_Letters to Various Persons_, By HENRY D. THOREAU. Boston:
Ticknor & Fields.
The prose of Thoreau is daily winning recognition as possessing some of
the very highest qualities of thought and utterance, in a degree
scarcely rivalled in contemporary literature. In spite of whim and
frequent over-refining, and the entire omission of many important
aspects of human life, these wondrous merits exercise their charm, and
we value everything which lets us into the workshop of so rare a mind.
These letters, most of which were addressed to a single confidential
friend, give us Thoreau's thoughts in undress, and there has been no
previous book in which we came so near him. It is like engraving the
studies of an artist,--studies many of which were found too daring or
difficult for final execution, and which must be shown in their original
shape or not at all. To any one who was more artist than thinker this
exhibition would be doing wrong; but to one like Thoreau, more thinker
than artist, it is an act of justice.
The public, being always eager for the details of personal life, and
therefore especially hungry for private letters, will hardly make this
distinction. All is held to be right which gives us more personality in
print. One can fancy the exasperation of a gossip, however, on opening
these profound and philosophic leaves. There is almost no private
history in them; and even of Thoreau's beloved science of Natural
History, very little. He does, indeed, begin one letter with "Dear
Mother, ... Pray have you the seventeen-year locust in Concord?" which
recalls Mendelssohn's birthday letter to his mother, opening with two
bars of music. But even such mundane matters as these occur rarely in
the book, which is chiefly made up of pure thought, and that of the
highest and often of the most subtile quality.
Thoreau had, in literature as in life, a code of his own, which, if
sometimes lax where others were stringent, was always stringent in
higher matters, where others were lax. Even the friendship of Emerson
could not coerce him into that careful elaboration which gives dignity
and sometimes a certain artistic monotony to the works of our great
essayist. Emerson never wilfully leaves a point unguarded, never allows
himself to be caught in undress. Thoreau spurns this punctiliousness,
and thus impairs his average execution; while for the same reason he
attains, in favored moments, a diction more flowing and a more lyric
strain than his teacher ever allows himself, at least in prose. He also
secures, through this daring, the occasional expression of more delicate
as well as more fantastic thoughts. And there is an interesting passage
in these letters where he rather unexpectedly recognizes the dignity of
literary art as art, and states very finely its range of power. "To look
at literature,--how many fine thoughts has every man had! how few fine
thoughts are expressed! Yet we never have a fantasy so subtile and
ethereal, but that _talent merely_, with more resolution and faithful
persistency, after a thousand failures, might fix and engrave it in
distinct and enduring words, and we should see that our dreams are the
solidest facts that we know." The Italics are his own, and the glimpse
at his literary method is very valuable.
One sees also, in these letters, how innate in him was that grand
simplicity of spiritual attitude, compared with which most confessions
of faith seem to show something hackneyed and second-hand. It seems the
first resumption--unless here again we must link his name with
Emerson's--of that great strain of thought of which Epictetus the slave
and Marcus Aurelius Antoninus the sovereign were the last previous
examples. Amid the general _Miserere_, here is one hymn of lofty cheer.
There is neither weak conceit nor weak contrition, but gratitude for
existence, and a sublime aim. "My actual life," he says, "is a fact in
view of which I have no occasion to congratulate myself; but for my
faith and aspiration I have respect. It is from these that I speak.
Every man's position is, in fact, too simple to be described.... I am
simply what I am, or I begin to be that.... I know that I am. I know
that another is who knows more than I, who takes interest in me, whose
creature, and yet whose kindred, in one sense, am I. I know that the
enterprise is worthy. I know that things work well. I have heard no bad
news." (p. 45.)
"Happy the man," he elsewhere nobly says, "who observes the heavenly
and the terrestrial law in just proportion; whose every faculty, from
the soles of his feet to the crown of his head, obeys the law of its
level; who neither stoops nor goes on tiptoe, but lives a balanced life,
acceptable to Nature and to God." And then he manfully adds,--"These
things I say; other things I do." Manfully, not mournfully; for his
life, though in many ways limited, was never, in any high sense,
unsuccessful; nor did he ever assume for one moment the attitude of
apology.
