NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
. 
 
 NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 With a ^Preface by PIERRE DE CHAIGNON LA ROSE 
 
 A Series of Twenty-five Papers Hith 
 erto Unpublished in Book Form 
 
 DUNSTER HOUSE 
 
 Cambridge, <3&assachusetts 
 MDCCCCXXI 
 

 Copyright, 1921, by 
 DUNSTER HOUSE BOOKSHOP 
 
 THK UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U. S. A. 
 
Preface 
 
 youthful Henry James, a few months 
 beyond the age of twenty-one, began his 
 literary career as critic, in The North American 
 Review of October, 1864, with an unsigned review 
 of Nassau W. Senior s "Essays on Fiction." In 
 the present volume the editor has collected all of 
 James s printed writings during the first three 
 calendar years of his apprenticeship (1864, 1865, 
 and 1866), with the exception of six papers which 
 have already appeared in "book form." Of these 
 six, two are stories: "A Landscape Painter" (The 
 Atlantic Monthly, February, 1866) and "A Day 
 of Days" (The Galaxy, June 15, 1866). Both 
 were reprinted by Henry James himself in his col 
 lection of tales called "Stories Revived" (1865). f 
 The other four are unsigned book-reviews and 
 may be found in Mr. Le Roy Phillips s volume 
 of "Views and Reviews" (1908). These are 
 "Matthew Arnold s Essays" (from The North 
 American Review, July, 1865), "Mr. Walt Whit 
 man" (from The Nation, November 16, 1865), 
 "The Limitations of Dickens" (from The Nation, 
 December 21, 1865), and "The Novels of George 
 Eliot" (from The Atlantic Monthly, October, 1866). 
 The re-publication of the twenty-five papers 
 
 
 
PREFACE 
 
 contained in this volume, all unsigned book- 
 reviews from either The North American Review 
 or The Nation^ is an attempt, not at predatory 
 "book-making" in the manner of the egregious 
 Mr. Wise or Mr. Shorter for the sake of unre 
 strained "collectors," but at presenting to the 
 many lovers of Henry James, in a worthy form, a 
 series of his writings hitherto comparatively in 
 accessible which may fairly be considered to con 
 stitute his literary journal his reading from day 
 to day and his passing but considered critical 
 reactions thereon. 
 
 To reprint all the forgotten and unsigned jour 
 nalistic scraps of an eminent author, fleeting 
 papers which he himself refrained from reordering 
 and reissuing, is often to do his memory a cruel 
 disservice. For many of the most eminent men 
 of letters have been obliged, especially in youth, 
 to stoop to "pot-boiling," and many under the 
 shelter of anonymity have lapsed into the common 
 frailty of haste and slovenliness. The average 
 "gentleman s library" is freighted with vast, poly- 
 teuchal, "definitive" editions of popular great 
 authors which, to a literary taste as sensitive, let 
 us say, as James s, would seem very largely im 
 pressive monuments to national deforestation 
 rather than to a discriminating national literacy. 
 But in the case of Henry James, fortunately or 
 otherwise, we shall, I feel, be spared a completely 
 "definitive" edition. A few devout Jacobites, the 
 editor included, will regret this; but the reason is 
 
 vi 
 
PREFACE 
 
 not far to seek. James, despite his present post 
 humous eminence, was never a "popular" author; 
 and even the most devout Jacobite must admit, 
 albeit with serene tranquillity, that he was not a 
 "great" one. This is not quite the place to enter 
 upon a discussion of fundamentals. I may be 
 permitted to waive the point and aver merely, to 
 the common agreement, that his work was en 
 dowed with a distinction and a personal charm 
 which, to ears attuned to his peculiar appeal, will 
 always be unrivalled. He was decidedly what he 
 himself would have called a "special case." Even 
 his youthful journalistic work will at once strike 
 his accustomed readers as redolent of his personal 
 "note." It was not "pot-boiling," as he was 
 never quite under the economic necessity which 
 resorts to that; and this being so, it could not be, 
 with his temperament, either hasty or slovenly, 
 however impenetrably anonymous. One may ac 
 quit oneself, therefore, of any disservice to his 
 fine memory in collecting his early papers to give 
 them out to his friends and lovers. One may 
 even go to the lengths he prescribed in the case 
 of Geoffrey Aspern, if in so doing one, as it were, 
 draws from an old cabinet, in this instance un 
 locked, a forgotten daguerreotype of the 6o s, a 
 portrait for which he knowingly sat and himself 
 autographed eager, fresh, and charming. 
 
 But before analysing the revealing young por 
 trait which these papers present, it will be well to 
 consider for a moment the general literary task 
 
 vii 
 
PREFACE 
 
 with which they concern themselves that of 
 "book-reviewing." Nowadays, unfortunately, in 
 America at least, one must discriminate between 
 the art of literary criticism and the trade of book- 
 reviewing. Originally one and the same thing, 
 to-day, thanks to a commercialized press and a 
 generation of publishers who regard their opera 
 tions chiefly as a species of speculative manufac 
 turing, in the United States what was once the 
 art of reviewing has sunk to a level of degrada 
 tion where it either contents itself with the dullest 
 of pedestrian comment or is indistinguishable 
 from the publisher s unenlightened paid adver 
 tisement. In general, it is so abysmally and 
 notoriously beneath contempt that it is scarcely 
 worth while to mention the fact. It is, however, 
 worth while, I think, to point out that half a 
 century ago the case was quite different, that re 
 viewing was among us by no means contemptible,- 
 and that not the least promising among our anony 
 mous critics was a youth of twenty-one who 
 quickly assumed an easy and distinguished pos 
 ture among his elders in The North American 
 Review. In the beginning, Henry James s critical 
 performances were not, of course, "first-rate," 
 his youth, if nothing else, would militate against 
 that. I am willing, reluctantly, to admit that, to 
 the end, he was not a "great" critic: his steady 
 preoccupation with problems of technique ren 
 dered that ultimate philosophical eminence unat 
 tainable (a constant, tragic paradox in all art). 
 
 viiii 
 
PREFACE 
 
 But even at the beginning his work was informed 
 with distinction, distinction of thought and of 
 expression. If one feels that he is occasionally 
 ineffectual, because he was groping for a literary 
 "form" which his youth had not yet achieved, 
 one is never unaware of the charm with which his 
 groping naturally invests itself. And so, if it 
 served no other purpose, this collection of reviews 
 by a youthful fellow-craftsman, now among the 
 august dead, might, if studied seriously by re 
 viewers of to-day in America, tend to revive a 
 well-nigh extinct art; for these papers, whatever 
 their faults, are the expression of an alert spirit, a 
 discriminating intelligence, ardently devoting it 
 self with rare singleness of purpose to a service 
 the rewarding beauty of which it never doubts. 
 Yet, after all, the chief function which this collec 
 tion will perform, and one most welcomed by 
 James s own faithful circle of readers, is that of 
 self-portraiture. 
 
 By a singular felicity of chance, the series opens 
 with a discussion of the art of fiction itself, the 
 art which James was later to cultivate with such 
 assiduity and peculiar success. His ingenuous 
 statement of the "fictitious writer s" problem (he 
 does make this single engaging slip!) is a bit of 
 unconscious prophecy, a programme which he was 
 himself to follow undeviatingly: what he wrote at 
 twenty-one through divination, he might well 
 have repeated at seventy in the light of experi 
 ence. "The friends of a prolific novelist," he sug- 
 
 ix 
 
PREFACE 
 
 gests, "must be frequently tempted to wonder at 
 the great man s fertility of invention and to dep 
 recate its moral effects ... to which the prolific 
 novelist will probably reply. . . . Just as the 
 habitually busy man is the best novel-reader, so 
 he is the best novel-writer; so the best novelist is 
 the busiest man. It is, as you say, because I 
 " grind out" my men and women that I endure 
 them. It is because I create them by the sweat 
 of my brow that I venture to look them in the 
 face. My work is my salvation. If this great 
 army of puppets came forth at my simple bidding, 
 then indeed I should die of their senseless clamor. 
 But as the matter stands, they are my very good 
 friends. The pains of labor regulate and conse 
 crate my progeny. ... If the novelist endowed 
 with the greatest " facility" ever known wrote with 
 a tenth part of the ease attributed to him, then 
 again his self-sufficiency might be a seventh 
 wonder. But he only half suffices to himself, and 
 it is the constant endeavor to supply the missing 
 half, to make both ends meet, that reconciles him 
 to his occupation/ "The Missing Half," by 
 Henry James: here, I propound, is a general title 
 in his own arresting vein for the long series of his 
 own reconciliatory "Comedie Humaine." 
 
 Among the list of writers whom James discusses 
 in this volume are an exceptional number of 
 names which have weathered the last half-cen 
 tury, some of the first importance, some of sec 
 ondary but still enduring worth; only a few will 
 
PREFACE 
 
 be unknown to his younger readers. One will be 
 amused, and if a confirmed Jacobite not at all 
 surprised, to see how time has in general con 
 firmed the early judgments of the youthful critic. 
 And readers who themselves have ever ventured 
 into "reviewing" will at once seek out with curi 
 osity the grounds and terms of the critic s likes 
 and dislikes. 
 
 The grounds of some few of James s dislikes are 
 certainly constitutional. I, for one, in view of 
 the future "Turn of the Screw" and "What 
 Maisie Knew," have been perhaps unreasonably 
 diverted by this little passage: "The heroine of 
 Moods is a fitful, wayward, and withal most 
 amiable young person, named Sylvia. We regret 
 to say that Miss Alcott takes her up in her child 
 hood. We are utterly weary of stories about pre 
 cocious little girls. In the first place, they are 
 themselves disagreeable and unprofitable objects 
 of study; and in the second, they are always the 
 precursors of a not less unprofitable middle-aged 
 lover." (The lover in this instance is an advanced 
 thirty-five!) And at fifty-four he himself gives 
 us an acute study of perhaps the most pathetically 
 precocious little girl in English fiction. But at 
 twenty-one, himself unsuspectingly precocious, 
 his interest in "juvenilia," if it ever was quite 
 normal, is magnificently held in abeyance. One 
 gets an echo of something of this twenty years 
 later in the grounds of Stevenson s gay complaint 
 of James. "He cannot," writes Stevenson in "A 
 
 xi 
 
PREFACE 
 
 Humble Remonstrance/* "criticise the author as 
 he goes, because/ says he, comparing it with an 
 other work, / have been a child, but I have never 
 been on a quest for buried treasure? Here is, in 
 deed, a wilful paradox; for if he has never been on 
 a quest for buried treasure, it can be demon 
 strated that he has never been a child. There 
 never was a child (unless Master James) but has 
 hunted gold, and been a pirate, and a military 
 commander, and a bandit of the mountains. . . ." 
 One cannot escape the conviction from the outset 
 that the hidden treasure to which "Master 
 James" surprisingly early devoted the search of 
 a lifetime was a purely literary one. And in such 
 a search the interruptions of juvenile Sylvias 
 become something of a resentible impertinence. 
 
 Scarcely more than half a dozen of the novels 
 herein reviewed are now hopelessly dead and be 
 yond discussion; but one may read the reviews of 
 even these with interest, for from them one gets 
 a vivid and fresh impression of the fleeting literary 
 fashion of a definite period. James, like any 
 healthy young reviewer, enjoys "roasting" them. 
 He equally enjoys, as does any reviewer worth 
 his salt, finding specimens which he can with a 
 clear conscience generously praise. It is the hope 
 lessly "middling" books which one can neither 
 magisterially excoriate nor benignantly garland 
 which set the reviewer his most exacting and 
 thankless task. From this last group James 
 seems, as far as possible, to have avoided choos- 
 
 xii 
 
PREFACE 
 
 ing his subjects. And, rather surprisingly, it is 
 in the first group that he seems inclined to place 
 Anthony Trollope, three of whose works he re 
 views in this volume. If he grows "utterly 
 weary" over the stories about "precocious little 
 girls," so he evinces a temperamental disposition 
 to weariness in taking up a novel by Trollope, 
 that soother of sleepless bedsides and solace of 
 infirmaries. The colloquial term "roasting" is 
 perhaps unduly harsh for the treatment which 
 James s few victims receive at his hands, for in 
 general his admonitions are wrapped in a friendly 
 wit and his disapproval phrased with a high ur 
 banity. Nevertheless, Trollope fares rather ill 
 with him. But he himself in his first discussion 
 of the art of fiction, gives us, unconsciously, the 
 reason which is, again, youth. "Certain young 
 persons," he gravely explains, under the cover of 
 a presumably mature anonymity, "are often 
 deeply concerned at their elders interest in a 
 book which they themselves have voted either 
 very dull or very silly. The truth is that their 
 elders are more credulous than they. Young per 
 sons, however they may outgrow the tendency in 
 later life, are often more or less romancers on 
 their own account. While the tendency lasts, 
 they are very critical in the matter of fictions." 
 Although this "tendency" was one which he, for 
 tunately for us, never outgrew, time certainly 
 mellowed and refined his judgment, notably in 
 the case of Trollope, to whose memory he makes, 
 
 Xlll 
 
PREFACE 
 
 in 1883, a very handsome and delicately discrimi 
 nating amend, now familiar to us. in "Partial 
 Portraits." 
 
 James s treatment of Swinburne also shows us 
 for the first time a little limitation of sympathy 
 which, in this instance, was not to be confined to 
 his youth but, I feel, was characteristic of his 
 mature years. One may readily agree with all 
 that he says of "Chastelard"; one may keenly 
 enjoy the clear-sightedness with which he picks 
 out its shortcomings and the neat precision with 
 which he makes his "points"; yet one cannot fail 
 to note that except for a final cursory sentence in 
 his review, the play might perfectly well have 
 been written in prose, for all that we gather from 
 the critic. His preoccupation is with its dramatic 
 technique, with its ineffectually solved problems 
 of "characterization," "movement," what you 
 will. This is, of course, wholly legitimate up 
 to a certain point; but, after all, the play is in 
 verse. And to its poetry, as such, he is unexpec 
 tedly insensitive. Few men other than dilettanti, 
 certainly few artists, have room in themselves for 
 a reasoned appreciation of all the arts. But it is 
 ever instructive to note their self-denials or re 
 strictions. With James you will hunt in vain for 
 any printed indication of a love of music. His 
 love of the art of painting, especially of portrai 
 ture, was intense and colored many pages of his 
 fictions. But in his long career as a critic he has 
 given us but three deliberately reasoned studies 
 
 xiv 
 
PREFACE 
 
 of poets, and these three poets are French: de 
 Musset, Gautier, and Baudelaire. It is, to me at 
 least,, singular that a master of English prose, a 
 critic so exquisitely endowed (and so voluminous) 
 should have left so little indication in his published 
 writings of a love of English poetry. 
 
 But many of even his accustomed readers will 
 find for the first time,, among the following papers, 
 Henry James s one measured excursion into the 
 field of formal Philosophy,, that family paddock 
 in which he might well have romped with the 
 brilliant gaiety of his eminent brother. The essay 
 on Epictetus with its admirable discussion of 
 Stoicism is a wholly unexpected little "James" 
 treasure which one would not willingly have 
 missed. As a measure, thus early, of his intellec 
 tual calibre, of his spiritual poise and sanity, of 
 his indefeasible kinship, it assumes to the student 
 and lover of James a value far beyond its own 
 critical importance. 
 
 And so one might go on, discussing paper after 
 paper in the light of his subsequent publications 
 and detaining the reader from the real purpose of 
 the book which is, as I said in the beginning, to 
 be found in James s unconscious self-portraiture. 
 It is a pleasure to share, in these resurrected pages 
 of his, those years of his fastidiously intelligent 
 reading and to come upon the most rewarding 
 number of felicities of thought and of diction. 
 But it is even more of a delight to find revealed 
 through them the familiar features of a loved 
 
 xv 
 
PREFACE 
 
 author in his young prime, features already 
 stamped with that distinguishing quality which 
 throughout his long life never grew blurred or 
 dimmed his supremely endearing "fineness/* 
 PIERRE DE CHAIGNON LA ROSE. 
 
 CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS, 
 February 18, 1921. 
 
 XVI 
 
Contents 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. FICTION AND SIR WALTER SCOTT ... i 
 
 f A review of "Essays on Fiction." By Nassau W. 
 \ Senior. London: 1864. Originally published in 
 The North American Review, October, 1864. 
 
 II. Miss PRESCOTT S "AZARIAN" . . . . 16 
 
 A review of "Azarian: an Episode." By Harriet 
 Elizabeth Prescott. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 
 1864. Originally published in The North American 
 Review, January, 1865. 
 
 III. LINDISFARN CHASE 33 
 
 A review of "Lindisfarn Chase: a Novel." By 
 T. Adolphus Trollope. New York: Harper and 
 Brothers, 1864. Originally published in The North 
 American Review, January, 1865. 
 
 IV. EMILY CHESTER: A NOVEL 37 
 
 A review of "Emily Chester: a Novel." [By Mrs. 
 A. M. C. Seemuller.] Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 
 1864. Originally published in The North American 
 Review, January, 1865. 
 
 V. Miss ALCOTT S "Moons" 49 
 
 A review of "Moods." By Louisa M. Alcott. 
 Boston : Loring, 1865. Originally published in The 
 North American Review, July, 1865. 
 
 VI. THE NOBLE SCHOOL OF FICTION ... 59 
 
 A review of "The Hillyars and the Burtons: a 
 Story of Two Families." By Henry Kingsley. 
 Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1865. Originally pub 
 lished in The Nation, July 6, 1865. 
 
 VII. "Miss MACKENZIE" .68 
 
 A review of "Miss Mackenzie." By Anthony 
 Trollope. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1865. 
 Originally published in The Nation, July 13, 
 1865. 
 
 xvii 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 VIII. "THE SCHONBERG-COTTA FAMILY" . . J J 
 A review of "Hearthstone Series: Chronicles of the 
 Schonberg-Cotta Family; The Early Dawn : Sketches 
 of Christian Life in England in the Olden Time; 
 Sketches of the United Brethren of Bohemia and 
 Moravia; Diary of Mrs. Kitty Trevylyan: a Story 
 of the Times of Whitefield and the Wesleys." New 
 York: Tibbals & Whiting. 3 vols. 1865. Orig 
 inally published in The Nation, September 14, 1865. 
 
 IX. "CAN You FORGIVE HER?" 84 
 
 A review of "Can You Forgive Her?" By An 
 thony Trollope. New York: Harper and Brothers. 
 Originally published in The Nation, September 28, 
 1865. 
 
 X. "THE GAYWORTHYS" .92 
 
 A review of "The Gayworthys: a Story of Threads 
 and Thrums." By the author of "Faith Gartney s 
 Girlhood" [Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney]. Boston: 
 Loring, 1865. Originally published in The North 
 American Review, October, 1865. 
 
 XI. A FRENCH CRITIC 99 
 
 A review of "Nouvelles Etudes sur la Litterature 
 Contemporaine." By Edmond Scherer. Paris, 1865. 
 Originally published in The Nation, October 1 2, 1 865. 
 
 XII. Miss BRADDON 108 
 
 A review of "Aurora Floyd." By M. E. Braddon. 
 New York: American News Company [1865]. Orig 
 inally published in The Nation, November 9, 1865. 
 
 XIII. EUGENIE DE GUERIN S JOURNAL . . .117 
 
 A review of "The Journal of Eugenie de Guerin." 
 By G. S. Trebutien. London: Simpkin and Mar 
 shall, 1865. Originally published in The Nation, 
 December 14, 1865. 
 
 XIV. "THE BELTON ESTATE" 124 
 
 A review of "The Belton Estate." By Anthony 
 Trollope. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott and Com 
 pany, 1866. Originally published in The Nation, 
 January 4, 1866. 
 
 xviii 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 XV. 
 
 >c 
 
 XVI. 
 
 SWINBURNE S "CHASTELARD" . ... 132 
 A review of "Chastelard: a Tragedy." By Alger 
 non Charles Swinburne. New York : Hurd and 
 Houghton, 1866. Originally published in The 
 Nation, January 18, 1866. 
 
 KINGSLEY S "HEREWARD" 139 
 
 A review of * Hereward, the Last of the English. * By 
 Charles Kingsley. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1 866. 
 Originally published in The Nation, January 25, 1866. 
 
 XVII. "WINIFRED BERTRAM" 146 
 
 A review of "Winifred Bertram and the World She 
 Lived In." By the author of "The Schonberg- 
 Cotta Family" [Mrs. E. R. Charles]. New York: 
 M. W. Dodd, 1866. Originally published in The 
 Nation, February i, 1866. 
 
 XVIII. MRS. GASKELL 153 
 
 A review of Wives and Daughters. By Mrs. Gas- 
 kell. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1866. Orig 
 inally published in The Nation, February 22, 1866. 
 
 XIX. 
 
 XX. 
 
 XXI. 
 
 X 
 
 "MARIAN ROOKE" 
 
 A review of "Marian Rooke, or The Quest for 
 Fortune: a Tale of the Younger World." By 
 Henry D. Sedley. New York: Sheldon and Com 
 pany, 1865. Originally published in The Nation, 
 February 22, 1866. 
 
 "A NOBLE LIFE" 
 
 A review ! of "A Noble Life." By the author of 
 "John Halifax, Gentleman" [Mrs. D. M. M. 
 Craik]. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1866. 
 Originally published in The Nation, March i, 1866. 
 
 EPICTETUS 
 
 A review of "The Works of Epictetus, Consisting 
 of His Discourses, in Four Books; The Enchiridion; 
 and Fragments. A translation from the Greek, based 
 upon that of Elizabeth Carter." By Thomas Went- 
 worth Higginson. Boston : Little, Brown, and Com 
 pany, 1865. Originally published in The North 
 American Review, April, 1866. 
 
 xix 
 
 160 
 
 73 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 XXII. VICTOR HUGO S LAST NOVEL . . . . 
 
 A review of "Les Travailleurs de la Mer." By 
 Victor Hugo. A. Lacroix, Verborckhoven et Com- 
 pagnie, Bruxelles; F. W. Christern, New York, 
 1866. Originally published in The Nation, April 12, 
 1866. 
 
 188 
 
 XXIII. FELIX HOLT, THE RADICAL 200 
 
 A review of " Felix Holt, the Radical." By George 
 < Eliot. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1866. 
 Originally published in The Nation, August 1 6, 
 1866. 
 
 XXIV. EUGENIE DE GUERIN S LETTERS . . . 209 
 
 A review of " Lettres d Eugenie de Guerin." Paris: 
 , Didier, 1866. New York: Alexander Strahan and 
 Company, 1866. ; Originally published in The Nation, 
 September 13, 1866. 
 
 XXV. THE LAST FRENCH NOVEL 219 
 
 A review of "Affaire Clemenceau : Memoire de 
 f 1 Accuse." By Alexandre Dumas. Paris: Michel 
 
 Levy, 1866. Originally published in The Nation, 
 October n, 1866. 
 
 XX 
 
I 
 
 Fiction and Sir Walter Scott 
 
 TITE opened this work with the hope of finding 
 a general survey of the nature and princi 
 ples of the subject of which it professes to treat. 
 Its title had led us to anticipate some attempt to 
 codify the vague and desultory canons, which 
 cannot, indeed, be said to govern, but which in 
 some measure define, this department of litera 
 ture. We had long regretted the absence of any 
 critical treatise upon fiction. But our regret was 
 destined to be embittered by disappointment. 
 
 The title of the volume before us is a misnomer. 
 The late Mr. Senior would have done better to 
 call his book Essays on Fictions. Essays on the 
 Novelists, even, would have been too pretentious 
 a name. For in the first place, Mr. Senior s novel 
 ists are but five in number; and in the second, we 
 are treated, not to an examination of their general 
 merits, but to an exposition of the plots of their 
 different works. These Essays, we are told, ap 
 peared in four of the leading English Reviews at 
 intervals from the year 1821 to the year 1857. 
 On the whole, we do not think they were worth 
 this present resuscitation. Individually respect- 
 
 " Essays on Fiction. * By Nassau W. Senior. London: 
 1864. 
 
 I 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 able enough in their time and place, they yet 
 make a very worthless book. It is not necessarily 
 very severe censure of a magazine article to say 
 that it contains nothing. Sandwiched between 
 two disquisitions of real merit, it may subsist for 
 a couple of weeks upon the accidental glory of its 
 position. But when half a dozen empty articles 
 are bound together, they are not calculated to 
 form a very substantial volume. Mr. Senior s 
 papers may incur the fate to which we are told 
 that inanimate bodies, after long burial, are liable 
 on exposure to the air, they crumble into noth 
 ing. Much better things have been said on these 
 same authors than anything Mr. Senior has given 
 us. Much wiser dicta than his lie buried in the 
 dusty files of the minor periodicals. His remarks 
 are but a dull restatement of the current literary 
 criticism. He is superficial without being lively; 
 he is indeed so heavy, that we are induced to 
 wonder why his own weight does not force him 
 below the surface. 
 
 But he brings one important quality to his 
 task. He is evidently a very good novel-reader. 
 For this alone we are grateful. By profession not 
 a critic nor a maker of light books, he yet read 
 novels thoughtfully. In his eyes, we. fancy, the 
 half-hour " wasted " over a work of fiction was re 
 covered in the ensuing half-hour s meditation 
 upon it. That Mr. Senior was indeed what is 
 called a "confirmed" novel-reader, his accurate 
 memory for details, his patient research into in- 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 consistencies, dramatic, historic, geographic, 
 abundantly demonstrate. The literary judgments 
 of persons not exclusively literary are often very 
 pleasant. There are some busy men who have 
 read more romances and verses than twenty idle 
 women. They have devoured all James and 
 Dumas at odd hours. They have become thor 
 oughly acquainted with Bulwer, Coventry Pat- 
 more, and the morning paper, in their daily 
 transit to their place of business. They have 
 taken advantage of a day in bed to review all 
 Richardson. It is only because they are hard 
 working men that they can do these things. They 
 do them to the great surprise of their daughters 
 and sisters, who stay at home all day to practise 
 listless sonatas and read the magazines. If these 
 ladies had spent the day in teaching school, in 
 driving bargains, or in writing sermons, they 
 would readily do as much. For our own part, we 
 should like nothing better than to write stories 
 for weary lawyers and schoolmasters. Idle peo 
 ple are satisfied with the great romance of doing 
 nothing. But busy people come fresh to their 
 idleness. The imaginative faculty, which has 
 been gasping for breath all day under the great 
 pressure of reason, bursts forth when its possessor 
 is once ensconced under the evening lamp, and 
 draws a long breath in the fields of fiction. It fills 
 its lungs for the morrow. Sometimes, we regret 
 to say, it fills them in rather a fetid atmos 
 phere; but for the most part it inhales the whole- 
 
 3 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 some air of Anglo-Saxon good sense. Certain 
 young persons are often deeply concerned t their 
 elders interest in a book which they themselves 
 have voted either very dull or very silly. The 
 truth is, that their elders are more credulous than 
 they. Young persons, however they may out 
 grow the tendency in later life, are often more or 
 less romancers on their own account. While the 
 tendency lasts, they are very critical in the matter 
 of fictions. It is often enough to damn a well- 
 intentioned story, that the heroine should be 
 called Kate rather than Katherine; the hero An 
 thony rather than Ernest. These same youthful 
 critics will be much more impartial at middle age. 
 Many a matron of forty will manage to squeeze 
 out a tear over the recital of a form of courtship 
 which at eighteen she thought absurdly improb 
 able. She will be plunged in household cares; her 
 life will have grown prosaic; her thoughts will 
 have overcome their bad habits. It would seem, 
 therefore, that as her knowledge of life has in 
 creased, her judgment of fiction, which is but a 
 reflection of life, should have become more unerr 
 ing. But it is a singular fact, that as even the 
 most photographically disposed novels address 
 pre-eminently the imagination, her judgment, if 
 it be of the average weight, will remain in abey 
 ance, while her rejuvenated imagination takes a 
 holiday. The friends of a prolific novelist must 
 be frequently tempted to wonder at the great 
 man s fertility of invention, and to deprecate its 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 moral effects. An author s wife, sitting by his 
 study-table, and reading page after page of man 
 uscript as he dashes it off, will not be unlikely to 
 question him thus: "Do you never weary of this 
 constant grinding out of false persons and events? 
 To tell the truth, I do. I would rather not read 
 any more, if you please. It s very pretty, but 
 there s too much of it. It s all so untrue. I be 
 lieve I will go up to the nursery. Do you never 
 grow sick of this atmosphere of lies?" To which 
 the prolific novelist will probably reply: "Some 
 times; but not by any means so often as you 
 might suppose. Just as the habitually busy man 
 is the best novel-reader, so he is the best novel- 
 writer; so the best novelist is the busiest man. It 
 is, as you say, because I grind out my men and 
 women that I endure them. It is because I create 
 them by the sweat of my brow that I venture to 
 look them in the face. My work is my salvation. 
 If this great army of puppets came forth at my 
 simple bidding, then indeed I should die of their 
 senseless clamor. But as the matter stands, they 
 are my very good friends. The pains of labor 
 regulate and consecrate my progeny. If it were 
 as easy to write novels as to read them, then, too, 
 my stomach might rebel against the phantom 
 peopled atmosphere which I have given myself to 
 breathe. If the novelist endowed with the great 
 est * facility ever known wrote with a tenth part 
 of the ease attributed to him, then again his self- 
 sufficiency might be a seventh wonder. But he 
 
 5 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 only half suffices to himself, and it is the constant 
 endeavor to supply the missing half, to make both 
 ends meet, that reconciles him to his occupation." 
 
 But we have wandered from our original proposi 
 tion; which was, that the judgments of intelligent 
 half-critics, like Mr. Senior, are very pleasant to 
 serious critics. That is, they would be very 
 pleasant in conversation; but they are hardly 
 worth the trouble of reading. A person who dur 
 ing a long life has kept up with the light litera 
 ture of his day, if he have as good a memory as 
 Mr. Senior, will be an interesting half-hour s 
 companion. He will remind you of a great deal 
 that you have forgotten. This will be his prin 
 cipal merit. This is Mr. Senior s chief merit in 
 the present volume. 
 
 His five authors are Scott, Bulwer, Thackeray, 
 Mrs. Stowe, and Colonel Senior. We are at 
 loss to understand this latter gentleman s pres 
 ence in so august a company. He wrote, indeed, 
 a tale called "Charles Vernon", and we believe 
 him to be a relative of the author. His presence 
 was doubtless very good fun to the Messrs. Senior, 
 but it is rather poor fun to the public. It must be 
 confessed, however, that Mr. Senior has restrained 
 the partiality of blood to decent limits. He uses 
 his kinsman chiefly as a motive for an aesthetic 
 dissertation of questionable soundness; and he 
 praises his story no more than, to judge from two 
 or three extracts, it deserves. 
 
 He begins with Sir Walter Scott. The articles 
 6 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 of which the paper on Scott is composed were 
 written while the Waverley Novels were in their 
 first editions. In our opinion this fact is their 
 chief recommendation. It is interesting to learn 
 the original effect of these remarkable books. It 
 is pleasant to see their classical and time-honored 
 figures dealt with as the latest sensations of the 
 year. In the year 1821, the authorship of the 
 novels was still unavowed. But we may gather 
 from several of Mr. Senior s remarks the general 
 tendency of the public faith. The reviewer has 
 several sly hits at the author of "Marmion." He 
 points out a dozen coincidences in the talent and 
 treatment of the poet and the romancer. And he 
 leaves the intelligent reader to draw his own con 
 clusions. After a short preface he proceeds to the 
 dismemberment of each of the novels, from "Rob 
 Roy" downward. In retracing one by one these 
 long-forgotten plots and counter-plots, we yield 
 once more to something of the great master s 
 charm. We are inclined to believe that this 
 charm is proof against time. The popularity 
 which Mr. Senior celebrated forty years ago has 
 in no measure subsided. The only perceptible 
 change in Sir Walter s reputation is indeed the 
 inevitable lot of great writers. He has submitted 
 to the somewhat attenuating ordeal of classifica 
 tion; he has become a standard author. He has 
 been provided with a seat in our literature; and 
 if his visible stature has been by just so much cur 
 tailed, we must remember that it is only the pass- 
 
 7 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 ing guests who remain standing. Mr. Senior is a 
 great admirer of Sir Walter, as may be gathered 
 from the fact that he devotes two hundred pages 
 to him. And yet he has a keen eye for his defects; 
 and these he correctly holds to be very numerous. 
 Yet he still loves him in spite of his defects; 
 which we think will be the permanent attitude of 
 posterity. 
 
 Thirty years have elapsed since the publica 
 tion of the last of the Waverley series. During 
 thirty years it has been exposed to the public 
 view. And meanwhile an immense deal has been 
 accomplished in the department of fiction. A 
 vast army has sprung up, both of producers and 
 consumers. To the latter class a novel is no longer 
 the imposing phenomenon it was in Sir Walter s 
 time. It implies no very great talent; ingenuity 
 is held to be the chief requisite for success. And 
 indeed to write a readable novel is actually a 
 task of so little apparent difficulty, that with 
 many popular writers the matter is a constant 
 trial of speed with the reading public. This was 
 very much the case with Sir Walter. His facility 
 in composition was almost as great as that of 
 Mrs. Henry Wood, of modern repute. But it 
 was the fashion among his critics to attribute this 
 remarkable fact rather to his transcendent strength 
 than to the vulgarity of his task. This was a wise 
 conviction. Mrs. Wood writes three volumes in 
 three months, to last three months. Sir Walter 
 performed the same feat, and here, after the 
 
 8 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 lapse of forty years, we still linger over those 
 hasty pages. And we do it in the full cognizance 
 of faults which even Mrs. Wood has avoided, of 
 foibles for which she would blush. The public 
 taste has been educated to a spirit of the finest 
 discernment, the sternest exaction. No publisher 
 would venture to offer "Ivanhoe" in the year 
 1864 as a novelty. The secrets of the novelist s 
 craft have been laid bare; new contrivances have 
 been invented; and as fast as the old machinery 
 wears out, it is repaired by the clever artisans of 
 the day. Our modern ingenuity works prodigies 
 of which the great Wizard never dreamed. And 
 besides ingenuity we have had plenty of genius. 
 We have had Dickens and Thackeray. Twenty 
 other famous writers are working in the midst of 
 us. The authors of "Amyas Leigh", of "The 
 Cloister and the Hearth", of "Romola", have all 
 overtaken the author of "Waverley" in his own 
 walk. Sir Edward Bulwer has produced several 
 historical tales, which, to use an expressive vul 
 garism, have "gone down" very extensively. 
 And yet old-fashioned, ponderous Sir Walter 
 holds his own. 
 
 He was the inventor of a new style. We all 
 know the immense advantage a craftsman de 
 rives from this fact. He was the first to sport a 
 fashion which was eventually taken up. For 
 many years he enjoyed the good fortune of a 
 patentee. It is difficult for the present genera 
 tion to appreciate the blessings of this fashion. 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 But when we review the modes prevailing for 
 twenty years before, we see almost as great a 
 difference as a sudden transition from the Spen 
 serian ruff to the Byronic collar. We may best 
 express Scott s character by saying that, with 
 one or two exceptions, he was the first English 
 prose story-teller. He was the first fictitious 
 writer who addressed the public from its own 
 level, without any preoccupation of place. Rich 
 ardson is classified simply by the matter of length. 
 He is neither a romancer nor a story-teller: he is 
 simply Richardson. The works of Fielding and 
 Smollett are less monumental, yet we cannot help 
 feeling that they too are writing for an age in 
 which a single novel is meant to go a great way. 
 And then these three writers are emphatically 
 preachers and moralists. In the heart of their 
 productions lurks a didactic raison d etre. Even 
 Smollett who at first sight appears to recount 
 his heroes adventures very much as Leporello in 
 the opera rehearses the exploits of Don Juan - 
 aims to instruct and to edify. To posterity one 
 of the chief attractions of "Tom Jones" is the 
 fact that its author was one of the masses, that 
 he wrote from the midst of the working, suffering 
 mortal throng. But we feel guilty in reading the 
 book in any such disposition of mind. We feel 
 guilty, indeed, in admitting the question of art or 
 science into our considerations. The story is like 
 a vast episode in a sermon preached by a grandly 
 humorous divine; and however we may be enter- 
 
 10 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 tained by the way, we must not forget that our 
 ultimate duty is to be instructed. With the 
 minister s week-day life we have no concern: for 
 the present he is awful, impersonal Morality; and 
 we shall incur his severest displeasure if we view 
 him as Henry Fielding, Esq., as a rakish man of 
 letters, or even as a figure in English literature. 
 "Waverley" was the first novel which was self- 
 forgetful. It proposed simply to amuse the reader, 
 as an old English ballad amused him. It under 
 took to prove nothing but facts. It was the novel 
 irresponsible. 
 
 We do not mean to say that Scott s great suc 
 cess was owing solely to this, the freshness of his 
 method. This was, indeed, of great account, but 
 it was as nothing compared with his own intel 
 lectual wealth. Before him no prose-writer had 
 exhibited so vast and rich an imagination: it had 
 not, indeed, been supposed that in prose the im 
 aginative faculty was capable of such extended 
 use. Since Shakespeare, no writer had created so 
 immense a gallery of portraits, nor, on the whole, 
 had any portraits been so lifelike. Men and 
 women, for almost the first time out of poetry, 
 were presented in their habits as they lived. The 
 Waverley characters were all instinct with some 
 thing of the poetic fire. To our present taste 
 many of them may seem little better than lay- 
 figures. But there are many kinds of lay-figures. 
 A person who goes from the workshop of a carver 
 of figure-heads for ships to an exhibition of wax- 
 
 ii 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 work, will find in the latter the very reflection of 
 nature. And even when occasionally the waxen 
 visages are somewhat inexpressive, he can con 
 sole himself with the sight of unmistakable velvet 
 and brocade and tartan. Scott went to his prose 
 task with essentially the same spirit which he had 
 brought to the composition of his poems. Between 
 these two departments of his work the difference 
 is very small. Portions of "Marmion" are very 
 good prose; portions of "Old Mortality" are 
 tolerable poetry. Scott was never a very deep, 
 intense, poetic poet: his verse alone was unflagging. 
 So when he attacked his prose characters with his 
 habitual poetic inspiration, the harmony of style 
 was hardly violated. It is a great peculiarity, 
 and perhaps it is one of the charms of his historical 
 / tales, that history is dealt with in all poetic rev 
 erence. He is tender of the past: he knows that 
 she is frail. He certainly knows it. Sir Walter 
 could not have read so widely or so curiously as 
 he did, without discovering a vast deal that was 
 gross and ignoble in bygone times. But he ex 
 cludes these elements as if he feared they would 
 clash with his numbers. He has the same indiffer 
 ence to historic truth as an epic poet, without, in 
 the novels, having the same excuse. We write 
 historical tales differently now. We acknowledge 
 the beauty and propriety of a certain poetic 
 reticence. But we confine it to poetry. The task 
 of the historical story-teller is, not to invest, but 
 to divest the past. Tennyson s "Idyls of the 
 
 12 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 King" are far more one-sided, if we may so ex 
 press it, than anything of Scott s. But imagine 
 what disclosures we should have if Mr. Charles 
 Reade were to take it into his head to write a 
 novel about King Arthur and his times. 
 
