Chapter IX: In Society (9)

After the Romans came the Teutonic invaders; and of these the Franks so imposed themselves upon the country that they gave it their name, and Gaul became France. Charlemagne was neither Celtic nor Latin, but simply Karl the Great, a Teutonic monarch under whose sceptre all the Franks were united. The predominance of the Franks in Gaul for many generations had a modifying influence upon the people. The Celtic Gaul was a lively, spirited, vain, bold, but not a very steadily courageous man. The Teutonic was a quieter, steadier, more reserved, and more thoughtful man. He was a bigger man, too, and like big men, he took things more quietly; he had the steady courage which the dashing and gaily caparisoned Celt somewhat lacked. And yet it is remarkable that in the end the Celtic nature reasserted itself in France, although with some modification; and to-day the Frenchman is a Celt, as fond of talk, of fanciful poetry, of fine dress, and show, and dash, as his forefather was fifteen hundred years ago.

It was not until about the year 850 that the language of the people of France assumed a form distinctively French, according to the modern standard; and even then it was so rude and unformed that to a modern uneducated Frenchman it would be quite as strange and incomprehensible as Latin itself. From the very first the great distinction between the language of the north and that of the south seems to have existed. The _langue d'oc_ and the _langue d'oil_ contended for the mastery, which was finally won by the latter. This is remarkable, as the former was the softer and more cultivated tongue. The finest and the most of the very early poetry of France was written in the _langue d'oc_. To this literature and to the condition of the society in which it was produced Mr. Van Laun gives much attention, as might have been expected. This part of his book is interesting to students of literary history; but we must confess that the songs of the troubadours have to us very rarely any of the charms of poetry, and that we think that much of the admiration of them which has been expressed by literary antiquarians is fictitious. There is occasionally in these poems a touch of natural feeling; but generally they are cold and full of conceits. Form seems to have been more important in the poet's eyes than spirit; and instead of genuine fervor we have deliberate extravagance. The great epic poem of the French language--its greatest if not its only great poem--the "Chanson de Roland"--is written in the _langue d'oil_. Mr. Van Laun notices this poem of course, and gives a brief summary of its plot, or we might better say of its incidents; but we are surprised that he does not give it more attention. It is far more worthy of critical examination than the fantastic love poems of the troubadours.

In his account of feudal society and of the effect which its conditions had upon such literature as there was in that day, Mr. Van Laun could hardly pass over those tribunals so characteristic and so foreign to our modes of thought and feeling nowadays--the courts of love, of which the troubadours were, in a sort, the advocates. These courts were governed by a Code of Love, which had thirty-one statutes or ruling maxims. Of these maxims the most significant, and some of the most remarkable, are the following:

The plea of wedlock is not a sufficient excuse from love.

None can be bound by a double love.

It is undoubted that love is always diminishing or increasing.

A two years' widowhood is enjoined for a deceased lover.

It is shameful to love those with whom marriage would be shameful.

A true lover does not desire the embrace of any one save his
companion in love.

Love rarely endures when made public.

Easy acceptance renders love contemptible; a slow acceptance causes
it to be held dear.

A man full of love is ever full of fear.

Love can deny nothing to a lover.

There is nothing to prevent one woman from being loved by two men,
nor one man by two women.

In the last quoted of these remarkable laws (which were the work of women and of a few men who wished to please women), it will be observed that no authority or countenance is given to the loving of two women by one man. Our author regards the effect of these courts and their code as on the whole beneficial. His judgment may be sound, monstrous as the code seems to us, recognizing and even sanctioning as it did relations of the sexes not formed according to civil laws; for, as he says, "it refined the inevitable evil, substituted an easy for an almost impracticable moral code, and being compelled to draw a new line between venial offences and coarse licentiousness, exacted a rigid obedience to those laws." There is also some force in his plea that the courts of love "rescued woman from what would have become a condition of intolerable degradation, elevated affection rather than passion into the place of honor, and encouraged devotion in the stronger sex, grace and propriety in the weaker." It is undoubtedly true that when society became more rigid in sexual morality, and the mediæval code of love disappeared, there remained the tenderness and courtesy for the fairer and weaker sex which that code had done so much to develop.

Mr. Van Laun's first volume brings us down only to the Renaissance. But at that period the characteristic trait of French literature developed itself strongly. That trait is satire; not the bloody scourge of Juvenal, but a light, caustic, reserved, and almost pleasant although malicious satire--malicious in the French sense of _malice_, which is not so strong a word as its English counterpart. The difference between the French spirit and the English is shown by the fact that with free thought in the English race came stubborn dissent; in the French, light-hearted satire. "Satire," as Mr. Van Laun justly says, "is at the root of the French character, an instinct among the descendants of the ancient Gauls, who loved to fight and to talk well." This satire broke out in the sixteenth century with a brightness and causticity which has ever since distinguished French literature. The leader was Marguerite, sister to Francis I., the well-known Queen of Navarre. Her "Heptameron" is a strange book for a woman, and not a bad woman, a lady, and a queen, to have written. In it "she vents her contemptuous scorn upon husbands, although [perhaps because] she was married; against monks, though she was an ardent devotee of religion; against lawyers and doctors, though she was a queen." But it is most happily added that "her shrewdest satire of all is unconsciously pointed against herself; for she stands revealed to us a very woman, the rivals for whose favor are God and the devil, and who affords to neither of these more than a short coquettish glance."

