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system than the “Data of Ethics," which was the volume last issued, and which formed the first division of the "Principles of Morality." For deciding to issue by itself this and each succeeding division of the "Principles of Sociology," Mr. Spencer has found several reasons. "One is that each division, though related to the rest, nevertheless forms a whole so far distinct that it may be fairly well understood without the rest. Another is that large volumes (and Vol. II. threatens to exceed in bulk Vol. I.) are alarming; and that many, who are deterred by their size from reading them, will not fear to undertake separately the parts of which they are composed. A third and chief reason is that postponement of issue until completion of the entire volume necessitates an undesirable delay in the issue of its earlier divisions: substantially independent works being thus kept in manuscript much longer than need be." Portions of the present work have already been published as articles in various periodicals in England and on the Continent, and in "The Popular Science Monthly" in America; but the last five chapters, composing nearly half the volume, have not hitherto appeared either at home or abroad, and the whole has been subjected to a most careful and minute revision. In deference to a criticism passed by friends upon the published articles that they were overweighted by illustrative facts, Mr. Spencer has diminished in many cases the amount of evidence offered in support of his propositions; but he admits in advance that the defect may still be alleged. "That, with a view to improved effect," he says in

his preface, "I have not suppressed a larger number of illustrations is due to the consideration that scientific proof, rather than artistic merit, is the end to be here achieved. If sociological generalizations are to pass out of the stage of opinion into the stage of established truth, it can only be through extensive accumulations of instances; the inductions must be wide if the conclusions are to be accepted as valid. Especially while there continues the belief that social phenomena are not the subject-matter of a science, it is requisite that the correlations among them should be shown to hold in multitudinous cases. Evidence furnished by various races in various parts of the world must be given before there can be rebutted the allegation that the inferences drawn are not true. Indeed, of social phenomena more than all other phenomena, it must, because of their complexity, hold that only by comparisons of many examples can fundamental relations be distinguished from superficial relations."

We have followed Mr. Spencer's example in touching upon this point at the outset, because, to the general reader coming unprepared to the work, it would be apt to seem little more than an aggregation of facts and instances, the vast number and infinite variety of which confuse the judgment and bewilder the memory. The principles with which Mr. Spen

cer sets out and the conclusions at which he arrives

are comparatively few and simple, but his method of proof is by what we may call cumulative evidence drawn from an infinite multiplicity of sources.

To

keep the head clear in merely reading the interminable procession of facts is a task of no small difficulty; and, in collecting them and marshaling them in their due order and relations, Mr. Spencer has performed one of the most impressive of the Herculean labors involved in his long and arduous task.

So closely interlinked are the various stages of the author's argument, and so dependent upon each other are the several portions of his exposition, that it would be impossible to detach a series of passages which should serve to exemplify and illustrate the whole. We must perforce content ourselves with indicating briefly the aim and purport of the book, since it would be almost frivolous in dealing with a work of this character merely to quote a number of disconnected passages because they seemed curious or interesting. The fundamental proposition with which the book opens, and to the establishing of which the rest of the book is devoted, is laid down in the following passage:

If, disregarding conduct that is entirely private, we consider only that species of conduct which involves direct relations with other persons; and if, under the name of government, we include all control of such conduct, however arising; then we must say that the earliest kind of government, and the government which is ever spontaneously recommencing, is the government of ceremonial observance. More may be said. This kind of government, besides preceding other kinds, and besides having in all places and times approached nearer to universality of influence, has ever had, and continues to have, the largest share in regulating men's lives.

The next most important proposition, which is nowhere so distinctly formulated by Mr. Spencer, but which is implied throughout, is that these ceremonial observances which constitute the primary and most comprehensive form of government, and which are now distinguished as political, religious, and social, had a common origin; and that this origin is to be found not in conventions at one time or other deliberately made, as people tacitly assume, but in usages that are the natural products of social life which have gradually evolved. Adhering tenaciously to all his elders taught him, the primitive man deviates into novelty only through unintended modifications. Every one now knows that languages are not devised but evolve; and the same is true of usages."

