Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, September, 1880

This is, of course, a natural result of the gaps and contradictions in the evidence, the lack especially of those minute details which are not only necessary links, but often the most suggestive features, in a record of facts or delineation of character. And if it be urged that a deeper insight would have in some measure supplied this deficiency, the answer can only be that we have no right to expect from any man the exercise of powers which he does not possess or affect to possess—powers which, in a case like this, would need to be of the finest and rarest kind. We may, however, fairly regret that Mr. Stephen has not availed himself of a resource that lay within his reach for making the accessories of his picture more brilliant and effective, with the possible incidental result of throwing a stronger light on the principal figure. Whatever else may be debated about Pope, no one would deny that he was pre-eminently the man of his time—not only its most conspicuous figure, but the very embodiment of its ideals. He suited it and it suited him. Hence the fulness and in a certain sense perfection of his work, the fact that he has given his name to an epoch as well as a school, and consequently the important place which he still retains in the history of literature. Men who were certainly not his inferiors in intellectual power lived in the same age, partook of its influence and contributed to its achievements; but they were not so thoroughly at home in it: their best qualities were stunted, rather than developed, by its soil and atmosphere. Dryden, one may safely say, would have been greater had he lived earlier, Fielding had he lived later. But one cannot imagine Pope thriving in any other air or producing equal work under different influences. The qualities most esteemed by his contemporaries he possessed in a superlative degree; his limitations were common to the society in which he moved, and neither he nor it was conscious of them as such; consequently, what would have been impediments to a different nature were to his means of free and spontaneous action. And not only does he represent the ideas of his age, but he depicted its types and manners. In this respect he is the link between the comic dramatists and the novelists, between Congreve and Fielding. The wits, the beaux, the fine ladies, the Grub Street drudges of the reign of Anne, whatever be the fidelity or other merits of the portraitures, are more familiar to us in the satires of Pope than as reflected in any other mirror. For these reasons Pope is one of the last men who can be studied to advantage from a single point of view or in a detached position. We need to understand not only his personal relations but his general affinities with the men and events of his time—of that world, at least, of which he was the centre. True, the period is better known to readers generally than almost any other. But it is not a copious accumulation of facts or a labored analysis—for which there would have been no space—that we miss in Mr. Stephen's book, but such groupings and irradiating touches as might have given us a vivid glimpse, if only a glimpse, of the whole field. Yet in lamenting that this much is not given us we are perhaps making the mistake before noticed, of demanding from a given source what it could not supply. We are driven back, therefore, on the reflection how much the slightest things in art depend on inspiration, on original power—how immeasurable the distance is between the man of culture and the man of genius.

Samuel Lover: A Biographical Sketch. With Selections from his Writings and Correspondence. By Andrew James Symington. New York: Harper & Brothers.

The memory of so genial and popular a writer as Lover ought to be kept as green as possible, and Mr. Symington has done well to embody his Loveriana in a short life of the Irish humorist. The new material brought forth is slender, consisting simply of a few letters and ten short poems, not of his best; but it was worth publishing, and Mr. Symington has the advantage, in treating of Lover, of writing from personal knowledge. He has rather slurred over the earlier part of Lover's career, apparently from a fear of trespassing on the preserves of a longer biography previously published; which is a pity, as his sketch will have most interest for readers who come fresh to the subject. Even those whose curiosity in regard to the writer has not been stirred by reading his works may get a very good idea of them from the selections printed here. The book is not a critical study: it enters into no details or analysis of Lover's character. It is simply a hurried outline of his life, interspersed with songs and stories which go a good way to make up for the meagreness of personal anecdote, and ending with some friendly letters and short notes written by Lover during the last few years of his life and addressed to Mr. Symington. Most of these letters were written in poor health from the Isle of Wight or Jersey, to which places he was sent by the doctors. They are not of the brilliant or gossipy order, but they are admirable in their good colloquial English and cheerful, unaffected style. Lover was a man of great activity of mind, combined with warm affections. His life-story was not very romantic, but it was a wholesome and pleasant one. When young he was deeply attached to an English girl, with whom, though they were separated (Mr. Symington does not say from what cause), he maintained through life a warm friendship. The young lady married, and Lover consoled himself and was married twice, each time, it appears, very happily. His letters contain many little domestic allusions, reporting his own occupations and those of "the good little wife" at their fireside in Kent or away at the shore, where they look back with regret to their own country-house. Lover had a warm attachment to home, the house as well as the inmates. "I cannot tell you," he writes from the Isle of Wight, "how much I have been put off my balance by my exile from my own house. For a time one is willing to make, for health's sake, a sacrifice of domestic comfort and give up the pleasant habits one can indulge in in one's own home; but to lead for months and months a lodging-house life is very miserable: it benumbs the best of our faculties; the edge of enjoyment is blunted. Music is sweeter within the compass of your own walls; the book is pleasanter taken from the familiar shelf of your own library; in one's own studio the habit of happy occupation has made an atmosphere that has a charm in it."

