THE NEW BOOKS.

MEMORIES OF TENNYSON, RUSKIN, AND BROWNING.*

In these pleasantly-written records of her three illustrious friends (or rather four, as Mrs. Browning is included), the author has freely blended biographical fact with the account of her own impressions and appreciations, the personal element rather preponderating. One is not, of course, to expect from the pen of Mrs. Ritchie confidences of the sort known as "breezy" or "startling," which are apt to form the staple of personal reminiscence. Of the rather questionable convention permitting espials into the lives of notable people that would be held impertinences elsewhere, Mrs. Ritchie has not availed herself. We find in

her pages no hint of those interesting skeletonclosets which the biographer is expected to unlock. Her book, delightful and informing though it is, is even lacking in that anecdotal quality which its title seems to promise; and the reader who might be pleased to learn, for instance, from a source so authentic, that Mr. Ruskin, is, entre nous, "no better than he should be," or that Mr. Browning, in the intervals of composition, used to refresh himself by chastising Mrs. Browning, will be disappointed. Tacitly acquitting her readers at the outset of ill-bred curiosity, Mrs. Ritchie has nicely distinguished throughout between the things that may be, and the things that should not be, given to the public. This refinement of tone and treatment has a charm in itself.

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Aside from their literary grace, perhaps the most noticeable thing in the "Records the strain of genuine, almost unquestioning, admiration. At times, and especially in the paper on Ruskin (which is, by the way, largely a commentary, with abundant quotation, on "Præterita"), the writer's turn for hero worship is almost pathetic. But the hero worship is at least sincere; and it has, moreover, nowadays something of the charm of novelty. Accustomed as we are to having our enthusiasms chilled to the marrow by critics of the school of M. Scherer; to measuring off merit with the vernier, and weighing out praise on the jeweller's scales, Mrs. Ritchie's whole-hearted admirations are refreshing. They give one, as it were, the cheery sensation of emerging

*RECORDS OF TENNYSON, RUSKIN, AND BROWNING. By Anne Thackeray Ritchie. Illustrated. New York: Harper & Brothers.

from a damp cellar into the sunshine. have spoken of her special enthusiasm for Ruskin. Criticism-ever impatient of a cult has, we know, been pretty busy picking holes in the Ruskinian coat; and artists especially (we mean performers, as contradistinguished from talkers) have spoken disrespectfully of Mr. Ruskin's pretensions. But Mrs. Ritchie, in her fine womanlike enthusiasm, ignores these carpings; she accepts her hero in his entiretyhis political economy, his paradoxes, his dithyrambic art-criticism, his self-contradictions, his provoking way of mistaking his own likes and dislikes for general principles, and the rest. How much of Mr. Ruskin's vogue has been due to his marvellous gift of expression, she does not stop to consider; and even at this point, his very stronghold, we remember that Ruskin has been assailed. Let us turn for

enlightenment to M. Scherer:

"The influence of Carlyle's mannerism has been considerable. He has given birth to a whole generation of writers, disdainful of that manliness of style which consists in saying things worth saying in the best way possible, and set above all on the refinements of the virtuoso, or even the tricks of the charlatan. Some great talents in England have been ruined in this deplorable school. Mr. Ruskin ended like Carlyle himself by passing from the recherché to the bizarre, and from affectation to mere mystifying. Yet there are still some who feel themselves strong enough to be

sincere and simple, and they are worth all the more for

it. Mr. Matthew Arnold has, I should think, as many ideas in his head as Carlyle, and as much poetry in his soul as Mr. Ruskin, and yet he does not think himself obliged to speak like a mystagogue."

How beauty vanishes under the microscope! But there are many of us, doubtless, who will prefer being wrong with Mrs. Ritchie to being right with M. Scherer in these matters; for this endless quenching of our beacon-lights, or, at best, the showing them to be mere candles magnificently refracted in the haze of our imaginations, carries with it the unpleasant consequence of making us uncomfortable, and the disastrous one of wrecking our faith in human performance.

Such was our author's preconceived ideal of Mr. Ruskin that she confesses she was shocked, on visiting him at Coniston, to find that he had an umbrella:

"I remember noticing, with a thrill, the umbrellastand in the glass door. So Mr. Ruskin had an umbrella just like other people!"

