had never grappled with his subject at first hand, a recent review closed with the suggestion that there is already one American scholar whose right to undertake this high and arduous task would not be questioned anywhere. It is but an echo of these words when we express

the earnest hope that we may hereafter welcome a book, as yet unannounced and very probably unplanned, which would be a worthy corner-stone for the national scholarship of the twentieth century, Gildersleeve's Literature and Life of

Hellas.

Art. An Artist's Story of the Great War, told and illustrated, with nearly three hundred relief-etchings after Sketches in the Field and twenty half-tone Equestrian Portraits from Original Oil Paintings, by Edwin Forbes. (Fords, Howard & Hulbert.) Mr. Forbes is one of the greatest of war correspondents, and as he handled a brush as deftly as he did a stylographic pen the combination of text and design is uncommonly good. In the four parts already issued of a serial which is to contain twenty, it is easy to see the scope of the work. This is an artist's portfolio, with letterpress by the artist himself. He has disengaged notable and characteristic passages and treated them, so that the reader, before he finishes, will have a wide range of observation of soldier life, and need not fear that he is in for a long formal narrative. It is all touch and go. - The chief features of L'Art (Macmillan) for 15 January and 1 February are etchings after Rubens and Claes Berchem, red chalk studies from nature by Émile Lévy, an interesting woodcut portrait of Alphonse Karr, and several cuts illustrative of Pays de France by Pierre Gauthiez. The portrait of Karr occurs in the serial study Les Salonniers depuis Cent Ans.

Oberammergau, 1890, by William Allen Butler. (Harpers.) A vellum-covered, dignified folio volume, containing Mr. Butler's narrative of and comment on the play in fluent, serious verse, several interesting wood engravings from scenes, and an accompaniment of notes.

Literature and Criticism. Boswell's Life of Johnson, including Boswell's Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, and Johnson's Diary of a Journey into North Wales. Edited

by George Birkbeck Hill. In six volumes. (Harpers.) Dr. Hill has identified his name with Johnson's in this noble edition of a great work. Johnson was himself such a golden milestone of his age and country that it is easy to regard him the centre of the literary history of his time, and to annotate Boswell's work so freely as to make it, text and annotation, a thesaurus. This has always been seen, and Croker loaded the book down, but Croker was both careless and prejudiced. Dr. Hill approaches the subject from that scientific side which is so inestimable a point of view when one is exploiting a subject, and not himself. His notes are rich in matter, yet restrained in expression, and his apparatus of index and appendix gives a value to the work which any one will appreciate who has been baffled by the vexatious index of the most familiar edition heretofore. The plates and portraits increase the positive worth of the work, and the style of the whole series of volumes is of a high order of bookmaking. -A Guide-Book to the Poetic and Dramatic Works of Robert Browning, by George Willis Cooke. (Houghton.) In the city built by Browning there are many places which it is hard for strangers to find, and even his friends are sometimes puzzled to describe. In this handy volume, arranged alphabetically, Mr. Cooke has performed the very useful service of furnishing clues. He does not irritate the sensitive mind of the student and lover of Browning by acting as a bumptious valet de place, and telling him what he is to think or how he is to feel, but simply puts him in the way of enjoying himself more thoroughly by removing some of those external ob

Eckermann, continuing a remark about the last day seeming to be near, which we find repeated in this scene as Faust and Mephistopheles approach the horrible revelry," our country people have certainly kept up their strength, and will, I hope, long be able to secure us from total decay and destruction. The rural population are to be regarded as a magazine, from which the forces of declining manhood are always recruited and refreshed. But just go into our great towns, and you will feel quite differently. Just take a turn beside a second Diable Boiteux or a physician of large practice, and he will whisper to you tales which will horrify you at the misery, and astonish you at the vice, with which human nature is visited, and from which society suffers."

Here, then, in Mephistopheles we find our "second diable boiteux," by whose side we take a turn through the great city; and, after reading this paragraph, we may enjoy with Goethe his quiet laugh with Zelter over the labors of the commentators who have "taken such pains to convert poetry back into prose." They have rendered a service, however, in searching out the originals who sat for the different portraits; for here, as everywhere, Goethe always draws, even his most fanciful figures, from a living model. We may, perhaps, in connection with this recall Goethe's remark to Schiller, on "the peculiar character of the public in a great city. It lives in an incessant tumult of getting and spending; and what we call the higher mood can neither be produced there nor communicated;" and his observation to Eckermann, that he "anticipates special pleasure from Delacroix's scenes on the Brocken. You will see here the extensive experience of life for which a great city like Paris has given him such opportunities."

With the disgust which comes to Faust, dancing with his fair, nude partner, as her animal nature shows itself to him, the image of his purer love returns; and in the next scene, again face to face with Nature, he sees his action in its true light, curses Mephistopheles, and bids him bear him to where Gretchen is imprisoned. In that most pathetic scene of all literature which ends the First Part, we learn from the distracted utterances of poor Gretchen, raving amid the straw on the prison floor, the secret of her tragic end.

