Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 by Various

V >> Various >> Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863

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"Slavery's, of course, the chief corner-stone,"
Lilliburlero, etc.,
"Of our NEW CIV-IL-I-ZA-TI-ON!"
Lilliburlero, etc.
"Lero, lero, that's quite sincere O, that's quite sincere," says old
Uncle Sam,
"Lero, lero, filibustero, that's quite sincere," says old Uncle Sam.

"You'll understand, my recreant tool,"
Lilliburlero, etc.,
"You're to submit, and we are to rule,"

Lilliburlero, etc.
"Lero, lore, aren't you a hero! aren't you a hero!" says Uncle Sam,
"Lero, lero, filibustero, aren't you a hero!" says Uncle Sam.

"If to these terms you fully consent,"
Lilliburlero, etc.,
"I'll be Perpetual King-President,"
Lilliburlero, etc.
"Lero, lero, take your sombrero, off to your swamps!" says old Uncle Sam,
"Lero, lero, filibustero, cut, double-quick!" says old Uncle Sam.

* * * * *

REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.

_Titan: A Romance_. From the German of Jean Paul Friedrich Richter.
Translated by CHARLES T. BROOKS. In Two Volumes. Boston: Ticknor and
Fields.

Jean Paul first became one of the notabilities of German literature
after he had published "Hesperus," a novel which contains the originals
of the characters that reappear under different names in "Titan." His
previous popularity did not penetrate far within the circle of scholars
and thinkers, and never knocked at the charmed threshold of the Weimar
set, whose taste was controlled by Goethe and Schiller. But "Hesperus"
made a great noise, and these warders of the German Valhalla were
obliged to open the door just a crack, in order to reconnoitre the
pretentious arrival. Goethe first called the attention of Schiller to
the book, sending him a copy while he was at Jena, in 1795. Schiller
recognized at once its power and geniality, but was disposed to regard
it as a literary oddity, whose grotesque build and want of finish rather
depreciated the rich cargo,--at least, did not bring it handsomely into
port. The first book of "Wilhelm Meister" had appeared the year before,
and that was more acceptable to Schiller, who had cooled off after
writing his "Robbers," and was looking out for the true theory of poetry
and art. He and Goethe concluded that "Hesperus" was worth liking,
though it was a great pity the author had not better taste; he ought to
come up and live with them, in an aesthetic atmosphere, where he could
find and admire his superiors, and have his great crude gems ground
down to brilliant facets. Schiller said it was the book of a lonely and
isolated man. It was, indeed.

But it was a book which represented, far more profoundly and healthily
than Schiller's "Robbers," that revolt of men of genius against every
species of finical prescription, in literature and society, which
ushered in the new age of Germany. And it expresses with uncalculating
sincerity all the natural emotions which a century of pedantry and
Gallic affectation had been crowding out of books and men. It was a
charge at the point of the pen upon the dapper flunkeys who were keeping
the door of the German future; the brawny breast, breathing deep with
the struggle, and pouring out great volumes of feeling, burst through
the restraints of the time. He cleared a place, and called all men to
stand close to his beating heart, and almost furiously pressed them
there, that they might feel what a thing friendship was and the ideal
life of the soul. And as he held them, his face grew broad and deep with
humor; men looked into it and saw themselves, all the real good and the
absurdly conventional which they had, and there was a great jubilation
at the genial sight. And it was as if a lot of porters followed him,
overloaded with quaint and curious knowledge gathered from books of
travel, of medicine, of history, metaphysics, and biography, which they
dumped without much concert, but just as it happened, in the very middle
of a fine emotion, and all through his jovial speech. What an irruption
it was!--as if by a tilt of the planet the climate had changed suddenly,
and palm-trees, oranges, the sugarcane, the grotesque dragon-tree, and
all the woods of rich and curious grain, stood in the temperate and
meagre soil.

Schiller met Jean Paul in the spring of 1796. In writing to Goethe about
their interviews, he says,--"I have told you nothing yet about Hesperus.
I found him on the whole such as I expected, just as odd as if he had
fallen from the moon, full of good-will, and very eager to see things
that are outside of him, but he lacks the organ by which one sees";
and in a letter of a later date he doubts whether Richter will ever
sympathize with their way of handling the great subjects of Man and
Nature.