These limitations of his life no doubt impaired his thought also, in
certain directions. The letters might sometimes exhibit the record of
Carlyle's lion, attempting to live on chicken-weed. Here is a man of
vast digestive power, who, prizing the flavor of whortleberries and wild
apples, insists on making these almost his only food. It is amazing to
see what nutriment he extracts from them; yet would not, after all, an
ampler bill of fare have done better? Is there not something to be got
from the caucus and from the opera, which Thoreau abhorred, as well as
from the swamps which he justly loved? Could he not have spent two hours
rationally in Boston elsewhere than at the station-house of the railway
that led to Concord? His habits suggest a perpetual feeling of privation
and effort, and he has to be constantly on the alert to repel
condolence. This one-sidedness of result is a constant drawback on the
reader's enjoyment, and it is impossible to leave it out of sight. Yet
all criticism seems like cavilling, when one comes upon a series of
sentences like these:--
"Do what you love.... Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good
for something. All fables, indeed, have their morals; but the innocent
enjoy the story. Let nothing come between you and the light. Respect men
as brothers only. When you travel to the Celestial City, carry no letter
of introduction. When you knock, ask to see God,--none of the servants.
In what concerns you much, do not think that you have companions; know
that you are alone in the world." (p. 46.)
This suggests those wonderful strokes in the "Indenture" in "Wilhelm
Meister," and Goethe cannot surpass it.
His finest defence of his habitual solitude occurs in these letters
also, and has some statements whose felicitousness can hardly be
surpassed. "As for any dispute about solitude and society, any
comparison is impertinent.... It is not that we love to be alone, but
that we love to soar; and when we do soar, the company grows thinner and
thinner, till there is none at all. It is either the tribune on the
plain, a sermon on the mount, or a very private ecstasy still higher up.
We are not the less to aim at the summits, though the multitude does not
ascend them. Use all the society that will abet you." (p. 139.)
And since the unsocial character of Thoreau's theory of life has been
one of the most serious charges against it, his fine series of thoughts
on love and marriage in this volume become peculiarly interesting. "Love
must be as much a light as a flame." "Love is a severe critic. Hate can
pardon more than love." "A man of fine perceptions is more truly
feminine than a merely sentimental woman." "It is not enough that we are
truthful; we must cherish and carry out high purposes to be truthful
about." These are sentences on which one might spin commentaries and
scholia to the end of life; and there are many others as admirable.
His few verses close the volume,--few and choice, with a rare flavor of
the seventeenth century in them. The best poem of all, "My life is like
a stroll upon the beach," is not improved by its new and inadequate
title, "The Fisher's Boy." The three poems near the end, "Smoke,"
"Mist," and "Haze," are marvellous triumphs of language; the thoughts
and fancies are as subtile as the themes, and yet are embodied as
delicately and accurately as if uttered in Greek.
_France and England in North America._ A Series of Historical
Narratives. By FRANCIS PARKMAN, Author of "History of the
Conspiracy of Pontiac," "Prairie and Rocky Mountain Life," etc. Part
First. Pioneers of France in the New World. Boston: Little, Brown, & Co.
It has been known for nearly a score of years within our literary
circles, that one of the richest and least wrought themes of our
American history had been appropriated by the zeal and research of a
student eminently qualified by nature, culture, and personal experience
to develop its wealth of interest. While very many among us may have
been aware that Mr. Parkman had devoted himself to the task of which we
have before us some of the results, only a narrower circle of friends
have known under what severe physical embarrassments and disabilities he
has been restrained from maturing those results. He has fully and sadly
realized, within his own different range, the experience which he so
aptly phrases as endured by his hero, the adventurous and dauntless
Champlain. When that great pioneer, midway in his splendid career, was
planning one of his almost annual voyages hitherward, at one of the most
emergent periods of his enterprise, he was seized on board his vessel in
France with a violent illness, and reduced, as Mr. Parkman says, to that
"most miserable of all conflicts, the battle of the eager spirit against
the treacherous and failing flesh." Mr. Parkman has known well what
these words mean. In his case, as in that of Champlain, it was not from
the burden of years and natural decay, but from the touch of disease in
the period of life's full vigor in its midway course, that mental
activity was restrained. When, besides the inflictions of a racked
nervous system, the author suffered in addition a malady of the eyes,
which limited him, as he says, to intervals of five minutes for reading
or writing, when it did not wholly preclude them, we may well marvel at
what he has accomplished. And the reader will marvel all the more that
the hindrances and pains under which the matter of these pages has been
wrought have left no traces or transfer of themselves here. It may be
possible that an occasional twinge or pang may have concentrated the
terse narrative, or pointed the sharp and shrewd moralizings of these
pages; for there is an amazing conciseness and a keen epigrammatic
sagacity in them. But there is no languor, no feebleness, no sleepy
prosiness, to indicate where vivacity flagged, and where an episode or
paragraph was finished after the glow had yielded to exhaustion.
