Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, February, 1885

LITERARY NOTICES

• True, and Other Stories. By George Parsons Lathrop.

• New York: Funk & Wagnalls.

• Noble Blood. A Novel. By Julian Hawthorne,

• author of “Sebastian Strome,” “Garth,” “Bressant,” etc.

• New York: D. Appleton & Co.

• Prince Saroni’s Wife and the Pearl-Shell Necklace.

• By Julian Hawthorne. New York: Funk & Wagnalls.

• Dr. Grattan. A Novel. By William A. Hammond,

• author of “Lal.” New York: D. Appleton & Co.

• The Old-Fashioned Fairy Book. By Mrs. Burton Harrison.

• Illustrated by Rosina Emmet. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

• Katherine. A Novel. By Susa B. Vance.

• Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co.

• White Feathers. By G. I. Cervus.

• Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co.

Mr. Lathrop, whose little collection of stories heads this list of recent fiction, is a young American author who is well and favorably known as a writer of subtlety and penetration in the delineation of character, as well as marked by a notable picturesqueness of presentation. The volume before us, though by no means representative of his best, has much of his characteristic quality, both on its serious and comic sides. “True” is a tale of North Carolina life, the scene being laid, for the most part, near Pamlico Sound. It has the merit of being thoroughly an American story, though the basis for the plot is laid in the separation of two English lovers in the early days of American colonization, the lady going with her father to the new world, her lover being at the last moment forced to remain in England, never again to rejoin his sweetheart. From this separation and the chance meeting, after two hundred years, of a descendant of the young Englishman with representatives of his sweetheart’s line, Mr. Lathrop weaves a tale of uncommon interest, and of much dramatic power. He has struck perhaps the richest vein of romance that American history affords, and the literary skill, and yet simplicity, with which he improves his opportunity, are worthy of high commendation. The other stories in the volume, “Major Barrington’s Marriage,” “Bad Peppers,” “The Three Bridges,” and “In Each Other’s Shoes,” are good, each in its own way, and afford a pleasant variety of excellent reading.

Mr. Julian Hawthorne’s story of “Noble Blood” is a pleasant yet subtile and quaint story, the scene of which is laid in Ireland. A young artist becomes acquainted with a very beautiful woman whose ambition is to link her own with noble blood. The hero of the story, who loves his new friend, who, though of Irish birth and family, is descended from an Italian merchant, discovers through a singular chain of circumstances that the lady is the descendant of the noblest blood in Venice, her so-called merchant forefather having been a great Venetian noble, who was compelled to fly from his own land to escape the consequences of an act of mad revenge. This strange revelation satisfies Miss Cadogna’s desire for noble blood, and she contents herself with her plain lover. Out of this simple yet quaint and dramatic material Mr. Hawthorne has woven a singularly interesting little romance, in which the graver elements are touched up by little flashes and strokes of humor. It is a piece of good literary work and will add to the author’s reputation, though it is by no means up to the author’s best level.

As good as the foregoing novel is there is much stronger and subtler work in “Prince Saroni’s Wife” and the “Pearl-Shell Necklace,” two short stories that well illustrate Mr. Hawthorne’s peculiar power. Each is of a tragical cast, and the latter especially has at times a dramatic intensity that becomes almost painful. Mr. Hawthorne, as did his father, embodies his most tragical conceptions in such simple and direct language, that the spell wrought upon the reader does not pass with the reading, but remains long after the book has been laid aside. There is a psychological value, too, in Mr. Hawthorne’s work, which rewards a close study of his characters. One feels that he is not a mere story-teller, but, as well, an acute analyzer and a close student of human nature in some of its most perplexing phases. “Prince Saroni’s Wife” is the tale of an Italian prince, and “The Pearl-Shell Necklace” is a story of American life. Both of them are well worth the reading, and told with a clear-cut strength and directness which mark the writer as a literary artist as well as a man of genius.

