Quakerism, our public-school system and our charities are the things which please Frau Migerka best, and impress her most favorably among our institutions. The skein of poetry which is so queerly entangled with the homespun yarn of the German nature is drawn out by the Floral Mission, the Children's Free Excursions and the Midnight Association: she declares that American women are truly admirable in their beneficence, and that the way in which the poor are cared for by private kindness and liberality, independent of the state, is one of the brightest sides of our social life. But does it come from a warmer benevolence, a deeper sense of brotherhood, than in other nations? She thinks not. Besides the great affluence of the country as a whole, there are three causes for American charity—vanity and the emulation of rival sects, the feeling of universal equality, which makes almsgiving in every form appear more as a duty than a benefit, and the afore-mentioned tendency to hypocrisy.
Whatever Frau Migerka finds good in America which is not hypocrisy or a relic of the past she ascribes to German influence. We are undoubtedly indebted to Germans for many excellent and pleasant usages, as well as for the rapid decay of that superstitious deference to women of which she complains. Our increasing love of music she rightly claims is due to her countrymen, but its primitive manifestations are all our own, and her sufferings from them form one of the few lively passages in the narrative. The piano in the steamboat saloon; the boarding-school girl—"dear Carry, who has got on so splendidly with her music in such a short time;" the Canadian rustic dandy, who only knows his notes; the long-haired travelling virtuoso with his violin (in all probability her own countryman, however); the head-waiter and his harp; the young bride in her smart clothes, with her thin voice and endless ballads; the exulting bridegroom, who accompanies her on a three-stopped tin trumpet,—form a Bedlamite procession through which our sympathies follow her; but in setting down this experience as American, although it occurred on a voyage up the Saguenay, she overlooks the proud fact that German influence must be spreading to Canada.
Frau Migerka's letters are not to be treated seriously, nor are they merely to be made fun of. They would not deserve more than a paragraph's notice but for their local interest, which will probably make them more entertaining to Philadelphians than they could have been to the female friend in Vienna. They are not written in an unfriendly spirit; yet nothing the lady met with wins cordial, hearty sympathy or approbation, her commendation of our charities being, as we have seen, qualified by the motives for them which she supposes. The one thing in America which she felt she should regret is Niagara, which is unlucky for her, as there are few things for which she could not more easily find a substitute. Of her reflections and aspirations—
Á la mode Germanorum,
With her sentimentalibus lachrymæ roar 'em,
And bathos and pathos delightful to see—
the following specimen will suffice: "Here flows the Wissahickon, silent, dark and motionless, as if dreaming of a bygone world and unable to awaken to the bustling present. Many an Indian maiden has beheld her brown visage and sparkling eyes mirrored in its crystals. Yet let no one trust the quiet of that river: a short space farther and the tranquil stream becomes a rushing mountain-torrent, the friendly vale grows wildly romantic, full of gloomy, mysterious beauty. How like is this water to many a human soul, which lives as serene and shut within itself as if it scarce knew what it is to feel, until passion sweeps over it and the whole being is changed and uplifts its voice loud and tumultuous!"
Jack. From the French of Alphonse Daudet, author of "Sidonie," "Robert Helmont," etc., by Mary Neal Sherwood, translator of "Sidonie." Boston: Estes & Lauriat.
Daudet's Sidonie in its English form certainly received in this country all the praise it deserved. It has now been followed by the same author's Jack, which has the additional advantage of its predecessor's success, and shares with it the benefit of careful translation. The story is an exceedingly pathetic one: it describes the career of the son of a frivolous woman, of not even doubtful reputation, from the time of his entering school until his death. This mother is a silly creature with an affectionate heart, who is really fond of her son and tries in her feeble way to do all she can for him. Being rebuffed in her attempt to place him in one school, she thrusts him into another, and leaves him to be first petted and then bullied by a French translation of Squeers and a crowd of his satellites. With one of the teachers, D'Argenton, the mother falls wildly in love, and they are married. Jack runs away from school to their home, and finds himself pursued by the malignity of his step-father, who finally sends him off to work in a machine-shop. The people he sees here are kind to him, but the work is much too hard for his delicate health, and, to make matters worse, he is offered, and accepts in his ignorance, a place as stoker in a large steamship. This is almost his death, but he manages to escape penniless from the wreck of the ship, and returns to Paris. He finds near by, in the suburb where he had formerly lived, the old doctor who had been kind to him, and his granddaughter, with whom he is soon in love. At this point it will be well to stop abridging the story, so that the reader may find out for himself the poor young fellow's subsequent misery. There are occasional slight relapses into the happiness he has at rare intervals already known in his life, and at the last he dies in the arms of the woman he loves; but the general impression is that of great wretchedness.
