CHAPTER XVIII.

As they turned into another path, Jane saw the boy Phil running toward

the stables, and Betty came toward her, walking calmly, but twisting her

sleeve into a rag with nervous fingers.

"My father!" cried Jane.

"Yes. He's awake, and he don't seem quite so peart as he was this

morning. But it's nothing: don't you be scared, miss. I took the liberty

of sending Phil for the doctor," panting after her as she ran.

Van Ness quickened his pace and followed.

The captain was in his arm-chair, wrapped in his flowered dressing-gown.

Buff and Dave were busy over him, their black lips turning blue with

fright.

"No, I'll not go to bed!" he cried testily. "What good will blankets and

feathers be to me? It's death, you blockhead! But don't tell her--don't

tell Miss Jane."

"Hyah she is, sah."

"Keep her out!--Oh, Jenny! Go, finish your walk. I--I'm very well, and

I'd rather be alone a while. Dave will stay with me," looking helplessly

up into her white face. Then he broke down and fumbled for her hand:

"Oh, I'm going--I'm going, Jenny."

"No, no, father, you shall not go. It's just a passing pain. Swallow

this," holding the gray head close to her breast. Her hand shook so that

she could not put the spoon to his lips.

"I wish you would go away, child. It will worry you so. I never meant

you to be with me when It came."

She could not answer. She laid him down, drenched his hands with

camphor, seeing how blue and sunken they were. "His feet are like ice,

Betty," she cried. "What shall I do? what shall I do?"

"I've got mustard draughts here, ma'am. Try and get him to take these

drops."

"Yes, yes. Don't go out of the room, dear Betty! Don't leave him." She

caught hold of this savior who was wise in mustard draughts and tonics.

Why had she never learned such things in all her long, useless life? She

would not look beyond the blue marks on his hands and the cold of his

feet. She and Betty could fight them until the doctor came--just as the

wrecked man sees only the floating logs and the raft, and will not look

below at the unfathomable black sea waiting for him.

"'Pears to me, Miss Jane," said Dave presently in a pitying whisper, "as

dat ar camphire on'y vexes him. His bref is mos' gone."

"Whah de debbil am dat doctor?" muttered Buff, going to the door, with a

thrill of terror at his oath. For in the last moment the approach of an

awful Power was felt in the commonplace little room. Yet the afternoon

sunshine shone as before in the open door, the green curtains waved to

and fro, a chicken came pecking up on to the wooden steps. The captain's

feeble glance wandered to it.

"The gate of the poultry-yard is broken, Dave.--Remind me to-morrow,

Jane--my new lock."

"De Lohd sabe us! Can't you take his mind off his patents, Miss Jane,

an' Death jes' at hand?"

"I told Phil to bring the minister with the doctor," whispered Betty.

She took the useless mustard away from the poor old feet and covered

them reverently. They would never feel any touch again. Then she and

Dave drew away from him, and stood back from the chair, leaving him

alone with his child.

Jane knelt, holding him by the hand, looking into the dimming eyes.

"Father!" she said. "You must not go. You shall not leave me! Father!"

The old man's soul, as always irresolute, halted at the call, going out

to its long journey: "I will not leave you until I have taken care of

you, Jenny," trying to smile at her.

"And how are you, my dear sir?" said a mellow voice behind her. "Feeling

better, are we now--eh?"

"Van Ness? Yes." The captain's voice gathered a little of its old

authority, and he struggled to rise. "Is it all settled? Have you

promised to marry him, Jenny?"

"She will! she will!" replied Van Ness hastily. "It will be arranged as

you wish, my dear sir."

"I must be sure of it," uneasily, with the restlessness of coming death

and the old desire to control. "I cannot go until I see you his wife,

Jane."

Jane held his hand immovable. She did not stir nor show any feeling more

than the wooden plank on which she kneeled.

There was a slight stir at the door. Doctor Knox came in with Mr.

Lampret, the meek little Methodist minister from the village. The doctor

went up to the captain, who waved him impatiently aside.

"Too late, doctor. Your occupation's gone. I have a matter to arrange,

and--only a few minutes."

Jane raised her head, looking dully at the physician.

He shook his head. "There is no chance," he said. As he drew back he

watched the girl, rather than the dying man. He was used to seeing women

suffer, but he felt an unwonted pity for this friendless Jane.

The captain beckoned feebly to Mr. Lampret: "I'm glad to see you

here.--Now--Van Ness--now. I can give her to you. I can die in peace."

Van Ness's color changed, perhaps for the first time in his life. He

stood irresolute. He had not thought of immediate marriage with Jane. He

scanned in that instant the danger involved in it--the probability that

Charlotte would "make trouble"--the chance of buying her off. The actual

risk involved was great enough to make even his ruddy face ghastly.

But if he allowed this chance to escape he would never regain his hold

on her. Was this property twice to slip from his grasp? He took a step

closer to her, and laid his hand on her arm.

"Will you consent?" he said.

She let fall her father's hand and stood up. She and Van Ness were a

little apart from the others, so that his words were heard only by

herself. There was absolute silence in the room, except for the

breathing of the dying man.

Van Ness stooped closer to her: she could feel his warm clammy breath on

her cheek. "You are very dear to me." Seeing that she shuddered, he

changed his mode of attack to direct assault: "If you marry me you will

restore the property--restore, you understand?--to the children to whom

it belongs."

"Jenny," moaned her father, "are you ready? I cannot die in peace until

this is done."

The clergyman took pity on the girl: something in her set, deep-lined

face alarmed him: "Is there any reason why you do not wish to gratify

your father's last wish?"

She did not answer. There was no reason but her hopeless passion for

another man, whose wife she could never be. Yet it seemed to her that

God was bidding her to be true to that true love at whatever cost.

"I infer," said the little man, turning to Van Ness, "that the marriage

was arranged before, and is only hastened now by"--glancing at the

captain--"circumstances."

"Yes, yes! Precisely!" suavely. "You may trust me. You may have heard my

name before--Pliny Van Ness."

Mr. Lampret bowed deferentially: "The name is well known. Our church has

reason--grateful," he murmured.--"My dear Miss Swendon, this is a hard

trial--hard. A young girl would fain give herself away with joy and

rejoicing. But as your father will not depart in peace, I see no reason

why the ceremony should not immediately take place."

"Jane! Jane!" cried the captain shrilly, "why do you delay?"

There was no answer for a minute. Then there came into her face a sudden

resolve. She turned and held out her hand to Van Ness: "I will marry

you."

The words revived the captain. "Lift me up," he said to David--"Closer,

closer, Mr. Lampret! I can't hear very well." He listened eagerly until

the last words of the marriage service were said. Then his head sank on

his breast: "I'm always loth to interfere. But I am glad that is settled

properly."

Van Ness turned to kiss his wife, but, without seeing him apparently,

she went up to her father and put her lips to his. Van Ness followed

her, as if to assert his rightful place, and, standing on the other side

of the sofa, possessed himself of the captain's one hand, pressing it

gently.

"He is sinking very fast," he said. "Let him rest in my arms."

She shivered, and held him tighter to her breast. When she would have

stroked back the gray hair from his forehead, Van Ness's soft fingers

were there with hers, soothing them: "Compose yourself. Our dear father

will soon be gone."

"Jenny!"

"Yes, father."

"I'll hear you now--your chapter, you know. We ought to have read the

Bible more. We forgot the Lord, we were so busy. But--but--" He lifted

his hand, struggled to rise, his dim eyes lighting with sudden energy.

"Jenny! He doesn't forget me now!"

"No, father, no!"

There was a long silence. Dave sobbed aloud. Mr. Van Ness cleared his

throat composedly. "I will sing," he said. "A hymn would soothe his

passage, probably; or shall I pray?"

Jane leaned forward: "Go away!"

"How? Eh?" aghast, and not sure he had comprehended the vehement

whisper.

"Go. You shall not come between us in these last minutes. You have the

money now. Go away!"

Van Ness wheeled instantly. He was plentiful in expedients for so slight

an emergency as this. He beckoned the clergyman and doctor out of the

room, and shut the door.

"It would be better to leave them alone, gentlemen. The relation between

Captain Swendon and his--ah--Mrs. Van Ness--has always been singularly

close and intimate. The presence of so many strangers oppresses them

both."

"I readily understand that," rejoined Mr. Lampret eagerly, "as far as we

are concerned. But do you return, my dear sir. Surely _you_--"

But Van Ness waved his hand lightly: "No, no! I am comparatively a

stranger to the dear old man. In a few moments--when all is over--I

shall return to support and console _her_."

"Delicate feeling there! Remarkably fine feeling, sir!" said the

clergyman as he strolled with the doctor to his buggy, leaving Mr. Van

Ness to the sanctity of his grief. "Going now? I shall remain until all

is over. There appears to be a storm coming up," with a sad subjection

of tone.

The gathering clouds darkened the room where the captain lay dying: the

wind sobbed gustily through the open window. His feeble eyes were

steady as they never had been in life: he nodded from time to time as

Jane repeated the old verses which he had taught her when she was a

little child.

"'Come unto Me.' That's good! It's all good.--Some water, Dave. What are

you crying about, old fellow?--Yes, we'll read the Bible every day,

Jenny. We'll begin all fresh. We've plenty of time--plenty of time--"

Dave, holding the water to his lips, took it quickly away and fell upon

his knees.

"Oh, father! father!"

The darkness was heavy and the wind blew fiercely as this overgrown

boy's soul went out to love and dogmatize and make mistakes elsewhere.

They let Jane lie a while upon his breast: she was as cold and

motionless as the dead when they took her up.

"I'll go for her husband," said the sobbing old negro.

"No," said Betty shrewdly. "Let her alone a while. This is trouble

enough, God knows, poor child!"

When Jane's senses came to her, and she looked about her intelligently,

old Dave cried eagerly, "I'll fetch Mr. Van Ness: I'll fetch yoh

husband, Miss Jenny."

She stood up quickly: "No. Let me be alone with my father a little

while. Go out, please, and watch the door."

"Nobody shall come in," said Betty.

The room was nearly dark. She was alone with the dead for a long time.

She stooped at last and kissed passionately the poor hand and face which

had been close to her all her life.

"Good-bye!" she said. "Good-bye, father!"

* * * * *

When Mr. Van Ness and the clergyman entered the room later, they found

Betty there, her lean visage half terrified and half defiant.

"Where is my wife?" said Van Ness with the sad authority becoming the

master of this house of mourning.

"She--she begs that she may not be disturbed until to-morrow," said

Betty with a scared look behind her. "She's ill. The fact is, she's

clean worn out with trouble."

"I can readily conceive that," said Mr. Lampret.

