KATERFELTO IN REPOSE.
Is there not a lull in the quack-medicine business? Its advertisements do not appear to us to shine with the brilliancy of old. Those astonishing portraits of Old Doctor So-and-So, and the gorgeous perspective view of the interior of Professor Snooks's laboratory, all alive with forty 'prentice-power pill-machines and tincture-vats like the pools of a swimming academy, have ceased to illustrate the condition of modern art and medicine.
Possibly, the sensational style has been found to have lost its force, and a more quiet and stately tone to be more promotive of the popularity of bread-pills and root-bitters. It looks more professional. Mountebankery in physic has been overdone, as it has in a great many other things. The quacks, if they successfully inculcate this lesson and bring in a corresponding reform, will have been useful public servants. Others have been forcing the pace as well as they, and may well slacken speed, if not call a halt. The blatant and dogmatic has been increasingly predominant in the announcement of new theories, notions and "missions." We are all concerned in seeing it checked, and simple truth and plodding inquiry once more given a chance. Repeated disappointments have made the world distrustful of startling discoveries and sweeping panaceas—a fact which should commend itself to the attention of all the charlatans, and of those who, not charlatans, have caught from them the fashion of violent and premature trumpeting. Political and social cure-alls will have to work their way slowly and painfully into notice. They must submit to the rules of trade, and not look for success until they have demonstrated that what they offer in the market is what it pretends to be. The world is tired of being taken by storm. Just now it is in a more than usually distrustful mood—in a state of marked disillusionment. It declines to have a creed of any kind slammed into its face—so many new ones have palpably failed, and so many old ones have proved themselves possessed of forgotten virtues. Good and evil have proved to be omnipresent, and to pervade everything, like iron and sulphur.
E. C. B.
LITERATURE OF THE DAY.
Madame Gervaisais. By Edmond and Jules de Goncourt. New Edition. Paris.
This is in many respects a remarkable book. It shows unusual talent and thought—skill in the morbid anatomy of the soul. It is out of the common line in having but one character, the heroine, and not a word about love. It is, in fact, the biography of a woman during her conversion to Roman Catholicism: the incidents are merely the successive steps by which she is brought within the pale. The interest lies in the mental and moral fluctuations through which she passes while under the influence to which she is subjected, and which in one way or another does not cease to act upon her for an instant. The book is a complement to Madame Craven's pictures of conversion and the devout life, but differs from them in the point of view.
Madame Gervaisais is the widow of a man who filled for years an important office under the government by dint of small gifts of precision and punctuality, being in himself an insignificant person. His position and wealth, and the beauty and superior endowments of his wife, attracted men of mark to the house, and her salon was long one of the most sought in Paris. Her marriage had not been a happy one: the intellectual resources in which she has sought compensation have been insufficient, although she has never tried more exciting distractions, and at thirty-seven she finds herself free, rich, still handsome, with one child, delicate and slow of development, born after ten years of wedlock, the spring of her heart and hopes broken from the long pressure of conjugal despotism and unkindness, her health enfeebled to a degree which makes it advisable for her to spend a winter in Rome. This is the status quo at the opening of the history. Her life in Rome is told almost day by day, affording opportunity for the most detailed descriptions of places and customs, times and seasons, festivals and ceremonies: these are given with extreme, scrupulous fidelity and an accurate choice of words, but they have not the magic touch which brings unvisited scenes before you or revives half-forgotten ones with the freshness of things seen yesterday. This is strange, as the impressions, the sensations of mind and body, produced upon a stranger by Rome are wonderfully conveyed. "She was astonished at the refinement and acuteness of perception which she had acquired since coming thither.... She remembered a glass of water which she had drunk at the door of a little café on one of the first evenings, and which had seemed the most delicious draught she had ever tasted. It struck her that warm countries must possess all sorts of little felicities of soil and climate unknown in colder ones, an enchanted aqua felice trickling everywhere. And day by day she felt the nothings of her life assuming an intensity of pleasure and enjoyment that nothings have when one is in love." "In the gardens of the Villa Borghese on those spring days she had hours of singular well-being—a sort of sweet oppression, a relaxation which made her happy: they were days whose temperature was like a tepid bath, with warm whiffs of acacia and orange blossoms; a dusty sky; a sun which was only an orange glow; a smothering of the sound of the distant bells; a song of disconnected notes, as if the birds were tired; an atmosphere where a line which might be taken for the flight of an insect proved to be a drop of rain, which fell every five minutes without wetting you." Her life, which is very solitary, consists principally of sightseeing, study, the care and companionship of her child, and the revery which hangs about existence in Italy like an exhalation from the ground. Madame Gervaisais, brought up of course a French Catholic, has gradually become a free-thinker of the serious kind, high-principled and earnest: she is described as a woman of elevated mind and character, the force of whose will and intelligence has kept her from being betrayed by a naturally loving disposition, which has expended itself in friendship and filial and maternal affection, the latter being her only passion. The respectful distance which the author places between her and the rest of the world is indicated by her first name never being mentioned: she is only Madame Gervaisais. But she is not only a woman of reading: she is an artist and a musician, and these tastes increase her susceptibility to the soft masterdom of the place.
