LITERATURE OF THE DAY.
Little Hodge. By the author of "Ginx's Baby." New York: Dodd & Mead.
The pamphlet has changed since the days of Swift and Dr. Johnson, and the modern method, which seeks to influence opinion by means of a short, pointed story, is certainly a gain in persuasiveness and pictorial vigor. It is hard to say what the dean of Saint Patrick's would have thought of The Battle of Dorking, or Ginx's Baby, or Lord Bantam, or Little Hodge, by the author of the last two of these. The dean's ferocity of expression no modern writer can allow himself; and the engine of a tremendous intellect is by no means apparent, as it was in his work, behind the efforts of our modern pamphleteers. But the nerves of pity, when exquisitely touched, are as apt to influence action as the feelings of hate or scorn, and Swift's proposal, from the depths of his bleeding heart, to fat and eat the Irish children, was no more adapted to produce reformed legislation than is the picture in Little Hodge of the ten deserted children starving under the thatch, the eldest girl frozen and pallid, the father shot by a gamekeeper, after having failed to support his motherless brood. Swift would have put in some matchless touches, but the picture seems adapted to our day of average, mechanical commonplace. It has a nerve of tenderness in it which will work upon the gentler souls of our communities. The father of Little Hodge is represented as an honest field-laborer, working for Farmer Jolly at nine shillings a week. The birth of his manikin baby and the accompanying death of his wife increase his cares past bearing. He thereupon commits three crimes in succession: he applies to Jolly for an increase of pay, he joins the agrarian movement of a year ago, and he attempts to run away and find work elsewhere. He is inexorably, minutely and witheringly punished for these several acts, and at last gets his only chance of comfort in a violent death, leaving his poor problems unsolved and his children naked and starving. Such a picture, if drawn by a foreigner, would arouse English indignation from shore to shore; but it is home-drawn. The only foreign delineation is in the author's Jehoiachin Settle, a stage Yankee, whose avocation is planting English children in Canada after the manner of Miss Rye. Settle is a preposterous failure, but every other limb of the writer's argument is strong and operative.
At His Gates. By Mrs. Oliphant. New York: Scribner, Armstrong & Co.
The author of Miss Marjoribanks, who is said to keep writing first a good novel and then a poor novel in careful alternation, will leave her friends in some doubt as to which category she means her last story to be placed in, for it is impossible to call it poor, and conscience-rending to call it good. It is long, and depicts many persons, of whom only one, Mr. Burton's cynical wife, is at all original. Mr. Burton aforesaid, a pompous business-man, places "at his gates," just outside his villa walls, the widow of a man whom he has used as a catspaw. The catspaw was a guileless artist, whom Burton has tempted to take a directorship in his bank when the latter was about to break, he himself retiring in time. The poor painter, in despair, jumps into the water, and his wife, who is proud and aristocratic, is condemned to be the pensioner and neighbor of a vulgar villain, every favor from whom is a conscious insult. Presently the tables are turned. Whether the asphyxiated artist really comes undrowned again, and returns rich from America, nothing could persuade us to tell, as we disapprove of the premature revelation of plots. But the tiresome Burton, at any rate, is bound to come to grief, and his headstrong young daughter to run off with his partner in atrocity, a man as old as her father, and his wife to adapt her cold philosophy to a tiny house in the best part of London. There is one scene, worth all the rest of the book, where this lady tries to bargain with her son, whom she is really fond of, for a manifestation of his love: she is about to yield to his opinion that she should give up her own private settlement to the creditors of her ruined husband, and then, just as she is consenting to this sacrifice, not disinterestedly but maternally, the boy blurts out his passion for a parvenu girl, the lost painter's daughter in fact—a rival whom he introduces to her in the moment of her supreme tenderness. She simply observes, "You have acted according to your nature, Ned—like the rest." If there were ten such chapters in the book as the one containing this scene, the novel would be something immortal, instead of what it is—railway reading of exceptional merit. It forms the first of a "Library of Choice Fiction" projected by Messrs. Scribner, Armstrong & Co., of which it forms a very encouraging standard of interest.
Memoirs of Madame Desbordes-Valmore. By Sainte-Beuve. With a Selection from her Poems. Translated by Harriet W. Preston. Boston: Roberts Brothers.