Mr. Parkman's theme is one of adventure on the grandest scale, with
novel conditions and elements, and under the quickening of master
passions of a sort to give to incidents and achievements a most romantic
and soul-absorbing interest. Only incidentally, and then most slightly,
does he have to deal with state affairs, with court intrigues, or with
diplomatic complications. He has to follow men into regions and scenes
in which there is so much raw material, and so much of the originality
of human conditions and qualities, that no precedents are of avail, and
it is even doubtful whether there are principles that have authority to
guide or that may be safely recognized. Nor could he have treated his
grand theme with that amazing facility and skill, which, as his work
manifests them, will satisfy all his readers that the theme belongs to
him and he to it, had not his native tastes, his training, and his
actual experience brought him into a most intelligent sympathy with his
subject-matter. Without being an adventurer, in the modern sense of the
term, he has the spirit which filled the best old sense of the word. He
has been a wide traveller and an explorer. Familiar by actual
observation with the scenes through which he has to follow the track of
the pioneers whom he chronicles, he has also acquainted himself by
foot-journeys and canoe-navigation under Indian guides with scenes and
regions still unspoiled of their wilderness features. He has crossed the
Rocky Mountains by the war-path of the savages, and penetrated far
beyond the borders of civilization in the direction of the northern ice
on our continent. He is skilled in native woodcraft, in the phenomena of
the forest and the lake, the winding river and the cataract. He has
watched the aspects of Nature through all the seasons in regions far
away from the havoc and the finish of culture. He has been alone as a
white man in the squalid lodges of the Indians, has lived after their
manner up to the edge of the restraints which a civilized man must
always take with him, and has consented to forego all that is meant by
the word comfort, that he might learn actually what our
transcendentalists and sentimentalists are so taken with theoretically.
He knows the inner make and furnishings of the savage brain and heart,
the qualities of their thought and passions, their superstitions,
follies, and vices; and while he deals with them and their ways with the
right spirit and consideration of a high-toned Christian man, he yields
to no silly inventiveness of fancy or romance in portraying them. They
are barely human, and they are hideous and revolting in his pages, as
they are in real life. Mr. Parkman knows them for just what they are,
and as they are. Helped by natural adaptation and sympathy to put
himself into communication with them sufficiently to analyze their
composition and to scan their range of being, he has presented such a
portraiture and estimate of them as will be increasingly valuable while
they are wasting away, to be known to future generations only by the
record.
It is through Mr. Parkman's keen observation and discernment, as a
traverser of wild regions and a student of aboriginal life and
character, that his pages are made to abound with such vivid and
vigorous delineations. He has great skill in description, whether on a
grand scale or in the minutest details of adventure or of scenery. He
can touch by a phrase, most delicately or massively, the outline and the
features of what he would communicate. He can strip from field,
river-bank, hill-top, and the partially cleared forests all the things
and aspects which civilization has superinduced, and can restore to them
their primitive, unsullied elements. He gives us the aroma of the wild
woods, the tints of tree, shrub, and berry as the autumn paints them,
the notes and screams and howls of the creatures which held these haunts
before or with man; and though we were reading some of his pages on one
of the hottest of our dog-days, we felt a grateful chill come over us as
we were following his description of a Canadian winter.
Mr. Parkman's subject required, for its competent treatment, a vast
amount of research and a judicious use of authorities in documents
printed or still in manuscript. Happily, there is abundance of material,
and that, for the most part, of prime value. The period which his theme
covers, though primeval in reference to the date of our own English
beginnings here, opens within the era when pens and types were
diligently employed to record all real occurrences, and when rival
interests induced a multiplication of narratives of the same events, to
the extent even of telling many important stories in two very different
ways. The element of the marvellous and the superstitious is so
inwrought with the documentary history and the personal narratives of
the time, exaggeration and misrepresentation were then almost so
consistent with honesty, that any one who essays to digest trustworthy
history from them may be more embarrassed by the abundance than he would
be by the paucity of his materials. Our author has spared no pains or
expense in the gathering of plans, pamphlets, and solid volumes, in
procuring copies of unpublished documents, and in consulting all the
known sources of information. He discriminates with skill, and knows
when to trust himself and to encourage his readers in relying upon them.