 Having come thus far, we are arrested by the 
 sudden conviction that it is useless to dogmatize 
 upon Scott; that it is almost ungrateful to criti 
 cize him. He, least of all, would have invited or 
 sanctioned any curious investigation of his works. 
 They were written without pretense: all that has 
 been claimed for them has been claimed by others 
 than their author. They are emphatically works 
 of entertainment. As such let us cherish and pre 
 serve them. Say what we will, we should be very 
 sorry to lose, and equally sorry to mend them. 
 There are few of us but can become sentimental 
 over the uncounted hours they have cost us. 
 There are moments of high-strung sympathy with 
 the spirit which is abroad when we might find 
 them rather dull in parts; but they are capital 
 books to have read. Who would forego the com 
 panionship of all those shadowy figures which 
 stand side by side in their morocco niches in 
 yonder mahogany cathedral? What youth would 
 willingly close his eyes upon that dazzling array 
 of female forms, so serried that he can hardly 
 see where to choose, Rebecca of York, Edith 
 Plantagenet, Mary of Scotland, sweet Lucy 
 Ashton? What maiden would consent to drop 
 the dear acquaintance of Halbert Glendinning, 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 of Wilfred of Ivanhoe, of Roland Graeme and 
 Henry Morton? Scott was a born story-teller: 
 we can give him no higher praise. Surveying his 
 works, his character, his method, as a whole, we 
 can liken him to nothing better than to a strong 
 and kindly elder brother, who gathers his juvenile 
 public about him at eventide, and pours out a 
 stream of wondrous improvisation. Who can 
 not remember an experience like this? On no 
 occasion are the delights of fiction so intense. 
 Fiction? These are the triumphs of fact. In the 
 richness of his invention and memory, in the in 
 finitude of his knowledge, in his improvidence for 
 the future, in the skill with which he answers, or 
 rather parries, sudden questions, in his low- 
 voiced pathos and his resounding merriment, he 
 is identical with the ideal fireside chronicler. And 
 thoroughly to enjoy him, we must again become 
 as credulous as children at twilight. 
 
 The only other name of equal greatness with 
 Scott s handled by Mr. Senior is Thackeray s. 
 His remarks upon Thackeray are singularly point 
 less. He tells us that "Vanity Fair" is a re 
 markable book; but a person whose knowledge of 
 Thackeray was derived from Mr. Senior s article 
 would be surely at a loss to know wherein it is 
 remarkable. To him it seems to have been above 
 all amusing. We confess that this was not our 
 impression of the book on our last reading. We 
 remember once witnessing a harrowing melodrama 
 in a country playhouse, where we happened to be 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 seated behind a rustic young couple who labored 
 under an almost brutal incapacity to take the 
 play as it was meant. They were like blood 
 hounds on the wrong track. They laughed up 
 roariously, whereas the great point of the piece 
 was that they should weep. They found the 
 horrors capital sport, and when the central horror 
 reached its climax, their merriment had assumed 
 such violence that the prompter, at the cost of all 
 dramatic vrai semblance^ had to advance to the 
 footlights and inform them that he should be 
 obliged to suspend the performance until betwixt 
 them they could compose a decent visage. We 
 can imagine some such stern inclination on the 
 part of the author of "Vanity Fair", on learning 
 that there were those in the audience who mistook 
 his performance for a comedy. 
 
 We have no space to advert to Mr. Senior s ob 
 servations upon Bulwer. They are at least more 
 lenient than any we ourselves should be tempted 
 to make. As for the article on Mrs. Stowe, it is 
 quite out of place. It is in no sense of the word a 
 literary criticism. It is a disquisition on the 
 prospects of slavery in the United States. 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 II 
 
 Trescott s 
 
 volume before us is characterized by that 
 * venturesome, unprincipled literary spirit, de 
 fiant alike of wisdom and taste, which has been 
 traceable through Miss Prescott s productions, 
 from "Sir Rohan s Ghost" downward. We looked 
 upon this latter work, at the time of its publica 
 tion, as the very apotheosis of the picturesque; 
 but "Sir Rohan s Ghost", "The Amber Gods", 
 and even "The Rim", compared with "Azarian", 
 are admirably sober and coherent. Miss Prescott 
 has steadily grown in audacity, and in that disa 
 greeable audacity which seems to have been fos 
 tered rather by flattery than by remonstrance. 
 Let her pray to be delivered from her friends. 
 
 What manner of writing is it which lends itself 
 so frankly to aberrations of taste? It is that 
 literary fashion which, to speak historically, was 
 brought into our literature by Tennyson s poetry. 
 The best name for it, as a literary style, is the ideal 
 descriptive style. Like all founders of schools, 
 Tennyson has been far exceeded by his disciples. 
 
 "Azarian: an Episode." By Harriet Elizabeth Prescott. 
 Boston: 1864. 
 
 16 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 The style in question reposes not so much upon 
 the observation of the objects of external nature 
 as the projection of one s fancy upon them. It 
 may be seen exemplified in its youthful vigor in 
 Tennyson s "Dream of Fair Women"; it is ex 
 emplified in its effete old age in Mr. Alexander 
 Smith and Miss Fresco tt, passim. 
 
 The writer of a work of fiction has this advan 
 tage over his critic, that he can frequently sub 
 stantiate his cause by an a posteriori scheme of 
 treatment. For this reason, it is often difficult to 
 fasten down a story-teller to his premises, and 
 then to confront him with his aberrations. For 
 each successive delinquency he has the ready 
 excuse of an unimpeachable intention. Such or 
 such a glaring blot is the very key-stone of his 
 plan. When we tell Miss Prescott that some one 
 of her tales is marvellously void of human nature 
 and false to actual society, she may meet us with 
 the reply that a correct portraiture of nature and 
 society was not intended. She may claim the 
 poet s license. And superficially she will have the 
 best of it. But woe to the writer who claims 
 the poet s license, without being able to answer 
 the poet s obligations; to the writer of whatever 
 class who subsists upon the immunities, rather than 
 the responsibilities, of his task. 
 
 The subject of "Azarian" is sufficiently dra 
 matic. A young orphan-girl a painter of flowers 
 by profession allows herself to become engaged 
 to a young Greek physician resident in Boston. 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 Ruth is warm-hearted and patient; Azarian is 
 cold-hearted, selfish, and an amateur of the fine 
 arts, especially that of flirting. He wearies of Ruth 
 before marriage, slights, neglects, and drives 
 her to despair. She resolves on suicide; but when 
 on the brink of destruction, she pauses and recon 
 ciles herself to life, and, the engagement with 
 Azarian being broken off by tacit agreement, to 
 happiness. 
 
 What is the central element of the above data? 
 The element of feeling. W 7 hat is the central 
 element of the tale as it stands written? The 
 element of words. The story contains, as it need 
 contain, but few incidents. It is made of the 
 stuff of a French etude. Its real interest lies in the 
 history of two persons* moral intercourse. Instead 
 of this, we are treated to an elaborate descrip 
 tion of four persons physical aspect and costume, 
 and of certain aspects of inanimate nature. Of hu 
 man nature there is not an unadulterated page in 
 the book, not a chapter of history. From be 
 ginning to end it is a succession of forced assaults 
 upon the impregnable stronghold of painting; a 
 wearisome series of word-pictures, linked by a 
 slight thread of narrative, strung together, to use 
 one of Miss Fresco tt s own expressions, like "beads 
 on a leash." If the dictionary were a palette of 
 colors, and a goose-quill a brush, Miss Prescott 
 would be a very clever painter. But as words 
 possess a certain inherent dignity, value, and in 
 dependence, language being rather the stamped 
 
 18 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 and authorized coinage which expresses the value 
 of thought than the brute metal out of which forms 
 are moulded, her pictures are invariably incoherent 
 and meaningless. What do we know of Ruth and j 
 Azarian, of Charmian and Madame Saratov? 
 Next to nothing: the little that we know we learn 
 in spite of Miss Prescott s fine writing. These 
 persons are localized, christened (we admit in 
 rather a pagan fashion), provided with matter-of- 
 fact occupations. They are Bostonians of the nine 
 teenth century. The little drama in which they 
 have parts, or something very like it, is acted every 
 day, anywhere between the Common and the 
 river. There is, accordingly, every presumptive 
 reason why we should feel conscious of a certain 
 affinity with them. But from any such sensation 
 we are effectually debarred by Miss Prescott s 
 inordinate fondness for the picturesque. 
 
 There is surely no principle of fictitious com 
 position so true as this, that an author s para 
 mount charge is the cure of souls, to the subjection, 
 and if need be to the exclusion, of the picturesque. 
 Let him look to his characters: his figures will 
 take care of themselves. Let the author who has 
 grasped the heart of his purpose trust to his reader s 
 sympathy: from that vantage-ground he may 
 infallibly command it. In what we may call sub 
 ordinate points, that is, in Miss Prescott s promi 
 nent and obtrusive points, it is an immense succor. 
 It supplements his intention. Given an animate 
 being, you may readily clothe it in your mind s eye 
 
 9 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 with a body, a local habitation, and a name. Given 
 we say, an animate being: that is the point. The 
 reader who is set face to face with a gorgeous doll 
 will assuredly fail to inspire it with sympathetic 
 life. To do so, he must have become excited and 
 interested. What is there in a doll to excite and 
 interest? ( 
 
 In reading books of the Azarian school, for, 
 alas! there is a school, we have often devoutly 
 wished that some legal penalty were attached 
 to the use of description. We have sighed for a 
 novel with a dramatis personce of disembodied 
 spirits. Azarian gives his name to two hundred 
 and fifty pages; and at the end of those pages, the 
 chief fact with which he is associated in our minds 
 is that he wore his hair in "waves of flaccid gold." 
 Of Madame Saratov we read that she was the 
 widow of a Russian exile, domesticated in Boston 
 for the purpose of giving lessons in French, music, 
 and Russ, and of educating her boys. In spite of 
 the narrowness of means attributable to a lady who 
 follows the profession of teaching, she lives in a 
 splendor not unworthy of the Muscovite Krem 
 lin. She has a maid to haunt her steps; her 
 chosen raiment is silks and velvets; she sleeps in 
 counterpanes of satin; her thimble, when she sews, 
 is incrusted at the base with pearls; she holds a 
 salon y and treats her guests to draughts of "richly- 
 rosy" cordial. One of her dresses is a gown of 
 green Genoa velvet, with peacock s feathers of gor 
 geous green and gold. What do you think of that 
 
 20 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 for an exiled teacher of languages, boasting her 
 self Russian? Perhaps, after all, it is not so im 
 probable. In the person of Madame Saratov, 
 Miss Prescott had doubtless the intention of a 
 sufficiently dramatic character, the European 
 mistress of a salon. But her primary intention 
 completely disappears beneath this thick impasto 
 of words and images. Such is the fate of all her 
 creations: either they are still-born, or they sur 
 vive but for a few pages; she smothers them with 
 caresses. 
 
 When a very little girl becomes the happy pos 
 sessor of a wax-doll, she testifies her affection for 
 it by a fond manipulation of its rosy visage. If the 
 nose, for instance, is unusually shapely and pretty, 
 the fact is made patent by a constant friction 
 of the finger-tips; so that poor dolly is rapidly 
 smutted out of recognition. In a certain sense 
 we would compare Miss Prescott to such a little 
 girl. She fingers her puppets to death. I "Good 
 heavens, Madam!" we are forever on the point of 
 exclaiming, "let the poor things speak for them 
 selves. What? are you afraid they can t stand 
 alone ?"j Even the most clearly defined character 
 would succumb beneath this repeated posing, 
 attitudinizing, and changing of costume. Take 
 any breathing person from the ranks of fiction, - 
 Hetty in "Adam Bede", or Becky Sharp the Great 
 (we select women advisedly, for it is known that 
 they can endure twenty times more than men in 
 this respect), place her for a few pages in Miss 
 
 21 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 Prescott s charge, and what will be the result? 
 Adieu, dear familiar friend; you melt like wax in a 
 candle. Imagine Thackeray forever pulling Re 
 becca s curls and settling the folds of her dress. 
 
 This bad h^bit of Miss Prescott s is more than 
 an offence against art. Nature herself resents it. 
 It is an injustice to men and women to assume that 
 the fleshly element carries such weight. In the 
 history of a loving and breaking heart, is that the 
 only thing worth noticing? Are the external signs 
 and accidents of passion the only points to be 
 detailed ? What we want is Passion s self, her 
 language, her ringing voice, her gait, the present 
 ment of her deeds. What do we care about the 
 beauty of man or woman in comparison with their 
 humanity? In a novel we crave the spectacle 
 of that of which we may feel that we know it. 
 The only lasting fictions are those which have 
 spoken to the reader s heart, and not to his eye; 
 those which have introduced him to an atmosphere 
 in which it was credible that human beings might 
 exist, and to human beings with whom he might 
 feel tempted to claim kinship. 
 
 When once a work of fiction may be classed as a 
 novel, its foremost claim to merit, and indeed the 
 measure of its merit, is its truth, its truth to 
 something, however questionable that thing may 
 be in point of morals or of taste. "Azarian" is 
 true to nothing. No one ever looked like Azarian, 
 talked like him, nor, on the whole, acted like him; 
 for although his specific deeds, as related in the 
 
 22 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 volume before us, are few and far between, we find 
 it difficult to believe that any one ever pursued 
 a line of conduct so utterly meaningless as that 
 which we are invited, or rather allowed, to attri 
 bute to him. 
 
 We have called Miss Prescott s manner the 
 descriptive manner; but in so doing we took care to 
 distinguish it from the famous realistic system 
 which has asserted itself so largely in the fictitious 
 writing of the last few years. It is not a counsel 
 we would indiscriminately bestow, on the con 
 trary, we would gladly see the vulgar realism which 
 governs the average imagination leavened by a 
 little old-fashioned idealism, but Miss Presco^t, 
 if she hopes to accomplish anything worth accom 
 plishing, must renounce new-fashioned idealism 
 for a while, and diligently study the canons of the 
 so-called realist school. We gladly admit that she 
 has the talent to profit by such a discipline. But 
 to be real in writing is to describe; such is the 
 popular notion. Were this notion correct, Miss 
 Prescott would be a very good realist, none 
 better. But for this fallacious axiom we propose 
 to substitute another, which, if it does not embrace 
 the whole truth, comes several degrees nearer to it: 
 to be real in writing is to express; whether by 
 description or otherwise is of secondary importance. 
 The short tales of M. Prosper Merimee are emi 
 nently real; but he seldom or never describes: he 
 conveys. It is not to be denied that the great 
 names in the realist line are associated with a 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 pronounced fondness for description. It is for 
 this reason that we remind Miss Prescott of them. 
 Let her take Balzac s "Eugenie Grandet", for 
 instance. It will probably be affirmed that this 
 story, the interest of which is to the full as human 
 as that of her own, is equally elaborate in the 
 painting of external objects. But such an asser 
 tion will involve a mistake: Balzac does not paint, 
 does not copy, objects; his chosen instrument 
 being a pen, he is content to write them. He is 
 literally real: he presents objects as they are. 
 The scene and persons of his drama are minutely 
 described. Grandet s house, his sitting-room, 
 his habits, his appearance, his dress, are all repro 
 duced with the fidelity of a photograph. The 
 same with Madame Grandet and Eugenie. We 
 are exactly informed as to the young girl s stat 
 ure, features, and dress. The same with Charles 
 Grandet, when he comes upon the scene. His 
 coat, his trousers, his watch-chain, his cravat, 
 the curl of his hair, are all dwelt upon. We almost 
 see the musty little sitting-room in which so much 
 of the action goes forward. We are familiar with 
 the gray boiserie, the faded curtains, the rickety 
 card-tables, the framed samplers on the walls, 
 Madame Grandet s foot-warmer, and the table 
 set for the meagre dinner. And yet our sense of 
 the human interest of the story is never lost. Why 
 is this? It is because these things are all described 
 only in so far as they bear upon the action, and not 
 in the least for themselves. If you resolve to 
 
 24 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 describe a thing, you cannot describe it too care 
 fully. But as the soul of a novel is its action, you 
 should only describe those things which are ac 
 cessory to the action. It is in determining what 
 things are so accessory that real taste, science, and 
 judgment are shown. 
 
 The reader feels that Miss Prescott describes 
 not in accordance with any well-considered plan, \/ 
 but simply for the sake of describing, and of so j/y> 
 gratifying her almost morbid love of the pictur- ? 
 esque. There is a reason latent in every one of 
 Balzac s tales why such things should appear thus, 
 and such persons so, a clear, well-defined reason, 
 easily discoverable by the observing and sym 
 pathetic eye. Each separate part is conducive to 
 the general effect; and this general effect has been 
 studied, pondered, analyzed: in the end it is pro 
 duced. Balzac lays his stage, sets his scene, and 
 introduces his puppets. He describes them once 
 for all; this done, the story marches. He does not 
 linger nervously about his figures, like a sculptor 
 about his unfinished clay-model, administering a 
 stroke here and afixing a lump there. He has done 
 all this beforehand, in his thoughts; his figures 
 are completed before the story begins. This latter 
 fact is perhaps one of the most valuable in regard 
 to Balzac. His story exists before it is told; it j 
 stands complete before his mind s eye. It was a 
 characteristic of his mind, enriched as it was by 
 sensual observation, to see his figures clearly and 
 fully as with the eye of sense. So seeing them, the 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 desire was irresistible to present them to the 
 reader. How clearly he saw them we may judge 
 from the minuteness of his presentations. It was 
 clearly done because it was scientifically done. 
 That word resumes our lesson. He set down things 
 in black and white, not, as Miss Prescott seems 
 vaguely to aim at doing, in red, blue, and green, 
 in prose, scientifically, as they stood. He aimed at 
 local color; that is, at giving the facts of things. 
 To determine these facts required labor, foresight, 
 reflection; but Balzac shrank from no labor of eye 
 or brain, provided he could adequately cover the 
 framework of his story. 
 
 Miss Prescott s style is evidently the point on 
 which she bases her highest claims to distinction. 
 She has been taught that, in possessing this style, 
 she possesses a great and uncommon gift. Noth 
 ing is more false. The fine writing in which 
 "Azarian" abounds is the cheapest writing of the 
 day. Every magazine-story bears traces of it. 
 It is so widely adopted, because to a person of 
 clever fancy there is no kind of writing that is so 
 easy, so easy, we mean, considering the effect 
 produced. Of course it is much easier to write 
 in a style which necessitates no looking out of 
 words: but such a style makes comparatively 
 little impression. The manner in question is 
 easy, because the writer recognizes no standard of 
 truth or accuracy by which his performances 
 may be measured. He does not transcribe facts, 
 facts must be counted, measured, weighed, which 
 
 26 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 takes far too much trouble. He does not pa 
 tiently study the nature and appearance of a 
 thing until he has won from it the confession of 
 that absolute appreciable quality, the correct 
 statement of which is alone true description; he 
 does not commit himself to statements, for these 
 are dangerous things; he does not, in short, ex 
 tract; he affixes. He does not consult the object 
 to be described, so recognizing it as a fact; he 
 consults his imagination, and so constitutes it a 
 theme to be elaborated. In the picture which he 
 proceeds to make, some of the qualities of the 
 object will certainly be found; but it matters little 
 whether they are the chief distinctive ones, 
 any satisfy his conscience. 
 
 All writing is narration; to describe is simply to 
 narrate things in their order of place, instead of 
 events in their order of time. If you consult this 
 order, your description will stand; if you neglect it, 
 you will have an imposing mass of words, but no 
 recognizable thing. We do not mean to say that 
 Miss Prescott has a wholly commonplace fancy. 
 (We use the word commonplace advisedly, for 
 there are no commonplaces so vulgar as those 
 chromatic epigrams which mark the Tennysonian 
 prose school.) On the contrary, she has a fancy 
 which would serve very well to garnish a dish of 
 solid fiction, but which furnishes poor material 
 for the body of the dish. These clever conceits, 
 this keen eye for the superficial picturesque, this 
 inborn love of bric-d-brac and sunsets, may be 
 
 27 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 made very effectively to supplement a true 
 dramatic exposition; but they are a wretched 
 substitute for such. And even in bric-a-brac and 
 sunsets Miss Prescott s execution is crude. In 
 her very specialty, she is but an indifferent artist. 
 Who is so clever in the bric-d-brac line as M. 
 Theophile Gautier? He takes an occasional 
 liberty with the French language; but, on the 
 whole, he finds his best account in a policy of 
 studious respect even for her most irritating forms 
 of conservatism. The consequence is, that his 
 efforts in this line are unapproachable, and, what 
 is better, irreproachable. One of the greatest 
 dangers to which those who pursue this line are 
 liable is the danger that they may fall into the 
 ridiculous. By a close adherence to that medium 
 of expression which other forms of thought have 
 made respectable, this danger is effectually set at 
 naught. What is achieved by the paternally 
 governed French tongue may surely be effected by 
 that chartered libertine, our own. Miss Prescott 
 uses far too many words, synonymous words and 
 meaningless words. Like the majority of female 
 writers, Mrs. Browning, George Sand, Gail 
 Hamilton, Mrs. Stowe, she possesses in excess 
 the fatal gift of fluency. Her paragraphs read as 
 if in composition she completely ignored the ex 
 pedient of erasure. What painter ever painted a 
 picture without rubbing out and transposing, dis 
 placing, effacing, replacing? There is no essential 
 difference of system between the painting of a 
 
 28 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 picture and the writing of a novel. Why should 
 the novelist expect to do what his fellow-worker 
 never even hopes to acquire the faculty of doing, - 
 execute his work at a stroke? It is plain that Miss 
 Prescott adds, tacks on, interpolates, piles up, if we 
 may use the expression; but it seems very doubt 
 ful if she often takes counsel of the old Horatian 
 precept, in plain English, to scratch out. A 
 true artist should be as sternly just as a Roman 
 father. A moderate exercise of this Roman justice 
 would have reduced "Azarian" to half its actual 
 length. The various descriptive passages would 
 have been wonderfully simplified, and we might 
 have possessed a few good pictures. 
 
 If Miss Prescott would only take such good old 
 English words as we possess, words instinct with 
 the meaning of centuries, and, having fully re 
 solved upon that which she wished to convey, cast 
 her intention in those familiar terms which long 
 use has invested with almost absolute force of 
 expression, then she would describe things in a 
 manner which could not fail to arouse the sym 
 pathy, the interest, the dormant memories of the 
 reader. What is the possible bearing of such 
 phrases as "vermeil ardency," or "a tang of 
 color"? of such childish attempts at alliteration 
 - the most frequent bugbear of Miss Prescott s 
 readers as "studded with starry sprinkle and 
 spatter of splendor," and the following sentence, 
 in which, speaking of the leaves of the blackberry- 
 vine, she tells us that they are "damasked with 
 
 29 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 deepening layer and spilth of color, brinded and 
 barred and blotted beneath the dripping fingers 
 of October, nipped by nest-lining bees," and, 
 lastly, "suffused through all their veins with the 
 shining soul of the mild and mellow season"? 
 
 This is nothing but "words, words, words, 
 Horatio!" They express nothing; they only seem 
 to express. The true test of the worth of a prose 
 description to simplify matters we leave poetry 
 quite out of the question is one s ability to 
 resolve it back into its original elements. You 
 construct your description from a chosen object; 
 can you, conversely, from your description con 
 struct that object? We defy anyone to represent 
 the "fine scarlet of the blackberry- vine," and "the 
 gilded bronze of beeches," - fair sentences by 
 themselves, which express almost as much as we 
 can reasonably hope to express on the subject, 
 under the inspiration of the rhapsody above 
 quoted, and what follows it. Of course, where so 
 much is attempted in the way of expression, some 
 thing is sometimes expressed. But with Miss Pres- 
 cott such an occasional success is apt to be what 
 the French call a succes manque. This is the fault 
 of what our authoress must allow us to call her 
 inveterate bad taste; for whenever she has said a 
 good thing, she invariably spoils it by trying to 
 make it better: to let well enough alone is indeed 
 in all respects the great lesson which experience 
 has in store for her. It is sufficiently felicitous, for 
 instance, as such things go, to call the chandelier 
 
 3 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 of a theatre "a basket of light." There stands 
 the simple successful image. But Miss Prescott 
 immediately tacks on the assertion that it "pours 
 down on all its brimming burden of lustre." It 
 would be bad taste again, if it were not such bad 
 physiology, to speak of Azarian s flaccid hair 
 being "drenched with some penetrating perfume, 
 an Oriental water that stung the brain to vigor." 
 The idea that a man s intellectual mood is at the 
 mercy of his pommade is one which we recommend 
 to the serious consideration of barbers. The 
 reader will observe that Azarian s hair is drenched: 
 an instance of the habitual intensity of Miss 
 Prescott s style. The word intensity expresses 
 better than any other its various shortcomings, 
 or rather excesses. The only intensity worth 
 anything in writing is intensity of thought. To 
 endeavor to fortify flimsy conceptions by the 
 constant use of verbal superlatives is like painting 
 the cheeks and pencilling the eyebrows of a corpse. 
 
 Miss Prescott would rightfully resent our criti 
 cism if, after all, we had no counsel to offer. Of 
 course our advice is to take or to leave, but it 
 is due to ourselves to produce it. 
 
 We would earnestly exhort Miss Prescott to be 
 real, to be true to something. In a notice of Mr. 
 Charles Reade recently published in the Atlantic, 
 our authoress indulged in a fling at Mr. Anthony 
 Trollope for what she probably considers his 
 grovelling fidelity to minute social truths. But 
 we hold it far better to be real as Mr. Trollope 
 
 3 1 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 is real, than to be ideal after the fashion of the 
 authoress of "Azarian." As in the writing of 
 fiction there is no grander instrument than a 
 potent imagination, such as Mr. Hawthorne s, for 
 instance, so there is no more pernicious depend 
 ence than an unbridled fancy. Mr. Trollope has 
 not the imagination of Mr. Reade, his strong 
 grasp of the possible; but he has a delicate per 
 ception of the actual which makes every whit 
 as firm ground to work upon. This delicate per 
 ception of the actual Miss Prescott would do well 
 to cultivate: if Mr. Trollope is too distasteful to 
 her, she may cultivate it in the attentive perusal 
 of Mr. Reade, in whom there are many Trollopes. 
 Let her not fear to grovel, but take note of what is, 
 constitute herself an observer, and review the im 
 measurable treasures she has slighted. If she will 
 conscientiously do this, she will need to invent 
 neither new and unprecedented phases of humanity 
 nor equally unprecedented nouns and adjectives. 
 There are already more than enough for the novel 
 ists purpose. All we ask of him is to use the 
 material ready to his hand. When Miss Prescott 
 reconciles herself to this lowly task, then and then 
 only will she find herself truly rich in resource. 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 III 
 
 J^indisfarn hase 
 
 T S HIS is a fair specimen of a second-rate novel, 
 * a species of work which commands a certain 
 degree of respect; for second-rate novels are the 
 great literary feature of the day. It is the work 
 of a man who has no vocation for his task except 
 a well-practised hand, and who would yet find it 
 very hard that he should not write his novel with 
 the rest. In the present condition of literature, 
 when novel-writing is at once a trade and a past- 
 time, books of this class are inevitable. Let us 
 take them for what they are worth. Both in 
 England and in this country they find an immense 
 public of excellent persons, whose chief delight in 
 literature is the contemplation of respectable^ 
 mediocrity. Such works as "Lindisfarn Chase" 
 are plentiful, because they are so easy to write; 
 they are popular, because they are so easy to read. 
 To compose a novel on the model before us, 
 one must have seen a good many well-bred people, 
 and have read a good many well-written novels. 
 These qualifications are easily acquired. The 
 novel of a writer who possesses them will be (if it 
 
 "Lindisfarn Chase." By T. Adolphus Trollope. New 
 York: 1864. 
 
 33 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 is successful) a reflection of the manner of his 
 social equals or inferiors and of his literary supe 
 riors. If it is unsuccessful, the reason will prob 
 ably be that the author has sought inspiration in 
 his social superiors. In the case of an attempted 
 portraiture of a lower order of society, a series of 
 false representations will not be so likely to prove 
 fatal, because the critics and the reading public 
 are not so well informed as to the facts. A book 
 like "Lindisfarn Chase" might almost be written 
 by recipe; so much depends upon the writer s 
 familiarity with good society, and upon his good 
 taste; so little depends upon his real dramatic 
 perception. The first requisite is to collect a 
 large number of persons, so many that you have 
 no space to refine upon individuals, even if you 
 should sometimes feel dangerously tempted to do 
 so; to give these persons pleasant, expressive 
 names, and to scatter among them a few handfuls 
 of clever description. The next step is to make a 
 fair distribution of what may be called pre-his- 
 toric facts, facts which are referred to periods 
 prior to the opening of the tale, and which serve, 
 as it were, as your base of supplies during its 
 progress. According as these facts are natural 
 and commonplace, or improbable and surprising, 
 your story is an ordinary novel of manners, a 
 sober photograph of common life, or a romance. 
 Their great virtue is to relieve the writer of all 
 analysis of character, to enable him to forge his 
 interest out of the exhibition of circumstance 
 
 34 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 rather than out of the examination of motived 
 The work before us affords an instance to the 
 point. 
 
 Mr. Trollope desires to represent a vicious and 
 intriguing young girl; so he takes an English 
 maiden, and supposes her to have been educated 
 in Paris. Vice and intrigue are conjured up by a 
 touch of the pen. Paris covers a multitude of 
 sins. Mr. Trollope fills his young lady s mouth 
 with French phrases and allusions, assures us that 
 she was a very hard case, and lo! she does service 
 as a complex human creature. Margaret Lindis- 
 farn is a weak repetition of Thackeray s Blanche 
 Amory. Heu quanta minus! Mr. Trollope is very 
 far from possessing even his" brother s knowledge 
 of the workings of young girls hearts. Young 
 girls are seldom so passionless as Margaret Lindis- 
 farn. Beautiful, wealthy, still in her teens, she is 
 represented as possessing the deep diplomatic 
 heart of an old gentlewoman who has half a dozen 
 daughters on her hands. But granting that it is 
 possible that she should be as coldly selfish as she 
 is made out to be, why refer it all to Paris? It is 
 surely not necessary to have lived in Paris to be 
 heartless. Margaret is full of grace and tact, and 
 is always well-dressed: a residence in the French 
 capital may have been required to explain these 
 advantages. She is cold-hearted, scheming, and 
 has her beautiful eyes perpetually fastened upon 
 the main chance. We see no reason why these 
 attributes should not have been of insular growth. 
 
 35 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 The only definite character we are able to assign 
 to the book is that of an argument against edu 
 cating English youth in Paris. A paltry aim, the 
 reader may say, for a work of art of these dimen 
 sions. He will say truly: but from such topics as 
 this is the English fiction of the present day glad 
 to draw inspiration. 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 IV 
 
 Emily Chester: 
 
 book is so well-meaning, that we are de- 
 terred by a feeling of real consideration for 
 its author from buying back, in the free expres 
 sion of our regret at misused time, the several 
 tedious hours we have spent over its pages. It is 
 emphatically a dull work; and yet it is a work in 
 which many persons might discern that arch- 
 opponent of dulness, a questionable moral tend 
 ency. It is almost, we think, a worthless book; 
 and yet it is decidedly a serious one. Its compo 
 sition has evidently been a great matter for the 
 author. 
 
 This latter fact commands our sympathy and 
 tempers our severity; and yet at the same time it 
 arouses a strong feeling of melancholy. This is 
 the age of conscientious poor books, as well as of 
 unscrupulous clever ones; and we are often ap 
 palled at the quantity of ponderous literary matter 
 which is kept afloat in the market by the simple 
 fact that those who have set it afloat are persons 
 of a well-meaning sort. When a book is both bad 
 
 "Emily Chester." [By Mrs. A. M. C. Seemuller.] Bos 
 ton: 1864. 
 
 37 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 and clever, the critic who pulls it to pieces feels 
 that the author has some consolation in the sweet 
 ness of his own wit for the acerbity of that of 
 others. But when a book is destitute of even the 
 excellence of a pleasant style, it is surrounded 
 with an atmosphere of innocence and innocuous- 
 ness which inspires the justly indignant reviewer 
 with compassion for the hapless adventurer who 
 has nothing to fall back upon. 
 
 We have called "Emily Chester" a dull book, 
 because the author has chosen a subject and a 
 manner alike certain to make it dull in any but 
 the most skilful hands. She has told a story of 
 character in a would-be psychological mode; not 
 of every-day character, such as is employed by 
 Mr. Trollope and Miss Austen, but of character 
 which she must allow us to term exceptional. She 
 has brought together three persons; for although 
 in the latter part of the book other names occur 
 with some frequency, they remain nothing but 
 names; and during three hundred and fifty close 
 pages, we are invited to watch the moral opera 
 tions of this romantic trio. What a chance for 
 dulness is here! 
 
 She has linked her three persons together by a 
 simple dramatic mechanism. They are a husband, 
 a wife, and a lover. Emily Chester, the wife, is a 
 beautiful and accomplished young woman. When 
 we have said this, we have said as much about her 
 as we venture positively to assert; for any further 
 acquaintance with her is the result of mere guess- 
 
 38 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 work. Her person is minutely described. At 
 eighteen she has a magnificently developed figure. 
 We are told that she has a deep sense of the beau 
 tiful; we gather generally that she is good yet 
 proud, with a stern Romanesque pride, pas 
 sionate yet cold, and although very calm and 
 stately on all occasions, quite free from petty 
 feminine affectations; that she is furthermore 
 earnestly devoted to music, and addicted to quot 
 ing from the German. Is she clever? We know 
 not. The author has evidently intended to make 
 her very perfect, but she has only succeeded in 
 making her very inane. She behaves on all occa 
 sions in a most irreproachable, inhuman manner; 
 as if from the hour of her birth she had resolved 
 to be a martyr, and was grimly determined not to 
 be balked of her purpose. When anything par 
 ticularly disagreeable happens, she becomes very 
 pale and calm and statuesque. Although in the 
 ordinary affairs of life she is sufficiently cheerful 
 and voluble, whenever anything occurs a little out 
 of the usual way she seems to remember the stake 
 and the torture, and straightway becomes silent 
 and cold and classical. She goes down into her 
 grave after a life of acute misery without ever 
 having "let on", as the phrase is, that there has 
 been anything particular the matter with her. In 
 view of these facts, we presume that the author 
 has aimed at the creation of a perfect woman, - 
 a woman high-toned, high-spirited, high-souled, 
 high-bred, high and mighty in all respects. 
 
 39 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 Heaven preserve us from any more radical speci 
 mens of this perfection! 
 
 To wish to create such a specimen was a very 
 laudable, but a very perilous ambition; to have 
 created it, would have been an admirable achieve 
 ment. But the task remains pretty much what 
 it was. Emily Chester is not a character; she is 
 a mere shadow; the mind s eye strives in vain to 
 body her forth from the fluent mass of talk in 
 which she is embodied. We do not wish to be 
 understood as attributing this fact of her indis 
 tinctness to the fact of her general excellence and 
 nobleness; good women, thank heaven, may be as 
 vividly realized as bad ones. We attribute it to 
 the want of clearness in the author s conception, 
 to the want of science in her execution. 
 
 Max Crampton and Frederick Hastings, who 
 are both very faulty persons, are equally incom 
 plete and intangible. Max is an eccentric mil- 
 lionnaire, a mute adorer of Miss Chester; mute, 
 that is, with regard to his passion, but a great 
 talker and theorizer on things in general. We 
 have a strong impression of having met him be 
 fore. He is the repetition of a type that has of 
 late years obtained great favor with lady novelists: 
 the ugly, rich, middle-aged lover, with stern brows 
 and white teeth; reticent and yet ardent; indo 
 lent and yet muscular, full of satire and common- 
 sense. Max is partly a German, as such men often 
 are, in novels. In spite of these striking charac 
 teristics, his fine rich ugliness, his sardonic laugh, 
 
 40 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 his enormous mental strength, the fulness of his 
 devotion and of his magnanimity, he is anything 
 but a living, moving person. He is essentially a 
 woman s man; one of those impossible heroes, 
 whom lady novelists concoct half out of their own 
 erratic fancies and half out of those of other lady 
 novelists. But if Max is a woman s man, what is 
 Frederick Hastings? He is worse; he is almost a 
 man s woman. He is nothing; he is more shadowy 
 even than Emily. We are told that he had beauty 
 and grace of person, delicacy, subtlety of mind, 
 womanly quickness of perception. But, like his 
 companions, he utterly fails to assert himself. 
 
 Such are the three mutually related individuals 
 with whom we are brought into relation. We can 
 not but suppose that, as we have said, the author 
 intended them for persons of exceptional en 
 dowments. Such beauty, such moral force and 
 fervor, as are shadowed forth in Emily; so sublime 
 and Gothic an ugliness, such intellectual depth, 
 breadth, strength, so vast an intellectual and 
 moral capacity generally, as we are taught to as 
 sociate with Max: these traits are certainly not 
 vouchsafed to the vulgar many. Nor is it given 
 to one man out of five thousand, we apprehend, 
 to be so consummate a charmer as Frederick 
 Hastings. 
 
 But granting the existence of these almost 
 unique persons, we recur to our statement that 
 they are treated in a psychological fashion. We 
 use this word, for want of a better one, in what 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 we may call its technical sense. We apply it to 
 the fact that the author makes the action of her 
 story rest, not only exclusively, but what is more 
 to the point, avowedly, upon the temperament, 
 nature, constitution, instincts, of her characters; 
 upon their physical rather than upon their moral 
 sense. There is a novel at present languidly cir 
 culating in our literature- "Charles Auchester" 
 which is generally spoken of by its admirers as 
 a "novel of temperament." "Emily Chester" is 
 of the same sort; it is an attempt to exalt the 
 physical sensibilities into the place of monitors 
 and directors, or at any rate to endow them with 
 supreme force and subtlety. Psychology, it may 
 be said, is the observation of the moral and intel 
 lectual character. We repeat that we use the 
 word in what we have called its technical sense, 
 the scrutiny, in fiction, of motive generally. It is 
 very common now-a-days for young novelists to 
 build up figures minus the soul. There are two 
 ways of so eliminating the spiritual principle. 
 One is by effectually diluting it in the description 
 of outward objects, as is the case with the pic 
 turesque school of writing; another is by diluting 
 it in the description of internal subjects. This 
 latter course has been pursued in the volume be 
 fore us. In either case the temperament is the 
 nearest approach we have to a soul. Emily be 
 comes aware of Frederick Hastings s presence at 
 Mrs. Dana s party by "a species of animal mag 
 netism." Many writers would have said by the 
 
 42 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 use of her eyes. During the period of her grief at 
 her father s death, Max feels that he is "constitu 
 tionally powerless" to help her. So he does not 
 even try. As she regains her health, after her 
 marriage, "her morbid sensitiveness to outward 
 influences" returns with renewed vigor. Her old 
 constitutional repulsion towards (sic) her husband 
 increases with fearful rapidity. She tries in vain 
 to overcome it: "the battle with, and denial of, 
 instinct resulted as such conflicts inevitably 
 must." The mood in which she drives him from 
 her, in what may not be inappropriately termed 
 the "balcony scene" on the Lake of Como, arises 
 from her having been "true to her constitutional 
 sensitiveness." Max recognizes the old friend 
 ship between his wife and Hastings to have been 
 the "constitutional harmony of two congenial 
 natures." Emily s spirit, on page 245, is bound 
 by "human law with which its nature had no cor 
 respondence." We are told on page 285, that 
 Frederick Hastings held Emily fascinated by his 
 "motive power over the supersensuous portion of 
 her being." 
 
 But it is needless to multiply examples. There 
 is hardly a page in which the author does not in 
 sinuate her conviction that, in proportion as a 
 person is finely organized, in so far is he apt to be 
 the slave of his instincts, the subject of unac 
 countable attractions and repulsions, loathings 
 and yearnings. We do not wish to use hard words; 
 perhaps, indeed, the word which is in our mind, 
 
 43 
 
L B 
 
 Mil 
 
 NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 and which will be on the lips of many, is in these 
 latter days no longer a hard word; but if "Emily 
 Chester" is immortal, it is by the fact of the above 
 false representation. It is not in making a woman 
 prefer another man to her husband, nor even in 
 making her detest a kind and virtuous husband. 
 It is in showing her to be so disposed without an 
 assignable reason; it is in making her irresponsible. 
 But the absurdity of such a view of human nature 
 lullifies its pernicious tendency. Beasts and idiots 
 act from their instincts; educated men and women, 
 even when they most violate principle, act from 
 their reason, however perverted, and their affec 
 tions, however misplaced. 
 
