LITERATURE OF THE DAY.

Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life. By George Eliot. Vol. II. New York: Harper & Brothers.

As a "study of provincial life" Middlemarch appeals to a class of readers who might have little taste for the psychological studies in which the book abounds, and which give it a much deeper import. Its variety, spirit and truth of local color are Hogarthian, while it shows a figure, in the heroine, of far higher beauty and belonging to the great circle of epic characters. Dorothea, with her loveliness and her history of divine blunders, is fit to stand with any queen of song or story. This volume begins with the closing scenes in her scholar-husband's life. The character is a curious, and, after all, a pathetic one. What Philadelphia reader, at least, can pursue the narrative of poor Casaubon's misplaced study and ill-judged bequest without being reminded of another career of futile scholarship near home? Like him, as it will seem to the curious annalist, Richard Rush was a student without an audience, and like him a mistaken testator. Locking up his mind from the public amidst a company of ideas imbibed in the day when his city was the great book-producing city of the country, Rush prosecuted his barren researches in a moral prison, saw domestic life only through a grating woven from his own prejudices, and died in the confidence falsely sustaining him that the inefficiency of a lifetime would be amended by the bequests of an impracticable will. Rush, too, was wealthy, of influential family, studious, sterile, and apt to put off present action in the hope that the grave would one day co-operate with his motives; and Rush, like the imagined author of the Key to all Mythologies, finds the grave a treacherous trustee. The heroine of Middlemarch, in her action over her husband's testament, behaves as every true and lovable woman, obeying the emotions, will behave while the world lasts: a flippant, easy, youthful censor has told her, in a boudoir in the Via Sistina at Rome, that her husband's labor was thrown away because the Germans had taken the lead in historical inquiries, and that they laughed at those who groped about in woods where they had made good roads. The censor is agreeable, curly, and has engaging ways of lying about on hearth-rugs and giving his arm to quaint old maids: his criticism is therefore securely effective against all the conclusions of a life of dry labor; and so it comes that Dorothea writes on her husband's posthumous schedule: "I could not use it. Do you not see now that I could not submit my soul to yours by working hopelessly at what I have no belief in?" That is the way in which schemes of more or less erudition will for ever be lost to the world when entrusted to those who reason as Nature imperiously teaches them to do, through their affinity with blooming cheeks, curled locks and versatile intellects. It is inevitable that Dorothea must sink, from her dreams of emulating Saint Theresa, to comradeship with the glossy occupant of the hearth-rug. George Eliot, as a true artist, sees what is faulty in the catastrophe, but she will not unsex her creation. Another of her characters, Rosamond, she pursues with a minute, withering, one would say vindictive, contempt. It is the beautiful, distinguished young creature who marries Lydgate on account of his high connections, and who trains him to do up her plaits of hair for her, and allows him to talk the "little language" of affection, which Rosamond, though not returning it, "accepted as if she had been a serene and lovely image, now and then miraculously dimpling toward her votary." How such a creature can become the cool blighting Nemesis of a hopeful home, ruining it by extravagance, and taking credit to herself for every act of calm revolt, until her wretched husband, who had meant to be another Vesalius, compares her to Boccaccio's basil, that flourished upon the brains of a massacred man, the author sees only too plainly, and shows forth in some of the most cutting scenes she has ever written. Her "Study of Provincial Life," while it reveals her warm poet's love for a lofty nature defeated by its conditions, shows still plainer her intimate and personal dread of the cold thin nature that kills by its commonplace. The last she rewards contemptuously with a carriage in the Park and a rich second match: the first she punishes with exquisite Junonine tenderness by giving her a little boy in the bride-chamber of the home of the clever young politician whom the local editor has called a "violent energumen."