Dr. Hammond’s second novel, “Dr. Grattan,” is not equal to his first in power, freshness, and dramatic sense, qualities which partly redeemed the crudeness and extravagance of the latter book. “Lal” was in many ways a notable work, and though the work of a prentice hand in the art of novel-writing, had plenty of strength and vigor in it. In “Dr. Grattan” one must confess to a feeling of disappointment, as the story is a trifle dull, and none of the characters have any of the vraisemblance of flesh and blood, except a few of the village loafers and loungers, who haunt the village store of the Adirondack town, where the scene of the story is placed. Dr. Grattan, the hero of the book, is a middle aged country physician, who has one fair daughter, and who is pictured to us as a noble specimen of a man, in his physical, mental, and moral attributes. Mr. Lamar and his daughter Louise are personages of a singular cast. The father is a monomaniac, though a gentleman and a millionaire, and the daughter a superb and glorious woman, endowed with all the noblest qualities of her sex. The main animus of the book is apparently to show that a middle-aged country physician may have a justifiable taste for novel-writing, to while away the intervals of medical practice; and that he, if well-preserved and good-looking, even if encumbered with a pretty daughter herself marriageable, may win the superb and glorious woman before mentioned for a second wife. Both of these points the author establishes to his own satisfaction. There is enough material to make a very good story, but we do not think Dr. Hammond handles it with as much skill and deftness as might be woven into it. The style is slipshod and careless, and such as one might fancy would be the instinctive method of an author who had rattled off the matter at race-horse speed very much as a woman would reel off a skein of worsted. One or two unpleasant faults are specially noticeable in a minor way. One among them may be mentioned as a disposition to sneer at novelists, who, whatever their faults of conception as to the function of the novelist, rank deservedly high as master-artists in style and finish of method. The questionable taste of such criticism, under the circumstances, is very much such as would call forth condemnation for Howells or James if they had the audacity to practice medicine to the infinite peril of their fellow-beings, and then satirize a skilful and experienced physician whose ability was widely recognized. Ne sutor ultra crepidem, or, if he will insist, let not the shoemaker use his last to measure the art of Apelles or Praxiteles.

Mrs. Burton Harrison’s “Old-Fashioned Fairy Book” is a collection of fresh and charming fairy stories and middle-age myths happily adapted to the taste and comprehension of young people. This lady has discovered in the various examples of literary work, she has given the public, fine artistic taste and facility. The present little volume is a charming present for lads and lassies, and the stories told are not such as the youngster finds in the ordinary book of fairy stories. They are derived from out-of-the way sources, and though some of them are rather grim for young people, they are on the whole sufficiently healthy and cheerful for their purpose. The chief recommendation of these selections is that they do not belong to the class of hackneyed and conventional tales mostly utilized for fairy book-making. The illustrations by Miss Rosina Emmet are spirited; graceful and appropriate.

The last two novels mentioned in our list may be dismissed with a few words as belonging to the eminently proper and virtuous school of fiction, which demands that there shall be a certain fixed proportion of such haranguing as would be ordinarily heard in a Sunday-school, whatever other elements may be introduced to meet the tastes of the novel-reading class. The excellent moral advice so freely scattered throughout these novels we cordially commend as worthy to be pondered and inwardly digested, but probably the average novel-reader would wish for it in a different place. Yet there are novels and novels, just as there are people and people, and it may be that there is a public for just such productions as the above. It is with unqualified pleasure that we commend these two volumes, “White Feathers” and “Katherine,” as quite gorgeous specimens of bookbinding and cover designing in a cheap fashion.

• Egypt and Babylon. From Sacred and Profane Sources.

• By George Rawlinson, M.A.,

• Camden Professor of Ancient History, Oxford.

• New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

This contribution to ancient history is a useful companion to Prof. Sayce’s “Ancient Empires of the East,” recently published by the same house. It is the work of one of the most noted of English scholars, and he has brought all the latest researches to bear on the study of the two great empires of Egypt and Babylonia, with whom the Jewish people had most to do. The method of Prof. Rawlinson is to make the Biblical references to these two mighty nations the text or foundation of his studies; and then to turn on the somewhat obscure and contradictory accounts of the Sacred Records the fulness of light brought out of archæological and linguistic research. The result is very happy, and the Biblical student of the Old Testament will find in this book a guide of the greatest value in clearly grasping the accounts of the Biblical writers.