 We presume that our author wishes us to ad 
 mire, or at least to compassionate, her heroine; 
 but we must deny her the tribute of either senti 
 ment. It may be claimed for her that she was 
 ultimately victorious over her lawless impulses; 
 but this claim we reject. Passion was indeed con 
 quered by duty, but life was conquered by pas 
 sion. The true victory of mind would have been, 
 not perhaps in a happy, but at least in a peaceful 
 life. Granting the possibility of Emily s having 
 been beset by these vague and nameless conflict 
 ing forces, the one course open to her was to con 
 quer a peace. Women who love less wisely than 
 well engage our sympathy even while we deny 
 them our approbation; but a woman who indulges 
 in a foolish passion, without even the excuse of 
 loving well, must be curtly and sternly dismissed. 
 
 44 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 At no period of Emily s history could she have 
 assigned a reason to herself (let alone her disabil 
 ity to make her position clear to her husband) 
 for her intense loathing of Max Crampton! We 
 do not say that she could not have defended her 
 position; she could not have even indicated it. 
 Nor could she have given a name to the state of 
 her feelings with regard to Hastings. She admits 
 to herself that he does not engage her heart; he 
 dominates merely "the supersensuous portion of 
 her being." We hope that this glittering gener 
 ality was not of Emily s own contrivance. Sore 
 distressed indeed must she have been, if she could 
 not have made herself out a better case than her 
 biographer has made for her. If her biographer 
 had represented her as loving Frederick Hastings, 
 as struggling with her love, and finally reducing 
 it from a disorderly to an orderly passion, we 
 should have pledged her our fullest sympathy and 
 interest. Having done so well, we might have 
 regretted that she should not have done better, 
 and have continued to adorn that fashionable 
 society of which she was so brilliant a member. 
 She was in truth supremely handsome; she might 
 have lived for her beauty s sake. But others have 
 done so much worse, that we should have been 
 sorry to complain. As the case stands, we com 
 plain bitterly, not so much of Emily as of the 
 author; for we are satisfied that an Emily is im 
 possible. Even from the author s point of view, 
 however, her case is an easy one. She had no 
 
 45 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 hate to contend with, merely loathing; no love, 
 merely yearning; no feelings, as far as we can 
 make out, merely sensations. Except the loss of 
 her property, we maintain that she has no deep 
 sorrow in life. She refuses Hastings in the season 
 of her trial. Good: she would not marry a man 
 whom she did not love, merely for a subsistence; 
 so far she was an honest woman. But she refuses 
 him at the cost of a great agony. We do not un 
 derstand her predicament. It is our belief that 
 there is no serious middle state between friendship 
 and love. If Emily did not love Hastings, why 
 should she have suffered so intensely in refusing 
 him? Certainly not out of sympathy for him dis 
 appointed. We may be told that she did not love 
 him in a way to marry him: she loved him, then, 
 as a mother or a sister. The refusal of his hand 
 must have been, in such a case, an easy rather 
 than a difficult task. She accepts Max as irre 
 sponsibly as she refuses Frederick, because 
 there is a look in his eyes of claiming her body 
 and soul, "through his divine right of the 
 stronger." Such a look must be either very 
 brutal or very tender. What we know of Max 
 forbids us to suppose that in his case it was 
 tainted with the former element; it must accord 
 ingly have expressed the ripened will to serve, 
 cherish, and protect. Why, then, should it in 
 later years, as Emily looked back upon it, have 
 filled her with so grisly a horror? Such terrors 
 are self-made. A woman who despises her hus- 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 band s person may perhaps, if she is very weak 
 and nervous, grow to invest it with numerous fan 
 tastic analogies. If, on the contrary, she is as 
 admirably self-poised as Mrs. Crampton, she will 
 endeavor, by the steady contemplation of his 
 magnificent intellect and his generous devotion, 
 to discern the subtle halo (always discernible to 
 the eye of belief) which a noble soul sheds 
 through an ignoble body. Our author will per 
 haps resent our insinuation that the unutterable 
 loathing of Max s wife for him was anything so 
 easily disposed of as a contempt for his person. 
 Such a feeling is a very lawful one; it may easily 
 be an impediment to a wife s happiness; but 
 when it is balanced by so deep a conviction of her 
 partner s moral and intellectual integrity as Mrs. 
 Crampton s own mental acuteness furnished her, 
 it is certainly not an insuperable bar to a career 
 of comfortable resignation. When it assumes the 
 unnatural proportions in which it is here exhibited, 
 it conclusively proves that its subject is a pro 
 foundly vicious person. Emily found just that in 
 Hastings which she missed in her husband. If 
 the absence of this quality in Max was sufficient 
 to unfit him for her true love, why should not 
 its presence have been potent enough to insure 
 her heart to Frederick? We doubt very much 
 whether she had a heart; we mistrust those 
 hearts which are known only by their ineffable 
 emptiness and woe. But taking her biographer s 
 word for it that she had, the above little piece of 
 
 47 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 logic ought, we think, effectually to confound it. 
 Heart-histories, as they are called, have generally 
 been considered a very weary and unprofitable 
 species of fiction; but we infinitely prefer the old- 
 fashioned love-stories, in which no love but heart- 
 love was recognized, to these modern teachings of 
 a vagrant passion which has neither a name nor 
 a habitation. We are not particularly fond of 
 any kind of sentimentality; but Heaven defend 
 us from the sentimentality which soars above all 
 our old superstitions, and allies itself with any 
 thing so rational as a theory. 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 V 
 
 "Jtfoods" 
 
 T TNDER the above title, Miss Alcott has given 
 ^ us her version of the old story of the husband, 
 the wife, and the lover. This story has been told 
 so often that an author s only pretext for telling 
 it again is his consciousness of an ability to make 
 it either more entertaining or more instructive; 
 to invest it with incidents more dramatic, or with 
 a more pointed moral. Its interest has already 
 been carried to the furthest limits, both of tragedy 
 and comedy, by a number of practised French 
 writers: under this head, therefore, competition 
 would be superfluous. Has Miss Alcott proposed 
 to herself to give her story a philosophical bear 
 ing? We can hardly suppose it. 
 
 We have seen it asserted that her book claims 
 to deal with the "doctrine of affinities." What 
 the doctrine of affinities is, we do not exactly 
 know; but we are inclined to think that our author 
 has been somewhat maligned. Her book is, to 
 our perception, innocent of any doctrine whatever. 
 
 The heroine of "Moods" is a fitful, wayward, 
 and withal most amiable young person, named 
 Sylvia. We regret to say that Miss Alcott takes 
 
 "Moods. * By Louisa M. Alcott. Boston: 1865. 
 49 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 her up in her childhood. We are utterly weary of 
 stories about precocious little girls. In the first 
 place, they are in themselves disagreeable and 
 unprofitable objects of study; and in the second, 
 they are always the precursors of a not less un 
 profitable middle-aged lover. We admit that, 
 even to the middle-aged, Sylvia must have been 
 a most engaging little person. One of her means 
 of fascination is to disguise herself as a boy and 
 work in the garden with a hoe and wheelbarrow; 
 under which circumstances she is clandestinely 
 watched by one of the heroes, who then and there 
 falls in love with her. Then she goes off on a 
 camping-out expedition of a week s duration, in 
 company with three gentlemen, with no super 
 fluous luggage, as far as we can ascertain, but a 
 cockle-shell stuck "pilgrim-wise" in her hat. It 
 is hard to say whether the impropriety of this 
 proceeding is the greater or the less from the fact 
 of her extreme youth. This fact is at any rate 
 kindly overlooked by two of her companions, who 
 become desperately enamored of her before the 
 week is out. These two gentlemen are Miss 
 Alcott s heroes. One of them, Mr. Geoffrey Moor, 
 is unobjectionable enough; we shall have some 
 thing to say of him hereafter: but the other, Mr. 
 Adam Warwick, is one of our oldest and most in 
 veterate foes. He is the inevitable cavaliere ser- 
 vente of the precocious little girl; the laconical, 
 satirical, dogmatical lover, of about thirty-five, 
 with the "brown mane", the "quiet smile", the 
 
 5 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 " masterful soul", and the "commanding eye." 
 Do not all novel-readers remember a figure, a 
 hundred figures, analogous to this? Can they 
 not, one of his properties being given, the 
 "quiet smile" for instance, reconstruct the 
 whole monstrous shape? When the "quiet smile" 
 is suggested, we know what is coming: we foresee 
 the cynical bachelor or widower, the amateur of 
 human nature, "Full of strange oaths, and bearded 
 like the pard", who has travelled all over the world, 
 lives on a mysterious patrimony, and spends his 
 time in breaking the hearts and the wills of de 
 mure little school-girls, who answer him with 
 "Yes, sir", and "No, sir." 
 
 Mr. Warwick is plainly a great favorite with 
 the author. She has for him that affection which 
 writers entertain, not for those figures whom they 
 have well known, but for such as they have much 
 pondered. Miss Alcott has probably mused upon 
 Warwick so long and so lovingly that she has lost 
 all sense of his proportions. There is a most dis 
 couraging good-will in the manner in which lady 
 novelists elaborate their impossible heroes. There 
 are, thank Heaven, no such men at large in society. 
 We speak thus devoutly, not because Warwick is 
 a vicious person, on the contrary, he exhibits 
 the sternest integrity; but because, apparently as 
 a natural result of being thoroughly conscientious, 
 he is essentially disagreeable. Women appear to 
 delight in the conception of men who shall be in 
 supportable to men. Warwick is intended to be 
 
 51 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 a profoundly serious person. A species of pro 
 logue is prefixed to the tale, in which we are 
 initiated into his passion for one Ottila, a beauti 
 ful Cuban lady. This chapter is a literary curios 
 ity. The relations of the two lovers are illustrated 
 by means of a dialogue between them. Consider 
 ing how bad this dialogue is, it is really very 
 good. We mean that, considering what nonsense 
 the lovers are made to talk, their conversation is 
 quite dramatic. We are not certain of the extent 
 to which the author sympathizes with her hero; 
 but we are pretty sure that she has a secret 
 "Bravo" in store for him upon his exit. He talks 
 to his mistress as no sane man ever talked to a 
 woman. It is not too much to say that he talks 
 like a brute. Ottila s great crime has been, that, 
 after three months wooing, he has not found her 
 so excellent a person as he at first supposed her 
 to be. This is a specimen of his language: li You 
 allured my eye with loveliness, my ear with music; 
 piqued curiosity, pampered pride, and subdued 
 will by flatteries subtly administered. Beginning 
 afar off, you let all influences do their work, till 
 the moment came for the effective stroke. Then 
 you made a crowning sacrifice of maiden modesty, 
 and owned you loved me." What return does she 
 get for the sacrifice, if sacrifice it was? To have 
 her favors thrown back in her teeth on the day 
 that her lover determines to jilt her. To jilt a 
 woman in an underhand fashion is bad enough; 
 but to break your word to her and at the same 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 time load her with outrage, to call her evil names 
 because she is so provokingly in the right, to add 
 the foulest insult to the bitterest injury, these 
 things may be worthy of a dissolute adventurer, 
 but they are certainly not worthy of a model hero. 
 Warwick tells Ottila that he is "a man untamed 
 by any law but that of [his] own will." He is 
 further described as "violently virtuous, a mas 
 terful soul, bent on living out his aspirations at 
 any cost"; and as possessed of "great nobility of 
 character, great audacity of mind"; as being "too 
 fierce an iconoclast to suit the old party, too in 
 dividual a reformer to join the new", and "a 
 grand man in the rough, an excellent tonic for 
 those who have courage to try him." Truly, for 
 her courage in trying him, poor Ottila is generously 
 rewarded. His attitude towards her may be re 
 duced to this: Three months ago, I fell in love 
 with your beauty, your grace, your wit. I took 
 them as a promise of a moral elevation which I 
 now find you do not possess. And yet, the deust 
 take it, I am engaged to you. Ergo, you are 
 false, immodest, and lacking in the "moral senti 
 ment", and I will have nothing to do with you. 
 I may be a sneak, a coward, a brute; but at all 
 events, I am untamed by any law, etc. 
 
 Before the picnic above mentioned is over, 
 Warwick and Moor have, unknown to each other, 
 both lost their hearts to Sylvia. Warwick may 
 not declare himself, inasmuch as, to do him jus 
 tice, he considers himself bound by word to the 
 
 53 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 unfortunate beauty of the Havana. But Moor, 
 who is free to do as he pleases, forthwith offers 
 himself. He is refused, the young girl having a 
 preference for Warwick. But while she is wait 
 ing for Warwick s declaration, his flirtation with 
 Ottila comes to her knowledge. She recalls Moor, 
 marries him, and goes to spend her honeymoon 
 among the White Mountains. Here Warwick 
 turns up. He has been absent in Cuba, whether 
 taking back his rude speeches to Ottila, or fol 
 lowing them up with more of the same sort, we 
 are not informed. He is accordingly ignorant of 
 the change in his mistress s circumstances. He 
 finds her alone on the mountain-side, and straight 
 way unburdens his heart. Here ensues a very 
 pretty scene, prettily told. On learning the sad 
 truth, Warwick takes himself off, over the crest 
 of the hill, looking very tall and grand against 
 the sun, and leaving his mistress alone in the 
 shadow. In the shadow she passes the rest of 
 her brief existence. She might have lived along 
 happily enough, we conceive, masquerading with 
 her gentle husband in the fashion of old days, if 
 Warwick had not come back, and proffered a 
 visit, his one natural and his one naughty act. 
 Of course it is all up with Sylvia. An honest man 
 in Warwick s position would immediately have 
 withdrawn, on seeing that his presence only 
 served seriously to alienate his mistress from her 
 husband. A dishonest man would have remained 
 and made love to his friend s wife. 
 
 54 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 Miss Alcott tries to persuade us that her hero 
 does neither; but we maintain that he adopts the 
 latter course, and, what is worse, does it like an 
 arrant hypocrite. He proceeds to lay down the 
 law of matrimonial duty to Sylvia in a manner 
 which, in our opinion, would warrant her in call 
 ing in her husband to turn him out of the house. 
 He declares, indeed, that he designs no "French 
 sentiment nor sin", whatever these may be; but 
 he exerts the utmost power of his "masterful 
 soul" to bully her into a protest against her un 
 natural union. No man with any sense of de 
 cency, no man of the slightest common-sense, 
 would presume to dogmatize in this conceited 
 fashion upon a matter with which he has not the 
 least concern. Miss Alcott would tell us, we pre 
 sume, that it is not as a lover, but as a friend, that 
 Warwick offers the advice here put into his mouth. 
 Family friends, when they know what they are 
 about, are only too glad to shirk the responsibility 
 of an opinion in matrimonial differences. When a 
 man beats, starves, or otherwise misuses his wife, 
 any judicious acquaintance will take the responsi 
 bility of advising the poor woman to seek legal 
 redress; and he need not, to use Miss Alcott s 
 own preposition, have an affinity "for" her, to do 
 so. But it is inconceivable that a wise and vir 
 tuous gentleman should deliberately persuade two 
 dear friends dear equally to himself and to 
 each other to pick imperceptible flaws in a 
 relation whose inviolability is the great interest 
 
 55 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 of their lives, and which, from the picture pre 
 sented to us, is certainly one of exceptional com 
 fort and harmony. 
 
 In all this matter it strikes us that Sylvia s 
 husband is the only one to be pitied. His wife, 
 while in a somnambulistic state, confesses the 
 secret of her illicit affection. Moor is, of course, 
 bitterly outraged, and his anger is well described. 
 Sylvia pities him intensely, but insists with sweet 
 inflexibility that she cannot continue to be his 
 wife, and dismisses him to Europe, with a most 
 audacious speech about the beautiful eternity 
 and the immortality of love. Moor, who for a 
 moment has evinced a gleam of natural passion, 
 which does something towards redeeming from 
 ludicrous unreality the united efforts of the trio 
 before us, soon recovers himself, and submits to 
 his fate precisely like a morbidly conscientious 
 young girl who is engaged in the formation of her 
 character under the direction of her clergyman. 
 From this point accordingly the story becomes 
 more and more unnatural, although, we cheer 
 fully add, it becomes considerably more dramatic, 
 and is much better told. All this portion is, in 
 fact, very pretty; indeed, if it were not so essen 
 tially false, we should call it very fine. As it is, 
 we can only use the expression in its ironical 
 sense. Moor consents to sacrifice himself to the 
 beautiful ethical abstraction which his wife and 
 her lover have concocted between them. He will 
 go to Europe and await the dawning of some new 
 
 56 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 abstraction, under whose starry influence he may 
 return. When he does return, it will not be, we 
 may be sure, to give his wife the thorough rating 
 she deserves. 
 
 At the eleventh hour, when the vessel is about 
 to start, Warwick turns up, and thrusts himself, 
 as a travelling companion, upon the man he has 
 outraged. As Warwick was destined to die a 
 violent death, we think Miss Alcott might have 
 here appropriately closed her book by making 
 Moor pitch Adam into the water for his imperti 
 nence. But as usual, Warwick has his own way. 
 
 During their absence, Sylvia sinks into a rapid 
 decline. After a certain interval they start home 
 ward. But their ship is wrecked; Warwick is lost 
 in trying to save Moor s life; and Moor reaches 
 home alone. Sylvia then proceeds to put him 
 and every one else in the wrong by dying the 
 death of the righteous. 
 
 The two most striking facts with regard to 
 "Moods" are the author s ignorance of human 
 nature, and her self-confidence in spite of this 
 ignorance. Miss Alcott doubtless knows men and 
 women well enough to deal successfully with 
 their every-day virtues and temptations, but not 
 well enough to handle great dramatic passions. 
 The consequence is, that her play is not a real 
 play, nor her actors real actors. 
 
 But beside these facts are others, less salient 
 perhaps, upon which it is pleasanter to touch. 
 Chief among these is the author s decided clever- 
 
 57 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 ness; that quality to which we owe it that, in 
 spite of the absurdities of the action, the last half 
 of her book is replete with beauty and vigor. 
 What shall we call this quality? Imagination 
 does not seem to us too grand a word. For, 
 in the absence of knowledge, our authoress has 
 derived her figures, as the German derived his 
 camel, from the depths of her moral consciousness. 
 If they are on this account the less real, they are 
 also on this account the more unmistakably in 
 stinct with a certain beauty and grace. If Miss 
 Alcott s experience of human nature has been small, 
 as we should suppose, her admiration for it is never 
 theless great. Putting aside Adam s treatment 
 of Ottila, she sympathizes throughout her book 
 with none but great things. She has the rare 
 merit, accordingly, of being very seldom puerile. 
 For inanimate nature, too, she has a genuine love, 
 together with a very pretty way of describing it. 
 With these qualities there is no reason why Miss 
 Alcott should not write a very good novel, pro 
 vided she will be satisfied to describe only that 
 which she has seen. When such a novel comes, as 
 we doubt not it eventually will, we shall be among 
 the first to welcome it. With the exception of two 
 or three celebrated names, we know not, indeed, 
 to whom, in this country, unless to Miss Alcott, 
 we are to look for a novel above the average. 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 VI 
 
 The J^oble School of Fiction 
 
 "V|R. HENRY KINGSLEY may be fairly de- 
 *--- scribed as a reduced copy of his brother. 
 He lacks, indeed, many of his brother s gifts; 
 especially that tone of authority which the 
 Rev. Charles Kingsley derives from his connection 
 with the Church and the University. He cher 
 ishes, publicly, at least, no original theory of his 
 tory. He has less talent, to begin with; and less 
 knowledge, to end with. But he is nevertheless, 
 as perhaps indeed for these very reasons, a capital 
 example of the pure Kingsley spirit. In him we 
 see the famous muscular system of morality pre 
 sented in its simplest form, disengaged from the 
 factitious graces of scholarship. Our feeling for 
 Mr. Henry Kingsley, for which under other cir 
 cumstances we could not positively vouch, is 
 almost kindled into gratitude when we consider 
 the good service he has rendered the rising gen 
 eration in divesting the name of Kingsley of its 
 terror. As long as Mr. Charles Kingsley wrote 
 about the age of Elizabeth and the age of Hypa- 
 tia, and exercised his powerful and perverse 
 
 "The Hilly ars and the Burtons: a Story of Two Families." 
 By Henry Kingsley. Boston: 1865. 
 
 59 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 imagination upon the Greeks of the fifth century 
 and the Englishmen of the sixteenth, those young 
 persons who possessed only the common-school 
 notions of the rise of Protestantism and the fall 
 of Paganism had nothing to depend upon during 
 their slow convalescence from the Kingsley fever 
 - which we take to be a malady natural to youth, 
 like the measles or the scarlatina, leaving the sub 
 ject much stronger and sounder but a vague 
 uncomfortable sensation of the one-sidedness of 
 their teacher. Those persons, on the other hand, 
 who had inquired for themselves into the manners 
 of the Elizabethan era, discovered, what they had 
 all along expected, that both Mr. Kingsley s Eng 
 lishmen and his Spaniards, although in a certain 
 way wonderfully life-like, were yet not the char 
 acters of history; that these persons were occupied 
 with far other thoughts than that of posing for 
 the confusion of the degenerate Anglo-Saxons of 
 the present day; that they were infinitely brutal, 
 indeed, and sentimental in their own fashion; but 
 that this fashion was very unlike Mr. Kingsley s. 
 There is a way of writing history which on gen 
 eral grounds impugns the writer s fidelity; that is, 
 studying it with a prejudice either in favor of 
 human nature or against it. This is the method 
 selected by Mr. Kingsley and Mr. Carlyle. Mr. 
 Kingsley s prejudice is, on the whole, in favor of 
 human nature; while Mr. Carlyle s is against it. 
 It is astonishing, however, how nearly the two 
 writers coincide in their conclusions. When in 
 
 60 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 "Two Years Ago" Mr. Charles Kingsley took up 
 the men and women about us, he inflicted upon 
 his cause an injury which his brother s novels 
 have only served to aggravate. He made a very 
 thrilling story; a story which we would advise all 
 young persons to read, as they take a cold bath 
 in winter time, for the sake of the "reaction"; 
 but he forfeited his old claim to being considered 
 a teacher. He gave us the old giants and the old 
 cravens; but giants and cravens were found to be 
 insufficient to the demands of the age. The age 
 has stronger muscles and weaker nerves than 
 Mr. Kingsley supposes. 
 
 The author of the volume before us tells us in 
 a brief preface that his object has been to paint 
 the conflict between love and duty in the breast 
 of an uneducated girl, who, after a year and a 
 half at boarding-school, "might have developed 
 into a very noble lady." He adds that this ques 
 tion of the claims of duty as opposed to love is 
 one which, "thanks to the nobleness of our 
 women", is being continually put before us. To 
 what women the possessive pronoun refers is left 
 to conjecture: but judging from the fact that 
 whenever the Messrs. Kingsley speak of the 
 human race in general they mean their own coun 
 trymen in particular, we may safely apply.it to 
 the daughters of England. But however this 
 may be, the question in point is one which, in 
 spite of Mr. Kingsley s preface, and thanks to his 
 incompetency to tell a straight story, is not put 
 
 61 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 before us here. We are treated to nothing so 
 beautiful, so simple, or so interesting. Does the 
 author really believe that any such severe inten 
 tion is discernible among his chaotic, inartistic 
 touches? We can hardly think that he does; and 
 yet, if he does not, his preface is inconceivably 
 impudent. It is time that this fashion were done 
 away with, of tacking a subject upon your story 
 on the eve of publication. As long as Mr. Kings- 
 ley s book has a subject, what matters it whether 
 it be outside of the story or inside? The story is 
 composed on the plan of three-fourths of the 
 modern popular novels. The author leaps astride 
 of a half-broken fancy, starts off at a brisk trot 
 (we are all familiar with the cheerful energetic 
 colloquy or description with which these works 
 open), and trusts to Providence for the rest. His 
 main dependence is his command of that expe 
 dient which is known in street parlance as "col 
 lecting a crowd." He overawes the reader by the 
 force of numbers; and in this way he is never 
 caught solus upon the stage; for to be left alone 
 with his audience, or even to be forced into a pro 
 longed tete-d-tete with one of his characters, is the 
 giant terror of the second-rate novelist. Another 
 unfailing resource of Mr. Henry Kingsley is his 
 intimate acquaintance with Australian life. This 
 fact is evidently in his opinion, by itself, almost a 
 sufficient outfit for a novelist. It is one of those 
 rudimentary truths which cannot be too often 
 repeated, that to write a novel it is not necessary 
 
 62 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 to have been a traveller, an adventurer, a sight 
 seer; it is simply necessary to be an artist. Mr. 
 Kingsley s descriptions of Australia are very 
 pretty; but they are not half so good as those of 
 Mr. Charles Reade, who, as far as we know, has 
 never visited the country. We mean that they 
 do not give the reader that vivid impression of a 
 particular place which the genius of Mr. Reade 
 contrives to produce. Mr. Reade went to Aus 
 tralia that is, his imagination went on pur 
 pose to compose certain chapters in "Never too 
 Late to Mend." Mr. Kingsley went in the flesh; 
 but Mr. Kingsley in the flesh is not equal to Mr. 
 Reade in the spirit. 
 
 The main object of the novels of Mr. Charles 
 Kingsley and his brother has seemed to us to be 
 to give a strong impression of what they would 
 call "human nobleness." Human nobleness, 
 when we come across it in life, is a very fine 
 thing; but it quite loses its flavor when it is made 
 so cheap as it is made in these works. It is em 
 phatically an occasional quality; it is not, and, 
 with all due respect for the stalwart Englishmen 
 of Queen Elizabeth s time and eke of Queen Vic 
 toria s, it never was the prime element of human 
 life, nor were its headquarters at any time on the 
 island of Great Britain. By saying it is an occa 
 sional quality, we simply mean that it is a great 
 one, and is therefore manifested in great and 
 exceptional moments. In the ordinary course of 
 life it dees not come into play; it is sufficiently 
 
 63 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 represented by courage, modesty, industry. Let 
 the novelist give us these virtues for what they 
 are, and not for what no true lover of human 
 nature would have them pretend to be, or else 
 let him devise sublime opportunities, situations 
 which really match the latent nobleness of the 
 human soul. We can all of us take the outside 
 view of magnanimity; it belongs to the poet to 
 take the inside one. It seems to us that the 
 sturdy and virtuous Burtons in the present tale 
 have but a narrow scale of emotions. Mr. Kings- 
 ley would apparently have us look upon them all 
 as heroes, which, with the best will in the world, 
 we cannot succeed in doing. A hero is but a 
 species of genius, a genius pro fempore. The 
 Burtons are essentially commonplace. The best 
 that can be said of them is that they had a good 
 notion of their duty. It is here, as it seems to us, 
 that praise should begin, and not, as Mr. Kingsley 
 would have us think, that it should be content to 
 end. The notion of duty is an excellent one to 
 start with, but it is a poor thing to spend one s 
 life in trying to compass. A life so spent, at any 
 rate, is not a fit subject for an epic novel. The 
 Burtons had none but the minor virtues hon 
 esty, energy, and a strong family feeling. Let us 
 do all justice to these excellent qualities, but let 
 us not shame them by for ever speaking of them 
 with our hats off, and a "so help me God!" The 
 only hero in Mr. Kingsley s book is, to our per 
 ception, the villain, Sir George Hillyar. He has 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 a spark of inspiration; he is ridden by an evil 
 genius; he has a spirit of his own. The others, the 
 good persons, the gentlemen and ladies, whether 
 developed by "a year and a half at boarding- 
 school", or still in the rough, have nothing but 
 the old Kingsleian air noble. We are informed 
 that they have "great souls", which on small 
 provocation rush into their eyes and into the 
 grasp of their hands; and they are for ever ad 
 dressing each other as "old boy" and "old girl." 
 "Is this ambition?" Has the language of friend 
 ship and of love no finer terms than these? Those 
 who use them, we are reminded, are gentlemen in 
 the rough. There is, in our opinion, no such 
 thing as a gentleman in the rough. A gentleman 
 is born of his polish. 
 
 A great French critic characterized Mr. Carlyle 
 in a sentence which we are confident he did not 
 keep for what we have called the noble school of 
 fiction, the muscular system of morals, only be 
 cause its founder was unknown to him. Carlyle, 
 said M. Taine, "would limit the human heart to 
 the English sentiment of respect." It seems to 
 us that these words admirably sum up Kings- 
 leyism, the morality which Mr. Charles Kingsley 
 preaches in his sermons, teaches in his wondrous 
 lectures on history, and dramatizes in his novels, 
 and of which his brother is a more worldly and 
 popular representative. There is that in Mr. 
 Charles Kingsley s tone which implies a convic 
 tion that when he has served up human nature in 
 
 65 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 the way described by M. Taine, he has finally 
 disposed of it. He has held up the English spirit 
 to the imitation of the world. He has, indeed, 
 held it up by the force of his great talents to the 
 contemplation of a large number of spectators, 
 and of certain admirable properties of this spirit 
 he will long be regarded as one of the most graphic 
 exponents. But he has shown, together with a 
 great deal to admire, a great deal to reprove; and 
 it is his damning fault (the expression is not too 
 strong) that equally with its merits he would im 
 pose its defects wholesale upon the rest of man 
 kind. But there is in the human heart a sentiment 
 higher than that of duty the sentiment of free 
 dom; and in the human imagination a force which 
 respects nothing but what is divine. In the mus 
 cular faith there is very little of the divine, because 
 there is very little that is spiritual. For the 
 same reason there is nothing but a spurious noble 
 ness. Who would rest content with this as the 
 last word of religious sagacity: that the ideal for 
 human endeavor is the English gentleman ? - 
 unless, indeed, it be the English gentleman him 
 self. To this do Mr. Charles Kingsley s teachings 
 amount. There is, nevertheless, in his novels, 
 and in his brother s as well, a great deal which we 
 might call beautiful, if it were not that this word 
 always suggests something that is true; a great 
 deal which we must/therefore, be content to call 
 pretty. Professor Kingsley would probably be by 
 no means satisfied to have us call "Westward, 
 
 66 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 Ho!" a pretty story; but it is pretty, nevertheless; 
 it is, in fact, quite charming. It is written in a 
 style which the author would himself call "noble 
 English", and it contains many lovely descrip 
 tions of South America, which he has apparently 
 the advantage of not having visited. How a real 
 South America would clash with his unreal Eng 
 land! Mr. Henry Kingsley will never do any 
 thing so good; but if he will forget a vast number 
 of things, and remember as many more, he may 
 write a readable story yet. Let him forget, in the 
 first place, that he is an English gentleman, and 
 remember that he is a novelist. Let him forget 
 (always in the interest of art) the eternal respon 
 sibility of the rich to the poor, which in the volume 
 before us has spoiled two good things. And let 
 him talk a little less about nobleness, and inquire 
 a little more closely into its real essence. We do 
 not desire hereby to arrest the possible flights of 
 his imagination. On the contrary, we are sure 
 that if he will woo human nature with the proper 
 assiduity, he will draw from her many a sweet 
 confession, infinitely more creditable than any 
 thing he could have fancied. Only let him not 
 consider it necessary to his success to salute her 
 invariably as "old girl." 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 VII 
 
 ^Mackenzie 
 
 TTTE have long entertained for Mr. Trollope a 
 partiality of which we have yet been some 
 what ashamed. Perhaps, indeed, we do wrong to 
 say that we have entertained it. It has rather 
 usurped our hospitality, and has resisted several 
 attempts at forcible expulsion. If it remains, 
 therefore, in however diminished vigor, we con 
 fess that it will be through our weakness. 
 
 Miss Mackenzie is a worthy gentlewoman, who, 
 coming at the age of thirty-six into a comfortable 
 little fortune, retires to enjoy it at a quiet watering- 
 place, where, in the course of time, she is beset by 
 a brace of mercenary suitors. After the lapse of a 
 year she discovers that she holds her property by 
 a wrongful title, and is compelled to transfer it 
 to her cousin, a widowed baronet, with several 
 children, who, however, gallantly repairs the 
 injury thus judicially inflicted, by making her his 
 wife. The work may be qualified, therefore, in 
 strictness, as the history of the pecuniary em 
 barrassments of a middle-aged spinster. The 
 subject has, at least, the charm of novelty, a 
 
 "Miss Mackenzie." By Anthony Trollope. New York: 
 1865. 
 
 68 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 merit of which the author has wisely appreciated 
 the force. We had had heroines of many kinds, 
 maidens in their teens, yea, even in their units, 
 and matrons in their twenties, but as yet we had 
 had no maidens in their thirties. We, for our part, 
 have often been called upon to protest against 
 the inveterate and excessive immaturity of the 
 ladies in whose fortunes we are expected to in 
 terest ourselves, and we are sincerely grateful to 
 Mr. Trollope for having practically recognized the 
 truth that a woman is potentially a heroine as 
 long as she lives. To many persons a middle-aged 
 woman in love trenches upon the ridiculous. 
 Such persons may be assured, however, that al 
 though there is considerable talk about this 
 passion in "Miss Mackenzie", there is very little 
 of its substance. Mr. Trollope has evidently been 
 conscious of the precarious nature of his heroines 
 dignity, and in attempting to cancel the peril to 
 which it is exposed, he has diminished the real 
 elements of passion. This is apt to be the case in 
 Mr. Trollope s stories. Passion has to await the 
 convenience of so many other claimants that in 
 the end she is but scantly served. As for action, 
 we all know what we are to expect of Mr. Trollope 
 in this direction; and the admirers of "quiet 
 novels", as they are somewhat euphuistically 
 termed, will not be disappointed here. Miss 
 Mackenzie loses her brother, and assumes his 
 property: she then adopts her little niece, takes 
 lodgings at Littlebath, returns a few visits, pro- 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 cures a seat at church, puts her niece at school, 
 receives a few awkward visits from a couple of 
 vulgar bachelors, quarrels with her pastor s wife, 
 goes to stay with some dull old relatives, loses her 
 money, falls out with the dull relatives, is taken 
 up by a fashionable cousin and made to serve in 
 a fancy fair, and finally receives and accepts an 
 offer from another cousin. Except the acquisi 
 tion and loss of her property, which events are 
 detailed at great length, she has no adventures. 
 Her life could not well be more peaceful. She 
 certainly suffers and enjoys less than most women. 
 Granting, that the adventures entailed upon her 
 by her luckless 800 a year are such as may 
 properly mark her for our observation and com 
 pensate for the lack of incidents more dramatic, 
 Mr. Trollope may consider that he has hit the 
 average of the experience of unmarried English 
 ladies. It is perhaps impossible to overstate the 
 habitual monotony of such lives; and at all events, 
 as far as the chronicler of domestic events has 
 courage to go in this direction, so far will a certain 
 proportion of facts bear him out. Literally, then, 
 Mr. Trollope accomplishes his purpose of being true 
 to common life. But in reading his pages, we were 
 constantly induced to ask ourselves whether he is 
 equally true to nature; that is, whether in the midst 
 of this multitude of real things, of uncompro 
 misingly real circumstances, the persons put before 
 us are equally real. Mr. Trollope has proposed to 
 himself to describe those facts which are so close 
 
 70 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 under every one s nose that no one notices them. 
 Life is vulgar, but we know not how vulgar it is 
 till we see it set down in his pages. It may be said, 
 therefore, that the emotions which depend upon 
 such facts as these cannot be too prosaic; that as 
 prison discipline makes men idiots, an approach, 
 however slight, to this kind of influence perceptibly 
 weakens the mind. We are yet compelled to 
 doubt whether men and women of healthy in 
 tellect take life, even in its smallest manifesta 
 tion, as stupidly as Miss Mackenzie and her friends. 
 Mr. Trollope has, we conceive, simply wished to 
 interest us in ordinary mortals: it has not been 
 his intention to introduce us to a company of 
 imbeciles. But, seriously, we do not consider 
 these people to be much better. Detach them 
 from their circumstances, reduce them to their 
 essences, and what do they amount to? They are 
 but the halves of men and women. The accumu 
 lation of minute and felicitous circumstances 
 which constitutes the modern novel sheds such a 
 glamour of reality over the figures which sustain 
 the action that we forbear to scrutinize them 
 separately. The figures are the generals in the 
 argument; the facts are the particulars. The 
 persons should accordingly reflect life upon the 
 details, and not borrow it from them. To do so 
 is only to borrow the contagion of death. This 
 latter part is the part they play, and with this 
 result, as it seems to us, in "Miss Mackenzie." 
 It is possible that this result is Mr. Trollope s 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 misfortune rather than his fault. He has en 
 countered it in trying to avoid an error which he 
 doubtless considers more pernicious still, that of 
 overcharging nature. He has doubtless done his 
 best to give us the happy middle truth. But ah, 
 if the truth is not so black as she is sometimes 
 painted, neither is she so pale! 
 
 We do not expect from the writers of Mr. 
 Trollope s school (and this we esteem already a 
 great concession) that they shall contribute to the 
 glory of human nature; but we may at least exact 
 that they do not wantonly detract from it. Mr. 
 Trollope s offence is, after all, deliberate. He has 
 deliberately selected vulgar illustrations. His 
 choice may indeed be explained by an infirmity for 
 which he is not responsible: we mean his lack of 
 imagination. But when a novelist s imagination 
 is weak, his judgment should be strong. Such was 
 the case with Thackeray. Mr. Trollope is of 
 course wise, in view of the infirmity in question, in 
 devoting himself to those subjects which least 
 expose it. He is an excellent, an admirable 
 observer; and such an one may accomplish much. 
 But why does he not observe great things as well 
 as little ones? It was by doing so that Thackeray 
 wrote "Henry Esmond." Mr. Trollope s devotion 
 to little things, inveterate, self-sufficient as it 
 is, begets upon the reader the very disagreeable 
 impression that not only no imagination was re 
 quired for the work before him, but that a man of 
 imagination could not possibly have written it. 
 
 72 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 A more richly-gifted writer would miss many of his 
 small (that is, his great) effects. It must be ad 
 mitted, however, that he would obtain on the 
 other hand a number of truly great ones. Yet, as 
 great effects are generally produced at present by 
 small means, Mr. Trollope is master of a wide 
 field! He deals wholly in small effects. His 
 manner, like most of the literary manners of the 
 day, is a small manner. And what a strange 
 phenomenon, when we reflect upon it, is this same 
 small manner! What an anomaly in a work of 
 imagination is such a chapter as that in which 
 our author describes Mrs. Tom Mackenzie s 
 shabby dinner party. It is as well described as 
 it possibly could be. Nothing is omitted. It is 
 almost as good as certain similar scenes in the 
 "Book of Snobs." It makes the reader s ear 
 tingle and his cheeks to redden with shame. 
 Nothing, we say, is omitted; but, alas! nothing is 
 infused. The scene possesses no interest but such 
 as resides in the crude facts: and as this is null, 
 the picture is clever, it is faithful, it is even 
 horrible, but it is not interesting. There we touch 
 upon the difference between the great manner and 
 the small manner; herein lies the reason why in 
 such scenes Mr. Trollope is only almost as good as 
 Thackeray. It can generally be said of this small 
 manner that it succeeds; cleverness is certain of 
 success; it never has the vertigo; it is only genius 
 and folly that fail. But in what does it succeed? 
 That is the test question: the question which it 
 
 73 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 behooves us to impose now-a-days with ever 
 growing stringency upon works of art; for it is the 
 answer to this question that should approve or 
 condemn them. It is small praise to say of a 
 novelist that he succeeds in mortifying the reader. 
 Yet Mr. Trollope is master of but two effects: he 
 renders his reader comfortable or the reverse. 
 As long as he restricts himself to this scale of 
 emotion, of course he has no need of imagination, 
 for imagination speaks to the heart. In the scene 
 here mentioned, Mr. Trollope, as we have said, 
 mortifies the reader; in other scenes he fosters his 
 equanimity, and his plan, indeed, is generally 
 to leave him in a pleasant frame of mind. 
 
