like even to think of it. It is like a night-lived the fast life of the demi-monde, eaten her daily existence, and the crave for the So it is in Mr. Yates' novel Land at Last, an exceedingly clever story of Bohemian life, with artists for actors, and a woman supposed all through to belong to the demimonde for heroine. Mr. Yates has evident-in fact, with her love for her mate as a ly tried hard to combine the realistic novel predominant motive power. Natural of which he would write if left alone to follow course she is not; the cat who became a his own bent, with the kind of interest now lady, but yet sprang after the mouse, never demanded by the public, and he has no can have been quite natural - say when doubt in a measure succeeded. His story rats were scratching at the wood-work; is interesting enough, and the lesser figures, and these tigresses always wear the human Geoffrey Ludlow, the patient, slow, strong skin very loosely; but she is worth watchartist, with genius in him which does not ing in her couchant weariness, with the emerge except in his pictures, and is wholly fiery eyes always watching for the impulse absent from his conversation, unselfish, and which is to bid her resume her form, worth with a trace of romance, is admirably watching as she waits for "her husband's drawn. So is Lord Caterham sketched, guests," and thinking of the past-away life we fancy, like the hero of A Noble Life, in the jungle; — from the late Mr. Smedley - and so is, in all but some external peculiarities, which if "A great weariness was on Margaret that real pall as they would do in real life, Wil- day; she had tried to rouse herself, but found it liam Bowker, the old wise artist, of broken impossible, so had sat all through the morning heart and lost reputation, whose heart is as ories. Between her past and her present life staring vacantly before her, busy with old memwarm as ever but needs wine, and whose there was so little in common, that these membrain is as keen as ever but useless to him-ories were seldom roused by associations. The self. But all the figures in the book are dimmed to a degree Mr. Yates probably does not himself perceive by the blazing figure of the tigress, with dead white face, and violet eyes "set in that deep deadgold frame of hair." The quality of the tigress in this case is an absorbing love for her mate, which swallows up every vestige of feeling. She has married and been deserted by an aristocratic cadet, who has persuaded her to call herself his mistress. During their amour she has dull, never changing domestic day, and the pretty respectability of Elm Lodge, did not recall the wild Parisian revels, the rough pleasant Bohemianism of garrison lodgings, the sumptuous luxury of the Florentine villa. But there was something in the weather to-day-in the bright fierce glare of the sun, in the solemn, utto her mind one when she and Leonard and some terly unbroken stillness-which brought back others were cruising off the Devonshire coast in Tom Marshall's yacht- a day on which, with scarcely a breath of air to be felt, they lay becalmed in Babbicombe Bay; under an awning, his friends. And she must listen to of course, over which the men from time to time worked the fire-hose; and how absurdly funny Tom Marshall was when the ice ran short. Leonard said-The gate-bell rang, and her husband's voice was heard in hearty welcome to the old lady's praises of Geoff., and how she thought it not improbable, if things went on as they were going, that the happiest dream of her life would be fulfilled- that she should ride in her son's carriage. It would be yours, of course, my dear; I know that well enough; but you'd let me ride in it sometimes, just for the honour and the glory of the thing.' And they talked like this to her; the old lady of the glory of a carriage; Matilda of some hawbuck wretch for whom she had a liking; to her! who had sat on the box-seat of a drag a score of times, with half-a-score of the best men in England sitting behind her, all eager for a word or a smile."
It is hard to read of this woman, utterly bad except in her mad, tigress-like love for her first husband, adulteress and traitress in her adultery, faithless wife, cold mother, and cruel friend, without an interest, and harder to explain whence the general interest arises. For the moment it is generalsuch a woman sells any book—and we want to know whence it comes. It is not from the naturalness of the character. There have been such people in real life perhaps. Marguerite de Valois, as described by history and not by Dumas, was such a woman, and so was Mary Stuart, but nobody believes the genuine tigress frequent in English life. Bad women are common no doubt, and women who are bad in other respects than cruelty, but they are almost invariably small women, given to petty plot and small wile, with purposes liable to be turned by conventional obstacles, and when free from stain remarkably solicitous for their reputation. The woman who is capable of inventing a false story of her own seduction, for instance, without motive for a hundred stories would have been as probable, and a dead husband would have been most vraisemblant of all—has probably among English women yet to be created. The real hard, English girl would avoid just that, press to her object by any means save that lie, deceive, and simulate to avoid precisely that imputation. Nor though women often plot, do they often plan, plan deeply, with a resolution to sweep away any obstacle in their path. Becky Sharp is the true representation of the British adventuress - Becky