Imagens das páginas
PDF
ePub

[ocr errors]

his story to an exiled Russian Jew, whose acquaintance he made shortly after the exile landed in America. He has gone also to published records of Russian treatment of Jews, and has endeavored to make his tale a consistent narrative of the fortunes of a Jew in Russia from boyhood to manhood. He shows skill in the handling of his material, and, though moved by the incidents which he narrates, does not lose his selfcontrol as a writer. - Ivan the Fool, A Lost Opportunity, and Polikushka, by Count Leo Tolstoy. (Webster.) A small volume of three tales; the first setting forth the author's communistic ideas, the second a picture of peasant life, the third the story of the servant of a nobleman. · The Man from Nowhere, by Flora Haines Loughead. (C. A. Murdock & Co., San Francisco.) Mrs. Loughead is trying an interesting experiment in publishing single-number stories, which one would naturally expect to find in magazines, separately in a monthly series which she entitles The Gold Dust Series. This little tale would not be overlooked if it appeared in a magazine. Holiday Stories, by Stephen Fiske. (B. R. Tucker, Boston.) Nine short stories in a paper cover. They are lively trifles. Thaïs, by Anatole France. Translated by A. D. Hall. (Nile C. Smith Publishing Co., Chicago.) We have already noticed this book in its original dress. We cannot say that the English adds any charm to the work. - Tales of Three Centuries, by Michael Zagoskin. Translated from the Russian by Jeremiah Curtin. (Little, Brown & Co.) Mr. Curtin in his interesting and helpful Introduction, which the reader may take up at the end as well as at the beginning with profit, relates with fine power some of his own Russian experiences. The tales impress one by the skill with which the English language has been employed in rendering what is so foreign in form as the Russian. There is a singular chatter, which falls on the ear like an imperfectly understood speech, very common in Russian tales, and seen at its extreme in this book. The stories, if one can penetrate the foreign skin, will be found interesting, though hardly absorbing. - Ryle's Open Gate, by Susan Teackle Moore. (Houghton.) A lightly connected series of sketches portraying life and characteristics in an obscure Long Island village, where native and exotic life go on

side by side. The author has both a fine sense of humor and, what often goes with this, a generous sympathy, so that in the very informal pictures of what she sees there is something more than cleverness at work; there is a genuine humanism. One readily accepts the temper in which the book is written, and recognizes the good humor with which these little studies in life are dashed off. The demands made by the reader when he drops into the book are easily met, and he is rather satisfied with what he gets than made to pursue the writer with restless importunity for something greater, more ambitious. A sketch in the Ideal, a Romance. (Lippincott.) The sketch is so faint that the reader has some difficulty in making out the outline, and when he has found the story he has lost his interest. The materials for a tragedy are used in making a sentimental reverie. Recent books in paper are: The Anarchists, a Picture of Civilization at the Close of the Nineteenth Century, by John Henry Mackay, with a Portrait of the Author and a Study of his Works, by Gabriele Reuter,

-

[ocr errors]

translated from the German by George Schumm (B. R. Tucker, Boston); Morphine, a Tale of the Present Day, by Dubut De Laforest (the Waverly Co., New York); Evelyn's Career, by the Author of My Wife's Niece (Harpers).

Books for Young People. Left to Themselves, being the Ordeal of Philip and Gerald, by Edward Irenæus Stevenson. (Hunt & Eaton, New York.) Mr. Stevenson, in a brief preface, pleads for a closer attention to character in books for the young. The preface reads a little oddly when taken in connection with a story which appeals almost wholly to love of excitement. A boat race, an attempt at kidnapping, a steamboat explosion, a shipwreck, life on an apparently deserted island, the discovery of a forger, these and incidents like these do not preclude appeals to the reason and to students of character, but we are bound to say that we do not believe the young readers of this book will be set to thinking because of it. It will stir them, as an involved story of adventure easily may stir them, but the hero will appear as the stuff of which heroes in such adventures usually are made. — The Chase of the Meteor, and Other Stories, by Edwin Lassetter Bynner. (Little, Brown & Co.) A collec

