In contemplation the poet rises above the mists of sordidness which rise from the struggle of trade and industry, beyond the clouds of pessimism and religious doubt, and on the Pisgah heights of h.e.l.lenic culture he sees a vision of the new life that shall come to man.
Through the beautiful world-myth, the story of Demeter and Persephone and Dionysus, the poet is taught the lesson of the immortality of the race, of its ceaseless progression toward a n.o.bler and more beautiful future. To celebrate their happiness at the discovery that Aidoneus, dread King of Death, is none other than the Lord of Life "leader of the blessed to the highest heaven," they resolve to bring about the redemption of the world.
This is made possible through the union of Aphrodite, Beauty of Form, with Apollo, Light of the Mind. From them shall spring a new race of G.o.ds, typifying the new ideals which shall uplift man until he is fitted for fellowship at the banquet of the Immortals. Thence will rise "a n.o.bler, a larger mankind," wakened at length from "the night of toil, unhallowed by joy in the task." Through Aphrodite will come "feeling and loving--and art that bids death defiance," and through Apollo "seeing and knowing and man"s life-mastering science." Thence shall come
"The lover"s rapture Elysian, The poet"s fury, the prophet"s vision, The serene world-sight of the thinker."
This vision typified the future regeneration of America and through her of the race. From the sordid reality of present conditions man must advance ever nearer to the "eternal ideal"; from mean conditions, inspired by lofty emotions and holy enthusiasms, shall come new standards of life and of art.
Mr. Guthrie"s work indicates in its form some of the characteristics of the new literary art. Though his theories are undoubtedly good, the expression is as yet too crude to form much idea of its possibilities.
Whatever may be the age of the author, his work indicates a certain inexperience and lacks the grasp and finish of the skilled workman. His work is too reminiscent; he has not sufficiently a.s.similated his sources and impressed them with his own individuality, giving them a distinctive unity of conception and expression. Though we are quite willing to accept his a.s.surance that he "did not intend his work to resemble any known performance," we are continually reminded of pa.s.sages in other writers who had inspired him. At times we are struck with admiration at his power for catching the very trick of his model.
His work is as "oddly suited" as was Portia"s lover. For he suggests to us--Homer and the Greek tragedians of course in theme and expression; Milton and Dante with their lofty ideals; Piers Ploughman dreaming about his "fair field full of folk." For the conception he owes much to Sh.e.l.ley"s "Prometheus," whose theme is very similar, but his methods are more modern, with verse theories of Whitman, philosophy of Browning, a Wagnerian idea of rhythm, making each rhythmical theme represent a peculiar mood or image, which is frequently very effective but sometimes forced.
_Harriott S. Olive._
(Songs from the Ghetto, by Morris Rosenfeld. With Introduction, Prose Translation, and Glossary. By Leo Weiner, Instructor in the Slavic Languages at Harvard University. Boston: Small, Maynard & Co.--A Vision of New h.e.l.las--Songs of American Destiny. William Norman Guthrie.
Clarke Publishing Company. Chicago: $2.50.)
COL. HIGGINSON"S "CONTEMPORARIES" AND MRS.
HOWE"S "REMINISCENCES."
Colonel Higginson might have added to his "Contemporaries" as a sub-t.i.tle: "Our Nineteenth Century Roll of Honor," for he makes mention, either brief or extended, in his book, of nearly all the men and women of the age who would be ent.i.tled to a place on such a roll.
It gives one"s patriotism a thrill, on looking down the list, to see how long and splendid a one it is, to note what fine thoughts, emotions, and achievements stand representative in the brief sketches of the period of our national existence which the author has observed and shared in. Patriotic fervor for the past, and, arguing from the past, a renewed hope in the national future, are the dominant feelings the book begets. Not that the author has emphasized the bequests of statesmen and reformers to the country, to the neglect of other influences. The volume contains nineteen sketches; and the poet, the philosopher, the scientist, the man of private though beneficent life, have all places therein; yet all is woven into a whole with one aspect, the national one.
All of the sketches are, as the preface states, reprinted pieces first published in different periodicals any time during the past fifty years. Since from this point of view the volume can have little or no consecutiveness, it is noteworthy that a picture of the times is nevertheless obtained unbroken in its continuity. Every sketch, however fragmentary a part of the life of its subject, has the vigor of its surroundings; and the papers upon the men and women of the Abolitionist period and the Civil War, though most of them have been somewhat revised for their present publication, have the heart-beats of the "times that tried men"s souls" throbbing in them true and loud.
