hopefulness, the unfailing patience and good temper, with which he
applied himself to the task of cultivating the good will and securing
the co-operation of the natives--that made his enterprise a success.
With some exceptions, for which he gives ample credit, his European
subordinates seem to have been a constant source of embarrassment.
Possibly there may have been on his own part a lack of that
administrative ability which, acquired through discipline, imparts the
skill and power to enforce it. At all events, it is the sympathy and
humor with which he portrays his innumerable "blood-brothers"--greedy,
cunning, and capricious, but untainted with ferocity, and consequently
manageable, like children, by a judicious blending of severity and
indulgence--that give interest and charm to his narrative. It has many
faults and deficiencies which in a work of greater literary pretensions
would be inexcusable. The grammatical blunders with which it abounds
are the least annoying, since their grossness makes it easy for the
reader to supply mentally the needed correction without effort or
consideration. Looseness of diction, repetitions and redundancies of all
kinds, and, above all, a frequent lack of clearness and vividness both
in statement and description, are more serious impediments to the wish
to gain comprehension and instruction. Like most untrained writers, Mr.
Stanley imagines that, with a sufficiency of matter, it is only
necessary to refrain from striving after picturesque effects or ornate
embellishments in order to attain the qualities of clearness and
simplicity. Happily, the impulsiveness that betrays itself in his style
seems to have been kept well under control in the management of his
enterprise. It is always, indeed, apparent as a leading characteristic,
but it breaks loose only on occasions when it may be safely and not
unattractively displayed.
"Life of Frank Buckland." By his Brother-in-Law, George C.
Bompas. London: Smith, Elder & Co. Philadelphia: J. B.
Lippincott Company.
There is a story told of Sir Edwin Landseer's being presented to the
King of Portugal, who impressively greeted the famous painter with, "I
am rejoiced to make your acquaintance, Sir Edwin Landseer, _I am so fond
of beasts_." An equally ardent sympathy with Frank Buckland's specialty
was necessary to his friends while he was alive, and is required by
those who read this delightful, bizarre, and admirable history of a man
whose fellow-feeling for all creatures endowed with life was as broad
and comprehensive as Dame Nature's for all her children. He had, it
might seem, no antipathies. Everything excited his interest, curiosity,
and tenderness. Bears, eagles, vipers, jackals, hedgehogs, and snakes
roomed with him. He not only lived on intimate terms with his zoological
curiosities, petting them, training them, studying them, but he finally
ate them. As Douglas Jerrold said of the New Zealanders, "Very
economical people. We only kill our enemies; they eat 'em. We hate our
foes to the last: while there's no learning in the end how Zealanders
are brought to relish 'em."
It had been the elder Buckland's habit to try strange dishes. While he
was Dean of Westminster, hedgehogs, tortoises, potted ostrich, and
occasionally rats, frogs, and snails, were served up for the
delectation of favored guests, and alligator was considered a rare
delicacy. "Party at the Deanery," one guest notes: "tripe for dinner;
don't like crocodile for breakfast." Thus freed, to begin with, from the
trammels of habit and prejudice, there was little in the way of fish,
flesh, or fowl which Frank Buckland did not sooner or later try, with
various results. For instance, to quote from his diary:
"March 9. Party of Huxley, Blagden, Rolfs. Had the lump-fish for dinner;
very good,--something like turtle.
"March 10. Rather seedy from lump-fish."
And again:
"B---- called: had a viper for luncheon."
He held a theory that from popular ignorance and superstition much
wholesome material is wasted which might be made useful not only in
satisfying hunger, but in cheapening the prices of the foods which new
control the market. The "Acclimatization Society" was formed by his
influence, at the inaugural dinner of which everything that grows on the
face of the earth and under the waters was partaken of, from kangaroo
hams to sea-slugs. These various studies and experiments, all entered
into with unequalled spirit and audacity, led up finally to the great
work of Frank Buckland's life, which was the restocking of the
watercourses of his own and other countries with the trout and salmon
which had once teemed in them, but had been driven away by man's
encroachments. The success of his system of fish-culture is too well
known to require comment, having had the happiest results in all
countries in which it has been introduced. But the perils and
vicissitudes encountered in procuring the ova are little realized by
most people. "Salmon-egg collecting," Frank Buckland wrote in 1878, "is
one of the most difficult, and I may say dangerous, tasks that fall to
my lot." And it was, indeed, the frightful exposure attending this
search for spawn on a bitter January day in the icy waters of the North
Tyne that shortened his bright, useful career.
