Volume 23 — CURRENT LITERATURE.

Mrs. Annie Edwards's last book[K] does not open well in point of style. The first paragraph of the first chapter is: "She was a woman of nearly thirty when I first saw her; a woman spiritless and worn beyond her years," etc. This beginning not only a chapter but a book with a pronoun implying an antecedent is very bad, in the low and vulgar way of badness. It brings to mind the superhuman daily efforts of the "American humorist" of journalism to be funny; and it should be left to him and to his kind. And in the next paragraph Mrs. Edwards describes her heroine as "walking wearily along the weary street of Chesterford St. Mary." Bad style again, and this time in the way of affectation. A man's way may be weary if he is tired or weak; but not even then should it be so called, when he has just been spoken of as weary himself, or as walking wearily; and weary as applied descriptively to a village street is almost nonsense. These defects are not important, but they arrest attention as being at the very opening of the story. And it must be confessed that for a chapter or two "A Point of Honor" is rather slight in texture and commonplace. It is, however, interesting enough to lead us on, and the reader who holds his way into the third or fourth chapter is repaid. The authoress then warms up to her work, and begins to show her quality, which is that of a true literary artist. We do not say a great artist, be it observed, but a true artist. She paints only genre pictures; but unlike most works of that class (on canvas at least), they are not mere representations of pretty faces and pretty clothes. She works with a real knowledge of the human heart, and her work is full of feeling. She does nothing in the grand style; even her most loving women do not have grand passions; but all her work is truthful and warm with real life, and her earnest people are really in earnest. The story of "A Point of Honor" is interesting, although its incidents are not all out of the common way. Gifford Mohun, the handsome young heir of Yatton, an estate in Devonshire, loves, when he is only twenty, one Jane Grand, a beautiful and sweet-natured girl who is only a year younger than himself. Nothing is known of her history. She herself does not know her own parentage. All this has been concealed from her at her father's request, and with some reason; for it comes out that she is the daughter of a felon, who died in the hulks, by a minor French actress, a modification of whose name, Grandet, she bears. When she knows this, she refuses to taint Mohun's name and life with such dishonor, and he accepts her decision; doing so with two implications on the part of the authoress: first, that he was selfish in doing so at all; next, that doing it he did it coldly and with a false affectation of feeling. He leaves Yatton and its neighborhood, and plunges into dissipation. Jane remains at Chesterford, leading her solitary life and loving him. Meantime the vicar, Mr. Follett, a man of strong nature, much tenderness, and great tact, whose character is admirably drawn, loves Jane, and quietly bides his time. After ten years, however, Mohun returns, walks into Jane's parlor, and asks her to be friends with him. She, loving him no less than ever, assents gladly, and thereafter he is almost domesticated in her cottage. He has become somewhat gross in manner and in speech, as well as in person; but Jane loves him, and watches for his coming, day by day, as when she was a girl. This goes on for some months, with a slight admixture of the curate, when all at once a new personage appears upon the scene. Mohun receives a letter, which he shows to Jane, and asks her advice about. It is from a Matty Fergusson, whom he remembers as the untidy little daughter of some disreputable people he knew something of at a German watering place. She tells a sad tale of destitution, and asks him to recommend her to some of his friends as a governess or companion. He is disgusted and angered at the intrusion, and proposes to send her a five-pound note, or perhaps ten pounds, and so end the matter. But Jane, whom he asks to write the letter for him, is touched with pity for the poor girl's forlornness and suffering, and writes an invitation to her to come to Chesterford and visit her for a week. She brings a Greek horse within the walls of her little Troy. She and Gifford expect to see a poor, meek, limp, shabbily dressed slip of a girl; but Miss Matty Fergusson enters the cottage a tall and magnificently beautiful young woman; her grandeur both of toilet and person quite dwarfing the poor little cottage and its poor little mistress. The end is now visible. Matty Fergusson is the adventuress daughter of an adventuress mother. Nothing was true in her letter except the story of her poverty; and she has played this game with the direct purpose of catching the master of Yatton. She succeeds; and when Jane speaks to him about its being time for his overwhelming young friend to depart, he becomes rude and makes a brutal speech, which undeceives Jane, and kills her love for him. Mohun, however, does not give himself up to the Fergusson without an attempt at freedom, and an endeavor to resume his relations with Jane, whom he now appreciates at her full worth. He confesses and deplores his fault and begs forgiveness, and offers to break with Miss Fergusson at any cost, if Jane will give him back her love. But she, although she forgives, will not receive him again on the old footing, and he drives off with his handsome adventuress wife, and Jane loves and is married to Mr. Follett. The story is told with great and yet with very simple skill, and the characters of the few personages are revealed rather than portrayed. And by the way, we remark upon Mrs. Edwards's ability to interest her readers and work out a story with few materials. She rarely depends for her effects upon more than four or five personages. She is equally reserved in her manner. She does not paint black and white, but with human tints only in light and shadow. In this book Mohun's selfishness is shown with a very delicate hand, and although we are left in no doubt as to his real character, he is dealt with in such an impartial and artistic spirit, that some similarly selfish men will apologize for him and some others will, it may be hoped, read themselves in him and struggle against the worse part of their natures. Jane is, perhaps, more angel than woman, but then a good woman who loves is so often truly angelic with an admixture of human passion that makes her more loveable as well as more loving than any angel ever was, that we cannot find fault with poor Jane's perfection. In reading this book we cannot but remark the common nature of its subject in women's novels nowadays. The themes on which they write endless variations are the selfishness of men, and the unselfishness of women in love. Of the men in the women-written novels of the day, so many are plausible, agreeable, clever, accomplished, heartless creatures; only a few escape the general condemnation, and they are those queer creatures "women's men"—impossible, and bores, like Daniel Deronda. The heroines, major and minor, love devotedly. But George Eliot does not fall into the latter blunder. For some reason she is able to see the feminine as well as the masculine side of social and sexual selfishness. This treatment of men on the part of the sex is remarkable, for women themselves will admit and do admit, in unguarded moments, that there is somewhat less of disinterestedness in this matter on woman's side than on man's. But the point, we suppose, is this, that woman, when she does love with all her heart, loves with a blind devotion, an exclusiveness of admiration and of passion, and a persistency, which she demands from man, which, not having, she doubts whether she is loved at all, and which, it must be confessed, rare in woman, is much more rare in man, with whom indeed it is exceptional. The truth is that man's love is as different from woman's as his body is; but it is, therefore, none the less worth having if she would only think so. Man is made to have less exclusiveness of feeling in this respect than woman has. He would not be man else, nor she woman if she were otherwise. The mistake is in her expectation of receiving exactly the same as she gives. She has found out that she does not get it, or does so very rarely, and the men in women's novels of the Gifford Mohun type are one of the ways in which she proclaims and avenges her wrongs.