• The Hundred Greatest Men:

• Portraits of the Hundred Greatest Men in History,

• Reproduced from Fine and Rare Steel-Engravings, with

• General Introduction by Ralph Waldo Emerson;

• and to Book I. by Matthew Arnold;

• to Book II. by H. Taine;

• to Book III. by Prof. Max Müller and Ernest Renan;

• to Book IV. by President Noah Porter;

• to Book V. by Very Rev. Dean Stanley;

• to Book VI. by Prof. H. Helmholtz; to Book VII. by J. A. Froude;

• and to Book VIII. by Prof. John Fiske.

• New York: D. Appleton & Co.

The editor of this collection of pen portraits of the hundred greatest men, informs us that the project is one side of an attempt to view the history of the world as natural history. In this way he conceives biography as the physiology of history just as archæology is its anatomy. With this thought in mind Dr. William Wood has been for fifteen years a collector of engraved portraits and antiquities regarding them as historic documents. Out of this mass of material he has given us the illustrations of the book, which consist of the portraits of the great men, the primates of their race, while to illustrate the portraits we have short, and, it need hardly be said, meagre accounts of the men themselves, with a brief tabulation of their work, and a condensed estimate of their place in the world’s progress. The principal literary value of the book, we think, is to be found in the prefaces or introductions to each department, with the general introduction by Ralph Waldo Emerson. All of these are written in a scholarly and able style, and will be read with as much or even more interest than the biographical sketches themselves. After all, we fancy the value of the work to most readers will be accepted as pertaining to the portraits, which are reproduced in a very artistic manner from old and rare engravings. These are of great interest. In the biographical statements nothing but the barest outline, not quite as much, in fact, as may be found in our best cyclopædias, is attempted. The book is very handsomely printed and manufactured, and is one of the best specimens of book-making which we have recently seen.

• Eve’s Daughters; or, Common-Sense for Maid, Wife and Mother.

• By Marian Harland, author of “Common-Sense in the Household.”

• New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

The author of this book is widely known, and her words respected in a line of subjects peculiarly affecting the interests of her own sex. In the new volume under notice she talks familiarly to her sex about those matters where women need sound counsel more than elsewhere. It is in the relations of wife and mother that her advice is the most urgent and important. At a time when there is growing up among women of the better class such a cruelly perverse view of the duties and responsibility of their own sex, especially in relation to marriage and child-bearing, the words of a wise, earnest and thoughtful woman are peculiarly needed. Miss Harland speaks plainly, yet delicately, on such subjects, and if her injunctions could be widely heeded the world would be better off. It is a work to be specially and cordially recommended to young women everywhere.

• A Review of the Holy Bible, Containing the Old

• and New Testaments. By Edward B. Latch.

• Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co.

The author of this book, for we suppose he can be called an author who rearranges and classifies the text of the Bible with a view to bringing out better the inner meaning and purpose of the text, we are led to judge is not a theologian by profession. But this does not commend his work any the less. The unprofessional enthusiast, believing either that he has some inner illumination, or convinced that he is working on the lines of a finer and higher logic than is given to other men, is well justified in encroaching on a field which by ordinary consent is given up to professional scholars. Mr. Latch is evidently profoundly sure that he has found esoteric meanings in the great Biblical cryptogram, which reveal themselves clearly once the clew is given. The clew in this case is a study of the Bible, taking the interpretations of St. Paul as a starting-point and assuming a number of bases, according to which these interpretations are classed. The whole attempt is curious and interesting, and is likely to prove edifying to students of the Sacred Scriptures. Mr. Latch works out a curious historic psychology in the sacred records, and his comments and glosses are highly ingenious if not convincing. Of one thing we are sure. The author is convinced that his mission is to make the purpose of the Bible clearer, more consecutive and conclusive for the theology worked out of it by that great codifier and lawgiver of Christian theology, St. Paul. This modern coadjutor of the great apostle is saturated with the Pauline theology, and yet some of his views are fresh and original, though never at variance with those of his master, from whom he drinks at the fountainhead. The quaint and ingenious interpretations which we find scattered through these pages will repay reading, even when we think his glosses forced and eccentric. To find a man in this age of the world, after the raging of eighteen hundred years of exhaustive religious and dogmatic controversy, who fancies that he has something new and startling to say on the problems propounded in the Bible, is a refreshing fact which should not go without brief comment.

