Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 22, August, 1878

Bits of Travel at Home. By H. H. Boston: Roberts Brothers

The author's present home we should incline to fix in Colorado, but she includes New England and California in her travels, and finds something beautiful to describe wherever she goes within those broad limits. The Yosemite, the Big Trees, the Mormons, the Chinese, the snow-sheds, drawing-room cars, agates, prairie-and mountain-flowers, New Hampshire life and scenery, and an infinity of like material, are readably, and not incongruously, presented in her little book. Population is so sparse and Nature so redundant in the scene of most of her descriptions as to render them sometimes a little lifeless, and oblige her to depend too solely upon her powers of landscape painting with the pen. We miss the human element, as we do in the vast, however luxuriant, pictures of Bierstadt and Moran—artists who preceded her on the same sketching-ground. Not that she fails to make the most of what Nature places before her. Rather, she makes too much of it, and lavishes whole pages on truthful, minute and vivid, but bewildering, detail of mountain, river, rock, plain, plants and sea. She is enraptured, for example, with Lake Tahoe and with the wild flowers of California and Colorado, and enables us to understand why she is so; but the raptures are not shared by the reader, partly for the very reason that they are so elaborately explained. Printer's ink, when used as a pigment or pencil, should be used sparingly, with a few, sharp, clear, bold touches, and without painful finish or niggling. What amplification would not weaken instead of heightening the effect of "the copse-wood gray that waved and wept on Loch Achray"? Breadth, distance and atmosphere are obscured by H. H.'s carefully itemized foregrounds. But the itemizing is done admirably and con amore by one who is a botanist, a poet and an observer. The Great Desert is no desert to her: no square foot of it is barren. Even the sage-brush has a charm, if only from its dim likeness to a miniature olive tree, both being glaucous and hoary. An oasis of irrigated clover on Humboldt River is made a theme for an idyl. The vast rocks, when bare even of moss, are at least rich and various in tint and form, and have plenty of meaning to her.

A traveller between Omaha and San Francisco might well carry this pocket volume as a lorgnette. It will show him what he might otherwise miss, and make more visible to him what he sees. It belongs to a high class of railroad literature, and is in style and matter so full of movement as to suggest the railway to readers by the fireside.

Putnam's Art Handbooks. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons

This series of manuals for beginners with pencil and palette will include five small books. The two before us treat of "Landscape Painting" and "Sketching from Nature." Both are old acquaintances, reprinted respectively from the thirty-fourth and thirty-eighth London editions. When they first came under our eye, more years ago than we need state, they bore the imprint of a London firm of color-dealers, and were loaded down with advertisements and less direct recommendations of their wares to an extent that rather obscured the valuable and interesting part of the publications. This rubbish has been swept away in the American edition, so that the tyro can get at what he needs to know more readily, and use it with more confidence, than when he was puzzled to distinguish between solid instruction and hollow puffery. The notes added by the American editor are very scant, and yet so sensible as to enhance one's regret at their paucity and meagreness. Directions for the use of pigments and vehicles well enough adapted for the English climate may require modification for ours. Moreover, British artists have not unfrequently, in their methods, shown themselves too prone to sacrifice durability to immediate effect. The list of colors has, too, been enriched by some accessions within the past third of a century which demand mention. Such points should be considered in a new edition of the brochure on landscape painting. Generally speaking, it is a good guide, and may safely be placed in the hands of the young colorist.

The sketcher from Nature will find in the other a succinct set of rules clearly stated. He will not need much else if he has a good hand and eye, and the industry and perseverance to use them. He has first to render objects and scenes by simple lines; and to assist him in that the elementary laws of perspective are here laid before him. Some mechanical appliances, such as a small frame that may be carried in the pocket, divided by equidistant wires, vertical and horizontal, and serving, when held before the eye, to fix the relative situation of points in the view, we do not find alluded to. Perhaps they are as well let alone, as corks have been abandoned in the swimming-school.

When the series is completed the whole may well be bound together. Smaller type, thinner paper and less margin would make a book readily portable, containing all that is indispensable to the student, and a good deal besides that the maturer artist will be none the worse for being reminded of. One who has attained some little facility with the pencil might adopt it as a sufficient mentor in the field or in the studio, and accept its guidance in a path to be perfected by his own powers, according to their measure, toward such pleasure, elevation of taste or fortune as art offers. Studies abound everywhere. The ruins, arched bridges and picturesque dwellings and other erections of Europe are but slenderly to be regretted by the American beginner. He has no lack of clouds, rocks, trees, houses, etc., embracing within their contours every possible line and shade. He may even learn precision of line and tint better than his Transatlantic brother, who is apt to be tempted into carelessness by the ragged variety and indecision of the objects offered by his surroundings and nearly unknown here. The broken and wandering touch suggested by the jagged stones of a crumbling castle is not that which one should begin by cultivating. Breadth and firmness in form, color and chiaroscuro are attainments to be first held in view, and never to be lost sight of.