—"The Barton Experiment," by "the author of 'Helen's Babies,'"[L] cannot be called a novel—hardly a tale—and yet it is a story—the story of a great "temperance movement" at Barton, which is supposed to be a village somewhere at the west—in Kentucky, we should say, from certain local references. We do not know who the author of Helen's Babies is—he, and Helen, and her babies being alike strangers to us; but he is a clever writer, and a humorist, with no little dramatic power. His personages are studies from nature, and have individuality and life; albeit they reveal a somewhat narrow horizon of observation. He uses largely, but always humorously, the western style of exaggeration; as, for example, when he makes one of his reformers tell a steamboat captain that if he will stop drinking whiskey, he will make a reputation, and "be as famous as the Red River raft or the Mammoth Cave—the only thing of the sort west of the Alleghanies." He describes his people in a way that shows that he has them in the eye of his imagination; as in this portrait of a Mrs. Tappelmine: "With face, hair, eyes, and garments of the same color, the color itself being neutral; small, thin, faded, inconspicuous, poorly clad, bent with labors which had yielded no return, as dead to the world as saints strive to be, yet remaining in the world for the sake of those whom she had often wished out of it," etc. The book is in every way clever, and its purpose is admirable—the lesson which it is written to teach being that personal effort and personal sacrifice on the part of reformers is necessary to reclaim hard drinkers. But the radical fault of all such moral story writing is that the writer makes his puppets do as he likes. The drinking steamboat captain yields to the persuasions of his friend, and even submits to necessary personal restraint. But how if he had not yielded? Old Tappelmine gives up his whiskey for the sake of money and employment, which inducements are strongly backed by his neutral-colored wife; but how if he had been brutally selfish and immovable? In both these cases, and in all the others, failure was at least quite as likely as success. People in real life cannot be managed as they can upon paper. Still the book contains a truth, and is likely to do good.