"

The process by which spontaneously arising customs gradually crystallize into laws is traced by Mr. Spencer along many converging lines of evidence; and the following passage from his closing chapter contains, perhaps, as convenient a summary of the evidence and the conclusion to which it leads as can be quoted:

In primitive headless groups of men, such customs as A few regulate conduct form but a small aggregate. certain cases bodily mutilations, and some interdicts on naturally prompted actions on meeting strangers, in foods monopolized by adult men, constitute a brief code. But, with consolidation into compound, doubly compound, and trebly compound societies, there arise great accumulations of ceremonial arrangements regulating all

the actions of life-there is an increase in the mass of observances. Originally simple, those observances become progressively complex. From the same root grow up various kinds of obeisances. Primitive descriptive names develop into numerous graduated titles. From aboriginal salutes come, in course of time, complimentary forms of address adjusted to persons and occasions. Weapons taken in war give origin to symbols of authority, assuming, little by little, great diversities in their shapes. While certain trophies, differentiating into badges, dresses, and decorations, eventually in each of these divisions present multitudinous varieties, no longer bearing any resemblance to their originals. And, besides the increasing heterogeneity which in each society arises among products having a common origin, there is the further heterogeneity which arises between this aggregate of products in one society and the allied aggregates in other societies. Simultaneously there is progress in. definiteness; ending, as in the East, in fixed forms prescribed in all their details, which must not under penalty be departed from. And in sundry places the vast assemblages of complex and definite ceremonies thus elaborated are consolidated into coherent codes set forth in books.

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The entire book is substantially devoted to furnishing detailed proofs of these propositions; and to showing, furthermore, that the growth of ceremonial or governmental institutions conforms in every particular to the laws of evolution at large. 'When we observe," says Mr. Spencer, "the original unity exhibited by ceremony as it exists in primitive hordes, in contrast with the diversity which ceremony, under its forms of political, religious, and social, assumes in developed societies, we recognize another aspect of the transformation undergone by all products of evolution."

It may be numbered among the curious incidents of literary history that after nearly twenty years have elapsed since the first publication of Gautier's "Le Capitaine Fracasse," without any one thinking it worth while to introduce it to American readers, two rival translations of the story have been issued simultaneously by different houses in the same city.* This is partly explained, no doubt, by the very high praise which Mr. Henry James, Jr., has bestowed upon the work in his "French Poets and Novelists"; and, this being so, it may be interesting to the reader to know precisely what Mr. James has to say about it. In his charming essay on Gautier occurs the following passage:

If, as an illustration, we could transfuse the essence of one of Gautier's best performances into this colorless report, we should choose the "Capitaine Fracasse." In this delightful work Gautier has surpassed himself, and produced the model of picturesque romances. The story was published, we believe, some twenty-five years after it

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was announced-and announced because the author had taken a fancy to the title and proposed to write "up" to it. We can not say how much of the long interval was occupied with this endeavor; but certainly the "Capitaine Fracasse" is as good as if a quarter of a century had been given to it. Besides being his most ambitious work, it bears more marks of leisure and meditation than its companions. M. Meissonier might have written it, if, with the same talent and a good deal more geniality, he had chosen to use the pen rather than the brush. The subject is just such a one as Gautier was born to appreciate-a subject of which the pictorial side emphasizes itself as naturally as that of "Don Quixote." It is borrowed, indeed, but as great talents borrow-for a use that brings the original into fashion again. Scarron's "Roman Comique," which furnished Gautier with his starting-point, is as barren to the eye as "Gil Blas" itself, besides being a much coarser piece of humor. The sort of memory one retains of the "Capitaine Fracasse" is hard to express, save by some almost physical analogy. We remember the perusal of most good novels as an intellectual pleasure-a pleasure which varies in degree, but is, as far as it goes, an affair of the mind. The hours spent over the "Capitaine Fracasse" seem to have been an affair of the senses, of personal experience, of observation and contact as illusory as those of a peculiarly vivid dream. The novel presents the adventures of a company of strolling players of Louis XIII.'s timetheir vicissitudes, collective and individual, their miseries

