O trefoil, sparkling on the rainy plain,
O rainbow, with three colors after rain,
Shine sweetly: thrice my love hath smiled on me.
The allegory by which Gareth's four opponents are made to form a sort of stumbling succession representing Morn, Noon, Evening, and Night or Death, is hardly worth the introduction, but it is not insisted upon: the last of these knights, besieging Castle Perilous in a skull helmet, and clamoring for marriage with Lynette's sister Lyonors, turns out to be a large-sized, fresh-faced and foolish boy, who issues from the skull "as a flower new blown," and fatuously explains that his brothers have dressed him out in burlesque and deposited him as a bugbear at the gate. This is not very salutary allegorizing, but it is soon over, and the poem closed, leaving a pleasant perfume in the reader's mind of chivalry, errantry and the delicious days before the invention of civilization.
Handbook of the History of Philosophy. By Dr. Albert Schwegler. Translated arid annotated by James Hutchison Stirling, LL.D. New York: Putnam.
Spinoza teaches that "substance is God;" but, says Mr. Matthew Arnold, "propositions about substance pass by mankind at large like the idle wind, which mankind at large regards not: it will not even listen to a word about these propositions, unless it first learns what their author was driving at with them, and finds that this object of his is one with which it sympathizes." There is no way of getting the multitude to listen to Spinoza's Ethics or Plato's Dialectics but something is gained when a man of science like Dr. Schwegler happens to possess the gift of fluent and easy statement, and can pour into a work like the present, which is the expansion of a hasty encyclopaedia article, the vivacity of current speech, and the impulse which gives unity to a long history while it excludes crabbed digressions. It happens that the American world received the first translation of Schwegler's History of Philosophy; and it may be asked, What need have Americans of a subsequent version by a Scotch doctor of laws? The answer is, that Mr. Seelye's earlier rendering was taken from a first edition, and that the present one includes the variations made in five editions which have now been issued. Even on British ground the work thus translated has reached three editions, and the multitude of "mankind at large," hearing of these repeated editions in Edinburgh and of twenty thousand copies sold in Germany, may begin to prick up its ears, and to think that this is one of the easily-read philosophies of modern times, of which Taine and Michelet have the secret. It is not so: abstractions stated with scientific precision in their elliptic slang or technicality are not and cannot be made easy reading: the strong hands of condensation which Schwegler pressed down upon the material he controlled so perfectly have not left it lighter or more digestible. The reader of this manual, for instance, will be invited to consider the Eleatic argumentation that nothing exists but Identity, "which is the beënt, and that Difference, the non-beënt, does not exist; and therefore that he must not only not go on talking about difference, but that he must not allude to difference as being anything but the non-beënt; for if he casts about for a synonym, and arrives at the notion that he may say non-existent for non-beënt, he is abjectly wrong, for beënt does not mean existent, and non-beënt non-existent, but it must be considered that the beënt is strictly the non-existent, and the existent the non-beënt." Such are the amenities of expression into which an eloquent metaphysician, trying his best to speak popularly, is led. Yet the book is readable to that orderly application of the mind which such studies exact, and is the firmest and strictest guide now speaking our English tongue. Its steady attention to the business in hand, from the pre-Socratic philosphies down through the great age of the Greek revival, to Germany and Hegel at last, is most sustained and admirable. Indeed, few thinkers of Anglo-Saxon birth are able even to praise such a book as it deserves. The only real impediment to its acceptance by scholars of our race is that its attention to modern philosophy is rather partial, the French and the Germans getting most of the story, and English philosophers like Locke and Hume receiving scant attention, while Paley is not recognized. This class of omissions is attended to by the Scotch translator in a mass of annotations which lead him into a broad and interesting view of British philosophy, in the course of which he has some severe reflections on the ignorance of Mr. Lewes and Mr. Mill. On account of these valuable notes, and also for the alterations made by Schwegler himself, we feel that we must invite American scholars possessing the Seelye translation to replace it or accompany it by this present version, which is a cheap and compassable volume.
