “ LILLE EYOLF." supposed to be his half-sister. With the latter he Since the publication of “En Folkefiende" in has grown up from childhood in the closest inti- 1882, every second year has been marked by the macy. Now, following close upon the loss of the child, comes the discovery that the supposed rela- appearance of a new play from the pen of Dr. Ibsen. tionship of brother and sister does not exist; and Two years may seem a long time to be given to the the other discovery, which both realize as by a light- composition of a prose drama that occupies less than two hours in the acting, and fills a printed volume ning filash, but which neither ventures to commit to of very modest dimensions ; but we are assured by words, that they are more to one another than even the author's biographer that the two years really go a brother and sister can be. This situation, which to the making of the work, and that the final pro- is treated with the greatest delicacy, closes the sec- ond act. duct is the result of a labor limee for which few mod- Allmers. Asta! What are you saying? ern writers have the requisite patience. It is only Asta. Read the letters. Then you will see — and under- after careful study that we may comprehend the in- stand. And perhaps you will forgive - my mother, also. finite pains bestowed upon every detail of these re Allmers. [Putting his hands to his head.] I cannot grasp markable works, or realize that few poets give their it, cannot hold fast to the thought. You, Asta, then you are verse the elaboration bestowed by Dr. Ibsen upon not -? Asta. You are not my brother, Alfred. the polished prose of his dialogue. Allmers. (Quickly, half-defiant, gazing upon her.] Well, The new play, which has just been received from but how does that alter our relations after all ? Not in the Copenhagen, and of which translations into English, least. German, French, Russian, Dutch, Hungarian, Bo- Asta. [Shaking her head.] It alters everything, Alfred. Our relation is not that of brother and sister. hemian, and Polish have been arranged, is entitled Allmers. No, no! But as sacred for all that. It will al- “Lille Eyolf,” and is in three acts. Coming after ways be as sacred. “ Hedda Gabler” and “ Bygmester Solness,” it is a Asta. Do not forget that you are subject to the law of relief to the reader, for it is simpler in plan and mutability, as you said but now. more obvious in significance. Many of its passages Allmers. [Looking searchingly at her.) Do you mean by that are far-reaching in their implications, and strike Asta. (Quietly, but deeply stirred.) Not a word more, into the very depths of the soul; but the reader is dear, dear Alfred. [Taking up some flowers from a chair.] not all the time haunted by the suggestion of some Do you see these water-lilies ? elusive allegory, some hidden meaning that leads Allmers. (Nodding slowly.] They are of the sort that shoot up — far up from the depths. him a will-o'-the-wisp chase and lands him in a bog Asta. I picked them in the pool. There, where it flows of conjecture. Even the most ardent of symbolists out into the fjord. (Holding them out to him.) Will you have may possibly be content to take this play for what them, Alfred ? it is, and see in it nothing more than a direct tran- Allmers. [Taking them.] Thank you. Asta. (With tearful eyes.] They are like a last greeting script of life under ideal conditions arranged by a to you from – from little Eyolf. consummate artistic sense. Allmers. (Gazing upon her.] From Eyolf out yonder? Or Alfred Allmers and his wife, Rita, have been mar- from you? ried for some ten years, and have one child, a boy Asta. (Softly.) From as both. Come with me to Rita. Allmers. [Taking his hat and murmuring.] Asta. Eyolf. of nine, named Eyolf. The child has been crippled Little Eyolf ! in infancy, and is just reaching the age when he real- The character of Rita, the wife, is less transpar- izes the difference between himself and other boys ent than that of Asta, and her motives are not so sound of limb. The father, passionately attached to his child, has determined to devote himself to his easily laid bare. In the first act she is presented happiness, and bring what harmony is yet possible ing him his interest in his intellectual pursuits, his to us as attached to Allmers to the point of grudg- into a life so unfitted to battle for itself. He thus affection for his sister, and even his absorption in states his new-found aim: the child. She sees with delight the prospect of a “I will try to bring to light all the rich possibilities that are dawning in his childish soul. I will bring to full growth, to marriage between Asta and a young engineer who flower and fruit, every germ of noble purpose within him. has for some time been laying siege to the sister's And I will do more than that. I will help him to harmonize heart. his wishes with what things are attainable by him. For now Rita. I should be very glad to see a match made between they are not in harmony. He longs for things that will be him and Asta. unattainable all his life long. But I will create joy in his Allmers. (Discontented.] Why would you like that? mind." Rita. (With rising emotion.) Because then she would have These plans are all broken off by the accidental to go far away with him. She could never come out to us the way she does now. drowning in the fjord of the child, whose winsome Allmers. (Looking at her with amazement.] What! Would figure, like that of Mamillius in “ The Winter's you like to get rid of Asta ? Tale,” makes but the briefest appearance upon the Rita. Yes, yes, Alfred. scene, then passes from our sight, although never Allmers. But why in all the world from our memory. Rita. [Passionately throwing her arms about his neck.] Because then I should at last have you for myself alone. Yet The remaining two acts of the play are essentially -not quite then even. Not wholly for myself. [Bursting into a study of two women and their relations with Ali convulsive tears.] Oh, Alfred, Alfred-I cannot give you up! ? 6 [Jan. 1, THE DIAL us once more. Allmers. [Gently freeing himself.] But, dearest Rita, be Rita. I still hate the book. But I sat and listened when reasonable. you spoke. And now I want to test myself. In my own way. Rita. No, I don't care the least bit about being reasonable. Allmers. (Shaking his head.] It is not for the sake of the I care only about you. For you alone in the whole world. unfinished book? (Flinging herself upon his neck again.] For you, for you, for Rita. No, I have a reason for it. you ! Allmers. What? Allmers. Let go, let go,-you hurt me. Rita. [With a melancholy smile.] I want to find favor in Rita. (Releasing him.] If I only could. (With flashing those big, open eyes, you see. eyes.] Oh, if you only knew, how I have hated you ! Allmers. [Resolutely, fixing his gaze upon her.] Could I Allmers. Hated me? not be with you, and help you, Rita ? Rita. Yes, when you sat in there by yourself, brooding Rita. Would you ? over your work. Long, long into the night. [Plaintively.] Allmers. Yes, if I only knew that I could. So long, so late, Alfred. Oh, how I hated your work! Rita. [Lingeringly.) But then you would have to stay Allmers. But now I have given it all up. here. Rita. (Laughing harshly.] Indeed! Now you are absorbed Allmers. [Gently.] Let us try to make it succeed. in something yet worse. Rita. [In a barely audible voice.] Let us try, Alfred. Allmers. [Excited.] Worse! Do you call the child some- [Both are silent. Allmers goes to the staff and raises the thing worse? flag that has floated at half-mast. Rita watches him in si- Rita. [Vehemently.) Yes, I do.''In the relation between lence.] us two, I call him that. For the child,- the child is besides Allmers. [Coming back to her.] There is a hard day's a living human being, he is. [With increasing agitation.) But I will not bear it, Alfred! I will not bear it, and I tell you so! work before us, Rita. Allmers. [In a low voice, looking fixedly at her.] I am Rita. But you shall see the peace of the sabbath fall upon almost afraid of you at times, Rita. Allmers. (With quiet emotion.] Perchance we shall have Rita. [Darkly.) I am often afraid of myself. And for visits from the world of spirits. just that reason you must not arouse the evil in me. Rita. [Whispering.] Spirits ? This scene strikes the keynote of Rita's character. Allmers. Perchance they are about us—those we have lost. She displays jealousy, undoubtedly, but jealousy of Rita. [Nodding slowly.] Our little Eyolf. And your big a complex sort, jealousy even more morbid than Eyolf too. that passion usually is. The problem of the re Allmers. [Gazing into space.] Perhaps on our way through life- maining two acts is that of working out the effects - we may now and then - catch some glimpses of them. Rita. Where shall we look, Alfred ? of the child's death upon this passionate nature, and Allmers. [Fixing his eyes upon her.] Above. upon the nature, equally passionate in its depths Rita. [Nods in assent.] Yes, yes, above. but outwardly more restrained, of Allmers. Allmers. Above - toward the mountain-peaks. Toward the stars. And toward the great silence. To trace the process by which these stricken souls Rita. [Stretching out her hand to him.] Thank you. find peace would be impossible without translating the greater part of the two acts that follow. For In this lovely scene, and in the play of which it is peace finally comes—or we are at least assured that the ending, we find once more the Ibsen that to its advent is imminent to her, through love, now some of us, at least, has seemed wellnigh lost of re- first realized, for the memory of the lost child ; to cent years, the idealist of “ Brand ” and “ Peer him, through a deeper penetration into the mystery Gynt,” the ethical leader who has preached so many of life. At first dazed with grief, the future a blank sermons upon the theme of losing life for the sake of saving it. For this play is but another illustra- to both, they instinctively turn to one another for tion of the text, help, and, in community of grief, grope towards that “Evigt ejes kun det tabte," higher plane of thought and feeling which is attain- able by the courageous, but, perhaps, only through which is the real subject of so many of Dr. Ibsen's works. the refiner's fire of suffering. We leave them with WILLIAM MORTON PAYNE. the ascent well begun, and the goal dimly in view. Moved by a common impulse of altruism, they re- solve, thus bereft of their own child, to make bet- ter and brighter the lives of the village children JANUARY about them, the very children who had made no ef- fort to save Eyolf from his fate. We translate the Say it, my Winds,— was never king but me! beautiful scene with which the play ends : Say it, and say the king is on his throne, His lords about him. — Stand, lords, you, mine own; Allmers. What do you really think you can do for all these Hearts of my heart, let but one beating be: poverty-stricken children? Now is the topmost hour of royalty- Rita. I will try to see if I cannot soften - and ennoble their lot. Ho, Winds, stick sharper, prick 'em to the bone ! Allmers. If you can do that, little Eyolf was not born in Yon oak, there, wrench bim, fetch a louder groan ! . vain. Bow, bow, old bald-top, bend the creaking knee ! - Rita. Nor in vain taken from us. Rake, strip the hill; smite harder, Winds, by half; Allmers. (Looking fixedly at her.] Have no illusion upon Drive, Cold, clean to men's hearts, set deep your sting one point, Rita. It is not love that impels you to this course. In men. — - Lords, come, a hollowful we quaff, Rita. No, it is not that. At least not yet. Then for a roaring stave; hey, drink and sing ! Allmers. What is it, really? The world's last window, rack it with your laugh: Rita. (Half evasively.) You have so often talked to Asta about human responsibility - Ha, ha ! but it is good to be a king ! Allmers. About the book you hated. JOHN VANCE CHENEY. 1895.] 7 THE DIAL area is hardly possible in this country. Of course no COMMUNICATIONS. American library could ever hope to rival the British Museum or the Bodleian in their particular field, but ENGLISH LITERATURE IN AMERICAN it is a disgraceful lacuna in tbe endowment of American LIBRARIES. scholarship that research in almost any direction (except (To the Editor of THE DIAL.) perhaps in Shakespeare study and in one or two mod- The rapidly increasing interest in the study of English ern subjects) demanding any but the simplest and most literature in American schools and universities, and the elementary materials can only be prosecuted abroad. recent suggestion in THE DIAL that the leading specialty In no field except that of history—and literature is one of the new Crerar Library should be English literature of the chief documents of history—are great collections in the broad sense of the term, lends renewed value to of books so necessary as in the study of literature, and the statistics and statements contained in the “ Notes the most universal of the arts will never attain to its on Special Collections in American Libraries" issued proper dignity in American civilization until adequate from the Harvard College Library. From this docu- material means for its fostering and promotion are af- ment I summarize briefly the descriptions of the chief forded. The Crerar Library could supply no greater collections in English literature as reported from all the need than by a collection of the literature of the En- great libraries of the country except the Library of glish tongue. F. I. CARPENTER. Congress at Washington. The best general collections are probably those at The University of Chicago, Dec. 22, 1894. Harvard, in the Boston Public Library, in the Lenox Library at New York including the Duyckinck collection THE PERILOUS USE OF UNKNOWN TONGUES. of 15,000 volumes in literary history, and in the Sutro (To the Editor of THE DIAL.) Library at San Francisco. Considerable collections also exist at the University of California; at Johns Hopkins A great many people firmly believe that a knowledge (especially complete in regard to Beowulf); at Lafayette of Latin is not at all necessary in order to get through College (Professor March's collection in Old and Mid this life successfully, but one might suppose that all dle English, said to be “nearly complete for Anglo would agree as to the necessity of such a knowledge to Saxon”); in the Massachusetts Historical Society's Li- anyone who attempts to use the language. The sorry brary, Boston, including the Dowse collection of “best plight into which some of the Columbian Exposition editions and rarities in English literature”; at the Uni- officials were thrown by the lack of this knowledge has versity of Vermont (the George P. Marsh library); the been pointed out by one of your correspondents. Let collection of periodicals and of transactions and publi- me call attention to a few similar cases of unsuccessful cations of learned societies in the Chicago Public Library; wrestling with an unknown tongue. In a ponderous at Dartmouth College; the material originally used by work on the “ Principles of Economic Philosophy,” pub Noah Webster in preparing bis dictionary, belonging to lished several years ago, the principle “omnium vivum the Hartford Library Association; and a few others of ex ovo” is stated, and, as if purposely to clear the less importance. printer of blame, we have as its counterpart “omnium In addition to those specified above, the chief special ovum ex vivo.” Perhaps nothing better should be ex- collections are as follows: The Barton collection in the pected from a work on political economy published in Boston Public Library, nearly 14,000 volumes, mostly the midst of a campaign, but it is only a few months Shakespeariana and rare editions of English Drama and since no less a magazine than “ The Atlantic Monthly” Poetry. The Shakespeare collection of 1000 volumes was guilty of omnia Gallia,” in quoting from the first in the Lenox Library, including all the early editions. sentence of Cæsar's Commentaries ! By the help of Other Shakespeare collections as follows: The Wisconsin Mrs. Partington, with her “omnibi,” the process of re- State Historical Society, 1200 volumes; the Mercantile duction from the third to the first and second declen- Library, Philadelphia, 1200 volumes (Shakespeare and sions is complete for all genders, though the stems do not the Drama); the Columbia College Library, 700 vol- happen to coincide. But this is not all; along comes umes; the St. Louis Public Library, 600 volumes; the “The Cosmopolitan" with“ monstrum informum ingeus,' Peabody Institute, Baltimore, 500 volumes; the Brown which would have been much more terrible to Vergil University Library, 400 volumes, including many rare than was Polyphemus to Æneas. “Ad valorum," on pamphlets; and the recently acquired collection at the the editorial page of “ The Independent” a few years University of Michigan. Harvard, Columbia, and the ago, may have been a mere typographical error; but Lenox have also considerable collections on Milton. The “ex unum quadraginta” (of the number of dishes of folk-lore collection of 5800 volumes at Harvard is “sup- soup from one can of some new preparation), which I posed to be the largest in existence. .” Harvard also has culled from a polyglot street-car advertisement in Bal- valuable Shelley and Carlyle MSS. and books. The timore, is doubtless to be ascribed to the same cause Boston Athenæum has a Byron collection of over 200 operating in the other instances mentioned: crass ignor- volumes. Lafayette College has special collections on ance of the language. Horace says: Priestley, De Foe, Junius, etc. The Lenox Library has “Ludere qui nescit campestribus abstinet armis," a fine collection of incunabula, including a portion of the which offers a very important suggestion to those who first English printed book, 1474, and other specimens attempt to use Latin without some little knowledge of of Caxton and the early English printers. its forms. Viewing these summaries as a whole, it is evident that Since writing the above, I have received the Decem- there is nowhere in the United States any really satis ber“ Education” (fresh from Boston!) with the informa- factory and fairly complete collection in the great field tion (p. 255) that Gudeman's “ Dialogus de Oratoribus” of English literature. A few special collections offer a contains “a prolegomena.” promising beginning in one or more narrow parts of the W. H. JOHNSON. field, but extended study and research over any wide Denison University, Granville, O., Dec. 24, 1894. 8 [Jan. 1, THE DIAL miration. She sees Punchinello (freely per- The New Books. spiring and more shiny and rubicund than ever) led up the hostess to be congratulated and MORE MEMOIRS OF LITERARY LONDON.* thanked and patronized, and then handed round The qualities that won for Mrs. Anne Thack to the company severally, like a sort of refresh- eray Ritchie's “Records of Tennyson and Brown- ment; and the entertainment is over. ing "so cordial a welcome on both sides of the “ As we move towards the door again, we once more Atlantic are once more pleasantly in evidence pass Mr. Locker (of the • London Lyrics '), and he nods kindly, and tells me he knows my father. Well, and in her “ Chapters from Some Unwritten Me- what do you think of Jasmin ?' he asks; but I can't moirs." Essentially the volume is a retrospect answer him, my illusions are dashed.... I who bad of the author's girlhood, which seems to have longed to see a poet ! who had pictured something so been divided pretty evenly between London and different ! I swallowed down as best I could that gulp of salt-water which is so apt to choke us when we first Paris, and the opening sentence sounds its key- take our plunge into the experience of life.” note : Yet Mrs. Ritchie had been that evening in “My father lived in good company, so that even as children we must have seen a good many poets and re- a throng of poets, as she learned later; for markable people, though we were not always conscious Lamartine, Chateaubriand, Girardin, Mérimée, of our privileges." and some others, were of the company. And Mrs. Ritchie opens the series of pen-portraits he too of the red face and the shirt-frill was a which form the staple of her book with a lively poet — a poet of the people, writing from his sketch of her “first poet,” Jasmin (Jaquou heart in his own dialect ; one of the school, as Jansemin, in the langue d'Oc), the barber-poet Sainte-Beuve says, of Horace, and of Theocri- of Agen. She met Jasmin at a party given in tus, and of Gray, and “ of all those charming his honor by Lady Elgin at Paris ; and the studious inspirations which aim at perfection outer man of the tonsorial bard fell wofully in all their work.” short of her young ideal. She had learned at It was at Paris, also, that Mrs. Ritchie met school some of his beautiful verses, and her her first musician ; and here there was no dis- fancy had painted a poet to match--something illusionment. She accompanied, one morning, in the Byronic way, with a distinctive touch as she relates, a friend of her grandmother's on of the warm South” superadded. But alas ! a visit to the lodgings of one whose name and when the real Jasmin dawned upon her at Lady identity were not at first made known to her. Elgin's rout, it was no belated troubabour that The friend was a Scotch lady of rank, who to she saw, but a stout jovial figure like an over the harshest of exteriors joined the mildest of ripe Bacchus — a jolly, red, shining face, with souls; and her errand on this occasion was round prominent features, framed with little plainly one of kindness, for there was a large pomatumy wisps of hair (smacking all too basket in the carriage containing a store of plainly of the shop), and a Falstaffian torso viands and bottles. Arrived at a small house clad in a gorgeous frilled shirt over a pink lin- in a side street near the Arc de Triomphe, the ing. She could have cried for vexation. It carriage stopped, and the lady got out, care- was her first illusion perdue. fully carrying her parcel. The door was opened “That the poet ? -- not that,' I falter, gazing at by a slight delicate-looking man with long hair, Punchinello, high-shouldered, good-humored. Yes, of strangely bright eyes, and a thin hooked nose. course it's that,' said a little girl, laughing at my dis- may; and the crowd seems to form a circle, in the cen- “When Miss X. saw him she hastily put down her tre of which stands this droll creature, who now begins basket, caught both his hands in hers, began to shake to recite in a monotonous voice." them gently, and to scold him in an affectionate reprov- ing way for having come to the door. He laughed, said Mrs. Ritchie understood French pretty well he had guessed who it was, and motioned her to enter, at the time; but of Jasmin's patois she could and I followed at her sign with the basket - followed make nothing. To her untrained ear the reci into a narrow little room, with no furniture in it what- tation was a meaningless "chi, cha, chou, at- ever but an upright piano and a few straw chairs stand- ing on the wooden shiny floor. He made us sit down chiou, atchiou, atchiou,” '-a kind of mellifluous with some courtesy, and in reply to her questions said Provençal sneeze, to the rhythm of which the he was pretty well. Had he slept ? He shook his head. ample shirt-frill beat time, as the voice rose and Had he eaten? He shrugged his shoulders and pointed fell. It leaves off at last, and there is a moment to the piano. He had been composing something - I of silence, and then a buzz of low-voiced ad- --would Miss X. like to hear it? . She would like to hear remember that he spoke in an abrupt, light sort of way CHAPTERS FROM SOME UNWRITTEN MEMOIRS. By Anne it,' she answered, she would dearly like to hear it; but it Thackeray Ritchie. New York: Harper & Brothers. would tire him to play; it could not be good for him.”' 1895.] 9 THE DIAL ness. ened away.” He smiled again, shook back his long hair, and form of a draft on the Rothschilds. It was seated himself at the piano ; and instantly the learned later, however, that the beleaguered old room was filled with a rain of continuous sound, lady had scorned to apply the money to the a fuent stream of rippling melody that rose purchase of luxuries above the horrible frican- and fell, and swelled and died away again, until deaux and salmis of rats and mice to which her the strained ear scarcely caught its echo. There neighbors were reduced, subscribing it rather, was a magician at the keys. as she proudly said, “ to the cannon which were “The lady sat absorbed and listening, and as I looked presented by our quartier to the city of Paris.” at her I saw tears in her eyes—great clear tears rolling “My father,” observes Mrs. Ritchie, “ had down her cheeks while the music poured on and on. a weakness for dandies.” Magnificent speci- can't, alas, recall that music! I would give anything to remember it now; but the truth is I was so interested mens of the “ Dandiacal body” used to cross in the people that I scarcely listened. When he stopped her vision sometimes, as they passed through at last and looked round, the lady started up. You the hall to the study; but there was one that mustn't play any more,' she said; it's too beautiful'- outshone the rest as the sun the stars in bright- and she praised him in a tender, motherly, pitying sort of way, and then hurriedly said we must go; but as we This splendid person, she remembers, took leave she added almost in a whisper with a humble had a little pencil-sketch in his hand ; and it apologizing look — I have brought you some of that seemed to her impossible that so grand a being jelly, and my sister sent some of the wine you fancied could be so feeble a draughtsman. the other day; pray try, to take a little.' He again shook his head at er, seeming more vexed than grate- “ He appeared to us one Sunday morning in the sun- shine. When I came down to breakfast I found him ful. It is very wrong; you shouldn't bring me these things,' he said in French. •I won't play to you if you sitting beside my father at the table, with an untasted do'_but she put him back softly, and hurriedly closed cup of coffee before him; he seemed to fill the bow- window with radiance as if he were Apollo; he leaned the door upon him and the offending basket, and hast- against his chair with one elbow resting on its back, with shining studs and curls and boots. We could see his The player was Chopin. “Never forget," said horse looking in at us over the blind. It was indeed a Mrs. Ritchie's companion, that you have heard sight for little girls to remember all their lives." Chopin play; for soon no one will ever hear It was indeed ; for the visitor was Count D'Or- him play any more." say—the brilliant being who (as Richard Doyle Mrs. Ritchie's historian, or rather her“ pro- relates) so impressed a literary man of the day fessor of history,” was not a Thiers, or a Guizot, that the latter was heard to roar out in dismay or even a Lamartine. It was a certain quaint old at a city banquet where D'Orsay was present, body who, for the behoof of very young ladies, above the din of aldermanic gabbling and gob- made a feint at giving historical lectures, keep bling, “Waiter! for Heaven's sake bring melted ing herself laboriously a chapter or so ahead butter for the flounder of the Count!” He could of her pupils, and plunging (Mrs. Ritchie re- not bear that the waiter's omission should rest members) into the bloody chaos of the Merov as a blot upon his country's cookery. ingian and Carolingian times with a zest com No literary memoir of the period would be ically at odds with her own appearance. This complete without a glimpse of the Carlyles. Madame P., whose purse was even leaner than Mrs. Ritchie first saw the sage at a dinner at her lectures, is the heroine of a pleasant story her father's, given for Miss Brontë; and she of Thackeray, the truth of which is now vouched remembers him then chiefly as railing at the for by his daughter. appearance of cockneys upon Scotch mountain- “When my father came to Paris to fetch us away, he sides. There were also too many Americans was interested in the accounts he heard of the old lady there for his taste; “but the Americans were from his mother and cousin. ... I was sent one day to search for a certain pill-box in my father's room, of as gods compared to the cockneys," he kindly which he proceeded to empty the contents into the fire- added. Later, the old house in Cheyne Row place, and then, drawing a neat banker's roll from his (the Mecca of Carlyle's “millions of trans- pocket, to fill up the little cube with new napoleons, atlantic bores”), became a familiar spot to her; packing them in closely up to the brim. After which, and here she heard from the lips of Mrs. Car- the cover being restored, he wrote the following prescrip- tion in his beautiful even handwriting: • Madame P. . lyle many stories that have since strayed into To be taken occasionally when required. Signed, Dr. print. "If,” said the poor lady pathetically W. M. T.'" on one occasion, “ if you wish for a quiet life, Years after, when Paris was besieged by the never you marry a dyspeptic man of genius. Germans, and Madame P. was in sorer straits “I remember,” Mrs. Ritchie adds, she used than ever before, “ Dr. W. M. T.'s” generous to tell us how, when he first grew a beard, all prescription was repeated -- this time in the the time he had saved by ceasing to shave he 10 [Jan. 1 THE DIAL spent wandering about the house, and bemoan- pared for delivery before a great popular audi- ing that much was amiss in the universe.' If ence, such as a forceful speaker of eminent Mrs. Carlyle was, as tradition says, a shade reputation always commands in the lecture-hall nearer Xanthippe than Griselda, there was as of the Lowell Institute. Before such an audi- suredly much in her universe to explain and ence the lecturer had a right to assume that palliate the fact. there were only a few who had made a special Mrs. Ritchie's notes on the Carlyles close study of the Revolution, sufficient to enable with a characteristic little story that will bear them to follow the presentation of a single phase re-telling. It seems that irreverent thieves of the great movement without much prelim- having broken into the sanctuary at Chelsea inary explanation. The first six lectures, con- and carried off the dining-room clock, it was cerning the causes of the Revolution, were arranged by some of the then aging philoso- therefore given mainly as an introduction, to pher's friends to formally present him with a prepare the audience for what the lecturer had new one. Lady Stanley was elected spokes- to say about Mirabeau, for whom he has a de- woman on the occasion : cided partiality. “ It was Carlyle's birthday, and a dismal winter's day; The main interest in these volumes opens the streets were shrouded in greenish vapors, and the with the seventh lecture, on the party of one houses looked no less dreary within than the streets man, the fourth party in the Assembly, Mira- through which we had come. Somewhat chilled and depressed, we all assembled in Lady Stanley's great beau. “Yes," says the author, “and [he] not drawing-room in Dover Street, where the fog had also only was a party of himself, but he knew be- penetrated, and presently from the farther end of the forehand that it would be so, and was deter- room, advancing through the darkness, came Carlyle.mined that it should be so.” In that assembly There was a moment's pause. No one moved. He of twelve hundred deputies there were many stood in the middle of the room without speaking. No doubt the philosopher as well as his disciples felt the influ- of the best as well as most illustrious men in ence of the atmosphere. Lady Stanley went to meet him. France; or, as La Marck says, all the capac- · Here is a little birthday present we want you to accept ities, talents, energy, and spirit in the kingdom. from us all, Mr. Carlyle,' said she, quickly pushing up Mirabeau was then forty years old. He was. before him a small table upon which stood the clock ticking all ready for his acceptance. Then came another the best-known man in that period of the Rev- silence, broken by a knell, sadly sounding in our ears. olution. His abilities were of the highest order. • Eh, what have I got to do with Time any more ?'