Book: Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861

V >> Various >> Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861




We seem to be living in an age of pamphleteers. More than ever, both in
France and Germany, are pamphlets the order of the day. In Paris
alone, the year 1860 has given birth to hundreds of these writings of
circumstance,--political squibs, visionary remodellings of European
states,--vying with each other for ephemeral celebrity. They fill the
windows of the book-shops, and are spread by scores along the stands
in the numerous galleries which the Parisian population throngs of
evenings. Those issued in the early part of the year have gradually
descended from the rank of new publications, and may be found on
every quay, spread out, for a few _centimes_, side by side with
old weather-beaten books, odd volumes, refuse of libraries, which
book-lovers daily finger through in the hope of finding some pearl, some
rarity, in the worthless mass.

Thus we have seen the interminable Rhine question discussed in its every
possible phase,--still more that of Italy. Between come the Druses, the
Orient, the Turks. Then Italy again, Garibaldi, Naples, the Pope.

To state in general terms the tendency of these rockets of literature,
or to arrive at the spirit which seems to pervade them, is not quite so
easy as it would seem. They are written by authors of all party-colors,
within certain impassable limits prescribed by the parental restrictions
of Government. Still it seems to be the old story of soothing; and many
a conclusion--as where England is smoothed down by a few flatteries and
told that her most natural ally is France, or where Germany is heartily
assured that she has nothing to fear, that all the changes proposed are
for the good of the Teutonic race--reminds us very strongly of that
widely known verse in child-literature,--

"Will you walk into my parlor," etc.

We have before us, however, a work which, from its size and from
the labor bestowed upon it, deserves to be ranked above the various
productions that have scarcely called forth more than a passing notice
in the daily press.

The pamphlet named at the head of this article, and which is but a
complement to the volume, is one of the numerous reconstructions and
rearrangements of European limits made in the quiet of the study. Were
it this alone, it would deserve but little attention. It is more. The
author bases his theories upon other than political reasons, having
labored hard to establish many debatable points of Ethnography in the
interesting notes appended to the work, and which form by far the most
remarkable part of it. So we have the question of Races discussed at
full length. There is certainly some philological legerdemain, as may be
seen from some of the convenient conclusions of the author concerning
the Celts and the Gauls. He is full of such paragraphs as this in his
argumentation:--

"It has seemed to us proved, that the names,
Volces, Volsks, Bolgs, Belgs, Belgians, Welsh,
Welchs, Waels, Wuelchs or Walchs, Walls,
Walloons, Valais, Valois, Vlaks, Wallachians,
Galatians, Galtachs, Galls, Gaels or Caels,
Gaelic, Galot, Gallegos, Gaul, and even Ola,
Olatz, and Vallus, were but one and the same
word under different forms."

The point to be established at all hazards is, that the French,
Spaniards, Portuguese, Italians, Belgians, and even the English and
Greeks, form but one great family, of one hundred and fifteen million
individuals,--the Gallo-Roman. This Neo-Latin world the author would
wish combined in one grand confederation, like the States of America.
Hence his use of the term _Panlatinism_, in opposition to the so much
debated one of _Panslavism_. The merit of the work under consideration
is, that, though decidedly French in all its views, it condenses in
a few paragraphs the present mooted question of race. The idea of
Panslavism, or the uniting of eighty millions of Sclavonians under one
banner, was, in its origin, republican and federal, whatever it may
have become since. Few words have acquired more diametrically opposite
meanings, according as they were uttered by radical or conservative.
Hence the confusion, hence the many strange phrases to be met with in
the periodical press. The author of the present work has sought to throw
some light on this important point. Leaving aside his prophetic fears of
future shocks with American or Asiatic powers as visionary, we can say
for the work that it presents in a clear light the question of races
as referring to European politics. The notes are good, and no research
seems to have been spared by the writer to establish the position he
maintains.


1. _Ancient Danish Ballads._ Translated from the Originals, by R.C.
ALEXANDER PRIOR, M.D. London: Williams & Norgate. Leipzig: R. Hartmann.
1860, 3 vols. pp. lx., 400, 468, 500.

2. _Edinburgh Papers._ By ROBERT CHAMBERS, F.R.S.E., etc., etc. _The
Romantic Scottish Ballads, their Epoch and Authorship._ W. & R.
Chambers: London and Edinburgh. 1859. pp. 40.

3. _The Romantic Scottish Ballads, and the Lady Wardlaw Heresy._ By
NORVAL CLYNE. Aberdeen: A. Brown & Co. 1859. pp. 49.

