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In thought, in insight, in eloquent utterance, Starr King was one of the foremost preachers America has produced, and his illus. trious patriotism endears his memory to every true. hearted citizen. ZURY: The Meanest Man in Spring County. A Novel. By JOSEPH KIRKLAND. With Frontispiece Illustration. 12mo, $1.50. This is a striking story of the rugged pioneer era of Illinois, and depicts in strong lines the vigorous, stern life of the early settlers. It includes noteworthy types of character, careful studies of social conditions, deeply interesting incidents and situations, and is told with marked power. 1, 3 AND 5 BOND STREET, NEW YORK. HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO., Boston. Mrs. Silsbee's Half Century in Salem.-Dawson's LITERARY NOTES AND NEWS MR. HAGGARD'S ROMANCES. 5 7 10 11 15 19 21 24 26 26 Some of the current criticism of Mr. Haggard's books recalls the whimsical criticism Cervantes made of himself: "This Cervantes has long been my friend. His book does, indeed, display a little power of invention; it aims at something but it reaches nothing." One reviewer says that Mr. Haggard "has but a rudimentary ability to delineate character, which is the chief function of the novelist," yet concedes that "Jess" "is certainly interesting." If, in the surfeit of books palling all tastes now, any story is interesting, must it need be that before we grant a grace to the author he must show that he can delineate character as some other writers do who are tiresome enough? Another critic notes that in "King Solomon's Mines" the crescent moon in full bow rises over Kukuanaland from the east a little after sunset; the next evening it has suddenly become full; and the following day after it has become full it totally eclipses the sun. The critic justly doubts whether even in Kukuanaland moon and sun should play such hocus-pocus arts with astronomy. And even the least exacting reader will be more than once annoyed by the crudeness of many of Mr. Haggard's sentences. But it takes more and greater faults than these to damn a writer if his work is vital and strong. The world of readers are used to good writing. Never in the world were there so many good writers and so much good writing as now. That Mr. Haggard could be so much read and seem to so many readers to be worth their attention and commendation makes a strong presumption that he has distinctive and marked merits despite any and all shortcomings in his performance. But the history of literature shows that novelty alone may secure many readers and a wide and transient reputation. The history of criticism teaches its professors to make a modest and doubtful estimate of their forecasts. They are not prophets or children of prophets and their judgments are not likely to be prescient. For our own part we shall make a very moderate and misgiving estimate of Mr. Haggard as he seems to us. He has shown the old distinction between the novel and the romance. In the former the imagination pictures what is: in the latter it invents what is not. The novel dealing with the actual but slightly transposed has come in these latter days to an almost unmixed realism. In the degree it has become realistic we were all outgrowing romance. While we are all in this mood Mr. Haggard surprises us with romances as fantastic as those that Cervantes caricatured to immortal death. He chose his line with deliberation. Here is a scene from one of his first stories: "Well, Ernest,' she said, 'what are you thinking about? You are as dull as—as the dullest thing in the world, whatever that may be. What is the dullest thing in the world?' 'I don't know,' he answered, awakening; 'yes I think I do: an American novel.' 'Yes, that is a good definition. You are as dull as an American novel' And in the outset of "King Solomon's Mines" Allan Quatermain promises: "This history won't be dull, whatever else it may be." Thus Mr. Haggard has entered the lists against the dulness of the American fashion in novels, and resolute to keep you awake as one of his prime purposes. He writes both novels and romances. second story he published, "The Witch's Head," is a novel with the witch's head introduced unexpectedly to entertain the company with a by-play of parlor magic. It is a deus ex machina fabricated outright to scare the reader into wakefulness and differentiate Mr. Haggard's story from those American novels whose dulness is to his thought a pleonastic euphemism for a good honest yawn in the presence of one's lady-love. Mr. Haggard is secure in his invention: there is no witch's head nor anything like it in the American novels that we read. Lest we be too much humiliated by such contrasted pov The = erty of invention, we may proudly claim as an American that we think we will not be overpositive, but we think that our passing eye has caught upon news-counters the titlepages of nickel-dreadfuls, unquestionably by American writers, whose luxuriant fancy will match even the italicized nod, nod, nodding of the head that frightened Hard Riding Atterleigh out of the poor remnant of his wits. Happily Mr. Haggard's American novel-reading is restricted to the living present. For there is in our memory, though