• The Elements of Moral Science, Theoretical and Practical.

• By Noah Porter, D.D., LL.D., President of Yale College.

• New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

The remarkable President of Yale College, whose name is treasured up in the hearts of thousands of the alumni of Yale as one of the wisest, most genial, and lovable of the many distinguished instructors associated with the history of the college, gives us in this study of ethics the ripe and mellowed fruit of his thought and work. For many years President Porter was the professor of mental and moral philosophy before he assumed the headship of the college. The substance of the book before us was originally given in the shape of lectures before the senior classes. We are told that the book is not designed for a scientific treatise, but to meet the wants of those students and readers who, though somewhat mature in their philosophical thinking and disciplined in their mental habits, still require expanded definitions and abundant illustrations involving more or less of repetition. Dr. Porter has in his own line of investigation great clearness of statement, and the power, perhaps growing out of the needs of the class-room, of familiarizing and simplifying abstruse reasonings. We find this strikingly illustrated in the book before us. It is masterly in its lucidity of reasoning, and in its applications often so practical as to make us feel that the object of the author is not merely to lay bare the scientific theory of ethics, but to bring its principles home to the heart and sympathy of his readers. As a dialectical exposition the cut-and-dried philosopher who revels in the abstract formulas of Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer and others may find occasion to criticise Dr. Porter’s methods. But to the general reader the speculations of Dr. Porter will prove none the less interesting because he brings them down to the sympathies and interests of men.

FOREIGN LITERARY NOTES

Dr. Stratmann, the compiler of the excellent “Dictionary of the Old English Language,” has died at Cologne at the age of sixty-two.

The engagement is announced of Mr. G. E. Buckle, the editor of the Times, to Miss Alice Payn, the third daughter of the distinguished novelist and editor of the Cornhill Magazine.

There is the unusual number of three vacancies at this moment in the ranks of the French “Immortals.” Two of the seats, however, are as good as filled by M. Joseph Bertrand and M. Victor Duruy. For the third there are several candidates, of whom M. Ludovic Halévy is first favorite. It was believed that M. Alphonse Daudet was standing, but he has authorized the Figaro to say that he never has offered himself, and never will offer himself to the Academy.

A new novel by Georg Ebers, upon which he has been at work for two years, is to be published at Christmas. The subject is taken from the last struggles of Paganism against Christendom, and the scene is laid in Egypt.

The new and enlarged edition (the third) of Hermann Grimm’s “Essays,” includes articles on Lord Byron and Leigh Hunt, Frederick the Great and Macaulay, and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Henrik Ibsen’s “Vildanden” to which all Scandinavia has been looking forward for months past, proves on the whole a disappointment to his admirers. It is a five-act social satire, full of strong scenes and pregnant sayings, and containing at least two masterly characters; but there is no shirking the fact that as a drama it is ill-digested and formless. Nor is the apologue of “The Wild Duck,” from which it takes its name, by any means so luminous or of such general application as is commonly the case with this great satirist’s inventions. It will certainly not add to the fame of the author of “A Doll’s House” and “Ghosts.” Björnsen, too, in his new novel, “Det Flager,” is not at his best. It is an earnest and well-meant protest against false delicacy in education; but unfortunately it proves its author to be distinctly deficient in true delicacy. The youngest of the three great Norwegian poets, Alexander Kielland, has not yet issued his promised novel “Fortuna,” but it is to be hoped that he may redeem the credit of a season which has as yet proved by no means the annus mirabilis that was anticipated.