—The same publishers have also brought out an illustrated book by Bayard Taylor,[M] which is suitable to the coming holiday season. It is a collection of short tales of adventure in different parts of the world, in which boys take a prominent part. It is one of the fruits of the author's extended travels, and is manly, simple, and healthy—a very good sort of book for those for whom it is intended, which, in these days of mawkish or feverish "juvenile" literature, is saying much for it.

—Why Miss Thacher should call a little book, which contains a little collection of little sketches, "Seashore and Prairie," we do not see. It is rather a big and an affected name for such a slight thing. But it is bright and pleasant, and well suited to the needs of those who cannot fix their attention long upon any subject. We regret to see in it marks of that extravagance and affectation in the use of language which are such common blemishes of style in our ephemeral literature. For example: a very sensible and much needed plea for the preservation of birds, is called "The Massacre of the Innocents;" and we are told that "a St. Bartholomew of birds has been inaugurated." Miss Thacher should leave this style of writing to the newspaper reporters.

—The large circle of readers who are interested in Palestine, and the lands and waters round about it, will find Mr. Warner's last book of travel[N] very pleasant reading—full of information and suggestion. He observes closely, describes nature with a true feeling for her beauties, and men with spirit and a fine apprehension of their peculiarities. He is not very reverent, and breaks some idols which have been worshipped. He is not an admirer of the Hebrews, or of anything that is theirs, except their literature. His style is lively and agreeable, but we cannot call it either elegant or correct. He tells some "traveller's stories;" for instance, one about catching an eagle's feather on horseback (pp. 103, 104). True he "has the feather to show;" but on the whole he makes not too many overdrafts upon the credulity of his readers, and does not color much too highly.

—In his latest tale[O] Mr. Yates introduces American characters, following what seems to be the prevailing fashion among English authors, especially those who are not of the first rank. Mr. Yates manages his foreign scenes and characters with good judgment, but his Americans we should not recognize as such without his introduction. The scene of the story is in England. Sir Frederick Randall, a dissolute young nobleman, is condemned to imprisonment, under an assumed name, for forgery. Making his escape, he woos a beautiful and innocent American girl, the daughter of a petroleum millionaire from Oil City. As he is already married, it is necessary to dispose of one wife before he takes another. This he does by throwing madam over a cliff by the seashore. Caught by projecting bushes, she is, without his knowledge, rescued alive by some Americans, who are yachting off the coast. One of these Americans has long loved Minnie Adams, the pretty American girl, but she and her parents are fascinated by Sir Frederick's title and the expected introduction to high-class English society. Minnie marries the would-be murderer, and after a year of trouble and brutal treatment, severe sickness ensues, during which she is nursed by her husband's first and only legal wife. Finally Sir Frederick is murdered by an old comrade of his debaucheries, and the two wives are equitably distributed between the two American gentlemen.

—Messrs. Hurd & Houghton are doing good service in reissuing the Riverside edition of the Waverley Novels.[P] The well-chosen proportion of page and type and the excellent work of the Riverside press have combined to make these volumes, what American books are too apt not to be—a thing of permanent beauty. The publishers intend to bring out the edition quite rapidly. Five volumes are ready, and the others will follow at the rate of one each month. The present is the great era of mediocre men. A horde of novel writers gain their living successfully enough, and we take them up and talk about what they are doing, and how their works compare with each other, as if their doings had real importance. But what are they to the enduring genius of Abbotsford? He has not only proved an inexhaustible source of delight to two generations of readers, but has founded an industry—the publication of his works—which is likely to be for scores of years to come a permanent source of livelihood to hundreds.

