It seems unnecessary, to say the least, to translate from the German pictures of life like those contained in this romance, since there are innumerable English and American novels, filled with the same sensuous details, and teeming with shameless descriptions of illicit love. In all the family life introduced to our notice in the course of this thick volume, the only married pairs that are described as living comfortably together are objects of ridicule, while men who make love to their neighbors' wives, and the married women who respond to these advances, are made to appear exceedingly interesting and lovely, and their wicked words and deeds justified on the ground, so popular in these days, incompatibility in the conjugal relations.
As might be expected from such immoral teaching, utter infidelity follows in its wake.
Responsibility to God or man is ignored throughout these pages, though much is said about the great eternal laws of nature, which seems to mean, according to this author, unbelief in the God of revelation; since the only persons who profess to have any faith in the life beyond are proved arrant hypocrites, and excite only our disgust by their assumed piety.
Such reading should be condemned without qualification, although the style may be, as in this volume, graceful and polished, the language vigorous, often piquant, the descriptions of natural beauties glowing with light and warmth, social questions discussed with equanimity and calmness—but the trail of the serpent is over them all. We unhesitatingly pronounce this a dangerous book—not problematically, only, but positively bad reading.
Walter Savage Landor. A Biography. By John Forster. 8vo, pp. 693. Boston: Fields, Osgood & Co.
Mr. Forster has led us to expect so much from him, by his excellent biography of Goldsmith and other works, that we are not only disappointed but a great deal surprised by the defects of the present bulky volume. Landor's life was a tempting theme to one who knew it so well as Mr. Forster. Stretching far beyond the ordinary limit of human longevity, crowded not perhaps with very stirring incidents, yet with figures of deep historical and literary interest, and curious for its extraordinary manifestations of a strong character, it was a subject of which an accomplished writer might have made one of the best biographies in the language. Mr. Forster has committed a grave fault, however, in being too diffuse, and, valuable as his book must be to the student of Landor's history and times, it certainly cannot be called very interesting. What with the prolixity of the narrative, and the prolonged summaries and analyses of Landor's writings, the reader is too often tempted to close the book from utter weariness. Yet there is a remarkable attraction in the life of that violent, wrongheaded, wonderful old man of genius, who left so many enthusiastic friends, though, it has been truly said, nobody could possibly live with him, and who has enriched English literature with poetry worthy of the classic ages of Greece, and prose among the purest and most eloquent in the language, though there is probably no other author of equal pretensions of whom the mass of readers are so completely ignorant. For this reason, Mr. Forster's biography, cumbrous as it is, deserves an extensive circulation, and it contains so much merit, that we hope he may be induced to bring it into better shape.
Wandering Recollections Of A Somewhat Busy Life:
An Autobiography.
By John Neal.
Boston: Roberts Brothers. 1869.