Recent Literature
COLONEL WARING'S book1 is a timely and valuable contribution to the sanitary literature of the day. Parts of it appeared originally in The Atlantic Monthly, and the great interest with which they were received led the author to a more detailed treatment of the subject in a permanent form, “ addressed more especially to the average citizen and householder.” In this work he has succeeded exceedingly well; for there is certainly no other one treatise which deals with the difficult problems of filth-removal in so fair and comprehensive a manner, while the clear and forcible style of the writer and the skill of the publishers have united to make it thoroughly readable and even attractive.
The first chapter is devoted entirely to the strictly sanitary aspect of the question, the effect of filth in its various forms upon health. In this the writer carefully avoids the discussion of mooted theories, contenting himself with quotations from a few recognized authorities and the bare recital of a number of well-chosenfacts illustrative of the causation of disease by filth, showing, too, how all but universal are the evils of bad drainage and sewerage in our houses, towns, and cities, and how general is the apathy of even the intelligent portion of the community in regard to a matter so seriously affecting their most vital interests. In illustration of these points, Boston receives sharp but well-deserved criticism. In some places the epigrammatic style is used with very telling effect; as, for instance, “ We accustom ourselves to withstanding the attacks of an infected atmosphere wonderfully well; but for all that we are constantly in the presence of danger, and, though insensibly resisting, are too often insensibly yielding to it; ” “ The victims of typhoid fever die, not by the act of God, but by the act of man.” Thus far, in this country at least, the relations between disease and carelessness in the removal of filth have often been considered refinements in medical speculation rather than practical applications of well-known laws; and Colonel Waring’s conclusions are therefore especially valuable, coming, as they do, from one who is in the position of an impartial observer of facts collected by men who are not commonly looked upon as “ practical,” and who might he thought by many to be influenced by professional bias. As regards this chapter and portions of a later one on the sizes of sewers, the statement in the preface is too modest, that the professional engineer and the architect will not find much to instruct them.
The next two hundred pages, the bulk of the book, are devoted to descriptions of the ordinary and some of the unusual defects in the sanitary arrangements of houses and towns, to suggestions for improvements, and to general directions for meeting the requirements of each case, so full that there can be hardly a householder in the State, whether rural or urban, who would not be benefited by a careful study of them. Under the head of drainage, the removal of dampness from houses by securing dry cellars and foundations receives the first place, as its importance deserves ; for certainly, in a new country like ours, soil-moisture is one of the most prolific sources of disease. The author has done wisely throughout this part of his book in not attempting to deal so fully in particulars as to allow the reader to think that he may himself become a self-made engineer or a self-made architect— a fallacy that has cost many a man lives dear to him, because he thought it superfluous to consult an expert in a matter so apparently common and simple, and yet so difficult and of such vital importance, as the proper location and arrangement of soil-pipes, water-closets, etc. From this very desire, however, to omit details not suited to the character of the book, the author has given hardly importance enough to the internal arrangements of houses, whereby the entrance of deleterious gases should be prevented. It would be impossible, indeed, to discuss, except in a special treatise, all the complex points for consideration in making a dwelling safe from sewer-exhalations, and that would hopelessly confuse the unprofessional reader; but some persons might be misled by the plate on page 188, and by the statement on page 152 that “a continuous movement of the air in one direction or the other carries away and dilutes sewer-gases, and, if they contain the germs of organic disease capable of infecting the human blood, these are believed to be destroyed by oxidation or otherwise,” into a false sense of security by making him suppose that dilution and oxidation alone would always render sewergases innocuous, which is probably not meant, as the decision of the International Sanitary Congress at Vienna had already been quoted, that the contagium of the infectious diseases is all but indestructible (except by sufficient heat). According to Dr. George Buchanan, too, the experience of Croydon, which is quoted somewhat at length, has just shown by a severe epidemic of typhoid fever (in 1875) that the best ventilation possible of sewers and drains is inadequate to produce safety in time of an epidemic, unless it he such as to sever the air of the sewer from that of the housedrain. The advisability of this precaution is indeed intimated on pages 188 and 189, but, we think, not insisted upon with sufficient force. Nor would all sanitarians agree that “sewage-matters, though offensive, are not dangerous until two or three days after their production.” And many of them would be unwilling, even on the high authority of Colonel Waring, to follow his example in storing in their cellars the contents of earth-closets, “ where they become sufficiently dry, after a month or so, to be used again; ” especially since Dr. Ballard, one of the medical inspectors of the local government board of England, has attributed the spread of enteric fever in West Riding to " infection probably spread by infected earth supplied to earth-closets,” a chance which Pettenkofer predicted some years ago.