It is evident that we have not a new light of poetry in Mr. Voldo.[Q] He tells us that this is a first attempt, and it may well be the last, for he seems to have been led—and misled—into the practice of poetic expression by a certain gift, in his case fatal, of rhythm. The flow of his lines is far superior to the meaning or the expression. In fact the latter is so involved and farfetched, that the former is often entirely obscured. To find out what it is he tries to tell us would really be a painful process, and the few attempts we have made were too immediately fatiguing to produce any results. Two of his poems are worth reading, one because its versification is well managed, and the other because its story is simple and naturally told. It is a relief after so many pages of overstraining at words, and it shows that Mr. Voldo can be really pleasant, if he will only be simple. Well, two out of fifty is above the average!

It is only two years since a prominent American geologist wrote to a foreign scientific paper that he had been on the point of sending to Germany for two or three men to assist him in an important State survey.[R] His reason for this determination was that our country did not possess men competent to find and follow up intelligently the different strata; except those who were already engaged on other surveys. Luckily this discreditable act was prevented by the sudden abandonment of one of these other surveys, which released assistants enough to satisfy this extremely difficult gentleman. The truth is that, by some means, geological science has been pushed in this country with great vigor and with grand results. Within the last ten years there has been a revival of energy in that particular science which recalls the golden days of Hugh Miller, Murchison, Agassiz, and Lyell. The time when the very exacting gentleman, above alluded to, could not find helpers on this side of the Atlantic, was the middle point around which were grouped the surveys of Newberry and Andrews in Ohio, Clarence King in Nevada, Whitney in California, Wheeler and Powell south of the Pacific Railroad, and Hayden north of that line. Michigan was just finishing a partial, but extremely productive, survey of her mineral regions. Missouri had plunged hopefully into another. Pennsylvania was planning the comprehensive work in which Leslie and his aids are now engaged. Indiana, New Jersey, and other States had taken the great steps so much desired by the initiated all over the world, and had made the geologist a standing member of their government. All this had been done without the necessary importation of a foreigner. One or two foreigners had obtained employment on these surveys, but only because they came here and sought the work. Nearly every one of the young men who performed the work of assistants was an American. It is safe to say that in this revival of geological work from twenty to fifty young Americans have learned to be scientific men. As to the results of their activity, it is sufficient to read a report like that of Mr. Powell, to find how rapidly they are adding to our knowledge of the earth's history, and even altering the canons of scientific belief. Mr. Powell tells us that in his first expedition, eight years ago, and for three years after that, he tried hard to find in the west the equivalents of the State epochs and periods so well known as the basis of geological nomenclature, and nearly all taken from the exposures in New York and other Eastern and Southeastern States. It was not until this attempt was abandoned that he began to make progress. He had to study the western regions by themselves, and leave correspondences to the future. That was the experience of all the workers in the west, and it brings plainly to view the great fact, of which not all, even of our best known geologists, are yet fully persuaded, that the geological record, though doubtless a unit, is not uniform over the whole country. These shackles thrown off, the geology of the west leaped up with a vigor which is astonishing. It seemed to be pretty evident, from Prof. Huxley's lectures here, that he had not before imagined what results had been obtained in America. This is not surprising. Few foreigners are able to keep along with the work performed in this country, where there is such a direful supposed lack of workers! It is a fact that at present there is no part of the world where the discoveries made in this science are of so general importance as here. The Rocky mountains owe their name "to great and widely spread aridity," the mountains being "scantily clothed with vegetation and the indurated lithologic formations rarely masked with soils." But there are many systems of uplifts in this region, and Mr. Powell distinguishes three in the field covered by his report. They are the Park mountains ("the lofty mountains that stand as walls about the great parks of Southern Wyoming, Colorado, and Northern New Mexico"); the Basin Range system (named by Gilbert from the fact that many of them surround basins that have no drainage to the sea); and the Plateau Province. It is worth remarking that in the west the geologist precedes or accompanies the topographer, and accordingly has an opportunity to name the regions according to real peculiarities rather than chance suggestions. The future map will be significant of the past history as well as of the ocular features of the landscape. Mr. Powell gives careful sections of the strata in the Plateau Province, where they are about 46,000 feet thick. Few persons imagine the vast amount of work, exploration, and comparison which such drawings embody. The beds form a series of groups unlike those of the New York geologists, but the great geologic ages are as well defined as elsewhere. The synchronism remains to be fully established by palæontological proofs. He thinks he has been able to fix upon the true point of division between the Mesozoic and Cenozoic ages, and to prove that coal was deposited through about 7,000 feet of Cretaceous and about 4,500 feet of Cenozoic beds. Mr. Powell's literary style is excellent—not involved, but clear and energetic. He was wise to abandon the idea of publishing an itinerary, which would, as he says, "encumber geological literature with a mass of undigested facts of little value." Geology has enough of such meaningless reports. As it is, we follow him with confidence, and he gives us a story that is plain and comprehensible.

