Miss Martineau's "Autobiography,"[2 ] which comprises two-thirds of this voluminous publication, is an interesting specimen of an interesting sort of book. It appeals much more to the general reader than most of the multitudinous volumes which she gave to the world during her lifetime, and we shall not be surprised if it takes its place among the limited number of excellent personal memoirs in the language. (For this purpose, however, we must add, it would need to be disembarrassed of the biographical appendage affixed to it by the editor, which, though carefully and agreeably prepared, we cannot but regard as rather a dead weight upon the book. It repeats much of what the author has related, and envelopes her narrative in a diffuse, eulogistic commentary which strikes the reader sometimes as superfluous and sometimes as directly at variance with the impression made upon him by Miss Martineau's text.) Miss Martineau was indeed, intellectually, one of the most remarkable women who have exhibited themselves to the world. She was not delicate, she was not graceful, or imaginative, or æsthetic, or some of the other pretty things that literary ladies are expected to be; but she was extraordinarily vigorous; she had a great understanding—a great reason. She gives, intellectually, a great impression of force. She was a really heroic worker, a genuine philosopher, and she made her mark upon her time. Her reader's last feeling about her is that she was thoroughly respectable. He will have had incidental feelings of a less genial kind; he will have been irritated at the coarseness of some of her judgments and the complacency of some of her claims; at her evident want of tact and repose; at a disposition to which he will even permit himself, perhaps, to apply the epithet of meddlesome. But he will have a strong sense of Miss Martineau's care for great things—her sustained desire, prompting her always to production of some kind, to help along and enlighten the human race. She was a combatant, and the whole force of her nature prompted her to discussion. Such natures cannot afford to be delicate—to be easily bruised and scratched; neither can they afford to have that speculative cast of fancy which wastes valuable time in scruples that are possibly superfluous and questions that are possibly vain. In spite of any such apologetic view of her disposition as may be put forth, however, it is probable that Miss Martineau's autobiography will give offence enough. She speaks out her mind with complete frankness upon most of the persons that she has known, subject to the single condition of her book being published after her death. Of its being postponed until the death of the objects of her criticism we hear nothing, though this would have been more to the point. Miss Martineau deals out disapproval with so liberal a hand, that among those persons concerned who are still living much resentment and disgust must inevitably ensue. Downright and vigorous as she is in spirit, there is no mistaking the degree of her censure, and as (whatever else she may be) she is not a flippant writer, it has every appearance of being deliberate and premeditated. We do not pretend to decide upon the propriety of her hard knocks, or to point out the particular cases in which they might have been a little softer; but we cannot help saying that there is something in Miss Martineau's general attitude toward individuals which inspires one with a certain mistrust. She was evidently always judging and always uttering judgments. Her business in life was to have opinions and to promulgate them, and as objects of opinion she seems to have regarded persons very much as she regarded abstract ideas—attributing to them an equal unconsciousness of denunciation. This eagerness to qualify her fellow members of society would have been perhaps a great virtue if Miss Martineau's powers of observation had been of extraordinary fineness; but in spite of an occasional very happy hit, we hardly think this to have been the case. Sometimes, evidently, she went straight to the point, and often, independently of the justice of her appreciation, this is expressed with an extremely vigorous neatness. But frequently her descriptions of people strike us as both harsh and superficial, and more especially as heated, even after the lapse of years. She goes out of her way to pronounce very unflattering verdicts upon men and women who have apparently had little more connection with her life than that they have been her contemporaries. This is apart from the rightful spirit of an autobiography, which, it seems to us, should deal only with people who have been real factors in the writer's life. The latter pages of Miss Martineau's first volume contain a series of portraits, some brief, some more extended, of which it must be said that their very incisive lines make them extremely entertaining. Miss Martineau's style is always excellent for strength and fulness of meaning, and at times she has a real genius for terseness. Lord Campbell "was wonderfully like the present Lord; was facetious, in and out of place; politic; flattering to an insulting degree, and prone to moralizing in so trite a way as to be almost as insulting." That has almost the condensation of Saint-Simon. There is a very vivid, satirical portrait in this same chapter of a certain Lady Stepney, who wrote silly novels of the "fashionable" type which Thackeray burlesqued, and boasted that she received £700 a piece for them; and there are sketches of Campbell, Bulwer, Landseer, and various other persons, which if they are wanting in graciousness, are not wanting in spirit. Miss Martineau gives in extenso her opinion of Macaulay, and a very low opinion it seems to be. It is, however, very much the verdict of time—save in regard to the "dreary indolence" of which the author accuses him, and which will excite surprise in the readers of Mr. Trevylyan's "Life." Of Lockhart and Croker and their insolent treatment of herself and her fame in the early part of her career, she gives a lamentable, and apparently a just account; but stories about the underhandedness and truculence of these discreditable founders of the modern art of "reviewing" are by this time old stories. There is also a story about poor Mr. N. P. Willis, which, though it consorts equally with the impression which this littérateur contrived to diffuse with regard to himself, it was less decent to relate. When Miss Martineau left England for America, Mr. Willis gave her a bundle of letters of introduction to various people here; and on arriving in this country and proceeding to present Mr. Willis's passports, she found that the gentleman was unknown to most of the persons to whom they were addressed. A fastidious delicacy might have suggested to Miss Martineau that her lips were sealed by the fact that, of slight value as these documents were, she had at least accepted and made use of them. We suppose there was no case in which, even when repudiated, they did not practically serve as an introduction. But Miss Martineau was not fastidiously delicate.
