_The Seer, or Commonplaces Refreshed._ By LEIGH HUNT. In Two
Volumes. Boston: Roberts Brothers.
Among the books most prized, in our modest private book-room, are some
which bear the delicate and graceful autograph of Leigh Hunt, having
floated from his deserted library to these American shores. There is the
Apollonius from which came the text of his poem of "The Panther";--this
is his mark against the legend, on page sixty-nine; and here is the old
engraving of Apollonius, which he no doubt inserted as a frontispiece to
the book. Here again is his copy of Rousseau's "Confessions," Holyoake's
translation, annotated through and through with Hunt's humane and
penetrating criticisms on nature with which his own had much in common,
though purer and sweeter. This volume of Milton's "Minor Poems" was his
also, with the rich and varied notes of Warton, the edition of whose
literary charms he somewhere speaks with such delight. Here also is
Forster's "Perennial Calendar," a book of rural gossip, such as Leigh
Hunt thoroughly enjoyed; and this copy of Aubrey de Vere's Poems was a
present from the author. Above all, perhaps, one dwells with interest on
a volume of Hennell's "Christianity and Infidelity," riddled through and
through by pen-and-ink underscorings, extending sometimes to every line
upon a page. The book ends with a generous paragraph in assertion of the
comfort and sufficiency of Natural Religion; and after it comes, written
originally in pencil, then in ink again, always with the same firm and
elegant handwriting, the indorsement, "Amen. So be it. L. H. July 14th,
1857." This was written in his seventy-third year, two years before his
death, and this must have been about the time of Hawthorne's visit to
him. Read the "Amen" in the light of that beautiful description of
patient and frugal old age, and it is a touching and noble memorial.
Americans often fancied that they noticed something American in Leigh
Hunt's _physique_ and manners, without knowing how near he came to
owning a Cisatlantic birth. His mother was a Philadelphian; and his
father, a West-Indian, resided in this country until within a few years
of his death. It is fitting, therefore, that our publishers should keep
his writings in the market, and this is well done in this handsome
edition of "The Seer." These charming essays will bear preservation;
none are more saturated with cultivated taste and literary allusion, and
in none are more graceful pictures painted on a slighter canvas. If
there is an occasional impression of fragility and superficiality, it is
yet wholly in character, and seems not to interfere with the peculiar
charm. Hunt, for instance, writes a delightful paper on the theme of
"Cricket," without ten allusions to the game, or one indication of ever
having stopped to watch it. He discourses deliciously upon Anacreon's
"Tettix,"--the modern Cicada,--and then calls it a beetle. There is apt,
indeed, to be a pervading trace of that kind of conscious effort which
is technically called "book-making," and one certainly finds the
entertainment a little frothy, at times, compared with the elder
essayists. Nevertheless, Leigh Hunt's roses always bloom, his breezes
are always "redolent of joy and youth," and his sunny spirit pervades
even a rainy day. Chaucer and Keats never yet have found a more delicate
or discriminating critic; and his paper on Wordsworth, beside the fine
touches, has solider qualities that command one's admiration. The
personal memorials of the author's literary friends have a peculiar
charm to us in this land and generation, for whom Hazlitt and Keats are
names almost as shadowy and romantic as Amadis or Lancelot; but best of
all is his noble tribute to Shelley. After speaking (Vol. II. p. 38) of
the deep philanthropy which lay beneath the apparent cynicism of
Hazlitt, he thus continues:--"But only imagine a man who should feel
this interest too, and be deeply amiable, and have great sufferings,
bodily and mental, and know his own errors, and waive the claim of his
own virtues, and manifest an unceasing considerateness of the comforts
of those about him, in the very least as well as greatest
things,--surviving, in the pure life of his heart, all mistake, all
misconception, all exasperation, and ever having a soft word in his
extremity, not only for those who consoled, but for those who distressed
him; and imagine how we must have loved _him_. It was Mr. Shelley."
Such an epitaph writes the character not only of him who receives the
tribute, but of him who pays it. And if there ever lived a literary man
who might fitly claim for his funeral stone the inscription, "Lord, keep
my memory green," it was the sweet-tempered, flower-loving Leigh Hunt.
_Christ and his Salvation._ In sermons variously related thereto. By
HORACE BUSHNELL. New York: Charles Scribner.
These sermons are distinguished from the ordinary discourses of the
pulpit by being the product not merely of religious faith and feeling,
but of religious genius. They embody the thought and experience of a
life, and the ideas they inculcate are not so much the dogmas of a sect
as the divinations of an individual. "This is Christianity as it has
been verified in my consciousness," might be taken as the motto of the
volume. The result is, that the collection is an addition to religious
literature, and will be read with satisfaction for its stimulating
effect on the religious sense by hundreds who may disagree with its
direct teachings.