But Van Ness said nothing: he only glanced toward the still figure which

lay upon the sofa covered with a white sheet, and turned away with a

gloom and alarm on his benignant face quite new to it.

A couple of hours afterward, being alone, he met Betty coming out of

Jane's apartment, and stopped her sternly:

"Mrs. Nichols, I must see my wife. If she is ill, my place is beside

her."

For her answer Betty, with a gasp, threw open the door.

The room was vacant.

"Where is she?"

"As God sees me, I don't know. She bade me say this to you--That she had

paid you the debt, and had gone where you would never find her."

Van Ness's smooth countenance scarcely evinced surprise. He went into

the room and walked about it, and as he touched little articles of dress

and the toilette which she had left scattered here and there, which were

yet warm from her presence, the stout, bulky man could scarcely draw his

breath. He stopped in front of the white pillow with the impress of her

head on it, took up the velvet band which had fastened her hair, the

knot half untied. So nearly within his hold--to escape!

"What is the money to me?" he muttered. "It is Jane that I

want--_Jane_."

Betty was standing at the door when he went out. She cowered back when

she saw the sultry fire in his eyes.

"I don't know where she went. She only said as you would never find her,

sir."

"I will find her," said Van Ness quietly.

REBECCA HARDING DAVIS.

[TO BE CONTINUED.]

THE CHURCH OF ST. SOPHIA.

Few buildings have been the object of such passionate attachment as the

great church of Constantinople. To the Greeks of the Lower Empire, St.

Sophia was all that their temple was to the Jews--the centre of the

national life and the focus of the national religion. There a long train

of princes, proudly styling themselves emperors of the Romans, had been

consecrated and had worshipped--there a succession of patriarchs had

edified the Church, presided over great councils, and defied the rival

bishops of Old Rome. The glories of St. Sophia proclaimed that the city

of Constantine was not merely the capital of the East, but the one city

which had been born and educated in the bosom of the faith, and never

polluted by the worship of the older gods. To the modern Greek the

gilded Crescent that has supplanted the Cross on its aërial dome is at

once a sacrilege and a humiliation, a flashing symbol of political and

religious degradation, telling too plainly that the barbarian rules in

the palaces of the Cæsars, and that the faith once delivered by the

Saviour at Jerusalem has been driven from its noblest temple by the

Prophet of Arabia. Nor can the venerable edifice be without interest to

all of us when we remember how it is identified with the greatest

triumphs and the greatest reverses of Christianity, and with the two

great epochs of Christian history--the death of paganism and the birth

of free thought: its erection was a proof of the former, and its capture

led directly to the Renaissance.

The present church is the fourth which has stood on the same spot and

borne the same name. Constantine in A.D. 325--therefore long before his

baptism--dedicated the first to the Wisdom of God which was from the

beginning (Proverbs viii. 22)--that is, to the Logos, or Word of God.

Near it he founded another, dedicated to the Peace of God which passeth

all understanding. His son and successor, Constantius, as the former

seemed too small for his increasing city, rebuilt St. Sophia, and added

to it the latter, the church of St. Irene. This second St. Sophia

witnessed the strange pagan revival of Julian and the ascendency of

Arianism under Valens. From St. Sophia issued that crowd of satyr-like

monks and Jezebel-like women who attacked Gregory Nazianzen in his

missionary church Anastasia; and from its gate went forth into poverty

and exile Damophilus, the last of the Arian patriarchs, when Theodosius,

at the head of his armed soldiers, conducted the triumphant Gregory

through streets echoing with cries of rage, grief, astonishment and

despair, and in the church, filled with the imperial guards in all the

panoply of war, installed him with his own imperial hand on the throne

of the patriarchs. But the greatest name in the annals of the church of

Constantius is that of St. John Chrysostom. Here he denounced the vices

of the rich, the extravagance of female dress, the profuse honors paid

to the statue of Eudocia the empress; here, when the fallen minister

Eutropius had fled for refuge to the church and lay grovelling in

agonies of fear under the holy table, he uttered his great discourse on

the instability of human greatness and the forgiveness of injuries.[9]

Here, in allusion to the hostility of the empress, he cried, "Herodias

is again furious; Herodias again dances; she again demands the head of

John"--a sentence not to be forgotten by a woman and a queen. Her

revenge came soon. On Easter Eve, A.D. 404, St. Sophia was invaded by

the troops, the rite of baptism rudely interrupted, the Catholics driven

from the church to the baths, from the baths to the fields: amid the

tumult fire burst forth in the sanctuary, and the church perished in the

conflagration.

[Footnote 9: "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity! Where are now the

splendid surroundings of the consulship? Where are the gleaming torches,

the applause, the dances, the banquets, the crowded feasts? Where are

the acclamations of the circus, the adulation of the spectators?

Perished. A storm has stripped off the leaves and bared the tree, now

tottering from its root. Where are the feigned friends, the revellings

and drinkings, the swarm of parasites, the various artifices of the

cook, the slaves and ministers to the caprices of the powerful? They

were but night and a dream--the day has come and they have vanished;

they were spring flowers--the spring has ended and they are withered;

they were shadows, and they have passed away--a vapor that is

dissipated, a bubble that is burst, a spider's web that is torn. Who was

higher in place than this man? Who had ascended greater heights of

honor? Now he is more wretched than the prisoner, more pitiable than the

slave, more indigent than the beggar famishing. What need is there of

words when the man is here before us? See the pallor of death on his

cheeks, the chattering of his teeth, the trembling of his limbs--the

broken voice, the unsteady tongue, the form and figure befitting a stony

heart.

"Nor do I say these things as a reproach, but to soften your hearts--to

lead you to be content with his present punishment. Let the rich see

here the ruin of the mighty: let the poor thank his poverty, which has

been a safe asylum, a waveless harbor, a sure defence. To rich and poor,

to high and low, to bond and free, here is a lesson to benefit all. Have

not I softened your hearts and cast out your anger, extinguished your

inhumanity and led you to compassion? Your faces show it, and your

streaming tears. Let us pray to the God of mercy to soften the emperor's

heart. Thus shall God be favorable to us; thus shall our sins be wiped

out; thus shall we adorn the Church; thus to the farthest ends of the

world will be spread the fame of our humanity and forgiveness."]

The third church was built by Theodosius, A.D. 415, and witnessed a

strange occurrence when its throne was occupied by the well-known

Nestorius, whose name still gives an appellation to the widespread

Nestorian sect. Proclus, the bishop of Cyzicus, was preaching in St.

Sophia, and argued in his discourse for the ascription to the Blessed

Virgin of the title "mother of God;" but the patriarch rose from his

throne and denounced, in the presence of the astonished congregation,

the language of the preacher. This church, too, beheld the

excommunication of the Monophysite Acacius, when one of the Sleepless

Brotherhood, as the body of monks was called, pinned to his vestments,

as he was celebrating at the altar, the sentence of the Roman pontiff,

Felix II.

From Old Rome, New Rome adopted old vices--among others, the passion for

the entertainments of the circus and the factions to which they gave

rise. The two chief parties were the Blues and the Greens, and when

Justinian ascended the throne the Greens were partisans of heresy and

Anastasius--the Blues, of orthodoxy and Justinian. In January, A.D.

532, their rivalry came to a head, or rather the licentious oppressions

of the Blues drove the Greens to despair. The arrest of some ringleaders

of both parties led to a temporary union: a joint attack on the

prefect's palace resulted; the palace was burnt, the prisons thrown

open; the city was in the possession of the mob, who encountered with

all the fury of religious enthusiasm the wild barbarian soldiery. The

women threw from roofs and windows stones on the heads of the troops,

who in return darted firebrands against the houses. For five days the

tumult raged and the flames spread. The conflagration destroyed St.

Sophia, the baths of Zeuxippus, the Brazen Porch of the palace, St.

Sampson's Hospital with its inmates, and the porches which led to the

Forum. Justinian had lost his throne had not the empress Theodora

inspired him with courage. The sedition was at last suppressed, but not

before thirty thousand of the rioters, whose watchword had been Νίκα,

perished in the contest.

On the fortieth day after the fire the St. Sophia still standing was

begun. After prayer by the patriarch Eutychius the foundation-stone was

laid by Justinian on the twenty-third of February, A.D. 532. Large

purchases of adjacent lots were made for the purpose of enlarging the

site. The land on the right hand of the nave, as far as the pillar of

St. Basil, was bought from Charito--on the left, as far as the pillar of

St. Gregory, from Xenophon, a cobbler; that for the bema, from a eunuch

named Antiochus; for the vestry and treasure-house, from a lady named

Anna. The three last named did not want to sell. The emperor in person

had to wait on the lady, who, overcome by this mark of zeal or

condescension, fell at his feet and gave him the ground, stipulating

that she might be buried near it, and trusting that at the day of

judgment she might have a share in the merit of such a work. Antiochus

was more obdurate, but a cruel advantage was taken of his passion for

the sports of the circus. He was arrested on some pretext just before

the great games and thrown into prison. As the time of the festival

approached he gradually weakened, and when the day at length arrived he

surrendered at discretion. The circus was crowded, the emperor in his

seat, the races just beginning, but the sport was suspended till

Antiochus was brought from prison, and in sight of the eager spectators

conducted to the emperor's box to conclude the bargain. The poor cobbler

Xenophon was treated scurvily. He had a longing to play the great man

once in his life, and demanded as a condition of sale that the factions

of the circus should give him a royal salute. The condition was

literally fulfilled. Clad in white and scarlet, the cobbler was placed

in the centre of the arena and the salute given _behind his back_.

For the materials requisitions were made in all the provinces. The

governors of the _Themata_ of the East, the West, the North and the

South were ordered to send up to the capital pillars and marbles from

the ancient temples, baths and palaces. Eight columns of porphyry, which

Aurelian had transported from Baalbec to adorn the temple of the Sun

erected by him at Rome, were sent to Constantinople by Marcia, a noble

widow, whose dowry they had been; eight pillars of green marble were

supplied by the famous shrine of the Ephesian Diana, and the temples of

the Delian Apollo, of Cybele at Cyzicus and of Athene at Athens were

despoiled of their most valuable portions.

The work was pressed forward vigorously. The stones were paid for on

delivery; the workmen had extra pay twice a week; the emperor, staff in

hand, dressed in white linen robe with a white linen kerchief on his

head, daily visited and encouraged his workmen. The architects,

Anthemius of Tralles and Ignatius of Miletus, had under their orders,

according to the Greek stories, one hundred master architects, each

superintending one hundred men. The lime was tempered with barley-water,

and the foundations of the great central piers, fifty feet square and

twenty feet deep, were laid with concrete in which the same barley-water

and chopped willow-bark, poured in lukewarm, were chief ingredients. The

mosaics and marbles of the interior were laid in lime and oil. The

bricks for the cupola were made of Rhodian clay, under the direction of

Troilus the chamberlain, Theodore the patrician of Seleucia, and Basil

the quæstor, and were so light that twelve of them weighed only as much

as one ordinary brick. This last statement, however, of the Byzantine

writer is described by Salzenberg as a pure fiction. The building was

fireproof, no wood being used except in some of the doors.