It has been with all these means for faithful and profitable work in his
possession, gathered around him in aggravating reminders of their
unwrought wealth, and with a spirit of craving ardor to digest and
reproduce them, that Mr. Parkman has been compelled to suffer the
discipline of a form of invalidism which disables without destroying or
even impairing the power and will for continuous intellectual
employment. Brief intervals of relief and a recent period of promise and
hopefulness of full restoration have been heroically devoted to the
production of that instalment of his whole plan which we have in the
volume before us.
That plan, as his first and comprehensive title indicates, covers a
narration of the initiatory schemes and measures for the exploration and
settlement of the New World by France and England. As France had the
precedence in that enterprise, this first volume is fitly devoted to its
rehearsal. The French story is also far more picturesque, more brilliant
and sombre, too, in its details. There is more of the wild, the
romantic, and the tragic in it. Mr. Parkman briefly, but strikingly,
contrasts the spirit which animated and the fortunes which befell the
representatives of the two European nations,--the one of which has
wrought the romance, the other of which has moulded the living
development, of North America.
Under the specific title of this volume,--the "Pioneers of France in the
New World,"--the author gives us historical narratives of stirring and
even heroic enterprise in two localities at extreme points of our
present territory: first, the story of the sadly abortive attempt made
by the Huguenots to effect a settlement in Florida; and second, the
adventures, undertakings, and discoveries of Champlain, his predecessors
and associates, in and near Canada. The volume is touchingly dedicated
to three near kinsmen of the author,--young men who in the glory and
beauty of their youth, the joy and hope of parents who yielded the
costly sacrifice, gave themselves to the deliverance of our country from
the ruin plotted for it by a slave despotism.
Mr. Parkman mentions--allowing to it in his brief reference all the
weight which it probably deserves--a vague tradition, which, had it been
sustained by fact, would have introduced an entirely new element into
the conditions involved in the rival claims to the right of colonizing
and possessing America, as practically contested by European nations.
The Pope's Bull which deeded the whole continent to Spain, as if it
were a farm, reinforced the claim already conventionally yielded to her
through right of discovery. For anything, however, to the knowledge of
which Columbus came before his death, or even his immediate successors
before their death, all the parts of America which he saw or knew might
have been insulated spaces, like those in which he actually set up
Spanish authority. What might have been the issue for this continent, or
rather for the spaces which it covers, had it been really divided by the
high seas into three immense islands like Australasia, so that Spain,
France, and England might have made an amicable division between them,
would afford curious matter for speculation. The tradition referred to
is, that the continent had been actually discovered by a Frenchman four
years before the first voyage of Columbus hitherward. A vessel from
Dieppe, while at sea off the coast of Africa, was said to have been
blown to sight of land across the ocean on our shores. A mariner,
Pinzon, who was on board of her, being afterwards discharged from French
service in disgrace, joined himself to Columbus, and was with him when
he made his great discovery. It may have been so. But the story,
slenderly rooted in itself, has no support. Spain was the claimant, and,
so far as the bold and repeated attempt of the Huguenots to contest her
claims in Florida was thwarted by a diabolical, yet not unavenged
ruthlessness of resistance, Spain made good her asserted right.
Mr. Parkman sketches rapidly some preliminary details relating to
Huguenot colonization in Brazil and early Spanish adventures. The zeal
of the French Huguenots had anticipated that of the English Puritans in
seeking a Transatlantic field for its development. A philosophical
historian might find an engaging theme, in tracing to diversities of
national character, to the aims which stirred in human spirits, and to
fickle circumstances of date or place, the contrasted issues of failure
and success in the different enterprises. To human sight or foresight,
the Huguenots had the more hopeful omens at the start. But religious
zeal and avarice, combined in a way most cunningly adapted to
contravene, if that were possible, the Saviour's profound warning, "No
man can serve two masters," were, after all, only combined in a way to
bring them into the most shameful conflict. The Huguenot at the South
shared with the Spaniard the lust for gold; and the backers alike of
Roman and Protestant zeal in Canada divided their interest between the
souls of the Indians and the furs and skins of wild animals.
The heroic and the chivalric elements in the spirit and prowess of these
early adventurers give a charm even to the narratives which reveal to us
their fearful sufferings and their atrocities. Physically and morally
they must have been endowed unlike those who now hoe fields, make shoes,
and watch the wheels of our thrifty mechanisms. Avarice and zeal, the
latter being sometimes substituted by a daring passion for the romantic,
nerved men, and women too, to undertakings and endurances which shame
our enfeebled ways. The partners in these enterprises were never
homogeneous in character, as were eminently the Colonists of New
England. They were of most mixed and discordant materials. Prisons were
ransacked for convicts and desperadoes; humble artisans and peasants
were accepted as laborers; roving mariners, whose only sure port of rest
would be in the abyss, were bribed for transient service, the condition
always exacted being that they must be ready for the nonce to turn
landsmen for fighting in swamp or bush. These, with a sprinkling of
young and impoverished nobles, and one or two really towering and master
spirits, in whom either of the two leading passions was the spur, and
who could win through court patronage a patent or a commission, made in
every case, either South or North, the staple material of French
adventure.