The reader can find the first interviews which Richter had with Goethe
and Schiller in Lewes's "Life of Goethe," Vol. II. p. 269. Of Goethe,
Richter said, "By heaven! we shall love each other!" and of Schiller,
"He is full of acumen, but without love." The German public, which loves
Richter, has reversed his first impression. And indeed Richter himself,
though he could not get along with Schiller, learned that Goethe's
loving capacity, which he thought he saw break out with fire while
Goethe read a poem to him, was only the passion of an artistic nature
which impregnates its own products.

Richter's love was very different. It was a sympathy with men and women
of all conditions, fed secretly the while that his shaggy genius was
struggling with poverty and apparently unfavorable circumstances. He was
always a child, yearning to feel the arms of some affection around him,
very susceptible to the moods of other people, yet testing them by a
humorous sincerity. All the books which he devoured in his desultory
rage for knowledge turned into nourishment for an imagination that
was destined chiefly to interpret a very lofty moral sense and a very
democratic feeling. And whenever his humor caught an edge in the
easterly moments of his mind, it was never sharpened against humanity,
and made nothing tender bleed. Now and then we know he has a caustic
thing or two to say about women; but it is lunar-caustic for a wart.

Goethe did not like this indiscriminate and democratic temper. The
sly remarks of Richter upon the Transparencies and Well-born
and Excellencies of his time, with their faded taste and dreary
mandarin-life varied by loose morals and contempt for the invisible,
could not have suited the man whose best friend was a real Duke, as it
happened, one of Nature's noblemen, one whose wife, the Duchess Sophia,
afterwards held Bonaparte so tranquilly at bay upon her palace-steps.
Goethe had, too, a bureaucratic vein in him; he spoke well of dignities,
and carefully stepped through the cumbrous minuet of court-life without
impinging upon a single Serene or Well-born bunyon. Mirabeau himself
would have elbowed his way through furbelows and court-rapiers more
forbearingly than Richter. It was not possible to make this genius
plastic, in the aesthetic sense which legislated at Weimar. Besides,
Goethe could not look at Nature as Richter did. To such a grand observer
Richter must have appeared like a sunset-smitten girl.

An American ought to value Richter's books for the causes which made
them repulsive to all social and literary cliques. The exquisite art,
and the wise, clear mind of Goethe need not come into contrast, to
disable us from giving Richter the reception which alone he would value
or command. Nor is it necessary to deny that the frequent intercalations
and suspensions of his narrative, racy and suggestive as they are, and
overflowing with feeling, will fret a modern reader who is always "on
time," like an express-man, and is quite as regardless of what may be
expressed.

"Titan" is not a novel in the way that Charles Reade's, or Eugene Sue's,
or Victor Hugo's books are novels. The nearest English model, in the
matter of style and quaint presuming on the reader's patience, is
Sterne. But if one wishes to see how Richter is _not_ sentimental, in
spite of his incessant and un-American emotion, let him read Sterne, and
hasten then to be embraced by Richter's unsophisticated feeling, which
is none the less refreshing because it is so exuberant and has such a
habit of pursuing all his characters. And where else, in any language,
is Nature so worshipped, and so rapturously chased with glowing words,
as some young Daphne by some fiery boy?

Neither are there any characters in this novel, in the sense of marked
idiosyncrasies, or of the subtile development of an individual.
Sometimes Richter's men and women are only the lay-figures upon which
he piles and adjusts his gorgeous cloth-of-gold and figured damask. But
Siebenkaes and his wife, in "Flower-, Fruit-, and Thorn-Pieces," are
characters, quite as much as any of Balzac's nice _genre_ men and
women, and on a higher plane. Richter uses his persons of both sexes
principally to express the conditions of his feeling; they are cockles,
alternately dry and sparkling, underneath his mighty ebb and flow.

On one point we doubt if the American mind will understand Richter. He
believed in a love that one man might have for another man, which as
little corresponds to the average idea of friendship as the anti-slavery
sentiment of the "People's party" corresponds to Mr. Garrison's. In this
respect Richter creates an ideal and interfuses it with all his natural
ardor, which a German can understand better than the men of any other
nation, for in him is the tendency that Richter seeks to set forth by
his passionate imagination. Orestes and Pylades, David and Jonathan, and
the other famous loves of men, are suspected by the calculating breeds
of people. Brother Jonathan seldom finds his David, and he doubtless
thinks the Canon ought to have transferred that Scriptural friendship
into the Apocrypha. We shall sniff at the highly colored intercourse
of Richter's men, for it is often more than we can do to really love a
woman. We shall pronounce the relation affected, and the expression of
it turgid, even nauseous. But there is a genuine noble pulse in the
German heart, which beats to the rhythm of two men's heroic attachment,
and can expand till all the blood that flows through Richter's style
is welcomed and propelled by it. Still, we think that the unexpressed
friendship may also stand justified before the ideal.