It was at this period that the present school of French literature had its beginning; the spirit then so strongly manifested, the tendency to clearness, brightness, and high finish of style which then appeared among French writers, have since that time been the signs and tokens of the French mind and hand in literature. All that goes before is rude or fantastic or pedantic; then French literature rises in its splendor; we can hardly say its grandeur. Mr. Van Laun's first volume is full of interest which, however, is rather historical than literary; in the succeeding part of his work we may look for criticism more acceptable to the general reader.

--We pass easily from this history of the earliest days of French literature to its very latest, and we may add, one of its most characteristic productions. Alphonse Daudet's novel, "Fromont Jeune et Risler Ainé," has suddenly attained one of those rare and brilliant successes which seem possible only in France. Within an incredibly short time sixty thousand copies of it were sold, and it was "crowned" by the French Academy; whatever that may mean, whether an actual crowning of either book or author, it certainly does imply the awarding of the highest honors by the most eminent literary tribunal in France. It has now been reproduced here in a translation which leaves nothing to be desired, whether as a transfusion of the French spirit of the book, or as an example of a fine English narrative style.[10] Indeed, it unites these two most important requisites of a good translation in a rare and remarkable manner. As to the book itself, although it is a very good novel, and carries upon its face the evidence that it is a careful study of a certain phase of French life, we are at a loss to account for its phenomenal success. It is all about Sidonie, who may be called its heroine, as Becky Sharp is the heroine of "Vanity Fair." Now Sidonie is a pretty, vulgar, vile-souled shop girl who uses her beauty to make her way to a certain sort of _bourgeois_ fashionable life, but who is really a far more infamous creature than many a common harlot. For she is not wanton; she is not merely venal; she is pitilessly selfish and fiendishly malicious. She has no honesty of any kind--of mind, heart, soul, or body. A baser, viler creature in female, and therefore in human form, it would be impossible to conceive. For to all grovelling, debasing vice she adds a monstrous, cold-hearted cruelty. With all this she is not remarkable for anything except a pretty, blooming face and a low cunning. What need to familiarize us with the life of such a creature? She ruins the happiness of two men, one of a noble soul and the other a weak-minded creature; she breaks up a family; she brings her principal victim to suicide; and all this not even for a grand passion, but that she may have fine dresses, diamonds, and a social success. This is very barren business. We do not care to have such a life as this laid before us with all the particularity of treatment which belongs to the realistic school. But granted that we did desire it, we must confess that we could not wish for it better done. The life-portraiture, inner as well as outer, is perfect and minute to admiration. The end is brought about in fine melodramatic style. Around Sidonie are grouped several personages lovable and unlovable, admirable and unadmirable, but all painted with perfect, clear conception and firm, minute touch. The distinctive Frenchness of the author is manifest in every page. It is shown particularly in the absence of any touch of humor in the portraiture of Sidonie. Unlike Becky Sharp, she hems no little shirt in public until a little Rawdon has long outgrown it. The hard portrait of her hard soul has no such softening touch as that. The book is of a bad sort; but of its sort most admirable.

[10] "_Sidonie._" From the French of ALPHONSE DAUDET. 16mo, pp.
262. Boston: Estes & Lauriat.

* * * * *

The Lenten season is peculiarly the time for religious books, and the publishers have not failed to take advantage of it this year. Among the most interesting and valuable of the new works is Dr. Gregory's examination into the reason for having Four Gospels.[11] Why there should be two, three, or any number more than one, or less than eleven, is a question that has been considered significant for many centuries. Why out of eleven faithful disciples, precisely four should be inspired to write the history of the founder of the Church is certainly a problem that must be worth examining. The first idea, and it is one that has not died out yet, was that the four Gospels were so many incomplete but supplementary narratives, and in the second century efforts were made to improve upon the Biblical record by the Harmonists, who tried to compile what they considered a consistent and progressive account of the acts of Christ's ministry. They were followed by the Allegorists, who took the vision of Ezekiel, with its likeness of a man, a lion, an ox, and an eagle, and applied it to the writers of the Gospels as an exemplification of the meaning each of the narratives was intended to have. Though they, and their modern followers also, have not been able to agree upon this symbolical purport, the four Evangelists have retained in art those symbolical figures. The lion and St. Mark, the eagle and St. John are indissolubly connected in ecclesiastical art and story. The other schools of interpretation are, according to Dr. Gregory, the rationalists and "the common-sense critics." His own answer to the question, Why Four Gospels? is, that Christ had a mission to the Jews, and Matthew presented that argument for his divinity which was best calculated to impress that people; and to the Romans, to whom Mark was an interpreter; and to the Greeks, to whom Luke spoke; and to the Church at large, for whom John wrote his gospel of gentleness and love. The Jew, the Roman, and the Greek then composed the world of civilization--the existing society of that day--and in the Bible we find one writer for each of these nations, and one for the whole Church. This is certainly a rational and unembarrassed explanation. Dr. Gregory enforces it with great force and learning.