After a graphic sketch of the line of Spanish notables in the New
World,--of Ponce de Leon, of Garay, Ayllon, De Narvaez, and De
Soto,--Mr. Parkman concisely reviews the successive attempts at a
settlement in Florida by Frenchmen. His central figures here are Admiral
De Coligny and his agents, Villegagnon, Ribaut, and Laudonnière. They
had no fixed policy towards the Indians, and they followed the worst
possible course with them. They wholly neglected tillage, and so were in
constant peril of starvation. They were lawless and disorderly in their
fellowship, and were always at the mercy of conspirators among
themselves.
Beginning about the year 1550, and embracing the quarter of a century
following, there transpired on the coast of Florida a series of acts of
mingled heroism and barbarity not easily paralleled in any chapter of
the world's history. Menendez, under his commission as Adelantado,
having effected the first European settlement in North America at St.
Augustine, and the French having established a river fort named
Caroline, the struggle which could not long have been deferred was
invited. We have here a double narrative. While the French commander,
Ribaut, is shipwrecked in an enterprise by sea against St. Augustine,
Menendez, by land, after a most harassing tramp through forest and
swamp, successfully assails Fort Caroline. Though he has pledged his
honor to spare those who surrendered to his mercy, he foully breaks his
pledge, as no faith was to be kept with heretics. A brutal massacre,
which shocked even his Indian allies, signalized his victory. An
inscription on the trees under which he slaughtered his victims
announced that vengeance was wreaked on them, "not as Frenchmen, but as
heretics."
These atrocities were in their turn avenged, after a similar fashion and
in the same spirit, by Dominique de Gourgues. It is doubtful whether he
was a Huguenot; but he felt, as the French monarch and court did not,
the rankling disgrace of this bloody catastrophe. An intense hater of
the Spaniards, he gave his whole spirit of chivalry and prowess, in the
approved fashion of the age, to avenge the insult to France. Providing
himself with three small vessels, navigable by sail or oar, he gathered
a fit company for his enterprise; but not till well on his way did he
reveal to them his real purpose, in which they proved willing
coadjutors. He found the Spaniards at their forts had alienated the
Indians, who readily leagued with him. By a bold combination and a
fierce onslaught he carries the Spanish works, and retaliates on his
fiendish and now cowering prisoners by hanging them, "not as Spaniards,
but as traitors, robbers, and murderers." De Gourgues came to do this,
not to make another attempt for a permanent settlement in the interest
of France. He therefore destroyed the forts, and with a friendly parting
from his red allies, much to their sorrow, returned home. Thus closes
one episode in the world's tragic history.
Turning now towards the North, Mr. Parkman takes a comprehensive review
of the hazy period of history covered by traditions and imperfect
records, with vague relations of adventure by Normans, Basques, and
Bretons, on fishing expeditions to Newfoundland and the main coast.
These were followed by three exploring enterprises and partial
settlements, between 1506 and 1518. Verrazzano, with four ships, coasted
along our shores, and was for fifteen days the guest of some friendly
Indians at Newport, the centre of our modern fashionable summer-life.
Jaques Cartier made two voyages in 1534-5, gave the name of St. Lawrence
to the river, and visited the sites of Quebec and Montreal. A third
voyage was planned for 1541, to be followed by a reinforcement by J. F.
de la Roque, Sieur de Roberval. Its arrival being delayed, the famished
settlers, wasted by the scurvy, and dreading another horrid winter of
untold sufferings, returned home. Roberval renewed the occupancy of
Quebec, and then there is a chasm and a broken story.
La Roche, in 1598, left forty convicts, adventurers in his crew, on
Sable Island, merely for a temporary sojourn while he should coast on.
Being blown back to France in his vessel, these forlorn exiles were left
for five years on that dreary waste, and only twelve survivors then
remained to be rescued. Some wild cattle that had propagated from
predecessors left by luckless wanderers on a previous voyage, or which
had swum ashore from a wreck, had furnished them a partial supply.
