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MASTERPIECES OF THE
MASTERS OF FICTION

OTHER BOOKS

BY

WILLIAM DUDLEY FOULKE

SLAV OR SAXON

LIFE OF OLIVER P. MORTON

MAYA (A Romance in Prose)

PROTEAN PAPERS

ANNOTATED TRANSLATION OF HISTORY OF THE LANGOBARDS BY PAUL THE DEACON

MAYA (A Dramatic Poem)

DOROTHY DAY

MASTERPIECES OF THE
MASTERS OF FICTION

BY

WILLIAM DUDLEY FOULKE

NEW YORK
THE COSMOPOLITAN PRESS
1912

Copyright, 1912, by
William Dudley Foulke

MASTERPIECES OF THE
MASTERS OF FICTION

PREFACE

A short time ago I determined that instead of taking up any new works of fiction I would go over the masterpieces which I had read long since and see what changes time had made in my impressions of them. To do this I chose some forty of the most distinguished authors and decided to select one story from each,—the best one, if I could make up my mind which that was—at all events, one which stood in the first rank of his productions. I determined to read these in succession, one after another, in the shortest time possible, and thus get a comprehensive notion of the whole. Of course under such conditions exhaustive criticism would be out of the question, but I thought that the general perspective and the comparative merits and faults of each work would appear more vividly in this manner than in any other way.

The productions of living authors were discarded, as well as all fiction in verse.

Arranged chronologically, the selections I made were as follows:

I think I see many picking out here and there a name, and hear them saying, “What a bad selection! Wilkie Collins ought to be in the list rather than Charles Reade; ‘Vanity Fair’ ought to be in the place of ‘Henry Esmond,’ ‘Waverly’ in the place of ‘Ivanhoe’,” etc., etc. But if we except two or three names like Manzoni and Gogol, who are not yet estimated at their full value by English and American readers, I think common opinion will justify, in a general way, my catalogue of authors, and I feel sure that the works chosen, if not the masterpieces, are at least fairly typical of each.

CONTENTS

GARGANTUA
FRANÇOIS RABELAIS

Coleridge classed Rabelais among the greatest creative minds of the world, with Shakespeare, Dante, Cervantes, etc. Not many will be found to-day who will agree with such an estimate. Rabelais himself would perhaps laugh at it as heartily as he laughed at the vices and foibles of his time.

“Gargantua,” a burlesque romance, is the biography of a good-natured giant of that name, the son of King Grangousier, who is born in a remarkable manner out of the left ear of Gargamelle, his mother. The author expresses a doubt whether his readers will thoroughly believe the truth of this strange nativity, but says that it is not impossible with God, and that there is nothing in the Bible against it. He cites the examples of other prodigies and declares that he is not so impudent a liar as Pliny was in treating of strange births. Then follow many absurd and farcical descriptions of the conduct and apparel of the infant giant, his colors and liveries, his wooden horses, and the silly instruction given to him by foolish sophisters. In Paris he steals the bells of Notre Dame to adorn the neck of the hideous great mare upon whose back he has travelled thither, and Master Janotus is sent to him to pronounce a great oration, imploring the return of the bells. This nonsensical speech is a laughable potpourri of French, Latin, and gibberish. The bells are returned, and now Gargantua submits himself to the government of his new tutor, Ponocrates, who establishes a novel system of instruction for his big pupil.

The book gives a detailed description of the ingenious division of time made by this wise preceptor, so that every moment of the day might be devoted to the acquisition of some useful branch of knowledge.

A strife arises between the shepherds of the country and some cake-bakers of the neighboring kingdom of Lerne. The cake-bakers, being worsted, complain to Picrochole, their king, who collects an army and invades the country of Grangousier, pillaging and ravaging everywhere. But when the invaders come to steal the grapes of the convent of Seville, the stout Friar John with his “staff of the cross” lays about him energetically dealing death and destruction on every side. Picrochole storms the rock and castle of Clermond, and news is brought to Grangousier of the invasion. The good old king at first tries to conciliate his neighbor, and sends him a great abundance of cakes and other gifts, but the choleric Picrochole will not retire, though he keeps everything that is sent to him. The Duke of Smalltrash, the Earl of Swashbuckler, and Captain Durtaille persuade him that he is about to conquer the world, and there is a long burlesque catalogue of all the countries they are to subdue, after which they will return, sit down, rest and be merry. But the wise Echephron, another of the king’s counsellors, tells him that it will be more prudent to take their rest and enjoyment at once and not wait till they have conquered the world. Meanwhile Gargantua is sent forth against Picrochole. The enemy’s artillery has so little power against him that he combs the cannonballs out of his hair. Among other episodes, he unwittingly eats up six pilgrims in a salad, but one of them strikes the nerve of a hollow tooth in his mouth, upon which he takes them all out again. They escape, and then one of them shows the others how their adventure had been foretold by the Prophet David in the Psalms.

There is much droll conversation at a feast given by Gargantua to Friar John. The stout friar has many adventures, and plays an important part in the attack upon Picrochole’s army, when the poor choleric king flees in disguise and at last becomes a porter at Lyons. Here he is as testy and pettish as ever, and hopes for the fulfillment of a prophecy that he should be restored to his kingdom “at the coming of the Cocklicranes,” who it seems could never come at all.

Gargantua proclaims amnesty to the vanquished, the spoil is divided and Friar John rewarded by the establishment of the Abbey of Theleme, which is filled with all beautiful things and inhabited by fair knights and ladies who keep no hours nor vigils, take no vows, but enjoy the delights of liberty under the rule, “Do what thou wilt,” spurred by their own instincts to virtuous actions and with no temptation to transgress the laws.

In a very attractive prologue to this strange medley, the author sets our curiosity agog with the simile of a philosophical dog and a marrow bone, telling his readers to break the bone and suck out the allegorical sense “or the things proposed to be signified by these Pythagorical symbols.” So the world has been trying very hard ever since to guess whether Gargantua was Francis I of France or Henry d’Albret of Navarre; whether Friar John was Cardinal Chatillon or Martin Luther, or both together; whether Picrochole was Charles V or someone else; whether the cake-bakers were Popish priests or anyone in particular; and so on to the end of a very long chapter. Certainly the personages described in this burlesque had to be obscurely drawn in order to protect the author from the dungeon or the stake. In one place Rabelais intimates that he did not mean anything at all by his absurdities. “When I did dictate them I thought thereon no more than you who possibly were drinking the whilst I was. For in the composing of this very lordly book I never lost nor bestowed any more nor any other time than what was appointed to serve me for taking my bodily refection, that is, whilst I was eating and drinking.” And indeed “Gargantua” is a work that, like the verses of Ennius to which he alludes, smells much more of the wine than the oil; for, with all its drollery, and occasional wisdom, there are chapters which seem little less than the products of inebriety. Moreover, the work is defaced, especially the earlier part of it, by a mass of obscenity which is not to be excused either by the manners of the time nor by the exigencies of the story.

DON QUIXOTE
MIGUEL DE CERVANTES

Among works of prose fiction “Don Quixote” has undoubtedly the most universal reputation. Mr. Henry Edward Watts, the latest and best translator, considers it “the finest book,” and Justin McCarthy, the recent editor of Shelton’s version, calls it “the noblest novel” in the world. Probably this would be the verdict of a majority of the best literary critics.

The Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance is more widely known and recognized among mankind everywhere than any other single character in fiction. And indeed there has never been any other character more elaborately developed.

In the matter of plot, as well as personages, the scope of this work is rather narrow. It is merely a series of adventures, and while the priest, the barber, the bachelor, the duke, the duchess, and many other persons appear incidentally, and while all of these are well sketched, the work would be nothing except for the wonderful sayings and doings of the mad knight and his squire. And the contrast between the two sets forth in the strongest possible relief the characteristics of each. Don Quixote, solemn, tall, lank, “with cheeks that kissed each other on the inside,” and Sancho, short, fat, round-bellied,—the knight filled with fine spiritual fire, his madness enhanced by endless fasts and vigils; the squire sleeping, eating, thinking of nothing but the facts of physical existence,—Don Quixote, the dreamer, the idealist, the gentleman—for there is no one trait which shines through all his madness as unmistakably as his gentility; Sancho, a coarse, sensuous clod, an odd mixture of simplicity and shrewdness, garrulous, full of proverbs, with a rustic and very fleshly philosophy of his own, a squire who sometimes cheats his master with false tales.

Don Quixote goes forth upon his battered Rocinante, to redress all wrongs, actual or imaginary, to fight windmills, to engage in desperate battles with flocks of sheep; to sail upon enchanted barks; to fly through the air on a wooden horse; and perform a thousand extravagances, travesties of the impossible prodigies recorded in books of chivalry and enchantment.

The description of Don Quixote’s madness is masterly. His inability to separate actual occurrences from the figments of his imagination appears with wonderful power; for instance, in the scene of the puppets, where he demolishes the apparatus of the show, and then agrees to pay for the damage, and again refuses when the lady for whom compensation is demanded has been already rescued, fact and fancy contending with each other inextricably in his soul. As a study in psychology, no character of fiction or drama outside of Shakespeare is at all comparable to “Don Quixote.” Yet through all his grotesque hallucinations appears his essential nobility. As Sancho says of him, “He has a soul as clean as a pitcher. He can do no harm to anyone, but good to all. He has no malice at all. A child might persuade him it is night at noonday. And it is for this simplicity I love him like my heartstrings, and cannot be handy at leaving him for all the pranks he plays.” Thus do we love the simple-minded, even in madness.

One of the clearest evidences of Cervantes’ genius is his power to make even the vagaries of a madman so laughable. In any other hands the adventures of Don Quixote would not be funny. I remember once seeing a dramatic representation of the story, in which Henry Irving impersonated the hero. It was well done, but it was not amusing. The poor knight was so utterly wrapped in his hallucinations that he was an object of pity rather than of laughter. But in the novel itself the humor of Cervantes overcomes even our sympathy. The wild reasoning of Don Quixote is often so irresistibly absurd that his madness is forgotten. For instance, he does penance in the Sierra Morena in honor of his Dulcinea, and proposes to imitate Amadis and Orlando, who tore up trees by the roots, slew shepherds, demolished houses, and performed a thousand other extravagances. Sancho remarks that these knights of old had a reason for their follies and penances, but that Don Quixote had none, to which his master replies, “In this consists the refinement of my plan. A knight errant that runs mad with cause deserves no thanks, but to do so without reason is the point, giving my lady to understand what I should perform in the wet, if I do this in the dry.”

The Spaniards say that “Don Quixote” is untranslatable. Of course a masterpiece of this kind can not be enjoyed to the full, with all its delicate aroma, in any other tongue, and in one sense it can not be fully understood by any one who is not himself a Spaniard, who has not the feelings, the surroundings, and perhaps the prejudices to which the great book was addressed. But, judged by such a standard, what masterpiece of past times can any of us fully enjoy? In another sense, however, a foreigner can enjoy “Don Quixote” better than a Spaniard; for some of its most characteristic features are those which to one who lives amid the same surroundings will pass unobserved. No one can judge of the perspective of a great work unless he be far enough away to see it in its relations to the rest of the world. In this larger sense, I think that Don Quixote can be understood by an American of our century as well as by a Spaniard of the time in which it was written. Something of the details will escape him, but the beauty of the whole may be even more apparent. The things that we lose in translation,—for instance, the sonorous solemnity of the magniloquent diction of Don Quixote,—are atoned for by the fact that Don Quixote himself is a more distinctive type to us than he could have been to the people of his own age and country.

I am not sure but that the Englishman or the American can grasp the sum total of his qualities better through a good translation than even in the original. The Spanish of “Don Quixote” is somewhat archaic, and in places a little obscure, even to the most proficient in the living tongue. So elusive is the pleasure which comes with the dry humor of such a book that it must offer itself spontaneously, it must fit the mood of the reader, it must be the luxury of an idle hour, or much of the charm of it will escape. Therefore it is that I have found in Shelton’s translation, and still more in the recent rendering of Mr. Watts, a keener pleasure than I have ever been able to dig out of the original mine.

“Don Quixote” is not without great faults. It was written carelessly. This indeed often adds to the naturalness of the descriptions and the situations, but the blemishes are sometimes self-evident and glaring. For instance, after Sancho’s ass has been stolen by Ginés de Pasamonte, the squire is represented, sometimes as walking, sometimes as riding on the very animal he has lost. Some of Cervantes’s commentators, like Clemencin, who are mathematical rather than artistic in their criticisms, call our attention to the numerous incongruities of this sort. But the greatest masters of literature, even Homer and Shakespeare—have been guilty in the same way.

Indeed, there is a good deal in “Don Quixote” which reminds one of Shakespeare. Take for instance the following discourse between Don Quixote and Sancho Panza:

“Prithee, tell me, hast thou not seen some comedy played wherein are introduced kings, emperors, pontiffs, knights, ladies and divers other personages? One plays the bully, another the knave; one the merchant, one the soldier; others the witty fool and the foolish lover; and, the comedy ended and their apparel put off, all the players remain equal.”

“Yes, marry have I,” answered Sancho.

“But the same,” pursued Don Quixote, “happens in the comedy and commerce of this world, wherein some play the emperors, others the pontiffs; in short all the parts that can be introduced into a drama; but on reaching the end, which is when life is done, Death strips all of the robes which distinguished them, and they remain equal in the grave.”

“A brave comparison!” cried Sancho, “though not so new but that I have heard it many and divers times, like that of the game of chess,—how, so long as the game lasts, each piece has its particular office, and the game being finished, they are all mixed, shuffled, and jumbled, and put away into a bag, which is much like putting away life in the grave.”

“Every day, Sancho,” quoth Don Quixote, “thou becomest less simple and more wise.”

The passages in “Macbeth,” “Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care,” and “The sleeping and the dead are but as pictures,” find their counterparts in the following dialogue, in which Sancho says to his master:

“I only know that while I sleep I have no fear, nor hope, nor trouble, nor glory; and good luck to him who invented sleep, a cloak which covers all a man’s thoughts, the meat which takes away hunger, the water which quenches thirst, the fire which warms the cold, the cold which tempers the heat; to end up, the general coin with which all things are bought, the balance and weight which levels the shepherd with the king and the fool with the wise man. There is only one thing, as I have heard say, is bad about sleep, and it is that it looks like death, for between the sleeping and the dead there is very little difference.”

The great fault of “Don Quixote” is its excessive prolixity. Provided the best parts might be selected, it would be a better novel if it filled only half the space. The same moralizing by the knight and his squire is too often repeated; the same proverbs come forth again and again. This is the reason why the work is read far less at the present time than it used to be. In these busy days there is not much place for the four volume novel.

Then, too, the long episodes, the story of Cardenio, the tale of the captive and of Impertinent Curiosity, would be better told as separate narratives rather than as parts of a book with which they have no proper connection. The introduction of such stories was one of the tricks of the time, but it is an artistic blemish. On the other hand, Cervantes’s use of the Moorish historian, Ben Engeli, is a literary device admirably employed, and the point at which he first introduces Ben Engeli’s narrative is a delicious satire upon a literary trick common to novelists even of the present time. For it will be remembered that the terrible conflict between Don Quixote and the Biscayan was left suspended, as it were, in mid-air, each of the mighty combatants having raised his sword and being prepared to dash at the other, at which point the narrative was interrupted, the author being unable to learn anything of the outcome of the fray until he discovered in the Alcazar of Toledo the manuscript of the Arabian historiographer.

“Don Quixote” has been the model upon which many of the best works of fiction have been based. One can see distinct traces of Cervantes’s methods in “Pickwick Papers.” There are undoubtedly many points of difference between Mr. Pickwick and Don Quixote, yet the points of resemblance are very clear; and Sam Weller corresponds more nearly to Sancho than any character in modern fiction. The lugubrious episodes in the “Pickwick Papers” are not wholly unlike those in “Don Quixote,” and the solemnity of these episodes furnishes the same contrast to the merry absurdities of the narrative itself.

Ichabod Crane is in some respects a Yankee “Knight of the Sorrowful Figure,” though devoid of the madness and of the high spiritual aims of his Castilian prototype.