The two most striking and characteristic sermons in the volume are the
first and the last, respectively entitled, "Christ waiting to find
Room," a masterly analysis of the worldliness of the so-called Christian
world, and "Heaven Opened," a plea equally masterly for the existence in
man of a supernatural sense to discern supernatural things. Between
these come the sermons entitled, "The Gentleness of God," "The Insight
of Love," "Salvation for the Lost Condition," "The Bad Mind makes a Bad
Element," and "The Wrath of the Lamb," which illustrate so well the
union in Dr. Bushnell's mind of practical sagacity and force of thought
with keenness and reach of spiritual vision, that we select them from
the rest as particularly worthy of the reader's attention. Indeed, to
have written these discourses is to have done the work of a ministry.
The peculiarity of the whole volume, and a singular peculiarity in a
collection of sermons, is the absence of commonplace. The writer's
method is to bring his mind into close contact with things instead of
phrases,--to think round his subject, and think into his subject, and,
if possible, think through his subject to the law on which it depends;
and thus, when his thinking results in no novelty of view, it is still
the indorsement of an accepted truth by a fresh perception of it. Truths
in such a process never put on the character of truisms, but are as
vital to the last observer as to the first. There is hardly a page in
the volume which is not original, in the sense of recording original
impressions of objects, individually seen, grasped, and examined. There
are numerous originalities of a different kind, which may not be so
pleasing to some classes of Christians,--as when he aims to show that an
accredited spiritual form does not express a corresponding spiritual
fact, or as when he splits some shell of creed which imprisons rather
than embodies the kernel of faith, and lets the oppressed truth go free.
This power of penetrating thought, so determined as at times to wear a
look of doggedness,--this analysis which shrinks from no problems, which
is provoked by obstacles into intenser effort, and which is almost
fanatical in its desire to get at the idea and reason of everything it
probes,--is relieved by a richly sympathetic and imaginative
nature,--indeed, is so welded with it, that insight and analysis serve
each other, and cool reason gives solidity to ecstatic experience.
Perhaps as a seer Dr. Bushnell may be more certain of recognition than
as a reasoner. Whatever may be thought of the orthodoxy of the doctrines
he has rationalized, there can be no doubt as to the reality of the
spiritual states he has described. His intellectual method may be wrong
or incomplete, but it in some way enables him to reach the substance of
Christian life and light and love and joy. There are passages in the
volume which are all aglow with the sacred fire of that rapture which
rewards only those souls that soar into the regions where the objects
that kindle it abide; and this elevation which touches ecstasy, this
effluence from the spiritual mood of the writer, is not limited to
special bursts of eloquence, but gleams along the lines of many a
clinching argument, and flashes out from many an uncadenced period.
The style of the book is what might be expected from the character of
the author and the processes of his thinking. The mental state dictates
the form of the sentence and the selection of the words. Thought and
expression, so to speak, breed in and in. There is a certain roughness
in the strength of the man, which is ever asserting itself through his
cultured vigor; and in the diction, rustic plainness of speech
alternates with the nomenclature of metaphysics, rugged sense with
lifting raptures, and curt, blunt, homely expression with vivid,
whatever may be his form of words, he always loads them with meaning,
and with his own meaning. He is not a fluent writer, but his resources
of expression ever correspond to his richness of thought. And if his
style cannot be said to bend gracefully to the variations of his
subject, it still bends and does not break. In felicity and originality
of epithet, the usual sign of a writer's genuineness of perception, he
is excelled by no theologian of the time. He also has that power of
pithy and pointed language which so condenses a statement of a fact or
principle that it gives forth the diamond sparkle of epigram. The effect
of wit is produced while the purpose is the gravest possible: as when he
tells some brother religionists, who base their creeds on the hyperboles
of Scripture, that they mistake interjections for propositions,--or as
when he reproves those pretenders to grace who count it apparently "a
kind of merit that they live loosely enough to make salvation by merit
impossible."
The animating spirit of the volume is a desire to bring men's minds into
contact with what is vital in religion, and this leads to many a sharp
comment both on the dogmatism of sects and the rationalism of critics.