The reader must be content to meet this stout and fervent man as he is,
not expecting that his genius will consult our tastes or prejudices,
or that his head will stoop at all for the sake of our company. Then
beneath his dense paragraphs and through his rambling pages his humility
will greet us, and fraternal regards draw us irresistibly to him. He is
a man for a people's reading, notwithstanding all the involutions of
style and thought which might suggest a different judgment. He certainly
does not write like Cobbett or Franklin, nor has he the thin, clear
polish of the popular historian. Yet his shrewdness and tenderness will
touch all simple-minded men; and twenty Cobbetts, or people's writers,
sharply rubbed together, could never light the flame of his imperial
imagination, for it is a kind of sunshine, sometimes hot enough, but
broad, impartial, and quickening, wherever there is something that waits
to grow.

And scarcely one man in a century appears so highly gifted with that
wonderful quality for which we have no better name than Humor. His humor
is the conciliation that takes place between love and knowledge. The two
tendencies create the bold and graceful orbit on which his well-balanced
books revolve. With one alone, his impetuosity would hasten to quench
itself in the molten centre; and with the other alone, he would fly
cynically beyond the reach of heat. This reconciling humor sometimes
shakes his book with Olympic laughter; as if the postprandial nectar
circulated in pools of cups, into which all incompatibilities fall and
are drowned. You drink this recasting of the planet's joys and sorrows,
contempt and contradictions, while it is yet fluent and bubbling to the
lip. There are all the selfish men, and petulant, intriguing women in
it, all their weaknesses, and the ill-humor of their times. But the
draught lights up the brain with an anticipation of some future solution
of these discords, or perhaps we may say, intoxicates us with the serene
tolerance which the Creative Mind must have for all His little ones. Is
not humor a finite mood of that Impartiality whose sun rises upon the
evil and the good, whose smile becomes the laughter of these denser
skies?

It is plain from what we have said that the task of translating this
novel must be full of difficulties. There are strange words, allusions
drawn from foreign books that are now a hundred years old or more and
never seen in libraries; the figurative style makes half the sentences
in a page seem strange at first, they invite consideration, and do not
feebly surrender to a smooth consecutive English. Just as you think you
are at the bottom of a paragraph and are on the point of stepping on the
floor, he stops you with another stair, or lets you through: in other
words, you are never safe from a whimsical allusion or a twist in the
thought. The narrative extends no thread which you may take in one hand
as you poke along: it frequently disappears altogether, and it seems as
if you had another book with its vocabulary and style.

It is not too high praise to say that Mr. Brooks has overcome all
these difficulties without the sacrifice of a single characteristic
of Richter's genius. We have the sense and passion unmutilated. The
translation is accurate, and also bold. By the comparison of a few
test-passages with the original, Mr. Brooks's adroit and patient labor
appears clearly. We desire to pay him the meed of our respect and
gratitude. Few readers of "Titan" will appreciate the toil which has
secured them this new sensation of becoming intimate with "Jean Paul the
Only." It is new, because, notwithstanding several books of Jean
Paul have been already translated, "Titan" is the most vigorous and
exhaustive book he wrote. He poured his whole fiery and romantic soul
into it. It may be said that all the fine and humane elements of the
revolutionary period in which he lived appear in this book,--the
religious feeling, the horror of sensuality, the hatred of every kind of
cant, the struggle for definite knowledge out of a confusing whirl of
man's generous sentiments all broken loose, the tendency to worship duty
and justice, and the Titanic extravagance of a "lustihood," both
of youth and emotion, which threatens, in Alexander's temper, to
appropriate the world. All this is admirably expressed in the Promethean
title of the book. We do not think that it can be profitably read, or
with an intelligent respect for its great author, unless we recall the
period, the state of politics, religion, domestic life, the new German
age of thought which was rising, with ferment, amid uncouth gambolling
shapes of jovial horn-blowing fellows, from the waves. He is the
divinity who owns a whole herd of them. As we sit to read, let the same
light fall on the page in which it was composed, and there will appear
upon it the genius which is confined to no age or clime, and addresses
every heart.