—he He was the greatest orator in the Assembly. said. It was a melancholy moment. Nobody could It is claimed that he was its greatest practical speak. The unfortunate promoter of the scheme felt statesman. I cannot think that he desired to her heart sink into her shoes." stand alone in the Assembly, having no party But we have quoted enough from Mrs. affiliations and wanting none. No one under- Ritchie's pleasant and, in its light way, mat- stood better than Mirabeau the difficult public terful little book to show its scope and tenor. questions that awaited solution. And no one Other chapters treat of further Paris and Lon- understood better than he that even in public don memories, of tours on the continent, includ. ing a visit to Weimar, of “Mrs. Kemble,” etc.; by a union of influential men acting together assemblies such questions can be solved best and there are pleasant glimpses throughout of for a common purpose. The power to bring Thackeray and his circle. E. G. J. about such effective combinations is at least one of the best-known tests of practical statesman- ship. Nothing seems clearer than that Mira- MIRABEAU AND THE FRENCH REV. beau desired to be a leader of a party in the As-- OLUTION.* sembly. He desired especially, while retaining In the prefatory note to the two volumes con- his seat as deputy, to be in the ministry, where taining the twelve lectures recently delivered by Professor Von Holst before the Lowell In- king openly, and not, as the privilege was only he would have the privilege of approaching the stitute, the distinguished author asks readers once accorded to him, of approaching the king and critics to take the pages for what they pur- secretly and by a private door. It is because port to be : not a book on the French Revolu- he was a party by himself, and not because he tion, but merely some lectures on it, given under determined to be so, that his desire was never prescribed limits. These lectures were pre- These lectures were pre- gratified. Under the law of November 7, 1789, *THE FRENCH REVOLUTION, Tested by Mirabeau's Career: members of the Assembly could not enter the Twelve Lectures on the History of the French Revolution. ministry. When that door to his ambition was By H. Von Holst. In two volumes, with portrait. Chicago : Callaghan & Co. closed, he passed the remainder of his life in. 1895.] 11 THE DIAL vain efforts to make combinations with influen- sequent ones, the purpose of La Marck was tial men to secure for himself a secret position formed. He says : “I wished to contribute to behind the throne, from which, without any the preservation of the throne, as to the defence department for himself, his unseen hand should of the unhappy king who occupied it. To bring direct all the departments, through a king who to the cause of the king Count Mirabeau, who had no will and no fixed purpose except to re- seemed to be the most violent and the most dan- ceive from Rome his directions and from the gerous enemy of the throne, to put him in the armies of Europe his defence. Rivalry, jeal rank of its most powerful defenders, seemed to ousy, and the inability of Frenchmen to appre me to be an essential service to render." To ciate statesmanship, have been assigned as effect this service La Marck had many inter- reasons for his failure. The explanation is not views with the queen, and, finally, one with adequate ; for it is not true. Frenchmen are both king and queen. “ When the king en- not wanting in magnanimity. Mirabeau him- tered,” says La Marck, “ without any preamble self explained the cause of the difficulty, often and with his usual brusqueness, he said, “The saying: " Ah! how the immorality of my youth queen has told you that I have decided to em- injures the public weal.” His conduct during ploy Count Mirabeau, if you think it is in his the Revolution completes the explanation. His intentions and in his power to be useful to me.' life, from beginning to end, is a significant After some suggestions by La Marck, to the illustration of the fact that character, such as effect that all the revolutionary chiefs might Washington's or Hampden's, is more influential be induced to enter into the service of the king, even in popular assemblies than oratory and the suggestions in relation to the other chiefs talent. Arthur Young says: “ In every com being ignored, the king said that what should pany, of every rank, you hear of Count Mira be done with Mirabeau must be kept a profound beau's talents; that he is one of the best pens secret from the ministers. It was then agreed in France, and the first orator; and that he that the king should pay the debts of Mirabeau, could not carry, from confidence, six votes in amounting to 208,000 francs, allow him 6000 the states.” This explanation was satisfactory francs a month for his expenses, and should de- to Mirabeau's contemporaries. It has been posit with La Marck the king's notes of France generally accepted by eminent writers on the amounting to 1,000,000 francs, which should Revolution, from that day to our time. It is be delivered to Mirabeau at the close of the not accepted by Professor Von Holst, who Assembly, if, in the meantime, the king should seems to think that the time has not yet come be satisfied in relation to Mirabeau's fidelity. for full justice to Mirabeau. In addition to these gifts, it was afterwards It is claimed that the immorality of his youth agreed to allow three hundred francs a month was such as was common in that time; but that, to the copyist of Mirabeau, “to pay for his si- when he entered public life at the time of the lence,” as La Marck said. Mirabeau accepted Revolution, his ambition was aroused, he became these gifts gratefully, including the conditional a new man, and the immorality of his youth promise as to the additional million francs should not be counted against him. Unfor:which were to be given on Cæsar's method : tunately, venality, the vice of his public life, something down, and much more to follow. is one that is more destructive to the founda- La Marck was repeatedly charged to keep the tions of public welfare than all the vices of his whole transaction in the profoundest secrecy. youth. Mirabeau's failure to win the confi- Secrecy and silence are the well-known covers dence of his contemporaries will not be under to venality everywhere. stood when his vices in public and in private Mirabeau's private agreement to enter into life shall have been forgotten. The account of the service of the king was consummated about Mirabeau's venality is given in the writings of the tenth of May, 1790. Previous to that time, La Marck with coloring as favorable as honest every door to a place in the ministry had been friendship could use. They knew each other closed against him. “If I were asked," says prior to the Revolution. They were both in They were both in Professor Von Holst, “what chapter of his whole the National Assembly. Meeting in the As- history redounds, upon the whole, the most to sembly, Mirabeau made the first advances, ask his honor, not only as a statesman but also as ing La Marck to sound the court, and saying a man, I should unhesitatingly answer: that of to him : “ Let them understand at the chateau his relations to the court." I am far from that I am more disposed towards them than thinking that this is, or ever will be, the judg- against them.” In that interview, and in sub-I ment of history. It was not even the judgment 12 [Jan. 1, THE DIAL of Mirabeau. On the twenty-first of October, more destructive Revolution. It was to that 1789, when he might have reasonably consid-party that Mirabeau, when interrupted, shouted: ered that a place in the ministry was open to “Silence aux trente voix !” Lafayette, with him, he wrote to La Marck : “A great succour dauntless courage, long continued to resist the I cannot accept without a place which makes influence of that party. When it had acquired it legitimate. A pension for public service control of the king, the Assembly, the munici- previously rendered is a badge of honor; a pay- palities, the clubs, and the armies, and resist- ment secretly bestowed for political services to ance was no longer possible, Lafayette honor- be rendered, “ without a place which renders it ably withdrew from the army he commanded.. legitimate," was then, and is now, considered a “From the fifth of October," says our author, badge of dishonor. It is to the credit of hu- “Lafayette was the most powerful man in the man nature that the prejudice, vices, and ven. realm, not to do good, but to avert, as well as alities of Mirabeau account for his failure to to bring about, some of the worst evils. There- gain the confidence of his contemporaries. But fore one of the main points in Mirabeau's pro- these are not all of Mirabeau. His nobler part gramme from that day on is to coax or to force will live. His fifty notes to the king contain him into an offensive and defensive alliance, or the most valuable contribution to political to break his power.' The alternative is not science that has come down to us from the Rev-correctly stated. Mirabeau, for several months, olution. In that view, and with the proper labored incessantly both to secure an alliance qualifications, his relations to the court will re with the most powerful man in France, and at dound most to his honor as a statesman and as the same time to break him down. Lafayette a man. had daily access to the king. Mirabeau had Professor Von Holst seems to undervalue not. Under his secret "employment,” he could the great qualities of Lafayette. “Not many only send his notes to the king, giving advice persons,” he says, “who have cut a prominent which was never followed. In half of these figure in great times have lost so much by hav- secret notes he assailed Lafayette with unscru- ing the search-light of critical history turned pulous malice. He carried on both purposes at. upon them as Lafayette.” The conduct and the same time—one openly, the other secretly. character of Lafayette were well known long On the first of June, 1790, Mirabeau wrote before any such search-light was discovered. to Lafayette : “ Your great qualities have need However it may be elsewhere, it was known, at of my impelling force ; my impelling force bas- least in France and in the United States, that need of your great qualities.” On the same in a long life tried by many tests, the conduct day, he sent his first note to the king, in which, of Lafayette was exceptionally consistent, and through page after page, he employed his “im- that it was uniformly governed, not by passion, pelling force” in unscrupulous detraction of but by principle. In all emergencies he dis- Lafayette’s “great qualities.” He failed to played the same high qualities. He was early break Lafayette ; and he failed, as he had failed trained in the school of experience, under Wash with others, and for the same reason, to secure ington, whose friendship and confidence he al- the coveted alliance. Lafayette did not know ways retained. From the time when he first all that is now known about the conduct of decided to come to America, if the testimony Mirabeau. He knew, however, enough, and of La Marck may be accepted, his whole after therefore justly refused to take the proferred conduct was impelled by a force of will that hand, as afterwards the Girondins refused to one rarely meets. take the hand of Danton. The one, offered His first experience led him to prefer con treacherously, was soiled with money; the other, stitutional liberty under a republic. In the In the offered magnanimously, was stained with blood. France of that time, he agreed with almost all Professor Von Holst revives the stale charge of the Revolutionary leaders that it was suffi- relating to Lafayette's conduct on the fifth cient to secure constitutional liberty under a and sixth of October, 1789. He says of La- king. He and the other leaders failed to ar fayette: “As to the part he played on the fifth rest the course of the Revolution at a point of October, he himself has always seen a halo where nearly all of them wished it to stop. It around his head.” And again : “ Though it is easier to break down a dam than to stay the cannot be directly proved that Lafayette rather consequent rush of waters. In the last period liked to be led to Versailles, circumstantial evi- of Mirabeau's life, a small but determined party dence renders it likely.” When Lafayette was of men began to prepare for the second and hunting down the promoters of that movement, 1895.] 13 THE DIAL it was Mirabeau who thought it necessary to A NEW BOOK ON SHAKESPEARE. * explain to Lafayette that he [Mirabeau] had no part in it. When, afterwards, the charge “Will it do to say anything more about was made against Lafayette, he gave a digni- Chaucer?". The question was put some time fied explanation, refuting the slander. Who since by the late Professor of Belles Lettres at has a better claim to be favorably heard in ex Harvard. He thought (very fortunately for planation of his conduct, when assailed, than a ws) that it would do. Probably many people man like Lafayette, who always stood erect, put the same question concerning Shakespeare, and who therefore can bear to have the search- whenever they see a new book of Shakespear- light of history turned upon every part of his ian criticism. And yet it is fortunate for us illustrious career? Sainte-Beuve says: “ All that Mr. Wendell thought it would do to say the reproaches against Lafayette in relation something more about Shakespeare. A good to the days of the twenty-second of July and many books serve as bricks with which people the fifth and sixth of October seem to me to be succeed in building up a solid wall between abandoned or refuted.” There never was a themselves and the object of their study. This moment when Lafayette was not ready to risk book on Shakespeare serves a very different his life, and, what was more to him than life, purpose. his deserved popularity, in the restraint of un- Mr. Wendell has tried, to use his own words, lawful violence; nor when he failed in duty at " to see Shakspere, so far as possible at this the cost of principle. He was five years in the distance of time, as he saw himself.” In this prisons of Austria. The doors of the dungeon there seems at first nothing very out of the way, at Olmutz were always open to him at any mo- nothing which would mark a book out from ment when he should be ready to make the many other studies of Shakespeare. But, if least denial of the political principles upon you think of it, the task is not at all easy. Of which his entire life was governed. In the course there is now at hand much whereby one treaty made after the victory over the Aus may arrange the matter of historical perspect- trians at Campo-Formio, Napoleon inserted ive, but in this case that is the least difficulty. a stipulation securing to Lafayette his free. The real difficulty is that people have got into dom. In due time Lafayette returned to France. the way of regarding Shakespeare as a phe- After thanking Napoleon for his liberty, he re nomenon so out of the ordinary course of things tired to his estates. He was offered many po. that they never really think seriously of seeing sitions under the government, and refused them him as he saw himself. him as he saw himself. Most people, and most all, saying to Napoleon : “ The silence of my critics too, feel about Shakespeare as did that retreat is the maximum of my deference ; if noted man who had the plays bound like a fam- Bonaparte wishes to serve liberty, I am devoted ily Bible and lettered “The Inspired Book.” to him ; but I cannot approve of an arbitrary He had a special table for it in the reception- government, nor associate myself with it." He room, with a marble top, I believe. maintained the same attitude in subsequent con- tion is fatal to the best criticism. It has usually versations with him. When some courtier said been the order of the day to feel that if there to Napoleon that Lafayette was talking against were anything in the plays that we did not ad- him, “Let that man alone,” said Napoleon ; mire or understand, it was our own fat-witted- “ he has said more to my face than he will ever ness that blinded us. Many people will dislike say behind my back.” to give up this idea : it had, to say the least, It was no false idol that the fathers of our the charm of simplicity a paramount excel- Republic set up in Lafayette ; and as long as lence with most folks when ideas are in ques- pure character, consistent conduct, and noble tion. Mr. Wendell, however, is very modern. sacrifice shall be admired, his memory, here, He handles “The Merchant of Venice” with at least, will be honored. no more reverence than if it were First Chron- D. L. SHOREY. icles. “ As an artist,” he remarks of it, “ of course, Shakspere's task was to distract at- The Congress of American Philologists, which has tention from the absurdity of his plot.” Such just completed a three days' session at Philadelphia, boldness startles one. But after the first shock is the direct outcome of the Chicago Congress of is over, it is found to be refreshing. There 1893. Besides the four societies represented at Chi- might be danger of running into mere imperti- cago, this second Congress has included the American Oriental Society, the Society of Biblical Literature and * WILLIAM SHAKSPERE. By Barrett Wendell. New York Exegesis, and the Archeological Institute of America. Charles Scribner's Sons. The no- 14 [Jan. 1, THE DIAL nence. sonal. But Mr. Wendell probably found no we may expect; we may desire something be- especial need of guarding himself in this re sides, but we must acknowledge the immense spect ; his book is modern, and scholarly too. value of this particular acquisition. Mr. Wen- To follow out his plan, Mr. Wendell keeps dell leaves us in no doubt of his views upon two ideas well in the mind of the reader. First, certain possible additions. he never forgets that Shakespeare's plays were “The unanswerable question which that last sugges- always produced for the pleasure of the au- tion raises, however,-as to whether Beatrice and Cleo- dience of an Elizabethan theatre. That gives patra be different portraits of the same living woman who inspired the Sonnets,—is impertinent. The Shak- them an element which must be reckoned with, spere with whom we may legitimately deal is not the although it is circumstantial in character. Then, man, who has left no record of his actual life, but the quite as important to realize, the man who suc- artist, who has left the fullest record of his emotional ceeded in pleasing the Elizabethans was a poet experience. To search for the actual man is at once unbecoming and futile.” " of first-rate genius," a man who worked out his conceptions according to the different im- It will probably occur to many that there is pulses of an emotional life and an artistic tem- some middle ground between an æsthetic ap- perament. On these lines is the problem worked preciation of Shakespeare's artistic nature and out; and as a result we have a book which, a prying curiosity into Shakespeare's personal affairs. while it is neither an exposition of the Shake- To my mind, Mr. Dowden's book spearian theory on the conduct of life, nor a represents such a mean, for it seems to me to almost statement of the Shakespearian practice in give us Shakespearian thought in a way, blank verse, delineation of character, and devel. abstract, which is not exactly artistic nor per- opment of plot, does give us a conception (which we instinctively recognize as well founded) of But the subject of this book is Shakespeare the growth of the poet's genius. as an artist. And, fortunately, Mr. Wendell Such a book will of course be compared with has a very accurate power of appreciating the artistic nature. He has much that is very sug- the somewhat similar study of Mr. Dowden ; and it may at once be said that neither book gestive to say, in one place and another, as to loses by the comparison. Mr. Dowden's book what sort of man an artist is. 66 In an artist of whatever kind," he remarks, “a period of was called “Shakspere: His Mind and Art," but (if one can for a moment make the separa vigorous creative imagination declares itself tion) it said most about the former subject. artistic temperament rarely understand.” It is after a fashion which people who are not of Mr. Wendell has more to say of the latter. In other words, while Mr. Dowden exhibits in a a pity, perhaps, but they do not. Mr. Wendell profoundly interesting way a development of has a good deal to say which may be of help. thought and feeling, Mr. Wendell has succeeded It is unnecessary to try to convey in a few rather better in showing the artistic character words the net result of such a book. of that development. single quotation will do something to show into what conception Mr. Wendell's method works “ That the development which we are trying to fol- low is rather artistic than personal, however, we cannot itself out. too strenuously keep in mind. The details of Shak “Quite apart from its lasting literary value, apart, spere's private life, quite undiscoverable nowadays, are, too, from its unique personal quality, the work of Shak- after all, no one's business. For the rest, nobody fa spere has new interest to modern students as a complete miliar with the literature and the stage of his time can individual example of how fine art emerges from an very seriously believe that in writing his plays he gen archaic convention, fuses imagination with growing sense erally meant to be philosophical, ethical, didactic. Like of fact, and declines into a more mature convention where any other playwright, he made plays for audiences. He the sense of fact represses and finally stifles the force differed from other playwrights chiefly in the fervid of creative imagination." depth of his artistic nature.” There is a great deal more that one would One need not go the whole length with Mr. like to say about the book. Its whole atmos- Wendell and insist that the artistic side of the phere, its tone, is characteristic and agreeable ; poet is the only one with which we have any its many bits of particular criticism are almost concern. But it is undoubtedly a matter of always put with a very always put with a very nice touch. There may absorbing interest. “Our business, after all,” be a few whose ideas will be made no clearer says Mr. Wendell, “ is not to fathom the depths by a comparison with the relations of Fanny of Hamlet, but only to assure ourselves of Ham Ellsler and the Duc de Reichstadt, or even let's relation to Shakspere's development as with the career of Louis Philippe's Duc de an artist." That makes very clear just what Choiseul-Praslin. But these characters are, to Yet a 1895.] 15 THE DIAL tell the truth, kept far in the background and parison of institutions and societies which is rarely intrude upon us. There are many charm both exact and clear. Whatever be the cause, ing obiter dicta—not the least of which is the progress is the process by which the relatively remark that Portia is “ an exquisite type of complex grows out of the relatively simple or- that unhappily rare kind of human being who ganization ; it consists of a series of changes is produced only by the union of high thinking in the structure, functions, and organs of the and high living. unit. Progress is the passing from simple, in- Mr. Wendell has produced an excellent and coherent, indefinite homogeneity, to complex, thoroughly modern book on Shakespeare. And coherent, definite heterogeneity. At one end when we say it is modern, we mean, not that it of the story stand the organisms having few is new-fangled, nor that it is questionable, nor parts, loosely held together, and but slightly that it is flippant. We mean that it enables We mean that it enables related, while at the other are found bodies us to enjoy Shakespeare in a way that was im- having many intimately connected organs which possible to our grandfathers and grandmothers. depend entirely on each other for the full per- EDWARD E. HALE, JR. formance of their several functions. The char- acteristics of the process are a specialization of function, an integration and differentiation of SOCIAL PROGRESS IN ENGLAND.* parts, and a consequent complexity of struct- ure. It is the peculiar merit of the work that The history of England is the history of has been undertaken by Mr. Traill and his co- European civilization, and in a sense the his- laborers that the ideal set before them is the tory of humanity. Within the space of a thou- scientific explanation of England's progress, sand years her people have advanced from a and the critical examination of the relation be- condition of almost absolute barbarism to the tween cause and effect in the several depart- front rank in culture and refinement. She has ments of social life. They have undertaken occupied this advanced position for several cen- turies. But in the thirteenth century England forgetting dynastic struggle, court intrigue, to write English history on Darwinian lines ; was far behind Spain, France, and the other con- diplomacy, and war, they have given the nar- tinental countries, in all those arts of life which rative of the material, moral, and intellectual go to make up a highly developed society. The progress of the people, and of the career of the bulk of her population still lived in mud huts, English people as a society, “ not as a Polity, cultivated only small strips of land which were held under feudal tenure, knew little and cared nor as a State among States.” It deals with less for the outside world, were scattered over the manners and customs of the succeeding a sparsely settled territory, and had little music, the art of getting a living. periods, with ways of thinking and feeling, with no art, and only the modicum of literature The work is almost encyclopædic in character, which was offered in church chronicles. To- but is in no way a compilation. It is more nearly day her people are better fed, better clothed, a series of short excellent treatises by eminent better housed, better educated, better governed, specialists on the various phases of social life : and enjoy more of the comforts of life, than on trade and agriculture, art and architecture, those of any other European country. To un on language and literature, public health, mor- derstand this progress, the causes underlying als, manners, the development of jurisprudence, it and making it in a sense necessary, and the the church, the army, the navy, science, edu- conditions rendering it possible, is to under- cation, religion, and the action and reaction stand the law of social progress and gain the between these different elements of our civili- key to the history of the race. zation. We are no longer in doubt as to what con- It is a stupendous task, and one which in- stitutes real progress. Recent investigations into the nature and laws of animal and plant the accumulating facts grow too various in creases in difficulty as the story advances, and life have given us a scientific basis for the com- character to be massed together without risk *SOCIAL ENGLAND. A Record of the Progress of the Peo of confusion. ple in Religion, Laws, Arts, Industry, Commerce, Science, “New activities arise which refuse to class them- Literature, and Manners, from the Earliest Times to the Pres- ent Day. By Various Writers. Edited by H. D. Traill, D.C.L., selves under the old headings. Divisions of the subject sometime Fellow of St. John's College, Oxford. Volume I., throw off subdivisions, which themselves require later From the Earliest Times to the Accession of Edward I. Vol on to be further subdivided. In every department of ume II., From the Accession of Edward I. to the Death of our national life there is the same story of evolutionary Henry VII. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. growth – continuous in some of them, intermittent in 16 [Jan. 1, THE DIAL others, but unmistakable in all. Industries multiply years unmarked by famine and pestilence (Den- and ramify; Commerce begets child after child; Art, ton)? The writer on Public Health, Mr. Creigh- however slowly in this country (England) as compared with others, diversifies its forms; Learning breaks from ton, speaks with great vigor and acumen con- its medieval tutelage and enters upon its world-wide cerning the condition early in the century; but patrimony; Literature, after achieving a poetic utterance unfortunately he is allowed, or has chosen to the most noble to which may has ever attained, perfects use, barely a page. a prose more powerful than that of any living compet- It seems almost ungracious, however, thus to itor, and more flexible than all save one; and finally, Science, latest of birth, but most marvellous of growth, indicate possible faults and shortcomings, and rises suddenly to towering stature, stretches forth its apparently disparage a work of such marked hundred hands of power, extending immeasurably the excellence one which as a whole is so admir- reach of human energies, and, through the reaction of ably well done, being conceived on the highest a transformed external life upon man's inner nature, profoundly and irreversibly, if still to some extent ob- plan and executed with consummate skill. When scurely, modifies the earthly destinies of the race.” (P. completed, the work will include the results of xvi.) the most advanced learning in English scientific What may be called the distribution of em circles regarding England's history. It will phasis thus becomes the greatest difficulty for unquestionably be the best as well as the latest the editor to overcome. It is therefore natural history, telling the whole story in the way best that just here the work should fall far short of calculated to enforce the truth as to the causes the ideal. The various essays must inevitably of social progress and the real condition of ad- differ widely in originality and in style, which vancing civilization. The development of legal is perhaps a happy incident of composite au institutions and of jurisprudence is traced by thorship. Some writers have assumed too much, the hand of a master; the progressive expan- while others have taken too little for granted, sion of industry and of commerce, the history or have filled their pages with tedious quota of agriculture and its influence on the habits tions and long extracts from illustrative docu of the people, the action and reaction between ments instead of giving scientific conclusions the wants of the people and their economic based on a thorough study of the sources of movement, is sketched by economists who still historic information. Not infrequently a writer utter the supply-and-demand shibboleth, but is guilty of speaking with that tone of authority who nevertheless recognize the importance of which conveys the idea of absolute finality of " a living wage” and of the standard of liv- judgment, while others leave their subject con ing and social habits of the mass of the pop- fessedly incomplete. All of these, however, are ulation as affording the market which must in very minor defects when compared with the the long run determine the character of a coun- general result. try's production ; the gradual spread of educa- Treating each departmentof social life in sev tion from the few monks who alone knew how eralty, it is true, has inevitably entailed a cer to write in Norman England, to the farthest tain amount of repetition; but this need not have corner of England and to the lowest level of been allowed to be utterly superfluous, as is the English society, the advance in the arts and reference to the “great discontent among the la sciences, and the increase in enlightenment boring classes," on page 270 of Volume II., fol through university, grammar school, and vari- lowing as it does an excellent account of this ous associations for the advancement of science, rebellion under Wat Tyler which is given by the growth of language and literature,— each Mr. Corbett a few pages earlier. Still less was it phase of the intellectual development is treated necessary that the statement of fact by different separately and with a view to show its connec- writers in the same volume be contradictory, tion with and influence on “ the progress of the as are the references to the Black Death on people.” Each chapter closes with an essay on pages 13 and 133 of the second volume. This manners and customs, which is apparently writ- is peculiarly unfortunate in view of the very ten by the editor, and seeks to give unity, con- contradictory opinions still held regarding even tinuity, and logical completeness to the whole, the general character of this fourteenth century and to show how industrial, intellectual, and and the importance of the Black Death as evi religious forces register their influence in the dence of the preceding and as cause of the suc social life of the people, in the dress, the ceeding condition of agriculture and of labor amusements, the house and its decoration, meth- ers. Was it in truth the golden age of the ods of eating and drinking, the literature and English laborer (Rogers), or a period of un song, the every-day ways of living. mitigated disaster, in which there were few The story begins with England before the 1895.] 