This great creation is one of the
few classics » that the nineteenth cen-
tury has added to literature.
few classics » that the nineteenth cen-
tury has added to literature.
Warner - World's Best Literature - v30 - Guide to Systematic Readings
The name "Winter's
sphere of the two is not dissimilar: there Tale) derives partly from the fact that
is a tonic moral quality in Imogen's un- the play opens in winter, and partly
assailable virtue like the bracing mount- from the resemblance of the story to a
ain air in which the royal youths have marvelous tale told by a winter's fire.
been brought up. The beautiful song Like (Othello,' it depicts the tragic re-
(Fear No More the Heat o' the Sun) sults of jealousy, in this case long
a great favorite with Tennyson. years of suffering for both husband and
Cymbeline wanted his daughter Imogen wife, and the purification of the soul of
to marry his stepson Cloten, a boorish the former through remorse, and his
lout and cruel villain, but she has se- final reconciliation with his wronged
cretly married a brave and loyal private queen. Leontes, king of Sicily, unlike
gentleman, Posthumus Leonatus, and he Othello, has a natural bent toward jeal-
is banished for it. In Italy one lachimo ousy; he suspects without good cause,
wagers him ten thousand ducats to his and is grossly tyrannical in his persecu-
diamond ring that he can seduce the tions of the innocent. Hermione, in her
honor of Imogen. He miserably fails, sweet patience and sorrow, is the most
even by the aid of lies as to the disloy- divinely compassionate matron Shakes-
alty of Posthumus, and then pretends he peare has delineated. Polixenes, king
was but testing her virtue for her hus- of Bohemia, has been nine months a
band's sake. She pardons him, and re- guest of his boyhood's friend Leontes,
ceives into her chamber, for safe-keeping, and is warmly urged by both king and
a trunk, supposed to contain costly plate queen
to stay longer. Hermione's
and jewels, but which really contains warm hospitality and her lingering hand
lachimo himself, who emerges from it in pressures are construed by the king as
the dead of night; slips the bracelet proof of criminality: he sees himself
from her arm; observes the mole, cinque- laughed at for a cuckold; a deep fire of
spotted with crimson, on her breast; and rage burns in his heart; he wants Ca-
notes down in his book the furniture millo to poison Polisenes; but this good
and ornaments of the room. He returns man flies with him to Bohemia. Leon-
to Italy. Posthumus despairingly yields tes puts his wife in prison, where she is
himself beaten, and writes to his serv- delivered of a daughter. He compels
ant Pisanio to kill Imogen; to facilitate Antigonus to swear to expose it in a
the deed, he sends her word to meet desert place, and then proceeds with the
him at Milford Haven. Thither she flies formal trial of his wife. His messen-
was
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SYNOPSES OF NOTED BOOKS
a
was
gers to Delphi report her guiltless. She THE TEMPEST, one of Shakespeare's
swoons away, and Paulina gives out very latest plays (1611), written in the
that she is dead. But she is secretly mellow maturity of his genius, is prob-
conveyed away, after the funeral, and ably based on a lost Italian novella or
revived. Her little son dies from grief. play, though certain incidents are bor-
Sixteen years now elapse, and we are rowed from three pamphlets on the Ber-
across seas in Bohemia, near the palace mudas and Virginia and from Florio's
of Polixenes, and near where Hermi- Montaigne. The scene is said to be
one's infant daughter was exposed, but laid in the haunted island of Lampe-
rescued (with a bundle containing rich dusa in the Mediterranean. In the
bearing cloth, gold, jewels, etc. ) by an opening lines we see a ship laboring in
old shepherd. Antigonus and his ship's heavy seas near the shore of an island,
crew were all lost, so no trace of the in- whose sole inhabitants, besides the
fant could be found. But here she is, spirits of earth and air typified in the
the sweetest girl in Bohemia and named dainty ye powerful sprite Ariel, are
Perdita (“the lost one”). A sheep- Prospero and his lovely daughter Mi-
shearing feast at the old shepherd's cot- randa, and their slave, the deformed
tage is in progress. His son has gone boor Caliban, an aborigine of the is-
for sugar and spices and rice, and had land.
The grave and good Prospero is
his pocket picked by that rogue of
luckier castaway than Robinson
rogues, that snapper-up of unconsidered Crusoe, in that his old friend Gonzalo
trifles, Autolycus. The dainty Perdita put into the boat with him not only his
moves about under the green trees as infant daughter, but clothes, and some
the hostess of the occasion, giving to books of magic, by the aid of which
each guest a bunch of sweet flowers and both men and spirits, and the very ele-
a welcome. Polixenes and Camillo are ments, are subject to the beck of his
here in disguise, to look after Polix- wand. He was the rightful Duke of
enes's son Florizel. After dancing, and Milan, but
supplanted by his
some songs from peddler Autolycus, brother Antonio, who with his confeder-
Florizel and Perdita are about to be be- ate, the king of Naples, and the lat-
trothed when Polixenes discovers him- ter's son Ferdinand and others, is cast
self and threatens direst punishment to ashore on the island. The shipwreck
the rustics. The lovers fly to Sicily, occurs full in the sight of the weeping
with a feigned story for the ear of Miranda; but all hands are saved, and
Leontes; and the old shepherd and his the ship too. The humorous characters
son get aboard Florizel's ship to show are the butler Stephano, and the court
the bundle and fairy gold” found with jester Trinculo, both semi-drunk, their
Perdita, expecting thus to save their speech and songs caught from the sail-
lives by proving that they are not re- ors, and savoring of salt and tar.
sponsible for
her doings. Polixenes Throughout the play the three groups of
and Camillo follow the fugitives, and at personages, — the royal retinue with the
Leontes's court is great rejoicing at the irrepressible and malapropos old Gon-
discovery of the king's daughter; which zalo, the drunken fellows and Caliban,
joy is increased tenfold by Paulina, who and Prospero with his daughter and
restores Hermione to her repentant hus- Ferdinand, - move leisurely to and fro,
band's arms. Her device for gradually the whole action taking up only three
and gently possessing him of the idea of hours. The three boors, fuddled with
Hermione's being alive, is curious and their fine liquor and bearing the bark
shrewd. She gives out that she has in bottle, rove about the enchanted island,
her gallery a marvelous statue of Her- fall into the filthy-mantled pool, and are
mione by Julio Romano, so recently stoutly pinched by Prospero's goblins for
finished that the red paint on the lips is theft. The murderous plot of Antonio
yet wet.
When the curtain is drawn by and the courtier Sebastian is exposed at
Paulina, husband and daughter gaze the phantom banquet of the harpies.
greedily on the statue, and to their Spellbound in the linden grove, all the
amazement it is made to step down guilty parties come forward into
from its pedestal and speak. They per- charmed circle and take a lecture from
ceive it to be warm with life, and to be Prospero. General reconciliation. Then
indeed Hermione herself, - let us hope, to finally, Miranda and Ferdinand are dis-
have less strain on her charity thereafter. covered playing chess before Prospero's
a
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SYNOPSES OF NOTED BOOKS
401
on
a
or
cell, and learn that to-morrow they set
sail for Naples to be married.
Two NOBLE KINSMEN. – A most no-
ble and pathetic drama, founded
Chaucer's (Knighte's Tale, and first
printed in 1634, with the names of
Shakespeare and Fletcher on the title-
page as authors. The grand passages
show the very style of Coriolanus)
and of The Tempest,' and are wholly
beyond Fletcher's powers: e. g. , the
magnificent description of Arcite's horse,
worthy of the Panathenaic frieze; the
Meissonier portraits of the champion
Knights' assistants,— the stern, brown-
faced prince with long, black, shining
hair and lion mien, the massive-thewed
blond, and the rest; the portrait of
Arcite himself, his eye like a sharp
weapon on soft sheath, of most
fiery sparkle and soft sweetness);
of Palamon's brown manly face and
thought-lined brow. And how Shakes-
pearean that phrase applied to old men
nearing death,—the gray approachers !
And who but Shakespeare would have
written the lines (so admired by Ten-
nyson) on Mars,-
« Who dost pluck
with hand omnipotent from forth blue clouds
The mason'd turrets"?
The under-plot about the jailer's
daughter, who goes mad for Palamon's
love, is a weak and repulsive imitation
of the Ophelia scenes in (Hamlet. )
The play is about the tribulations of
two noble youths who both love the
sweet girl, «fresher than
the
May, - Emilia, sister of Hippolyta,
wife of Theseus. Their love separates
them; they were a miracle of friend-
ship, they become bitterest foes. By
Theseus's command they select each
three friends, and in a trial by combat
of the eight champions, Arcite wins
Emilia, but is at once killed by his
horse falling on him, and Palamon
secures the prize after all.
Henry VIII. , a historical drama by
Shakespeare, based on Edward Hall's
(Union of the Families of Lancaster
and York,' Holinshed's Chronicles,' and
Fox's 'Acts and Monuments of the
Church. ) The key-idea is the muta-
bility of earthly grandeur, and by one
or another turn of Fortune's wheel, the
overthrow of the mighty - i. e. , of the
Duke of Buckingham, of Cardinal Wol-
sey, and
of Queen arine. The
action covers a period of sixteen years,
XXX-2Ć
from the field of the Cloth of Gold, in
1520, described in the opening pages,
to the death of Queen Katharine in
1536. It is the trial and divorce of this
patient, queenly, and unfortunate woman,
that forms the main subject of the
drama. She was the daughter of Ferdi-
nand and Isabella of Castile, and born
in 1485. She had been married when
seventeen to Arthur, eldest son of Henry
VII. Arthur lived only five months after
his marriage, and when at seventeen
years Henry VIII. came to the throne
(that most hateful ruffian and tyrant),
he married Katharine, then twenty-four.
She bore him children, and he never
lost his respect for her and her unblem-
ished life. But twenty years after his
marriage he met Anne Bullen at a merry
ball at Cardinal Wolsey's palace, and
fell in love with her, and immediately
conceived conscientious scruples against
the legality of his marriage. Queen
Katharine is brought to trial before a
solemn council of nobles and churchmen.
With fine dignity she appeals to the
Pope and leaves the council, refusing
then and ever after to attend any of
their courts. The speeches are master-
pieces of pathetic and noble defense.
In all his facts the poet follows history
very faithfully. The Pope goes against
her, and she is divorced and sequestered
at Kimbolton, where presently she dies
heart-broken, sending a dying message
of love to Henry. Intertwined with the
sad fortunes of the queen the
equally crushing calamities that overtake
Cardinal Wolsey. His high-blown pride,
his oppressive exactions in amassing
wealth greater than the king's, his ego
et rex meus, his double dealing with
Henry in securing the Pope's sanction
to the divorce,- these and other things
are the means whereby his many ene-
mies work his ruin. He is stripped of
all his dignities and offices, and wanders
away, an old man broken with the storms
of State, to lay his bones in Leicester
Abbey. The episode of the trial of
Archbishop Cranmer is so pathetically
handled as to excite tears. He is brought
to trial for heresy by bis enemy Gardi-
ner, bishop of Winchester, but has pre-
viously been moved to tears of gratitude
by Henry's secretly bidding him be of
good cheer, and giving him his signet
ring as a talisman to conjure with if too
hard pressed by his enemies. Henry is
so placed as to oversee (himself unseen)
are
same
## p. 402 (#438) ############################################
402
SYNOPSES OF NOTED BOOKS
Cranmer's trial and the arrogant perse-
cution of Gardiner. Cranmer produces
the ring just as they are commanding
him to be led away to the Tower; and
Henry steps forth to first rebuke his
enemies and then command them to be
at peace. He does Cranmer the high
honor of asking him to become a god-
father to the daughter (Elizabeth) of
Anne Bullen; and after Cranmer's elo-
quent prophecy at the christening, the
curtain falls. The setting of this play
is full of rich and magnificent scenery
and spectacular pomp.
not work, japers, and mynstralles »
that sell "glee. ” They are, or nearly so,
the same beings Chaucer assembled at
the « Tabard » inn, on the eve of his pil-
grimage to Canterbury. This crowd has
likewise a pilgrimage to make.
