A French paper says that "an American company proposes to introduce fur seals from Alaska into Lake Superior! The temperature of the lake is considered to be sufficiently cold for the purpose, and the company hopes to obtain from Congress and the Canadian Parliament an act protecting the creatures from slaughter for twenty years, after which time it is supposed that they will be sufficiently acclimatized and numerous to form subjects of sport." As the fur seal is a marine animal and Lake Superior is a body of fresh water, the success of the experiment, and even the authenticity of the story, is at least doubtful!
M. Giffard, inventor of the steam injector which bears his name, has entered upon a line of invention of which Americans have been very fond. He is building a small steamer to ply, during the French Exposition, over the three miles of the Seine between Pont Royal and the Exhibition. The steamer will be thirty metres, or one hundred feet long and three and a half metres, or eleven feet eight inches broad, and is to make forty-five miles an hour! The length is to the beam, therefore, as 8½ to 1. It is singular that marine engineering has gained but little from these attempts to attain excessive speeds. The real advances have been obtained by small successive improvements.
CURRENT LITERATURE.
Mr. Henri Van Laun is known in the world of letters by his admirable translation of Taine's "History of English Literature," and also by his not yet completed translation of Molière's works; the latter being not merely a translation, but a very thoroughly worked English edition of the great French dramatist. He now presents us with the first volume of an original critical work of great importance and interest[9]—nothing less than a history of French literature. Mr. Van Laun's work is not a mere critical appreciation of French writers, which of itself would be an undertaking of very considerable moment, and which would fill a place hitherto unoccupied in our critical literature. The present work is in fact a history of French thought, and even more; it is a history of the French people as exhibited in the writings of Frenchmen from the very earliest period. The author accepts the theory which has lately come into vogue among the more elaborate, if not the profounder critics, that the literature of an age is a manifestation of its spirit; that a nation, or rather a people, has a soul like an individual man, and that that soul is manifested and is to be read in the pages of its authors; that as it, the people, is developed, intellectually, morally, socially, and politically, from age to age, the changes through which it passes are reflected in its literature, and that there no less, perhaps even more, than in the record of its doings at home, abroad, in the family, in society, in commerce, in manufactures, in art, and on the field of battle, is to be found its true portraiture. Indeed, he begins his book with the assertion that "the history of a literature is the history of a people; if not this, it is worthless."
To this theory and its general acceptance we owe chiefly the very wide scope and the philosophical profundity of most modern critical writing of the higher kind. Critics are not content nowadays with taking up a poem, novel, essay, or history, and looking at it by itself as an individual and isolated work of art. They must look into the personal life of the writer; they must discover and estimate all the influences by which he was surrounded; and among these they give a very important place to the condition of the society in which he lived, the political and religious forces which were at work while he was studying, thinking, writing. Briefly, they regard him not as an isolated individual force, but as a manifestation, a result of many forces, as doing his work less by personal volition than as the unconscious agent or representative of the times in which he lived. Consequently a critical edition or appreciation of a great writer has come to be not a purely literary task, but an attempt to unfold the mental and moral condition of a people and a period. Compare, for example, Addison's criticism of the "Paradise Lost," to which in a great measure the general appreciation of that poem is due, with David Masson's "Life of Milton." The former can all be included in a thin duodecimo volume, and has been so printed; the latter, still unfinished, fills several ponderous octavo volumes. Addison concerns himself with the poem itself; Masson writes an elaborate history of Puritanism and of the English people during the development and completion of that religious, social, and political revolution which produced the Commonwealth in Old England and the Puritan emigration to America, with the formation of the religious commonwealths of New England. True, Addison did not undertake to do what Masson undertook, and allowance must be made for the avowed difference between the methods of the two writers. But still that very difference is the significant exponent of the critical spirit of the times in which they lived. The very fact that the Victorian critic has undertaken his tremendous task, which Addison or any man of his time would not have thought of, is significant of the change in critical manner to which we have referred.
That the new theory of the proper scope of criticism is well founded, cannot be entirely denied. Literature to a certain degree is a characteristic product of the age and of the people for which, if not by which, it is produced. And if Mr. Van Laun had confined himself to the affirmative part of his proposition, his position would have been less disputable than it became when he added his negative assertion. It is not quite true that the history of a literature is the history of a people; still further from the truth is it that literary history which is not the history of a people is worthless. It might be easily shown that some of the very greatest literary productions known to the world have very slight relations, or none at all, to the condition of the society in which they were written. What, for example, is there in Shakespeare's plays, or in Sir Walter Scott's poems and novels, which is a manifestation of the spirit of their time? Scott, Wordsworth, Byron, and Moore were strictly contemporaries. What could be more unlike than their poems in spirit or in substance? What one trait have they in common? The theory in question is an example of the tendency of men to over generalization of particular facts, and of a like tendency to over subtlety in critical philosophy.
The spirit of a people is, however, undeniably manifest in the writings of its best and most favored authors; and to trace the rise of that spirit and the gradual formation of a national or popular character is a legitimate and a very instructive part of the task of a critic who undertakes to present a full appreciation of a national literature.
Mr. Van Laun certainly begins at the beginning. He shows us what the French people are; how the French nation arose and gradually grew into an individual existence; and he thus imitates and emulates the distinguished French critic whose work he has translated. M. Taine is strong on the manifestation of Anglo-Saxonism in English literature, and even finds the results of English beef and beer, and of the very rain and fog of England, in the books of English writers.