Some one has said that he who first swallowed an oyster was a brave man, but many will agree that the one who first devoured a shrimp bodily was still braver. Not but that the shrimp may possess desirable nutritive qualities—may indeed be exceedingly palatable to those whose imaginations are proof against the sight of its jointed legs and arms and its ugly physiognomy. But in India, at least, where dead human bodies are often seen floating down the sacred Ganges literally covered with these crustaceans, the appetite for them must be sensibly affected. Many of Her Majesty's subjects there will never touch a shrimp after once witnessing this spectacle in the Ganges. The animal, however, may not be the common shrimp (Crangon vulgaris).
Catching shrimps for market is quite an extensive industry, and in France mostly pursued by women, who wade knee deep into the water, pushing before them a net sewed around a hoop at the end of a long stick. A pannier or bag tied around the waist receives the animals from the net. In winter the shrimp retires from the beach into deeper water. It is then caught in boats with nets, made now of galvanized wire, which resists the action of the sea-water and is a great improvement upon the old twine net. In feeding, the shrimp grasps its minute prey by the short rake-like appendages between the legs proper and the tail, and passes it along up to its claws, and then to the mouth. These appendages serve also as a brush when the shrimp makes its toilet. To do this it stands as high as it can on the tips of its long legs, and bends its head and claws under its body, and when these are duly brushed the lobes of the tail are subjected to the same process.
LITERATURE OF THE DAY.
The Poetical Works of William Blake, Lyrical and Miscellaneous. Edited, with a prefatory memoir, by William Michael Rossetti. Boston: Roberts Brothers.
The Poems of William Blake, comprising Songs of Innocence and of Experience, together with Poetical Sketches and some Copyright Poems not in any other edition. London: Basil Montagu Pickering.
It does not add to the mere delight of reading Blake's poems to know that in point of time they preceded the writings of Cowper, Wordsworth and Burns, but assuredly it enhances our estimation of their merit, and should have great weight in determining the literary rank of their author. His first volume, called Poetical Sketches, printed only for private circulation after lying for six years in manuscript, appeared in 1783, and then only by dint of the kindly efforts of influential and prosperous friends, notably Flaxman the sculptor. The Sketches were written between the ages of twelve and twenty. The Songs of Innocence and Experience appeared between 1787 and 1794, and were united in one volume in the latter year. It is by the poems contained in these two volumes, although he published or left in manuscript many other compositions, most of which are collected in one or the other of the editions now before us, that he is best known. During his lifetime his writings never achieved any general literary success. It fared with his poems as with his paintings, only in a minor degree: they were highly esteemed by the initiated, by his personal friends, by a few men whose keen natural perception of genius enabled them to discern it in spite of the eccentricity and inequality of his work; but to the general public, on whose recognition depends the reputation of the artist, his verses as well as his drawings were a sealed, or at least an enigmatical, book. His verses have no literary atmosphere about them: they smell neither of the midnight oil nor of that smoke of fame the fumes of which Byron tells us "are frankincense to human thought." They seem to have been written as spontaneously as a bird might warble on a bough, and no bird was ever more careless of auditors than Blake. It was not until twelve years after his death that a selection from his poems was given to the general public by the elder Pickering, and twenty-four years after (eleven years ago) a more general interest was created in his work, both as artist and poet, by a long and elaborate biography of him written by Mr. Gilchrist, and accompanied by a selection from his poems made by Mr. Rossetti. Subsequent to this publication appeared a voluminous critical essay on his genius by Mr. Algernon Charles Swinburne. The former of these two books was calculated to induce and foster a more general knowledge and appreciation of Blake's poetry. We can hardly say as much for Mr. Swinburne's essay. The exaggerated and fantastical epithets of praise, the involved and overloaded method of criticism, would have the effect upon most readers of creating a distaste in advance for the writings so heralded. The "Prefatory Memoir" prefixed by Mr. W. M. Rossetti to the most recent edition of the poems is of a different character, and may be commended to all readers who are about to make acquaintance with them.