"The world," says Goethe, "is to me like a great factory, where, amid the whirring looms and wheels, we all work out the purposes of the Master Workman." To Gretchen, with the great gift of love, the great responsibility of another life has been given. She too, at work in this whirring loom of time, has been made the guardian of a part of that fabric, the Garment of Life, by which we recognize the Deity. "If we work with the Master," Goethe says,

66

our holiday will come, and our reward. If we strive to seize the web or destroy it, we shall destroy ourselves." Gretchen, neglecting the loom, has, for her own convenience, stretched out her hand to get rid of the responsibility imposed upon her, and the awful wheels of God come over and crush her. But notice, as the night ends, in the gray streak of dawn she recognizes the divine justice, and, refusing to escape the penalty, becomes, in her exalted reunion with the Divine Purpose, the influence that still shall lead her lover upward and on.

In the Second Part we see, reviewing the larger field, the life of the race; what this influence, this manifestation of the Ewig-weibliche, the Woman-Soul, has there done for us. But all this must be reserved for another occasion. William P. Andrews.

ven;

In spite of the great mass of private correspondence offered to the public within the last quarter of a century, we can think of but three women, Mrs. Carlyle, Madame Craven, and Madame Mohl, whose letters in any respect of fer a parallel to those of Mrs. Kemble. This resemblance lies not so much in the style, the keen observation, the bold diagnosis, and the pretty variegated arrows shot almost at random, which amuse the reader, but may somewhere leave a sting, in which these letters remind us of Mrs. Carlyle's; nor in the exquisite feeling for family life, for friendship, for all beauty of the intellectual and moral order, in which Mrs. Kemble is nearly akin to Madame Cranor yet in the capacity which belongs to the woman of the salon for a wide diversity of intimate friendships, and for keen appreciation of the exotic refinements of the most highly civilized life which characterize alike the writer and Madame Mohl; but rather in the fact that each one of these women possesses, like Mrs. Kemble, the art of embodying the facts of her environment, giving definite shape and color to her surroundings, and presenting the men and women encountered day by day as in a magic mirror, where few of the shifting lights which constitute personality and make up life are lost. There is a wide difference in the way these four women write, and in the effect their letters produce upon the reader; but in each of them we discern the artist behind the detailed and balanced impression produced, an artist under the spur of an imperative necessity to find some clear medium of expression, that takes the form of confidential let

1 Further Records. 1848-1883. A Series of Letters by FRANCES ANNE KEMBLE. Forming a Sequel to Records of a Girlhood and Records

ters, which are half a self-confession and half a work of art, presenting as they do, although unconsciously, by a cunning arrangement of details and stroke upon stroke of line and color, what the artist has seen, heard, and felt, thus making up in the total more than a narrative, an idyl or a drama.

A.

Of course another factor in such correspondence, and a powerful one, is friendly feeling, and a desire to share all with one in complete sympathy with the writer; but, as we know, that may exist quite independently of any capacity for producing good letters. George Sand's letters are, in general, simple, serious, and charming, showing a large and tranquil outlook upon life, but the real human element nowhere emerges into full relief. When she writes about particular people, she idealizes, or philosophizes, or psychologizes; that is, she crosses the borderland of actuality, and enters her own realm of romance. thoroughly enjoyable letter-writer must have absolute truth for a starting-point, if only in order to give charm to his divagations on the road. Variations on a familiar air played out of tune delight nobody with a true ear. Besides this instinctive habit of seeing accurately and reporting fairly, a keen vision and keener feelings are required, a wide sympathy with the facts of life, and, above all, the requisite "push" which comes from an unjaded literary talent and a strong individuality. For, after all, no matter what letters describe, the actual interest centres in the writer herself, and it is the revelation of her own character that gives worth to details which, except as manifestations of herself, would have little force or meaning. of Later Life. New York: Henry Holt & Co. London: Richard Bentley. 1891.

If these Further Records lack the charm of Mrs. Kemble's wonderful Records of a Girlhood, which first found favor with the public in the pages of The Atlantic under the title of Old Woman's Gossip, or if they fail to touch contemporary life and thought with the same breadth and vigor which characterized her Later Records, they possess their own unique advantages, and could not easily be excelled in their clear presentation of a striking individuality and its milieu, or in their shrewd and accurate criticism of life. The present book is made up, not like the others from a general correspondence, but of two independent series of letters, each printed continuously: the first, addressed to Miss Harriet St. Leger, beginning in January, 1874, and ending with Miss St. Leger's death, in 1877, taking up more than three quarters of the whole space, and making indeed a journal intime; and the second to Mr. Arthur Malkin, infrequent, desultory, but still complete enough to give a general sketch of the writer's experience from 1848 to 1883. There is a deplorable lack of good editing in the whole work, which might have been considerably shortened had the endless repetition of the same matter been omitted. Undated letters have been introduced in a way to make, at times, a bewildering jumble. Then, too, the want of chronological arrangement in the two distinct series of letters shows a singular indifference to the artistic make-up of the book on the part of author and publishers. Why those addressed to Mr. Malkin, most of which so far antedate those to Miss St. Leger, should not have been presented at the start, and finally have been merged in the fuller correspondence, is nowhere explained. However, the sudden transition offers the charm of the unexpected. In the twinkling of an eye the writer casts off the trappings of age, and reappears as the traditional Fanny Kemble midway in her brilliant VOL. LXVII. NO. 403.

