Life Without and Life Within; or, Reviews, Narratives, Essays, and Poems.
"Coningsby" was full of talent, yet its chief interest lay in this
aspiration after reality, and the rich materials taken from contemporary
life. There is nothing in it good after the original manner of
D'Israeli, except the sketches of Eton, and above all, the noble
schoolboy's letter. The picture of the Jew, so elaborately limned, is
chiefly valuable as affording keys to so many interesting facts.
"Sybil" is an attempt to do justice to the claims of the laboring
classes, and investigate the duties of those in whose hands the money is
at present, towards the rest. It comes to no result: it only exhibits
some truths in a more striking light than heretofore. D'Israeli shows
the taint of old prejudice in the necessity he felt to marry the
daughter of the people to one _not_ of the people. Those worthy to be
distinguished must still have good blood, or rather old blood, for what
is called good needs now to be renovated from a homelier source. But his
leaders must have _old_ blood; the fresh ichor, the direct flow from
heaven, is not enough to animate their lives to the deeds now needed.
D'Israeli is another of those who give testimony in behalf of our
favorite idea that a leading feature of the new era will be in new and
higher developments of the feminine character. He looks at women as a
man does who is truly in love. He does not paint them well, that is, not
with profound fidelity to nature. But, ideally, he sees them well, for
they are to him the inspirers and representatives of what is holy,
tender, and simply great.
There are good sketches of the manufacturers at home, not the overseers,
but the real makers.
Sue is a congenial activity with D'Israeli, but with clearer notions of
what he wants. His "De Rohan" is a poor book, though it contains some
things excellent. But it is faulty,--even more so than is usual with
him, in heavy exaggerations, and is less redeemed by brilliant effects,
good schemes, and lively strains of feeling. The wish to unmask Louis
XIV. is defeated by the hatred with which the character inspired him,
the liberal of the nineteenth century. The Grand Monarque was really
brutally selfish and ignorant, as Sue represents him; but then there
_was_ a native greatness, which justified, in some degree, the illusion
he diffused, and which falsifies all Sue's representation. It is not by
an inventory of facts or traits that what is most vital in character,
and which makes its due impression on contemporaries, can be apprehended
or depicted. "De Rohan" is worth reading for particulars of an
interesting period, put together with accuracy and with a sense of
physiological effects, if not of the spiritual realities that they
represented.
"Self, by the Author of Cecil," is one of the worst of a paltry class of
novels--those which aim at representing the very dregs in a social life,
now at its lowest ebb. If it has produced a sensation, that only shows
the poverty of life among those who can be interested in it. I have
known more life lived in a day among factory girls, or in a village
school, than informs these volumes, with all their great pretension and
affected vivacity. It is not worth our while to read this class of
English novels; they are far worse than the French, morally as well as
mentally. This has no merits as to the development of character or
exposition of motives; it is a poor, external, lifeless thing.
"Dashes at Life," by N. P. Willis. The life of Mr. Willis is too
European for him to have a general or permanent fame in America. We need
a life of our own, and a literature of our own. Those writers who are
dearest to us, and really most interesting, are those who are at least
rooted to the soil. If they are not great enough to be the prophets of
the new era, they at least exhibit the features of their native clime,
and the complexion given by its native air. But Mr. Willis is a son of
Europe, and his writings can interest only the fashionable world of this
country, which, by imitating Europe, fails entirely of a genius, grace,
and invention of its own. Still, in their way, they are excellent. They
are most lively pictures, showing the fine natural organization of the
writer, on whom none, the slightest symptom of what he is looking for,
is thrown away; sparkling with bold, light wit, succinct, and colored
with glow, and for a full light. Some of them were new to us, and we
read them through, missing none of the words, and laughed with a full
heart, and without one grain of complaisance, which is much, very much,
to say in these days. We said these sketches would not have a permanent
fame, and yet we may be wrong. The new, full, original, radiant,
American life may receive them as an heirloom from this transition state
we are in now, and future generations may stare at the mongrel products
of Saratoga, and maidens still laugh till they cry at the "Letter of
Jane S. to her Spirit-Bridegroom."
All these story-books show, even to the languor of the hottest day, the
solemn signs of revolution. Life has become too factitious; it has no
longer a leg left to stand upon, and cannot be carried much farther in
this way. England--ah! who can resist visions of phalansteries in every
park, and the treasures of art turned into public galleries for the use
of the artificers who will no longer be unwashed, but raised and
educated by the refinements of sufficient leisure, and the instructions
of genius. England must glide, or totter, or fall into revolution; there
is not room for such selfish elves, and unique young dukes, in a country
so crowded with men, and with those who ought to be women, and are
turned into work-tools. There are very impressive hints on this last
topic in "Sybil, or the Two Worlds," (of the rich and poor.) God has
time to remember the design with which he made this world also.
SHELLEY'S POEMS[18]
We are very glad to see this handsome copy of Shelley ready for those
who have long been vainly inquiring at all the bookstores for such a
one.