But the best and most efficient introduction that a true poet can have is the general publication of his works. Let them speak for themselves to lovers of poetry, and no other prophet or expounder is needed. This is no place for extended comment on Blake's characteristics as a poet. His best songs are worthy to be ranked with those of the early Elizabethan dramatists, and they are not like them as a copy is like an original, but rather resemble them as the inspirations of a kindred genius. To find the superiors of some of Blake's songs we must go to Shakespeare. The faults of his best poems are always superficial, and often mere errors of carelessness and of the absence of literary workmanship, but the hand that strikes the keynote is the hand of a master. Such pieces as the "Lines to the Evening Star," the songs beginning "Memory, hither come," "How sweet I roamed from field to field!" "Love and Harmony combine," and the "Address to the Muses," in the Sketches, are full of melody and sweetness, and have a certain lyrical perfection in which Blake excels; while in the Songs of Innocence the poems called "Night" and "Ah Sunflower!" seem to be equally beautiful. "A Little Boy Lost," in the Songs of Experience, is perhaps the best known of all the poems, and is quoted, with an unlicensed change of title, in Mr. Emerson's Parnassus. The disorder of Blake's mind, which was a very real and positive fact, undoubtedly had a detrimental effect on his work, both in art and literature; and there is often a sense of "sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh" as he touches on some one of the subjects which were potent to disturb his brain. But when he sings for the love of singing, with no memory of the outer world and its terrible problems, the solving of which lay heavy on his heart and brain, then he is all sweetness, melody and harmony, and gives us not only the delight of his exquisite verses, but that other joy that comes from the sense of breathing an atmosphere of devotion, purity, and genial sweetness.
Les Pléiades. Par le comte de Gobineau. Stockholm and Paris.
The author of this book has traveled extensively, and has been a keen observer of men and manners, as well as a diligent student of history and ethnography. He has represented his government in countries so remote and contrasted as Persia and Sweden, has made antiquarian researches in the islands of the Mediterranean, has visited parts of America, and has won reputation as a scholar and writer by a number of works on such abstruse questions as Oriental philosophy and religion, the cuneiform inscriptions and the distinctions of race. The present book is merely a novel, yet it was clearly intended to embody the deepest and maturest thoughts of the author in regard to "the proper study of mankind," both individually and collectively. The nature of man, how it is affected by diversity of circumstances, by nationality, descent, rank and occupation, by the relations of class to class, of society to the individual, of personal will to a controlling destiny,—this may be said to form the motive of the volume; and though such action as there is in it takes place chiefly at the court of one of the minor states of Germany, this narrow field was evidently selected on a similar principle to that of the Greek drama, with its "unities" of time and place and the narratives and explanations of the Chorus. The discussions in the book embrace all the problems of history, the characters are of different nationalities, and are all enriched by the fruits of culture and travel, and the story is a series of crucial tests by which, as we are to infer, the author's theories are verified. This plan is not absolutely novel. Goethe had adopted a still slighter though far happier framework for his ripest thoughts and profoundest observations. Yet even Goethe's exquisite art was at fault when he sought to extend the original design; and if the first part of Wilhelm Meister is the most perfectly constructed work in the whole range of literature, the second is merely a heap of precious materials, with here and there such groupings and dispositions as indicate how details had been conceived, while the general plan refused to shape itself in the master's mind. Count Gobineau's failure is of a different kind. His story is not only grotesque in construction, but inartistic in all its parts. In every group of incidents there is the same lack of harmony and completeness as in the adaptation and subordination of each to the whole. Nor, with all the author's knowledge of life and of men, has he succeeded in creating characters recognizable as life-like and as veritable originals. Single features are well drawn, certain temperaments are keenly analyzed, but the whole conception is never firm, consistent and complete. The simplest, like old Lanze and his daughter Lina, are intrinsically commonplace; the most elaborated, like Madame Tonska and the duke Jean-Théodore, waver between familiar types and questionable shadows; and those that, like Laudon and the Gennevilliers, promise better results, are imperfectly developed. Such defects would be fatal in a novel of the ordinary kind. But this is not a novel of the ordinary kind. The real staple of the book consists not of the incidents and the characters, but of discussions and reflections which sparkle with wit, with shrewd observation, and with ingenious if not absolutely profound speculation. There are a hundred little essays in it, compact with thought and bristling with epigram, that have an eighteenth-century flavor, and suffuse with a sauce piquante what would otherwise have been a flavorless dish. Whether the theory from which the title of the book is derived, and which is expounded at length in the opening chapters, would bear a rigid examination, or was even meant to be taken seriously, may be doubted. It is, at all events, very poorly illustrated by the characters and events selected to exemplify it.