[11] "_Why Four Gospels?_ or, The Gospel for all the World." By
D. S. GREGORY, D.D. New York: Sheldon & Co.

* * * * *

MR. BUCHANAN'S "Shadow of the Sword"[12] has so many faults that it is a wonder he could have written it to the end without arousing his own disgust. It revives the long-neglected horrors of the time of the first Napoleon, and deals with them in a way that is brutal, not artistic. Its hero is a deserter, and he is so sharply followed by the gendarmes that for a year or more he lives the life of a burrowing animal, until reason itself is unseated. The only relief to a picture which the author strives vigorously to make revolting is the love of the hero's betrothed; but that too is so mingled with terror that it only throws a more lurid light upon the sufferings her lover undergoes. The style is as close an imitation of the French as the author can produce, occasionally varied, however, most ludicrously by an unguarded exhibition of English slang. The heroine has those eyes so rarely seen outside of novels, of "that mystic color which can be soft as heaven with joy and love, but dark as death with jealousy and wrath." For those who get near enough to gaze long into them, they reveal "strange depths of passion, and self-control, and pride." The individual who did this gazing is a tall, lusty fellow, and healthy as the average of fisherman's boys, but for all that he has the soul of romance within him. When his comrades are lounging on the beach, _he_ is "walking in some vast cathedral not made with hands," or performing daring feats of strength. Unluckily forsaking his cathedral, to lounge on the beach with his true love, like common mortals, they are caught by the tide, and have to wade through the water to escape. She bares her legs for the bath without hesitation or blush, for "she knew that they were pretty, of course, and she felt no shame." But there is one thing this young lady would not for worlds reveal, and that is _her hair_, which is invariably concealed beneath a coif. But as the waters deepen, Rohan throws the pretty-limbed creature over his shoulder and wades thigh deep. As he lands her he looks up, "and lo! he saw a sight which brought the bright blood to his own cheeks and made him tremble like a tree beneath his load." _Her hair had fallen down_, and the cheeks and neck that bore unmoved the exposure of her knees, were now "crimson with a delicious shame." This incident "bared each to each in all the nudity of passion," and it certainly bares the nudity of the author's invention. He is nowhere prurient, and nowhere delicate. He describes the revolting details of the story with as much unction as if they were the important things, and he leaves his hero at the end a complete failure in life and love, wasted in strength, and ruined in mind.

[12] "_The Shadow of the Sword._" A Romance. By ROBERT BUCHANAN.
New York: Lovell, Adam, Wesson & Co.

* * * * *

WE are glad to see Dr. McClellan persist in his study of the cholera question.[13] We know of no publications which are better fitted than his to awaken the people to a proper sense of the duty, and also of the efficiency, of personal providence against disease. He is an advocate of the Indian origin theory of the disease and its spread by personal infection only, and in this pamphlet maintains two propositions: 1st, that Asiatic cholera has never yet _originated on the American continent_, but in every instance has spread from a first case which reached its shores from some countries beyond the ocean; and 2d, that it is diffused by the migrations of individuals who are infected by the disease, a specific poison existing in their dejecta, which reproduces the disease in any person to whom it gains access. This is a theory of epidemic cholera which is rational, consistent with the constantly developing facts of scientific research, and which happily includes a remedy that is every way practicable and thorough. But it is a theory that is not yet acknowledged by all authorities. Telluric conditions, malaria, and other local influences are frequently pointed to as the cause of the disease, and the doctrine of specific cholera poison still demands strong partisan advocacy.

[13] "_Lessons to be Learned from the Cholera Facts of the Past
Year._" By ELY MCCLELLAN, M.D., Surgeon U.S.A. Reprinted from the
"Richmond and Louisville Medical Journal."

--An anonymous pamphlet on vivisection, which takes ground against that mode of obtaining knowledge, is not worth serious notice except for the odd argument that crime is likely to increase if the vivisectionists are allowed to experiment on cats and dogs, as the new English law proposes! Criminals, says the authoress, rarely have had pets, and _therefore_ if we kill all the pets, and thus deprive ourselves of the refining influences of kitty and the ennobling example of doggy, we shall the more readily turn to criminal ways. Another powerful argument is that "the countries where vivisection has prevailed seem to have secured no lasting blessing, but to have been the subjects of peculiarly calamitous afflictions, direful disasters, unnatural _internal tribulations_, and other multiplied evils." This is theocracy with a vengeance.