“Don Quixote,” like many other masterpieces, like the “Odyssey,” “Hamlet,” “Paradise Lost,” and the “Divine Comedy,” falters a little at the end. Cervantes was evidently in a hurry to finish it, and the conversion of the knight upon his death-bed is somewhat sudden. But the defects in this great work are (to use a very hackneyed simile) like the spots upon the sun. It will always remain one of the world’s greatest masterpieces.

GIL BLAS
ALAIN RENÉ LE SAGE

If, as some say, the object of fiction is simply to amuse, no work of fiction has better attained that object than “Gil Blas.” It is the greatest and the most celebrated of that class of novels called the novela picaresca, or rogue story, and consists of a succession of the liveliest and merriest incidents, slenderly connected as parts of the autobiography of a Spanish lackey, and narrated in a style that is a model of luminous simplicity. The hero encounters every variety of good and evil fortune, each following the other like the figures of a kaleidoscope. From the moment when, as a simple youth, he is sent forth into the world with a mule and forty ducats, he plunges into the midst of ludicrous adventures. At the first town he entertains at supper a parasite who calls him “the ornament of Oviedo,” “the torch of philosophy,” “the eighth wonder of the world,” and who, after gorging himself at the expense of the young student, laughs in his face at his credulity. He is next decoyed into a cave of robbers, where he is locked in and made to serve as the Ganymede of the band, but before long he escapes and rescues a fair lady, Doña Mencia, who gratefully gives him a thousand ducats and a valuable ring. But he tells of his good fortune, and is fleeced of his money and his ring in a confidence game skillfully played by one Camilla and by Don Rafael, her pretended brother, acting in concert with his own valet, Ambrose. In his misfortune he meets Fabricio, an old schoolmate, who advises him to become a lackey rather than a tutor, since the former calling opens a better career than teaching to a man of shrewd wit. Gil Blas is convinced, and seeks a situation.

His first place is with the fat licentiate, Sedillo, where he serves faithfully and leads a dog’s life in hopes of a legacy, as soon as his master shall be carried off with the gout. He gets as the legacy his master’s library, consisting of three books, “The Perfect Cook,” a work on indigestion, and a breviary. Then he takes a situation with Dr. Sangrado, the physician who has hastened Sedillo’s departure from the world, from whom he learns in a word the whole art of healing, to wit, bleeding profusely and administering vast quantities of hot water, a system which Gil Blas puts into practice as Sangrado’s deputy, kills most of his patients, and has to flee from Valladolid in the night. After many adventures he arrives at Madrid, becomes the servant of Don Mathias de Silva, a dissolute young nobleman, and learns much of the ways of the world. Dressed in his master’s clothes, he makes love to a great lady, as he supposes, but finds that she is Laura, the maid of the actress Arsenia, whom his master visits. Don Mathias is killed in a duel, whereupon our hero takes service with the actress, and has fine times with his dear Laura, but at last leaves the place because he is unwilling “to live any longer with the seven mortal sins.” Next he takes a situation with Don Vincent de Guzman, fancies that his master’s daughter Aurora is in love with him, and makes a great fool of himself at a midnight interview, where she seeks his aid in behalf of her passion for Don Luis Pacheco. A very pretty story follows of her efforts in the guise of a man to inspire Pacheco’s love, efforts which are not unlike those of Rosalind with Orlando, and which in like manner are crowned with success. Gil Blas then goes to live with Pacheco’s uncle, an asthmatic old man, who looks “like the resurrection of Lazarus,” but who loves the young and beautiful Euphrasia. Gil Blas finds another gallant hidden in her room, and tells his master, but he is dismissed for his pains.

Our hero now renders a service to a young nobleman, Don Alphonso de Leyva, who is a fugitive from justice, and goes with him to a cave, where Don Raphael and Ambrose are found disguised as hermits, and the former gives a graphic account of his past life and rogueries. At first Gil Blas and Don Alphonso join them in their rascally enterprises. They all array themselves as inquisitors, and proceed to appropriate the property of Samuel Simon, a converted Jew, whom they charge with relapsing into heresy. The questions propounded in behalf of the Holy Office are highly grotesque. But neither Gil Blas nor Don Alphonso are willing to continue such a life, so they part from their companions, and Don Alphonso, who is soon after happily married to Seraphina (quite a long love story hangs thereby), makes Gil Blas the intendant of his castle. But Gil Blas quarrels with Seraphina’s maid, whereupon he leaves the service of his friend and betakes himself to Granada, where he obtains a place as secretary of the archbishop. The description of the learned prelate, short, fat, and very vain of his oratorical gifts, is extremely lifelike, and the following scene, where he requires Gil Blas to give him a warning of his failing powers, is deservedly celebrated:

One evening he repeated before me with enthusiasm a homily which he intended to pronounce next day in the cathedral. He was not contented with asking me what I thought of it in a general way; he obliged me to single out the particular places which I most admired. I had the good luck to mention his favorite passages, those which he looked upon as the best. By this means I passed in his judgment for a man who had a delicate knowledge of the true beauties of a work. “That,” he cried, “is what you call having taste and sentiment! Go to, my friend, I assure you, you have not got Boeotian ears.” In a word, he was so well satisfied with me that he said to me, with some vivacity, “Gil Blas, give thyself no uneasiness about thy fortune. I undertake to make it agreeable. I love thee, and as a proof of my affection, make thee my confidant.... Listen with attention to what I am going to say to thee. My chief pleasure consists in preaching. The Lord gives a blessing to my homilies. They touch the hearts of sinners and make them seriously reflect and have recourse to penitence. I have the satisfaction of seeing a miser, terrified by the images which I represent to his avarice, open his treasures and squander them with a prodigal hand. I have also turned a voluptuary from his pleasures, filled hermitages with the ambitious, and strengthened in her duty a wife who had been shaken by the allurements of a lover. These conversions, which are frequent, ought of themselves to arouse me to work. Nevertheless, I will confess my weakness, I propose to myself another reward, a reward which the delicacy of my virtue reproaches me with in vain; I mean the esteem of the world for fine polished writing. The honor of being regarded a perfect orator has many charms for me. My works are found equally strong and delicate, but I would like to avoid the fault of good authors who write too long, and I would retire with all my reputation. Therefore, my dear Gil Blas,” continued the prelate, “I exact one thing of thy zeal. When thou shalt perceive that my pen smacks of old age, when thou shalt see my genius flagging, don’t fail to advise me of it. I do not trust my own judgment upon that point. My self-love may deceive me. That observation requires a disinterested mind, and I make choice of thine, which I know is good. I will rely upon thy judgment.... Do not fear to be frank and sincere, for I shall receive thy advice as a mark of thy affection for me. Besides, thy own interest is concerned; if, unfortunately for thee, it should come to my ears that they say in the city my discourses have no longer their wonted force and it is high time for me to rest, I declare to thee plainly that thou shalt lose my friendship as well as the fortune I have promised. Such will be the fruit of thy foolish discretion.”

After the bishop has had an attack of apoplexy, and the time comes for Gil Blas to perform his duty, this is what happens:

The only thing that embarrassed me now was how to break the ice. Luckily the orator himself extricated me from that difficulty, by asking what people said of him, and if they were satisfied with his last discourse. I answered that his homilies were always admired, but in my opinion the last had not succeeded so well as the rest, in affecting the audience. “How, friend!” replied he, with astonishment, “has it met with any Aristarchus?” “No, sir,” said I, “by no means; such works as yours are not to be criticised; everybody is charmed with them. Nevertheless, since you have laid your injunctions upon me to be free and sincere, I will take the liberty to tell you that your last discourse, in my judgment, has not altogether the energy of your other performances. Are you not of the same opinion?”

My master grew pale at these words; and said, with a forced smile, “So then, Mr. Gil Blas, this piece is not to your taste?” “I don’t say so, sir,” cried I, quite disconcerted; “I think it excellent, although a little inferior to your other productions.” “I understand you,” he replied, “you think I am failing, don’t you? Come, be plain; you believe it is time for me to think of retiring.” “I should not have been so bold,” said I, “as to speak so freely, if your grace had not commanded me; I do no more, therefore, than obey you; and I most humbly beg that you will not be offended at my freedom.” “God forbid,” cried he with precipitation, “God forbid that I should find fault with it. In so doing, I should be very unjust. I don’t at all take it ill that you speak your sentiment; it is your sentiment only that I find bad. I have been most egregiously deceived in your narrow understanding.”

Though I was disconcerted, I endeavored to find some mitigation, in order to set things to rights again; but how is it possible to appease an incensed author, one especially who has been accustomed to hear himself praised? “Say no more, my child,” said he, “you are yet too raw to distinguish the true from the false. Know that I never composed a better homily than that which you disapprove; for my genius, thank Heaven, hath as yet lost nothing of its vigor. Henceforth I will make a better choice of a confidant, and keep one of greater ability than you. Go,” he added (pushing me by the shoulders out of the room), “go tell my treasurer to give you a hundred ducats, and may Heaven conduct you with that sum. Adieu, Mr. Gil Blas, I wish you all manner of prosperity, with a little more taste.”

And so the comedy goes on. One new face after another appears on the scene, among them Captain Hannibal Chinchilla, with monstrous moustache, who has left an eye in Naples, an arm in Lombardy, and a leg in the Low Country; then Count Galiano, who is fonder of his monkey than of his servants. Our hero becomes one of the secretaries of the prime minister, the Duke of Lerma, where he acquires great honor, but for a long time, no pay. Finally he sells his influence, gets into court intrigues, rises step by step, until he is about to marry the daughter of a rich jeweller, when he is arrested and thrown into the tower of Segovia. Here he is found by his faithful valet Scipio, who gets him released. He now determines to renounce the court forever, and his old friend Don Alphonso gives him a small estate at Lirias. But when the new king comes in, Gil Blas is tempted back again, rises rapidly under Count Olivares, and when this minister falls, follows him into retirement. Upon the death of the count, Gil Blas returns to Lirias, where his marriage and his happy life with his wife, Dorothea, close the story.

Many of the personages of the tale reappear at the most unlooked for places and in the most unexpected characters. For instance, the two rascals, Don Raphael and Ambrose, turn up as monks in a convent, where they have led a life of great piety and penitence for over a year. But Don Raphael is the treasurer and Ambrose is the porter of the monastery, and soon these worthy brothers disappear with all the funds. They come to their deserts, however, for the last that is seen of them they are walking with other culprits to an auto da fe, their heads decorated with the carochas or pasteboard caps upon which are painted the flames and devils of eternal punishment.

Another interesting character who comes in at different parts of the story is the schoolmate of Gil Blas, Fabricio, the son of the barber Nunez. At first a valet, he next turns up as a poet, having composed a worthless comedy which was a great success, from which he judged the public was a good milch cow. Some amusing descriptions follow of Fabricio’s opinion as to what constitutes a fine style. He reads a sonnet which Gil Blas cannot understand, but the son of the barber Nunez insists that this shows its excellence—that obscurity is the charm of all works that aim to be sublime, and that it is quite enough if the poet thinks they have a meaning. There are amusing portraits of Fabricio’s friends, who imagine themselves great authors and who dispute and fight at their host’s table over the comparative merits of their wretched productions. Next Fabricio is found in the hospital; he has abandoned the Muses and written an ode to bid them an eternal adieu. But as soon as he is well he is back at his old occupation, and gets a place with a liberal patron, Gómez de Ribera. He writes a play, which, being fortunately hissed and hooted by the populace, gets him a good pension from his patron, who obstinately admires it and says, “Victrix causa Diis placuit sed victa Catoni.” There is an amusing account of a dinner which Fabricio gives to his literary friends, where they discuss the question what constitutes the chief interest in the Iphigenia of Euripides, one of the guests solemnly maintaining that it was not the peril of the heroine, but the wind. “I take the part of the Greeks,” says Melchior de Villegas. “I espouse their purpose. I only wish for the departure of their fleet, and I look with an indifferent eye upon Iphigenia in her peril, since her death is a means of obtaining from the gods a favorable wind.”

Le Sage is almost as hard upon the doctors as Molière. Dr. Sangrado has become a type. He was so expeditious that he did not often give time for any of his patients to call a notary in order to make a will. After they had been bled to death, he always insisted that they died because they had not been bled enough and had not taken enough hot water. The doctor admitted to Gil Blas that he did not often cure his patients, and that if he were not so sure of his principles he might have been tempted to think that his bleeding and hot water had really injured them, but that he could not change his methods because he had published a book! In his last interview with Gil Blas, the good doctor (now retired from practice) deplores the decadence of medicine, but is caught by his own pupil drinking wine in violation of his own precepts.

All through the book stories of the events of their own lives are told by the principal characters. The robbers in the cave, Doña Mencia, Don Alphonso, Don Raphael, Scipio, and others, all give us their histories, which resemble in miniature the principal narrative. The novel is a very long one, and although it is well written everywhere, the latter part contains some incidents which seem like repetitions, and the interest is not held quite up to the standard of the earlier books.

“Gil Blas” is an admirable prose satire, a satire written with the light raillery of Horace rather than the invective of Juvenal. It sparkles everywhere with French wit, and though the scene is laid in Spain (the model for that kind of story being the early Spanish tales like “Lazarillo de Tormes”), yet the style and the characters are essentially French, and many of the latter are taken from the acquaintance of the author himself. The illusion, however, is well maintained, and it is only upon rare occasions (such as the raillery of the petits maîtres) that one notices characteristics which do not seem quite at home in Spain. Near the close of the book there are a number of historical characters (Spanish, of course), but these are by no means the liveliest or best. Indeed, it may well be doubted whether “Gil Blas” has not rather suffered than gained by the introduction of its historical features.

I have noticed that while I can enjoy “Don Quixote” perhaps better in the translation than the original, “Gil Blas,” on the other hand, sounds more natural to me in a Spanish version than in the original French. This may be mere fancy, or perhaps it may be attributed to this, that “Gil Blas,” being a foreign production, seems more natural after having been acclimated, as it were, by translation into the language of the country in which its scenes are laid. “Don Quixote,” on the other hand, being thoroughly Spanish does not lose its national characteristics, no matter what the language in which it is communicated to the reader.

ROBINSON CRUSOE
DANIEL DEFOE

The main feature of this story—an account of the efforts of a castaway to live comfortably without human aid,—is extremely attractive to the young. Many of the scenes are very vivid,—the shipwreck, the lonely island, the birds startled at the sound of the gun, the wildcat that observes the new intruder; his efforts to provide for himself food, clothing, and shelter; the construction of his strange dwelling, the planting of his crops, the care of his goats, the building of his canoe, and most of all, the account of the wild man Friday, whom he secures for his servant,—all these things are ingeniously and attractively described. But the repetitions which occur throughout the book make it in places very tedious. Crusoe tells us in his diary the same story which he has already related in the preceding narrative; he moralizes again and again upon his folly in disregarding the advice of his good father; he computes over and over the evils and the blessings that have befallen him; and tells many times and at great length the story of how he became a Christian and learned to pray. Much of the book is a sermon of Puritan dimensions. This is one of the works where the abridgement is better than the original. The homilies are commonplace, there are few striking passages and the style, though occasionally picturesque, is often dry and involved.

Of course in such a work there can be little portraiture of character. Robinson Crusoe himself is not a specially interesting person. His ingenuity is all that attracts us. In one or two places his jumbled motives are described with unconscious naïveté. For instance, he says, when he saw Friday escaping from the two savages who had intended to make a meal of him: “It came very firmly upon my thoughts, and indeed irresistibly, that now was the time to get me a servant and perhaps a companion or assistant, and that I was called plainly by Providence to save this poor creature’s life.” So he killed the pursuers and appropriated Friday.

The description of Friday is well conceived. This interesting barbarian worships his master’s gun and talks to it, desiring it not to kill him. He says of Benamuckee, the creator, “All things say ‘Oh!’ to him,” and the objections of this child of nature to his master’s theology are very lifelike. “If God much stronger than the devil, why God no kill the devil, so make him no more do wicked?” And after Crusoe had replied, “God will at last punish him severely; he is reserved for the judgment and is to be cast into the bottomless pit, to dwell with everlasting fire,” Friday’s rejoinder has never yet, I think, been successfully answered,—“Why not kill the devil now, not kill great ago?” It was natural that Crusoe should say, “Here I was run down again by him to the last degree.”