« They journey through abstract coun-
tries, they follow mystic roads
in search of Truth and of Supreme
Good. »
This search is the subject of an elab-
orate allegory, in the course of which
the current abuses in Church and State
are vigorously attacked. The poet in-
veighs especially against the greed and
insincerity of his age, personifying these
qualities in Lady Meed, who leads men
astray, and tricks them into sin. The
poem throws much light upon social and
religious institutions of the day. These
revelations must, however, be sought for
among the strange mist-shapes of alle-
gory.
The poet's vocabulary is similar to
that of Chaucer. Several dialects are
combined in it, the Midland dia
dominating The metre is alliterative,
long lines, divided into half-lines by a
pause. Each line contains strong, or ac-
cented, syllables in fixed number, and
weak or unaccented syllables in varying
number.
About Piers Plowman) there has
grown up a considerable body of editor-
ial commentary. The work of Thomas
Wright and of Skeat in this field is
noteworthy.
The Vision
of Piers Plowman, an
English poem of the fourteenth cen-
tury, is ascribed, chiefly on the ground
of internal evidence, to William Lang-
land or Longland, a monk of Malvern,
in spirit a Thomas Carlyle of the Middle
Ages, crying out against abuses, insist-
ing upon sincerity as the first of virtues.
This poem belongs to the class of the
dream-poem, a characteristic product of
his century. Dante had seen all heaven
and hell in vision. Gower and the au-
thor of Pearl had dreamed dreams.
(The Vision of Piers Plowman) is a cu-
rious amalgamation of fantastic allegory
and clear-cut fact, of nebulous dreams
and vivid pictures of the England of the
day. The author is at once as realistic
as Chaucer and as mystical as Guil-
laume de Lorris, the observant man of
the world and the brooding anchorite;
his poem reflects both the England of
the fourteenth century and the visionary,
child-like mediæval mind.
Internal evidence fixes its date about
1362. Forty manuscript copies of it, be-
longing for the most part to the latter
end of the fourteenth century, attest its
popularity. Three distinct versions are
extant, known as Texts A, B, and C.
The probable date of Text A is 1362-63;
of Text B, 1376–77; of Text C, 1398–99.
The variations in these texts are consid-
erable. An imitation of the poem called
(Piers Plowman's Crede) appeared about
1393. The author of Piers Plowman)
represents himself as falling asleep on
Malvern Hills, on a beautiful May morn-
ing: In his dreams he beholds a vast
plain, «a feir feld ful of folk,” repre-
senting indeed the whole of humanity:
knights, monks, parsons, workmen sing-
ing French songs, cooks crying hot pies !
Hote pyes, hote! ” pardoners, pilgrims,
preachers, beggars, jongleurs who will
1
on
Sartor Resartus, by Thomas Carlyle,
first appeared in Fraser's Magazine,
in 1833-34, and later in book form. It
is divided into three parts, - introduc-
tory, biographical, and philosophical.
The first part describes an imaginary
book (Clothes: Their Origin and
Influence) by Diogenes Teufelsdröckh,
Professor of Things in General at
Weissnichtwo in Germany. The book,
the editor complains, is uneven in style
and matter, and extraordinarily difficult
to comprehend, but of such vigor in
places that he is impelled to translate
parts of it. The book begins with a
history of clothes: they are co-existent
with civilization, and are the source of
all social
and
political distinction.
Aprons, for example, are of all sorts,
from the smith's iron sheet to the
bishop's useless drapery. The re
church is shown in the paper aprons
## p. 403 (#439) ############################################
SYNOPSES OF NOTED BOOKS
403
men.
as
a
of the Paris cooks; future historians man and of the freedom of thought.
will talk, not of church, but of jour-Religion is the basis of society: every
nalism, and of editors instead of states- society may be described as a church
Man is apt to forget that he is which is audibly preaching or prophesy-
not a mere clothed animal, - that to ing, or which is not yet articulate, or
the eye of pure reason he is a soul. which is dumb with old age. Religion
Still Teufelsdröckh does not counsel a has entirely abandoned the clothes pro-
return to the natural state, for he rec- vided for her by modern society, and
ognizes the utility of clothes the sits apart making herself new ones. All
foundation of society. Wonder, at him- symbols are valuable as keeping some-
self or at nature, every man must feel thing silent, and, at the same time, as
in order to worship. Everything ma- revealing something of the Infinite.
terial is but an emblem of something Society now has no proper symbols,
spiritual; clothes are such emblems, and owing to over-utilitarianism and over-
are thus worthy of examination.
independence. Still a new society is form-
The autobiographic details sent to the ing itself to rise, Phænix-like, from the
editor which fill Book ii. came to him on ashes of the old. Mankind, like nature,
loose scraps of paper in sealed paper is one, not an aggregate of units. The
bags, with no attempt at arrangement future church for the worship of these
anywhere. A mysterious stranger left mysteries will be literature, as already
Teufelsdröckh, when he was a helpless suggested by the prophet Goethe. Cus-
infant, at the house of Andreas Futteral, tom makes nature, time, and space, which
a veteran and farmer. Andreas and his are really miracles, seem natural, but
wife Gretchen brought the boy up hon- we must feel wonder and reverence at
estly and carefully. As child he them. Our life is through mystery to
roamed out-doors, listened to the talk of mystery, from God to God. The chief
old men, and watched the sunset light points, in concluding, to be remembered
play over
the valley. At school he are: All life is based on wonder; all
learned little, and at the gymnasiums clothes, or symbols, are forms or mani-
less. At the university he received no festations of the spiritual or infinite;
instruction, but happened to prefer read- cant and hypocrisy everywhere should
ing to rioting, and so gained a great deal be replaced by clear truth.
of information. Then he was thrust into
the world to find out what his capability
was by himself. He withdrew from the riet Waters Preston, is an account
law, in which he had begun, and tried of the poetry of Provence, old and new.
to start out for himself.
The woman The earlier essays describe the work
whom he loved married another, and he of the two best-known of the <Fé-
was plunged into the depths of despair. libres, as the school of modern poets
Doubt, which he had felt in the univer- of the South of France is called: men
sity, became unbelief in God and even who write in the old (langue d'oc,”
the Devil, — in everything but duty, could or Provençal dialect, in opposition to
he have known what duty was.
He was
the langue d'oil,” or French tongue,
a victim to a curious fear, until one day which they do not acknowledge as their
his whole spirit rose, and uttering the language. Miss Preston makes many
protest of the everlasting no, asserted translations of their verse, which give
its own freedom. After that he wan- a vivid presentment of the fire and
dered in a «Centre of Indifference, color and naïve simplicity of the ori-
not caring much, but interested in cities, ginals. Another poet of the South of
fields, and books. Life came to mean France, neither Provençal nor French,
freedom to him; he felt impelled to was Jacques Jasmin, who wrote in the
look through the shows of things to the peculiar Gascon dialect, with all the
things themselves,» — to find the Ideal wit and gayety of his race. The fore-
in the midst of the Actual.
runners of all these men were the old
The third book, which deals with the troubadours, who fourished from the
philosophy itself, is much less continuous driving out of the Saracens to the end
and clear. In the first chapter, he of the crusades, during the age of
praises George Fox's suit of leather as chivalry,” and who spent their lives
the most remarkable suit of its century, making love songs for the ladies of their
since it was a symbol of the equality of preference. Their chansons, or songs, so
Troubadours and Trouveres, by Har-
>>
## p. 404 (#440) ############################################
404
SYNOPSES OF NOTED BOOKS
sec
simple and so perfect, were invariably on
the one theme of love; occasionally they
wrote longer pieces, called “sirventes,
which were narrative or satiric. Many
charming translations illustrate their
manner. The book closes with a chap-
ter on the Arthurian legends, showing
what these owe to Geoffrey of Mon-
mouth, to unknown French romances,
to Sir Thomas Malory, and finally
to Tennyson. Miss Preston's excellent
scholarship and rare literary gift com-
bine to make a most entertaining book.
own
ambitions. Leaving the actors, he be-
comes acquainted with some landed pro-
prietors belonging to the lesser nobility
of the country. And here the
ond period of his apprenticeship begins.
Meeting people of culture and position
in society, he comes into closer touch
with real life, and is initiated into the
ways of the world. His development is
further hastened by finding his son Fe-
lix, whom he has never acknowledged.
What women and society are still unable
to teach him, he now learns from his
child. The awakening sense of
his parental responsibilities is the final
touchstone of his fully developed man-
hood. Having thus completed his ap-
prenticeship to life in a series of bitter
experiences, he now marries a lady of
rank, and turns landed proprietor. The
scheme of the novel gave Goethe oppor-
tunity to bring in the most varied phases
of society, especially the nobility of his
time, and the actors. He also discusses
different æsthetic principles, especially
the laws of dramatic art as exemplified
in (Hamlet. ) He also touches on ques-
tions of education, and religious contro-
versy, and satirizes somewhat the secret
societies, just then beginning to spring
up in Germany. (Wilhelm Meister,' in
short, gives a richly colored picture of
the life of Goethe's time.
Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship.
The first part of Wilhelm Meis-
ter) was finished in 1796, after having
occupied Goethe's attention for twenty
years.
The central idea of this great
novel is the development of the individ-
ual by means of the most varied expe-
riences of life. There is no plot proper,
but in a series of brilliant episodes the
different stages of the hero's spiritual
growth are brought before the reader.
Wilhelm Meister is a young man with
many admirable qualities of character,
but passionate and emotional, somewhat
unstable, lacking reflection and proper
knowledge of the world. The son of a
well-to-do business man in a small Ger-
man town is traveling for his father's
house when he falls in with a troupe of
strolling comedians. From earliest boy-
hood he has been devoted to the theatre,
a passion which has been nourished by
puppet-plays and much reading of dra-
matic literature and romances. Disgusted
with the routine of business, and eager
for new experiences, he joins the players,
determined to become an actor himself,
His apprenticeship to life falls into two
periods. The first comprises the lessons
he learned while among the players.
Brought up in comfort in a respectable,
somewhat philistine household, he enjoys
at first the free and easy life of his new
companions, though as a class they had
at that period hardly any standing in
society. He becomes passionately at-
tached to Marianne, a charming young
actress, who returns his love, but whom
he leaves after a while, because of un-
grounded jealousy. For a time he thinks
he has found his true vocation in the
pursuit of the actor's art. But ill-success
on the stage, and closer acquaintance
with this bohemian life of shams and
gilded misery, disillusions him, and re-
veals the insubstantiality of his youthful
Scarlet Letter, The, the novel which
established Nathaniel Hawthorne's
fame, and which he wrote in the ancient
environment of Salem, was published in
1850, when he was forty-six years old.
