Mr. Perkins's book[12 ] almost disarms criticism by its very character, for it is impossible to make a selection of books that is at the same time limited in size and adapted to diverse and contrary necessities. Private libraries want the best books, public libraries the books most called for by the general and often undiscriminating public. "The Best Reading" contains the titles of about ten thousand books, and as that is less than half the number printed every year, the work is confessedly incomplete from whatever point of view we look at it. Still it is useful to librarians, of whom there are several hundred inexperienced ones in the country, and to professional essayists, or magazine writers, a class that must contain thousands of persons. With every allowance for unavoidable imperfections, we think Mr. Perkins can revise the list with advantage, taking out some obsolete writers and putting in some new ones in their place—Herbert Spencer for example.
Both Mr. Loftie's "Plea for Art in the House" and the Misses Garrett's advice on "House Decoration"[13 ] belong to the best kind of works on the very important subject of cultivating good taste in the furniture of the home. They are very direct and clear, and their authors are entirely competent to instruct us all on this subject. Especially are they free from what we consider to be the worst fault a book of this kind can show, an obtrusive pretension to superior taste. It is a great mistake to suppose that we can elevate people by showing them that we consider ourselves far above them in taste and judgment; but this mistake is not unfrequently made. That may be the fact, but if there is no evidence of it but a patronizing treatment of others, there is little hope that much good will be done. Both these books are free from that error, and Mr. Loftie especially takes his readers into a survey of a good many branches of decorative art, exhibiting a familiar acquaintance with them all, talking alternately of the blunders and successes of collectors, real and would-be, and all with a natural enthusiasm and freedom from superciliousness. The Garrett sisters also give a great number of valuable suggestions and some very taking illustrations of tasteful decoration. We wish they had given less of their work to criticism of the conventional London house and more to the description of what is good. So far as we are acquainted with books of this class, they abound in two faults, discursiveness and inordinate discussion of bad models. Artistic house decoration is a technical art, and must be taught like all other arts—by the exhibition of good precedents. Strictly speaking, there can be no theories in matters of taste. All the so-called laws or canons of taste are obtained by observing what has been well done. From that we may learn what is well doing, and the educated taste produces good work. There is nothing in art so implicit as the surveyor's dependence upon the law of magnetic attraction. The notes of a survey well made to-day can be given to a surveyor a century hence, and he will bring the lines out to within half an inch, and put his hand upon each boundary mark that has been made. But it is not so in art. In all the reconstructions of ancient Grecian buildings not one has been rebuilt. Neither the Madeleine nor the Valhalla repeat the art of the Parthenon, however faithfully they repeat its form and measurements. Good taste is a thing that no French surveyor can secure with any refinement whatever of the metric system. But still there is a soil in which this plant can be grown, and that soil is the collective evidences of good taste in the past. Let us have a book so full of good illustrations that didactic instruction shall not be needed.
NEBULÆ.
—Our discussion of life insurance management, in this part of "The Galaxy," was but preliminary to the thorough article upon the subject which we present to our readers in this number. It is a subject of great importance, and one which concerns multitudes of the very best class of our citizens, to whom we recommend this article for thoughtful perusal. Its writer has a more thorough acquaintance with life insurance management than is probably possessed by any other one man in the country. He knows, he does not infer or conjecture, and he has learned by experience the only way in which to bring life insurance companies to an effective responsibility. What they are, even when they are not managed in a manner undeniably fraudulent, has been shown by the recent investigations at Albany, which brought to light the payment of salaries and bonuses of monstrous extravagance and the use of proxies by the thousand on the part of the officers who took these great sums out of the pockets of clerks and clergymen, widows and orphans. Something must be done, and that speedily, to correct this abuse even among the honest companies, and the way to doing it is pointed out in the article to which we refer.