* * * * *

FOR some years past the "North American Review" has been enriched by papers from the late Mr. Chauncey Wright on various subjects in the wide field of modern philosophy, but especially in the much disputed theories of biology. They exhibited such proofs of independent judgment and critical acumen as to give their author immediate standing among European as well as home savants. These critiques have been collected and published under the name "Philosophical Discussions."[14] Much as we admired these articles when they first appeared, we do not see that a republication of them is needed unless as a graceful monument to an enthusiastic student. In their permanent form they lose the immediate fitness to questions under universal discussion, which is the true _raison d'être_ of such papers. The extreme wordiness which was Mr. Wright's principal literary fault is disagreeably manifest when his book is laid by those of other masters in positive philosophy. This is especially noticeable in the only strictly original discussion in the book, the one on the arrangement of leaves in plants. In this paper the editor has left out the "strictly inductive investigation" which contains the kernel of the essay! He has omitted the soul and given the "limbs and outward flourishes" of the author's discussion, and much to the latter's discredit. Aside from this tendency to sentences and words of philosophical length, Mr. Wright's style is extremely agreeable, clear, and strong. It frequently shines with unexpected felicities of expression, just as the author's argument frequently awakens the perception with its unusual keenness and depth of thought.

[14] "_Philosophical Discussions._" By CHAUNCEY WRIGHT. With a
Biographical Sketch of the Author by Charles Eliot Norton. New
York: Henry Holt & Co.

* * * * *

"THE CONVICTS,"[15] by Auerbach, will not increase that author's reputation in America. It belongs to the distinctively romantic school of German fiction. The story is that two convicts, reformed through the agency of a charitable society, marry and bring up a large family of children. These suffer pangs of sorrow when they learn of the stain on their parents' name, but otherwise they do not appear to be inconvenienced by their unfortunate origin. They marry into stations very much above them, though in addition to the embarrassing criminal history of their parents, they suffer what in Germany is the hardly less disaster, of being the children of a railway signal man! We suppose the object of this plot, and of much special social sentiment which is introduced in the story, is to represent the increased importance which the industrial classes have in Germany, as elsewhere in the world. Here in America the improvement in the condition of the working-man does not excite attention except from professed students of political economy. But in Germany it is contrasted with a previous state of almost complete vassalage, and the poets there seem to think it indicates an approaching brotherhood of man. Wealth and worth are to embrace each other, and the sins of the father are not to descend even to the first generation of children. We cannot but sympathize with the Councillor of State (whose granddaughter wants to, and does, marry one of the convict flagman's sons, an artisan) when he says:

See! see! This then is the latest ideal? Formerly the ideals were
painters, musicians, hussar riding masters, and players. Now love
also is practical. So then an artisan? All the enthusiasm runs to
tunnels and viaducts.

[15] "_The Convicts and their Children._" By BERTHOLD AUERBACH.
Translated by Charles T. Brooks. Leisure Hour Series. New York:
H. Holt & Co.

The book is marred by unnecessary exactitude in translation. Thouing and theeing make no impression of intimacy and confidence on the American understanding as they do on the German, and should be omitted. Nor has the author the strength of his youth, and the beauty of his fancy no longer atones for the weakness of the story. Nothing in the whole of the book proper is so good as the following from the preface:

A generation has passed away since I began to present in a
framework of fiction the interior life of my countrymen and
neighbors. If after another generation a poet shall again undertake
to express the village life of my home, what will he perhaps find?
Flowers bloom in all times out of the German soil, and Beauty will
in all times bloom out of the German soul.

* * * * *

OF late years there has been a tendency to abandon the exhaustive "manuals" which once formed the only style of school and hand-books known, and to use in their place books which contain only so much of a science as is taught in some one well-proportioned school. The change is based on the rational supposition that whatever suffices for the thorough instruction of students should also satisfy the wants of an ordinary practical worker. Mr. Ricketts's "Notes on Assaying"[16] belong to this modern kind of text-book. They contain what the students in the School of Mines in New York learn, and as a thorough knowledge of assaying is obviously necessary to a mining engineer, the author considers that the same course if honestly worked through should suffice for practice outside the school. The book covers both dry and wet assaying, and gold parting, and there are chapters in which the apparatus and chemical reagents are described. A few condensed notes on blowpiping finish an extremely concise and useful book, always available for reference, and in which the self-taught workman may find his way without confusion.

[16] "_Notes on Assaying and Assay Schemes._" By PIERRE DE
PEYSTER RICKETTS, E.M. New York: The Art Printing Establishment.