Its simple plot of Puritan times in New
England is surrounded with an air of
mystery and of weird imaginings. The
scene is in Boston, two hundred years
ago: the chief characters are Hester
Prynne; her lover, Arthur Dimmes-
dale, the young but revered minister of
the town; their child, Pearl; and her
husband Roger Chillingworth, an aged
scholar, a former resident of Amster-
dam, who, resolving to remove to the
New World, had, two years previously,
sent his young wife Hester on before
him. When the book opens, he arrives
in Boston, to find her upon the pillory,
her babe in her arms; upon her breast
the Scarlet Letter “A” (“Adulteress”),
which she has been condemned to wear
for life. She refuses to reveal the
name of her partner in guilt, and takes
up her lonely abode on the edge of the
## p. 405 (#441) ############################################
SYNOPSES OF NOTED BOOKS
405
on
rare
wilderness. Here Pearl grows up a wild
elf-like child; here Hester makes atone-
ment by devoting her life to deeds of
mercy.
Her husband, whose identity
she has sworn to conceal, remains in the
town, and in the guise of a physician,
pries into and tortures the minister's
remorse-haunted soul. Hester, knowing
this, forgetting aught but love, proposes
fight with him. He wills to remain,
to reveal his guilt publicly. Confessing
all, after a sermon of great power, he
dies in Hester's arms, upon the plat-
form where she once stood condemned.
A wonderful atmosphere of the Puritan
society bathes this book, its moral in-
tensity, its sensitiveness to the unseen
powers; while forever pressing in upon
the seething little community is the
mystery of the new-world wilderness,
the counterpart of the spiritual wilder-
ness in which Hester and Arthur wan-
der.
This great creation is one of the
few classics » that the nineteenth cen-
tury has added to literature.
Knightly Soldier, The, by H. Clay
Trumbull, is a biography of Major
Henry Ward Camp of the Tenth Con-
necticut Volunteers, who fell in one of
the battles before Richmond in 1864. It
was written while the War was still in
progress; while the author, who
chaplain in the army and an attached
friend of the subject of the memoir, was
still amid the stress of the great con-
Aict; and he writes with the warmth of
personal affection and comradeship of
the career of a young American soldier.
It is a noble monument to the memory
of the author's friend; at the same time
it is a graphic chronicle of a soldier's
life in the field. The letters of Major
Camp interwoven with the narrative
reveal the man's study of himself in the
experiences of battle, prison, flight, re-
capture, liberation; and show him to be
indeed a knightly soldier. )
Twenty Years of Congress: From
Lincoln to Garfield, WITH A RE-
THE EVENTS WHICH LED
THE POLITICAL REVOLUTION OF 1860, by
James G. Blaine, with portraits. (2 vols.
1884-86. ) Mr. Blaine's unrivaled oppor-
of
work it an
contribution to history. It is clear, in-
teresting, and brilliantly written. A
large part of the first volume is de-
voted to a review of the events which
led up to the Civil War. Beginning
with the original compromises between
the North and the South embodied in
the Constitution, it proceeds with the
Missouri Compromises of 1820 and 1821,
the origin and development of the abo-
lition party, the character of the South-
ern leaders, the Mexican War, origin
and growth of the Republican party,
the Dred Scott decision, the debate
between Douglas and Lincoln, the
John Brown raid and Lincoln's elec-
tion. Then follow two chapters
Congress in the winter of 1860-61; after
which the course of affairs during the
War and down to the inauguration of
President Johnson occupies the rest of
the volume. Mr. Blaine shows himself
to be a warm admirer of Henry Clay,
contrasting him very favorably with
Webster, and saying of him: «In the
combination of qualities which
constitute at once the matchless leader
of party and the statesman of consum-
mate ability and inexhaustible resource,
he has never been surpassed by any
man speaking the English tongue. ) Of
General Grant he speaks in the most
appreciative terms. The picture of Lin-
coln's character is strongly drawn and
glowing. Volume ii. covers the period
from the beginning of Johnson's admin-
istration to the year 1881. The disband-
ment of the army, reconstruction, the
three amendments to the Constitution,
the government's financial legislation,
Johnson's impeachment, General Grant's
two terms, the Geneva award, Hayes's
administration, the fisheries question,
and Garfield's election, are among the
topics treated. In conclusion, the author
alludes to the unprecedented difficulty
of the legislative problems during the
War, and briefly notes' the course of
Congress in grappling with them, re-
views the progress of the people dur-
ing the twenty years, claiming credit
for Congress for the result, and asserts
that “No government of modern times
has encountered the dangers that beset
the United States, achieved the
triumphs wherewith the nation is
crowned. »
was
:
VIEW
OF
TO
or
inn itkis varike imekese period important Luckther sketchesney Street Markehavd
, by
for their subjects strange incidents of life
in the far West during the gold-fever
of '49.
The essential romance of that.
adventurous, lawless, womanless society
## p. 406 (#442) ############################################
406
SYNOPSES OF NOTED BOOKS
is embodied in these tales. Representa-
tive members of it, gamblers with the
melancholy air and intellectual abstrac-
tion of a Hamlet”; all-around scamps
with blond hair and Raphael faces;
men with pasts buried in the oblivion
east of the Mississippi; young men, bat-
tered men, decayed college graduates,
and ex-convicts, are brought together in
picturesque confusion, — their hot, fierce
dramas being played against the loneli-
ness of the Sierras, the aloofness of an
unconquerable nature. (The Luck of
Roaring Camp' is perhaps the
beautiful of the sketches; (The Outcasts
of Poker Flat) is scarcely less pathetic.
In Tennessee's Partner,' and in Mig-
gles,' humor and pathos are mingled.
The entire book is a wonderfully dra-
matic transcript . of a phase of Western
life forever passed away.
The environment in which she is placed
- fashionable England of the beginning
of the century — offered a great field for
the genius of Thackeray. He portrayed
it with marvelous, sustained skill through
the long, leisurely, many-chaptered novel.
Not a foible of fashionable life escaped
him: not one weakness of human nature,
not one fallacy of the gay world. His
satire plays like searching light upon
the canvas. His humanity does not miss
the pathos sometimes lurking under the
hard, bright surface of events. He does
not forget that some women are tender,
that some men are brave. Neither does
he pass eternal judgment upon his char-
acters. In his dealings with these fre-
quenters of Vanity Fair,' there is some-
thing of the indifference of the gods,
something, too, of their chivalry.
most
uo Vadis, the latest and perhaps the
Vanity Fair, by W. M. Thackeray Q“most popular proste a nohy Perkies Polish
a
(1847–48), is one of the few great
novels of the world, and perhaps the
only novel of society that ranks as
classic, as a perfect and complete em-
bodiment of those peculiar forces and
conditions embraced in the term "fash-
ionable. ) As the sub-title states, it is
<< without a hero); but not, however,
without a heroine. The central figure of
the book is that chef-d'œuvre, the im-
mortal, inimitable, magnificent Becky
Sharp, the transcendent type of social
strugglers, the cleverest, most unmoral
woman in the whole range of fiction.
From the hour when she tosses John-
son's Dictionary, the last gift of her
teacher, out of the window of the Sedley
coach, to her final appearance on the
stage of the novel, she never falters in
the bluff game she is playing with so-
ciety. Her victims are numerous, her
success, with slight exceptions, is unim-
peachable. In constant contrast to her is
pretty, pink-and-white, amiable Amelia,
all love and trust, Beckey's school inti-
mate and first protector.
On Amelia
and Amelia's family, Becky first climbs
towards the dizzy heights of an assured
social position. Rawdon Crawley is her
final prey, the successful victim of
her matrimonial ventures. Having se-
cured him, she is more at liberty to be
herself, to cease the strain of concealing
her real nature, in her home at least.
To the world she is still an actress, and
the world does not find her out until it
has suffered by her.
master in fiction, Henryk Sienkiewicz,
is, like the trilogy,” historical; it deals,
however, not with the history of Poland,
but with that of Rome in the time
of Nero. The magnificent spectacular
environment of the decaying Roman
empire, the dramatic qualities of the
Christian religion, then assuming a
world-wide significance, offer rich mate-
rial for the genius of Sienkiewicz. He
presents the background of his narrative
with marvelous vividness. Against it he
draws great figures: Petronius, the lordly
Roman noble, the very flower of pagan-
ism; Eunice and Lygia, diverse products
of the same opulent world; Nero, the
beast-emperor; the Christians seeking an
unseen kingdom in a city overwhelmed
by the symbols of earthly imperialism;
others typical of dying
Rome, or of that New Rome to be es-
tablished on the ruined throne of the
Cæsars. The novel as a whole is in-
tensely dramatic, sometimes melodra-
matic. Its curious title has reference to
an ancient legend, which relates that St.
Peter, fleeing from Rome and from
crucifixion, meets his Lord Christ on
the Appian Way. «Lord, whither goest
thou ? ) (Domine, quo vadis ? ) cries Peter.
« To Rome, to be crucified again,” is the
reply. The apostle thereupon turns back
to his martyrdom. While (Quo Vadis)
cannot rank with the trilogy,” it is in
many respects a remarkable novel. Its
merit is not, however, in the ratio of its
popularity.
and many
## p. 407 (#443) ############################################
SYNOPSES OF NOTED BOOKS
407
Indiana, by “George Sand” (Madame
Dudevant). A romantic tale pub-
lished in 1832, which is of interest
chiefly as being the first which brought
the distinguished author into note, and
also as portraying something of the au-
thor's own experience in married life.
The scene is alternately in the Castle
de Brie, the estate of the aged Colonel
Delmare, a retired officer of Napoleon's
army, where he lives with his youthful
Creole wife Indiana; and in Paris,
where the wife visits her aristocratic
aunt, and where lives Raymond de Ra-
mière, the heartless and reckless lover
first of her foster-sister and maid Noun,
and then of herself. Estranged from
her ill-matched husband, the young wife
is drawn into the fascinations of Ray-
mond, whose artfulness succeeds in de-
ceiving the Colonel, the wife, and all
the faithful English cousin, Sir
Ralph; who secretly loves Indiana, but
shields Raymond from discovery for fear
of the pain that would result to her.
Desperate situations and dire conflicts
of emotions follow, with much discourse
on love and marital duty, and frequent
discussions of the social ard political
questions of the day; the Colonel repre-
senting the Napoleonic idea of empire,
Raymond the conservative legitimist,
and Sir Ralph the modern republican.
The descriptions of nature are vivid,
and the characters are skillfully drawn,
however untrue they may seem to actual
life.
to force them into submission to the
house of Hapsburg. But a band of the
free-born Swiss gathered together on
the Rütli, that famous meadow on the
lake of Lucerne, even now an objective
point of pilgrimage to the traveler in
Switzerland. They swore a solemn oath
to overthrow the Austrian tyranny, and
to free their country. But even while
they were maturing their plans, one of
the oppressors, Gessler, came to his
death. He had forced William Tell to
shoot an apple from the head of his
son, as a punishment for disregarding a
ridiculous ordinance. Tell, one of the
best marksmen far and wide, hit the
core of the apple without so much as
touching a hair of his son's head. Yet
he swore vengeance, and at the next
opportunity he shot Gessler. This deed
was the signal for a general uprising of
the people. The Austrian officials were
driven out of the country, their castles
destroyed, and Switzerland
more free. Although the play is named
after Tell, he is merely the nominal
hero. The real protagonists are the
whole people.
save
was
once
William Tell, the last completed
drama of Schiller, - his swan-
song, was written in 1804, one year
before his death. It is considered one
of his finest works, being the most ma-
ture expression of that idea of freedom
with which he had opened his poetic
career in (The Robbers, twenty years
before. But whereas Karl Moor was
warring against the existing order of
things, the Swiss people were fighting
for the preservation of their ancient
rights. The drama deals with what one
might call the rebellion of the three
Swiss counties, Schwyz, Uri, and Unter-
walden, against the duke Albrecht of
Austria, who at the same time
German Emperor under the name Al-
brecht I. , reigning 1298-1308. His
bailiffs, Hermann Gessler von Bruneck
and Beringer von Landenberg, harassed
the people in all possible ways, in order
Yemassee, The: A ROMANCE OF Caro-
LINA, by William
Gilmore Sims.