Rome is considered by those who make such matters their business a peculiarly favorable spot for proselytizing: there is supposed to be an afflatus from various sources which disposes the unbelieving soul to the reception of the Church's teaching. The MM. de Goncourt understand this: "What a vast embrace, what an immense holy contagion, is religion at Rome!" We become aware of a general lassitude and ennervation in the firm texture of Madame Gervaisais's nature before the first approach is made to her convictions. And how are those approaches made? Can any one point to the first step? Has it ever been positively ascertained whether a certain meeting, a borrowed book, a striking coincidence, a conversation which has insensibly glided into a particular channel, was the result of chance or long premeditation? In the present case it is impossible to detect the earliest shadow of design falling across circumstance. Was Madame Gervaisais's landlady sent to offer prayers for the recovery of the sick child at the Sant' Agostino? Did the man-servant read her journal and report its contents? Had the Russian countess come on purpose to make her acquaintance when she found her sitting under the oak tree at Castel Gandolfo reading Lammenais's essay on religious indifference? The mystery which surrounds these questions corresponds entirely to similar unexplained occurrences in Madame Craven's seductive pages, where the finger of the sacred-supernatural is tacitly supposed to play a decisive part. But, chance or calculation, it leads in the same direction; and after a year and a half in Rome, Madame Gervaisais, who has given up Lammenais for a book of her Russian friend's, and has fallen into a state of languid dejection, takes to attending the regular sermon at the Jesuits' church, where the music, the paintings, the architecture, corrupt in style as they are, gradually induce a sort of somnolent ecstasy. Before many Sundays pass a celebrated preacher ascends the pulpit. "He was known as a man of talent in the order—an actor, a pantomimist, a comedian, a tragedian, whose gesticulatory and perambulatery eloquence swept the platform, and whose dramatic fire was enough to kindle the wood of the desk. He declaimed, wept, sobbed, raised his voice, let it break, whimpered, thundered, and his discourse gave the congregation all the emotions and illusions of a theatrical recitation." Madame Gervaisais at first hardly listens, but a few words suddenly arrest her attention, and she hears the preacher say, "Rash and audacious woman—and not only rash and audacious, but wretched and unhappy—who dares to disdain the manifestations of the divine will, and declares that her own reason is the only light she needs!" proceeding to describe her habitual attitude of mind, and winding up with a terrible denunciation delivered with the authority which those alone can wield who believe themselves the mouthpieces of Infallibility. She returns home profoundly shaken, with the dreadful suspicion that her inmost secrets have somehow been discovered, and that she has been preached at. A few days later she accidentally hears that it is the princess de Belgiojoso who has been the object of the fulmination: the relief is unspeakable, and produces a momentary reaction, but the mark has been made.