This copious retrospect appears to have been written about the year 1855, when the author had ceased to labor; having earned a highly honorable repose, and being moreover incapacitated by serious ill health. She appears then, at fifty-three years of age, to have thought her death very near; but she lived to be a much older woman—for upward of twenty years. Her motive in writing her memoirs is affirmed to be a desire to take her good name into her own hands, and anticipate the possible publication of her letters, an event which, very properly, she sternly deprecates. As to these letters, however, Mrs. Chapman publishes several, and makes liberal use of others. The reader wonders what her correspondence would have been, since what she destined to publicity is occasionally so invidious. Another motive with Miss Martineau appears to have been a desire to set forth, in particular, the history of her religious opinions—the history being sufficiently remarkable. Born among the primitive Unitarians (the city of Norwich, her paternal home, was, we believe, a sort of focus of this amiable form of Dissent), she passed, with her advance in life, from a precocious and morbid youthful piety to the furthest limits of skepticism. The story is an interesting one, and it forms both the first and the last note that she strikes; but we doubt whether (even among persons as little "theological" as herself) her reflections on this subject will serve to exemplify her judgment at its best. Her skepticism is too dogmatic and her whole attitude toward the "superstition" she has cast off too much marked by a small eagerness for formulas in the opposite direction, and a narrow complacency in the act of ventilating her negations. She cannot keep her hands off affirmations about a future state, and she lacks that imaginative feeling (so indispensable in all this matter) which suggests that the completest form of the liberty which she claims as against her theological education is tacit suspension of judgment. In general Miss Martineau is certainly not superficial, but here, in feeling, she is. This however is the penalty of having been narrowly theological in one's earlier years; it always leaves a bad trace somewhere, especially in reaction. The chapters in which Miss Martineau describes these early years are admirable; they place before us most vividly the hard conditions of her childish life, and they describe with singular psychological minuteness the unfolding of her character and the growth of her impressions. They have a remarkable candor, and it certainly cannot be said that the author's portrait of her youthful self is a flattered one. We doubt whether, except Rousseau, any autobiographer ever had the courage to accuse himself of so ungraceful a fault as infant miserliness. "I certainly was very close," says Miss Martineau, "all my childhood and youth." Her account of the circumstances which led to and accompanied her first steps in literature, of the first money she earned (she was in sore need of it), and of the growth of her form and development of her powers, and her confidence in them—all this is extremely real, touching, and interesting. She succeeded almost from the first, but her success was the result of an amount of unaided exertion which excites our wonder. What fairly launched her was the publication of her "Tales in Illustration of Political Economy," and there was something really heroic in the way that as a poor young woman with "views" of her own and without helpful companionship, she explored and mastered this tough science. Her views prevailed, and floated her into distinction. We have no space to allude to the details of the rest of her career, one of the principal events of which was her visit to America in 1834. It lasted more than two years, and was commemorated by Miss Martineau, on her return, in no less than six volumes. Mrs. Chapman deals with it largely in her supplementary memoir, treating chiefly, however, of the visitor's relations with the Abolition party. Miss Martineau evidently exaggerates both the odium which she incurred and the danger to which she exposed herself by these relations. They were natural ones for an ardently liberal Englishwoman to form, for the Abolitionists, to foreign eyes, must at that time have represented the only eminent feeling, the only sense of an ideal, visible amid the commonplace prosperity of American life. In her last pages Miss Martineau indulges some gloomy forebodings as to the future of the United States, which offers, she says, the only instance on record "of a nation being inferior to its institutions." This was written in 1855; we abstain from hazarding a conjecture as to whether she would think better or worse of us now.