The ninth chapter consists of an interesting account of Captain Liernur’s ingenious pneumatic sewerage system as used in parts of towns in Holland, upon which the author evidently looks with some favor; at least he finds in it many excellent features which he considers worthy of further trial, and possibly of more general use.
In the last chapter, on the disposal of sewage, Mr. Rogers Field’s admirable system of flush-tanks and sub-irrigation is described. The latter alone has been used with admirable results by the author on his farm at Newport for many years, and he has hopes of still better success from the addition of the flush-tank. This is recommended as the best method for the harmless and offenseless removal of liquid refuse where there are no sewers, where there is a small lot of land available, and where the winter cold is not too great. For public, buildings, small towns, or portions of towns, under favorable circumstances, it seems to offer a complete solution of the question. Of course some system of dry removal is necessary, besides; and, although the earth-closets do not justify all that was said of them when Colonel Waring introduced them into this country, they have always been found efficient and valuable if properly cared for. The disposal of sewage in the case of large towns is one of such great difficulty, and under any of the methods now in use so costly, that it is not considered at length here. Enough is said to indicate that no method of utilizing sewage on a large scale has yet been made profitable and uniformly satisfactory, and no disposal of it is so free from objections as its discharge into a large body of water, which will dilute or remove it beyond any possibility of danger or offense. .In this connection the admirable remarks in a previous chapter on the " dry conservancy system ” should be read with that careful and thoughtful attention which the importance of the subject in many of our cities and towns now demands.
The distinguished translator of the Mécanique Céleste has said that it is impossible for the human mind to come into contact with figures without making mistakes. In the book before us we have found only two, where the death-rate of England (page 18) and the amount of night-soil removed by carts in Boston (page 65) are placed too high. The latter mistake is a natural one, from the fact that the catch-basins of the street gullies in Boston are commonly called cess-pools.
— The sympathetic reader, familiar with the course of Mr. Browning’s poetry, will find it easy to adopt as his own the temper in which many of the poems in the collection just published are conceived;2 by degrees, the poet, as if roughly casting off the public, has come to address himself more exclusively to the special audience which he has trained to like his poetry, and in this volume has taken them into his confidence in several instances. That is to say, while the dramatist is as interested as ever in the vivid persons who start into life with such flashes of fiery force, he inclines more than formerly to cry to his friends, This is a part of me ; when this man bleeds, look, I suffer too; this dramatizing is not something outside of me; all of it I have seen, part of it I am. One should speak hesitatingly of one’s friend growing old, but there are touches in this volume which with all their vigor of expression betray a restless, poetic mind beginning to turn upon itself with a somewhat sorrowful rage. Why, else, all this fuming at critics : this angry repetition of the hard names with which his poetry has been called any time the past forty years: this constant return to the questionings which might come to one when his work was over ? Pacchiarotto and how he Worked in Distemper is the story of a painter in Siena who turned reformer, and for a trial of his skill at dialectics first covered the walls of his studio with figures representing all classes and ranks, when he in turn harangued and defended them; finding this fantastic procedure rather stimulating than satisfying, he left his paints and his painted men and women for reform in the actual city, and shortly met with the customary reception of reformers, escaping only by lying concealed in a tomb and crawling out thence to find refuge in a monastery, where he easily declares his discovery, made when lying in the tomb, that his reform was all vanity, and cries, —
I'm back to the paint-brush and mahl-stick ;
And as for man, let each and all stick
To what was prescribed them at starting!