tion of eleven lively stories. The author tries direct narrative, nonsense, and fancy by turn. He is possibly a little too afraid of being dull. Mr. Richard Harding Davis in his Stories for Boys (Scribners) displays much the same spirit as in his stories for older readers; the difference lies in the choice of subjects, which for the most part have to do with boy life, and in a looser structure, as if he felt that too much art might weaken the force of his narrative. There is a burly good nature in the feeling, a vim, an almost headlong eagerness, which ought to endear these stories to the hearts of youngsters. Nor does the author mistake mere muscular energy for manliness, but shows in many delicate ways how closely allied are bravery and tenderness. — A New Mexico David, and Other Stories and Sketches of the Southwest, by Charles F. Lummis. (Scribners.) Nearly a score of short sketches of character and adventure, in which Pueblo Indians, throwing the lasso, rounding up, New Mexican games, and other lively frontier subjects are treated in an offhand, friendly, and attractive manner by one who draws upon his own experience and observation, not upon a chance visit, but in several years of residence. - American Football, by Walter Camp. (Harpers.) Mr. Camp has written, and is still writing, a good deal on this subject. Perhaps this may explain why the little book halts between the two courses of a book for experts and a book for on-lookers. Yet each class will find something of interest in it, and the portraits of thirty-one heroes of the field will be scanned attentively by young America. It will be noticed that these portraits are sometimes of the head, never of the toe exclusively, and more often of the whole figure; this proportion seems to be correct. The volume of St. Nicholas for 1891 is broken into two bound parts. (The Century Co.) It may be said of this magazine in general that it aims at breaking down the distinction between literature for the young and literature for maturer readers by its appeal to a literary and artistic sense. - Harper's Young People for 1891 (Harpers) suggests the difference between weekly and monthly publication in a greater number of short papers. The size of the page also permits a greater breadth of illus tration. This weekly has a sturdy, matterof-fact character about it which commends

itself to one who believes that books for the young should be temporary affairs, used up in youth.

Literature and Criticism. Dr. Henry Van Dyke has brought out a second edition of The Poetry of Tennyson (Scribners), in which, besides other revision, he includes two new chapters: Fruit from an Old Tree, in which he treats of Tennyson's latest poems, and On the Study of Tennyson.

Messrs. A. C. McClurg & Co., of Chicago, have been making some noticeably attractive editions of books which have stood the test of time. Among them are Scott's The Lady of the Lake and Byron's Childe Harold. The editor has sought to reproduce the author's work without intruding his own notes or criticism. Thus he does a service to students by giving Byron's preface to the first and second cantos, and his dedicatory letter. Another work of great interest to readers who remember the furore produced by it forty years ago is Charles Auchester, by Elizabeth Sheppard. This has been reproduced in two neat volumes, with an introduction and notes by that competent musical critic, Mr. George P. Upton. For it is as a musical novel that the book had such vogue, and the slight knowledge which people had of the author intensified the interest; for Miss Sheppard was in her sixteenth year when she completed this romance. She died young, having written but one other novel, Counterparts. Two contributions from her pen also appeared in The Atlantic. The book should be read by the young, though we sometimes fear that the young of this day have been so inoculated with the spirit of criticism that they are not quite as receptive of enthusiastic crudities as their parents and grandparents were. — The publication of the Latest Literary Essays and Addresses of James Russell Lowell (Houghton) deepens one's sense of the loss which American letters has sustained in Mr. Lowell's death; for in these papers, written for the most part after the author's release from diplomatic duties, there is such mellowness of expression, such ripeness of thought, and so genuine a sympathy with current movements that there is no hint of decadence of power, and one can scarcely help thinking, All this and more we might have enjoyed for half a score of years longer. The third volume of Mr. Crump's edition of Landor's Im

aginary Conversations (Macmillan) has the additional attraction of an engraving of Bewick's portrait of Landor, which gives with extraordinary force the viciousness of Landor's temper. The dialogues of Sovereigns and Statesmen are completed, and

the series of dialogues of Literary Men is begun. As this portion includes Southey and Porson and Johnson and Horne Tooke, the reader has a good opportunity of noting Landor's caprices and his sudden keen literary perceptions.

Sweets for

THE CONTRIBUTORS' CLUB.

HEAVEN has blessed me with a Scholars. friend, an honest, plodding Hellenophile, who digs, as Adam may be supposed to have done, for love of it. When I heard from him, last summer, he was where he intends to spend the rest of his life: not in his native Brattleboro, but in the Archipelago. Never was a man deeper in his vocation. His talk is all, like the gentle king's,

"of graves, of worms and epitaphs," although he was ever a most cheerful wight. His spade and his peering spectacles have made close acquaintance with the undersurface of Greece, and with the Grecianized borders of Asia and Africa. The results seem to me already very considerable. I am proud to be the first to print several brief verses, unknown to Cephalas in his convent, which Folsom has found, sometimes in absolute preservation, on burial stones and urns of the first and second centuries before Christ. So jealous has he grown since he set out upon his archæological travels (patient journeys, doubling and crossing on themselves, within a radius of less than seven hundred miles) that I doubt whether he intends, at any time, to give these precious fragments, in their original state, to the public. As poems, he hardly knows what value to put upon them; as relics of a grand civilization, he is their confirmed worshiper. But Folsom has too cautious a mind to bring forth a book on the subject; and he has, besides, the Horatian dread: he would not wish to be "in every gentleman's library." Meanwhile, it was easy for me to persuade him to let me use a few of the inscriptions in a magazine which he is still disposed to read. I have them before me, copied on gray paper, in his own crabbed hand which has changed not at all since we were boys together in