17 THE DIAL English — when the earliest settler, the dark from the prospective ideal of the Saxon archi- Ibernian, had been overcome by the tall and tect, the ground plan remains his.” fair-bued Celt, and this Aryan tribesman, Equally in evidence is the fact that it is im- “With his pride of race and his more advanced concep- possible to give definite boundary to the Mid- tion of property as a subject not of common but of fam- dle Ages. Commercial growth brings consti- ily ownership, had declined to the condition of a despised tutional changes, and constitutional changes in villager, so far as social and political importance were concerned; the tribal chief had grown into the tribal turn favor commercial growth; but in neither king; the free land of the tribe, alike with the common is there a sharp line between mediævalism and land of the villagers, had become tributary to him; and modern life. The reign of Henry VII. is a the two communities, family and communistic, were period of transition; it is marked by new ideas alike his subjects. It was through the strife of tribal and new influences. kings, with its consequence of the flight, the exile, and the appeal for Roman assistance of those who had been “But they are only as yet in germ. The printing- worsted in the struggle, that the way was opened for press is at work; but its first result is destructive, almost the conquest of Britain to the conquerors of Gaul. paralysing to literature. America is found, both South Dim with the dust of centuries, yet still distinctly vis- and North; but the effect on English industry and com- ible in dialect and tradition, in boundary lines of shire merce is hardly marked until Elizabeth's reign. The and diocese, and in the strange survivals of prehistoric new learning had made its way to Oxford with Colet feud, the tribal divisions of Celtic England can still be and Erasmus; but no breath of hostility can yet be de- traced, while the rule of the Roman has been forgotten, tected against Church dogmas.” even where his villa and his storied gravestone remain." There is no sudden change, nor is the course (I., xxii-xxii.) of development a chapter of happy accidents. In the second volume the progress of events Each advance on social organization has its dis- is traced down through the Middle Ages and tinct cause or set of causes, and telling the story into the beginnings of modern England, -when of human progress is as definitely a science as the Church had passed its climax of prosperity is recounting changes in the physical structure and independence. of the earth, the movements of the heavenly “ Henceforth it prepares its own downfall by an even bodies, or the way chemical forces combine to closer connection with the royal power. That royal power itself was beginning to show the influence of produce very unlike substances out of the same those theories and those events which were soon to elements. It is a science, moreover, whose laws cover all Europe with absolutist sovereignties. The new cannot be broken with impunity. Humanity commercial classes, in whose support this absolutism is slow in learning the lesson, but even a hasty was to find its practical basis, begin to manifest them- reading of these pages should convince pessi- selves. Most rapid change of all, the feudal baronage had been, even in the preceding century, transforming mistic reformers that no scheme of social pro- itself into a modern nobility, intriguing for places and gress is worth a moment's consideration which pensions, instead of taking up arms for local independ- | implies a sudden and radical regeneration of ence.” (II., 277-278.) human nature, or which involves artificial ap- The all-important lesson taught by these vol- pliances outside the steady development of the umes is that development has been continuous wants and desires of mankind. Change is the and that there have been no violent breaks in law of life; but it is change that is slow and the narrative, each succeeding social stage grow-gradual, and which comes practically through ing naturally out of the preceding conditions the almost unconscious action of forces lying through the action of forces of which it is pos- deeply buried in human nature. sible to measure the power for good and evil. ARTHUR B. WOODFORD. Even the Norman Conquest is no cataclasm. The break is more apparent than real. It is true “ the central administration and the local EDWIN BOOTH'S LETTERS. * government, temporal and spiritual, had been When, a little time ago, Mr. William Win- taken over by a new set of men—better man- ter's biography of Edwin Booth came into hand agers, keener, more unscrupulous, less drunken and was read with a grateful sense of its ade- and quarrelsome, better trained, hardier, thrift- ier, more in sympathy with the general Euro-actor, it was supposed no superior memorial of quacy by the admirers and friends of the great pean movements, more adventurous, more tem- that troubled genius would likely be added to perate.” But it is equally true that the “ Nor- our literature. A tender intimacy of many man conqueror built upon the main lines of that years'duration between the two distinctly gifted civil organization which he found in existence at his coming, and widely as the elevation of EDWIN Booth: Recollections by his daughter, Edwina Booth Grossman, and letters to her and his friends. New the completed structure may have departed | York: The Century Co. 21 18 [Jan. 1, THE DIAL men had qualified the critic to be the best proc in the ambition-corrupted nobility of Macbeth; tor of the actor; and the appreciative estimate in the piteous bitterness of the laughing, rail- of the professional achievements of the player ing, mordant Bertruchio ; in the masterly was sweetened and enriched by a sympathetic counterpart of the age-broken and ingratitude- knowledge of the man expressed in a tribute maddened Lear; in the jocundity of gay and honorable alike to the memory of the dead and sportive roles ; we perhaps have known him in to the reputation of the living friend. the easy moments when permitted friends have But filial affection guiding the intelligence shared the pleasures of free and bantering, of an accomplished woman has done even more jest-enlivened conversation, with no more se- for the public's gratitude in withdrawing, gently, roius care than to keep cigars alight; but here tenderly, and with touching simplicity, the veil from his daughter's pen is a picture of him as of privacy that guarded the domestic and per- few, indeed, have known him : sonal life of Edwin Booth, for the first time “ His nature was childlike, trustful, dependent, yet permitting his countrymen to view this chief he was always my wise and loving counselor. How often would he quote the following adage to me:- glory of the American stage in the light of a If your lips you'd keep from slips, character so fine and a nature so earnest, un- Of these five things beware: selfish, and devout, that admiration of the Of whom you speak, genius must hereafter be associated with loving To whom you speak, And how, and when, and where.' regard of the man, so famous and yet so little He was essentially paternal and purely domestic; and known for what he was in heart and soul. these qualities were never tarnished by public favor or Mrs. Grossman's unaffectedly, almost art- worldly praise. In the home he was at his best among his lessly, written recollections of her father com- favorite pipes and books, and surrounded by his Lares and Penates. He loved personally to arrange the furnishings pose one of the most exquisitely beautiful and of his home, and carefully studied its merest details. He graciously impressive pictures of character to had a woman's taste, and his artistic touch was every- be found in literature; and though there is but where evident. His delight in adorning the home never a detail here and there, though the few pages led him into extravagant display, for his tastes were al- are mainly generalizations covering memories ways simple, and he had no love for ostentation. With boyish enthusiasm he enjoyed every detail of farm from the infancy to the mature womanhood of life, and loved nothing better than to watch the growth the writer, these, with the letters penned with of the trees he himself had planted. His love of ani- no expectation that they would ever find their mals amounted, at one time, almost to a passion. : way to the printing press, must be accepted as His loyalty to his friends, his reverence and considera- a better and truer portraiture of the man than tion for the old, no matter in what station of life, and his manifold charities to the poor and needy, were not the may be found in the most voluminous biograph- least among his many virtues. His modesty in bestow- ical narrative. One yields so completely to ing favors extended itself even to the members of his the charm of Mrs. Grossman's candor of love family, and his beautiful gifts to me were offered with and pride as to enter feelingly into the spirit a tender, shy reserve. .. His unselfish devotion to his and sentiment of her own mind, moved by her mother and invalid sister were [sic] conspicuous among his domestic traits. He was a loyal and devoted husband, emotions, animated by her spirit of affection, and on many occasions, after the play, I have seen him until, reading here and there among the letters, tenderly nurse his invalid wife (to whom he was mar- one feels how precious a thing it was to be near ried in 1869), thus losing his much-needed rest. When to the heart and close in the life of such a man. scandalous tongues attacked the privacy of his home, he refused to contradict the false reports circulated, and It is a new understanding of Booth, an under- invariably replied to my earnest protestations, My standing that gives new dignity and worth, and daughter, all will yet be well.' His dignity toward his brings the reader nearer in sentiment to the detractors won for him a host of defenders. My inti- actor whose work we have viewed in silent awe mate knowledge of his heroic sacrifices, his early strug- gles and privations, his crushing sorrow and bitter dis- or approved in tumultuous applause, little think- appointments, had made my father a hero in my eyes, ing how much of mildness, diffidence, sweetness and I admire his noble manhood even more ardently and sadness of spirit lay below the noble forces than I cherish his genius. . . . His veneration for all expended in the creation of characters that religious subjects, his belief in the immortal life, his ranged from the boisterous mirth of Petruchio practical uses of the teachings of Jesus, and his convic- tion that God's will is best, never forsook him even in to the sublime madness of Lear, and had in the midst of his severest trials; and though often the them all the passions of nature. We have victim of the basest deception from so-called friends, known him in the craft, cunning, and knavery who, in not a few instances cruelly imposed upon his of Iago ; in the woful melancholy and sombre trustful, generous nature, he remained almost childlike in his belief in the integrity of others. . . . I can- philosophy of Hamlet; in the frank, open but not speak without tears of the declining weeks of his subtly abused honesty and generosity of Othello; | beautiful life—of his gentle patience during his last ill- . 1895.] 19 THE DIAL ness (of seven weeks' duration), and of the childlike that is achieved. Edwin, I have never told you yet, beauty of his countenance when all furrows of care and have I, of all the odd thoughts I have had, and do have, sorrow were smoothed away, and nothing could touch about you? Well, on some of the days to come, when him further. His last coherent words were addressed I am influenced by your loved presence, and after the to our little children, whom we had taken to his bedside singing of some pretty song, perhaps I will tell you." two days before he died. My boy called gently, · How Among all the letters written by Edwin are you, dear grandpa ?' and the answer came loud and clear, in the familiar boyish way, How are you your- Booth, none sets the man before us so clearly, self, old fellow ?'" so humanly, so compassionately, and yet so ad- Exquisitely beautiful as is this picture of mirably and lovably, as that of March 3, 1863, manly nobility and spiritual sweetness of char- addressed to his friend, Captain Adam Badeau, acter, it is not merely the partial and affection- beginning thus : “ By the time this reaches you, you will perhaps have colored view of an only and tenderly, fondly heard of the terrible blow I have received — a blow cherished daughter. There is in the goodly num- which renders life aimless, hopeless, darker than it was ber of letters,— written to mirthful impulse, before I caught the glimpse of heaven in true devotion or with serious emotion, or in strangely mel- to her, the sweetest being that made man's home a something to be loved. My heart is crushed, dryed up ancholy but never wholly despondent vein, and desolate. I bave no ambition now, no one to please, through a period of thirty years,—scarcely one no one to cheer me. . . . You can feel my agony I that does not in its measure confirm, in its sen know, and if while I was happy I failed to keep you timent, in its candor, in its ingenuous sincere advised of my whereabouts and doings, you see I think tone, the truth of this ideal. But the picture grief where I know it will not be despised. I should not of you in my misery, and seek to pour out my flood of would be incomplete without some associated complain even in my gulf of woe, for surely God is just, touches from the life of the woman, love of whom is good, is wiser than we, and nothing has ever so im- gave lofty purpose to the soul of Booth, grief pressed me with the truth of this as Mollie's death. for whose untimely sudden death very nearly They tell me that time and use will soften the blow, and betrayed to irredeemable desolation the genius I shall grow to forget her. God forbid ! My grief, keen as it is and crushing, is still sweet to me; for it is a part that is so lustrous a part of America's pride of of her. . . . What can I do or look upon that will not intellectual, artistic achievement. Mary Dev remind me of her ? All things I loved or admired she lin was the object of Booth's first impassioned, took delight in; my acting was studied to please her, romantic, exalted love, a love that was only vice was all I asked, all I valued. If she was pleased I and after I left the theatre, and we were alone, her ad- “this side idolatry.” That she merited the ador- was satisfied; if not, I felt a spur to prick me on to at- ation he gave to her is not to be questioned. tain the point. Doesn't it seem hard that one so Though she was no more than a girl when they young, so full of life, devotion, and promise should go were married, the dignity of her character, the so suddenly? Would to God I were there with her. But I suppose that's wrong; I suppose I will be there generous quality of her nature, and the high di- shortly. . . . Madness would be a relief to me, and I rection of her exceptionally clear, pure, and have often thought that I stood very near to the brink lofty mind, fitted her perfectly to be the com of it. . . . God bless you, Ad! Be brave and struggle, panion, comforter, guide, and sustaining in- but set not your heart on anything in this world. If spiration of a man whom the very nature of his good comes to you take it and enjoy it; but be ready al- ways to relinquish it without a groan." genius made dependent upon some finer stim- ulus than his own too easily discouraged ambi- It is only during the period of his immoder- tion. What her influence upon him was, what ate grief, the influence of which was never herself must have been to him in the three wholly cast off, that the letters are in gloomy, swiftly speeding years of their blissful but earn- sombre vein. Knowing how much melancholy was by nature in the mood of Edwin Booth, one est union, this excerpt from one of her letters to him will sufficiently declare. is surprised, indeed, by the frequency with which It was written humor, drollery, and a boyishness of capering just before they were married, and is at once a hop for herself and a promise to him, both of fancy, got into his letters. He had a keen sense of the ludicrous, and comical conceits crop up which were happily fulfilled of time: continuously, while the jaunty air with which “This morning in my walk, I was thinking of the be- ing God had given me to influence and cherish, for he disposes of all sorts of friendly and even you have ever seemed to me like what Shelley says of him- business interests informs one how charming, self—'a phantom among men'_ companionless as the how delightful a companion he must have been last fading storm,' and yet my spirit ever seems lighter in some snugly comfortable corner, with close, and more joyous when with you. This I can account familiar friends about him, his cheerful pipe for only by believing that a mission has been given me to fulfil, and that I shall be rewarded by seeing you sending coils of gray and azure smoke to rise to be great and happy. wreathe themselves lazily into quaint and del- “ Ah! the angels surely will rejoice in heaven when icate fancies above his head. A verse to society, 20 [Jan. 1, THE DIAL 97 he loved his friends, and from the first of these present-day problems is a noticeable feature of the letters written to his prattling baby girl in work. Education, property, corporations, transpor- the style so well known of fond parents address tation, taxation, money, criminals, pauperism, cities, ing their tempered wisdom to infant minds — the family, the church, international relations, to the last, written to the Shakespearian scholar, these are the themes of successive chapters. The fundamental thesis of Professor Hoffman's political Mr. Horace Furness, whether the mood be grave science is the absolute and indivisible sovereignty of or gay, the kindly, generous, loyal heart shines the State. This is essentially the view taken by through,—a temper wonderfully level with the Burgess and others. It is undoubtedly correct, if spirit of charity that casts out malice. The let- by sovereignty one means sovereignty within the ters indicate a man of taste, refinement, and sphere of human law. sphere of human law. But the last word has not artistic culture; a mind above the gross de yet been said on this vital topic. The broad and mands of material success; a soul that a trying, vigorous view which the author takes of current temptation-beset profession could not divert questions is interesting. He holds that the earth from its religious singleness ; a devotion to art; belongs to civilization, and that the organized State may very properly do for the welfare of its mem- sincerity of purpose ; and above all a spirit bers many things besides police duty. This is very " that fortune's buffets and rewards Hast ta'en with equal thanks." far from the once dominant doctrine of laissez faire -a doctrine which meant in substance simply "every These recollections and letters give us a wel- man for himself and the devil take the hindmost." come addition to our knowledge of Edwin The modern State is not organized socialism, but it. Booth, and one of inestimable value to theat- is in fact highly socialistic. Perhaps it might bet- rical literature, besides being in themselves in- ter be called “the cooperative State,” in contradis- expressibly charming for an evening's reading tinction from the other form. And it is this kind and for the after solace of many a tedious hour of State which operates the common means of com- when the times seem out of joint. They teach a munication, which may operate means of transporta-- great lesson of charity and forbearance; and tion, which provides education, cares for the poor there are those whose mission it is to teach God's and the insane, and in many other ways works for word, may learn something of benevolence, lov- the general welfare. It is this kind of State, too, which may logically join with others in the interest ing kindness, and broad humanity, from the let- of humanity to compel a semi-barbarous State to de ters of our dead player. cent government. Common humanity should, for ELWYN A. BARRON. example, lead the civilized world to put an end, once for all, to the hideous farce known as the gov- ernment of Turkey. A government which cannot RECENT POLITICAL DISCUSSIONS.* or will not prevent such horrors as the Bulgarian outrages in 1876 and the Armenian horrors of 1894 Professor Hoffmann's book on “ The Sphere of is clearly unfit to exist. In short, the coöperative the State" is brief and to the point. He sets out State and cooperative States are the means which with the distinction between the State and its gov men are using to make life better worth living. They ernment, and then, on that as a basis, proceeds to are not open to the reproach of paternalism. That construct a body of political science. The constant was a phase of the personal autocracies which have application of the principles laid down by him to now all but disappeared from the world. Coöpera- * THE SPHERE OF THE STATE; or, The People as a Body tive democracies have taken their place. And it is Politic. By Frank Sargent Hoffman, A.M., Professor of this modern form of State which Mr. Hoffman pre- Philosophy, Union College. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. sents so cleverly. THE RISE OF MODERN DEMOCRACY IN OLD AND NEW EN Mr. Charles Borgeaud, in his little study of "The GLAND. By Charles Borgeaud, Member of the Faculty of Rise of Modern Democracy,” tries to trace the ori- Law, Geneva. Translated by Mrs. Birkbeck Hill. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. gin of that democratic movement which now dom-- SOURCES OF THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES. inates political society. He finds its germ in the By C. Ellis Stevens, LL.D. New York: Macmillan & Co. Protestant Reformation,-its early buds in the En- SELECT STATUTES, and other Constitutional Documents, glish Puritan uprising of the seventeenth century. Illustrative of the Reigns of Elizabeth and James I. Edited Mr. Borgeaud shows very clearly that the Re- by G. W. Prothero, Fellow of King's College, Cambridge. New York: Macmillan & Co. formation in both its phases was essentially demo- COMMON SENSE APPLIED TO WOMAN SUFFRAGE. By cratic. This was not clearly seen by many of the Mary Putnam-Jacobi, M.D. (“Questions of the Day" se leaders. Luther and Calvin were not democrats, ries.) New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. either in religion or politics. The English eccle- PRIMARY ELECTIONS. By Daniel S. Remsen, of the New siastical revolution under Henry and Edward and York Bar (“Questions of the Day" series.) New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. Elizabeth was very conservative, and was not in- CANADIAN INDEPENDENCE, Annexation, and British Im- tended by its promotors to pass beyond an effective perial Federation. By James Douglas. (“Questions of the control. It was only under John Knox in Scotland, Day" series.) New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. and under the extreme Puritans who fought the 1895.] 21 THE DIAL Stuart kings, that a real democracy was apparent. of the Confederation, and used the material at hand In truth, the popes and the kings who assailed Pro in mending them. This material was the experi- testantism on the continent, as aimed at the very ence of the several States, both as English colonies thrones of pontiff and monarch, were more far-see and as members of the Union, and the English sys- ing than the reformers themselves. And when James tem of government and law. With all these things I. flouted the Puritan petitioners at Hampton Court, the convention were quite familiar. They knew he realized acutely, as did few others, the extreme that the quarrel of the colonists with King George danger to his royal prerogative coming from these had been over what they deemed the essential rights simple-minded and pious people. The logical mean of Englishmen. They were hardly likely to abandon ing of the right of private judgment, on which were these rights, or the accustomed means of guarding founded the religious revolutions of the sixteenth them, in the final structure of national government and seventeenth centuries, was certainly the sov which was the outcome of the Revolution. And so ereignty of the people over the State as well as over it is not difficult to trace to an English origin, either the Church. The American Constitution and the directly or through the colonies, almost every clause French Revolution are in a very true sense direct of the Constitution. Incidentally, Mr. Stevens de- sequents of Luther's ninety-five theses at Wittenberg. votes considerable space to exhibiting the weakness Part of this, Mr. Borgeaud makes quite plain. He of the claims of Mr. Douglas Campbell in behalf points out how democratic were the parliamentary of Dutch influence. Here again the author's task army of Cromwell, and the Puritan settlers in Mass- is not difficult. Mr. Campbell's book is rather in- achusetts and Connecticut and Rhode Island. And teresting than conclusive. That there was some the settlement of those colonies was a part of the result on American institutions by contact with same movement as that which cost Charles I. his the Dutch is quite possible. But just how much, head. An apt illustration of these premature efforts and just what that result was, it would not be easy at democratic reform in the State is the “ Agree- to estimate. The most striking part of Mr. Stev- ment of the People," which was proposed by a large ens's book is that devoted to the Executive. Mr. body of the army, in 1647, as a settlement of the Stevens brings out very clearly the really great difficulties. The king was a captive, but was still power of the American President, and its quite di. king, the house of lords was yet a part of parlia-rect derivation from the old form of English king- ment, and it seemed far from certain that the fruits ship, as well as from the temporary revival of that of the wars would not be lost. The “Agreement” form by George III. An extended footnote details was in fact a sketch of a republican constitution for an interview of the author with the late ex-Presi- England. It contained such features as the adop- dent Hayes, which gives an interesting view of tion of a written constitution which should include American cabinet methods and of the very great ex- a bill of rights and definite limitations on the pow tent of executive powers, even as bearing on the ini- ers of parliament, abolition of king and lords, equal tiation and progress of legislation. The banking and electoral districts, universal suffrage, and biennial currency measure now pending is a significant illus- parliaments. All this was in advance of the age. tration. There is no doubt that Mr. Cleveland is in It took England forty years to reach the bill of many ways a greater potentate than Queen Victoria. rights, a half century to adopt triennial parliaments We are a composite nation, to be sure. (soon changed at that), two centuries to compass political organization and legal methods, like our electoral reforms, and king and lords are yet part of national language, are undoubtedly English. The parliament. But the great features of the "Agree types have been rather unkind to Mr. Stevens in a ment” were in fact put into operation in the dem few instances. “Cobbit” for “Cobbett" on p. 144, ocratic American colonies, and finally embodied in “1737” for “1787" on p. 146, and “ Petition of the Constitution of the United States. So it is Rights” for “Petition of Right” on p. 207, are quite correct to say that the meeting of Cromwell's cases in point. Otherwise the volume is a good ex- regiments in 1647, which voted the “ Agreement,” | ample of bookmaking. was really a preliminary caucus of which the Con Among the modern devices for putting the ma- vention over which Washington presided in 1787 terials of history within reach of scholars in general, did the finished work. And England is slowly com that of making reprints of important documents is ing to the methods of American democracy. Mr. most valuable. Stubbs's “ Select Charters” is price- Borgeaud is substantially right. Political democ less to students of Old and Middle English institu- racy is a direct result of the overthrow of ecclesi tions. Mr. S. R. Gardiner's Selection of Docu- astical aristocracy. ments of the Puritan Revolution is also exceedingly Dr. Ellis Stevens's work on the “ Success of the useful. And now Mr. G. W. Prothero has filled the Constitution of the United States” is devoted to the gap between them by a series of reprints from the thesis of the English origin of the American Con- reigns of Elizabeth and James I. The Act of Su- stitution. His task is not difficult to accomplish. premacy, for instance, is printed in full. Other The convention at Philadelphia did not evolve a documents are abbreviated more or less. Besides frame of government from their own inner con statutes, there are well-chosen extracts from the pro- sciousness. They were a group of lawyers, judges, ceedings of parliament, including the famous speech and statesmen, who knew quite clearly the defects of Peter Wentworth, for which that worthy was But