--Under the pressure of incessant examinations for admission to and promotion in many fields of human activity, from the Government service to apprentices' workshops, English literature is receiving important accessions to its facilities for teaching science. All kinds of positive knowledge are condensed into class books, sometimes by the very master minds of scientific research, sometimes by experienced teachers. Of the latter kind is Mr. Lee's "Acoustics, Light and Heat,"[17] which he has written to meet the wants of students for the Advanced Stage Examination of the British Department of Science and Art. Excellence in such a work requires that the main principles of the science should be sufficiently covered, explanations be clear, illustrations sufficient, and language as simple as possible. Mr. Lee's book appears to us somewhat over-condensed, but otherwise conforms to these requirements.

[17] "_Acoustics, Light and Heat._" By WILLIAM LEES, M.A. With
200 illustrations. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons.

* * * * *

LORD DUFFERIN'S "Letters from High Latitudes," describing the yacht voyage he made in 1856 to Iceland, Jan Mayen, and Spitzbergen, are so well known that it is only necessary to say they are republished by Lovell, Adam, Wesson & Co., a Canadian firm that has lately established itself in New York. In reading these familiar and gossipy letters, one is painfully impressed with a sense of the dreariness of the Northern regions. Whatever there is of interest is carried there by the traveller. The country itself, even including Iceland, adds little to the narrative, and sea life, whether stormy or calm, is not provocative of incident. But in spite of these inherent discouragements, the author maintains his cheerfulness throughout with such uniformity that we cannot resist a suspicion of its genuineness. He comes up to the inditing of each epistle with the determined smile of a much battered pugilist, when a new round is called--and we are very much in his debt for his pluck.

BOOKS RECEIVED.

"_Sir Roger de Coverley._" J. HADBERTON. G. P. Putnam's Sons. $1.00.

"_Childhood of the English Nation._" ELLA S. ARMITAGE. The same. $1.25.

"_Modern Materialism._" JAMES MARTINEAU. The same. $1.25.

"_Acoustics, Light and Heat._" W. LEES, M.A. The same. $1.50.

"_Letters from High Latitudes._" LORD DUFFERIN. Lovell, Adam, Wesson & Co.

"_Shadow of the Sword._" ROBERT BUCHANAN. The same.

"_The Splendid Advantage of being a Woman._" CHAS. J. DUNPHIE. The same.

"_King Saul._" A Tragedy. BYRON A. BROOKS. Nelson & Phillips.

"_U. S. Geological Survey of the Territories._" F. V. HAYDEN. Vols. IX. and X., and Annual Report for 1875.

"_The Jukes._ A Study in Crime and Pauperism." E HARRIS, M.D. G. P. Putnam's Sons.

"_Waverley Novels_," Riverside Edition. HURD & HOUGHTON.
"_The Abbot._" $1.50.
"_Kenilworth._" $1.50.
"_Fortunes of Nigel._" $1.50.
"_The Pirate._" $1.50.

"_Heritage of Langdaler._" Mrs. ALEXANDER. Henry Holt & Co. $1.25.

"_The New Church._" B. F. BARRETT. Claxton, Remsen & Halffelfinger.

"_List of Merchant Vessels of the United States._" Government Printing Office.

"_Smithsonian Report 1875._" Government Printing Office.

"_Six Weeks in Norway._" E. L. ANDERSON. Robert Clarke & Co.

"_Alexander Hamilton._" Hon. GEORGE SHEA. Hurd & Houghton. $1.00.

"_Harriet Martineau's Autobiography._" Two volumes. M. W. CHAPMAN. J. R. Osgood & Co. $6.00

NEBULÆ.

--WE have not yet entered into rivalry with Mexico; and although to those who looked upon our politics during the last two months from the outside only, we have doubtless seemed to be tending toward anarchy, revolution, and pronunciamentos, we were really in no such danger. Teutonic blood and the English language (Anglo-Saxons and Germans are both Teutonic) seem to carry with them a certain steadiness and capacity of common-sense perception which are preventives of great political folly; and although it is not the habit of our politicians to speak very respectfully of each other from the opposite sides of a political canvass, and the conduct of our Representatives at Washington is not always quite so admirable and exemplary as it might be, we do not, in French phrase, "descend into the streets," or raise barricades, or fly at each other's throats unless we mean real revolutionary business. Even then we are apt to go decorously, if not solemnly, about our work, and talk about "the course of human events" and "a decent respect for the opinions of mankind"; we at least did so once, and notwithstanding the great changes that have taken place in our political and social condition, it may be safely assumed that we should do so again. Frothy talk at Washington gives occasion for leading articles which are not always less frothy, and for sensation headings that gladden the eyes of newsboys. The desperate political game played at Washington for the Presidency has had a very bad effect upon our reputation, and has increased the very political demoralization of which it was an outward sign; but it is safe to say that when the most furious politicians there talked revolution they did not "mean business." Both parties stood before the world in a not very admirable light. On the one hand, the Democrats digged a pit and fell into it themselves. The Electoral Commission was their own contrivance; and when they were moved to wrath and denunciation by the decisions against their case, they only showed that they formed the Commission in the supposed certainty that it would decide in their favor. They did not want a tribunal of arbitration, but a decision under the forms of arbitration. On the other hand, the Republicans appeared with changed front on the subject of State sovereignty. No assertion of the purely federative constitution of the Union could equal in force the decision that, fraud or no fraud, Congress should not go behind the electoral certificates of the Governors of the various States. Partisanship was equally binding on both sides. If then all the Republicans on the Commission always voted one way, with like "solidarity" all the Democrats always voted the other. To adopt a phrase attributed to the ex-Confederate General Jubal Early, the seven-spot couldn't take the eight. One result of the struggle, and of the revelations which it brought about, was the remarkable one of the destruction of the prestige of the candidate who came within one electoral vote of the Presidency. It is safe to say that if a new election had been brought about, the Democrats would not have ventured to go into it with Mr. Tilden in nomination.

