[10] See number for October, 1876.
Here is a bit of his criticism: "You were quite right to be irritated with this Fanny. I had to see what success Madame Bovary had with all the clever people of society to believe in the success of Fanny. His emphatic and declamatory style has helped the author in putting into his book more shocking and absurd things than there were in the vile anecdotes about Madame Bovary. If a young buffalo in the Pontine Marshes were to write his memoirs, with a detailed account of his loves, his jealousy, his excesses and his despair, he would doubtless give expression to the same sentiment of moral good and evil among buffaloes, but he would not exaggerate the fashion of description in such a ridiculous way. The genuineness of his feelings would prevent his seeing a number of things which do not concern his passions. He would not describe, while sharpening his horns for the fight, the little field-flowers, which he could not notice, nor the village curé's wig, which does not concern him at all; but this small and numerous school of self-styled realists has, in my opinion, so little keen feeling and true passion that it is like the mathematician who wrote from his mother's deathbed, 'I lost my mother this day at twenty-two and one-half minutes after eight [mean time].' The passions are not so accurate, and do not see so many things."
Here is an extract from a letter written in the perturbed days of 1848: "In the country, whence I write, there is no news. The vervain, the heliotropes, are in flower, as they are every year, and the squirrels run up and down the trees without asking what is going on in Paris. Not one has subscribed to the most insignificant newspaper. By the way, do you suppose there are social disturbances among the beasts of the air, or of the fields, or of the waters? That is not impossible, and I should be very sorry if it were the case: it pleases my imagination more to think that the squirrels are living to-day just as they lived in the garden of Eden; but I have already told you that at a not very remote period a race of rats, stronger than those who dwelt here, came by chance on a merchant vessel from the East Indies, and drove out all the former population of rats that had lived under our old kings. The ancient race of rats is to be found only in isolated farms. We have no longer the rats that gnawed the cloaks of the knights of the Middle Ages. Ask some professor of the Jardin des Plantes what he thinks of it.
"When I say that everything is quiet here, I am wrong, for the men at least were very uneasy regarding what might take place on the 14th of July. It was whispered that there was confusion in the capital, and when the diligence passed by a great many small land-owners were on their doorsteps waiting for their newspaper, while their cows were feeding quietly in the meadow, not suspecting that there was a Ledru-Rollin or a Louis Blanc in the world who wanted to begin the world over again on a better model. This eagerness to know what is going on in Paris is a customary sign of disturbance. At present one is naturally anxious to know whether the little field one has planted with handsome trees will by to-morrow's sunrise belong to some obscure soldier of the obscure Sobrier. Formerly they were the veterans of Sylla or of Cæsar, at least, who took the house of Virgil, but now-a-days they are the veterans of Sobrier who threaten the house of Victor Hugo. The times are deteriorating in every direction."
Further extracts might be made in abundance to show the humor that played over not the surface of things, but their inmost depths, and threw such a clear light on all sorts of topics; but the reader would do best to add this volume to the other two, and judge for himself how great is the merit of these letters, how rare the intelligence they show, how fine the appreciation of literature and of men which breathes through them all. They are books for all time.
The Wings of Courage: Stories for American Boys and Girls. From the French, by Mary E. Field. With Illustrations. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons.
Lotus Land, and Other Poems. By G.S. Ladson. Cincinnati: Peter G. Thomson.
The Young Magdalen, and Other Poems. By Francis S. Smith. With Portrait of the Author. Philadelphia: T.B. Peterson & Brothers.