Once planted as fools, no departing
From folly one inch, sœculorum
In sœcula ! ”
This is Pacchiarotto’s conclusion. Again, in the two poems headed Pisgah Sights, where one is imagined as overlooking the world, something of the same strain recurs in another measure : —
Lover and scorner,
Docile and mulish. —
Keep each his corner ! ”
So, in the strange, complicated poem, Bifurcation, which one reads again and again as a fascinating riddle, at least this can be made out — the final solution of questions of duty which were confused by possible selfdeception.
In a subtler form there are poems in the book which turn upon thoughts not often put into syllables by a poet. Such is the very tender and surprising poem, Fears and Scruples, which Donne might have written with but slight change of phrase. The Prologue also contains the breath of an inspiration which attentive readers have never missed from Browning’s poetry since he married, and now is warm with a spiritual fervor which refines the language into the subtlest shape. The same influence, though more vague and unsatisfactory, seems to attend Numpholeptos, which we shall have to read again before we understand it, and with no great confidence in another reading either.
There are, besides, two or three poems which betray a poetical self-consciousness that is rather the irritability of age than the very profound questionings of an eager, strong man. In the poem, At the Mermaid, he dramatizes Shakespeare with his friends, and makes the great poet object to any crowning of him which supposes a comparison of genius. In the lively poem, House, he asks, —
Do I live in a house you would like to see?
Is it scant of gear, has it store of pelf ?
' Unlock my heart with a sonnet-key? ’
' Take notice : this building remains on view,
Its suites of reception every one,
Its private apartment and bedroom too ;
No ; thanking the public, I must decline.
A peep through my window, if folks prefer;
But, please you, no foot over threshold of mine!
Your house the exception ! " With this same key
Shakespeare unlocked his heart,” once more '
Did Shakespeare ? If so, the less Shakespeare he ! ”
As we intimated above, the less agreeable, side of the revelation of the poet’s personality is in the repeated onslaught which he makes upon the critics, He turns upon them unexpectedly at the end of Pacchiarotto, and one fails to find the occasion which that poem gives except as introducing one more book; he devotes pretty much the whole of his Epilogue to them, and to the world of readers that finds fault with his poetry. It is the kind of familiar talk which one would hear from the poet in his own house, and find him all the more human for it, but hears in his poetry with mixed feelings of regret and amusement.
It may be urged that Browning himself, even in some of the verses we have quoted, protests against this attempt at identifying the poet with his poetic creation, but it is in the fact of the protest and in the choice of subjects that we find evidence of this impatience of a restless aye which we heartily wish out of his poetry. Yet it is just these little speeches by the actor after the play is over which will tighten the personal cords already attaching him to his friends, and this volume will doubtless come to many readers of Browning almost as an autograph letter. When all this is said and we have made our friendly complaint, wc take up the book again and read the more artistic and impersonal poems with renewed ardor. Hervc Biel is here, already taking its place as one of the great minor poems of the language, and there is a very powerful and finely sustained poem, Forgiveness, while two or three half-serious, half-grotesque stories bear out Browning’s reputation as a consummate painter in fresco. After all, who of our poets is so full-minded as he, pouring without stint from treasures which run over with richness ? The alertness, the compression of thought, the riotous expansion of fancy, the plunge into torrents of life, the sudden calm of an awed mind, all these are here in this book as in his earlier poems, and we have no fears that Browning will really grow old any faster than we do.