* * * * *

--THE struggle is over, and the uncertainty is past; and now, according to very general anticipations, business ought to revive and prosperity to return. We would gladly believe that such will be the result, but we doubt it. Business will revive, prosperity will return; for the country is rich, never more so, and is daily becoming richer. It is impossible to stop the onward course of a people who have our advantages; but the causes of our present depression lie too deep to be touched by the settlement of a mere party contest. We are suffering from the effects of a political, social, and moral revolution which has been in progress for nearly twenty years, and which the rest of the world has felt hardly less than ourselves. We have suffered the most because on the one hand our financial position is at any time less stable than that of other people, and on the other because we of all have undergone the greatest moral deterioration. We have been brought to that sad condition in which we are afraid to trust each other. So many of us have been playing the part of adventurers, so many have been playing a "confidence game," that confidence is gone in another sense than that in which it is so often said to be wanting. Prosperity will return to our business circles slowly and surely as our moral tone rises, and as business is conducted upon stable principles and upon an honorable basis. We must cease to "swap jackknives" in the shape of railway bonds and unimproved land; we must do more productive work and keep better faith. Hard work and honesty will do more for us than the settlement of the Presidential question, although that will probably do something.

* * * * *

--THIRTY-FIVE years ago Charles Dickens, having visited the legislative capital of a great nation, wrote thus about the men that he found there: "I saw in them the wheels that move the meanest perversion of virtuous political machinery that the worst tools ever wrought. Despicable trickery at elections, underhanded tamperings with public officers, cowardly attacks upon opponents with scurrilous newspapers for shields, and hired pens for daggers, shameful trucklings to mercenary knaves, whose claim to be considered is that every day and week they sow new crops of ruin with their venal types, which are like dragons' teeth of yore in everything but sharpness; aiding and abetting of every bad inclination in the popular mind, and artful suppressions of all its good influences--such things as these, and in a word, Dishonest Faction, in its most depraved and unblushing form, stared at me from every corner of the crowded hall." Of what country could he have thus written? Manifestly some "effete monarchy" in the most degraded stage of its decadence.

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--THE effort to establish carnivals in America is not a very encouraging sign of a healthy moral tone in the public mind. Surely there was never an attempt more superfluous, untimely, or out of place. Not only New York, but the whole country is swarming with thousands of people who are in need of money to buy shelter, food, and clothing; banks of discount, savings banks, trust companies, the very charitable institutions, are brought to ruin and disgrace by fraudulent bankruptcy; and this is the time that is chosen to entice people to playing the fool publicly in the open streets. If ever a Lent should have been kept in the sackcloth of humiliation and the ashes of despair, it is that which has just passed. People who would take part in a carnival now would dance upon the borders of their own open graves. And what do we want of a carnival, even if we were prosperous? Carnivals are not suited to our national traits. They suit the Latin races of the south of Europe; and even among them they are fading away before the light of diffused intelligence and the thoughtfulness that comes of knowledge. To us they are entirely foreign. They do not suit our sober, practical habits of life and thought; and if we attempted them, we should only make ourselves ridiculous by our awkwardness. Festivals of that kind require a volatile people, who at least can practise folly gracefully. We should unite folly with dulness and stupidity. Moreover, such festivals cannot be got up to order anywhere. They are results; they are the growth of centuries. Italians and Frenchmen do not say, Go to! we will have a carnival. The thing belongs to them by inheritance; the memories of it mingle with their earliest recollections. As for us, we might go through a carnival dolefully, as a penance fitting to Lent; but as to enjoying one, except as spectators, to us that is quite impossible. All such festivities are foreign to our nature. We cannot even keep up an interest in "Decoration Day." We revere the memories of our dead; but a ceremonial exhibition of our reverence sits ill upon us. We do not take kindly to public spectacles, and ourselves never appear well in them. As to the sober procession for which the municipal laws in New York compelled the projected masquerade to be changed, it will be, if it is at all, only a means of advertising. That sort of display we take to hugely. It was with difficulty that President Lincoln's obsequies were preserved against the projects of advertisers. We turn the mountains into posters and the hills into sign-posts. If we must do that, let us do it openly and plainly; but a carnival! Fudge!