—Since= we prepared our last nebulous notes, General Grant has passed into private life. The country has accepted the event as a matter of course; it has elicited very little comment. The end of his administration was made the occasion of some retrospection and some criticism, it is true; but that did not, in either case, touch the subject which presents itself to us in connection with the change which took place in Washington on the 4th of March. General Grant, by becoming then a mere private citizen, closed one of the most remarkable careers in modern history. Men, a very few men, have done more, or been more, than he has done or has been; but it would be difficult to name a man in modern times who rose from obscurity to such a height, passed through such a series of events, held such power, and who passed peaceably, and in full possession of his health and all his faculties, into an absolutely powerless and private condition, and all this in sixteen years. The experiences of Cromwell and Washington were most nearly like Grant's. But Cromwell fought six years ere he won his crowning victory at Worcester; and although he was made Lord Protector in 1657, was known to all England as an able and energetic member of the Long Parliament, and one of the leaders of the popular party in 1640, seventeen years before. Washington also saw six years pass from the time when he drew his sword under the old elm at Cambridge, as Commander-in-Chief of the colonial forces, to that when he received Lord Cornwallis's at the surrender of Yorktown; and, made President in 1789, he retired in 1797, twenty-three years after he took command. But he was a prominent citizen of Virginia thirty-five years before that date, and was nominated deputy to the colonial congress in 1774. The position of our retiring President was very different, and his career was briefer and more crowded with events. In March, 1861, except his old West Point comrades and his few personal acquaintances, there were probably not twenty people in the country who knew of the existence of ex-brevet Captain Grant, U.S.A. Three years saw him the victor in hard-fought fields, in which the forces on either side more than trebled all that ever Cromwell or Washington commanded, and in 1864 he became General-in-Chief of the immense army of one of the great powers of the world; one year more saw him absolute victor, and the saviour of the Union. Four years passed, and he voluntarily laid down his sword and his supreme military command, to become President of the United States, doing so because he was regarded as the only man who could save in peace what he won in war. At the end of four years, he received, like Washington and Jefferson, Jackson and Lincoln, the honor of a reëlection, and three years later he seemed likely to have the unprecedented distinction of an election to a third term. Now, although we may not say there is none so poor to do him honor, he is entirely without position, military or civil, and it is certainly true that many a mousing politician has far more influence than the victor of Appomatox and he who was once dreaded by many people, and looked to by others without dread, as the coming "man on horseback."
—Such a career in these days was possible only in this country, and here it will probably be impossible hereafter. Of civil war we have, we may be sure, seen the last, as it was really the first, that was ever fought on our soil. And indeed it was big enough to suffice for our share of that sort of thing for ever. That we shall ever be called upon to wage war with a foreign foe is in the extremest degree improbable. No other power wants any of our territory, at the price, at least, which it would cost to get it; and we have taken all that we want from other people. Cuba, if we get it—the advantage of which is not clear to all minds—we shall get by purchase. We shall, therefore, it would seem, never be so greatly indebted again to a successful general. In case we should be so, and he should be one of General Sherman's successors, it may be reasonably doubted if, with General Grant's experience before his eyes, he will give up the assured life position of General-in-Chief for the temporary honors and troubles of the Presidential chair. It is not necessary to be a blind admirer of General Grant, or a member of the party which made him twice President, to do him the justice of admitting that his resignation of the office which he won with such eclat, and held with such general honor, the world over, was a sacrifice to the good of the Union for which he fought. He had for life a position equally honorable with that of Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and more striking in its distinction. He had no superior but the President of the United States; not a certain man, but the incumbent of the office for the time being. He might, and probably would, have seen a succession of such men rise, and pass into powerless privacy, while he maintained his high position. He gave up this permanent distinction, with its well-assured emoluments, at what we must admit that he regarded as the call of duty, of patriotism. And now he is, so to speak, a nobody. Admitting all the errors that have been charged against him—and he doubtless committed many—admitting even that the party which he represented is hostile to the best interests of the country (we do not say that it is so, for we speak for no party and in no political interest in these pages)—the spectacle of the passage of such a man into absolute public insignificance, without any public care or public thought for his future, is a very impressive one, and one not in all respects admirable. As his career was possible only in this country, so also was the close of it. The government, the people of no other great nation, would drop a man who had done what he did, and held the positions which he held, into an unprovided, obscure future, putting him off, like an old shoe. Once the victorious commander of an army of half a million of men, a man whose name was in the mouths of all the civilized world, for eight years the ruler, with more than kingly power, of a nation of forty millions, and a country which stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and which covered the temperate zone in a continent, he has been remitted again, as far as the nation is concerned, into his former unimportance, we cannot say obscurity, to live a private life upon a very moderate competence. It may be right that this should be so; but none the less is the spectacle one of great interest and significance; all the more is his brief career one of the most remarkable in the history of civilized peoples.