Book: Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864

V >> Various >> Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864





_A Summer Cruise on the Coast of New England._ By Robert Carter. Boston:
Crosby & Nichols, pp. 261.

In these days, when the high price of paper makes it easy for authors to
sell by the pound what no one would take by the single copy, he is
luckiest who has made the heaviest book. Our morning newspaper nowadays
is a kind of palimpsest, and one cannot help wondering how many dead
volumes, how many hopes and disappointments, lie buried under that
surface made smooth for the Telegraph (sole author who is sure of
readers) to write upon. We seem to detect here and there a flavor of
Jones's Poem or Smith's History, something like the rhythm of the one
and the accuracy of the other. _Quot libras autore summo invenies?_ is
the question for booksellers now.

In a metaphysical sense, one is apt to find many heavy books for one
weighty one, and it is as difficult to make light reading that shall
have any nutriment in it as to make light bread. Mr. Carter has
succeeded in giving us something at once entertaining and instructive.
One who introduces us to a new pleasure close by our own doors, and
tells us how we may have a cheap vacation of open air, with fresh
experience of scenery and adventure at every turn, deserves something of
the same kind of gratitude as he who makes two blades of grass grow
where one grew before. Americans, above all other men, need to be taught
to take a vacation, and how to spend one so as to find in it the rest
which mere waste of time never gives. Mr. Carter teaches us how we may
have all the pleasure without any of the responsibilities of yachting,
and, reversing the method of our summer migration, shows us the shore
from the sea.

Hakluyt and Purchas have made us familiar with, the landscape of our
coast to the early voyagers,--with its fringe of forest to the water's
edge, its fair havens, its swarms of wild fowl, its wooded islets
tangled with grape-vines, its unknown mountains looming inland, and its
great rivers flowing out of the realm of dream; but its present aspect
is nearly as unfamiliar to us as to them. We know almost as little of
the natives as Gosnold. Mr. Carter's voyage extends from Plymouth to
Mount Desert, and he lands here and there to explore a fishing-village
or seaport town, with all the interest of an outlandish man. He
describes scenery with the warmth of a lover of Nature and the accuracy
of a geographer. Acting as a kind of volunteer aide-de-camp to a
naturalist, he dredges and fishes both as man of science and amateur,
and makes us more familiarly acquainted with many queer denizens of
fin-land. He mingles with our fishermen, and finds that the schoolmaster
has been among them also. His book is lively without being flippant, and
full of information without that dulness which is apt to be the evil
demon of statistics. The moral of it is, that, as one may travel from
Dan to Beersheba and see nothing, so one needs but to open his eyes to
the life and Nature around him to find plenty of entertainment and
knowledge.


_Azarian_: An Episode. By Harriet E. Prescott, Author of "The Amber
Gods," etc. Boston: Ticknor & Fields.

If one opened the costly album of some rare colorist, and became
bewildered amid successive wreaths of pictured flowers, with hues that
seemed to burn, and freshness that seemed fragrant, one could hardly
quarrel with a few stray splashes of purple or carmine spilt heedlessly
on the pages. Such a book is "Azarian"; and if few are so lavish and
reckless with their pigments as Harriet Prescott, it is because few have
access to such wealth. If one proceeds from the theory that all life in
New England is to be pictured as bare and pallid, it must seem very
wrong in her to use tints so daring; but if one believes that life here,
as elsewhere, may be passionate as Petrarch and deep as Beethoven, there
appears no reason why all descriptive art should be Quaker-colored.