There is this relief to the somewhat monotonous gloom—that Jack's character is refined and strengthened by what he goes through; and there is very touching pathos in his treatment of his mother at all times, and especially when she puts an end to his hopes of saving enough money to marry on by returning to live with him. Yet it is a question whether there is not a wanton and wilful accumulation of wretchedness about the poor fellow's head, which, of course, does its allotted work in depressing the reader, and so makes the book effective, but also, it may be felt, offensive as regards literary art. A cool inventory of Jack's causes for happiness and sorrow might leave the reader undecided about the nature of the book, and its mournfulness might be matched by that of many another novel which is considered to be only allowably pathetic; but this one is written with such virulence, so to speak, or at least with such manifest design to accumulate miseries, that the reader's soul revolts within him at being put on the rack in this violent way. What makes it more noticeable is, that this is a French novel which is thus marked by what are more distinctly the qualities of an English novel. In French novels we expect to find a more temperate method of writing and the absence of such heat as Daudet shows, which is of common occurrence in those English novels where no pains are spared to show the good man's virtues and the bad man's faults. Mr. Carker, in Dombey and Son, may serve as an example of the way this is sometimes done. Daudet is quite as energetic in pointing obvious morals. The way he impales D'Argenton on the point of his pen and spares no pains in holding him up to ridicule is an instance of this, while a much clearer one, and one wholly unredeemed by such permissible satire as at times redeems the portrait of D'Argenton, is the account of the school to which Jack is sent. There is no air of reality in the account of the little king of Dahomey who is Jack's sole friend in that wretched place. Then, too, the poor silly mother can never appear but the author, besides making her talk and act like the foolish creature she is, must be for ever whispering in the reader's ear that she is a great fool and a frivolous creature. This over-violent method defeats its own object, and surprises and pains the reader instead of gratifying him. Nothing is taken for granted; we are not left to perceive anything by our own unaided vision; everything is made as plain for us as if it were written in words of one syllable. But that way of writing palls at length, and calls forth a feeling of disappointment with what is in some respects a very able novel.
X. Doudan, Mélanges et Lettres. Avec une introduction par M. le comte d'Haussonville, et des notices par MM. de Sacy et Cuvillier-Fleury. Tome III. Paris: Calmann Lévy.
Only a year ago two volumes of M. Doudan's correspondence were given to the public—they received notice in these pages,[10] it will be remembered—with a conditional promise of more in case the first should be duly appreciated. Fortunately, these letters were widely read and heartily admired, so that now we have this third volume, with further selections up to the year 1860, and the promise of the speedy appearance of a fourth, to contain letters after that date and Doudan's essay on the "Revolutions of Taste." There need be no fear in any one's mind that all the best letters were taken for the first publication, and that the editor has been obliged to swell the pages of this volume with Doudan's hasty, uninteresting notes. Far from it: everything that Doudan wrote had, as some one has well said, the flavor of perfection: he never wrote letters as one writes prize essays, cramming into some of them all his wit and wisdom, leaving his less fortunate correspondents to content themselves with the meagre statement of facts. All the qualities that were to be noticed in the volumes that first appeared are to be found here; and they are qualities of the rarest sort. His method of expressing himself is simply delightful, his French is most charming, and his wit and humor must fascinate those who are capable of appreciating anything outside of mathematical exactness of statement. Critics have been by no means unanimous in his praise: some have complained that he wrote his letters with the direct intention of pleasing—not so much those to whom the letters were avowedly sent as deceived posterity. The only reason for this ill-natured supposition would seem to be that the letters were too good for private correspondence; which is a strong argument in favor of reading them. Others—and they are French critics—despise him because he was a friend of the duc de Broglie, but in the course of time this will doubtless be forgiven him. Some, too, object to his humor. M.G. Monod, for instance, who is a very intelligent man, says in the Academy that Doudan "makes fun of everything, even when fun is quite out of place. Even in the most tragic occurrences he finds occasion for wit." But, after all, it is a way humorists have: the only remedy for such levity would seem to be decapitation or solitary confinement in prison without pen, ink and paper. Some are so captious that they say Doudan was too delicate and refined a critic for the crude world he lived in. But what is the use of a critic who praises what is worthless, and has no word of encouragement for what is good and deserving of praise? The value of a man like Doudan is that he rises above the common herd by the exactest discrimination: he never follows the multitude in adoring false gods, but is true to his own delicate taste. If common sense is the power of applying the judgment to trifles as well as to important matters, good taste in literature is the habit of applying the judgment to slight as well as to serious questions. Doudan's taste is most refined; that is to say, he is not influenced by general rumor, but he examines everything on its own merits, overlooking nothing, and appreciating even slight matters without placing them above things of real importance.