GULLIVER’S TRAVELS
JONATHAN SWIFT

I suppose the human mind is naturally inclined to a belief in dwarfs and giants. There are legends about them in the folk-lore of nearly every people. It requires only an exaggeration of the things we know to believe in larger men and smaller men than we have ever seen. In “Gulliver’s Travels” Swift has worked out the details of comparative size with great particularity, and the book is an illustration of the principle that even a palpable fiction may be made so definite and circumstantial that it will almost command belief.

The figure of the great Man-Mountain dragging the tiny fleet of Lilliput is vivid and lifelike, and when in Brobdignag the same giant becomes a helpless dwarf, is carried like a mouse in the mouth of a dog, and has fierce struggles with a frog and a rat, the scenes do not seem at all impossible. The art of the story-teller gives probability to the wildest fancies, and you can hardly doubt, as you read, that the kingdoms of the big people and the little people must have existed, so plain are the scenes before your eyes.

But Swift’s description of the physical characteristics of these peoples is not more vivid than his account of their customs and social peculiarities.

Much of his satire was meant to set off certain follies of his own time, but to us the most valuable part of it is that which portrays the general frailties of humanity. He holds up to nature a mirror which, while it distorts the features a little, still makes the caricature extremely lifelike. Even where the Lilliputians are most absurd we recognize their similarity to ourselves. The quarrels between the partisans of low and high heeled shoes, the revolution and obstinate war concerning the proper manner of opening an egg, are not a whit more nonsensical than some of our own social and theological controversies. The Lilliputians bury their dead with the head down in order that the body may be in the right position for the resurrection, just as the Mahometan faces Mecca in his prayers, the Christian builds his church according to certain points of the compass, and the ritualist makes his genuflexions in carefully prescribed forms, for reasons quite as cogent and unanswerable.

The “little people” well knew there were no other regions of the earth than Lilliput and Blefuscu, and here, too, we are like them. Most of us consider that all there is of importance in the universe is that which falls within our own spheres of observation.

No one can read Swift’s story without reflecting that our own little world must seem much like Lilliput to the great eye which looks upon this planet as only one among the islands of the firmament.

In Laputa we see ourselves even more clearly. We can find counterparts of the great lord of wide attainments and eminent services, who was accounted ignorant and stupid because he had so ill an ear for music that he beat time in the wrong place. The philosophers who moved about the earth with one eye turned inward and the other upward toward the zenith, and who constantly required a flapper to bring them to their senses, are old and familiar acquaintances.

The proposition to impose a tax upon men’s vices has been put into practice many a time, and the scheme of a general raffle to secure the prizes of patronage would seem to be a tolerable refuge from our former system of political appointments.

But all through “Gulliver’s Travels” the folly and wickedness of men is greatly overdrawn, and in the final voyage to the country of the Houyhnhnms the colors are quite too dark to be truthful. This part of the book is not a mere satire, but a malignant invective against humanity, so bitter that it ceases to be either attractive or convincing. The lawyers sell out to the highest bidder, the doctors kill their patients to justify their own prognostications; all mankind is vile—worse than the beasts,—until we begin to feel an aversion for an author whose judgment has been so greatly distorted by his own malevolence. We can not help inferring that he who attributes such qualities to his fellow-creatures must himself have a large share of them; and it is not surprising to find great irregularities and scandals in the life of Swift, nor to learn that at last his mind flickered out in imbecility.

MANON LESCAUT
THE ABBÉ PRÉVOST

What is the subtle charm of “Manon Lescaut” which has given it the place of a classic in French fiction, and which causes it to be read at the present time with the same delight as when it was written? It does not sparkle with wit, nor is it filled with wisdom. The heroine is far from being an estimable character, and the poor hero, the Chevalier des Grieux, is admirable only in one thing—in his constant and self-sacrificing devotion to the unworthy object of his passion.

He meets her in the courtyard of an inn at Passy. It is a case of love at first sight. They flee from the inn together, and Manon becomes his mistress. The youth is ardent but inexperienced, while the girl, though no older in years, is far maturer, more subtle and self-asserting. It is not many weeks before she forsakes him for a more advantageous connection. For a long time he is in despair at her faithlessness. At last he enters upon a regular life, and becomes a student in a theological seminary. On the day of his graduation she comes to him again. In a moment all his good resolutions are flung to the winds and he falls at once under her influence. They live for a time upon the money she has acquired from a more opulent lover, but it is stolen, and he betakes himself to the gambler’s expedients to restore their shattered fortunes. She leads him into evil courses, and many are the tricks they play upon her other admirers. Twice they are thrown into prison, and on the last occasion, to gratify the revenge of a defrauded and disappointed suitor, Manon is sent with a chain gang to the French settlement at New Orleans. Her lover goes with her, and after they are established in their distant abode they decide to invoke the aid of the church upon their union and to become man and wife. But the governor of the province has other views for Manon, and desires to marry her to his nephew. A duel follows, and the Chevalier des Grieux is forced to flee. Manon accompanies him to the wilderness, but, unable to endure the fatigues and perils of such a life, she expires in the arms of her lover.

This sounds like rather poor material for a novel, yet so charmingly and simply is the story told, so deep and so natural is the Chevalier’s passion, that he invests his wayward mistress in our eyes with the same charms that he sees in her himself, until we pardon the infidelities of the beautiful creature almost as readily as he.

TOM JONES
HENRY FIELDING

There are some who insist that Fielding’s “Tom Jones” has not been surpassed by the work of any of the later novelists.

I confess that on the second reading of this story I failed to find in either plot or portraiture that excellence which would entitle the book to take a preëminent rank among works of fiction. In the succession of adventures which compose the tale there is a recurrence of incidents which resemble each other so closely that they cease to be novel or attractive. Conversations are usually interrupted by the unexpected appearance of some one not desired, or else by an “uproar” followed by a fight, until the repetition becomes monotonous. There is not a character in the book capable of arousing any strong feeling of admiration or sympathy.

Sophia Western is intended to be amiable and attractive, though she gives little evidence of any remarkable or alluring qualities in what she says or does. Her sufferings are hardly great enough to cause distress to the reader, and the manner in which she finally agrees to wed her scapegrace of a lover, without waiting for the probationary year which she had first required, does not betoken any great constancy or strength of purpose.

Tom Jones himself is not beset by those overpowering temptations and strong passions which might in a way excuse his scandalous behavior. He is indeed warm-hearted, courageous, and fond of his benefactor, Mr. Allworthy, and he is apparently somewhat attached even to the young woman to whom he is continually unfaithful. If he has other excellences, they do not appear, while his vices are conspicuous and repulsive. A thoroughly interesting character can not be made out of such material.

On the other hand, hypocrisy becomes living flesh and blood in the person of the discreet, pious, treacherous, cold-blooded Blifil, who “visited his friend Jones but seldom, and never alone,” and “cautiously avoided any intimacy lest it might contaminate the sobriety of his own character.”

The most picturesque person in the book is undoubtedly Squire Western, with his senseless prejudices and his wild outbreaks of passion.

But if we leave the characters and incidents out of the question, there is a good deal of delightful reading in the book. The author is a consummate master of English. I began “Tom Jones” just after finishing “David Copperfield,” and the transition from the style of Dickens to that of Fielding was a refreshing surprise. The chapters which are introductory to each of the so-called “books” of the novel are intended, as the author tells us, to set off the rest by reason of their dulness. Some of them are in fact a little tedious, but many are pleasant excursions into fields of criticism and satire which mark the author as an essayist of the first order. The mock-heroic manner in which he describes the methods of his own work, the burlesque praises which he bestows upon it, and his contempt for his critics, are very amusing.

“This work,” he says, “may indeed be considered as a great creation of our own, and for a little reptile of a critic to presume to find fault with any of its parts without knowing the manner in which the whole is connected, and before he comes to the final catastrophe, is a most presumptuous absurdity.”

In another place he gives a comic justification of plagiarism from classical authors:

“The ancients,” he says, “may be considered as a rich common where every person who has the smallest tenement in Parnassus hath a free right to fatten his muse.” “The writers of antiquity were so many wealthy squires from whom the poor might claim an immemorial custom of taking whatever they could come at, so long as they maintained strict honesty among themselves.”

His use of epic diction in the description of the commonplace is sometimes irresistibly comic,—for example, the following on the fight of Mollie Seagrim in the churchyard:

“Recount, O Muse, the names of those who fell on this fatal day. First, Jemmy Tweedle felt on his hinder head the direful bone. Him the pleasant banks of sweetly winding Stour had nourished, where he first learnt the vocal art, with which, wandering up and down at wakes and fairs, he cheered the rural nymphs and swains, when upon the green they interweaved the sprightly dance, while he himself stood fiddling and jumping to his own music. How little now avails his fiddle! He thumps the verdant floor with his carcass.”

Contrary to the general opinion, I think that Fielding is entitled to far more praise for the literary quality which pervades his novel than for its “realism” and “fidelity to nature” which are the claims of most of its admirers.

RASSELAS
DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON

Dr. Johnson is one of the few men whose reputation is due, not so much to his writings (which are generally the source of all permanent renown in a literary man) as to his conversation and his peculiarities as recorded by his wonderful biographer—things which in most men are the source of a very limited and evanescent fame.

It is not intended here to dispute the conclusions of Macaulay that he was both a great and a good man, but merely to point out how little good work he has put forth to justify his prodigious reputation. For instance, he compiled a dictionary; and although it was never a very good dictionary, and is now quite obsolete, yet the memory of the tremendous stir it made has lasted down to the present time. He wrote some annotations of Shakespeare’s plays, which show that he had a very limited understanding of their meaning, yet his observations have been more generally quoted than those of commentators far more accurate and discerning. He entered the field of fiction and wrote “Rasselas,” and there are very few novels (if “Rasselas” can be called a novel at all) which upon their intrinsic merits less deserve an extravagant reputation as one of the classics of our literature.

The plot is the slenderest possible. Rasselas, the fourth son of the emperor of Abyssinia, is confined within the “Happy Valley,” from which exit is impossible, and, wanting nothing, naturally suffers from ennui. He spends twenty months in fruitless imaginings, and then four months more in resolving to lose no more time in idle resolves, when he is awakened to more vigorous exertion by hearing a maid who had broken a porcelain cup remark, “What cannot be repaired is not to be regretted.” Then for a few hours he “regretted his regret,” and from that time bent his whole mind to the means of escape. He spent ten months trying to find a way out (a job which would be laughed at by an able-bodied member of the Alpine Club) then he betook himself to an inventor of a flying machine, who of course came to grief. Finally a poet, named Imlac, told Rasselas of his extensive travels, and they received from the conies, who had “dug holes tending upwards in an oblique line,” a hint as to the means of escape, of which Dr. Johnson gives the following rather foggy description: “By piercing the mountain in the same direction, we will begin where the summit hangs over the middle part and labor upwards till we issue up behind the prominence.” The two now proceed to tunnel the mountain, and Nekayah, the prince’s sister, with her favorite maid, Pekuah, accompany them to the outside world. They journey to Cairo, where they engage in the search for happiness,—philosophy, the pastoral life, material prosperity, solitude, the life led “according to nature,” the splendor of courts, the modesty of humble life, marriage, and celibacy, all being successively examined and found wanting. They visit the pyramids, and here Pekuah is carried away by a band of Arabs, but she is afterwards ransomed and relates her adventures (which are not interesting) at considerable length. They admire the learning and happiness of a certain astronomer, but Imlac finds out that he is crazy; they consult an old man whose wisdom has deeply impressed them, but who can give them little comfort; they discuss the merits of conventual life; finally they visit the catacombs, where Imlac discourses on the nature of the soul; and at “the conclusion in which nothing is concluded” (for this is the title of the last chapter), Pekuah thinks she would like to be the prioress of a convent, Nekayah wants to learn all the sciences and found a college, Rasselas desires a little kingdom where he can administer justice, while Imlac and the astronomer (who has now recovered his right mind) “were contented to be driven along the stream of life without directing their course to any particular port.” They all know that none of their wishes can be gratified, so they resolve to go home. This conclusion might have been inserted almost anywhere else in the book with equal propriety.

The story is a mere thread upon which is hung a succession of reflections and homilies, some of which are shallow, many commonplace and trite, and only a few are at the same time striking, original, and worthy of remembrance.

The author maintains the existence of ghosts because belief in them is supported by the “concurrent and unvaried testimony of all ages and of all nations,” and such an opinion “could become universal only by its truth!”

There is very little humor to be found in the ponderous moralizing of this book. There is, however, a touch of quaint satire upon the theories of contemporary French philosophy, that deserves to be remembered. Rasselas is listening to a philosopher who advises his hearers to “throw away the incumbrance of precepts” and carry with them “this simple and intelligible maxim that ‘deviation from nature is deviation from happiness.’” He asks what it is to live according to nature, and the philosopher answers:

“‘To live according to nature is to act always with due regard to the fitness arising from the relations and qualities of causes and effects; to concur with the great and unchangeable scheme of universal felicity; to cooperate with the general disposition and tendency of the present system of things.’

“The prince soon found that this was one of the sages whom he should understand less as he heard him longer. He therefore bowed and was silent; and the philosopher, supposing him satisfied, and the rest vanquished, rose up and departed with the air of a man that had coöperated with the present system.”

The style of “Rasselas” (like that of everything Dr. Johnson wrote) is stilted and affected. In the Happy Valley “every blast shook spices from the rocks and every month dropped fruits.” Its inhabitants “wandered in the gardens of fragrance and slept in the fortresses of security.” When Rasselas reaches Cairo he tells us of the gilded youth of that metropolis, that “their mirth was without images, their laughter without motive.... The frown of power dejected and the eye of wisdom abashed them.”

Of a professor who there lectured on philosophy, Rasselas declares: “He speaks, and attention watches his lips. He reasons, and conviction closes his periods.” This might do in an oration, but it is pretty poor for a novel. But worst of all, Dr. Johnson puts into the mouth of the young and innocent Nekayah the following words upon the subject of marriage:

“When I see and reckon the various forms of connubial infelicity, the unexpected causes of lasting discord, the diversities of temper, the oppositions of opinion, the rude collisions of contrary desire where both are urged by violent impulses, the obstinate contests of disagreeable virtues where both are supported by consciousness of good intention, I am sometimes disposed to think with the severer casuists of most nations, that marriage is rather permitted than approved, and that none, but by the instigation of a passion too much indulged, entangle themselves with indissoluble compacts.”

Readers who think that this sort of conversation is natural and beautiful ought to be fond of “Rasselas,” but those who do not will inevitably feel that it was too bad that the author of the great Dictionary had so intimate an acquaintance with so many words.

CANDIDE
FRANÇOIS VOLTAIRE

In the same year that “Rasselas” appeared (1759), Voltaire published his “Candide.” While the coarseness and irreverent merriment of the French philosopher are quite unlike the ponderous Sunday-school didacticism of Dr. Johnson, still there are points of remarkable resemblance in these two works, written as they were by the two literary autocrats of that generation. The Happy Valley of Abyssinia finds its counterpart in El Dorado, and the object of each book was to illustrate the same truths—the uncertainties and vicissitudes of life and the vanity of human wishes, although the moral drawn from these truths is very different in the two cases.

Saintsbury considers “Candide”, from a literary point of view, “unsurpassable,” while some of Voltaire’s critics and commentators seem to regard it as scarcely worthy of notice. The truth lies somewhere between these estimates. “Candide” can hardly be classed as a novel, for it is in no sense a just portraiture of life or of human nature. It is essentially a burlesque written in ridicule of philosophic optimism, and of the orthodox contention that all which happens is the result of a wise and beneficent design. It is a work thoroughly characteristic of Voltaire, and sparkles everywhere with his wit and laughing mockery.

