As everybody will read “The Scarlet Letter,” it would be impertinent to give a synopsis of the plot. The principal characters, Dimmesdale, Chillingworth, Hester, and little Pearl, all indicate a firm grasp of individualities, although from the peculiar method of the story, they are developed more in the way of logical analysis than by events. The descriptive portions of the novel are in a high degree picturesque and vivid, bringing the scenes directly home to the heart and imagination, and indicating a clear vision of the life as well as forms of nature. Little Pearl is perhaps Hawthorne’s finest poetical creation, and is the very perfection of ideal impishness.
In common, we trust, with the rest of mankind, we regretted Hawthorne’s dismissal from the Custom House, but if that event compels him to exert his genius in the production of such books as the present, we shall be inclined to class the Honorable Secretary of the Treasury among the great philanthropists. In his next work we hope to have a romance equal to The Scarlet Letter in pathos and power, but more relieved by touches of that beautiful and peculiar humor, so serene and so searching, in which he excels almost all living writers.
Latter Day Pamphlets. Edited by Thomas Carlyle. No. 1. The Present Time. Boston: Phillips, Sampson & Co.
The reader of Carlyle will find nothing new in principle, and little new in phraseology, in this pamphlet, but it is still fresh and racy, and exhibits the author hammering as lustily as ever on his old anvil, with his old tools. The picture given of the poor simple Pope, with the New Testament in his hand—the pitying contempt with which Lamartine is alluded to—and the view of American democracy—will be found the most readable portions of the pamphlet. Lamartine, with his fine French phrases and sentimentalities, looks small enough as subjected to the surly tests of such an Icelandic critic as Carlyle—“a most eloquent, fair-spoken literary gentleman, whom thoughtless persons took for a prophet, priest, and heaven-sent evangelist, and whom a wise Yankee friend of mine discerned to be properly ‘the first stump-orator in the world, standing, too, on the highest stump for the time.’ A sorrowful spectacle to all men of reflection during the time he lasted, that poor M. de Lamartine; with nothing in him but melodious wind and soft sowder, which he and others took for something divine, and not diabolic! Sad enough: the eloquent latest impersonation of Chaos-come-again; able to talk for itself, and declare persuasively that it is Cosmos! However, you have but to wait a little, in such cases; all balloons do and must give up their gas in the pressure of things, and are collapsed in a sufficiently wretched manner before long.” The wise Yankee friend alluded to here is, we suppose, Mr. Emerson.
Carlyle, though he seems with De Tocqueville, to consider Democracy inevitable in Europe, still despises and hates it, and thinks that even in America it is nothing more than “Anarchy plus the constable.” His view of the United States, sufficiently contemptuous as a whole, closes with a bitter, sardonic jest, which we think will make the tour of the world, and injure us more than a thousand Trollopes and Basil Halls. He asks, “What great human soul, what great thought, what great, noble thing that one could worship, or loyally admire, has yet been produced there?” We might answer this question easily, but Carlyle answers it in a sufficiently provoking manner—“What have they done? They have doubled their population every twenty years. They have begotten, with a rapidity beyond recorded example, eighteen millions of the greatest bores ever seen in this world before—that, hitherto, is their feat in History.”
As regards Great Britain, Carlyle considers that the only practical way to remedy its evils, is to reject all cant about liberty and constitutional government, and enslave the lower classes. He accordingly recommends to the English government a plan of enforced labor, and puts an imaginary speech in the mouth of the Prime Minister, addressed to the “floods of Irish and other Beggars, the able-bodied Lackalls, nomadic or stationary, and the General Assembly, outdoor and indoor, of the Pauper Populations of these Realms.” This speech sounds well enough as a joke, provided a man can view a horde of men as he would so many horses, but it is ridiculous as a practical exposition of principles. It is certain that in one hour after a British minister had made such a declaration, army, navy, and party would melt away from him, and he would be on the gallows or in Bedlam. As a politician, Carlyle is little more than a philosopher of sneers and negations, without one positive practical principle. His idea of government implies a falsehood in fact, reposing on the monstrous assumption that civilized society is composed of a vast collection of men, little better than brutes, who would endure the tyranny of a smaller number of despots, little better than Carlyle.
Modern Literature and Literary Men: Being a Second Gallery of Literary Portraits. By George Gilfillan: New York: D. Appleton & Co. 1 vol. 12mo.
Mr. Emerson has remarked that “it makes a great difference in the force of a sentence whether a man be behind it or no.” We hardly think that there is a true man behind the best of Mr. Gilfillan’s sentences. He has a mind of much sensitiveness to his own merits, and some to the merits of others, and welters readily into the expression of both; but his inspiration seems to spring from presumption and whisky-punch. The reader is teased into attention by Mr. Gilfillan’s confident manner, without having his attention rewarded by intimacy with Mr. Gilfillan’s nature. There is merit in his occasional thoughts, and truth in his detached remarks, but the impression of the whole is of a slush of shining words. The subject is only an occasion for the author to pour out his own memories and fancies, and thus to exhibit himself. The movement of his mind is half-way between a strut and a reel, and his faculties are ever in a state of pert intoxication. He paws rather than handles a great poet, and we never witness his approach to a Milton or Wordsworth without a shudder. Having in his intellect no presiding will or even principle, his compositions are an anarchy of opinions and terms, without any intellectual conscientiousness or austere regard for the truth of things; and their popularity is the result of that sack of the dictionary which has made so much of our popular literature a mere debauch in words.