1 struction of the principal character out of an excess of womanhood; but Mrs. Burnett, while more conspicuously a woman in her dealing with life than either of the others, has also taken a larger canvas and essayed a more serious piece of art. It is not possible to read her latest novel without being aware of the intensity of feeling and thought which have been given to it at times; at times, we say, for there are passages so sluggish in movement that one is almost tempted to believe that the author was either uncertain in her intention, or possessed with the notion that it was necessary to produce a four years' effect upon the reader by a deliberate slowing of the action of the story. As a matter of fact, the element of time is of very slight significance in the development of the plot of this novel, and indeed introduces a disturbance in the reader's mind; for he cannot help thinking that where passions are so intense as in the lives of Bertha and Tredennis it would be impossible to avoid an earlier éclaircissement. Again, the nobility and strength of Tredennis, when given four years' trial, would inevitably find some solution of the problem of his life through work; and his love for Bertha, which Mrs. Burnett uses as an indication of his strong character, is dangerously near being a sign of radical weakness. So long as the lapse of time is not emphasized by the writer, the reader is content to see the dramatis persona of the tale only in their immediate and frequent relation to each other; but when he is repeatedly, reminded that year after year is rolling round, he cannot help doubting if the tremendous pressure which each person in the story has on his or her neighbor would not in the course of nature be somewhat more relaxed. By keeping out of sight this troublesome element of time, the 1 Through One Administration. By FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT. Boston: James R. Osgood & Co. 1883. author would find it easier to persuade us that the very trifling incidents of the story, like the gift of a bunch of heliotropes, or the attitude in which people stand or sit, must needs recur to the memory of the characters from time to time. In so realistic a tale as this, these romantic incidents have a disproportionate value. We forget that we are talking about a story which the reader may chance not to have read. It is the story, in its main lines, of a young woman entering Washington society just as a young officer in the army - who if he had stayed longer in Washington would doubtless have won the young woman — left for the frontier. After eight years, Colonel Tredennis returns to Washington, to find Bertha Herrick the wife of a light-minded, selfish fellow, who is drifting about. She has apparently thrown herself into society from a love of power and a pursuit of happiness, but the return of the friend of her youth is the occasion for a better knowledge of her. She has secretly retained her love of him, which has grown more intense with the decline of her respect for her husband. Through one administration we are allowed to see the torture of this unhappy woman. Outwardly she is the brightest, gayest, of mortals, and little by little these arts and charms are made use of by her husband to accomplish political and corrupt ends. Colonel Tredennis looks on in anguish. He refuses to abandon his faith in her, but that faith must rest upon recollection and occasional glimpses of her real nature; the sight which is offered him is of a heartless, restless woman. But this is the mask which she wears to conceal from him her fatal love. She seems bent on destroying his faith in her, in order to protect herself from herself. This incessant conflict between the real and the assumed woman is, in our judgment, a violation of nature. We do not deny that Mrs. Burnett has con structed this dualism with great subtlety and skill, but the very means which she has taken tends to create skepticism; for the reader is compelled to follow a bewildering succession of dresses, attitudes, looks, and half-uttered words in order to realize to himself this protean shape. The brilliant conversations which are intended to illustrate her position are so dazzling as to confuse the image; and if it were not for the recurrence now and again to the real tragedy which is going on, the reader would become weary of this highly wrought woman and unable to give her the dole of pity to which she is entitled. Moreover, the subtlety with which Mrs. Burnett treats this character involves her in a singular inconsistency. Mrs. Amory is represented as a woman of great penetration. She certainly has read her husband thoroughly; yet after an indefinitely long and very familiar acquaintance with the Westoria business, this subtle woman is overpowered by a revelation of the central fact. It seems impossible that she should not have known of her husband's real connection with the fraud. There are two other characters, who act somewhat as foils to the principal ones: Arbuthnot, an extremely refined and sensitive man, who hovers near the tragedy, and Agnes Sylvestre, a woman who has suffered like Bertha, but has found a philosophic repose. The details of each character are drawn with scrupulous care and much nicety, and the scene of their betrothal is admirably managed. Nevertheless, clever as Arbuthnot