REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.
America and her Commentators: With a Critical Sketch of Travel in the United States. By Henry T. Tuckerman. New York: Charles Scribner. 8vo. pp. 460.
If a little late, we are none the less sincere in extending to this timely and excellent work a hearty welcome. It is full of varied interest and valuable instruction. It is equally adapted to attract and edify our own citizens, and to guide and inform those foreigners who wish to know the history and facts of American society. The object of the work is to present a general view of the traits and transitions of our country, as they are reflected in the records made at different periods by writers of various nationalities, and to discuss, in connection with this exhibition, the temper and value of the principal critics of our civilization, emphasizing and indorsing their correct observations, pointing out and rectifying their erroneous ones. There are obviously many great advantages in thus reverting to the past and examining the present of American institutions and life by the help of the literature of travel in America,—a literature so richly suggestive, because so constantly modified by the national peculiarities and personal points of view of the writers. Mr. Tuckerman has improved these advantages with care and tact. In the preface and introduction, characterized by an ample command of the resources of the subject, easy discursiveness and lively criticism, he puts the reader in possession of such preliminary information as he will like or need to have. The body of the work begins with a portrayal of America as it appeared to its earliest discoverers and explorers. The second chapter is devoted to the Jesuit missionaries, who, reviving the spirit of the Crusades, plunged into the wilderness to convert the aborigines to Christianity, and, inspired by the wonders of the virgin solitude, became the pioneer writers of American travels. Chapters third and fourth deal with the French travellers who have visited and written on our country, from Chastellux to Laboulaye. The similar list of British travellers and writers is presented and discussed in the fifth and sixth chapters. Chapter seventh is taken up with "English Abuse of America"; and the subject has rarely been treated so fitly and firmly, with such a blending of just severity and moderation. "Cockneyism," Mr. Tuckerman says, "may seem not worthy of analysis, far less of refutation; but, as Sydney Smith remarked, 'In a country surrounded by dikes, a rat may inundate a province'; and it is the long-continued gnawing of the tooth of detraction, that, at a momentous crisis, let in the cold flood at last upon the nation's heart, and quenched its traditional love." The eighth chapter depicts the views and characterizes the qualities of the Northern European authors who have travelled in America and written concerning us. In the ninth chapter our Italian visitors and critics are treated in like manner. And in the tenth chapter the same task is performed for the Americans themselves who have journeyed through and written on their own country. Then follows the conclusion, recapitulating and applying the results of the whole survey. And the work properly closes with an index, furnishing the reader facilities for immediate reference to any passage, topic, or name he wishes to find.
For the task he has here undertaken Mr. Tuckerman is well qualified by the varied and comprehensive range of his knowledge and culture, the devotion of his life to travel, art, and study. His pages not only illustrate, they also vindicate, the character and claims of American nationality. He shows that "there never was a populous land about which the truth has been more generalized and less discriminated." His descriptions of local scenery and historic incidents recognize all that is lovely and sublime in our national landscapes, all that is romantic or distinctive in our national life. His humane and ethical sympathies are ready, discriminating, and generous; his approbations and rebukes, vivid and generally rightly applied. These and other associated qualities lend interest and value to the biographic sketches he presents of the numerous travellers and authors whose works pass in review. The pictures of many of these persons—such as Marquette, Volney, D'Allessandro, Bartram—are psychological studies of much freshness and force.
Biographical Sketches of Loyalists of the American Revolution: With an Historical Essay. By Lorenzo Sabine. Two Volumes. Boston: Little, Brown, & Co. 8vo. pp. 608, 600.
Mr. Sabine has attempted in these volumes to present in a judicial spirit a chapter of our Revolutionary history which usually bears the most of passion in its recital,—believing, as he does, that impartiality is identical with charity, in dealing with his theme. The first edition of his work, in a single volume, has been before the public seventeen years. The zeal and fidelity of his labor have been well appreciated. So far as his purpose has involved a plea or an apology for the Loyalists of the American Revolution, his critics who have at all abated their commendation of him have challenged him on the side where he might most willingly have been supposed to err, that of an excess of leniency. As to the class of men with whom he deals generally in his introductory essay, and individually in the elaborate biographical sketches which follow, the same difficulty presents itself which is encountered in all attempts to canvass the faults or the characteristics of any body of men who bear a common party-name or share a common opinion, while in the staple of real virtue or vice, of honor or baseness, of sincerity or hypocrisy, they may represent the poles of difference. The contemporary estimate of the Tories, and in large part the treatment of them which was thought to be just, were, in the main, adjusted with reference to the meanest and most malignant portion. Mr. Sabine, while by no means espousing the championship even of the best of them, would have the whole body judged with the candor which comes of looking at their general fellowship in the light of its natural prejudices, prepossessions, and embarrassments. It is to be considered also that the best of the class were a sort of warrant for the worst.