One paper, upon John Brown"s Household, printed in 1859 and quite unaltered, preserves by the splendid restraint of its simple language the very spirit of the iron endeavor and concentred force it describes.
The value of an author"s judgment upon his contemporaries, is unquestioned; the advantage of a personal share in the lives and actions of the men who form his theme, added to our already confidence in his critical judgment, give it worth over other proved biography. On the deeds of many of the men whose work he commemorates, Fame has yet to p.r.o.nounce lastly: their services are too recent for a perfect judgment. But testimony such as this will surely have value in a decision.
One feels a little inclined to quarrel with the author that there is so little "I" in his book, that there are so few really personal glimpses, but of course this is too much to ask of a book which is really a compilation of scattered sketches; and perhaps Colonel Higginson will remedy the lack in the future.
It is seldom that one has the pleasure of reading so satisfying and delightful a piece of autobiography as Mrs. Howe"s "Reminiscences." One hardly knows, when the last page is turned, which of two capacities of the mind has been more completely filled and brimmed over: that of intellectual appreciation, or the well where abides the feeling of delighted enthusiasm which is inspired by our friend. We respond to the pleasure the reading gives us with a really personal sense of grat.i.tude.
The subject matter of the book could not have been of other than deep interest. Mrs. Howe"s long and beautiful life has been lived in surroundings of the highest culture of her time; the events of which she has written are those which will take their place in the history of the century just closing; and finally, the men and women who were her friends and in whose labors she shared, were the men and women whose opinions have largely moulded the events. But it is not all this, of unfailing interest though it must be, that gives the book its finest quality, and that makes one wish to read it over the moment one has read it through. It is, instead, that we have learned so much of a beauty-gifted and beauty-giving life in words at once so simple and so satisfying. Cheeriness and healthiness--if by the latter word one may express a certain poise and normalness of outlook--are the characteristics of the narrative. The great and the small of life each receive their just due; perhaps it is by her treatment of the small that we are best a.s.sured we have read into an intimacy with Mrs. Howe.
That perennial question as to the feminine lack of humor, which has lately been re-threshed in the newspapers, should receive final and silencing reply--had it ever deserved a reply at all--in the "Reminiscences." The narrative twinkles with keen appreciation of the humorous, the ludicrous, even of the deliciously nonsensical; also abounding in that larger sort of humor which does not consist in seeing the point to a joke, but which makes life bearable and judgments tender under conditions least likely to keep them so.
a.s.suredly Mrs. Howe did not put together the recollections of her life with primarily didactic purpose, just as a.s.suredly she did not write them down primarily for the benefit of the American young woman. Yet in view of the cause to which she has given the work of her latter years, it is permitted me to say that no greater encouragement could be given it for the future than the words from which we learn her personal services to it and to the other causes which she has aided with brain and hands throughout her life. _Helen Tracy Porter._
(Contemporaries, By Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1899. $2.00. Reminiscences: Julia Ward Howe.
Houghton, Mifflin & Co. Boston and New York. $2.50.)
LIFE AND LETTERS.
----The last scenes in the present-day epoch of commercialism promise to be like the last scenes in the old-time epoch of feudalism, picturesque, violent, and significant rendings and tearings of the whole body politic prior to a re-formation on the basis of a larger unity. Then they portended the unification of England under the Tudors, or the unification of France under the eleventh Louis. Now they portend--what?
Some larger, more spiritual unity, it may be guessed, that shall quietly and with unprecedented swiftness make use of the materialistic objects which the short-sighted leaders of commercialism now have in mind, and after a manner they no more dream is implied in their success than the royal dynasties of England and France dreamed that the b.l.o.o.d.y heads of kings would be the fruit of the new nationality.
----To the leaders of the commercial world-movement, their materialistic objects are ends in themselves, very substance of very substance. But the Time-spirit already laughs them to scorn and tosses them, as mere tools out of place, to some more convenient corner of her s.p.a.cious work-shop, where they make but one with a ma.s.s of other such tools awaiting the mastery of her history-shaping hand.
The tumults of South Africa and China are but signs of the vaster tumult in which these tumults shall be devoured and a.s.similated.