our 22 [Jan. 1, THE DIAL . committed to the Tower; there are executive docu Mr. D. S. Remsen, of the New York bar, devotes ments illustrative of constitutional tendencies of the his little book on “ Primary Elections” to a discus- times, taken from Strype, Camden, et al.; there are sion of party organization and its improvement. not a few famous law cases reprinted Bates's, His idea is to guard primary elections by an elab- and the impeachment of Lord Bacon; and there is orate system of provisions, substantially equivalent a mass of ecclesiastical documents. The selections to an Australian ballot law with minority represen- are made with discretion, and are carefully indexed. tation. The main objection to his scheme is its The book well illustrates the modern method of his complexity. Our whole body of democratic insti- torical study. At one time, not so long ago, his tutions is tending to become a mechanism so vast and tory was merely a branch of literature. It was read complicated that it may in the end require a tech- largely as a portion of “polite letters,” the main nical education to take any share in it. It is said thing being literary style. To-day history is a branch that the President of the late New York State Con- of science. Literary finish is a desirable quality, stitutional Convention was unable to mark his vote but no more so than in a work on glaciers. The properly at the recent election. We are trying to main thing is sound thought. And now no student And now no student remedy the evils of universal suffrage by ingenious is content to “read” history. He investigates. He self-acting devices. Perhaps we may learn in time wants the material from which a correct view of some simple method which will do quite as well. facts and their relations can be had. And he wants Meanwhile, let us be rather slow in adding more to work out this view for himself. In short, the cogs and wheels. modern student of history is quite like the intelli- Mr. James Douglas discusses “Canadian Inde- gent reader of newspapers, who cares little for edi pendence, Imperial Federation, and Annexation,” torials, but wants all the news accurately reprinted. from a Canadian point of view. He argues that He can make his own comments. Mr. Prothero's neither Canada nor the United States would have book gives a photographic reproduction of history much to gain from a political union, while each in the making of a most important epoch in the would have not a little to lose. Mr. Douglas is development of the English people. With Stubbs, probably right. The idea of uniting in one great Prothero, and Gardiner, one can study the England republic all America north of Mexico is one that of Elizabeth and her pedantic Scotch cousin with tickles the fancy. But there are elements in the some satisfaction. problem which cannot be disregarded, and which at “ Common Sense Applied to Woman Suffrage least admonish to make haste slowly. Certainly the is the title of a breezy little volume by Dr. Mary status of the French in Canada is unlike anything Putnam-Jacobi. The author is learned and lucid with which we have to deal, and one which would and trenchant. But beyond all, she is unconsciously be peculiarly annoying in our system. It is bad and deliciously convincing bf the essential likeness enough for us to be asked to make a state out of of men and women. Men are quite apt to write the Spanish peons in New Mexico. But the State one-sidedly. We call this partisanship. If we think of Quebec would hold such views of the relations of with the writer, we like it. If we think otherwise, Church and State as would hardly accord with Amer- we rail at it. If we try to be even-minded, we won ican ideas. We don't need Canada just now. der why a book should not be a scholar's investiga- HARRY PRATT JUDSON. tion rather than an advocate's plea. But then we know better. Books are written for all manner of reasons, sometimes for no discoverable reason at all. And this book is quite as partisan as a polit- BRIEFS ON NEW BOOKS. ical editorial written by a mere man. That Woman Suffrage is coming there can be little doubt. In- The distinctive merits of first-rate Memorials of deed, it is already here in some form. But whether English book-making are well exem- we are ready to go on opening the ballot unreservedly plified in two soberly elegant octavo to indiscriminate classes, is not so sure. Because volumes from the press of Messrs. Longmans, Green, an illiterate and fat-witted man may vote, is hardly & Co., entitled "Memorials of St. James's Palace.” a sound reason for granting that privilege to the The author, the Rev. Edgar Sheppard, Sub-Dean of same grade of woman. After the war we armed the Chapels Royal, has spent several laborious years the freedmen with the ballot, for their self-defence. in the compilation of his work, pursuing his re- The outcome is hardly an irrefragable argument for searches among the records of more or less remote unlimited suffrage. But if the ignorant sea-island royalty with a pious enthusiasm and a reverential negro may vote, why should the alert modern col sense of the semi-sacredness of his theme not very lege woman be unenfranchised? Why, indeed? Still, intelligible to the American mind, perhaps, but why should we enfranchise the ignorant sea-island nevertheless interesting and instructive in its pres- negro woman? This is the case in a nutshell. And ent results. Strange to say, in this age of never would not the champions of a sexless vote be more ending, ever multiplying books, the story of the helpful towards the political regeneration of which whilom home of England's kings and queens, and they dream, if at the same time they worked towards the constituted centre of her court pageant and cere- an intelligent and a responsible vote? monial, has never before been told in continuous St. James's Palace. - 1895.] 23 THE DIAL Grammar. detail. Yet from time immemorial the Palace of St. had supposed it. I set out from hence impressed James's has been the cynosure of loyal British eyes, with the idea the rice dealers here had given me, that and its name has long been a potent one to conjure the difference between your rice and that of Pied- with in continental diplomatic circles. Scarcely a mont proceeded from a difference in the machine chamber, hall, or corridor in the venerable pile but for cleaning it. At Marseilles I hoped to know has its curious and interesting personal or historical what the Piedmont machine was ; but I could find association. It contains, for instance, the room, of nobody who knew anything of it. I determined sombre memory to all leal Jacobitical souls, where therefore to sift the matter to the bottom by cross- Charles I. slept away his last allotted hours beside ing the Alps into the rice country. I found the ma- the faithful Herbert, and whence he passed, on that chine exactly such a one as you had described to fatal frosty morning, ominous in the annals of mon me in Congress in the year 1775. There was but archy, to the scaffold at Whitehall. But St. James's one conclusion to be drawn, to-wit, that the rice was record (unlike that of grim Holyrood) is joyous of a different species, and I determined to take rather than tragic — mainly the chronicle of royal enough to put you in seed." This helpfulness was births, baptisms, and marriages, of shining court the best service Jefferson could render his country- fêtes and formalities, the whole pleasantly seasoned men at that time, and it shows the benevolent side with a thousand and one odds and ends of piquant of his character. Walpolian chat and personalia. Into these and more important matters our author has gone exhaustively English-German About a year ago Professor Victor and enthusiastically, leaving no documentary stone Comparative Henry of the University of Paris unturned, and tracing the story of the Palace and published his “ Précis de Grammaire its associations and regulations from the founding Comparée de l'Anglais et de l'Allemand,” and re- (before A.D. 1100) of its predecessor, a lepers' hos-cently his own translation has appeared under the pital (“spittle for mayden lepers," old Howel calls title “Comparative Grammar of English and Ger- it) dedicated to St. James the Less, down to mod. man (Macmillan). The book, as the preface ern times. Pictorially, the work is a notable one. points out, is intended to introduce the comparative There are eight full-page copper plates, mostly por- method to students having some knowledge of both traits, besides a great number of full-page and text languages, though for the English reader it will be illustrations. Many of these are from rare originals intelligible after he has mastered the general out- in the Royal collections, and all are well chosen and lines of the grammatical structure of German. The germane to the text. author does not presuppose a knowledge of either Sanskrit or Greek, but deals with the subject simply The fourth volume of Mr. Paul Lei from the Germanic side. The book includes a list More of the writings of cester Ford's collection of the Writ of about forty of the most essential works on Ger- Jefferson. ings of Thomas Jefferson (Putnam) manic philology, and a short introduction on the covers the period from 1784 to 1787. Mr. Jeffer classification and relation of the Germanic languages son as the representative in Paris of the new Re and dialects. The body of the work is divided into public is an interesting figure. He was in a society four parts, treating respectively Sounds, Words, thoroughly congenial to him, which he thought the Declension, and Conjugation. In the first division most spirited, the most cultivated, and the most en a brief survey of the elements of physiological pho- tertaining in the world. He had a penchant for spec netics is followed by a study in which the vowels ulation, and Paris was the favorite resort of philos are traced back, by the inductive method, to their ophers who had learned to respect and love one common prehistoric form. In a similar manner the great American, Franklin, and who were delighted laws of consonantal change are discussed. The to add another American to their circle. If Jeffer treatment, though brief, is clear, and affords the son lacked the originality, profundity, and wit of beginner a presentation of the subject that is easily Franklin, his suggestiveness and enthusiasm suited comprehended. The accepted results of recent Ger- the French temperament of the day, and kept alive man investigation are stated in such a way that the the popular interest in the experiment in govern- English-speaking student will find it advantageous ment across the Atlantic. Jefferson's letters, whether to read what Professor Henry has to say on the written to ladies, men of letters, or statesmen, have subject of Phonetics before taking up a work like a grace and charm suited to any age. He never Sievers's Grundzüge. The chapter, or rather section, lost an opportunity to extend the information about on Words deals with the subject of derivation, and his own country, and to commend the virtues and affords a systematic discussion of a subject upon happiness of his fellow countrymen as worthy of which courses of lectures are frequently given at imitation. He was industrious in acquiring infor- German universities, but upon which the literature mation as to new inventions and improvements in that is useful to the beginner is meagre. Independ- agriculture, which he communicated to his corre ent of its scientific value, it affords the student an spondents in the new world. Thus, we find him opportunity to enlarge and strengthen his German writing to Edward Rutledge, Paris, July 14, 1787 : vocabulary; for it exhibits clearly, and in a manner “I was glad to find that the adoption of your rice easily remembered, some of the most important to this market was considered worth attention, as I | points of agreement and difference between English 24 [Jan. 1, THE DIAL Snake Dance of the Indians. Prose and German words. The two following sections deal by few works that can be called "epoch-making.” with the inflections, and show the essentially Ger One living German composer, however, must be manic structure of the English. The book concludes accorded a place among the immortals- Johannes with an excellent index of English and of German Brahms, the defender of musical orthodoxy against words, the former containing some nine hundred the tendencies of the “music of the future.” In entries and the latter a rather larger number. Va him no quality of greatness is lacking. His ideas rious errors in the French edition have been cor are marked by grandeur, wealth, and originality; rected. The work is satisfactorily printed, and the he uses the old forms with ease and power, or devel- English is surprisingly idiomatic and accurate. All ops them into new organisms, full of suggestion and things considered, the work is an able and valuable opportunity for his successors ; the greatest of his one, and is unrivalled in English. works are marked both by deep expression and ex- The fourth volume of the « Journal quisite beauty, and none of his writings are without signs of genius. Brahms's principal works are dis- of American Ethnology and Archæ cussed and analyzed by Mr. Maitland with great ology” (Houghton) continues the re- intelligence and sympathy. The portraits and bib- cords of the Hemenway Southwestern Archæological liography connected with each sketch are valuable Expedition, and is a worthy successor to the previous features of the volume. volumes. It is dedicated to the memory of Mrs. Mary Hemenway": a reminder of the loss to the Mr. Le Gallienne's book of “ Prose world of a noble-hearted woman, liberal in her in- Fancies” (Putnam) is easy reading Fancies." terested helpfulness of scientific work in America. and gives the reader many pleasant Dr. Fewkes is the author of the volume, in the pre moments. It is a pleasure not unmixed, for the paration of which he was assisted by Mr. Owens and good and the mediocre more than once join hands Mr. Stephen. The chief author, deeply interested across the pages. If one could omit an unnecessary as he is in the comparative study of American In third or half of the volume he would have left a small dian Ceremonials, must have felt a special satisfac handful of sketches whose charm is real. Mr. Le tion in preparing this description of the famous Gallienne, as one might surmise from the fine por- Snake Dance of the Mokis. The ceremony, which trait that faces the title-page, possesses a delicate is celebrated but once in two years at any one pue- fancy and clear insight. He is at his best, in this vol- blo, was observed by Dr. Fewkes at Walpi in 1891 ume, when he writes of serious things seen in the garb and 1893. The account given relates chiefly to the of graceful metaphor. His best mood is romantic, observance of 1891, but is pieced out here and there and when writing in that mood he produces some- with the later notes. A careful description of each thing that has the flavor of poetry and the outward stage of the nine days' ceremony is presented; uten form of art. Sometimes he turns out a sentence sils, dress, gestures, songs, are minutely detailed; that penetrates quite through the surface; as when illustrations help to clearness of understanding. No he speaks of “ that delicate instinct for proportion, attempt is made to explain the significance of the which is one of the most precious attributes of what ceremony, but the myth dramatized at one part of we call a gentleman.” Humor he has, too, which is the performance is presented. This snake dance, in pleasantest when it skims lightly over a subject; which living rattlesnakes are carried writhing in the the avowedly humorous pieces in the book smack- mouths of the performers, has been for years a favor- ing often of hack-work. The book has no one ite subject with newspaper writers. But although theme: the five and twenty sketches are unrelated, some good material — notably Captain Bourke's and range from facetious satire to thoughtful mus- book — has been published, students will hail this ing on the Ewigweibliche. If a common aim may carefully detailed account as perhaps the most valu. be found, it is that the various papers protest against able contribution to the subject yet made. shams and unrealities. The living The excellent series of “ Masters of Repetitions and The many who feel that the more composers Contemporary Music” (imported by parallelisms in subtle effects of verse structure are of Germany. Scribner) has a new volume devoted English verse. left untouched by the ordinary met- to the living composers of Germany, written by Mr. rical analysis will open with interest a little volume J. A. Fuller Maitland. A volume dealing with such by Professor C. Alphonso Smith, entitled “ Repeti- names as Brahms, Bruch, Goldmark, Joachim, and tions and Parallelisms in English Verse" (Univer- Clara Schumann, has a field of great interest, even sity Publishing Company). These terms were used though it be true, as the author thinks, that “the by Longfellow in writing of the characteristics of tide of music which for so many years has favored the verse (imitated from the Finnish) in his “Hia- Germany above all other nations seems almost at watha "; but it is in Poe and Swinburne that the the ebb, at last.” The enormous influence of Wag wonderful poetical capabilities of repetition and par- ner upon the musical art of this century has in some allelism appear in their full development. Professor ways repressed rather than stimulated the produc- Smith has traced the employment of these devices tivity of his contemporaries in the same sphere of from the early ballads, through Coleridge, to Poe; production; German opera has indeed been marked and from Poe, through Baudelaire, to Swinburne. 1895.] 25 THE DIAL With an ear sensitive to catch the most delicate ef- “ Character Studies ” (Whittaker), fect, he at times, perhaps, tries to point out har- Character studies by Mr. Frederick Saunders, the ven- of literary folk. monies that do not exist; but the reader will thank erable Astor librarian, is a volume him for bringing out some hidden beauties that may containing pleasant and unassuming sketches of six have hitherto escaped him. No attempt is made to distinguished literary persons whom it has been the give a psychological explanation of the effects. author's good fortune to meet or to know. Edward Irving, Mrs. Jameson, Bryant, Longfellow, Wash- Historical studies If Mr. Charles Sears Baldwin's “ In- ington Irving, and Joseph Green Coggswell are the of the English flections and Syntax of the Morte six, and the distinctive quality of their personalities language. D'Arthur” is an earnest of what may is set forth in these wide-margined pages. The lit- be expected from Messrs. Ginn & Co.'s plan of co erary criticism is genial rather than acute, the au- operation with scholars in publishing works of special thor's admiration cleaving first of all to those traits rather than of general interest, the publishers de that go to make up manhood. The first word of serve for this plan the thanks of the learned world. the title is thus to be taken in its moral signification, Mr. Baldwin's book is a real contribution to the and its promise is adequately fulfilled in a book history of the English language, giving a clear state that is, in the pleasanter sense of a much abused ment, with copious and even exhaustive exemplifi- word, instructive. cation, of the main features of the language as fixed for the nonce in the usage of Malory. The sections treating of the verb ablaut, and of prepositions, are BRIEFER MENTION. especially good. The faults of the book are not se- rious : the index should be fuller; much might fitly Hugh Clough” (Macmillan) has been added to the A volume of “ Selections from the Poems of Arthur have been treated here that has been left, presum- ably, to lexicography. « The Bothie of Tober-na- The author's commendable “Golden Treasury” series. vuolich" fills the first half of the pretty little volume; intention of editing selections from the “Morte selections from “ Dipsychus "and“ Amours de Voyage,” D'Arthur" for school use will, when carried out, with a few miscellaneous pieces, make up the second increase greatly the value of the present work. half. “ Mari Magno" is not represented. The best of Clough is between these covers, and we fancy that pos- Mr. William Blake's “ The Cross, terity will still further sift his slender product, and The Cross as a Ancient and Modern ” (Randolph) really treasure not more than a score of pages. religious symbol. gives much interesting information Miss Frances E. Lord, of Wellesley College, has done regarding the cross as a religious symbol. Part I., a simple but much-needed piece of work in her little “ The Cross in the Orient,” shows that it was used book on “ The Roman Pronunciation of Latin" (Ginn). among the Early Aryans, the old Egyptians, Baby- The work consists of two parts, “Why We Use It" and “ How to Use It.” In the former we have collected the lonians, Greeks, Scandinavians, and other pre-Chris- tian peoples. The various forms -- svastika, tau, evidence upon which our knowledge of the pronunciation is based; in the latter we have a number of helpful sug- etc.,—are mentioned, and their meanings suggested. gestions to teachers. There are many thousands of sec- The Christian cross, and its variations in art, her-ondary school and college teachers in this country who aldry, and architecture, are briefly considered. Part need just such a book as this, both for help in their daily II., " The Cross in the Occident,” presents the evi- work, and for the confuting of those uninformed per- dence regarding this symbol among North Amer sons (still found here and there) who imagine (and say) ican tribes before white settlement. The crosses of that we do not really know how Cicero and Quintilian Mexico, of the Mississippi Valley Mound-building pronounced their native speech. tribes, etc., are described. The style of the work is Dr. George Hempl, of the University of Michigan, simple and readable, and the many illustrations- deserves the thanks of all teachers of English for his admirable brochure on “Chaucer's Pronunciation and more than a hundred-add to the value of the book. the Spelling of the Ellesmere MS.” (Heath). The pam- Stratford Shakespeare's Stratford” (Scrib- phlet is just what is needed by school and college teach- ers. It is better than Professor Skeat's introduction to described ner) is a thin volume of wood-cuts “ The Man of Lawe's Tale," and the phonetic basis of and pictured. and descriptive letter-press of which its exposition is strictly scientific. The author recom- Mr. Hallsworth Waite is the draughtsman and au mends its use in connection with Dr. Sweet's “ Second thor. The writing is interesting, and many of the Middle-English Primer," to be followed by the Morris- sketches are decidedly good. Stratford and vicin Skeat edition of the “Prologue” and “ Knighte's Tale.” ity is the field of the artist's pilgrimage, and the We had hoped to find space for a notice of the Hon. book records his impressions in simple prose and un- William Warren Vernon's “Readings on the Inferno of affected drawing. The eye for the picturesque is Dante” (Macmillan) adequate to the great importance manifest, and if the sixty or more of illustrations of the work, but a brief description must suffice. It is similar in plan to the companion work on the “ Purga- never rise to brilliancy, they are never less than torio," of which a second edition is promised. Text, worthy of their theme. The book is a pleasant translation, and commentary run along together, filling “ souvenir volume” to the Stratford visitor, and a the thirteen hundred pages of two thick volumes. Al- tantalizing glimpse of Shakespeare's town and coun though the “ Readings" are said to be chiefly based try to the stay-at-home reader of the plays. on the Commentary of Benvenuto da Imola,” they are 26 [Jan. 1, THE DIAL see. really based upon the whole range of Dante literature, and if the student can have but one work of general criticism and exposition, this is decidedly the work that he must get. There is an introduction by the Rev. Ed- ward Moore. Commander Charles N. Robinson, R.N., has prepared a popular account of “ The British Fleet" (Macmillan), which describes in compact form, with many curious and instructive cuts and plates, “ the growth, achievements, and duties of the Navy of the Empire.” The work has four sections, devoted, respectively, to the growth and history of the Royal Navy, its administration, its mate- rial, and its personnel. There is a good index, and an interesting appendix upon the paintings, drawings, and prints that have been reproduced for purposes of illus- tration. In spite of the many earlier books upon this subject, the present volume really seems to occupy a place hardly filled before. Dr. Norman Kerr's “Inebriety or Narcomania” (Tait) appears in a new and greatly enlarged edition. The au- thor's experience in the treatment of inebriates has made him one of the foremost authorities upon the subject of this book, and we need hardly add that he handles it in a thoroughly scientific way. He contends strongly that alcoholism and the allied forms of mania are diseases and should be treated as such. He gives a great num- ber of cases from his own exceptional experience to es- tablish this assertion, and presents also the treatment which he has found to be efficacious. Dr. Kerr is an attractive writer, and by avoiding the use of technical- ities he has produced a book which all classes can read intelligently. The usefulness of William Ramsay's “ Manual of Ro- man Antiquities” has been amply tested by the expe- rience of over forty years. A fifteenth edition now ap- pears, revised and partly rewritten by Signor Rodolfo Lanciani, whose name is a sufficient guarantee that the work has been brought down to the date of the most recent excavations. The work, which is imported by Messrs. Charles Scribner's Sons, is a substantial volume of nearly six hundred pages, illustrated with woodcuts and full-page photogravure plates. The late Dr. John Bradshaw was the compiler of “A Concordance to the Poetical Works of John Milton” (Macmillan) now published, and perhaps more needed than a concordance of any other English poet yet un- provided with such apparatus. The earlier works of Todd, Prendergast, and Cleveland are manifestly inad- equate, and students will be thankful for this completer performance of the task. Dr. Bradshaw, who died a year ago, was the editor of Milton in the new “ Aldine" series. The present volume contains four hundred dou- ble-columned pages. “ Preparatory Physics” (Longmans), by Mr. Will- iam J. Hopkins, is a short laboratory course, mainly in mechanics, for schools of secondary grade. Mr. H. N. Chute's “ Physical Laboratory Manual” (Heath) is a similar text-book, possibly a trifle more elementary, and undoubtedly more attractive in arrangement and presentation. Mr. J. Edward Taylor's “ Theoretical Mechanics — Fluids” (Longmans) is a small treatise especially devised for the unhappy English youth who are cramming for their examinations. The method is totally unlike that of the book just before mentioned. “An Elementary History of Art” (Imported by Scribner), by Mrs. Arthur Bell ("N. D'Anvers ") has long been a favorite among popular manuals. It now reappears in a fourth edition, carefully revised by the author. The work is used in England as a text-book in civil se ice examinations, a fact which testifies to its excellence. It attempts to cover the whole field—arcbi- tecture, sculpture, and painting, is amply though not. very satisfactorily illustrated, is well provided with in- dexes and glossaries, and its nearly six hundred pages- are stoutly bound in half-leather. A group of recent publications for students and teach- ers of Latin, published by Messrs. Ginn & Co., com- prises the following books: “ The First Latin Book," by Messrs. W.C. Collar and M. G. Daniell, of the Bos-- ton schools; “ Latin at Sight," by Mr. Edwin Post, a book which teachers ought to find particularly useful; an edition of “The Odes and Epodes of Horace,” an- notated by Professor Clement Lawrence Smith; and “ An Introduction to the Verse of Terrence,” by Dr. H. W. Hayley. We may mention in this connection Mr. H. W. Auden's translation, from the sixth German edition, of Herr C. Meissner's “ Latin Phrase Book” (Macmillan). The series of “Contributions to American Educa- tional History,” edited for the Bureau of Education by Professor Herbert B. Adams, has just been augmented by four volumes of great value. They deal, respect- ively, with the history of education in Connecticut and Delaware, and of higher education in Iowa and Tennes- Each of these works is the study of a careful specialist, and treats exhaustively of its subject. When such a work shall have been done for every state in the Union, the historian of education in this country will have at hand something like an adequate collection of materials for his work, and it will be possible to pre- pare a general account of the subject with some claims to completeness. “ A History of Our Own Times,” by Mr. Justin Mc- Carthy, has been a very popular book ever since its ap- pearance ten or more years ago. The popularity is, on the whole, deserved, in spite of the Irish bias and jour- nalistic method of the writer, for nowhere else is so readable a summary of the Victorian period to be found. We now welcome a reissue of the work (Lovell), made more serviceable than ever by an extension from 1880 to 1894, the work of Mr. G. Mercer Adam. The new edition is in two volumes, with a new index and some thirty portraits. It is also moderate in price. « From Monkey to Man; or, Society in the Tertiary Age" (Dibble) is the title of a romance of our remote ancestors, at the time when they were abandoning their earlier arboreal habit, and had discovered that two legs are better than four. Among other things, the book tells of “the great expedition from Cocoanut Hill and the wars in Alligator Swamp.” Mr. Austin Bierbower is the author of this fanciful production, and Mr. H. R. Heaton has provided it with illustrations. There is not a little humor in the development of the plot, and we come now and then upon a touch obviously satiric of intent. “Stories from English History" (Macmillan), from Julius Cæsar to the Black Prince, is well described by its title, the earlier sketches being given in the form of a dialogue, while those of a later period are plain tales. The author, the Rev. A. J. Church, M.A., has included both legend and fact; and though the stories are neces- sarily sketchy, they are as satisfactory as their extent permits. The illustrations are reproductions of ancient sculptures and engravings. 1895.] 