Gifted with a rare variety of talents, Lover heartily enjoyed the exercise of each, and found his chief pleasure in their development. He worked incessantly at painting, writing or musical composition—worked for love of the work, not from uneasy effort or outside pressure. In this respect he presents a happy contrast to his fellow-countryman and brother-humorist Charles Lever, whose biography, published some months ago, left a painful impression on the mind in its view of a man of genuine talent and attractive qualities living in a feverish way and writing constantly against his inclination, too often below his powers. As writers the two stand side by side. Lover had more versatility of talent, taking him partly outside the field of literature. He made the most of his powers: nothing which he has written gives the idea that he might have done it better. He was a poet, which Lever was not, and had an easy command of versification and language. His songs, while they show no high poetic qualities, are excellent of their kind, and his facility in turning an impromptu verse is shown in this scrap from the book before us in praise of a friend and physician:

  Whene'er your vitality  Is feeble in quality,  And you fear a fatality    May end the strife,  Then Dr. Joe Dickson  Is the man I would fix on  For putting new wicks on    The lamp of life.

In his stories Lover relied less on drollery of incident and indulged more in play upon words than Lever, but the humor of both is essentially of the same kind and drawn from the same source. Compared with much of our American humor, it has a spontaneousness, and above all a lovable quality, that ours lacks. The boy who has laughed over Lorrequer and Handy Andy is apt to look back at them not merely with amusement, but with a feeling of camaraderie and even tenderness. He has laughed with them as well as at them—has somehow gained through the laughter a glimpse of the writer which inspires liking and respect.

New England Bygones. By E.H. Arr. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott & Co.

E.H. Arr has produced a very pleasant book by a simple effort of memory. By letting the mind's eye travel back carefully and vigilantly over the scenes of a youth passed in a rural part of New England, and taking notes of its journey, she has made a graphic picture of life in that corner of the country forty years ago. Not a few men and women who were "raised" there have carried away, bit for bit, the same reminiscences, so exactly does one New England landscape resemble another, in details of foreground at least. The same description of orchard, stone walls or old well will fit any farm in Maine or Massachusetts, and fond recollection sniffs the same odor of sputtering doughnuts through the kitchen-door, whether it carries one back to the Green hills or the White. Recollections are alike, but impressions differ, one class of minds retaining the sense of bareness and gloom which is so continually insisted upon in some New England books, and others, as in the book before us, dwelling lovingly upon the wholesome flavor, pungent yet mellow, which gives New England country life a distinctive charm unlike anything else either in this or the mother-country. Even the Sunday is pleasant to look back upon to E.H. Arr; which is probably one instance of the fact that retrospective pleasure is sometimes totally disproportionate to present enjoyment.

The author is more successful in her treatment of landscape than of figures. Her village people are shown too much under one aspect: she possesses none of the humor which dares to take the most opposite traits, the grotesque and the beautiful alike, and blend them in a sound, artistic whole. Her characters are evidently drawn from life, but we miss the many little touches which would make them alive. An essay on "Old Trees" contains some of the best work in the book, with its charming sketch of an old orchard, bringing to view the twisted trees and even the irregularities of the ground, and to the palate a sharp after-taste of yellowing apples picked up from tufts of matted grass. After all, the New England of the writer's bygones does not differ essentially from the New England of to-day, though a more vivid study of life would perhaps have brought out more contrasts between the two.

Books Received.

Homo Sum: A Novel. By Georg Ebers. From the German by Clara Bell. New York: William S. Gottsberger.

Unto the Third and Fourth Generation: A Study. By Helen Campbell. New York: Fords, Howard & Hulbert.

Allaooddeen, a Tragedy, and Other Poems. By the author of "Constance," etc. London: Smith, Elder & Co.

Third-Term Politics: A Lecture. By Horace White. New York: Independent Republican Association.

The American Bicycler. By Charles E. Pratt. Illustrated. Boston: Press of Rockwell & Churchill.

Alva Vine; or, Art versus Duty. By Henri Gordon. New York: American News Company.