Joseph Noirel's Revenge. By Victor Cherbuliez. Translated from the French by Wm. F. West, A. M. New York: Holt & Williams.
M. Victor Cherbuliez belongs to a Genevese family long and honorably connected with literature in the capacity of publishers both at Paris and Geneva. It is in the latter town and the adjacent region that the scene of the present story—the first, we believe, of the author's works which has found its way into English—is laid; and much of its charm is derived from the local coloring with which many of the characters and incidents are invested. Even the quiet home-life of so beautiful and renowned a place cannot but be tinted by reflections from the incomparable beauties of its surroundings, and from the grand and vivid passages of its singularly picturesque history. The subordinate figures on the canvas have accordingly an interest greater than what arises from their commonplace individualities and their meagre part in the action—like barndoor fowls pecking and clucking beside larger bipeds in a walled yard steeped in sunlight. But the sunlight which gives a delicious warmth and brightness to the earlier chapters of the novel is soon succeeded by gloom and tempest. The interest is more and more concentrated on the few principal persons; and the action, which at the outset promised to be light and amusing, with merely so much of tenderness and pathos as may belong to the higher comedy, becomes by degrees deeply tragical, and ends in a catastrophe which is saved from being horrible and revolting only by the shadows that forecast and the softening strains that attend it. In point of construction and skillful handling the story is as effective as French art alone could have made it, while it has an under-meaning rendered all the more suggestive by being left to find its way into the reader's reflections without any obvious prompting. The heroine, sole child of a prosperous bourgeois couple, stands between two lovers—one the last relic of a noble Burgundian family; the other a workman with socialist tendencies. Marguerite Mirion is invested with all the fascination which beauty of face, simplicity of mind, purity of soul, sweetness of disposition and joyousness of spirit can impart. Yet she is, and feels herself to be, entirely bourgeoise, longing for no ideal heights, worldly or spiritual, ready for all ordinary duties, content with simple and innocent pleasures, rinding in the life, the thoughts, the occupations and enjoyments of her class all that is needed to make the current of her life run smoothly and to satisfy the cravings of her bright but gentle nature. It is in simple obedience to the will of her parents that she marries Count Roger d'Ornis, and is carried from her happy home at Mon-Plaisir to a dilapidated castle in the Jura, where there are no smiling faces or loving hearts to make her welcome—where, on the contrary, she meets only with haughty, spiteful or morose looks and a chilling and gloomy atmosphere. It is from sheer necessity that she accepts the aid of Joseph Noirel, her father's head-workman, whose ardent spirit, quickened by the consciousness of talent, but rendered morbid by the slights which his birth and position have entailed, has been plunged into blackest night by the loss of the single star that had illumined its firmament. Count Roger is not wholly devoid of honor and generosity; but he has no true appreciation of his wife, and will sacrifice her without remorse to save his own reputation. Joseph, on the other hand, is ready to dare all things to protect her from harm; but he cannot forego the reward which entails upon her a deeper misery. It is Marguerite alone who, in the terrible struggle of fate and of clashing interests and desires, rises to the height of absolute self-abnegation; and this not through any sudden development of qualities or intuitions foreign to her previous modes of thought, but by the simple application of these to the hard and complicated problems which have suddenly confronted her. Herein lies the novelty of the conception and the lesson which the author has apparently intended to convey. See, he seems to say, how the bourgeois nature, equally scorned by the classes above and below it as the embodiment of vulgar ease and selfishness, contains precisely the elements of true heroism which are wanting alike in those who set conventional rules above moral laws and in those who revolt against all restrictions. The book is thus an apology for a class which is no favorite with poets or romancers; but, as we have said, the design is only to be inferred from the story, and may easily pass unnoticed, at least with American readers. The character of Noirel is powerfully drawn, but it is less original than that of the heroine, belonging, for example, to the same type as the hero of Le Rouge et le Noir—"ce Robespierre de village," as Sainte-Beuve, we believe, calls him.