27 THE DIAL It was needless for that contemporary to repeat the old NEW YORK TOPICS. song, however, as to “why people, when they discuss New York, December 25, 1894. the relations of authors and publishers, so seldom give Literary movements and schools arise, reach their cul the publisher credit for common business sense. They mination, and decline, with such rapidity, nowadays, do not seem to understand that publishers, like most that it is a question whether the well-worn phrase, fin- men, are doing business on business principles." Do n't de-siècle, should not be altered to apply to the close of they? I warrant the authors do. This quotation would each succeeding year. It was one B. Franklin, I be- far better read, “I wonder why people, when they dis- lieve, a printer, who preached that immortal sermon, cuss the relations of authors and publishers, so seldom “ The Ephemera,” using for his mouthpiece the insect give the author credit for common business sense. They to whom the sum total of existence was compressed do not seem to understand that authors, like most men, within a single day. And B. Franklin's typographical are doing business on business principles.” How good that sounds. successor, Mr. T. DeVinne, might well preach another I hope Mr. Du Maurier made a fine bar- such sermon, based on observation of “the feeble fantasts gain. No doubt he will be Baron Du Maurier, if the and realists of the day,” as they are styled by Mr. Whit- wind holds fair, and if he be eligible. ing of the Springfield « Republican.” Well, the real- Speaking of the profits of English novelists, there is ists have had their day—or so at least Mr. Thayer de- one small item of American interest. Mr. Edward Bel- clares in “The Forum,"—the fantasts are passing, and lamy's “ Looking Backward” has just reached its four now we are wondering what will come after the ro- hundredth thousand. The sale for the past year or two mancers. It is a good time, when everybody is indulg- has been slower but steady. He apparently has been ing in the festivities of the season and nobody is likely following the practice of Mr. Hall Caine, of whom it is to hear you, to growl at literary and artistic vagaries. said that “ he has no work on hand just now; he is en- First of all, let me ask what we have done that the joying the success of The Manxman' and meditating Beardsley women should be flaunted at us from the his next big book.” Welcome, Messieurs les Anglais, boardings, as is being done by bill-stickers for “ The to our golden grain, but restrain the tendency exhibited Masqueraders.” We are tired of the Beardsley women by certain eager brethren to put their feet in the trough. already, but I suppose they will serve to work” the Dr. Horace Howard Furness is busily engaged at his multitude for some time yet, and we must endure. As country place in Wallingford, Penn., with the final to posters in general, the mania is spreading with fright- proofs of the “Midsummer Night's Dream,” which the ful rapidity. “ Art” is to be seen on every fence, and J. B. Lippincott Co. will bring out in March. It was at --- tell it not in Gath — in every grocery window. For one time rumored that Dr. Furness had given up fur- several months I have been admiring the successive pos- ther work on his “ Variorum” edition of Shakespeare; ters of some unknown but enterprising magazine dis- but this is, happily, untrue. “ Romeo and Juliet,” by played in a neighboring shop. A specially striking the way, the first of the series, appeared in 1871. The winter-scene drew my close attention, and I found my- “ Midsummer Night's Dream” will contain a very full self perusing a summary of the estimable qualities of discussion concerning the allegory contained in Oberon's -'s soups. It is evident that we shall soon surpass vision of the “fair vestal throned by the West.” The the Frenchmen in their own field, and that the maga- identity of the “ little Western flower,” referred to a few zines will bave to seek a new method of advertising. lines further on, is discussed by various authorities in “ Tomato-can pictures" will no longer serve as the de- some fifteen pages of fine type. Mary, Queen of Scots, signation of a popular Academician's pictures among and Lettice Knollys, wife of the Earl of Essex, are, I his less-successful rivals,—and why? Because pictures believe, the most likely originals. on tomato cans will soon be conformed to “high art.” Of all the season's giftbooks, of the standard type, Then there is “ Trilby.” Caught at last! How one the “Holland” of Signor Edmondo de Amicis, trans- sympathizes with Mr. Dick at times like these, and with lated by Miss Helen Zimmern and published by Messrs. his efforts to keep the head of Charles the First out of Porter & Coates, of Philadelphia, seems to me the most his Memorial ! But there is no help for it. Trilby" beautiful in its simple but elegant binding. The cover must be mentioned,—for “Trilby” is to be dramatized. design embraces a delicate tracery of tulips, while Pray, Messrs. Harpers, and pray, Mr. Du Maurier, sup- the printing and the photogravures are as nearly per- press any more " Trilby" posters. Let Mr. Palmer spell fect as possible. The edition was sold out soon after out the word in letters twenty feet high, if he chooses, publication, but a new supply was obtained in time for but no pictures. Do not remove the last vestige of the late Christmas trade. This point is interesting as our enjoyment of them by such damnable iteration. Are showing how large and constant the demand is for well- we to have “ Trilby made standard works of literature. soap—à la Svengali! Are we to have “ Trilby" slippers ? Not in New York, at least, It is impossible to name all the literary, educational, -for they were several sizes too large in the story! and scientific events, which take place here at this season How about “ Trilby" living pictures ? The brain reels of the year. This week there is the seventh annual at the thought of the revenues to be gained by farming meeting of the American Economic Association, with a out « Trilby” privileges. Judging by the crowds at reception by President Low of Columbia. Next week the Fifth Avenue Galleries last week, a travelling art- will include the Memorial Meeting in honor of Robert gallery containing the original drawings would bring in Louis Stevenson; the recital of an act of Mr. Walter an immense sum. I should be glad to receive one per Damrosch's opera, “ The Scarlet Letter,” announced last cent for the suggestion. year in this correspondence, for which Mr. George Par- “Trilby” must be now approaching the two hundred sons Lathrop has written the libretto; and the triennial thousand mark in the “States.” A mere ten per cent Twelfth Night celebration of the Century Club, the of the retail price, $1.75, would net the author $35,000 only occasion on which all “strangers” are banished for that many copies. Who would not write a “ Trilby," from the rooms of the most hospitable of the great New York clubs. if he could, as your contemporary in this city remarks ? ARTHUR STEDMAN. 28 [Jan. 1, THE DIAL over two and a half millions of dollars, nearly half being LITERARY NOTES. dutiable. This is a falling-off of about twenty-five per A revised edition of Mr. Austin Dobson's poems is cent from the figures for the corresponding period of announced by Messrs. Dodd, Mead & Co. 1893. During the same nine months we exported books Mr. George A. Aitken will edit a sixteen-volume edi- to the value of one and three-quarters millions of dollars. tion of Defoe's works of fiction for Messrs. Dent & Co. The publication of that valuable weekly, “ Science," The FitzGerald letters to Fanny Kemble, one hun- has just been resumed, under the direction of an edi- dred or so in number, will first appear serially in “Tem- torial committee whose membership includes such lead- ple Bar.” ers of American scientific thought as Professors New- Mr. John T. Morse, Jr., will prepare the authorized comb, Mendenhall, Pickering, Remsen, LeConte, Davis, memoir of Oliver Wendell Holmes, mentioned in our Marsh, Brooks, Brinton, and Cattell. We heartily last issue. welcome the reappearance of the periodical after its long The J. B. Lippincott Co. announce a work upon “ New eclipse. High German," in two volumes, by the late William Dr. John Lord, the well-known writer and lecturer Winston Valentine. upon history, died at his home in Stamford, Conn., on Professor 0. F. Emerson is about to follow up his the fifteenth of December. He was one of the men of “ History of the English Language " with a similar but 1809, and his birthday was that of Mr. Gladstone, De- smaller volume for high-school use. cember 29. “ Beacon-Lights of History” is his most Mr. Humphry Ward is this winter to make a tour widely-read work. The Rev. Alex. S. Twombly, D.D., in the United States, lecturing on art and artists. It is of Newton, Mass., is preparing a memoir of Dr. Lord. said that Mrs. Ward will accompany him. He would gladly receive memoranda of fact, letters from Dr. Lord, etc., and, in all cases where it is requested, Mme. Blanc's papers on “The Condition of Woman in the United States,” translated by Miss Abby Lang- having copied from it what may suit his purposes. will carefully preserve and return such material after don Alger, are announced by Messrs. Roberts Brothers. Messrs. Lemcke & Buechner (Westermann) send us A Memorial Meeting in honor of the late Robert Louis Stevenson will be held in the great auditorium of a neatly-printed “Catalogue Raisonné of German Lit- the Carnegie Music Hall, New York, on the evening of erature,” giving priced lists of German classical works, January 4. It will be held under the auspices of Mr. together with notes upon the best English translations. Lincoln's “ Uncut Leaves" Society and the St. Andrews Mrs. Anne Thackeray Ritchie, whose “Chapters of Society, of that city, leading authors, artists, editors, Unwritten Memoirs" are reviewed in this issue of The and business men coöperating. Mr. Edmund Clarence DIAL, is reported to have under consideration the pre Stedman will preside and deliver the opening address. paration of an annotated edition of her father's work. Speeches are expected from Messrs. Richard Henry The Rev. George E. Ellis, President of the Massa Stoddard, Andrew Carnegie, William Winter, George chusetts Historical Society, died in Boston on the twenty W. Cable, Parke Godwin, David Christie Murray, and first of December, at the age of eighty. He was the others. Mr. Nelson Wheatcroft will recite a ballad and author of many biographical, historical, and theological a selection from a story by Stevenson, and musical in- works. terludes will be given by an orchestra. Dr. John Chapman, for many years editor of “ The In Whittier's lately published Letters several refer- Westminster Review," and the intimate associate of ences are made to the poem of “ Barbara Frietchie,” George Eliot, Froude, Dr. Martineau, and Mr. Spencer, the historical basis of which has more than once been died early in December. For many years past he had called in question. A note from Mr. Whittier to the practised medicine in Paris, although he still kept his editor of this journal, not included in the recent col- hold upon the “ Review." lection, touches the point at issue, though, it must be A “Social England " series, edited by Mr. Kenelm L. admitted, not very conclusively. The note is dated from Cotes, is announced by Messrs. Macmillan & Co. The Amesbury, Nov. 15, 1885, and in it Mr. Whittier says: first volume to appear will be « Troubadours and Courts “Of the substantial truth of the heroism of Barbara of Love," by Mr. J. F. Rowbotham. Other volumes will Frietchie I can have no doubt. Mrs. E. D. N. South- be « The English Manor,” by Professor Vinogradoff; worth, the novelist, of Washington, sent me a slip from and “The Pre-Elizabethan Drama," by Miss Lucy Toul a newspaper, stating the circumstance as it is given in min Smith. the poem, and assured me of its substantial correctness. The name of Lord Rosebery heads the list of a com Dorothea L. Dix, the philanthropic worker in the Union mittee organized to secure the purchase of Carlyle's hospitals, confirmed it. From half a dozen other sources house in Cheyne Road, Chelsea. It is hoped to make I had the account, and all agree in the main facts. a Carlyle Museum of the building. A fund of about Barbara Frietchie was the boldest and most outspoken £4000 is needed, and subscriptions are invited. Re Unionist in Frederick, and manifested it to the Rebel mittances may be made to Mr. A. C. Miller, 61 Cecil army in an unmistakable manner.” St., Manchester, England. The “Saturday Review,” under the new management Mr. L. J. B. Lincoln, the editor of “Uncut Leaves," of Mr. Frank Harris, is making a fierce attack upon the has begun the issue of a “monthly letter of advance new Oxford School of English Literature. The follow- criticism and literary information.” The first number ing is a specimen of the slashing sort of criticism that has appeared, and consists of twelve pages of fresh and is being served up weekly: “ The curriculum of the new readable comment upon books recently, or about to be, School of English Language and Literature at Oxford published, as well as notes upon the doings of literary is now before us. To say that it justifies our fears of folk in New York and elsewhere. what such a Board of Studies, as the Board appointed Our imports of books and other printed matter for for the regulation of this School, would be likely to pro- the first nine months of last year amounted to a little duce, would be to give a very imperfect idea of so de- 1895.] 29 THE DIAL LIST OF NEW BOOKS. [The following list, containing 91 titles, includes books re- ceived by THE DIAL since its last issue.] plorable an exhibition of pedantry, ignorance, and incom- petence. Of pedantry, for all that has any pretension to satisfactory organization is the Philological portion; of ignorance, for the boundary dates assigned to par- ticular epochs in our literature are often as muddled as they are misleading, while the selection of books prescribed for special study displays utter inability to distinguish between what is and what is not character- istic and significant in the works of individual authors, both particularly in relation to the authors themselves and generally in relation to the era at which such works appeared; of incompetence, for two-thirds of what constitutes a literary education in the true sense of the term -an adequate acquaintance with classical litera- ture, a knowledge of the principles of criticism, the possession of a good style, of sound judgment, of refined taste, and the like—are in the provisions of this curric- ulum simply ignored. Regarded as a curriculum of Philology it is most inadequate. Regarded as a cur- riculum in Literature it is literally below contempt." HISTORY. The Two First Centuries of Florentine History: The Republic and Parties at the Time of Dante. By Prof. Pasquale Villari; trans. by Linda Villari, Illus., 8vo, gilt top, uncut, pp. 365. Macmillan & Co. $3.75. London and the Kingdom: A History. By Reginald R. Sharpe, D.C.L. Vol. II.; 8vo, pp. 650. Longmans, Green, & Co. $3.50. History of the Jews. By Professor H. Graetz. Vol. IV., 1270-1618 C. E.; 8vo, pp. 743. Philadelphia : Jewish Pub- lication Society. $3. The Crusades: The Story of the Latin Kingdom of Jeru- salem. By T. A. Archer and Charles L. Kingsford. Illus., 12mo, pp. 467. Putnams'"Story of the Nations." $1.50. The Post in Grant and Farm. By J. Wilson Hyde, author of "The Royal Mail." 12mo, uncut, pp. 355. Macmil- lan & Co. $1.75. BIOGRAPHY AND MEMOIRS. The Life of Richard Owen. By his grandson, the Rev. Richard Owen, M.A.; with essay by the Right Hon. T. H. Huxley, F.R.S. 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Beyond a ques- English Translations of German Books, tion this work is one which will receive a hearty welcome being hints for selecting the Gernian Library of a man from men of refined literary tastes, as well as those who have of culture. given but little time to the study of ancient history.”— New Haven Leader. Subscriptions for Foreign and American Periodicals. “The history and local color of the time is admirably pre- JUST PUBLISHED. served, and the author has the charm of making his readers feel the personality of his characters. The style is fluent and WALTER BLACKBURN HARTE'S the volume worthy of praise."— Boston Times. MEDITATIONS IN MOTLEY PRINCE HENRY (the Navigator) A Bundle of Papers Imbued with the Of Portugal, and the Age of Discovery in Europe. By C. R. BEAZLEY, M.A., Fellow of Merton College, Oxford. 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ALL LOVERS OF TRUE HUMOR WILL ENJOY THE FANTAS- TICAL SPECULATIONS, THE PIQUANT WIT, THE DROLL COM Holiday Number of “ Notes on New Books,” giving full de- MENTS ON LIFE AND LITERATURE, AND ROBUST IMAGININGS scriptions of the season's publications and prospectuses of the OF THIS BELATED HUMORIST. “Stories of the Nations " and the “ Heroes of the Nations," “Walter Blackburn Harte is rapidly becoming a factor in sent on application. the literary life of Boston.”—Boston Advertiser. Price, Cloth extra, $1.25. G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS, ARENA PUBLISHING CO., Copley Square, Boston. NEW YORK AND LONDON. 36 [Jan. 16, 1895. THE DIAL Macmillan & Co.'s New Popular Books. A PRIVATE DIARY. 12 THE RALSTONS. A Sequel to “ Katharine Lauderdale." By F. MARION CRAWFORD, author of “Saracinesca,” “Marion Darche,” “ Don Orsino," etc. 2 vols., small 12mo, buckram, $2.00. Already Published. KATHARINE LAUDERDALE. By F. MARION CRAWFORD. 2 vols., small 12mo, buckram, $2.00. The Melancholy of Stephen Allard. 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By WILLIAM Ports. 18mo, gilt By HIRAM CORSON, A.M., LL.D., Professor of English Lit- top, 75 cents. erature in Cornell University. 18mo, gilt top, 75 cents. Now Ready: MR. BRYCE'S GREAT WORK ON THE AMERICAN COMMONWEALTH. In two volumes. Price, $4.00 net. NEW, REVISED, AND ENLARGED EDITION, WITH ADDITIONAL CHAPTERS. THE AMERICAN COMMONWEALTH. By JAMES BRYCE, D.C.L., author of "The Holy Roman Empire”; M.P. for Aberdeen. 2 vols. Third edition. Revised throughout and much enlarged. Large 12mo, cloth, gilt top. Vol. I., 724 pages, price $1.75 net. Vol. II., about 1000 pages, price $2.25 net. The set, 2 vols., in box, $4.00 net. * The work has been thoroughly brought down to date. The new chapters treat of the Tammany Ring in New York City; the Home of the Nation; the South since the War; Present and Future of the Negro. We have here a storehouse of political information regarding America such as no other writer, American or other, has ever provided in one work. ... It will remain a standard even for the American reader."- New York Tribune. MACMILLAN & COMPANY, PUBLISHERS, No. 66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK. THE DIAL A Semi-Monthly Journal of Literary Criticism, Discussion, and Information. PAGE 37 43 45 . . . No. 206. JANUARY 16, 1895. Vol. XVIII. over the pseudonymous signature of “ Ellen Alleyne.” It was not, however, until 1862 CONTENTS. that she took her destined place among the CHRISTINA GEORGINA ROSSETTI . greater Victorian poets, with “Goblin Market and Other Poems.” That volume was followed, NOVELS AND NOVEL READERS. Richard Burton 39 in 1866, by “The Prince's Progress and Other COMMUNICATIONS 41 Poems," and, in 1881, by “A Pageant and "Mirabeau and the French Revolution.”—A Reply. H. von Holst. Other Poems.” It is upon the contents of these Departmental Libraries. Aksel G. S. Josephson. three collections that Miss Rossetti's reputation MEMORIES OF SEVENTY YEARS. E. G. J. . must rest, although she did a considerable amount of other literary work. Before discuss- THE WAY OF THE GODS IN JAPAN. Ernest W. Clement ing the character of her poems, we may dispose EARLY LONDON THEATRES. G. M. Hyde . of the other books by a simple enumeration. 47 “Commonplace and Other Short Stories" ROPES'S HISTORY OF THE CIVIL WAR. C. H. Cooper (1870) and “Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme- 48 Book” (1872) are titles that speak for them- RECENT FICTION. William Morton Payne 50 Warner's The Golden House.- Cable's John March, selves. “Speaking Likenesses," a volume of Southerner. – Mitchell's When All the Woods Are “quasi-allegorical prose," and Annus Domini: Green.- Ford's The Honorable Peter Stirling. — A Prayer for Every Day in the Year,” both Clowes's The Double Emperor. — Bouvé's Centuries Apart. — Crockett's The Lilac Sunbonnet. - Hag- bear the date 1874. “Seek and Find," "Called gard's The People of the Mist.-Hope's The God in to the Saints,” and “ Letter and Spirit,” three the Car.-Hope's The Indiscretion of the Duchess.- Mrs. Edmonds's Amygdala.--Cunningham's Sibylla. religious works in prose, date from 1879, 1881, - Zola's Lourdes. -- Jókai's Eyes Like the Sea. - and 1883, respectively; while “ Time Flies, Björnson's Synnöve Solbakken. a reading diary in alternate verse and prose, BRIEFS ON NEW BOOKS. 56 appeared in 1885, and was, we believe, her last Some sound and readable musical criticism. — “The published volume. These devotional books, English Novel” and the “Study of Fiction.” – A text-book of an old-fashioned sort.—The military ca- which have both found and deserved a large reer of General Hancock.-Josiah Wedgwood and his and appreciative audience, are distinctly out of work. – Closing volume of Professor Huxley's col- the common, but the spirit which finds expres- lected essays. — A satisfactory life of Cicero. - A * Prelude to Poetry.” sion in them finds utterance still more intense BRIEFER MENTION and rapturous in the three volumes of song to 59 which we now turn. NEW YORK TOPICS. Arthur Stedman 60 It is not the least of the glories of English LITERARY NOTES. poetry that two women should be numbered TOPICS IN LEADING PERIODICALS 61 among the singers whom we most love and LIST OF NEW BOOKS 62 honor. It is perhaps idle to inquire whether Mrs. Browning or Miss Rossetti is to be es- teemed the greater poet; the one thing certain CHRISTINA GEORGINA ROSSETTI. is that no other English woman is to be named The last day of the year just ended brought in the same breath with them. These two news of the death of Miss Rossetti, the young stand far apart from the throng, lifted above est of that famous quartette of brothers and it by inspiration and achievement, and no ac- zisters of whom Mr. W. M. Rossetti is now count of the greater poetry of our century can left the sole survivor. Maria Francesca, who ignore them. If there is something more in- died in 1876, was the oldest of the four, hav- stinctive, more inevitable in impulse, about the ing first seen the light in 1827. Then came work of Mrs. Browning, there is more of re- Dante Gabriel in 1828, William Michael in straint and of artistic finish about the work of 1829, and Christina Georgina in 1830. Miss Miss Rossetti. The test of popularity would Rossetti gave early evidence of her poetic tal- assign to the former the higher rank, just as ents, as is shown by the privately-printed vol it would place Byron above Keats and Cole- ume of “ Verses,” dated 1847. In 1850, with ridge, or above Wordsworth and Shelley ; but her brothers, she wrote for the famous Germ," the critic has better tests than the noisy verdicts . . . 60 . 38 [Jan. 16, THE DIAL 66 19 of the multitude, and those tests lessen, if they common use of the dialogue form and the ab- do not quite do away with, the seeming dispar- solute identity of the austere ethical motive. ity between the fame of the two women. Miss Rossetti's verses sometimes suggest The longer pieces which introduce Miss Ros those of other poets, but we always feel that setti's three volumes are not the most success her art is distinctly her own. The divine sim- ful of their contents. It is rather to the lyrics, plicity of Blake is echoed in such a stanza as ballads, and sonnets that the lover of poetry “What can lambkins do will turn to find her at her best. Who, for All the keen night through ? Nestle by their woolly mother, example, could once read and ever forget such The careful ewe." a sonnet as Rest”? The melting, almost cloying, sweetness of the “O Earth, lie heavily upon her eyes ; Tennysonian lyric meets us in these verses : Seal her sweet eyes weary of watching, Earth; Lie close around her; leave no room for mirth “Come to me in the silence of the night; With its harsh laughter, nor for sound of sighs. Come in the speaking silence of a dream ; She hath no questions, she hath no replies, Come with soft rounded cheeks and eyes as bright Hushed in and curtained with a blessed dearth As sunlight on a stream; Of all that irked her from the hour of birth, Come back in tears, With stillness that is almost Paradise. O memory, hope, love of finished years." Darkness more clear than noonday holdeth her, As for the influence of the great Italian, which Silence more musical than any song ; Even her very heart hath ceased to stir: shaped so powerfully the thought of every mem- Until the morning of Eternity ber of the Rossetti family, it is less tangible Her rest shall not begin nor end, but be ; here than in the work of her greater brother, And when she wakes she will not think it long." yet to it must be attributed much of the ten- Or who could escape the haunting quality of derness and the pervasive mysticism of her such a lyric as this : poems. It is perhaps most apparent in the two “When I am dead, my dearest, Sing no sad songs for me; sonnet-sequences, “ Monna Innominata” and Plant thou no roses at my head, « Later Life," both included in the volume of Nor shady cypress-tree; 1881. And the influence of that brother who Be the green grass above me With showers and dewdrops wet; bore the sacred name of the Florentine is like- And if thou wilt, remember, wise intangible but pervasive. We get a And if thou wilt, forget. glimpse of it in “ Amor Mundi,” for example, “I shall not see the shadows, and in many a vanitas vanitatum strain. But I shall not feel the rain ; I shall not hear the nightingale we must repeat that Miss Rossetti's genius was Sing on, as if in pain : too original to be chargeable with anything And dreaming through the twilight more than that assimilation of spiritual influ- That doth not rise nor set, Haply I may remember, ence from which no poet can hope wholly to es- And haply may forget." cape, and which links together in one golden The poem just quoted can hardly fail to re chain the poetic tradition of the ages. call, in feeling, thought, and measure, Mr. If in most of the provinces of the lyric realm Swinburne’s“ Rococo," and thus emphasizes the Miss Rossetti’s verse challenges comparison spiritual relationship of the author to the poets with that of our greater singers, it is in the of the group sometimes styled “Pre-Raphael- religious province that the challenge is most ite.” Similarly, the perfect lyric called “ Dream- imperative and her mastery most manifest. Land” is clearly akin to “ The Garden of Not in Keble or Newman, not in Herbert or Proserpine,” and it is not difficult to discern Vaughan, do we find a clearer or more beau- the same sortof kinship between Miss Rossetti's tiful expression of the religious sentiment than “Up-Hill” and Mr. Swinburne’s “ The Pil is dominant in Miss Rossetti's three books. In grims.” Now the point to be noted is that all this respect, at least, she is unsurpassed, and three of Miss Rossetti's poems were published perhaps unequalled, by any of her contempo- in the volume of 1862, while the three Swin- raries. In her devotional pieces there is no burnian poems date from several years later. touch of affectation, artificiality, or insincerity. There is, of course, no question of imitation Such poems as “ The Three Enemies” and in each case what remains a simple theme with “ Advent” in the first volume, “ Paradise" and the one poet is elaborated into a symphony by - The Lowest Place” in the second, and many the other—but it is difficult to escape of the glorious lyrics and sonnets of the third, clusion that the man was influenced by the wo will long be treasured among the religious clas- man in all three of the cases. Particularly with sics of the English language. Perhaps the “Up-Hill” and “The Pilgrims,” we note the poet's highest achievement in this kind is the the con- 1895.] 