The same excellent faculty for characterization serves our historian on great occasions as well as small ones. Of an intriguing nobleman like the Duke of Norfolk, he is as prompt to speak as of the harp itself: "He was one of those politicians who are never contented; who plot and counterplot incessantly; who are always running their heads fearlessly, to be sure, but indiscreetly, into danger of decapitation." This fine analytic power appears throughout the book. Describing the enthusiasm of the Londoners for Henry of Bolingbroke, and their coldness towards the captive King Richard, the historian acutely observes: "Ever thus, from the beginning of the world, have those been insulted who have fallen from a high estate. The multitude follows successful usurpation, but never offers a shield to fallen dignity." The bashfulness and silence of Prince Henry an ordinary writer would perhaps have called by those names; but Mr. Towle says: "He was neither loud nor forward in giving his views; he apparently felt that one so young should never seem dogmatic or positive on questions in regard to which age and learning were in doubt." Such a sentence might perhaps suggest the idea that Mr. Towle's History was intended for the more youthful reader, but when you read, farther on, in the analysis of Henry's character, "It was fitting that so fine a soul should be illustrated by brilliancy of intellect and eloquence of speech, that so precious a jewel should be encased in a casket of beauty and graceful proportion,"—or when you learn, in another place, that "the eloquence of Stephen Partington stirred the religious element of Henry's character, which appreciated and admired superior ability of speech,"—we say, you can no longer doubt that Mr. Towle addresses himself to minds as mature as his own. It is natural that an historian whose warmth of feeling is visible in his glow of language should be an enthusiastic worshipper of his hero, and should defend him against all aspersions. Mr. Towle finds that, if Henry was a rake in youth and a bigot in manhood, he was certainly a very amiable rake and a very earnest bigot. "There can be no doubt," says our historian, in his convincing way, "that he often paused in his reckless career, filled with remorse, wrestling with his flighty spirit, to overcome his unseemly sports"; and as to the sincerity of his fanaticism, "to suppose otherwise is to charge a mere youth with a hypocritical cunning worthy of the Borgias in their zenith." Masterly strokes like these are, of course, intended to console the reader for a want of distinctness in Mr. Towle's narrative, from which one does not rise with the clearest ideas of the civilization and events of the time which he describes.
We can understand how great an attraction so brilliant and picturesque an epoch of history should have for a spirit like Mr. Towle's; but we cannot help thinking it a pity that he should have attempted to reproduce, in such an ambitious form, the fancies which its contemplation suggested. The book is scarcely too large for the subject, but it is much too large for Mr. Towle, whose grievous fashion of padding must be plain enough, even in the few passages which we have quoted from his book. A writer may, by means of a certain dead-a-lively expansive style of narration, contrived out of turns of expression adapted from Percy's Reliques, the Waverly Novels, the newspapers, and the imitators of Thackeray's historical gossip, succeed in filling five hundred pages, but he will hardly satisfy one reader; and we are convinced by Mr. Towle's work that, whatever other species of literature may demand the exercise of a childish imagination,—a weak fancy easily caught with the prettiness as well as the pomp of words,—a slender philosophy incapable of grasping the true significance of events,—a logic continually tripped upon its own rapier,—and a powerful feeling for anti-climax, with no small sentiment for solecism,—History, at least, has little to gain from them.
War of the Rebellion; or, Scylla and Charybdis. Consisting of Observations upon the Causes, Course, and Consequences of the Late Civil War in the United States. By H. S. Foote. New York: Harper and Brothers. 1866.
