Emerson was in need of more skilled assistance, and although he kept up the pretense of caring for his pear-trees he soon relinquished the homelier implements; his farming was on the whole poetical, and played a larger part in his thoughts and verses than in his income. The history of his garden, however, illustrates his habits; and it was but a step from the plot about his door to the wild woodlands, the pastures, and Walden ledge, without an account of which the story of his life with nature would be incomplete. It must be said that he liked in nature the abundance and the vast scope of the elements rather than the beauty of landscape. In it he found at different solitude from that of his books, and it rested him at the same time that it refreshed and stimulated his thoughts. There are many fine sentences from the journals which show just in what way he felt these influences.

It is rather within doors that we see him most near in this memorial. The management of his household so far as it concerned the training of the children is very openly told. He was by no means so severe as to impose the rules in which he had himself been bred. He held cards in disfavor, and permitted them only after nightfall; he would allow no games on the Sabbath, but he took the children to walk after the Bible lessons and other duties of the day were done; he disapproved the light talk usual with the young, and himself set an example in seriousness, not permitting himself to laugh aloud; he greatly prized the reading of good books, insisted on study, gave attention to the reading and declamation of poetry, and took an immediate interest and oversight in the children's affairs. He did not neglect sports. He was an excellent walker, skated and swam; and he taught his boy, not apparently with the greatest dexterity, how to shoot with a gun. showed no sign of physical weakness, but had left the invalidism of his early

He

manhood behind him; on his Western journeys he met with conditions that would have tried strong constitutions, but did not suffer; and it is even said that he "throve on physical hardship." He was a frugal man in smoking, and would lay aside an unfinished cigar till another time. He had no liking for pet animals, and would not willingly touch them; on the other hand, he was fond of very small children, and had a nurse's skill in handling them. He was, as all know, hospitable to young men, and forgot, he says, his greater age in talking with them. Indeed, his son thinks he made too much of his supposed inability to be sociable, but was both accessible and agreeable; this, nevertheless, is a different thing from bare accessibility to others. He was a constant worker, doing usually, it appears, more than eight hours of writing and reading daily; and he had abundant leisure, being uninterrupted by other affairs than his

own.

His son denies to him the Yankee shrewdness with which, principally because of his negotiations in behalf of Carlyle, he has been credited. He understood ordinary accounts only with great difficulty, and was, in fact, deficient in all such matters. It is true he arranged for the delivery of his lectures, but without any system or proper plan beyond what circumstances enforced of themselves; and in later life the rise of the lyceum bureaus must have been a material assistance. He took advice from his friends in regard to investments; and he was much surprised to find how much more profitable his property proved when his son-in-law, Mr. Forbes, took charge of it. Shrewdness in business must, on this evidence, be left out of his character; and yet in his essays one finds a quality of mind which is not so well expressed by any other word, an acute sense which seems at times to modify the Old World mysticism of his mind with a certain Yankee

restraint. Sometimes, it is true, this springs rather from his diction than from his temperament.

The volume does not readily lend itself to condensed notice, as the portrait it gives is composed so closely of details, line on line. Any who wish to see Emerson as he lived, in the common relations of ordinary men, must read it, as being by far the most complete and valuable source of such information. The manner in which the memoir has been written is altogether admirable, and the description it incidentally gives of life in a

New England community is not the least part of its charm. Emerson himself is never lost sight of, he is the central figure on every page; but he is painted on a background of Concord scenes and people which yields his environment, and puts the whole story upon the common footing of life. The discussions at the close in regard to the growth of his poetic faculty of expression, the reality of his solutions of the problem of life for himself, and the harmony of his insights make a fitting end to a delightfully familiar book.

THREE octavo volumes about Madame de Staël might be full of interest and entertainment; the canvas is none too large for the subject, and the subject is still unhackneyed. Notwithstanding the countless pages that have now for a hundred years made her name famous, Madame de Staël has not even yet had her place as a woman and as a writer definitely and irrevocably assigned to her, and those who are most familiar with what has been said are the most ready to listen to one more criticism of her, whether it be eulogistic or condemnatory. But in these volumes there is little original criticism of any weight, and consequently they have small interest for previous students of the subject, while the structure of the work is such as to make it of not much use to any one who is not already well informed. It is a large, clumsy, and heavy accumulation of more or less valuable material, little of it new, and most of it well known. Written in German by a German lady, the original work is neither

1 Madame de Staël: her Friends and her Influence in Politics and Literature. By LADY BLENNERHASSETT. Translated by J. E. GORVOL. LXIV. — NO. 382.