 This is all very well; and we are perhaps ill 
 advised to expect sympathy for any harsh strict 
 ures upon a writer who renders such excellent 
 service. Let us, however, plainly disavow a 
 harsh intention. Let us, in the interest of our 
 argument, heartily recognize his merits. His 
 merits, indeed! he has only too many. His manner 
 is literally freckled with virtues. We use this 
 term advisedly, because its virtues are all virtues 
 of detail: the virtues of the photograph. The pho 
 tograph lacks the supreme virtue of possessing a 
 character. It is the detail alone that distinguishes 
 one photograph from another. What but the 
 details distinguishes one of Mr. Trollope s novels 
 from another, and, if we may use the expression, 
 consigns it to itself? Of course the details are 
 charming, some of them ineffably charming. The 
 
 74 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 ingenuous loves, the innocent flirtations, of Young 
 England, have been described by Mr. Trollope 
 in such a way as to secure him the universal 
 public good-will; described minutely, sympatheti 
 cally, accurately; if it were not that an indefinable 
 instinct bade us to keep the word in reserve, we 
 should say truthfully. The story of Miss Mac 
 kenzie lacks this element of vernal love-making. 
 The most that can be said of the affairs of this 
 lady s heart is that they are not ridiculous. They 
 are assuredly not interesting; and they are in 
 volved in much that is absolutely repulsive. 
 When you draw on the grand scale, a certain 
 amount of coarseness in your lines is excusable; 
 but when you work with such short and cautious 
 strokes as Mr. Trollope, it behooves you, above 
 all things, to be delicate. Still, taking the book in 
 its best points, the development of Miss Mac 
 kenzie s affections would not, in actual life, be a 
 phenomenon worthy of an intelligent spectator. 
 What rights, then, accrue to it in print? Miss 
 Mackenzie is an utterly commonplace person, 
 and her lover is almost a fool. He is apparently 
 unsusceptible of the smallest inspiration from the 
 events of his life. W 7 hy should we follow the for 
 tunes of such people ? They vulgarize experience 
 and all the other heavenly gifts. Why should we 
 stop to gather nettles when there are roses bloom 
 ing under our hands ? Why should we batten upon 
 over-cooked prose while the air is redolent with 
 undistilled poetry? It is perhaps well that we 
 
 75 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 should learn how superficial, how spiritless, how 
 literal human feeling may become; but is a novel 
 here our proper lesson-book? Clever novels may 
 be manufactured of such material as this; but to 
 outweigh a thousand merits they will have the 
 one defect, that they are monstrous. They will be 
 anomalies. Mr. Matthew Arnold, however, has 
 recently told us that a large class of Englishmen 
 consider it no objection to a thing that it is an 
 anomaly. Mr. Trollope is doubtless one of the 
 number. 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 VIII 
 
 The Schonberg-fytta Family 
 
 / 1PHE wide circulation obtained by this work 
 * and its successors we attribute to their clever 
 interfusion, and, indeed, we might almost say 
 confusion, of history and fiction with religion. 
 They offer neither the best history, the best piety, 
 nor the best fiction, but they appeal to a public 
 which has long since become reconciled to com 
 promise that extensive public, so respectable 
 in everything but its literary taste, which patro 
 nizes what is called "Sunday reading." We do 
 not propose to examine the theory of this branch 
 of literature. It is an implicitly accepted fact. 
 We propose simply to offer a few remarks upon 
 the works before us as its fruit. 
 
 The foremost property of the school to which 
 these works belong is an attempted, and, to a 
 certain degree, successful compromise between 
 the interests of youth and those of maturity, be 
 tween the serious and the trivial. This, indeed, 
 
 "Hearthstone Series: Chronicles of the Schonberg-Cotta 
 Family; The Early Dawn: Sketches of Christian Life in Eng 
 land in the Olden Time; Sketches of the United Brethren of 
 Bohemia and Moravia; Diary of Mrs. Kitty Trevylyan: a 
 Story of the Times of Whitefield and the Wesleys." New 
 York: 1865. 
 
 77 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 is the mark of a vast proportion of the efforts of 
 modern book-making efforts which in their 
 aggregate may be regarded as an attempt to pro 
 vide a special literature for women and children, 
 to provide books which grown women may read 
 aloud to children without either party being 
 bored. Books of this class never aim at anything 
 so simple as merely to entertain. They frequently 
 contain, as in the present case, an infusion of re 
 ligious and historical information, and they in 
 all cases embody a moral lesson. This latter fact 
 is held to render them incompetent as novels; 
 and doubtless, after all, it does, for of a genuine 
 novel the meaning and the lesson are infinite; 
 and here they are carefully narrowed down to a 
 special precept. 
 
 It would be unjust to deny that these semi- 
 developed novels are often very charming. Oc 
 casionally, like the "Heir of Redclyffe", they 
 almost legitimate themselves by the force of 
 genius. But this only when a first-rate mind 
 takes the matter in hand. By a first-rate mind 
 we here mean a mind which (since its action is 
 restricted beforehand to the shortest gait, the 
 smallest manners possible this side of the ridicu 
 lous) is the master and not the slave of its material. 
 It is just now very much the fashion to discuss 
 the so-called principle of realism, and we all 
 know that there exists in France a school of art 
 in which it is associated with great brilliancy and 
 great immorality. The disciples of this school 
 
 78 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 pursue, with an assiduity worthy of a better 
 cause, the research of local colors, with which 
 they have produced a number of curious effects. 
 We believe, however, that the greatest successes 
 in this line are reserved for that branch of the 
 school which contains the most female writers; 
 for if women are unable to draw, they notoriously 
 can at all events paint, and this is what realism 
 requires. For an exhibition of the true realistic 
 chic we would accordingly refer that body of 
 artists who are represented in France by MM. 
 Flaubert and Gerome to that class of works which 
 in our literature are represented by the "Daisy 
 Chain" and "The Wide, Wide World", and to 
 which the "Chronicles" before us essentially 
 belong. Until the value of chic can be finally 
 established, we should doubtless be thankful that 
 in our literature it lends its vivifying force only 
 to objects and sensations of the most unques 
 tioned propriety. In these "Chronicles," for in 
 stance, it is impressed into the service of religion. 
 In this particular instance, the healthy, if not 
 very lively, fancy of the author, her pleasant 
 style, and her apparent religious sincerity, secure 
 a result which on the whole is not uninteresting. 
 But the radical defects of the theological novel 
 come out strongly in the "Diary of Mrs. Kitty 
 Trevylyan", where the story is but a thin coat 
 ing for a bitter pill of Methodism. We are all of 
 us Protestants, and we are all of us glad to see 
 the Reformation placed in its most favorable light, 
 
 79 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 but as we are not all of us Methodists, it is hard 
 to sympathize with a lady s ex parte treatment of 
 John Wesley. Our authoress does not claim to 
 be more than superficial, and it were better not 
 to touch Methodism at all than to handle it super 
 ficially. It is probably impossible that such of 
 the phenomena of Methodism as might with any 
 show of likelihood find an echo in the daily jot 
 tings of an ordinary country girl should be other 
 than repulsive to the impartial reader. 
 
 The "Chronicles" present a kind of tabular 
 view of the domestic pursuits of a group of grow 
 ing boys and girls, contemporaries and friends of 
 Martin Luther. Of this, the central figure in her 
 narrative, the authoress has discreetly given us 
 only a portrait in profile. Her object has been to 
 give us a household picture of the Reformation. 
 But it is the misfortune of short-gaited writers 
 that they are unable to carry out an idea which 
 demands any continuity of purpose. They en 
 joy, however, this compensation, that if they do 
 not succeed in one thing, they may reasonably be 
 held to have succeeded in another. Of history in 
 the "Chronicles" there is just as much as may 
 have been obtained by an attentive perusal of 
 M. Merle d Aubigne. But there is a great deal 
 of what has been very wittily called "her story." 
 A very small part of the Reformation must neces 
 sarily have been seen from the leaded window- 
 panes of an obscure Saxon printer. But a certain 
 infinitesimal portion of it may very naturally 
 
 80 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 have transpired in the quaint and wainscotted 
 rooms behind these window-panes, especially if 
 the printer s family happened to boast the ac 
 quaintance of Doctor Luther. When we have 
 said that the author has conveyed the impression 
 of all this Gothic furniture with tolerable success, 
 we have given to the truthfulness of her work 
 the highest praise at our command. For this a 
 pleasing fancy was alone required; but for those 
 more difficult portions which involved the re 
 construction of feelings and ideas, there was 
 need of that vigorous imagination and that serious 
 reflection which can stand on tiptoe and overlook 
 three centuries of civilization. 
 
 The author s whole tone is the tone of the re 
 trospective present. She anticipates throughout 
 the judgments of posterity. Morally, her young 
 chroniclers are of the nineteenth century, or they 
 at least have had access to it. The subjects of 
 great revolutions are like the rank and file of 
 great armies, they are all unconscious of the direc 
 tion and force of the movement to which they 
 contribute. Our civil war has taught us, among 
 so many other valuable lessons, the gross natural 
 blindness that is, we are bound in reason to 
 believe, the clear spiritual insight of great 
 popular impulses. It has intimated that if these 
 were of men only they would often miscarry for 
 very shame. But men s natural deserts are fre 
 quently at variance with their spiritual needs; 
 and they are allowed to execute the divine plan 
 
 8l 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 not only by their own petty practices, but on 
 their own petty theories; not only by obedience 
 but by spontaneity. We are very apt to do small 
 things in God s name, but God does great things 
 in ours. The sagacious Schonbergs-Cotta are by 
 far too divinely illumined, too well aware of what 
 they want, and of what they are likely to get. 
 There must have been a great deal more of feel 
 ing than of thought in the Reformation, and 
 almost as much of action as of either. People 
 loved and hated, and feared and fought, and a 
 fact, we imagine, which is near the bottom of 
 much that is of revolutionary effect were 
 dreadfully nervous; but we may be certain that 
 they did not moralize as we moralize now-a-days. 
 Protestantism is still on the whole sufficiently 
 orthodox; but we are all of us more or less Uni 
 tarians in spirit compared with the founders of 
 our creed. What was done both by them and by 
 their opponents was done in the absolute name of 
 religion. How then should it have been done at 
 all? "When half-gods go/ says Emerson, "the 
 gods arrive." Assuredly, when the gods arrive, 
 the half-gods depart. When religion enters in 
 force, moral pre-occupations withdraw. Duty 
 was not probably an habitual topic with the Re 
 formers. We doubt whether a simple burgher s 
 daughter was familiar with the word "conscien 
 tious." That she had a conscience is eminently 
 probable, but we hardly believe that she knew it. 
 Nor can we conceive her to have been troubled 
 
 82 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 with "views" or "difficulties." But however this 
 may be, let us not bear severely on any honest 
 attempt to revive the great facts of the past. If 
 people must indulge in the composition of in 
 genious nothings, let their nothings be about a 
 central something. Let us hang our fancies rather 
 upon the immortal than upon the ephemeral. 
 Works like the present affect the great figure of 
 history as much and as little as the travelling 
 cloud-shadows affect the insensitive mountains. 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 IX 
 
 Can Ton Forgive Her? 
 
 ^ I A HIS new novel of Mr. Trollope s has nothing 
 *- new to teach us either about Mr. Trollope 
 himself as a novelist, about English society as a 
 theme for the novelist, or, failing information on 
 these points, about the complex human heart. 
 Take any one of his former tales, change the 
 names of half the characters, leave the others 
 standing, and transpose the incidents, and you 
 will have "Can You Forgive Her?" It is neither 
 better nor worse than the tale which you will 
 select. It became long ago apparent that Mr. 
 Trollope had only one manner. In this manner 
 he very soon showed us his maximum. He has 
 recently, in "Miss Mackenzie", showed us his 
 minimum. In the work before us he has remained 
 pretty constantly at his best. There is, indeed, a 
 certain amount of that inconceivably vulgar love- 
 making between middle-aged persons by which 
 "Miss Mackenzie" was distinguished; but the 
 burden of the story rests upon the young people. 
 
 For so thick a book, there is certainly very little 
 story. There are no less than three different plots, 
 
 "Can You Forgive Her?" By Anthony Trollope. New 
 York: 1865. 
 
 84 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 however, if the word can be applied to Mr. Trol- 
 lope s simple machinations. That is, there is a 
 leading story, which, being foreseen at the outset 
 to be insufficient to protract the book during the 
 requisite number of months, is padded with a 
 couple of underplots, one of which comes almost 
 near being pathetic, as the other falls very far 
 short of being humorous. The main narrative, of 
 course, concerns the settlement in life it is 
 hard to give it a more sentimental name of a 
 beautiful young lady. Alice Vavasar, well-born, 
 high-spirited, motherless, and engaged to Mr. 
 John Grey, the consummate model of a Christian 
 gentleman, mistrusting the quality of her affec 
 tion, breaks off her engagement, after which, in a 
 moment of enthusiasm, she renews an anterior 
 engagement with her cousin, George Vavasar, a 
 plausible rascal. John Grey will not be put off, 
 however, and steadfastly maintains his suit. In 
 the course of time George s villany is discovered. 
 He attempts, unsuccessfully, to murder Grey. 
 Grey follows his mistress, pleads his cause once 
 more, and is taken back again. The question is, 
 Can we forgive Miss Vavasar? Of course we can, 
 and forget her, too, for that matter. What does 
 Mr. Trollope mean by this question? It is a good 
 instance of the superficial character of his work 
 that he has been asking it once a month for so 
 long a time without being struck by its flagrant 
 impertinence. What are we to forgive? Alice 
 Vavasar s ultimate acceptance of John Grey 
 
 85 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 makes her temporary ill-treatment of him, viewed 
 as a moral question, a subject for mere drawing- 
 room gossip. There are few of Mr. Trollope s 
 readers who will not resent being summoned to 
 pass judgment on such a sin as the one here pre 
 sented, to establish by precedent the criminality 
 of the conscientious flutterings of an excellent 
 young lady. Charming women, thanks to the 
 talent of their biographers, have been forgiven 
 much greater improprieties. Since forgiveness 
 was to be brought into the question, why did not 
 Mr. Trollope show us an error that we might 
 really forgive an error that would move us to 
 indignation? It is too much to be called upon to 
 take cognizance in novels of sins against conven 
 tion, of improprieties; we have enough of these in 
 life. We can have charity and pity only for real 
 sin and real misery. We trust to novels to main 
 tain us in the practice of great indignations and 
 great generosities. Miss Vavasar s dilemma is 
 doubtless considerable enough in itself, but by 
 the time it is completely unfolded by Mr. Trollope 
 it has become so trivial, it is associated with so 
 much that is of a merely accidental interest, it is 
 so deflowered of the bloom of a serious experience, 
 that when we are asked to enter into it judicially, 
 we feel almost tempted to say that really it is 
 Miss Vavasar s own exclusive business. From the 
 moment that a novel comes to a happy conclu 
 sion, we can forgive everything - or nothing. 
 The gradual publication of "Can You Forgive 
 
 86 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 Her?" made its readers familiar with the appeal 
 resting upon their judgment long before they were 
 in a position to judge. The only way, it seems to 
 us, to justify this appeal and to obviate the fla 
 grant anti-climax which the work now presents, 
 was to lead the story to a catastrophe, to leave 
 the heroine prima facie in the wrong, to make her 
 rupture with Grey, in a word, final. Then we 
 might have forgiven her in consideration of the 
 lonely years of repentance in store for her, and of 
 her having been at any rate consistent. Then the 
 world s forgiveness would have been of some im 
 portance to her. Now, at one for ever with her 
 lover, what matters our opinion? It certainly 
 matters very little to ourselves. 
 
 Mr. Trollope s book presents no feature more 
 remarkable than the inveteracy with which he 
 just eludes being really serious; unless it be the 
 almost equal success with which he frequently 
 escapes being really humorous. Both of these re 
 sults are the penalty of writing so rapidly; but as 
 in much rapid writing we are often made to regret 
 the absence of that sober second thought which 
 may curtail an extravagance that critical move 
 ment which, if you will only give it time, is surely 
 to follow the creative one so in Mr. Trollope 
 we perpetually miss that sustained action of the 
 imagination, that creative movement which in 
 those in whom this faculty is not supreme may, if 
 you will give it time, bear out the natural or crit 
 ical one, which would intensify and animate his 
 
 87 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 first conception. We are for ever wishing that he 
 would go a little further, a little deeper. There 
 are a hundred places in "Can You Forgive Her?" 
 where even the dullest readers will be sure to ex 
 press this wish. For ourselves, we were very 
 much disappointed that when Alice returns to her 
 cousin George she should not do so more frankly, 
 that on eventually restoring herself to Grey she 
 should have so little to expiate or to forget, that 
 she should leave herself, in short, so easy an issue 
 by her refusal to admit Vavasar to a lover s privi 
 lege. Our desire for a different course of action 
 is simply founded on the fact that it would have 
 been so much more interesting. When it is pro 
 posed to represent a young girl as jilting her lover 
 in such a way as that the moral of the tale resolves 
 itself into the question of the venality of her of 
 fence, it evinces in the novelist a deep insensibility 
 to his opportunities that he should succeed, after 
 all, in making of the tragedy but a simple post 
 ponement of the wedding-day. 
 
 To Mr. Trollope all the possible incidents of 
 society seem to be of equal importance and of 
 equal interest. He has the same treatment, the 
 same tone, for them all. After narrating the 
 minutest particulars of a certain phase of his 
 heroine s experience, he will dwell with equal 
 length and great patience upon the proceedings 
 of a vulgar widow (the heroine s aunt), who is 
 engaged in playing fast and loose with a couple 
 of vulgar suitors. With what authority can we 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 invest the pen which treats of the lovely niece, 
 when we see it devoted with the same good- will 
 to the utterly prosaic and unlovely aunt? It is 
 of course evident that Mr. Trollope has not in 
 tended to make the aunt either poetic or attrac 
 tive. He has intended, in the first place, to swell 
 his book into the prescribed dimensions, and, in 
 cidentally, to make the inserted matter amusing. 
 A single chapter of it might be amusing; a dozen 
 chapters are inexpressibly wearisome. The un 
 due prominence assigned to this episode is yet 
 not so signal an offence against good judgment as 
 the subordination of Lady Glencora Palliser s 
 story to that of Alice Vavasar s. It is a great 
 mistake in speaking of a novel to be over-positive 
 as to what ought to be and what ought not; but 
 we do not fear to dogmatize when we say that by 
 rights Lady Glencora is the heroine of the book. 
 Her adventure is more important, more dramatic, 
 more interesting than Alice Vavasar s. That it is 
 more interesting is not a matter of opinion, but a 
 matter of fact. A woman who forsakes her hus 
 band belongs more to the technical heroic than a 
 woman who merely forsakes her lover. Lady 
 Glencora, young and fascinating, torn from the 
 man of her heart and married to a stranger, and 
 pursued after marriage by her old lover, hand 
 some, dissolute, desperate, touches at a hundred 
 points almost upon the tragical. And yet her his 
 tory gets itself told as best it may, in the intervals 
 of what is after all, considering the denouement^ 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 but a serious comedy. It is, to use a common 
 illustration, as if Mr. Forest should appear on the 
 "off-nights" of no matter what fainter dramatic 
 luminary. It signifies little in the argument that 
 Lady Glencora s adventure came also to an anti 
 climax; for in this case the reader rejects the con 
 clusion as a mere begging of the issue. Of all 
 literary sinners Mr. Trollope deserves fewest hard 
 words, but we can scarcely refrain from calling 
 this conclusion impudent. To a real novelist s 
 eye, the story on which it depends is hardly be 
 gun; to Mr. Trollope, it is satisfactorily ended. 
 The only explanation of all this is probably that 
 the measure of his invention is not in his subject, 
 in his understanding with his own mind; but out 
 side of it, in his understanding with his publishers. 
 Poor little Lady Glencora, with her prettiness, 
 her grace, her colossal fortune, and her sorrows, is 
 the one really poetic figure in the novel. Why 
 not have dealt her a little poetic justice? Why 
 not, for her sake, have shown a little boldness? 
 We do not presume to prescribe to Mr. Trollope 
 the particular thing he should have done; we 
 simply affirm in general terms that he should have 
 gone further. Everything forbade that Lady 
 Glencora and her lover should be vulgarly dis 
 posed of. What are we to conclude? It is easy 
 to conceive either that Burgo Fitzgerald slowly 
 wasted his life, or that he flung it suddenly away. 
 But the supposition is by no means easy that 
 Lady Glencora either wasted hers or carefully 
 
 90 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 economized it. Besides, there is no pretence of 
 winding up Burgo Fitzgerald s thread; it is rudely 
 clipped by the editorial shears. There is, on the 
 contrary, a pretence of completing the destiny of 
 his companion. But we have more respect for 
 Lady Glencora s humanity than to suppose that 
 the incident on which the curtain of her little 
 tragedy falls, is for her anything more than an 
 interruption. Another case in which Mr. Trol- 
 lope had burdened himself, as he proceeded, with 
 the obligation to go further, is that of George 
 Vavasar. Upon him, as upon Lady Glencora, 
 there hangs a faint reflection of poetry. In both 
 these cases, Mr. Trollope, dealing with an un 
 familiar substance, seems to have evoked a ghost 
 which he cannot exorcise. As the reader follows 
 George Vavasar deeper into his troubles all of 
 which are very well described his excited imag 
 ination hankers for what shall we say? Noth 
 ing less positive than Vavasar s death. Here was 
 a chance for Mr. Trollope to redeem a thousand 
 pages of small talk; the wretched man should have 
 killed himself; for although bloodshed is not quite 
 so common an element of modern life as the sen 
 sation writers would have us believe, yet people 
 do occasionally, when hard pushed, commit sui 
 cide. But for Mr. Trollope anything is prefer 
 able to a sensation; an incident is ever preferable 
 to an event. George Vavasar simply takes ship 
 to America. 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 X 
 
 The Qayworthys 
 
 / T A HIS book appears to have been suggested by 
 -* a fanciful theory of life, which the author 
 embodies in a somewhat over-figurative preface, 
 and which recurs throughout the story at intervals, 
 like a species of refrain. The theory in question 
 amounts to neither more nor less than this: that 
 life is largely made up of broken threads, of plans 
 arrested in their development, of hopes untimely 
 crushed. This idea is neither very new nor very 
 profound; but the novel formula under which it 
 is shadowed forth on the title-page will probably 
 cause it to strike many well-disposed minds as 
 for the first time. In a story written in the in 
 terest of a theory two excellent things are almost 
 certain to be spoiled. It might seem, indeed, 
 that it would be a very small figure of a story 
 that could be injured by a theory like the present 
 one; but when once an author has his dogma at 
 heart, unless he is very much of an artist, it is 
 sure to become obtrusive at the capital moment, 
 and to remind the reader that he is, after all, 
 learning a moral lesson. The slightly ingenious 
 and very superficial figure in which the author 
 
 "The Gayworthys : a Story of Threads and Thrums." [By 
 Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney.] Boston : 1865. 
 
 9 2 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 embodies her philosophy recurs with a frequency 
 which is truly impertinent. 
 
 Our story is organized upon three main threads, 
 which, considering the apparent force of the au 
 thor s conviction, are on the whole very tenderly 
 handled; inasmuch as, although two of them are 
 at moments drawn so tight that we are fully pre 
 pared for the final snap and the quiet triumph of 
 the author s "I told you so," yet only one of 
 them is really severed past all repair. This 
 catastrophe symbolizes the fate of Miss Rebecca 
 Gayworthy, who cherishes a secret flame for her 
 pastor, the Rev. Jordan King. Mr. King, in 
 turn, entertains a passion for another young 
 lady, whom he marries, but who is not all for 
 him that Miss Gayworthy would have been. The 
 broken thread here is Miss Gayworthy s slighted 
 regard for Mr. King. 
 
 There are two other pairs of lovers whose much 
 shifting relations fill up the rest of the book. 
 Miss Joanna Gayworthy is gifted, for her mis 
 fortune, with a lively tongue and an impetuous 
 temper. She is kept for a number of years the 
 subject of one of those gratuitous misconceptions 
 in which lady novelists delight. To our mind 
 there is quite as much of the comical as of the 
 pathetic in her misunderstanding with Gabriel 
 Hartshorne. Both she and her lover seem bent 
 on fixing the minimum of words with which a 
 courtship can be conducted, and the utmost pos 
 sible impertinence of those words. They fall the 
 
 93 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 natural victims to their own ingenuity. The fault, 
 however, is more with him than with her. If she 
 was a little too much of a coquette, he was far 
 too little of an enthusiast. Women have a pre 
 scriptive right to answer indirectly at serious 
 moments; but men labor under a prescriptive ob 
 ligation at these moments to speak and act to 
 the point. We cannot but think that Gabriel ob 
 tained his mistress quite as soon as he had won 
 her. 
 
 Of the parties yet mentioned, however, neither 
 is to be taken for the hero and heroine proper; 
 for in the presence of the inevitable, the orthodox 
 little girl, this time, fortunately, matched not 
 with a condescending man of the world, but with 
 a lad of her own age, in the presence, we say, 
 of these heroic figures, who shall dare to claim 
 that distinction? Sarah Gair and Gershom Vorse 
 are brought up together in the fields, like another 
 Daphnis and Chloe. Gershom is sent to sea by 
 the machinations of Sarah s mother, who has a 
 quasi-prophetic insight into what may be. Sarah 
 blossoms into young ladyhood, and Gershom ob 
 tains command of a vessel. In the course of time 
 he comes home, but, we regret to say, with little 
 of the breezy gallantry of his profession. For 
 long years his old playmate has worn his image 
 upon her heart of hearts. He utterly fails to take 
 cognizance of her attachment, and in fact snubs 
 her most unmercifully. Thrums again, as you 
 see. It is perhaps hard to overstate the possi- 
 
 94 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 bilities of man s insensibility as opposed to wom 
 an s cunning devotion. But the whole picture of 
 Gershom Vorse strikes us as ill-conceived; and 
 yet those who remember Tom Tulliver in "The 
 Mill on the Floss" will acknowledge that much 
 can be made in a dramatic way of the figure of 
 the rational, practical, honest, prejudiced youth 
 whose responsibilities begin early. It is perhaps 
 natural that Gershom Vorse s contempt for the 
 mother should have predisposed him against the 
 daughter; but why should he nurse so unmannerly 
 an intolerance of all her little woman s graces? If 
 Sarah was really a perfect young lady, she was 
 too good for this grim and precocious Puritan. 
 He despises her because, being a young lady, she 
 looks and dresses like one, because she wears 
 "puffed muslin and dainty boots." Out upon 
 him! What should he care about such things? 
 That this trait is not manly, we need not affirm; 
 but it is the reverse of masculine. 
 
 It is hardly worth while, however, to criticise 
 details in an episode which is so radically defec 
 tive as this one. Its radical defect is the degrada 
 tion of sentiment by making children responsible 
 for it. This practice is becoming the bane of our 
 novels. It signifies little where it began, or what 
 authority it claims: it is, in our opinion, as fatal 
 to the dignity of serious feeling and to the gran 
 deur of strong passions as the most flagrant im 
 moralities of French fiction. Heaven defend us 
 from the puerile! If we desire to read about 
 
 95 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 children, we shall not be at loss: the repertory of 
 juvenile works is vast. But if we desire to learn 
 the various circumstances under which love- 
 making may be conducted, let us not repair to 
 the nursery and the school-room. A man s child 
 hood and his manhood can never, without a viola 
 tion of truth, be made the same story; much less 
 may the youth and maturity of a woman. In 
 "The Gayworthys" the loves of the two young 
 people are far too exclusively projected from their 
 infancy. The age for Daphnis and Chloe has 
 passed. Passion and sentiment must always be 
 more or less intelligent not to shock the public 
 taste. There are, of course, few things so charm 
 ing as the innocence of childhood, just as there 
 are few things so interesting as the experience of 
 manhood. But they cannot in a love-story be 
 successfully combined. Thackeray s great genius 
 was insufficient to prevent the fruition of Henry 
 Esmond s boyish devotion from seeming very 
 disagreeable. Every reader feels that, if he had 
 had the story to write, that should not have been 
 its consummation. There is in the experience of 
 every man and woman a certain proportion of 
 sensations which are interesting only to them 
 selves. To this class of feelings we would refer 
 the childish reminiscences held in common by 
 two persons who at the age of discretion unite 
 their destinies. A man seldom falls in love with 
 the young girl who has grown up at his side; he 
 either likes or dislikes her too much. But when 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 he does, it is from quite a new stand-point and 
 with a new range of feelings. He does not woo 
 her in the name of their juvenile escapades. These 
 are pretty only in after years, when there is no 
 other poetry to be had. And they are, there 
 fore, quite apart from the purposes of the serious 
 novelist. 
 
 So much for the faults of "The Gayworthys." 
 Let us now pay the tribute of an explicit recogni 
 tion to its very great cleverness. Without this 
 quality no novel in these days can hope to suc 
 ceed. But "The Gayworthys" has even more of 
 it than is needed for success. How many accom 
 plishments the would-be successful novel demands! 
 and how many are here displayed! When we 
 count them over, indeed, we are half amazed at 
 our temerity in offering these prosy strictures. 
 The observation, the memory, the invention, the 
 fancy, the humor, the love of human nature, 
 lavished upon these four hundred pages are the 
 results almost of an education. Let us, we re 
 peat, make them a very low bow. They contain 
 much that is admirable and much that is power 
 ful. It is for this reason that, when we see them 
 misused, as it seems to us, conjoined with what 
 is vulgar and false, we make a respectful protest. 
 We know not whether in this case their union 
 makes a total which we may properly call genius; 
 but it at all events makes a force sufficiently like 
 genius not to be able with impunity to work in 
 ignorance of principle. We do not claim to have 
 
 97 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 laid down any principles. They are already laid 
 down in a thousand consummate works of art. 
 All we wish to do here all we have space to 
 do is to remind the author of "The Gay- 
 worthys " that they exist. 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 XI 
 
 French Critic 
 
 the first series of these literary studies, 
 published two years ago, M. Scherer attached 
 a preface which he doubtless intends shall serve 
 also for this second volume. A short glance at 
 this preface will initiate us into the author s view 
 of the limits of his own work. "Custom exacts", 
 says M. Scherer, "that a preface should sum up 
 the doctrines of the book. But suppose the book 
 has no doctrines? I find many subjects handled in 
 these pages: philosophy, religion, literature, his 
 tory, politics, morals there is a little of all these. 
 If, indeed, I start no ideas on these subjects, I 
 speak of men who have done so. But in the midst 
 of all this I look in vain for the least sign of a 
 doctrine. Nay, what is worse, the book seems 
 to me to be full of inconsistencies, or, as some 
 might say, of contradictions. I find myself to-day 
 all latitude, and to-morrow all indignation; now 
 a rigid moralist, now a disinterested critic; now 
 tolerant as a philosopher, now strenuous as a 
 partizan." To the critic duly reproached with 
 these inconsistencies, pursues M. Scherer, there 
 
 "Nouvelles Etudes sur la Litterature Contemporaine." 
 By Edmond Scherer. Paris: 1865. 
 
 99 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 remains this resource: to accept the reproach, and 
 to reduce it to its proper value. This M. Scherer 
 proceeds to do in his own case. At bottom, he 
 affirms, rightly understood, no serious mind ever 
 contradicts itself. To accuse a man of so doing 
 is simply to display covertly your own ignorance. 
 How can we know those secret reasons, those 
 blind instincts, those confused motives, which the 
 subject of them himself only half suspects? We 
 think that a man has changed when he has only 
 pursued or achieved his natural manifestation. 
 There are in the tyranny of circumstances and 
 the inherent inflexibility of ideas a hundred 
 obstacles to the complete expression of feelings. 
 These feelings, which constitute a man s real 
 substance, his inclinations, his affections, his 
 aspirations, never change. The nearest approach 
 they make to it is to develop by a strictly logical 
 process. In default of doctrines in a work or, 
 as we should say, in default of a system, of a con 
 sistent argument there is always, accordingly, 
 a certain irrepressible moral substance. This 
 moral substance in his own work M. Scherer 
 declares to be the love of liberty. He loves lib 
 erty as the necessary condition of truth, of thor 
 ough examination, of impartiality. "Contention, 
 written and spoken ", says M. Scherer, "the op 
 position and the fusion of opinions, errors, re 
 tractions, excuses, reactions: all these things are 
 the formation of truth." And these things are 
 only possible under liberty. "Truth", he con- 
 
 100 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 tinues, "is for me simply improvement; and lib 
 erty is scarcely more than another name for this 
 constant process of improvement." 
 
 M. Scherer s merits, then, as a critic, are these: 
 that he has no doctrines, and that in default of 
 these he is prompted by as excellent a feeling as 
 the love of liberty. It may seem questionable at 
 first whether the former fact is really a merit. It 
 is not that in reading M. Scherer s volume we 
 do not find much that is positive: many opinions, 
 much sympathy, much dissent, much philosophy, 
 much strong feeling; for without these the re 
 proach of inconsistency would be impossible. We 
 find much that we can specifically approve or 
 condemn. We find even plenty of theories. But 
 this touches perhaps the very point. There are 
 plenty of theories, but no theory. We find and 
 this is the highest praise, it seems to us, that we 
 can give a critic none but a moral unity: that 
 is, the author is a liberal. It is hard to say, in 
 reading M. Scherer s books, which is the most 
 pleasing phenomenon, this intellectual eclecticism 
 or this moral consistency. The age surely pre 
 sents no finer spectacle than that of a mind liberal 
 after this fashion; not from a brutal impatience of 
 order, but from experience, from reflection, seri 
 ously, intelligently, having known, relished, and 
 appropriated the many virtues of conservatism; 
 a mind inquisitive of truth and of knowledge, 
 accessible on all sides, unprejudiced, desirous 
 above all things to examine directly, fearless of 
 
 101 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 reputed errors, but merciless to error when proved, 
 tolerant of dissent, respectful of sincerity, con 
 tent neither to reason on matters of feeling nor to 
 sentimentalize on matters of reason, equitable, 
 dispassionate, sympathetic. M. Scherer is a solid 
 embodiment of Mr. Matthew Arnold s ideal critic. 
 Those who affirmed Mr. Arnold s ideal to be im 
 practicable may here be refuted; those who 
 thought it undesirable may perhaps be converted. 
 For they will see that once granted M. Scherer s 
 seriousness, his competency to the treatment of a 
 given subject rests entirely upon his intellectual 
 independence or irresponsibility. Of all men who 
 deal with ideas, the critic is essentially the least 
 independent; it behooves him, therefore, to claim 
 the utmost possible incidental or extrinsic freedom. 
 His subject and his stand-point are limited before 
 hand. He is in the nature of his function opposed 
 to his author, and his position, therefore, depends 
 upon that which his author has taken. If, in 
 addition to his natural and proper servitude to 
 his subject, he is shackled with a further servitude, 
 outside of his subject, he works at a ridiculous dis 
 advantage. This outer servitude may either be to 
 a principle, a theory, a doctrine, a dogma, or it 
 may be to a party; and it is against this latter form 
 of subordination, as most frequent in his own 
 country, that Mr. Arnold more especially protests. 
 But as a critic, quite as much as any other writer, 
 must have what M. Scherer calls an inspiration 
 of his own, must possess a unit of sincerity and 
 
 102 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 consistency, he finds it in his conscience. It is on 
 this basis that he preserves his individuality, or, if 
 you like, his self-respect. It is from this moral 
 sense, and, we may add, from their religious con 
 victions, that writers like Scherer derive that 
 steadfast and delicate spiritual force which ani 
 mates, co-ordinates, and harmonizes the mass of 
 brief opinions, of undeveloped assertions, of con 
 jectures, of fancies, of sentiments, which are the 
 substance of this work. 
 
 There are, of course, degrees in criticism as in 
 everything else. There is small criticism and there 
 is great criticism. But great criticism seems to us 
 to touch more or less nearly on pure philosophy. 
 Pure criticism must be of the small kind. Goethe 
 is a great critic; M. Sainte-Beuve is a small one. 
 Goethe has laid down general principles. M. 
 Sainte-Beuve has laid down particular principles; 
 and, above all, he has observed facts and stated 
 results. Goethe frequently starts from an idea; 
 M. Sainte-Beuve starts from a fact: Goethe from 
 a general rule, M. Sainte-Beuve from a particular 
 instance. When we reflect upon all the faculties 
 and all the accomplishments needed by the literary 
 critic in these days, we are almost tempted to say 
 that he should unite in himself the qualities which 
 are required for success in every other department 
 of letters. But we may more strictly sum up his 
 necessary character by saying that he is a com 
 promise between the philosopher and the historian. 
 We spoke of M. Sainte-Beuve, who, on the whole, 
 
 103 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 may be called the first of living critics. He is a 
 philosopher in so far as that he deals with ideas. 
 He counts, weighs, measures, appraises them. 
 But he is not a philosopher in so far as that he 
 works with no supreme object. There results 
 from his work no deliberate theory of life, of 
 nature, of the universe. He is not, as the philoso 
 pher must ever be more or less, a partizan. When 
 he pulls down, it lies in his discretion or his gen 
 erosity to build up again; whereas the philosopher 
 is for ever offering the better in exchange for the 
 worse that which is more true in exchange for 
 that which is less. The philosopher s function is 
 to compare a work with an abstract principle of 
 truth; the critic s is to compare a work with itself, 
 with its own concrete standard of truth. The 
 critic deals, therefore, with parts, the philosopher 
 with wholes. In M. Sainte-Beuve, however, it is 
 the historian who is most generously represented. 
 As a critic, he bears the same relation to facts that 
 he does to ideas. As the metaphysician handles 
 ideas with a preconceived theory, so the historian 
 handles facts with a preconcerted plan. But with 
 this theory or this plan, the critic has nothing to 
 do. He works on the small scale, in detail, looking 
 neither before him, behind him, nor on either 
 side. Like Mr. Ruskin s model young painter 
 with his landscape, M. Sainte-Beuve covers up 
 all history but the small square field under his 
 eye. On this field, however, he works with pre- 
 Raphaelite minuteness; he exhausts it. Then he 
 
 104 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 shifts his window-frame, as we may call it, and 
 begins again. The essence of the practicability 
 of history is in a constant obedience to propor 
 tion. M. Sainte-Beuve, like a true critic, ignores 
 proportion. The reunion of his chapters, there 
 fore, would make no history, any more than the 
 reunion of the young pre-Raphaelite s studies 
 would make a picture. 
 
 M. Scherer s place among the critics of the time 
 is very high. If M. Sainte-Beuve has earned the 
 highest place, M. Scherer has a claim to the next. 
 For ourselves, we prefer M. Scherer. He has not 
 M. Sainte-Beuve s unrivalled power of reproducing 
 the physiognomy of a particular moment as of a 
 particular figure of the past; he cannot pick out 
 some obscure secondary figure of the seventeenth 
 century some forgotten litterateur , some mo 
 mentary king s mistress and in twenty pages 
 place the person before you as a complete human 
 being, to be for ever remembered, with a distinct 
 personality, with a character, an expression, a 
 face, a dress, habits, eccentricities. M. Scherer, 
 we say, has not done this. But we prefer him 
 because his morality is positive without being 
 obtrusive; and because, besides the distinction 
 of beauty and ugliness, the aesthetic distinc 
 tion of right and wrong, there constantly oc 
 curs in his pages the moral distinction between 
 good and evil; because, in short, we salute 
 in this fact that wisdom which, after having 
 made the journey round the whole sphere of 
 
 105 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 knowledge, returns at last with a melancholy joy 
 to morality. 
 