It is impossible to follow in detail an operation which is like the perpetual falling of drops of water or friction of grains of sand, accompanied, moreover, by an occult, spiritual process like the function of an organ. Before many months the proselyte put herself under the direction of a Jesuit confessor. Little by little she had separated herself from her few relations with the outer world; she went no more to the French embassy or the French academy, where she had met fresh currents of thought from political, artistic and literary circles; she gave up a pleasant Italian house where there was superstition enough, but not bigotry, broke off her intercourse with a lifelong friend, a sincere but liberal member of the Gallican Church, and left the letters of her only brother unanswered and unread. Her faculties were absorbed by her fanaticism. "A secret metamorphosis was taking place within her: her pride of intellect, her spirit of analysis, research, criticism, her individuality of judgment, the energy of her own opinions, gave way little by little under a revolution of her moral temperament, a sort of inversion of her nature." She undergoes various phases of beatitude and depression, and is amazed at the penetration with which her Jesuit confessor, whose study has been human nature and whose learning is soul-craft, divines her condition of mind. She lends herself to his practices in the same way that assistant mortals unconsciously help the spirits in table-turning. He finds her too self-tormenting and scrupulous, and after a long and perfectly graduated exordium, in which he has felt her spiritual pulse from time to time to ascertain that it gave the due number of beats, and no more, concludes by telling her to throw off all individual responsibility: he assumes that for her. "Believe that when you appear before the tribunal of the Sovereign Judge you can say, Lord, what I have done or omitted has been in obedience to those whom you have given to govern me in your name. And be sure that a soul cannot sin in acting according to the orders and lights of its spiritual father." But by the time she had entirely abnegated her accountability she finds the easy rule of the Jesuits too lax, and for her further humiliation and penance takes for her director a monk of one of the barefooted orders—a coarse and ignorant Calabrian peasant, whose austerity has given him a widespread reputation for sanctity.
There is something more than painful in the minute portrayal of the degradation of mind, character, even temper, which occupies the latter part of the book: it is repulsive, and it strikes us as overdone, although we know of at least one similar instance in real life. But Madame Gervaisais has been represented as an uncommon woman in every way, and we are forced to allow the progress of undermining disease some share in her abasement. The last ten or a dozen chapters and the tragical conclusion are among the weaker portions of the book, which as a novel has many defects. It is nevertheless an able performance, and might be a useful one if people, as a rule, were not more eager for the poison than the antidote. All the phenomena and experiences which are unfolded like holy relics by Madame Craven's high-bred hands are recognized by MM. de Goncourt, but they are differently accounted for.
In Rénée Mauperin, another book by the same authors, which with considerable cleverness has also many faults of construction and development, we have a glimpse of the cheerful social aspect of the Roman hierarchy through its intervention in mundane affairs. "The Abbé Blampoix had neither parish nor curacy. He had a special vocation: he was the priest of the world, the gay world, the great world.... His voice was musical and his style flowery. He called the devil 'the prince of evil,' and the Eucharist 'the divine aliment.' He abounded in periphrases colored like sacred prints.... From time to time fashionable phrases and colloquialisms of the day mingled in his spiritual consolations, like bits of a newspaper in a book of devotion. He had the odor of the century. His gown kept, as it were, the perfume of all the pretty sins which had come near it.... Mothers consulted him before they took their daughters to their first ball: daughters sought his advice before going thither. He was the man from whom permission was obtained to wear low-neck dresses—of whom one inquired the novels which might be perused and the plays which might be seen. He baptized children and confessed adulteries of heart.... Great sorrows, despair, had recourse to him, and he ordered a journey to Italy, the diversions of painting and music and a good confession at Rome." By this and analogous counsel on still more delicate matters he superseded the fashionable physician. But what kept him most busy was a species of matrimonial agency which he managed for the benefit of his flock. "There was an instant's silence, during which nothing was heard but the rustling of the abbé's papers. At last he drew out a visiting-card turned down at the corner, which he held toward the light, and read: 'Three hundred thousand francs interest, obligations; fifteen thousand francs income from the wedding-day; father and mother dead; six hundred thousand at the death of some uncles and aunts who are not married and will not marry. The young lady is nineteen—charming, prettier than she is aware of. Here, let us think about that,' said the abbé, putting back the card. 'Well—let's see: I have also—yes, at this very moment—an orphan: twenty-five thousand francs income on marrying. But no, that won't do: the guardian is desirous of an influential connection. Ah! wait: perhaps this will do: twenty-two years old, not pretty, accomplished, intelligent, dresses well; the father has fifteen hundred thousand francs, three children, a solid fortune."
