Volume 11 — LITERATURE OF THE DAY.

The Life of Charles Dickens. By John Forster. Vol. II. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott & Co.

Beginning with Dickens's return from America in 1842, this volume covers a period of less than ten years, the most productive, and apparently the happiest, of his life. It brings out in even stronger relief than the preceding volume his strong individuality, a trait which, whether it attracts or repels—and on most persons we think it produces alternately each of these effects—is full of interest, worthy of study and fruitful of suggestions. Its superabundant energy seemed to create demands in order that it might expend itself in satisfying them. Its persistence was toughened by failure as much as by success. Its vivacity, verging upon boisterousness, was incapable of being chilled. Its strenuousness knew no lassitude, and needed no repose. In play as in work, in physical exercise as in mental labor, in all his projects, purposes and performances, Dickens seems to have been in a perpetual state of tension that allowed of no reaction. His was a mind not morbidly self-conscious, but ever aglow with the consciousness of power and the ardor of its achievement, in-sensible of waste and undisturbed by critical introspection.

The excitement into which he was thrown by the composition of his books exceeds anything of the kind recorded in literary history, and stands in strong contrast with the self-contained tranquillity with which Scott performed an equal or greater amount of labor. Yet it does not, like similar ebullitions in other men, suggest any notion of weakness or of a talent strained beyond its capacity. It was coupled with an enormous facility of execution and the ability to pass with undiminished freshness from one field of action to another. It sprang from the intensity with which every idea was conceived, and which belonged equally to his smallest with his greatest undertakings. "The book," he writes of the Chimes, "has made my face white in a foreign land. My cheeks, which were beginning to fill out, have sunk again; my eyes have grown immensely large; my hair is very lank, and the head inside the hair is hot and giddy. Read the scene at the end of the third part twice. I wouldn't write it twice for something.... Since I conceived, at the beginning of the second part, what must happen in the third, I have undergone as much sorrow and agitation as if the thing were real, and have wakened up with it at night. I was obliged to lock myself in when I finished it yesterday, for my face was swollen for the time to twice its proper size, and was hugely ridiculous." The little book was written at Genoa; and having finished it, he must make a winter journey to London, "because," as he writes to Forster, "of that unspeakable restless something which would render it almost as impossible for me to remain here, and not see the thing complete, as it would be for a full balloon, left to itself, not to go up." A further reason was to try the effect of the story upon a circle of listeners, to be assembled for the purpose: "Carlyle, indispensable, and I should like his wife of all things; her judgment would be invaluable. You will ask Mac, and why not his sister? Stanny and Jerrold I should particularly wish. Edwin Landseer, Blanchard perhaps Harness; and what say you to Fonblanque and Fox?" After this it is amusing to read that the book "was not one of his greatest successes, and it raised him up some objectors;" but the reading was the germ of those which afterward brought him into such close relations with his public.

Of another Christmas story he writes, "I dreamed all last week that the Battle of Life was a series of chambers, impossible to be got to rights or got out of, through which I wandered drearily all night. On Saturday night I don't think I slept an hour. I was perpetually roaming through the story, and endeavoring to dovetail the revolution here into the plot. The mental distress quite horrible." Here we have, perhaps, a clear case of the effects of overwork. But in general the details of his plots, the names of the characters, above all, the titles of the stories, were evolved with an amount of thought and discussion that might have sufficed for the plan and the preparations for a battle. "Martin Chuzzlewit" is not a name suggestive of long and serious deliberation: one might rather suppose that it had turned up accidentally and been accepted simply as being as good as another. Yet it was not adopted till after many others had been discussed and rejected. "Martin was the prefix to all, but the surname varied from its first form of Sweezleden, Sweezleback and Sweeztewag, to those of Chuzzletoe, Chuzzleboy, Chubblewig and Chuzzlewig." David Copperfield was preceded by a still longer list of abortions, and Household Words, as a mere title, was the result of a parturition far exceeding in length and severity any throes of travail known to natural history.

All this was unaccompanied by any of the doubts and misgivings, the fits of depression and intervals of lassitude, which are the ordinary tortures of authorship. Nor had it any connection with the weaknesses of the craft, its small vanities and jealousies. "It was," as Mr. Forster well remarks, "part of the intense individuality by which he effected so much to set the high value which in general he did upon what he was striving to accomplish." Hence, too, no half-formed and then abandoned projects were among the stepping-stones of his career. A plan or an idea, once conceived, was certain to be shaped, developed and matured; and whatever the result, it left up disheartening effect, no feeling of distrust, to cripple a subsequent undertaking.