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--WE cannot successfully imitate Europeans in their graceful follies; but in their soberer and more practical habits we might well follow their example. A step has been just taken in Germany which is more needed here, and which yet there is hardly any hope that we shall profit by. The union of German apothecaries has addressed a petition to the Federal Council demanding that the secret medicines concocted and advertised by quacks shall be officially tested before they are permitted to be sold. A more creditable and needful step was never taken, or one which was more indicative of enlightenment and high civilization. Quack medicines are on the whole a curse to mankind. They are generally imposed upon the ignorant and credulous by men who care not what harm they do so long as they profit by their business. Many of these medicines--so called--are very injurious, and a still greater proportion of them are entirely useless. The very fact that their composition is kept secret is against them. It is a law absolute among all honorable physicians that no remedial agent shall be kept secret. Such physicians, if in their practice they discover a remedy for any disease, at once make it known to the whole profession. To keep such a discovery secret would be to lose caste, if not to be entirely excluded from honorable professional association and recognition. If such an examination as that proposed in Germany is needed there, here it is required by a tenfold greater necessity. America is the great field of operation for the patent medicine vender. Here he thrives. Here he accumulates huge fortunes if he will only advertise persistently and with sufficient disregard of truth. And his chief victims are women and children. He is one of the pests of our society. We cannot exclude him, or extinguish him entirely; that would interfere with the individual liberty of the citizen; not only of the seller, but of the buyer. If people choose to poison themselves gradually, they insist upon their right to do so unhindered by government action. But at least we might do what the German apothecaries ask to have done, and require as a condition of the granting of a patent for a medicine that it should be tested and its contents officially declared. The effect of such a measure upon the general health would be in the highest degree beneficial; and at least the public would be protected against the fraudulent representations of the majority of patent medicine makers and venders.

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--IN another matter, church chimes, we have imitated Europe, and not discreetly, and we have had our first check. A certain chime of church bells in Philadelphia became annoying to the people in the neighborhood, who complained to the courts, and obtained an injunction restricting the use of the chimes to certain times of day. Even were this often bell-jangling not the annoyance that it is, the whole American public would owe something to these good Philadelphians simply for the good example of their action in this matter. They were annoyed by some one, the agent of a corporation, who, although he did not commit murder, burglary, or arson, interfered with their comfort and marred their enjoyment of life; and they, like sensible men, instead of putting up with the annoyance after the American fashion, and saying, "Oh, no matter! What can we do to stop it? Let it go!" set themselves to work to see if they couldn't stop it. They tested the question whether a certain number of men might please their taste or their religious fancy at the risk of disturbing and annoying others; and they succeeded. It is to be hoped that the lesson will not be lost in regard not only to the specific annoyance which was the cause of complaint, but all other selfish indulgences by which some men interfere with the rights of others. The law of common sense and justice in such matters is that every man may enjoy himself as he pleases so long as he does not interfere with the enjoyment of their natural rights by others. A man may give his days and nights to ringing chimes so long as they are not heard outside of his own house; but if they are so heard, and they deprive a single person of rest, or even of a quiet enjoyment of life, he has passed the limit of right. A dozen men may like a strong perfume; but they have no right to load the common air with it to the annoyance even of a thirteenth. This matter of ringing church chimes has become somewhat of a religious and sentimental affectation. Chimes have a very pretty effect in literature; and at a distance in the country they are charming. But when they clang daily in the tower of a city church within a few hundred yards of you, they become a great nuisance. Nor is the annoyance they give diminished when the chimer, instead of ringing such changes as are suited to bells, will insist upon playing _affettuoso_. In fact, all church bells are an annoyance in cities, and a needless one. They were first used to call people to church when there were no clocks, and before watches were heard of. Now, when the humblest apartment has a clock that strikes the hour, "the church-going bell" is entirely superfluous for the object for which it is rung, and is really a great annoyance not only to the sick, but to those who are in health. It is a noisy anachronism which clamors with iron tongue and brazen throat for its own suppression.