The expectations raised by the title of Dr. Prior's volumes are in a
great measure disappointed by their contents. The book is of value only
because it gives for the first time, in English, the substance of a
large number of Danish ballads, and points out the relations between
them and similar productions in other languages. Of the spirit and life
of these remarkable poems a person hitherto unfamiliar with them would
find but scanty indication in Dr. Prior's versions. He has merely done
them into English in a somewhat mechanical way, and one scarcely gets
a better notion of the more imaginative ones in his bald reproductions
than of the "Iliad" from the analysis of that poem in the "Epistolae
Obscurorum Virorum." It seems to require almost as peculiar powers to
translate an old ballad as to write a new one.

Dr. Prior complains of Jamieson, that his versions from the Danish are
done in a broad Scotch dialect, almost as unintelligible to ordinary
readers as the language of which they profess to give the meaning. But
if any one compare Jamieson's rendering of "The Buried Mother" with Dr.
Prior's, (Prior, vol. i. p. 368,) he will, we think, see cause to regret
that Jamieson did not do what Dr. Prior has attempted, and that he has
not left us a greater number of translations equally good. Jamieson's
fault was not so much his broad Scotch as his over-fondness for
archaisms, sometimes of mere spelling, which give rise to a needless
obscurity. We think that he was theoretically right; but he should not
have pushed his theory to the extent of puzzling the reader, where his
aim was to give only that air of strangeness which allures the fancy. As
respects ballads dealing with the supernatural, Jamieson's notion of
the duty of a translator was certainly the true one. There is something
almost ludicrous in a ghost talking the ordinary conversational language
of every-day life, which might, to be sure, serve very well for some
of Jung Stilling's spirits in bottle-green hunting-coats with brass
buttons, but hardly for the majesty of buried Denmark. Dr. Prior may
claim that his renderings are more literal; but it is the vice of
literal translation, that the phrases of one language, if exactly
reproduced in another, while they may have the same sense, convey a
wholly different impression to the imagination. It is to such cases that
the Italian proverb, _Tradutiore traditore_, applies. Dryden, citing
approvingly Denham's verses to Fanshawe,

"They but preserve his ashes, thou his flame,
True to his sense, but truer to his fame,"

says, with his usual pithiness, "Too faithfully is indeed pedantically."

In Dr. Prior's version of the "The Buried Mother" we find a case
precisely in point. The Stepmother says to the poor Orphans,--

"In blind-house shall ye lie all night."

Jamieson gives it,--

"Says, 'Ye sall ligg i' the mirk all night.'"

Now, the object in all translations of ballad-poetry being to reproduce
simple and downright phrases with equal simplicity and force, to give
us the same effects and not the same words, we vastly prefer Jamieson's
verse to Dr. Prior's, in spite of the affectation of _ligg_ for _lie_.
If _blind-house_ be the equivalent for _dark_ in the original, Dr.
Prior should have told us so in a note, giving us the stronger (because
simpler) English word in the text. He might as well write _hand-shoe_
for _glove_, in a translation from the German. Elsewhere Jamieson errs
in preferring _groff_ to _great_, and the more that _groff_ means more
properly _coarse_ than _large_.

The following couplet is also from Dr. Prior's translation of this
ballad:--

"They cried one evening till the sound
Their mother heard beneath the ground."

Jamieson has it,--

"'Twas lang i' the night, and the bairnies
grat [cried],
Their mither she under the mools [mould]
heard that."

Again, Dr. Prior gives us,--

"Her eldest daughter then she sped
To fetch Child Dyring out of bed";

instead of Jamieson's--

"Till her eldest dochter syne [then] said she,
'Ye bid Child Dyring come here to me.'"

And, still worse,--

"Out from their chest she stretch'd her bones
And rent her way through earth and stones";

where Jamieson is not only more literal, but more forcible,--

"Wi' her banes sae stark a bowt she gae
Hath riven both wall and marble gray."

The original is better than either,--

"She upward heaved her mighty bones
And rived both wall and gray marble-stones."

Jamieson had the true instinct of a translator, though his own verses
defy the stanchest reader; and, reasoning by analogy, Dr. Prior's
translations are so bad that he ought to be capable of very good
original poetry.

However, with all its defects, Dr. Prior's book is of value for the
information it gives. Under the dead ribs of his translations the reader
familiar with old ballads can create a life for himself, and can form
some conception of the spirit and strength of the originals.

Mr. Chambers's pamphlet is one that we should hardly have expected from
the editor of the best collection of ballads in the language before
that of Professor Child. Directly in the teeth of all probability, he
attributes the bulk of the _romantic_ Scottish ballads to Lady Wardlaw,
who wrote "Hardyknute." This is one of those theories (like that of Lord
Bacon being the author of Shakspeare's plays) which cannot be argued,
but which every one familiar with the subject challenges peremptorily.
Without going very deeply into the matter, Mr. Norval Clyne has put in
a clever plea in arrest of judgment. The truth is, that, in the present
state of our knowledge, "Hardyknute" could not pass muster as an antique
better than "Vortigern," or the poems of "Master Rowley"; and the notion
that Lady Wardlaw could have written "Sir Patrick Spens" will not hold
water better than a sieve, when we consider how hopelessly inferior are
the imitations of old ballads written by Scott, with fifty times her
familiarity with the originals, and a man of genius besides.