The publications of the Massachusetts Board of Health[S] have been of a superior character, and have given that organization decided prominence among similar American boards. The question of how to prevent river pollution in their State they think can best be solved by placing advisory power in the hands of some Government officer, upon whose conclusions legislative action for each case should be based. This officer would be paid by the parties in interest. Good results are to be obtained only by comparing and altering when necessary what is done. In this country too little is known about this subject, and the appointment of an official "with power" is the first step toward knowledge. The suggestions made as to the way to deal with sewage are also mostly good, but it is doubtful whether general purification can wisely be enforced in the present state of sanitary science. If there are any very bad cases of pollution, they may properly be provided for in the way suggested, and experience gained from them. The lack of experience here is partially corrected by studying the work accomplished abroad; but a rapid review of such work can never replace the slower results of individual experience. The report of Mr. Kirkwood, the engineer, adds to the abundant testimony we already have of the efficacy and power of Nature's quietest work. Analyses show that the water of Charles river above the Newton lower falls is, when filtered, fit, though barely fit, to drink, and yet it has received the refuse of forty-two mills and factories, with a population of 14,000 persons known to be sewering into the river, and a population in the basin of three times that number. The river has a dry-weather flow of only twenty million gallons in twenty-four hours. On the general subject of sewage utilization the secretary concludes that in this country the sewage has no value, but can in some places, at least, be utilized without loss. In the death rate of Massachusetts towns the village of Canton (4,192 population) carries the palm, with only 11.9 deaths per thousand. Holyoke, 56.5 per thousand, has the highest.

—The report that a city is to be built in England on strict sanitary principles, in which man may, if he will, live to a hundred and fifty years of age, will give additional interest to this address[T] in which Dr. Richardson develops the project. The address was delivered a year ago, when the Doctor was president of the Health Department of the Social Science Association. It deserves attention because it indicates, pretty nearly, the goal toward which all the conscious and unconscious improvement in our living for centuries has tended. Whether man can obtain such control over the duration of his life depends very largely upon whether he finds himself able to submit to the discipline and self-abnegation without which the mechanical improvements made will have only partial success. Perfect living is not merely a thing of appliances. These are necessary, but the subjection of the will to the requirements of orderly conduct is equally necessary. However, Dr. Richardson says that "Utopia is but another word for time," and it is certain that his ideal of public and private life will be at least approached by the slow progress of small improvements. Some people have objected that they don't want to live a century and a half, and that a city where men two hundred years of age might occasionally be seen walking about is just the place they would most carefully avoid. But we can none of us escape our fate. If society is progressing toward that end, let us accept it, and even allow the men of science to hurry up matters a century or two. It is, perhaps, significant that this change in man's estate comes just at the time when a reduction in the rate of interest is taking place, and it seems likely that a man will have to live to a hundred years in order to accumulate enough to buy him a house. When he has it, he will need another half century to enjoy it. At all events read this ideal, extraordinary, and learned exposition of the health of the future.

—The idea of collecting in one volume a concise statement of modern theories of the mode in which we receive impressions is excellent, and it has been well carried out by Prof. Bernstein.[U] Touch, sight, hearing, smell, and taste are treated from an anatomical and experimental point of view, and the researches of Helmholtz, Weber, and the numerous band of investigators who have in late years devised so many ingenious modes of testing the operation of these senses are well represented. The book contains probably as much exact and accurate information, and as thorough a treatment of the subject, as can be contained in a volume of this size. It is an advanced treatise that places the reader in possession of the latest theories on these occult subjects. Of necessity it is not new; but this treatment and the facts here given will be found novel by most readers.

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