Candide, the hero, is brought up in the castle of the Baron of Thunder-Ten-Tronckh, where Master Pangloss, the instructor who teaches meta-physico-theologo-cosmolo-ingology, is the oracle of the family. “It is demonstrable,” says this great philosopher, “that things cannot be otherwise than they are; for as all things have been created for some end, they must necessarily be created for the best end. Observe, for instance, the nose is formed for spectacles; therefore we wear spectacles. The legs are visibly designed for stockings; accordingly we wear stockings,” etc. The book is a commentary on this text. Candide is kicked out of the castle for falling in love with the baron’s daughter. After sad wanderings, he is impressed by the Bulgarians, flogged nearly to death, takes part in the war with the Abares, in which some thirty thousand souls are massacred, escapes to Holland, meets the sage Pangloss, who is dying of a loathsome disease and who tells him that the castle has been destroyed and its inmates put to death. But Pangloss recovers and they start for Portugal, encountering a tempest, a shipwreck, the earthquake of Lisbon, (where 30,000 people were destroyed,) and finally the Inquisition and an auto-da-fé, where Candide receives a hundred lashes and Pangloss is hanged. Here Candide finds that his inamorata Cunegund is alive, having escaped the slaughter at Thunder-Ten-Tronckh, though she has encountered calamities equal to his own, and though at that time the Grand Inquisitor and one Issachar, a Jew, are holding her as their prisoner and slave. Candide slays them one after the other, and escapes with his Cunegund to Cadiz, whence they set sail for Buenos Aires. But here things are as bad as in Europe. Cunegund is again torn from her lover, who, with his servant, Cacambo, wanders through Paraguay; fights with her brother the baron, who has turned Jesuit and become one of the rulers of that country; escapes again, and discovers the hitherto inaccessible and unknown country of El Dorado in the heart of the mountains, where the clay is yellow gold, the pebbles are precious stones, where there are no priests, nor monks, nor courts, nor prisons, and where the people lead lives of innocence and ideal happiness. Upon his departure he takes with him a flock of sheep laden with treasure, but as soon as he reaches the haunts of men the wickedness of the world begins again. His treasure is stolen and he returns to Europe, meeting with marvellous adventures in France, in England, in Venice, and finally in Turkey, where he again encounters his Cunegund, ransoms her from slavery, and weds her, after she has become a hideous and ill-favored scold. The sage Pangloss, although he has been hanged, dissected, enslaved and flogged, turns up again, still maintaining that everything goes on as well as possible, because as a philosopher it would be unbecoming in him to retract!

At every turn of the kaleidoscope some new scene of fraud, lust, rapine, slaughter, sacrilege, or inevitable calamity, comes into view, generally linked with some ridiculous accessory such as only the mind of Voltaire could conceive, and yet with each grotesque apparition there comes also a sort of conviction that the author has not greatly overdrawn the picture, but has merely grouped together in startling juxtaposition the things which actually happen in the world.

At last Candide settles in a small farm in the Propontis, and from a neighbor, an old man, quite ignorant of philosophy and public affairs, he learns the real secret of happiness,—to cultivate his little patch of land, and by labor to keep off the three great evils, idleness, vice, and want. The moral is thus expressed in the concluding sentences:

“‘There is a concatenation of all events in the best of possible worlds; for, in short, had you not been kicked out of a fine castle for the love of Miss Cunegund, had you not been put into the Inquisition, had you not traveled over America on foot, had you not run the baron through the body, and had you not lost all your sheep which you brought from the good country of El Dorado, you would not have been here to eat preserved citrons and pistachio nuts.’ ‘Excellently observed,’ answered Candide, ‘but let us take care of our garden.’”

While the story as a whole is a wild phantasmagoria, calling to mind the works of Rabelais by its grossness and inextricable confusion, it contains also, like “Gargantua,” passages of exquisite irony and masterly satire. For instance, the Venetian senator Pococurante, who by despising and condemning the great works of art and literature proved his superiority to all and passed for a prodigious genius, is vividly drawn, and it makes us wonder whether Voltaire’s own great reputation had not a source which was essentially the same as that of his Pococurante.

TRISTRAM SHANDY
LAURENCE STERNE

I was for some time in doubt whether “Tristram Shandy” ought to be in my list of masterpieces. In one sense it is hardly a work of fiction at all, for a few rather trifling incidents are made the basis of such endless digressions and ruminations that it is in fact not so much a story as a medley of satire, philosophy, and humor. But the ear-marks of Cervantes and Rabelais appear in it very plainly, and perhaps it is as much entitled to a place here as the burlesques of the celebrated Frenchman.

I began “Tristram Shandy” several times, and read the greater part of it on disconnected occasions; yet the poor hero had such a hard time, through so many hundreds of pages, in getting into the world at all, that I always gave up without reading the book to the end. And, to say the truth, nobody ought to read it consecutively. A part of the humor consists in the endless prolixity with which trifling events are narrated, and a joke thus lengthened out into the enormous dimensions of several volumes becomes too huge to handle all at once. Another part of the humor is displayed in the jumble with which the events and observations upon them are thrown together. The preface, for instance (and a very amusing preface it is), is pitched into the middle of the book. Whole chapters are omitted and their places supplied by stars, and the subsequent chapters (which tell the whole story) are given to explaining why these omissions were made, namely, that the parts left out were too fine for the rest of the story. The author appropriately asks us, after several volumes of this confusion, how our heads feel!

The style, which is generally conversational and highly idiomatic, is sometimes purposely involved, and gives us a picturesque, vague impression, which is often vivid, though upon analysis it represents nothing in particular. Evidently Carlyle, who was a great admirer of Sterne, imitated his manner in places, though he lacked much of the wit and lightness of fancy of the author of “Tristram Shandy.” There are indeed passages in which the style of the two authors is almost indistinguishable.

Naturally, in such a book a good part of the fun has to be dug out with considerable labor; and this is not always the way in which humor is most attractive. To the reader who is anxious for a denouement, “Tristram Shandy” is a most exasperating work, for there is no denouement at all. You never get anywhere, and the book ends, like the Sentimental Journey, right at the midst of perhaps the most interesting part of it.

It improves a good deal, however, upon a second reading, when you no longer care how anything is going to turn out, and when the choice morsels are more easily extracted. It contains a great many observations which go well in a commonplace book, containing as they do a humorous epitome of matters of universal knowledge. Sterne has the Shakespearean quality of filching from others and then transforming his plunder into gold by a striking originality of his own. The actual facts described are very few. Tristram’s birth, with all its accessories, his broken nose, his christening, his father’s odd philosophy and scheme of education, so elaborate that the boy’s actual training had to be abandoned while the father was writing his great Tristrapaedia,—these things, together with the history of Uncle Toby, wounded in the groin at the siege of Namur, and of his faithful servant Corporal Trim, and finally the episode of the Widow Wadman, who laid siege to Uncle Toby’s heart, an episode broken off in the middle at the end of the book, are pretty much all. But the descriptions of character are admirable. The dear, simple-minded, modest Uncle Toby, with his hobby, to wit: his fortifications and his military science,—Uncle Toby, who continually interrupts the emanations of Shandean philosophy by inapposite remarks, will always be a type in literature.

The coarseness of “Tristram Shandy” excludes the book from indiscriminate reading at the present time, but its coarseness, although in places very great, is, on the whole, of a rather innocent character, and the work will keep its place as a classic among the lovers of genuine humor.

It contains occasional passages of singular beauty. Witness the following.

“Time wastes too fast; every letter I trace tells me with what rapidity life follows my pen; the days and hours of it more precious, my dear Jenny, than the rubies about thy neck, are flying over our heads like light clouds of a windy day, never to return more; everything presses on,—whilst thou art twisting that lock, see! it grows gray; and every time I kiss thy hand to bid adieu, and every absence which follows it, are preludes to that eternal separation which we are shortly to make.”

THE VICAR OF WAKEFIELD
OLIVER GOLDSMITH

I was forcibly reminded of the fact that our estimate of a work of literature depends largely upon our mood and upon surrounding circumstances after my last reading of “The Vicar of Wakefield.” Upon a former reading I had been filled with great admiration for Goldsmith’s novel. The plot seemed admirably constructed, the characters well drawn, and the literary charm of the book inexpressibly attractive. On the subsequent perusal the work did not come up to the standard I had imagined. Both the style and the plot appeared somewhat artificial, and the combination of incidents improbable. The literary charm was there, but even that was not so great as I had supposed. I can not altogether account for this change of view. Perhaps it is due to the fact that my earlier reading was just after my perusal of “Tom Jones,” and followed a certain disappointment and disgust at Fielding’s work, whereas the final reading followed the perusal of Manzoni’s masterpiece, “The Betrothed,” by the side of which even “The Vicar of Wakefield” shines with a lustre that is somewhat dim. It is perhaps also due to the fact that the sudden alternations of fortune described in Goldsmith’s novel are more startling, and therefore more attractive on a fresh impression than they are when they are anticipated.

“The Vicar of Wakefield” begins with a delightful description of the family of the good man who tells the story,—of his wife, “chosen for the qualities that would wear well,” but whose conduct, I thought, did not altogether justify such a selection; of his two daughters, Olivia and Sophia, with romantic names in which the father had no choice; and of his younger sons. Among these, he says, a family likeness prevailed, and “properly speaking, they had but one character, that of being all equally generous, credulous, simple, and inoffensive.” He describes the part he took in the Whistonian controversy, maintaining that it was unlawful for a priest of the church of England, after the death of his first wife, to take another,—a controversy which led to a difference with a neighboring clergyman, Mr. Wilmot, the father of Arabella, to whom the vicar’s son George was betrothed, and ended in the breaking off of the engagement, after it was also found that the vicar’s fortune had been lost. Then follows a description of the removal of the family to a new parish; of the departure of George to seek his fortune; of the straightened circumstances and simple life of the others; of the love of finery displayed by the wife and daughters; of their efforts at gentility and their attempts to attract Squire Thornhill, their dissolute landlord, and to secure him as a husband for Olivia. The squire brings from London two women of abandoned character, whom he introduces as ladies of high rank, and who seek to induce the daughters of the honest clergyman to return with them to the town.

Two attractive episodes are here introduced. In order to defray the expenses necessary to keep up appearances and to send the girls to London, the boy Moses is sent to a fair to sell the colt, and an amusing account is given of his return with a gross of worthless green spectacles, which a sharper had palmed off upon him. Then the vicar himself goes to sell the other horse, and the same man, one Ephraim Jenkinson, who appeared to be a pious and venerable gentleman, and displayed great learning about Sanchoniathon, Manetho, Berosus, Ocellus Lucanus, and the cosmogony of the world, gives him a worthless draft upon one of his neighbors in payment. These two episodes call to mind some of the adventures of Gil Blas.

Upon his return home the vicar finds that the two great ladies from London have departed, without his daughters, being dissuaded from taking them by a letter of one Mr. Burchell, a friend of the family, a gentleman in reduced circumstances, as was supposed, whose attentions to Sophia have caused her father much anxiety. A letter of Burchell is discovered, containing some dark insinuations, which are erroneously thought to apply, not to the two women, but to the vicar’s own family, and great is the indignation at Burchell for his scandalous interference. Squire Thornhill continues his attentions to the vicar’s eldest daughter, and is included with the family in a huge picture, which is inadvertently made so large that it will not go into any of the rooms of the vicar’s cottage, but has to stand against the kitchen wall. Instead of pressing his suit openly, however, the squire elopes with Olivia, upon whom he imposes a fictitious marriage, and then, after a time, abandons her. The poor clergyman starts upon a vain pursuit of his daughter, believing that Burchell is responsible for her abduction. In his wanderings he comes upon his son George, who is attached to a company of strolling players, and the young man gives him an account of his adventures; of his travels in Holland, whither he has gone to teach the Dutch English, without reflecting that for this purpose it was necessary that he should first learn Dutch; of his induction into the art of a connoisseur of pictures at Paris, where he learns that the whole secret of it consists in a strict adherence to two rules,—“the one, always to observe the picture might have been better if the painter had taken more pains; and the other, to praise the works of Pietro Perugino.” The squire arrives during the vicar’s interview with his son, and agrees to purchase for George a commission in a West India regiment, taking from the father a bond for a hundred pounds, the purchase money.

But shortly afterwards the vicar comes upon his daughter Olivia, who is in great distress, and he learns from her that it is the squire, and not Burchell, who has betrayed her. When the good man returns home he finds his dwelling in flames, and rescues his two little boys, but is seriously burned in the conflagration, and shortly afterwards he has an altercation with the squire, who thereupon arrests him for non-payment of the hundred pounds, and throws him into jail. One of his fellow-prisoners begins to talk about cosmogony, Sanchoniathon, etc., and he recognizes the rogue Jenkinson, who now, however, becomes his friend. A simple and pathetic account is given of the scenes in the prison; of his exhortations to his fellow-prisoners to reform their evil courses; of their laughter, the pranks they play on him, and the ultimate respect and love which he awakens. So long as his daughter lives, the vicar will not seek to secure his release from prison by making his submission to the squire; but he soon learns from Jenkinson that the poor girl is dead. His second daughter, Sophia, is suddenly abducted, and George unexpectedly comes into the prison in fetters, prosecuted by the squire for sending a challenge and for injuring one of his servants. At this point the climax of human wretchedness would seem to be reached. But here everything changes. Burchell, who has just rescued Sophia and brought her back in safety, now comes upon the scene and discloses himself as the uncle of Squire Thornhill and the real owner of the estate which the young squire has been enjoying. Thornhill arrives, and his villainies are one after another unmasked. Miss Wilmot, whom he is about to marry, learns of his infidelities, renounces him, and again accepts her former suitor, George. The squire impudently insists on keeping her fortune, according to the marriage contract, but Jenkinson now reveals the fact that Thornhill is already wedded to Olivia, since the priest who married them was a true priest, and it was he and not the girl who had been imposed upon. Olivia herself now appears; she is not dead, Jenkinson having declared that she was for the purpose of inducing the good vicar to make his submission to the squire and get out of prison. Burchell, now Sir William Thornhill, seeks the hand of Sophia, the vicar’s property is restored to him, and the story concludes with two weddings and universal happiness. The conclusion is more satisfactory than that of the book of Job, to which the story bears some slight resemblance, for in Goldsmith’s novel even the dead are restored to life.

It is quite evident, from the foregoing outline of the plot, that there is decidedly too much machinery in it to be altogether natural; and this artificiality, which seems characteristic rather of the age than of the author, is also found in the diction of the book, in which Johnsonian antitheses sometimes appear, although these were used by Goldsmith with more restraint and with better taste than by any other writer of the period. For instance, in the author’s Advertisement, speaking of the vicar, it is said:

“He is drawn as ready to teach, and ready to obey; as simple in affluence, and majestic in adversity.”

Describing the early prosperous days of the family, the vicar says:

“We had no revolutions to fear, nor fatigues to undergo; all our adventures were by the fire-side, and all our migrations from the blue bed to the brown.”

Again:

“My children, the offspring of temperance, as they were educated without softness, so they were at once well-formed and healthy; my sons hardy and active, my daughters beautiful and blooming.... The one entertained me with her vivacity when I was gay, the other with her sense when I was serious,” etc., etc.

Of course the language of the book is elegant and beautiful,—nothing that Goldsmith ever wrote was otherwise; but I think that our present era is to be congratulated upon the fact that however great its defects of style in other particulars such formalism is now mostly obsolete.

Two of the characters in the book are extremely well drawn,—the good vicar himself, with his simplicity, kindness, and religious reverence; his patience, however, on two or three occasions interrupted by most natural outbreaks of indignation; and his wife, motherly and foolish, with her shallow schemes for the advancement of her daughters.

The three poems introduced into the story,—“The Hermit,” the “Elegy on a Mad Dog,” and last and most beautiful of all, the verses beginning—

“When lovely woman stoops to folly,
And finds, too late, that men betray,”

will long be known and admired in English literature. They are models of purity and simplicity, though Goldsmith, as well as Wordsworth, sometimes comes dangerously near the line which separates that which is delicately beautiful from that which is sentimental and commonplace.