and gayeties, their loves and squabbles, and their final apportionment of worldly comfort-very much in that symmetrical fashion in which they have so often stood forth to receive it at the fall of the curtain. It is a fairytale of Bohemia, a triumph of the picturesque. In this case, by a special extension of his power, the author has made the dramatic interest as lively as the pictorial, and lodged good human hearts beneath the wonderfullypainted rusty doublets and tarnished satins of his maskers. The great charm of the book is a sort of combined geniality of feeling and coloring, which leaves one in doubt whether the author is the most joyous of painters or the cleverest of poets. It is a masterpiece of goodhumor-a good-humor sustained by the artist's indefatigable relish for his theme. In artistic “bits,” of course, the book abounds; it is a delightful gallery of portraits. The models, with their paint and pomatum, their broken plumes and threadbare velvet, their false finery and their real hunger, their playhouse manners and morals, are certainly not very choice company; but the author hanwhich we so speedily feel the influence that, long before dles them with an affectionate, sympathetic jocosity of

we have finished, we seem to have drunk with them, one

and all, out of the playhouse goblet to the confusion of respectability and life before the scenes. If we incline to look for deeper meanings, we can fancy the work in the last analysis an expression of that brotherly sympathy with the social position of the comedian which Gautier was too much what the French call an homme de théâtre not to entertain as an almost poetic sentiment. The Capitaine Fracasse" ranks, in our opinion, with the first works of the imagination produced in our day.

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This fine and true description renders it unnecessary for us to say anything more of the original work, as a literary product; and such further comments as we have to make may be profitably addressed to a question which seems to be raised by both the translations before us-the question, namely, of the proper function of a translator. It would be generally conceded, we suppose, that the primary

aim of a translator should be to reproduce the ideas, meaning, and language of the original with the utmost possible fidelity and exactness. Differences of structure and idiom between any two languages will always suffice to prevent a literal word-for-word reproduction, and the extent of the deviation authorized by this has to be left to the taste and discretion of the translator; but the fundamental rule of good translation is as we have stated it, and applies with especial force to the work of so supreme a literary artist as Gautier. Tested by this rule, we regret to say that both the translations of "Captain Fracasse" are not only defective, but inexcusably so. Each translator, in her different way, has seemed to think that she could improve Gautier's work, and has subjected it to a process decidedly worse than "that light editorial hacking and hewing to right and left" which Carlyle resented so deeply when it was inflicted upon his own manuscript by Jeffrey. Miss Ripley, indeed, frankly confesses in a prefatory note that certain considerations seemed to furnish "justification for carrying the translator's work further than mere verbal expressions"; and though Mrs. Beam says nothing on the point-thereby implying, we think, that her version has been prepared on the customary plan-she has felt no more hesitation than her rival in introducing “some minor changes" of her own.

There are certain features of "Le Capitaine Fracasse," it may be candidly said, which go far to explain if not to justify certain of the omissions which Miss Ripley has ventured upon. The manners, the morals, and the language of the age of Louis XIII. were much freer than those of our own time, even in France; and Gautier was not the artist to soften this feature in any picture of the time that he might undertake to paint. On the contrary, he has depended upon it largely for that "local color" which is indispensable to the vraisemblance of an historical novel; and, besides the laxity of tone which pervades the whole, has introduced a series of episodes designed especially to illustrate that contempt for conventional restraints which characterizes the period he has attempted to depict. All these episodes, without exception, Miss Ripley has remorselessly cut out, and has thereby mutilated the story irretrievably as a work of art. We say "mutilated," because, aside from the danger of disturbing the light and shade of a picture as the artist has conceived it, these "playhouse manners and morals," as Mr. James calls them, form the indispensable background to the character of the pure and refined Isabelle and the idyllic love between her and Captain Fracasse which constitute the great charm of

the book. We are not to be understood as main

taining that such episodes are unobjectionable; but, the time to consider them is when deciding whether the story is one which deserves to be introduced to a new circle of readers. If it be decided that, in spite of its faults, it deserves to be so introduced, then there can be no doubt that, in the case of such an author as Gautier, at least it should be presented as one entire and perfect chrysolite."