Nature and cultivation gave to this writer a rare inventive skill, an
astonishing subtilty in the delineation of character, and a style
perhaps unequalled among contemporaries in a certain Keats-like
affluence. Yet her plots have usually been melodramatic, her characters
morbid, and her descriptions overdone. These are undoubtedly great
offences, and have grievously checked her growing fame. But the American
public, so ready to flatter early merit, has itself to thank, if that
flattery prove a pernicious atmosphere. That fatal cheapness of
immediate reputation which stunts most of our young writers, making the
rudiments of fame so easy to acquire, and fame itself so
difficult,--which dwarfs our female writers so especially that not one
of them, save Margaret Fuller, has ever yet taken the pains to train
herself for first-class literary work,--has no doubt had a transient
influence on Harriet Prescott. Add to this, perhaps, the common and
fatal necessity of authorship which pushes even second-best wares into
the market. It is evident, that, with all the instinct of a student and
an artist, she has been a sensation-writer against her will. The whole
structure of "Azarian," which is evidently a work of art and of love,
indicates these higher aspirations, and shows that she is resolved to
nourish them, not by abandoning her own peculiar ground, but by training
her gifts and gradually exorcising her temptations. Like her "Amber
Gods," the book rests its strength on its descriptive and analytic
power, not on its events; but, unlike that extraordinary story, it is
healthful in its development and hopeful in its ending. The name of "An
Episode" seems to be given to it, not in affectation, but in humility.
It is simply a minute study of character, in the French style, though
with a freshness and sweetness which no Frenchman ever yet succeeded in
transferring into language, and which here leave none of that bad taste
in the mouth of which Charlotte Bronte complained. The main situation is
one not new in fiction, being simply unequal love and broken troth, but
it is one never to be portrayed too often or too tenderly, and it is not
desecrated, but ennobled by the handling. It is refreshing to be able to
say for Miss Prescott that she absolutely reaches the end of the book
without a suicide or a murder, although the heroine for a moment
meditates the one and goes to the theatre to behold the other. The
dialogue, usually a weak point with this writer, is here for better
managed than usual, having her customary piquancy, with less of
disfigurement from flippancy and bad puns. The plot shows none of those
alarming pieces of incongruity and bathos which have marred some of her
stories. And one may fancy that it is not far to seek for the originals
of Azarian, Charmian, and Madame Sarator.

It is the style of the book, however, to which one must revert with
admiration, not unmingled with criticism, and, it may be, a trifle of
just indignation. There are not ten living writers in America of whom it
can be said that their style is in itself a charm,--that it has the
range, the flexibility, the delicacy, the ease, the strength, which
constitute permanent power,--that it is so saturated with life, with
literary allusion, with the symbolism of Nature, as to make us dwell on
the mere sentences with delight, apart from all thought of argument or
theme. This it is to be a literary artist; and as Miss Prescott may
justly claim to rank among these favored ones, she must be tried by the
code which befits her station. There is not, perhaps, another individual
among us who could have written the delicious descriptions of external
Nature which this book contains,--not one of the multitude of young
artists, now devoting their happy hours to flower-painting, who can
depict color by color as she depicts it by words. We hold in our hands
an illuminated missal, some Gospel of Nature according to June or
October, as the case may be. The price she pays for this astonishing
gift is to be often overmastered by it, to be often betrayed into
exuberant and fantastic phrases, and wanderings into the realm of words
unborn. One fancies the dismay of the accomplished corrector of the
University Press, as his indignant pencil hung over "incanting" and
"reverizing" and "cose." Yet closer examination always shows that she,
too, has studied grammar and dictionary, algebra and the Greek alphabet;
and her most daring verbal feats are never vague or wayward, for there
is always an eager and accurate brain behind them. She dares too much to
escape blunders, yet, after all, commits fewer in proportion than those
who dare less. The basis of all good writing is truth in details; and
her lavish wealth of description would be a gaudy profanation, were it
not based on a fidelity of observation which is Thoreau-like, so far as
it goes. "Sabbatia sprays, those rosy ghosts that haunt the Plymouth
ponds,"--"the cardinal, with the very glitter of the stream it loves
meshed like a silver mist behind its scarlet sheen,"--"the wide rhodora
marshes, where some fleece of burning mist seemed to be fallen and
caught and tangled in countless filaments upon the bare twigs,"--such
traits as these are not to be found in the newspapers nor in the
botanies. With all her seeming lavishness, she rarely wastes a word.
Though she may sometimes heap upon a frail hepatica some greater
accumulation of fine-spun fancies than its slender head will bear, she
yet can so characterize a flower with a touch that any one of its lovers
would know it without the name. If she hints at "those slipshod little
anemones that cannot stop to count their petals, but take one from their
neighbor or leave another behind them," it is because she knows how
peculiarly this fantastic variableness belongs to the rue-leaved
species, so unlike the staid precision of its cousin, the wind-flower,
from which not one pedestrian in a hundred can yet distinguish it. If
she simply says, "great armfuls of blue lupines," she has said enough,
because this is almost the only wild-flower whose size, shape, and
abundance naturally tempt one to gather it thus: imagine her speaking of
armfuls of violets or wild roses! From this basis of accurate fact her
fancy can safely unfold its utmost wings, as in her fancied
illustrations for the Garden-Song in "Maud," or in the wonderful
descriptions of Azarian's lonely nights on the water. "He leaned over
his boat-side, miles away from any shore, a star looked down from far
above, a star looked up from far below, the glint passed as instantly,
and left him the sole spirit between immense concaves of void and
fulness, shut in like the flaw in a diamond." How the subscribers to the
Circulating Library of the enterprising Mr. Loring must catch their
breaths in amazement, when that courteous gentleman hands them for the
last new novel--sandwiched between "Pique" and "Woodburn"--thoughts of
such a compass as that!