In laying down the book the reader is conscious of a different feeling from that with which he ordinarily parts with a work of fiction which has gratified his artistic tastes and furnished him with a high intellectual pleasure. Comparing the productions of George Eliot with those of other novelists, we are tempted to think of these as trivial fond records, which might well be blotted from the tablets of the memory, leaving the inscription she has placed there to live alone in ineffaceable characters. It is not that they show her to be endowed with a larger measure of those gifts which constitute the artist. In each of these she has perhaps been equaled or surpassed by one or another of her predecessors. As a painter of manners, of all that belongs to the surface of life, she is rivaled in fidelity, if not in breadth and force, by Fielding, Thackeray and Miss Austen. Her observation is less keen than theirs, her portraiture less vivid, her humor less cordial and abundant. Her conceptions have not the intensity of Charlotte Bronté's, nor her great scenes the dramatic fire of Scott's. In the minor matters of invention and plot she sometimes has recourse to shifts that betray the deficiencies they are intended to conceal. The quality in which she is supreme is one that lies beyond the strict domain of art. It is the power of penetrating to the roots of human character and action—a power which seems to be something more than insight, but for which sympathy would be a still less adequate term, indicating as it does a nature harmonious and complete, one in which intellect and feeling are resolved into an element that overflows and envelops its object without effort or repulsion. In other novelists we admire a subtlety that winds through the intricacies of motives, unmasking deceptions, revealing weaknesses and flaws but half suspected, or delicacies and beauties but half appreciated: George Eliot drops a plummet that sinks straight and steadily, through turbid waves and calm under-current, reaching depths before unexplored. We can claim no part in her discoveries, however our faculties may be exercised in grasping or in testing them. They more often correct than confirm our impressions; they make large additions to our knowledge; they suggest the necessity of reconstructing our theories and placing them on a new and wider base.

A Memorial of Alice and Phœbe Cary. By Mary Clemmer Ames. New York: Hurd & Houghton.

Alice Cary was a poetess of feeling, tender, prolific, overworked, unhealthy, and cooked to desiccation in a New York "elegant residence" that was but one enormous stove. Phœbe, working less, was amusing, plump, gay and original. Alice, obediently grinding out her sweet morning poem for the Ledger before she went to market, died at her desk, and then Phœbe died of loneliness. It is a gentle and a thoroughly American history. In the eyes of both these Ohio women, New York was the market where they could easiest sell their wares, and their poems were commodities from which they were determined to derive as comfortable an existence as possible. Any strict idea of duty to their art, as the responsibility committed to them above all things on earth, seems never to have crossed the mind of either sister, though Alice, who wrote a great many volumes, would occasionally complain—not, however, more feelingly than all sincere authors do—that she knew her labors were overtaxing her faculty. They arranged, at their handsome residence on Twentieth street, a salon of Sunday evenings, where Mr. Greeley, Robert Bonner and Whitelaw Reid used to meet and converse kindly with the minor literati, and which were believed to have much of the pleasantness and life of French conversaziones. Alice Cary has left a profusion of pensive poetry: the following is the most beautiful extract she affords:

Phœbe, who was reckoned less clever than Alice, excites a great deal more sympathy, quietly accepting a position of admiring secondariness, and yielding occasional good things in wit or poetry: she was famed among her friends as a punster and parodist, and once answered at a dinner to a question what wine they used, "Oh, we drink Heidsick, but we keep mum." An irresistibly taking and womanly remark of hers, disposing in its own way of whole schemes of Calvinistic theology, was her reply to the argument for endless punishment: "Well, if God ever sends me into such misery, I know He will give me a constitution to bear it." Again, as the least laborious of the sisters, her talent had moments of greater felicity than that of Alice, and she has left one hymn which has all the promise of a lasting favorite. The sacred lyric, "One sweetly solemn thought comes to me o'er and o'er," is sung, as it deserves to be, wherever Christianity is known, and there is an attested story of its having aroused a pair of gamblers in China to repentance and permanent reform. It is imprudent to predict a permanent place for even the best of Alice Carey's gentle songs; but Phœbe's utterance may very possibly be quoted, from her unpretending station as adviser and alleviator of every-day life, after her name shall be forgotten and her religion shall have become impersonal.

How I Found Livingstone. By Henry M. Stanley. New York: Scribner, Armstrong & Co.