The authors of these books may not be very good Catholics, but, at all events, they are not Protestants, and it cannot be objected that they are writing of things they know nothing about.
Charlotte Brontë: A Monograph. By T. Wemyss Reid. New York: Scribner, Armstrong & Co.
We should all be grateful to one who lets in a glint of sunshine on a scene, a career, a life or a group of lives which we have been accustomed to see wrapped in unbroken shade. Perfect shadow we distrust instinctively, for we know that it is false Art and false Nature. There must be a bit of light somewhere for every picture and every being. We have long been looking for it, in the face of persistent denial, in the case of that famous Haworth household and its literary productions. Mrs. Gaskell rather deepened the gloom of Jane Eyre and Villette, and left us small hope of a glance at the bright side of the characters and the daily life of the three weird sisters, their brother Patrick and their father, Patrick senior.
Mr. Reid cries fiat lux, and carries the proclamation into effect, like the impatient gentleman who broke the windows which were obscured by the too frequent repetition of that motto burnt in on every pane. And he suggests, or leaves to dawn upon our after-perception, more light than he directly makes. To carry out the glass simile, panes merely cracked by him drop out piecemeal after he has withdrawn his hand, and we come to see more and farther than our guide himself.
In this way he unwittingly enlightens us in the trivial matter of the family name. Everybody has wondered how an English country parson came to have for patronymic Lord Nelson's second title, won in battle from the Mediterranean. This Mr. Reid explains by a short cut like the well-known solution of an extraordinary story: "The man lied." Brontë, with or without an unaccountable diæresis on the last letter, was an assumed name, adopted by the first and last who bore it purely for the sake of euphony. Now, while we could believe anything sombre and stern of one sporting that deep, nasal and majestic appellative, we find it impossible to associate thoughts of unearthly gloom with the airy Milesian cognomen of Pat Prunty, even though weighted with the solemn prefix of "Reverend." Sure enough, we satisfy ourselves very speedily that the parent we have been accustomed to denounce as having blighted three or four young lives, and cheated English literature out of several good novels, was by no means the savage depicted by Mrs. Gaskell, or even by Mr. Reid. His worst recorded exploits have something of the bizarre about them, as when he cut into bits a dress presented to his wife by one to whom he was not willing she should be indebted, and fired off pocket-pistols at unseasonable hours and places. Mrs. Prunty does not appear to have run short in her wardrobe, nor did the pistols ever hit any one. The old gentleman, in spite of narrow circumstances, gave his daughters and son a good education and what social advantages lay within his reach. The world was clearly more open to them than it was to him. A widower from the infancy of all his children, he not unnaturally became a little peculiar and exacting. When, his only son having drunk himself to death, the last of three daughters who had reached elderly and acidulated maidenhood indicated a wish to marry a man she confesses she did not love, he objected. Yet he persisted in his opposition only a few months. As soon as he perceived Charlotte to be really anxious for the union, he gave his full and kindly consent. All his daughters used him and his scapegrace of a son freely as literary material, drawing from them the central figures of the most effective of the novels. Nor was he an unconscious or unwilling sitter. The writing of the tales soon ceased to be a secret to him. He criticised, suggested and otherwise assisted with some of them in a more active sense of the term than that in which it is applied to a spectator.
A secluded life and narrow range of observation mainly account for what of morbidness and lack of geniality marks these works. Charlotte's private correspondence, when printed precisely as written and not clipped or garbled, shows distinctly a sunny side, and justifies the conclusion that the early life of the sisters was "unquestionably peaceful, happy and wholesome." That this should be the fact adds to our enjoyment of the novels. Our confidence in, and consequent admiration of, a powerful picture are the more assured by our knowledge that the touch under which it grew was not cramped or warped by suffering. Had Charlotte Brontë's literary life been prolonged under the new conditions opened to her by her sudden fame, we have small reason to suppose that she would have created a more telling character than Rochester, though she would not have exhausted her powers in the microscopic delineation of commonplace people which constitutes the province of her most popular female successor. She would have portrayed stronger subjects in a more vigorous and incisive style. Some critical remarks in her few letters from London are strikingly direct and acute. Thackeray, Mrs. Browning, Turner and Macready come in for a few lines each which hit them to the life. She possessed the critical temperament and faculty. The metropolitan field suited to its best exercise she was, alas! destined never to enter.