This is an American romance, the lead-
ing events of which are strictly true.
The Yemassee are a powerful and gal-
lant race of Indians, dwelling, with their
tributary tribes, at the time of the ac-
tion, in South Carolina. Their hunting
grounds are gradually encroached upon
by the English colonists, who, by pur-
chases, seizures, and intrigues, finally
change the feeling of friendship with
which their advent was greeted, into
fear, and finally into savage revolt. It
is during this period of warfare (the
early part of the eighteenth century)
that the scene of the romance is laid.
Mingled with the description of the life
of the primitive red man is a stirring
account of the struggles of the early
colonists. The romance culminates in a
realistic account of the attack by the
Yemassee, in conjunction with neighbor-
ing tribes and Spanish allies, upon a
small band of colonists, who, after a
fierce conflict, finally defeat them. Inter-
woven with the scenes of savage cruelty,
Spanish intrigue, and colonial hardship,
is the love story of pretty Bess Matthews,
daughter of the pastor, and Gabriel
Harrison, the savior of the little band;
was
## p. 408 (#444) ############################################
408
SYNOPSES OF NOTED BOOKS
who later, as Charles Craven, Governor ketched me at it! Git off and set down!
and Lord Palatine of Carolina, claims You ain't goin' for no doctor, I know );
. her hand. If the narrative seems often and who confesses that his aim is to be
extravagant in its multiplicity of ad- “the Pacific Slope Bonheur. ” His criti-
ventures, hair-breadth escapes, thrilling cisms on his fellow artists are more in-
climaxes, and recurrent dangers, it is cisive than Taine's. < Old Eastman
to be remembered that it depicts a time Johnson's barns and everlasting girl
when adventure was the rule, and rou- with the ears of corn ain't life, it ain't
tine the exception; when death lurked got the real git-up. ” Bierstadt's mount-
at every threshold, and life was but a ains would <blow over in one of oui
daily exemplification of the survival of fall winds. He hasn't got what old
the fittest. ”
Ruskin calls for. ) In all Mr. King's
Some of the principal characters are character sketches appear the modest
Sanutee, chief of the Yemassee; Mati- | good sense and sympathy, and the phi-
wan, his wife; Occonestoga, his son, losophic spirit, that makes his analysis
slain for betrayal of his tribe; Richard of social problems so satisfactory. The
Chorley, the buccaneer; and the trader concluding chapter is given to Califor-
Granger, and his wife, — the latter a nia as furnishing a study of character.
type of the woman, brave in spirit and Forced to admit the conditions on which
keen of wit, whom the early colonies she has been condemned as vulgar and
developed.
brutal, he yet perceives that being is
far less significant than becoming, and
Mountaineering in the Sierra Ne- that her future is to be not less mag-
vada, by Clarence King. (1872. ) nificent than her hopes.
Mr. King is so well known a scientist
that the government very properly long Social Silhouettes, by Edgar Fawcett,
ago annexed his services. It is therefore (1885,) is a series of gracefully ironic
to be taken for granted that the geology sketches upon New York society. Mr.
and geography of this volume are above Mark Manhattan, born among the elect,
suspicion. But what delights the un- related to most of the Knickerbocker
learned reader is not its scientific accu- families, and blessed with an adequate
racy, but its nice observation, its vivid income, amuses his leisure by a study
power of description, its unfailing hu- of social types. He introduces us to the
mor, its beautiful literary art. The offi- charmed circle of Rivingtons, River-
cial mountaineer in pursuit of his duty | sides, Croton-Nyacks, Schenectadys, and
ascends Mount Shasta and Mount Tyn- others, all opulent, all sublimely sure of
dall, Mount Whitney and the peaks of their own superiority to the rest of hu-
the Yosemite, and gathers all the data manity. With a serene pity born of in-
for which a distant administration is timate knowledge of society's prizes, he
pining. But on his own account, and watches the rich parvenu, Mrs. Ridgeway
to the unspeakable satisfaction of his Bridgeway, push her way to recognition.
audience, he «interviews » the Pike There is the young lady who fails be-
County immigrant, the Digger, the man
her evident anxiety to please
from Nowhere, and the Californian; and repels with a sense of strain all who ap-
the reader is privileged to assist with proach her.
There is the young man
unspeakable satisfaction on all these so- who succeeds because he makes no ef-
cial occasions, and to sigh that there are fort, and although able to express noth-
not more. A joy forever is that painter ing except manner and pronunciation,
of the Sierras whom the geologist — has name and dollars. Mr. Bradford
«longing for some equal artist who Putnam is another type, an egotistic
should arise and choose to paint our nonentity without a thought in his mind
Sierras as they really are, with all their or a generous sentiment in his heart,
color-glory, power of innumerable pine who arrogantly enjoys what the gods
and countless pinnacle, gloom of tem- have provided. Mr. Mark Manhattan
pestor splendor, where rushing light does not think that “the brave little
shatters itself upon granite crag, Mayflower steered its pale, half-starved
burns in dying rose upon far fields of inmates through bleak storm of angry
snow” — suddenly encountered, painting seas to help them found an ancestry for
a large canvas, who accosted him such idle dalliers. ” He is a kindly
with «Dern'd if you ain't just naturally cynic with sympathy for those who suf-
cause
OT
on
## p. 409 (#445) ############################################
SYNOPSES OF NOTED BOOKS
409
fer in intricate social meshes, and with zantine Empire, 717–1204; (3) Mediæval
contempt for all false standards and hy- Greece and Trebizond, 1204-1566; (4)
pocrisy. He is not a reformer, but an Greece under Ottoman and Venetian
indolent spectator with sense of hu- Dominion, 1453–1821; and (5) The Greek
mor, who, after all, enjoys the society Revolution and Greek Affairs, 1843–1864.
which he wittily berates.
The whole was thoroughly revised by
the author before his death at Athens
Sicilian Vespers, The, by Cassimir in 1875, and was very carefully edited
Delavigne. This tragedy in five for the Clarendon Press by Rev. H. F.
acts, first performed in Paris in 1819, is Tozer. In comparison with Gibbon, it
only memorable from its subject, the deals far more with interesting social
«Sicilian Vespers,” that being the name particulars, and comes much nearer than
given to the massacre of the French in Gibbon did to adequate treatment of
Sicily, in 1282, the signal for which was the ages which both have covered. The
to be the first stroke of the vesper-bell. author's prolonged residence in Greece,
John of Procida returns from a visit to with very great sympathetic attention
secure the aid of Pedro of Aragon in to Greek affairs, peculiarly qualified him
liberating Sicily from the French. His to deal intelligently with the problems
son Loredan has become the fast friend of Greek character through the long
of Montfort, the representative of Charles course of ages, from the Roman con-
of Anjou. Montfort asks Loredan to in- | quest to the latest developments. Taken
tercede for him with Princess Amelia, in connection with Grote's admirable
heir to the throne of Sicily, unaware volumes for the ages of Greek story
that she is his betrothed. Procida orders before Alexander the Great, the two
his son to slay his friend, who is also works, even with a gap of two cen-
his country's foe. Amelia warns Mont- turies between them, form one of the
fort, whom she loves despite her be- most interesting courses in history for
trothal. Montfort, learning Loredan's thirty centuries to which the attention
claims upon her, upbraids him and of intelligent readers can be given.
banishes him; but his nobler impulses
This
triumph, and he pardons him. Night Leon Roch, by B. Pérez Galdós.
falls; the massacre breaks out. Under
novel is a painful study of the
struggle which is to-day taking place
cover of darkness, Loredan stabs his
friend, who forgives him with his last
between dogma and modern scientific
breath. Loredan cries, «Thou shalt be
thought. The field of battle is the
avenged, and kills himself. His father
family of Leon Roch, a young scientist,
married to Maria, the daughter of the
exclaims, «O my country, I have re-
stored thy honor, but have lost my son.
Marquis de Telleria. Leon thinks he will
have no trouble in molding the young
Forgive these tears. ” Then, turning to
his fellow-conspirators, «Be ready to
girl, but finds soon after marriage that
fight at dawn of day. ” And so the play
she expects to convert him. When he
ends,
laughingly asks her how, she tears a
scientific book from his hand and destroys
reece under Foreign Domination,
it. Knowing that his wife's confessor is
Gree
ITS CONQUEST BY
responsible for her conduct, he offers to
THE RO-
MANS TO THE PRESENT TIME: 146 B. C. -
forsake his scientific studies if she will
leave Madrid and confine her church-
1864 A. D. By George Finlay. (Fi-
going to Sundays.
nal revised ed. 7 vols. , (1877. ) A thor-
She refuses; but
when he insists on
oughly learned, accurate, and interesting
a separation, she
consents.
for two thousand
history of Greece
The visit of her brother Luis,
and
ten years,
by writer who
a religious fanatic, prevents its accom-
qualified himself for his task by life-long plishment; and his death places an in-
residence in Greece: a soldier there in
superable barrier between husband and
wife.
Byron's time, a statesman and econo-
From this event the story moves rap-
mist of exceptional intelligence, and a
great historian of the more judicious
idly to a sad ending.
and practical type. The work was exe-
Peter Ibbetson, by George Du Mau-
cuted in parts in the years 1844-1861. rier. In Peter Ibbetson) romance
It consists of (1) Greece under the Ro. and realism so skillfully blended
mans 146 B. C. -717 A. D. ; (2) The By- that one accepts the fairy-tale element
FROM
a
## p. 410 (#446) ############################################
410
SYNOPSES OF NOTED BOOKS
a
new
a
a
as
own
almost unquestioningly. The book is a Van Bibber and others, by Richard
prose poem, and carries its reader into Harding Davis (1890), is a collection
world of dreams and ideal of short stories that appeared originally
beauty.
in the magazines. The central figure in
The first chapters tell the hero's life the majority of them is Van Bibber, a
as a child in the country near Paris, young New Yorker of the mythical
where he lives happily with his parents (Four Hundred, a charming fellow,
and his delicate little friend Mimsey combining the exquisiteness of the aristo-
Seraskier, until his father and mother crat with the sterling virtues of the
die, and he is taken away by his uncle. great American people. His tact is con-
The next years are spent at school in summate, his ideals of good form unim-
England; then Peter quarrels with his peachable, his snobbery entirely well-bred.
bad, ill-bred uncle, and becomes Having plenty of money, and nothing to
lonely, hard-working architect. He falls do but to be about town,” he is in the
in love at first sight with Mary, the way of adventures. Some of these are
Duchess of Towers: “It was the quick, funny; one or two are pathetic. They
sharp, cruel blow, the coup de poignard, all serve to throw high light upon Van
that beauty of the most obvious, yet Bibber in his character of a swell. The
subtle, consummate, and highly organ- stories are well written, and show the
ized order, can deal to a thoroughly pre- author's equal acquaintance with Fifth
pared victim. ” Afterwards he has Avenue and with the East Side.
strange, sweet dream of his boyhood,
where Mary is the only living reality Shirley, Charlotte Brontë's third novel,
; ,
and she tells him how to dream true,
was published in 1849. The scene is
and thus live over again his happy life
laid in the Yorkshire country with which
a child in France. Finally Peter
she had been acquainted from childhood.