While human skill and foresight and industry were thus engaged in their

sacred task, the heavenly host, according to the Greek traditions, did

not fail to inspire and protect the toilers. Three visions are narrated.

One day, when the laborers had retired, leaving their tools under the

care of a son of the architect Ignatius, there appeared before the lad,

at the right-hand side of the pier of the upper semi-dome as you ascend

to the dome, a figure like one of the eunuchs of the court, in white and

shining apparel, bidding him recall the workmen to the work of Heaven,

and, to give confidence that nothing would be lost during the absence of

the messenger, adding, "I swear by the Holy Wisdom I will not depart

before thou returnest." The sequel was unfortunate for the boy. By the

emperor's orders, all the officials of the court were brought for

identification before the stripling: he could recognize none as the one

who sent him. Of course, he must have had a vision; and to ensure the

perpetual presence and protection of the celestial visitor according to

his oath, the boy was sent for the rest of his life to the Cyclades.

Again, one Saturday, as the day was declining, the same figure appeared

to the emperor: "Why art thou disquieted for money? Send hither

to-morrow some of thy great men, and I will supply thy needs." On the

morrow came Strategius the treasurer, Basil the quæstor, Theodore the

prefect, and a train of fifty servants and twenty mules. The radiant

figure led them through the Golden Gate, and on and on till they stood

before an immense palace. They ascended its magnificent portico, and

followed their guide through long corridors till they reached a door

which he opened with a brazen key, and disclosed a chamber where the

floor was covered with gold coin. The mules were loaded with the

treasure, and the officers, returning, laid at Justinian's feet eight

thousand pounds weight of gold. Astonished at the tale told by the

officials, the emperor despatched a messenger to the spot described. No

palace there towered aloft: the spot was desolate and unbuilt on.

A third time the angel--in the imperial dress, with the purple

buskin--presented himself to the architect, and bade him change his plan

from a double to a triple apse τρίφωτον μύακα. He

remonstrated, when he next met the emperor, about his contradictory

directions, and was awestruck to hear that on the day when the vision

came to him in the building Justinian had not quitted his palace.

Thus under angelic guidance the work went on, and after five years,

eleven months and ten days of ceaseless toil the stately fane was

completed. Largesses of enormous amount were distributed: one thousand

oxen, as many sheep, as many swine, six hundred deer, ten thousand

fowls, thirty thousand measures of corn, were given to the poor. In long

procession, on Christmas Eve, A.D. 538, the emperor, accompanied by the

patriarch, came to the door of St. Sophia; thence, unaccompanied by

priest or courtier, as though making the final offering alone, he ran to

the foot of the ambo, and with hands outstretched in the attitude of

prayer exclaimed, "Glory to God, who hath deemed me worthy of such a

work! I have conquered thee, Solomon." Well might he so exclaim as he

gazed on the temple resplendent with gold and jewels and flashing

marbles and decked with the spoils of heathen shrines. There was the

white marble of Paros, the blue of Libya, the green of Croceæ, the

black-streaked Celtic marble, the rosy-veined Phrygian, the granite and

porphyry of Egypt; supporting the four smaller semi-domes were the eight

pillars from the temple of the Sun; on either side of the nave the eight

columns which had once adorned the temple of Diana of the Ephesians; the

seats of the priests and the throne of the patriarch were silver-gilt;

the dome of the ciborium over the holy table was of pure gold, bearing a

cross weighing seventy-five pounds and encrusted with precious stones.

The sacred vessels--the chalices, the flagons, the patens--were of the

same metal; the hangings of the altar were of cloth of gold embroidered

with gems; the candlesticks on the altar, the ambo, in the women's

gallery and elsewhere, six thousand in number, were all of gold, as were

the crosses on the bema, the covers of the holy books, the pillars of

the iconostasis screening off the bema. In the altar itself pious

ingenuity had surpassed itself. Into the fluid mass of liquid gold were

thrown pearls, rubies, crystals, topazes, sapphires, onyxes and

amethysts to enhance the costliness of the holiest of holies. The

expense was enormous--Byzantine writers say three hundred and twenty

thousand pounds weight of gold, or between sixty and seventy millions of

dollars.

In marked contrast to the pagan temples, where the resources of art were

lavished on the exterior, the outside of St. Sophia is remarkably plain

and unornamented. To some extent this is due to the removal of all the

statues by the Turks; but even when they were in their places it must

have been merely a huge rectangular mass. The length of the building is

two hundred and forty-one feet, the breadth two hundred and twenty-six

feet, the diameter of the dome one hundred feet, the height to the

centre of it one hundred and seventy-nine feet. East and west of the

great dome spring two large semi-domes, the eastern supported by three

smaller semi-domes, of which the centre one covers the bema; the western

by two smaller semi-domes. The effect of this arrangement is that the

spectator sees at once the lofty dome in the centre, whereas in modern

buildings of like design the full view of the dome is not obtained till

we are nearly under it. St. Sophia thus seems great at first sight--St.

Peter's only after reflection. Around the dome are twenty-four windows;

at the four angles are four colossal seraphim; in the centre the face of

Christ, the sovereign Judge, looked down in mosaic. The porch or narthex

is double, one hundred feet in depth. In the outer one stood the phiale,

with the inscription that reads the same backward and forward: ΝΙΨΟΝ

ΑΝΟΜΗΜΑΤΑ ΜΗ ΜΟΝΑΝ ΟΨΙΝ--"Wash thine iniquities, not the face

alone." Five marble portals, with bronze gates wrought in floriated

crosses, admit to the inner narthex, whence nine doors of bronze,

exquisite in workmanship, admit to the church. Over the centre doorway

is a group in mosaic, where Justinian is represented kneeling with a

nimbus round his head. Over this second narthex and the side aisles is

the _gynœconitis_ or women's gallery, adorned with sixty-seven

pillars, so that the whole number of columns in the church is the prime

number one hundred and seven. In the interior was the nave for the

laity, divided from the _soleas_, or the part for the clergy, by the

_ambo_, a stately and elaborate structure with a canopy of gold and a

cross of pure gold weighing one hundred pounds. The ambo was at once

pulpit and reading-desk. The soleas supplied accommodation for three

hundred and eighty-five ministers of various ranks, including sixty

priests, one hundred deacons and thirty deaconesses. On the left of the

soleas was the seat of the emperor--on the right, the throne of the

patriarch. From the soleas projected the apse of the _bema_, or

sanctuary, flanked by the _diaconicon_, or vestry, and the _prothesis_,

where the elements were prepared for the Eucharist. The bema was divided

from the soleas by the _iconostasis_, or screen, made of silver, and

exhibiting in oval medallions the _icons_ or pictures of Our Lord, His

Virgin Mother, the prophets and apostles. In the iconostasis were the

three holy doors--above the middle one a massive cross of gold. Behind

the holy table ran a semicircular row of seats for the officiating

clergy, the stalls of silver-gilt, the columns dividing them of gold. In

the chord of the bema stood the holy table with its _ciborium_ or canopy

of gold.

But in addition to the marble and alabaster which gleamed in various

hues from wall and pavement, St. Sophia was bright with mosaics. On the

great west arch was represented the Blessed Virgin and Sts. Peter and

Paul; on the sides still exist the figures of St. Anthemius, Basil,

Gregory, Dionysius the Areopagite, Nicholas of Myra, Gregory the

Armenian, and the prophets Jeremiah, Isaiah, Jonah and Habakkuk. On the

eastern arch is again a representation of the Virgin Mother, of St. John

the Baptist and of John Palæologus, the last Christian restorer of the

church; on the arch of the bema, Our Lord, His Mother and the archangel

Michael.

On great festivals the emperor went to St. Sophia in state, in

embroidered robes, with purple buskins and close diadem. This diadem was

a high cap of cloth or silk covered with jewels, the crown formed of a

horizontal circle and two arches of gold, bearing at their intersection

a cross or globe. With him went the rest of the imperial family, the

cæsar or sebastocrator in open diadem and green buskins, the

panhypersebastos, the protosebastos and the despots. In attendance were

the great officers--the curapalata, or lord steward, with his silver

rod; the great logothete, or chancellor; the great domestic, who

commanded the infantry; the protostrator, who commanded the cavalry; the

stratopedarch, or quartermaster-general; the protospathaire of the

guards; the constable of the Franks; the æteriarch of the barbarians;

the acolyte of the English or Varangians. In the Byzantine

administration the great duke commanded the fleet, having under him the

great drangaire and the emir or admiral, an Arabic designation borrowed

from the Norman kings of Sicily. To this long array of officials and

courtiers must be added the patriarch and his clergy in the magnificent

vestments of the Greek Church, if we wish to form an idea of the

splendid ceremonial which gave to dome and arch a life and a

significance now lost in the simpler forms of Mohammedan worship.

Twenty years after Justinian in his pride had exclaimed, "Νενίκηκά

σε, Σαλομών," the great dome and the eastern semi-domes fell and

destroyed the holy table and the rich apparatus of the bema; but the

zeal and energy of Justinian did not experience any diminution. A nephew

and namesake of one of the original designers, Ignatius, was employed to

restore the work. He gave the dome its present form, making its height

twenty-five feet more than that of its predecessor, thus diminishing the

lateral thrust. The church remains substantially the same as thus

restored in A.D. 561, but needed and received in after years many

repairs. In A.D. 896 the tower at the west end was erected by the

emperor Michael, and in A.D. 987 a thorough renovation was carried out

by Basil the Bulgaricide. The conquest of the city by the Latins in A.D.

1204 led to the entire destruction of the rich interior arrangements,

and we read of the repairs effected by Andronicus in 1307 A.D., and,

the eastern semi-dome showing signs of giving way, by John Palæologus

IV. in 1345.

The Mohammedan conquest of course swept away the ornaments of the

interior--the ambo, the iconostasis and the holy table. The heads of the

crosses were chiselled off, so as to destroy the cruciform shape, and

the numerous groups and figures portrayed in mosaic were covered with

coats of whitewash. During the restoration of the church in the reign of

Abd-ul-Medjid these works of art were once more brought to light by

Fossati, and sketches of them made by this architect and by Herr

Salzenberg before they were again hidden from sight. The figures of the

four seraphim were never covered, and still look down upon the

desecrated temple: on the four piers hang huge shields bearing in Arabic

characters the names of Aboo-bekr, Omar, Osman and Ali, the four

companions of the Prophet, whom the orthodox Soonees reverence as the

true khalifs. The floor is covered with rich carpeting. As the

Mussulman at prayer turns to the Kebla at Mecca--that is, to the

south-east--and as the church was built nearly east and west, the

pulpit, the carpet, the long lines of worshippers are now arrayed

obliquely to the length of the building.