THE SORROWS OF YOUNG WERTHER
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

Many of the lovers of Goethe will no doubt say that his longer works, “Wilhelm Meister” or “Elective Affinities,” are his most important productions in the field of fiction; but it always seemed to me that, as a portrait of actual life, his earliest and simplest story is entitled to the highest rank. The first part of “Werther” is one of the most charming bits of idyllic literature extant. The character of the hero appears very clearly and naturally from his letters to his friend. He has a sensitive, impressionable, sympathetic, unaffected, lovable, and simple nature, subject to sudden transitions from joy to wretchedness. He loves children; he is interested in the lowly. To his eyes, at this time, the world and the people in it are all good. His descriptions of natural scenery are filled with a lively and poetic charm, and so, too, are his accounts of those he meets. Most attractive of all is his portrait of Charlotte, when he first sees her, cutting bread for her little brothers and sisters, then at the dance, and afterwards, on almost every page in which her name appears. The incidents of this story, except the concluding portion of it, are taken largely from the author’s own experience, and Goethe, inconstant as he was in his affections, knew not only how to love passionately, but how to describe the object of his passion as she appeared to him; and he has given us here a girl so attractive that we become enamored of the portrait. Her outbursts of merriment, her constant cheerfulness, her deep, sympathetic nature, the delicate home touches in her conduct of the household, all go to make up a character the charm of which is irresistible. But she is engaged to be married. Werther knows this from the time he has first seen her; yet, like a moth, he flits around the candle; and when Albert, her betrothed, arrives,—a character whose cool temper and sound understanding are a sharp antithesis to his own passionate and volatile nature,—life in his eyes suddenly changes. We see this even in the changing views with which he regards Nature. The universe, instead of being the source of universal joy, has grown to be a fearful monster, forever devouring its own offspring. His buoyant spirits become depressed; he broods over the one thought of his love for Charlotte, until he resolves to flee. He takes service under an ambassador, whom he describes as “the most punctilious blockhead under heaven.” He writes with utter contempt of the hollow society by which he is surrounded, with its meaningless gradations; and when at last he inadvertently remains at a reception at which his rank does not entitle him to be present, and is asked to leave, whereupon scandal arises, he resigns his place in disgust.

In the meantime, Albert and Charlotte have become married, but the one great passion of Werther’s life brings him back to her. He recognizes his folly, but he can not resist it. His thoughts circle around her alone, and his imaginations become morbid and feverish. “If Albert should die!” “How much better fitted am I to be her husband!” Her pity for him, and the tenderness with which she treats his hopeless passion, inflame him all the more.

Werther’s letters to his friend are now interrupted, and the editor fills in the gaps with a narrative and observations of his own. Werther becomes gloomy, morose, unbalanced, and finally resolves upon suicide. Charlotte asks him not to visit her, but in spite of this he goes, and reads to her some melancholy passages from Ossian, not very apposite in the facts they describe, but quite in tune with his feelings in their mournful and melancholy character. When he sees her sympathy with his affliction, a passionate outbreak ensues, and she parts from him, declaring that she can never see him again. He wanders distraught at night over the crags, and, returning home, makes his preparations for death. He sends to Albert, asking to borrow his pistols for a journey. Albert directs Charlotte to give them to the messenger, which she does. A long letter from Werther to Charlotte and a simple description of the final catastrophe end the narrative.

There is a great inconsistency between Werther’s character as it appears in the last part of the book and that shown by his earlier letters, an inconsistency which it seems to me is not wholly due to the transformation in his feelings caused by his hopeless love. The last letter which Werther writes to Charlotte is of a most compromising character, telling her that he knows she loves him, and that she is to be his in that curious future world which he pictures to himself, where it would seem that passion rather than virtue is to be rewarded. He insists on describing the harrowing details of his contemplated suicide, reminding her that it is from her hand that he has received the pistol, and throwing upon her the responsibility, all this accompanied by the most tender endearments. Is this love? Is it even a tolerable form of insanity? It may be said that no course of action is unreasonable for a madman, yet to me the final pages seem inartistic. In this part of the book the author evidently had to rely upon his unaided imagination rather than upon the memory of his own experience, and Werther’s frame of mind after he had resolved upon suicide is one which I think Goethe had felt very imperfectly in his own consciousness.

But whatever the incongruities of the story so far as the hero is concerned, it must be said that fiction has rarely, if ever, drawn a character more womanly, in the best sense of the word, than Charlotte. She is one of the most attractive types in literature.

PAUL AND VIRGINIA
BERNARDIN DE ST. PIERRE

Were it not for the immense reputation of “Paul and Virginia,” a reputation which has lasted for more than a century, that book should find no place in a list of the great works of fiction.

Saint Pierre considered his work a picture of nature, a sort of prose pastoral, modelled after Theocritus; but to many it will seem rather the picture of a counterfeit or fiat nature, which was greatly in vogue at the time in an extremely artificial society and among those who had little knowledge of the genuine article. I do not mean by this to criticise the author’s description of natural scenery or natural phenomena. His picture of the Isle-de-France, and of the surroundings of the little cabins in which the events of the story occur, is beautiful and lifelike; his account of the hurricane in which Virginia perishes is realistic, and impressive; but his portrait of what human life would be in a condition of Arcadian simplicity is far from convincing. The author tells us in his preface that he intends to show that our happiness consists in living according to nature and virtue. When a definite thesis is thus proposed at the outset, the truthfulness of the portrait may easily be overlooked and the dramatis personæ may even become impossibilities.

Here are two amiable children who grow up together in two neighboring cabins “according to nature,”—that is, they can not read and write,—and yet they devote themselves to amateur theatricals and to landscape gardening. In decorating the tropical surroundings of their humble homes they make these almost as artificial as the park of Versailles. The names which they give to the choice spots are stilted and unnatural. A certain rock is called “The Discovery of Friendship.” A circle of orange trees and bananas around a small grass-plat, where Paul and Virginia go and dance, is called “Concord.” Another tree where their respective mothers meet to tell their griefs is christened “Tears Wiped Away.” A neighboring hermit (the man who afterwards tells the story) scatters appropriate Latin verses in divers other localities.

Nothing that is planted ever seems to fail. The flowers are abundant, but somehow they seem like manufactured flowers. Even their perfume suggests rather the pharmacy than the field, and we see nothing of any thorns.

A few of the scenes between Paul and Virginia are natural and beautiful. Perhaps the best part of the story is the description of the shy maidenly reserve which takes the place of childish affection when the girl first becomes a woman. But the bulk of the book is filled with a curious mixture of sickly sentimentality, long Sunday-school homilies, and a very commonplace philosophy. The climax is reached after Virginia, who has been sent to France to be educated by her aunt, returns to the island and perishes with the ship which is wrecked by a hurricane upon the shore. This occurs under the eyes of her lover, who makes heroic but ineffectual efforts to rescue her. According to the curiously devised plot of the author, she could escape by swimming from the sinking ship if she would accept the proffered aid of a sailor and consent to divest herself of her clothing, but her modesty is greater than her love of life. She turns away, lifts her eyes to heaven, and with appropriate gestures goes down with the ship. This may be impressive to the Gallic mind, but to many a hard-headed Anglo-Saxon it will look like rubbish. The book ends with a description of the grief of her lover, in spite of enormous doses of consolation ineffectually administered to him by a friend, and finally with the death of pretty much everybody concerned, all from broken hearts, and in a very short space of time. Thus is demonstrated the happiness which is sure to reward those who keep close to nature.

We are told that the events recorded actually occurred. It may be that the skeleton of the story is founded upon fact, but if so, I feel sure that the flesh and blood with which the imagination of the author has clothed it is quite different from that which it actually possessed.

ATALA
FRANÇOIS CHATEAUBRIAND

I hear that not long ago, as the result of an extensive vote taken among the subscribers of a leading French periodical, it was found that Chateaubriand was the most popular of all French writers of fiction of the present century. Certainly this is a surprising result when such names as Balzac, Hugo, and Daudet are considered as competitors, and one’s first impression is that those who gave their suffrages in favor of Chateaubriand must have been sentimental rather than judicious readers.

And yet a careful perusal of “Atala,” the short romance by which Chateaubriand won his literary spurs, will perhaps give the author a higher rank in fiction than is generally accorded to him by our colder and less impressionable race. The plot is simplicity itself. Atala is an Indian maiden, although a Christian, and is supposed to be the daughter of Simaghan the chief. Her real father, however, is Lopez, a Spaniard. Her mother before her death required from her a vow of perpetual celibacy. Chactas, a young brave of the tribe of the Natchez, who has lived among the Spaniards at St. Augustine, is captured by Simaghan and is to be burned alive. Atala releases him from his bonds, they flee together, and wander long through the forest. Their love is so great that Atala, fearing she would break her vow, takes poison and dies under the care of the good Father Aubry, a missionary, who administers the last consolations of religion.

This story has been called an epic in prose, but its predominant feature is hardly the heroic. It is rather a pastoral, if that word can be applied to a description of primitive life where there are neither flocks nor shepherds. “Atala” follows somewhat the same lines as “Paul and Virginia,” and although it is supposed to contain incongruities in attributing the qualities of civilization to savages, yet perhaps Chateaubriand, who had had considerable personal experience with American Indians, may not have been so wide of the mark as we think. Moreover, Atala was part Spaniard; Chactas had been brought up among the whites, and the counterpart of the old priest actually existed in Jogues the Jesuit father. And if it were not so, why may not the poet create such children of his fancy as he will, and give them what garb and conversation and surroundings he may please, so long as they are really human and beautiful? Atala is certainly an interesting and natural character, the consolations of the priest are filled with tender pathos, the style of the book is simple yet highly poetical, and there are descriptions of nature—of the forest, the mountains, the storm—of great beauty and vividness,—pictures that sometimes make us wish to betake ourselves to the wilderness.

The moralizing of Chateaubriand is by no means so tedious as that of St. Pierre, and there is nothing in Atala so essentially devoid of common sense as the conduct of the artificial creatures who have been “living according to Nature,” in the Ile de France.

Let us say, then, that Chateaubriand, if not preëminent, is entitled to an honorable rank among the masters of fiction.

PRIDE AND PREJUDICE
JANE AUSTEN

The narrow horizon of Jane Austen’s life was perhaps one of the reasons why her perception of human nature was so keen and accurate in the matters which fell under her observation. Her novels contain no extraordinary types nor incidents, but she makes the most of the average and the commonplace, which become more than usually interesting under her treatment. He who reads “Pride and Prejudice” will get a faithful picture, not only of English country life, but of a great deal that belongs to life everywhere. None of the characters are exaggerated; they are entirely human and natural. The conversation is not too brilliant to be lifelike. When bright things are said they are introduced in a spontaneous and almost inevitable manner. All through the book we recognize in the author a quiet yet acute observer of actual occurrences, who has culled largely from her own recollection many of the most attractive incidents and has grouped them together with simple yet effective art. The satire is so unobtrusive that sometimes it appears unconscious.

The Bennet household is well described. “Mr. Bennet was so odd a mixture of quick parts, sarcastic humor, reserve, and caprice, that the experience of three and twenty years had been insufficient to make his wife understand his character. Her mind was less difficult to develop. She was a woman of mean understanding, little information, and uncertain temper. When she was discontented she fancied herself nervous. The business of her life was to get her daughters married; its solace was visiting and news.”

And again: “Her husband was very little otherwise indebted to her than as her ignorance and folly contributed to his amusement. This is not the sort of happiness which a man would in general wish to owe to his wife, but where other powers of entertainment are wanting, the true philosopher will derive benefit from such as are given.”

There are five daughters in the family, whose characters are excellently set off by comparison with one another,—Jane, the eldest, beautiful, gracious, kindly, sweet-tempered, always believing the best of everybody; Elizabeth, high-spirited, brilliant, and decidedly the most attractive, although by no means so charitable as her sister in her judgment of others. The three other sisters, Mary, Kitty, and Lydia, are as empty-headed as their mother. Lydia, the youngest, in particular, is a wild, giddy girl, continually running after the officers with their fine coats.

The book deals with a society where woman’s sole resource is matrimony, and through the entire story there runs a great deal of talk of catching a husband, and of schemes for this purpose. The silly Mrs. Bennet flings her daughters, in the most transparent way, first at one man and then another, much to the mortification of Jane and Elizabeth.

It appears that Mr. Bingley, a young, unmarried, and wealthy gentleman, has recently taken the estate of Netherfield, and moves into the neighborhood, bringing with him his two sisters, women of selfish and supercilious character. His friend Darcy, the proprietor of the large estate of Pemberly, in Derbyshire, also accompanies him. The book opens with the following sentence:

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighborhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered as the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.”

The partiality of Bingley for Jane is soon apparent, but the young man is hurried away from Netherfield by his sisters and his friend Darcy, who desires to preserve him from an undesirable connection. By mutual misunderstandings Jane and he are kept apart until near the close of the book, and the main interest in the story centers around Darcy and Elizabeth. Darcy’s manner is proud, cold, and disagreeable, and Elizabeth resents his conduct in a lively and spirited fashion, which renders her all the more attractive in his eyes. She hears, however, from Wickham, a young officer in the militia, of his evil conduct in disregarding his father’s wishes and depriving this companion of his boyhood of a living, which he had been recommended by his father’s will to bestow upon Wickham.

Mr. Collins, a young clergyman who has inherited by entail the reversion of Longbourn, the Bennet property, visits the Bennet household, resolving to marry one of the daughters—any one of them will do; and on learning that Jane is likely to be disposed of, he at once transfers his suit to Elizabeth. He is a formal, pompous, ridiculous toady, filled with great awe of his patroness, Lady Catherine De Bourgh. The manner in which he pays his addresses to Elizabeth is related with delightful particularity:

“‘Almost as soon as I entered the house,’ [he says], ‘I singled you out as the companion of my future life. But, before I am run away with by my feelings on this subject, perhaps it will be advisable for me to state my reasons for marrying—and, moreover, for coming into Hertfordshire with the design of selecting a wife, as I certainly did.’

“The idea of Mr. Collins, with all his solemn composure, being run away with by his feelings, made Elizabeth so near laughing, that she could not use the short pause he allowed in any attempt to stop him further, and he continued:

“‘My reasons for marrying are, first, that I think it a right thing for every clergyman in easy circumstances (like myself) to set the example of matrimony in his parish; secondly, that I am convinced it will add very greatly to my happiness; and thirdly—which, perhaps, I ought to have mentioned earlier, that it is the particular advice and recommendation of the very noble lady whom I have the honor of calling patroness. Twice has she condescended to give me her opinion (unasked, too!) on this subject; and it was but the very Saturday night before I left Hunsford—between our pools at quadrille, while Mrs. Jenkinson was arranging Miss De Bourgh’s footstool—that she said, ‘Mr. Collins, you must marry. A clergyman like you must marry. Choose properly, choose a gentlewoman, for my sake; and for your own, let her be an active, useful sort of person, not brought up high, but able to make a small income go a good way. This is my advice. Find such a woman as soon as you can, bring her to Hunsford, and I will visit her.’ Allow me, by the way, to observe, my fair cousin, that I do not reckon the notice and kindness of Lady Catherine de Bourgh as among the least of the advantages in my power to offer. You will find her manners beyond anything I can describe; and your wit and vivacity I think must be acceptable to her, especially when tempered with the silence and respect which her rank will inevitably excite. Thus much for my general intention in favor of matrimony; it remains to be told why my views were directed to Longbourn instead of my own neighborhood, where, I assure you, there are many amiable young women. But, the fact is, that being as I am to inherit this estate after the death of your honored father, (who, however, may live many years longer), I could not satisfy myself without resolving to choose a wife from among his daughters, that the loss to them might be as little as possible, when the melancholy event takes place—which, however, as I have already said, may not be for several years. This has been my motive, my fair cousin, and I flatter myself it will not sink me in your esteem. And now, nothing remains for me but to assure you, in the most animated language, of the violence of my affection. To fortune I am perfectly indifferent, and shall make no demand of that nature on your father, since I am well aware that it could not be complied with; and that one thousand pounds in the four per cents., which will not be yours till after your mother’s decease, is all that you may ever be entitled to. On that head, therefore, I shall be uniformly silent; and you may assure yourself that no ungenerous reproach shall ever pass my lips when we are married.’

“It was absolutely necessary to interrupt him now.

“‘You are too hasty, sir,’ she cried. ‘You forget that I have made no answer. Let me do it without further loss of time. Accept my thanks for the compliment you are paying me. I am very sensible of the honor of your proposals, but it is impossible for me to do otherwise than decline them.’