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Mrs. Beam's delinquencies are of a different character, though their effect upon the story is hardly less injurious. She has not allowed herself to be intimidaced by the features of which we have spoken, and she records the "episodes" that have disappeared entirely from Miss Ripley's text with unshrinking literalness and precision; but of the descriptive portions of Gautier's work she has presented little more than a summary or abstract. Miss Ripley sins in this respect also, but to nothing like the extent that Mrs. Beam has done. She has endeavored to preserve some, at least, of the original outlines, while Mrs. Beam has simply picked out phrases and sentences here and there, and constructed a series of pictures to please herself. This would be a comparatively venial fault in many cases, but Gautier's highest power as an artist is exhibited in the opulence and splendor of his pictorial effects; and in "Le Capitaine Fracasse" the copious details— minute and leisurely, but never tedious-display in its most striking aspect his fertility of invention. To quote Mr. James again: “His real imaginative power is shown in his masterly evocation of localities, and in the thick-coming fancies that minister to his inexhaustible conception of that pictorial 'setting' of human life which interested him so much more than human life itself.”

In conclusion, we may say that Miss Ripley's version is the more spirited and vivacious-more skillful in its suggestion of Gautier's light and sparkling style; while Mrs. Beam's gives a more trustworthy idea of the character and contents of the story. But it will be necessary to read both in order to get even a tolerably exact notion of the original work, and a real translation yet remains to be made.

ALMOST at the beginning of English literature stands Chaucer, and, of course, the biographer who undertakes to deal with him has a much more difficult task than he whose subject stands in the full light of more recent and better recorded times. Bearing this in mind, it must be admitted, we think, that Professor Ward's little book is a most praiseworthy achievement.* All that is definitely known, or even plausibly conjectured, about Chaucer's life could be adequately stated within the compass of twenty lines, and to make a biography of him in the ordinary sense of the term would of course be impossible; yet those who study his works attentively, and with a proper knowledge of the times and circumstances in which they were produced, can obtain a clear and probably accurate conception of the character and personality which lie behind them.

To enable the reader to approach these works with a proper equipment of the knowledge necessary to interpret them, and to awaken his attention to the personal revelations and implications of the works themselves, is the task which Professor Ward has

* English Men of Letters. Edited by John Morley. Chaucer, by Adolphus William Ward. New York: Harper & Brothers. 12mo, pp. 199.

set before himself, and which he has fulfilled with a gratifying degree of success. Nearly a third of his little volume is devoted to a consideration of Chaucer's times, a clear understanding of which is absolutely essential to a just appreciation of Chaucer's work in literature. Of every man it is true in a general way, but of Chaucer it may be said in a peculiar sense, that he was the creature of his period; and, while he himself furnishes the most valuable and conclusive evidence of what that period was, the evidence must be fully sifted and classified before its significance can be wholly grasped. Speaking of this study of Chaucer in intimate connection with his times, Professor Ward says:

The value of such evidence as the mind of a great poet speaking in his works furnishes for a knowledge of the times to which he belongs is inestimable; for it shows

above all, for his dramatic power in the portraiture of character. On this latter point Professor Ward has a passage which we can not forbear quoting:

cal fact and conjecture which the laborious researches of students and scholars have disinterred from the Royal Wardrobe Book, the Issue Rolls of the Exchequer, the Customs Rolls, and such like public records, and from the writings of his contemporaries or immediate successors. In it also he points out the conclusions which may be drawn from the internal evidence of the poet's own works; and as an indispensable preliminary to this considers fully the questions involved in the genuineness or spuriousness of the various works which have been attributed to Chaucer. All the light which his indisputably genuine works can be made to throw upon the life and character of the poet is here studiously collected; and then in another brief chapter the author discusses the "Characteristics of Chaucer and his Poetry." The criticism in this last-named chapter is to us what has survived, as well as what was doomed to our mind the most helpful and satisfactory to which decay, in the life of the nation with which that mind was Chaucer has been subjected, and it is entirely indein sensitive sympathy. And it therefore seemed not inap- pendent of the customary dicta. Chaucer is usually propriate to approach, in the first instance, from this praised as a narrative poet and as a painter of napoint of view, the subject of this biographical essay- ture, and in neither of these departments, as it seems Chaucer, "the poet of the dawn": for in him there are to us, is he entitled to the highest rank. Professor many things significant of the age of transition in which Ward praises him more discriminatingly for his vihe lived; in him the mixture of Frenchman and Eng-vacity and humor, for his gayety and brightness, and, lishman is still in a sense incomplete, as that of their language is in the diction of his poems. His gayety of heart is hardly English; nor is his willing (though, to be sure, not invariably unquestioning) acceptance of forms into the inner meaning of which he does not greatly vex his soul by entering; nor his airy way of ridiculing what he has no intention of helping to overthrow; nor his light unconcern in the question whether he is, or is not, an immoral writer. Or, at least, in all of these things he has no share in qualities and tendencies, which influences and conflicts unknown to and unforeseen by him may be safely said to have ultimately made characteristic of Englishmen. But he is English in his freedom and frankness of spirit; in his manliness of mind; in his preference for the good in things as they are to the good in things as they might be; in his loyalty, his piety, his truthfulness. Of the great movement which was to mold the national character for at least a long series of generations he displays no serious foreknowledge; and of the elements already preparing to affect the course of that movement he shows a very incomplete consciousness. But, of the health and strength which, after struggles many and various, made that movement possible and made it victorious, he, more than any of his contemporaries, is the living type and the speaking witness. Thus, like the times to which he belongs, he stands half in and half out of the middle ages, half in and half out of a phase of our national life which we can never hope to understand more than partially and imperfectly. And it is this, taken together with the fact that he is the first English poet to read whom is to enjoy him, and that he garnished not only our language but our literature with blossoms still adorning them in vernal freshness, which makes Chaucer's figure so unique a one in the gallery of our great English writers, and gives to his works an interest so inexhaustible for the historical as well as for the literary student.

The most valuable chapter, of course, is that on "Chaucer's Life and Works," which occupies more than half the volume. In it Professor Ward has gathered and linked together all those bits of biographi

He is the first great painter of character, because he

is the first great observer of it among modern European writers. His power of comic observation need not be been incidentally furnished in these pages. More espedwelt upon again, after the illustrations of it which have cially with regard to the manners and ways of women, which often, while seeming so natural to women themselves, appear so odd to male observers, Chaucer's eye

was ever on the alert. But his works likewise contain of men, as well as a keen eye for their manners, together passages displaying a penetrating insight into the minds with a power of generalizing, which, when kept within mankind, so admirable to us in our great essayists, from due bounds, lies at the root of the wise knowledge of

Bacon to Addison, and his modern successors. . . .

ing character, above all, that Chaucer became the true It was by virtue of his power of observing and drawpredecessor of two several growths in our literature, in

From this

both of which characterization forms a most important
element-it might, perhaps, be truly said, the element
which surpasses all others in importance.
point of view the dramatic poets of the Elizabethan age
atists, and the English novelists of the eighteenth and
remain unequaled by any other school or group of dram-
nineteenth centuries by the representatives of any other
development of prose-fiction. In the art of construction,
in the invention and the arrangement of incident, these
dramatists and novelists may have been left behind by
others; in the creation of character they are, on the
whole, without rivals in their respective branches of
literature. To the earlier, at least, of these growths,
Chaucer may be said to have pointed the way. His
personages-more especially, of course, those who are
assembled together in the prologue to the "Canterbury
Tales"-are not mere phantasms of the brain, or even
mere actual possibilities, but real human beings, and
types true to the likeness of whole classes of men and
women, or to the mold in which all human nature is

cast. This is, upon the whole, the most wonderful, as it is perhaps the most generally recognized, of Chaucer's gifts. It would not of itself have sufficed to make him a great dramatist, had the drama stood ready for him as a

literary form into which to pour the inspirations of his

genius, as it afterward stood ready for our great Eliza

bethans. But to it were added in him that perception of a strong dramatic situation and that power of finding the right words for it which have determined the success of many plays, and the absence of which materially detracts from the completeness of the effect of others, high as their merit may be in other respects.