Pontgravé and Chauvin attempted a settlement at Tadoussac, the dismal
wilderness at the mouth of the Saguenay, thenceforward the rendezvous of
European and Indian traders. All these were preliminary anticipations of
the real occupancy of New France. Champlain, Poutrincourt, and
Lescarbot, in 1607, established at Port Royal the first agricultural
colony in the New World. Then began that series of futile and vexatious
dealings on the part of the French court, in granting and withdrawing
monopolies, conflicting commissions and patents, with confused purposes
of feudalism and restricted privilege, which embarrassed all effective
progress, and visited chagrin and disappointment on every devoted
adventurer.
The great picture on Mr. Parkman's canvas is Champlain. That really
noble-souled, heroic, and marvellous man, whom our author appreciates,
yet with sagacious discrimination presents to the life, is a splendid
subject for his admirable rehearsal. At the age of thirty-three he
becomes the most conspicuous, and, on the whole, the most intelligent,
agent of the French interest in these parts of the world. Dying at
Quebec at the age of sixty-eight, and after twenty-seven years of
service to the colony, he had probably drawn his life through more and
a greater variety of perils than have ever been encountered by man. He
was dauntless and all-enduring, fruitful in resource, self-controlled
and persevering, and, though not wiser than his age, purer and more
true. He was as lithesome as an Indian, and could outdo him in some
physical efforts and endurance. His almost yearly voyages between France
and Quebec led him through strange contrasts of court and wilderness
life; but he was the same man in both. His discovery of the lake which
bears his name, his journey to Lake Huron, under the lure of the
impostor Vignau, encouraging his own dream of a passage through the
continent to India, and his many tramps for Indian warfare or discovery,
are most attractive episodes for our author.
Mr. Parkman relates incidentally the massacre in Frenchman's Bay, the
efforts and cross purposes of the Recollets and the Jesuit missionaries,
and furnishes a vivid sketch of the fortunes of the settlement under
threatened assaults from Indians and in a temporary surrender to the
English. He intimates the matter which he has yet in store. May we enjoy
the coveted pleasure of reading it!
_Hesperus, or Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days._ A Biography. From the German of
J. P. Fr. Richter. Translated by CHARLES T. BROOKS. In Two
Volumes. Boston: Ticknor and Fields.
This romance, the first work of Jean Paul's which won the attention of
his countrymen, is called "Hesperus," apparently for no reason more
definite than that the heroine, like a fair evening-star, beams over the
fortunes of the other personages, and becomes at length the morning-star
of one. The supplementary title of "Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days" is a
quaint subdivision of the volumes into as many chapters, each of which
is a "Dog-Post-Day," because it purports to be dispatched in a bottle
round a dog's neck to an island within the whimsical geography which the
author loved to construct, and in which he pretended to dwell. Truly,
the ordinary _terra-firma_ was of little consequence for home-keeping
purposes to Jean Paul, as the reader will doubtless confess before he
has proceeded far through the maze of Extra Leaves, Intercalary Days,
Extra Lines, Extra Shoots, and Extorted Anti-critique. And the divisions
which are busied with the story, instead of carrying it forward, stray
with it in all directions, like a genuine summer vagabond to whom direct
travel is a crime against the season. Many charming things are gathered
by the way; but if the reader is in haste to arrive, or thinks it would
not be amiss at least to put up somewhere, his patience will be severely
tried. We do not recommend the volumes for railway-reading, nor to
clergymen for the entertainment of sewing-bees, nor to the devourer of
novels, in whose life the fiction that must be read at one sitting forms
an epoch. It is a good _vade-mecum_ for a voyage round either Cape; its
digressive character suits the listless mood of the sea-goer, and he can
drop, we will not say the thread, but the entanglement, in whatever
watch he pleases.
Let no one expect the critic to sketch the plot of this romance. It is a
grouping of motives and temperaments under the names of men and women,
concerning whom many subtile things are said and hinted; and they are
pushed into and out of complicated situations, by stress of brilliant
authorship, without lifting their fingers. There is no necessary
development nor movement: the people are like the bits of glass which
shake into the surprising patterns of the kaleidoscope. The relation of
the parties to each other is a great mystification, bunglingly managed:
we cannot understand at last how Victor, the hero of the chief
love-passage, turns out to be the son of a clergyman instead of a lord,
and Flamin the son of a lord in spite of the plain declaration on the
first page that he belongs to a clergyman. No key-notes of expectation
and surmise are struck; the reader is as blind as the old lord who is
Victor's reputed father, and not a glimmer of light reaches him till
suddenly and causelessly he is dazed. The author has emphasized his
sentiments, but has not shaded and brought out the features of his
story. It is plain, that, when he began to write, not the faintest
notion of a _dénouement_ had dawned upon his fancy. The best-defined
action in the book results from Flamin's ignorance that he is Clotilde's
brother, for he is thus jealous of his friend Victor's love for her. How
break off Flamin's love for his unknown sister? How rescue Victor from
his self-imposed delicacy and win for him a bride? This is the substance
of the story, hampered by wild, spasmodic interpolations and intrigues
and didactic explanations.