_The Works of Rufus Choate, with a Memoir of his Life_. By SAMUEL GILMAN
BROWN, Professor in Dartmouth College. In Two Volumes. Boston: Little,
Brown, & Co.

In estimating the claims of any biographical work we must bear in mind
the difficulties of the subject, the advantages which the writer enjoys,
and the disadvantages under which he labors. The life, genius, and
character of Mr. Choate present a stimulating, but not an easy task to
him who essays to delineate them. We have read of a man who had taught
his dog to bite out of a piece of bread a profile likeness of Voltaire;
it was not more difficult to draw a caricature of Mr. Choate, but to
paint him as he was requires a nice pencil and a discriminating touch.
The salient traits were easily recognized by all. The general public
saw in him a man who flung himself into his cases with the fervor
and passion of a mountain-torrent, whose eloquence was exuberant and
sometimes extravagant, who said quaint and brilliant things with a very
grave countenance, and whose handwriting was picturesquely illegible. We
verily believe that Mr. Choate's peculiar handwriting was as well known
to his townsmen and neighbors, was as frequent a topic of observation
and comment, as any of the traits of his mind and character. We need
hardly add that this popular image which was called Mr. Choate resembled
the real man about as much as a sign-post daub of General Washington
resembles the head by Stuart. The skill of the true artist is shown in
catching and transferring to the canvas the delicate distinctions which
make a difference between faces which have a general similarity. No man
had more need of this fine discrimination in order to have justice done
him than Mr. Choate; for there was no man who would have been more
imperfectly known, had he been known only by those prominent and obvious
characteristics which all the world could see. He was a great and
successful lawyer, but his original taste was for literature rather
than law. Few men were more before the public than he, and yet he loved
privacy more than publicity. He had acquaintances numberless, and facile
and gracious manners, but his heart was open to very few. His eloquence
was luxuriant and efflorescent, but he was also a close and compact
reasoner. He had a vein of playful exaggeration in his common speech,
but his temperament was earnest, impassioned, almost melancholy. The
more nearly one knew Mr. Choate, the more cause had he to correct
superficial impressions.

Professor Brown has many qualifications for the task which was devolved
upon him. He knew, loved, and admired Mr. Choate. A graduate and
professor of Dartmouth College, the son of a former president, he caught
a larger portion of the light thrown, back upon the college by the
genius and fame of her brilliant son. A good scholar himself, he is
competent to appreciate the ripe scholarship of Mr. Choate, and his love
of letters. His style is clear, simple, and manly. He has, too, the
moral qualities needed in a man who undertakes to write the biography
of an eminent man recently deceased, who has left children, relatives,
friends, acquaintances, and rivals,--the tact, the instinct, the
judgment which teaches what to say and what to leave unsaid, and refuses
to admit the public into those inner chambers of the mind and heart
where the public has no right to go. But he has one disqualification:
he is not a lawyer, and no one but a lawyer can take the full gauge and
dimensions of what Mr. Choate was and did. For Mr. Choate, various as
were his intellectual tastes, wide as was the range of his intellectual
curiosity, made all things else secondary and subservient to legal
studies and professional aspirations. To the law he gave his mind
and life, and all that he did outside of the law was done in those
breathing-spaces and intermissions of professional labor in which most
lawyers in large practice are content to do nothing.

But Professor Brown's biography is satisfactory in all respects, even in
the delineations of the professional character of Mr. Choate, where, if
anywhere, we should have looked for imperfect comprehension. The members
of the bar may rest assured that justice has been done to the legal
claims and merits of one of whom they were so justly proud; and the
public may be assured that the traits of Mr. Choate's character, the
qualities of his mind,--his great and conspicuous powers, as well as his
lighter graces and finer gifts,--have been set down with taste, feeling,
judgment, and discrimination. This seems but measured language, and yet
we mean it for generous praise; bearing always in mind the difficulties
of the subject, and, as Professor Brown has happily said in his preface,
that "the traits of Mr. Choate's character were so peculiar, its lights
and shades so delicate, various, and evanescent." We confess that we sat
down to read the biography not without a little uneasiness, not without
a flutter of apprehension. But all feeling of this kind was soon
dissipated as we went on, and there came in its place a grateful sense
of the grace, skill, and taste which Professor Brown had shown in his
delineation, and the faithful portrait he had produced. And one secret
of this success is to be found in the fact that he had no other object
or purpose than to do justice to his subject. He is entirely free from
self-reference. There is not in the remotest corner of his mind a wish
to magnify his office and draw attention from the theme of the biography
to the biographer himself. He permits himself no digressions, he
obtrudes no needless reflections, enters into no profitless discussions:
he is content to unfold the panorama of Mr. Choate's life, and do little
more than point out the scenes and passages as they pass before the
spectator's eye.