not in his, the picture of a head-a real living one," Harpe's Head" as we remember it—which an American novelist of the last generation thrust one dismal dark night into one small window of a cabin in the dense woods. A head, grizzled, malignant, silent, bloody, sinister, which for hair-lifting power over the imagination of boys-for dramatic ability to make one's backbone consciously and uncomfortably alive at any hour of a country night-did in the comparison make the head of Mr. Haggard's witch a poor thing of shreds and patches, of pasteboard and stuffed sawdust. Skilfully contrived, too, as is the mighty door of stone which settles as doom full closing the diamond chamber of King Solomon's Mines like a grave to Mr. Haggard's adventurers, it quickened our memory to the recalling of a very yellowcovered novel we read " years and years ago," undoubtedly written by an American novelist, wherein a cunning and fanatical Chinese bonze or priest shut an American explorer into a living tomb of rock in the great wall of China by just such an infernal contrivance of a stone door. We would not enter into this ungracious form of international rivalry, matching forgotten American genius with Mr. Haggard, if he had honestly looked Dorothy full in the face, and yawned, but said nothing about the dulness of American novels. would have left him to stumble by chance into Mr. William F. Cody's-Buffalo Bill's"Wild West," soon to show in London, and make the discovery for himself how fully America has already grown an art and genius kindred to his own. We Now we are being spiteful, and we did not mean to be that. Let us seriously consider our author's work. The first thing to be said is that he is most readable as a novelist but most interesting in romance. It is in the latter that he has secured such large attention and by it he will have whatever distinctive place is to be his among writers. The present generation of readers do not take readily to romance. We have all been trained away from it. We do not read it easily and sympathetically. And yet the romantic quality in Mr. Haggard's stories, highly seasoned as it is, is what has given him his sudden distinction. It is the undoing of much recent criticism. It Mr. is such a reversal of the drift in literature that he has not a reader but has strong misgivings but one's first duty is to find fault with Mr. Haggard and say that he will not do at all. This author has sprung full-armed into fame, with a great multitude of readers on both sides of the Atlantic, since Mr. Howells so lately set up his Editorial Study in "Harper's Magazine," to dissuade this generation from having one minute's time or patience for such stories as Mr. Haggard writes. Howells has let his view be known with sufficient clearness and insistence. He reads backwards fifty years, to recall that Carlyle said that the only romance is reality and prophesied that the multitude of novel-writers must "sweep their novel-fabric into the dustcart, and betake themselves with such faculty as they have to understand and record what is true." Mr. Howells hopes for Charles Egbert Craddock that she will "wholly escape from romantic ideals." The fruition of his desire for her is this dreary outlook: "Some day, and not long hence, we believe that this gifted author will address herself yet more modernly to her work, and give us her mountain folk as she saw them before her fancy began to work upon them." That is babbling folly. It is sheer and unmixed nonsense. Nothing could be duller and stupider in this world than those mountain folk as she saw them before her fancy began to work upon them. The occasional photograph or oldfashioned daguerreotype in their cabins was fine art, the local department of their country paper was sparkling genius when compared and contrasted with the dullness and stupidity and unlovely coarseness of the actual talk and lives of these people whom her fancy has made pleasantly comrade to us because it has fashioned them as they are not. Mr. Howells's apostleship of inanity and common-place as the true sphere of a novel comes to a bitter end that we have some malicious pleasure in it is made inaudible in the noise of the whole novel-reading world of England and America clamoring about the book counters for "She" and "King Solomon's Mines"! It is not a deliberated protest against Mr. Howells's critical canons: it is the unthinking indifference to his opinions of that vast multitude of men and women who delight in the romantic and seek Mr. Haggard's books because he gives them what they want. Mr. Haggard's readers, too, are Matthew Arnold's "remnant." They are not the crowd of Philistines who every Saturday night seek their "Ledger" or "Mercury" or penny-dreadful with such eagerness; they are the literary elect who have a mild pleasure in Mr. James and a juster and keener rapture in a new story by Mr. Howells. George Eliot, by a rare genius in self-introspection, vital with dramatic power and a lofty informing philosophic spirit; Thackeray and Dickens, with rare talent for caricature, kept a generation of readers subject to them without romance. This limitation and absence of a factor else thought indispensable in story-telling has later been set up as a