— The most obvious criticism of the second volume in the No Name Series3 is that the poem recalls decidedly and at all points the manner of Mr. Morris. It is a kind of dwarfed epic; it wears that quaint air of being a translation or a modernized version, which Mr. Morris’s poems have; twice it admits at the end of a line that very characteristic expression, “ waters wan,”Which the author of The Earthly Paradise is fond of using in the same position; and even the author’s descriptions are, like Mr. Morris’s, conventionalized as if for purposes of decoration, by the use of certain general adjectives and the omission of the article. The metre, we should have premised, is the same, namely, the heroic ; and it is a trait of this author and of Mr. Morris carefully to avoid feminine rhymes. The occasional use of these would, wo think, have lent Deirdrè a much-needed variety of movement. Its most marked fault, after the resemblance just touched upon, is a kind of monotony which weighs upon the reader in spite of the rapid action, stirring incident, and gay coloring; and this effect is perhaps increased by the writers partiality for expanded similes. But when we have made these exceptions there remains much that is admirable in the book. The anonymous writer deserves credit for invading with so much spirit and grace this untrodden domain of old Irish legend, and still more for the exuberance of feeling and the energy of fancy with which he treats his subject. Very charming is the portion that relates the building of the palace and Deirdrè’s imprisoned childhood in the garden ; though the author’s best strength, it seems to us, is put forth in the passages of war that abound in the poem. The battling in the last book, The Tragedy of the House of the Red Branch, is painted with real power; and here is a description of one of the Usnanian heroes which is extremely good : —
Fierce in his mighty panoply he shone,
Of high-ridged brazen helm and linked mail,
That oft had cast aside the rattling hail
Of arrows from his broad breast and great heart;
Of orbèd shield that, wrought with curious art,
In gold work on its field for blazon wore
The semblance of a mighty forest boar
Rushing with bristling back from Out his den,
Deep in the wood, on struggling dogs and men ;
Of ponderous sword hung low upon his thigh,
Whose huge hilt sparkled like a starlit sky
With many a gem ; of spear whose dreadful blade,
All battle-notched, of swarthy bronze was made,
Whose tapering shaft in beauty once bloomed bright
A fair young ash by old Ardsalla’s height, -
Oft 'mid its green leaves in the happy spring
Did the winds whisper and the wild birds sing,
Oft 'neath its shadow on the daisied grass
The lovers fond, their blissful hours would pass, —
Now — hapless change! — instead of leaves and buds
Gleamed rings and brazen clasps and silver studs,
And that terrific blade wherefrom the blood,
As down the echoing path the hero strode,
Still dript upon the shaft with ruddy hue.”
The measures italicized illustrate a power of penetrating a matter by force of some rich metaphor which is several times exerted with great effect in other places,as in these lines : —
Oh, farther than the slender glittering bar
Of cloud that oft in windless nights of June
Lies like a golden lance athwart the moon ! ”
The poet shows himself master of a good vocabulary, notwithstanding the fact that he is often content with ordinary, or careless, or on the other hand sophomoric expression. In the first canto he permits himself, in describing the ravages of a she-bear among children, this needlessly physical hideousness: —
Was all one mass of steaming flesh and gore
And echoing to her loud, remorseless roar !
But then, he is also capable of a movement of pure strength like the following : —
Making the still eve shudder with its blare,
Telling that all is ready ! ”
The narrative drags a little in the seventh canto, and the author does himself injustice in the thinness of the monologues there ascribed to Deirdrè; but he comes to his own rescue very effectually in the closing book, and it is an exquisite pathos with which he describes how at the death of the heroes
From Deirdrè, over all sounds rising high
And piercing, like a wounded sea-gull’s cry
Heard 'mid the roar of storms.”
That, in our estimation, is the finest thing in the poem. It seems to argue rare capabilities on the part of the author ; but it must be observed that the passages which we have chosen for commendation belong to a group of perhaps a dozen, scattered through more than four thousand lines. The number of verses that stamp themselves at once on the mind is very small, and the singer appears scarcely aware of that strength of wing which lifts him into his most spirited and resounding flights. We would not have him conscious of them, but if he respected his possibilities enough to use a greater reserve and compression, he could assuredly do better than he has done. Still, Deirdrè will reward the reader; the story is romantic and picturesque, and is told with both passion and poetic skill.