is, we venture to think that Mrs. Burnett deliberately changed her mind about him when her story was half done. She tries in the latter half to persuade us that Arbuthnot was misunderstood by everybody, and that he was really a fine, unselfish, and honorable fellow. For all that, she is accountable for the misunderstanding. She has furnished certain touchstones of character in Professor Herrick and Colonel Tre dennis, and gives us to understand, in the former half of the book, that these men profoundly distrust Arbuthnot, not from anything which he says or does, but from what he is. That is the way with touchstones. Yet all this distrust vanishes, and not through any new revelation of his character. He has all the make-up of a subtle villain, and the reader accepts him in that quality, only to discover after a while that the author of his being has decided to make his subtlety a subtlety of virtue. It is, indeed, the excess of this finespun web of character which weakens the value of Mrs. Burnett's work. The reader is required to follow the pattern of the spiritual plot too closely. The incidental plot is not perplexing. That is seen clearly enough; but the difficulty arises from an insistence of the author that we shall know her characters too intimately, and it is her own fault that, in keeping us constantly at work finding them out, she retards the progress of her story, and creates a sense of weari ness. Could we not have known Mrs. Amory just as well through fewer interviews? Must we be introduced to her afresh whenever she puts on a new gown? Even her physical disabilities come to fatigue us. She is constantly on the verge of greater ills than befall her, and we come to think of her as liv ing in a condition of arrested faintness. This physical statement goes too far. We object to having mysterious operations of her organization hinted at, with an aside by the author that women will understand what she means. There is, however, a finer womanly power which excites our admiration. No man could have written the dramatic scene where Mrs. Amory triumphs over her adversaries at the ball, when her social doom seemed already pronounced; and the reader for once is really excited by the fear that she will not have the physical strength to go through with it. He watches the color in her cheek with real concern. There are passages, also, which refuse to admit of reference to sex, as that admirable one when Tredennis confronts Amory and wrings his true character from him. It is plain that Washington society has given Mrs. Burnett much food for reflection, and the lives of the men and women who draw their bread from official patronage are depicted with power and earnestness. There is much that is in protest against corruption, and there are glimpses of political life as seen from the interior; but after all, the author's interest is in her characters and their effect upon each other. We think that if she had allowed this interaction of the characters to take place more positively through the incidents of such society, and had depended less upon their perpetual comment upon each other, her book would have been a stronger one. It is strong in patches; it lacks the cumulative force of a great tragedy, because, while the plot is cumulative, the crisis of the characters is never really reached; at any rate, there is no coincidence between that crisis and the crisis of the plot. The book, when all is said, is a brilliant book. It might have been a great one. JONES VERY. MR. ANDREWS has done an excellent service in saving from oblivion the name of a man and a poet unique in his time, and singularly out of keeping with this age of worldliness.1 In 1839, a little volume of his writings, including three prose essays, Shakespeare, Hamlet, and Epic Poetry, with about sixty sonnets in the Shakespearean form and a few lyrical pieces, was published by Little & Brown, at the instance of Mr. Emerson, who took a warm personal and lit erary interest in the author. This collection is out of print, and has for many years been rare. The present volume does not contain the essays, but comprises twice as many poems, though still not all that Mr. Very produced. The essays would scarcely attract attention now, in the altered condition of literary estimate; many of the poems are commonplace; some are but feeble repetitions of sentiments that had been better expressed before. One or two of those here presented to the public might have 1 Poems. By JONES VERY. With an Introductory Memoir by WILLIAM P. ANDREWS. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 1883. been dropped, as being tame or diluted; but the best give evidence of original power, genuine feeling, and unconscious art, if art can be said ever to be unconscious. At all events, they betray a peculiar tone of religious emotion, expressed in suitable language, always simple, often beautiful, sometimes ravishiugly sweet and touching. We cannot in all cases respond to Mr. Andrews' judgment that "Mr. Very's verse is absolutely composed without a thought of literary form; that might not be a recommendation; but we can say with him that it is characterized by "a wholly natural spontaneity, which is almost as rare as it is conceded to be admirable." From the little memoir, simply, modestly, and charmingly written, without fulsome laudation, yet