Westward by Rail; a Journey to San Francisco and Back, and a Visit to the Mormons. By W. T. Rae. Longmans, Green, and Co.
In a new introductory chapter to this second and cheaper edition of his book, concerning which, on its first appearance, we spake with strong and merited commendation, Mr. Rae gives additional information concerning the Mormons, and the effect produced upon Mormonism by the new railway, by the Mormon revolt under Mr. Godbe and the sons of Joseph Smith, and by the vigorous policy of the United States Government. Mr. Rae does not think that it has sustained much damage by either. Brigham Young said that he did not 'care anything for a religion which could not stand a railroad.' Mr. Godbe's reform is brought under suspicion by its commercial motive, and was checkmated by Brigham Young giving the electoral franchise to women. The chief perils to Mormonism are the successful assertion of the control of the Mormon militia by Governor Schaffer, and some decisions of Chief Justice McKean securing absolute impartiality between Mormon and Gentile in the law courts, refusing to naturalize any aliens who are polygamists, and refusing to legalize certain donations of public land made by the Mormon Legislative Assembly. The recent census gives a population in Salt Lake City of 17,246 persons, in the territory of Utah of 86,786, both much below the calculation of the Mormons themselves.
Mr. Rae also gives the latest information concerning gold and silver mining in the States of California and Nevada, and the territory of Utah, and concerning the development of traffic on the Great Pacific Railway.
Canoe Travelling: Log of a Cruise in the Baltic, and Practical Hints in Building and Fitting Canoes. By Warington Baden-Powell. With Twenty-four Illustrations and a Map. Smith, Elder, and Co.
The canoe achievements of Mr. McGregor—and perhaps even more the graphic way in which they have been described—have provoked much emulation, and bid fair to raise canoeing into one of our characteristic national recreations, like yachting and Alpine climbing. Mr. Baden-Powell records a remarkable achievement of 400 miles of canoeing in the Baltic. Starting from Gothenburg in the Cattegat, on the western coast of Sweden, he and his companion took their two canoes up the river Gotha, and across the large inland lake Wevern, 100 miles long, which they crossed in a steamer; then through the West Gotha Canal, and across the Lakes Wicken and Wettern, Boven, Roxen, and Elen, with their connecting canals, to the Baltic; then along the north coast of the Baltic, with its innumerable islets, and up the Oxlo Sound to Stockholm. From Stockholm they went by steamer to Gothland, Carlsharm, and Malmo, from which place they crossed in the canoes to Copenhagen, thence by railway and steamer to Ketson, Kiel, and Hamburg, where, after some short river canoe excursions, they took steamer to England. The account of the voyage is little more than a log of sailing experiences, with slight touches of description of people and places; but it will be read with interest by all who are fond of boating, and by many who are not. The second part of the book is purely technical, and furnishes data for the construction of canoes.
POETRY, FICTION, AND BELLES LETTRES.
Balaustion's Adventure: including a Transcript from Euripides. By Robert Browning. Smith, Elder, and Co.
Mr. Browning's pastimes are characteristic enough. This new poem he calls a May-month amusement, in the very graceful dedication in which he explains its origin; but still we have the personal qualities as predominant as elsewhere. The Countess Cowper, it appears, urged him to give a version of a play of Euripides, 'of that strangest, sweetest song of his, Alkestis;' and Mr. Browning gallantly set himself to the task. But well may he say, in a slightly different sense from what he meant it, though truly in no disparagement of his own originality, 'Euripides might fear little; out I, also, have an interest in the performance; and what wonder if I beg you to suffer that it make, in another and far easier sense, its nearest possible approach to those Greek qualities of goodness and beauty, by laying itself gratefully at your feet?' Had it not been for the skill with which Mr. Browning invents dramatic expedients to aid him in relieving and toning down the contrast which would inevitably have been felt between the direct and sunny simplicity of the Greek, and his own wayward, imperative many-moodedness—to coin a phrase—something of the grotesque would assuredly have mingled itself with this performance. But, though the clear wine has been poured into a coloured glass, ornamented with design all too florid, it is presented to us by so sweet a hand that we often forget the contrast in the singular grace of the maidenly face and figure. Balaustion—wild pomegranate flower—has in her something of the Greek; but she has also an ineffable touch of our modern time. Her image comes as that of a reconciling spirit between Mr. Browning and the old Greek poet, in such a manner, as suffices to divert the mind from a too exclusive devotion to particular points. The necessity that rests on Mr. Browning to first of all create a series of media through which any circumstance or event may be seen, comes out most strongly here, where the subject-matter seemed least of all to admit of it. The triumph of Mr. Browning's genius lies in this, that in some sort he justifies his own injustice to those Greek qualities of unvarying clearness and grace of outline. Goethe, in his 'Helena,' celebrated in significant style the marriage of the Greek and Gothic spirit, and he even condescended under allegorical figure to point at individual poets. Had he lived to read 'Balaustion's Adventure,' he would have found in it a valuable instance. Mr. Browning is Greek in the fresh simplicity of his feeling; but Gothic in the necessity he is ever under to see his thoughts reduplicated in the shade and sunshine of many different moods or minds. Hence the lyrical spirit and the peculiarly dramatic form of his work; and so it is in this 'Adventure.'
The girlish simplicity of Balaustion, the Rhodian maiden who recites the play, and her capacity for pure unalloyed devotion—for she twice saves her friends by her patriotism and love of poetry—justify, in part at least, what appear to be inconsistencies in Mr. Browning's rendering; such, for example, as the lofty idealisation of the character of Admetos. It is just such as a fresh enthusiastic girl would, out of her own maidenly conception, impose on a hero of her own, thrown into such tragic circumstances of those of Alkestis. Thus, even where we are most induced to criticise, the figure of the teller comes in to warn us; but after all, the modern poet, by virtue of his dramatic medium, has reached a truer conception than that of Euripides, or has illumined his conception by letting full upon it the freer lights of earlier time. But clearly, the transcript from Euripides, in the hands of Mr. Browning, undergoes a strange transformation. It is not alone that lines here and there vary very much from the original, and that expressions are amplified or departed from; it is that on the old Greek thought a wholly modern conception of love, and of life and death, is superimposed, and a dim doctrine of spiritual compensation interwoven with it, which is quite alien to Greek feeling. Something, however, may be said for the fact that we have here really a reminiscence of a former telling, in which, naturally, much of the halo that rests on the past, simply because it has 'orbed into the perfect star,' would unconsciously well up round the recollection, and colour the incident. All this, of course, shows Mr. Browning's supreme art in dramatic expedient; but some of the expressions of Herakles and not a few utterances of Admetos, are almost too distinctly spiritualistic to pass muster in the connection in which we find them. For example, this:—