This book, the circumstances of its writing considered, is a literary curiosity. It contains seven hundred and twenty pages octavo, and it was composed in an incredibly short time, while the stomach of its author was digesting a series of stout English dinners, and his attention dissipating among speech-makings and speech-listenings, feasts, meetings and visits. Only a New York reporter could have achieved the feat. The faculty acquired by men of Mr. Stanley's trade, of acting with the intense decision and energy of great military captains, and then relating the action with the voluble unction of bar-rooms or political stumps, is a strange mixed faculty, and is found to perfection in the reporters' rooms of the New York Herald. The tale has the Herald's well-known style, and is a correspondent's letter in a state of amplification. It is always energetic, often tinged with real heroism and romance, and adorned sometimes with an ambition of classical allusions that resemble Egyptian jewels worn by a Nubian savage. It has not the least self-restraint or good taste, but it sounds fresh, genuine and sincere. It brings out with fine distinctness the feudal fidelity of a reporter-errant, whose whole soul is dyed with belief in the great establishment whose behest he obeys—one of the last refuges in which mediæval humility is to be found. As a part of the same habit of mind, Mr. Stanley shows a fine, literal, unquestioning championship of the object of his quest, Dr. Livingstone; but he seems to admire the doctor, after all, rather as an ornamental possession of the New York Herald. The great traveler's good-nature to Mr. Bennett, as a voluntary correspondent and coadjutor by brevet with the journal, disarms and enchants him: beginning with a prejudice, he ends by saying, "I grant he is not an angel, but he approaches to that being as near as the nature of a living man will allow." In every trait Stanley shows himself whole-souled, ignorant of half measures, unscrupulous, cruel on occasion, driving, positive, and furnished with a sure instinct of success. The book, from its hasty construction, admits many inconsistencies, the worst of which is its long tirade against the Geographical Society, nullified finally by gracious thanks for their medal; but it has the energetic virtue of a book written while memory was fresh, and is often truly dramatic and pictorial. It is the garrulous appendage of a strange and solid achievement, the feather-end of the arrow, which advertises the hit of the steel.

The Minnesinger of Germany. By A. E. Kroeger. New York: Hurd & Houghton.

Mr. Kroeger appears to have an antiquarian's thoroughness in his subject, and he has made it an interesting one to Western readers. But he has not succeeded in his translations, partly because he does not respect the usage and associations of the English words he rivets incompatibly together, and partly because success, even for a more poetical translator, is impossible in the premises. The authors of the Minnelay, in their elaborate rhyme-caprice, must have remained harmonious and lyrical, which is not the case with a version like this:

Or like this, which Mr. Kroeger, without the fear of Maud's author before his eyes, compares to Tennyson:

These studies of intricate rhymes concealed in and terminating the lines are at least as hard for the reader as for the writer; yet we hope Mr. Kroeger will not lose his readers before they arrive at the historical and critical parts of the work, which are really valuable. The narrative of Ulrich von Lichtenstein of the thirteenth century, who sent one of his fingers to an exacting lady-love, and paraded through Europe on her quests disguised variously as King Arthur, Queen Venus or as a leper, is one which makes the maddest deeds of Quixote seem sane, although he was a true singer and an admired chevalier of his period. Gottfried von Strassburg, whose excellent poem of Tristan and Isolde inspires the writer with his least unhappy translation, leads the subject away from the mere love-carolers toward the authors of the metrical romances, the bards of Germany. It is at this point that he introduces some forcible criticisms on Tennyson's poetry of that character, and makes it evident that the Laureate might have improved his Idyls by extending his readings among the German chanters of Arthurian legend. The following seems practical and just: "If Tennyson was determined to make the love-passion the chief theme of his work, rather than the religious element of the St. Graal, he had at hand in one of his legends that very same relation between the sexes which existed between Queen Guinevere and Launcelot, and yet deprived in the essential point of all disgusting characteristics. It seems strange that the impropriety of making this adulterous connection between the king and queen the chief theme of his song should not have struck Tennyson when he dedicated his legends to the husband of Queen Victoria, even in that dedication drawing comparisons: strange that he should have taken no means to hide it, by at least bringing the king into some position of interest, whereas he is made so little of that he seems a mild, inoffensive, gentle soul, who is ready even to shake hands with the seducer of his wife." In this connection it will repay the reader to peruse, even if the version has not much charm, the long extract from Gottfried's Tristan, with an eye to the noble and knightly way in which the legend is conceived and taken up. Mr. Kroeger, who can give it no grace in translation, is a warm partisan in matters of melody and rhythm, appreciating Coleridge and Swinburne. Altogether, he is a sincere and useful interpreter between our public—rather careless of musty poetry—and the fine old German singers.