Nor was Dickens so absorbed in his work as to leave it reluctantly, or to find no fullness of satisfaction in occupations or enjoyments of a different kind. On the contrary, no man ever threw himself so heartily and entirely into the business of the hour, or more eagerly sought diversion and change. Dinners, private and public, excursions in chosen companionship, amateur theatricals, schemes of charity or benevolence, occupied a large portion of his time, and were entered into with an ardor which never flagged or needed to be stimulated. His correspondence—an unfailing barometer to indicate the state of the mental atmosphere—is always full of life, overflowing, for the most part, with animal spirits, often vivid in description both of places and people, turning discomforts and embarrassments into subjects of lively narrative or indignant protest. The letters from Genoa and Lausanne are especially copious and entertaining, and form, we think, the most interesting portion of the book. The later chapters, giving the final year of his residence in Devonshire Terrace, are less satisfactory. We would fain have had a picture of that circle of which Dickens was one of the most prominent figures; but though his own personality is revealed in the fullest light, the group in the background is left indistinct, most of its members being barely visible, and none of them adequately portrayed.

Émaux et Camées. Par Théophile Gautier. Nombre définitif. Paris: Charpentier; New York: F.W. Christern.

Gautier was polishing and adding to his literary jewelry almost to the day of his death, and the final edition which he published among the last of his works about doubles the number of poems first issued. These verses are like nothing we have in English. Their imagery is strongly sophisticated, tortured, brought from vast distances, and then chilled into form. Yet they are the most sincere utterances of a soul fed perpetually among cabinets and picture-galleries, to whom their compact method of utterance is, so to speak, secondarily natural. That they are precious and beauteous no one can deny. How sparkling are the successive descriptions of women—blonde, brune, Spanish, contralto-voiced, coquettish, etc.—whom the poet, like some capricious artist, invites into his atelier, drapes hastily with old Moorish or Venetian or diaphanous costumes, and then reflects in a diminishing mirror, changing the model into a fine statuette of ivory and enamel! More virile and thoughtful images are intermixed: such are the figures of the old Invalides seen at the Column Vendôme in a December fog, and for whom he pleads: "Mock not those men whom the street urchin follows, laughing: they were the Day of which we are the twilight—maybe the night!" Not less fresh are the two "Homesick Obelisks"—that in the Place de la Concorde, wearying its stony heart out for Egypt, and that at Luxor, equally tired, and longing to be planted at Paris, among a living crowd. But Gautier is a colorist, an artist with words, and he is at his best when he works without much outline, celebrating draperies, bouquets and laces, to all of which he can give a meaning quite other than the milliner's, as where he asserts that the plaits of a rose-colored dress are "the lips of my unappeased desires," or describes March as a barber, powdering the wigs of the blossoming almond trees, and a valet, lacing up the rosebuds in their corsets of green velvet. Whatever he touches he leaves artificial, "enameled," yet charming. The verses added in the present edition are more pensive, even sombre. A life given to art wholly, without patriotism or religion or philosophy, does not prepare the greenest old age. There is a long and beautiful poem, "Le Château du Souvenir," which he fills, not exactly with Charles Lamb's "old familiar faces," but with portraits of his mistresses and of his old self. There is the "Last Vow"—to a woman he has pursued "for eighteen years," and whom he still accosts, though "the white graveyard lilacs have blossomed about my temples, and I shall soon have them tufting and shading all my forehead." There is also the accent of his irresponsible courtiership, the facile and unashamed flattery he paid to such a woman as Princess Mathilde. This personage was, or is, an artist; and we may not be mistaken in believing that we have seen, cast aside in the vast storerooms of Haseltine's galleries in this city—an example and gnomon of disenchanted glory—her water-color sketch called the "Fellah Woman," and the very one of which Gautier sang: "Caprice of a fantastic brush and of an imperial leisure!... Those eyes, a whole poem of languor and pleasure, resolve the riddle and say, 'Be thou Love—I am Beauty.'"

The late poems, however, as well as the old, are filled with felicities. They contain many a lesson of the word-master, who, though he did not attain the Academy, left the French language gold, which he found marble. The ornaments, exquisite licenses, foreign graces and wide researches which Gautier conferred upon his mother-tongue have enriched it for future time, and they are best seen in this volume.

