It is only necessary to add, that the English of the translation is delightful, while the mechanical getting up of the book, its paper and type, render it most agreeable to read.
1. Napoleon And The Queen Of Prussia.
An Historical Novel, by L. Mühlbach.
Translated from the German, by F. Jordan.
Complete in one volume, with illustrations.
New York: D. Appleton & Co. 1867. 8vo, pp. 265.
2. The Daughter Of An Empress.
An Historical Novel, by L. Mühlbach;
translated from the German by Nathaniel Greene.
Complete in one volume, with illustrations.
New York: D. Appleton & Co. 1867, 8vo, pp. 255.
3. Marie Antoinette And Her Son.
An Historical Novel, by L. Mühlbach.
Complete in one volume, with illustrations.
New York: D. Appleton & Co. 1867. 8vo, pp. 301.
On a former occasion we noticed three of the Mühlbach books, all we had then read, as favorably as our conscience would permit; for we wish to be thought capable of recognizing literary merit in books written by others than Catholics. Now, Catholics have at least nature, and, though we do not recognize the sufficiency of nature without grace, we yet do not hold it to be totally corrupt, or count it good for nothing. We are always ready to recognize merit in literary works, by whomsoever written, if able, and true to genuine nature. The Mühlbach novels are written with spirit and ability, a talent almost approaching to genius, with some touches of nature, and with considerable historical information. Having said so much, we have exhausted our praise. The works are true throughout neither to nature nor to history, and their moral tone is low and unwholesome—pagan, not Christian. Their popularity, which can be but short-lived—for it is hardly possible to read one of them a second time—speaks very little in favor of the taste, the knowledge of history, or the moral tone of our American reading public, as far as published. The least faulty, and to us the least repulsive of the series, is Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia, though it shows less ability than Joseph II. and his Court. We broke down before we got half through The Daughter of an Empress, and we have read only a few pages of Marie Antoinette and her Son. We have had no desire to have our feelings harrowed up by a fresh recital of the horrors of the French Revolution, especially of the wrongs of the beautiful and lovely Queen of France, and the young Dauphin. Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia is, however, a book we can read, and some portions of it with deep interest; but even this is disfigured by namby-pamby sentiment. Adulterous love, self-murders, and horrors of all sorts, enough both to disgust the Christian reader, and to give even a reader of strong nerves the nightmare for weeks after reading it. The Mühlbach is in ecstasy of delight when Napoleon overcomes the virtue of the Countess Walewski, and has no doubt that the self-murderer has ended all his troubles and rests in peace. She seems, through all her books, not to regard adultery, if prompted by love, or suicide either, if inspired by disappointed patriotism, as a sin. Indeed, throughout she writes as a low-minded pagan, not as a high-minded Christian. She apotheosizes persons who die with imprecations of vengeance on their enemies in their mouths, and by their own hands; and even the beautiful and slandered Queen Louisa has no higher aspirations than those of patriotism.
We have heretofore said of the Mühlbach books that they have too much fiction for history, and too much history for fiction; but even a great part of her history is itself fiction, in the sense of being untrue, which fiction never need be. Scott, in his historical novels, commits a thousand anachronisms, mistakes one person for another, and is rarely accurate in the minuter details; but he never falsifies history, and the impression he gives of an epoch or a historical person is always truthful. The impression the Mühlbach gives, even when historically correct as to details, is unhistorical and untrue. We are no believers in the immaculate virtue or high-mindedness of the royal and imperial courts of the eighteenth century, but no one who reflects a moment can believe that the Mühlbach gives a true picture of them. There is no doubt at all times much illicit love, cunning, intrigue, cruelty, vice, and crime, in the ranks of the great, but our experience proves that there is something else there also. At the time of the French Revolution the nobility were corrupt enough, but were they more so than the people who warred against them? Were the murderers and applauders of the murder of Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette superior to them in either public or private virtue? If the great are bad, the little are seldom better; and nothing can have a more unwholesome effect on society than the multitude of novels poured forth by little women and less men, professing to describe the manners and morals, but really traducing the manners and morals of the upper classes. Such novels are untrue in fact, and serve only to gratify the mean curiosity and malice of the envious and the malignant. Whoever reads the late book of the Queen of Great Britain and Ireland will find that she and her husband furnished a model of the domestic virtues and affections. Even when the Mühlbach professes to write history, she does not write it, and perverts it quite unnecessarily when by no means demanded by the aesthetic exigencies of her story. We pass over the calumnies of the Jesuits and the private life of Ganganelli, Pope Clement XIV. They please us better than would her praise. But she represents Charles III., King of Spain, as refusing his consent to the suppression of the Society of Jesus after he had expelled the Jesuits from his own dominions, and when he was most urgent of all the Bourbon princes for their suppression. She represents France as in favor of the suppression, but holding back her formal assent till she could secure that of Spain, when it is well known, that the King, Louis XV. and Choiseul, then at the head of the French government, were rather favorable to the Jesuits than otherwise, and gave them up only after a decree of parliament had been rendered against them, and even then only in order to obtain from the parliament, always their bitter enemies, the registering of certain edicts in which the minister believed France was more interested than in preserving the society. The Spanish, French, Portuguese, and several of the Italian princes, demanded of the pope, under threats of schism, the suppression of the order before the Empress Marie Theresa reluctantly consented, at the order of the pope, to allow the Bull suppressing the society to be published in her dominions, as the Mühlbach has herself described in her Joseph II. and his Court. These works are not only not trustworthy in their history, not only in their grouping and coloring falsify it, but they pervert the judgment, prejudice the mind so against the truth that it is able only with great difficulty to recognize it when it comes to be presented by learned and faithful historians.