old S's hated schoolroom; and the letter containing them was registered, at my request, at the post office in Rhodes: so that the whole thing must have seemed to him modern and irreverent enough. With great diffidence, and conscious that I am not myself, like Mr. Andrew Laug, a poet of the winning Alexandrian breed, I submit the following close translations of Folsom's waifs and strays. They begin with three epitaphs, over which Professor W—— and I have made many blind and daring guesses, and which are enough like Meleager's affectionate accents to "tease us out of thought.” The third, moreover, is interesting as corroborated evidence of the suspicion of immortality among the "poor heathen.”

"Ere the Ferryman from the coast of spirits
Turn the diligent oar that brought thee thither,
Soul, remember; and leave a kiss upon it
For thy desolate father, for thy sister,
Whichsoever be first to cross hereafter."

"Upon thy level tomb till windy winter dawn, The fallen leaves delay;

But plain and pure their trace is, when themselves are torn From delicate frost away.

"As here to transient frost the absent leaf is, such Thou wert and art to me;

So on my passing life is thy long-passed touch, O dear Alcithoë!"

"Jaffa ended, Cos begun

Thee, Aristeus; thou wert one
Fit to trample out the sun :
Who shall think thine ardors are
But a cinder in a jar ? "

The lines on a victor in the foot races I please myself by attributing to Leonidas of Tarentum. Folsom, on the other hand, thinks it perfectly blasphemous to speculate on the authorship of such gifts of the gods. This is as happy-hearted a funeral song as any that has come down to us :

"Here lies one in the earth who scarce of the earth was moulded;

Wise Ethalides' son, himself no lover of study, Cnopus, asleep, indoors, the young invincible runner. They from the cliff footpath that see on the grave we made him,

Tameless, slant in the wind, the bare, the beautiful iris, Stop short, full of delight, and shout forth, See, it is Cnopus

Runs, with white throat forward, over the sands to Chalcis!"""

It is to be observed how vaingloriously the unknown author gets in his slap at Æthalides, a kind, slow, round-shouldered old fellow, no doubt, like Folsom, for all the world. My best Grecian, Professor W—, is greatly taken with what some poet (could it be Palladas?) has to say of a young child. The epitaph has much of the early Spartan spirit :·

"I laid the strewings, sweetest, on thine urn;
I lowered the torch, I poured the cup to Dis.
Now hushaby, my little child, and learn
Long sleep how good it is.

"In vain thy mother prays, wayfaring hence,
Peace to her heart, where only heartaches dwell;
But thou more blest, O wild intelligence!
Forget her, and farewell."

And here again, I say to myself, is Callimachus, lover of little things perfected with large meanings. It is a pity that this flute-sigh should not be in the Anthology, as indeed it may have been, long ago :

"Light thou hast of the moon,

Shade of the dammar-pine,

Here on thy hillside bed:

Fair befall thee, O fair

Lily of womanhood,

Patient long, and at last
Happier; ah, Blæsilla!"

Two more end the list, the former in sapphics :

"Hail, and be of comfort, thou pious Xeno,
Late the urn of many a kinsman wreathing;
On thine own shall even the stranger offer
Plentiful myrtle."

"Me, deep-tressed meadows, take to your loyal keeping,

Hard by the swish of sickles ever in Aulon sleeping, Philophron, old and tired, and glad to be done with reaping."

The Aulon mentioned, Folsom tells me, is not Aulon at the head of the Illyrian bay, but the Aulon of the peninsula, much farther south, on the same west coast. The urn of Aristeus was discovered under a stall outside Alexandria itself, and that of Xeno, who seems to have been a survivor of battles or some other public sorrow, is judged

to belong to the third rather than to the second century. Some of the inscriptions were pieced together with extreme difficulty. A few, such as that of a certain Agathon, a portion of whose princely tomb lay flat on the beach under the crags of Paros, were wholly undecipherable; and I will try to think, therefore, that they do not rank with the eight I have given, full of the semi-tropic fragrance of dying Greece. We owe this little quarry of a twenty years' hunt to a Vermont Yankee; to no expedition other than Folsom's love and zeal. La science cherche; l'amour a trouvé.

Friendship's I should like to lay before the Question. members of the Club, who certainly may be said to belong to the thoughtful and thinking men and women of our land, a question that has puzzled me long and sorely.