Although the building of Justinian has never had a patriarch like

Gregory or Chrysostom, it has been the scene of many important events.

At the altar of St. Sophia the emperor Heracleios was compelled by the

citizens to swear to remain in Constantinople when, terrified by the

attacks of the Alans in the North and the Persians in the East, he was

thinking of transferring the seat of the Roman empire to the city of

Carthage. In the ambo, Heracleonas, his younger son by the intriguing

Martina, was forced to exhibit the true heir to the throne, his nephew

Constans. "Christians, to St. Sophia!" was the order of Leontius, who

led the revolt against the cruel Justinian II., and "This is the day of

the Lord," the text of the sermon from the ambo to the insurgents. In

the same spot, after five years of cruel captivity, the five sons of

Constantine Copronymus took refuge. Nicephorus, the eldest, had been

deprived of sight: the others had their tongues cut out. The blind spoke

for the dumb: "Countrymen and Christians, behold the sons of your

emperor, if you can recognize our features! We throw ourselves on your

compassion." From A.D. 726 there reigned the iconoclastic emperors, who

banished all images from the churches, but the year A.D. 842 saw the

sacred icons again restored by Theodora. Her patronage raised to the

patriarchate Ignatius, a son of the emperor Michael Rhaagabe. He

excommunicated the cæsar Bardes for an incestuous marriage, and in

revenge the cæsar forcibly expelled him from his church, and then

endeavored to extort a confession of resignation by stripes and cruelty.

From the high character of Ignatius it was necessary that his successor

should be equal to him in reputation: the cæsar selected for the office

a man of great firmness, unblemished integrity and immense erudition,

the celebrated Photius, whose invaluable work, the _Myriobiblion_, is

still a treasure-house for the scholar. At the time of his election

Photius was a layman, combining the somewhat discordant titles of

proto-a-secretis, or chief-justice, and protospathaire, or captain of

the guards. The first day witnessed his transformation from a layman to

a monk; the second day he was made a reader; the third day, a subdeacon;

the fourth, a full deacon; the fifth, a priest, the sixth, Christmas

Day, A.D. 858, beheld him placed in the throne of Chrysostom. But this

new patriarch was not left undisturbed by the friends of Ignatius. They

appealed to the pope, Nicholas I., who excommunicated Photius, his

legates depositing on the altar of St. Sophia a solemn anathema

enumerating the seven heresies of the Greeks, and devoting teacher and

disciple to the eternal society of the devil and his angels. "From this

thunder-bolt may be dated the schism of the Eastern Church." Photius in

turn excommunicated and deposed Pope Nicholas. It is hard to say how

often Photius was banished and restored. He was banished by Basil the

Macedonian, and Ignatius restored. He was recalled after the death of

Ignatius, and presided in the general council of 869 A.D., and was

banished again by the emperor Leo.

The conquest by the combined forces of the Venetians and the French in

1204, A.D., was disastrous to St. Sophia. The veil of the sanctuary was

torn asunder for the sake of the golden fringe, the altar broken in

pieces, and the wrought silver and gold ornaments torn down. A

prostitute was placed on the throne of the patriarchs, and danced and

sang in derision of the hymns and processions of the Oriental rite. But

this wanton sacrilege and shameless indecency disgusted the Greeks less

than the celebration of the Eucharist according to the Latin rite with

unleavened bread. The Orthodox patriarch fled, a Venetian prelate was

installed on the vacant throne, but after a succession of six Latin

patriarchs no trace of the Latin conquest was left in the church except

the tomb, in the women's gallery,

Of blind old Dandolo,

The octogenarian chief, Byzantium's conquering foe;

and the feelings of the outraged Greeks found expression in the words of

the great duke: "I would rather see in St. Sophia the turban of Mohammed

than the tiara of pope or cardinal."

This hatred, deep and strong, of the Latins and the Latin rite

effectually marred all the attempts at reunion of the two churches

undertaken by John Palæologus in the hope of thus alluring to his aid

the arms of Western Christendom. When Metrophanes, who had assented to

the terms of union with Rome, was consecrated, the spacious church was

empty--even the cross-bearers had fled. A final trial to conciliate Rome

and the nations who acknowledged the pope as the Vicar of God was made

by the ill-fated Constantine. On December 12, A.D. 1452, the two

nations joined in communion in St. Sophia: Pope Nicholas and the

patriarch Gregory were solemnly commemorated; but the dress and language

of the Latin priest were objects of horror, and when he was seen to mix

water with the wine and take up the unleavened wafer, the worshippers of

either sex and every degree rushed forth from the lofty dome, dispersed

themselves in taverns, drank confusion to the slaves of the pope, and

emptied their glasses in honor of the Blessed Virgin. The polluted

church was deserted by clergy and people, and "a vast and gloomy silence

prevailed in that venerable dome which had so often smoked with a cloud

of incense, blazed with innumerable lights and resounded with the voice

of prayer and thanksgiving." But when Constantine had fallen, with the

courage of a Roman, at the gate of St. Romanus, St. Sophia was sought

again by the timid crowd. "In the space of an hour the sanctuary, the

choir, the nave, the upper and lower galleries, were filled with

multitudes of fathers and husbands, of women and children, of priests,

monks and nuns," expecting the descent of an angel whose celestial sword

was to exterminate the hosts of the Turks. But axes began to thunder at

the bolted doors; the priest fled from the altar with the consecrated

elements, and tradition added to his escape the miraculous feature that

the door through which he passed defied all efforts to open it. This

door, in the upper gallery, was opened during the repairs a few years

ago, and was found to lead to an old disused staircase choked up with

rubbish. Although there is pointed out on one of the pillars a red mark

said to have been made by the bloody hand of Mohammed as he stood on a

heap of slain, truth compels the historian to assert that the church was

not defiled with bloodshed: no resistance was made; the conquerors had

merely to select their captives. Through the struggling mass of fierce

captors and reluctant prisoners Mohammed forced his way to the bema,

laid his hand on the altar and exclaimed, "One only is God, One only;

and Mohammed is His prophet." The next Friday all the forms of Islam

were gone through--the muezzin proclaimed the hours of prayer from the

Venetian bell-tower; the imam preached; the sultan in person performed

the _namaz_ of prayer. From that hour the church which had seen the

Arian controversy, which had been the scene of disputes respecting the

twofold nature, the one person, the eternal generation of the Son, and

whose last days were engaged in denying the double procession of the

Holy Ghost, has been the temple of a faith that teaches that "God begets

not, nor is He begotten; and of His mercy there is no end."

HUGH CRAIG.

OUR MONTHLY GOSSIP.

RUSSIAN AND TURKISH MUSIC.

In the obscure period preceding the origin of the great civilizer, Peter

I., the Muscovites knew scarcely more than one melody, to which

different words were adapted according to the circumstances. "It served

alike," says an old author, "the unhappy man for his lamentations; the

drunkard for his bacchanalian song; the laborer for his diversion when

overcome with weariness; the driver for encouragement to his horses; and

the young for regulating their steps in the dance." Among the

instruments that were used to accompany this universal melody we notice

the _goudok_, a species of violin having three strings, of which the

_chanterelle_ was played _pizzicata_, while a very short bow was drawn

over the other two strings. (These bass strings must have acted like a

double pedal accompaniment--_i.e._ two immovable notes, for the

performer had not, so far as we know, a third hand to vary the

intonation.) Then there was the _balalai-ka_, a kind of guitar with two

strings; the _doutka_ an exact copy of the double pipes of antiquity;

the _gousli_, or horizontal harp, approaching the zither or psalterion;

the _valinca_, which was a species of bagpipe, etc. All of this was very

primitive and a little savage. However, music was noticeably more

advanced in the southern province of Ukraine. "Many of the inhabitants

of this portion of the country went to Moscow or St. Petersburg, and

entered the service of the nobles in the capacity of musicians. They

had, and have still, very fine voices. They formed almost the entire

choir of the imperial chapel.... The Ukrainians all love music and the

dance, and seem to have no occupation more important than that of

amusing themselves. They excel particularly on the _bandora_, with which

they accompany their songs of a tender or lively character."

It was hardly until the time of Peter the Great--that is to say, in the

early part of the last century--that European music was introduced into

Russia. "The czar appointed a certain number of young men, who were

taught to play on trumpets, kettle-drums, hautboys and bassoons; and so

that the public might be in a state to judge of their progress, he

commanded that every day at noon they should perform, some of them in

the belfry of the Admiralty, the others in the belfry of the

fortress.... While he was at table _cornets à bouguin_ and _sackbuts_

(trombones) were played. The violins and bass-viols were reserved for

court balls." But it was not until the reign of the czarina Anne that a

troupe of Italian singers established themselves at St. Petersburg. The

first opera played by them in this capital was entitled _Abiazare_: the

score was by the Florentine maëstro Araya, chapel-master of the court.

It was to the empress Elizabeth, "_née avec une âme sensible_," that the

town of Moscow owed the building of its first theatre. The opera with

which it was inaugurated was _La Clemenza di Tito_, a poem of

Metastasio's, the music by Hasse, with a prologue of Araya's entitled

_La Russia afflitta e riconsolata_.

From this time on the musical part of Russia maintained uninterrupted

relations with Italy. Araya's successors were Galuppi, Iraetta, Sarti,

Cimarosa, Federico Ricci (author of _Crispino e la Comare_). We must add

to the list Boieldieu, who in the first part of this century occupied

the envied position of chapel-master to the czar.

And now let us pass over the Pruth. It would be difficult in an article

of a few lines to give an exact idea of the Turkish music, for in order

to do this it is necessary to treat the question from an acoustic point

of view.

In fact, the Oriental gamut differs from ours very essentially, as it

contains quarter tones. Our ears, educated to the semitone as minimum

interval, cannot seize any melodious meaning in the midst of these

heteroclite sounds. However, the Turkish music, well suited to the

dance, is not lacking in rhythm. The principal instruments used to mark

the time are the _daul_, or great drum; the _tomboleh_, or small drum;

the _kios_, a brass drum; the triangle, etc.... As for the other

instruments, they are--the _sinekeman_, a violin of large dimensions;

the _nei_, flute made of a reed; the _ghirif_, little flute; the

_kânon_, a psalterion with strings of catgut, which is particularly in

favor in the harems, etc.... In _Constantinople in 1828_ (by Farlane) we

read: "The music to which the dervishes perform their ambulatory

rotations is made up of tambourines, small drums and Turkish flutes....