* * * * *

_Miss Gilbert's Career_. An American Story. By J.G. HOLLAND. New York:
Charles Scribner.

There is scarcely a more hazardous experiment for any novelist than "a
novel with a purpose." If the moral does not run away with the story, it
is in most cases only because the author's lucky star has made the moral
too feeble, in spite of his efforts, to do that or anything else,--in
other words, because his book has fortunately defeated its own object.
That any clever girl will be kept from the perilous paths of authorship
by the warnings, however strongly inculcated, of any novel whatever, we
are not prepared to assert: we venture to say no one will be deterred by
the history of Miss Fanny Gilbert. If a woman's happiness is to be found
in love, and not in fame, the question nevertheless recurs,--What is she
to do before the love comes? Our author only shows that his heroine's
restless unhappiness was owing to her having to wait for her heart to be
awakened: to prove what he desires to prove, he should demonstrate that
it was owing to her having adopted authorship during the time of her
waiting. During that time, Miss Fanny Gilbert wrote novels, and was
unhappy: would she have been happy, if, in the interval, she had
chronicled small beer? And even admitting that her authorship caused her
unhappiness, we can scarcely believe Dr. Holland prepared to say, after
having allowed his heroine a real talent, as one condition of the
problem, that she ought to have concealed that talent in the decorous
napkin of silence.

What the moral loses the story gains. Our author has lost nothing of
that genuine love of Nature, of that quick perception of the comic
element in men and things, of that delightful freshness and liveliness,
which threw such a charm about the former writings of Timothy Titcomb.
No story can be pronounced a failure which has vivacity and interest;
and the volume before us adds to vivacity and interest vigorous sketches
of character and scenery, droll conversation and incidents, a frequent
and kindly humor, and, underlying all, a true, earnest purpose, which
claims not only approval for the author, but respect for the man.

Dr. Holland describes admirably whatever he has himself seen.
Unfortunately, he has not seen his hero or his heroine. About Arthur
Blague there is nothing real or distinctive. There is a life and reality
in many scenes of his experience; but the central figure of the group
stands conventional and inanimate,--the ordinary walking gentleman of
the stage,--the stereo-typed hero of the novel,--hero only by virtue of
his finally marrying the heroine. The one merit of the delineation--that
it is a portrait of a delicate Christian gentleman--is sadly marred by
the vulgar smartness of Arthur's repartees with the scampish New-Yorker.
A victory in such a contest was by no means necessary to vindicate the
hero's superiority; and if he so far forgot himself as to engage at all
in the degrading warfare, a defeat would have been more creditable. His
retorts are undeniably smart; but "smartness" is the attribute of a
"fellow," not of a "gentleman."

Miss Fanny Gilbert is a warm-hearted, high-spirited girl, clever and
ambitious, and disposed at first to look contemptuously on poor Arthur,
whose humble labors appear in most dingy and sordid colors, when
contrasted with the fair Fanny's gorgeous dreams. She is not a very
fascinating nor a very real heroine; but she is better than most of our
heroines, and some of her experiences are very pleasantly told.

Arthur's miserly employer is very good, and his shrewd friend Cheek is
capitally drawn. It was a peculiarly happy thought to make Cheek into
a railroad-conductor, and finally into a "gentlemanly and efficient"
superintendent. Nothing else would have suited his character half so
well. The business-like religionists, Moustache and Breastpin, are not
so good as the author meant to have them. The young bookseller is very
well done, and Dr. Gilbert very natural and lifelike. The story of the
Doctor's awakened interest in his daughter's success, and of his journey
to New York, is very well told. We like especially the lesson which
the triumphant authoress, in the full glory of her fame, receives,
on finding that her father sets a higher value on his son's least
achievement than on his daughter's highest success,--that, however a
woman may deserve a man's place, the world will never award it to her.
It would have been more effective, however, if Dr. Holland had not been
quite so anxious that no one should fail to perceive the moral,--if
he had had a little more confidence in his readers. But we can give
unqualified praise to the scene between Miss Gilbert and the little
crippled boy, which is one of the most beautiful and touching pictures
ever yet presented.

It is a real satisfaction to find a book which one may venture to
criticize fearlessly, knowing that it will bear the test,--especially
at present, when one needs be as chary of trying any book fairly as
Don Quixote was of proving his unlucky helmet. And an additional
satisfaction is caused by the fact, that the book, not only in origin,
but in essence, is American from cover to cover.




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