We have often wondered that the technique of art should have so meagre a literature. Its philosophy and poetry have employed many pens, and been exhaustively analyzed, but this has been mostly the work of outsiders—of critics devoid even of the qualification laid down by Disraeli of having failed in the practical exploitation of the field they discuss, but for all that often powerful critics. Artists have rarely been able to paint their pictures in black and white and run them through the press. They cannot so display the infinite gradations that grow upon their canvas, nor trace in words the subtle principles which have presided at the birth of their works and of every part of them. General rules they can lay down, as poets can the elements of their own trade; but these rules are at the command of the veriest daub or rhymester; the manifold development of them to results almost divine remaining, even to those who achieve it in either walk, evasive and untraceable. The masters of verse and art have mapped out for us none of their secrets. The deductions we make from their practice are our deductions, not theirs. Raffaelle, if questioned, could only point to his palette spread with the common colors, and Homer had not even pen and ink. Our versifiers are provided with admirable paper and gold pens, and our artists, young and old, with the colors Elliott once told an inquirer he made his marvellous flesh-tints with—red, blue and yellow.

Adventures of a Consul Abroad. By Luigi Monti. Boston: Lee & Shepard

This is a didactic or illustrative story, with a moral we find thus laid down on the last page: "Our government sends men abroad who, after hard labor and long experience, learn a complicated, delicate and responsible profession; and no sooner have they learned it, and are able to perform creditably to themselves and the government they represent all its intricate duties, than they are recalled and replaced by inexperienced men, who have to go through the same ordeal, and never stay long enough to be of real service to their country."

The gentleman upon whose shadowy shoulders is placed the heavy task of pointing this dictum is Samuel Sampleton, Esq., teacher of a private seminary on Cape Cod, who gets tired of the young idea and seeks more profitable and expanded fields of labor. He has not, at the outset, the slightest preparation for the duties of the position—that of United States consul at Verdecuerno (a translation of Palermo into "Greenhorn")—or even knowledge of what they are. His utter lack of information in the premises is indeed quite exceptional, especially in a New England teacher. We should have expected an average lad of fourteen in any part of the Union to have suspected that a consul would need some acquaintance with the language of the people among whom he was stationed, if not some slight notion of the general routine and purposes of the office. Mr. Sampleton, however, is not lacking in shrewdness and energy, and sets to work manfully, despite the difficulties of his situation, general and special. After several trying years, the comical tribulations of which are graphically set forth, he is just beginning to feel himself at home when he is summarily placed there in another sense by recall. He comes back as poor as he went, save in experience and the languages, and resumes the ferule with the determination not again to abandon it for the pen of the public employé.

It is chiefly to the social side of consular life that Mr. Monti introduces us, and most of the scenes belong to that aspect. The salary, no longer eked out by fees and other perquisites, is much inferior to the emoluments of other consuls at the same port, and the American representative is consequently entirely outshone by his colleagues of other nationalities. A considerable degree of diplomatic style is expected from the corps, and kept up by all but himself. In dinners, equipages, buttons and gold lace, and display of every kind, not merely France, England and Russia, but Denmark and Turkey, leave him deep in the shade. They have consular residences, large offices and reading-rooms, with secretaries, interpreters and the other paraphernalia of a small embassy, while Jonathan nests, with his wife, on the third or fourth flat of a suburban rookery, and uses his dining-room for an office. The sea-captains grumble at having to seek him in such a burrow, and being accorded nothing when they get there beyond the barest official action. He cannot interchange courtesies with the magnates of the city, and thus places himself and the interests of his country, so far as that often potent means of influence goes, at a great disadvantage. A pompous commodore brings an American squadron into port, and is ineffably disgusted at finding his consul utterly unable to do the honors or in any way assist the cruise.

Our author holds that the compensation of these mercantile and quasi-diplomatic agents ought to be largely increased, it being now inadequate as measured either by their labor and responsibility or by the allowances made by other nations, our commercial rivals. Certainly, additional pay in any reasonable proportion would be but a trifle in comparison with the result should it promote the rise of our marine from its present unprecedented state of depression. If consuls will create, or recreate, shipping, and reintroduce the American flag to the numerous foreign ports to which it is becoming each year more and more a stranger, let us by all means have them everywhere and at liberal salaries, with quant. suff. of clerks, assistants, flunkeys, dress-suits for dinner-parties and court-suits for state receptions, and all the other necessaries of an efficient consulate, the want whereof so vexed the soul of Mr. Sampleton. And then let us make fixtures of these gentlemen, with good behavior for their tenure of office, and in the selection of them endeavor to apply abroad the test it seems next to impossible to adhere to at home—honesty, capacity and fidelity.