“‘I am not now to learn,’ replied Mr. Collins, with a formal wave of the hand, ‘that it is usual with young ladies to reject the addresses of the man whom they secretly mean to accept, when he first applies for their favor; and that sometimes the refusal is repeated a second or even a third time. I am, therefore, by no means discouraged by what you have just said, and shall hope to lead you to the altar ere long.’

“‘Upon my word, sir,’ cried Elizabeth, ‘your hope is rather an extraordinary one, after my declaration. I do assure you that I am not one of those young ladies (if such young ladies there are) who are so daring as to risk their happiness on the chance of being asked a second time. I am perfectly serious in my refusal. You could not make me happy, and I am convinced that I am the last woman in the world who would make you so. Nay, were your friend Lady Catherine to know me, I am persuaded she would find me in every respect ill qualified for the situation.’

“‘You must give me leave to flatter myself, my dear cousin, that your refusal of my addresses is merely a thing of course. My reasons for believing it are briefly these:—It does not appear to me that my hand is unworthy your acceptance, or that the establishment I can offer would be any other than highly desirable. My situation in life, my connections with the family of De Bourgh, and my relationship to your own, are circumstances highly in my favor; and you should take it into further consideration that, in spite of your manifold attractions it is by no means certain that another offer of marriage may ever be made you. Your portion is unhappily so small, that it will in all likelihood undo the effects of your loveliness and amiable qualifications. As I must therefore conclude that you are not serious in your rejection of me, I shall choose to attribute it to your wish of increasing my love by suspense, according to the usual practice of elegant females.’

“‘I do assure you, sir, that I have no pretensions whatever to that kind of elegance which consists in tormenting a respectable man. I would rather be paid the compliment of being believed sincere. I thank you again and again for the honor you have done me in your proposals, but to accept them is absolutely impossible. My feelings in every respect forbid it. Can I speak plainer? Do not consider me now as an elegant female intending to plague you, but as a rational creature speaking the truth from her heart.’

“‘You are uniformly charming!’ cried he, with an air of awkward gallantry; ‘and I am persuaded that when sanctioned by the express authority of both your excellent parents, my proposals will not fail of being acceptable.’

“To such perseverance in wilful self-deception, Elizabeth would make no reply, and immediately and in silence withdrew; determined, that if he persisted in considering her repeated refusals as flattering encouragement, to apply to her father, whose negative might be uttered in such a manner as must be decisive, and whose behavior at least could not be mistaken for the affectation and coquetry of an elegant female.”

But after Collins is persuaded that he is rejected by Elizabeth, he at once makes suit to her friend, Charlotte Lucas, and Charlotte, who has an eye to the main chance, snaps up the foolish clergyman with little ceremony, and, like many another woman under similar circumstances, manages him adroitly and bears patiently and cheerfully her dull life with him at the parsonage.

Elizabeth, while on a visit to her friend at this place, again sees Darcy on several occasions. His manners are constrained; she dislikes him heartily; and it is with the utmost surprise that she listens at last to a confession of love, in which he declares that he has struggled vainly, that his feelings will not be repressed, and in which he speaks most inappropriately of his sense of her inferiority, of the marriage being a degradation, and of the family obstacles which judgment has always opposed to his inclination. She rejects him with indignation, and reproaches him for separating his friend Bingley from her sister, and for his unjust treatment of Wickham. He on his part is astounded at her refusal, and the next morning places in her hand a letter, explaining, with great candor and rather brutal frankness, his motives for his action, and justifying very fully his treatment of Wickham, whose bad character is clearly shown.

It is not long before Wickham elopes with the foolish Lydia, and lives with her in hiding in London, but refuses to marry her. Darcy, without the knowledge of any of the Bennet household, sets about to discover the fugitives, and finally persuades Wickham to marry the girl, to whom he gives a portion sufficient to make her an object of attraction to her unprincipled lover.

These two characters, Darcy and Wickham, are not clearly described when they are first introduced to us, and Elizabeth, the heroine, though she is generally a shrewd observer, makes a serious mistake in estimating their respective merits, a mistake that we would be very likely to make ourselves under the same circumstances.

In the later chapters of the book Darcy overcomes his pride, and Elizabeth her prejudice, Bingley and Jane are again brought together, and the marriages of the two couples form a fitting conclusion for the novel.

Perhaps the character of the Lady Catherine de Bourgh is the most graphically drawn of any in the book. Her rank, her wealth, and her arrogance make her the general adviser of the inferior race of mortals whom she deigns to notice. She criticises every household but her own, resents the expression of an opinion by any one except herself, points out the mistakes of everyone else at the card tables, constantly relates anecdotes of her personal experience, determines what the weather is to be next day, finds fault with the employments of her neighbors and the arrangement of their furniture, detects their housemaids in negligence, impresses upon the young women of her acquaintance that they will never play well unless they practice more, etc., etc., etc. All her hospitality is attended by intolerable dullness and ill-breeding. Her interview with Elizabeth, in which she insolently directs that young woman not to marry Darcy, because she has selected him for her own daughter, is drawn with a masterly hand, and, as might be expected, her conduct turns out to be the very means of reconciliation between those she would keep apart.

In the following letter of condolence sent by Mr. Collins to Lydia’s father, after her elopement became known, the nature of the reverend clergyman appears, unconsciously painted by his own hand far better than it could be characterized by others:

“‘My dear Sir:

“‘I feel myself called upon, by our relationship, and my situation in life, to condole with you on the grievous affliction you are now suffering under, of which we were yesterday informed by a letter from Hertfordshire. Be assured, my dear sir, that Mrs. Collins and myself sincerely sympathize with you, and all your respectable family, in your present distress, which must be of the bitterest kind, because proceeding from a cause which no time can remove. No arguments shall be wanting, on my part, that can alleviate so severe a misfortune; or that may comfort you under a circumstance that must be of all others most afflicting to a parent’s mind. The death of your daughter would have been a blessing in comparison to this. And it is the more to be lamented, because there is reason to suppose, as my dear Charlotte informs me, that this licentiousness of behavior in your daughter has proceeded from a faulty degree of indulgence; though, at the same time, for the consolation of yourself and Mrs. Bennet, I am inclined to think that her own disposition must be naturally bad, or she could not be guilty of such an enormity, at so early an age. Howsoever that may be, you are grievously to be pitied, in which opinion I am not only joined by Mrs. Collins, but, likewise, by Lady Catherine and her daughter, to whom I have related the affair. They agree with me in apprehending that this false step in one daughter will be injurious to the fortunes of all the others, for who, as Lady Catherine herself condescendingly says, will connect themselves with such a family? And this consideration leads me, moreover, to reflect with augmented satisfaction on a certain event of last November; for had it been otherwise, I must have been involved in all your sorrows and disgrace. Let me advise you, then, my dear sir, to console yourself as much as possible, to throw off your unworthy child from your affection forever, and leave her to reap the fruits of her own heinous offence.’

“‘I am, dear sir, &c., &c.’”

While “Pride and Prejudice” is not a book of absorbing interest, it is a very faithful portraiture of life, and a quiet and effective satire on some of the commonest foibles of mankind.

UNDINE
DE LA MOTTE FOUQUE

The fairy world holds among its enchantments no more gracious figure than Undine, whose simple story is filled with unutterable pathos and tenderness.

The Knight Huldbrand meets her in the guise of a young girl at the cottage of a fisherman by whom she had been brought up as a daughter. Beautiful, wayward, mischievous, she falls in love with the handsome knight and testifies her fondness by mad pranks as well as by artless caresses. After they are married Huldbrand learns for the first time that his bride is a water-sprite, belonging to a race more beautiful than mankind, but devoid of an immortal soul, which can be acquired only by marriage with some human being. A great change now comes over Undine; for with her new soul there comes to her all that depth of feeling and suffering which the possession of the priceless gift implies. The scene in which she first reveals to her husband her real nature and tremblingly awaits her destiny at his hands is beautiful in the extreme. The married pair take their departure from the cottage and proceed through the enchanted forest on their way to Huldbrand’s castle at Ringstetten. The water-sprite Kühleborn, the kinsman of Undine, who besets their pathway here and elsewhere and who dissolves into a mountain torrent, is described with that vagueness which is the charm of the supernatural. On the way to Ringstetten, Undine, moved with pity for the proud and imperious Bertalda, who has been cast off by the duke of the country for her unworthiness, takes her home and receives her as a companion and friend. Gradually the love of Huldbrand for his wife wanes, and he becomes enamored of Bertalda; and while Undine’s kinsfolk, the water-sprites, seek to revenge the slights she is compelled to suffer, yet the poor wife, with loving self-sacrifice, protects not only her husband but even her rival from their power. At last, while sailing on the Danube, Huldbrand loads his wife with curses and imprecations, and she is compelled to leave him and join her kindred in the river below. And when, after his marriage with Bertalda, she is required to come back to the castle and be his executioner, she lovingly performs her terrible office with a kiss.

There are some imperfections and inconsistencies in the story, as perhaps there must be in all tales dealing with the supernatural, but the traits which come to this fair creature with the soul bestowed upon her at her wedding, the gentleness, the self-sacrifice and submissive love, are drawn by the hand of a master and painted in colors which genius alone can impart to the creations of fancy.

PETER SCHLEMIHL
ADELBERT CHAMISSO

A German critic of considerable authority speaks of “Peter Schlemihl” as “a faultless work of art, and one of deep import.” It is not necessary to concur in this estimate nor to imagine, as some do, that the shadowless man was a symbol of the author, “a wanderer without a country,” in order to give the book a reasonably high place in literature. No doubt there are autobiographical features in the story, but Chamisso’s own account of its simple genesis is evidently the true one. “I had lost,” he said, “upon a journey, my hat, portmanteau, gloves, pocket-handkerchief, and my entire travelling outfit. Fouqué asked me if I had not also lost my shadow, and we pictured this misfortune to ourselves.” Something out of La Fontaine furnished another incident, and the book was written largely to amuse the children of the author’s friend Hilzig. It is a sort of fairy story dealing largely with the supernatural.

At the garden of a rich gentleman to whom he has brought a letter of introduction, Peter Schlemihl meets a quiet man dressed in gray, who, when anything is desired by the guests, at once takes it out of his pocket. A piece of court plaster, a telescope, a Turkish carpet, a tent, and finally a horse saddled and bridled, are successively produced without anyone showing surprise at these remarkable proceedings or even seeming to know who the stranger is. When Schlemihl retires from the company the gray man follows him and offers him the inexhaustible purse of Fortunatus in exchange for his shadow. Schlemihl, poor man, thinking it a small thing to part with at such a price, sells this humble attendant to the devil, and the rest of the book sets forth the calamities that follow—the pity of the old women, the outcry of the children, the contempt of the men, especially the stout ones who have broad shadows of their own. Schlemihl tries to keep in the shade, shuts himself up in his room with his gold, proposes to have a shadow painted, sends his faithful servant Bendel to get his own back from the gray man, but all in vain. The stranger promises, however, to return “in a year and a day.”

All the splendor procured by Schlemihl’s wealth is as nothing by the side of the evil fate entailed by the loss of his shadow. He is especially unfortunate in love. At first Fanny smiles upon his suit, but falls senseless when the moon rises and casts only a single shadow as the two sit side by side. Then, when he flees to another country, where the people take him for a king and he wins sweet Mina’s heart, his secret is betrayed by Rascal, one of his own hirelings, who robs him at once both of his money and his intended bride.

At the end of the year and the day the gray man appears and offers him back his shadow if he will only subscribe a little obligation to surrender to the bearer his soul after its separation from his body. The argument is cogent. “What sort of a thing is your soul? Have you ever seen it, and what do you think you can do with it after you are dead?” But this time the voice of the tempter is unavailing, for although at first Peter is on the point of yielding when tortured by the sight of his weeping Mina about to be consigned to the arms of the hated Rascal, yet a friendly unconsciousness overcomes him and the contract is not signed.

The poor unfortunate again rides forth into the world, followed by the man in gray, until at last Schlemihl in despair flings away the purse, whereupon his evil spirit departs, leaving him free and light-hearted, although poor as well as shadowless and alone in the world.

He now avoids human society, and having become possessed of a pair of seven-league boots he is astonished to find himself striding over immense tracts of territory in an incredibly short space of time. Now he first clearly sees his appointed destiny. Shut out from the society of his fellows, nature is to be his compensation. The earth is given to him as a rich garden, and science is to be the purpose of his life. He naturally has facilities for investigation possessed by no one else. He strides through all parts of both continents, passing across Behring Straits from Asia to America, but he deplores the fact that New Holland and other islands of the Pacific are still inaccessible to him, and he gazes from the utmost point of land which his seven-league boots will permit him to reach, to the unattainable regions beyond the sea, and deems himself as badly off as if he were still behind the bars of a prison, oppressed as he is with the terrible consciousness that his great work on natural history, embracing only the flora and fauna of the two continents, must still remain a fragment.

He chooses for his hermitage a cave in the Thebais, and when we leave him he is still engaged in the preparation of his great work.

There is an inexhaustible fund of humor in the story. The various excuses given by Schlemihl for the loss of his shadow are certainly grotesque. One was that when he was travelling in Russia it froze so hard that the shadow stuck to the ground; another that a rough man walked so rudely into the shadow that he tore a hole in it and it was sent out to be mended. Another excuse was that it disappeared during a long sickness, with the hair and nails of the hero, and while hair and nails had been restored, the shadow had never come back.

“Peter Schlemihl” is written in a charming style. The vocabulary and the diction are extremely simple. This is perhaps due to the fact that the book was intended for a child’s story, but still more, I think, to the fact that Chamisso being by birth a Frenchman, his diction has something in it of the clear and luminous character of French prose.

THE LEGEND OF SLEEPY HOLLOW
WASHINGTON IRVING

As in painting it is not the huge canvas but the miniature which is most finished and delicate in detail, so in American fiction it is a short story of the simplest type, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” which furnishes perhaps the choicest illustration of the perfection of literary handiwork.

The incidents of the tale are meager; the characters are very few. Ichabod Crane, the Yankee schoolmaster, is pretty much all. But with what a master hand are drawn the few lines that portray his grotesque personality! “He was tall, but exceedingly lank, with narrow shoulders, long arms and legs, hands that dangled a mile out of his sleeves, feet that might have served for shovels, and his whole frame most loosely hung together. His head was small and flat on top, with huge ears, large green glassy eyes, and a long snipe nose, so that it looked like a weather-cock perched on his spindle neck to tell which way the wind blew. To see him striding along the profile of a hill on a windy day, with his clothes bagging and fluttering about him, one might have mistaken him for the genius of famine descending upon the earth, or some scarecrow escaped from a cornfield.”

In the matter of style, this little sketch is as near perfection as it is possible to come. The landscape pictures are so lifelike that the reader is flushed by the opulence of the autumn harvests “in which the birds were taking their farewell banquets,” or hushed by the calm brooding over the Tappan Zee, while the schoolmaster jogs along upon his ancient nag to lay siege to the heart and the inheritance of the fair Katrina Van Tassel. The crullers and doughnuts on the table of the Dutch farmer inspire an appetite in the reader almost as keen as that of the pedagogue; and the final catastrophe, when, after the rejection of his suit, the trembling Ichabod falls a victim to the Headless Horseman, overthrown by the pumpkin hurled from the hands of the irreverent Brom Bones, is a climax worthy of the humor of Cervantes himself. Indeed, there are strong grounds for believing that Don Quixote was the model of the lank pedagogue, who, whether he bestrides Gunpowder, or delves in the lore of ghosts and hobgoblins, or shakes himself to pieces in the dance, irresistibly calls to mind the peerless knight of La Mancha. But whether or not Irving borrowed the lay figure from another, he has moulded the cast upon it so perfectly that Ichabod is all his own.

IVANHOE
WALTER SCOTT

The novelist who puts the scene of his story in a place and a time far removed from his own has perhaps this advantage, that he offers to his reader scenes that have the charm of strangeness and novelty; but he suffers from a serious drawback,—he can never interpret the thoughts and conduct of his characters with the same truthfulness, nor in quite the same lively manner as if they were familiar to him by daily contact. For the human interest of his drama he has to rely not so much upon temporary or local characteristics as upon those which are common to all periods and all communities. Indeed, if there be any local color, it is apt to be that of the author’s own surroundings rather than of those in which the story is laid.