The slight value which this volume possesses is of a nature altogether different from that which the author doubtless ascribes to it, though we imagine most of his readers will agree with us in esteeming it chiefly for its personal reminiscences of great events and people. As for Mr. Foote's philosophization of the history he recounts, it is so generally based upon erroneous views of conditions and occurrences, that we would willingly have spared it all, if we could have had in its place a full and simple narrative of his official career from the time he took part in secession up to the moment of his departure from the Rebel territory. We find nothing new in what he has to say concerning the character of our colonial civilization and the unity of our colonial origin; and, as we get farther from the creation of the world and approach our own era, we must confess that the light shed upon the slavery question by Mr. Foote seems but vague and unsatisfactory. A few disastrous years have separated us so widely from all the fallacies once current here, that Mr. Foote's voice comes like an utterance from Antediluvia, when he tells us how compromises continually restored us to complete tranquillity, which the machinations of wicked people, North and South, instantly disturbed again. There was once a race of feeble-minded politicians who thought that, if the Northern Abolitionists and Southern fire-eaters were destroyed, there could be no possible disagreement between the sections concerning slavery; and Mr. Foote, surviving his contemporaries, still clings to their delusions, and believes that the late war resulted from the conflict of ambitious and unscrupulous men, and not from the conflict of principles. Now that slavery is forever removed, it might seem that this was a harmless error enough, and would probably hurt nobody,—not even Mr. Foote. But the fact is important, since it is probable that Mr. Foote represents the opinions of a large class of people at the South, who were friendly to the Union in the beginning of the war, but yielded later to the general feeling of hostility. They were hardly less mischievous during the struggle than the original Secessionists, and, now that the struggle is ended, are likely to give us even more trouble.
Mr. Foote offers no satisfactory explanation of his own course in taking part in the Rebel government, which was founded upon a principle always abhorrent to him, and opposed to all his ideas of good faith and good policy; but he gives us to understand that he was for a long time about the only honest man unhanged in the Confederacy. Concerning the political transactions of that short-lived state, he informs us of few things which have not been told us by others, and his criticism of Davis's official action has little to recommend it except its disapproval of Davis.
We must do Mr. Foote the justice to say that his book is not marred by any violence towards the great number of great men with whom he has politically differed; that he frankly expresses his regret for such of his errors as he now sees, and is not ashamed to be ashamed of certain offences (like that which won him a very unpleasant nickname) against good taste and good breeding, which the imperfect civilization of Southern politicians formerly tempted them to commit. Remoteness from the currents of modern thought—such as life in a region so isolated as the South has always been involves—will account for much cast-off allusion in his book to Greece and Rome, as well as that inflation of style generally characteristic of Southern literature.
Poems in Sunshine and Firelight. By John James Piatt. Cincinnati: R. W. Carroll & Co. 1866.
Among the best poems of the earlier days of the Atlantic was Mr. Piatt's "Morning Street," which we think some of our readers may remember even at this remote period, after so much immortality in all walks of literature has flourished and passed away. Mr. Piatt later published a little volume of verses together with another writer of the West; and yet later, "The Nests at Washington,"—a book made up of poems from his own pen and from that of Mrs. Piatt. He now at last appears in a volume wholly his, which we may regard as the work of a mind in some degree confirmed in its habits of perception and expression.
We must allow to the author as great originality as belongs to any of our younger poets. It is true that the presence of the all-pervading Tennyson is more sensibly felt here than in the first poems of Mr. Piatt; but even here it is very faint, and if the diction occasionally reminds of him, Mr. Piatt's poems are undoubtedly conceived in a spirit entirely his own. This spirit, however, is one to which its proper sense of the beautiful is often so nearly sufficient, that the effort to impart it is made with apparent indifference. The poet's ideal so wins him and delights him, in that intangible and airy form which it first wore to his vision, that he seems to think, if he shall put down certain words by virtue of which he can remember its loveliness, he shall also have perfectly realized its beauty to another. We do not know one poem by Mr. Piatt in which a full and clear sense of his whole meaning is at once given to the reader; and he is obscure at times, we fear, because he has not himself a distinct perception of that which he wishes to say, though far oftener his obscurity seems to result from impatience, or the flattery of those hollow and alluring words which beset the dreams of poets, and must be harshly snubbed before they can be finally banished. There are many noble lines in his poems, but not much unity of effect or coherence of sentiment; and it happens now and then that the idea which the reader painfully and laboriously evolves from them is, after all, not a great truth or beauty, but some curious intellectual toy, some plaything of the singer's fancy, some idle stroke of antithesis.
In the poem called "At Evening," in which the poet can be so preposterous as to say,