Is it possible for us, in love or friendship, to give ourselves too much, or to give too much of ourselves, whichever form you prefer, especially where the other person is less responsive, either from greater natural reserve, or less depth and strength of feeling? Too much of our hearts and souls, I mean; for I do not refer to the kind of affection that shows itself in any personal demonstrativeness, but to that spiritual love only, which can and does exist very strongly, even between people who rarely, if ever, meet face to face. Must we always jealously reserve something, always hold Self so precious, the Self that all our own noblest instincts, as well as all the teachings of the Christian religion, bid us "to put behind us,” — that we never dare, freely and without stint, to give it all? Personally I am greatly inclined to agree with the noble words of a friend, who says: "Friendship, certainly, is a gift of God. And our reserves upon the subject, our fears as well, lest we may abandon ourselves too much to the influence of our friends, belong too much to the materialism in which we live." But I have another friend, - a woman no longer young in years, though very much so in feeling, impulsive, intense, and imaginative, and something of a poet, who has suffered keenly from unreserved abandonment of self all her life. She has had various friendships, to which she, on her side, brought all the passionate fervor of her nature; and in all these she says she knows she has "given

herself too much," for sooner or later she has invariably come to grief in them all. But there seems no remedy for it, for "thus was she made." She cannot do anything by halves. If she gives her soul at all, she gives it wholly.

Now is there in this any sin against the Holy Ghost, that must be punished by "fierce pangs of fire"? Will some one kindly offer a solution of the problem ?

- If you have a large, perhaps Love me, hate my Enemies. even if you have only a small circle of friends, that circle includes persons at variance with one another. In such cases nothing is commoner than that they should expect you to espouse their quarrel, or at least to disown their adversary. Friends' friends are not usually found very prepossessing, because our acquaintance with them does not arise spontaneously; and A does not resent it if you decline to adopt his favorites B, C, D, but he does resent your continuance of friendship with X, Y, Z, after they have become his enemies.

Now is not this a little unreasonable? If I value the friendship both of A and X, why should I renounce either of them? Of course, if I clearly see that one of them has acted unhandsomely, I remonstrate with him, and, if remonstrance is ineffectual, I may feel it a duty to "cut" him, on account of the light thrown by the quarrel on his real character; but in the vast majority of cases I either see fault on both sides, or cannot profess to judge the right and wrong of the dispute. I cannot, it may be, help siding mentally with one or the other, or at least cannot help thinking that one is more to blame than the other; but why should I mix myself up in the quarrel? No doubt it is disagreeable to have a name tabooed in conversation; no doubt it would be better that my friends should be regarded by you with favor or indifference; but this is an impracticable ideal, and we must take the world as we find it. It is one thing, moreover, to begin an intimacy with your enemy; it is quite another thing to retain the friendship of a man who has become your enemy, but whom I continue to respect. If you expect me to turn against your enemy, you may expect me, on your changing your mind, to come back to him, and may reproach me with having indorsed or encouraged your

mistake. You and he may even be reconciled at my expense. It is certainly awkward to know two persons who may chance to call on me simultaneously; but the servant may be instructed to ask one to wait till the other has left, and I can take care never to invite them together. What would be most unwise would be to attempt to reconcile them. This should never be done unasked, and should seldom be done even if one of the adversaries requests it.

The late W. E. Forster, who ruled Ireland under Mr. Gladstone in 1880, had been friendly, in the pre-Parnellite days, with Mr. Justin McCarthy as a journalist. When the latter suddenly entered Parliament as Parnell's lieutenant, Forster "cut" him. Now both were on visiting terms with a lady, and at her receptions they sometimes met. She was anxious that they should be reconciled, and essayed to introduce them to each other. They bowed stiffly, but did not exchange a word. Sometimes the lady, seated between them and talked to by both simultaneously, found the situation embarrassing; but she had shown want of tact in trying to reconcile them. Liking both, regretting their estrangement, mentally blaming Forster, she should have resigned herself to facts. It would have been hard, if Forster had called upon her, to choose between his friendship and Mr. McCarthy's. Although he did not go this length, he probably felt a little annoyed at her evident opinion that he was in the wrong. Curiously enough, Mr. McCarthy ended by being the opponent, or at least the rival, of the very man his intimacy with whom had alienated Forster. Mr. Gladstone has notoriously lost many of his oldest friends by his alliance with the Home Rulers. Happy the country where political differences are not so heated as to sever friendships. In any war, a neutral is almost sure to displease the belligerents, so difficult is it to hold the scales of neutrality even. In the wars of the French Revolution, America, though anxious to hold aloof, was on the verge of war with France, and was forced into war with England. In our civil war, England disappointed both North and South. If England and Russia, the whale and the elephant, as Bismarck called them, should ever fall out, the United States would remain the friend of both; yet both would perhaps feel irritation at the continued

« AnteriorContinuar »