There are sometimes fictitious writers who sweep across the land in a
great wave of popularity and then pass away,--as Frederika Bremer twenty
years ago,--and leave no visible impression behind. But Harriet
Prescott's fame rests on a foundation of sure superiorities, so far as
she possesses it; and no one has impaired or can impair it, except
herself. If it has not grown as was at first anticipated, it has been
her own doing, and "Azarian" has come none too soon to give a better
augury for the future. There is no literary laurel too high for her to
grasp, if her own will, and favoring circumstances, shall enable her to
choose only noble and innocent themes, and to use canvas firm and pure
enough for the rare colors she employs.


_The Wrong of Slavery, the Right of Emancipation, and the Future of the
African Race in the United States_. By Robert Dale Owen. Philadelphia:
J.B. Lippincott & Co. 12mo.

"Book, Sir, book! It's the _title_!" This is the reputed saying of
Longman, the publisher, when asked for the key to bookselling. It is a
pity that Mr. Owen's book has so cumbrous a name to carry; for
everything else about it is compact and portable. Few American works on
statistics or political economy possess either brevity or an index, and
this combines both treasures. "In this small volume, which a busy man
may read in a few hours," the author condenses an immense deal,--and it
is a blessed sign, if a man who has been in Congress can still be so
economical of words. If his brother Congressmen would only imitate his
precious example, what a blessed hope! How gladly would one subscribe
for the "Congressional Globe," with the assurance that it would
henceforth be the only tedious book in his library, that all the chaff
would hereafter be safely winnowed into that, and all the sense put into
comfortable little duo-decimos like this!

Mr. Owen's opportunities, as Chairman of the American Freedmen's
Commission, have been very great, and he has used them well. The history
of slavery and the slave-trade,--the practical consequences of
both,--the constitutionality of emancipation,--the present condition of
the freed slaves, and their probable future,--all this ground is
comprehended within two hundred and fifty pages. The points last named
have, of course, the most immediate value, and his treatment of these
is exceedingly manly and sensible. He shows conclusively that the whole
demeanor of the freed slaves has done them infinite credit, and that the
key to their successful management is simply to treat them with justice.
That this justice includes equal rights of citizenship he fully asserts,
and states the gist of the matter in one of the most telling paragraphs
of the book. "God, who made the liberation of the negro the condition
under which alone we could succeed in this war, has now, in His
providence, brought about a position of things under which it would seem
that a full recognition of that negro's rights as a citizen becomes
indispensable to stability of government in peace." For, as Mr. Owen
shows, even if under any other circumstances we might excuse ourselves
for delaying the recognition of the freedman's right to suffrage,
because of his ignorance and inexperience, yet it would be utterly
disastrous to do so now, when two-thirds of the white population will
remain disloyal, even when conquered. We cannot safely reorganize a
republican government on the basis of one-sixth of its population, and
shall be absolutely compelled to avail ourselves of that additional
three-sixths which is loyal and black. Fortunately, as a matter of fact,
there are no obstacles to the citizenship of the Southern negro greater
than those in the way of the average foreign immigrant. The emancipated
negro is at least as industrious and thrifty as the Celt, takes more
pride in self-support, is far more eager for education, and has fewer
vices. It is impossible to name any standard of requisites for the full
rights of citizenship which will give a vote to the Celt and exclude the
negro.