We have two good novels, one very foreign and the other very domestic. The first is by Auerbach,[3 ] whose high purpose and truly ideal treatment of the narrative all who have read "On the Heights" will remember with pleasure. He preserves the same style essentially in this story, although it is of an entirely different character. A painter visiting a country village in company with a young scholar and philosopher who is an assistant librarian and is called the collaborator, paints as a Madonna the beautiful daughter of the keeper of the village inn. He falls in love with her, attracted no less by her unconcealed love for him than by her beauty. He takes her to town with him, a town where there is a little German court, very refined esthetik, and very high-dried old manners. The poor girl drives him almost mad with her awkwardness, her ignorance of polished life, and her independence. It does not help the matter that in the latter respect she wins the favor of others, even of the Prince himself. After a while he avoids her, takes to wine-drinking, and comes home drunk. She sees her position, and from what he is suffering, and she goes back to her parents, leaving behind her an unreproachful, fond, and most touching letter of farewell. Poor girl! sad as it was for her, what else could she do? It was the best course under the circumstances; for although her heart broke over it, she at least kept her love for him, and that by remaining she might have lost. After a while she dies, and he after a long time betrothes himself to another woman, who loves him, and to whose love he responds with such a feeling as beauty and sweetness and devotion might raise in the breast of a man whose heart is really in the grave of his dead wife. He dies before a second marriage from injuries received in a dispute with his brother-in-law. It will be seen that this simple story of humble life presented temptations to treatment in the most literal and realistic way. But in Auerbach's hands it is ideal. Its likeness in certain respects to the story of "A Princess of Thule" will strike all the readers of William Black's most charming novel. But the treatment is as unlike as the incidents and the localities. Auerbach's little novel is essentially German in thought, in feeling, in purpose, in treatment. We have never read a more thoroughly German book. This character is given to it, and its ideality is very much enhanced by the character of the collaborator, who is constantly looking upon every incident of life from a lofty philosophic point of view; serious generally, sometimes humorous, often serio-comic. "Wilhelm Meister" itself is not a more thoroughly characteristic production of the German mind. But it is nevertheless a sweet, simple, touching story, the sentiment diffused through which has a peculiar charm. It forms one of Mr. Henry Holt's well selected "Leisure Hour Series." The translation is marked by idiomatic vigor and a very skilful adaptation of the rustic phraseology of one language to that of the other.
—As unlike to this as can be is a novel by an author whose name is entirely new to us, but whose work bears the traces of some literary experience.[4 ] Its double title is very well chosen. In it a number of people, young and middle-aged, are gathered together for the summer in the beautiful Connecticut country house of one of them—a wealthy young bachelor. There they all fall in love. We can hardly say that everybody falls in love with everybody else; but it is pretty nearly that. Everybody is in love with some one else; and the consequence is, after a good deal of cross-purposing and some suffering, half a dozen marriages. The change that has taken place in the purpose of the novel and in the manner of treatment of character by the novel writer could not be more clearly exampled than by "Love in Idleness." It is absolutely without plot, has hardly enough coherence to be called a story, is entirely without incident. And yet it is very interesting from the first page to the last, although its interest is not of the highest kind even in the novel range. To give our readers any notion of it is quite impossible without telling them almost all that happens, all that is said, thought, and felt by the various personages. The book is strongly American; but its Americans are of the most cultivated classes; and it is guiltless of hard-fisted farmers, Southern slave-drivers, and California gold-diggers. It is entirely free from that irritating intellectual eruption sometimes called American humor. In fact, its personages are taken both from the Old England and the New; and side by side, one set can hardly be distinguished from the other as in real life. He who must perforce be called the hero is a Senator, forty-eight years old, who is engaged to marry a rather cool, reserved, and stately woman of thirty, but is loved almost at first sight by Felise Clairmont, a girl of nineteen, half French, half American, of enchanting beauty, and still more captivating ways. She is loved by almost every other man in the book; but her avowed lover is the Senator's younger brother, who is the host of the assembled company, exclusive of Felise, who lives near by with her guardian, a certain judge. The Senator loves the young girl as fondly as she loves him, and still more deeply, and what the result is we shall leave our readers to find out from the book itself, which will richly repay the novel reader. It is exceedingly well written, and its social machinery is managed with skill; but it is a little too much elaborated in the conversations, which are rather excessively epigrammatic at times. The author of such a novel, if not an old hand, should give us something better and stronger ere long.