The dervishes begin singing a soft and slow melody while turning around:

then the movement is gradually accelerated until it becomes a giddy

whirl, lasting twelve or fifteen minutes. After a brief pause a second

dance begins, then a third, more rapid and more savage, and the cries,

_Allah il Allah, la illa il Allah_, are given louder and sharper than

before." If our readers have any curiosity about this strange art, they

have but to open the score of _Oberon_: they will find there two

authentic Turkish airs, noted down almost textually by Weber--namely,

the march of the patrol which ends the first act, and the dizzy round

that makes the dénoûment of the piece, dragging the pasha and his suite

into a choreographic vortex with the force of a whirlwind.--_Condensed

from an article by A. de Lasalle_.

"LES NAUFRAGÉS DE CALAIS."

After the restoration of the monarchy in France on the 22d of July,

1815, a royal decree ordained the banishment of thirty-eight ex-members

of the Convention who had voted for the death of Louis XVI. These

unhappy regicides took refuge in the Low Countries, but the French

government demanded their expulsion, and King William of Holland was

reluctantly compelled to obey. Among these persons was Merlin of Douai,

who had been Minister of Justice in 1795. On being refused an asylum on

Dutch soil, he took passage on board the brig Alice for New York. She

was wrecked off Flushing before reaching the Channel. Her passengers

were saved, and relanded on the coast of Belgium. In this situation how

vividly must Merlin have recalled a parallel event in which he played

the part of an unjust and cruel judge, while his victims were two

hundred and fifty shipwrecked noblemen escaping from the government of

the Reign of Terror!

Minister Merlin, having been written to to know what disposition it

would be proper to make of the _naufragés de Calais_, as these

unfortunates are called in history (since the law dooming to death

emigrants who returned to France with arms in their hands did not seem

to apply to persons shipwrecked while escaping), he answered with fierce

brevity, "Wherever I find an enemy I kill him!" In spite of the Minister

of Justice, however, public opinion in Calais was on the side of

humanity. Delays were interposed, and one brave lawyer, Gorse by name,

ventured to address a letter of remonstrance to the minister, which cost

him his liberty, and would doubtless have brought him to the guillotine

but for the fall of Robespierre.

Among the naufragés de Calais (all noblemen) was the duke de

Choiseul-Saintville. He and his companions were transferred from jail to

jail during the reign of the Directory. Sometimes they were threatened

with courts-martial--sometimes they appeared to be forgotten. Several

times they were tried in civil courts, and every time they were

acquitted. But they were never set at liberty, and it is difficult to

imagine what might have been their fate had not Bonaparte suddenly

returned from Egypt. The news of his landing was hailed by all who were

suffering from the weak tyrannies and unjust indecisions of the

Directory. The naufragés especially saw in his sense of what was

generous and just a hope of deliverance.

That deliverance came even sooner than they expected, thanks to the

following letter, written by Stéphanie de Choiseul, a girl of fourteen,

to the First Consul:

"CITIZEN GENERAL, FIRST CONSUL:"

I hardly know how to address you, for I am writing without the knowledge

of anybody, and I do not even know if you will get my letter. But every

one is talking about you: every one is saying that you are so very

great--that you are setting so much that has been wrong to rights--that

you are doing things so very wonderful. When I hear this I feel

confident you will not despise my prayers and tears. If what I am doing

seems very extraordinary, pardon my boldness because I am so unhappy.

"You have no doubt heard of the naufragés de Calais, who have been tried

and acquitted several times. Several times they have been on the point

of being sent away from France and set at liberty, but each time the

prospect has only resulted in their being more harshly treated than

before. What crime have they committed? They were cast away on the

French coast against their will. They were not bearing arms against

their country. If you deign to read their defence you will be convinced

of the justice of their cause. Alas! Citizen First Consul, my father is

one of these unhappy persons. He is sick--he is dying in prison. In

spite of any prejudice you may feel against him, you would take pity on

him if you could know all he has suffered. He has been now nearly five

years in prison, sent from dungeon to dungeon, sometimes confined with

mad people, sometimes with criminals.

"After being eleven months imprisoned in the casemates of the citadel of

Lille, he has been sent in chains to Ham, and cannot understand why his

imprisonment has been made more strict than before. He is now alone, in

solitary confinement. I have been torn from him in prison, and now I

come imploring you upon my knees to let me go back to him, unless you

will grant his liberty to my prayers.

"Take me, citizen general, as a hostage for my father. I will promise he

shall submit to whatever conditions may be asked of him. If I may only

be imprisoned in his stead, I shall be happy. I will answer for him: you

may trust him wherever he may be permitted to live.

"Take pity on my grief: grant me this prayer. If you do, you will make

amends to me for many sorrows, for I have lost upon the scaffold my

nearest and dearest friends. I have no one left now but my father and

my little brother. Take pity upon him and me. We will bless you every

day if you do so. The endless gratitude of such poor children will

surely do you good, and help in some way to make your life more happy.

That gratitude will be always yours if you will save our father, who

will die if you do not succor us.

"You are so great you will not despise our prayer. Be our deliverer, and

be sure your name will never be uttered in our presence without being

blessed from the very depths of our souls."

"STÉPHANIE CHOISEUL.

HOURCOURT (Vosges), 4 Frimaire, an VIII."

Immediately after the First Consul had read this letter the naufragés

were set at liberty; that is, they were transported beyond the limits of

France. Two years later, however, they were permitted to return by the

act of general amnesty. Many, however, had already made their peace with

the new government. The duke de Choiseul was of that number.

Twenty years later, as we have already seen, Merlin, the savage Minister

of Justice who had refused pity to these unfortunate persons, was

himself, by a similar shipwreck under similar circumstances, delivered

over to the mercy of their friends. He had sententiously declared,

"Wherever I find an enemy I kill him!" King William of Holland silenced

one of his ministers who was urging him to take revenge on Merlin by

very different words: "A hurricane has thrown him back upon our coast:

shall I be more pitiless than winds and storms?"

Once again during the brief remainder of his days was Merlin to learn

the lesson "_noblesse oblige_" by experiencing a generosity he had never

shown. In 1820 his son, General Eugène Merlin, who had served with

distinction under the Empire, but had made his submission to the

government of the Restoration, was arrested on a charge of being

implicated in a military conspiracy. The matter came before the Court of

Peers. The duke de Choiseul, high in the favor of his king, sat as one

of the judges. He believed the young man innocent, and took his defence

upon himself, pleading his cause so warmly that General Eugène Merlin

was acquitted.

Stéphanie de Choiseul married when she grew up, and became duchesse de

Marmier.

E.W.L.

REALISTIC ART.

Seldom now-a-days does an "old master" appear in the catalogues of

art-sales or private galleries, the genuine article having grown too

scarce and the fictitious too abundant. What the buyer looks for is a

picture younger than himself, as full of the fashion of his own day as

his coat or his hat. The painter must have some celebrity, and that must

have at least six or eight years to grow in. Allowing for that necessary

age, the newer the artist the better his work. The period has every

confidence in itself, and does not care to look back for guidance and

instruction in the principles of beauty and taste.

Naturally, this state of things implies realism in the selection and

treatment of subjects. There is no time to idealize. The pencil must

seize what is at hand, and serve it up on the spot. Landscapes and

figures are flat copies of what the artist sees, and are labelled with

their true names. Lorettes, contadine and odalisques are presented to us

as such, and not as goddesses, heroines or saints. A ravine in Algeria,

Norway or the Rocky Mountains, a sugar-camp in Maine or a wreck at Long

Branch, are equally undisguised in their shape and title. The successors

of Wilson and Turner no longer compose or combine. They have stopped

clipping Nature into bits and sewing her together again like a patchwork

quilt. The scenes we meet with on the walls are real scenes, to a tree

or a ripple, and the title tells us so. Some liberties are taken with

the clouds, and an artificial drapery of light and shade is thrown over

the solid objects. Appropriate figures, too, are injected, by way of

making up some sort of story and showing that the place is inhabited.

But plain, faithful copying, as of an advanced drawing-school turned

out of doors, and not pretending to be anything else, is the rule.

Not yet is a representation of Ajax or Ariadne, a satyr or a nymph,

labelled "Portrait of a Gentleman" or "of a Lady," as the case may be.

That may come ere long, with the names, given and family, of the

individuals so honored. Till then we do without the Homeric characters

altogether, and get Smith and Jones, their spouses and progeny, in

dresses and situations they may be readily conceived as filling.

All this implies a reign of truth. Truth is a good thing, and nowhere a

better thing than in art. But literal truth is prosaic, and the

Gradgrind school of art has a tendency to lower us to the hardest kind

of facts. Stationary subjects are the choice of the copyist. Asses,

ponds, weeds, bottles, melons, young chickens (dead), oysters and

decayed trees commend themselves as capital sitters. It is disheartening

to the amateur to see his gallery gradually assuming the similitude of a

common or a junk-shop. However, an ultra-realistic style cannot prevail

long. Human nature cannot bear it, and will insist on springing from

earth into a purer, thinner and more impalpable air. A craving for the

imaginative will assert itself; and when it does so art will be all the

stronger for the discipline and study through which it is now passing.

ARTISTIC JENKINSISM.

Who was it that, his soul hot within him at the undue predominance of

the dead languages in the English university curriculum, declared that

the system of facts with which the British graduate of the present day

was the most familiar was the intrigues of the heathen gods?

We think of this Thersites sometimes when our eyes light, in big

double-sheeted daily or fashionable monthly, on a column or two, fresh

from over the water, of exhaustive minutiæ of the daily life, walk and

conversation of French artists, playwrights, actors and actresses.

Matter of this sort was not wont to be so absorbingly interesting to the

American reader. The time was not very long since when a very little of

it went a great way with him--when the domestic troubles of Madame de

Caux and the personal habits of M. Sardou would not have been considered

worth as many lines as they now get paragraphs. Even such assiduously

advertised affairs as the relations of De Musset and George Sand, and

Rachel's patronage of her pets among the gilded youth, created no

contemporary sensation comparable to that consequent upon their

resuscitation. And we were none the worse for missing such topics,

although they were rather less unworthy of study than the corresponding

gossip of to-day. Literature, the drama, music and pictorial art on the

Continent were certainly not at a lower standard fifteen or twenty years

ago than now. The inner halo around their leading lights was not less

attractive or less deserving of micrometric analysis. No first-class

name has been added to their number in either walk, nor are the

individual careers of the second-class characters who have succeeded

them at all more fruitful in salient traits for instruction or

entertainment.