Chinese wall bounding its empire. Surely criticism could not make a more perverse or vexatious misjudgment than that a privation of faculty in this writer or that is to be made the measure of merit in all other performance. It must readily be granted that a great and enduring literature must have larger qualities than caricatures; but surely the alternative is not a flat, stale, and unprofitable realism. It did not need the reaction in opinion marked by the sudden and phenomenal eagerness with which Mr. Haggard is now sought after, to make it certain that no school of criticism could long hold sway whose dogmas must make its orthodox adherents lament that writers could mislead genius into so bad an unrealism as "Hamlet" and "The Midsummer Night's Dream," "Don Quixote" and "The Idyls of the King." It marks possibly the strength of the public weariness of realism, rather than the inherent merits of Mr. Haggard's books, that they have grown into so great favor. We are only prepared to give casual impressions, not to make a criticism that we would care to have guide the judgment of others, or to indicate the verdict of the future. But our reading of his stories has not shown us that he has any marked quality of mind save imagination, or any noteworthiness as a writer save invention. He has no wit. He has not written one sentence sprightly enough to catch the reader's attention. It is inconceivable that stories could be written so devoid of humor. The only gleam of a suggestion that he possesses the quality even remotely is his poor grotesquerie of Captain Good's half-shaven whiskers and pantless legs. That poor device marches through his story unattended by any other show of mirth, reminding one of Gilbert's ancient mariner in the "Yarn of the Nancy Bell ": "I never larf and I never smile, And I never lark nor play, But I sit and croak, and a single joke I have -which is to say "-and then Mr. Haggard tells you again of Good's half-whisker and beautiful white legs. All the talking done by the persons in his several stories is unrelieved commonplace. He does not conceive or portray a character so as to make it take on any distinctness of personality. Each and everyone is dim and impersonal. Even "Jess," upon whom he has spent all his gifts in character-making, is a lay-figure in a shop window invested with certain incident and qualities. You would never recognize her unless you saw her galloping across South Africa with an ostrich after her. Any girl pursued by an angry ostrich would be Jess, so far as you can identify her by anything you know when you have read the story. His fine writing is tawdry when not commonplace. He has overdone his romance time and again. Gagool was so evidently made to scare you, that she fails to do it because she is an absurd stage devil made for the occasion. The battle between the loyal and insurgent parts of King Twala's army misses the satire of Gulliver or Don Quixote, if that is what was intended, and is farcical. Many of the devices made to get your wonder are too stagey. "She," on her ideal side as metaphysics or philosophy or science or whatever Mr. Haggard meant her for, fails as an intellectual conception because he was not clear in his own mind what he intended her meaning to be. The place of the Fire of Life enfeebled his imagination when he had need for it to be at its best, and what might have been a great mental conception fell away into a Black Crook spectacle less impressive than a visit to a manufactory of electric light. Every chapter of his writings has something crude and defective. Yet over and above these, he is a great story-writer. He has freshened and quickened literature by showing in a distinctive and original way that the stories are not all told. He has shown that the alternative of the vapid commonplace of realism is not what Mr. Ruskin calls foul fiction-a morbid introspection of evil passions on their way from the slums to the morgue-but that romanticism, using a clean imagination, appealing to the faculty of wonder, is for most men and women the supreme and perpetually attractive form and matter of story-telling. It may be that Mr. Haggard marks a tendency and will himself be shortlived. It may equally be that there is enough originality in his romances that the future may make him a favored place alongside of Defoe and "Robinson Crusoe." If we were to hazard a guess, we would think the latter more likely to be the case than the former. For, with all his patent defects, he seems to us to have the divine incommunicable gift of creation: that genius which survives transient faults and endures in its own right. SAMUEL M. CLARK. FRANKLIN IN FRANCE.