The biography is most instructive and valuable, besides being highly
interesting. And Frank Buckland's life was by far too rich and too
many-sided to allow anything less than his full history to give an
adequate idea of his patience, his fidelity of purpose, his love of
work, and his joy in accomplishment. The birthday entries in his diary
almost invariably disclose his satisfaction and comfort in his own life
and endeavors: "December 17, 1870. My birthday. I am very thankful to
God to allow me so much prosperity and happiness on my forty-fourth
birthday, and that I have been enabled to work so well. I trust he may
spare me for many more years to go on with my work."
The book abounds in droll stories, some quite new, and some already
given in his lectures and natural-history papers. He generally travelled
with some curious collections in his pockets or in bottles; and, whether
these were rats, vipers, snails, or frogs, by some strange fatality they
were certain to get loose and turn up among his fellow-passengers in car
or diligence. To twine snakes around the necks and arms of young ladies
playing quadrilles was another harmless joke. "Don't be afraid," he
would say: "they won't hurt you. And do be a good girl, and don't make a
fuss." He possessed an easy gift of adapting scientific theories and
deductions to popular interest and comprehension, and his "Curiosities
in Natural History" and other writings undoubtedly gave a strong impulse
to the tastes of this generation, of which the many out-of-doors papers
on birds, game, and the habits of all living creatures are the result.
"George Eliot's Poetry, and Other Studies." By Rose Elizabeth
Cleveland. New York: Funk & Wagnalls.
Miss Cleveland's book shows wide reading, study, painstaking
discrimination, enthusiastic zeal, and, above all, the never-failing
impulse of an individual idea. It reveals on every page a healthy,
well-poised womanly nature, and the opinions advanced are a part of the
conscience and moral being as well as of the intellect. The author has
fed her mind and heart with high dreams and lofty ideals, and it is not
only a pleasure to her to disclose them, but a sacred duty as well.
"When a high thought comes," she writes in "Reciprocity," "we owe that
thought to the world. A great deal of this interment of our best
thought-life is justified to ourselves by the plea that such thoughts
are too sacred for utterance: a wretched sophistry, a miserable excuse
for what is really our fear of criticism." There is nothing trivial or
false about the critical and ethical views which Miss Cleveland gives
bravely, although they are not invariably rendered with the felicity and
pointed phrase which come from a careful selection of words and symbols.
She is a little dazzled by the flowers and fruitage of a fancy which
most of us are compelled to curb and prune to meet the requisitions of
time and space. These papers were prepared chiefly, the dedication tells
us, for schools and colleges, and a little of the pedantry and ample
leisure of a teacher who has his audience safe under his own control is
apparent in them. Little goes without saying; the whole story is told;
yet it is always easy to put aside the parasitical growth and get at the
solid and useful idea. The book was not written for critics who desire
to have everything summed up in a single sentence, and who are apt to
praise the volumes which encumber the book-seller's shelves rather than
those which run through seven editions in as many days.
Like most other American essayists, she has couched many of her phrases
and ideas in the Emersonian mould. Her sentences are short; she uses a
homely illustration by preference. "Independence," she says, "in an
absolute sense is an impossibility. The nature of things is against it.
The human soul was not made to contain itself. It was made to spill
over, and it does and will spill over, always as _quid pro quo_,
wherever lodged, to the end of time."... "There is a vast amount of
thinking which ought to be in the market. We hold our best thoughts and
give our second best."... "We do a good deal of shirking in this life on
the ground of not being geniuses. The truth is, there is an immense
amount of humbug lurking in the folds of those specious theories about
genius. Let a man or woman go to work at a thing, and the genius will
take care of itself."