It is a familiar theory that the creative age dies out as the critical

age gains strength--that when we grow nice, finical and blasé as to the

quality of our intellectual aliment, we prove thereby the enfeeblement

of our intellectual appetite and digestion. At present, the

circumstances point to our having gone a step farther still, and

attained the _hyper_critical stage. Our attention now has degenerated

into a study of the dishes wherein the aforesaid food is served--their

lustre, fabric, style and "crackle," a craze in flesh-and-blood

ceramics. We never get tired of holding them up to the light and

minutely mapping all their flaws and beauties, with each shade of color

and glaze, superficial and iridescent or struck through and solid.

There may be something in the fierce light that beats upon a literary or

artistic throne beneficial alike to subject and monarch. But here there

are too many thrones, and the light is too fierce. Let us have a

selection of potentates to be illuminated, and let us turn down the gas

a little.

E.B.

LITERATURE OF THE DAY.

Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV. By Francis Parkman.

Boston: Little, Brown & Co.

In this volume Mr. Parkman has made a long step toward the culminating

point of his historical series, and in the preface he announces that,

passing over the intervening half century, he will make the fall of the

French dominion in Canada the subject of his next book. There will then

be more to relate of interest to readers in general than the events and

personages of the present work can afford: this, nevertheless, has a

peculiar value, as showing the opening of the rivalry between the French

and English colonies, and exposing the causes which from the beginning

rendered defeat inevitable for the former. These causes Mr. Parkman has

already stated in the _Old Régime in Canada_, though less clearly and

with an apparent tendency to consider that the result, after all, really

came from an incapacity of the "French Celt" for self-government. More

truly he now says that, had the Huguenots been allowed to settle in

Canada, its fate would probably have been different. They represented

that middle class to which was in great part due the success of the

English settlements; and, standing shoulder to shoulder, as was their

way, they would have formed a strong wall against encroachment and

invasion. But Louis XIV. wished to exercise a more immediate control

over his North American possessions than he might have found practicable

had the too independent Huguenots been permitted to swarm into the land.

Moreover, the colony, formed originally by the missionaries, retained

its religious character to the very end. In the government the priest

gradually gave way to the royal officer, though not without a contest:

the jarrings between temporal and spiritual authorities were frequent,

and not least so in Frontenac's time. He indeed lived in a constant

state of quarrel with the Jesuits, who were, nevertheless, his right

hand in external troubles. Canada was peopled by an "army of bigots," to

use Napoleon's expression; and the priests kept alive the spirit of

warlike piety which furthered so well the purposes of king and governor.

Cross in hand, they led their Indian converts to battle; nor do they

seem to have softened the asperities of Indian warfare, doubtless

looking on fire and steel as the best discipline for their heretical

foes. Children taken in war they were accustomed to keep and bring up as

Catholics; and this desire to save souls, which was communicated by the

fathers to the whole population, helps to explain why captives among the

Canadians, as among the Indians, so often forgot their homes and were

unwilling to return to them. Both French and savages received their

prisoners into their families, and treated them as they did those of

their own blood--the latter to make good their losses in war by the

adoption of new members into the tribe, the former as well from natural

kindliness as moved by eagerness for the spiritual welfare of the

benighted. The English, like the Plains Indians of the present day, had

no such motives; and those living in captivity among them, however

kindly treated, remained aliens, and seized gladly any opportunity of

regaining their freedom.

Mr. Parkman, while doing full justice to the ability, valor and

self-sacrifice of the priests, condemns of course their acceptance, and

even approval, of such barbarous customs as torture and the killing of

non-combatants; and this blame extends itself to the French generally,

with whose adoption of savage practices he compares the self-restraint

and mercifulness of the New Englanders, even when, as at the time of the

capture of Port Royal, exasperated by the recent massacre of their

countrymen. The causes of this difference of conduct are not far to

seek, though Mr. Parkman does not explain them, being perhaps inclined

to refer it to national character. The war-parties that left Quebec and

Montreal consisted of soldiers, trained to the manner of war which in

the first half of that century turned much of Germany into a desert, or

of Indians and trappers, red and white savages, who inflicted cruelty on

others with all the indifference which they displayed in bearing it. The

forces of New England, on the other hand, were composed of fishermen and

farmers, men with families and engaged in peaceful occupations, to which

war came as an unwelcome interruption. Murder had not been taught them

as a duty, but forbidden as a crime; and, more gentle by habit, it was

not to be expected but that they would display far more moderation in

bloodshedding.

The military character of Canada is strikingly shown by the moral

influence exercised over the people by the character of the governor. As

in an army the officers are known by the conduct of their troops, so his

vigor or inability gave tone to the whole colony. Under Frontenac all

was energy and confidence, while under the blustering La Barre and the

pious Denonville, who ruled between the count's two terms of office, the

_habitans_ shut themselves up in forts, leaving their fields to the

ravages of the Mohawks. At the age of seventy Frontenac returned to

uphold the failing colony, sent by the king as the only man capable of

performing the task. He was sagacious in council, prompt and tireless in

action, and, what was a chief recommendation to his post, he well

understood the character of the Indians, his dealings with whom were

marked by equal address and firmness. "In their eyes," says Mr. Parkman,

"Frontenac was by far the greatest of the 'Onontios' or governors of

Canada." Common sense and a knowledge of men probably enabled him to

make himself feared and esteemed even by the fierce, astute Iroquois,

quick at noting weaknesses, but recognizing a man when they saw him. The

count, on his side, was attracted by these foes, so difficult to fight,

whose shrewd diplomacy and unflinching courage he appreciated no less

than their childish simplicity; while their cruelties did not shock the

old campaigner against the Turks, who could be cruel enough himself on

an occasion where policy seemed to demand it, though he was wont to

display much courtesy and generosity toward his English prisoners, many

of whom he ransomed from the Indians. In fine, he deserves all the good

that Mr. Parkman has to say of him, if not entitled to the unlimited

laudations bestowed on him by Father Goyer. The discourse which this

priest--one of the Récollet order--held over the count's grave is, as

annotated by a hostile critic, a most amusing document, and gives a good

idea of Frontenac's real character. He left more friends than enemies

behind him, and the mourning of the whole colony for his loss may be set

against the bitterness with which his Jesuit adversaries pursued him

even after his death.

Nimport. (Wayside Series.) Boston: Lockwood, Brooks & Co.

_Nimport_ certainly deserves to be set high among the new American

novels that are appearing in such unaccustomed profusion. If, as it

would seem, it is a first venture of some unknown writer, it indicates

considerable promise, not perhaps of the highest talent, but of that

agreeable union of humor and intelligence of which the richest fruit is

to be seen in the stories of Mrs. Oliphant among contemporary authors.

The book has decided faults: it is too long; the different chapters are

incoherently put together; characters are lugged in and turned out again

without any reference to the needs of the plot; what is most interesting

is cut up by frequent interruptions; there are too many threads in the

story; and yet, in spite of these glaring faults, there is so much

cleverness of a certain sort in the parts that are good that the reader

is disposed to be very clement toward this well-meant though mistaken

profusion of material.

The story deals with the fortunes of a family who have been left almost

penniless at the death of their parents, and it is narrated by one of

their number, a somewhat wan and spectral figure, an artist, whose

adventures are thrust in amid the far more interesting letters of a

sister who recounts her experience as governess in a rich but underbred

family. Her pen is very sharp, and she puts down what she sees and hears

with a great deal of cleverness. Had the story consisted of her career

alone, it would have been much completer than the present motley record,

but some amusing episodes would have been sacrificed which the reader

could ill spare. The best of these is the account of Aunt Bangs, the

stately and unattractive relation who swoops down upon the fragment of

the family left at home, perching like a raven over their heads, and

bullying them to within an inch of their lives. Everything that is said

about her is full of unexaggerating humor. There is no grinning through

a horse-collar in these scenes, and no reckless abuse of old age, but

simply accurate drawing of a disagreeable character. This is certainly

much more the author's strong point than the delineation of high

tragedy. A murder is as much out of place in this simple narration as it

would be in a quiet, decent parlor. It is not thrilling: it is simply

out of taste, in the way of being unnatural and offensive, rather than a

legitimate conclusion to carefully-drawn horrors. The introduction does

not lead up to such black crime: the book is on surer ground in quiet

domestic incidents. Once for all, it may be said that Phil's death, the

part about Miss Quilty, and possibly even what is said about Dan, might

have been omitted to advantage. What would have been left has been only

injured by this extraneous matter; and the directness of the impression

the better parts would have made has been weakened by this distracting

complexity.

The good parts are really good: they lack the morbidness which

undermines so many otherwise clever stories of New England life. Too

frequently in these the element of passion is left out, and in its place

we have a good deal of more or less entertaining writing about

love-making, with the love left out. But in this book this mistake is

not made. The love-story is simple enough and obvious enough. It will

never make the book a formidable rival to _Jane Eyre_, but so far as it

goes it is true to every-day life. What is best in the book is the

intelligent observation to which it bears witness: its humor is kindly

and unaffected. The story is clumsy and ill-constructed, but it has

decided merit, and the faults are only such as could have been best

cured by the judicious application of a pair of scissors. Too often it

happens that the reader of novels feels that the author's only chance is

to be born again, but _Nimport_ inspires the hope that the writer will

try again.

Briefe aus Philadelphia (1876) an eine Freundin (Letters from

Philadelphia to a Friend). Von Catherine Migerka. Wien.

As long as a concern--or at least curiosity--to see ourselves as others

see us shall move American breasts, so long will such books as the above

have interest for us. In the present case it will depend entirely upon

the interest we take in what relates to ourselves, for a more vapid yet

didactic little volume--or rather pamphlet--than Frau Migerka's letters

we have never seen; which we say with a distinct recollection of various

books by our own country-folk upon foreign lands. The author is not

observant of characteristic details, nor has she the faculty of drawing

inferences or coming to general conclusions correctly from what she sees

and hears. She has collected some statistics, picked up some facts,

noted some prominent features of the national physiognomy, which she has

mixed and muddled with apostrophes to Nature, Liberty, the soul of man,

the German people, the American people, and poetical reflections a

little in the manner of Primula Veris, the literary lady in one of

Spielhagen's novels. It is unusual for German women to travel: many of

them in easy circumstances and a respectable position live and die

without going more than a few miles from home. From Dresden to Pilnitz,

from Berlin to Potsdam, from Vienna to Glocknitz, from Munich to the

Staremberg See, is by many of the inhabitants considered not an

excursion, but a journey. Frau Migerka is a Viennese, and appears to

have studied men and manners exclusively in her own country, as her

standards and comparisons are drawn thence alone. She came to this

country with her husband, who was one of the Austrian commissioners to

the International Exposition, and Philadelphia was the only American

city which she saw, except fleeting glimpses of New York, Boston and

Cleveland. She was exceedingly struck by New York Bay, and indeed the

scenery of the country wherever she went elicited real raptures,

although she invariably declines the attempt to describe it as beyond

her powers: the only natural beauties on which she expatiates are

sunrises, sunsets and moonlights. These not being phenomena peculiar to

our heavens, it is fair to suppose that she was unaccustomed to behold

them in so much beauty and splendor; but it does not seem to have

occurred to her that they were due to the extraordinary clearness and

brilliancy of our sky and atmosphere compared with those of most

European countries. New York itself disappointed her by looking "so new

and modern, with nothing to recall the past;" and she sadly contrasts

Broadway with the streets of Vienna, on which stand the haughty palaces

of the Schwarzenbergs, Lichtensteins and Esterhazys. One must be a

soulful German to come to a new country and lament over its cities for

not being old. Her remarks about Boston are calculated to irritate the

feelings of sister-cities without gratifying the Bostonians: she says

that the moral qualities of that community have obtained for it the

prominence and leadership in the politics and religion of the country

and an intellectual supremacy in public opinion, but that the city is

not handsome, and that the bad taste of the edifices, within and

without, is barbarous. Cleveland is the town which pleases her most, and

she ascribes its beauty and charm to German influence. With

Philadelphia she had some opportunity of making acquaintance, and her

impressions of us will be amusing to those who are not too thin-skinned.

