Mr. Mason, the compiler of these volumes, has a keen sense of that
taste which exists in all people (and certainly it is a kind of
curiosity not without its redeeming side) which prompts a hearty
appetite for personal gossip about appearance, habits, social traits,
methods of work and thought concerning distinguished men. Yet there is
another side to the question, however interesting such information may
be. This is specially in gossip about authors. The literary worker puts
the best part of himself in his writings. Here all the noble impulses
of his nature find an outlet, and in many cases he thinks it sufficient
to give this field for his higher traits, and puts his lower ones alone
into action. No man is a hero to his valet. A too near acquaintance,
and that is just what the editor of these volumes seeks to give us, is
always disillusioning. The conception which the author gives of himself
in his books is often sadly sullied and belittled, when we come to
know the solid body within the photosphere of glory, which his genius
radiates. Yet it is as well that we should know the real man as well as
what is commonly known as the ideal man. It enables us to guard against
those specious enthusiasms, which may be dangerously aroused by the
brilliant sophistries of poetry or rhetoric. Knowing the actual lives
and habits of great men is like an Ithuriel spear, often, when we study
teachings by its test. But putting aside the desirability of knowing
intimately the lives of great authors on the score of literature or
morals, it cannot be denied that such information is of a fascinating
sort. Mr. Mason has gathered these personal descriptions and criticisms
from all sorts of sources. Literary contemporaries, accounts of
friends and enemies, the confessions of authors themselves, family
records, biographies, magazine articles, books of reminiscence—in a
word every kind of material has been freely used. Authors are shown
in a kaleidoscopic light from a great variety of stand-points, and we
have the slurs and sneers of enemies as well as the loving admiration
of friends. Descriptions are pointed with racy and pungent anecdotes,
and it is but just to say that we have not found a dull line in these
volumes. Mr. Mason has performed his work with excellent editorial
taste. There is a brief and well-written notice appended to the chapter
on each author, and a literary chronology, the latter of which will be
found very useful for handy reference. These racy volumes ought to find
a wide public, and we think, aside from their charm for the general
reader, the literary man will find here a well-filled treasury of
convenient anecdote and illustration, which, in many cases, will save
him the toil of weary search. In these days of many books, such works
have a special use which should not be ignored.
ITALY FROM THE FALL OF NAPOLEON I. IN 1815, TO THE DEATH OF VICTOR
EMMANUEL IN 1878. By John Webb Probyn. New York: _Cassell & Company,
Limited_.
“Italy from the Fall of Napoleon I., in 1815, to the Death of Victor
Emanuel, in 1878,” by John Webb Probyn, is just ready from the press of
Cassell & Company. In noticing this important work we can do no better
than to quote from the author’s preface. “The purpose of this volume,”
writes Mr. Probyn, “is to give a concise account of the chief causes
and events which have transformed Italy from a divided into a united
country. A detailed history of this important epoch would fill volumes,
and will not be written for some time to come. Yet it is desirable that
all who are interested in the important events of our time should be
able to obtain some connected account of so striking a transformation
as that which was effected in Italy between the years 1815 and 1878.
It has been with the object of giving such an account that this volume
has been written.” Mr. Probyn lived in Italy among the Italians while
this struggle was going on, and he writes from a close knowledge of his
subject.
HARRIET MARTINEAU (FAMOUS WOMEN SERIES). By Mrs. F. Fenwick Miller.
Boston: _Roberts Brothers_.
The distinguished woman who forms the subject of this biography is
less known and read in America than she should be, and it is to be
hoped that this concise, lucid and well-written account of her life
and work will awaken interest in one whose literary labors will merit
perusal and study. Miss Martineau was one of the precursors of that
movement for the larger life and mental liberty of her sex, which
to-day has assumed formidable proportions, and indulged, we need
hardly say, many strange vagaries. Miss Martineau began to write at
an early age and soon began to impress herself on the public mind,
though it was for a long time suspected that she was a man. The whole
tone of her mind and intellectual sympathies was eminently masculine,
though on the emotional and moral side of her nature she was intensely
feminine. An early love disappointment, as has been the case with not
a few literary women, shut her out from that circle of wifehood and
motherhood in which she would have been far more happy than she was
ordained to be by fate. Yet the world would have been a loser, so true
is it that it is often by virtue of those conditions which sacrifice
happiness that the most precious fruits of life are bestowed on the
world. It would be interesting to follow the literary career of Miss
Martineau, if space permitted, as her life was not only rich in its own
results but interwoven with the most aggressive, keen and significant
literary life of her age. To the world at large Miss Martineau, who
had a philosophical mind of the highest order, is best known as the
translator of Comte, of whose system she was an enthusiastic advocate.
Her translation of Comte’s ponderous “Positive Philosophy,” published
in French in six volumes, which she condensed into three volumes of
lucid and forcible English, is not merely a masterpiece of translation,
but a monument of acumen. So well was her work done, that Comte himself
adapted it for his students’ use, discarding his own edition. So it
came to pass that Comte’s own work fell out of use, and that his
complete teachings became accessible only to his countrymen through a
retranslation of Miss Martineau’s original translation and adaptation.