— In the present day, when historians are trying with considerable success to make their histories as interesting as novels, writers of fiction are holding themselves well aloof from entering into rivalry by putting any instruction into their books, so that the hybrid historical novel is apt to go begging for readers. The abuse of the word “ centennial ” also has saddened some once cheerful hearts, so that a romance that is both historical and centennial is likely in its doulde-barreled pomp to frighten off a good many readers. In this way The Spur of Monmouth4 is pretty heavily handicapped, but those who rise superior to such whimsical objections and who do not look too closely for faultless execution will find hero a novel that, whatever its faults, is certainly readable. There are some new versions given to the minor incidents of the revolutionary war, which do not exceed the license that custom allows the writer of romances. It is claimed that they are true, that the facts are gathered by the ex-pension agent while distributing his dole among the survivors of the war, but however that may be, and it is not a matter of vast importance, it is fair to imagine that the romantic story would not have suffered if it had been let pass for pure fiction.
The novel is clumsily put together, and is marred by such expressions as are to be found in two consecutive lines on page 73: “ the other States similarly located as to latitude. Inquired of, as to his full name, Marc Antony would have answered ; ” but there is yet a great deal of vigor in the way the separate scenes are sketched, while there is the proof of great inexperience in the lack of connection between them. Although the value of the new material is but slight for the historian, the reader gets the advantage of it in the general verisimilitude of the book. General Washington is one of the prominent characters of the romance, and is well drawn, except perhaps in the scene where he is talking with his wife about the miseries of Valley Forge. Nothing could equal the solemnity and stillness of that conversation, which would do credit to the pen of a “ centennial dramatist,”though sadly out of place here. For the rest there is a good deal to praise: the people talk naturally and less as one is apt to imagine one’s ancestors talked, that is to say, as if they were human beings and not pictures or graven images ; and there is a good deal of amusement to be got from the minor characters. As to the romantic story of Catharine Trafford and Colonel George Vernon opinions will differ ; all will agree, however, that there is no lack of romance about it. Indian John is an accomplished hero of fiction. In a word, this is a novel of considerable ability, composed of cleverly drawn incidents, some of which are really impressive; it puts a period of the Revolution clearly before the readers, and will serve to interest young readers, more especially, and by young readers is meant those boys who are fresh from Cooper and Marryatt, and who will find nothing to harm them here. Older readers too will not find the story uninteresting. It is only to be regretted that the book did not have more efficient revision, for at times, to borrow a phrase of the ex-pension agent, the heart of the reader agonizes under the awkwardness of his recital. The novel is better than it seems from its title and from its faults.
— The volume on Italy5 which Messrs. Scribner, Welford, and Armstrong publish this year has all the luxury of binding, paper, letter-press, and illustrations which made their Spain altogether the most superb affair of the last holiday season. It has not the unique attractiveness of the Spain, where the light, graceful, easy fullness of the author’s studies of Spanish life was so richly attended by the force and wonderful variety of Doré’s pencil. Instead of being the work of one writer, it is a compilation from three German travelers, with what editorial labor on Mr. Trollope’s part does not conspicuously appear. But they are pleasant people, these travelers, and for Germans, lively. Their observation of Italy if very cursory is sympathetic, and they and the artists have known howto make a book which it is an hour of Italy for the reader to look through. They are all, artists and writers, a little over-sentimental at times, as Germans are apt to be about what they like; but they do not try to be funny ; and we think we now prefer the traveling sentimentalist to the traveling droll, so much has the latter overdone himself. These Germans are sincerely bent upon making you feel and understand Italy, and they would he agreeable in the simplest form ; with all these splendors of pictures and print they would be astonishingly good if the Baron Davillier in his Spain had not been so much better. But if Mr. Trollope himself had not written, we do not know where we should have found that abundance of knowledge concerning Italy which M. Davillier shows concerning Spain, and almost any of us may be the wiser for what these authors tell us so pleasantly. The illustrations of the Italy have sometimes the air of compositions, but they are good compositions, and they are very often full of delightful character : a face, an attitude, a single gesture, vividly caught, shows us all Italy again. They are in fact excellent in their way; but even in commending the book, as we do, it would be false to pretend that they have the interest and strong charm of Doré’s pictures, in which Spain not only appears but lives and moves.