 If we have a complaint, indeed, to make of 
 M. Sainte-Beuve, it is that with all his experience 
 he is not more melancholy. On great subjects, 
 subjects of the first order, M. Scherer is as efficient 
 as the author of the "Causeries de Lundi." He 
 has judged his contemporaries quite as keenly: 
 witness his article on M. Veuillot. And in the 
 volume under notice are two papers, one on Mme. 
 de Sevigne, the other on Mme. Roland, which are 
 delicate with all M. Sainte-Beuve s delicacy, and 
 eloquent with more than his eloquence. If we 
 were tempted to set another critic before M. 
 Scherer, that critic would be M. Taine. But on 
 reflection we conclude that M. Taine is not pre 
 eminently a critic. He is alternately a philosopher 
 and a historian. His strong point is not to dis 
 criminate shades of difference. On the contrary, 
 he is perpetually sacrificing shades to broad lines. 
 He is valuable for his general views, his broad 
 retrospects, his resumes. He passes indeed, in 
 cidentally, very shrewd literary judgments, as 
 when, for instance, he says of Swift s poetry that 
 instead of creating illusions it destroys them. But 
 he is too passionate, too partial, too eloquent. 
 The critic is useful in repairing the inevitable 
 small injustices committed by other writers; in 
 going over the ground after them and restoring 
 the perverted balance of truth. Now in Taine s 
 "History of English Literature", which is nomi- 
 
 106 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 nally a critical work, there is in each chapter 
 abundant room for this supplementary process 
 of the critic proper. In the work of M. Scherer 
 there is room but for contradiction which is, 
 in fact, a forcible making of room. With him, 
 analysis has reached its furthest limits, and it is 
 because he is more analytic than Mr. Taine 
 admitting, as we do, that he has not his genius 
 - that we place him higher as a critic. Of M. 
 Scherer s religious character we have not explicitly 
 spoken, because we cannot speak of it properly in 
 these limits. We can only say that in religion, as in 
 everything else, he is a liberal; and we can pay no 
 higher tribute to his critical worth than by adding 
 that he has found means to unite the keenest 
 theological penetration and the widest theological 
 erudition with the greatest spiritual tolerance. 
 
 107 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 XII 
 
 TV/flSS AURORA FLOYD, as half the world 
 ^ * knows, was a young lady who got into no 
 end of trouble by marrying her father s groom. 
 We had supposed that this adventure had long 
 ago become an old story; but here is a new edition 
 of her memoirs to prove that the public has not 
 done with her yet. We would assure those indi 
 viduals who look with regret upon this assump 
 tion by a " sensation " novel of the honors of 
 legitimate fiction, that the author of "Aurora 
 Floyd" is an uncommonly clever person. Her 
 /works are distinguished by a quality for which we 
 I can find no better name than "pluck"; and should 
 not pluck have its reward wherever found? If 
 common report is correct, Miss Braddon had for 
 many years beguiled the leisure moments of an 
 arduous profession the dramatic profession - 
 by the composition of fictitious narrative. But 
 until the publication of "Lady Audley s Secret" 
 she failed to make her mark. To what secret im 
 pulse or inspiration we owe this sudden reversal 
 of fortune it is difficult to say; but the grim de- 
 
 " Aurora Floyd/ By M. E. Braddon. New York: 1865. 
 
 108 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 termination to succeed is so apparent in every 
 line of "Lady Audley s Secret", that the critic is 
 warranted in conjecturing that she had at last 
 become desperate. People talk of novels with a 
 purpose; and from this class of works, both by her 
 patrons and her enemies, Miss Braddon s tales 
 are excluded. But what novel ever betrayed a 
 more resolute purpose than the production of 
 what we may call Miss Braddon s second manner?. 
 Her purpose was at any hazard to make a hit, to \ 
 catch the public ear. It was a difficult task, but 
 audacity could accomplish it. Miss Braddon ac 
 cordingly resorted to extreme measures, and ere- . 
 ated the sensation novel. It is to this audacity, 
 this courage of despair, as manifested in her later 
 works, that we have given the name of pluck. In 
 these works it has settled down into a quiet de 
 termination not to let her public get ahead of her. 
 A writer who has suddenly leaped into a popular 
 ity greatly disproportionate to his merit, can only 
 retain his popularity by observing a strictly re 
 spectful attitude to his readers. This has been 
 Miss Braddon s attitude, and she has maintained 
 it with unwearied patience. She has been in her 
 way a disciple as well as a teacher. She has kept 
 up with the subtle innovations to which her art, 
 like all others, is subject, as well as with the 
 equally delicate fluctuations of the public taste. 
 The result has been a very obvious improvement 
 in her style. 
 
 She had been preceded in the same path by 
 109 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 Mr. Wilkie Collins, whose "Woman in White", 
 with its diaries and letters and its general ponder 
 osity, was a kind of nineteenth century version of 
 "Clarissa Harlowe." Mind, we say a nineteenth 
 century version. To Mr. Collins belongs the 
 credit of having introduced into fiction those most 
 mysterious of mysteries, the mysteries which are 
 at our own doors. This innovation gave a new 
 impetus to the literature of horrors. It was fatal 
 to the authority of Mrs. Radcliffe and her ever 
 lasting castle in the Apennines. What are the 
 Apennines to us, or we to the Apennines? Instead 
 of the terrors of "Udolpho", we were treated to 
 the terrors of the cheerful country-house and the 
 busy London lodgings. And there is no doubt 
 that these were infinitely the more terrible. Mrs. 
 Radcliffe s mysteries were romances pure and 
 simple; while those of Mr. Wilkie Collins were 
 stern reality. The supernatural, which Mrs. Rad 
 cliffe constantly implies, though she generally 
 saves her conscience, at the eleventh hour, by ex 
 plaining it away, requires a powerful imagination 
 in order to be as exciting as the natural, as Mr. 
 Collins and Miss Braddon, without any imagina 
 tion at all, know how to manage it. A good 
 ghost-story, to be half as terrible as a good mur 
 der-story, must be connected at a hundred points 
 with the common objects of life. The best ghost- 
 story probably ever written a tale published 
 some years ago in Blackwood s Magazine was 
 constructed with an admirable understanding of 
 
 no 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 this principle. Half of its force was derived from 
 its prosaic, commonplace, daylight accessories. 
 Less delicately terrible, perhaps, than the vagaries 
 of departed spirits, but to the full as interesting, as 
 the modern novel reader understands the word, 
 are the numberless possible forms of human ma 
 lignity. Crime, indeed, has always been a theme 
 for dramatic poets; but with the old poets its 
 dramatic interest lay in the fact that it compro 
 mised the criminal s moral repose. Whence else 
 is the interest of Orestes and Macbeth? With Mr. 
 Collins and Miss Braddon (our modern Euripides 
 and Shakespeare) the interest of crime is in the 
 fact that it compromises the criminars personal 
 safety. The play is a tragedy, not in virtue of an 
 avenging deity, but in virtue of a preventive sys 
 tem of law; not through the presence of a com 
 pany of fairies, but through that of an admirable 
 organization of police detectives. Of course, the 
 nearer the criminal and the detective are brought 
 home to the reader, the more lively his "sensa 
 tion." They are brought home to the reader by 
 a happy choice of probable circumstances; and 
 it is through their skill in the choice of these cir 
 cumstances their thorough-going realism that 
 Mr. Collins and Miss Braddon have become 
 famous. In like manner, it is by the thorough 
 going realism of modern actors that the works of 
 the most poetic of poets have been made to furnish 
 precedent for sensational writers. There are no 
 circumstances in "Macbeth", as you read it; but 
 
 in 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 as you see it played by Mr. Charles Kean or Mr. 
 Booth it is nothing but circumstances. And we 
 may here remark, in parentheses, that if the actors 
 of a past generation Garrick and Mrs. Siddons 
 - left with their contemporaries so profound a 
 conviction of their greatness , it is probably be 
 cause, like the great dramatists they interpreted, 
 they were ideal and poetic; because their effort 
 was not to impress but to express. 
 
 We have said that although Mr. Collins an 
 ticipated Miss Braddon in the work of devising 
 domestic mysteries adapted to the wants of a 
 sternly prosaic age, she was yet the founder of 
 the sensation novel. Mr. Collins s productions 
 deserve a more respectable name. They are 
 massive and elaborate constructions monu 
 ments of mosaic work, for the proper mastery of 
 which it would seem, at first, that an index and 
 note-book were required. They are not so much 
 works of art as works of science. To read "The 
 Woman in White , requires very much the same 
 intellectual effort as to read Motley or Froude. 
 We may say, therefore, that Mr. Collins being to 
 Miss Braddon what Richardson is to Miss Austen, 
 we date the novel of domestic mystery from the 
 former lady, for the same reason that we date the 
 novel of domestic tranquillity from the latter. 
 Miss Braddon began by a skilful combination of 
 bigamy, arson, murder, and insanity. These 
 phenomena are all represented in the deeds of 
 Lady Audley. The novelty lay in the heroine be- 
 
 112 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 ing, not a picturesque Italian of the fourteenth 
 century, but an English gentlewoman of the cur 
 rent year, familiar with the use of the railway and 
 the telegraph. The intense probability of the 
 story is constantly reiterated. Modern England 
 
 - the England of to-day s newspaper crops up 
 at every step. Of course Lady Audley is a non 
 entity, without a heart, a soul, a reason. But 
 what we may call the small change for these facts 
 
 - her eyes, her hair, her mouth, her dresses, her 
 bedroom furniture, her little words and deeds - 
 are so lavishly bestowed that she successfully 
 maintains a kind of half illusion. Lady Audley 
 was diabolically wicked; Aurora Floyd, her suc 
 cessor, was simply foolish, or indiscreet, or indeli 
 cate or anything you please to say of a young 
 lady who runs off with a hostler. But as bigamy 
 had been the cause of Lady Audley s crimes, so it 
 is the cause of Aurora s woes. She marries a sec 
 ond time, on the hypothesis of the death of the 
 hostler. But, to paraphrase a sentence of Thack 
 eray s in a sketch of the projected plot of "Denis 
 Duval", suppose, after all, it should turn out that 
 the hostler was not dead? In "Aurora Floyd" 
 the small change is more abundant than ever. 
 Aurora s hair, in particular, alternately blue- 
 black, purple-black, and dead-black, is made to 
 go a great way. Since "Aurora Floyd", Miss 
 Braddon has published half-a-dozen more novels; 
 each, as we have intimated, better than the pre 
 vious one, and running through more editions; 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 but each fundamentally a repetition of "Aurora 
 Floyd." These works are censured and ridiculed, 
 but they are extensively read. The author has a 
 hold upon the public. It is, assuredly, worth our 
 while to enquire more particularly how she has 
 obtained it. 
 
 The great public, in the first place, is made up 
 of a vast number of little publics, very much as 
 our Union is made up of States, and it is necessary 
 to consider which of these publics is Miss Brad- 
 don s. We can best define it with the half of a 
 negative. It is that public which reads nothing 
 but novels, and yet which reads neither George 
 Eliot, George Sand, Thackeray, nor Hawthorne. 
 People who read nothing but novels are very poor 
 critics of human nature. Their foremost desire 
 is for something new. J Now, we all know that 
 human nature is very nearly as old as the hills. 
 But society is for ever renewing itself. To society, 
 accordingly, and not to life, Miss Braddon turns, 
 and produces, not stories of passion, but stories of 
 action. Society is a vast magazine of crime and 
 suffering, of enormities, mysteries, and miseries of 
 every description, of incidents, in a word. In pro 
 portion as an incident is exceptional, it is interest 
 ing to persons in search of novelty. Bigamy, 
 murder, and arson are exceptional. Miss Brad 
 don distributes these materials with a generous 
 hand, and attracts the attention of her public. 
 The next step is to hold its attention. There have 
 been plenty of tales of crime which have not 
 
 114 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 made their authors famous, nor put money in 
 their purses. The reason can have been only that 
 they were not well executed. Miss Braddon, ac 
 cordingly, goes to work like an artist. Let not 
 the curious public take for granted that, from a 
 literary point of view, her works are contemptible. 
 Miss Braddon writes neither fine English nor 
 slovenly English; not she. She writes what we 
 may call very knowing English. If her readers 
 have not read George Eliot and Thackeray and all 
 the great authorities, she assuredly has, and, like 
 every one else, she is the better for it. With a 
 telling subject and a knowing style she proceeds 
 to get up her photograph. These require shrewd 
 observation and wide experience; Miss Braddon 
 has both. Like all women, she has a turn for color; 
 she knows how to paint. She overloads her can 
 vas with detail. It is the peculiar character of 
 these details that constitute her chief force. They 
 betray an intimate acquaintance with that dis 
 orderly half of society which becomes every day 
 a greater object of interest to the orderly half. 
 They intimate that, to use an irresistible vulgar 
 ism, Miss Braddon "has been there." The novel 
 ist who interprets the illegitimate world to the 
 legitimate world, commands from the nature of 
 his position a certain popularity. Miss Braddon 
 deals familiarly with gamblers, and betting-men, 
 and flashy reprobates of every description. - She 
 knows much that ladies are not accustomed to 
 know, but that they are apparently very glad to 
 
 "5 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 learn. The names of drinks, the technicalities of 
 the faro-table, the lingo of the turf, the talk nat 
 ural to a crowd of fast men at supper, when there 
 are no ladies present but Miss Braddon, the way 
 one gentleman knocks another down all these 
 things the exact local coloring of Bohemia 
 our sisters and daughters may learn from these 
 works. These things are the incidents of vice; 
 and vice, as is well known, even modern, civilized, 
 elegant, prosaic vice, has its romance. Of this 
 romance Miss Braddon has taken advantage, and 
 the secret of her success is, simply, that she has 
 done her work better than her predecessors. 
 That is, she has done it with a woman s finesse 
 and a strict regard to morality. If one of her 
 heroines elopes with a handsome stable-boy, she 
 saves the proprieties by marrying him. This may 
 be indecent if you like, but it is not immoral. If 
 another of her heroines is ever tempted, she re 
 sists. With people who are not particular, there 
 fore, as to the moral delicacy of their author, or 
 as to their intellectual strength, Miss Braddon is 
 very naturally a favorite. 
 
 116 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 XIII 
 
 Sugenie de Cjuerin* s yournal 
 
 TF Mademoiselle de Guerin, transcribing from 
 * the fulness of her affection and her piety her 
 daily record of one of the quietest lives that ever 
 was led by one who had not formally renounced 
 the world, could have foreseen that within a few 
 years after her death, her love, her piety, her 
 character, her daily habits, her household cares, 
 her inmost and freest thoughts, were to be weighed 
 and measured by half the literary critics of Europe 
 and America, she would, doubtless, have found 
 in this fact a miracle more wonderful than any 
 of those to which, in the lives of her favorite 
 saints, she accorded so gracious a belief. The his 
 tory of a man or woman of genius prolongs itself 
 after death; and one of the most pleasing facts 
 with regard to that of Mile, de Guerin is that it 
 was her fate to know nothing of her fame. One 
 of the most unselfish of women, she was spared 
 the experience of that publicity which was the 
 inevitable result of her talents. Genius is not 
 a private fact: sooner or later, in the nature of 
 things, it becomes common property. Mile, de 
 
 "The Journal of Eugenie de Guerin." By G. S. Trebutien. 
 London: 1865. 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 Guerin pays from her present eminence the pen 
 alty of her admirable faculties. If there be in 
 the seclusion, the modesty, the cheerful obscurity 
 and humility of her life, an essential incongruity 
 with the broad light of actual criticism, we may 
 console ourselves with the reflection that, in so 
 far as it might, fortune has dealt with her in her 
 own spirit. It has respected her noble uncon 
 sciousness. Her life and her fame stand apart. 
 Between her own enjoyment of the work and the 
 world s enjoyment of it intervenes that fact of 
 her death which completes the one and excuses 
 the other. 
 
 Our own excuse for speaking of Mile, de Guerin 
 at this somewhat late day lies in the recent issue 
 of an English translation of her journal. This 
 translation is apparently as good as it was likely 
 to be. In the matter of style, it is our opinion 
 that Mile, de Guerin loses as much by translation 
 as her great countrywoman, Mme. de Sevigne; 
 and as it is for her style especially that we per 
 sonally value Mile, de Guerin, we cannot but 
 think that an English version of her feelings 
 would fail, in a very important particular, to rep 
 resent her her journal being, indeed, nothing 
 more than a tissue of feelings, woven as simply, 
 as easily, as closely, as rapidly, with the same in 
 terrupted continuity, as a piece of fireside knitting- 
 work. It is probable, nevertheless, that the book 
 will prove acceptable from its character of piety; 
 and for those who are not acquainted with the 
 
 118 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 original, it may even, through the translator s faith 
 ful sympathy, possess a certain literary charm. 
 
 Mile, de Guerin s journal begins in 1834, when 
 she was twenty-nine years of age, and ceases in 
 1840. It was strictly a series of daily letters ad 
 dressed to her brother Maurice, and consigned to 
 a number of blank-books, which he read when 
 each was filled. It may be divided into two parts: 
 the first, covering less than five years, extending 
 to the death of Maurice de Guerin; and the second, 
 covering a year and a half, extending from this 
 event to what we may almost call the real death 
 of Mile, de Guerin herself that is, the cessation 
 of that practice of daily communion with her 
 brother which had so long absorbed her most 
 lively energies. She actually survived her brother 
 nine years, a period of which she has left us only 
 that beginning of a record formed by those few 
 pages of her journal which she has inscribed to 
 his departed soul. Her admirers will hardly re 
 gret the absence of a more extended chronicle of 
 these weary years. Mile, de Guerin s thoughts 
 had always been half for heaven and half for 
 Maurice. When Maurice died they reverted, by 
 a pious compromise, to heaven alone, and as 
 sumed an almost painful monotony. 
 
 The chief figure in Mile, de Guerin s life, ac 
 cordingly, is not her own, but that of her brother. 
 He, too, has become famous; he, too, had his 
 genius. The sisterly devotion expressed and im 
 plied in every line of Mile, de Guerin s writing 
 
 119 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 needs, indeed, no such fact as this to explain it. 
 She was nothing of a critic; and for the readers 
 of the journal alone, the simple presumption that 
 Maurice de Guerin was a lovable man is sufficient 
 to account for his supremacy in the life of a woman 
 who lived exclusively in her natural affections. 
 For her, then, he was simply the dearest of her 
 brothers; for us, if we had the space, he would be 
 a most interesting object of study. But we can 
 spare him but a few words. He was by several 
 years Eugenie s junior. Sent to school at a dis 
 tance at an early age, and compelled subsequently 
 to earn his living in Paris by teaching and writing, 
 his life was passed in comparative solitude, and 
 his relations with his family maintained by letters. 
 His first plan had been to enter the church, and 
 with this view he had attached himself to a small 
 community of theological students organized and 
 governed by Lamennais. The dispersion of this 
 community, however, arrested and diverted his 
 ecclesiastical aspirations; and if he never thor 
 oughly abandoned himself to the world as it 
 stands opposed to the church, his habitual se 
 clusion and temperance are marked by a strictly 
 secular tone. After several years of Paris drudg 
 ery he contracted a marriage with a young girl 
 of some fortune. He died at the age of twenty- 
 eight. To ourselves, Maurice de Guerin is a more 
 interesting person than his sister. We cannot, 
 indeed, help regarding the collection recently 
 made of his letters and literary remains as a most 
 
 120 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 valuable contribution to our knowledge of the 
 human mind. What he would have accomplished 
 if time had been more generous towards him, it is 
 difficult to say; but as it is, little can be claimed 
 for him on the ground of his positive achievements. 
 To say that he is chiefly interesting as a phenome 
 non seems but a cold way of looking at one who, 
 in all that we know of his character, inspires us 
 with the most tender affection; and yet so it is 
 that we are tempted to speak of Maurice de 
 Guerin. So i t_is_that Jge are led to look at every 
 man who is deficient in will. This was the case 
 with Guerin. His letters, his diary, his verses, 
 are one long record-of moral impotency. He was 
 one of the saddest of men. That he had genius, 
 we think his little prose-poem, entitled "The 
 Centaur", conclusively proves; not a splendid, a 
 far-reaching genius, but nevertheless a source of 
 inspiration which was all his own. His sensibility, 
 his perceptions, were of the deepest. He put 
 imagination into everything that he said or wrote. 
 He has left descriptions of nature which have 
 probably never been excelled, because, probably, 
 nature has never been more delicately perceived. 
 And yet we may be sure that for posterity he will 
 live rather in his sister than in himself. For he 
 is essentially an imperfect figure; and what the 
 present asks of the past is before all things com 
 pleteness. A man is only remembered beyond 
 his own generation by his results; and the most 
 that Guerin has left us is a heritage of processes. 
 
 121 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 If he had lived and grown great, we should 
 assuredly be delighted to peruse the record of 
 his moral and religious tatonnements. But as his 
 whole life was but a fragment, his fragmentary 
 efforts lack that character of unity which is 
 essential to whomsoever, in morals or in letters, 
 is destined to become anything of a classic. 
 Maurice de Guerin s only unity is in his sister. 
 
 The singular unity of her own genius, indeed, 
 is such as almost to qualify her for this distinc 
 tion. As her brother was all complexity, she was 
 all simplicity. As he was all doubt, she was all 
 faith. It seems to us that we shall place Mile, de 
 Guerin on her proper footing, and obviate much 
 possible misconception, if we say that hers was an 
 essentially^fo/te nature. We just now mentioned 
 Mme. de Sevigne. The great charm of Mme. de 
 Sevigne s style is her perfect ability to say what 
 ever she pleases. But as she was chiefly an ob 
 server of fashionable society, she was not often 
 tempted to utter very composite truths. Now, 
 Mile, de Guerin, perpetually engaged in the con 
 templation of the Divine goodness, finds the 
 right word and the right phrase with the same de 
 lightful ease as her great predecessor. With her, 
 as with Mme. de Sevigne, style was a natural 
 gift. Many of the causes of this perfection are 
 doubtless identical in both cases. Both Mme. de 
 Sevigne and Mile, de Guerin were women of taste 
 and of tact, who, under these conditions, wrote 
 from the heart. They wrote freely and familiarly, 
 
 122 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 without any pre-occupation whatever. They 
 were both women of birth, both ladies as we say 
 now-a-days. To both of them there clings an air 
 of purely natural distinction, of implicit subor 
 dination to the fact of race, a silent sense of re 
 sponsibility to the past, which goes far to explain 
 the positive character of their style. When we 
 add to this that in both of them the imaginative 
 faculty was singularly limited, we shall have in 
 dicated those features which they possessed in 
 common, and shall have helped to confirm our 
 assertion of the finite quality of Mile, de Guerin s 
 mind. It was not that she was without imagina 
 tion; on the contrary, she unmistakably pos 
 sessed it; but she possessed it in very small 
 measure. Religion without imagination is piety; 
 and such is Mile, de Guerin s religion. Her journal, 
 taken as a whole, seems to us to express a profound 
 contentment. She was, indeed, in a certain sense, 
 impatient of life, but with no stronger impatience 
 than such as the church was able to allay. She 
 had, of course, her moments of discouragement; 
 but, on the whole, she found it easy to believe, 
 and she was too implicit a believer to be unhappy. 
 Her peculiar merit is that, without exaltation, 
 enthusiasm, or ecstacy, quietly, steadily, and 
 naturally, she entertained the idea of the Divine 
 goodness. The truth is that she was strong. She 
 was a woman of character. Thoroughly depend 
 ent on the church, she was independent of every 
 thing else. 
 
 123 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 XIV 
 
 The Helton Estate 
 
 T TEREj in the natural order of events, is a new 
 * * novel by Mr. Trollope. This time it is Miss 
 Clara Amedroz who is agitated by conflicting 
 thoughts. Like most of Mr. Trollope s recent 
 heroines, she is no longer in the first blush of 
 youth; and her story, like most of Mr. Trollope s 
 recent stories, is that of a woman standing ir 
 resolute between a better lover and a worse. She 
 first rejects the better for the worse, and then re 
 jects the worse for the better. This latter move 
 ment is final, and Captain Aylmer, like Crosbie, 
 in "The Small House at Allington", has to put 
 up with a red-nosed Lady Emily. The reader will 
 surmise that we are not in "The Bel ton Estate" 
 introduced to very new ground. The book is, 
 nevertheless, to our mind, more readable than 
 many of its predecessors. It is comparatively 
 short, and has the advantage of being a single 
 story, unencumbered by any subordinate or co 
 ordinate plot. The interest of Mr. Trollope s 
 main narrative is usually so far from being in 
 tense that repeated interruption on behalf of the 
 
 "The Belton Estate." By Anthony Trollope. Philadel 
 phia : 1866. 
 
 I2 4 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 actors charged with the more strictly humorous 
 business is often very near proving altogether 
 fatal. To become involved in one of his love 
 stories is very like sinking into a gentle slumber; 
 and it is well known that when you are aroused 
 from your slumber to see something which your 
 well-meaning intruder considers very entertain 
 ing, it is a difficult matter to woo it back again. 
 In the tale before us we slumber on gently to the 
 end. There is no heroine but Miss Clara Amedroz, 
 and no heroes but her two suitors. The lady loves 
 amiss, but discovers it in time, and invests her 
 affections more safely. Such, in strictness, is the 
 substance of the tale; but it is filled out as Mr. 
 Trollope alone knows how to fill out the primitive 
 meagreness of his dramatic skeletons. The three 
 persons whom we have mentioned are each a 
 character in a way, and their sayings and doings, 
 their comings and goings, are registered to the 
 letter and timed to the minute. They write a 
 number of letters, which are duly transcribed; 
 they make frequent railway journeys by the 
 down-train from London; they have cups of tea 
 in their bedrooms; and they do, in short, in the 
 novel very much as the reader is doing out of it. 
 We do not make these remarks in a tone of com 
 plaint. Mr. Trollope has been long enough before 
 the public to have enabled it to take his measure. 
 We do not open his books with the expectation of 
 being thrilled, or convinced, or deeply moved in 
 any way, and, accordingly, when we find one to 
 
 125 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 be as flat as a Dutch landscape, we remind our 
 selves that we have wittingly travelled into Hol 
 land, and that we have no right to abuse the 
 scenery for being in character. We reflect, more 
 over, that there are a vast number of excellent 
 Dutchmen for whom this low-lying horizon has 
 infinite charms. If we are passionate and egotis 
 tical, we turn our back upon them for a nation of 
 irreclaimable dullards; but if we are critical and 
 disinterested, we endeavor to view the prospect 
 from a Dutch stand-point. 
 
 Looking at "The Bel ton Estate", then, from 
 Mr. Trollope s own point of view, it is a very 
 pleasing tale. It contains not a word against 
 nature. It relates, with great knowledge, humor, 
 and grace of style, the history of the affections of 
 a charming young lady. No unlawful devices are 
 resorted to in order to interest us. People and 
 things are painted as they stand. Miss Clara 
 Amedroz is charming only as two-thirds of her 
 sex are charming by the sweetness of her face 
 and figure, the propriety of her manners, and the 
 amiability of her disposition. Represented thus, 
 without perversion or exaggeration, she engages 
 our sympathy as one whom we can understand, 
 from having known a hundred women exactly 
 like her. Will Belton, the lover whom she finally 
 accepts, is still more vividly natural. Even the 
 critic, who judges the book strictly from a reader s 
 stand-point, must admit that Mr. Trollope has 
 drawn few better figures than this, or even (what 
 
 126 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 is more to the purpose) that, as a representation, 
 he is an approach to ideal excellence. The author 
 understands him well in the life, and the reader 
 understands him well in the book. As soon as he 
 begins to talk we begin to know and to like him, 
 as we know and like such men in the flesh after 
 half an hour of their society. It is true that for 
 many of us half an hour of their society is suffi 
 cient, and that here Will Belton is kept before us 
 for days and weeks. No better reason for this is 
 needed than the presumption that the author 
 does not tire of such men so rapidly as we: men 
 healthy, hearty, and shrewd, but men, as we take 
 the liberty of declaring, utterly without mind. 
 Mr. Trollope is simply unable to depict a mind in 
 any liberal sense of the word. He tried it in John 
 Grey in "Can You Forgive Her?" but most 
 readers will agree that he failed to express very 
 vividly this gentleman s scholarly intelligence. 
 Will Belton is an enterprising young squire, with 
 a head large enough for a hundred prejudices, but 
 too small for a single opinion, and a heart com 
 petent on the condition, however, as it seems 
 to us, of considerable generous self-contraction on 
 her part to embrace Miss Amedroz. 
 
 The other lover, Captain Aylmer, is not as suc 
 cessful a figure as his rival, but he is yet a very 
 fair likeness of a man who probably abounds in 
 the ranks of that society from which Mr. Trollope 
 recruits his characters, and who occurs, we ven 
 ture to believe, in that society alone. Not that 
 
 127 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 there are not in all the walks of life weak and 
 passionless men who allow their mothers to bully 
 their affianced wives, and who are utterly incom 
 petent to entertain an idea. But in no other 
 society than that to which Captain Aylmer be 
 longs do such frigidity and such stupidity stand 
 so little in the way of social success. They seem 
 in his case, indeed, to be a passport to it. His 
 prospects depend upon his being respectable, and 
 his being respectable depends, apparently, on his 
 being contemptible. We do not suppose, how 
 ever, that Mr. Trollope likes him any better than 
 we. In fact, Mr. Trollope never fails to betray 
 his antipathy for mean people and mean actions. 
 And antipathetic to his tastes as is Captain Ayl- 
 mer s nature, it is the more creditable to him that 
 he has described it so coolly, critically, and tem 
 perately. Mr. Trollope is never guilty of an excess 
 in any direction, and the vice of his villain is of 
 so mild a quality that it is powerless to prejudice 
 him against his even milder virtues. These seem 
 to us insufficient to account for Clara s passion, 
 for we are bound to believe that for her it was a 
 passion. As far as the reader sees, Captain Aylmer 
 has done nothing to excite it and everything to 
 quench it, and, indeed, we are quite taken by sur 
 prise when, after her aunt s death, she answers 
 his proposal with so emphatic an affirmative. It 
 is a pleasant surprise, however, to find any of 
 Mr. Trollope s people doing a thing contrary to 
 common-sense. Nothing can be better always 
 
 128 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 from the Dutch point of view than the man 
 agement of the reaction in both parties against 
 their engagement; but to base the rupture of a 
 marriage engagement upon an indisposition on 
 the part of the gentleman s mother that the lady 
 shall maintain an acquaintance of long standing 
 with another lady whose past history is discovered 
 to offer a certain little vantage-point for scandal, 
 is, even from the Dutch point of view, an unwar 
 rantable piece of puerility. But the shabbiness of 
 grand society and especially the secret mean 
 nesses, parsimonies, and cruelties of the exemplary 
 British matron have as great an attraction for 
 Mr. Trollope as they had for Thackeray; and the 
 account of Clara s visit to the home of her in 
 tended, the description of the magnificent bully 
 ing of Lady Aylmer, and the picture of Miss 
 Aylmer - "as ignorant, weak, and stupid a poor 
 woman as you shall find anywhere in Europe" 
 make a sketch almost as relentless as the satire of 
 "Vanity Fair" or the "Newcomes." There are 
 several other passages equally clever, notably the 
 chapter in which Belton delivers up Miss Amedroz 
 to her lover s care at the hotel in London; and in 
 which, secure in his expression elsewhere of Bel- 
 ton s superiority to Aylmer, the author feels that 
 he can afford to make him still more delicately 
 natural than he has made him already by con 
 trasting him, pro tempore, very disadvantageously 
 with his rival, and causing him to lose his temper 
 and make a fool of himself. 
 
 129 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 Such praise as this we may freely bestow on the 
 work before us, because, qualified by the impor 
 tant stricture which we have kept in reserve, we 
 feel that it will not seem excessive. Our great ob 
 jection to "The Belton Estate" is that, as we 
 read it, we seemed to be reading a work written 
 for children; a work prepared for minds unable to 
 think; a work below the apprehension of the aver 
 age man and woman, or, at the very most, on a 
 level with it, and in no particular above it. "The 
 Belton Estate * is a stupid book; and in a much 
 deeper sense than that of being simply dull, for a 
 dull book is always a book that might have been 
 lively. A dull book is a failure. Mr. Trollope s 
 story is stupid and a success. It is essentially, 
 organically, consistently stupid; stupid in direct 
 proportion to its strength. It is without a single 
 idea. It is utterly incompetent to the primary 
 functions of a book, of whatever nature, namely 
 - to suggest thought. In a certain way, indeed, 
 it suggests thought; but this is only on the ruins 
 of its own existence as a book. It acts as the occa 
 sion, not as the cause, of thought. It indicates 
 the manner in which a novel should not, on any 
 account, be written. That it should deal exclu 
 sively with dull, flat, commonplace people was to 
 be expected; and this need not be a fault; but it 
 deals with such people as one of themselves; and 
 this is what Lady Aylmer would call a "damning" 
 fault. Mr. Trollope is a good observer; but he is 
 literally nothing else. He is apparently as incap- 
 
 130 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 able of disengaging an idea as of drawing an in 
 ference. All his incidents are, if we may so express 
 it, empirical. He has seen and heard every act 
 and every speech that appears in his pages. That 
 minds like his should exist, and exist in plenty, is 
 neither to be wondered at nor to be deplored; but 
 that such a mind as his should devote itself to 
 writing novels, and that these novels should be 
 successful, appears to us an extraordinary fact. 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 XV 
 
 Swinburne s "hastelard" 
 
 "/^HASTELARD" is not destined, in our 
 ^^ judgment, to add to the reputation of the 
 author of "Atalanta in Calydon." It has been 
 said we know not on what authority that 
 it is an early production, which the author was 
 encouraged to publish by the success of the latter 
 work. On perusal, this rumor becomes easily 
 credible. "Chastelard" bears many signs of 
 immaturity. The subject, indeed, is one which a 
 man might select at any age; but the treatment of 
 it, as it seems to us, is that of a man still young. 
 The subject is one of the numerous flirtations of 
 Queen Mary of Scotland, which makes, like so 
 many of the rest, a very good theme for a tragedy. 
 A drama involving this remarkable woman has, 
 by the fact of her presence alone, a strong chance 
 of success. The play or the novel is half made by 
 the simple use of her name. Her figure has been 
 repeatedly used, and it is likely it will continue to 
 be used for a long time to come; for it adapts itself 
 to the most diverse modes of treatment. In 
 poetry, after all, the great point is that the objects 
 
 "Chastelard: A Tragedy." By Algernon Charles Swin 
 burne. New York: 1866. 
 
 132 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 of our interest should be romantic, and from every 
 possible point of view Queen Mary answers this 
 requisite, whether we accept her as a very con 
 scientious or as a very profligate woman; as a 
 martyr or simply as a criminal. For the fact re 
 mains that she was supremely unhappy; and when 
 to this fact we add the consideration that she was 
 in person supremely lovely, that she embodied, 
 if not all the virtues, at least all the charms, of her 
 sex, we shall not be at loss to understand the 
 ready application of her history to purposes of 
 sentiment. And yet, whoever takes her in hand 
 is held to a certain deliberate view of her character 
 the poet quite as much as the historian. Upon 
 the historian, indeed, a certain conception is im 
 posed by his strict responsibility to facts; but the 
 poet, to whom a great license is usually allowed 
 in the way of modifying facts, is free to take pretty 
 much the view that pleases him best. We repeat, 
 however, that upon some one conception he is 
 bound to take his stand, and to occupy it to the 
 last. Now, the immaturity of Mr. Swinburne s 
 work lies, if we are not mistaken, in his failure to 
 make very clear to himself what he thought about 
 his heroine. That he had thought a great deal 
 about her, we assuredly do not doubt; but he had 
 failed to think to the purpose. He had apparently 
 given up all his imagination to his subject; and, 
 in so doing, had done well; but it seems to us that 
 in this process his subject had the best of the bar 
 gain; it gave him very little in return. 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 Mr. Swinburne has printed at the beginning of 
 his play a short passage from that credulous old 
 voyager, Sir John Mandeville, wherein he speaks 
 of a certain isle toward the north, peopled by 
 beautiful and evil women with eyes of precious 
 stones, which, when they behold any man, forth 
 with slay him with the beholding. The author s 
 intention, then, has been to indicate a certain 
 poetic analogy between these fatal sirens and his 
 heroine. The idea is pretty; the reader makes the 
 rapprochement and proceeds; but when, as he 
 advances in his reading, it dawns upon him that 
 it is upon this idea, as much as upon any other 
 appreciable one, that the tragedy rests, he ex 
 periences a feeling of disappointment which, we 
 are bound to say, accompanies him to the end. 
 He recurs to the title-page and finds another epi 
 graph, from Ronsard, which the author has very 
 prettily translated in the body of the play: 
 
 "With coming lilies in late April came 
 Her body, fashioned whiter for their shame; 
 And roses, touched with blood since Adam bled, 
 From her fair color filled their lips with red." 
 
 The reader s growing disappointment comes 
 from his growing sense of the incompetency of 
 any idea corresponding at all exclusively with 
 these poetic fancies to serve as the leading idea 
 of the work. Out of this disappointment, indeed, 
 there comes a certain quiet satisfaction; the sat 
 isfaction, namely, of witnessing the downfall of 
 a structure reared on an unsound basis. Mr. 
 
 134 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 Swinburne, following the fashion of the day, has 
 endeavored throughout his work to substitute 
 color for design. His failure is, to the reader s 
 mind, an homage to truth. Let us assuredly not 
 proscribe color; but let us first prepare something 
 to receive it. A dramatic work without design is 
 a monstrosity. We may rudely convey our im 
 pression of the radical weakness of "Chastelard" 
 by saying that it has no backbone. The prose of 
 the poetry just referred to that salutary prose 
 which, if we mistake not, intervenes between 
 poetic thought and poetic expression is that 
 Mary was superlatively fascinating to the sense 
 and superlatively heartless. To say, in poetry, 
 that a woman slays a man with her jewelled eyes, 
 is to mean in prose that she causes every man to 
 love her passionately, and that she deceives every 
 man who does love her. As a woman of this 
 quality, if we fully disengage his idea, Mr. Swin 
 burne accepts Queen Mary in other words, as a 
 coquette on the heroic scale. But we repeat that 
 this idea, as he handles it, will not carry his play. 
 His understanding of Mary s moyens begins and 
 ends with his very lively appreciation of the graces 
 of her body. It is very easy to believe that these 
 were infinite; it was, indeed, in Mr. Swinburne s 
 power to make us know absolutely that they were. 
 It were an impertinence to remind him how 
 Shakespeare makes us know such things. Shake 
 speare s word carries weight; he speaks with 
 authority. The plot of Mr. Swinburne s play, 
 
 135 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 if plot it may be called, is the history of the brief 
 passion aroused by Mary in the breast of the 
 French adventurer who gives his name to the 
 work. He has followed her to Scotland and keeps 
 himself under her eye; she encourages his devo 
 tion, but, meanwhile, marries Darnley. On the 
 night of her marriage he makes his way into her 
 presence, and she makes him half welcome. Thus 
 discovered, however, in the penetralia of the palace, 
 he is arrested and cast into prison. Death is the 
 inevitable result of his presumption. Mary, how 
 ever, by a bold exercise of her prerogative, pardons 
 him and sends him an order of release, which, 
 instead of using, he destroys. Mary th en visits 
 him just before his execution, and, in a scene 
 which appears to us an equal compound of radical 
 feebleness and superficial cleverness, finds him 
 resolved to die. The reader assists at his death 
 through the time-honored expedient of a spectator 
 at a window describing the scene without to a 
 faint-hearted companion within. The play ends 
 with these pregnant lines: 
 
 "Make way there for the lord of Bothwell; room 
 Place for my lord of Bothwell next the Queen." 
 