Provided with Professor Ward's monograph and with Mr. Arthur Gilman's Riverside edition of the poet's works, reviewed in a recent number of the "Journal," the reader will find himself better equipped for an intelligent appreciation and enjoyment of Chaucer's poetry than any previous genera

tion of students has been.

WHOEVER has fallen under the malign influence of "that worst of all skepticisms, a disbelief in human goodness," should read that biography of "Sister Dora" which, it is not surprising to hear, has made so profound an impression upon the English reading public. It has been finely said by one who knew her well that the life of Sister Dora exemplified "the sublime possibilities of Christianity"; but while her peculiarly vivid and vital faith no doubt sustained her through many an arduous and discouraging experience, yet it must be said that her career, rightly considered, can not fail also to exalt our estimate of that poor human nature which has been so much denounced and decried. For, if Sister Dora was distinctively a product of Christianity, she was certainly a unique and unprecedented product. Hers was no pious asceticism or exaltation of mystic emotion, but a most wholesome and human personality; and her profound belief in the efficacy of good works would have shocked and grieved the typical theologian of the old school.

Sister Dora was not a member of one of the Roman Catholic orders, as might naturally be inferred from her title. The daughter of a clergyman of the Church of England, she was herself a zealous member of that Church; and the title by which she is likely to become so widely known was derived from her temporary connection with the Sisterhood of the Good Samaritans, a secular community of voluntary associates who occupied themselves with nursing and other "works of mercy" in different parts of the United Kingdom. At the age of twenty-nine she left her comfortable home, contrary to her father's wishes, to teach a poor parish school in a remote village; at the age of thirty-two she joined the Sisterhood, and the remainder of her most laborious life was devoted unreservedly to those "works of mercy" which the Sisterhood had marked out for

* Sister Dora. A Biography. By Margaret Lonsdale. With a Portrait. From the sixth English edition. Boston: Roberts Brothers. 16m0, pp. 290.

themselves. She did this not because of any exaltation of pious fervor, for at the time the momentous step was decided upon she was in the toils of religious doubt; nor because of "blighted affections or disgust with the world, for the pride of life and the pleasures of the senses were always strong within her; nor from the desire for remunerative employ. ment, for her home was secure, and after her father's death she would possess an independent fortune. Endowed with personal beauty which could not have failed to secure her a marked position in any society; with talents which would have commanded success in almost any department of intellectual effort; with the refined tastes and instincts of a carefully nurtured keen appetite for the delights of life and society; and mentally cultivated lady; with an exceptionally and with ample opportunities for enjoying them if she had chosen ; possessed of every possible tempta tion and inducement to the customary life of selfish pleasure and occupation, she deliberately turned from them all in the heyday of her health and beauty, and devoted herself to that hospital-nursing which, while it involves much noble and skillful work, involves also the performance of menial offices from which the very dregs of society turn with disgust. Why did she do this? Her motive was simply and solely the desire "to do good to others"; and this object she pursued with an energy, an eagerness, an enthusiastic devotion which far surpassed in ardor even that selfish greed which is peculiarly characteristic of the age, and which her whole life rebukes and puts to shame. "Money itself,” says her biographer, "was valuable to her only that she might spend it on others."

It is not our intention to summarize the story which Miss Lonsdale has told so well-with such straightforward frankness and simplicity of style. It would be hopeless to attempt to improve upon the manner of its telling; and no one, we imagine, will think the story too long in its present shape. On the contrary, in these days of voluminous "memoirs," it is difficult to avoid the feeling that less than adequate justice has been done to a most fruitful subject. This, however, is to make the mistake of measuring such work by quantity instead of quality, and a closer consideration will suffice to show that, in the case of Sister Dora, the life and the record of it are singularly harmonious with each other. And we are confident of receiving the heart-felt thanks of all readers who shall follow our recommendation to read the little book for themselves.

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