This is a simple, domestic tale, founded on the difficulties, the struggles, and the ultimate success of a poor foundling boy, thrown in his infancy among strangers, and fighting his way, through the great battle-field of life, in spite of all difficulties, by dint of genius, backed by industry, perseverance, energy, honesty, and faith, to happiness, fame, and fortune.
The subject is well conceived, the plot well planned, the characters, in the main, well drawn, though in some sort exaggerated, and the tale, as regards matter, well told.
It would be pleasant to end here; but we should do justice neither to the author nor to ourselves, did we not speak the truth, right out. And the truth is—that all these excellences, and the book itself, are almost in toto ruined by the detestable affectation, false sentiment, and sickening transcendentalism of the manner.
Young ladies of an æsthetic turn of mind, members of a sentimental clique in some small western town, may think such passages as the following sweetly pretty: “She lived opulently in a lofty book;”—monstrous poor lodgings for opulence, it seems to us—“she was industrious; and yet she lived all she could in the woods, and loved to lie down in the hay-fields, or under the oaks on the hill pasture overlooking the village, and warble responses to the birds, and let them sing her at last to sleep. She loved to feed the fishes in meadow-brooks. She built nests for robins and sparrows every spring.” But the author may rely on it, that men of judgment and sense, and women of matured taste, will, according to their natures, laugh at or lament such perversity.
For the writer can write better, but chooses to write worse. Some of his descriptions of scenery are simple, terse, and beautiful—some of his glimpses at character true, shrewd, and striking—though his style is, at times, provincial, inelegant, and ungrammatical; as when he writes that some person “like to have done so and so”—meaning that he “was on the point of doing so;” or that a boy’s nostrils “palpitated the spirit of a man,” which is neither grammar nor sense, much less English.
The author is, as we judge, a young man and a young writer; and therefore it is that we have written so freely, for we are convinced that, if he will lay aside his besetting affectations, eschew pseudo sentimentalism, and write naturally about nature, he may yet take high place as a describer of the domestic and rural life of America.
Personal Memoirs and Recollections of Editorial Life. By Joseph T. Buckingham. Boston: Ticknor, Reed & Fields. 2 vols. 16mo.
The present volumes are the production of one of the veterans of the American press, connected for more than fifty years with many enterprises in the periodical department of literature, such as the Polyanthos, the New England Magazine, and the Boston Courier. He has known intimately most of the authors, artists, actors, poets, eminent merchants, politicians and statesmen, of his section of the country, and his work overflows with reminiscences of their personal and public character. Starting as a practical printer, he worked steadily up to editorial life and political position; and now enjoys a wide reputation in New England, not only for fearlessness and for ability, but for independence, incorruptible honor, unswerving honesty, and uncompromising consistency—qualities which have stood a little in the way of his interest in those emergencies when judicious apostacy is the road to wealth and consideration. To no one better than to him can be justly applied the words of Sidney Smith, in relation to Sir James Scarlett: “He has never sold the warm feelings and honorable motives of youth and manhood for an annual sum of money and an office. He has never touched the political Aceldama, nor signed the devil’s bond for cursing to-morrow what he has blessed to-day.”
The introductory portion of these volumes, describing the condition of the author’s parents at the close of the revolutionary war, conveys a vivid idea of the injustice done to those soldiers and officers of the war, who had invested their whole means in the discredited continental currency. The tale of poverty which Mr. Buckingham tells, is one of the most pathetic we ever read. The description of the struggles of his mother, left after his father’s death with a large family, to support herself and her children, is more powerful than any thing of the kind we remember in romance. The trusting piety, which mingled with all her miseries and lightened their load, is touchingly delineated. Indeed, the first fifty pages of the book are worthy to be placed in the front rank of biographical literature.