 There is, moreover, a slight under-plot, resting 
 upon the unrequited passion of Mary Beaton, the 
 queen s woman, for Chastelard, and upon her 
 suppressed jealousy of her mistress. There is 
 assuredly in all this the stuff of a truly dramatic 
 work; but as the case stands, it appears to us that 
 the dramatic element is flagrantly missed. We 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 can hardly doubt, indeed, that there was an in 
 tention in the faint and indefinite lines in which 
 all the figures but that of the Queen are drawn. 
 There is every reason to suppose that Mr. Swin 
 burne had advisedly restricted himself to the 
 complete and consistent exhibition of her character 
 alone. Darnley, Murray, and the four Marys are 
 merely the respective signs of a certain number of 
 convenient speeches. Chastelard, too, is practi 
 cally a forfeit, or, rather, he and Mary are but one. 
 The only way, in our judgment, to force home upon 
 the reader the requisite sense of Mary s magical 
 personal influence was to initiate him thoroughly 
 into its effects upon Chastelard s feelings. This, 
 we repeat, Mr. Swinburne has not even attempted 
 to do. Chastelard descants in twenty different 
 passages of very florid and eloquent verse upon 
 the intoxicating beauties of his mistress; but 
 meanwhile the play stands still. Chastelard is 
 ready to damn himself for Mary s love, and this 
 fact, dramatically so great, makes shift to reflect 
 itself in a dozen of those desperately descriptive 
 speeches in which the poetry of the day delights. 
 Chastelard is in love, the author may argue, and 
 a lover is at best a highly imaginative rhapsodist. 
 Nay, a lover is at the worst a man, and a man 
 of many feelings. We should be very sorry to be 
 understood as wishing to suppress such talk as 
 Chastelard s. On the contrary, we should say - 
 let him talk as much as he pleases, and let him 
 deal out poetry by the handful, the more the 
 
 137 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 better. But meanwhile let not the play languish, 
 let not the story halt. As for Mary, towards 
 whom the reader is to conceive Mr. Swinburne as 
 having assumed serious responsibilities, we may 
 safely say that he has left her untouched. He has 
 consigned her neither to life nor to death. The 
 light of her great name illumines his page, and 
 here and there the imagination of the cultivated 
 reader throbs responsive to an awakened echo 
 of his own previous reading. If Mr. Swinburne 
 has failed to vivify his persons, however, if he 
 has failed to express his subject, he has at least 
 done what the unsuccessful artist so often turns 
 out to have done: he has in a very lively manner 
 expressed himself. " Atalanta in Calydon" proved 
 that he was a poet; his present work indicates 
 that his poetic temperament is of a very vigorous 
 order. It indicates, moreover, that it is compara 
 tively easy to write energetic poetry, but that it 
 is very difficult to write a good play. 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 XVI 
 
 J^ingsley s "Hereward" 
 
 TV/fR- KINGSLEY has written nothing better 
 *** than this recital of the adventures of Here- 
 ward, son of the famous Lady Godiva of Coven 
 try, and the "grim earl", Leofric, her husband - 
 who as a boy, under King Edward the Confessor, 
 was outlawed, as too hard a case for his parents 
 to manage; who took service with foreign princes 
 and turned sea-rover on his own account; who 
 was the last of the Berserkers and the first of the 
 knights-errant; who performed unparalleled feats 
 of valor and of cunning; who on the Duke of 
 Normandy s invasion of England felt himself, 
 in spite of his outlawry, still an Englishman at 
 heart, sailed over to England, and collected an 
 army to contest the Norman rights; who contested 
 them long and bravely, in the fen-country of 
 Lincolnshire, but at last found the invaders too 
 many for him and was driven for a subsistence to 
 the greenwood, where he set the fashion to Robin 
 Hood and the dozen other ballad-heroes whom 
 the author enumerates; who under his reverses 
 grew cold and faithless to the devoted wife whom 
 
 " Hereward, the Last of the English." By Charles Kingsley . 
 Boston : 1866. 
 
 139 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 he had married out of Flanders, and who had 
 followed his fortunes over land and sea; who, 
 repudiating Torfrida, thought to patch up his 
 prospects by a base union with a Norman princess, 
 for whom he had cherished an earlier but an un 
 worthy passion, and by a tardy submission to the 
 new king; but who at last, disappointed, humil 
 iated, demoralized by idleness, fell a victim, in his 
 stalwart prime, to the jealousy of the Norman 
 knights. 
 
 Mr. Kingsley s hero, as the reader sees, is an 
 historical figure, duly celebrated in the contem 
 porary and other chronicles, Anglo-Saxon and 
 Norman. How many of his adventures are fic 
 tion does not here signify, inasmuch as they were 
 destined to become fiction in Mr. Kingsley s novel; 
 and, as the elements of a novel by a man of genius, 
 become animated with a more lively respectability 
 than could ever accrue to them as parcels of du 
 bious history. For his leading points, Mr. Kings- 
 ley abides by his chroniclers, who, on their side, 
 abide by tradition. Tradition had made of Here- 
 ward s adventures a most picturesque and ro 
 mantic story; and they have assuredly lost none 
 of their qualities in Mr. Kingsley s hands. Here- 
 ward is a hero quite after his own heart; one 
 whose virtue, in the antique sense, comes ready- 
 made to his use; so that he has to supply this 
 article only in its modern significance. The last 
 representative of unadulterated English grit, of 
 what is now the rich marrow of the English char- 
 
 140 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 acter, could not, with his generous excesses and 
 his simple shortcomings, but forcibly inspire our 
 author s imagination. He was a hero, covered 
 with those glories which as a poet, of an epic 
 turn, as an admirable story-teller and describer, 
 and as an Englishman, Mr. Kingsley would de 
 light to relate; and he was a man, subject to those 
 masculine foibles over which, in his ecclesiastical 
 and didactic character, our author would love to 
 moralize. Courage has ever been in Mr. Kings- 
 ley s view the divine fact in human nature; and 
 courage, as bravely understood as he understands 
 it, is assuredly an excellent thing. He has done 
 his best to make it worthy of its high position; 
 his constant effort has been to prove that it is not 
 an easy virtue. He has several times shown us 
 that a man may be rich in that courage which is 
 the condition of successful adventure, but that 
 he may be very much afraid of his duty. In fact, 
 almost every one of his heroes has been com 
 pelled to make good his heroism by an act of 
 signal magnanimity. In this manner Kingsley 
 has insisted upon the worthlessness of the great 
 est natural strength when unaccompanied by a 
 corresponding strength of soul. One of his remote 
 disciples has given a name to this unsanctified 
 offset the title of the tale, "Barren Honors." 
 The readers of "Two Years Ago" will remember, 
 moreover, the pathetic interest which attached 
 in that charming novel to the essentially unre- 
 generate manfulness of Tom Turnall. The lesson 
 
 141 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 of his history was that it behooves every man to 
 devote his muscle we can find no better name 
 for Mr. Kingsley s conception of intelligence 
 to the service of strict morality. This obliga 
 tion is the constant theme of Mr. Kingsley s 
 teaching. It is true that, to his perception, the 
 possibilities of human character run in a very 
 narrow channel, and that a man has done his 
 grandest when he has contrived not to shirk his 
 plain duty. Duty, for him, is a five-barred gate 
 in a hunting-field: the cowards dismount and 
 fumble at the unyielding padlock; the " gentle 
 men " ride steadily to the leap. 
 
 It has been hinted how "Hereward" turns out 
 a coward. After a long career of generous hack 
 ing and hewing, of the most heroic brutalities and 
 the most knightly courtesies, he finds himself face 
 to face with one of the homely trials of private 
 life. He is tired of his wife, who has lost her 
 youth and her beauty in his service, and he is 
 tempted by another woman who has been keep 
 ing both for him through all the years of his 
 wanderings. To say, shortly, that he puts away 
 his wife and marries his unworthy temptress would 
 be to do him injustice. This is what he comes to, 
 indeed; but, before judging him, we must learn in 
 Mr. Kingsley s pages how naturally he does so. 
 Hereward is an instance of that "demoralization" 
 by defeat of which we have heard so much within 
 the last five years. He is purely and simply a 
 fighting man, and with his enormous fighting 
 
 142 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 capacity he may not unfitly be taken to repre 
 sent, on a reduced scale, the susceptibilities of a 
 whole modern army. When, at last, his enemies 
 outnumber him, he loses heart and, by a very 
 simple process, becomes good for nothing. This 
 process the gradual corrosion in idleness of a 
 practical mind of the heroic type is one which 
 Mr. Kingsley is very well qualified to trace; and 
 although he has troubled himself throughout very 
 little with the psychology of his story, and has 
 told it as much as possible in the simple objective 
 tone of the old chroniclers to whom he so con 
 stantly refers, he has yet, thanks to the moraliz 
 ing habit which he is apparently quite unable 
 entirely to renounce, given us a very pretty in 
 sight into poor Hereward s feelings. 
 
 It is the absence of the old attempt at philosophy 
 and at the writing of history which makes the 
 chief merit of "Hereward" as compared with the 
 author s other tales. Certain merits Mr. Kingsley 
 has in splendid fulness, but the metaphysical 
 faculty is not one of them; and yet in every 
 one of his writings hitherto there has been a stub 
 born philosophical pretension. There is a certain 
 faculty of story-telling as complete and, used in 
 no matter what simplicity, as legitimate and hon 
 orable as any other; and this gift is Mr. Kingsley s. 
 But it has been his constant ambition to yoke it 
 with the procedure of an historian. An important 
 requisite for an historian is to know how to handle 
 ideas, an accomplishment which Mr. Kingsley 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 lacks, as any one may see by turning to his lec 
 tures on history, and especially to the inaugural 
 lecture, in which he exhibits his views on the 
 philosophy of history. But in the work before us, 
 as we have said, he has adhered to his chroniclers; 
 and as there is a world of difference between a 
 chronicler and an historian, he has not been 
 tempted to express many opinions. He has told 
 his story with great rapidity and vivacity, and 
 with that happy command of language which 
 makes him one of the few English writers of the 
 present moment from whose style we derive a 
 positive satisfaction. He writes in all seriousness, 
 and yet with a most grateful suppression of that 
 aggressively earnest tone which has hitherto 
 formed his chief point of contact with Mr. Car- 
 lyle. He writes, in short, as one who enjoys his 
 work; and this fact it is which will give to "Here- 
 ward" a durable and inalienable value. The 
 book is not, in our opinion, what historical novels 
 are so apt to become a pastiche. It represents 
 a vast amount of knowledge, of imagination, and 
 of sympathy. We have never been partial to 
 Mr. Kingsley s arrogance, his shallowness, his 
 sanctified prejudices; but we have never doubted 
 that he is a man of genius. "To be a master/ as 
 we were told the other day, "is to be a master/ 
 "Hereward" is simply a masterpiece, in the 
 literal sense of the term, and as such it is good to 
 read. This fact was supreme in our minds as we 
 read it, and it seemed more forcibly charged than 
 
 144 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 ever before with the assurance of the author s 
 peculiar genius. What is this genius? It lies, in 
 the first place, as it seems to us, in his being a 
 heaven-commissioned raconteur; and, in the second 
 place, in his being a consummate Englishman. 
 Some of them are better Englishmen than others. 
 Mr. Kingsley is one of the best. By as much as 
 he is insufferable when he dogmatizes like a 
 schoolboy upon the characteristics of his nation, 
 by so much is he admirable and delightful when 
 he unconsciously expresses them. No American 
 can see these qualities embodied in a work of art 
 without a thrill of sympathy. "Hereward" is an 
 English story English in its subject, in its 
 spirit, and in its form. He would be a very poor 
 American who, in reading it, should be insensible 
 to the charm of this fact; and he would be a very 
 poor critic who should show himself unable to 
 distinguish between Mr. Kingsley a master and 
 Mr. Kingsley not a master. 
 
 45 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 XVII 
 
 Winifred Bertram 
 
 VyiNIFRED BERTRAM" is, in our judg- 
 *^ ment, much better than the author s pre 
 ceding work: it is in fact an excellent book of its 
 class. This class it is difficult to define. Were it 
 not that in a certain chapter where Sunday litera 
 ture is brought into question, the author fails to 
 express her sympathy with it in a manner so signal 
 as almost to suggest an intent to deprecate, we 
 should say that her own book was fashioned on 
 this principle. The chief figure in Miss Winifred 
 Bertram s world, and one quite overshadowing 
 this young lady, is a certain Grace Leigh, who, 
 albeit of a very tender age, is frequently made the 
 mouth-piece of the author s religious convictions 
 and views of life. She is so free from human im 
 perfections, and under all circumstances gravi 
 tates so infallibly and gracefully towards the 
 right, that her attitude on any question may 
 almost be taken to settle that question for spirits 
 less clearly illumined. She administers a quiet 
 snub to "Sunday books" by declaring that she 
 possesses none. "I do not think Shakespeare is 
 
 "Winifred Bertram and the World She Lived In." [By 
 Mrs. E. R. Charles.] New York : 1866. 
 
 146 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 quite one/ she adds, "nor Homer, although it 
 often helps me on Sundays, and every day, to 
 think of them." The truth is, however, that this 
 young lady is so instinctive a respecter of Sunday 
 that she can very well afford to dispense with 
 literary stimulus. Wherever w.e place this work, 
 its generous and liberal tone will assure it a re 
 spectable station; but is the author confident that 
 she has not been liberal even to laxity in the com 
 prehensive bienveillance which she attributes to 
 Miss Grace Leigh, when the latter affirms that 
 "all sermons are nice"? It is true that she quali 
 fies her assertion by the further remark that "at 
 least there is something nice in them", namely, 
 the text. But the whole speech is a very good illus 
 tration of the weaker side of the author s spirit. 
 It is indeed the speech of a child, and may have 
 been intended to indicate her character rather 
 than to express a truth of the author s own in 
 telligence. Nevertheless, as we have said, this 
 precocious little maiden is somehow invested with 
 so decided an air of authority, that even when she 
 is off her stilts the reader feels that he is expected 
 to be very attentive. Now the word nice as ap 
 plied to a sermon is thoroughly meaningless; as 
 applied to a Scripture text it is, from the author s 
 point of view, almost irreverent. And yet the 
 reader is annoyed with a suspicion that the author 
 fancies herself to have conveyed in these terms a 
 really ponderable truth. Here is another instance 
 of the same gushing optimism. Having put for- 
 
 147 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 ward the startling proposition that "everything 
 is pleasant" - it will be observed that our young 
 friend is of a decidedly generalizing turn Miss 
 
 Jjrace Leigh proceeds to confirm it as follows: 
 "It is pleasant to wake up in the morning and 
 
 ! think how much one has to do for people and 
 it is pleasant to mend father s things and it is 
 pleasant to help the Miss Levels with their schol 
 ars and it is pleasant to make the cold meat 
 seem like new to father by little changes and it 
 is pleasant that Mr. Treherne [the landlord] is a 
 greengrocer and not a baker, because there are 
 never any hot, uncomfortable smells and/ to 
 conclude, "it is pleasant that there is a corner of 
 the churchyard in sight." In other words, we 
 would say, with all deference, it is pleasant to be 
 able to be sentimental in cold blood. This pleas 
 ure, however, is to the full as "difficult to grasp 
 as the converse luxury of being reasonable in a 
 passion. 
 
 In spite of this defect, it is very evident that it 
 has been the author s aim to advocate a thor 
 oughly healthy scheme of piety. She had deter 
 mined to supersede the old-fashioned doctrinal 
 tales on their own ground; to depict a world in 
 which religious zeal should be compatible, in very 
 young persons, with sound limbs and a lively in 
 terest in secular pastimes; in which the practice 
 of religious duties should be but the foremost 
 condition of a liberal education. This world of 
 Miss Winifred Bertram is, accordingly, a highly 
 
 148 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 accomplished one. It recalls those fine houses 
 with violet window-panes, in whose drawing-rooms 
 even the humblest visitors are touched with a 
 faint reflection of the purple. Sin and sorrow 
 assume a roseate hue. Candid virtue wears the 
 beautiful blush of modesty. We have seen how 
 the little girl above quoted gets "help" from 
 Homer and Shakespeare. So every one about her 
 is engaged in helping and being helped. She her 
 self is the grand centre of assistance, in virtue, we 
 presume, of her being in direct receipt of this favor 
 from the great sources just mentioned. She walks 
 through these pages shedding light and bounty, 
 counsel and comfort; preaching, prescribing, and 
 chiding. She makes as pretty a figure as you 
 could wish; but she is, to our mind, far too good 
 to be true. As the heroine of a fairy tale she 
 would be admirable, but as a member of this 
 working-day world she is almost ridiculous. She 
 is a nosegay of impossible flowers of flowers 
 that do not bloom in the low temperature of child 
 hood. We firmly believe that children in pina 
 fores, however rich their natural promise, do not 
 indulge in extemporaneous prayer, in the cogita 
 tion of Scripture texts, and in the visitation of the 
 poor and needy, except in very conscious imita 
 tion of their elders. The best good they accom 
 plish is effected through a compromise with their 
 essentially immoral love of pleasure. To be dis 
 interested is among the very latest lessons they 
 karn, and we should look with suspicion upon a 
 
 149 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 little girl whose life was devoted to the service of 
 an idea. In other words, children grow positively 
 good only as they grow wise, and they grow wise 
 only as they grow old and leave childhood behind 
 them. To make them good before their time is 
 to make them wise before their time, which is a 
 very painful consummation. The author justifies 
 the saintly sagacity of little Grace Leigh by the 
 fact of her having been obliged to look out for 
 herself at a very tender age; but this very com 
 petency to the various cares and difficulties of her 
 position, on which the author dwells so lovingly, 
 is to us a thoroughly unpleasant spectacle. An 
 habitually pre-occupied child is likely to be an 
 unhappy one, and an unhappy one although, 
 like Mr. Dickens s Little Nell, she may never do 
 anything naughty is certainly little more than 
 an instrument of pathos. We can conceive of 
 nothing more pernicious for a child than a pre 
 mature sense of the seriousness of life, and, above 
 all, of that whole range of obligations to which 
 Miss Grace Leigh is so keenly sensitive the 
 obligations of charity, the duties of alms-giving. 
 Nothing would tend more to make a child insuffer 
 ably arrogant than the constant presence of a 
 company of pensioners of its own bounty. Chil 
 dren are essentially democratic, and to represent 
 the poor as in a state of perpetual dependence on 
 them is to destroy some of their happiest traits. 
 
 But there is a great deal in these pages which 
 is evidently meant for the parents of the little 
 
 150 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 boys and girls who read them. There is, for in 
 stance, the episode of the conversion of Mrs. 
 O Brien from elegant carelessness, and heedless- 
 ness of her opportunities for beneficence, to an 
 ingenious and systematic practice of philanthropy. 
 We have no doubt that many idle women with 
 plenty of money may derive considerable profit 
 from the perusal of Mrs. O Brien s story. And 
 there is a great deal more which they may find 
 equally entertaining and instructive many a 
 forcible reminder of the earnestness of life, and of 
 the fact that by taking a friendly interest in their 
 cooks and housemaids, and bestowing kindly 
 words and thoughts as well as loaves and purses 
 upon the inhabitants of tenement-houses, they 
 may diminish the sum of human misery. We 
 agree with the author that there is a wise way of 
 giving alms as well as a foolish one, and that that 
 promiscuous flinging of bounty which saves the 
 benefactor all the trouble of enquiry and of selec 
 tion is very detrimental. But, in our opinion, it 
 is especially detrimental to the active party. To 
 the passive one the pauper it is of compara 
 tively little importance whether assistance is given 
 him intelligently or not. We should say, indeed, 
 that the more impersonally it is given, the better 
 for both parties. The kind of charity advocated 
 with such good sense and good feeling in these 
 pages, is as good as any charity can be which is 
 essentially one with patronage. To show that 
 patronage may be consistent with humility has 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 been practically, at least the author s aim. 
 In the violet-tinted atmosphere of Miss Winifred 
 Bertram s world, this may be so, but hardly, we 
 conceive, in the daylight of nature. Such books 
 as these books teaching the rich how to give - 
 should always carry a companion-piece showing 
 the poor how to take. The objects of the en 
 lightened charity practised in these pages are 
 invariably very reasonable as well as very senti 
 mental. A little wilfulness, a little malice, a little 
 blockheadedness, a little ingratitude, and the posi 
 tion of the alms-dealer becomes very ungraceful; 
 and Miss Winifred Bertram s companions are 
 nothing if not graceful. As a serious work, ac 
 cordingly, we do not deem this account of them 
 very strong. As an exhibition of a very beautiful 
 ideal of life by a person who has felt very gener 
 ously on the subject, it deserves all respect; but 
 we cannot help feeling that religion and human 
 nature, and good and evil, and all the other ob 
 jects of the author s concern, are of very different 
 aspect and proportions from those into which she 
 casts them. Nevertheless, her book may be read 
 with excellent profit by all well-disposed persons: 
 it is full of incidental merit, and is uncommonly 
 well written. Little girls, we suppose, will read it 
 and like it, and for a few days strive to emulate 
 Grace Leigh. But they will eventually relax their 
 spiritual sinews, we trust, and be good once more 
 in a fashion less formidable to their unregenerate 
 elders. 
 
 152 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 XVIII 
 JXCrs. gas {el I 
 
 TT7E cannot help thinking that in "Wives and 
 * * Daughters" the late Mrs. Gaskell has 
 added to the number of those works of fiction - 
 of which we cannot perhaps count more than a 
 score as having been produced in our time - 
 which will outlast the duration of their novelty 
 and continue for years to come to be read and 
 relished for a higher order of merits. Besides 
 being the best of the author s own tales put 
 ting aside "Cranford", that is, which as a work 
 of quite other pretensions ought not to be weighed 
 against it, and which seems to us manifestly des 
 tined in its modest way to become a classic - 
 it is also one of the very best novels of its kind. 
 So delicately, so elaborately, so artistically, so 
 truthfully, and heartily is the story wrought out, 
 that the hours given to its perusal seem like hours 
 actually spent, in the flesh as well as the spirit, 
 among the scenes and people described, in the 
 atmosphere of their motives, feelings, traditions, 
 associations. The gentle skill with which the 
 reader is slowly involved in the tissue of the story; 
 
 "Wives and Daughters." By Mrs. Gaskell. New York : 
 1866. 
 
 J 53 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 the delicacy of the handwork which has perfected 
 every mesh of the net in which he finds himself 
 ultimately entangled; the lightness of touch 
 which, while he stands all unsuspicious of literary 
 artifice, has stopped every issue into the real 
 world; the admirable, inaudible, invisible exer 
 cise of creative power, in short, with which a 
 new and arbitrary world is reared over his heed 
 less head a world insidiously inclusive of him 
 (such is the assoupissement of his critical sense), 
 complete in every particular, from the divine 
 blue of the summer sky to the June-bugs in the 
 roses, from Cynthia Kirkpatrick and her infinite 
 revelations of human nature to old Mrs. Goode- 
 nough and her provincial bad grammar these 
 marvellous results, we say, are such as to compel 
 the reader s very warmest admiration, and to 
 make him feel, in his gratitude for this seeming 
 accession of social and moral knowledge, as if he 
 made but a poor return to the author in testifying, 
 no matter how strongly, to the fact of her genius. 
 For Mrs. Gaskell s genius was so very compos 
 ite as a quality, it was so obviously the offspring 
 of her affections, her feelings, her associations, 
 and (considering that, after all, it was genius) 
 was so little of an intellectual matter, that it 
 seems almost like slighting these charming facts 
 to talk of them under a collective name, espe 
 cially when that name is a term so coarsely 
 and disrespectfully synthetic as the word genius 
 has grown to be. But genius is of many kinds, 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 and we are almost tempted to say that that of 
 Mrs. Gaskell strikes us as being little else than a 
 peculiar play of her personal character. In say 
 ing this we wish to be understood as valuing not 
 her intellect the less, but her character the more. 
 Were we touching upon her literary character at 
 large, we should say that in her literary career as 
 a whole she displayed, considering her success, a 
 minimum of head. Her career was marked by 
 several little literary indiscretions, which show 
 how much writing was a matter of pure feeling 
 with her. Her "Life of Miss Bronte", for in 
 stance, although a very readable and delightful 
 book, is one which a woman of strong head could 
 not possibly have written; for, full as it is of fine 
 qualities, of affection, of generosity, of sympathy, 
 of imagination, it lacks the prime requisites of a 
 good biography. It is written with a signal want 
 of judgment and of critical power; and it has 
 always seemed to us that it tells the reader con 
 siderably more about Mrs. Gaskell than about 
 Miss Bronte. In the tale before us this same want 
 of judgment, as we may still call it in the absence 
 of a better name, presuming that the term ap 
 plies to it only as it stands contrasted with richer 
 gifts, is shown; not in the general management of 
 the story, nor yet in the details, most of which 
 are as good as perfect, but in the way in which, 
 as the tale progresses, the author loses herself in 
 its current very much as we have seen that she 
 causes the reader to do. 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 The book is very long and of an interest so 
 quiet that not a few of its readers will be sure to 
 vote it dull. In the early portion especially the 
 details are so numerous and so minute that even 
 a very well-disposed reader will be tempted to lay 
 down the book and ask himself of what possible 
 concern to him are the clean frocks and the French 
 lessons of little Molly Gibson. But if he will 
 have patience awhile he will see. As an end these 
 modest domestic facts are indeed valueless; but 
 as a means to what the author would probably 
 have called a "realization" of her central idea, 
 /. e., Molly Gibson, a product, to a certain extent, 
 of clean frocks and French lessons, they hold an 
 eminently respectable place. As he gets on in 
 the story he is thankful for them. They have 
 educated him to a proper degree of interest in the 
 heroine. He feels that he knows her the better 
 and loves her the more for a certain acquaint 
 ance with the minutice of her homely bourgeois 
 life. Molly Gibson, however, in spite of the al 
 most fraternal relation which is thus established 
 between herself and the reader or perhaps, in 
 deed, because of it, for if no man is a hero to his 
 valet de chambre, it may be said that no young 
 lady is a heroine to one who, if we may so express 
 our meaning, has known her since she was "so 
 high" -Molly Gibson, we repeat, commands a 
 slighter degree of interest than the companion 
 figure of Cynthia Kirkpatrick. Of this figure, in 
 a note affixed to the book in apology for the ab- 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 sence of the final chapter, which Mrs. Gaskell did 
 not live to write, the editor of the magazine in 
 which the story originally appeared speaks in 
 terms of very high praise; and yet, as it seems to 
 us, of praise thoroughly well deserved. To de 
 scribe Cynthia as she stands in Mrs. Gaskell s 
 pages is impossible. The reader who cares to 
 know her must trace her attentively out. She 
 is a girl of whom, in life, any one of her friends, so 
 challenged, would hesitate to attempt to give a 
 general account, and yet whose specific sayings 
 and doings and looks such a friend would probably 
 delight to talk about. This latter has been Mrs. 
 Gaskell s course; and if, in a certain sense, it shows 
 her weakness, it also shows her wisdom. She had 
 probably known a Cynthia Kirkpatrick, a resume 
 of whose character she had given up as hopeless; 
 and she has here accordingly taken a generous 
 revenge in an analysis as admirably conducted as 
 any we remember to have read. She contents 
 herself with a simple record of the innumerable 
 small facts of the young girl s daily life, and leaves 
 the reader to draw his conclusions. He draws 
 them as he proceeds, and yet leaves them always 
 subject to revision; and he derives from the 
 author s own marked abdication of the authorita 
 tive generalizing tone which, when the other char 
 acters are concerned, she has used as a right, a 
 very delightful sense of the mystery of Cynthia s 
 nature and of those large proportions which 
 mystery always suggests. The fact is that genius 
 
 57 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 is always difficult to formulate, and that Cynthia 
 had a genius for fascination. Her whole character 
 subserved this end. Next after her we think her 
 mother the best drawn character in the book. 
 Less difficult indeed to draw than the daughter, 
 the very nicest art was yet required to keep her 
 from merging, in the reader s sight, into an amus 
 ing caricature a sort of commixture of a very 
 mild solution of Becky Sharp with an equally feeble 
 decoction of Mrs. Nickleby. Touch by touch, 
 under the reader s eye, she builds herself up into 
 her selfish and silly and consummately natural 
 completeness. 
 
 Mrs. Gaskell s men are less successful than her 
 women, and her hero in this book, making all 
 allowance for the type of man intended, is hardly 
 interesting enough in juxtaposition with his vivid 
 sweethearts. Still his defects as a masculine being 
 are negative and not positive, which is something 
 to be thankful for, now that lady-novelists are 
 growing completely to eschew the use of simple 
 and honest youths. Osborne Hamley, a much 
 more ambitious figure than Roger, and ambitious 
 as the figure of Cynthia is ambitious, is to our 
 judgment less successful than either of these; and 
 we think the praise given him in the editorial note 
 above-mentioned is excessive. He has a place in 
 the story, and he is delicately and even forcibly 
 conceived, but he is practically little more than 
 a suggestion. Mrs. Gaskell had exhausted her 
 poetry upon Cynthia, and she could spare to 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 Osborne s very dramatic and even romantic pre 
 dicaments little more than the close prosaic han 
 dling which she had found sufficient for the more 
 vulgar creations. Where this handling accords 
 thoroughly with the spirit of the figures, as in 
 the case of Doctor Gibson and Squire Hamley, 
 the result is admirable. It is good praise of these 
 strongly marked, masculine, middle-aged men to 
 say that they are as forcibly drawn as if a wise 
 masculine hand had drawn them. Perhaps the 
 best scene in the book (as the editor remarks) is 
 the one in which the squire smokes a pipe with 
 one of his sons after his high words with the other. 
 We have intimated that this scene is prosaic; but 
 let not the reader take fright at the word. If an 
 author can be powerful, delicate, humorous, 
 pathetic, dramatic, within the strict limits of 
 homely prose, we see no need of his "dropping 
 into poetry," as Mr. Dickens says. It is Mrs. 
 Gaskell s highest praise to have been all of this, 
 and yet to have written "an everyday story" (as, 
 if we mistake not, the original title of "Wives and 
 Daughters" ran) in an everyday style. 
 
 59 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 XIX 
 <3&arian T^ooke 
 
 is an average novel and a very bad book 
 a distinction, as it seems to us, easy to 
 understand. There have been many novels, con 
 temptible or ridiculous in point of dramatic in 
 terest, which have obtained a respectful attention 
 through the wisdom of their tone or the elevation 
 of their style. There have been others, skilful 
 and absorbing in the matter of plot, which the 
 reader has nevertheless flung aside half-read, as 
 intolerably foolish, or intolerably vicious in 
 spirit. The plot of "Marian Rooke", although it 
 can hardly be called very skilful on the writer s 
 part or very absorbing on the reader s, is yet 
 decently interesting, as plots go, and may readily 
 suffice to the entertainment of those jolly bar 
 barians of taste who read novels only for what they 
 call the "story." "Marian Rooke" has an abun 
 dance a superabundance of story, a vast deal 
 of incident, of variety, of sentiment, of passion, 
 of description, of conversation, and of that face 
 tious element which no gentleman s novel should 
 be without. These merits, however, are not by 
 
 "Marian Rooke, or The Quest for Fortune : a Tale of the 
 Younger World." By Henry D. Sedley. New York : 1865. 
 
 1 60 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 themselves of so high an order as to justify us 
 to our conscience in an attempt to impose them 
 upon the public recognition; we should have been 
 content to leave their destinies to fortune. The 
 part of duty in the matter, since duty there is, is 
 to point out the defects of the work. 
 
 "Marian Rooke", then, is a tale of the "younger 
 world", or, in other words, of life in the United 
 States. If we are not mistaken, it was published 
 in England either just before, or simultaneously 
 with, its appearance in New York; and if on this 
 point, too, we are not wrong in our facts, it met 
 with a warmer welcome on the other side of the 
 water than it has encountered on this, as, indeed, 
 it had every reason to do, inasmuch as we may 
 convey a certain idea of its spirit in saying that, 
 whereas it was written for English circulating 
 libraries, it was written only, if we may so express 
 it, at American ones. This air of divided nation 
 ality which attended its production is an index 
 of a similar feature in the conception of the book. 
 The reader vacillates between setting the author 
 down as a consummate Yankee and dubbing him 
 as a consummate cockney. At one moment he 
 asserts himself an Englishman who has a peril 
 ously small amount of learning about the United 
 States, and at another he seems conclusively to 
 prove himself one of our dear fellow-countrymen > 
 with his honest head slightly turned by a glimpse 
 of the carriage going to one of the Queen of 
 England s drawing-rooms. It remains a constant 
 
 161 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 source of perplexity that he should be at once so 
 poor an American and so poor an Englishman. 
 No Englishman ever entertained for New Eng 
 land the magnificent loathing which burns in Mr. 
 Sedley s pages. What is New England to him or 
 he to New England that he should thus rack his 
 ingenuity in her behalf? So divinely disinterested 
 an hostility was never inspired by a mere interest 
 in abstract truth. A tour in the United States in 
 midwinter, with a fatal succession of bad hotels, 
 exorbitant hack-drivers, impertinent steamboat 
 clerks, thankless female fellow-travellers, and ter 
 rific railway collisions, might possibly create in a 
 generous British bosom a certain lusty personal 
 antipathy to our unmannerly democracy; a vehe 
 ment, honest expression of which could not fail 
 to make a chapter of picturesque and profitable 
 reading. But it takes an emancipated, a disfran 
 chised, an outlawed, or, if you please, a disap 
 pointed, American to wish us to believe that he 
 detests us simply on theory. This impression the 
 author of "Marian Rooke" would fain convey. 
 Therefore we say we set him down as one of our 
 selves. But he betrays, incidentally, as we have 
 intimated, so what shall we call it? so lively 
 an ignorance of our manners and customs, our 
 method of action and of speech, that this hypothe 
 sis also is not without a certain measure of dis 
 proof. He has vouchsafed us no information on 
 the contested point; and this it is that prevents 
 conjecture from being impertinent, for it is founded 
 
 162 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 solely upon the evidence of the story itself, which, 
 as a book once fairly and squarely published, is 
 utterly given over to the public use, and to all such 
 probing, weighing, and analyzing as may help 
 the public to understand it. Further reflection, 
 then, on the mooted point leads us to the conclu 
 sion that in order to furnish Mr. Sedley with any 
 local habitation whatever we must consider one 
 of the two conflicting elements of his tale as a 
 purely dramatic characteristic. As the conflict 
 lies between his perfect familiarity with some points 
 of American life and his singular and arbitrary 
 ignorance of others, we must decide that either 
 his knowledge or his ignorance is assumed. And 
 as his ignorance is generally not so much an absence 
 of knowledge and of statement as positive false 
 knowledge and false statement, we embrace the 
 hypothesis that his scathing indifference to the 
 facts of the case is the result of a good deal of 
 painful ingenuity. And this is what we have in 
 mind in calling his book at the outset a bad book. 
 A book which, from an avowedly critical stand 
 point even if it were a very flimsy novel - 
 should roundly abuse and reprobate all things 
 American, would command our respect, if it did 
 not command our agreement. But a book pro 
 jected (intellectually) from the midst of us, as the 
 present one betrays itself to have been, intended 
 to strike us by a rebound from the ignorant sym 
 pathy of foreign readers, displaying its knowledge 
 of us by the possession of a large number of facts 
 
 163 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 and by the petty perversion of every fact which 
 it does possess, and leaving an issue for escape 
 from the charge of deliberate misrepresentation 
 (so good a Yankee is the author) by a species of 
 implicit self-reference to a community where a 
 certain ignorance of our habits is not more than 
 natural, a book in which the author has put 
 himself to so much trouble to do such an ugly 
 piece of work, commands neither our agreement 
 nor our respect. 
 
 The hero of the tale is the son of a dissolute 
 English gentleman time-honored and familiar 
 combination! who, having immigrated to this 
 country, married an American wife. In this man 
 ner originated the fatal "kink" in the young 
 man s nature the conflict between his literal 
 allegiance to the land of his birth and his spiritual 
 affinity with the proud home of his ancestors. 
 Marian Rooke, a burning Creole beauty, the 
 daughter of a rich Louisiana planter, is similarly 
 at odds with fortune, it having been discovered on 
 her father s death that she is the child of a slave. 
 Hence a beautiful bond of sympathy between the 
 two. We do not propose to relate their adven 
 tures. It is enough to say that these are cast 
 successively in California, in Europe, in Boston, 
 in Berkshire County, Massachusetts (where the 
 local color becomes quite appalling), and in the 
 city of New York. The hero and heroine are 
 duly joined in matrimony at the close, and sub 
 sequently, we are informed, the hero does "yeo- 
 
 164 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 man s service" in the late war, on which side the 
 author (still like a shrewd Yankee) refuses to tell 
 us, so leaving in considerable doubt (since so 
 essential a point is perforce slighted) whether he 
 really fought on either. He serves throughout 
 the book as an instrument for eliciting in their 
 utmost intensity the vulgar manners and sordid 
 morals of the American people. He is, probably 
 in view of this fact, the most deeply pathetic 
 character in the whole extent of fiction. We have 
 no space categorically to refute the ingenious 
 accusations which Mr. Sedley has levied upon 
 our manners and our speech. We must content 
 ourselves with saying that as, if they were true, 
 they would tell a sad tale of our vulgarity, so, 
 since they are false, they tell a sad tale of the 
 vulgarity of Mr. Sedley s imagination. What 
 California was, socially, fifteen years ago, we can 
 not say; but it was certainly not the headquarters 
 of politeness, and we accordingly leave it to Mr. 
 Sedley s tender mercies. But we are better quali 
 fied to judge of New York and Boston. Here is a 
 young lady of fashion, of the former city, welcom 
 ing her mother s guests at a conversazione: "We 
 are very gay to-night, although promiscuous. Talk 
 has been lively. There are a good many ladies 
 round. Pa and Professor Sukkar are conferring 
 on immorality. Pa is speaking now. Hush!" 
 Here is another young lady, with the best blood 
 in the land in her veins, conferring with her 
 mother as to the probable character of the hero, 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 who has just made his entree into New York 
 society: "Heavens, no! Clinton would have never 
 given letters to a politician; whatever his faults, 
 my brother would never have introduced a politi 
 cian into the family of the Parapets!" "Unless 
 sinning through ignorance, perhaps/ suggests the 
 mother. "Ignorance! surely their odious names 
 are familiar enough. To be sure we don t read 
 the detestable newspapers, their organs, but the 
 men do; and I am confident either papa or Clinton 
 would know if Mr. Gifford had been compromised 
 in politics." Having represented every American 
 in his pages, of no matter what station in life, as 
 using a form of the traditional Sam Slick dialect, 
 in which all the humorous quaintness is omitted 
 and all the extravagant coarseness is retained, 
 the author makes generous amends at last by the 
 elegant language which he puts into the mouths 
 of the Parapets, the family of the young lady just 
 quoted; and by the still more elegant distinction 
 which he claims for them. Into various details of 
 their dreary snobbishness we will not plunge. 
 They constitute, in the author s sight, the one 
 redeeming feature of our deplorable social con 
 dition; and he assures us that, incredible as the 
 fact may appear, they yet do actually flourish in 
 aristocratic idleness and seclusion in the midst of 
 our universal barbarism. This, surely, is the most 
 unkindest cut of all. It suggests, moreover, fearful 
 reflections as to what our fate would have been had 
 Mr. Sedley been minded to be complimentary. 
 