meets Mary face to face; they discover,
The heroine, Shirley, was drawn from
her
sister Emily.
sphere of the two is not dissimilar: there Tale) derives partly from the fact that
is a tonic moral quality in Imogen's un- the play opens in winter, and partly
assailable virtue like the bracing mount- from the resemblance of the story to a
ain air in which the royal youths have marvelous tale told by a winter's fire.
been brought up. The beautiful song Like (Othello,' it depicts the tragic re-
(Fear No More the Heat o' the Sun) sults of jealousy, in this case long
a great favorite with Tennyson. years of suffering for both husband and
Cymbeline wanted his daughter Imogen wife, and the purification of the soul of
to marry his stepson Cloten, a boorish the former through remorse, and his
lout and cruel villain, but she has se- final reconciliation with his wronged
cretly married a brave and loyal private queen. Leontes, king of Sicily, unlike
gentleman, Posthumus Leonatus, and he Othello, has a natural bent toward jeal-
is banished for it. In Italy one lachimo ousy; he suspects without good cause,
wagers him ten thousand ducats to his and is grossly tyrannical in his persecu-
diamond ring that he can seduce the tions of the innocent. Hermione, in her
honor of Imogen. He miserably fails, sweet patience and sorrow, is the most
even by the aid of lies as to the disloy- divinely compassionate matron Shakes-
alty of Posthumus, and then pretends he peare has delineated. Polixenes, king
was but testing her virtue for her hus- of Bohemia, has been nine months a
band's sake. She pardons him, and re- guest of his boyhood's friend Leontes,
ceives into her chamber, for safe-keeping, and is warmly urged by both king and
a trunk, supposed to contain costly plate queen
to stay longer. Hermione's
and jewels, but which really contains warm hospitality and her lingering hand
lachimo himself, who emerges from it in pressures are construed by the king as
the dead of night; slips the bracelet proof of criminality: he sees himself
from her arm; observes the mole, cinque- laughed at for a cuckold; a deep fire of
spotted with crimson, on her breast; and rage burns in his heart; he wants Ca-
notes down in his book the furniture millo to poison Polisenes; but this good
and ornaments of the room. He returns man flies with him to Bohemia. Leon-
to Italy. Posthumus despairingly yields tes puts his wife in prison, where she is
himself beaten, and writes to his serv- delivered of a daughter. He compels
ant Pisanio to kill Imogen; to facilitate Antigonus to swear to expose it in a
the deed, he sends her word to meet desert place, and then proceeds with the
him at Milford Haven. Thither she flies formal trial of his wife. His messen-
was
## p. 400 (#436) ############################################
400
SYNOPSES OF NOTED BOOKS
a
was
gers to Delphi report her guiltless. She THE TEMPEST, one of Shakespeare's
swoons away, and Paulina gives out very latest plays (1611), written in the
that she is dead. But she is secretly mellow maturity of his genius, is prob-
conveyed away, after the funeral, and ably based on a lost Italian novella or
revived. Her little son dies from grief. play, though certain incidents are bor-
Sixteen years now elapse, and we are rowed from three pamphlets on the Ber-
across seas in Bohemia, near the palace mudas and Virginia and from Florio's
of Polixenes, and near where Hermi- Montaigne. The scene is said to be
one's infant daughter was exposed, but laid in the haunted island of Lampe-
rescued (with a bundle containing rich dusa in the Mediterranean. In the
bearing cloth, gold, jewels, etc. ) by an opening lines we see a ship laboring in
old shepherd. Antigonus and his ship's heavy seas near the shore of an island,
crew were all lost, so no trace of the in- whose sole inhabitants, besides the
fant could be found. But here she is, spirits of earth and air typified in the
the sweetest girl in Bohemia and named dainty ye powerful sprite Ariel, are
Perdita (“the lost one”). A sheep- Prospero and his lovely daughter Mi-
shearing feast at the old shepherd's cot- randa, and their slave, the deformed
tage is in progress. His son has gone boor Caliban, an aborigine of the is-
for sugar and spices and rice, and had land.
The grave and good Prospero is
his pocket picked by that rogue of
luckier castaway than Robinson
rogues, that snapper-up of unconsidered Crusoe, in that his old friend Gonzalo
trifles, Autolycus. The dainty Perdita put into the boat with him not only his
moves about under the green trees as infant daughter, but clothes, and some
the hostess of the occasion, giving to books of magic, by the aid of which
each guest a bunch of sweet flowers and both men and spirits, and the very ele-
a welcome. Polixenes and Camillo are ments, are subject to the beck of his
here in disguise, to look after Polix- wand. He was the rightful Duke of
enes's son Florizel. After dancing, and Milan, but
supplanted by his
some songs from peddler Autolycus, brother Antonio, who with his confeder-
Florizel and Perdita are about to be be- ate, the king of Naples, and the lat-
trothed when Polixenes discovers him- ter's son Ferdinand and others, is cast
self and threatens direst punishment to ashore on the island. The shipwreck
the rustics. The lovers fly to Sicily, occurs full in the sight of the weeping
with a feigned story for the ear of Miranda; but all hands are saved, and
Leontes; and the old shepherd and his the ship too. The humorous characters
son get aboard Florizel's ship to show are the butler Stephano, and the court
the bundle and fairy gold” found with jester Trinculo, both semi-drunk, their
Perdita, expecting thus to save their speech and songs caught from the sail-
lives by proving that they are not re- ors, and savoring of salt and tar.
sponsible for
her doings. Polixenes Throughout the play the three groups of
and Camillo follow the fugitives, and at personages, — the royal retinue with the
Leontes's court is great rejoicing at the irrepressible and malapropos old Gon-
discovery of the king's daughter; which zalo, the drunken fellows and Caliban,
joy is increased tenfold by Paulina, who and Prospero with his daughter and
restores Hermione to her repentant hus- Ferdinand, - move leisurely to and fro,
band's arms. Her device for gradually the whole action taking up only three
and gently possessing him of the idea of hours. The three boors, fuddled with
Hermione's being alive, is curious and their fine liquor and bearing the bark
shrewd. She gives out that she has in bottle, rove about the enchanted island,
her gallery a marvelous statue of Her- fall into the filthy-mantled pool, and are
mione by Julio Romano, so recently stoutly pinched by Prospero's goblins for
finished that the red paint on the lips is theft. The murderous plot of Antonio
yet wet.
When the curtain is drawn by and the courtier Sebastian is exposed at
Paulina, husband and daughter gaze the phantom banquet of the harpies.
greedily on the statue, and to their Spellbound in the linden grove, all the
amazement it is made to step down guilty parties come forward into
from its pedestal and speak. They per- charmed circle and take a lecture from
ceive it to be warm with life, and to be Prospero. General reconciliation. Then
indeed Hermione herself, - let us hope, to finally, Miranda and Ferdinand are dis-
have less strain on her charity thereafter. covered playing chess before Prospero's
a
## p. 401 (#437) ############################################
SYNOPSES OF NOTED BOOKS
401
on
a
or
cell, and learn that to-morrow they set
sail for Naples to be married.
Two NOBLE KINSMEN. – A most no-
ble and pathetic drama, founded
Chaucer's (Knighte's Tale, and first
printed in 1634, with the names of
Shakespeare and Fletcher on the title-
page as authors. The grand passages
show the very style of Coriolanus)
and of The Tempest,' and are wholly
beyond Fletcher's powers: e. g. , the
magnificent description of Arcite's horse,
worthy of the Panathenaic frieze; the
Meissonier portraits of the champion
Knights' assistants,— the stern, brown-
faced prince with long, black, shining
hair and lion mien, the massive-thewed
blond, and the rest; the portrait of
Arcite himself, his eye like a sharp
weapon on soft sheath, of most
fiery sparkle and soft sweetness);
of Palamon's brown manly face and
thought-lined brow. And how Shakes-
pearean that phrase applied to old men
nearing death,—the gray approachers !
And who but Shakespeare would have
written the lines (so admired by Ten-
nyson) on Mars,-
« Who dost pluck
with hand omnipotent from forth blue clouds
The mason'd turrets"?
The under-plot about the jailer's
daughter, who goes mad for Palamon's
love, is a weak and repulsive imitation
of the Ophelia scenes in (Hamlet. )
The play is about the tribulations of
two noble youths who both love the
sweet girl, «fresher than
the
May, - Emilia, sister of Hippolyta,
wife of Theseus. Their love separates
them; they were a miracle of friend-
ship, they become bitterest foes. By
Theseus's command they select each
three friends, and in a trial by combat
of the eight champions, Arcite wins
Emilia, but is at once killed by his
horse falling on him, and Palamon
secures the prize after all.
Henry VIII. , a historical drama by
Shakespeare, based on Edward Hall's
(Union of the Families of Lancaster
and York,' Holinshed's Chronicles,' and
Fox's 'Acts and Monuments of the
Church. ) The key-idea is the muta-
bility of earthly grandeur, and by one
or another turn of Fortune's wheel, the
overthrow of the mighty - i. e. , of the
Duke of Buckingham, of Cardinal Wol-
sey, and
of Queen arine. The
action covers a period of sixteen years,
XXX-2Ć
from the field of the Cloth of Gold, in
1520, described in the opening pages,
to the death of Queen Katharine in
1536. It is the trial and divorce of this
patient, queenly, and unfortunate woman,
that forms the main subject of the
drama. She was the daughter of Ferdi-
nand and Isabella of Castile, and born
in 1485. She had been married when
seventeen to Arthur, eldest son of Henry
VII. Arthur lived only five months after
his marriage, and when at seventeen
years Henry VIII. came to the throne
(that most hateful ruffian and tyrant),
he married Katharine, then twenty-four.
She bore him children, and he never
lost his respect for her and her unblem-
ished life. But twenty years after his
marriage he met Anne Bullen at a merry
ball at Cardinal Wolsey's palace, and
fell in love with her, and immediately
conceived conscientious scruples against
the legality of his marriage. Queen
Katharine is brought to trial before a
solemn council of nobles and churchmen.
With fine dignity she appeals to the
Pope and leaves the council, refusing
then and ever after to attend any of
their courts. The speeches are master-
pieces of pathetic and noble defense.
In all his facts the poet follows history
very faithfully. The Pope goes against
her, and she is divorced and sequestered
at Kimbolton, where presently she dies
heart-broken, sending a dying message
of love to Henry. Intertwined with the
sad fortunes of the queen the
equally crushing calamities that overtake
Cardinal Wolsey. His high-blown pride,
his oppressive exactions in amassing
wealth greater than the king's, his ego
et rex meus, his double dealing with
Henry in securing the Pope's sanction
to the divorce,- these and other things
are the means whereby his many ene-
mies work his ruin. He is stripped of
all his dignities and offices, and wanders
away, an old man broken with the storms
of State, to lay his bones in Leicester
Abbey. The episode of the trial of
Archbishop Cranmer is so pathetically
handled as to excite tears. He is brought
to trial for heresy by bis enemy Gardi-
ner, bishop of Winchester, but has pre-
viously been moved to tears of gratitude
by Henry's secretly bidding him be of
good cheer, and giving him his signet
ring as a talisman to conjure with if too
hard pressed by his enemies. Henry is
so placed as to oversee (himself unseen)
are
same
## p. 402 (#438) ############################################
402
SYNOPSES OF NOTED BOOKS
Cranmer's trial and the arrogant perse-
cution of Gardiner. Cranmer produces
the ring just as they are commanding
him to be led away to the Tower; and
Henry steps forth to first rebuke his
enemies and then command them to be
at peace. He does Cranmer the high
honor of asking him to become a god-
father to the daughter (Elizabeth) of
Anne Bullen; and after Cranmer's elo-
quent prophecy at the christening, the
curtain falls. The setting of this play
is full of rich and magnificent scenery
and spectacular pomp.
not work, japers, and mynstralles »
that sell "glee. ” They are, or nearly so,
the same beings Chaucer assembled at
the « Tabard » inn, on the eve of his pil-
grimage to Canterbury. This crowd has
likewise a pilgrimage to make.