In “Ivanhoe,” Scott sought to reproduce the period of Richard I, and perhaps the reproduction is as lifelike as any that could be made, where the materials are so scanty. The novel belongs distinctly to the romantic school, and contains all the usual ingredients of books of chivalry,—knights errant, heroes in disguise, prodigies of valor, maidens in distress, a foul ravisher, a wandering monarch, a drinking friar, etc. These things are pruned of their most evident absurdities, but the story is still quite far removed from probability. The plot is palpably a creation of imaginative architecture, resembling some well proportioned temple or villa, rather than the product of natural development like a landscape or like life itself. In places the author invokes the Saxon Chronicle and other authorities in proof of the credibility of his narrative, but these references themselves show that he is not unconscious of the fact that his story stands in need of extraneous support.

And yet, this artificiality being once conceded, how beautiful is the structure! How fine the material, and how symmetrically it is put together! Sometimes, perhaps, the narrative lags a little; sometimes the descriptions, like those of Cedric’s hall or Athelstane’s castle, are longer than the impatience of the reader cares to tolerate. Yet the great scenes of the drama, how vividly do all these stand forth in our memory! How splendid the stage setting and how well arranged the incidents!

The story opens quietly. Gurth, the swineherd, and Wamba, the jester of Cedric the Saxon, are driving home a herd of swine, when they are overtaken by Prior Aymer and the Templar Brian de Bois-Guilbert with their train. Then follows the supper scene at Rotherwood, the residence of Cedric, where Ivanhoe, disguised as a wandering palmer, returned from Palestine, visits his father’s home, answers the boasting taunts of the Templar, saves the poor Jew, Isaac of York, and is supplied with armor for the coming tourney.

Next follows one of the most celebrated scenes in literature, the description of the passage at arms at Ashby, in which Ivanhoe, as the “Disinherited Knight,” vanquishes all antagonists and names Rowena, Cedric’s ward, as queen of love and beauty, and where, in the melée on the second day, the “Black Sluggard,” another unknown knight, turns the fortunes of the fray against the Templar.

Perhaps even more admirably constructed are the scenes which follow,—the capture of Cedric, Rowena, Athelstane, Isaac and his daughter Rebecca, by the Norman nobles, and their imprisonment in the castle of Front-de-Boeuf, where they are separated from each other, and where the events which take place simultaneously in different parts of the castle are narrated with great vividness and power. While Cedric and Athelstane are held for ransom, Front-de-Boeuf seeks to extort a vast sum of money from poor Isaac by preparing to roast him alive; De Bracy, a Norman noble, demands the hand of Rowena as the price of her safety and that of Ivanhoe; and the Templar besets Rebecca with his amorous importunities until she prepares to fling herself from the parapet to escape his violence. The interruption of these scenes by a bugle call from without, the demand for the release of the captives made by Wamba, Gurth, the Black Knight, and Locksley, captain of the outlaws, followed by the siege and burning of the castle, constitute perhaps the climax of the story, and are even more impressive than its third great scene, the trial of Rebecca for sorcery, and her deliverance by Ivanhoe, who appears as her champion at the last moment.

Certain episodes are almost as attractive as the main thread of the narrative. For instance, the drinking bout between Friar Tuck and the Black Knight (who turns out to be King Richard) in the chapel in the forest.

There are improbabilities in this work which show us very clearly that it is a creation of the imagination rather than a transcript of observations from actual life. Take, for instance, the conversation between Brian de Bois-Guilbert and the captive Rebecca in the castle. It is safe to say that no knight, however profligate, ever began a love-suit to a maiden with a satirical reminder that her father was then being tortured for money in another part of the castle, in such words as the following:

“Know, bright lily of the vale of Baca, that thy father is already in the hands of a powerful alchemist, who knows how to convert into gold and silver even the rusty bars of a dungeon grate. The venerable Isaac is subjected to an alembic, which will distill from him all he holds dear, without any assistance from my requests or thy entreaty. Thy ransom must be paid by love and beauty, and in no other coin will I accept it.”

And yet, in spite of such defects, the heroism displayed by Rebecca in this particular scene has made it one of the most attractive in the entire story. Rebecca is indeed one of the noblest characters in fiction, and the portrait is natural and human, as well as heroic. Although she was delivered from the stake by her champion, the story ends sadly for her, since the knight whom she loves has become the husband of Rowena. Scott tells us in his preface that he has been censured for this, but he adds, with admirable taste, that he thinks that a character of a highly virtuous and lofty stamp is degraded rather than exalted by an attempt to reward virtue with temporal prosperity.

But to my mind the most attractive person in the book is Wamba, the jester. He appears to me in many ways a close imitation of some of Shakespeare’s clowns. His jests are on an average quite as good, and he everywhere awakens our liveliest interest and sympathy, from the hour when he interposes his shield of brawn in front of the Jew at the tournament until the time when he exchanges repartees and songs with the Black Knight on their way through the forest. There is, moreover a strain of pathos in his merriment, and when he enters the castle of Front-de-Boeuf, disguised as a monk, and exchanges his garments with his master, remaining within the castle in expectation of death, the gibes with which he accompanies his sacrifice give to his character something very human, lovable, and withal heroic. Even Shakespeare has hardly given us a better clown.

The resuscitation and the appearance of the Saxon noble Athelstane at his own funeral feast is far from artistic. Scott himself calls it a tour de force, and says he put it in at the vehement entreaties of his friend and printer, who was inconsolable at the Saxon being conveyed to the tomb,—an example which ought to be a warning to authors to follow their own judgment rather than that of their friends.

In the crucible of Scott’s imagination moral qualities are sometimes fused together in such manner that the original ingredients are quite undiscernible. Robin Hood and his outlaws become generous heroes, and Friar Tuck, who is in reality a dissolute and hypocritical monk, becomes amiable and attractive. Indeed, this great writer of romance is filled with such ever present optimism and love of honorable qualities, that it is almost impossible for him to draw the picture of a really detestable man. His novels offer the strongest possible contrast to the pessimistic realism of some of the more recent works of fiction.

Men may differ in their estimates of Ivanhoe as a picture of human life and character, but they can hardly differ in their estimate of it as a beautiful piece of poetic imagination.

THE BETROTHED
ALESSANDRO MANZONI

“The Betrothed,” by Manzoni, has not received at the hands of the English or American public that wide celebrity or high rank which it deserves. It is a very great novel. Excepting only “Don Quixote,” and some of the masterpieces of Thackeray, I know of nothing more excellent in the whole range of fiction. There is no artificiality, no sensationalism, no straining after effect; but the story proceeds naturally and even quietly through events of great historic as well as tragic interest, to its consummation.

The scene opens at a village on the shores of the lake of Como, on an occasion when Don Abbondio, the curate of the parish, is stopped on his way home by two “bravoes” of Don Rodrigo, a nobleman of the locality, and warned, upon pain of death, not to celebrate the marriage of Renzo Tramaglino and Lucia Mondella, which had been fixed for the following day. The scene is a very vivid one, and the terror of Don Abbondio is set forth in the liveliest manner. He is also warned not to disclose the warning; “It will be the same as marrying them,” says the bravo. But the poor priest is a leaky vessel, and when he grumbles and complains to his housekeeper Perpetua, he can not refrain from relating to her the awful threat. Dreadful are his dreams that night of “bravoes, Don Rodrigo, Renzo, cries, muskets”; and on the next day, when he makes blundering excuses to the bridegroom and tries to overwhelm him with Latin quotations which he can not understand, the truth all comes out, for Perpetua has talked with Renzo about “overbearing tyrants,” and Renzo at last worms the story, and even the name of the “tyrant,” out of the frightened priest.

But the wedding is stopped, and Renzo betakes himself to Dr. Azzecca Garbugli, learned in the law, who treats him encouragingly and confidentially, so long as he thinks he has only a malefactor to defend, quoting terrible edicts with the comforting assurance that he can get him off, until he learns that Renzo has come, not to defeat but to seek justice, and that too against the powerful Don Rodrigo. Then he sends the poor fellow away, and will hear nothing in justification of his suit.

But the unfortunate lovers have a friend in the person of Father Cristoforo, a monk, who in his early life had killed a man in a rage, and devoted the remainder of his days to the humility and repentance of the cloister. He takes it upon himself to visit Don Rodrigo, and in earnest and indignant words remonstrates with the abandoned nobleman, but he is ordered from the house.

And now Agnese, the gossiping mother of Lucia, proposes to accomplish the marriage by craft. The lovers are to make a declaration before the curate in the presence of witnesses. This, it seems, was a method recognized by law. Renzo undertakes his preparations for the scheme; gains access to Don Abbondio’s house through a friend, who comes under pretense of paying rent; but just as they are making the mutual declaration they are interrupted by a great outcry on the part of Don Abbondio, who throws the tablecloth over Lucia’s face and stops the proceedings.

That same night Don Rodrigo has sent his bravoes to abduct Lucia. They steal into the house, but find it empty, and are suddenly startled by the ringing of the bell, which has followed the outcry of Don Abbondio. “Each of the villains seems to hear in these peals his name, surname, and nickname,” and they flee in consternation, while the betrothed betake themselves to the convent of Father Cristoforo, at Pescarenico; and the tumult aroused in the village by these events, admirably pictured by the novelist, at length subsides.

Father Cristoforo sends Renzo to Milan, and the women to a convent at Monza, where Lucia is to find refuge with “the Signora,” a nun of high rank, who has been compelled by her father to assume the veil. The Signora is proud, passionate, unreconciled. Her history, and the schemes by which her consent to a monastic life had been extorted by alternate persecutions and flatteries, are skillfully delineated, as well as her intrigue with Egidio, an abandoned man, living in a house adjoining the convent, which intrigue is followed by the mysterious disappearance of a lay sister who has discovered the crime. But “the Signora” now rejoices at the opportunity of thus sheltering an innocent creature like Lucia, whom she takes under her protection.

Renzo reaches Milan at the time of the breaking out of the bread riots, due to the prevailing famine. The looting and destruction of one of the bake-houses is vividly described, and also the attack upon the superintendent of provisions. Renzo can not keep out of these exciting scenes, and becomes quite a hero, making a speech to the crowd, innocent enough in purpose, but easily construed into sedition by a secret agent of the government who hears it, attaches himself to Renzo, acts as his guide to an inn in the neighborhood, where the innocent young man unlawfully refuses to give his name to the innkeeper, but unwittingly reveals it to his guide; then goes to bed intoxicated, is arrested next morning, escapes from the officers of justice in the midst of the crowd, flees from the city, and does not stop until he has quit the duchy of Milan, crossed the Adda, and taken refuge with his cousin Bortolo in the Bergamascan territory—all of which is followed by proceedings declaring him a dangerous outlaw,—luckily, however, after he is well out of reach.

Through the intrigues of Don Rodrigo, the monk Cristoforo is sent away to Rimini, and the nobleman now betakes himself to the castle of a great lord, whose name is not given, so dreadful were the crimes he was said to have committed. The Unnamed took upon himself the task of kidnapping Lucia from the convent, and for this purpose availed himself of Egidio, who compelled the Signora to betray the girl committed to her keeping and to send Lucia on a pretended message, to be seized, thrown into a carriage, and driven to that lair of robbers, the castle of the Unnamed. But so great are her sufferings, so moving her piteous appeals, that even the heart of the outlaw is touched, and he falters in his desperate scheme. Lucia in her agony prays to the Madonna for deliverance, and, resolving to sacrifice what she holds most dear, she determines to give up her beloved Renzo, and vows to remain a virgin.

A fine description is given of the remorse which steals over the conscience of the desperate malefactor, his despair at the contemplation of a career which is now drawing near its close, with its inevitable termination, and the thought, “If there should really be another life!” He hears again the piteous words of Lucia when she besought him to set her free, “God pardons so many sins for one deed of mercy!”

When the morning breaks after a night of this remorse, he hears the distant chiming of bells; learns of the festival of the people in the neighborhood who were going to meet their bishop, Cardinal Federigo Borromeo, and, by a sudden impulse, he too determines to go and present himself to the cardinal. The history of this great prelate, a saintly man, is given in detail—his works of charity, his writings, his efforts in the cause of education. The Unnamed is welcomed by the Cardinal with joy and genuine tenderness, and the details of a religious conversion, often repulsive to an unsympathetic reader, here become, through the author’s skill, both natural and attractive.

Don Abbondio, to his great consternation is now sent with the celebrated outlaw to fetch Lucia from his castle. He goes thither, trembling, grumbling, and complaining to himself like an old woman. The poor girl is released, and believes, of course, that her deliverance is due to the Madonna.

Shortly afterwards the cardinal, on the occasion of a visit to Don Abbondio’s parish, takes the poor priest to task for his violated duty in refusing to celebrate the marriage. There are few passages in literature more impressive than the solemn severity of his reproof;—

“Signor Curate, why did you not unite in marriage this Lucia with her bethrothed husband?”....

“Don Abbondio began to relate the doleful history; but suppressing the principal name, he merely substituted a great Signor; thus giving to prudence the little that he could in such an emergency.

“‘And you have no other motive?’ asked the Cardinal, having attentively heard the whole.

“‘Perhaps I have not sufficiently explained myself,’ replied Don Abbondio. ‘I was prohibited under pain of death to perform this marriage.’

“‘And does this appear to you a sufficient reason for omitting a positive duty?’

“‘I have always endeavored to do my duty, even at very great inconvenience; but when one’s life is concerned....’

“‘And when you presented yourself to the church,’ said Federigo, in a still more solemn tone, ‘to receive Holy Orders, did she caution you about your life?’.... ‘He from whom we have received teaching and example, in imitation of whom we suffer ourselves to be called, and call ourselves, shepherds; when He descended upon earth to execute His office, did He lay down as a condition the safety of His life? And to save it, to preserve it, I say, a few days longer upon earth, at the expense of charity and duty, did he institute the holy unction, the imposition of hands, the gift of the priesthood? Leave it to the world to teach this virtue, to advocate this doctrine. What do I say? Oh, shame! the world itself rejects it; the world also makes its own laws, which fix the limits of good and evil; it, too, has its gospel, a gospel of pride and hatred; and it will not have it said that the love of life is a reason for transgressing its precepts. It will not, and it is obeyed. And we! children and proclaimers of the promise! What would the Church be, if such language as yours were that of all your brethren?’

“‘I repeat, my Lord,’ answered Don Abbondio, ‘that I shall be to blame.... One can’t give one’s self courage.’

“‘And why then, I might ask you, did you undertake an office which binds upon you a continual warfare with the passions of the world?... Ah, if for so many years of pastoral labors you have loved your flock (and how could you not love them?)—if you have placed in them your affections, your cares, your happiness, courage ought not to fail you in the moment of need; love is intrepid.’”

This discourse, which is much longer than I have quoted, gives us an admirable ideal of the episcopal office, and through the whole of it the contrast between these two natures vividly appears, without any apparent effort on the part of the author to produce it.

In the meantime, Renzo, who has been in hiding under an assumed name, has established secret communication with Agnese, the mother of his betrothed, and is naturally greatly disgusted to learn of Lucia’s vow. Lucia has found refuge at Milan with a distinguished lady, one Donna Prassede, who is a type of the “superior woman”—one of those pestilent, unsympathetic natures, determined to do good to others at whatever violence to their feelings; who feels herself the instrument of Heaven and with a consciousness of innate superiority, and great display of patronage, torments Lucia by denouncing the unworthy outlaw to whom her affections have been engaged.

Up to this point the narrative has traversed scenes common enough to the period with which it deals; but here it takes up the story of one of the most terrible public calamities which history records—the appearance of the plague in Milan. The scenes of the preceding famine are vividly described; the inefficacy of the ridiculous legal remedies by which it was proposed to supply the lack of natural resources; the establishment of the Lazaretto; the war raging in Italy, which distracted the attention of the authorities; and, finally, the invasion of the German army, by which the plague was introduced into the territory of Milan. A historical account is given of the introduction of the contagion, and the various stages of public sentiment in regard to it.