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--AND so at last the marriage of Adelina Patti to the Marquis of Caux has come to its natural end. What could the Marquis or the lady expect? He married her for the money that she earned, and that he might own so charming a celebrity; she accepted him as a husband for his title. Years have passed, and nothing has occurred to bind them more closely. The lady has no children, or any prospect of one; and so there is nothing in the way of a judicial separation on account of incompatibility. It is not necessary to suppose that the distinguished prima donna has actually run away from her husband with a lover; but it would only be natural if there were a man in the distance more to her taste. It is remarkable, by the way, that so great an interest should be taken by Americans in the fortunes of this lady, who, since she has developed her extraordinary talent, has turned her back entirely on this country. She is spoken of here often as an American prima donna. This can only be the result of a very great and an absurd misapprehension. Adelina Patti is an Italian. Her father and mother were both Italians, who could speak hardly a word of English. Her education and habits of life have been entirely Italian. Even if she had been born here by the chance of a professional residence here by her mother, that would not have made her anything else than Italian, more than a like chance residence in Russia or in Turkey would have made her a Russian or a Turk, or than the Irishman's being born in a stable would have made him a horse. When a family emigrates and resides permanently in another country, assuming the life and the habits of that country, and intermarrying there, it changes its nationality, but not otherwise. The eagerness which many Americans show to claim as American everything meritorious in art over whose supposed origin the Stars and Stripes may have been thrown, is a witness to our real native poverty in that respect, which we reveal by the very means by which we would conceal it. And besides all this, Adelina Patti was not even born in this country. She came here from Europe a little girl, with her mother, Katarina Barili-Patti, a prima donna, who, although she had not her daughter's facility of execution and range of voice, sang in the grand style, and who, as a dramatic vocalist, was far beyond _la diva_, as Adelina is absurdly called. As to her parting company with M. Caux, nothing is more probable than that the restraint--at least external--which belongs to the life of a marquise became too intolerable to her inborn Bohemianism, and that she seeks deliverance not only from an unloved and unloving husband, but from the galling restraints of dull respectability.

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--THERE is a club in London, the Albemarle, which admits both men and women as members, and which the wags have therefore nicknamed the Middlesex club. An English gentleman being urged to join this club on the ground that he could take his wife there, plumply refused on that very ground, saying that the chief good in a club consisted in its being a refuge for married men. Whereupon the average woman exclaims, "The brute! What did he marry for if he wanted to be rid of his wife?" A view of the case not unnatural perhaps in a woman, but most unwise. Passing by the not very remote possibility that there are women (as there are men) who in the matrimonial lottery could not be regarded as prizes, there are strong reasons for the exclusion of women, even the most charming, from clubs. For women a man may see at home daily or in society. It is in those places that he expects to find them; there they naturally belong; there they are attractive. But when he sets up a club it is for the very purpose of enjoying man companionship and indulging his mannish tastes. He wishes there to be entirely at his ease, and not to be called on for "little attentions." He wears his hat in the club-house if he likes, and he does not wish to be called upon to take it off unless he likes. In short, he wishes there to be free, for a time, from the restraints which the presence of ladies puts upon the conduct and conversation of men, even of those who neither in act nor in speech pass the bounds of reasonable decorum. Women in clubs are pretty annoyances, fine things very much out of place. Moreover, it is true, although by most women, particularly married women, it will not be believed, that clubs, by their exclusion of women, make the society of the sex more pleasant to the average man, and tend to keep warm the marital love of the average husband. Woman, whether to her credit or not we shall not undertake to decide, can bear the continued companionship of a favored man much better than man can bear that of a woman, no matter how beautiful, how charming, or how much beloved. But even women are happier for the inevitable separation from them of their husbands every day and during a greater part of the day. As to men, unfortunately many of them would begin to weary of a woman, and at last to dislike her, if they were compelled to pass every evening in her company. Here the club steps in (we are not speaking of the mere "club man"), and interposes its conservative influence. Many a man's love is kept fresh by his having his club for a refuge; and many a love which has cooled almost to indifference has been prevented from turning into aversion by the soothing influences of that refuge. For the leisurely classes of men clubs are a benign invention; and women should in their own interests avoid giving them anything of a "middlesex" character.

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--WHILE we write a new grand scandal is impending of the Beecher-Tilton kind, which will attract less attention than that did because the parties to it are less widely known. But as the principal person is a late minister of Trinity Church in New York, and now the head, of the far-famed charitable association known as "St. John's Guild," and as the principal witness and complainant is this gentleman's wife, who is the daughter of a late rector of Trinity, and as she has already, before the investigation is begun, shown an inclination to have no connubial reserves with the public, the affair promises to be what the journalists call a rich case. It certainly is a very deplorable one, however it may result to the persons principally interested. It is much to be regretted that the investigation has been announced with such a flourish of trumpets, calling in the wife, who declares herself so much injured, inviting the press, and announcing that the investigation will be held with open doors; and this after a publication almost in minute detail of all the charges brought against the Reverend defendant--at whose own request, by the way, the investigation is set on foot. Investigations like these must needs sometimes take place; but everything should be done to confine a knowledge of them to those who are called upon to take part in them, either as parties, as referees, or as advocates. On the contrary, everything is done to make them as public and as injurious and offensive as possible. In this the press is chiefly culpable. Nothing is gained for justice by such public exhibitions, and much is lost to decency.