It was not an eventful life; it was, indeed, the reverse. It was a life
passed in the constant and assiduous practice of the law. We do not
forget his brief term of service in the House of Representatives, and
his longer period in the Senate; but these were but episodes. They were
trusts reluctantly assumed and gladly laid aside; for he was one of
those exceptional Americans who have no love of political distinction
or public office. A lawyer's life leaves little to be recorded; the
triumphs of the bar are proverbially ephemeral, and lawyers themselves
are willing to forget the cases they have tried and the verdicts they
have won. Had Mr. Choate been merely and exclusively a lawyer, the story
of his life could have been told in half a dozen pages; but though
he was a great lawyer and advocate, he was something more: he was an
orator, a scholar, and a patriot. He had no taste for public life, as
we have just said; but he had the deepest interest in public subjects,
loved his country with a fervid love, had read much and thought much
upon questions of politics and government Busy as he always was in
his profession, his mind, discursive, sleepless, always thirsting for
knowledge, was never content to walk along the beaten highway of the
law, but was ever wandering into the flowery fields of poetry and
philosophy on the right hand and the left. These volumes show how
untiring was his industry, how various were his attainments, how
accurate was his knowledge, how healthy and catholic were his
intellectual tastes. The only thing for which he had no taste was
repose; the only thing which he could not do was to rest. When we see
what his manner of life was, how for so many years the nightly vigil
succeeded the daily toil, how the bow was always strung, how much he
studied and wrote outside of his profession, even while bearing the
burden and anxiety of an immense practice, we can only wonder that he
lived so long.

The whole of the second volume and a full half of the first are occupied
with Mr. Choate's own productions, mainly speeches and lectures. Many of
these have been published before, but some of them appear in print for
the first time. Mr. Choate's peculiar characteristics of style and
manner--his exuberance of language, his full flow of thought, his
redundancy of epithet, his long-drawn sentences, stretching on through
clause after clause before the orbit of his thought had begun to turn
and enter upon itself--are well known. We cannot say that the contents
of these volumes will add to the high reputation which Mr. Choate
already enjoys as a brilliant writer, an eloquent speaker, a patriotic
statesman; but we can and do say that the glimpses we herein get of his
purely human qualities--of that inner life which belongs to every man
simply as man--all add to the interest which already clings to his name,
by showing him in a light and in relations of which the public who hung
with delight upon his lips knew little or nothing. He had long been one
of the celebrities of the city; his face and form were familiar to his
towns-people, and all strangers were anxious to see and hear him: but,
though he moved and acted in public, he dwelt apart. His orbit embraced
the three points of the court-room, his office, and his home,--and
no more. He had no need of society, of amusement, of sympathy, of
companionship. We are free to say that we think it was a defect in his
nature, at least a mistake in his life, that he did not cultivate his
friendships more. Few men of his eminence have ever lived so long and
written so few letters. But his diaries and journals, now for the first
time given to the light, show us the inner man and the inner life. Here
he communed with himself. Here he intrusted his thoughts, his hopes,
his dreams, his aspirations to the safe confidence of his note-book.
No portions of the two volumes are to us of more interest than these
diaries and journals. They bear the stamp of perfect sincerity. They
show us how high his standard was, how little he was satisfied with
anything he had done, how deep and strong were his love of knowledge and
his love of beauty, how every step of progress was made a starting-point
for a new advance. And from these, and other indications which these
volumes contain, we can learn how modest he was, how gentle and
courteous, how full of playfulness and graceful wit, how unprejudiced,
how imbued with reverence for things high and sacred, how penetrated
with delicate tact and sensitive propriety. He nursed no displeasures;
he cultivated no antipathies; he was free from dark suspicions, sullen
resentments, and smouldering hates; he put no venom upon his blade.

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