Remarkable as were her philosophical powers, her work in the domain
of imagination, though always hinging on a serious purpose, was of a
superior sort. A keen and successful student of political economy,
she wrote a series of remarkable tales, based on various perplexing
problems in this line of thought and research. In addition to these,
her pathetic and humorous tales are full of charm, and distinguished
by a style equally charming and forcible. She might have been a great
novelist had not her fondness for philosophical studies become the
passion of her life. She was an indefatigable contributor to newspapers
and magazines on a great variety of subjects, though she generally
wrote anonymously. It was for this reason that her literary labors,
which were arduous in the extreme, were comparatively ill-paid, and
that life, even in her old age, was no easy struggle for her. The
work, among her voluminous writings, on which her fame will probably
rest as on a corner-stone, is “A History of the Thirty Years Peace.”
This is a history of her own time, pungent, full of powerful color,
though often sombre, impartial yet searching, characterized by the
sternest love of truth, and couched in a literary style of great
force and clearness. She showed the rare power of discussing events
which were almost contemporary, as calmly as if she were surveying
a remote period of antiquity. The _Athenæum_ said of this book on
its publication: “The principles which she enunciates are based on
eternal truths, and evolved with a logical precision that admits
rhetorical ornament without becoming obscure or confused.” Another
remarkable work was “Eastern Life,” the fruit of research in the
East. In this she made a bold and masterly attack on the dogmatic
beliefs of Christianity. The end and object of her reasoning in this
work is: That men have ever constructed the Image of a Ruler of the
Universe out of their own minds; that all successive ideas about the
Supreme Being have originated from within and been modified by the
surrounding circumstances; and that all theologies, therefore, are
baseless productions of the human imagination and have no essential
connection with those great religious ideas and emotions by which men
are constrained to live nobly, to do justly, and to love what they see
to be the true and right. The publication of this book raised a storm
of opprobrium, for England was then far more illiberal than now. Yet
it is a singular fact that, in spite of her free-thinking, Harriet
Martineau had as her intimate friends and warm admirers some of the
most pious and sincere clergymen of the age. She died in 1876 at the
age of seventy-four, after a life of exemplary goodness and brilliant
intellectual activity, honored and loved by all who knew her, even by
those who dissented most widely from her beliefs. She was among those
who ploughed up the mental soil of her time most successfully, and
few, either men or women, have written with more force, sincerity and
suggestiveness on the great serious questions of life.
WEIRD TALES BY E. T. W. HOFFMAN. New Translation from the German, with
a Biographical Memoir, by J. T. Beally, B.A. In two volumes. New York:
_Charles Scribner’s Sons_.
Hoffman, the German romancer, to most English readers who know of him,
is a _nomen et preteria nihil_, yet in his own land he is a classic.
His stories are mostly short tales or novelettes, for he appears to
have lacked the sustained vigor and concentration for the longer
novel, like our own Poe, to whom he has been sometimes likened in the
character of his genius. Yet how marvellously unlike Poe’s are the
stories in the volumes before us! The intense imaginativeness, logical
coherence and lofty style which mark Poe are absent in Hoffman. Yet, on
the other hand, the latter, who like his American analogue revels in
topics weird and fantastic, if not horrible, relieves the sombre color
of his pictures with flashes of homely tenderness and charming humor,
of which Poe is totally vacant.
Hoffman, who was well born, though not of noble family, received an
excellent education. He studied at Königsburg University, where he
matriculated as a student of jurisprudence, and seems to have made
enough proficiency in this branch of knowledge to have justified the
various civil appointments which he from time to time received during
his strange and stormy life, only to forfeit them by acts of mad folly
or neglect. He was by turns actor, musician, painter, litterateur,
civil magistrate and tramp. Gifted with brilliant and versatile
talents, there was probably never a man more totally unbalanced and
at the mercy of every wind of passion and caprice that blew. Had he
possessed a self-directing purpose, a steady ideal to which he devoted
himself, it is not improbable that his genius might have raised him
to a leading place in German literature. Yet perhaps his talents and
tastes were too versatile for any very great achievement, even under
more favorable conditions. As matters stand he is known to the world by
his short tales, in which he uses freely the machinery of fantasy and
horror, though he never revolts the taste, even in his wildest moods.
Yet some of his best stories are entirely free from this element of the
strained and unnatural, and show that it was through no lack of native
strength and robustness of mind, that he selected at other times the
most abnormal and perverse developments of action and character as the
warp of his literary textures. Hoffman’s stories are interesting from
their ingenuity, a certain naïve simplicity combined with an audacious
handling of impossible or improbable circumstances, and a charming
under-current of pathos and humor, which bubbles up through the crust
at the most unexpected turns. We should hardly regard these stories as
a model for the modern writer, yet there is a quality about them which
far more artistic stories might lack. It is singular to narrate that
some of his most agreeable and objective stories, where he completely
escapes from morbid imaginings, are those he wrote when dying by inches
in great agony, for he, too, like Heine—a much greater and subtler
genius—lay on a mattress grave, though for months and not for years.
The stories collected in the volumes under notice contain those which
are recognized by critics as his best, and will repay perusal as
being excellent representations of a school of fiction which is now
at its ebb-tide, though how soon it will come again to the fore it is
impossible to prophecy, as mode and vogue in literary taste go through
the same eternal cycle, as do almost all other mundane things.