Sainte-Beuve, with whom the art of female biography seems to have died, and who has given us so many softly touched and profoundly understood portraits, is here engaged with one of his own personal friends and contemporaries. This is no study of a heroine long dead, and draped in the obsolete and winning costume of the Empire or the Revolution, but of an anxious woman concerned with the hardship and grime of our own day, "amid the dust and defilement of the city, on the highway, always in quest of lodgings, climbing to the fifth story, wounded on every angle." Only sympathy and a poetic touchstone could bring out the essence and sweetness of a nature so unhappily disguised; but Sainte-Beuve, discarding with a single gesture her penitential mask and hood, finds Madame Desbordes-Valmore "polished, gracious, and even hospitable, investing everything with a certain attractive and artistic air, hiding her griefs under a natural grace, lighted even by gleams of merriment." The poor details of her life he contrives to lose under a purposed artlessness of narrative and a caressing superfluity of loyal eulogy. We learn, however, that Mademoiselle Desbordes was born at Douai in 1786, and died in Paris in 1859. Daughter of a heraldic painter, the necessities of her family obliged her to make a voyage, as a child, to Guadeloupe, in the hope of receiving aid from a rich relative, and a little later to go upon the stage. In the provinces, and occasionally at Paris, she played in the role of ingénue with an exquisite address, succeeding because such a part was really a natural expression of herself: she thus won the abiding friendship of the great Mars, who turned to the young comédienne a little-suspected and tender side of her own character. Mademoiselle Desbordes' artistic charm was infinite, and she controlled with innocent ease the fountain of tears, whitening the whole parterre with pocket-handkerchiefs when she appeared as the Eveline, Claudine and Eulalie of French sentimental drama. But she felt keenly the social ostracism which was still strong toward the stage of 1800, and bewailed in her poetry the "honors divine by night allowed, by day anathematized." In 1817 she married an actor, M. Valmore, who subsequently disappeared into obscure official life, accepting with joy a position as catalogue-maker in the National Library. Her relatives, and even her eldest daughter, received small government favors, while her own little pension, when it came, was so distasteful that for a long time she could not bring herself to apply for the payments. She was a confirmed patriot, shrank from the favors of the throne, was ill for six weeks after Waterloo, and hailed with delight the revolution of '48, which for some time stopped her pension and impoverished her. After twenty years of the stage she retired into the greater privacy of literature, and published various collections of verse which struck a note of pure transparent sentiment rare in the epoch of Louis Philippe. She had, in an uncommon degree, the gift of intelligent admiration: her addresses to the great men of her time appear to be as far as possible from a spirit of calculation or self-interest, but they secured her an answering sympathy all the more valuable as it was never bargained for. Michelet said, "My heart is full of her;" Balzac wrote a drama at her solicitation; Lamartine, taking to himself a published compliment which she had intended for another, replied with twenty beautiful stanzas; Victor Hugo wrote to her, "You are poetry itself;" Mademoiselle Mars, when past the age of public favor, took from her the plain counsel to retire with kindness and actual thanks; Dumas wrote a preface for her; Madame Recamier obtained her pension; the brilliant Sophie Gay, now Madame Émile de Girardin, wrote of her poetry, "How could one depict better the luxury of grief?" M. Raspail, the austere republican, called her the tenth muse, the muse of virtue; and Sainte-Beuve himself, thinking less of her literary life than of her family life and manifold compassions, terms her the "Mater Dolorosa of poetry." His memoir, however, is valuable for its own grace as much as for the modest sweetness of its subject: without his friendly eloquence the name of Madame Desbordes-Valmore would not have got beyond a kind of personal circle of native admirers, nor the present translator have rendered for foreign ears the whispering story of her pure deeds and the plaintive numbers of her verse.
Memoir of a Brother. By Thomas Hughes, Author of "Tom Brown's School-days." London: Macmillan & Co.
Here is a book that was never meant to be dissected and analyzed by critics and reviewers. It is not hard to imagine the "discomfort and annoyance" which the writer has (he tells us) felt in consenting to give to the public a memoir compiled for a private family circle. Still, on the whole, it is altogether well, and there is good reason to call attention to it, for there is much benefit in the book for many readers. It is the loving record of a life that, from first to last, never challenged the world's attention—that was connected with no great movement or event, political, theological or social; but a life, all the same, that was lived with a truth, an earnestness and a straightness that won the affection and respect of all who came within its influence, and will, or we are much mistaken, glow warmly in the hearts and memories of just all whose eyes now light upon this story of it.
How many boys—ay, and grown men and women too—got up from Tom Brown's School-days consciously the better from the reading of it! But there was withal a vague feeling of incompleteness, an unsatisfied longing. The story left off too soon. One wanted to know more of Tom after his school-days. And then, it was, after all, a novel, a fiction. One would have liked to come across that Tom, and perhaps felt half afraid that he might not readily be found outside the cover of the volume. It is true that that longing to know something of the hero's after-life which is one accompaniment of the perusal of a thoroughly good work of fiction was, in the case of Tom Brown, partially gratified. Everybody had the chance of seeing Tom Brown at Oxford, and watching their old favorite's course through undergraduate days to that haven and final goal of fiction-writers, marriage. But there he is lost to view for good and all, and one is left to the amiable hypothesis that he lived happy all his days, without being either shown how he managed to do so, or taught how we might manage to do likewise.