FRENCH AND GERMAN.6
The appearance of a new book from the pen of Renan is always an event of some importance, but it may be doubted whether the dialogues which constitute the principal part of the volume before us to-day 7 will serve to add a great deal to his fame. They were written, he tells us in the preface, at Versailles in the month of May, 1871, when the communists were holding Paris, and their composition afforded him a relief from the distress the condition of his country created within him; and surely there is something interesting in the vision we get of him thus consoling himself with philosophy. The gloom of that period has left its mark on the work, it is true, but no more than would be considered natural; and if at times he is openly pessimistic, it is not the defeat of his fellow-countrymen which is to blame, for the most cheerless passages read like nothing so much as translations from some favorite philosophers of the victorious Germans. The dramatic part of the dialogues does not pretend to be well put; the speakers with the Greek names are singularly devoid of life, and their slight controversies bear much more likeness to soliloquies than to the discussion of most philosophers. The dialogues are three in number, the first dealing with the certainties, the next with the probabilities, the third with dreams, of man’s position in the universe. Among the certainties we find Schopenhauer’s theory of the world existing as a vast force, with its phenomena manifestations of the “ Wille,” and with desire perpetually luring men on to action and consequent disappointment. Our duty in these conditions, Renan says, is when we perceive their existence to resign ourselves to the tasks set us by nature without murmuring or outbreak. Under the head of probabilities we see eloquent promises of what will come to the world under the light of steadily improving science, which light, however, will be dimmed by the permanent decay of the arts. When we approach the dreams we find an ingenious denunciation of democracy, based as it is upon respect for mediocrity. “ The ideal of American society is perhaps more remote than any other from the ideal of a society controlled by science. The principle that society exists only for the happiness and liberty of the individuals composing it does not appear to conform to the plans of nature, which consider only the species, to the neglect of the individual. There is great danger that the final result of democracy will be a social condition in which the degenerate masses will care for nothing but the enjoyment of ignoble and vulgar pleasure.” Again he says, “ We are not fond of the former régime, for it forbade free thought and often hindered study; but a democracy without an ideal would not be more favorable to them. At present democracy is preferable, for it presents fewer obstacles to intellectual advance, but at the end it may do more harm. Science demands a devoted spirit; in an immoral or superficial country there can be no real scholars, for a scholar is the result of the abnegation, of the seriousness, of the sacrifice, of two or three generations; he represents an immense economy of life and force. ... In order to have a thinker there should be people ready to do his part of the work, without understanding or appreciating what he does. What is more opposed to the spirit of a certain democracy, which admits the value of that alone which it can comprehend, or, more truly, thinks it can comprehend ? Primary instruction will render this abnegation rare, for it is to be feared lest a people that has received primary instruction, full of a foolish vanity, should be unwilling to contribute to the support of a culture superior to its own, that is to say, to giving itself masters.”
These passages will serve to show how a sensitive thinker, as Renan doubtless is, feels about some of the dangers which threaten the advance of the world to-day, and in this country more than anywhere, for here we are trying the problem of reconciling civilization with democracy. The methods which Renan suggests for meeting these dangers can hardly be recommended, because they are unpractical; he says that the distinctions of classes must be maintained, that the many must perish for the greater glory of the few, etc., but he is talking to the winds; he will never persuade races of men to sacrifice themselves in that blind way for a problematic good which they will never have. The new conditions must be accepted and the dangers they threaten must be met by new devices; this running back to old methods is unscientific, and bears close resemblance to the bigotry which scientific men are accustomed to denounce with some fervor when they detect it in their enemies. Doubtless they view with regret any opposition to the advance of science, but it is to its great glory that it has outlived so much opposition ; it need not expect that it will ever have an untrammeled course, nor is it desirable that it should, for narrowness and arrogance do not exist among the unscientific alone. To succeed, it must exert itself to prove its necessity even to the half-educated,—that is imperative, — not by depriving every one of any rudiments of knowledge. The church never asked with more earnestness for ignorant dependence on its might than Renan does here in behalf of science. The time will come when it will be necessary to oppose seriously the claims of science to omniscience ; at present any such attack would be misunderstood, and every aid should be given to this comparatively new method of human thought. Further on in the dreams we come to a pæan in favor of Von Hartmann’s Unbewusste. It will be seen that these dialogues of Renan’s are fuller of a sort of poetic than of a truly scientific spirit.