Dr. Bushnell always seeks that in religion which not merely illumines
the mind, but invigorates the will. It is not the form of a doctrine,
but the force in the believer, which engages his attention. In pursuing
this method he displays alternately the qualities of an interpreter and
of an iconoclast; but his object is the same, whether he evolves
unexpected meanings from an accredited dogma, or assails the sense in
which it is generally received. And so tenacious is his hold on the life
of Christianity, and so vivid his mode of presenting it, that both
dogmatist and rationalist must feel, in reading his volume, that he has
given its proper prominence to much in Christianity which their methods
tempt them to overlook.
_The Morrisons, a Story of Domestic Life._ By MRS. MARGARET
HOSMER. New York: John Bradburn.
Full of improbabilities, and becoming lurid with domestic tragedies at
the end, this story has yet a sincerity and earnestness of style that
may entitle it to be called respectable, among the mass of American
stories. Novels are being sold by the five thousand which have far less
ability in characterization or in grouping. The persons remain in one's
memory as real individuals, which is saying a good deal; the dialogue,
though excessive in quantity, is neither tame nor flippant; and there is
an attractive compactness in the plot, which is all comprised within one
house in an unknown city. But this plot soon gets beyond the author's
grasp, nevertheless; she creates individualities, and can do nothing
with them but kill them. The defects, however, are those of
inexperience, the merits are the author's own. The value of her next
book will probably be in inverse ratio to the success of this: should
this fail, she may come to something; should this succeed, there is
small hope for her.
_Studies for Stories._ By JEAN INGELOW. Boston: Roberts
Brothers.
These narratives are probably called "Studies for Stories," as the
catalogue of the Boston Public Library is called an "Index to a
Catalogue": this being a profession of humility, implying that a proper
story, like a regular catalogue, should be a much more elaborate affair.
Nevertheless, a story, even if christened a study, must be criticized by
the laws of stories and no other.
Tried by this standard, we must admit that Miss Ingelow's prose, though
possessing many merits, has not quite the charm of her verses. With a
good deal of skill in depicting character, and with a style that is not
unpleasing, though rather formal and old-fashioned, she has no serious
drawback except a very prominent and unpleasant moral tendency, which
is, indeed, made so conspicuous that one rather resents it, and feels a
slight reaction in favor of vice. One is disposed to apply to so
oppressively didactic an author the cautious criticism of Talleyrand on
his female friend,--"She is insufferable, but that is her only fault."
For this demonstrativeness of ethics renders it necessary for her to
paint her typical sinners in colors of total blackness, and one seldom
finds, even among mature offenders, such unmitigated scoundrels as she
exhibits in their teens. They do not move or talk like human beings, but
like lay figures into which certain specified sins have been poured.
This is an artistic as well as ethical error. As Porson finely said to
Rogers, "In drawing a villain, we should always furnish him with
something that may seem to justify him to himself"; and Schiller, in his
æsthetic writings, lays down the same rule. Yet this censurable habit
does not seem to proceed from anything cynical in the author's own
nature, but rather from inexperience, and from a personal directness
which moves only in straight lines. It seems as if she were so
single-minded in her good intents as to assume all bad people equally
single-minded in evil; but they are not.
Thus, in "The Cumberers," the fault to be assailed is selfishness, and,
in honest zeal to show it in its most formidable light, she builds up
her typical "Cumberer" into such a complicated monster, so stupendous in
her self-absorption, as to be infinitely less beneficial to the reader
than a merely ordinary inconsistent human being would have been. The
most selfish younger sister reading this story would become a Pharisee,
and thank God, that, whatever her peccadilloes, she was not so bad as
this Amelia. "My Great-Aunt's Picture" does the same for the vice of
envy; "Dr. Deane's Governess" for discontent, and so on; only that this
last story is so oddly mixed up with English class-distinctions and
conventionalisms that one hardly knows when the young lady is supposed
to be doing right and when doing wrong. The same puzzle occurs in the
closing story, "Emily's Ambition," where the censurable point of the
aspiration consists in being dissatisfied with the humbler vocation of
school-teaching, and in pining after the loftier career of milliner,
which in this community would seem like turning social gradations
upside-down.
By far the ablest of the five "studies," at least in its opening, is the
school-story of "The Stolen Treasure," which, with a high-flown name,
and a most melodramatic and commonplace ending, shows yet great power in
the delineation and grouping of characters. The young school-girls are
as real as those of Charlotte Bronté; and although the typical maidenly
desperado is present,--lying and cheating with such hopeless obviousness
that it seems as if they must all have had to look very hard the other
way to avoid finding her out,--yet there is certainly much promise and
power in the narrative. Let us hope that the modesty of the title of
this volume really indicates a lofty purpose in its author, and that she
will learn to avoid exaggeration of character as she avoids exaggeration
of style.