Miss Cleveland has gathered a large audience, and it is a satisfaction
to feel in reading her book that she holds her place before them with
invariable good sense, high faith, and a dignity which commands respect.
"Aulnay Tower." By Blanche Willis Howard. Boston: Ticknor & Co.
There is a good situation in "Aulnay Tower," but the book may be said to
be all situation, with little movement, no development, and the very
slightest free play of character and motive. The scene is laid at the
château of the Marquis de Montauban, not far from Paris, at the moment
in the Franco-German war when Sedan had been fought, the emperor was a
prisoner, and the Germans were investing the capital. The marquis, his
niece the Countess Nathalie de Vallauris, and his chaplain the Abbé de
Navailles, in spite of orders from General Trochu, have remained at this
country-seat, apparently indifferent to passing events. Thus it is a
rude awakening when they find the Germans knocking at the castle doors
and demanding entertainment for the officers of the Saxon grenadiers,
who are quartered upon them during most of the time occupied by the
siege of Paris.
Here, then, is the situation. The Countess Nathalie, a widow of
twenty-three, "a beautiful woman, young, pale, fair-haired, stately and
forbidding," confronts these invaders of her private peace and enemies
of her country, intending to freeze them by her haughtiness, her
indifference, her disdain, but carries away even from the first
encounter a haunting and rankling recollection of a tall man in blue;
while the tall man in blue, Adjutant von Nordenfels, "from the moment
she stood before the officers in her cold protest and unrelenting
pride," was madly in love with the countess. The feelings of these two
young people being thus from the first removed from the region of doubt
and conjecture, what few slight obstacles contrive to separate them for
a time carry little weight with the reader. There is a dearth of
incident which the side-play of the coquettish maid, Nathalie's
_femme-de-chambre_, fails to relieve. The marquis and Manette are the
traditional nobleman and soubrette, and flourish before us all the
adjuncts of the stage. We give a fragment from a soliloquy of Manette's
which suggests the foot-lights and an enforced "wait" in a comedy during
a change of dress for the principal actors: "I adore Countess Nathalie,
and am thankful for my blessings. And yet I have my disappointments, my
chagrins. To-day, for example, what a field for genius! what a chance
for never-to-be-forgotten impressions! A dozen officers! Not a woman in
Aulnay but madame and me. Oh, just heaven, what possibilities! My rich
imagination dressed us both in the twinkling of an eye. For the
Countess Nathalie gentle severity was the key-note of my
composition,--heavy black silk, of course. There it lies. Elegance and
dignity in the train. Happy surprises in the drapery. Fascination in the
sleeves. Defiance, pride, and patriotism in the high collar, tempered by
regret in the soft ruche.... She would have been a problem and a poem;
while I, in my cheerful reds, my dazzling white, my decisive short
skirts, my piquant shoes, my audacious apron, am a conundrum, a
pleasantry, an epigram." This would be very pretty on the stage, but a
waiting-maid who calls herself an "epigram" passes our imagination under
any other circumstances. In fact, Miss Howard seems to us to be
altogether on a false tack in this novel,--to have utterly abandoned
realism, and in its place to have imposed upon us scenes, characters,
and actuating motives which have figured over and over again in book and
play, and to which she has not succeeded in imparting any special
vivacity or charm. The novel falls far below "Guenn," in which the
author riveted and deepened the impression of her first clever little
book, "One Summer."
"Married for Fun." Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co.
The title of "Married for Fun," and the plot of the book itself, might
easily suggest its being a screaming farce; and that may actually have
been the intention of the author, although she is at times painfully
serious. A young lady who, after going through a form of marriage to an
utter stranger in a stupid charade, believes herself to be legally his
wife, seems to be practically unfitted for the position of heroine in
anything except a farce. But there is no fun in the book, and a whole
series of absurd and incoherent incidents fail to produce any effect
upon the reader save one of deadly ennui. The narrative, if such a host
of incongruities and imbecilities can be called a narrative, is
perpetually adorned by choice reflections of the author's own, and the
itinerancy of an extended European tour is condensed and added to the
other attractions.
End of Project Gutenberg's Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885, by Various