Anglo-American Literature and Manners. From the French of Philarète Chasles, Professor in the College of France. New York: Charles Scribner. 1 vol. 12mo.
This brilliant and vigorous volume should be read for its happy flashes of original thought, and occasional keenness of observation, rather than for its consistent truth. It swarms with errors, but the errors are so sparklingly expressed that they are valuable as epigrams when worthless as opinions. Every thing is sacrificed to point, and even the truths the volume contains are lit up in such a glare of witty impertinence, that they are truths suggested rather than truths expressed. French dogmatism is pertness, and our lively Frenchman’s pertness almost amounts to genius. But he is still a scholar and a critic, and some of the principles he announces are really deep and valuable; it is in their application that he fails. He lacks all sobriety of mind in observing character, manners and men, being chiefly solicitous to find in them pegs to hang his epigrams on, so that the object seen will not be America, Franklin, Irving or Bryant, but Philarète Chasles. And then he is so perfectly content with himself—he chuckles and chirrups so blithely over his own brilliant little self—he has such a sweet unconsciousness that the limits of his conceptions are not the limits of the human mind—that his quick, sharp, knowing, and gleeful spirit becomes, after the first shocks of opposition are over, quite delightful to the reader’s reason and risibles. He seems continually to say of himself, with little Isaac, in Sheridan’s Duenna—“roguish, perhaps, but keen, devilish keen.” We envy the students of the College of France such a Professor of Belles Lettres, who must hear himself talk as gladly as others hear him, and whose very seriousness seems got up for effect. He has a philosophy regarding the “fitness of things;” but to him this fitness consists in the predetermined ease with which nature and man yield occasions for point and antithesis to such a charming fellow as Philarète Chasles.
In truth, our author is a French Hazlitt. We will give some of his sprightly decisions on our American writers, in illustration of his manner. He is a joking, but a hanging judge, vivacious as a coxcomb but ruthless as a Jeffries. In speaking of Washington Irving, he overlooks Irving’s subtle sentiment, purely native to his character, and calls him a mere graceful imitator of old English literature. All that he writes “is a somewhat timid copy, on silk paper, of Addison, Steele and Swift,” and “it glows with the gentle, agreeable lustre of watered silk.” He praises Cooper, it is true, and praises him intelligently; but then he calls Joel Barlow’s Columbiad “a poem which has both eloquence and vigor.” Afterward, forgetting this praise, he lumps the “Columbiad,” Dwight’s “Conquest of Canaan,” and Colton’s “Tecumseh,” together, as “epics, colossi of cotton and papier maché, forming a mass of about ten thousand verses, which, however, yield the palm in absurdity to the epic called ”Washington,“ printed in Boston, in 1843.” It is needless to say that the first three of these epics few Americans have ever read, and the last, which is made the butt of our author’s satire, no American ever heard of. We have made particular inquiries of “the man who read Cooper’s Monnikens,”—who, we are happy to inform the public, is gradually recovering from the effects of his gigantic feat—and even that remarkable individual had not yet got on the trail of “Washington, an Epic.” It seems, if we may believe Philarète Chasles, that the poet in question had read in one Dr. Channing’s writings that America had no national literature. Struck with this astounding fact, which had never occurred to him before, he naively says, that he resolved at once to present his country with an epic. Our French critic deposes that the present has been made, but as the country, which ought to know, is ignorant of the matter, it will take more than a foreigner’s assertion to make us believe it. The coming man, with his coming epic, should therefore be awaited in breathless wonder; “Expectation sits i’ th’ air;” let all our astronomers of letters be on the watch, with telescopes sweeping the whole field of observation, for this new and “mighty orb of song” which is to “swim into our ken.”
Our friend Griswold’s collection of American poetry, the invariable target of all that “gentle dullness which ever loves a joke,” is, of course, made the especial mark of our Frenchman’s malicious raillery. “The distinctive sign of all the specimens,” he says, “is commonplace; they are all made with a shoemaker’s punch. Take off your hats, salute these images, they are from the Gradus ad Parnassum. The worn-out forms of Europe make fortunes in the States, as bonnets of past fashions do in the Colonies. The figures are stereotyped; the lake is ever blue, the forest ever trembling, the eagle invariably sublime. The bad Spanish poets did not write more rapidly stantes pede in uno, their wretched rhymes, than the modern American verse-makers, bankers, settlers, merchants, clerks, and tavern-keepers, their epics and their odes. In the way of counterfeiting they are quite at ease. One re-does the Giour, another the Dunciad. Mr. Charles Fenno Hoffman repeats the songs of Thomas Moore; Mr. Sprague models after Pope and Collins. One takes the Byronic stanza, another appropriates the cadence and images of Wordsworth. Mrs. Hemans, Tennyson, Milnes, all find imitators. Once the consecration of the British public given, the American counterfeit soon appears.” Is not this in the very spirit of little Isaac—“roguish, perhaps, but keen, devilish keen!” Still, it is really too bad that a Frenchman should presume to attack our poetry on the ground of imitation and diffuseness. What has been the larger part of French poetry for five centuries? Has it not been cold imitation of classical models or red-republican spasm? The French poets have been five centuries at work, and yet where is French poetry? graceful, vigorous, vital, national poetry? Why, is it not notorious that it was fast dwindling from frigid imitation into hopeless imbecility when it was roused by the convulsive school—which is but feebleness gone stark mad and raving? The French never had any poetry, growing naturally out of the national mind, like the poetry of Greece, or Italy, or Spain, or England. Ah! Philarète Chasles, smirking so conceitedly in your national glass-house, beware how you throw stones! You Frenchmen, who imitate even in your revolutions—you, whose republican heroes are but caricatures “done into” French from Plutarch, and about as much like the original as Ovid “Englished” by a Grub-Street hack of Charles’s day—you talk of imitation!