 1 66 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 XX 
 
 U^oble J^ife 
 
 lives have always been a sort of spe- 
 cialty with the author of "John Halifax." 
 Few novelists, in this age of sympathy with pic 
 turesque turpitude, have given us such flattering 
 accounts of human nature, or have paid such 
 glowing tributes to virtue. "John Halifax" was 
 an attempt to tell the story of a life perfect in 
 every particular; and to relate, moreover, every 
 particular of it. The hero was a sort of Sir Charles 
 Grandison of the democracy, faultless in manner 
 and in morals. There is something almost awful 
 in the thought of a writer undertaking to give 
 a detailed picture of the actions of a perfectly 
 virtuous being. Sir Charles Grandison, with his 
 wig and his sword, his high heels, his bows, his 
 smiles, his Johnsonian compliments, his irre 
 proachable tone, his moderation, his reverence, 
 his piety, his* decency in all the relations of life, 
 was possible to the author, and is tolerable to the 
 reader, only as the product of an age in which 
 nature was represented by majestic generaliza 
 tions. But to create a model gentleman in an 
 
 "A Noble Life." By Mrs. D. M. M. Craik. New York : 
 1866. 
 
 l6 7 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 age when, to be satisfactory to the general public, 
 art has to specify every individual fact of nature; 
 when, in order to believe what we are desired to 
 believe of such a person, we need to see him photo 
 graphed at each successive stage of his proceed 
 ings, argues either great courage or great temerity 
 on the part of a writer, and certainly involves a 
 system of bold co-operation on the reader s side. 
 We cannot but think that, if Miss Muloch had 
 weighed her task more fairly, she would have 
 shrunk from it in dismay. But neither before nor 
 after his successful incarnation was John Halifax 
 to be weighed or measured. We know of no scales 
 that will hold him, and of no unit of length with 
 which to compare him. He is infinite; he outlasts 
 time; he is enshrined in a million innocent breasts; 
 and before his awful perfection and his eternal 
 durability we respectfully lower our lance. We 
 have, indeed, not the least inclination to laugh at 
 him; nor do we desire to speak with anything but 
 respect of the spirit in which he and his numer 
 ous brothers and sisters have been conceived; for 
 we believe it to have been, at bottom, a serious 
 one. That is, Miss Muloch is manifestly a serious 
 lover of human nature, and a passionate admirer 
 of a fine man and a fine woman. Here, surely, is 
 a good solid basis to work upon; and we are cer 
 tain that on this point Miss Muloch yields to 
 none in the force of her inspiration. But she 
 gives us the impression of having always looked at 
 men and women through a curtain of rose-colored 
 
 168 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 gauze. This impediment to a clear and natural 
 vision is nothing more, we conceive, than her 
 excessive sentimentality. Such a defect may be 
 but the exaggeration of a virtue, but it makes sad 
 work in Miss Muloch s tales. It destroys their 
 most vital property their appearance of reality; 
 it falsifies every fact and every truth it touches; 
 and, by reaction, it inevitably impugns the writ 
 er s sincerity. 
 
 The volume before us contains the story of an 
 unfortunate man who, born to wealth and honors, 
 is rendered incompetent, by ill-health and de 
 formity, to the simplest offices of life, but whose 
 soul shines the brighter for this eclipse of his body. 
 Orphaned, dwarfed, crippled, unable to walk, to 
 hold a fork, a book, or a pen, with body enough to 
 suffer acutely, and yet with so little that he can 
 act only through servants upon the objects nearest 
 to him, he contrives, nevertheless, to maintain a 
 noble equanimity, to practise a boundless charity, 
 and to achieve a wide intellectual culture. Such 
 is Miss Muloch s noble life, and this time, at 
 least, we do not contest her epithet. We might 
 cite several examples to illustrate that lively pre 
 dilection for cripples and invalids by which she 
 has always been distinguished; but we defer to 
 this generous idiosyncracy. It is no more than 
 right that the sickly half of humanity should have 
 its chronicler; and as far as the Earl of Cairnforth 
 is concerned, it were a real loss to the robust half 
 that he should lack his poet. For we cannot 
 
 169 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 help thinking that, admirable as the subject is, 
 the author has done it fair justice, and that she 
 has appreciated its great opportunities. She has 
 handled it delicately and wisely, both as judged 
 by its intrinsic merits and, still more, as judged 
 by her own hitherto revealed abilities. She has 
 told her story simply, directly, and forcibly, with 
 but a moderate tendency to moralize, and quite 
 an artistic perception of the inherent value of 
 her facts. A profound sense of the beauty of the 
 theme impels us to say that of course there are 
 many points in which she might have done better, 
 and to express our regret that, since the story 
 was destined to be written, an essentially stronger 
 pen should not have anticipated the task; since, 
 indeed, the history of a wise man s soul was in 
 question, a wise man, and not a woman some 
 thing less than wise, should have undertaken to 
 relate it. In such a case certain faulty-sketched 
 episodes would have been more satisfactory. 
 That of Helen Cardross s intimacy with the earl, 
 for instance, would probably have gained largely 
 in dramatic interest by the suggestion of a more 
 delicate sentiment on the earl s part sensitive, 
 imaginative, manly-souled as he is represented as 
 being than that of a grateful nursling. Such a 
 feat was doubtless beyond Miss Muloch s powers 
 - as it would indeed have been beyond any 
 woman s; and it was, therefore, the part of pru 
 dence not to attempt it. Another weak point is 
 the very undeveloped state of the whole incident of 
 
 170 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 the visit of the earl s insidious kinsman. If this 
 had been drawn out more artistically, it would 
 have given a very interesting picture of the moves 
 and counter-moves about the helpless nobleman s 
 chair, of his simple friends and servants, and his 
 subtle cousin. 
 
 Good story-tellers, however, are not so plenti 
 ful as that we should throw aside a story because 
 it is told with only partial success. When was 
 more than approximate justice ever done a great 
 subject? In view of this general truth, we gladly 
 commend Miss Muloch as fairly successful. As 
 suredly, she has her own peculiar merits. If she 
 has not much philosophy nor much style, she has 
 at least feeling and taste. If she does not savor 
 of the classics, neither does she savor of the news 
 papers. If, in short, she is not George Eliot on 
 the one hand, neither is she Miss Braddon on 
 the other. Where a writer is so transparently a 
 woman as she and the last-named lady betray 
 themselves to be, it matters more than a little 
 what kind of woman she is. In the face of this 
 circumstance, the simplicity, the ignorance, the 
 want of experience, the innocent false guesses 
 and inferences, which, in severely critical moods, 
 are almost ridiculous, resolve themselves into 
 facts charming and even sacred, while the mascu 
 line cleverness, the social omniscience, which 
 satisfy the merely intellectual exactions, become 
 an almost revolting spectacle. Miss Muloch is 
 kindly, somewhat dull, pious, and very senti- 
 
 171 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 mental she has both the virtues and defects 
 which are covered by the untranslatable French 
 word honnete. Miss Braddon is brilliant, lively, 
 ingenious, and destitute of a ray of sentiment; 
 and we should never dream of calling her honnete. 
 And, as matters stand at present, to say that we 
 prefer the sentimental school to the other, is 
 simply to say that we prefer virtue to vice. 
 
 172 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 XXI 
 
 Spictetus 
 
 THE present edition of Epictetus, as the title- 
 page affirms, rests upon Mrs. Carter s trans 
 lation, which was published in a clumsy quarto in 
 1758. On comparing the two versions, we find 
 that the modifications made by the present editor 
 bear chiefly upon the undue quaintness, direct 
 ness, and familiarity of Mrs. Carter s style. They 
 were undertaken, he intimates, with the hope 
 of popularizing the great Stoic moralist among 
 modern readers. It is a significant fact, in view 
 of this intention, that the present version has 
 altogether a more literary air than Mrs. Carter s 
 own, for which, to judge from the long list of aris 
 tocratic subscribers that accompanies it, a some 
 what exclusive patronage was anticipated. The 
 difference between the two versions is not very 
 great, but it has seemed to us that the altera 
 tions made by Mr. Higginson tend to substitute 
 the language of books for the language of talk. 
 This, however, is but as it should be. The lan 
 guage of talk of the present day is quite as literary 
 as the language of books of a hundred years ago. 
 
 "The Works of Epictetus." By Thomas Wentworth Hig- 
 ginson. Boston : 1865. 
 
 173 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 How far under these new auspices Epictetus 
 is destined to become familiar to modern English 
 readers is a difficult question to decide. In every 
 attempted resuscitation of an old author, one of 
 two things is either expressly or tacitly claimed 
 for him. He is conceived to possess either an 
 historical or an intrinsic interest. He is intro 
 duced to us either as a phenomenon, an object 
 worthy of study in connection with a particu 
 lar phase of civilization, or as a teacher, an ob 
 ject worthy of study in himself, independently 
 of time or place. In one case, in a word, he is 
 offered us as a means; in the other case he is offered 
 us as an end. To become popular he must fulfil 
 the latter condition. The question suggested by 
 this new edition of Epictetus is whether or not 
 he is susceptible of a direct modern application. 
 There are two ways of answering this question. 
 One is to attempt an exposition of his character, 
 and, with the reader s sympathy, to deduce thence 
 our reply. The other is to give our opinion at 
 once, and then to proceed to justify it by an ex 
 position of his character. We select the latter 
 course. We agree with the editor, then, that the 
 teachings of Epictetus possess a permanent value, 
 - that they may properly form at least one de 
 partment in a modern handbook of morals. 
 
 Little is known of our author s life. That he 
 was a Greek by birth; that he lived at Rome in 
 the latter part of the first century; that he was a 
 slave, deformed and poor; and that he publicly 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 discussed philosophy; these facts make up all 
 that we know of his history. But these are as 
 suredly enough. As his philosophy was avowedly 
 a matter of living and acting, we may be sure 
 the sympathetic reader of his Discourses cannot 
 but be sure that he exemplified it in his own 
 life and acts. We need to know little of the his 
 tory of a man whose theory of conduct was so 
 explicit, so emphatic, so detailed. There is in his 
 precepts, possessing them even as we do at sec 
 ond hand, a personal accent, a tone of honesty, of 
 sincerity, of feeling, an expression, so to speak, 
 of temperament, which gives them a kind of 
 autobiographical force. Like his great master, 
 Socrates, the object of his constant and almost 
 religious reference, we know him only as he 
 stands reported by a disciple. But he has this 
 advantage, that his disciple was a man of no par 
 ticular originality. A thoroughly earnest man, 
 moreover, a man of strong personal influence and 
 lively idiosyncrasies, such as Epictetus must have 
 been, may often be more successfully represented 
 by another than by himself. In an age when 
 morals and metaphysics were taught by direct 
 exhortation, and the teacher s authority de 
 pended largely upon the accordance of his habits 
 with his theories; when genius was reflected as 
 much in the conduct as in the intellect, and was 
 in fact measured as much by the one as by the 
 other; and when the various incidents of a man s 
 natural disposition that whole range of quali- 
 
 75 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 ties which in the present day are held to be quite 
 impertinent to public life increased or dimin 
 ished the force of his precepts, in such an age 
 it is probable that the general figure of a philoso 
 pher was in the eyes of his disciples a very vivid 
 and absolute fact, and, provided they were neither 
 Xenophons nor Platos, would be strictly respected 
 in their recollections and reports. This is espe 
 cially likely to have been the case with Epictetus, 
 from the fact that he was a Stoic. The Stoic 
 philosophy is emphatically a practical one, a rule 
 of life: it applies to the day, the hour, the moment. 
 As represented by Epictetus it is as far removed 
 as possible from metaphysics. There is, there 
 fore, no Stoicism of mere principle. And, lastly, 
 there reigns throughout the parts of Epictetus s 
 Discourses such a close mutual consistency as to 
 fix the impression that his life was thoroughly 
 consistent with the whole. 
 
 Stoicism is the most absolute and uncomprom 
 ising system of morals ever accepted by man. We 
 say system of morals, because it is in effect noth 
 ing of a philosophy. It is a stifling of philosophy, 
 a prohibition of inquiry. It declares a man s 
 happiness to be wholly in his own hands, to be 
 identical with the strength of his will, to consist 
 in a certain parti-pris of self-control, steadfastly 
 maintained. It teaches the absolute supremacy 
 of virtue, its superiority to health, riches, 
 honor, and prosperity. Virtue consists in a state 
 of moral satisfaction with those things which 
 
 176 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 reason tells us are in our power, and in a sublime 
 independence of those things which are not in our 
 power. It is not in our power to be rich, to be 
 free, to be sound of body. But it is in our power 
 to be resigned to poverty, slavery, and sickness. 
 It is in our power to live philosophically; /. e., pa 
 tiently, passively, in conscious accordance with 
 the divine part of our nature. It is easy to un 
 derstand the efficacy of such a doctrine as this 
 in the age of Nero and Domitian, before Chris 
 tianity had had time to suggest that virtue is not 
 necessarily a servitude, and that the true condi 
 tion of happiness is freedom. In that age the 
 only hope of mankind was in the virgin human 
 will. Epictetus never once intimates the existence 
 of an idea of rights. On the contrary, his whole 
 theory of those things which are not in our power 
 is inconsistent with such an idea. In his view, 
 the conditions of humanity are permanently fixed. 
 Life is beset on every side with poverty and suffer 
 ing. Slavery is an accepted fact. Every man is 
 subject, as a matter of course, to certain visita 
 tions of cruelty and injustice. These are so in 
 evitable, so much a law of the universe, that we 
 must regulate our lives accordingly. To declaim 
 against them, to resist them, to deny them, is out 
 of the question. Our duty is to accept them in 
 order that we may properly reject them. Our 
 own persons are the field of this operation. Over 
 them we have no power; but over ourselves we 
 have an absolute mastery, that is, over our true 
 
 177 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 selves; not this contemptible carcass, these perish 
 able limbs, this fleeting life, nothing so simple 
 as that; and yet, if we would but perceive it, some 
 thing infinitely more simple, the self-contained, 
 unencumbered faculty of reason. Within our 
 own souls we reign supreme. Cruelty and injus 
 tice may invade our bodies; the Stoic quietly 
 awaits them on the threshold of his reason, arrests 
 their progress, turns them to naught, and covers 
 them with confusion. "You may hurt me," he 
 says, "if you can, that is, if I will. I am only 
 hurt so far as I heed my injuries; but I will not 
 heed them. I have better things to think of, - 
 the providence of God, his wisdom, power, and 
 beauty, and this god-like principle, my own nature, 
 from which I derive courage, modesty, and re 
 ligion. You may hurt me and misuse me, and 
 much good may it do you. It will indeed gratify 
 you, inasmuch as for you it is I that you perse 
 cute; but for me, who am the proper judge, I 
 would have you know, it is not I, but this miser 
 able body, to which you are welcome." 
 
 The age in which this attitude of mind was a 
 refuge, a rest, a relief, the fruit of a philosophy, 
 is an age which we cannot adequately conceive 
 without a strong intellectual effort. And we must 
 remember that men would not have assumed 
 it, if, in spite of its apparent difficulties, it had 
 not opened the wisest course. Aux grands maux 
 les grands remedes. When injustice was on the 
 heroic scale, submission had to be on the heroic 
 
 178 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 scale too. Such were the consolations of a Ro 
 manized world. In a brutal age virtue is brutal 
 as well as vice; and, indeed, we read the moral de 
 pression engendered by the Roman decline more 
 clearly in these utterances of a reactionary piety 
 than in any record of the flagrant profligacy of the 
 time. When this was the last word of honest 
 Paganism, it was high time that Christianity 
 should arrive; for if vice called for a reform, vir 
 tue called for it equally. Christianity was needed 
 to correct the Roman spirit, generally, in its 
 good as well as in its evil manifestations. It was 
 needed to teach the respect of weakness. The 
 Stoicism of Epictetus is in its uncompromising 
 sternness, its harshness, its one-sidedness, its lack 
 of imagination, a thoroughly Roman principle. 
 It rests upon common sense. It adapts itself to 
 only one stand-point, and betrays no suspicion 
 of the needs of a character different from that of 
 its teacher. Common sense, in the character of a 
 kind of deus ex machina, has often undertaken the 
 solution of complex philosophical problems; but 
 it has solved them only by cutting the knot. 
 
 Stoicism, then, is essentially unphilosophic. It 
 simplifies human troubles by ignoring half of 
 them. It is a wilful blindness, a constant begging 
 of the question. It fosters apathy and paralyzes 
 the sensibilities. It is through our sensibilities 
 that we suffer, but it is through them, too, that 
 we enjoy; and when, by a practical annihilation 
 of the body, the soul is rendered inaccessible to 
 
 179 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 pain, it is likewise rendered both inaccessible and 
 incompetent to real pleasure, to the pleasure 
 of action; for the source of half its impressions, 
 the medium of its constant expression, the condi 
 tion of human reciprocity, has been destroyed. 
 Stoicism is thus a negation of the possibility of 
 progress. If the world, taken at a given moment, 
 were destined to maintain all its relations un 
 changed forevermore, then the doctrine in ques 
 tion would be the best theory of life within human 
 attainment. But as to the modern mind, there is 
 always a possible future in which to lodge the 
 fulfilment of impossible ideals; for, besides our 
 principle of Christian faith, there exists for the 
 things of this world a kindred principle of Chris 
 tian hope, Stoicism seems, at the present day, to 
 imply an utter social immobility. And if the 
 majority of mankind became Stoics, it is certain 
 that social immobility would ensue as the result 
 of so general an assumption of passivity. The 
 grand defect of the system is, that it discourages 
 all responsibility to anything but one s own soul. 
 There is a somewhat apocryphal anecdote of 
 Epictetus having said to his master, Epaphroditus, 
 as the latter was about to put his leg into the tor 
 ture, "You will break my leg"; and, when in a 
 few moments this result was accomplished, of his 
 having quietly added, "Did not I tell you so?" 
 It would be easy to quote this anecdote as an ex 
 ample of great nobleness of soul. But, on reflec 
 tion, we see that it reveals, from our modern point 
 
 1 80 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 of view, an astounding moral degradation. It 
 assuredly does not diminish our respect for Epic 
 tetus, any more than the tub of Diogenes dimin 
 ishes our respect for him; but it sets inflexible 
 limits to our consideration for the spirit by which 
 a noble nature was so enslaved. There is no doubt 
 that, on its own ground, Pagan brutality was best 
 refuted by such means as these. But it is equally 
 certain that such means as these are possible only 
 to spirits tainted by the evils which they deplore. 
 It is against the experience of such evils that they 
 react; but as long as the battle is fought on the old 
 ground, the reactionists only half secure our sym 
 pathy. To future ages they have too much in 
 common with their oppressors. It is only when 
 the circle is broken, when the reaction is leavened 
 by a wholly new element, that it seems to us to 
 justify itself. The taint of Epictetus is the taint 
 of slavery. 
 
 Mr. Higginson tells us, in his Preface, that these 
 Discourses were the favorite reading of Toussaint 
 1 Ouverture. When we add this fact to the fact 
 that Epictetus was himself a slave, when we 
 view, in connection, the affinity with these prin 
 ciples of two minds elevated, indeed, by the senti 
 ment of liberty, but in a measure debased by the 
 practice of servitude, we shall approach a per 
 ception of the ignoble side of Stoicism. It has 
 occurred to us that we might realize it in the fol 
 lowing fashion. Let us imagine a negro slave, 
 under our former Southern dispensation, keenly 
 
 181 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 conscious of all the indignities of his position, 
 and with an intellect of exceptional power, dog 
 matically making the best of them, preaching 
 indifference to them, and concluding, in fact, 
 that weariness and blows and plantation fare are 
 rather good things, we shall so take home to our 
 minds the didactic character of Epictetus. 
 
 To the vivacity, the consistency, the intensity 
 of belief, the uncompromising frankness of speech 
 with which this character is maintained, we can 
 not pay too large a tribute of respect. He must 
 have been a wholesome spectacle in that diseased 
 age, this free-thinking, plain-speaking old man, 
 a slave and a cripple, sturdily scornful of idleness, 
 luxury, timidity, false philosophy, and all power 
 and pride of place, and sternly reverent of purity, 
 temperance, and piety, one of the few upright 
 figures in the general decline. Of the universal 
 corruption and laxity of character and will he is 
 keenly, almost pathetically, sensible. "Show me 
 some one person, * he exclaims, "formed accord 
 ing to the principles which he professes. Show me 
 one who is sick, and happy; in danger, and happy; 
 dying, and happy; exiled, and happy; disgraced, 
 and happy. Show him to me; for, by Heaven, I 
 long to see a Stoic. ... Do me this favor. Do 
 not refuse an old man a sight which he has never 
 seen. . . . Let any of you show me a human soul, 
 desiring to be in unity with God; not to accuse 
 either God or man; not to be angry; not to be en 
 vious; not to be jealous; in a word, desiring from 
 
 182 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 a man to become a god, and in this poor, mortal 
 body aiming to have fellowship with Zeus. Show 
 him to me. But you cannot." No indeed, they 
 could not. And yet very little of the energy of 
 Epictetus goes to merely deploring and lament 
 ing the immorality about him. He is indefati 
 gable in reproving, contradicting, and what we 
 should now-a-days call snubbing, his auditors 
 and interlocutors; in reminding them of their 
 duties, in shaming them out of their foibles and 
 vices. He is a merciless critic of all theorists, 
 logicians, and rhetoricians, of all who fail to 
 take the very highest ground in regard to the 
 duties of a man, and who teach the conscience to 
 satisfy itself with a form of words. He himself 
 has no need of theories; his five senses teach him 
 all he wants to know. "Have these things no 
 weight?" he asks. "Let a Pyrrhonist or an 
 Academic come and oppose them. For my part, 
 I have neither leisure nor ability to stand up as 
 advocate for common sense. ... I may not be 
 able to explain how sensation takes place, whether 
 it be diffused universally or reside in a particular 
 part, for I find perplexities in either case; but 
 that you and I are not the same person, I very 
 exactly know." Like most men of a deep moral 
 sense, he is not at all inquisitive; he feels very 
 little curiosity concerning the phenomena of the 
 external world. From beginning to end of his 
 Discourses, there is no hint of a theory of nature, 
 of being, or of the universe. He is ready to take 
 
 183 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 all these things as they come, as the work of the 
 gods, and as adding, in their marvellous beauty 
 and complexity, to the debt we owe the gods. 
 But they are no concern of his. His business is 
 with human nature, with the elevation of human 
 character to the divine ideal. To our perception 
 he is very weak as a logician, although he con 
 stantly claims to arrive at truth and wisdom by 
 a severe exercise of the reasoning faculty. His 
 nature is pre-eminently a religious one; and it is 
 when he speaks under the impulse of feeling, and 
 with a certain accent of passion, that he is most 
 worth quoting and remembering. There are mo 
 ments when he talks very much as a modern 
 Christian would talk. "What else can I do, a 
 lame old man, but sing hymns to God? . . . Since 
 I am a reasonable creature, it is my duty to praise 
 God. This is my business. I do it. Nor will I 
 ever desert this post so long as it is permitted me; 
 and I call upon you to join in the same song." 
 Epictetus praises God because he is a reasonable 
 creature; but what he calls reason, we should, in 
 many cases, call faith. His sense of a Divine 
 presence in human affairs never, indeed, rises to 
 enthusiasm or to ecstasy; but it is, nevertheless, 
 very far removed from the common sense on which, 
 in treating of our attitude towards the things 
 of this life, he invariably takes his stand. Reli 
 gious natures are of no particular time, and of 
 no particular faith. The piety of Epictetus was 
 a religious instinct as pure as the devotion of a 
 
 184 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 Christian saint; that is, it did for him the most 
 that religion can do for any man, it enabled him 
 to live hopefully in the midst of a miserable world. 
 It enabled him to do so, indeed, only through the 
 exercise of a force of will of which few Christian 
 saints have probably felt the need; for they have 
 rested their hopes on a definite assurance. 
 
 The great value of these Discourses, then, to 
 our perception, is not in their philosophy, for, 
 in strictness, they have none, but in the re 
 flection they offer of their author s character. 
 Intellectually he was no genius, he was, if we 
 may use the expression, very slightly intellectual; 
 he was without curiosity, without science, with 
 out imagination, the element which lends so 
 great a charm to the writings of that other Stoic, 
 Marcus Aurelius. He was simply a moralist; he 
 had a genius for virtue. He was intensely a man 
 among men, an untiring observer, and a good deal 
 of a satirist. It was by the life of his style that he 
 acted upon his immediate disciples, and it is by 
 the same virtue, outlasting almost two thou 
 sand years and a transformation into our mod 
 ern speech, that he will act upon the readers of 
 to-day. When moral nobleness finds solid expres 
 sion, there is no limit to its duration or its influ 
 ence. Epictetus dealt with crude human nature, 
 which is the same in Christians and Pagans, in 
 men of the nineteenth century and men of the 
 first. In every doctrine there are good and bad 
 possibilities, there is a good and a bad Stoicism. 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 But a literal Stoicism our present social conditions 
 render, to say the least, difficult. For the majority 
 of mankind society is tender rather than harsh. 
 We have no longer to hold out our necks to unjust 
 persecutors, to bow our heads to gratuitous in 
 sults, to wrap our human nakedness in our simple 
 virtue. This is not an heroic age, and it becomes 
 daily more difficult to be gracefully proud. We, 
 therefore, with less danger than earlier genera 
 tions may accept and apply Epictetus. Such ac 
 ceptance, indeed, as he may receive at our hands 
 would hardly answer his desires, and would be but 
 another instance of the unceremonious avidity 
 with which the present fashions the past to its 
 needs. The good a man does the world depends 
 as much on the way the world takes him as on 
 the way he offers himself. Let us take Epictetus 
 as we take all things in these critical days, eclec- 
 tically. Let us take what suits us, and leave what 
 does not suit us. There is no doubt but we shall 
 find much to our purpose; for we still suffer, and 
 as long as we suffer we must act a part. 
 
 "I am acquainted with no book/ says Mr. 
 Higginson, "in which the inevitable laws of ret 
 ribution are more grandly stated, with less of 
 merely childish bribery or threatening." The 
 reader of Epictetus will easily discover what is 
 meant by this, and will decide that, explain it by 
 Stoicism or any other name one may choose, it 
 is for this fact that our author is pre-eminently 
 valuable. That no gain can make up for the loss 
 
 1 86 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 of virtue is an old story, but Epictetus makes it 
 new. What is the punishment, he inquires, of 
 craven spirits? "To be as they are." "Paris, 
 they say," to quote from another chapter, "was 
 undone when the Greeks invaded Troy and laid 
 it waste, and his family were slain in battle. By 
 no means; for no one is undone by an action not 
 his own. . . . His true undoing was when he lost 
 modesty, faith, honor, virtue. When was Achilles 
 undone? When Patroclus died? By no means. 
 But when he gave himself up to rage." And in 
 another place: "I lost my lamp because the thief 
 was better at keeping awake than I. But for 
 that lamp he paid the price of becoming a thief, 
 for that lamp he lost his virtue and became like a 
 wild beast. This seemed to him a good bargain; 
 and so let it be!" And in still another: "Is there 
 not a divine and inevitable law, which exacts the 
 greatest punishments from those who are guilty 
 of the greatest offences? For what says this law? 
 Let him who claims what belongs not to him be 
 arrogant, be vainglorious, be base, be a slave; let 
 him grieve, let him envy, let him pity; and, in a 
 word, let him lament and be miserable." " That 
 he is unhappy" he says elsewhere, "is an addition 
 every one must make for himself." This is good 
 Stoicism; and to bear it well in mind is neither 
 more nor less, for us moderns, than to apply 
 Epictetus. 
 
 187 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 XXII 
 
 Victor Hugo s J^jist 
 
 ELIGION, society, and nature," says M. 
 Victor Hugo in his preface, "such are the 
 three struggles of man. . . . Man deals with diffi 
 culty under the form superstition, under the form 
 prejudice, and under the form element. A triple 
 ananke weighs upon us: the anank e of dogmas, 
 the ananke of laws, the ananke of things. In 
 * Notre Dame de Paris the author has denounced 
 the first; in Les Miserables he has pointed out 
 the second; in the present work he indicates the 
 third." 
 
 Great programmes and intentions, even though 
 they be a posteriori, are one of M. Victor Hugo s 
 liveliest characteristics. It will, therefore, not 
 surprise any of his old readers to find him calling 
 what a writer less fond of magnificent generali 
 zations would have been content to describe as 
 "a tale of the sea", a picture of "the ananke of 
 things." But M. Victor Hugo is a poet, and he 
 embarks upon the deep in a very different spirit 
 from the late Captain Marryat. He carries with 
 him provisions for a voyage all but interminable; 
 
 "Les Travailleurs de la Mer." By Victor Hugo. New 
 York: 1866. 
 
 188 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 he touches at foreign lands whose existence has 
 never been suspected; and he makes discoveries 
 of almost fabulous importance. 
 
 The scene of "Les Travailleurs de la Mer" is 
 laid in M. Hugo s adopted home of Guernsey, or 
 rather in great part in yes, literally in the 
 circumjacent ocean. The story is a very small 
 one in spite of its enormous distensions and infla 
 tions. An inhabitant of the island, the proprietor 
 of a very pretty niece, becomes also proprietor, in 
 the early days of the invention, of a very pretty 
 steamer, with which he establishes communica 
 tion with the coast of France. He employs as 
 captain one Sieur Clubin, a man long noted on the 
 island for his exquisite probity and virtue. One 
 of his chief recommendations to the esteem of his 
 employer is the fact that in former years, when 
 the latter had admitted to partnership a person 
 of doubtful antecedents, by name Rantaine, he 
 had, out of the fulness of his integrity, divined 
 this gentleman s rascality, and had forewarned 
 his master that some fine day Rantaine would 
 decamp with the cash-box. This catastrophe is, 
 indeed, not slow in happening. Rantaine sud 
 denly departs for regions unknown, taking with 
 him fifty thousand francs more than his share of 
 the capital. These three persons, Lethierry, the 
 proprietor of the steamer, Rantaine, and the cap 
 tain, Clubin, are all described with a minuteness 
 very disproportionate to any part they play in 
 the story. But when M. Victor Hugo picks up a 
 
 189 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 supernumerary he is not wont to set him down 
 until he has bedecked him with more epigrams, 
 anecdotes, formulas, and similes than would fur 
 nish forth a dozen ordinary heroes. Lethierry is 
 famous for his alacrity in rescuing the victims of 
 shipwrecks. In heavy weather he paces the shore, 
 scanning the horizon, and if he descries a craft of 
 any species or degree in need of assistance, he is 
 soon seen from afar "upright on the vessel, drip 
 ping with rain, mingled with the lightning, with 
 the face of a lion who should have a mane of sea- 
 foam." After a day spent in this exercise, he goes 
 home and knits a pair of stockings. He was a 
 savage, says the author, but he had his elegances. 
 The chief of these is that he is very fastidious 
 about women s hands. The reason that he had 
 never married was probably that he had never 
 found a pretty enough pair of hands in his own 
 station of life. He brings up his niece, Deru- 
 chette, to take care, above all things, of her 
 hands. About this young lady M. Hugo says an 
 enormous number of extravagant and pretty 
 things. We all know what to expect, however, 
 when M. Hugo enters upon the chapter jeune 
 fille. "To have a smile", he says at the close of a 
 rhapsody on this subject, "which, one knows not 
 how, lightens the weight of the enormous chain 
 dragged in common by all the living, is what 
 else can I call it but divine? Deruchette had this 
 smile. We will say more. Deruchette was this 
 smile." Rantaine, the villain, is a most formid- 
 
 190 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 able creature. He is a mass of incongruities. He 
 has been everywhere and everything. "He was 
 capable of all things, and of worse." "He had 
 passed his life in making eclipses appearing, 
 disappearing, re-appearing. He was a rascal with 
 a revolving light/ "He used to say, Je suis 
 pour les mceurs -I go in for morals." Sieur 
 Clubin is the reverse of Rantaine. His life is all 
 above-board. He is piety, honesty, decency in 
 carnate. To suspect him is to make one s self 
 suspected. He is like the ermine; he would die of 
 a stain. As we have said, he sails the little steamer 
 from Guernsey to Saint Malo. One of his idio- 
 syncracies is never to forget a face he has seen. 
 At the latter place, accordingly, he recognizes 
 after a number of years the ci-devant humbug, 
 Rantaine. He procures a revolver, surprises him 
 on the cliff, just after (unfortunately, as you 
 might say) he has confirmed his identity by push 
 ing a coast-guard over into the sea; he faces him, 
 and coolly demands a restitution of the fifty thou 
 sand francs. Such is his address that the for 
 midable Rantaine complies like a child, and hands 
 over the little box containing the money. Find 
 ing a surplus of ten thousand francs, Clubin re 
 turns them, pockets the balance, and dismisses 
 the criminal. All that Clubin desires is to restore 
 to his impoverished employer his dues. Forth 
 with, accordingly, he gets up steam, and departs 
 for Guernsey, with his fifty thousand francs se 
 cured in a belt about his waist. On the Guernsey 
 
 191 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 coast, however, the steamer enters a heavy fog, 
 which soon obscures all progress; and to make 
 matters worse at this critical moment, the pilot 
 is drunk. The captain takes the helm and ad 
 vances boldly through the fog. But a sudden 
 break in the sky shows the vessel to be close upon 
 a terrible shoal, and before it can be avoided a 
 terrific shock indicates that the steamer has 
 struck. The passengers are huddled into a boat, 
 but the captain, who has conducted himself 
 throughout with admirable presence of mind, 
 announces his intention of remaining with the 
 vessel until it goes down. This ideal of heroism 
 is vainly combated; the boat moves away, and 
 the disinterested Clubin is left alone with the 
 ocean, the wreck, and do you see the point ? - 
 the fifty thousand francs. Doubtless, you do not 
 see it yet; for, in the first place, the Sieur Clubin 
 cannot use the money if he will, and then, as we 
 know, he would not if he could. But here comes 
 a grand coup de theatre^ one of M. Hugo s own. 
 What if the virtuous Clubin should, after all, be 
 no better than the iniquitous Rantaine, no better 
 than a life-long hypocrite, the would-be murderer 
 of a shipload of innocents? 
 
 The author develops this hypothesis in a won 
 derful chapter entitled "The Interior of a Soul 
 Illumined." A very dark soul indeed is this of 
 Clubin, needing all the rockets and bonfires of 
 M. Hugo s speech to penetrate its dusky recesses. 
 Left alone on the dreadful ocean, this monstrous 
 
 192 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 being bursts into a wicked laugh. He folds his 
 arms and tastes his solitude. He is free, he is 
 rich, he has succeeded. Now he is going to begin. 
 He has "eliminated the world." " There are 
 caverns in the hypocrite/ adds the author; "or 
 rather, the whole hypocrite is a single cavern. 
 When Clubin found himself alone his cavern 
 opened. He ventilated his soul." "He had 
 been", we furthermore read, "the Tantalus of 
 cynicism." He now looks upon his honesty as a 
 serpent looks upon his old skin; and as he does so 
 he laughs a second time. But in these delights he 
 does not forget the practical. His plan is to swim 
 ashore (he is a marvellous swimmer), to remain 
 hidden on the coast until a smuggling vessel picks 
 him up, and then to make his way to America. 
 His exultation, however, is but short-lived. As 
 he looks the fog is rent in twain, and he sees that 
 he has lost his way more effectually than he had 
 intended. The fog has served him but too well. 
 He has not struck the small shoal which he had, 
 as he fancied, steered for, but a much larger one 
 further distant from the shore. Instead of having 
 a mile to swim, he has fifteen. Nevertheless he 
 strips and plunges. As he touches bottom he 
 feels his foot seized. Meanwhile the small boat 
 has been picked up by a sloop, and the passengers 
 have brought the evil tidings into the port of 
 Saint Sampson. The good proprietor of the 
 steamer is overwhelmed with grief for the loss of 
 his precious, his unique, his laboriously wrought 
 
 193 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 machinery. It is suggested, however, that it may 
 still be recovered, that it may be disengaged from 
 the double embrace of the wreck and the rocks, 
 and successfully brought ashore. Whereupon 
 Miss Deruchette steps forth and declares that she 
 will marry the man who shall accomplish this 
 herculean labor. Now this young lady has long 
 been adored in silence by a young amateur of the 
 ocean, a strange, brooding, melancholy, ill-reputed 
 fellow, a kind of amphibious Werther, whose only 
 outlet for his passion has been, for a number of 
 years, to serenade his mistress with an instrument 
 which M. Hugo repeatedly denominates a "bug- 
 pipe." He accepts the challenge, and straightway 
 betakes himself, alone and unaided, to the fatal 
 shoal between which the hapless vessel stands 
 wedged. Here begins M. Hugo s version of the 
 struggle of man with the elements, "the ananke 
 of things" promised in his preface, and a wonder 
 ful version it is. 
 
 The whole of the second book is devoted to the 
 labors of this new Hercules in wrenching with his 
 single hands the machinery of the steamer from 
 the angry clutch of nature. Gilliatt (such is the 
 hero s name) encamps upon the summit of a great 
 rock hard by the field of his operations, one of a 
 brace of strong brothers which just hold their 
 chins out of water. Here, under the stars, sur 
 rounded by the world of waves, he spends the 
 nights of two long months, during which, through 
 hurricane and cold and fever and hunger, thirst, 
 
 194 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 and despair, he gradually, by a combination of 
 cranks and cross-beams and pulleys which, we 
 doubt not, are as admirably self-consistent as the 
 famous camel which the German philosopher 
 evolved from the depths of his moral conscious 
 ness, he finally, we say, disenthralls the machin 
 ery from the shattered authority of the wreck. 
 To believe so big a story you must understand 
 what an extraordinary personage was this Gilliatt. 
 M. Hugo has smoothed the way by a full analysis 
 of his nature and habits at the opening of the 
 work; but we protest in all gravity that we utterly 
 fail to comprehend him. Physically, he is of 
 those days when there were giants; morally, he is 
 the product of too much reading of M. de Lamar- 
 tine, Alfred de Musset, and M. Victor Hugo him 
 self. "La somme" says the author, "he was 
 simply a poor man who knew how to read and 
 write." Elsewhere, he is "a great troubled mind 
 and a great wild heart." He has thus a certain 
 affiliation with Mr. Carlyle. Again, while he is 
 defying the tempests and tides for the love of 
 Deruchette, he is "a kind of Job of the ocean. 
 But a Job militant, a Job conqueror, a Job Prome 
 theus." There is a vast deal in this long descrip 
 tion of his daily battle with the elements which 
 we should like to quote, had we the space. A 
 great deal we should quote for the reader s amuse 
 ment; but for a few passages we should expect his 
 admiration. Never, we believe, has mere writing 
 gone so far: that is, never was nature so effectually 
 
 95 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 ousted from its place, in its own nominal interest. 
 We have room only for half-a-dozen sentences 
 relative to Gilliatt s adventure with a certain 
 hideous marine animal, called by M. Hugo the 
 pieuvre: an enlarged jelly-fish, with tentacles, and 
 eyes of hideous expression. This obscene creature 
 will become famous through M. Hugo s magnifi 
 cent hyperbole. "Compared with the pieuvre" 
 he says, "the old hydras provoke a smile. Homer 
 and Hesiod could only make the Chimaera. God 
 has made the pieuvre. When God wishes, he ex 
 cels in the execrable." 
 