Much as has been written on this point, Mr. Owen has yet some
astonishing facts to contribute. He shows, for instance, by the official
statements, that, amidst the great distress produced in the city of St.
Louis at the beginning of the war, by the gathering of white and black
refugees from all parts of the State, when ten thousand persons received
public aid, only two out of that whole vast number were of negro blood.
These two were all who applied, one being lame, the other bedridden, and
both women. He shows, upon similar authority, that the free colored
people of Louisiana, under serious civil disabilities, are, on the
average, richer, by seven and a half per cent., than the people of the
Northern States. Their average wealth in 1860 was five hundred and
twenty dollars, while the average wealth in the loyal Free States is
only four hundred and eighty-four dollars. Such facts show how utterly
gratuitous is the frequent assumption that the emancipated slave does
not sufficiently know the value of a dollar.

Upon some disputed points Mr. Owen does not, perhaps, make his facts
quite cover his inferences, as, for instance, on the vexed question of
the vigor and vitality of the mulatto, upon which the more extended
observations of the last three years have as yet shed little light. It
is the same with the whole obscure problem of amalgamation; indeed, he
slips into an absolute contradiction, in pronouncing judgment rather too
hastily here. "I believe," he says, "that the effect of general
emancipation will be to discourage amalgamation. It is rare in Canada."
(p. 219.) But, however it may be in Canada, he has already admitted,
four pages before, that "the proportion of mulattoes among the free
colored is much greater than among the slaves," which is, doubt less,
true, except, perhaps, in a few large cities of the South. It is a
subject of common remark that the Southern colored regiments are
generally of far darker complexion than those recruited at the North,
and this is inexplicable except on the supposition that freedom, even
more than slavery, tends thus far to amalgamation. What further step in
reasoning this suggests, it is, fortunately, not needful to inquire;
like all other mysteries of human destiny, this will safely work itself
out. It is not for nothing that the black man thrives in contact with
the white, while the red man dies; and there certainly are practical
anxieties enough to last us for a month or two, without borrowing any
from the remoter future.


_Enoch Arden_, etc. By ALFRED TENNYSON, D.C.L., Poet-Laureate. Boston:
Ticknor & Fields.

In his new volume Tennyson has thrown out some verses, graceful,
defiant, triumphant, and yet a little touched with sadness, in which he
assails the thieves who have stolen his seed of poetry, and made the
flower so common that the people call it--as, indeed, they did when
first it blossomed--a weed. It may be for the reason here indicated that
he has chosen for his later poems a form--that of the Idyl--the
versification, construction, and use of which he has made his own by a
delicate and yet indisputable stamp of sovereignty: whatever may be the
reason, let us be thankful for the choice. He has worked in no field of
whose resources he was more completely master, or which has yielded him
more full and varied development of his rare genius. The work of his
riper years, with the results of his fidelity in discipline, his
generous culture, his catholic and earnest intercourse with men, and his
clear and thoughtful observation lying ready for his use, he has crowned
the green glory of his past with a chaplet that will grow more sure of
permanence with the scrutiny of every succeeding year. In his "Idyls of
the King" we recognized the best moral qualities of many of his previous
works; and in "Enoch Arden," which gives the title to his last volume,
he has turned the full light of his perfected genius on the simple
scenes of domestic joy and sorrow.

We have always deemed it one of the greatest of Tennyson's great and
good qualities, that he is unfaltering in the tribute of honor which he
pays to the sterling virtues and to the beauty and heroism which he
rejoices to point us to in the daily walk of the humblest life. A
blameless character, pure desire, manly ambition, a fervent faith, and a
strong will, resting on the firm innermost foundation of a Christian
spirit, are as real to him in the fisherman as in the peerless prince.
The temptations, the strength, and the temper of the hero are so common
to both, and so clearly brought out in each, that we feel the Man in the
Prince, and the high aim of the Prince in the true Man. There is the
"grand, heroic soul" in Enoch as in Arthur,--

"Who reverenced his conscience as his king;
Whose glory was redressing human wrong;
Who spoke no slander, no, nor listened to it;
Who loved one only, and who clave to her."