The best poets of America, according to our pleasant Frenchman, are Bryant, Emerson and Longfellow. “Bryant has created nothing great; his voice is feeble, melodious, somewhat vague; but pure, solemn, and not imitative. . . . . . By his contemplative gentleness and gravity he reminds one of Klopstock; fantasy and free caprice are found in neither.” Mr. Emerson “is the most original man produced in the United States up to this day;” a true remark, if it be meant to be confined to literature, but perhaps unjust if extended to politics, as in that department our country has produced many marked originalities, ranging all the way from original sin to original virtue. Chasles emphasizes the exquisite beauty of Emerson’s lines to the Humble-Bee—one of the finest poems in the language. Of Longfellow it is said, that he is more varied than either Emerson or Bryant; and “severe intellectual beauty,” “a peculiar sweetness of expression and rhythm,” “great calm approaching to majesty,” “a sensibility stirred in its very deeps, but exhibited in moderated vibration and rhythm,” “a sad, sweet grandeur,” are mentioned as characteristics of this, the first in rank of American poets, and first in virtue of having soared highest “into the middle air of Poesy.” The essential flavor and fragrance of Emerson’s poetic thought, it is hardly to be expected that a foreigner could appreciate, and we are therefore not surprised that after naming Emerson as the most original man in the United States, he should still prefer Longfellow’s poetry.
Our author exercises the utmost severity of his pertness on the female poets whom he selects from our “forests of versifiers;” but we are too gallant to quote his impertinences. There is a good chapter on Audubon, and the introductory paragraph of description is so striking that we cannot refrain from extracting it. “Had you visited the English drawing-rooms in 1832, you would have remarked in the midst of a philosophic crowd, speaking obscurely, and overthrowing without pity the highest questions of metaphysics, a man very different from those about him. The absurd and mean European dress could not disguise that simple and almost wild dignity which is found in the bosom of the solitude which nurses it. While men of letters, a vain and talking race, disputed in the conversational arena, the prize of epigram or the laurels of pedantry, the man of whom I speak remained standing, head erect, with free, proud eye, silent, modest, listening sometimes with disdainful, though not caustic air to the æsthetic tumult, which seemed to astonish him. If he spoke it was at an interval of repose; with one word he discovered an error, and brought back discussion to its principle and its object. A certain naive and wild good sense animated his language, which was just, moderate and energetic. His long, black, waving hair was parted naturally upon his smooth white forehead, upon a front capable of containing and guarding the fires of thought. In his whole dress there was an air of singular neatness; you would have said that the waters of some brook, running through the untrodden forest, and bathing the roots of oaks old as the world, had served him for a mirror. . . . At the sight of that long hair, that bared throat, the independent manner, the manly elegance which characterized him, you would have said, ‘that man has not lived long in old Europe.’”
In taking leave of this volume it may be proper to remark, that it is rather a series of sketches, published originally in a separate form, than a connected view of American institutions and literature. This will account, in some degree, for its lack of proportion and its omissions. As a whole, if a conglomerate can be called a whole, it is a shrewd, mischievous, witty, sparkling, egotistical, flippant, free-and-easy, cut-and-come-again, impertinent, inconsistent, sprightly, Frenchified performance, sipping “the foam of many minds.”
The Clifford Family; or A Tale of the Old Dominion. By One of her Daughters. New York: Harper & Brothers. 1 vol. 12mo.
The authoress of this volume evinces many admirable qualities of mind and heart, and is especially felicitous in depicting the struggle of generous with selfish passions. The scene of the story is laid in Virginia, at the breaking out of the revolutionary war, and the sad havoc which that event made among lovers whose hearts were opposed to their duties, is very truthfully represented. There is, however, a pervading tone of sadness in the book which weakens the impression due to its essential vigor of description and characterization.