 The author then proceeds with solemn iteration 
 to rehearse all the monsters, fabulous and veri 
 table, which have ever been the terror of man, 
 together with their respective death-dealing at 
 tributes. The pieuvre has none of all these - 
 none of these vulgar agencies of dread. What, 
 then, is the pieuvre? It is a sucker. "It is, in 
 appearance, a mere rag floating under water. 
 When at rest it is dust-colored. But enraged it 
 grows violet. Then it throws itself upon you. 
 Fearful sensation! it is soft." Its tentacular 
 thongs garrote you; its contact paralyzes. "It 
 looks scorbutic, gangrenescent. It is disease ar 
 ranged into a monstrosity." But we will leave 
 M. Hugo the fine illustrations of his own tongue. 
 " Une viscosite qui a une volonte, quoi de plus ef- 
 f ray able? De la glue petrie de haine." This irre 
 sistible creature devours you in such a way as to 
 elicit from M. Hugo the following remark: "Be- 
 
 196 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 yond the terrible, being eaten alive, is the ineffable, 
 being drunk alive." This is followed by some 
 characteristic ratiocinations on physiology. Gil- 
 liatt comes near being absorbed into the pieuvre; 
 but, for the matter of that, we all go into each 
 other. " Pourriture, cest nourriture. Fearful 
 cleaning of the globe! Carnivorous man is an 
 entomber; and life is made of death. . . . We are 
 sepulchres." In spite of this general law, how 
 ever, Gilliatt defers his burial by decapitating the 
 pieuvre. Shortly afterwards, he discovers, in a 
 very nearly submarine cavern, a human skeleton, 
 girded about with a money belt, inside of which 
 is written Sieur Clubin. It was not in vain, there 
 fore, that this unfaithful servant had been de 
 tained beneath the waters. Gilliatt appropriates, 
 provisionally, the belt, and ultimately arrives at 
 a successful solution of his problem in mechanics. 
 His interruptions, his perils, his sufferings, his 
 visions, must be read in detail. There is a long 
 description of a storm which grazes the sublime 
 and jostles the ridiculous. Detached from its 
 context, any example of the former would, we 
 fear, fail to justify itself to the reader; and, in 
 deed, the nearest approach to greatness in this 
 whole episode is not to be found in particular 
 passages, but in the very magnificent intention of 
 the whole. As for the ridiculous, we cannot but 
 think that it is amply presented by everything 
 that follows Gilliatt s successful return with the 
 rescued and renovated vessel. While Deruchette s 
 
 197 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 uncle is digesting his surprise, gratitude, and joy, 
 Deruchette herself is engaged in a very sentimental 
 tete-a-tete in the garden with a young Anglican 
 divine. An involuntary witness of their emotions, 
 Gilliatt immediately withdraws his claims. More 
 than this, he personally superintends the marriage 
 of the young couple, and sees them on board the 
 vessel which, after the wedding, is to convey them 
 to England. And after this, says the superficial 
 reader, he of course goes home and smokes a pipe. 
 But little has such a reader fathomed the depths 
 of this heroic nature. He betakes himself to a 
 well-known spot on the side of a cliff, where a de 
 pression in the rock forms, at low tide, a sort of 
 natural chair. Here he seats himself in time to 
 witness the passage of the vessel bearing away 
 Deruchette and her husband. It almost "grazed 
 the cliff", says M. Hugo. There on the deck, in a 
 bar of sunshine, sit the happy young couple, lost 
 in mutual endearments. The vessel moves away 
 toward the horizon, while the tide rises to Gil- 
 liatt s feet. As the vessel travels before his un 
 winking eye, so gradually the water surges about 
 him. It reaches his knees, his waist, his shoulders, 
 his chin: but he moves not. The little birds call 
 to him warningly, but he heeds them not. He 
 sits open-eyed, gazing at the sloop. His eye, 
 says the author, "resembled nothing that can 
 be seen on this earth. That calm and tragic 
 pupil contained the inexpressible/ As the dis 
 tant sloop disappears from the horizon, the eye 
 
 198 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 is hidden, the head is covered, the ocean reigns 
 alone. 
 
 Such is M. Victor Hugo s story. The reader 
 will see that, dramatically, it is emphatically not 
 what, from the title, it was likely pre-eminently 
 to be a study from nature. Nature is nowhere: 
 M. Victor Hugo is everywhere; and his work will 
 add very little to our knowledge of anything but 
 himself. It is, in our opinion, the work of a de 
 cline. We have not hesitated to speak of it with 
 levity, because we believe it to have been written 
 exclusively from the head. This fact we deeply 
 regret, for we have an enormous respect for M. 
 Victor Hugo s heart. 
 
 199 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 XXIII 
 
 Felix Holt, the T^adical 
 
 TDETTER, perhaps, than any of George Eliot s 
 " novels does "Felix Holt" illustrate her closely 
 wedded talent and foibles. Her plots have always 
 been artificial clumsily artificial the conduct 
 of her story slow, and her style diffuse. Her con 
 clusions have been signally weak, as the reader 
 will admit who recalls Hetty s reprieve in "Adam 
 Bede", the inundation of the Floss, and, worse 
 than either, the comfortable reconciliation of 
 Romola and Tessa. The plot of "Felix Holt" is 
 essentially made up, and its development is forced. 
 The style is the same lingering, slow-moving, ex 
 panding instrument which we already know. The 
 termination is hasty, inconsiderate, and unsatis 
 factory is, in fact, almost an anti-climax. It is 
 a good instance of a certain sagacious tendency to 
 compromise which pervades the author s spirit, 
 and to which her novels owe that disproportion 
 between the meagre effect of the whole and the 
 vigorous character of the different parts, which 
 stamp them as the works of a secondary thinker 
 and an incomplete artist. But if such are the 
 
 " Felix Holt, the Radical." By George Eliot. New York : 
 1866. 
 
 2OO 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 faults of "Felix Holt" or some of them, we hasten 
 to add that its merits are immense, and that the 
 critic finds it no easy task to disengage himself 
 from the spell of so much power, so much bril 
 liancy, and so much discretion. In what other 
 writer than George Eliot could we forgive so rusty 
 a plot, and such langueurs of exposition, such a 
 disparity of outline and detail? or, we may even 
 say, of outline and outline of general outline 
 and of particular? so much drawing and so little 
 composition? In compensation for these defects 
 we have the broad array of those rich accom 
 plishments to which we owe "Adam Bede" and 
 "Romola." First in order comes the firm and 
 elaborate delineation of individual character, of 
 which Tito in "Romola" is a better example than 
 the present work affords us. Then comes that ex 
 tensive human sympathy, that easy understand 
 ing of character at large, that familiarity with man, 
 from which a novelist draws his real inspiration, 
 from which he borrows all his ideal lines and hues, 
 to which he appeals for a blessing on his fictitious 
 process, and to which he owes it that, firm locked 
 in the tissue of the most rigid prose, he is still 
 more or less of a poet. George Eliot s humanity 
 colors all her other gifts her humor, her morality, 
 and her exquisite rhetoric. Of all her qualities her 
 humor is apparently most generally relished. Its 
 popularity may, perhaps, be partially accounted 
 for by a natural reaction against the dogma, so 
 long maintained, that a woman has no humor. 
 
 20 1 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 Still, there is no doubt that what passes for such 
 among the admirers of Mrs. Poyser and Mrs. 
 Glegg really rests upon a much broader perception 
 of human incongruities than belongs to many a 
 masculine humorist. As for our author s morality, 
 each of our readers has felt its influence for him 
 self. We hardly know how to qualify it. It is not 
 bold, nor passionate, nor aggressive, nor uncom 
 promising it is constant, genial, and discreet. 
 It is apparently the fruit of a great deal of culture, 
 experience, and resignation. It carries with it 
 that charm and that authority which will always 
 attend the assertions of a mind enriched by re 
 searches, when it declares that wisdom and affec 
 tion are better than science. We speak of the 
 author s intellectual culture of course only as we 
 see it reflected in her style a style the secret 
 of whose force is in the union of the tenderest and 
 most abundant sympathies with a body of knowl 
 edge so ample and so active as to be absolutely 
 free from pedantry. 
 
 As a story "Felix Holt" is singularly inartistic. 
 The promise of the title is only half kept. The 
 history of the hero s opinions is made subordinate 
 to so many other considerations, to so many 
 sketches of secondary figures, to so many discur 
 sive amplifications of incidental points, to so 
 much that is clear and brilliant and entertaining, 
 but that, compared with this central object, is not 
 serious, that when the reader finds the book draw 
 ing to a close without having, as it were, brought 
 
 202 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 Felix Holt s passions to a head, he feels tempted 
 to pronounce it a failure and a mistake. As a 
 novel with a hero there is no doubt that it is 
 a failure. Felix is a fragment. We find him a 
 Radical and we leave him what? only "utterly 
 married"; which is all very well in its place, but 
 which by itself makes no conclusion. He tells 
 his mistress at the outset that he was "converted 
 by six weeks debauchery." These very dramatic 
 antecedents demanded somehow a group of con 
 sequents equally dramatic. But that quality of 
 discretion which we have mentioned as belonging 
 to the author, that tendency to avoid extreme de 
 ductions which has in some way muffled the crisis 
 in each of her novels, and which, reflected in her 
 style, always mitigates the generosity of her 
 eloquence these things appear to have shackled 
 the freedom of her hand in drawing a figure which 
 she wished and yet feared to make consistently 
 heroic. It is not that Felix acts at variance with 
 his high principles, but that, considering their 
 importance, he and his principles play so brief a 
 part and are so often absent from the scene. He 
 is distinguished for his excellent good sense. He 
 is uncompromising yet moderate, eager yet pa 
 tient, earnest yet unimpassioned. He is indeed 
 a thorough young Englishman, and, in spite of 
 his sincerity, his integrity, his intelligence, and 
 his broad shoulders, there is nothing in his figure to 
 thrill the reader. There is another great novelist 
 who has often dealt with men and women moved 
 
 203 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 by exceptional opinions. Whatever these opin 
 ions may be, the reader shares them for the time 
 with the writer; he is thrilled by the contact of 
 her passionate earnestness, and he is borne rap 
 idly along upon the floods of feeling which rush 
 through her pages. The Radicalism of "Felix 
 Holt" is strangely remote from the reader; we 
 do not say as Radicalism, which we may have 
 overtopped or undermined, but simply as a feel 
 ing entertained. In fact, after the singular 
 eclipse or extinction which it appears to undergo 
 on the occasion of his marriage, the reader feels 
 tempted to rejoice that he, personally, has not 
 worked himself nearer to it. There is, to our 
 perception, but little genuine passion in George 
 Eliot s men and women. With the exception of 
 Maggie Tulliver in "The Mill on the Floss", her 
 heroines are alt marked by a singular spiritual 
 tenuity. In two of her novels she has introduced 
 seductions; but in both these cases the heroines - 
 Hetty, in "Adam Bede", and Tessa, in "Romola" 
 - are of so light a character as to reduce to a 
 minimum the dramatic interest of the episode. 
 We nevertheless think Hetty the best drawn of 
 her young women. Esther Lyon, the heroine of 
 the present tale, has great merits of intention, but 
 the action subsides without having given her a 
 "chance." 
 
 It is as a broad picture of Midland country life 
 in England, thirty years ago, that "Felix Holt" 
 is, to our taste, most interesting. On this subject 
 
 204 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 the author writes from a full mind, with a wealth 
 of fancy, of suggestion, of illustration, at the com 
 mand of no other English writer, bearing you along 
 on the broad and placid rises of her speech, with a 
 kind of retarding persuasiveness which allows her 
 conjured images to sink slowly into your very 
 brain. She has written no pages of this kind of 
 discursive, comprehensive, sympathetic descrip 
 tion more powerful or more exquisite than the in 
 troductory chapter of the present work. Against 
 the solid and deep-colored passages and touches, 
 she has placed a vast number of rustic figures. 
 We have no space to discriminate them; we can 
 only say that in their aggregate they leave a vivid 
 sense of that multiplicity of eccentricities, and 
 humors, and quaintnesses, and simple bizarreries, 
 which appears to belong of right to old English 
 villages. There are particular scenes here scenes 
 among common people miners, tinkers, butchers, 
 saddlers, and undertakers as good as anything 
 that the author has written. Nothing can be 
 better than the scene in which Felix interrupts 
 Johnson s canvass in the tavern, or that of the 
 speech-making at Duffield. In general, we prefer 
 George Eliot s low-life to her high-life. She seems 
 carefully to have studied the one from without, 
 and the other-she seems to have glanced at from 
 the midst of it. Mrs. Transome seems to us 
 an unnatural, or rather we should say, a super 
 fluous figure. Her sorrows and trials occupy a 
 space disproportionate to any part that she plays. 
 
 205 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 She is intensely drawn, and yet dramatically she 
 stands idle. She is, nevertheless, made the oc 
 casion, like all of her fellow-actors, however 
 shadowy they may be, of a number of deep and 
 brilliant touches. The character of her son, the 
 well-born, cold-blooded, and moneyed Liberal, 
 who divides the heroship with Felix, is delicately 
 and firmly conceived; but like the great Tito even, 
 like Mr. Lyon, the Dissenting preacher in the 
 present work, like Esther Lyon herself, he is too 
 long-drawn, too placid; he lacks dramatic com 
 pactness and rapidity. Tito is presented to us 
 with some degree of completeness, only because 
 Romola is very long, and because, for his sake, 
 the reader is very patient. 
 
 A great deal of high praise has been given to 
 "Felix Holt", and a great deal more will be given 
 still; a great many strong words will be used about 
 the author. But we think it of considerable im 
 portance that these should at least go no further 
 than they have already gone. It is no new phe 
 nomenon for an English novelist to exhibit mental 
 resources which may avail him in other walks 
 of literature; to have powers of thought at all 
 commensurate with his powers of imagination, 
 that when a writer unites these conditions he is 
 likely to receive excessive homage* There is in 
 George Eliot s writings a tone of sagacity, of 
 easy penetration, which leads us to believe that 
 she would be the last to form a false estimate of 
 her works, together with a serious respect for 
 
 206 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 truth which convinces us that she would lament 
 the publication of such an estimate. In our 
 opinion, then, neither "Felix Holt", nor "Adam 
 Bede", nor "Romola", is a master-piece. They 
 have none of the inspiration, the heat, nor the 
 essential simplicity of such a work. They belong 
 to a kind of writing in which the English tongue 
 has .the good fortune to abound that clever, 
 voluble, bright-colored novel of manners which 
 began with the present century under the auspices 
 of Miss Edgeworth and Miss Austen. George 
 Eliot is stronger in degree than either of these 
 writers, but she is not different in kind. She 
 brings to her task a richer mind, but she uses it 
 in very much the same way. With a certain 
 masculine comprehensiveness which they lack, 
 she is eventually a feminine a delightfully femi 
 nine writer. She has the microscopic obser 
 vation, not a myriad of whose keen notations 
 are worth a single one of those great sympathetic 
 guesses with which a real master attacks the truth, 
 and which, by their occasional occurrence in the 
 stories of Mr. Charles Reade (the much abused 
 "Griffith Gaunt" included), make him, to our 
 mind, the most readable of living English novel 
 ists, and prove him a distant kinsman of Shake 
 speare. George Eliot has the exquisitely good 
 taste on a small scale, the absence of taste on 
 a large (the vulgar plot of "Felix Holt" exem 
 plifies this deficiency), the unbroken current of 
 feeling and, we may add, of expression, which 
 
 207 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 distinguishes the feminine mind. That she 
 should be offered a higher place than she has 
 earned, is easily explained by the charm which 
 such gifts as hers in such abundance are sure to 
 exercise. 
 
 208 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 XXIV 
 
 The fjtters of Eugenie de Querin 
 
 that the friends and correspondents of 
 Mademoiselle de Guerin have consented to 
 the publication of her letters, there remains no 
 obstacle to a thorough acquaintance not only with 
 the facts of her external life, but with her thoughts 
 and feelings the life of her soul. It can have 
 been the fortune of few persons to become so 
 widely and intimately known as the author of 
 these letters, and to have evoked sentiments of 
 such unalloyed admiration and tenderness. How 
 small is the proportion either of men or of women 
 who could afford to have the last veil of privacy 
 removed from their daily lives; not for an excep 
 tional moment, a season of violent inspiration or 
 of spasmodic effort, but constantly, uninterrupt 
 edly, for a period of seventeen years. Mile, de 
 Guerin s letters confirm in every particular the 
 consummately pleasing impression left by her 
 journal. A delicate mind, an affectionate heart, 
 a pious soul the gift of feeling and of expression 
 in equal measure and this not from the poverty 
 of the former faculty, but from the absolute rich 
 ness of the latter. The aggregation of these facts 
 
 "Lettres d Eugenie de Guerin." New York : 189^. 
 209 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 again resolves itself under the reader s eyes into a 
 figure of a sweetness so perfect, so uniform, and 
 so simple that it seems to belong rather to the 
 biography of a mediaeval saint than to the com 
 plex mechanism of our actual life. And, indeed, 
 what was Mile, de Guerin, after all, but a mediaeval 
 saint? No other definition so nearly covers the 
 union of her abundant gentleness and her perfect 
 simplicity. There are saints of various kinds 
 passionate saints and saints of pure piety. Mile, 
 de Guerin was one of the latter, and we cannot 
 but think that she needed but a wider field of 
 action to have effectually recommended herself to 
 the formal gratitude of the Church. This collec 
 tion of her letters seems to us to have every qual 
 ity requisite to place it beside those livres edifiants 
 of which she was so fond unction, intensity, 
 and orthodoxy. 
 
 We have called Mile, de Guerin a saint perhaps 
 as much from a sense of satisfaction in being able 
 to apply a temporary definition to out predicate 
 as from the desire to qualify our subject. What 
 is a saint? the reader may ask. A saint, we 
 hasten to reply, is Mile, de Guerin; read her 
 letters and you will discover. If you are dis 
 appointed, the reason will lie not in this admir 
 able woman, but in the saintly idea. Such as this 
 idea is, she answers it and we have called her, 
 moreover, a mediaeval saint. It is true that the 
 organization of society during these latter years 
 has not been favorable to a direct and extensive 
 
 210 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 action on the part of personal sanctity, and that, 
 as we associate the idea of a successful exercise of 
 this distinction with social conditions which have 
 long ceased to exist, it seems almost illogical to 
 imply that saintship is possible among our con 
 temporaries. Yet it is equally certain that men 
 and women of extraordinary purity of charac 
 ter constantly attain to a familiarity with di 
 vine things as deep and undisturbed as Mile, de 
 Guerin s. Her peculiar distinction that fact 
 through which she evokes the image of an earlier 
 stage of the world s history is the singular 
 simplicity of her genius and of her circumstances. 
 Nowhere are exquisite moral rectitude and the 
 spirit of devotion more frequent than in New 
 England; but in New England, to a certain ex 
 tent, virtue and piety seem to be nourished by 
 vice and skepticism. A very good man or a very 
 good woman in New England is an extremely 
 complex being. They are as innocent as you 
 please, but they are anything but ignorant. They 
 travel; they hold political opinions; they are ac 
 complished Abolitionists; they read magazines 
 and newspapers, and write for them; they read 
 novels and police reports; they subscribe to 
 lyceum lectures and to great libraries; in a word, 
 they are enlightened. The result of this freedom 
 of enquiry is that they become profoundly self- 
 conscious. They obtain a notion of the relation 
 of their virtues to a thousand objects of which 
 Mile, de Guerin had no conception, and, owing to 
 
 211 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 their relations with these objects, they present a 
 myriad of reflected lights and shadows. For Mile, 
 de Guerin there existed but two objects the 
 church and the world, of neither of which did it 
 ever occur to her to attempt an analysis. One 
 was all good, the other all evil although here, 
 perhaps, her rich natural charity arrested in some 
 degree her aversion. Such being her attitude 
 toward external things, Mile, de Guerin was cer 
 tainly not enlightened. But she was better than 
 this she was light itself. Her life or perhaps 
 we should rather say her faith is like a small, 
 still taper before a shrine, flickering in no fitful 
 air-current, and steadily burning to its socket. 
 
 To busy New Englanders the manners and 
 household habits exhibited in these letters are 
 stamped with all the quaintness of remote an 
 tiquity. But for a couple of short sojourns in 
 Paris and in the Nivernais, a journey to Toulouse, 
 and a visit to the Pyrenees shortly before her 
 death, Mile, de Guerin s life was passed in an 
 isolated chateau in the heart of an ancient prov 
 ince, without visitors, without books, without 
 diversions; with no society but that of her only 
 sister, a brother, the senior of Maurice, and her 
 father, whom the reader s fancy, kindled by an 
 occasional allusion, depicts as one of the scattered 
 outstanding gentlemen of the old regime proud, 
 incorruptible, austere, devout, and affectionate, 
 and, with his small resources, a keen wine-grower. 
 It is no wonder that, in the social vacuity of her 
 
 212 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 life, Mile, de Guerin turned so earnestly to letter- 
 writing. Her only other occupations were to 
 think about her brother Maurice, to spin by the 
 kitchen fireside, to read the life of a saint, or at 
 best a stray volume of Scott or Lamartine, or 
 Bernardin de Saint-Pierre; to observe zealously 
 the fasts and festivals and sacraments of the 
 church, and to visit sick peasants. Her greatest 
 social pleasure seems to have been an occasional 
 talk with an ecclesiastic; for to her perception all 
 priests were wise and benignant, and never com 
 monplace. "To-morrow", she writes, "I shall 
 talk sermon. We are to hear the Abbe Roques. 
 He is always my favorite preacher. // is nt that 
 the others are not excellent" There is something 
 very pathetic in the intellectual penury with 
 which Mile, de Guerin had to struggle, although 
 there is no doubt that the unsuspecting simplicity 
 of vision which charms us in her writing is largely 
 owing to the narrow extent of her reading. The 
 household stock of books was small; it was diffi 
 cult, both on account of the exiguity of the means 
 of the family and its remoteness from a large 
 town, to procure new ones; and in the case of 
 Mile, de Guerin herself, the number of available 
 works was further limited by her constant scruples 
 as to their morality. It must be owned that she 
 knew few works of the first excellence. She read 
 St. Augustine and Fenelon and Pascal, but for 
 the most part she got her thoughts very far from 
 the source. Some one gives her Montaigne, but, 
 
 213 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 although she is no longer a young girl, she dis 
 creetly declines to open him. "I am reading for 
 a second time," she writes, "Bernardin de Saint- 
 Pierre, an amiable and simple author, whom it is 
 good to read in the country. After this I should 
 like Notre Dame de Paris ; but I am afraid. 
 These novels make such havoc that I dread their 
 passage; it terrifies me simply to see their effect 
 on certain hearts. Mine, now so calm, would like 
 to remain as it is." So, instead of the great men, 
 she contents herself with the small. "You see," 
 she elsewhere says, "we are keeping the Month of 
 Mary. I have bought for this purpose at Albi a 
 little book, The New Month of Mary , by the 
 Abbe Le Gaillan; a little book of which I am very 
 fond soft and sweet, like May itself, and full of 
 flowers of devotion. Whoever should take it well 
 to heart would be agreeable to God and en admira 
 tion aux anges. . . . Read it; it is something 
 celestial." 
 
 It is difficult to give an idea of the intimacy, the 
 immediacy, of Mile, de Guerin s relations with 
 the practice of piety. Not an incident but is a 
 motive, a pretext, an occasion, for religious action 
 or reflection of some kind. She looks at the world 
 from over the top of her prie-dieu, with her finger 
 in her prayer-book. "Mile. d H.", she writes, 
 "comes to edify me every second day; she reaches 
 church early, confesses herself, and takes the 
 communion with an air d*ange that ravishes and 
 desolates me. How I envy her her soul! . . . Her 
 
 214 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 brothers, too, are little saints. The eldest, etc. 
 . . . Isn t it very edifying?" And again: "I am 
 in every way surrounded with edification, fed 
 upon sermons and discourses. Such a good Lent 
 as I have passed!" Describing to a dear friend, 
 a young lady of her own age, a peculiar ceremony 
 which she had witnessed on a young girl s taking 
 conventual vows: They say", she concludes, 
 " that everything the novice asks of God at this 
 moment is granted her. One asked to die; she 
 died. Do you know what I would ask ? That you 
 should be a saint." The reader will, of course, be 
 prepared to find Mile, de Guerin a very consistent 
 Catholic a perfect, an absolute one. This fact 
 explains her, and we may even say excuses her. 
 So complete a spiritual submission, so complete 
 an intellectual self-stultification, would be revolt 
 ing if they were a matter of choice. It is because 
 they are a matter of authority and necessity, 
 things born to and implicitly accepted, that the 
 reader is able to put away his sense of their funda 
 mental repulsiveness sufficiently to allow him to 
 appreciate their incidental charms. It is the utter 
 consistency of Mile, de Guerin s faith, the unin- 
 terruptedness of her spiritual subjection, that 
 make them beautiful. A question, a doubt, an 
 act of will, the least shadow of a claim to choice 
 - these things would instantly break the charm, 
 deprive the letters of their invaluable distinction, 
 and transform them from a delightful book into a 
 merely readable one. That distinction lies in the 
 
 215 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 fact that they form a work of pure, unmitigated 
 feeling. The penalty paid by Mile, de Guerin 
 and those persons who are educated in the same 
 principles, for their spiritual and mental security, 
 is that they are incapable of entertaining or pro 
 ducing ideas. There is not, to our belief, a single 
 idea, a single thought, in the whole of these pages. 
 On the other hand, one grand, supreme idea being 
 tacitly understood and accepted throughout - 
 the idea, namely, of the Church and a particu 
 lar direction being thus given to emotion, there 
 is an incalculable host of feelings. Judge how 
 matters are simplified. Genius and pure feeling! 
 No wonder Mile, de Guerin writes well! There 
 are, doubtless, persons who would be ill-natured 
 enough to call her a bigot; but never would the 
 term have been so ill applied. Is a pure skeptic a 
 bigot? Mile, de Guerin was the converse of this, 
 a pure believer. A pure skeptic doubts all he 
 knows; Mile, de Guerin believes all she knows. 
 She knows only the Catholic Church. A bigot 
 refuses; she did nothing all her life but accept. 
 
 The two great events of Mile, de Guerin s life 
 were her visit to Paris on the occasion of the mar 
 riage of her brother Maurice, and his death, in 
 Languedoc, eight months afterwards. Paris she 
 took very quietly, as she took everything. What 
 pleased her most was the abundance and splendor 
 of the churches, in which she spent a large portion 
 of her time. She had changed her sky, but she 
 did not change her mind. The profoundest im- 
 
 216 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 pression, however, that she was destined to re 
 ceive was that caused by her brother s death. He 
 died on the best of terms with the Church, from 
 which he had suffered a temporary alienation. 
 Her letters on the occasion of this event have 
 an accent of intense emotion which nothing else 
 could arouse. We cannot do better than trans 
 late a portion of one, which seems to us to possess 
 a most painful beauty: 
 
 "For a week now since he has left us since 
 he is in heaven and I am on earth I have n t 
 been able to speak to you of him, to be with you, 
 to unite with you, my tender friend, also so dearly 
 loved. Shall we never be disabused of our affec 
 tions? Neither sorrows, nor rupture, nor death - 
 nothing changes us. We love, still love love 
 into the very tomb, love ashes, cling to the body 
 which has borne a soul; but the soul, we know that 
 is in heaven. Oh, yes! there above, where I see 
 thee, my dear Maurice; where thou art awaiting 
 me and saying, Eugenie, come hither to God, 
 where one is happy. My dear friend, all happi 
 ness on earth is at an end; I told you so; I have 
 buried the life of my heart; I have lost the charm 
 of my existence. I did not know all that I found 
 in my brother, nor what happiness I had placed 
 in him. Prospects, hopes, my old life beside his, 
 and then a soul that understood me. He and 
 I were two eyes in the same head. Now we re 
 apart. God has come between us. His will be 
 done! God stood on Calvary for the love of us; 
 
 217 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 let us stand at the foot of the cross for the love of 
 him. This one seems heavy and covered with 
 thorns, but so was that of Jesus. Let him help 
 me to carry mine. We shall at last get to the top, 
 and from Calvary to heaven the road is n t long. 
 Life is short, and indeed what should we do on 
 earth with eternity? My God! so long as we are 
 holy, that we profit by the grace that comes from 
 trials, from tears, from tribulations and anguish, 
 treasures of the Christian! Oh, my friend! you 
 have only to look at these things, this world, with 
 the eye of faith, and all changes. Happy Father 
 Trubert, who sees this so eminently! How I 
 should like to have a little of his soul, so full 
 of faith, so radiant with love! . . . How things 
 change! Let us change, too, my friend; let us dis 
 abuse ourselves of the world, of its creatures, of 
 everything. I only ask for complete indifference/ 
 
 218 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 XXV 
 
 "The fjist French 
 
 TV/T ALEXANDRE DUMAS, the younger, hav- 
 
 -L* A ing established a reputation as one of the 
 most ingenious of playwrights, and the most un 
 flinching in his adherence to certain morbid social 
 types, has now, at one stroke, affixed his name to 
 the list of the greater French novelists. He had, 
 indeed, written a number of clever stories; but 
 in none of them was there discernible a claim 
 to arrest the public attention. In the "Affaire 
 Clemenceau " this claim is apparent from the first 
 page to the last; or, in other words, the work bears 
 signal marks of being, before all things, serious. 
 It is for this reason that we feel justified in speak 
 ing of it. 
 
 The story is cast into the shape of a memorial, 
 drawn up for the use of his advocate by a man 
 under indictment for the murder of his wife. It 
 proposes to relate the history of their connection 
 and to trace out, step by step, every link in a long 
 chain of provocation. It aims, in fact, at putting 
 the lawyer or, in other words, the reader as 
 nearly as possible in the position of the accused. 
 
 "Affaire Clemenceau: Memoire de I Accuse." By Alex- 
 andre Dumas. Paris : 1866. 
 
 210 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 It is not a piece of special pleading; it is a patient, 
 intelligent statement of facts. It is not, indeed, a 
 mere dry catalogue raisonne of incidents governed 
 only by the spirit of chronology; for the hero is, 
 on the face of the matter, a man of the deepest 
 feeling and the richest understanding. Although 
 the narrative confines itself to facts, these are 
 dealt with in a fashion which of late days it has 
 been agreed to call physiological. Metaphysics 
 have been for some time turning to physiology; 
 novels are following their example. The author 
 concerns himself with motives and with causes, 
 but his process is the reverse of transcendental. 
 He bores his way so keenly and so successfully 
 into the real, that one is tempted to fear that he 
 will come out on the other side, as the French 
 Revolution is said to have done with regard to 
 liberty. In speaking of his book, it behooves 
 the critic honestly to take note of the direction 
 towards which he sets his face. It is evident from 
 the outset that he will deal with things as they 
 are; that he will speak without intellectual prud 
 ery and without bravado; that, having to tell a 
 story containing elements the most painful and 
 the most repulsive, he will pursue the one course 
 which may justify his choice: that of exhibiting 
 these elements in their integrity. To adopt such 
 a course, so considerately, so consciously, and yet 
 with so little of that aggressive dogmatism which 
 would be sure to betray the mixed intention of an 
 inferior writer; to pursue it so steadily, so relent- 
 
 220 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 lessly, and with so sincere and manful an intelli 
 gence of the interests at stake; to do this is, in our 
 opinion, to have accomplished a great work, and 
 to have come very near being a great writer. 
 
 Pierre Clemenceau is the natural son of an 
 industrious and successful lingere. His misfor 
 tunes begin with his going to school, where the 
 circumstances of his birth make him an object 
 of general obloquy. The sufferings of childhood 
 have formed the stock of the first volume of many 
 an English novel, but we do not remember to have 
 read any account of a school-boy s tribulations 
 so natural in outline and so severely sober in color 
 as the bald recital of young Clemenceau s perse 
 cution. It has been said, and doubtless with 
 justice, in criticisms of this part of the book, that 
 M. Dumas has fallen quite beside the mark in 
 localizing such a system of moral reprobation in a 
 Parisian school. Let us American readers, then, 
 take it home to ourselves; we shall not have trans 
 lated the book for nothing. On leaving school, 
 Clemenceau evinces a lively inclination for model 
 ling in clay; some of his figures are shown to a 
 famous sculptor, who gives him hearty encourage 
 ment, and kindly consents to receive him as a 
 pupil. From this moment his worldly fortunes 
 prosper. His vocation is plain, he works hard, his 
 talent obtains due recognition. He is still a very 
 young man, however, when he meets at a fancy- 
 dress party, given by a literary lady of the Bohe 
 mian order, a singular couple, whose destinies are 
 
 221 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 forthwith interwoven with his own: a showy, 
 middle-aged woman, dressed as Marie de Medicis, 
 and her little daughter, radiant with velvet and 
 childish loveliness, as her page. The child, worn 
 out with late hours, falls asleep in an arm-chair; 
 while she sleeps, Clemenceau, with an artist s 
 impulse, attempts to sketch her figure, and, while 
 he sketches, loses his heart. The child awakes, 
 asks to see the picture, and then asks to possess it. 
 Clemenceau promises to add a few touches at his 
 leisure, and to bring it to her the next morning. 
 This whole scene has been aptly cited as an in 
 stance of the author s resolute devotion to the 
 actual and the natural. Nothing could be less 
 ideal, less pastoral, than the dawning of the hero s 
 passion. No privacy, no solitude, no fresh air, 
 no glimpse of nature; but, instead, a shabby- 
 genteel masquerade on a rainy night, the odors 
 of the pot-au-feu, an infant phenomenon, and a 
 mamma in hired finery. The acquaintance thus 
 begun soon becomes an intimacy. Madame 
 Dobronowska is a Polish lady who has had mis 
 fortunes, and who is leading a hand-to-mouth 
 existence in Paris, in anticipation of the brilliant 
 future to which she regards her daughter s beauty 
 as the key. There follows an elaborate picture of 
 the household of these two ladies, of their mingled 
 poverty and vanity, of the childish innocence and 
 incipient coquetry of the daughter, of the mag 
 nificent visions and the plausible garrulity of the 
 mother. Madame Dobronowska is an adventuress 
 
 222 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 more false and mercenary than the fancy can 
 readily conceive, but gifted for the ruin of her 
 victims with a certain strong perfume of frankness, 
 motherliness, and bonhomie^ which is the more 
 fatal because it is partly natural. There is some 
 thing equally pathetic and hideous in her jealous 
 adoration of her child s beauty and her merely 
 prudential vigilance. "Have you seen her hands?" 
 she asks of Clemenceau, when he comes with his 
 sketch. "Yes." "Look at them by daylight." 
 "She raised her daughter s hand and showed me 
 its truly remarkable transparency by flattening it, 
 so to speak, against the light; and then, taking it 
 between her own, she kissed it with a sort of 
 frenzy, crying, Tu es belle qa! y These words pro 
 duced upon the child the effect of a cordial; the 
 color came to her cheeks, she smiled, she had got 
 back her strength." Clemenceau executes a bust 
 of the young girl, and makes himself useful to the 
 mother. Before many weeks, however, his friends 
 leave Paris to seek their fortunes in Russia. For 
 three years Clemenceau sees nothing more of 
 them, although he occasionally receives a letter 
 from Iza (the daughter) describing the vicissi 
 tudes of their career. Failing in her attempt to 
 secure for her daughter the notice of the Crown 
 Prince at St. Petersburg, Madame Dobronowska 
 removes to Warsaw, and commences operations 
 afresh. As time elapses, however, these operations 
 prove to be of a nature detrimental to her daugh 
 ter s honor; and Iza, horrified by her mother s 
 
 223 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 machinations, which she is now of an age to com 
 prehend, applies for assistance to Clemenceau, as 
 her only friend. The young man replies by a dec 
 laration of love, which Iza receives with rapture, 
 and forthwith makes her escape to Paris. She is 
 now seventeen years old, and in the perfection of 
 beauty; Clemenceau s mother is admitted into 
 the secret, and they are married. For a long time 
 their married life is without a cloud; but at last 
 Iza becomes a mother, Madame Dobronowska 
 arrives, a reconciliation takes place, Clemenceau s 
 own mother wastes away from an inexplicable 
 malady, and a number of his friends show signs 
 of leaving him. Finally comes upon him like a 
 thunder-clap the revelation of a long course of 
 exorbitant infidelity on the part of his wife. The 
 woman who has been for him the purest of mor 
 tals has long been, for all the world beside, a 
 prodigy of impudicity. Clemenceau breaks with 
 her on the spot, and takes the edge from his frenzy 
 by fighting a duel with the last of her many lovers. 
 He provides for the maintenance of his child, and 
 suffers himself to be led to Rome by one of his 
 friends. Here, in the study of the great monu 
 ments of art, he awaits the closing of the wound 
 which has been inflicted upon his honor and upon 
 the deepest passions of his soul. His better wishes, 
 however, are not answered; day by day the desire 
 for revenge, the fury of resentment, gathers in 
 stead of losing force. Hearing at last that, after a 
 short term of seclusion, his wife has appeared 
 
 224 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 before the world in a blaze of splendor, as the pre 
 sumed mistress of a foreign potentate, he hastily 
 returns to Paris and presents himself at the man 
 sion occupied by Iza at the cost of her royal pro 
 tector. She receives him with the cynical good 
 nature of a soul utterly bereft of shame, and he 
 stabs her to the heart. 
 
 Such is a rapid outline of M. Dumas s story. 
 It traces the process of the fatal domination ac 
 quired by a base and ignoble soul over a lofty and 
 generous one. No criticism can give an idea of the 
 mingled delicacy and strength of the method by 
 which we are made to witness the unfolding of the 
 heroine s vicious instincts. There is in one of 
 Balzac s novels a certain Valerie Marneffe, who 
 may be qualified as the poetry of Thackeray s 
 Becky Sharpe. Iza Dobronowska is the poetry of 
 Valerie Marneffe. The principle of her being is an 
 absolute delight in her own corporeal loveliness; 
 this principle, taking active force, leads her into 
 the excesses which arrest her career. 
 
 We are content to sum up the defects of the 
 "Affaire Clemenceau" in the statement that its 
 ultimate effect is to depress the reader s mind, to 
 leave it with no better compensation for the 
 patient endurance of so many horrors than a 
 grave conviction of the writer s prodigious talent, 
 and a certain vague, irritating suspicion that his 
 own depression is even deeper than ours. In the 
 way of compensation this is not enough. To be 
 completely great, a work of art must lift up the 
 
 225 
 
NOTES AND REVIEWS 
 
 reader s heart; and it is the artist s secret to 
 reconcile this condition with images of the barest 
 and sternest reality. Life is dispiriting, art is 
 inspiring; and a story-teller who aims at anything 
 more than a fleeting success has no right to tell 
 an ugly story unless he knows its beautiful counter 
 part. The impression that he should aim to pro 
 duce on the reader s mind with his work must have 
 much in common with the impression originally 
 produced on his own mind by his subject. If the 
 effect of an efficient knowledge of his subject had 
 been to fill his spirit with melancholy, and to 
 paralyze his better feelings, it would be impossible 
 that his work should be written. Its existence 
 depends on the artist s reaction against the sub 
 ject; and if the subject is morally hideous, of 
 course this reaction will be in favor of moral 
 beauty. The fault of M. Dumas s book, in our 
 judgment, is not that such a reaction has not 
 occurred in his own mind, or even that it has been 
 slight, but that it is but faintly reflected in the 
 constitution of the story. There is in the author s 
 tone an unpleasant suggestion of cynicism. It 
 may be, however, that there is but just enough to 
 show us how seriously, how solemnly even, he has 
 taken the miseries which he describes. There is 
 enough, at any rate, to establish an essential 
 difference between the "Affaire Clemenceau" and 
 such a book as M. Edmond About s "Madelon." 
 It may be, taking high ground, a fault that the 
 former work is depressing; but is it not a greater 
 
 226 
 
BY HENRY JAMES 
 
 fault that the latter, considering what it is, is 
 amusing? The work before us thrills and interests 
 the reader from beginning to end. It is hard to 
 give it more liberal praise than to say that, in 
 spite of all its crudities, all its audacities, his 
 finer feelings are never for an instant in abey 
 ance, and although, to our nervous Anglo-Saxon 
 apprehensions, they may occasionally seem to 
 be threatened, their interests are never actually 
 superseded by those of his grosser ones. Since 
 the taste of the age is for realism, all thanks for 
 such realism as this. It fortifies and enlarges the 
 mind; it disciplines the fancy. Since radicalism 
 in literature is the order of the day, let us welcome 
 a radicalism so intelligent and so logical. In a 
 season of careless and flippant writing, and of 
 universal literary laxity, there are few sensations 
 more wholesome than to read a work so long con 
 sidered and so severely executed as the present. 
 From beginning to end there is not a word which 
 is accidental, not a sentence which leaves the 
 author s pen without his perfect assent and sym 
 pathy. He has driven in his stake at the end as 
 well as at the beginning. Such writing is reading 
 for men. 
 
 227 
 
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