Those who are tolerably well read in the biographies and histories of our Revolutionary period are aware that Dr. Franklin, who, about most exciting and passion-stirring subjects, was a man of remarkably moderate and tolerant spirit, was eminently a hater of the Tories, unrelenting in his animosity towards them, and sternly set against all the measures proposed at the Peace for their relief, either by the British Government to enforce our remuneration of their losses, or by our own General or State Governments to soften the penalties visited upon them. The origin and the explanation of this intense feeling of animosity toward the Loyalists in the breast of that philosopher of moderation are easily traced to one of the most interesting incidents in his residence near the British Court as agent for Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. The incident is connected with the still unexplained mystery of his getting possession of the famous letters of Hutchinson, Oliver, etc. Franklin was living and directing all his practical efforts for enlightening and influencing those whom he supposed to be simply the ignorant plotters of mischief against the Colonists, under the full and most confident belief that those plotters were merely the stupid and conceited members of the British Cabinet. He never had dreamed that he was to look either above them to the King, or behind them to any unknown instigators of their mischief. With perfect good faith on his own part, he gave them the benefit of their own supposed ignorance, wrong-headedness, wilfulness, and ingenuity, such as it was, in inventing irritating and oppressive measures which, he warned them, would inevitably alienate the hearts and the allegiance of the Colonists. He records, that, while he had never had a thought but such as this imagined state of the facts had favored, a Liberal member of Parliament, an intimate friend of his, coming to him for a private interview, had told him that the Ministry were not the prime movers in this mischief, but were instigated to it by parties whom Franklin little suspected of such an agency. When the Doctor expressed his incredulity, the friend promised to give him decisive evidence of the full truth of his assertion. It came to Franklin in a form which astounded him, while it opened his eyes and fixed his indignation upon a class of men who from that moment onward were to him the exponents of all malignity and baseness. The evidence came in the shape of the originals, the autographs, of the above-named letters, written by natives of the American soil, office-holders under the Crown, who, while pampered and trusted by their constituents on this side of the water, were actually dictating, advising, and inspiriting the measures of the British Ministry most hateful to the Colonists. Franklin never overcame the impression from that shock. When he was negotiating the treaty of peace, he set his face and heart most resolutely against all the efforts and propositions made by the representatives of the Crown to secure to the Tories redress or compensation. He insisted that Britain, in espousing their alleged wrongs, indicated that she herself ought to remunerate their losses; that they, in fact, had been her agents and instruments, as truly as were her Crown officials and troops. Their malignant hostility toward their fellow-Colonists, and the sufferings and losses entailed on America by their open assertion of the rights of the Crown, and by the direct or indirect help which oppressive measures had received from them, had deprived them of all claim even on the pity of those who had triumphed in spite of them. At any rate, Franklin insisted, and it was the utmost to which he would assent,—his irony and sarcasm in making the offer showing the depth of his bitterness on the subject,—that a balance should be struck between the losses of the Loyalists and those of the Colonists in the conflagration of their sea-ports and the outrages on the property of individual patriots.
The views and feelings of Franklin have been essentially those which have since prevailed popularly among us regarding the old Tories. Of course, when hard-pressed, he was willing to recognize a difference in the motives which prompted individuals and in the degrees of their turpitude. Mr. Sabine gives us in his introductory essay a most admirable analysis of the whole subject-matter, with an accurate and instructive array of all the facts bearing upon it. No man has given more thorough or patient inquiry to it, or has had better opportunities for gathering materials of prime authority and perfect authenticity for the treatment of it. In the biographical sketches which crowd his volumes will be found matter of varied and profound interest, alternately engaging the tender sympathy and firing the indignation of the reader. One can hardly fail of bethinking himself that the moral and judicial reflections which come from perusing this work will by and by, under some slight modifications, attach to the review of the characters and course of some men who are in antagonism to their country's cause in these days.
Broken Lights: An Inquiry into the Present Condition and Future Prospects of Religious Faith. By Frances Power Cobbe. Boston: J. E. Tilton & Co.