The Galaxy, April, 1877 Part 23

Upon the Celts came the Greeks and the Romans. The former took no such hold of the country as the latter did; but yet there seems to be some reason for Mr. Van Laun's summary of the influence upon Gaul, (not yet France) of the two great nations of antiquity when he says: "Greece, the commercial nation, had charmed and penetrated her hosts by her poetry, her rhetoric, her arts; Rome, the military nation, remodelled her victims by her laws, her administration, her moral vigor." This is somewhat loosely expressed for a work of such literary pretensions as those of the book before us; but it suggests the truth. There was, however, in the end, to use a popular phrase, "no comparison" between the influence of the Greeks and that of the Romans upon Gaul. It was in letters as in society and in politics; the intellectual existence of Gaul, as well as her physical existence, was to be inextricably interwoven with that of her Roman conquerors. Gaul became Romanized; the language of the country, whatever it had been, was driven out, and Latin took its place. The people of the country became one of what are now known as the Latin races, chiefly because of their languages.

French is little more than Latin first debased and then by culture reformed into a language having a character and laws of its own. The words which form the bulk of the French language may be traced, have been traced, down step by step from the original Latin forms; and it is found that changes from ancient Latin to modern French took place according to certain phonetic laws so absolute that, given a Latin word, philologists can tell surely under what form it must appear in French.

After the Romans came the Teutonic invaders; and of these the Franks so imposed themselves upon the country that they gave it their name, and Gaul became France. Charlemagne was neither Celtic nor Latin, but simply Karl the Great, a Teutonic monarch under whose sceptre all the Franks were united. The predominance of the Franks in Gaul for many generations had a modifying influence upon the people. The Celtic Gaul was a lively, spirited, vain, bold, but not a very steadily courageous man. The Teutonic was a quieter, steadier, more reserved, and more thoughtful man. He was a bigger man, too, and like big men, he took things more quietly; he had the steady courage which the das.h.i.+ng and gaily caparisoned Celt somewhat lacked. And yet it is remarkable that in the end the Celtic nature rea.s.serted itself in France, although with some modification; and to-day the Frenchman is a Celt, as fond of talk, of fanciful poetry, of fine dress, and show, and dash, as his forefather was fifteen hundred years ago.

It was not until about the year 850 that the language of the people of France a.s.sumed a form distinctively French, according to the modern standard; and even then it was so rude and unformed that to a modern uneducated Frenchman it would be quite as strange and incomprehensible as Latin itself. From the very first the great distinction between the language of the north and that of the south seems to have existed. The _langue d'oc_ and the _langue d'oil_ contended for the mastery, which was finally won by the latter. This is remarkable, as the former was the softer and more cultivated tongue. The finest and the most of the very early poetry of France was written in the _langue d'oc_. To this literature and to the condition of the society in which it was produced Mr. Van Laun gives much attention, as might have been expected. This part of his book is interesting to students of literary history; but we must confess that the songs of the troubadours have to us very rarely any of the charms of poetry, and that we think that much of the admiration of them which has been expressed by literary antiquarians is fict.i.tious. There is occasionally in these poems a touch of natural feeling; but generally they are cold and full of conceits. Form seems to have been more important in the poet's eyes than spirit; and instead of genuine fervor we have deliberate extravagance. The great epic poem of the French language--its greatest if not its only great poem--the "Chanson de Roland"--is written in the _langue d'oil_. Mr. Van Laun notices this poem of course, and gives a brief summary of its plot, or we might better say of its incidents; but we are surprised that he does not give it more attention. It is far more worthy of critical examination than the fantastic love poems of the troubadours.

In his account of feudal society and of the effect which its conditions had upon such literature as there was in that day, Mr. Van Laun could hardly pa.s.s over those tribunals so characteristic and so foreign to our modes of thought and feeling nowadays--the courts of love, of which the troubadours were, in a sort, the advocates. These courts were governed by a Code of Love, which had thirty-one statutes or ruling maxims. Of these maxims the most significant, and some of the most remarkable, are the following:

The plea of wedlock is not a sufficient excuse from love.

None can be bound by a double love.

It is undoubted that love is always diminis.h.i.+ng or increasing.

A two years' widowhood is enjoined for a deceased lover.