Concord Days. By A. Bronson Alcott. Boston: Roberts Brothers.

In these loose leaves we have the St. Martin's summer of a life. Mr. Alcott, from his quiet home in Concord, and from the edifice of his seventy-three years, picks out those mental growths and moral treasures which have kept their color through all the changes of the seasons. They bear the mark of selection, of choice, from out a vast abundance of material: to us readers the scissors have probably been a kinder implement than the pen. Be that as it may, the selections given are all worth saving, and the fragmentary resurrection is just about as much as our age has time to attend to of the growths that were formed when New England thought was young. That was the day when Mrs. Hominy fastened the cameo to her frontal bone and went to the sermon of Dr. Channing, when young Hawthorne chopped straw for the odious oxen at Brook Farm, and when a budding Booddha, called by his neighbors Thoreau, left mankind and proceeded to introvert himself by the borders of Walden Pond. Mr. Alcott's little diary gives us some of the best skimmings of that time of yeast. There is Emerson-worship, Channing-worship, Margaret Fuller-worship and the pale cast of The Dial. There is, besides, in another stratum that runs through the collection, a vein of very welcome investigation amongst old authors—Plutarch's charming letter of consolation to his wife on the death of their child; Crashaw's "Verses on a Prayer-Book;" Evelyn's letter on the origin of his Sylva; and many a jewel five-words-long filched from the authors whom modern taste votes slow and insupportable. We mention these to give some idea of the spirit in which this work of marquetry is executed—a work too fragmentary and incoherent to be easily describable except by its specimens. And while culling fragments, we cannot forbear mentioning the curious records of Mr. Alcott's "Conversations," held now with Frederika Bremer, now with a band of large-browed Concord children, held forty years ago, and turning perpetually upon the deeper questions of metaphysics and religion; we will even indulge ourselves with a short extract from one of the "Conversations with Children," reported verbatim by an apparently concealed auditress, and eliciting many a cunning bit of infantine wisdom, besides the following finer rhapsody, which Mr. Alcott succeeded in charming out of the lips of a boy six years of age:

"Mr. Alcott! you know Mrs. Barbauld says in her hymns, everything is prayer; every action is prayer; all nature prays; the bird prays in singing; the tree prays in growing; men pray—men can pray more; we feel; we have more, more than Nature; we can know, and do right: Conscience prays; all our powers pray; action prays. Once we said, here, that there was a Christ in the bottom of our spirits, when we try to be good. Then we pray in Christ; and that is the whole!"

To think that the lips of this ingenuous and golden-mouthed lad may be now pouring out patriotism in Congress is rather sad; but the author's own career tells us that there are some of the Chrysostoms of 1830 who have had the courage to keep quiet, and sweeten their own lives for family use. Mr. Alcott betrays in every line the kindest, sanest and humanest spirit; and we wish he could feel how grateful some of us are for his example of a thinker who can keep quiet, and a writer who can show the power of reticence.

Thirty Years in the Harem; or, The Autobiography of Melek-Hanum, wife of H.H. Kibrizli-Mehemet-Pasha. New York: Harper & Brothers.

We have had many revelations from the interior, but nothing quite like this. Most histories are valuable in proportion to the truthfulness of the narrator, but Mrs. Melek's story owes a large show of its interest to her obvious tension of the long-bow. It is, in fact, a self-revelation—the vain and audacious betrayal by an Oriental woman of the narrowness, the shallowness, the dishonesty which ages of false education have fastened upon her race. The lady in question is—and evidently knows herself to be—an exception among her countrywomen for ability and acumen: an extreme self-satisfaction and vanity are revealed in the recital of her most disreputable tricks. She passes for a white blackbird, a woman of intellect caught in the harem; and it needs but little ingenuity to guess the torment she must have been to her protectors—first to the excellent Dr. Millingen, with whom she formed a love-match, and whom she abuses—and then to her second husband, Kibrizli, ambassador in 1848 to the court of England, upon whom she attempted to palm off an heir by the ruse practiced by our own revered Mrs. Cunningham. Whatever the clever Melek does, or whatever treatment she receives, it is always she who is in the right, and her eternal "enemies" who are unjust, barbarous and stingy. The ferocious blackmailing of natives in the Holy Land which she practiced when her husband represented the sultan there, is represented as cleverness; but her divorce after the infamous false accouchement is a piece of persecution. The marriage and adventures of her daughter form a tangled romance through which we hear of a great deal more oppression and cruelty; and the escape into Europe, where the old enchantress appears to be now prowling in poverty and degradation, concludes the curious story. The narrative bears marks of having passed through a French translation and then a British version. To disentangle the thread of actuality that probably runs through it would be too troublesome and futile; but the truths that the wily Melek cannot help telling—the facts of the harem and of Eastern life that involuntarily sprinkle it all like a flavoring of strange spices—these are what give it the odd dash of interest which keeps it in our hands long after we had meant to toss it aside. Here is a "screaming sister" of the East—an odalisque who was not going to be oppressed and degraded like the other women, but who meant to be capable and cultivated and smart, just like the Christian ladies; and this bundle of lies and crimes and hates is what she arrives at.