_Collection De Vries._ German Series. Vols. I.-X. Boston: De
Vries, Ibarra, & Co.
The present high price of imported books, which is stimulating our
publishers to rival their English compeers in typographical triumphs, is
also creating an important class of German reprints, to which attention
should certainly be called. Until lately the chief business in this line
has been done by Philadelphia houses, but we now have editions from
Boston publishers which surpass all predecessors in accuracy and beauty.
Indeed, the average issues of the German press abroad do not equal these
in execution; and though the books issued are thus far small, yet the
taste shown in the selection gives them a peculiar value.
First comes Hans Andersen's ever-charming "Picture-Book without
Pictures,"--tales told by the Moon, as she looks in at the window of a
poor student. There is also a separate edition of this little work,
issued by the same house, with English notes for students, by Professor
Simonson of Trinity College.
Next comes "Prinzessin Ilse," a graceful little story by Von Ploennies,
almost as charming as "Undine,"--with its scene laid in the Hartz
Forest, by the legend-haunted Ilsenstein. Then follows a similar wreath
of fancies, called "Was sich der Wald erzählt," by Gustav zu Putlitz, in
which fir-trees and foxgloves tell their tales, and there are sermons
in stones and all the rest of it. Why is it that no language but the
German can possibly construct a _Mährchen_, so that Englishmen and
Americans grow dull, and Frenchmen insufferable, whenever they attempt
that delicious mingling of the ideal and the real?
Then we have two of the most popular novelettes of Paul Heyse, "Die
Einsamen" and "Anfang und Ende,"--two first-class æsthetic essays by
Hermann Grimm, on the Venus of Milo and on Raphael and Michel
Angelo,--and two comedies by Gustav zu Putlitz. There is also Von
Eichendorff's best novel, which in Berlin went through four editions in
a year, "Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts," or "Memoirs of a
Good-for-Nothing,"--and, finally, Tieck's well-known story of "The
Elves," and his "Tragedy of Little Red Riding-Hood."
Among these various attractions every reader of German books will
certainly find something to enjoy; and these editions should be
extensively used by teachers, as the separate volumes can be easily
obtained by mail, and the average cost of each is but about half a
dollar. We hope yet to see editions equally good of the complete works
of the standard German authors, printed in this country and for American
readers. Under present circumstances, they can be more cheaply produced
than imported.
_Reynard the Fox._ A Burlesque Poem, from the Low-German
Original of the Fifteenth Century. Boston: De Vries, Ibarra, &
Co.
The mocking legends of the Wolf and the Fox were wielded without mercy
by many mediæval satirists, against the human animals of those species,
then prevailing in courts and cloisters. But the jokes took their most
permanent form in the fable of "Reyneke de Vos," first published in the
year 1498. Written in Low-German by Nicholas Bauman, under the pseudonym
of Hinrek van Alkmer, the satire did a similar work to that done by
Rabelais, and Boccaccio, and Piers Plowman. It has since been translated
into many languages, and as Goethe at last thought it worth putting into
German hexameters, one may still find it worth reading in English
Hudibrastic rhymes. The present attractive edition is a reprint of the
paraphrase of Von Soltau, published at Hamburg in 1826,--though, for
some reason, this fact is not stated in the present issue. New or old,
the version is executed with much spirit, and is, to say the least,
easier reading than Goethe's hexameters.
_The Cradle of Rebellions: A History of the Secret Societies of
France._ By LUCIEN DE LA HODDE. New York: John Bradburn.
The translator of this sharp and pungent sketch of the later French
revolutionists is understood to be General John W. Phelps of Vermont,--a
man whose personal services, despite some eccentric traits, will give
him an honorable place in the history of these times. It is possible
that readers may not agree with him in his estimate of the dangers to be
incurred by American institutions from secret societies. They are a
thing essentially alien to our temperament. The Southern plotters of
treason were certainly open enough; it was we who were blind. The
"Know-Nothing" movement was a sort of political carnival, half jest,
half earnest, and good for that trip only. If anything could have
created secret societies, it would have been the Fugitive-Slave-Law
excitement: that, indeed, produced them by dozens, but they almost
always died still-born, and whatever was really done in the
revolutionary line was effected by very informal coöperation.
Indeed, even the French nation is, by its temperament, less inclined to
deep plotting than any nation of Southern Europe, and as De la Hodde
himself admits, "not one of our revolutions during the last sixty years
has been the work of conspirators." "There is but one maker of
revolutions in France, and that is Paris,--idle, sophistical,
disappointed, restless, evil-minded Paris. We all know her." "Of one
thing we may rest assured: the greater part of our revolutions signify
nothing." And this has been notoriously true since the days of the
Fronde.