« They journey through abstract coun-
tries, they follow mystic roads
in search of Truth and of Supreme
Good. »
This search is the subject of an elab-
orate allegory, in the course of which
the current abuses in Church and State
are vigorously attacked. The poet in-
veighs especially against the greed and
insincerity of his age, personifying these
qualities in Lady Meed, who leads men
astray, and tricks them into sin. The
poem throws much light upon social and
religious institutions of the day. These
revelations must, however, be sought for
among the strange mist-shapes of alle-
gory.
The poet's vocabulary is similar to
that of Chaucer. Several dialects are
combined in it, the Midland dia
dominating The metre is alliterative,
long lines, divided into half-lines by a
pause. Each line contains strong, or ac-
cented, syllables in fixed number, and
weak or unaccented syllables in varying
number.
About Piers Plowman) there has
grown up a considerable body of editor-
ial commentary. The work of Thomas
Wright and of Skeat in this field is
noteworthy.
The Vision
of Piers Plowman, an
English poem of the fourteenth cen-
tury, is ascribed, chiefly on the ground
of internal evidence, to William Lang-
land or Longland, a monk of Malvern,
in spirit a Thomas Carlyle of the Middle
Ages, crying out against abuses, insist-
ing upon sincerity as the first of virtues.
This poem belongs to the class of the
dream-poem, a characteristic product of
his century. Dante had seen all heaven
and hell in vision. Gower and the au-
thor of Pearl had dreamed dreams.
(The Vision of Piers Plowman) is a cu-
rious amalgamation of fantastic allegory
and clear-cut fact, of nebulous dreams
and vivid pictures of the England of the
day. The author is at once as realistic
as Chaucer and as mystical as Guil-
laume de Lorris, the observant man of
the world and the brooding anchorite;
his poem reflects both the England of
the fourteenth century and the visionary,
child-like mediæval mind.
Internal evidence fixes its date about
1362. Forty manuscript copies of it, be-
longing for the most part to the latter
end of the fourteenth century, attest its
popularity. Three distinct versions are
extant, known as Texts A, B, and C.
The probable date of Text A is 1362-63;
of Text B, 1376–77; of Text C, 1398–99.
The variations in these texts are consid-
erable. An imitation of the poem called
(Piers Plowman's Crede) appeared about
1393. The author of Piers Plowman)
represents himself as falling asleep on
Malvern Hills, on a beautiful May morn-
ing: In his dreams he beholds a vast
plain, «a feir feld ful of folk,” repre-
senting indeed the whole of humanity:
knights, monks, parsons, workmen sing-
ing French songs, cooks crying hot pies !
Hote pyes, hote! ” pardoners, pilgrims,
preachers, beggars, jongleurs who will
1
on
Sartor Resartus, by Thomas Carlyle,
first appeared in Fraser's Magazine,
in 1833-34, and later in book form. It
is divided into three parts, - introduc-
tory, biographical, and philosophical.
The first part describes an imaginary
book (Clothes: Their Origin and
Influence) by Diogenes Teufelsdröckh,
Professor of Things in General at
Weissnichtwo in Germany. The book,
the editor complains, is uneven in style
and matter, and extraordinarily difficult
to comprehend, but of such vigor in
places that he is impelled to translate
parts of it. The book begins with a
history of clothes: they are co-existent
with civilization, and are the source of
all social
and
political distinction.
Aprons, for example, are of all sorts,
from the smith's iron sheet to the
bishop's useless drapery. The re
church is shown in the paper aprons
## p. 403 (#439) ############################################
SYNOPSES OF NOTED BOOKS
403
men.
as
a
of the Paris cooks; future historians man and of the freedom of thought.
will talk, not of church, but of jour-Religion is the basis of society: every
nalism, and of editors instead of states- society may be described as a church
Man is apt to forget that he is which is audibly preaching or prophesy-
not a mere clothed animal, - that to ing, or which is not yet articulate, or
the eye of pure reason he is a soul. which is dumb with old age. Religion
Still Teufelsdröckh does not counsel a has entirely abandoned the clothes pro-
return to the natural state, for he rec- vided for her by modern society, and
ognizes the utility of clothes the sits apart making herself new ones. All
foundation of society. Wonder, at him- symbols are valuable as keeping some-
self or at nature, every man must feel thing silent, and, at the same time, as
in order to worship. Everything ma- revealing something of the Infinite.
terial is but an emblem of something Society now has no proper symbols,
spiritual; clothes are such emblems, and owing to over-utilitarianism and over-
are thus worthy of examination.
independence. Still a new society is form-
The autobiographic details sent to the ing itself to rise, Phænix-like, from the
editor which fill Book ii. came to him on ashes of the old. Mankind, like nature,
loose scraps of paper in sealed paper is one, not an aggregate of units. The
bags, with no attempt at arrangement future church for the worship of these
anywhere. A mysterious stranger left mysteries will be literature, as already
Teufelsdröckh, when he was a helpless suggested by the prophet Goethe. Cus-
infant, at the house of Andreas Futteral, tom makes nature, time, and space, which
a veteran and farmer. Andreas and his are really miracles, seem natural, but
wife Gretchen brought the boy up hon- we must feel wonder and reverence at
estly and carefully. As child he them. Our life is through mystery to
roamed out-doors, listened to the talk of mystery, from God to God. The chief
old men, and watched the sunset light points, in concluding, to be remembered
play over
the valley. At school he are: All life is based on wonder; all
learned little, and at the gymnasiums clothes, or symbols, are forms or mani-
less. At the university he received no festations of the spiritual or infinite;
instruction, but happened to prefer read- cant and hypocrisy everywhere should
ing to rioting, and so gained a great deal be replaced by clear truth.
of information. Then he was thrust into
the world to find out what his capability
was by himself. He withdrew from the riet Waters Preston, is an account
law, in which he had begun, and tried of the poetry of Provence, old and new.
to start out for himself.
The woman The earlier essays describe the work
whom he loved married another, and he of the two best-known of the <Fé-
was plunged into the depths of despair. libres, as the school of modern poets
Doubt, which he had felt in the univer- of the South of France is called: men
sity, became unbelief in God and even who write in the old (langue d'oc,”
the Devil, — in everything but duty, could or Provençal dialect, in opposition to
he have known what duty was.
He was
the langue d'oil,” or French tongue,
a victim to a curious fear, until one day which they do not acknowledge as their
his whole spirit rose, and uttering the language. Miss Preston makes many
protest of the everlasting no, asserted translations of their verse, which give
its own freedom. After that he wan- a vivid presentment of the fire and
dered in a «Centre of Indifference, color and naïve simplicity of the ori-
not caring much, but interested in cities, ginals. Another poet of the South of
fields, and books. Life came to mean France, neither Provençal nor French,
freedom to him; he felt impelled to was Jacques Jasmin, who wrote in the
look through the shows of things to the peculiar Gascon dialect, with all the
things themselves,» — to find the Ideal wit and gayety of his race. The fore-
in the midst of the Actual.
runners of all these men were the old
The third book, which deals with the troubadours, who fourished from the
philosophy itself, is much less continuous driving out of the Saracens to the end
and clear. In the first chapter, he of the crusades, during the age of
praises George Fox's suit of leather as chivalry,” and who spent their lives
the most remarkable suit of its century, making love songs for the ladies of their
since it was a symbol of the equality of preference. Their chansons, or songs, so
Troubadours and Trouveres, by Har-
>>
## p. 404 (#440) ############################################
404
SYNOPSES OF NOTED BOOKS
sec
simple and so perfect, were invariably on
the one theme of love; occasionally they
wrote longer pieces, called “sirventes,
which were narrative or satiric. Many
charming translations illustrate their
manner. The book closes with a chap-
ter on the Arthurian legends, showing
what these owe to Geoffrey of Mon-
mouth, to unknown French romances,
to Sir Thomas Malory, and finally
to Tennyson. Miss Preston's excellent
scholarship and rare literary gift com-
bine to make a most entertaining book.
own
ambitions. Leaving the actors, he be-
comes acquainted with some landed pro-
prietors belonging to the lesser nobility
of the country. And here the
ond period of his apprenticeship begins.
Meeting people of culture and position
in society, he comes into closer touch
with real life, and is initiated into the
ways of the world. His development is
further hastened by finding his son Fe-
lix, whom he has never acknowledged.
What women and society are still unable
to teach him, he now learns from his
child. The awakening sense of
his parental responsibilities is the final
touchstone of his fully developed man-
hood. Having thus completed his ap-
prenticeship to life in a series of bitter
experiences, he now marries a lady of
rank, and turns landed proprietor. The
scheme of the novel gave Goethe oppor-
tunity to bring in the most varied phases
of society, especially the nobility of his
time, and the actors. He also discusses
different æsthetic principles, especially
the laws of dramatic art as exemplified
in (Hamlet. ) He also touches on ques-
tions of education, and religious contro-
versy, and satirizes somewhat the secret
societies, just then beginning to spring
up in Germany. (Wilhelm Meister,' in
short, gives a richly colored picture of
the life of Goethe's time.
Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship.
The first part of Wilhelm Meis-
ter) was finished in 1796, after having
occupied Goethe's attention for twenty
years.
The central idea of this great
novel is the development of the individ-
ual by means of the most varied expe-
riences of life. There is no plot proper,
but in a series of brilliant episodes the
different stages of the hero's spiritual
growth are brought before the reader.
Wilhelm Meister is a young man with
many admirable qualities of character,
but passionate and emotional, somewhat
unstable, lacking reflection and proper
knowledge of the world. The son of a
well-to-do business man in a small Ger-
man town is traveling for his father's
house when he falls in with a troupe of
strolling comedians. From earliest boy-
hood he has been devoted to the theatre,
a passion which has been nourished by
puppet-plays and much reading of dra-
matic literature and romances. Disgusted
with the routine of business, and eager
for new experiences, he joins the players,
determined to become an actor himself,
His apprenticeship to life falls into two
periods. The first comprises the lessons
he learned while among the players.
Brought up in comfort in a respectable,
somewhat philistine household, he enjoys
at first the free and easy life of his new
companions, though as a class they had
at that period hardly any standing in
society. He becomes passionately at-
tached to Marianne, a charming young
actress, who returns his love, but whom
he leaves after a while, because of un-
grounded jealousy. For a time he thinks
he has found his true vocation in the
pursuit of the actor's art. But ill-success
on the stage, and closer acquaintance
with this bohemian life of shams and
gilded misery, disillusions him, and re-
veals the insubstantiality of his youthful
Scarlet Letter, The, the novel which
established Nathaniel Hawthorne's
fame, and which he wrote in the ancient
environment of Salem, was published in
1850, when he was forty-six years old.