Frau Migerka's first letter is devoted to the women of America, whom she

acknowledges to be pretty even beyond their reputation and her

expectation, wider awake and better educated than the men, and

beautifully dressed, although her sober taste is shocked by the display

of jewelry and trinkets in public conveyances and places of amusement.

She censures the rage for adornment of the women of the working-classes,

and the unfitness of a woman who is maid-of-all-work, whether in her own

house or that of an employer, appearing in the street arrayed with

pretensions to style and elegance which belong to people of very

different means and scale of living. Frau Migerka had heard of the

extravagance, love of luxury and idleness of our women in all classes,

but inclines to disbelieve the last charge, and to give them credit for

working much harder than they themselves admit. She suspects them of

being ashamed of household occupations, and shows us first the American

woman, who, after drudging the whole week, sallies forth on Sunday

peacockwise, "looking like a real lady" (as used to be said before

"ladies" took to advertising their desire for a cook's or chambermaid's

situation), and then the good German housewife, who, after "cooking and

cleaning all day long, stirring with spoons and clattering with plates,

patching the children's clothes and darning the goodman's hose, has no

ambition beyond relating her achievements to her next-door neighbors

over a friendly gossip-cup of coffee." It is a lifelike picture of the

two types: no right-minded person will deny the folly and vanity of the

American city woman, who does not lack mentors and censors in her own

country; but whether the German housewife, after her day of multifarious

scrubbing, scouring and sewing, might not find something better to talk

about in the evening, Frau Migerka could learn from some of our Yankee

farmers' wives. She considers American wives very inferior to German

ones; and there, again, she is right, as far as industry and

self-forgetfulness are concerned; but she also considers American

husbands as in a condition of subservience and degradation, of which

flagrant instances are their not daring to smoke in their wives' rooms,

and going to market carrying the basket. How wrong and inverted is such

a position! No, no: if there must be slaves, Nature has settled of which

sex they shall be by appointing that the weak shall serve the strong.

Therefore she accounts for the respect which the unworthy fair sex

receives in America, like several other things which she cannot

otherwise explain, as being a matter of tradition, the habit of a

reverence which our foremothers rightly received from men for whom they

had sacrificed everything but principle.

Frau Migerka betrays her curious lack of the inductive faculty by

accusing us of want of domestic taste and love of home, after remarking

on the inaptitude of our houses for social purposes: while delighted

with their cleanliness and convenience, she is struck by the absence of

suitable rooms for the assembling of guests, and the consequent

inconvenient crowd at an ordinary American party. Now, home-keeping is a

good fault, but a fault it is in the extent to which we carry it:

moreover, we and the English are the most domestic, the only truly

domestic, people, for we are the only civilized people who have houses

and homes of our own, and do not live in flats and apartments and go out

for our meals, repairing to beer-halls and tea-gardens in the evening.

Because Frau Migerka did not see the family circle, from the grandmother

down, abroad, knitting, chatting, drinking coffee and listening to music

with one ear--and a very cheerful sight it is--she inferred that there

is no family circle in this country, although, putting that and the snug

sitting-rooms, inconvenient for large companies, together, a sharper

woman would have come to an opposite conclusion. However, it is not for

their acumen that we quote any of her remarks, although, as has been

shown, they are sometimes sensible and just. There is much of both sense

and justice in her strictures on our mode of keeping Sunday--"the

compulsory Sabbath," as she terms it--which in her ignorance she

supposes to be a purely American custom. She is full of sympathy for the

breakers of the Sunday liquor-law, especially for the poor publicans.

But while speaking of the universal strict observance of the day, she

represents it as a sore tax and burden to a great number, who resent it

as an infringement of their personal liberty. She reconciles the

apparent contradiction in such a situation by referring to a vice which

gives her a ready key to many inconsistencies of our national character

and conduct--hypocrisy. One is forced to suppose that this seems a

natural explanation, since the hypocrite, whether an American type or

not, figures prominently in most pictures of German society drawn by

German hands.

Quakerism, our public-school system and our charities are the things

which please Frau Migerka best, and impress her most favorably among our

institutions. The skein of poetry which is so queerly entangled with the

homespun yarn of the German nature is drawn out by the Floral Mission,

the Children's Free Excursions and the Midnight Association: she

declares that American women are truly admirable in their beneficence,

and that the way in which the poor are cared for by private kindness and

liberality, independent of the state, is one of the brightest sides of

our social life. But does it come from a warmer benevolence, a deeper

sense of brotherhood, than in other nations? She thinks not. Besides the

great affluence of the country as a whole, there are three causes for

American charity--vanity and the emulation of rival sects, the feeling

of universal equality, which makes almsgiving in every form appear more

as a duty than a benefit, and the afore-mentioned tendency to hypocrisy.

Whatever Frau Migerka finds good in America which is not hypocrisy or a

relic of the past she ascribes to German influence. We are undoubtedly

indebted to Germans for many excellent and pleasant usages, as well as

for the rapid decay of that superstitious deference to women of which

she complains. Our increasing love of music she rightly claims is due to

her countrymen, but its primitive manifestations are all our own, and

her sufferings from them form one of the few lively passages in the

narrative. The piano in the steamboat saloon; the boarding-school

girl--"dear Carry, who has got on so splendidly with her music in such a

short time;" the Canadian rustic dandy, who only knows his notes; the

long-haired travelling virtuoso with his violin (in all probability her

own countryman, however); the head-waiter and his harp; the young bride

in her smart clothes, with her thin voice and endless ballads; the

exulting bridegroom, who accompanies her on a three-stopped tin

trumpet,--form a Bedlamite procession through which our sympathies

follow her; but in setting down this experience as _American_, although

it occurred on a voyage up the Saguenay, she overlooks the proud fact

that German influence must be spreading to Canada.

Frau Migerka's letters are not to be treated seriously, nor are they

merely to be made fun of. They would not deserve more than a paragraph's

notice but for their local interest, which will probably make them more

entertaining to Philadelphians than they could have been to the female

friend in Vienna. They are not written in an unfriendly spirit; yet

nothing the lady met with wins cordial, hearty sympathy or approbation,

her commendation of our charities being, as we have seen, qualified by

the motives for them which she supposes. The one thing in America which

she felt she should regret is Niagara, which is unlucky for her, as

there are few things for which she could not more easily find a

substitute. Of her reflections and aspirations--

_Á la mode_ Germanorum,

With her sentimentalibus lachrymæ roar 'em,

And bathos and pathos delightful to see--

the following specimen will suffice: "Here flows the Wissahickon,

silent, dark and motionless, as if dreaming of a bygone world and unable

to awaken to the bustling present. Many an Indian maiden has beheld her

brown visage and sparkling eyes mirrored in its crystals. Yet let no one

trust the quiet of that river: a short space farther and the tranquil

stream becomes a rushing mountain-torrent, the friendly vale grows

wildly romantic, full of gloomy, mysterious beauty. How like is this

water to many a human soul, which lives as serene and shut within itself

as if it scarce knew what it is to feel, until passion sweeps over it

and the whole being is changed and uplifts its voice loud and

tumultuous!"

Jack. From the French of Alphonse Daudet, author of "Sidonie," "Robert

Helmont," etc., by Mary Neal Sherwood, translator of "Sidonie." Boston:

Estes & Lauriat.

Daudet's _Sidonie_ in its English form certainly received in this

country all the praise it deserved. It has now been followed by the same

author's _Jack_, which has the additional advantage of its predecessor's

success, and shares with it the benefit of careful translation. The

story is an exceedingly pathetic one: it describes the career of the son

of a frivolous woman, of not even doubtful reputation, from the time of

his entering school until his death. This mother is a silly creature

with an affectionate heart, who is really fond of her son and tries in

her feeble way to do all she can for him. Being rebuffed in her attempt

to place him in one school, she thrusts him into another, and leaves him

to be first petted and then bullied by a French translation of Squeers

and a crowd of his satellites. With one of the teachers, D'Argenton, the

mother falls wildly in love, and they are married. Jack runs away from

school to their home, and finds himself pursued by the malignity of his

step-father, who finally sends him off to work in a machine-shop. The

people he sees here are kind to him, but the work is much too hard for

his delicate health, and, to make matters worse, he is offered, and

accepts in his ignorance, a place as stoker in a large steamship. This

is almost his death, but he manages to escape penniless from the wreck

of the ship, and returns to Paris. He finds near by, in the suburb where

he had formerly lived, the old doctor who had been kind to him, and his

granddaughter, with whom he is soon in love. At this point it will be

well to stop abridging the story, so that the reader may find out for

himself the poor young fellow's subsequent misery. There are occasional

slight relapses into the happiness he has at rare intervals already

known in his life, and at the last he dies in the arms of the woman he

loves; but the general impression is that of great wretchedness.

There is this relief to the somewhat monotonous gloom--that Jack's

character is refined and strengthened by what he goes through; and there

is very touching pathos in his treatment of his mother at all times, and

especially when she puts an end to his hopes of saving enough money to

marry on by returning to live with him. Yet it is a question whether

there is not a wanton and wilful accumulation of wretchedness about the

poor fellow's head, which, of course, does its allotted work in

depressing the reader, and so makes the book effective, but also, it may

be felt, offensive as regards literary art. A cool inventory of Jack's

causes for happiness and sorrow might leave the reader undecided about

the nature of the book, and its mournfulness might be matched by that of

many another novel which is considered to be only allowably pathetic;

but this one is written with such virulence, so to speak, or at least

with such manifest design to accumulate miseries, that the reader's

soul revolts within him at being put on the rack in this violent way.