Hints on Dress; or, What to Wear, When to Wear it, and How to Buy it. By Ethel C. Gale, (Putnam's Handy-Book Series.) New York: G.P. Putnam & Sons.

This little book will certainly elicit commendation from all who consider the subject of dress within the pale of aesthetic treatment; and, what is still more fortunate, it will probably serve to elevate, in some degree, the standard of taste among that large class of persons for whom handy volumes are chiefly compiled. Its statements and deductions are accurate, sensible, comprehensive and practical, and the style in which they are presented is simple and attractive. The color, form and suitability of dress, as well as the best methods of economy in its purchase and manufacture, are intelligently treated. We have only to regret the want of a chapter devoted to the hygiene of dress, which is a subject deserving the earnest attention of every friend of physical development. Ten or a dozen pages given to this topic might have done a service to hundreds who are willing enough to gather knowledge in passing, but who are repelled from the separate consideration of any subject which seems to call for the exercise of serious thought.

A Sketch Map of the Nile Sources and Lake Region of Central Africa, showing Dr. Livingstone's Discoveries and Mr. Stanley's Route. Folio, folded. Philadelphia: T. Elwood Zell.

A clear, well-executed polychrome map, evidently copied from the one recently published in England, if not actually printed there. It exhibits not only the route of Dr. Livingstone during the period included between the years 1866 and 1872, and that taken by Mr. Stanley in his recent search, but also the course which the former proposes to follow in the prosecution of his discoveries. The boundaries of lakes and the courses of rivers, where definitely known, are indicated by unbroken lines—where still supposititious, by dotted ones. The map, which is printed on heavy paper, is thirteen inches wide by eighteen inches long, and being folded within a stiff duodecimo cover, can be easily preserved and readily consulted.

Books Received.

Papers relating to the Transit of Venus in 1874. Prepared under the Direction of the Commissioners authorized by Congress. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing-office.

Reports on Observations of Encke's Comet during its Return in 1871. By Asaph Hall and Wm. Harkness. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing-Office.

Harry Delaware; or, An American in Germany. By Mathilde Estvan. New York: G.P. Putnam & Sons.

California for Health, Pleasure and Residence. By Charles Nordhoff. New York: Harper & Brothers.

The Lives of General U.S. Grant and Henry Wilson. Philadelphia: T.B. Peterson & Brothers.

The Romance of American History. By M. Schele de Vere. New York: G.P. Putnam & Sons.

Book of Ballads, Tales and Stories. By Benjamin G. Herre. Lancaster, Pa.: Wylie & Griest.

The Poet at the Breakfast Table. By Oliver Wendell Holmes. Boston: James R. Osgood & Co.

The Lawrence Speaker. By Philip Lawrence. Philadelphia: T.B. Peterson & Brothers.

Memoir of a Huguenot Family. By Ann Maury. New York: G.P. Putnam & Sons.

Within the Maze. By Mrs. Henry Wood. Philadelphia: T.B. Peterson & Brothers.

Sermons. By Rev. C.D.N. Campbell, D.D. New York: Hurd & Houghton.

Outlines of History. By Ed. A. Freeman, D.C.L. New York: Holt & Williams.

The End of the World. By Edward Eggleston. New York: Orange Judd & Co.

Sermons. By Rev. H.R. Haweis, M.A. New York: Holt & Williams.

Kaloolah. By W.S. Mayo, M.D. New York: G.P. Putnam & Sons.

Nast's Illustrated Almanac for 1873. New York: Harper & Brothers.

A Summer Romance. By Mary Healy. Boston: Roberts Brothers.

Song Life. By Philip Phillips. New York: Harper & Brothers.

Gavroche. By M.C. Pyle. Philadelphia: Porter & Coates.