We admit that an umbrella is not a poetical object, nor is it at any time a fit emblem of the Muse. There is, too, some inconsistency in a man's blotting the face of Nature with one, and at the same time railing at factories, rail

ways, etc., on the ground of their defacing the landscape, as Mr. Ruskin has done. But what man lives out his ideals, or is a hero to his valet, or does not reverse the glass when he views his own shortcomings? The world is full of these disparities (as Mrs. Ritchie's father never tired of telling us), of this lack of correspondence between the hero as we paint him and the hero as he is; and everywhere in life "du sublime au ridicule il n'y a qu'un pas.” "Even in the highest pathos of the World Tragedy," says Heine, "bits of fun slip in. The desperate republican who, like Brutus, plunged a knife to his heart, perhaps smelt it first to see whether someone had not split a herring with it, and on this great stage of the world all passes exactly the same as on our beggarly boards." Cæsar, we know, wore paint and false curls, Alexander had a crick in his neck, eloquent Gibbon was so fat that he could not rise from his knees after telling "love's flattering tale," Doctor Johnson wore foul linen, the Queen of Scots wore a wig, Mr. Kipling wears spectacles, and Mr. Ruskin carries an umbrella. "Such is the excellent foppery of the world." We were ourselves once shocked to find an eminent, almost a saintly, man whom we had revered from afar, wearing a green plush waistcoat with glass buttons.

But Mrs. Ritchie is not of the school that sees nothing in the sun but his spots. There is one anecdote of Mr. Ruskin to us painful, and hinting at sensibility gone mad. which she tells in an implicit way, almost arguing a lack of humor:

"Another legend, which I cannot vouch for either, but which seems suitable somehow, begins with a dream, in which Ruskin dreamt himself a Franciscan friar. Now I am told that when he was at Rome there was a beggar on the steps of the Pincio who begged of Mr. Ruskin every day as he passed, and who always received something. On one occasion the grateful beggar suddenly caught the outstretched hand and kissed it. Mr. Ruskin stopped short, drew his hand hastily away, and then with a sudden impulse, bending forward, kissed the beggar's cheek. The next day the man came to Mr. Ruskin's lodging to find him, bringing a gift, which he offered with tears in his eyes. It was a relic, he said, a shred of brown cloth which had once formed part of the robe of St. Francis Assisi, where he beheld those frescoes by Giotto which seemed to him more lovely than anything Tintoret himself had ever produced. I personally should like to believe that the mendicant was St. Francis appearing in the garb of a beggar to his great disciple, to whom also had been granted the gift of interpreting the voice of nature."

To less generous souls than Mrs. Ritchie's it will occur that a man who coddles and in

dulges his emotions to the point of publicly kissing street beggars, is getting on dangerous ground.

Our author first saw Mr. Ruskin at the house of Mrs. John Simon, who, says Ruskin, in the eleventh chapter of " Pæterita," "in my mother's old age was her most deeply trusted friend":

"It was at this lady's house, sitting by the kind hostess of many a year to be, that the writer first saw the author of Modern Painters,' while at the other end of the table Mr. Simon, now Sir John, sat carving, as was his wont, roast mutton—be it tender and smoking and juicy' and dispensing, as is still his wont, trimmings and oracles and epigrams with every plateful. I could even now quote some of the words Ruskin spoke on that summer's evening in Great Cumberland street and I can see him as he was then almost as plainly as on the last time that we met. His mood on that first occasion was one of deep depression, and I can remember being frightened, as well as absorbed, by his talk. Was he joking? Was he serious? I could hardly follow what he said then, though now it all seems simple enough. But good company is like good wine, and improves by keeping, and let us hope that this applies to the recipients as well as to the feast itself. Ruskin seemed less picturesque as a young man than in his later days. Perhaps gray waving hair may be more becoming than darker locks, but the speaking, earnest eyes must have been the same, as well as the tones of that delightful voice, with its slightly foreign pronunciation of the r, which seemed so familiar again when it welcomed us to Coniston long, long years after. Meeting thus, after fifteen years, I was struck by the change for the better in him; by the bright, radiant, sylvan look which a man gains by living among woods and hills and pure breezes."

Mrs. Ritchie's second meeting with Ruskin occurred many years later at Low Bank Ground, on Coniston Lake, and not far from his delightful retreat, Brantwood:

"He, the master of Brantwood, came, as I remember, dressed with some ceremony, meeting us with a certain old-fashioned courtesy and manner; but he spoke with his heart, of which the fashion doesn't change, happily, from one decade to another; and as he stood in his tall hat and frock-coat upon the green, the clouds and drifts came blowing up from every quarter of heaven, and I can almost see him while he talked with emphasis and remembrance of that which was then in both our minds."

Low Bank Ground is, as we have said, but a little way from Brantwood, which is approachable from it by land or water. "A dash of the oars, and you are there," said Ruskin :

"The sun came out between rain clouds as the boat struck with a hollow crunch against the stones of the tiny landing pier. Timothy from the farm, who had come to pilot us, told us with a sympathetic grin that Mr. Ruskin-Rooskin,' I think he called him- ‘had built t' pier, and set t' stoan himsel,' wi' the other gentlemen, but they had to send for t' smith from the village to make t' bolts faaster.'"

The house, says Mrs. Ritchie, " is white, plain, and comfortable," a path up a garden of fruit and flowers, of carnations and strawberries, not "unprofitably gay," serpentining with bright zig-zags to the lawn in front, a dwelling planned for sunshine, and sunshine on the English lakes, smiling out humidly, for the most part, between showers, is of a quality so rare and sweet that it counts for more than in other places. Close by is Coniston Lake, with its peaceful vistas and pleasant watery sounds, the splash of the wavelets, the rustle of the sedge, the "lapwing's solitary cry," the startled plunge of water-rat or otter,- of Naiad and Water-Nixie, one likes to fancy, for place and master are propitious. As for Brantwood itself, says the author, the brightness,

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The squareness, and its unaffected comfortableness, were, I think, the chief characteristics. You had a general impression of solid, old-fashioned furniture, of amber colored damask curtains and coverings; there were Turners and other water-color pictures in curly frames upon the drawing-room walls—a Prout, I think, among them; there was a noble Titian in the dining-room, and the full-length portrait of a child in a blue sash over the side-board, which has become familiar since then to the readers of Præterita'; and most certainly was there an absence of any of the art-dipthongs and peculiarities of modern taste; only the simplest and most natural arrangements for the comfort of the inmates and their guests. Turkey-carpets, steady round-tables, and above all a sense of cheerful, hospitable kindness, which seems to be traditional at Brantwood. For many years past Mrs. Severn has kept her cousin's house, and welcomed his guests with her own. . . That evening the first we spent at Brantwood-the rooms were lighted by slow sunset cross-lights from the lake without. Mrs. Severn sat in her place behind a silver urn, while the master of the house, with his back to the window, was dispensing such cheer, spiritual and temporal, as those who have been his guests will best realize. Fine wheaten bread, and Scotch cakes in many a crisp circlet and crescent" (does not the reader know these same Scotch cakes?- -scones they call them. Next to Burns and Sir Walter they are Scotia's choicest fruit), "and trout from the lake, and strawberries such as only grow on the Brantwood slopes. Were these cups of tea only, or cups of fancy, feeling, inspiration? And as we crunched and quaffed, we listened to a certain strain not easily to be described, changing from its graver first notes to the sweetest and most charming vibrations."

There are a number of these familiar homepictures, kindly, graphic, characteristic, in Mrs. Ritchie's pages.

The paper on the Brownings is thoroughly delightful, rather more personal than the others, and showing in its characterizations many traits of close and delicate observation. Mrs. Browning, especially, is brought home to us with a half dozen significant touches more explicit than chapters of labored analy

sis from a heavier hand. Says Mrs. Ritchie :

"I don't think any girl who had once experienced it could fail to respond to Mrs. Browning's motherly advance. There was something more than kindness in it; there was an implied interest, equality, and understanding which is very difficult to describe and impossible to forget. To the writer's own particular taste there never will be any more delightful person than the simple-minded woman of the world, who has seen enough to know what its praise is all worth, who is sure enough of her own position to take it for granted, who is interested in the person she is talking to, and unconscious of anything but a wish to give kindness and attention. This is the impression Mrs. Browning made upon me from the first moment I ever saw her to the last. Perhaps all the more vivid is the recollection of the peaceful home, of the fireside where the logs are burning while the lady of that kind hearth is established in her sofa corner, with her little boy curled up by her side, the door opening and shutting meanwhile to the quick step of the master of the house, to the life of the world without as it came to her in her quiet nook. Whether at Florence, at Rome, at Paris,

or in London once more, she seemed to carry her own atmosphere always, something serious, motherly, absolutely artless, and yet impassioned, noble, and sincere. I can recall the slight figure in its thin black dress, the writing apparatus by the sofa, the tiny inkstand, the quill-nibbed pen the unpretentious implements of her magic. She was a little woman; she liked little things,' Mr. Browning used to say."

And this "little woman who loved little things," the fond mother and home-keeping wife, neither a shrill debater nor a clamorous mover of the previous question nor a seeker to delve when she should spin, has, nevertheless, a place with the immortals. Mrs. Ritchie's pictures of her friend recall Schiller's lines

"Ehret die Frauen! sie flechten und weben
Himmlische Rosen ins irdische Leben."

For with all her genius and her learning-
at eight years old she read Homer in the orig-
inal, "holding her book in one hand and nursing
her doll on the other arm"- Mrs. Browning
filled the German poet's tender ideal, blending
in a harmonious whole qualities and acquire-
ments often foolishly thought incompatible.
Sure enough of her own position to take it
for granted," as our author says, her fame is
remote enough from the sorry sort of recogni-
tion that rewards the persistent claimant and
the unwearied scrambler.

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A note from Mrs. Ritchie's diary kept when she was quite a young girl reads:

"I think Mrs. Browning is the greatest woman I ever saw in all my life. She is very small, she is brown, with dark eyes and dead brown hair; she has white teeth and a low curious voice; she has a manner full of charm and kindness; she rarely laughs, but is always cheerful and smiling; her eyes are very bright. Her husband is not unlike her. He is short; he is dark,

with a frank, open countenance, long hair, streaked

with gray; he opens his mouth wide when he speaks; he has white teeth."

And here the girlish memoranda wander off. Almost the first time the author recalls Mr. Browning, he, with Thackeray and Mrs. Browning, was discussing spiritualism:

"My father was always immensely interested by the stories told of spiritualism and table-turning, though he certainly scarcely believed half of them. Mrs. Browning believed, and Mr. Browning was always irritated beyond measure, by the subject. I can remember her voice, a sort of faint, minor chord, as she, lisping the 'r' a little, uttered her remonstrating Robert!' and his loud dominant barytone sweeping away every possible plea she and my father could make; and then came my father's deliberate notes, which seemed to fall a little sadly his voice always sounded a little sad-upon the rising waves of the discussion."

Carlyle appears in the Tennysonian notes occasionally and once characteristically:

“It was about this time that Carlyle introduced Sir John Simon to Tennyson one night at Bath House, and made the often-quoted speech, There he sits upon a dung-heap surrounded by innumerable dead dogs'; by which dead dogs he meant Enone' and other Greek versions and adaptations. He had said the same thing of Landor and his Hellenics. I was told of this,' said Lord Tennyson, and sometime afterward repeated it to Carlyle: " I'm told that is what you say of me." He gave a kind of guffaw: "Eh, that wasn't a very luminous description of you, "he answered.""

Perhaps the best compliment Tennyson ever received, thinks Mrs. Ritchie, was one day when walking in Covent Garden, when he was stopped by a rough-looking man, who held out his hand and said: "You're Mr. Tenny

son.

Look here, sir, here am I. I've been drunk for six days out of the seven, but if you will shake me by the hand, I'm d-d if I ever get drunk again." Let us hope the "recording angel" was as lenient here as on another memorable occasion. A less appreciative admirer was the Freshwater boy who, being asked "if he knew Mr. Tennyson," replied, vaguely but confidently, "Yes, he makes poets for the Queen." What do you mean?" asked the amused questioner. "I don't know what they means, but p'liceman often seen him walking about a-making of 'em under the stars." Perhaps the boy spoke wiser than he knew; for Mr. Tennyson" has, in a sense, made poets sometimes, we fear, without much ground for rejoicing in his handiwork.

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A FORTUNATE OLD AUTHOR.* Before me are two editions of Jane Austen's works. One offers a chaste elegance of silver gray shot with hints of green with gold lettering, the other is brave in motley green and redand-gold, and has a solid backing of dark red leather. It is hard to choose between the letterpress, where both editions are so admirable. One edition is from the press of Messrs. Macmillan & Co., the other from that of Messrs. Roberts Brothers.

I have a fancy that Miss Austen would be vastly pleased with any of these charming books. They well fit the daintiness, the unerring and unobtrusive good taste, that are distinguishing characteristics of her work. A strange fate has been hers! She wrote to a cold audience, sometimes fit, always few. So little was she admired in her lifetime, that her nephew could say: "Sometimes a friend or neighbor . would condescend to speak with moderate approbation of Sense and Sensibility,' or 'Pride and Prejudice'; but if they had known that we in our inmost secret thoughts classed her with Madame d'Arblay or Miss Edgeworth, or even with some other novel-writers of the day whose names are now scarcely remembered, they would have considered it an amusing instance of family conceit!"

"Northanger Abbey" was sold to a Bath publisher for fifty dollars; and having bought the MS., the Bath publisher was afraid to publish what seemed to him such unsalable ware, and, in the end, Miss Austen bought it back. For "Sense and Sensibility" she received less than a hundred and fifty pounds, which she nevertheless regarded as a "prodigious recompense!" It is true that certain distinguished critics spoke warmly of her, but, in general, she seemed to have as fair a chance of gently slipping down to oblivion as any writer of the day.

Her work is so unlike any other work of her generation, so out of reach of the taste of the times, so devoid of vivid action and even vivid emotion, and of that vigor that comes from the use of vigorous motives, that it would seem beyond hoping that, in a hundred years from the time of her beginning to write her books, they should be studied patiently enough to re

*JANE AUSTEN'S NOVELS. Edited by R. B. Johnson. In ten volumes, illustrated. New York: Macmillan & Co. JANE AUSTEN'S NOVELS. In twelve volumes, illustrated. Boston: Roberts Brothers.

THE STORY OF JANE AUSTEN'S LIFE. By Oscar Fay Adams. Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co.

Her

veal their own exquisite merits, and that at this distant day she should have a greater audience than she had during her life. Yet this it is that has happened. The truest picture of every-day life in the early part of the century, just because it is the truest, has been studied with an ever-increasing delight. And there are some things very modern about her, so commonly styled "the prim Jane Austen.' She has our aim, to see life truly if we may not see it whole. Her range is narrow, but not so her vision; she enlightens every corner. people are commonplace, but they are alive. The meek little homesick Fanny Price (she has no more finery about the names of her heroines than she has about their characters), Elizabeth Bennett, with her quick eye and sharp tongue and warm heart, Emma and Knighton, the soft little Charlotte, the unprincipled Lady Susan and sweet Anne Eliot,- do we not give them the same regard or criticism that we keep for our acquaintances in the flesh? Perhaps, if one felt in a carping mood, one might send Lady Susan out of the gallery, for she really is the frankest of dissemblers, and dissects her arts for the admiration of her correspondent rather too much in the fashion of Richardson's great villain. But there is no flaw of this kind in Emma or Anne, or in good Mrs. Admiral Cox, who saves her husband, one is persuaded, just as skilfully in his course through the business of life as she does from the posts when he (and she) drive the gig!

In one way Miss Austen is certainly "prim." She wrote only of the people and the affairs that she knew; and the people that she knew valued appearance. She was expected by the manners of her time to range herself on the side of her virtuous characters, as well as to declare for Virtue itself. And, being a conscientious and "high-principled " woman, she faithfully did her duty in this respect. But the spirit of humor is not so easily banished; although Jane Austen was expected to talk like a prig and make her heroes do likewise, she is all the time smiling at her own or her characters' priggishness. It is too harsh to call her cynical, but, having the keenest sense of the incongruous, she smiles rather than weeps over folly.

In her earliest novels there is a serene absence of pathos, and, indeed, to the end she does not take the tearful joy that some of us moderns display in the minor chords. Yet there is a true pathos, as deep as it is unaffected, in Anne Eliot's speech to Harvill in

• . .

"Persuasion": "God forbid that I should undervalue the warm and faithful feelings of any of my fellow-creatures. No, I believe you capable of everything great and good in your married lives. I believe you equal to every important exertion and to every domestic forbearance, so long as if I may be allowed the expression so long as you have an object. I mean while the woman you love lives, and lives for you. All the privileges I claim for my own sex (it is not a very enviable one, you need not covet it) is that of loving longest when existence or when hope is gone.'

There is a deeper note in her last stories, "Persuasion" and " Emma" and "Mansfield Park," than in the earlier books, which run smoothly, as, indeed, life among prosperous and well-bred people is likely to run. What a pathetic figure is poor, harmless, silly Miss Bates! And there is a real and affecting touch in the joy of Sir Thomas Bertram to reach the home where his arrival creates only dismay! But the abiding impression left is not of sadness or sympathy, but a very quiet, sly humor. It is not unkind, but it is amazingly keen. Take, for instance, the description of Robert Ferrar, whose "face expressed a strong, natural, sterling insignificance," or of the Morland family: "A family of ten children will always be called a fine family where there are heads and arms and legs enough for the number, but the Morlands had little other right to the word, for they were in general very plain."

This spontaneous and placid humor that found its meat everywhere, must have been one of the fortunate circumstances of Miss Austen's life. It was as active in her letters and in her familiar intercourse as in her books; it gave herself and her nearest friends pleasure as long as she lived. Her nieces and nephews adored her, because she was not only always kind but always amusing. Perhaps her sense of humor helped her as much as her principles to never intrude her own concerns, and to be always interested in the concerns of others. All the testimony agrees that, particularly in her family circle, she was unselfish in little things and in great. After her funeral, “her brothers," says the youngest mourner there, "went back, sorrowing, to their several homes. They were very fond of her and very proud of her. They were attached to her by her talents, her virtues, and her engaging manners; and each loved afterwards to fancy a resemblance in some niece or daughter of his own to the dear sister Jane whose perfect equal they never expected to see."