* Of late the question has been asked, Who was the first great American? If we accept as necessary conditions of this title that the recipient must be preeminently the representative of the leading tendencies of the nation, * FRANKLIN IN FRANCE. From Original Documents, most of which are now published for the first time. By Edward E. Hale, and Edward E. Hale, Jr. Boston: Roberts Brothers. original as it is original, and that he must have won and held the admiration of the world, whom can we find to fulfil the requirements before Benjamin Franklin, and who has better satisfied them? His greatness lay in his ability to apply to the world a shrewd understanding that disclosed in the ordinary things about him potent forces for helpfulness. His life is the story of American common-sense in its highest form, applied to business, to politics, to science, to diplomacy, to religion, to philanthropy. Surely this self-made man, the apostle of the practical and the useful, is by the verdict of his own country and of Europe entitled to the distinction of being the first great American. Probably the three men who would find the choicest niches in an American Pantheon would be Franklin, Washington, and Lincoln. They achieved their success not so much by brilliancy of the higher intellectual powers as by their personal character. This is generally recognized in the case of Washington and of Lincoln, and it will be apparent in that of Franklin if we consider the leading incidents in his political services. There is truth in the remark of Condorcet that he was really an envoy not to the ministers of France, but to her people. He was welcomed by them not alone as the wise and simple searcher of nature's secrets; it was the Poor Richard wearing his fur cap among the powdered wigs, the shrewd humorist, the liberal in religion, the plain republican, that became the idol of the gay society of the Ancient Régime. Of such a man in such an age one can scarcely gain too full a knowledge. It was not until after Sparks's edition of Franklin's works had gone to press, that the long missing collection of the first editor, Wm. Temple Franklin, was brought to light upon the top shelf of a London tailor-shop. This collection, bought by Congress from Mr. Henry Stevens in Garfield's administration, contains two thousand nine hundred and thirty-eight different papers, of which the greater part have never been printed until now. The part of the collection least drawn upon by the first editor is that which followed the year 1780. This new material has given occasion for the complete edition of Franklin's works now publishing under the editorship of Mr. John Bigelow, and it is chiefly from the same source that Dr. Hale and his son, Edward E. Hale, Jr., have drawn for their attractive octavo volume of five hundred pages devoted to the story of Franklin in France. Dr. Hale thus states his plan: "I determined to examine anew the whole mission of Franklin to France. . . . with the intention of printing all the more important letters of Franklin not published heretofore, and also the most important unpublished letters of his corre spondents which would throw light on the history or on his life in France." In addition to the Stevens collection the authors have used the manuscript collections of Bancroft, the Adamses, Sparks, the American Philosophical Society, and the archives of Massachusetts. Previous investigations of this period had prepared students to look for interesting disclosures from this mine of unworked material. An old garret gave up to M. de Loménie the papers on which he founded his useful life of Beaumarchais which compelled us to form a more lenient judgment of Silas Deane, and enabled historians to add a dramatic chapter to the account of French secret aid to the American cause. Sparks had asserted that Jay was mistaken in suspecting double dealing on the part of the French court; but Bancroft's investigation, of the secret correspondence of Vergennes have reversed this verdict, by showing that our ally desired to limit the boundaries of the United States to the Ohio and the Alleghanies, to deny her the fisheries and to keep her in a state of dependency upon France. Franklin, maintaining, in opposition to Jay, that Vergennes had never deceived him, was loth to treat separately with England. Interesting information on this topic was to be hoped for in the volume before us. There was, too, the question of Franklin's real opinion of the society about him. At the time of the appearance of Wm. Temple Franklin's edition, John Foster had urged the possibility that the editor had suppressed papers showing that, despite the aid of the French court to his country, and the adulation of French society, the clear-eyed Benjamin Franklin was not blind to the hollowness of the Ancient Régime, but in the economic and political conditions about him must have foreseen the coming storm. Upon this important question regarding Franklin's character, however, the present work has nothing new to say. We are left to believe that he did not condemn the society in which he once expected to end his days, and that even a higher endowment than common-sense is needed for the prophetic soul. Turning the pages of the book for an answer to the other question, we are met with a serious disappointment. The period of Franklin's stay in France embraced the eight years and seven months intervening between 1776 and 1785. It is a matter of just complaint on the part of the reader that, whereas announcements and preface give every reason to expect a complete treatment of the period in one volume, the book closes with the siege of Yorktown, leaving untouched those years upon which we are informed the new material is richest, and which are of greatest interest in themselves. From other sources we learn |