Kismet. (No-Name Series.) Boston: Roberts Brothers.
As long as there are readers who care for a novel packed from cover to cover with interesting scenes of a promising flirtation that ripens into enthusiastic love-making by which three persons are in turn made miserable, so long such books as Kismet will be liked. The scene of the story is the Nile, the characters are for the most part voyagers on that river, and descriptions of the wonders that line its shores make an imposing background to the lightness of the incidents. This setting of the story makes the book really impressive: the scenery is brought before the reader not in the way a topographical map is constructed, but by dexterous touches which show that the anonymous author can rise above recording the vicissitudes of a more or less conventional courtship. But a good many writers have ship-wrecked just at that which seems so easy and is really so hard. All the good scenery in the world will not make a dull novel entertaining; but when, as is the case here, the story is interesting, the reader can only be grateful for everything thrown in over measure. This story is clever, because it describes so well the way in which a young woman who at the beginning of the tale is engaged to a young painter, George Ferris, whom she does not really love, learns a good deal about that passion when she meets the more fascinating Arthur Livingston on the Nile, and travels for a long time in his company. This Livingston, too, is not the conventional hero whose success wins the envious hatred of every man that reads its history: on the contrary, he is a well-drawn, probable character, who is well informed without being priggish, and whose sentimentality does not too thickly overlie his more active qualities. He seems like what he is—a rich young American who prefers Europe to this country, and who is not spoiled by living abroad. The whole relation in which he stands to the heroine, Bell Hamlyn—or Miss Hamlyn, as she is generally called, while her step-mother is almost always known as Flossy—is entertainingly and naturally told. To be sure, the veteran reader of novels will have a sense of having come across some of the incidents several times before, but what will seem much less familiar are the humor and the amusing satire with which the foibles of travellers are made fun of. The collarless American, the artless young Englishman, the light-minded flirt of the same country, and the more solemn British tourist, are shown up with great cleverness; and the talk of all the people is natural and amusing, although at times the solemn parts are not so well done as the lighter and more frivolous bits of the conversation. The book abounds with hits at social faults of one kind and another, and shows a perception of the ridiculous which promises well for the future success of the writer. It is not a great book, but it is a clever one, which belongs in the same category with The Initials; and every one has had, has, or will have a period of his or her life in which no more is asked than is to be found in that famous story. In both books the characters have a great resemblance to human beings as seen by a bright, observant, humorous person whose experience has not been wasted. It is not everybody who has afterward been famous that has made so good a beginning as the author of Kismet.
Books Received.
Narrative of the North Pole Expedition: U. S. Ship Polaris. Edited, under the direction of the Hon. G. M. Robeson, by Rear-Admiral C. H. Davis, U. S. N., U. S. Naval Observatory. Washington: Government Printing-Office.
Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay. By his Nephew, George Otto Trevelyan, M. P. (Leipsic edition.) Vols. I. and II. Leipsic: Lemmermann & Co. From R. Worthington, New York.
Fruit and Bread: A Scientific Diet. By Gustav Schlickeysen. Translated from the German by M. L. Holbrook, M. D. New York: M. L. Holbrook & Co.
A Woman-Hater. By Charles Reade. (Harpers' Household and Popular Editions.) New York: Harper & Brothers.
Unclaimed: A Story of English Life. By an Englishwoman. (Loring's Tales of the Day.) Boston: Loring.
Lectures on the History of Protection in the United States. By W. G. Sumner. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons.
The Scripture Club of Valley Rest. By the author of "Helen's Babies." New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons.
In Change Unchanged. By Linda Villari. (Leisure-Hour Series.) New York: Henry Holt & Co.
Afterglow. (No-Name Series.) Boston: Roberts Brothers.