LITERATURE OF THE DAY.
The Cossacks: A Tale of the Caucasus in 1852. By Count Leo Tolstoy. Translated from the Russian by Eugene Schuyler. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.
Russian novels, to judge from the specimens that have been presented to English readers, are prose poems rather than novels in the English sense of the word, dealing more with poetic phases than with those details and events of ordinary life which go to make up English and American novels of the better class. With whatever elaboration of plot or the reverse, they are distinctly artistic compositions, in which every part is in unison with a dominant idea, and their effect, not being scattered or diluted, is single and more or less forcible. Their method is the reverse of analytical. Nothing, for example, could be further from the pregnant sentences, the exhaustive analysis, of George Eliot, whose books are freighted with the accumulated and ever-accumulating wisdom of a life, than the poetic suggestiveness of Tourgueneff's creations, in which a wealth of material is sacrificed to artistic perfection, and the highest thought often seems to lie between the lines. George Eliot lays bare the innermost souls of her characters—we enter fully into their lives and thoughts: with Tourgueneff's it is left to a glance of the eye, a few passionate words, to reveal the mind within. In The Cossacks this absence of analysis is still more apparent. It is a picture of a curious and simple race, painted, not from within, but from the outside or Russian point of view. But here is no refining, no affectation of pastoral simplicity. The Cossacks is distinctly a primitive poem, one which can scarcely be classed either as idyl or epic, though, in spite of its scenes being mainly rural, it perhaps approaches more nearly to the epic. There is an Homeric simplicity in its descriptions of half-drunken warriors with their superb physique, their bravado, their native dignity and singleness of character. Marianka, the beautiful heroine, passes from one picture to another in her quiet, regular toil. Whether, clad in a loose skirt of pink cotton, she drives the oxen or piles the kizyak or dung-fuel along the fence with her hoe, or in holiday attire mingles with other girls at evening, she is always a subject for the artist's brush. What thoughts occupied this stately figure, in what way ideas circulated in her kerchiefed head, we are left to divine. Her conduct is a little enigmatical. Had she any thought of marrying Olenin, or were her actions dictated by coquetry accompanied by a spice of mischief? We are inclined to the latter opinion.
The story of The Cossacks exhibits a close similarity to that of a recent English (or rather Irish) novel, The Hon. Miss Ferrard. Both books transport a man of culture to the midst of a rude and more or less primitive people: in each, the hero, smitten with the beauty of a native girl (and in Olenin's case with the wild freshness of the life), is seized with a desire to throw off his old life, with its polish, its intellectual disappointments and its limitations, and become a primitive man among primitive men. In both, the moral and end are substantially the same. The girl's affections are bestowed naturally in her own class, and the disconsolate urban discovers that a wide divergence of feelings and sympathies, a gulf not to be voluntarily bridged over, lies between the man of the world and the illiterate peasant; that the results of habit are not lightly to be got rid of; and that a happiness which lies below us in the social scale may be as unattainable as higher prizes. The relations of the romantic and dreamy Olenin to his barbaric neighbors are finely portrayed. Nothing could be more natural than his presenting the young Cossack Lukashka with a horse in a fit of generous enthusiasm, and the latter's astonished and suspicious reception of the gift. Being utterly unable to divine its motive, he suspects some lurking design of evil, and regards the generosity as a deceit practised upon him.
But any comparison with an English book would but faintly illustrate The Cossacks. In the novelty of its scenes and characters, in its poetic simplicity of form and its unconscious picturesqueness, it is widely different from anything in our literature. It has a certain coldness, the coldness of an epic; for passion, though not lacking, is kept in abeyance in its pages, which are indeed chiefly filled with pictures, a set of literary chef d'œuvres, drawn with great power and vividness and full, of color and poetic feeling. That the book should produce such an impression in a translation so uncouth and blundering as Mr. Schuyler has given us is a strong testimony to its merit. It is usually thought that a translator ought to be tolerably familiar with two languages, but readers of The Cossacks will be forced to doubt if Mr. Schuyler is acquainted with one.
Molly Bawn: A Novel. By the author of "Phyllis." Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co.
Molly Bawn disarms criticism by its exuberant gayety, its lusciousness of description, its imperturbable good-humor and self-satisfaction, and its utter absence of responsibility. What can an auld critic do wi' a young book? And such a very young book!—so full of sweets and prettinesses, of audacious coquetries, and of jokes delivered with such a simple and fatuous joy that the meed of our laughter cannot be denied them! If we were to suggest that there is rather a surfeit of these good things, our objection would be liable to be set aside as the acrid cavilling of one whose taste for sweetmeats has been vitiated by dyspeptic tendencies. We can only recommend the book with hearty good-will to those whose sweet tooth still preserves its enamel, congratulating them upon the acquisition of a novel which may be read without any of those harassing perplexities or dismal ideas in which petulant authors embroil our tender susceptibilities—a novel in which the utmost pathos is in the little poutings of true lovers; in which kissing goes by favor, and favor is lavishly distributed; in which ugliness is the only crime, and virtue, or rather beauty (which is the same thing), is unfailingly triumphant. The stock scenery and properties, together with the usual characters of a society novel appear in Molly Bawn; and the personages are invested, if not with the divine gift of life, with a certain wire-strung movement which does not lack vivacity, and in some cases novelty; the villain, for example, having but little employment in his original capacity, and being utilized as a laughing-stock for the amusement of his victims. Even the grammar of the book can hardly be taken au sérieux. It exhibits a serene carelessness of rules, with a tendency to bulls which suggests that the heroine's nationality is also that of the author. A sentence in which we are told of a house that it is "larger, at first sight, than it in reality is," strikes a blow at the very essence of things, and those much-abused words will and would usurp the place of their relatives, shall and should, with a uniformity that proves the absence of negligence.
Samuel Johnson. By Leslie Stephen. (English Men of Letters, edited by John Morley.) New York: Harper & Brothers.