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biographic, historic, nor philosophic in quality; it lacks homogeneousness; it has an over-abundance of episodical excursions; it is a sort of encyclopædia of Madame de Staël's "period; " it is crowded with more information than any reader cares to learn from one work alone (since what covers so much ground must of necessity be incomplete); but it wins the reader's respectful regard from the careful preparation it indicates in the author, and from the evident pains she has taken to be trustworthy.

This praise cannot be bestowed on the translator, an Englishwoman, who, unfortunately, gives proof of insufficient knowledge of German and of English, of history, of Madame de Staël's personal career and circumstances and her writings, and of literature in general.

Lady Blennerhassett's failure to communicate to the reader of these volumes an interest in their subject corresponding to that which must have induced the writing of them is an injustice to Madame de Staël. The prevailing tone DON CUMMING. Three volumes. London: Chapman & Hall. 1889.

of the book is excellently quiet and impartial. The facts are laid before the reader in the manner neither of defense nor attack, and there is perhaps only too little clue given to the interpretation of them. The historical importance of Madame de Staël is adequately set forth, and her literary value, but the strength of her personal charm is not. indicated with sufficient sympathy. Yet this is what needs to be most insisted on in any large estimate of her, and should be the more emphasized the more the tradition of it dies out. An almost repellent conception now attaches in many minds to Madame de Staël's name, physical ugliness, mental assumption, social fatiguingness, personal ill-temper, looseness of life, artificiality of sentiment, vanity, and selfishness. But in truth, if some of these faults were at times hers, she possessed no less some very high, very noble, very charming qualities, rarer than such defects.

Little that she has written will be much read by later generations; it has the temporary character of talk, of words spoken on occasion and in haste; but those whom she may continue to interest, any one who is touched by what she says, will be moved to noble thoughts. To be responsive to her is to recognize the essential value of generous enthusiasm, the essential harm of cynical or contemptuous views of human existence. Her flaming and flashing eloquence was one with the fire that warmed her heart, and made her life ardent throughout. The sincerity of her expressions of personal sensibility is selfevident; even the extravagance of her love and admiration for her father is not greater than that of Madame de Sévigné for her daughter, and is more justifiable. Her other passionate attachments, though they were chiefly visible in her intellectual sympathies, involved her whole nature; and if there were no other testimony to her familiarity with

delicate as well as strong emotions, her creation of the character of Delphine a character that in its sweet womanliness has few rivals in fiction would be a sufficient proof of the deep and generous tenderness Madame de Staël was capable of feeling.

But other witnesses abound. Madame de Beaumont, the embodiment of purely feminine qualities, wrote to Joubert, in 1795: "Were Madame de Staël less remarkable intellectually than she is, one still could not but honor and love her for her kindness and her noble, lofty, large soul, capable of courageous emotions of self-sacrifice; for she is what Madame Roland thought herself to be, and without the least self-conceit, and with the conviction that all the world is as good and generous as herself."

Sainte-Beuve has admirably described "the need of self-devotion and of expansion, the pity born of suffering endured, the eager desire to solace, if it might be, the sorrows of all and of each,

as it were the maternal compassion of genius for all the misfortunes of men," - that breaks forth from her at times in a tone and an accent that appeals to our most beneficent impulses, and draws us nearer to our fellows.

Lady Blennerhassett has not dwelt very much on this high humanity of Madame de Staël, but she has defined very well her historical position in these few words: "She was a spiritual link in the chain of a great transmission, and she imparted to a younger generation, bred up under despotic pressure, the liberal opinions which she had with masculine courage preserved through twelve years of persecution."

It is to be regretted that our author shows a lack of appreciation of the other illustrious woman, the contemporary of Madame de Staël, whose political illusions were more noble and her devotion to liberty more personal. Begging pardon of Madame de Beaumont,

Madame de Staël was not what Madame Roland wished, at least, to be. But the serious simplicity, the grave sincerity, of the one nature detracts nothing, in contrast, from the value of the vastly wider and more various, more complicated, and more vehement character of the other; and it would have been not only just, but graceful, to have depicted Madame Roland more truly here than by such lines as these: "She desired the overthrow of the existing state of things, not only because it offended her sense of justice, but because it offended her vanity. Social conditions in which there was no place for her must for that reason be immediately destroyed, and in their stead must stand the ideal republic, the chimera of her solitary dreams."

Lady Blennerhassett makes no mention of the somewhat curious fact that Madame de Staël and Madame Roland are not known ever to have met; that in only one letter of Madame Roland's, written before she came to Paris, does she mention Madame de Staël, and Madame Roland's name never once occurs in Madame de Staël's writings. It is conspicuously absent in her chapters (in the Considérations) on the Girondins.

There is no attempt in these volumes to delineate any but the external conditions of the personage they treat of. The author does not analyze, and comments on but little, the various relations in which Madame de Staël stood to the many distinguished men who were her friends or her lovers, her guests or her hosts, or to the not remarkable men who were her husbands. In this respect she follows the lines marked out by Madame de Staël's first and perhaps best biographer, her devotedly attached cousin, the thoughtful Madame Necker de Saussure. This reticence of her cousin was also in sympathy with the wishes and the practice of her children,

the omission from them of her letters, said, "The custom which has been introduced of printing the letters of celebrated persons without consideration for their memory, and of seizing upon their moral possessions, is a disgrace to our age, of which I have always heard my mother speak with the utmost disapproval." The few letters to her friends that have been here and there published would indicate that Madame de Staël's moral position has suffered rather than gained by this dignified silence on the part of her family. And those who care for her reputation have especially regretted, within the last year or two, that there was nothing from her own hand to oppose to the extraordinarily disagreeable representations contained in the Journal Intime of Benjamin Constant, of which many portions were published in the Revue Internationale in 1887. Her would-be defenders comfort themselves with the remembrance that Joubert said of him, "This man is to

me

'Comme un violon faux qui jure sous l'archet;' all that he says jars on me [me blesse l'esprit];" while, on the other hand, Joubert declared, in regard to Madame de Staël, "Of all the women who have appeared in print, I like only her and Madame de Sévigné." In full sympathy with him, Madame de Beaumont, writing to him, expresses the painful truth in the words, "I am unhappy from being forced to see how the lot of the woman whom I so deeply love is entangled with that of a man really deserving to be hated."

If Lady Blennerhassett glides smoothly over this part of Madame de Staël's life, she somewhat lingers over her religious attitude in her last days. But these indefinite indications of the absence and presence of personal sympa

of feeling in such matters.

Her son,

the editor of her works, in explaining

than otherwise to the reader.

In the qualities that mark the transla

tion there is nothing that is agreeable to the reader; and for the sake of those who have already become owners of the English volumes, as well as of those intending to purchase them, it may be well to note a few of the countless mistakes which (beside the fifty-two more insignificant ones mentioned in the Errata) greatly diminish their value. The following have been observed only in a casual examination of the book; very many more, of course, would be dis- covered in a careful comparison of the original with the translation.

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To the simple errata may be added that in the Translator's Note (of only four lines) "ehre " should be ihre. In an Italian quotation "guidecar" should be giudicar. In a French quotation une voile" (a sail) should be un voile (a veil). The reference, in a note, on the second page of the second volume, to Joubert should be nine lines higher. It is curiously misleading as it now stands. "Rachel," who is constantly mentioned, is known in English as well as German literature as Rahel, Rahel Levin, the wife of Varnhagen von Ense. "Lettres des Provinces" should be Les Provinciales, of Pascal ("Lettres écrites ...à un provinciale"). The royal family were not "released from the logographer's box," but from the box (loge) of the Logographe (a journal of the day). The Marquis d'Agoult did not demand that a major of the guards should be admitted into the hall where the Parliament was sitting, but he himself, major of the guards, demanded admission. The Princesse de Poix was not the "god-daughter" of the Maréchale de Beauvau. She was her step-daughter (Stieftochter), her husband's daughter. The Marquise de Créqui did not doubt the "sanity," but the intelligence, of Madame de Staël. On page 208 of the second volume, "everything that teaches experience should be everything that experience teaches. On page 218, "sport" should be the right of hunting. The name of

Dupont de Nemours is exchanged, in a well-known story, by mistranslation, for that of La Harpe. A very remarkable statement is made that a criticism (written about 1799) "ascribes the merit to Sainte-Beuve of," etc. The truth is that to this criticism Sainte-Beuve ascribes the merit of, etc. The translator has the air of being familiar with "the poetry of Aristotle," but not with his Poetics. "The marine school, which gave to English romance the stamp," etc., is a delightfully original way of speaking of the Lake school.

Of mistranslations which completely obscure the sense, the following may be cited as specimens: —

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In the critical period preceding Necker's first exile from Paris, Miss Gordon Cumming says, unintelligibly (and rendered still more unintelligible by the context): Necker had now to choose between obeying the king (and thus closing his public career) and the probability of a recall to the ministry if he should pay no heed to the royal command. He chose the latter course, now the less dangerous of the two." The true translation is: "Necker therefore saw before him the two alternatives: either, by obeying the king, to bar himself from access to the public; or, by paying no attention to this royal command, to put in jeopardy, in all probability, the prospect of his recall to the position of minister. He decided on the latter course, though he was assured it