What makes it more noticeable is, that this is a French novel which is

thus marked by what are more distinctly the qualities of an English

novel. In French novels we expect to find a more temperate method of

writing and the absence of such heat as Daudet shows, which is of common

occurrence in those English novels where no pains are spared to show the

good man's virtues and the bad man's faults. Mr. Carker, in _Dombey and

Son_, may serve as an example of the way this is sometimes done. Daudet

is quite as energetic in pointing obvious morals. The way he impales

D'Argenton on the point of his pen and spares no pains in holding him up

to ridicule is an instance of this, while a much clearer one, and one

wholly unredeemed by such permissible satire as at times redeems the

portrait of D'Argenton, is the account of the school to which Jack is

sent. There is no air of reality in the account of the little king of

Dahomey who is Jack's sole friend in that wretched place. Then, too, the

poor silly mother can never appear but the author, besides making her

talk and act like the foolish creature she is, must be for ever

whispering in the reader's ear that she is a great fool and a frivolous

creature. This over-violent method defeats its own object, and surprises

and pains the reader instead of gratifying him. Nothing is taken for

granted; we are not left to perceive anything by our own unaided vision;

everything is made as plain for us as if it were written in words of one

syllable. But that way of writing palls at length, and calls forth a

feeling of disappointment with what is in some respects a very able

novel.

X. Doudan, Mélanges et Lettres. Avec une introduction par M. le comte

d'Haussonville, et des notices par MM. de Sacy et Cuvillier-Fleury. Tome

III. Paris: Calmann Lévy.

Only a year ago two volumes of M. Doudan's correspondence were given to

the public--they received notice in these pages,[10] it will be

remembered--with a conditional promise of more in case the first should

be duly appreciated. Fortunately, these letters were widely read and

heartily admired, so that now we have this third volume, with further

selections up to the year 1860, and the promise of the speedy

appearance of a fourth, to contain letters after that date and Doudan's

essay on the "Revolutions of Taste." There need be no fear in any one's

mind that all the best letters were taken for the first publication, and

that the editor has been obliged to swell the pages of this volume with

Doudan's hasty, uninteresting notes. Far from it: everything that Doudan

wrote had, as some one has well said, the flavor of perfection: he never

wrote letters as one writes prize essays, cramming into some of them all

his wit and wisdom, leaving his less fortunate correspondents to content

themselves with the meagre statement of facts. All the qualities that

were to be noticed in the volumes that first appeared are to be found

here; and they are qualities of the rarest sort. His method of

expressing himself is simply delightful, his French is most charming,

and his wit and humor must fascinate those who are capable of

appreciating anything outside of mathematical exactness of statement.

Critics have been by no means unanimous in his praise: some have

complained that he wrote his letters with the direct intention of

pleasing--not so much those to whom the letters were avowedly sent as

deceived posterity. The only reason for this ill-natured supposition

would seem to be that the letters were too good for private

correspondence; which is a strong argument in favor of reading them.

Others--and they are French critics--despise him because he was a friend

of the duc de Broglie, but in the course of time this will doubtless be

forgiven him. Some, too, object to his humor. M.G. Monod, for instance,

who is a very intelligent man, says in the _Academy_ that Doudan "makes

fun of everything, even when fun is quite out of place. Even in the most

tragic occurrences he finds occasion for wit." But, after all, it is a

way humorists have: the only remedy for such levity would seem to be

decapitation or solitary confinement in prison without pen, ink and

paper. Some are so captious that they say Doudan was too delicate and

refined a critic for the crude world he lived in. But what is the use of

a critic who praises what is worthless, and has no word of encouragement

for what is good and deserving of praise? The value of a man like Doudan

is that he rises above the common herd by the exactest discrimination:

he never follows the multitude in adoring false gods, but is true to his

own delicate taste. If common sense is the power of applying the

judgment to trifles as well as to important matters, good taste in

literature is the habit of applying the judgment to slight as well as to

serious questions. Doudan's taste is most refined; that is to say, he is

not influenced by general rumor, but he examines everything on its own

merits, overlooking nothing, and appreciating even slight matters

without placing them above things of real importance.

[Footnote 10: See number for October, 1876.]

Here is a bit of his criticism: "You were quite right to be irritated

with this _Fanny_. I had to see what success _Madame Bovary_ had with

all the clever people of society to believe in the success of _Fanny_.

His emphatic and declamatory style has helped the author in putting into

his book more shocking and absurd things than there were in the vile

anecdotes about Madame Bovary. If a young buffalo in the Pontine Marshes

were to write his memoirs, with a detailed account of his loves, his

jealousy, his excesses and his despair, he would doubtless give

expression to the same sentiment of moral good and evil among buffaloes,

but he would not exaggerate the fashion of description in such a

ridiculous way. The genuineness of his feelings would prevent his seeing

a number of things which do not concern his passions. He would not

describe, while sharpening his horns for the fight, the little

field-flowers, which he could not notice, nor the village curé's wig,

which does not concern him at all; but this small and numerous school of

self-styled realists has, in my opinion, so little keen feeling and true

passion that it is like the mathematician who wrote from his mother's

deathbed, 'I lost my mother this day at twenty-two and one-half minutes

after eight [mean time].' The passions are not so accurate, and do not

see so many things."

Here is an extract from a letter written in the perturbed days of 1848:

"In the country, whence I write, there is no news. The vervain, the

heliotropes, are in flower, as they are every year, and the squirrels

run up and down the trees without asking what is going on in Paris. Not

one has subscribed to the most insignificant newspaper. By the way, do

you suppose there are social disturbances among the beasts of the air,

or of the fields, or of the waters? That is not impossible, and I should

be very sorry if it were the case: it pleases my imagination more to

think that the squirrels are living to-day just as they lived in the

garden of Eden; but I have already told you that at a not very remote

period a race of rats, stronger than those who dwelt here, came by

chance on a merchant vessel from the East Indies, and drove out all the

former population of rats that had lived under our old kings. The

ancient race of rats is to be found only in isolated farms. We have no

longer the rats that gnawed the cloaks of the knights of the Middle

Ages. Ask some professor of the Jardin des Plantes what he thinks of it.

"When I say that everything is quiet here, I am wrong, for the men at

least were very uneasy regarding what might take place on the 14th of

July. It was whispered that there was confusion in the capital, and when

the diligence passed by a great many small land-owners were on their

doorsteps waiting for their newspaper, while their cows were feeding

quietly in the meadow, not suspecting that there was a Ledru-Rollin or a

Louis Blanc in the world who wanted to begin the world over again on a

better model. This eagerness to know what is going on in Paris is a

customary sign of disturbance. At present one is naturally anxious to

know whether the little field one has planted with handsome trees will

by to-morrow's sunrise belong to some obscure soldier of the obscure

Sobrier. Formerly they were the veterans of Sylla or of Cæsar, at least,

who took the house of Virgil, but now-a-days they are the veterans of

Sobrier who threaten the house of Victor Hugo. The times are

deteriorating in every direction."

Further extracts might be made in abundance to show the humor that

played over not the surface of things, but their inmost depths, and

threw such a clear light on all sorts of topics; but the reader would do

best to add this volume to the other two, and judge for himself how

great is the merit of these letters, how rare the intelligence they

show, how fine the appreciation of literature and of men which breathes

through them all. They are books for all time.

* * * * *

_Books Received_.

The Wings of Courage: Stories for American Boys and Girls. From the

French, by Mary E. Field. With Illustrations. New York: G.P. Putnam's

Sons.

Lotus Land, and Other Poems. By G.S. Ladson. Cincinnati: Peter G.

Thomson.

The Young Magdalen, and Other Poems. By Francis S. Smith. With Portrait

of the Author. Philadelphia: T.B. Peterson & Brothers.

Imaginary Conversations. By Walter Savage Landor. Fifth

Series--Miscellaneous Dialogues (concluded). Boston: Roberts Brothers.

Biology, with Preludes on Current Events. By Joseph Cook. (Boston Monday

Lectures.) Boston: James R. Osgood & Co.

The Sanitary Condition of City and Country Dwelling-houses. By George E.

Waring, Jr. New York: D. Van Nostrand.

Meister Karl's Sketch-Book. By Charles G. Leland (Hans Breitmann).

Philadelphia: T.B. Peterson & Brothers.

Beautiful Snow, and Other Poems. By J.W. Watson. Illustrated.

Philadelphia: T.B. Peterson & Brothers.

Dick's Recitations and Readings. No. 5. Edited by William B. Dick. New

York: Dick & Fitzgerald.

Nicholas Minturn: A Study in a Story. By J.G. Holland. New York:

Scribner, Armstrong & Co.

Cooking Receipts from _Harper's Bazaar_. (Half-Hour Series.) New York:

Harper & Brothers.

Devil-Puzzlers, and Other Studies. By Frederick B. Perkins. New York:

G.P. Putnam's Sons.

The Outcast, and Other Poems. By J.W. Watson. Philadelphia: T.B.

Peterson & Brothers.

The Publishers' Trade-List Annual, 1877. New York: Office of Publishers'

Weekly.

Egypt as it Is. By J.C. McCoan. With Map. New York: Henry Holt & Co.

The New School-Ma'am; or, A Summer in North Sparta. Boston: Loring.

Hetty's Strange History. (No-Name Series.) Boston: Roberts Brothers.

East Lynne. By Mrs. Henry Wood. New York: Dick & Fitzgerald.

Tangled: A Novel. By Rachel Carew. Chicago: S.C. Griggs & Co.

Selections from Epictetus. Boston: Roberts Brothers.

_New Music._

Sweet and Low: Cradle Song. Words by Tennyson; Music by Mrs. R.H.

Alexander. Philadelphia: W.H. Boner & Co.

Beneath the Stars: Serenade. Words and Music by Charles T. Dazey.

Louisville, Ky.: D.P. Faulds. "C" Co.: Ne Plus Ultra March. By Frank

Green. Philadelphia: W.H. Boner & Co.

Buttercup Polka. By Eastburn. Philadelphia: W.H. Boner & Co.

Transcriber's Notes:

Table of Contents and List of Illustrations added by Transcriber.

Page 538 "Why should not good and virtuous German Fraüleins" should

be Fräuleins.

Page 548 "she answered dreamily." Changed closing punctuation with

period not comma as original text printed.

Pages 580-581 end-of-page hyphenation "break-fast-tray" changed to

breakfast tray.

Page 601 "The Fräulien colored slightly" changed to Fräulein colored

slightly. Fräulein misspelled.

Page 633 "diadem, This" comma should be period, changed to period.

Page 648 "Harper's Bazar" changed to Harper's Bazaar.