39 THE DIAL 91 -“Old and New Year Ditties” of the first vols roughly, into three classes: first, those who care for ume. Some such claim, at least, has been made fiction as art primarily, and get their main pleasure by no less an authority than Mr. Swinburne for from its truth to life, its character analysis, and its the closing section of the poem. construction; second, those whose interest centres in the thesis of the book, and who care little or "Passing away, saith the World, passing away; Chances, beauty, and youth sapped day by day; nothing for form, style, and other distinctively lit- Thy life never continueth in one stay. erary features; and third, those to whom a novel is Is the eye waxen dim, is the dark hair changing to gray above all else a story, — something to amuse and That hath won neither laurel nor bay ? charm, an organism with movement, and zest of life. I shall clothe myself in Spring and bud in May: That division of novel-readers which looks for Thou, root-stricken, shalt not rebuild thy decay On my bosom for aye. and relishes to the full the art of a bit of fiction is Then I answered: Yea. comparatively small, and for obvious reasons. Here “Passing away, saith my Soul, passing away; belong the critics, the connoisseurs of literature. To With its burden of fear and hope, of labor and play; such it matters not so much if a story be pleasant, Hearken what the past doth witness and say: or whether or not it teaches sound morality and su- Rust in thy gold, a moth is in thine array, A canker is in thy bud, thy leaf must decay. perinduces a better opinion of one's fellow-men. If At midnight, at cock-crow, at morning, one certain day it have construction, vital character-drawing, and Lo, the Bridegroom shall come and shall not delay : verisimilitude, if it possesses stylistic distinction and Watch thou and pray. dramatic power, they are satisfied. The analytic Then I answered: Yea. student of the novel comes in the course of time to * Passing away, saith my God, passing away: put his attention on these things to the exclusion of Winter passeth after the long delay; New grapes on the vine, new figs on the tender spray, everything extraneous; he reads more as a scientist Turtle calleth turtle in Heaven's May. and less as a human being. This is at once the Though I tarry, wait for Me, trust Me, watch and pray. privilege and the penalty of the critical function. Arise, come away, night is past, and lo it is day, It is only the very great books that can wrest him My love, My sister, My spouse, thou shalt hear Me say. Then I answered : Yea." from this self-conscious and dubious coign of vant- age and set him cheek by jowl with ordinary hu- It is peculiarly fitting that the author of these manity, breathless in watching a piece of life and fervid and solemn verses, written for one New personally involved in the fortunes of the dramatis Year's season, should herself have passed away personce—in the grip of the sweetest and strongest on the very eve of another. of obsessions. Such, as a rule, is the critic's place and state of mind. Not always, even in his case, however. Mr. Andrew Lang, suffering, one might NOVELS AND NOVEL READERS. from a surfeit of culture, likes nothing so well as the novel with “go” and color and life, Just as the term father implies the correlative contradistinguished from that of analyses and the term child, so does a novel imply a novel reader. mooting of problems. Conceiving the end of art to It were hard to imagine a piece of fiction without be “pleasure, not edification,” he makes a plea for an audience, even if the audience number but one “the Fijian canons of fiction,” meaning thereby that and be furnished by the author himself. Readers, those naïve natives in their stories “ tell of gods and then, being necessary, it touches the quick of the giants and canoes greater than mountains, and of fictionist's interest to inquire: What is the attitude women fairer than the women of these days, and of of the present-day patrons of tales towards the dif- doings so strange that the jaws of the listeners fall ferent kinds of fiction purveyed for their delecta apart.” Mr. Lang, in short, is fond of beautiful tion? Is the purpose-novel preferred, or the light impossibilities in a novel. But it is none the less and cynical analytic study, or the frankly objective fair to say that the critic-class, as such, reads with adventure-tale of your true romanticist? Would “ Art for art's sake ” perpetually engraven upon its Mrs. Ward win the popular plebiscite, or Mr. Ben censorious front. And it is also plain that the audi- son, or Messrs. Stevenson, Doyle, and Weyman? ence thus furnished the fictionist is so small as to Of course a categorical reply could only be made be numerically contemptible, and in the vulgar mat- on the basis of counting noses: the pure mathemat ter of sales as unimportant as the p in pneumonia. ics of the problem will always be out of reach. To these professionals of criticism may be added a Still, what with the test of sales, the talk of society, fraction of the reading public which uses their and the a posteriori analyses of the critics, an opin- method, or in amateurish fashion, albeit honestly, ion of some solidity may be attained. The writer follows in their wake. Very young persons whose has made a point of conversing with divers sorts of education has been large and experience limited, and folk who care for fiction (and who, outside of the who for these reasons take themselves au grand absolutely illiterate class, does not care for it?), and serieux, and are more or less self-conscious in their has been both interested and instructed by the tes psychological habitudes, belong here; here belong, timony thus derived. Blending the illumination too, older, hardier, and more sensible people of a gained in this way with that from other sources, he natural intellectual keenness, the ab ovo analysts of has concluded that novel-readers may be divided, | life, and of literature its expression. These swear almost say, 40 [Jan. 16 THE DIAL or by Mr. Howells's dicta, and, as to quality, are of destroys by its own violence, and already may be the aristoi among readers, coveted by all genuine seen the after-effects of what has been cleverly artists. But neither of these subsidiary classes dubbed the “woman revolt in fiction.” Still, this swell the critic-class, caring for the art of a novel interest, this excitement, if temporary, has its sig- first of all, to proportions invalidating our claim nificance, and goes to show that a wider and deeper that it is decidedly the smallest of the three, and, appeal to humankind can be made through the novel, so far as immediate influence and the substantial and will be made, an appeal touching grave ques- return of figures is concerned, the least important. tions and the most sacred relations, as perhaps The second and larger class embraces readers through no other form of the written word. It will who object not to didactics in their novels. To them not do to sneer at tendency literature as lying out- a polemic in the guise of literature is as acceptable side of critical attention: Terence's line applies to as a pill, sugar-coated to the taste, to the thorough literature even as to life, and nothing in fiction that going homeopathist. Many falling into this cate broadly stirs his fellow men and women can be gory enjoy literature per se, to be sure; but they alien to the true critic's function. like it also to convey some thoughtful thesis, prefer Yet it is plain, and to be plainly stated, that this ring, so to say, the luxuriously cushioned barouche popular furore over a dominant piece of purpose. of fiction to wrestling with the same problem in the fiction tends to obscure critical tests and canons. Irish jaunting-car of sociology, or science. Hence is Those who read as they run, incline, under such in- derived a good part of the audience rallying to the Auence, to judge a work by the amount of imme- “ Heavenly Twins” and “A Yellow Aster"; diate noise and intelligent comment it begets, and that which a few years ago took up arms for “Rob as a consequence one hears absurdly exaggerated ert Elsmere.” A part, not the whole, we must encomium. “The Heavenly Twins,” for example, repeat; because these tendenzgeschichten, as the is put on a par with “ Marcella”; the truth being Germans call them, are far more than mere preach that beside Mrs. Ward's finished and masterful ments and special pleadings; often containing the work of art, it is ill-constructed, false to life, faulty vivid characterization of flesh-and-blood creatures, in drawing, and terribly diffuse,-in fine, the jour- the one red drop of human life which is precious. ney-work of a brilliant novice. The interest awak- But it is undeniable that the immense amount of ened by such a production is largely adventitious, talk evoked by such books had never been forth because based on an appeal lying beyond artistic coming were they not a stage upon which to dis tests. It is well to have this clearly in mind here play the puppets of theory and argument. Right in the United States, where comparative criticism is here opinions violently clash, and schools form as but locally conceded, and where for this reason a naturally as rocks crystallize. Plenty of earnest stern insistence upon the criteria of artistic perfec- and honest devotees of the novel will have it that tion is of all places most needed. It is not cause art and story interest may be supplied in a book, for complaint that a host of readers, the palpable plus the presentation of some vital question of the majority of whom are women, welcome novels hand- day, adding by so much to its importance and at- ling with more or less elan the relations of the sexes ; traction, and lifting fiction, traditionally regarded the repression, by the Anglo-Saxon traditions of as a “light” division of literature, into a more le convenance in fiction, of all that side of social phe- gitimate place, until it ranks with serious (too often nomena, results, as might be expected, in an excess a synonym for dull) literature. It is, in fact, a lit of curiosity and excitement which have their mor- erary cult, at the present writing, to be “serious” bid manifestations; but the residuum of all this fer- in the novel ; as it was a social cult, during the re ment will be a broader outlook and a freer concep- cent panic, to be poor. It was the book more pain- tion of motifs. If, however, we do not learn to fully and self-consciously didactic than any other apply rigidly and with malice prepense to any fic- in Énglish fiction within several years, which pro tion whatsoever, man-made or woman-begotten, the voked the most discussion—not critical controversy universal rules of art, a parlous state is ours. That so much as the more powerful unpredicable popular section of society which elects the purpose-novel as interest of society. The vogue and stimulation of its special pet and pride may gratify its taste under Madame Grand's strong if unequal and inartistic promise to exempt none of this popular product essay in the field of social analysis were little short from the Rhadamanthian judgment by the which of phenomenal, although now, striking work in other all fiction must be judged; and with the agreement sorts of fiction having since obscured it, one thinks to keep clearly dissevered in their own minds the of this study of the marital relation with Villon's appeal of art and the appeal of thought. refrain rising to the mind: “Where are the Snows The readers of a more genial habit and a more of Yester-year?” For a season, it is even likely traditional standard make up our third and final that the believers in purpose-fiction outnumbered class. They care for a story for the story's sake, not only the critical minority already characterized, and, bothering not overmuch if its likeness to life but also the old-fashioned followers of the healthier be dubious, go so far as to open arms to a fine rep- tale whom we are to reckon with under our third resentation of the improbable. They stand by Bal- division. For a season only, however, we should zac's phrase (rarely obeyed by the master himself) guess; there is a sort of rabies of interest which that the novelist should depict the world, not as it -- 1895.] 41 THE DIAL ers. is, but as it may possibly become. And it is this ticism as from the irresponsibility of the thorough- sort of folk, we would contend, which on the whole going realist. The advantage of those whose view- is the best-balanced, the most humanistic, and in hallo is for illusion lies in their being in the line of the long run the most influential, among novel-read a wholesome tradition, since men and women have Mr. Howells inclines to contemn a species gone more steadily to fiction for just that than for which, to his view, still loves the rattle and the aught else: and again, in their now perceptible and woolly horse in literature. But if he, or any other daily waxing in strength, a phenomenon due to the seeker after truth, will pursue the Socratic method, noticeable reaction, on the one side from the strained conversing with fellow mortals in the chance jostle probing of psychologic problems; on the other, from of the social plexus, he will get evidence pushing the art substituting form for substance and a qui- towards our conclusion. The fact is that, despite escent pessimism for the cheerful bustle and vigor all our rather self-conscious prating about art, and of red-blooded humankind. It is an audience to notwithstanding our somewhat feverish enthusiasm depend on in any age, this of the romance readers, over introspective social questions, the clear-headed and in quality such that the writer of fiction may and sound-hearted folk, who (thank heaven!) are well trust himself to deserve its plaudits; it is a con- the warp of our social fabric, do not care to fret stituency which he should hesitate to lose, even if and fume for any such thing. They go to the novel there appear to be a temporary appetite for the mor- for rest, amusement, illusion; as the lovers of Thack bid or the naturalistic. It is a backing which, year eray and Dickens did, of Scott and Dumas; as in and year out, will sell his books and establish his thousands now are doing with “ Trilby,” as true a fame and make his copyright a valuable inheritance child of the elder romanticists as was ever born. to his children. RICHARD BURTON. They have a deep-seated prejudice against fiction with a bad ending; so far from wishing to have a great book stamped indelibly on the mind at a first COMMUNICATIONS. contact, they are glad to possess, as a cultivated reader expressed it to the writer, “the pleasant "MIRABEAU AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION.” habit of forgetting a novel," assuring additional de- A REPLY light in the event of re-perusal. “The world is two- (To the Editor of The DIAL.) thirds bad, I know,” says the Advocatus diabole to I request you to publish in the next issue of your the stickler for high art and serious esteemed journal the following statements, hoping and 6 Your purpose. realism' teaches me nothing, it simply repeats un- trusting that you will willingly do so in justice, not only to myself, but also to the readers of The DIAL. savory and belittling facts of life ; and I would have Like every writer, I must expect to be criticized. none of it. Give me lies rather than literalities, or, Like every writer I have, however, a right to claim better yet, the half-truths of a scene where the light that my writings be not reviewed in such a way that is accented and the shadows put in corners—where readers of the criticism, who have not read the work they belong.” Now this is unphilosophic perhaps, criticized, must necessarily believe me to have written but it is natural and (pace Mr. Howells and those something totally different from what I have actually who jump with him it is healthy, very. The written. Without questioning in the least the motives trouble with the Howellsian view of fiction is that of Mr. D. L. Shorey, the reviewer of my Lowell lec- tures on the French Revolution in The DIAL, I charge it is professional, and so not generally applicable. him with having done so to the extent it possibly can He is perfectly right for himself. be done without saying any direct untruth. The in- But to argue pro and con as to this attitude of ferences drawn by Mr. Shorey from my statement in the readers who clamor for pleasant and incident- regard to Mirabeau's being and wanting to be a party thronged novels, and who are the casus essendi of by himself are his and not mine. The unbiased reader the Romantic reaction we are now witnessing, is, of the book will readily see why they are palpable fal- after all, aside from our main line of argument. lacies, though at first sight they seem to be irrefutable We are not justifying their position or attacking logical conclusions. The only explanation of Mr. it: we would simply register the fact of their exist. Shorey's misconception that I can find is that he seems to have read the lectures without paying any attention ence, and express the conviction that, while equal in whatever to the statement of facts they contain. To intelligence and possibly excelling in common-sense hurl Mirabeau's exclamation, “ Ah ! how the immoral- either of the two other classes, they are to-day, and ity of my youth injures the public weal," as a shaft will be more surely to-morrow, the strongest in num against me, is strange, for I quote it (II., 236), endorse bers, and thus for practical reasons are to be respect it most emphatically, show its tremendous import with fully regarded by the maker of tales. Mr. Craw minute detail, make it in fact one of the two main pil- ford, in his chapters on “ The Art of Fiction," lars of my whole argument. The same holds good of the insists that it is the novelist's primary business to pur- question of lack of confidence in Mirabeau to such a de- vey amusement. The believers in romances have a gree that I must fain believe Mr. Shorey to have skipped sneaking sympathy with this position, though many the twenty or more pages (scattered) treating of it. That Mirabeau “ became a new man (when he en- of them would claim, and rightly, that along with tered public life at the time of the revolution)”—he the pleasure may go a noble stimulation of ideals entered it much earlier, as Mr. Shorey can find briefly affording that instruction through the divine indi- stated in the lectures—"and the immorality of his rection of art which is as far removed from didac- | youth should not be counted against him” is not 42 [Jan. 16, THE DIAL > " claimed” by me. Nowhere is such a statement made in the lectures, but they contain many a page showing very elaborately that my opinion is in truth much more nearly the directly opposite one than that I am made to hold. From Mr. Shorey's expatiations on the pay- ment Mirabeau received from the court, the reader must conclude that I either pass it over in silence or justify it. I state the facts much more fully than he does, charge him (M.) with being “sorrily unscrupu- lous about how he got the money he wanted to spend, declare his “extravagant joy” over the king's liber- ality " was more than undignified, it was revolting,” but explain the transaction and reduce the charge of “ venality” to what is warranted by the facts. Mr. Shorey does not make the slightest attempt at contro- verting the facts adduced by me. About Lafayette Mr. Shorey and I disagree. In his opinion there was no need of “having the searchlight of critical history turned upon” the general, for he says : “The conduct and character of Lafayette were well known long before any such search-light was dis- covered [!?]. However it may be elsewhere, it was known at least in France and in the United States, that in a long life tried by many tests, the conduct of Lafayette was exceptionally consistent, and that it was uniformly governed not by passion, but by principle. In all emergencies he displayed the same high qualities.” If Mr. Shorey thinks that that is the way in which not only one serious historical writer, but all critical history, can be disposed of, in case the results of investi- gation have the misfortune not to be to his taste and to run counter to wide-spread popular opinions—well, then we differ, that is all. Again he does not make the slightest attempt at refuting the facts which I ad- duce-of course only an infinitesimal part of those fur- nished, in my opinion, by Lafayette's whole career- support of my views, Lafayette himself being one of my authorities. Mr. Shorey's calling a charge "stale' does not undo incontestably-proved facts, and to hear in 1895 an unsubstantiated opinion of Sainte-Beuve in such a question quoted as decisive is surprising. To learn that Mirabeau was far from being free from blame in his relations to Lafayette, and that he at the same time grossly flattered and bitterly denounced him, the reader need not turn to Mr. Shorey's review ; it is freely stated and blamed, but besides explained in the lectures. If the main contents of my lectures can be said to be at all alluded to by Mr. Shorey, it is done in two or three words and in such a way that nobody can possibly guess from them what the thesis is I have tried to prove by the facts, or rather what I maintain to be demonstrated by the facts. H. von Holst. Chicago, January 4, 1895. every science-for cataloguing purposes. The refer- ence librarian had to be acquainted with the standard literature in all the different branches of human knowl- edge. In former times there were such encyclopædic geniuses, who were able to grasp, as it were, the whole universe in one birds-eye view. That time is now past and gone for ever. Today every special science in- cludes more details than the whole field of scientific thought did fifty years ago. The librarian who would be something more than the go-between of the card catalogue and the shelves, who would be able to cata- logue and classify a collection of books without con- stantly consulting other catalogues, who would be able to rely upon his own knowledge,-in short, one who would treat the library profession as he would one of the lines of an educator's work,-must specialize. It was in recognition of this that the Newberry Library was organized as a “departmental” library, and that the Crerar Library now seems to be tending in the same direction. A couple of years ago, Miss Edith Clarke of the Newberry Library gave in the “Library Jour- nal” (September, 1891) a very interesting account of the working of the departments in the Newberry, and I refer the reader to this paper for more detailed inform- ation. These libraries are divided into departments of science,—there will be one department of medicine, one of music, one of social sciences, and so on. This plan will enable each assistant in the library to become ac- quainted with every detail of the technical side of his. work. In this way, furthermore, he will feel the neces- sity, and the possibility, of keeping his specialized knowledge up to date. As it is now in most libraries, the cataloguer, or the reference librarian, always feels. the necessity of keeping himself acquainted with all the departments of science; and as this is an absolute im- possibility, he will either feel that he is not doing, and cannot do, bis duty as well as he should, or-and this. is perhaps most often the case—he will content him- self with a certain superficiality, will content himself with the scant knowledge he can pick up in looking through the current magazines and in glancing over the pages of the new books as they come under his eyes. In the departmental libraries, and in the special libra-- ries, all this is changed. The librarian will feel that the field of literature with which he is to deal is within his grasp. He can pursue studies in the special line that interests him, without feeling that there are other things that he, in so doing, more or less neglects. In Europe, more especially in Germany and in the Scandi- navian countries, where, outside of the university libra- ries, few libraries of any importance exist, the library assistants are all university men; and the tendency is to. allow none but graduates (that is, doctors of philosophy and their equals) in the profession, because the librarian ought to be a specialist in any science and acquainted with scientific methods. This can be carried too far. The specialist will very often be narrow-minded, and in the library field nothing is more needed than men of broad minds. The departmental library, while giving the advantage of dividing the work on scientific lines, will keep the special departments in one organization, and thus facilitate the intercourse between the different departments. The staff of such a library will acquire the character of a university faculty, and this character will impose upon the members of the staff the unity of the special fields of work in which they are engaged. AKSEL G. S. JOSEPHSON. Lenox Library, New York City, Jan. 5, 1895. Lin DEPARTMENTAL LIBRARIES. (To the Editor of THE DIAL.) There has lately been originated in Chicago a type of libraries the career of which will greatly interest library workers in this country. The Newberry Library was the first, and now the Crerar Library seems to follow in its lead. Great general libraries have hitherto had their staff divided into departments according to the various classes of library work : there has been a catalogue department, a reference department, an ac- cession department, and so on. A cataloguer has been supposed to have in his head the most minute details of 1895.] 43 THE DIAL graving”—a work to which, he tells us, is due The New Books. the fact that “the University of Yale has hon- ored me by conferring on me the degree of MEMORIES OF SEVENTY YEARS.* Master of Arts." For twenty-seven years Mr. Linton has been a resident of this country, a “ Threescore and Ten Years ” is the title of trip to the States in 1866 - to organize a party a lively and readable, if at times rather sketchy, for Italy” leading to the more substantial and volume of reminiscences from the pen of Mr.W: fruitful, if less imposing, result of his perma- J. Linton, the well-known engraver. While nent engagement by Frank Leslie to conduct the book is largely a record of the author's the pictorial portion of the “ Illustrated News.” impressions of the many distinguished people It may be gathered from the foregoing facts he met during his career in England and in that Mr. Linton has been a radical, or at least this country, sufficient data are given to convey an advanced liberal, in politics—universal re- a fair notion of his own varied past and strong publicanism of the vague, high-soaring, Giron- personality. Born at London in 1812, Mr. dist type being his ideal. He is akin, one may Linton was early apprenticed to George Wil- believe, to the class of minds dominant in the mot Bonner, wood engraver; and wood engrav. latter half of the eighteenth century, whose ing has been, we take it, despite pretty constant dogmas of human perfectibility and the divine activity in the fields of authorship, journalism, right and innate virtue of that masterful ab- and political and philanthropic agitation, sub- straction, the “people,” nerved men like Robes- stantially his sheet anchor and real calling pierre and Saint Just to the commission of through life. Mr. Linton's journalistic expe- utopian follies which even now, in the face of rience has been, nevertheless, considerable. In the lessons of 1794, we seem in some danger 1841–2 he was editor of a Chartist newspaper of seeing repeated. Writing of Mr. Linton to called the “ Odd Fellow," and in 1845 of the Sir Charles Gavan Duffy in 1849, Carlyle “ Illustrated Family Journal,” which latter spoke as follows; and we quote the description, sheet he gave up in the same year to succeed not for its presumed literal accuracy, but be- Douglas Jerrold on the “ Illustrated Maga- cause we all know the sort of man Carlyle would In 1849 he was for a few weeks sub- be apt to apply it to: editor, under Thornton Hunt, of the “Spec- “ Also do not much mind Linton, who is a well- tator”; and shortly after he joined Hunt in enough meaning, but, I fear, extremely windy creature, starting the “Leader,” an ambitious journal of the Louis Blanc, George Sand, etc., species.” which was to be “at once an organ of the Were we to try our own hand with the brush, European Republicans and the centre of an we should perhaps paint Mr. Linton as one of English republican party, after the manner those amiable and well-intentioned people who, of the National and the Réforme in Paris." seeing everything refracted through the mists The “Leader”—of which Hunt was chief ed of their own super-sensibility, make a life bus- itor, G. H. Lewes literary editor, and our au iness of righting wrong and relieving distress, thor editor for foreign matters — did not last seldom distinguishing between unmerited pains long. Says Mr. Linton : and pains that are penalties, knocking the “ I had soon to find that Hunt's and Lewes's sympa shackles off the innocent victim and the con- thies with the Republican party were not to be depended on, that they merely wanted to exploit the connection victed gallows-bird alike, and not seldom tak- for the commercial advantage of the paper ... which ing their pay, like their immortal type in Cer- led nowhither, running, under the capricious direction vantes, in the abuse and ridicule of their cli- of Hunt and Lewes, like Leigh Hunt's Irishman's pig, ents. In revolutionary times Mr. Linton might up all manner of streets.' have been a lesser Tom Paine, tempered and As a free-lance journalist, Mr. Linton did diluted with the humane vagaries of an Anach- yeoman service, both in prose in the arsis Clootz. As times went, he did a vast deal twin causes of political liberalism and general of not altogether futile writing, speechifying, philanthropy; and he was an active speaker and organizing, in behalf of oppressed Italians, and organizer on the popular side during the Poles, Irish,- of any body, in short, that ap- Chartist and similar movements. As an author, peared to him to have a grievance,—to the no his credit rests chiefly on an excellent treatise small neglect, as he confesses, of his own proper on his own art, “ The Masters of Wood En- work of engraving. *THREESCORE AND TEN YEARS, 1820 to 1890 : Recollec- Passing from our impressions of Mr. Linton tions. By W.J. Linton. New York : Charles Scribner's Sons. to his impressions of others, we find a long list zine.” and verse, 44 [Jan. 16, THE DIAL 99 of names, eminent or notorious, ranging from unpleasant composition, too large and too unpleasant to Herbert Spencer to Mme. Blavatsky; from be hung in a private house, a gift as of a white elephant, neither to be accepted nor refused. I got out of the Carlyle to “Ben” Butler; from A. Bronson difficulty by Browning telling me that the old man had Alcott to Mace the pugilist ; from Tennyson no right to give it, as all his belongings' really belonged to Tupper — the latter of whom might have to his brother, Robert Landor, on whom Walter Savage passed, says Mr. Linton, “as a most respecta was living. So Browning took charge of the elephant ble and relieved me." grocer and possible church-warden "; from Swinburne to Robert Montgomery; from Rus- Mr. Linton recalls George Cruikshank as kin (to whom Mr. Linton sold Brantwood) to “ a well-built, good-looking, good-natured man, George Francis Train, whom he once saw mak- a bluff speaker who could call a spade a spade. ing a speech in support of his self-imposed His bump of reverence must have been poorly Presidential candidacy. Train, he adds, spoke developed ; for the author remembers him ex- fluently and well, though with not much in his claiming, with some impiety, in regard to a words. publisher who had misquoted him in a dispute During his speech he went to one end of the plat- over the price of some work, “ My dear sir, the form, and, taking hold of his nose with one hand, ran publisher is a liar!” Cruikshank, however, across the platform to the other end, saying: Let my seems to have lived, and even flourished, for nose alone !' That,' he added, “is the Democratic party!' Then, taking his nose with the other hand, he ran back: some years after this incident. Speaking of * You, too, let my nose alone! That is the Republican | Leech, Mr. Linton tells the story of the public party. I don't mean to be led by the nose by either.'”. castigation of one Bernard Gregory, a black- Prominent on the list of Mr. Linton's ac- guard journalist turned actor, at the hands of quaintances are Dickens, Landor, Hood, Brown- those he had pilloried in his scandal-mongering ing, Leech, Rossetti, Mazzini, Cruikshank, sheet, “ The Satirist.” Haydon, Emerson, Dr. Holmes, Longfellow, “On a certain morning London streets were pla- carded with the following notice: «Gentlemen of Lon- and others; and his impressions of these, where don! Mr. Bernard Gregory, the editor of the “Sat- he chooses to give them, are given with a can irist,” will appear to-night at Covent-Garden Theatre, dor and an independence of conventional esti in the character of Hamlet.' The placard had been mates that is refreshing Touching Dickens, put out by the • Punch' contributors, the object suffi- ciently obvious: to oppose Gregory, who was notori- whose “real vocation was as an actor of low ous as a rascally blackmailer. John Leech called on comedy," who “ was not the gentleman,” and me in the morning to tell me of their purpose and to who had “no soul of nobility in him,” he quotes ask me to go. Of course I went, and took a friend with the following story: me; and we got forward seats in the pit. Looking round I saw a lot of rough fellows who, I concluded, “When he and Wilkie Collins and Wills (the editor were hired as claquers for Gregory, and was not with- of Household Words ') went out, taking Dickens's doc- out fears of a fierce conflict. The curtain drew up, and tor with them, to eat the most expensive dinner they the action of the play began in all serenity; but so soon could get,' it was an action that marked the Amphitryon of the feast, if not the others also. It is an unpleasant as Hamlet appeared, an outcry, a burst of execration, rose so suddenly, and was so general, that one saw at anecdote, but it was told me by the doctor himself, who once no opposition could make head against it. Hisses had to prescribe for all three next day.” and hootings, cries of Off ! Off !_Blackguard ! Scoun- It is certainly not a little amusing to think of drel !' and the like, were hurled at the actor; and the this spiteful satirist of American gluttony and whole performance was stopped. Nothing was thrown neglect of table proprieties thus deliberately awhile, undauntedly impudent, then tried to make his except the storm of vociferation. Gregory faced it setting out to gorge himself to the point of voice heard in protest, but it was drowned in the roar apoplexy, and taking his doctor along with him of indignation. At length he gave in, and as the as a precautionary measure. curtain came down he seemed to cower and crouch be- neath. Then the manager came forward to withdraw Landor, Mr. Linton never saw, though he the piece, and the conspirators went out to moisten their corresponded with him, and once received, parched throats. Leech was hoarse for days.” through Browning, a dubious token of his re- An amusing afterpiece to this tragi-comedy gard in the shape of a picture “ supposed to be was the appearance of the noted pugilist, Jem by Michael Angelo.” The gift seems to have The gift seems to have Mace, as a witness in the suit for conspiracy done little more credit to the donor's heart than brought by Gregory against the Duke of Bruns- to his connoisseurship: wick, who, having been grossly assailed in “ Landor at one time had a large collection of pic “ The Satirist,” took a leading part in the riot. tures, supposed to be genuine, but seldom if ever of Mace, too, had been present and prominently any worth. This • Angelo' might be of that sort. I called on Browning to look at and to speak about the active. picture. It was a • Last Judgment,' a poor and very “He did not deny the part he had taken, but denied 1895.] 