Our poet never strays from Nature; which has for him two sides,--the old
duality, which is also forever,--the real and the ideal. To the one he
brings the most patient fidelity of study; the other he reflects in
every part of his poems in glowing imagery. "Enoch Arden" contains
scenes which a Pre-Raphaelite might draw from,--as that "cup-like hollow
in the down" which held the hazel-wood, with the children nutting
through its reluctant boughs, or the fireside of Philip, on which Enoch
looked and was desolate. On the other hand, no poet has so planted our
literature with gorgeous gardens from which generations of lesser
laborers will be enriched and prospered. The figures in which Tennyson
uses Nature are not, moreover, strained or artificial; they do not
distort or cover the inner meaning, but bloom from it, revealing its
beauty and its sweetness. All bear the mark of loving thought,--now so
delicate that its very faintness thrills and holds us, now strong and
spirited and solemn.

In this latest poem we find also the old surpassing skill of language, a
skill dependent on the faculty of penetrating to the inmost significance
both of words and of things, so that there is no waste, and so that
single words in single sentences stamp on the brain the substance of
long experiences. Witness this: Enoch lies sick, distant from home and
wife and children; here is one word crowded with pathos, telling of the
weary loss of livelihood, the burden slowly growing more intolerably
irksome to the bold and careful worker wrestling with pain, and to the
fragile mother of the new-born babe:--

"Another hand _crept_, too, across his trade,
Taking her bread and theirs."

See, again, how one line woven in the context shows where the tears
came. Enoch, wrecked, solitary, almost hopeless, found that

"A phantom made of many phantoms moved
Before him, haunting him,--or he himself
Moved, haunting people, things, and places known
Far in a darker isle beyond the line:
The babes, their babble, Annie, the small house,
The climbing street, the mill, the leafy lanes,
The peacock-yewtree and the lonely Hall,
The horse he drove, the boat he sold, the chill
November dawns and dewy glooming of the downs,
The gentle shower, _the smell of dying leaves_,
And the low moan of leaden-colored seas."

We know of no more perfect rendering of an unlearned and trustful faith
in God than this which Tennyson puts in the mouth of Enoch as he departs
on the voyage from which he never returns to his wife:--

"If you fear,
Cast all your fears on God: that anchor holds.
Is He not yonder in those uttermost
Parts of the morning? if I flee to these,
Can I go from Him? And the sea is His,
The sea is His: He made it."

In the repetition in the last line one can almost hear the sob welling
up from the heart of the strong sailor, as he speaks of God to one
beloved, in time of trial,--the feeling of bitterness in parting
starting with the impulse of the stronger faith.

In "Enoch Arden," as in "In Memoriam," Tennyson shows the sweet and sure
sympathy which informs him of all the ways of grief. In its sacred
experiences, where the slightest variance from the simplicity of actual
feeling would jostle all, he holds his way unquestioned.

It is a test, unembarrassed and complete, of genius, this treatment of
grief, the emotion which least of all brooks exaggeration or
sentimentalism. It is the test of human purity, too, and the hand must
be very tender and very clean which leaves thus exact and clear the
picture of the crowning phase of human life. If "In Memoriam" has
appropriated to itself, by its sublime supremacy, a phrase which, though
in daily use, is never heard without suggesting the poem, Tennyson shows
in "Enoch Arden" that he understands the sad and perfect reign of grief
in the life of the sailor and of the sailor's wife struck with a great
sorrow for the loss of the latest born, as well as in the broad and
varied range of his own cultured nature.

Coupled with the knowledge of grief is this of prayer,--"that mystery
when God in man is one with man-in-God,"--which is said when Enoch had
resolved to surrender his Annie rather than to break in upon her
happiness:--

"His resolve
Upbore him, and firm faith, and evermore
Prayer, from a living source within the will,
And beating up through all the bitter world,
Like fountains of sweet water in the sea,
Kept him a living soul."

And so we close the poem, which touches us again more than we deemed
possible, till each renewal of the reading stirs again the depths of
passionate sympathy. A pure manhood among the poets, a heart simple as
the simplest, an imperial fancy, whose lofty supremacy none can
question, a high faith, and a spirit possessed with the sublimest and
most universal of Christ's truths, a tender and strong humanity, not
bounded by a vague and misty sentiment, but pervading life in all its
forms, and with these great skill and patience and beauty in
expression,--these are the riper qualities to which "Enoch Arden"
testifies. They are qualities whose attainment and retention are
singularly rare, and whose value we cannot easily overrate.

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