with loving appreciation of the author's claims, one learns that Mr. Very was born at Salem, on the 28th of August, 1813; that when a boy nine years old he went to sea with his father, who was a shipmaster; that he studied at the public grammar school of his native town; that he was an eager student, recluse, shy, introspec tive; that, after due preparation, in course of which he qualified himself as a tutor in Latin, he entered Harvard College in the last term of the Sophomore year, and was graduated with all but the highest rank in 1836; that he was appointed tutor in Greek, a language he excelled in, and studied theology in the Divinity School at the same time; that he was not a popular preacher, never had a parish, never received a "call;" that in 1838, including some months of 1837 and 1839, — the height of the so-called Transcendental period, -he experienced a singular illumination, won the sympathies of Mr. Emerson and other leaders of that movement, and was by many regarded as a great light, by many as a candidate, along with Mr. Emerson and others, for an insane asylum; that at the end of this crisis, during which he wrote his finest poems, he fell into obscurity, passed the remainder of his days in Salem, and died on the 8th of May, 1880. At the time the present writer knew him, ten years or so after his spiritual exaltation, he was a tall, thin man, quiet, reserved, silent, serene, who had somewhat the aspect of an extinct crater. He looked as if he belonged to another sphere. His form was angular, his movement shy, his speech simple, plain, direct. His greeting was not hearty, precisely, for it was bloodless, but gladsome, a singular smile irradiating his solemn countenance like the sudden revelation of a soul within. It came and went instantaneously, leaving no trace of its presence, betraying no hint of its origin. The man appeared and disappeared like a spectre. His poems show a deep though calm love of natural beauty. According to Mr. Andrews, his fondness for flowers was early instilled into him by his mother, for whom he cherished a very tender affection; but, as appears from his writings, his love as well for nature as for man was of an impersonal character, the love of God absorbing all other, the thought of divine manifestation alone being of interest to him. Hawthorne ascribed his limitations to a want of feeling for the ludicrous. This is appar ent; but equally apparent is the absence of humor in the sense of personal sympathy with life. Thus in the two sonnets, one entitled The Slaveholder, the other The Slave, there is no allusion to the human condition of either, or to the conflict which divided the country. The reader would not suspect that any save spiritual considerations were of the smallest concern. In the days of his fame, if fame it could be called, Mr. Very's poems attracted the attention of a few eminent judges. Emerson spoke enthusiastically of them as "bearing the unquestionable stamp of grandeur." "They have the sublime unity of the Decalogue or the Code of Menu; and if as monotonous, yet are they almost as pure, as the sounds of surrounding nature." Mr. Bryant praised their "extraordinary grace and originality." Mr. Richard H. Dana declared that they stood "apart in American literature;" that they were "deeply and poetically thoughtful, true in language, and complete as a whole." Later, Mr. George W. Curtis has given as his judgment that they are "gems of purest ray serene." And in a note to one of Emerson's letters to Carlyle, wherein reference is made to the little volume of Very's Essays and Poems, Mr. Charles E. Norton calls it "the work of an exquisite spirit. Some of the poems it contains are as if written by a George Herbert who had studied Shakespeare, read Wordsworth, and lived in America." ica." We quote a few of the poems in order to convey an idea of their charac The following will be familiar to those acquainted with religious verse: THE PRAYER. WILT Thou not visit me ? The plant beside me feels thy gentle dew, And every blade of grass I see From thy deep earth its quickening moisture drew. Wilt Thou not visit me? Thy morning calls on me with cheering tone; And every hill and tree Lead but one voice, the voice of Thee alone. Come, for I need thy love More than the flower the dew, or grass the rain; Come gently as thy holy dove; And let me in thy sight rejoice to live again. I will not hide from them When thy storms come, though fierce may be their wrath, But bow with leafy stem, And strengthened follow on thy chosen path. Yes, Thou wilt visit me: Nor piant nor tree thine eye delights so well, As, when from sin set free, My spirit loves with thine in peace to dwell. THE SON. FATHER, I wait thy word. The sun doth stand THE SPIRIT LAND. FATHER! thy wonders do not singly stand, CHANGE. FATHER! there is no change to live with Thee, I but rejoicing hasten on the way. The morning comes with blushes overspread, And in its modest dawn around me shed, Thou hear'st the prayer and the ascending hymn. Hour follows hour, the lengthening shades descend; Yet they could never reach as far as me, THE fairest day that ever yet has shone THE APOSTLES. THE words that come unuttered by the breath, Looks without eyes, these lighten all the globe; They are the ministering angels, sent where Death Has walked the earth so long in seraph's robe; |