The reader must also become inured, by a course of physical training, to
resist the fiery onslaughts of a sentimentality which was the first
ferment of Jean Paul's sincere and huge imagination. See, for instance,
Vol. II. p. 229. And we cannot too much admire the tact which Mr. Brooks
has brought to the decanting of these seething passages into tolerable
vernacular limits. Sometimes, indeed, he misses a help which he might
have procured for the reader, to lift him, with less danger of
dislocation, to these pinnacles of passion, by transferring more of the
elevated idiom of the style: for, in some of the complicated paragraphs,
a too English rendering of the clauses gives the sentiment a dowdy and
prosaic air. We should not object to an occasional inversion of the
order, even where Jean Paul himself is more direct than usual; for this
always appeared to us to lend a racy German flavor to the page. No doubt
Jean Paul needs, first of all, to be made comprehensible; but if his
style is too persistently Anglicized, many places will be reached where
the sense itself must suffer for want of the picturesqueness of the
German idiom. The quaintness will grow flat, the color of the sentiment
will almost disappear, the rich paragraphs will run thinly clad,
disenchanted like Cinderella at midnight. Some of Mr. Carlyle's
translations from the German are invigorated by this Teutonicizing of
the English, and by the sincerity of phrases transferred directly as
they first came molten from the pen. This may be pushed to the point of
affectation; but judiciously used, it is suited to Jean Paul's fervor
and abandonment.
There is also a rhythm in his exalted moments, a delicate and noble
swing of the clauses, not easy to transfer: as in the Eighth
Dog-Post-Day, the paragraph commencing, "Wehe gröszere Wellen auf mich
zu, Morgenluft!" "Thou morning-air, break over me in greater waves!
Bathe me in thy vast billows which roll above our woods and meadows, and
bear me in blossom clouds past radiant gardens and glimmering streams,
and let me die gently floating above the earth, rocked amid flying
flowers and butterflies, and dissolving with outspread arms beneath the
sun; while all my veins fall blended into red morning-flakes down to the
flowers," etc. But this may appear finical to Mr. Brooks. We certainly
do not press it critically against his great and general success. Such a
paragraph as, for instance, the closing one upon page 340 of Vol. II. is
very trying to the resources of the translator. Here Mr. Brooks has
sacrificed to literalness an opportunity to sort the confused clauses
and stop their jostling: this may be done without diluting the
sentiment, and is within the translator's liberty.
It always seemed to us that the finest part of "Hesperus," and one of
the finest passages of German literature, is contained in the Ninth
Dog-Post-Day and some pages of the Tenth. The Ninth, in particular,
which is a perfect idyl, describes Victor's walk to Kussewitz: all the
landscape is made to share and symbolize his rapture: the people in the
fields, the framework of an unfinished house, the two-wheeled hut of the
shepherd, are not only well painted, but turned most naturally to the
help of interpreting his feeling. The chapter has also a direct and
unembarrassed movement, which is rare in this romance. And it is
beautifully translated.
The reader must understand that Victor is called by various names; so
that, if he merely dips into the book, as we suspect he will until his
sympathy is enlisted by some fine thought, his ignorance will increase
the frantic and dishevelled state of the story. Victor is Horion,
Sebastian, and Bastian; a susceptible youth, profoundly affected by the
presence of noble or handsome women, and brought into situations that
test his delicacy. He smuggles a declaration of love into a watch which
he sells, in the disguise of an Italian merchant, to the Princess
Agnola, on occasion of her first reception at the court of her husband.
