The Leipzic Grenzboten notices Mrs. Maberly's new romance of "Fashion" (which we believe has not yet been republished in America) with great praise, as a work of striking power and artistic management. Nevertheless, says the critic, this romance has excited in England as much anger as attention, and this he attributes to the truth with which the authoress has depicted the aristocratic world. He then makes the following remarks, which are curious enough to be translated: "The meaning of the word 'fashion' cannot be rendered in a foreign language. La mode and its tyranny approach somewhat to the sense, but still it remains unintelligible to us Germans, because we have no idea of the capricious, silly, and despotic laws of fashion in England. They do not relate, as with us, to mere outward things, as clothes and furniture, but especially to position and estimation in high society. In order to play a part on that stage it is necessary to understand the mysterious conditions and requirements which the goddess Fashion prescribes. High birth and riches, wit and beauty, find no mercy with her if her whimsical laws are not obeyed. In what these laws consist no living soul can say: they are double, yes three-fold, the je ne sais quoi of the French. The exclusiveness of English society is well known, a peculiarity in which it is only excelled by its copyist the American society of New York and Boston. But it is not enough to have obtained admission into the magic circle: there, too, fashion implacably demands its victims, and to her as to Moloch earthly and heavenly goods, wealth, and peace of soul, are offered up."
John Ruskin, who has written of painting, sculpture and architecture, in a manner more attractive to mere amateurs than any other author, will soon publish his elaborate work, "The Authors of Venice." Notwithstanding his almost blind idolatry of Turner, and his other heresies, Ruskin is one of the few writers on art who open new vistas to the mind; vehement, paradoxical, and one-sided he may be, but no other writer clears the subject in the same masterly manner—no other writer suggests more even to those of opposite opinions.
The first two volumes of Oehlenschlager's Lebens Erinnerungen have appeared at Vienna, and attract more observation than anything else in the late movements in the German literature. The poet's early struggles give one kind of interest to this work, and his friendship with illustrious litterateurs another. Madame de Stael, Goethe, Schiller, the Schlegels, Steffens, Hegel, and other representatives of German thought, pass in succession through these pages, mingled with pictures of Danish life, and criticisms on the Danish drama. Like most German biographies, this deals as much with German literature as with German life.
Gustave Planche, a clever Parisian critic, has in the last number of La Revue des Deux Mondes, an article on Lamartine's novels and Confessions, issued within the year. He spares neither the prose nor poetry of the romantic statesman. He classes the History of the Girondists with the novels. On the whole he thinks there is less of fact, or more of transmutation of fact, than in Sir Walter Scott's Waverley series: as in Scott's Life of Napoleon there was less of veracity than in any even of his professed fictions founded upon history. These romancists are never to be trusted, except in their own domains.
Prosper Mérimée, known among the poets by his Theatre de Clara Gazul, and who by his Chronique du Temps de Charles IX. and Colomba, was entitled to honorable mention in literature, has written a very clever book about the United States—the fruit of a visit to this country last year—which an accomplished New-Yorker is engaged in translating. His last previous performance was a Life of Pedro the Cruel, which has been translated and published in London, and is thus spoken of in the Literary Gazette:—
"The subject hardly yields in romantic variety, strange turns of fortune, characters of strong expression, and tragedies of the deepest pathos, to anything created by the imagination. Within the period and in the land which was marked by the fortunes of Pedro of Castile, the scene is crowded with figures over which both history and song have thrown a lasting interest. The names of Planche of France, Inez de Castro of Portugal, Du Guesclin,—the Black Prince, the White Company—belong alike to romance and to reality. The very 'Don Juan' of Mozart and Byron plays his part for an hour as no fabulous gallant at the court of Seville; Moors and Christians join in the council or in the field here, as well as in the strains of the Romancero; and the desperate game played for a crown by the rival brothers whose more than Theban strife was surrounded by such various objects of pity, admiration or terror, wants no incident, from its commencement to its climax, to fill the just measure of a tragic theme. One more striking could scarcely have been desired by a poet; yet M. Mérimée, who claims that character, has handled it with the judgment and diligence of an historian."