Its simple plot of Puritan times in New
England is surrounded with an air of
mystery and of weird imaginings. The
scene is in Boston, two hundred years
ago: the chief characters are Hester
Prynne; her lover, Arthur Dimmes-
dale, the young but revered minister of
the town; their child, Pearl; and her
husband Roger Chillingworth, an aged
scholar, a former resident of Amster-
dam, who, resolving to remove to the
New World, had, two years previously,
sent his young wife Hester on before
him. When the book opens, he arrives
in Boston, to find her upon the pillory,
her babe in her arms; upon her breast
the Scarlet Letter “A” (“Adulteress”),
which she has been condemned to wear
for life. She refuses to reveal the
name of her partner in guilt, and takes
up her lonely abode on the edge of the
## p. 405 (#441) ############################################
SYNOPSES OF NOTED BOOKS
405
on
rare
wilderness. Here Pearl grows up a wild
elf-like child; here Hester makes atone-
ment by devoting her life to deeds of
mercy.
Her husband, whose identity
she has sworn to conceal, remains in the
town, and in the guise of a physician,
pries into and tortures the minister's
remorse-haunted soul. Hester, knowing
this, forgetting aught but love, proposes
fight with him. He wills to remain,
to reveal his guilt publicly. Confessing
all, after a sermon of great power, he
dies in Hester's arms, upon the plat-
form where she once stood condemned.
A wonderful atmosphere of the Puritan
society bathes this book, its moral in-
tensity, its sensitiveness to the unseen
powers; while forever pressing in upon
the seething little community is the
mystery of the new-world wilderness,
the counterpart of the spiritual wilder-
ness in which Hester and Arthur wan-
der.
This great creation is one of the
few classics » that the nineteenth cen-
tury has added to literature.
Knightly Soldier, The, by H. Clay
Trumbull, is a biography of Major
Henry Ward Camp of the Tenth Con-
necticut Volunteers, who fell in one of
the battles before Richmond in 1864. It
was written while the War was still in
progress; while the author, who
chaplain in the army and an attached
friend of the subject of the memoir, was
still amid the stress of the great con-
Aict; and he writes with the warmth of
personal affection and comradeship of
the career of a young American soldier.
It is a noble monument to the memory
of the author's friend; at the same time
it is a graphic chronicle of a soldier's
life in the field. The letters of Major
Camp interwoven with the narrative
reveal the man's study of himself in the
experiences of battle, prison, flight, re-
capture, liberation; and show him to be
indeed a knightly soldier. )
Twenty Years of Congress: From
Lincoln to Garfield, WITH A RE-
THE EVENTS WHICH LED
THE POLITICAL REVOLUTION OF 1860, by
James G. Blaine, with portraits. (2 vols.
1884-86. ) Mr. Blaine's unrivaled oppor-
of
work it an
contribution to history. It is clear, in-
teresting, and brilliantly written. A
large part of the first volume is de-
voted to a review of the events which
led up to the Civil War. Beginning
with the original compromises between
the North and the South embodied in
the Constitution, it proceeds with the
Missouri Compromises of 1820 and 1821,
the origin and development of the abo-
lition party, the character of the South-
ern leaders, the Mexican War, origin
and growth of the Republican party,
the Dred Scott decision, the debate
between Douglas and Lincoln, the
John Brown raid and Lincoln's elec-
tion. Then follow two chapters
Congress in the winter of 1860-61; after
which the course of affairs during the
War and down to the inauguration of
President Johnson occupies the rest of
the volume. Mr. Blaine shows himself
to be a warm admirer of Henry Clay,
contrasting him very favorably with
Webster, and saying of him: «In the
combination of qualities which
constitute at once the matchless leader
of party and the statesman of consum-
mate ability and inexhaustible resource,
he has never been surpassed by any
man speaking the English tongue. ) Of
General Grant he speaks in the most
appreciative terms. The picture of Lin-
coln's character is strongly drawn and
glowing. Volume ii. covers the period
from the beginning of Johnson's admin-
istration to the year 1881. The disband-
ment of the army, reconstruction, the
three amendments to the Constitution,
the government's financial legislation,
Johnson's impeachment, General Grant's
two terms, the Geneva award, Hayes's
administration, the fisheries question,
and Garfield's election, are among the
topics treated. In conclusion, the author
alludes to the unprecedented difficulty
of the legislative problems during the
War, and briefly notes' the course of
Congress in grappling with them, re-
views the progress of the people dur-
ing the twenty years, claiming credit
for Congress for the result, and asserts
that “No government of modern times
has encountered the dangers that beset
the United States, achieved the
triumphs wherewith the nation is
crowned. »
was
:
VIEW
OF
TO
or
inn itkis varike imekese period important Luckther sketchesney Street Markehavd
, by
for their subjects strange incidents of life
in the far West during the gold-fever
of '49.
The essential romance of that.
adventurous, lawless, womanless society
## p. 406 (#442) ############################################
406
SYNOPSES OF NOTED BOOKS
is embodied in these tales. Representa-
tive members of it, gamblers with the
melancholy air and intellectual abstrac-
tion of a Hamlet”; all-around scamps
with blond hair and Raphael faces;
men with pasts buried in the oblivion
east of the Mississippi; young men, bat-
tered men, decayed college graduates,
and ex-convicts, are brought together in
picturesque confusion, — their hot, fierce
dramas being played against the loneli-
ness of the Sierras, the aloofness of an
unconquerable nature. (The Luck of
Roaring Camp' is perhaps the
beautiful of the sketches; (The Outcasts
of Poker Flat) is scarcely less pathetic.
In Tennessee's Partner,' and in Mig-
gles,' humor and pathos are mingled.
The entire book is a wonderfully dra-
matic transcript . of a phase of Western
life forever passed away.
The environment in which she is placed
- fashionable England of the beginning
of the century — offered a great field for
the genius of Thackeray. He portrayed
it with marvelous, sustained skill through
the long, leisurely, many-chaptered novel.
Not a foible of fashionable life escaped
him: not one weakness of human nature,
not one fallacy of the gay world. His
satire plays like searching light upon
the canvas. His humanity does not miss
the pathos sometimes lurking under the
hard, bright surface of events. He does
not forget that some women are tender,
that some men are brave. Neither does
he pass eternal judgment upon his char-
acters. In his dealings with these fre-
quenters of Vanity Fair,' there is some-
thing of the indifference of the gods,
something, too, of their chivalry.
most
uo Vadis, the latest and perhaps the
Vanity Fair, by W. M. Thackeray Q“most popular proste a nohy Perkies Polish
a
(1847–48), is one of the few great
novels of the world, and perhaps the
only novel of society that ranks as
classic, as a perfect and complete em-
bodiment of those peculiar forces and
conditions embraced in the term "fash-
ionable. ) As the sub-title states, it is
<< without a hero); but not, however,
without a heroine. The central figure of
the book is that chef-d'œuvre, the im-
mortal, inimitable, magnificent Becky
Sharp, the transcendent type of social
strugglers, the cleverest, most unmoral
woman in the whole range of fiction.
From the hour when she tosses John-
son's Dictionary, the last gift of her
teacher, out of the window of the Sedley
coach, to her final appearance on the
stage of the novel, she never falters in
the bluff game she is playing with so-
ciety. Her victims are numerous, her
success, with slight exceptions, is unim-
peachable. In constant contrast to her is
pretty, pink-and-white, amiable Amelia,
all love and trust, Beckey's school inti-
mate and first protector.
On Amelia
and Amelia's family, Becky first climbs
towards the dizzy heights of an assured
social position. Rawdon Crawley is her
final prey, the successful victim of
her matrimonial ventures. Having se-
cured him, she is more at liberty to be
herself, to cease the strain of concealing
her real nature, in her home at least.
To the world she is still an actress, and
the world does not find her out until it
has suffered by her.
master in fiction, Henryk Sienkiewicz,
is, like the trilogy,” historical; it deals,
however, not with the history of Poland,
but with that of Rome in the time
of Nero. The magnificent spectacular
environment of the decaying Roman
empire, the dramatic qualities of the
Christian religion, then assuming a
world-wide significance, offer rich mate-
rial for the genius of Sienkiewicz. He
presents the background of his narrative
with marvelous vividness. Against it he
draws great figures: Petronius, the lordly
Roman noble, the very flower of pagan-
ism; Eunice and Lygia, diverse products
of the same opulent world; Nero, the
beast-emperor; the Christians seeking an
unseen kingdom in a city overwhelmed
by the symbols of earthly imperialism;
others typical of dying
Rome, or of that New Rome to be es-
tablished on the ruined throne of the
Cæsars. The novel as a whole is in-
tensely dramatic, sometimes melodra-
matic. Its curious title has reference to
an ancient legend, which relates that St.
Peter, fleeing from Rome and from
crucifixion, meets his Lord Christ on
the Appian Way. «Lord, whither goest
thou ? ) (Domine, quo vadis ? ) cries Peter.
« To Rome, to be crucified again,” is the
reply. The apostle thereupon turns back
to his martyrdom. While (Quo Vadis)
cannot rank with the trilogy,” it is in
many respects a remarkable novel. Its
merit is not, however, in the ratio of its
popularity.
and many
## p. 407 (#443) ############################################
SYNOPSES OF NOTED BOOKS
407
Indiana, by “George Sand” (Madame
Dudevant). A romantic tale pub-
lished in 1832, which is of interest
chiefly as being the first which brought
the distinguished author into note, and
also as portraying something of the au-
thor's own experience in married life.
The scene is alternately in the Castle
de Brie, the estate of the aged Colonel
Delmare, a retired officer of Napoleon's
army, where he lives with his youthful
Creole wife Indiana; and in Paris,
where the wife visits her aristocratic
aunt, and where lives Raymond de Ra-
mière, the heartless and reckless lover
first of her foster-sister and maid Noun,
and then of herself. Estranged from
her ill-matched husband, the young wife
is drawn into the fascinations of Ray-
mond, whose artfulness succeeds in de-
ceiving the Colonel, the wife, and all
the faithful English cousin, Sir
Ralph; who secretly loves Indiana, but
shields Raymond from discovery for fear
of the pain that would result to her.
Desperate situations and dire conflicts
of emotions follow, with much discourse
on love and marital duty, and frequent
discussions of the social ard political
questions of the day; the Colonel repre-
senting the Napoleonic idea of empire,
Raymond the conservative legitimist,
and Sir Ralph the modern republican.
The descriptions of nature are vivid,
and the characters are skillfully drawn,
however untrue they may seem to actual
life.
to force them into submission to the
house of Hapsburg. But a band of the
free-born Swiss gathered together on
the Rütli, that famous meadow on the
lake of Lucerne, even now an objective
point of pilgrimage to the traveler in
Switzerland. They swore a solemn oath
to overthrow the Austrian tyranny, and
to free their country. But even while
they were maturing their plans, one of
the oppressors, Gessler, came to his
death. He had forced William Tell to
shoot an apple from the head of his
son, as a punishment for disregarding a
ridiculous ordinance. Tell, one of the
best marksmen far and wide, hit the
core of the apple without so much as
touching a hair of his son's head. Yet
he swore vengeance, and at the next
opportunity he shot Gessler. This deed
was the signal for a general uprising of
the people. The Austrian officials were
driven out of the country, their castles
destroyed, and Switzerland
more free. Although the play is named
after Tell, he is merely the nominal
hero. The real protagonists are the
whole people.
save
was
once
William Tell, the last completed
drama of Schiller, - his swan-
song, was written in 1804, one year
before his death. It is considered one
of his finest works, being the most ma-
ture expression of that idea of freedom
with which he had opened his poetic
career in (The Robbers, twenty years
before. But whereas Karl Moor was
warring against the existing order of
things, the Swiss people were fighting
for the preservation of their ancient
rights. The drama deals with what one
might call the rebellion of the three
Swiss counties, Schwyz, Uri, and Unter-
walden, against the duke Albrecht of
Austria, who at the same time
German Emperor under the name Al-
brecht I. , reigning 1298-1308. His
bailiffs, Hermann Gessler von Bruneck
and Beringer von Landenberg, harassed
the people in all possible ways, in order
Yemassee, The: A ROMANCE OF Caro-
LINA, by William
Gilmore Sims.