Yet the moral of the book is not without value, and its historic
interest is considerable, taken in connection with the other memoirs of
the same epoch. The style is rather piquant, and the translation good,
though a little stiff. The writer is an Orleanist, and thinks the
Revolution of 1848 a mere whim of the populace, favored by a "vertigo"
on the part of Louis Philippe. It was "an incomprehensible
contingency,--sovereign power giving way to a revolt, without the test
of a combat."
The book was first published under the Republic, to which the author
professes due loyalty. He suggests, however, that, as no one is required
by duty to fall in love with a very ugly woman who may have been imposed
on him in marriage, so he is not yet very much smitten with the
Republic. But he is ready to respect the dame, if she proves to deserve
it, as a legitimate connection.
_Cape Cod._ By HENRY D. THOREAU. Boston: Ticknor and Fields.
Cape Cod is photographed at last, for Thoreau has been there. Day by
day, with his stout pedestrian shoes, he plodded along that level
beach,--the eternal ocean on one side, and human existence reduced to
its simplest elements on the other,--and he pitilessly weighing each.
His mental processes never impress one with opulence and luxuriance, but
rather with a certain sublime tenacity, which extracts nutriment from
the most barren soil. He is therefore admirably matched against Cape
Cod; and though his books on softer aspects of Nature may have a
mellower charm, there is none in which the very absence of mellowness
can so well pass for an added merit.
No doubt there are passages which err upon the side of bareness. Cape
Cod itself certainly errs that way, and so often does our author; and
when they are combined, the result of desiccation is sometimes
astounding. But so much the truer the picture. If Vedder's "Lair of the
Sea-Serpent" had the rank verdure of the "Heart of the Andes," the
kraken would still be as unimpressive on canvas as in the newspapers. No
one ever dared to exhibit Cape Cod "long, and lank, and brown" enough
before, and hence the value of the book. For those who insist on
_chlorophylle_, is there not "Azarian"? If the dear public will tolerate
neither the presence of color in a picture, nor its absence, it is hard
to suit.
Yet it is worth remembering, that Thoreau's one perfect poem,--and one
of the most perfect in American literature,--"My life is like a stroll
upon the beach," must have been suggested by Cape Cod or some kindred
locality. And it is not the savage grandeur of the sea alone, but its
delicate loveliness and its ever-budding life, which will be found
recorded forever in some of these wondrous pages, intermixed with the
statistics of fish-flakes and the annals of old men's diseases.
But in his stern realism, the author employs what he himself calls
"Panurgic" plainness of speech, and deals with the horrors of the
sea-shore as composedly as with its pearls. His descriptions of the
memorials of shipwrecks, for instance, would be simply repulsive, but
that his very dryness has a sort of disinfectant quality, like the air
of California, where things the most loathsome may lie around us without
making the air impure.
He shows his wonted formidable accuracy all through these pages, and the
critic feels a sense of bewildered exultation in detecting him even in a
slip of the pen,--as when in the note on page 228 he gives to the town
of Rockport, on Cape Ann, the erroneous name of Rockland. After this
discovery, one may dare to wonder at his finding a novelty in the
"Upland Plover," and naming it among the birds not heard in the interior
of the State, when he might be supposed to have observed it, in summer,
near Mount Wachusett, where its wail adds so much, by day or night, to
the wildness of the scenery. Yet by the triviality of these our
criticisms one may measure the astonishing excellence of his books.
This wondrous eye and hand have passed away, and left no equal and no
second. Everything which Thoreau wrote has this peculiar value, that no
other observing powers were like his; no one else so laboriously
verified and exhausted the facts; and no other mind rose from them, at
will, into so subtile an air of meditation,--meditation too daring to be
called devout, by church or world, yet too pure and lofty to merit any
lower name. Lycidas has died once more, and has not left his peer.
Cape Cod does not change in its traits, but only in its boundaries, and
this book will stand for it, a century hence, as it now does. It is the
Cape Odyssey. Near the end, moreover, there is a remarkable chapter on
previous explorers, which shows, by its patient thoroughness, and by the
fearless way in which the author establishes facts which had eluded
Hildreth and Bancroft, that, had he chosen history for his vocation, he
could have extracted its marrow as faithfully as that of his more
customary themes. Yet the grand ocean-pictures which this book contains
remind us that it was the domain of external Nature which was his
peculiar province; and this sublime monotone of the surges seems his
fitting dirge, now that--to use the fine symbol of one who was his
comrade on this very excursion--his bark has "sunk to another sea."