— Admirers of Tourguéneff will find in a new volume, Les Reliques Vivantes,8 four short stories done into French, of the most important of which we have already spoken on the occasion of their appearance in a German translation. Some of them have also already appeared in English in American magazines. The volume is of light weight, but interesting.
— Those who take an interest in the present condition of religious controversy in Germany will perhaps care to look at a contribution to the matter which comes from the pen of Edward von Hartmann,9 which may be read either in German or in a French translation. Hartmann, it will be remembered, is the author of a Philosophy of the Unconscious, a book which in the six or seven years since its appearance has had great success in Germany and is beginning to be better known in other countries. His theory of the universe, while it differs in many important particulars, is not radically unlike that of Schopenhauer in its pessimism. As may be imagined, he is an “advanced” radical, and this book of his shows that he has no strong love for matters of traditional respect. Without mentioning what he says for either commendation or refutation, it may possibly he allowed us to give in brief compass some of the more important statements of this small volume. The essence of Protestantism being the right of individual judgment, this element has continually been exerting itself in one direction, namely, towards limiting by criticism the foundations of Christianity. The Church of Rome, on the other hand, has steadily rested on its old traditions, of which the infallibility of the Pope is the natural outcome. Modern science has, Hartmann says, cut away much of the ground on which Christianity rests, and now in the conflict in Germany between the state and the church he sees the threatened disappearance, not of religion, but of Christianity. What then is to replace this? Pantheism, sharply distinguished from anthropomorphic monotheism, is the new gospel of which Hartmann is the apostle. It is to resemble Buddhism in its ethics; it is to recognize the misery of human nature and to seek to release it by sympathy, and not in accordance to a direct command; it is to start from an earnest belief in pessimism.
For the full exposition of this theory the reader must turn to the book itself; however much he may distrust Hartmann’s powers of prophecy, he will find them something very different from Strauss’s machine-like materialism. The historical part is especially worthy of notice.
- The Sanitary Drainage of Houses and Towns. By GEORGE E. WARING, JR., Consulting Engineer for Agricultural and Sanitary Work. New York: Hurd and Houghton; Cambridge : The Riverside Press. 1876.↩
- Pacchiarotto and how he Worked in Distemper : with other Poems. By ROBERT BROWNING. Boston. J. R. Osgood & Co, 1876.↩
- No Name Series. Deirdrè. Boston: Roberts Brothers. 1876.↩
- The Spur of Monmouth; or, Washington in Arms. A Historical and Centennial Romance of the Revolution, from Personal Relations and Documen ts never before made public. By an Ex-Pension Agent. Philadelphia: Claxton, Remsen, and Haffelfinger. 1876.↩
- Italy, from the Alps to Mount Etna. Edited by THOMAS ADOLPHUS TROLLOPE. Illustrated with upwards of one hundred full-page and three hundred smaller engravings. New York : Scribner, Welford, and Armstrong. 1876.↩
- All books mentioned under this head are to be had at Schoenhof and Moeller’s, 40 Winter St.,Boston, Mass,↩
- Dialogues et Fragments Philosophiques, Par ERNEST RENAN, Membre de l’Institut. Paris : Lévy. 1876.↩
- Les Reliques Vivantes. Par I. TOURGUÉNEFF. Paris: Hetzel. 1876.↩
- La Religion de l'Avenir. Par ÉDOUARD DE HARTMANN. Traduit de l’Allemand. Paris : Sermer Baillière. 1876.↩