This book, the circumstances of its writing considered, is a literary curiosity. It contains seven hundred and twenty pages octavo, and it was composed in an incredibly short time, while the stomach of its author was digesting a series of stout English dinners, and his attention dissipating among speech-makings and speech-listenings, feasts, meetings and visits. Only a New York reporter could have achieved the feat. The faculty acquired by men of Mr. Stanley's trade, of acting with the intense decision and energy of great military captains, and then relating the action with the voluble unction of bar-rooms or political stumps, is a strange mixed faculty, and is found to perfection in the reporters' rooms of the New York Herald. The tale has the Herald's well-known style, and is a correspondent's letter in a state of amplification. It is always energetic, often tinged with real heroism and romance, and adorned sometimes with an ambition of classical allusions that resemble Egyptian jewels worn by a Nubian savage. It has not the least self-restraint or good taste, but it sounds fresh, genuine and sincere. It brings out with fine distinctness the feudal fidelity of a reporter-errant, whose whole soul is dyed with belief in the great establishment whose behest he obeys—one of the last refuges in which mediæval humility is to be found. As a part of the same habit of mind, Mr. Stanley shows a fine, literal, unquestioning championship of the object of his quest, Dr. Livingstone; but he seems to admire the doctor, after all, rather as an ornamental possession of the New York Herald. The great traveler's good-nature to Mr. Bennett, as a voluntary correspondent and coadjutor by brevet with the journal, disarms and enchants him: beginning with a prejudice, he ends by saying, "I grant he is not an angel, but he approaches to that being as near as the nature of a living man will allow." In every trait Stanley shows himself whole-souled, ignorant of half measures, unscrupulous, cruel on occasion, driving, positive, and furnished with a sure instinct of success. The book, from its hasty construction, admits many inconsistencies, the worst of which is its long tirade against the Geographical Society, nullified finally by gracious thanks for their medal; but it has the energetic virtue of a book written while memory was fresh, and is often truly dramatic and pictorial. It is the garrulous appendage of a strange and solid achievement, the feather-end of the arrow, which advertises the hit of the steel.
The Minnesinger of Germany. By A. E. Kroeger. New York: Hurd & Houghton.
Mr. Kroeger appears to have an antiquarian's thoroughness in his subject, and he has made it an interesting one to Western readers. But he has not succeeded in his translations, partly because he does not respect the usage and associations of the English words he rivets incompatibly together, and partly because success, even for a more poetical translator, is impossible in the premises. The authors of the Minnelay, in their elaborate rhyme-caprice, must have remained harmonious and lyrical, which is not the case with a version like this:
I look so Esau-like, perdu,
My hair hangs rough and unkempt. Hu!
Gentle Summer, where are you?
Ah, were the world no more so dhu!
Rather than bide in this purlieu,
Longer to stay I'll say, Adieu!
And go as monk to Toberlu.
Or like this, which Mr. Kroeger, without the fear of Maud's author before his eyes, compares to Tennyson:
Rosy-colored meadows
To shadows we see vanish everywhere,
Wood-birds' warbling dieth,
Sore-trieth them the snow of wintry year.
Woe, woe! what red mouth's glow
Hovers now o'er the valley?
Ah, ah, the hours of woe!
Lovers it doth rally
No more; yet its caress seems cosy.
These studies of intricate rhymes concealed in and terminating the lines are at least as hard for the reader as for the writer; yet we hope Mr. Kroeger will not lose his readers before they arrive at the historical and critical parts of the work, which are really valuable. The narrative of Ulrich von Lichtenstein of the thirteenth century, who sent one of his fingers to an exacting lady-love, and paraded through Europe on her quests disguised variously as King Arthur, Queen Venus or as a leper, is one which makes the maddest deeds of Quixote seem sane, although he was a true singer and an admired chevalier of his period. Gottfried von Strassburg, whose excellent poem of Tristan and Isolde inspires the writer with his least unhappy translation, leads the subject away from the mere love-carolers toward the authors of the metrical romances, the bards of Germany. It is at this point that he introduces some forcible criticisms on Tennyson's poetry of that character, and makes it evident that the Laureate might have improved his Idyls by extending his readings among the German chanters of Arthurian legend. The following seems practical and just: "If Tennyson was determined to make the love-passion the chief theme of his work, rather than the religious element of the St. Graal, he had at hand in one of his legends that very same relation between the sexes which existed between Queen Guinevere and Launcelot, and yet deprived in the essential point of all disgusting characteristics. It seems strange that the impropriety of making this adulterous connection between the king and queen the chief theme of his song should not have struck Tennyson when he dedicated his legends to the husband of Queen Victoria, even in that dedication drawing comparisons: strange that he should have taken no means to hide it, by at least bringing the king into some position of interest, whereas he is made so little of that he seems a mild, inoffensive, gentle soul, who is ready even to shake hands with the seducer of his wife." In this connection it will repay the reader to peruse, even if the version has not much charm, the long extract from Gottfried's Tristan, with an eye to the noble and knightly way in which the legend is conceived and taken up. Mr. Kroeger, who can give it no grace in translation, is a warm partisan in matters of melody and rhythm, appreciating Coleridge and Swinburne. Altogether, he is a sincere and useful interpreter between our public—rather careless of musty poetry—and the fine old German singers.
Books Received.
History of English Literature. By H. A. Taine. Abridged from the translation of H. van Laun, by John Fiske, Assistant Librarian of Harvard University. New York: Holt & Williams.