Sharp, who amidst her intrigues sighs for respectability, and only loves her husband in the one moment when his just wrath has crushed her schemes to powder. The tigress is not real,— but if but if not real, where is her charm? The true explanation is, we take it, not very creditable to the dignity of the novel-reading public. They like such stories, just as children like stories of savage and wild adventure, incidents of hunting, dangers by flood and field. They read, especially women, of Margaret Dacre as boys read of Captain Kidd, forgetting the criminality of the deed in the excitement of the danger. They watch her stalking her prey as we have all watched the Forest Ranger, admire a bold leap through the safeguards of society as we admire a leap across some impossible chasm, read of social obstacles as formerly of rocks and ravines, note the defeat of the bad man as boys record the lucky shot which kills the buffalo in the path of some mighty hunter, and are as callous to the agony of the victim as ehildren are to that of the elephant some heroic sportsman has brought down. It is the hunting instinct to which these books appeal, though the game is human, the weapon an unscrupulous use of beauty, and the jungle London society, with its dense foliage, and grassy glades, and hidden beasts and reptiles. The taste for such literature passes away very speedily, and we doubt if while it endures it is much more injurious than the stories of pirates and highwaymen, whilè, though more artistic, it is certainly not more beneficial. We prefer analyses of men and women, but if readers really enjoy sketches of tigresses in human form, they may as well buy sketches as careful and, despite the subject, us pure in idea as Mr. Yates'. They are at all events artistically better than the really astounding one of a monster of selfwill and bad temper upon whom Mr. Mark Lemon, in Falkner Lyle, has chosen to waste his powers. The tigresses are bad enough to us, but this woman, Bertha, whose infamous temper gives occasion for three volumes of misery and complications, is a shade worse. She is as insufferable in a book as she would be in real life. poseless, charmless, vicious-tempered bore, who ruins what might otherwise have been a readable novel. -a pur No. 1142. Fourth Series, No. 3. 21 April, 1866. LITTELL, SON, & CO., BOSTON. TERMS OF SUBSCRIPTION. FOR EIGHT DOLLARS, remitted directly to the Publishers, the Living Age will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage. But we do not prepay postage on less than a year; nor where we have to pay a commission for forwarding the money. Price of the First Series, in Cloth, 36 volumes, 90 dollars. Second The Complete work 20 50 66 88 220 66 Any Volume Bound, 3 dollars; Unbound, 2 dollars. The sets, or volumes, will be sent at the expense of the publishers. WE used to pay twelve cents a pound for paper. During the war, it advanced to thirty cents. Last year, at one time, it fell to sixteen cents; and we joyfully prepared to increase the pages of the Living Age for 1866, in full proportion. it altogether, it is well to suffer some inconveniences to remain, so as to help keep the peace. Notwithstanding their signal and acknowledged failure to understand AmeriWe were uncomfortably checked by a can affairs during the war, the English fresh advance of the price of paper to papers with undiminished confidence distwenty-four cents. But as the sale of the cuss the process of Reconstruction. The Living Age goes on increasing, notwith- Times, the Saturday Review, and, in genestanding the competition of several new ral, the papers which then took part against compilations; and as we have been greatly the United States, now write against the encouraged by the interest which our old course of Congress. Our old ally, the Specsubscribers have taken in adding new tator, continues its friendly interest. names to our list; and by the kind letters received from all parts of the country, including old friends long shut up in the South, our enlargement will be continued; and we shall spare no pains or expense to deserve the favorable opinion which has been shown to the work for eighty-eight volumes. It has been necessary to reprint a large part of the first volume of 1866. This completed the Third Series; and we are prepared to furnish complete sets up to the end of March, 1866. But it may be well for booksellers and others to take notice that, making so many pages a week as the work now contains, we cannot afford to stereotype them, and cannot long supply orders for back numbers of the Fourth Series. A time will very soon come when all subscriptions must begin with the current number. We are sorry that the good things which we gather should not always be accessible; but, as we grow older, we must work more from day to day, and not look too far ahead. "The Anglo-Saxon let loose," seems intended to show that irresponsible power cannot safely be intrusted even to this masterful race. The Coming Storm in Europe is not likely to make us desire the importation of the balance of power" into our politics. We have had enough of war to satisfy even fighting men; and what we have now to pray for are ploughs and pruning-hooks, and that every man may pursue his industrious calling, with none to molest, or make him afraid. Turner Photographed is one of the books one longs for. There are thousands of such beautiful collections published in London. The movement toward freedom in the French Chamber will probably prove to be only the beginning of great changes there. How to pacify Ireland is a duty which English