The real name of the writer of the Mühlbach books is no secret. She is a widow, said to be personally a very estimable lady; and it has been reported that she intends coming to this country and taking up her residence with us, and certainly we would not treat her uncourteously. But if the report be true, it is a good proof that her works are not very popular in Germany, and bring her but small pecuniary remuneration. Her works will not long be popular even in this country; for their popularity here has, to a great extent, been due to their supposed value as truthful pictures of the courts of Berlin, Vienna, St. Petersburg, Paris, and Rome, in the last century, not to their weak and sickly sentimentalism, their low moral tone, their worship of Venus or Anteros, or their cynicism in religion. The American people are excessively fond of reading about courts, kings and queens, emperors and empresses, dukes and duchesses, counts and countesses; and chiefly because they have no such things among themselves, they see them only as shrouded in mystery. But when they find that the Mühlbach books do not, after all, raise the veil, or give any trustworthy account of them, they will drop them; for they adopt as their motto, Ernst ist das Leben, and can never be long fascinated by the debased paganism of the Mühlbach. We would by no means do the author the slightest harm in character or purse, but we advise her in the future not to make her novels sermons or moral lectures, but to animate them with a real ethical spirit, so that they will make the reader stronger and better, not weaker and worse even in the natural order.
Two Thousand Miles On Horseback.
Santa Fe And Back.
A Summer Tour Through Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, And New-Mexico,
In The Year 1866.
By James F. Meline.
New York: Hurd & Houghton. 1867.
Really good books of travel have been found so entertaining and successful in time past, that more recently every quarter of the accessible globe has spawned tourists, and journals, and diaries, and "notes," and "visits," of a thousand varieties of vapidness. England, as usual in matters of superficial mediocrity, has been completely distanced by America. We have dozens of diarists who are promising candidates for the compliment some wicked spirit once paid Bayard Taylor—of having travelled more and seen less than any man living. Singularly enough, our own country has fared the worst at our own hands; singularly, because, full of natural wonders of its own, it has not to send its Winwood Reades to Senegambia for interesting material, and its charming, boy-beloved Captain Mayne to swear at the luckless "closet-naturalist" from all the corners of the world. We could turn all the Royal Societies loose along the Mississippi, and furnish them matter for a quarto to each F.R.S. Yet since Porte Crayon sharpened the lead-pencil into the war-spear, and his charming cousins stepped finally out of the carriage, and "Little Mice" sank to the level of a "man and a brother, and possible Congressman," only one traveller worth following has kept the field—the inimitable, the perennial Ross Browne, in Washoe, or Italy, or St. Petersburg, still the prince and paladin of tourists. Thus there is wondrous great room in the upper story of this literature, with a whole fresh young continent to hold the mirror to. Mr. Meline has challenged boldly and well for a good place in the front rank of our books of travel. He has great advantages and great aptitude for the task. His advantages are that, unless our spectacles and his artifice deceive us, he is a thorough good fellow—the sine qua non of the traveller everywhere—the shibboleth of the brotherhood of cosmopolites. But besides this, mores hominum multorum vidit et urbes. If we are not mistaken in remembering Mr. Meline as the same gentleman who was formerly French Consul in Cincinnati, he is a man who has known European capitals and landmarks, and, what is better, galleries and sculptures, and not known them in vain. And apt he certainly is. In the difficult art not to harp on anything, this book displays consummate judgment, and the choice of subjects shows a tact and skill most remarkable in what we understand to be a first book. There is just about enough fact to make the work decently solid, a good deal of fancy and impression, and above all, a light hand. The style as a whole is really good, because it does pretty evenly just what it attempts and professes—sometimes more, seldom less. The descriptions of Denver and Central City, and the account of the Pueblos of New Mexico interested us especially the former for its manner, the latter for its interesting and curious facts. But another reader would call our selection invidious, and cite quite another set of incidents. The fact is, Mr. Meline is everywhere vivid, easy, and suggestive, and we do think we like those two parts best because we have friends in Denver, and take a special interest in the old Poltec question.
Only one thing, barring a little pedantry here and there, we have to growl at in taking a grateful leave of a beguiling book. The author feels it his duty at painfully short intervals to say something funny, and has preserved and dished up the selectest assortment of aged, stale, and stupid jests we ever saw. We suspect him to be one of those terrible people who enjoy a witticism not wisely but too well. The moment he tries humor, his wonted taste and sparkle seem to take flight, and he grows to a dotage of inane merriment. It is hard to say whether the jokes he cracks himself, or those which he rehashes, ready cracked, are the more benumbingly dismal. The most provoking thing is, that the man is not at all wanting in play of wit; there are a hundred good and a few clever little side-hits in his volume. Only he must not force it. The moment he sets out systematically to be jocose, he is flatness itself.