45 THE DIAL E. G. J. having been hired for the conspiracy. He was asked: tention of the poet's excellent biographer, Mr. • What made you active in such a matter ? what inter- Pickard. Mr. Pickard gives the date as the est had you in it?' His interest, he replied, in public morality; he could not help protesting against such a 17th of December, 1807”; but we find Whit- man disgracing the stage—or words to that effect. The tier writing: “My birthday was the very last of judge complimented him, and said he was glad to find the year 1807." so much public spirit in the parish in which he had his Mr. Linton's book is, as we have tried to own residence." show, lively, pleasantly discursive, and strongly It is to be regretted that the tide of journalistic individual in tone, its main fault being an oc- scurrility has even in England since risen to casional tendency to run reminiscence into a such a point that even the professional prow mere list of notable names. The pages on the ess of the high-minded Mr. Mace would be as Chartist agitation, its aims, its incidents, and the broom of Mrs. Partington to the Atlantic its heroes, are of stable interest. Materially, the against it. volume is a tasteful one; and there is a fine Hastily running over a few of Mr. Linton's portrait of the author, showing a most kindly briefer characterizations, we find Bronson Al. and venerable face—truly “ a face like a bene- cott set down as “a strange, mystical, gentle diction." old philosopher, very gracious, very wordy, rather incomprehensible"; Walt Whitman as “a fine-natured, good-hearted, big fellow, a THE WAY OF THE GODS IN JAPAN.* true poet who could not write poetry, much of To an audience of Athenians on Mars' Hill, wilfulness accounting for his neglect of form, Paul said: “Ye men of Athens, I perceive perhaps as fatal a mistake in a poet as in a that in all things ye are altogether supersti- painter"; Mme. Blavatsky as “a fat, vulgar- tious.” One might likewise stand before an looking woman, not, one could not help think audience of Japanese and say: “Ye men of ing, at all likely to be mistaken for a prophet- Nippon, I perceive that in all things ye are alto- ess, no sibyl, but a veritable old witch, with gether superstitious.' For most faithfully and nothing venerable about her ”; Mr. Stoddard devoutly do the mass of the Japanese worship as “the highest poetic genius now living in their innumerable deities, estimated with the America "; Mr. Swinburne (in 1861) as “a indefinite expression, “ eighty myriads.” And young man looking like a boy, and with a boy the relation between men and gods there is so ish manner, jumping about as he became ex familiar that the former, when calling the lat- cited in speaking, yet interesting and attract ter to receive homage and hear prayer, use the ive", Place, the “ Westminster tailor," as a same method, the clapping of the hands, that “fierce Malthusian—with a large family”; Ros- is employed in summoning servants. Thus, in setti as “an Italian of the time of the Medici, Japan, deities are treated like domestics ; in not without thoughts and superstitions of that America, domestics conduct themselves as if period, a man of genius both in art and liter- they were deities! they were deities! And these Japanese gods ature, one, however, hindering the other, the are so numerous, so ubiquitous, and so demo- literary predominating, and by which he will cratic, that Mr. Percival Lowell, in his new be best recollected"; and Harriet Martineau book on “ Occult Japan,” is “tempted to in- as “a good-looking, interesting old lady, very clude them in the census, and to consider the deaf, but cheerful and eager for news, which population of Japan as composed of natives, she did not always catch correctly.” Of Miss globe-trotters, and gods.” Martineau Mr. Linton adds : It was in an unexpected and strange way that “With all her manly self-dependence and strict inten Mr. Lowell himself, though a Western “bar- tional honesty, with all her credit for practical common barian,” got into the presence of the gods, and, sense, she was as much a poet as her brother, the Rev. James; a romancer even in the region of economical after that introduction, was enabled to culti- facts, even in those hard · Poor Law Tales,' when under vate their acquaintance. He was ascending, Lord Brougham she was preparing to prove the neces for recreation, a sacred mount, named Ontake, sity for the Poor Law Amendment Act, that crowning when he fell in with three pilgrims, and became harshness of Whig rule. She has never had justice done an uninvited spectator of a series of esoteric rites to her on this ground of romance.” of divine incarnation. This interesting revela- In his chapter on American poets Mr. Lin tion led him into further investigation, and re- ton quotes a letter from Whittier, written in OCCULT JAPAN; or, The Way of the Gods: An Esoter reply to his request for the exact date of the Study of Japanese Personality and Possession. By Percival latter's birth, to which we beg to call the at Lowell. Illustrated. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 46 [Jan. 16, THE DIAL up in body sulted in a series of papers on “Esoteric Shinto, for feminine lips”; and the pure Shinto cere- read before the Asiatic Society of Japan and mony, which is plain and simple, and lacks the published in the “ Transactions ” of that body. excessive ritual of the other two. The details These papers, revised, together with about a of all these forms are fully described, and a hundred additional pages and four illustrations, very careful comparison is made by Mr. Lowell. make “Occult Japan,” which is a very in- It is impossible to summarize this portion of his teresting and valuable contribution to the study book, which must be read in toto; but it is pos- of folk-lore, anthropology, and comparative re sible to quote a characteristic passage or two : ligion. “ It (the pure Shinto ceremony] is nothing more or This book contains a minute description of less than a divine banquet, with the god himself for an after-dinner speaker. The dinner is all-essential to the several “ miracles," such as the ordeal of boil- affair, as it is to all Shinto rites. For the Shinto prac- ing water,” “ walking bare-foot over a bed of tice of dining its deities is not confined to the ceremony live coals," "climbing a ladder of sword-blades," of possession. Wherever the gods are invoked, for any “the descent of the thunder-god ”into a kettle cause whatsoever, they are induced to descend by the prospect of a dinner. A repast stands perpetually pre- of boiling rice, “calling down fire from heaven' pared on all Shinto altars; shrines being, to put it irrev- to light the tobacco in a pipe, etc. The last erently, free-lunch counters for deity, while every Shinto two were absolute “ fakes "; but the first three service is but a special banquet given some particular were actually performed in Mr. Lowell's pres god. One comes to conceive of a Shinto god's life as one continuous round of dining out. To induce an after- ence. The theory of the Japanese with refer- ence to miracles is that they can be performed doubtless judicious.” dinner mood in a god whom one wishes to propitiate is only by those who are absolutely pure “But such (shams) are easily exploded. An unex- and heart, and who, to obtain that purity, have pected pin in a tender part of the possessed's body gone through with certain sacred rites. But instantly does the business. For a god is sublimely su- that theory was demolished when Mr. Lowell's perior to being made a pin-cushion of, while a mere man invariably objects to it.” “boy” suddenly jumped out of the audience and climbed the ladder of sword-blades. The A chapter is devoted to pilgrimages and pil- successful performance of these miracles is as- grim clubs. The former are called “ peripa- cribed by Mr. Lowell to two things—"a thicker tetic picnic parties, faintly flavored with piety”; skin in the priests (the performers] and a and yet, with reference to Shinto, are “more thicker skull in the people.” And it seems than foot-notes to its creed.” The pilgrim clubs quite probable that “ doubtless credulity is the are not an imported institution, but a custom mother of miracles, but doubtless, also, with indigenous to Japan "; they contain generally the far eastern family of them, a pachyderma- a membership of from one hundred to five hun- dred tous sole step fathers the process. For most persons, while the largest club has about of them are questions of cuticle." twelve thousand members. These clubs are From the miracle of walking barefoot on live regularly officered and carefully managed ; and they send on the annual pilgrimages represen- coals an interesting “moral ” has been evolved, and is thus explained by the high priest : tatives chosen by lot. The pilgrimage to Ise, where there is nothing to see, and they won't “ The object of the rite is that the populace may see that the god when duly besought can take away the let you see it,” is made in spring, “ when the burning spirit of fire while permitting the body of it to cherries blow”; other pilgrimages are made in remain. For so can he do with the hearts of men; the midsummer; and at both seasons pilgrims and bad spirit may be driven out and the good put in its pilgrim clubs have “the right of way.” place while still the man continues to exist." In the last hundred pages of the book is given About one-third of the book is given up to a metaphysical discussion of hypnotism, trances, the subject of “ incarnations,” or “possession etc., with special reference to “things Japanese.” by the gods.” In order to enjoy a divine visit, There is an analysis of certain Japanese mental human beings must be pure ; and the two chief characteristics, such as lack of originality, un- exercises that induce purity are washings and common imitativeness, absence of reasoning, fasting, “ ablution and abstinence.” There are general incapacity for abstract ideas, and de- three forms in accordance with which a relig corous demeanor. There is also an application ious trance is brought on; the elaborate Ryöbu of the thought of the caviller who changed ceremony, employed by those who have fol Pope's well-known verse into the statement lowed that confused mixture of Buddhism and “An honest god's the noblest work of man." Shinto ; the pure Buddhist ceremony, which is For Mr. Lowell says of people's gods : peculiar in that “the god shows a preference “In their characters generally you shall see reflected 1895.] 47 THE DIAL the race characteristics. In Japan the gods are emi- nently Japanese. They are dignified, artistic, simple EARLY LONDON THEATRES.* souls, of the most exceptional deportment. Their life Mr. T. Fairman Ordish's volume on “ Early is made up of one long chain of ornamental, if some- wbat conventional, moments.” London Theatres "purports to be a “ theatrical And, of course, the man who wrote « The Soul history,” a study of playhouses rather than of the Far East” to prove that the Japanese, plays, except where the latter are found to throw Chinese, and Koreans have no “soul," no per- some fresh light on the evolution of the stage and sonality, no individuality, finds in these relig- the appurtenances. In spite of the author's anti- ious trances additional proof of that idea, and quarian professions, there is a gratuitous and also of “a curiously conceived impersonal kind delightful strand of literary allusion running of deity.” through the book, finally widening and expand- ing into a discussion of Henslowe's Diary, dis- En Mr. Lowell gives the following passant, opinion of Buddhism : tinguished autographs, Ben Jonson’s duel and « Emotionally its tenets do not at bottom satisfy us the various appearances of his and Shake- occidentals, flirt with them as we may. Passivity is not speare's plays,—all of which is, to the average our passion, preach it as we are prone to do each to his mind, more interesting than the bulk of the neighbor. Scientifically, pessimism is foolishness, and volume, and, indeed, is of a certain importance impersonality a stage in development from which we in establishing the topographical and archæ- are emerging, not one into which we shall ever relapse. As a dogma it is unfortunate, doing its devotee in the ological points in view. “ Rare old Ben ” comes deeper sense no good, but it becomes positively faulty in edgewise, with a frequency that needs, per- when it leads to practical ignoring of the mine and haps, no excuse when it is recalled how he bullies thine, and does other people harm.” posterity for recognition. Though a tolerably Having recently been treated to Mr. Hearn's good biography of him could be picked up along analysis of Shinto, we are delighted to have Mr. the way, there are other obiter dicta which are Lowell give his idea of what Shinto is : tantalizingly brief. Mr. Ordish has a way of “To foreign students . . . Shinto has seemed little postponing many elusive matters till the end better than the ghost of a belief, far too insubstantial of the chapter,” or “ the second volume a body of faith to hold a heart. To ticket its gods and which, we hasten to say, will treat more espe- pigeon-hole its folk-lore has appeared to be the end of a study of its cult." cially of the Shakespearian theatres, Black- “Shinto is the Japanese conception of the cosmos. friars and The Globe. The omission of these It is a combination of the worship of nature and of their for the present is justified by the fact that the own ancestors. . . . To the Japanese eye, the universe earliest playhouses were erected outside the itself took on the paternal look. Awe of their parents, which these people could comprehend, lent explanation town “ in the fields,” — owing to the “official to dread of nature, which they could not. Quite co- war” that was waged against them as “ simi- gently, to their minds, the thunder and the typhoon, the naries of impiety." sunshine and the earthquake, were the work not only After describing the scaffolds and stages of anthropomorphic beings, but of beings ancestrally related to themselves. In short, into . . . is simply made in the streets for the representations of the patriarchal principle projected without perspective plays, before theatres were constructed, and ad- into the past, dilating with distance into deity.” [Rather vancing the theory that the amphitheatres south excessively alliterative !] of London and in Cornwall, where national “Shinto is thus an adoration of family wraiths, or of imputed family wraiths; imaginaries of the first and sports and pastimes were cultivated, had more the second order in the analysis of the universe." effect in determining the configuration of the “Shinto is so Japanese it will not down. It is the early British theatre than did the arrangement faith of these people's birthright, not of their adoption. of churches and their much-exploited miracle- Its folk-lore is what they learned at the knee of the plays and moralities, Mr. Ordish considers in race-mother, not what they were taught from abroad. Buddhist they are by virtue of belief; Shinto by virtue seven chapters The Theatre, the first London of being.” playhouse, where Marlowe's “Faustus” and In the December (1894) issue of “ The Pop- the old pre-Shakespearian “Hamlet” were ular Science Monthly” a scholarly Japanese given ; The Curtain, which had the longest existence of all the London playhouses, and was associated, probably, with the first “ Romeo ” optimism.” We now await with interest Dr. and “Every Man in his Humour"; the Sur- Griffis's analyses of Shinto, Buddhism, and rey side, with its Tabard Inn and residences Confucianism, in his coming work on “ The Re * EARLY LONDON THEATRES (In the Fields). By T. Fair- ligions of Japan.” man Ordish, F.S.A. The Camden Library." London: ERNEST W. CLEMENT. Elliot Stock: New York : Macmillan & Co. personal purity, of 6 merry-making," of naive associated, probably, with the first " Romeo* 66 48 [Jan. 16, THE DIAL > • of actors ; the amphitheatres with movable where “with the sayd timber and wood stages and bear-baitings (a Spanish ambassa erected the famous Globe. He will follow the dor's graphic description, p. 131); the New ancient rivalries between The Theatre and The ington Butts, with its “unrecorded dramatic Curtain, The Globe and The Rose, as if he history,” The Rose, Hope Theatre, Paris Gar- knew the several managers. He will finger den, and The Swan. The last chapter is a the copper lace charged to the actors on Hens- decided contribution to antiquarian research. lowe's books. He will receive instructive hints As the author claims, “the upshot is practi as to certain scenes from Shakespeare, -as cally to rescue from oblivion another of the old when he reads : “You may be sure the wrest- playhouses.” The volume is replete with maps, ling match in `As You Like It’ was no child's illustrations, and reproductions of old prints ; play or stage business, but was watched with and it is agreeably indexed. Abundant ac critical attention ; for it was an element brought knowledgments are made to the previous in into the play from the life of the people. vestigations of Rendle and Halliwell-Phillipps. The existence of the playhouse implied a more A glance through these chapters reveals anew highly organized celebration of the national how essential was the theatre to the social de plays and games.” Thus the volume possesses velopment of England. Only in the churches an interest to the general reader as well as to and in the playhouses did all sections of Eliz- the antiquarian. Its style is readable and pains- abethan society meet; and Sunday was the day taking. It will doubtless be an authoritative set apart for the one as for the other, -indeed, reference-book on the subject of London play- bear-baitings occurred regularly “on the Son houses. G. M. HYDE. dayes in the afternone after divine service.” “The people had become accustomed to the stimulus and pleasure of dramatic representa- tions; and not the long tramp to Finsbury ROPES'S HISTORY OF THE CIVIL WAR.* Fields, not the roughness displayed by the Mr. Ropes has undertaken his “ Story of the groundlings nor the fact that idle and disso- Civil War” in the spirit of the true historian. lute characters inevitably haunted the play- His plan, as stated by himself, is "to write of house, nor even the real and terrible danger of the subjects treated from the standpoint of each the plague, could turn the Elizabethan play- of the contending parties.” “In my judg- goer from the pastime he loved." The city ment,” he adds, “ the war should not be so de- fathers little realized that the theatre was the picted as to imply that the North and the South outcome of the public sports which had been differed and quarreled about the same things. cultivated under their sanction and encourage- This was not the fact. The questions presented ment for many generations. Their repressive to the men of the North were not the same as measures are less interesting to read about, be- those with which their Southern contemporaries cause less picturesque, than the diatribes of the had to deal.” Whether or not we fully agree with clergy of the period. The offensive vituper- this last statement, it is evident that this book ation thrown off in the white heat of Puritan is not written in the interest of either combatant indignation, the inflated conviction of the pul- or of any theory. A vast mass of material for pit that “the door of a play-house was equiv- the history of the war has been contributed in alent to hell-mouth,” is pictured in the racy the form of personal experiences and partisan sermonic extracts collated by Mr. Ordish, and accounts. We are now far enough away from furnishes a convenient connecting link between the passions of the time to allow both scholarly Tertullian and Dr. Herrick Johnson. writing and unprejudiced reading about the The lover of theatrical gossip will here find great struggle. many trivial but spicy incidents tucked away amid much learning. He will read, with a mod- Though claiming to be simply a narrative of the military events of the war, this first volume, ern zest which finally erases the gap of three at least, is largely taken up with a description hundred years, that apparently such a thing as of the political situation in 1860 and 1861, and a poorhouse was unknown at the first London the inter-relations of politics and the military theatre; and assuredly the prices were,, pop- plans and operations. Mr. Ropes first contrasts ular"; that Nash's “ Pierce Penilesse witnessed by“ ten thousand spectators at * THE STORY OF THE CIVIL WAR. A Concise Account of the War in the United States of America between 1861 and least "; that The Theatre was finally taken down 1865. By John Codman Ropes. Part I. To the Opening of piece by piece and carried bodily to Bankside, the Campaign of 1862. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. was 1895.] 49 THE DIAL The respon- ress. *** the views of the sections as to the relation of the view of the hostile preparations making against States and the Nation. The South claimed and the fort by South Carolina, and especially believed that the United States was not a single because he used the words “my policy in nation, but a collection of nations, united by speaking of his disinclination to precipitate the treaty known as the Constitution. Though the outbreak of open hostilities. He gave the gov- question has been settled now adversely to this ernment full information as to his situation ; he position, it was honestly maintained by the vast had been given full discretion ; if the govern- majority of the men of the South, and formed ment had wished to press matters to a conclu- the basis of their political thought and action ; sion, it was open to it to do so. from it the right of Secession naturally fol-sibility should and does rest upon the govern- lowed. The North as honestly believed that ment at the centre, where broad plans were to the United States, whatever they may have be matured, rather than on a subordinate offi- been in 1789, constituted but one nation in cer immured within the narrow walls of a fort- 1861, and so denied the right of Secession as Besides, Mr. Ropes acknowledges that destructive of the nation they loved. These the outcome was better, all responsibility for differences were irreconcilable. The Southern- the outbreak being thrown upon the South, and ers were fighting for the integrity of their na in such a way as to evoke a most astonishing tions against ruthless Northern aggression ; the outburst of patriotic enthusiasm throughout the Northerners fought to preserve the integrity of North when Sumter fell. the nation they loved. The conflict was such One notes with interest, and with a query, as to kindle the patriotic feelings of both the the author's statement that the men of the contending parties. And though the North South had greater aptitude for war than their considered the war a Rebellion, it was in fact opponents. They loved it, and entered upon a war between nations, a war of conquest, and it with the enthusiasm that brings success. was so waged. It was not a rising for the re To the men of the North, on the other hand, dress of grievances, with two parties corre war was wholly distasteful; they went into it sponding to the Patriots and the Loyalists of wholly from a sense of duty, but with a grim the Revolution; it was substantially a unani determination to win, and to punish those who mous rising in behalf of their imperilled na were to blame for it. The several advantages tions, and as such was a patriotic war. This and disadvantages of the respective sections are may be a rather strong putting of the actual clearly described. case, yet there is enough foundation for it to The chapter on the Battle of Bull Run is free from the moral guilt of treason those who perhaps the best in the book. Here the au- resigned from the Federal service to go with thor's peculiar skill as a military historian and their States. It was their duty to go with their critic shows itself. Without loading his de- States, if they believed their allegiance to be- scription with detail, he has clearly presented long there first; and the treatment which the the plans of the commanders, the disposition of Southern leaders received, whether as prison the respective forces, and the movement of the ers or after their defeat, corresponded with this battle, in a masterly way; and his criticisms view. seem just. The defeat of the Northern forces The question of the Southern forts is taken he considers a deserved punishment for the up in the second chapter; and here, as on the folly of the administration in forcing an ag- general question of the War, Mr. Ropes de gressive battle with raw levies, when nothing clares that the positions of the parties were so of permanent importance was to be gained by utterly opposed that all criticism of one from victory. the standpoint of the other is illegitimate and We pass over the discussion of plans and valueless. What the positions were can be can be preparations in East and West, to note Mr. readily inferred from the general theories above Ropes's estimates of some of the prominent noted. But in any case the seizure was really characters of the war. General Buell he con- an act of war — which was thus begun before siders the ablest soldier by far that the period any hostile act had been committed by the na produced,-equal to McClellan as an organizer tional government — and justifiable only as a and disciplinarian, far superior “ in military necessity in view of impending war. În dis- sagacity, in clear and unprejudiced vision, and cussing the reinforcement of Fort Sumter, Mr. in decision of character.” Buell's comprehen- Ropes seems to criticize rather harshly Major sive plan of operations was rejected by Lincoln Anderson's failure to ask for more troops, in and McClellan on one side and Halleck on the 50 [Jan. 16, THE DIAL other, only to be followed at last when its wis- “ lack of confidence and of ordinary courtesy, dom had been proved by the failure of the rival such are the terms in which he allows him- plans. Only a part of McClellan's melancholy self to speak of the President and his acts, career belongs to the period covered by this while speaking admiringly only of his political volume, but the great change from unbounded sagacity. The facts he himself presents do not popularity and confidence to distrust and dis seem to warrant the expressions used ; while satisfaction appears long before the campaign the full history of the times, as it is disclosed, of 1862 is entered upon. Mr. Ropes does not only increases our admiration for him who bore blame McClellan for deferring extensive oper the crushing burden of the government, and ations against the enemy until spring, for he places him higher upon the world's calendar considers the army unready for a great aggres of really great men. sive campaign without long drill and the devel We have reason to be grateful to Mr. Ropes opment of a true military spirit. But he does for this work, and shall look for the remaining blame him for his neglect of opportunities for volumes with keen expectation. It is in the easily recovering the confidence of the country best sense popular, being clear, untechnical, and improving the spirit of his troops, for his free from confusing details, and at the same indecision and lack of enterprise, for his flat dis time based on ample research and written in a obedience of orders in leaving Washington insuf. judicial spirit. C. H. COOPER. ficiently protected when he transferred his army to the Peninsula, and especially for his unfortun- ate tendency to be governed by his imagination, which was uncommonly active, rather than by RECENT FICTION.* common sense. Referring to his insistence Mr. Charles Dudley Warner has for many years upon Buell's movement into East Tennessee been an Institution in American letters, and almost against disadvantages amounting almost to im- any sort of good work was to be expected of him. possibilities, the author says: But with all his reputation to back it, the excellence “Nothing shows more clearly the imaginative side of of “ A Little Journey in the World,” published about McClellan's mind, and his absolute inability to take any five years ago, and making its author for the first interest in or bestow any careful thought upon any sub time a novelist, was something of a surprise even ject that did not appeal to his imagination, than this to those most familiar with his writings. It was so curious letter. But it is plain that none of these unexpectedly good in so many ways, in its shrewd things [the difficulties] even entered the mind of Gen- eral McClellan. His head was full of his own campaign *THE GOLDEN HOUSE. A Novel. By Charles Dudley in Virginia, and nothing interested him that was not, Warner. New York: Harper & Brothers. or might not be supposed in some way to be, related to JOHN MARCH, SOUTHERNER. By George W. Cable. New his own operations there. And, as a sort of justification York: Charles Scribner's Sons. for his decision, he had conjured up before his imagin- WHEN ALL THE WOODS ARE GREEN. A Novel. By S. ation a vision of an eager and grateful population, in Weir Mitchell, M.D., LL.D. New York: The Century Co. half of the States of the Confederacy, flocking to the THE HONORABLE PETER STIRLING, and What People Thought of Him. By Paul Leicester Ford. New York: Union standard as soon as it should be unfurled on the Henry Holt & Co. mountains of East Tennessee, and of immense results' THE DOUBLE EMPEROR, A Story of a Vagabond Cunarder. therefrom arising." By W. Laird Clowes. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co. And elsewhere he says: CENTURIES APART. By Edward T. Bouvé. Boston: Little, “ McClellan's imagination was, in fact, always carry- Brown, & Co. ing him away from the facts before him, always induc- THE LILAC SUNBONNET. A Love Story. By S. R. Crockett. New York: D. Appleton & Co. ing him to see things in distorted shapes — and some- THE PEOPLE OF THE Mist. By H. Rider Haggard. New times, as we shall see later, impelling him to do things York : Longmans, Green, & Co. which he would not have done had he from the first THE GOD IN THE CAR. A Novel. By Anthony Hope. resolutely determined never to let himself be ruled by New York : D. Appleton & Co. his fancies and his prejudices.” THE INDISCRETION OF THE DUCHESS. By Anthony Hope. New York: Henry Holt & Co. Mr. Ropes's treatment of President Lincoln AMYGDALA. A Tale of the Greek Revolution. By Mrs. is unsympathetic, and, perhaps unconsciously, Edmonds. New York: Macmillan & Co. depreciatory. “ Puerile impatience," "singu SIBYLLA, By Sir H. S. Cunningham, K.C.I.E. New York: lar orders," “ this extraordinary production,” Macmillan & Co. LOURDES. By Emile Zola. Translated by Ernest A. Viz- “this is really ludicrous in its minimizing of the etelly. Chicago: F. Tennyson Neely. facts of the situation [of his proclamation after EYES LIKE THE SEA, By Maurus Jókai. Translated from the fall of Fort Sumter],” “Mr. Lincoln's the Hungarian by R. Nisbet Bain. New York: G. P. Put- nam's Sons. serious defects as an administrator,—as a man SYNNÖVE SOLBAKKEN. By Björnstjerne Björnson. Given of affairs,” “ futile and useless suggestions," in English by Julie Sutter. New York: Macmillan & Co. 99 1895.] 