He is ashamed of this after he begins to know Clotilde, who is one of
Jean Paul's pure and noble women; and he is at one time full of dread
lest the Princess had read his watch-paper, and at another full of pique
at the suspicion that she had not. Being court-physician and oculist, he
has frequent opportunities to visit Agnola, and there is one rather
florid occasion which the midnight cry of the street-watch man
interrupts. But all this time, the inflammable Victor was indulging a
kind of tenderness for Joachime, maid-of-honor and attractive female. As
the love for Clotilde deepens, he must destroy these partialities for
Agnola and Joachime. This is no easy matter; what with the watch-paper
and various emphatic passages of something more than friendship, the
true love does not at once stand forth, that he may find "the
partition-wall between love and friendship with women to be very visible
and very thick." But one day the accursed watch-paper flutters into
Joachime's hand, who at once takes it for a declaration of love to
herself, and beams with appropriate tenderness. Victor, seized with
sudden coldness and resolution, confesses all to Joachime; and the
story, released from its feminine embarrassments, would soon reach a
honeymoon, if it were not for the difficulty of deciding the parentage
and relationship of the various characters. A wise child knows its own
father; but no endowment of wisdom in the reader will harmonize the
genealogy of this romance. A birth-mark of a Stettin apple, which is
visible only in autumn when that fruit is ripening, plays the part of
Box's strawberry in the farce, and with as much perspicuity.
However, the characters are all respectably connected at last, and the
reader does not care to understand how they were ever disconnected: for
Lord Horion's motive in putting the children of the old Prince out of
the way, and keeping up such an expensive mystification, can be
justified only by an interesting plot. But American readers have learned
by this time, much to their credit, not to apply to Jean Paul for the
sensation of a cunningly woven narrative, like that of the English
school, which furnishes verisimilitude to real life that is quite as
improbable, though less glaringly so, than his departures from it.
"Hesperus" is filled with pure and noble thought. The different types of
female character are particularly well-defined; and if Jean Paul
sometimes affects to say cynical things of women, he cannot veil his
passionate regard for them, nor his profound appreciation of the
elements of their influence in forming true society and refining the
hearts of men. Notice the delicacy of the "Extra Leaf on Houses full of
Daughters." It is chiefly with the women of his romances that Jean Paul
succeeds in depicting individuals. And when we recollect the corrupt and
decaying generation out of which his genius sprang, like a newly created
species, to give a salutary shock to Gallic tastes, and lend a sturdy
country vigor to the new literature, we reverence his faithfulness, his
incorruptible humanity, his contempt for petty courts and faded manners,
his passion for Nature, and his love of God. All these characteristics
are so broadly printed upon his pages that the obsoleteness of the
narrative does not hide them.
In view of a second edition, we refer to Mr. Brooks's consideration a
few places, with wonder at his general accuracy in the translation of
obscure passages and the explanation of allusions.
Vol. I. page 22. _Sakeph-Katon_ (Zaqueph Qaton) is an occasional
pause-accent of the Hebrew, having the sense of "elevator minor," and is
peculiar to prose.
Page 68. The famous African Prince Le Boo deserves a note.
Page 111. _Ripieno_ is an Italian musical term, meaning that which
accompanies and strengthens.
Page 114. _Gränswildpret_ does not mean "frontier wild-game," but game
that, straying out of one precinct into another, gets captured: stray
game, or impounded waif.
Page 139. The note gives the sense, but the corresponding passage in the
text would stand clearer thus: "not a noble heart, by any means; for
such things Le Baut's golden key, though bored like a cannon, could
fasten rather."
Page 179. A note required: the passage of Shakspeare is, "Antony and
Cleopatra," Act V., Scene 2:--
"His face was as the heavens; and therein stuck
A sun and moon; which kept their course, and lighted
The little O, the earth."
_Territory of an old lady_ should be "prayer of an old lady." _Gebet_,
not _Gebiet_.
Page 209. _Eirunde Loch_ would be better represented by its anatomical
equivalent, _foramen ovale_. It should be closed before birth; in the
rare cases where it is left open after birth, the child lives half
asphyxiated.
Page 224, note. _Semperfreie_ is not from the Latin, but comes from
_sendbarfreie_, that is, eligible, free to be sent or elected to
offices, and consequently, immediately subject to the _Reich_, or Holy
Roman Empire.
Page 235. An _Odometer_ is an apparatus for measuring distances
travelled by whatsoever vehicle.
Page 275. _Incunabula_ means specimens of the first printed edition of a
work; also the first impressions of the first edition, the firstlings of
old editions.
Page 317. _Wackelfiguren_ means figures made of _Wacke_, a greenish-gray
mineral, soft and easily broken.
Page 322. The note is equivocal, since the phrase is used by fast women
who keep some one in their pay.
Vol. II., page 122. _Columbine_ is not equivalent to ballet-dancer; it
is the old historical personage of the pantomime, confederate and lover
of Harlequin, who protects her from false love.