statesmen must study; whether it can be done we can only learn hereafter. This number contains an unusual variety. Several articles which have been in type for some weeks are included. As" Friends Mr. Peabody's great benefaction to Lonsay we feel great enlargement." The don ought to give encouragement to simionly "piece de resistance" is that on Shel- lar enterprises in his own country. ley, whose life and character are very clearly shown. Most sensations seem to have been used for novel purposes. The article on Mad It was a puzzle to Americans that Eng-ness is apropos. land so long failed to see her interest about Maritime Law. The American Govern- "Breakfast" will be studied by all who ment went very far, too far, when it wish to begin the day well. proposed to exempt private property at sea from capture; and it did well in withdrawing the offer. We desire to lessen the evils of war; but, until we can do without A Desert Island does not seem so purely sentimental or romantic after all. From The London Review El L.* may set down the author as merely a THE POETRY OF JAMES RUSSELL LOW- facetious gentleman. For these reasons we are glad to see an English edition of the avowedly serious poems of James Russell Lowell given to the English public, and to have this opportunity of enlarging our own acquaintance with a writer who has unquestionably done honor to American literature both in poetry and prose. Nevertheless, we are not prepared to place Mr. Lowell in the first rank even of American poets. He is certainly not the equal of Longfellow or Whittier, nor has he anything like the wild invention and goblin phantasy of Edgar A. Poe. Somewhat he seems to halt in his poetical paces-to flag in his rhythmical ascent. He is not thoroughly inspired, and constantly suggests a faltering toward something prosaic. We suspect the truth to be that the character of his mind is too analytical to be poetic in the highest sense. He is a man of strong HARDLY less famous in England than in America as are the "Biglow Papers," but few readers on this side of the Atlantic know anything of the serious poetry of Mr. J. R. Lowell. It is true that, in a certain sense, and the very best sense too, the " Biglow Papers" themselves are serious, because they embody principles of the gravest kind, and are penetrated throughout with the burning and quivering fire of the writer's devotion to what he regards as truth and justice. But they take a colloquial and ludicrous form, and it is not improbable that many readers, especially in the Old World, see the fun to the exclusion of the deeper thought. Mr. Lowell, however, is not simply a humourist, nor even chiefly a humourist. He has undoubtedly a comic and satiric vein, of a very genuine kind; his rough, convictions on a good many subjects, politdry, somewhat grim New England drollery is a strange admixture of Puritan force with Yankee shrewdness and oddity; but the Puritan element is the stronger of the two, though the less superficially obvious, and it overshadows the buffoonery with a weight of thought and of passionate conviction, such as render the wildest utterances of Hosea Biglow, Birdofredom Sawin, Parson Wilbur, and the rest of them, anything but flippant. The man who could write the "Biglow Papers" must be a man of a nature certainly capable of serious impressions, and probably capable of writing poetry in its more dignified and lovely forms. In the second series, indeed, a passage occurs which is in itself poetry of no mean order, though half-disguised in uncouth New England phraseology. It is, an address to the Genius of America, and was quoted by us in noticing the work in which it occurs (LONDON REVIEW, September 17th, 1864). That passage had in it the true ring and accent of imaginative thought and speech emotion trembling at itself, passion soaring on its own wings into the heaven of beauty and of power. But, ordinarily, whatever poetry there may be in the "Biglow Papers" is simply that which earnestness and genius always imply when they select a rhythmical form, however coarse and grotesque. The thoughtful and sensitive respond to it at once; but careless readers may not perceive that it is there, and *The Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell, Author of the "Biglow Papers." Including "A Fable for the Critics." London : SO. Beeton. ical and otherwise, and he uses his poetry as a means of explaining and enforcing his views. This not unfrequently gives to his verse the appearance of having been consciously and artificially elaborated with an eye to some collateral object, instead of arising simply out of the poet's impulse to sing. We are afraid it must be said of him that he has too great a tendency to lecture us; and, though his lectures are always directed towards noble ends, and are instinct with the loftiest spirit of belief in Eternal Wisdom and Justice, we are sometimes disappointed at finding the professor in his cap where we expected to see the poet in his robes. He seems himself to be aware of this defect, for, in his charming and witty poem, "A Fable for Critics," he makes Apollo say: "There's Lowell, who's striving Parnassus to climb, With a whole bale of isms tied together with rhyme, He might get on alone, spite of brambles and boulders, But he can't with that bundle he has on his shoulders. The top of the hill he will ne'er come nigh reaching Till he learns the distinction 'twixt singing and preaching. His lyre has some chords that would ring pretty well, But he'd rather by half make a drum of the And rattle away till he's old as Methusalem, salem." |