44

career; crossing the ocean twice a year, and delighting both England and America with her readings; climbing mountains in Switzerland; wintering in Rome and summering in Lenox. In truth, the letters to "Arthur," both in their tone and scope, afford a piquant contrast to those addressed to "H.," whose views of life, always serious, had plainly not lightened with the advance of age and loss of sight. Mrs. Kemble is evidently at not a little pains to put herself into sympathy with the deprivations of her elderly friend by herself coquetting with old age, as sexagenarians are apt to do. She is now many years older than when she wrote the latest in date of these letters; yet when, in 1889, she was spending the summer in her beloved Switzerland, the group who were wont to gather in her tiny salon day after day-one of whom was a distinguished American novelist, and another John Walter Cross (who walked daily four miles across the glacier to join the little coterie) - found her, conversationally, at her inimitable best; never clearer in intellect or more ready with sallies of wit.

Miss St. Leger's friendship had counted for much in Mrs. Kemble's experience, and she was generous in acknowledgments. "I have lost," remarked the younger Pliny, when Corellius Rufus died, "yes, I have lost a witness of my own life;" and this all readers of Mrs. Kemble's various memoirs and letters know her beloved "H." to have been to her. And certainly letters like Mrs. Kemble's must have counted for much in the life of a blind invalid, past eighty years of age, written as they were with a complete absence of reserve, with marvelous facility of expression and trenchant powers of description, and out of an intellect swept clear of cobwebs. To see clearly and describe fearlessly belonged to Mrs. Kemble's temper and habit, and in this full correspondence minuteness of detail amply atones in the way of interest for possible

lack of variety. It seems to have been printed almost as it was written, the occasional hiatuses suggesting no obscure and conjectural private history, but rather serving to point to the meaning between the lines, while the initials are the most transparent veil to the personalities alluded to on every page.

Naturally, Mrs. Kemble's return to Philadelphia, in 1874, stirred memories and associations of an experience which, in a life like hers, actually formed but a single chapter, and which during the busy years of her full after career as an actress and a reader must have seemed unreal, but now was brought up at every turn. Her relationship with those closest had, however, little of the intimate habit which usually accompanies ties of blood; thus her constant allusions to her family take a delicate and piquant turn, and her admiring appreciation is tinged with a hundred pretty changeable lights of sentiment and also of criticism. She arranges her life at York Farm as completely as an Englishwoman may who perpetually reminds herself of American limitations. We may follow every detail of the quiet routine at York Farm, and each member of the household, from the central figure down to the setter dog and the canary bird, becomes individualized to us. Many vivid touches set forth the region round about, the burst of spring, the intense heats of summer, the wonderful transfiguration of autumn, the white and glittering splendors of winter, which seems to have expended its worst rigors in the years Mrs. Kemble lived at York Farm. The sloping fields undulate to the woods of Champlost, where lives her friend "M.," who is described over and over again, with a touch made exquisite by tender and admiring af fection. Even the by-path leading to Champlost soon gains charm for the reader, along a lane, across a park where fine oaks grow, with a gush of violets at the foot of the great trees, while the meadows on either side are

blue-white with the starry blossoms of the euphrasia. A quick sense for nature's refreshment and renovation to heart and soul is shown in every allusion to out-of-door life.

To transfer to this country not only the habits of English life, but also of English thought and the prejudices of a lifetime, was of course to make Mrs. Kemble an inexorable critic of everything American. We are accustomed to judicious strictures upon our manners, habits, and tendencies, in fact, we frequently court them by asking foreigners, and particularly English people, for their candid opinion of us; yet we do not get over a certain expectation of being pronounced faultless, and our withers are wrung when exceptions are taken to our public institutions and our national idiosyncrasies. There is no display of rosepink optimism in Mrs. Kemble's criticisms, but it should be remembered that when she sets out to interpret our domestic habits and our public politics, she is answering the questions of a correspondent curious to know the worst of a country she believes little good of; indeed, is surprised should be inhabited by well-to-do people able to denationalize themselves by living in Europe.

That Mrs. Kemble, in spite of her fault-finding with America in certain minor details, was in sympathy with us at the time of the crisis of our history may be seen by this extract from a letter to Mr. Malkin in September, 1861:

"The state of the country is very sad, and I fear will long continue to grieve and mortify its well-wishers; but of the ultimate success of the North I have not a shadow of a doubt. I hope to God that neither England nor any other power from the other side of the water will meddle in the matter, but above all not England; and thus, after some bad and good fighting, and an unlimited amount of brag and bluster on both sides, the South, in spite of a much better state of preparation, of better soldiers,