In Europe the fame of Shelley has risen superior to the clouds that
darkened its earlier days, hiding his true image from his fellow-men,
and from his own sad eyes oftentimes the common light of day. As a
thinker, men have learned to pardon what they consider errors in opinion
for the sake of singular nobleness, purity, and love in his main
tendency or spirit. As a poet, the many faults of his works having been
acknowledged, there are room and place to admire his far more numerous
and exquisite beauties.
The heart of the man, few, who have hearts of their own, refuse to
reverence, and many, even of devoutest Christians, would not refuse the
book which contains Queen Mab as a Christmas gift. For it has been
recognized that the founder of the Christian church would have suffered
one to come unto him, who was in faith and love so truly what he sought
in a disciple, without regard to the form his doctrine assumed.
The qualities of his poetry have often been analyzed, and the severer
critics, impatient of his exuberance, or unable to use their accustomed
spectacles in the golden mist that broods over all he has done, deny him
high honors; but the soul of aspiring youth, untrammelled by the canons
of taste, and untamed by scholarly discipline, swells into rapture at
his lyric sweetness, finds ambrosial refreshment from his plenteous
fancies, catches fire at his daring thought, and melts into boundless
weeping at his tender sadness--the sadness of a soul betrothed to an
ideal unattainable in this present sphere.
For ourselves, we dispute not with the _doctrinaires_ or the critics. We
cannot speak dispassionately of an influence that has been so dear to
us. Nearer than the nearest companions of life actual has Shelley been
to us. Many other great ones have shone upon us, and all who ever did so
shine are still resplendent in our firmament, for our mental life has
not been broken and contradictory, but thus far we "see what we
foresaw." But Shelley seemed to us an incarnation of what was sought in
the sympathies and desires of instinctive life, a light of dawn, and a
foreshowing of the weather of this day.
When still in childish years, the "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" fell in
our way. In a green meadow, skirted by a rich wood, watered by a lovely
rivulet, made picturesque by a mill a little farther down, sat a party
of young persons gayer than, and almost as inventive, as those that told
the tales recorded by Boccaccio. They were passing a few days in a scene
of deep seclusion, there uncared for by tutor or duenna, and with no bar
of routine to check the pranks of their gay, childish fancies. Every day
they assumed parts which through the waking hours must be acted out. One
day it was the characters in one of Richardson's novels; and most
solemnly we "my deared" each other with richest brocade of affability,
and interchanged in long, stiff phrase our sentimental secrets and prim
opinions. But to-day we sought relief in personating birds or insects;
and now it was the Libellula who, tired of wild flitting and darting,
rested on the grassy bank and read aloud the "Hymn to Intellectual
Beauty," torn by chance from the leaf of a foreign magazine.
It was one of those chances which we ever remember as the interposition
of some good angel in our fate. Solemn tears marked the change of mood
in our little party and with the words
"Have I not kept my vow?"
began a chain of thoughts whose golden links still bind the years
together.
Two or three years passed. The frosty Christmas season came; the trees
cracked with their splendid burden of ice, the old wooden country house
was banked up with high drifts of the beautiful snow, and the Libellula
became the owner of Shelley's Poems. It was her Christmas gift, and for
three days and three nights she ceased not to extract its sweets; and
how familiar still in memory every object seen from the chair in which
she sat enchanted during those three days, memorable to her as those of
July to the French nation! The fire, the position of the lamp, the
variegated shadows of that alcoved room, the bright stars up to which
she looked with such a feeling of congeniality from the contemplation of
this starry soul,--O, could but a De Quincey describe those days in
which the bridge between the real and ideal rose unbroken! He would not
do it, though, as _Suspiria de Profundis_, but as sighs of joy upon the
mountain height.
The poems we read then are what every one still reads, the "Julian and
Maddalo," with its profound revelations of the inward life; "Alastor,"
the soul sweeping like a breeze through nature; and some of the minor
poems. "Queen Mab," the "Prometheus," and other more formal works we
have not been able to read much. It was not when he tried to express
opinions which the wrongs of the world had put into his head, but when
he abandoned himself to the feelings which nature had implanted in his
own breast, that Shelley seemed to us so full of inspiration, and it is
so still.
In reply to all that can be urged against him by people of whom we do
not wish to speak ill,--for surely "they know not what they do,"--we are
wont simply to refer to the fact that he was the only man who redeemed
the human race from suspicion to the embittered soul of Byron. "Why,"
said Byron, "he is a man who would willingly die for others. _I am sure
of it._"
Yes! balance that against all the ill you can think of him that he was
a man able to live wretched for the sake of speaking sincerely what he
supposed to be truth, willing to die for the good of his fellows!
Mr. Foster has spoken well of him as a man: "Of Shelley's personal
character it is enough to say that it was wholly pervaded by the same
unbounded and unquestioning love for his fellow-men--the same holy and