It is shameful to love those with whom marriage would be shameful.

A true lover does not desire the embrace of any one save his companion in love.

Love rarely endures when made public.

Easy acceptance renders love contemptible; a slow acceptance causes it to be held dear.

A man full of love is ever full of fear.

Love can deny nothing to a lover.

There is nothing to prevent one woman from being loved by two men, nor one man by two women.

In the last quoted of these remarkable laws (which were the work of women and of a few men who wished to please women), it will be observed that no authority or countenance is given to the loving of two women by one man. Our author regards the effect of these courts and their code as on the whole beneficial. His judgment may be sound, monstrous as the code seems to us, recognizing and even sanctioning as it did relations of the s.e.xes not formed according to civil laws; for, as he says, "it refined the inevitable evil, subst.i.tuted an easy for an almost impracticable moral code, and being compelled to draw a new line between venial offences and coa.r.s.e licentiousness, exacted a rigid obedience to those laws." There is also some force in his plea that the courts of love "rescued woman from what would have become a condition of intolerable degradation, elevated affection rather than pa.s.sion into the place of honor, and encouraged devotion in the stronger s.e.x, grace and propriety in the weaker." It is undoubtedly true that when society became more rigid in s.e.xual morality, and the mediaeval code of love disappeared, there remained the tenderness and courtesy for the fairer and weaker s.e.x which that code had done so much to develop.

Mr. Van Laun's first volume brings us down only to the Renaissance. But at that period the characteristic trait of French literature developed itself strongly. That trait is satire; not the b.l.o.o.d.y scourge of Juvenal, but a light, caustic, reserved, and almost pleasant although malicious satire--malicious in the French sense of _malice_, which is not so strong a word as its English counterpart. The difference between the French spirit and the English is shown by the fact that with free thought in the English race came stubborn dissent; in the French, light-hearted satire. "Satire," as Mr. Van Laun justly says, "is at the root of the French character, an instinct among the descendants of the ancient Gauls, who loved to fight and to talk well." This satire broke out in the sixteenth century with a brightness and causticity which has ever since distinguished French literature. The leader was Marguerite, sister to Francis I., the well-known Queen of Navarre. Her "Heptameron"

is a strange book for a woman, and not a bad woman, a lady, and a queen, to have written. In it "she vents her contemptuous scorn upon husbands, although [perhaps because] she was married; against monks, though she was an ardent devotee of religion; against lawyers and doctors, though she was a queen." But it is most happily added that "her shrewdest satire of all is unconsciously pointed against herself; for she stands revealed to us a very woman, the rivals for whose favor are G.o.d and the devil, and who affords to neither of these more than a short coquettish glance."

It was at this period that the present school of French literature had its beginning; the spirit then so strongly manifested, the tendency to clearness, brightness, and high finish of style which then appeared among French writers, have since that time been the signs and tokens of the French mind and hand in literature. All that goes before is rude or fantastic or pedantic; then French literature rises in its splendor; we can hardly say its grandeur. Mr. Van Laun's first volume is full of interest which, however, is rather historical than literary; in the succeeding part of his work we may look for criticism more acceptable to the general reader.

--We pa.s.s easily from this history of the earliest days of French literature to its very latest, and we may add, one of its most characteristic productions. Alphonse Daudet's novel, "Fromont Jeune et Risler Aine," has suddenly attained one of those rare and brilliant successes which seem possible only in France. Within an incredibly short time sixty thousand copies of it were sold, and it was "crowned"

by the French Academy; whatever that may mean, whether an actual crowning of either book or author, it certainly does imply the awarding of the highest honors by the most eminent literary tribunal in France.

It has now been reproduced here in a translation which leaves nothing to be desired, whether as a transfusion of the French spirit of the book, or as an example of a fine English narrative style.[10] Indeed, it unites these two most important requisites of a good translation in a rare and remarkable manner. As to the book itself, although it is a very good novel, and carries upon its face the evidence that it is a careful study of a certain phase of French life, we are at a loss to account for its phenomenal success. It is all about Sidonie, who may be called its heroine, as Becky Sharp is the heroine of "Vanity Fair." Now Sidonie is a pretty, vulgar, vile-souled shop girl who uses her beauty to make her way to a certain sort of _bourgeois_ fas.h.i.+onable life, but who is really a far more infamous creature than many a common harlot.

For she is not wanton; she is not merely venal; she is pitilessly selfish and fiendishly malicious. She has no honesty of any kind--of mind, heart, soul, or body. A baser, viler creature in female, and therefore in human form, it would be impossible to conceive. For to all grovelling, debasing vice she adds a monstrous, cold-hearted cruelty.

With all this she is not remarkable for anything except a pretty, blooming face and a low cunning. What need to familiarize us with the life of such a creature? She ruins the happiness of two men, one of a n.o.ble soul and the other a weak-minded creature; she breaks up a family; she brings her princ.i.p.al victim to suicide; and all this not even for a grand pa.s.sion, but that she may have fine dresses, diamonds, and a social success. This is very barren business. We do not care to have such a life as this laid before us with all the particularity of treatment which belongs to the realistic school. But granted that we did desire it, we must confess that we could not wish for it better done. The life-portraiture, inner as well as outer, is perfect and minute to admiration. The end is brought about in fine melodramatic style. Around Sidonie are grouped several personages lovable and unlovable, admirable and unadmirable, but all painted with perfect, clear conception and firm, minute touch. The distinctive Frenchness of the author is manifest in every page. It is shown particularly in the absence of any touch of humor in the portraiture of Sidonie. Unlike Becky Sharp, she hems no little s.h.i.+rt in public until a little Rawdon has long outgrown it. The hard portrait of her hard soul has no such softening touch as that. The book is of a bad sort; but of its sort most admirable.

[10] "_Sidonie._" From the French of ALPHONSE DAUDET. 16mo, pp.

262. Boston: Estes & Lauriat.

The Lenten season is peculiarly the time for religious books, and the publishers have not failed to take advantage of it this year. Among the most interesting and valuable of the new works is Dr. Gregory's examination into the reason for having Four Gospels.[11] Why there should be two, three, or any number more than one, or less than eleven, is a question that has been considered significant for many centuries.

Why out of eleven faithful disciples, precisely four should be inspired to write the history of the founder of the Church is certainly a problem that must be worth examining. The first idea, and it is one that has not died out yet, was that the four Gospels were so many incomplete but supplementary narratives, and in the second century efforts were made to improve upon the Biblical record by the Harmonists, who tried to compile what they considered a consistent and progressive account of the acts of Christ's ministry. They were followed by the Allegorists, who took the vision of Ezekiel, with its likeness of a man, a lion, an ox, and an eagle, and applied it to the writers of the Gospels as an exemplification of the meaning each of the narratives was intended to have. Though they, and their modern followers also, have not been able to agree upon this symbolical purport, the four Evangelists have retained in art those symbolical figures. The lion and St. Mark, the eagle and St. John are indissolubly connected in ecclesiastical art and story. The other schools of interpretation are, according to Dr. Gregory, the rationalists and "the common-sense critics." His own answer to the question, Why Four Gospels? is, that Christ had a mission to the Jews, and Matthew presented that argument for his divinity which was best calculated to impress that people; and to the Romans, to whom Mark was an interpreter; and to the Greeks, to whom Luke spoke; and to the Church at large, for whom John wrote his gospel of gentleness and love. The Jew, the Roman, and the Greek then composed the world of civilization--the existing society of that day--and in the Bible we find one writer for each of these nations, and one for the whole Church. This is certainly a rational and unembarra.s.sed explanation. Dr.

Gregory enforces it with great force and learning.

[11] "_Why Four Gospels?_ or, The Gospel for all the World." By D. S. GREGORY, D.D. New York: Sheldon & Co.

MR. BUCHANAN'S "Shadow of the Sword"[12] has so many faults that it is a wonder he could have written it to the end without arousing his own disgust. It revives the long-neglected horrors of the time of the first Napoleon, and deals with them in a way that is brutal, not artistic.

Its hero is a deserter, and he is so sharply followed by the gendarmes that for a year or more he lives the life of a burrowing animal, until reason itself is unseated. The only relief to a picture which the author strives vigorously to make revolting is the love of the hero's betrothed; but that too is so mingled with terror that it only throws a more lurid light upon the sufferings her lover undergoes. The style is as close an imitation of the French as the author can produce, occasionally varied, however, most ludicrously by an unguarded exhibition of English slang. The heroine has those eyes so rarely seen outside of novels, of "that mystic color which can be soft as heaven with joy and love, but dark as death with jealousy and wrath." For those who get near enough to gaze long into them, they reveal "strange depths of pa.s.sion, and self-control, and pride." The individual who did this gazing is a tall, l.u.s.ty fellow, and healthy as the average of fisherman's boys, but for all that he has the soul of romance within him. When his comrades are lounging on the beach, _he_ is "walking in some vast cathedral not made with hands," or performing daring feats of strength. Unluckily forsaking his cathedral, to lounge on the beach with his true love, like common mortals, they are caught by the tide, and have to wade through the water to escape. She bares her legs for the bath without hesitation or blush, for "she knew that they were pretty, of course, and she felt no shame." But there is one thing this young lady would not for worlds reveal, and that is _her hair_, which is invariably concealed beneath a coif. But as the waters deepen, Rohan throws the pretty-limbed creature over his shoulder and wades thigh deep. As he lands her he looks up, "and lo! he saw a sight which brought the bright blood to his own cheeks and made him tremble like a tree beneath his load." _Her hair had fallen down_, and the cheeks and neck that bore unmoved the exposure of her knees, were now "crimson with a delicious shame." This incident "bared each to each in all the nudity of pa.s.sion," and it certainly bares the nudity of the author's invention. He is nowhere prurient, and nowhere delicate. He describes the revolting details of the story with as much unction as if they were the important things, and he leaves his hero at the end a complete failure in life and love, wasted in strength, and ruined in mind.

[12] "_The Shadow of the Sword._" A Romance. By ROBERT BUCHANAN.

New York: Lovell, Adam, Wesson & Co.

WE are glad to see Dr. McClellan persist in his study of the cholera question.[13] We know of no publications which are better fitted than his to awaken the people to a proper sense of the duty, and also of the efficiency, of personal providence against disease. He is an advocate of the Indian origin theory of the disease and its spread by personal infection only, and in this pamphlet maintains two propositions: 1st, that Asiatic cholera has never yet _originated on the American continent_, but in every instance has spread from a first case which reached its sh.o.r.es from some countries beyond the ocean; and 2d, that it is diffused by the migrations of individuals who are infected by the disease, a specific poison existing in their dejecta, which reproduces the disease in any person to whom it gains access. This is a theory of epidemic cholera which is rational, consistent with the constantly developing facts of scientific research, and which happily includes a remedy that is every way practicable and thorough. But it is a theory that is not yet acknowledged by all authorities. Telluric conditions, malaria, and other local influences are frequently pointed to as the cause of the disease, and the doctrine of specific cholera poison still demands strong partisan advocacy.

[13] "_Lessons to be Learned from the Cholera Facts of the Past Year._" By ELY MCCLELLAN, M.D., Surgeon U.S.A. Reprinted from the "Richmond and Louisville Medical Journal."

--An anonymous pamphlet on vivisection, which takes ground against that mode of obtaining knowledge, is not worth serious notice except for the odd argument that crime is likely to increase if the vivisectionists are allowed to experiment on cats and dogs, as the new English law proposes! Criminals, says the auth.o.r.ess, rarely have had pets, and _therefore_ if we kill all the pets, and thus deprive ourselves of the refining influences of kitty and the enn.o.bling example of doggy, we shall the more readily turn to criminal ways. Another powerful argument is that "the countries where vivisection has prevailed seem to have secured no lasting blessing, but to have been the subjects of peculiarly calamitous afflictions, direful disasters, unnatural _internal tribulations_, and other multiplied evils." This is theocracy with a vengeance.

FOR some years past the "North American Review" has been enriched by papers from the late Mr. Chauncey Wright on various subjects in the wide field of modern philosophy, but especially in the much disputed theories of biology. They exhibited such proofs of independent judgment and critical ac.u.men as to give their author immediate standing among European as well as home savants. These critiques have been collected and published under the name "Philosophical Discussions."[14] Much as we admired these articles when they first appeared, we do not see that a republication of them is needed unless as a graceful monument to an enthusiastic student. In their permanent form they lose the immediate fitness to questions under universal discussion, which is the true _raison d'etre_ of such papers. The extreme wordiness which was Mr.

Wright's princ.i.p.al literary fault is disagreeably manifest when his book is laid by those of other masters in positive philosophy. This is especially noticeable in the only strictly original discussion in the book, the one on the arrangement of leaves in plants. In this paper the editor has left out the "strictly inductive investigation" which contains the kernel of the essay! He has omitted the soul and given the "limbs and outward flourishes" of the author's discussion, and much to the latter's discredit. Aside from this tendency to sentences and words of philosophical length, Mr. Wright's style is extremely agreeable, clear, and strong. It frequently s.h.i.+nes with unexpected felicities of expression, just as the author's argument frequently awakens the perception with its unusual keenness and depth of thought.

[14] "_Philosophical Discussions._" By CHAUNCEY WRIGHT. With a Biographical Sketch of the Author by Charles Eliot Norton. New York: Henry Holt & Co.

"THE CONVICTS,"[15] by Auerbach, will not increase that author's reputation in America. It belongs to the distinctively romantic school of German fiction. The story is that two convicts, reformed through the agency of a charitable society, marry and bring up a large family of children. These suffer pangs of sorrow when they learn of the stain on their parents' name, but otherwise they do not appear to be inconvenienced by their unfortunate origin. They marry into stations very much above them, though in addition to the embarra.s.sing criminal history of their parents, they suffer what in Germany is the hardly less disaster, of being the children of a railway signal man! We suppose the object of this plot, and of much special social sentiment which is introduced in the story, is to represent the increased importance which the industrial cla.s.ses have in Germany, as elsewhere in the world. Here in America the improvement in the condition of the working-man does not excite attention except from professed students of political economy. But in Germany it is contrasted with a previous state of almost complete va.s.salage, and the poets there seem to think it indicates an approaching brotherhood of man. Wealth and worth are to embrace each other, and the sins of the father are not to descend even to the first generation of children. We cannot but sympathize with the Councillor of State (whose granddaughter wants to, and does, marry one of the convict flagman's sons, an artisan) when he says:

See! see! This then is the latest ideal? Formerly the ideals were painters, musicians, hussar riding masters, and players. Now love also is practical. So then an artisan? All the enthusiasm runs to tunnels and viaducts.

[15] "_The Convicts and their Children._" By BERTHOLD AUERBACH.

Translated by Charles T. Brooks. Leisure Hour Series. New York: H. Holt & Co.

The book is marred by unnecessary exact.i.tude in translation. Thouing and theeing make no impression of intimacy and confidence on the American understanding as they do on the German, and should be omitted.

Nor has the author the strength of his youth, and the beauty of his fancy no longer atones for the weakness of the story. Nothing in the whole of the book proper is so good as the following from the preface:

A generation has pa.s.sed away since I began to present in a framework of fiction the interior life of my countrymen and neighbors. If after another generation a poet shall again undertake to express the village life of my home, what will he perhaps find?

Flowers bloom in all times out of the German soil, and Beauty will in all times bloom out of the German soul.

OF late years there has been a tendency to abandon the exhaustive "manuals" which once formed the only style of school and hand-books known, and to use in their place books which contain only so much of a science as is taught in some one well-proportioned school. The change is based on the rational supposition that whatever suffices for the thorough instruction of students should also satisfy the wants of an ordinary practical worker. Mr. Ricketts's "Notes on a.s.saying"[16]

belong to this modern kind of text-book. They contain what the students in the School of Mines in New York learn, and as a thorough knowledge of a.s.saying is obviously necessary to a mining engineer, the author considers that the same course if honestly worked through should suffice for practice outside the school. The book covers both dry and wet a.s.saying, and gold parting, and there are chapters in which the apparatus and chemical reagents are described. A few condensed notes on blowpiping finish an extremely concise and useful book, always available for reference, and in which the self-taught workman may find his way without confusion.

[16] "_Notes on a.s.saying and a.s.say Schemes._" By PIERRE DE PEYSTER RICKETTS, E.M. New York: The Art Printing Establishment.