----In the world of faith, too, how restless is the aggregate organism!
Ruptures and dissolutions are splitting and fusing orthodoxies and heterodoxies.
And in the withdrawn and secret world of the human consciousness the ferment of new desires and potencies, opposed by all the organized and settled forces of opinion, is permeating thought, and stirring the slumbering soul to try the unguessed faculties of its idealism, as if the real king of the total Unquietness held there his throne.
The world of politics and commerce, the world of faith and intelligence tend, it would seem, already, towards that synthetic development foreseen in 1855, by one whom the obtuse world may yet have reason enough to recognize as one of the clearest-brained statesmen of the nineteenth century, though her trade was poetry not politics--Elizabeth Barrett Browning, when she said of the future:
"What I expect is a great development of Christianity in opposition to the churches, and of humanity generally in opposition to the nations."
GOETHE"S IPHIGENIE AT HARVARD.
It is an age of the universality of genius. Not only the treasures of our own literature in our own day, but the best that has been written in all lands in all ages, the best that is being thought and sung in every tongue to-day is ours. And the test of what is good is no longer that it appeals to the people of a certain period or race, but that it appeals to and expresses the spirit of humanity, that it fills a place in a _Welt-Litteratur_.
A striking instance of the power of the present to interpret the spirit of the past was the performance of Goethe"s Iphigenie at Harvard on the sixty-eighth anniversary of Goethe"s death. Professor Kuno Franke, writing in the New York Evening Post speaks of Iphigenie as "the worthiest production of artistic genius to represent German ideals to a distinctly academic audience at the foremost of American universities."
This it seems to us Iphigenie emphatically is _not_. In conscious imitation of Greek tragedy in the literary form and expression, as well as in the details of the story, it is Greek; in its psychological treatment, in the idea that personal salvation comes only through self-sacrifice, it is distinctively modern, but not German, in subject, expression or treatment.
Although the choice of Iphigenie as a representative German play was not justified, certainly nothing could have better expressed the genius of the greatest of German poets. The greatness of Goethe!--that was the fact of all others demonstrated by the performance of Iphigenie. He has given us a play which realizes the ideals of the Greek poets and sculptors, a play instinct with the deepest reverence of the Greek religion, yet at the same time a play which expressed the deepest emotions of a great spiritual revolution in his own life; a play which may be considered as a presentation of the very spirit of that Christianity which findeth its soul in losing it. One of its leading critics says of Iphigenie--"its ideals are not those of Greece or of Germany, or of any nationality or time, but rather the realization of the highest and n.o.blest aspirations of mankind in all lands and all tongues."
A universal literature is but the child of a universal religion, of that yearning toward the good and beautiful and true which has been the guiding star of man since the world began. The struggle in his own soul; the mystic meaning of a pagan faith, that in pa.s.sing has touched all succeeding ages with some measure of its radiant beauty; the poet"s vision of the future spiritual triumph of the race; all these Goethe united in one artistic expression, and the result is one of the great poems of the world.
The presentation of the play at Harvard was a marvellous exhibition of the power of a great artistic conception to carry an audience with it in enthusiastic appreciation of the spirit, without the necessity for an understanding of the medium of expression. Back of all expression is the spirit of its author, and as a beautiful voice interprets the meaning of the song written in an unknown tongue, so these German actors by the power of an art statuesque in its beauty, musical in expression, deeply spiritual in its interpretation of the poet"s soul, revealed to the audience the wondrous charm of Iphigenie. In a foreign tongue they portrayed the emotions of mythical heroes long dead in a distant land, and as we watched and listened the mythical dead became living mortals, and we understood their suffering and their heroism, saw the agony of the spiritual struggle, realized the force of the great temptation, knew the joy of the final victory.
A great poet, a drama of transcendent power and beauty, actors of consummate art, an enthusiastic audience,--nothing was lacking to make the event a memorable one. _H. S. O._
----At a recent debate at the "Philadelphia Browning Society" Miss Mary M. Cohen, the founder and first president of the Society and now one of its vice-presidents, opened the discussion with the following bright paper written to the question:--
Is Browning to be ranked as a legitimate member of the Victorian School?
Certainly he is. If any one tries to prove that he is not ent.i.tled to the claim, it must be because the poet has so much more of brilliant mental make-up than most of the Victorian writers that the critics are dazzled.