—"The Man Who Was Not a Colonel"[5 ] is an amusing story of that kind that may be denominated "light" even in fiction. The author rattles on through a variety of incidents, and adventures, and true-love tangles, without trying the reader's intellect with any particularly severe infliction of character study. It is a model of that literature which has received the distinctive title of railway, because in travelling we do not care to be bothered with thinking on our own part or others.
Mr. Wallace has done well in selecting the comprehensive title "Russia"[6 ] for his book. It is no mere record of a journey, or description of a country or people as a traveller sees them. The author spent six years in the land of the Tsars, studied the language, and lived with the people, and now he endeavors to show the origin and composition of the nation, its past history and present struggles, besides making minute studies of the serf system, the communes, emancipation in its methods and results, the peculiar conjunction of autocracy and democracy in the principles and practice of government, the agriculture, the religion, politics, population, and other important factors of a great empire. The book is sufficiently praised when we say that all these subjects are well treated. The author is careful to point out, as an analyst should, where his studies are incomplete, and he modestly tells us that his work is not presented as an unassailable summation of truth, but as the conclusion to which an unprejudiced observer came after long and careful study. We could not ask for better evidence of his sincerity than in the defence which he, an Englishman, makes of the Tsar's policy of foreign annexation! He tells us that this is not the result of autocratic choice, but is the only available one of three modes of restraint against marauding tribes. These three are a great wall, a military cordon, and annexation. The first is impossible in a country that for hundreds of miles has no durable building material, the second has been tried and found impracticable. As to the last, there is a choice between an armed frontier and occupation of the marauder's country, and the latter course is followed because it is cheaper in a pecuniary sense. To the question so often asked in England, How far is Russian "aggrandization" to go? Mr. Wallace answers that the Russian arms cannot stop until they reach the frontier of some stable power. In short, to those Russophobists in England who look with such alarm upon the approach of the Russians toward India, he calmly replies that this approach is both inevitable and desirable! No wonder he tells his countrymen that it is their duty to know Russia better. It is plainly impossible to even review in the most concise manner the numerous important discussions in this remarkable book, without producing another book in doing so. Mr. Wallace's work is one of the most valuable studies in social and governmental economy ever written, and several causes, aside from his personal fidelity and fitness, combine to make it so. In general, Russian society exhibits, so far as the peasantry are concerned, a simplicity of life and thought that carries the imagination irresistibly back to prehistoric times. No civilized race, no culturvolk, presents such aboriginal relations in its family and commonwealth. The nobles, on the other hand, and all the cultured class, are fermenting with great views and plans of social reform. The ideas that made such havoc in the early days of the French revolution have again swept within human vision, but this time they were caught up by a practical-minded Emperor and crystallized into the greatest premeditated political reform of this century! The wonderful feat of quietly emancipating forty million bonded servitors, at one stroke, the institution on a tremendous scale of what the dreamers have declared to be the classic relation of social man—communism, the division of land, taking about one-half from the rich and giving it to the poor—such marvels as these throw a halo of Arabian magic about the history of this simple people since 1861. When to these attractions is added the fact that this land of social classicity and political ideals is entirely accessible to study, as no other nation of like simple culture is, we think that reasons enough have been given for saying that our author has chosen the ripest field in the world for his harvest labors. He has shown himself a most conscientious and able worker in it, and our own country will be fortunate if the social revolution that has taken place in its Southern States ever finds so unprejudiced and painstaking a historian as he. To Americans Mr. Wallace's book should be more interesting and valuable than to any other readers, for many of these questions which he discusses so thoroughly have been settled in precisely the opposite way in this country! For instance, emancipation here was violent, the severance of master-and-slave relations complete, the future status of the two interested parties was not previously fixed, and no compensation was given to either. Here land is held solely by individual tenure; no person has enforced local bonds, but is free to move everywhere—that is, with the sole exception of Indians. We reject the colonization plan of dealing with marauding enemies, and adopt the armed frontier system. In short, we are diametrically opposite in our conclusions, and yet we have a national problem that is in two important respects essentially the same as Russia's. The settlement of a continent and the amalgamation of races is the double task imposed on us as well as them. One mode of accomplishing it we can see going on about us; its precise opposite is well exhibited in Mr. Wallace's "Russia."