“First, then, it was not the plague, absolutely not—by no means; the very utterance of the term was prohibited. Then, it was pestilential fevers; the idea was indirectly admitted in the adjective. Then, it was not the true nor real plague; that is to say, it was the plague, but only in a certain sense; not positively and undoubtedly the plague, but something to which no other name could be affixed. Lastly, it was the plague without doubt, without dispute; but even then another idea was appended to it, the idea of poison and witchcraft, which altered and confounded that conveyed in the word they could no longer repress.”

There are descriptions of the processions in the streets, the exhibition of the body of San Carlo Borromeo, and of the public rage against the supposed poisoners. But the most vivid part of the description begins when the author again takes up the thread of his story and describes the return of Don Rodrigo from a carousal, where he had excited great laughter by a funeral eulogium on his kinsman, Count Attilio, who had been carried off by the disease two days before. There is a powerful description of the coming on of the fatal malady, on his return, and of the dreams that tormented him in his sleep.

“He went on from one thing to another, till he seemed to find himself in a large church, in the first ranks, in the midst of a great crowd of people; there he was, wondering how he had got there, how the thought had ever entered his head, particularly at such a time; and he felt in his heart excessively vexed. He looked at the bystanders; they had all pale, emaciated countenances, with staring and glistening eyes, and hanging lips; their garments were tattered and falling to pieces; and through the rents appeared livid spots, and swellings. ‘Make room, you rabble!’ he fancied he cried, looking towards the door, which was far, far away; and accompanying the cry with a threatening expression of countenance, but without moving a limb; nay, even drawing up his body to avoid coming in contact with those polluted creatures, who crowded only too closely upon him on every side. But not one of the senseless beings seemed to move, nor even to have heard him; nay, they pressed still more upon him; and, above all, it felt as if some one of them, with his elbow, or whatever it might be, was pushing against his left side, between the heart and arm-pit, where he felt a painful, and as it were, heavy pressure. And if he writhed himself to get rid of this uneasy feeling, immediately a fresh unknown something began to prick him in the very same place. Enraged, he attempted to lay his hand on his sword; and then it seemed as if the thronging of the multitude had raised it up level with his chest, and that it was the hilt of it which pressed so in that spot; and the moment he touched it he felt a still sharper stitch. He cried out, panted, and would have uttered a still louder cry, when, behold! all these faces turned in one direction. He looked the same way, perceived a pulpit, and saw slowly rising above its edge something round, smooth, and shining; then rose, and distinctly appeared, a bald head; then two eyes, a face, a long and white beard, and the upright figure of a friar, visible above the sides down to the girdle; it was Friar Cristoforo! Darting a look around upon his audience, he seemed to Don Rodrigo to fix his gaze on him, at the same time raising his hand in exactly the attitude he had assumed in that room on the ground floor in his palace. Don Rodrigo then himself lifted up his hands in fury, and made an effort, as if to throw himself forward and grasp that arm extended in the air; a voice, which had been vainly and secretly struggling in his throat, burst forth in a great howl; and he awoke. He dropped the arm he had in reality uplifted, strove, with some difficulty, to recover the right meaning of everything, and to open his eyes, for the light of the already advanced day gave him no less uneasiness than that of the candle had done; recognized his bed and his chamber; understood that all had been a dream; the church, the people, the friar, all had vanished—all, but one thing—that pain in his left side. Together with this, he felt a frightful acceleration of palpitation at the heart, a noise and humming in his ears, a raging fire within, and a weight in all his limbs, worse than when he lay down. He hesitated a little before looking at the spot that pained him; at length, he uncovered it, and glanced at it with a shudder;—there was a hideous spot, of a livid purple hue.”

The unhappy man now finds that he has been betrayed by Griso, the chief of his bravoes, who, under pretense of bringing the doctor, has introduced into the room the horrible monatti, whose duty it is to drag away the dead to their graves and the sick to the Lazaretto. They plunder the stricken man of his treasures before his eyes, and then carry him away.

In the meantime Renzo, who has had the plague in the Bergamascan territory, finds it safe to return home, amid the general confusion, and proceeds to Milan to find Lucia. The terrible scenes in the streets are graphically described, but the realism is combined with a certain delicacy on the part of the author which renders even its most dreadful details not wholly repulsive. For instance, Renzo sees coming down the steps of one of the doorways.

“A woman with the delicate, yet majestic beauty, which is conspicuous in the Lombard blood. Her gait was weary, but not tottering; no tears fell from her eyes, though they bore tokens of having shed many; there was something peaceful and profound in her sorrow, which indicated a mind fully conscious and sensitive enough to feel it.... She carried in her arms a little child, about nine years old, now a lifeless body; but laid out and arranged, with her hair parted on her forehead, and in a white and remarkably clean dress, as if those hands had decked her out for a long promised feast, granted as a reward. Nor was she lying there, but upheld and adjusted on one arm, with her breast reclining against her mother’s, like a living creature; save that a delicate little hand, as white as wax, hung from one side with a kind of inanimate weight, and the head rested upon her mother’s shoulder with an abandonment deeper than that of sleep: her mother; for, even if their likeness to each other had not given assurance of the fact, the countenance which still depicted any feeling would have clearly revealed it.”

“A horrible looking monatto approached the woman, and attempted to take the burden from her arms, with a kind of unusual respect, however, and with involuntary hesitation. But she, slightly drawing back, yet with the air of one who shows neither scorn nor displeasure, said, ‘No, don’t take her from me yet; I must place her myself on this cart; here.’ So saying, she opened her hand, displayed a purse which she held in it, and dropped it into that which the monatto extended towards her. She then continued: ‘Promise me not to take a thread from around her, nor let any one else attempt to do so, and to lay her in the ground thus.’

“The monatto laid his right hand on his heart; and then zealously, and almost obsequiously, rather from the new feeling by which he was, as it were, subdued, than on account of the unlooked-for reward, hastened to make a little room on the car for the infant dead. The lady, giving it a kiss on the forehead, laid it on the spot prepared for it, as upon a bed, arranged it there, covering it with a pure white linen cloth, and pronounced the parting words: ‘Farewell, Cecilia! rest in peace! This evening we, too, will join you, to rest together forever. In the meanwhile, pray for us; for I will pray for you and the others.’ Then, turning again to the monatto, ‘You,’ said she, ‘when you pass this way in the evening, may come to fetch me too, and not me only.’

“So saying, she re-entered the house, and, after an instant, appeared at the window, holding in her arms another more dearly-loved one, still living, but with the marks of death on its countenance. She remained to contemplate these so unworthy obsequies of the first child, from the time the car started until it was out of sight, and then disappeared. And what remained for her to do, but to lay upon the bed the only one that was left her, and to stretch herself beside it, that they might die together, as the flower already full blown upon the stem falls together with the bud still enfolded in its calyx, under the scythe which levels alike all the herbage of the field.”

Renzo learns that Lucia has been taken to the Lazaretto, and he proceeds thither. The scenes in that dreadful abode of suffering are described in detail. Here he meets Father Cristoforo, who in tending the sick is already falling a victim.

“His voice was feeble, hollow, and as changed as everything else about him. His eye alone was what it always was, or had something about it even more bright and resplendent; as if Charity, elevated by the approaching end of her labors, and exulting in the consciousness of being near her source, restored to it a more ardent and purer fire than that which infirmity was every hour extinguishing.”

Renzo learns that Don Rodrigo himself is lying unconscious in one of the miserable hovels, and, filled at first with rage at the recollection of the man who has caused him so much wretchedness, he is at last brought, by the commanding reproofs of Father Cristoforo, into such a forgiving spirit that he can pray for his enemy’s salvation.

Renzo seeks Lucia in vain amid the procession of the few persons who were going forth cured from the Lazaretto, but he finds her at last, convalescent in one of the little huts in the woman’s quarters. A very characteristic conversation ensued between the lovers in regard to the binding nature of her vow, which Renzo naturally disputes, and calls Father Cristoforo to remonstrate and interpose. The good father consolingly tells Lucia that she had no right to offer to the Lord the will of another to whom she was already pledged; and by virtue of the authority of the church he absolves her from her vow. It is not long until the lovers, restored to their former happiness, leave the Lazaretto; and the book concludes with the consummation of their wishes—their marriage, and a happy wedded life.

A great deal of quiet satire pervades the story. Take, for instance, the following, in the description of Lecco, at the very opening of the book:

“At the time the events happened which we undertake to recount, this town, already of considerable importance, was also a place of defense, and for that reason had the honor of lodging a commander, and the advantage of possessing a fixed garrison of Spanish soldiers, who taught modesty to the damsels and matrons of the country; bestowed from time to time marks of their favor on the shoulders of a husband or a father; and never failed, in autumn, to disperse themselves in the vineyards, to thin the grapes, and lighten for the peasant the labors of the vintage.”

There is a great deal of homely philosophy intermixed with this satire. For instance, the criticism of

“those prudent persons who shrink back with alarm from the extreme of virtue as well as vice, are forever proclaiming that perfection lies in the medium between the two, and fix that medium exactly at the point which they have reached, and where they find themselves very much at their ease.”

These delicate touches come in most appropriately, and, as it were, spontaneously from the context. They are never lugged in head foremost, for the evident purpose of saying a good thing.

The book abounds in apt similes; for instance, in the following description of Perpetua’s vain efforts to keep a secret:

“But certain it is that such a secret in the poor woman’s breast was like very new wine in an old and badly-hooped cask, which ferments, and bubbles, and boils, and if it does not send the bung into the air, works itself about till it issues in froth, and penetrates between the staves, and oozes out in drops here and there, so that one can taste it, and almost decide what kind of wine it is.”

When the bravoes, led by Griso, in the guise of a pilgrim, attempt to carry off Lucia from her home and are suddenly thrown into consternation by the pealing of the bell, the author tells us:

“It required all the authority of Griso to keep them together, so that it might be a retreat and not a flight. Just as a dog urging a drove of pigs, runs here and there after those that break the ranks, seizes one by the ears, and drags him into the herd, propels another with his nose, barks at a third that leaves the line at the same moment, so the pilgrim laid hold of one of his troop just passing the threshold, and drew him back, detained with his staff others who had almost reached it, called after some who were flying they knew not whither, and finally succeeded in assembling them all in the middle of the courtyard.”

The characters are extremely well described. Perhaps the two lovers are the least striking of any in the book. Lucia is a simple peasant girl; Renzo, a rash, impulsive, kindly boy, easily led, a very natural, grown-up child such as Italy produces in greater luxuriance than colder and severer latitudes. There are no passionate love scenes in the book. The affection of the betrothed for each other seems rather an incident than the principal theme of the story. Don Ferrante, the husband of Donna Prassede, is a fine type of scholastic pedantry. The catalogue of his ridiculous acquirements in the absurd philosophy and learning of the time, with long lists of authors now unknown, reminds us of the studies of Don Quixote; Don Ferrante, too, is skilled in the science of chivalry, wherein he enjoyed the title of “Professor,” and “not only argued on it in a real, masterly manner, but, frequently requested to interfere in affairs of honor, always gave some decision.”

The officiousness of Donna Prassede is well set forth in the following:

“It was well for Lucia that she was not the only one to whom Donna Prassede had to do good.... Besides the rest of the family, all of whom were persons more or less needing amendment and guidance—besides all the other occasions which offered themselves to her, or she contrived to find, of extending the same kind offices, of her own free will, to many to whom she was under no obligations; she had also five daughters, none of whom were at home, but who gave her much more to think about than if they had been. Three of these were nuns, two were married; hence Donna Prassede naturally found herself with three monasteries, and two houses to superintend; a vast and complicated undertaking, and the more arduous, because two husbands, backed by fathers, mothers, and brothers; three abbesses, supported by other dignitaries, and by many nuns, would not accept her superintendence. It was a complete warfare, alias five warfares, concealed, and even courteous, up to a certain point, but ever active, ever vigilant. There was in every one of these places a continued watchfulness to avoid her solicitude, to close the door against her counsels, to elude her inquiries, and to keep her in the dark, as far as possible, on every undertaking. We do not mention the resistance, the difficulties she encountered in the management of other still more extraneous affairs; it is well known that one must generally do good to men by force.”

The story, like some other of the greatest works of fiction—like Don Quixote, Les Misérables, nay, like Henry Esmond itself, is somewhat too prolix. The long historical citations, the extracts from the edicts and proclamations of the time, look as if the author considered it necessary to prove his story rather than to let it prove itself. That Renzo and Lucia should leave Father Cristoforo to die alone is, to my mind, the most serious blemish in the book; but in spite of these shortcomings, “The Betrothed” is entitled to one of the first places in the front rank of the masterpieces of fiction.

EUGENIE GRANDET
HONORÉ DE BALZAC

It is not quite fair to Balzac to judge him by any one of the stories in his encyclopædic “Comedie Humaine.” The countless varieties of life and character which he portrays show the author’s versatility and power, and have perhaps a value from their very number which can not be adequately treated when we consider only a single specimen of his work. Many of his characters, it is true, are grotesques; some are absolute deformities; others are hard to understand by any but a Frenchman,—French human nature, as it seems to me, being a little different from human nature elsewhere; but there is one great work of his which, although it is not without its morbid side, must appeal to the common consciousness of all mankind, and bring to every human heart the conviction of its spiritual truth. “Eugenie Grandet” is a novel of this universal kind of excellence.

The plot is a very simple one. M. Grandet is a miser who lives in an old comfortless house in Saumur with his wife, his daughter Eugenie, and big Nanon, the maid of all work. The Cruchots and the De Grassins are intriguing for the hand of the heiress, and on Eugenie’s birthday, when all these are assembled, a stranger unexpectedly appears, Charles Grandet, her cousin, committed to the care of his uncle by his father in Paris, who has become a bankrupt and has determined upon suicide. Charles, however, knows nothing of this, and is overcome with pitiful grief when he learns of his father’s death. Eugenie, a simple minded girl, falls in love with him, but the old miser, anxious to get rid of him, sends him to the Indies. Grandet’s tyranny over his wife and child is graphically portrayed. The poor wife succumbs to it and dies. It is not long till the miser follows her, and Eugenie is left alone with a colossal fortune for which she cares nothing, and with a lover from whom she has received no word. In the meantime Charles has acquired a fortune of his own, and on his return writes to her that he wishes to marry another. Her dream is over, the light of her life is extinguished; she gives her hand without her heart to Cruchot, and upon his death continues her hopeless life alone in the desolate home, administering her estate with economy, but devoting its proceeds to works of beneficence.

This is a story, the like of which has happened many a time in actual life, but the cold skeleton of the tale as given above conveys not the slightest idea of the warm flesh and blood with which it is invested. The description of the old street and the dreary house and its furniture is a literary jewel. The account of the way in which Grandet accumulates his fortune, and of the neighborhood rumors regarding his wealth, stirs our own acquisitiveness as we read it, and shows him to be a very natural and almost inevitable sort of miser. He is moreover a man of commanding ability, who extorts respect even though he inspires abhorrence. The details of his habits, his economies, and his schemes, as well as his personal appearance, are admirably given. Equally lifelike are the descriptions of big Nanon, the devoted house-servant, starved and overtasked, yet always grateful to the master who took her when none others would; of the wife, submissive, sensitive, magnanimous, and uncomplaining; and of Eugenie, a girl who has grown up in perfect innocence of the world, pure, beautiful, and of a generous and noble spirit. All these are the subjects of an odious domestic tyranny on the part of “Goodman Grandet,” the particulars of which are set forth with powerful fidelity.

Charles is a rather uninteresting young dandy, who comes arrayed for conquest. It is not unnatural that an artless girl like Eugenie should fall in love with him, and her devices to procure him such luxuries as a cake, a wax candle, and sugar for his coffee, add to the charm of their simple love-making. The sympathy of the two women in his sorrow contrasts sharply with the sordid calculations of the miser, and the scene where Eugenie learns his needs by furtively reading two of his letters (for even her good qualities are decidedly of the French type) and then brings him her little store of gold, and when he hesitates, begs him on her knees to take it—this scene is very effective, as is also her despairing cry, after he departs, “O mother, mother, if I had God’s power for one moment!”

But the more tragic parts of this simple drama are near its close,—the stormy scene when Grandet learns that Eugenie has given Charles her money, her imprisonment in a room of the old house, her mother’s illness and patient death, and, ghastliest of all, the last hours of the miser: