Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, April 1885

Harriet Martineau (Famous Women Series). By Mrs. F. Fenwick Miller. Boston: Roberts Brothers.

The distinguished woman who forms the subject of this biography is less known and read in America than she should be, and it is to be hoped that this concise, lucid and well-written account of her life and work will awaken interest in one whose literary labors will merit perusal and study. Miss Martineau was one of the precursors of that movement for the larger life and mental liberty of her sex, which to-day has assumed formidable proportions, and indulged, we need hardly say, many strange vagaries. Miss Martineau began to write at an early age and soon began to impress herself on the public mind, though it was for a long time suspected that she was a man. The whole tone of her mind and intellectual sympathies was eminently masculine, though on the emotional and moral side of her nature she was intensely feminine. An early love disappointment, as has been the case with not a few literary women, shut her out from that circle of wifehood and motherhood in which she would have been far more happy than she was ordained to be by fate. Yet the world would have been a loser, so true is it that it is often by virtue of those conditions which sacrifice happiness that the most precious fruits of life are bestowed on the world. It would be interesting to follow the literary career of Miss Martineau, if space permitted, as her life was not only rich in its own results but interwoven with the most aggressive, keen and significant literary life of her age. To the world at large Miss Martineau, who had a philosophical mind of the highest order, is best known as the translator of Comte, of whose system she was an enthusiastic advocate. Her translation of Comte’s ponderous “Positive Philosophy,” published in French in six volumes, which she condensed into three volumes of lucid and forcible English, is not merely a masterpiece of translation, but a monument of acumen. So well was her work done, that Comte himself adapted it for his students’ use, discarding his own edition. So it came to pass that Comte’s own work fell out of use, and that his complete teachings became accessible only to his countrymen through a retranslation of Miss Martineau’s original translation and adaptation. Remarkable as were her philosophical powers, her work in the domain of imagination, though always hinging on a serious purpose, was of a superior sort. A keen and successful student of political economy, she wrote a series of remarkable tales, based on various perplexing problems in this line of thought and research. In addition to these, her pathetic and humorous tales are full of charm, and distinguished by a style equally charming and forcible. She might have been a great novelist had not her fondness for philosophical studies become the passion of her life. She was an indefatigable contributor to newspapers and magazines on a great variety of subjects, though she generally wrote anonymously. It was for this reason that her literary labors, which were arduous in the extreme, were comparatively ill-paid, and that life, even in her old age, was no easy struggle for her. The work, among her voluminous writings, on which her fame will probably rest as on a corner-stone, is “A History of the Thirty Years Peace.” This is a history of her own time, pungent, full of powerful color, though often sombre, impartial yet searching, characterized by the sternest love of truth, and couched in a literary style of great force and clearness. She showed the rare power of discussing events which were almost contemporary, as calmly as if she were surveying a remote period of antiquity. The Athenæum said of this book on its publication: “The principles which she enunciates are based on eternal truths, and evolved with a logical precision that admits rhetorical ornament without becoming obscure or confused.” Another remarkable work was “Eastern Life,” the fruit of research in the East. In this she made a bold and masterly attack on the dogmatic beliefs of Christianity. The end and object of her reasoning in this work is: That men have ever constructed the Image of a Ruler of the Universe out of their own minds; that all successive ideas about the Supreme Being have originated from within and been modified by the surrounding circumstances; and that all theologies, therefore, are baseless productions of the human imagination and have no essential connection with those great religious ideas and emotions by which men are constrained to live nobly, to do justly, and to love what they see to be the true and right. The publication of this book raised a storm of opprobrium, for England was then far more illiberal than now. Yet it is a singular fact that, in spite of her free-thinking, Harriet Martineau had as her intimate friends and warm admirers some of the most pious and sincere clergymen of the age. She died in 1876 at the age of seventy-four, after a life of exemplary goodness and brilliant intellectual activity, honored and loved by all who knew her, even by those who dissented most widely from her beliefs. She was among those who ploughed up the mental soil of her time most successfully, and few, either men or women, have written with more force, sincerity and suggestiveness on the great serious questions of life.

Weird Tales by E. T. W. Hoffman. New Translation from the German, with a Biographical Memoir, by J. T. Beally, B.A. In two volumes. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

Hoffman, the German romancer, to most English readers who know of him, is a nomen et preteria nihil, yet in his own land he is a classic. His stories are mostly short tales or novelettes, for he appears to have lacked the sustained vigor and concentration for the longer novel, like our own Poe, to whom he has been sometimes likened in the character of his genius. Yet how marvellously unlike Poe’s are the stories in the volumes before us! The intense imaginativeness, logical coherence and lofty style which mark Poe are absent in Hoffman. Yet, on the other hand, the latter, who like his American analogue revels in topics weird and fantastic, if not horrible, relieves the sombre color of his pictures with flashes of homely tenderness and charming humor, of which Poe is totally vacant.

Hoffman, who was well born, though not of noble family, received an excellent education. He studied at Königsburg University, where he matriculated as a student of jurisprudence, and seems to have made enough proficiency in this branch of knowledge to have justified the various civil appointments which he from time to time received during his strange and stormy life, only to forfeit them by acts of mad folly or neglect. He was by turns actor, musician, painter, litterateur, civil magistrate and tramp. Gifted with brilliant and versatile talents, there was probably never a man more totally unbalanced and at the mercy of every wind of passion and caprice that blew. Had he possessed a self-directing purpose, a steady ideal to which he devoted himself, it is not improbable that his genius might have raised him to a leading place in German literature. Yet perhaps his talents and tastes were too versatile for any very great achievement, even under more favorable conditions. As matters stand he is known to the world by his short tales, in which he uses freely the machinery of fantasy and horror, though he never revolts the taste, even in his wildest moods. Yet some of his best stories are entirely free from this element of the strained and unnatural, and show that it was through no lack of native strength and robustness of mind, that he selected at other times the most abnormal and perverse developments of action and character as the warp of his literary textures. Hoffman’s stories are interesting from their ingenuity, a certain naïve simplicity combined with an audacious handling of impossible or improbable circumstances, and a charming under-current of pathos and humor, which bubbles up through the crust at the most unexpected turns. We should hardly regard these stories as a model for the modern writer, yet there is a quality about them which far more artistic stories might lack. It is singular to narrate that some of his most agreeable and objective stories, where he completely escapes from morbid imaginings, are those he wrote when dying by inches in great agony, for he, too, like Heine – a much greater and subtler genius – lay on a mattrass grave, though for months and not for years. The stories collected in the volumes under notice contain those which are recognized by critics as his best, and will repay perusal as being excellent representations of a school of fiction which is now at its ebb-tide, though how soon it will come again to the fore it is impossible to prophecy, as mode and vogue in literary taste go through the same eternal cycle, as do almost all other mundane things.

FOREIGN LITERARY NOTES

Paul Ivanovich Ogorodnikof, who died last month at the age of fifty-eight, was destined for the army, but, being accused of participation in political disturbances, was confined in the fortress of Modlin. After his release he obtained employment in the Railway Administration, whereby he was enabled to amass a sum sufficient to cover the cost of a journey through Russia, Germany, France, England, and North America, of which he published an account. He was subsequently appointed correspondent of the Imperial Geographical Society in North-East Persia, and on his return home he devoted his exclusive attention to literature. His most interesting works, perhaps, are “Travels in Persia and her Caspian Provinces,” 1868, “Sketches in Persia,” 1868, and “The Land of the Sun,” 1881. But he was the author of various other works and numerous contributions to periodical literature, and in 1882 his “Diary of a Captive” was published in the Istorichesky Vyestnik.

The opening of the new college at Poona, India, which took place recently under the most favorable auspices, is noteworthy as marking the first important attempt of educated natives in the Bombay presidency to take the management of higher education into their own hands. The college has been appropriately named after Sir James Fergusson, who has always taken a great interest in the measures for its establishment, and during whose tenure of office as Governor of Bombay (now drawing to a close) such marked progress has been made in education in that presidency.

The first part of the second series of the Palæographical Society’s facsimiles, now ready for distribution to subscribers, contains two plates of Greek ostraka from Egypt, on which are written tax-gatherers’ receipts for imposts levied under the Roman dominion, A.D. 39-163; and specimens of the Curetonian palimpsest Homer of the sixth century; the Bodleian Greek Psalter of about A.D. 950; the Greek Gospels, Codex T, of the tenth century; and other Greek MSS. There are also plates from the ancient Latin Psalter of the fifth century and other early MSS. of Lord Ashburnham’s library; Pope Gregory’s “Moralia,” in Merovingian writing of the seventh century; the Berne Virgil, with Tironian glosses of the ninth century; the earliest Pipe Roll, A.D. 1130; English charters of the twelfth century; and drawings and illuminations in the Bodleian Cædmon, the Hyde Register, the Ashburnham Life of Christ, and the Medici Horæ lately purchased by the Italian Government.

Prince B. Giustiniani has placed in the hands of the Pope, in the name of his friend Lord Ashburnham, a precious manuscript from the library of Ashburnham House. It contains letters by Innocent III. written during the years 1207 and 1209, and taken from the archives of the Holy See when at Avignon at the beginning of the fifteenth century. The letters are fully described in the Bibliothèque de l’École des Chartes.

One of the late General Gordon’s minor contributions to literature is a brief memoir of Zebehr Pasha, which he drew up for the information of the Soudanese. General Gordon caused the memoir to be translated into Arabic, and we believe that copies of it are still in existence. It was written during the General’s first administration of the Soudan.

The memoirs of the late Rector of Lincoln will appear shortly, Mrs. Mark Pattison having finished correcting the proofs. Much difficulty has been experienced in verifying quotations, frequently made without reference or clue to authorship. In one or two instances only the attempt has been reluctantly abandoned in order not indefinitely to delay publication. Mrs. Mark Pattison leaves England in February for Madras, where she will spend next summer as the guest of the Governor and Mrs. Grant Duff at Ootacamund. Her work on industry and the arts in France under Colbert is now far advanced towards completion.

A “national” edition of Victor Hugo’s works is about to be brought out in Paris by M. Lemonnyer as publisher, and M. Georges Richard as printer. The plan of this new edition has been submitted by these gentlemen to M. Victor Hugo, who has given them the exclusive right to bring out, in quarto shape, the whole of his works. The publication will consist of about forty volumes, which are each to contain five parts, of from eighty to a hundred pages. One part will appear every fortnight, or about five volumes a year, and the first part of the first volume, which will contain the Odes and Ballads, is to appear on February 26, which is the eighty-third anniversary of the poet’s birth. The price will be 6 frs. per part, or 30 frs. per volume, so that the total cost of the forty volumes will be close upon £50. There will be also a few copies upon Japan and China paper of special manufacture, while the series will be illustrated with four portraits of the poet, 250 large etchings, and 2,500 line engravings. The 250 large etchings will be by such artists as Paul Baudry, Bonnat, Cabanel, Carrier-Belleuse, Falguière, Léon, Glaize, Henner, J. – P. Laurens, Puvis de Chavannes, Robert Fleury, etc., while the line engravings will be by L. Flameng, Champollion, Maxime Lalanne, and others.

The festival at Capua in commemoration of the bi-centenary of the birth of the distinguished antiquary and philologist, Alessio Simmaco Mazzocchi, which should have been held last autumn, but was postponed on account of the cholera, was celebrated on January 25. The meeting in the Museo Campano was attended by a large number of visitors from the neighboring towns and from Naples, and speeches were delivered by the Prefect (Commendatore Winspeare), Prof. F. Barnabei, and several others.

Dr. Martineau’s new book, “Types of Ethical Theory,” will be issued in a week or two by the Clarendon Press. The author seeks the ultimate basis of morals in the internal constitution of the human mind. He first vindicates the psychological method, then develops it, and finally guards it against partial applications, injurious to the autonomy of the conscience. He is thus led to pass under review at the outset some representative of each chief theory in which ethics emerge from metaphysical or physical assumptions, and at the close the several doctrines which psychologically deduce the moral sentiments from self-love, the sense of congruity, the perception of beauty, or other unmoral source. The part of the book intermediate between these two bodies of critical exposition is constructive.

The Spelling Reform Association of England have adopted, as a means of encouraging the progress of their cause, a new plan specially calculated to secure the adhesion of printers and publishers. They offer to supply experienced proof-readers free of cost, who are prepared to assist in producing books and pamphlets “in any degree of amended or fonetic spelling.”

Some interesting materials towards a memoir of the late Bishop Colenso have been derived from an unexpected source. A gentleman in Cornwall heard that a bookseller in Staffordshire had for sale a collection of the bishop’s letters. This coming to the knowledge of Mr. F. E. Colenso, the latter purchased them at once, and found that they consisted of letters ranging from 1830 to the middle of the bishop’s university career. The collection also includes two letters from the bishop’s college tutor which show the high estimation in which the young man was held by those who were brought into contact with him at Oxford.

It is understood that the late Henry G. Bohn’s collection of Art books, though comparatively few in number – said to be less than 800 – forms a perfectly unique library of reference, and in many languages. We hear that it includes splendidly bound folio editions of engravings from the great masters in almost every known European gallery. Mr. Bohn’s general private library – a substantial but by no means extensive one considering his colossal dealings with books – is not likely to be sold. It may not be generally known that he lent nearly 1,400 volumes to the Crystal Palace Exhibition some years ago, and lost them all in the fire there.

Messrs. Tillotson and Son, of the Bolton Journal, who are the originators of the practice of publishing novels by eminent writers simultaneously in a number of newspapers in England, the United States, and in the colonies, announce that they intend shortly to publish, instead of a serial novel of the usual three-volume size, what they call an “Octave of Short Stories.” The first of these tales, “A Rainy June,” by “Ouida,” will appear on February 28th. The other seven writers of the “Octave” are Mr. William Black, Miss Braddon, Miss Rhoda Broughton, Mr. Wilkie Collins, Mr. Thomas Hardy, Mr. Joseph Hatton, and Mrs. Oliphant.

Dr. C. Casati, who has just published a work in two volumes entitled Nuovo rivelazioni sui fatti in Milano nel 1847-48, is preparing for the press an edition of the unpublished letters of Pietro Borsieri, the prisoner of the Spielberg, together with letters addressed to him by several of his friends, among whom were Arrivabene, Berchet, Arconati, and Della Cisterna. The correspondence contains many particulars relating to the sufferings of these patriots in the Austrian prisons, and to the privations suffered by Borsieri and his companions in America. Dr. Casati will contribute a biographical sketch of Borsieri and notes in illustration of the letters.

At the meeting of the Florence Academia dei Lincei (department of historical sciences) on January 18, it was announced that no competitors having presented themselves for the prize offered by the Minister of Public Instruction for an essay on the Latin poetry published in Italy during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the competition will remain open until April 30, 1888.

Edward Odyniec, the Polish poet and journalist, and friend of Mickiewicz, died in Warsaw on January 15. He was born in 1804, and was educated at the University of Wilna, where he was a member of the celebrated society of the Philareti. His period of poetic activity falls chiefly in the time of the romantic movement in Poland. His odes and occasional poems were printed in 1825-28, and many of them have been translated into German and Bohemian. His translations from Byron, Moore, and Walter Scott are greatly admired in Poland. He also published several dramas on historical subjects. Odyniec was editor, first of the Kuryer Wilanski, and afterwards of the Kuryer Warszawski, and was highly esteemed as a political writer. He was personally very popular in Warsaw, and his funeral was attended by many thousands of people.

Dr. A. Emanuel Biedermann, Professor of Theology in the University of Zürich, died in that city on January 26. He was born at Winterthur in 1819, studied theology at Basel and Berlin 1837-41, and in 1843 was elected Pfarrer of Münchenstein in the Canton of Basel-land. In 1850 he was made Professor Extraordinarius of Theology in the University of Zürich, and in 1864 Professor Ordinarius of “Dogmatik.” His Christliche Dogmatic (Zürich, 1864) is the best known of his theological writings. In connection with Dr. Fries he founded in 1845 the Liberal ecclesiastical monthly, Die Kirche der Gegenwart, out of which the still extant Zeitstimmen was developed.

MISCELLANY

An Aerial Ride. – The recent ascents, first at Berlin, then at Baden, of Herr Lattemann, who is the inventor and constructor of an entirely novel miniature balloon, “Rotateur,” are remarkable, if foolhardy, performances. The intrepid aëronaut rises in the air merely suspended to a balloon by four ropes to a height of 4,000 feet. The Rotateur has the form of a cylinder, with semi-spherical ends and a horizontal axis. It holds about 9,300 cubic feet of ordinary gas, just enough to lift the weight of a man, without car, anchor, or other apparatus, about 4,000 feet. The balloon may be revolved round its horizontal axis by two cords attached at the periphery of the cylinder. The aëronaut is able by these cords to turn the valve, placed below, through which the gas is taken in and allowed to escape, when desired, round either the sides or to the top. This circular hole, as soon as the balloon is filled, is stretched out by a thick cane to such an extent longitudinally as to close it almost entirely, only leaving a narrow slit, through which, it is asserted, no gas can escape. If the aëronaut desires to let off the gas, he turns the cylinder balloon round its axis by manipulating the cords, the opening is moved to the side or top, and the cane removed by sharply pulling the cord attached to it, so that the opening becomes circular again, and allows the gas to escape. This is the new valve arrangement – the egg of Columbus – patented by Herr Lattemann. For up to the present time the valve was the Achilles heel of the balloon, because it was placed at the top, sometimes failing to act, at others not closing air-tight. Herr Lattemann in his ascents wears a strong leather belt, through the rings of which two ropes are drawn, and by which he fastens himself to the right and left of the balloon net. He thus hangs suspended as in a swing. Two other ropes, attached to the balloon, and passing through other rings in his belt, end in stirrups, into which the aërial rider places his feet. At his earlier ascents Herr Lattemann used a saddle, which he has now discarded, preferring to stand free in the stirrups. As soon as the aëronaut has balanced himself in his ropes, the signal “Off!” is given, and the balloon sails away. Herr Lattemann has hitherto been entirely successful in his ascents, which last about half an hour.

The Condition of Schleswig. – A graphic description is given in an article written by a correspondent of the Times in Copenhagen of the treatment to which the Danish inhabitants of Schleswig are subjected by the Germans. All the efforts of the authorities governing the duchy tend to the goal of crushing, and, if possible, exterminating the Danish language and Danish sentiment. The Danes in Schleswig cling with characteristic toughness to their language and to the old traditions of their race; they hate the Germans; they groan under the foreign yoke of suppression. Resisting all temptations and all menaces from Berlin, they still turn their regards and their love toward the Danish King and the Danish people, and they swear to hold out, even for generations, until the glorious day comes, as it is sure to come in the fulness of time, when the German chains shall be broken. It would be a very trifling sacrifice for Prussia, that has made such enormous gains and risen to the highest Power in Europe, to give those 200,000 or 250,000 Danish Schleswigers back to Denmark, the land of their predilection. The northern part of Schleswig is of no political or strategical importance to Prussia, and the proof of this is that the fortifications in Alsen and at Düppel are being levelled to the ground. Several instances of these petty persecutions are given by the correspondent. The names of towns and villages have been Germanized; railway guards are not permitted to speak Danish; in the public schools primers and songs and plays are to be in German, and the children are punished if they speak among themselves their maternal language; history is arranged so as to glorify Germany and disparage Denmark; the Danish colors of red and white are absolutely prohibited; in short, from the cradle to the grave, the Danish Schleswiger is submitted to a process of eradicating his original nature and dressing him up in a garb which he hates and detests. This petty war is carried on day after day under the sullen resistance and open protests of the Schleswigers, and proves a constant source of hatred and animosity between two nations destined by nature to be friends and allies. Of late the Prussian functionaries in Schleswig have entered upon a system of positive persecution that passes all bounds. Last summer several excursions of ladies and girls from the Danish districts in Schleswig were arranged to different places, one to the west coast of Jutland, another to Copenhagen; they came in flocks of two or three hundred, were hospitably entertained, enjoyed the sights and the liberty to avow their Danish sentiments, and then they returned to their bondage. Such of them as did not carefully hide the red and white favors or diminutive flags had to pay amends for their carelessness. But the great bulk of them could not be reached by the law, for, in spite of all, it has not yet been made a crime in Schleswig to travel beyond the frontier. With characteristic ingeniousness, the Prussian functionaries then hit upon a new plan, and visited the sins of the women and girls upon their husbands, fathers, or brothers. If these turned out to have, after the cession, optated for Denmark, and to be consequently Danish citizens only sojourning in Schleswig, they were peremptorily shown the door and ordered to leave the duchy within 48 hours or some few days. An edict authorizes any police-master to expel any foreign subject that may prove “troublesome” (lästig), and this term is a very elastic one. If the male relatives were Prussian subjects no law could be alleged against them, but among these such as filled public charges, particularly teachers and schoolmasters, have been summarily dismissed. In this way, farmers, small traders, artisans, dentists, school teachers, and so forth, whose wives or sisters or daughters did take part in the excursion trips, have been mercilessly driven away and deprived of their means of living. New cases of such expulsions are recorded every day. A system of the most petty persecution is at the same time enforced against those who cannot be turned out.