51 THE DIAL observation and kindly satire, in the unwonted fin raigned. The last time when Edith was present it was ish of its style and the delicacy of its characteriza Steele. The judgment, on the whole, had been favor- tion, best of all, in its persistent exaltation of cer- able, and there had been a little stir of tenderness among tain old-fashioned ideals of conduct and conceptions the bonnets over Thackeray's comments on the Christian of life that are apt to get crowded below the hori- soldier. It seemed to bring him near to them. •Poor Dick Steele,' said the essayist. Edith declared afterwards zon of such men of the world as Mr. Warner. This that the large woman who sat next to her, Mrs. Jerry is the eternal difficulty in fiction. The young writer Hollowell, whispered to her that she always thought his may have the fine enthusiasms and the first literary name was Bessemer; but this was, no doubt, a pleas- instincts, but he is only beginning his acquaintance antry. It was a beautiful essay, and so stimulating ! with life, and he cannot describe it with force and And then there was bouillon, and time to look about at discernment. On the other hand, the writer who the toilets. Poor Steele, it would have cheered his life knocks about in the world rarely escapes the con- to know that a century after his death so many beauti- tagion of its slow stain, and most often comes to ful women, exquisitely dressed, would have been con- know life only at the expense of the freshness of cerning themselves about him. The function lasted two hours. Edith made a little calculation. In five min- his ideals. It was because Mr. Warner, in his first utes she could have got from the encyclopædia all the attempt at extended fiction-writing, seemed to show facts in the essay, and while her maid was doing her that it was possible to avoid impalement upon the hair she could have read five times as much of Steele horn of this dilemma, to prove that the mellow as the essayist read. And, somehow, she was not stim- ness of experience might be gained without loss of ulated, for the impression seemed to prevail that now faith in the nobler human impulses, it was for these Steele was disposed of. And she had her doubts whether reasons that the story was notable. We are justi- literature would, after all, prove to be a permanent so- fied in making these remarks about an old book in cial distraction. But Edith may have been too severe a review of “Recent Fiction ” for the simple reason in her judgment. There was probably not a woman in that they are quite as applicable to one of the new- the class that day who did not go away with the knowl- edge that Steele was an author, and that he lived in the est of novels — to “ The Golden House,” which is, eighteenth century. The hope of the country is in the in fact, a continuation of the story published five diffusion of knowledge." years ago. Here is traced for us the career of Hen- The name of Thackeray occurs in the above extract; derson from his second marriage to his death. let us take the hint, and say at once that Thackeray Wealthier and wealthier he grows, and with each himself could not have done this particular thing step gained recedes farther and farther from the any better than Mr. Warner has done it. A final reach of our sympathies. No one recognizes better than himself the uselessness and hopelessness of the word must be given to Mr. W. T. Smedley's illus- trations, which are conspicuously excellent, both for whole struggle, but he cannot shape his character drawing and for sympathy. Writer and artist would The fierce excitement of the earlier stages appear to have seen the same things with the same in his career of worldly success has long since sub- sided, and he continues to amass wealth only by a eyes, so complete is the understanding between them. sort of dull instinct, and because there is nothing It is a pleasure to welcome Mr. Cable the novel- else in the world for him to do. Finally, death ist once more, for reasons both positive and negative. strikes him unexpectedly, and he passes from the The positive reason is, of course, that Mr. Cable is scene unmourned, save by those whose selfish inter- one of the half dozen best writers of fiction that ests are jeopardized by his undiscounted taking-off. America has produced; the negative reason is that But the sympathy that we cannot feel for Hender- in re-welcoming the novelist we may hope to have son finds among the other characters ample scope seen the last of the doctrinaire writer the upon great for action. There are the self-sacrificing workers Race Question of the New South. Let Mr. Cable among the slums—for Mr. Warner makes effective incorporate that question into his novels as much as use of the contrast between the New York of fash- he will (and he has made considerable use of it in the ion and frivolity and the New York of toil and de- present instance), but he will do well to avoid it as a gradation — and there is the heroine of the story, subject for further serious discussion. “John March, Edith Delancey, who keeps her soul sweet and pure Southerner" is the story of a young man who was amidst the enervating and corrupting influences of born in the late fifties, and who thus grew up to her environment, and whose love finally prevails to manhood during the period of reconstruction. We save her husband's weaker soul from ruin. Mr. first meet him as a child at the time of Lee's sur- Warner's style is at its mellowest and best in this render, and we part with him in early manhood, a novel. How good it is, and how delicately it can citizen of the New South of our own days. This satirize the foibles of the society that its master has scheme enables the writer to place before our eyes had so much practice in delineating, must be illus- a series of graphic pictures, enlivened by humor, trated by one short extract. pathos, and dramatic episode, of the typical phases “ Edith's day had been as busy as Jack's, notwith- in the emergence of the new régime from the old. standing she had put aside several things that demanded There is first the blank despair of defeat, then the her attention. She denied herself the morning attend- slowly reawakening will, then the advent of the ance on the Literature Class that was raking over the carpet-bagger and the hideous period of negro mis- eighteenth century. This week Swift was to be ar rule; last of all, there is the acceptance of the new anew. 52 [Jan. 16, THE DIAL scene. conditions, the recognition by the superior race of of comparative literary embryology shall chance to its responsibilities accompanied by the reassertion exhume from the mould of the year now just ended of its intelligence, and the effort to develope the a novel called “The Honorable Peter Stirling,” the material resources of a land lagging half a century work of Mr. Paul Leicester Ford, we fancy that he behind the rest of civilization. This is the series will recognize it as having been one of the precur- of pictures that Mr. Cable has drawn for us, and sors of the final triumph, as having had some dim illustrated by types of character appropriate to the glimpses, at least, of the aim that the Great Amer- It is true that the pictures are too often ican Novelist is bound to have in view. For that mere flash-light photographs, which leave us be aim must be, must it not ? to plunge into the heart wildered in the endeavor to connect them in logical of American life, to converge upon some focal sit- sequence, and that the broad general outlines of the uation the various streams of social energy that per- characters are not readily decipherable; but the book form the functions of the organism. It will not be contains such a wealth of happily conceived detail, easy to determine exactly what elements should con- and so hurries us on from one pleasant surprise to tribute to such a synthesis, but it may be confidently another, that we are not disposed to criticize very asserted, at least, that the political element cannot harshly its failure to impress the reader as a har be spared. For good or for evil we possess as a monious and well-cemented whole. Besides, all nation the political instinct as few nations have ever readers of Mr. Cable's other novels know that this possessed it. Now Mr. Ford has seized upon this is precisely the failure most characteristic of their truth, and has made politics the mainspring of his author. book. His hero, who is one of the strongest and " When All the Woods Are Green” is a sweet most vital characters that have appeared in our fic- and wholesome story of love and adventure in the tion, is first and foremost a politician. Plunged in forests of Eastern Canada. Three weeks of camp- the thick of New York politics, coming into close ing and salmon-fishing, enjoyed by a family party contact with all sorts of political types, even the on the one hand, and an adventitious young man on most degraded, not shrinking from any task, how- the other, furnish the sufficient setting for this tale. ever disagreeable, he shows us by his example how It need hardly be added that the family of campers a man may keep clean in the worst surroundings, provides a suitable heroine, and that the young man and emphasises the lesson that it is only by tempo- in question becomes less and less adventitious as rarily accepting politics as they are that we can the story runs on. The element of adventure is hope eventually to make them what they should be. sapplied, first by an opportune bear, and later by The implied rebuke to those who merely scold, sit- an attempt at murder on the part of one of the ting aloof in the seat of the scornful, is all the more natives. But neither the bear nor the native is per severe because it is conveyed only by implication. mitted to introduce an element of tragedy into the To discern the soul of good in so evil a thing as situation, although the latter comes dangerously municipal politics calls for sympathies that are not near doing so. It may be objected that too book often united with a sane ethical outlook ; but Peter ish a character is often given to the conversation, Stirling is possessed of the one without losing his and occasional verbal infelicities, such as the objec sense of the other, and it is this combination of tionable preposition “onto" and the equally objec qualities that makes of him so impressive and ad- tionable adverb “illy,” may be pointed out. But mirable a figure. The book is not all politics. A these are trifling defects in a narrative which is very charming love-story relieves the harshness of charmingly set forth as a whole, and which displays the central theme. Numerous minor types Ait in remarkable powers of quiet incisive characterization. and out of the scene, and the scene itself shifts often There is an even excellence about this, as about all enough to afford an agreeable variety. But the main of Dr. Mitchell's literary work, which makes minute interest attaches, after all, to the “practical ideal- criticism captious, and which, combined with light- ist ” of the title, a figure far from prepossessing at ness of touch, and sympathetic handling of the ma the outset, but gaining steadily upon the affections terial, makes us feel that we are in good company, and the esteem as the story pursues its course. “The and wish that the acquaintance might be prolonged. Honorable Peter Stirling” is not the Great Amer- When the Great American Novel shall have been ican Novel for several reasons. Its style is very born — and we hope some day to chronicle that faulty, for one thing, and the writer's touch is happy occurrence -- it will become interesting to heavy where it should be light, for another. But trace its spiritual genesis, not merely in the mind it is both a readable and an ethically helpful book, and heart of its creator, but in the antecedent liter- remarkable as coming from a writer without train- ature which shall have been tending toward so great ing (as far as we know) in the art of fiction, and a consummation. Many earlier attempts, to our hence deserving of cordial commendation. present purblind vision seemingly abortive, will then Some time ago, Mr. Herbert Ward wrote a story be seen to have contained within themselves the in which the President of the United States, in- germ of the flower so long hoped for, to have dis veigled on board of a swift cruiser, was kidnapped played flashes of insight into the essential nature of and held for ransom. More recently, Mr. “Anthony the problem so long unsolved. If, then, some student Hope” has told the story of a German monarch, 1895.] 53 THE DIAL to weep. ob- also feloniously entrapped, whose place was taken munion are made solemnly to depose one another by a man strikingly similar in appearance, the sub from office, thus leaving “the Kirk o' the Marrow, jects of the prince remaining unconscious of the de- precious and witnessing,” without any head at all. ception. We do not say that Mr. Clowes, the au But our main concern is, after all, with the two thor of "The Double Emperor,” has actually taken young people whose love-story goes on in spite of his story from these sources, but it is a theory hardly the dangers impending over the kirk, and who are, to be avoided by anyone who has read the two tales in fact, unwittingly the cause of so close an approach in question. In this case, the Emperor of Lusatia to so disastrous an extinction. It is a story told in (read Germany) is the victim of the kidnappers, prose by one who is a poet at heart; who permits who are enterprising Americans, and who carry out his pen to rhapsodize when ordinary prose would their nefarious scheme through the innocent offices be inadequate, but who never goes too far in exu- of one Esek Hoodlum, of New York, who was once berant expression, and rounds up every sentimental a fellow-student with the Emperor, who has his confi passage with some sly or shrewdly satirical observa- dence, and who writes articles about him for“Scrarp- tion that leaves one in doubt whether to laugh or ner's Magazine." It was really a little unkind to “ It is a fallacy common among girls that rechristen Mr. Poultney Bigelow with so very young men desire them as sisters”—Mr. Crockett's jectionable a name, to say nothing of representing satire has no shafts more keenly-pointed than this. him as so extremely gullible as he here appears. But Even the dialect talk which he uses is so manifestly this is merely parenthetical. The Emperor's double accurate, so brimming over with life and humor, is a young cavalry officer, who has been trained to that we cannot find a harsh name for it, albeit there personate his master, and thereby relieve the latter is no slight difficulty in its comprehension, and it from attendance upon all sorts of Lusatian cere represents a prevalent literary tendency that ought monials. The abduction of the real Emperor, con- to be frowned upon. sequently, fails to produce the intended effect, for After writing something like a score of novels, no one discovers that he has been abducted until the most fertile of inventions is likely to flag ; and after his escape, return, and proclamation of the we are not surprised to find in “ The People of the fact. This outline of a wildly improbable but fairly Mist ” a rearrangement of the materials already interesting story gives the main facts, but no idea exploited in “She," " King Solomon's Mines," and of how ingeniously the details are worked out. It “Montezuma's Daughter.' From the first two of is purely a story of incident and adventure, with these ingenious productions Mr. Haggard has bor- nothing that bears the remotest resemblance to de rowed the mysterious African people isolated from lineation of character. Indeed, so wooden a ollec- the rest of the world, the rock excavations, and the tion of puppets are not often worked by a novelist. colossal statue carved from the mountain-side; from Of course, it all ends happily, and the villainous the latter he has taken the whole framework of the Colonel Snaggs, the arch-plotter, meets with a just new romance. In fact, so obvious a reproduction of retribution for his crimes. one's former self passes the bounds of the permis- The irruption of the Scotsman into literature is sible. And yet, such is the instinctive craving of one of the most noteworthy of present-day move the normally-constituted mind for adventure and ments. We do not now refer to Stevenson and Mr. romantic happenings generally, thousands of read- Lang, who long ago became cosmopolitans, but to ers will become absorbed in the fortunes of Mr. such writers as Mr. Barrie, “ Ian Maclaren,” and Haggard's newest heroes, while recognizing almost Mr. S. R. Crockett, all of whom remain intensely every incident as hackneyed, and while realizing local, at least in their most characteristic produc- the slipshod style of the narrative, or rather its total tions. It is to the latter of the three, the chronicler lack of anything that is properly to be called style. of Galloway, that our attention is just now directed Even the cheap device of astonishing an untutored by “The Lilac Sunbonnet,” a novel that seems to people by the display of firearms is once more us distinctly superior to anything yet done by the pressed into service, while the old trick of posing annalist of Thrums. Mr. Crockett very frankly for gods with a barbarous tribe is the mainspring calls this book a love-story," and a love-story it is, of the action. It is all very familiar, but it is also charming and unabashed. It has, moreover, the very thrilling, and boys of most ages will welcome setting of Scotch landscape and the background of the story in spite of its many imperfections. a narrow and disputatious theology that have been A story of even greater improbability than that turned to effective account by many a love-story | just described is the work of Mr. Edward T. Bouvé, teller before, from the author of “The Heart of Mid and is entitled “Centuries Apart.” Since, in the Lothian” to the author of "A Daughter of Heth.” case of “The Double Emperor,” we have ventured The account of that remnant of the faithful, the to construct a possible line of literary descent, a sim- “true Kirk of God in Scotland; commonly called ilar suggestion may by allowed in the present in- the Marrow Kirk,” is as delightful a piece of the stance. The elements of “ Centuries Apart” might ological characterization as we have often met with, have been derived from three books : Mr. Marriott- although it verges upon the burlesque when the two Watson's “ Marahuna,” Mr. Murray's men who constitute the entire ministry of the com Shamo,” and Mr. Clemens's “A Yankee at the 6 Gobi or 54 [Jan. 16, THE DIAL Court of King Arthur.” The first of these novels though it has an added element of romantic adven- supplies the idea of mysterious lands beyond the ture, and displays a piquant ingenuity of invention. Antarctic ice-barrier, the second that of an old civ. It is all very impossible and very fascinating ; its ilization preserved by being cut off from the rest of secret seems to lie in the fact that the reader is kept the world, and the third that of bringing an enter constantly alert for new developments, which are prising American into contact with the life of me never quite what is anticipated. Like all the rest diæval England. To show how these incongruous of the author's books, it provides capital entertain- ideas have been combined, a sketch of Mr. Bouvé's ment and is not in the least fatiguing. plot is necessary. An American squadron, des “ Amygdala: A Tale of the Greek Revolution” patched during our Civil War to a Pacific Coast is a pretty story by Mrs. Edmonds, a writer already station by way of Cape Horn, is driven southward well-known for other studies of the interesting pe- by a fierce storm, and finds its way through a hith- riod of modern history with which this tale is con- erto unknown passage into an open Antarctic sea. cerned. We read in these pages of an Englishman Here a continent is discovered, and found to be peo who, following Byron's noble example, devotes his pled by fifteenth-century Englishmen, who, a few fortune and his life to the Greek cause, and who, years after the Tudor victory of Bosworth Field, happier than the poet, lives to see Greece freed from had sought a home in the new world just discovered the Turk. Bound up with the patriotic motive is by one Christopher Columbus, and who had, like the motive of love, for the Englishman becomes their followers of the nineteenth century, been driven enamored of the daughter of a village pappas, and by storms to the land of Mr. Bouvé's extremely ro finds in her affection an additional reason for activ- mantic tale. By these ingenious inventions, two ity in behalf of the Greek cause. The outcome of civilizations of four "centuries apart ” are brought the story is tragic, although the tragedy is chastened together by the author. We will leave the details and purified by the sacrifice of the heroine. of this meeting to be gathered from the book itself, adding only that the plot is developed with much The “ Sibylla ” of Sir H. S. Cunningham evinces skill, that it includes many thrilling happenings, and some training in the art of fiction, and the capacity that it is set forth with no slight degree of literary readable novel of English society. The taste and to produce a conventional, well-bred, and fairly art. Indeed, it is a tale distinctly out of the com- mon, and its materials, while not absolutely fresh style of the writer are good enough to bear the weight of material which is exceedingly hackneyed, in fiction, are at least not of the overworked sort that we recognize in ninety-nine novels out of every consisting, for the most part, of the career of an English gentleman in politics, diversified by a secret hundred. stain upon the family honor, which casts a tempo- The writer who nowadays achieves a popular suc rary cloud over his domestic happiness. The lead- cess is pretty sure to make hay while the sun shines, ing character is of a type far from sympathetic, but but such assiduity in the field as has recently been it doubtless exists, and its present portrayal is not displayed by the author of “The Prisoner of Zenda” devoid of interest. is to say the least uncommon, even in these days of The pun so obviously suggested by the title of swift and easy composition. Besides many contribu- M. Zola's latest novel is amply justified by the mat- tions to the magazines, this most industrious of hay ters with which the document deals. The events of makers promptly put forth “ A Change of Air," five days are told in as many hundreds of pages, which we reviewed some weeks ago, and “The and nothing is spared us of detail. We start from. Dolly Dialogues," a clever production that must at Paris to Lourdes in the first chapter, and with the least be mentioned. Besides these things, we note closing pages we return. On the way to the famous the simultaneous appearance of two new novels, resort, nearly every conceivable variety of loath- « The God in the Car” and “ The Indiscretion of some disease is exhibited with brutal realism. When the Duchess.” The former of these books derives we reach Lourdes, the various types that throng the its odd title from the Car of Juggernaut, as that place are passed in review one by one, and we are vehicle exists in popular fancy, moving resistlessly invited to contemplate, in strange juxtaposition, the forward, and crushing all who come in its way. various aspects of scepticism and credulity, of sor- The “God” who presides over this destruction is did commercialism and of mystical fervor. It must an Englishman of the type exemplified by Mr. Cecil be admitted that to read the book is almost equiv- Rhodes, who is engaged in the promotion of a great alent to making the journey. One can no more African Company, and whose resolute will shrinks forget the one than the other. There are also de- from nothing in the accomplishment of its purpose. tached scenes of great power and scattered passages The story is almost wholly one of conversation, is of a beauty so marked that even the English trans- fairly rapid in its movement, and contrives to in- lation cannot miss it. M. Zola is particularly happy, terest us in a dozen people without making us feel here as in “ Le Rêve," as an interpreter of the mys- that any one of them is a real or even a possible tical quality of religious faith. But there is little character. to be said for the novel as a work of constructive “ The Indiscretion of the Duchess" may be de art. The two characters who are intended to supply scribed in much the same terms as the above, al the nucleus of the interest are conceived with force 1895.] 55 THE DIAL 66 He says : and sympathy, but their lives are mixed up with, plies this first volume with a rambling essay of some yet not logically related to, so bewildering a mass seventy-five pages, in which we find a sketch of of episode that they do not emerge as they ought Herr Björnson's life and literary production, and to. It is the old story; M. Zola gives us most of some attempt to correlate his activities with those the elements of art; he fails to give us the synthetic of his home and foreign contemporaries. We do structure. His pages teem with life — actual, vis not expect accuracy from Mr. Gosse, and hence are ible, palpitating — but the one step beyond is not not surprised to read that “Synnöve Solbakken" taken, and the one supreme effect not attained. was first turned into English in 1870. In point of The name of the foremost Hungarian novelist fact, it was translated (or rather paraphrased) by “ Norsk Folkebled” and has become increasingly familiar to our public dur- Mary Howitt in 1858. ing the last two or three years, a fact more largely Tourganieff” are probably printer's errors, but due to the recent celebration of the writer's jubilee we are not so sure of “Frakerk” for “Frakark,” than to any wide introduction of his works to our and “ Sigurd the Bastard” is not admissible for readers. It must be said, in fact, that Jókai has not Sigurd Slembe.” Moreover, we are told that this yet been translated sufficiently to enable us to judge great work is a poem, although it is about nine- of the value of his achievement. Of his hundred tenths prose. But we may even forgive these things and fifty odd pieces of fiction, but a very few have in view of Mr. Gosse's recognition of the rank of been put into English garb, and it must be admitted · Sigurd Slembe among the works of its author. that those few do not account for his great reputa- “In all the various repertory of Björn- tion. That reputation, when duly sifted, will doubt- son, there is perhaps no single work in which so less be found to contain elements of many sorts, and high a level of technical excellence is aimed at, and to the patriotic rather than to the strictly literary at the same time so harmonious and dignified a elements we shall be forced to look to understand result obtained. Looking over the twenty-five or the main strength of his position among his coun- thirty volumes which Björnson has presented to the trymen. The mere bulk of his work is imposing, public, there is probably not one from which, in and Hungarians must take much pride in the pos- Landor's phrase, there is less for criticism 'to pare session of so prolific a writer; and besides this, his away' than from Sigurd Slembe."" This is strictly activity as a citizen has been associated with those true. “Sigurd Slembe” is the greatest of Herr political movements of the past half-century which Björnson's works, and, with the possible exception have appealed most forcibly to the Magyar heart. of " Brand," the greatest work in all Norwegian The latter proposition is illustrated by the novel pub- literature, Mr. Gosse makes a number of com- lished in 1890, crowned by the Hungarian Academy parisons between Herr Björnson and Dr. Ibsen, as the best novel of that year, and now translated into some of which are intelligible and some not. To English by Mr. R. Nisbet Bain. In " Eyes Like this second category belongs the statement, made the Sea" there is quite as much of autobiography after some remarks about the cold and self-restrained as of fiction. The author refers to himself by name, manner of the latter poet, that “Björnson would die tells of his patriotic activities during the great rev- in such an atmosphere, like an eagle in a Leyden olutionary year, of his wooing and his married life. jar.” The italics are ours. One more perplexing But with this personal narrative there is twined an statement deserves attention. Speaking of “ Kon- obviously fictitious thread, upon which hang the gen," Mr. Gosse says: “Few even of Björnson's fortunes of an extraordinary young woman named admirers appreciated it at first." Then comes the Bessy—the possessor of the eyes of sea-like hue and following foot-note : "The present writer was among depth — who takes to herself five successive hus them, and published certain remarks for which (be- bands, and who dies in prison under a life sentence ing grown older and wiser) he would now do pen- for the murder of the last. There is something fas- ance, in a white sheet.” This is all clear enough, cinating about the story of this erratic young woman, but we cannot reconcile it with Mr. Gosse's final in spite of the gross improbability of most of the estimate of the work in question, when he says that, things done by her, and the author's pictures of the as one reads • The King' to-day, it is difficult to struggle of 1848 are extremely vivid. These are realize how so brilliant an intellectual extravaganza, the merits of what is otherwise a harum-scarum so daring a political dream, should have failed to story, which is not, we must add, translated into fascinate us from the first.” If Mr. Gosse hopes even acceptable English. ever to be taken seriously as a critic or as a scholar, A new translation of Herr Björnson's novels is he must reform his slipshod methods, in Hamlet's phrase, “ altogether.” WILLIAM MORTON PAYNE. a thing to be welcomed, but enthusiasm is at least phrase, “ altogether." tempered by the discovery that “Synnöve Solbak- ken,” the first volume issued, is but an old transla- tion revamped, and by the further fact that the Mr. F. YORK POWELL has been appointed to the Re- announcement makes no promise of Herr Björn- by Freeman and Fronde. It was the general expecta- gius professorship of history at Oxford, the post occupied son's two most important novels, “ Det Flager i tion among scholars that Mr. Samuel Rawson Gardiner Byen og paa Havnen” and “ Paa Gud's Veje." would succeed to the duties of this chair, but Mr. Mr. Edmund Gosse is to edit the series, and sup Powell is a good second. 56 (Jan. 16, THE DIAL Novel " and the Delight in that colossal genius is another of the tests BRIEFS ON NEW BOOKS. of true musical feeling, quite as good a test as the one already given. And, strange to say, the test is Books of sound and readable musical Some sound and one that, more than most others, is likely to evoke readable musical criticism are rare, and we commend an honest answer. criticism. Mr. W. F. Apthorp's nine essays, Or, as Mr. Apthorp puts it : collectively called “Musicians and Music-Lovers “Many people who have to keep up a reputation for musical taste will bear the infliction of a Schumann (Scribner), as one of the best books of its class. The musicians to whom these essays give individual quartette or a Brahms symphony quite smilingly; they will grin and bear it, and try to think they treatment are Bach, Händel, Meyerbeer, Offenbach, Franz, Dresel, and John Sullivan Dwight, - a like it. But Bach marks the point where the worm will turn; he is the last straw that b