This is an American romance, the lead-
ing events of which are strictly true.
The Yemassee are a powerful and gal-
lant race of Indians, dwelling, with their
tributary tribes, at the time of the ac-
tion, in South Carolina. Their hunting
grounds are gradually encroached upon
by the English colonists, who, by pur-
chases, seizures, and intrigues, finally
change the feeling of friendship with
which their advent was greeted, into
fear, and finally into savage revolt. It
is during this period of warfare (the
early part of the eighteenth century)
that the scene of the romance is laid.
Mingled with the description of the life
of the primitive red man is a stirring
account of the struggles of the early
colonists. The romance culminates in a
realistic account of the attack by the
Yemassee, in conjunction with neighbor-
ing tribes and Spanish allies, upon a
small band of colonists, who, after a
fierce conflict, finally defeat them. Inter-
woven with the scenes of savage cruelty,
Spanish intrigue, and colonial hardship,
is the love story of pretty Bess Matthews,
daughter of the pastor, and Gabriel
Harrison, the savior of the little band;
was
## p. 408 (#444) ############################################
408
SYNOPSES OF NOTED BOOKS
who later, as Charles Craven, Governor ketched me at it! Git off and set down!
and Lord Palatine of Carolina, claims You ain't goin' for no doctor, I know );
. her hand. If the narrative seems often and who confesses that his aim is to be
extravagant in its multiplicity of ad- “the Pacific Slope Bonheur. ” His criti-
ventures, hair-breadth escapes, thrilling cisms on his fellow artists are more in-
climaxes, and recurrent dangers, it is cisive than Taine's. < Old Eastman
to be remembered that it depicts a time Johnson's barns and everlasting girl
when adventure was the rule, and rou- with the ears of corn ain't life, it ain't
tine the exception; when death lurked got the real git-up. ” Bierstadt's mount-
at every threshold, and life was but a ains would <blow over in one of oui
daily exemplification of the survival of fall winds. He hasn't got what old
the fittest. ”
Ruskin calls for. ) In all Mr. King's
Some of the principal characters are character sketches appear the modest
Sanutee, chief of the Yemassee; Mati- | good sense and sympathy, and the phi-
wan, his wife; Occonestoga, his son, losophic spirit, that makes his analysis
slain for betrayal of his tribe; Richard of social problems so satisfactory. The
Chorley, the buccaneer; and the trader concluding chapter is given to Califor-
Granger, and his wife, — the latter a nia as furnishing a study of character.
type of the woman, brave in spirit and Forced to admit the conditions on which
keen of wit, whom the early colonies she has been condemned as vulgar and
developed.
brutal, he yet perceives that being is
far less significant than becoming, and
Mountaineering in the Sierra Ne- that her future is to be not less mag-
vada, by Clarence King. (1872. ) nificent than her hopes.
Mr. King is so well known a scientist
that the government very properly long Social Silhouettes, by Edgar Fawcett,
ago annexed his services. It is therefore (1885,) is a series of gracefully ironic
to be taken for granted that the geology sketches upon New York society. Mr.
and geography of this volume are above Mark Manhattan, born among the elect,
suspicion. But what delights the un- related to most of the Knickerbocker
learned reader is not its scientific accu- families, and blessed with an adequate
racy, but its nice observation, its vivid income, amuses his leisure by a study
power of description, its unfailing hu- of social types. He introduces us to the
mor, its beautiful literary art. The offi- charmed circle of Rivingtons, River-
cial mountaineer in pursuit of his duty | sides, Croton-Nyacks, Schenectadys, and
ascends Mount Shasta and Mount Tyn- others, all opulent, all sublimely sure of
dall, Mount Whitney and the peaks of their own superiority to the rest of hu-
the Yosemite, and gathers all the data manity. With a serene pity born of in-
for which a distant administration is timate knowledge of society's prizes, he
pining. But on his own account, and watches the rich parvenu, Mrs. Ridgeway
to the unspeakable satisfaction of his Bridgeway, push her way to recognition.
audience, he «interviews » the Pike There is the young lady who fails be-
County immigrant, the Digger, the man
her evident anxiety to please
from Nowhere, and the Californian; and repels with a sense of strain all who ap-
the reader is privileged to assist with proach her.
There is the young man
unspeakable satisfaction on all these so- who succeeds because he makes no ef-
cial occasions, and to sigh that there are fort, and although able to express noth-
not more. A joy forever is that painter ing except manner and pronunciation,
of the Sierras whom the geologist — has name and dollars. Mr. Bradford
«longing for some equal artist who Putnam is another type, an egotistic
should arise and choose to paint our nonentity without a thought in his mind
Sierras as they really are, with all their or a generous sentiment in his heart,
color-glory, power of innumerable pine who arrogantly enjoys what the gods
and countless pinnacle, gloom of tem- have provided. Mr. Mark Manhattan
pestor splendor, where rushing light does not think that “the brave little
shatters itself upon granite crag, Mayflower steered its pale, half-starved
burns in dying rose upon far fields of inmates through bleak storm of angry
snow” — suddenly encountered, painting seas to help them found an ancestry for
a large canvas, who accosted him such idle dalliers. ” He is a kindly
with «Dern'd if you ain't just naturally cynic with sympathy for those who suf-
cause
OT
on
## p. 409 (#445) ############################################
SYNOPSES OF NOTED BOOKS
409
fer in intricate social meshes, and with zantine Empire, 717–1204; (3) Mediæval
contempt for all false standards and hy- Greece and Trebizond, 1204-1566; (4)
pocrisy. He is not a reformer, but an Greece under Ottoman and Venetian
indolent spectator with sense of hu- Dominion, 1453–1821; and (5) The Greek
mor, who, after all, enjoys the society Revolution and Greek Affairs, 1843–1864.
which he wittily berates.
The whole was thoroughly revised by
the author before his death at Athens
Sicilian Vespers, The, by Cassimir in 1875, and was very carefully edited
Delavigne. This tragedy in five for the Clarendon Press by Rev. H. F.
acts, first performed in Paris in 1819, is Tozer. In comparison with Gibbon, it
only memorable from its subject, the deals far more with interesting social
«Sicilian Vespers,” that being the name particulars, and comes much nearer than
given to the massacre of the French in Gibbon did to adequate treatment of
Sicily, in 1282, the signal for which was the ages which both have covered. The
to be the first stroke of the vesper-bell. author's prolonged residence in Greece,
John of Procida returns from a visit to with very great sympathetic attention
secure the aid of Pedro of Aragon in to Greek affairs, peculiarly qualified him
liberating Sicily from the French. His to deal intelligently with the problems
son Loredan has become the fast friend of Greek character through the long
of Montfort, the representative of Charles course of ages, from the Roman con-
of Anjou. Montfort asks Loredan to in- | quest to the latest developments. Taken
tercede for him with Princess Amelia, in connection with Grote's admirable
heir to the throne of Sicily, unaware volumes for the ages of Greek story
that she is his betrothed. Procida orders before Alexander the Great, the two
his son to slay his friend, who is also works, even with a gap of two cen-
his country's foe. Amelia warns Mont- turies between them, form one of the
fort, whom she loves despite her be- most interesting courses in history for
trothal. Montfort, learning Loredan's thirty centuries to which the attention
claims upon her, upbraids him and of intelligent readers can be given.
banishes him; but his nobler impulses
This
triumph, and he pardons him. Night Leon Roch, by B. Pérez Galdós.
falls; the massacre breaks out. Under
novel is a painful study of the
struggle which is to-day taking place
cover of darkness, Loredan stabs his
friend, who forgives him with his last
between dogma and modern scientific
breath. Loredan cries, «Thou shalt be
thought. The field of battle is the
avenged, and kills himself. His father
family of Leon Roch, a young scientist,
married to Maria, the daughter of the
exclaims, «O my country, I have re-
stored thy honor, but have lost my son.
Marquis de Telleria. Leon thinks he will
have no trouble in molding the young
Forgive these tears. ” Then, turning to
his fellow-conspirators, «Be ready to
girl, but finds soon after marriage that
fight at dawn of day. ” And so the play
she expects to convert him. When he
ends,
laughingly asks her how, she tears a
scientific book from his hand and destroys
reece under Foreign Domination,
it. Knowing that his wife's confessor is
Gree
ITS CONQUEST BY
responsible for her conduct, he offers to
THE RO-
MANS TO THE PRESENT TIME: 146 B. C. -
forsake his scientific studies if she will
leave Madrid and confine her church-
1864 A. D. By George Finlay. (Fi-
going to Sundays.
nal revised ed. 7 vols. , (1877. ) A thor-
She refuses; but
when he insists on
oughly learned, accurate, and interesting
a separation, she
consents.
for two thousand
history of Greece
The visit of her brother Luis,
and
ten years,
by writer who
a religious fanatic, prevents its accom-
qualified himself for his task by life-long plishment; and his death places an in-
residence in Greece: a soldier there in
superable barrier between husband and
wife.
Byron's time, a statesman and econo-
From this event the story moves rap-
mist of exceptional intelligence, and a
great historian of the more judicious
idly to a sad ending.
and practical type. The work was exe-
Peter Ibbetson, by George Du Mau-
cuted in parts in the years 1844-1861. rier. In Peter Ibbetson) romance
It consists of (1) Greece under the Ro. and realism so skillfully blended
mans 146 B. C. -717 A. D. ; (2) The By- that one accepts the fairy-tale element
FROM
a
## p. 410 (#446) ############################################
410
SYNOPSES OF NOTED BOOKS
a
new
a
a
as
own
almost unquestioningly. The book is a Van Bibber and others, by Richard
prose poem, and carries its reader into Harding Davis (1890), is a collection
world of dreams and ideal of short stories that appeared originally
beauty.
in the magazines. The central figure in
The first chapters tell the hero's life the majority of them is Van Bibber, a
as a child in the country near Paris, young New Yorker of the mythical
where he lives happily with his parents (Four Hundred, a charming fellow,
and his delicate little friend Mimsey combining the exquisiteness of the aristo-
Seraskier, until his father and mother crat with the sterling virtues of the
die, and he is taken away by his uncle. great American people. His tact is con-
The next years are spent at school in summate, his ideals of good form unim-
England; then Peter quarrels with his peachable, his snobbery entirely well-bred.
bad, ill-bred uncle, and becomes Having plenty of money, and nothing to
lonely, hard-working architect. He falls do but to be about town,” he is in the
in love at first sight with Mary, the way of adventures. Some of these are
Duchess of Towers: “It was the quick, funny; one or two are pathetic. They
sharp, cruel blow, the coup de poignard, all serve to throw high light upon Van
that beauty of the most obvious, yet Bibber in his character of a swell. The
subtle, consummate, and highly organ- stories are well written, and show the
ized order, can deal to a thoroughly pre- author's equal acquaintance with Fifth
pared victim. ” Afterwards he has Avenue and with the East Side.
strange, sweet dream of his boyhood,
where Mary is the only living reality Shirley, Charlotte Brontë's third novel,
; ,
and she tells him how to dream true,
was published in 1849. The scene is
and thus live over again his happy life
laid in the Yorkshire country with which
a child in France. Finally Peter
she had been acquainted from childhood.
meets Mary face to face; they discover,
The heroine, Shirley, was drawn from
her
sister Emily.
