The Aldine, Vol. 5, No. 1., January, 1872

Yet he who, in his youth,
No wine nor kiss hath tasted.
Will some day think, in truth,
That half his joys were wasted.

    —Joel Benton.
I have heard it asked why we speak of the dead with unqualified praise: of the living, always with certain reservations. It may be answered, because we have nothing to fear from the former, while the latter may stand in our way: so impure is our boasted solicitude for the memory of the dead. If it were the sacred and earnest feeling we pretend, it would strengthen and animate our intercourse with the living.—Goethe.

THE QUEEN'S CLOSET

Did anybody ever see a fairy in the city? Was a glimpse ever caught of Fairyland there? I say No. But I was in the country this summer where a great number of mushrooms grew, and one day when I was walking in a grassy lane I met a little, old queen, who was fanning herself with the leaf of the poor-man's-weather-glass; she had taken off her crown, and it was lying on the top of a lovely red mushroom. I poked the mushroom with my parasol, and instantly felt on my face a faint puff of air, and heard a hum no louder than the buzz of an angry fly.

I sat down on the grass, and then my eyes fell on the queen.

"You have let my crown fall in the dirt," she said, tossing a wisp of hair from her forehead; "but you great, insensible beings are always in mischief when you are in the country. Why don't you stay at home, in your brick cages that stand on heaps of flat stones? You are watched there all the time by creatures with clubs in their leather belts, so you cannot tear and crush things to pieces as you do here."

"Oh, I am so sorry, madam," I answered; "if you knew how unhappy I felt this morning when I started on my last walk, you would pity me. I must go home at once, and my home is in the city—shut in by houses before and behind it. If I look out of the window, I only see a strip of sky above me, where neither sun nor moon passes on its journey round the world; and below me, only the stone pavement over which goes an endless procession of men and women, upon a hundred errands I never guess at."

The queen tapped her head with a white stick like a peeled twig, and made such a noise that I examined it, and saw an ivory knob, which reminded me of the budding horns of a young deer. As if in answer to my thought, she said:

"It drops off every year. In the fairy-nature all elements are united. We partake of the animal and vegetable kingdoms, and add our own; this makes us what we are. We do not suffer, but we experience, without suffering, of course; our long lives glide along like dreams. As you are in sleep, so are we awake. If you love the country, which contains our kingdom, as the filbert-shell contains the kernel, I will endow you with power. I will give you something to take back with you."

What do you think she gave me? A little closet with shelves; on each shelf were laid away all my remembrances of the summer, for me to unfold at leisure. When she gave me the key, which looked exactly like a steel pen, she said: "When you turn the key you will understand my power. All things will be alive, will know as much, and talk as fast as you do. The closet, in short, is but a wee corner of my kingdom, where to-day and to-morrow are the same—past and present one. A maid-of-honor wishes to go to town. I'll send her in the closet. My slave, the geometrical spider, must spin her a warm cobweb—and when you open the closet, be sure and not disturb my little Fancie."

Some way Queen Imagin disappeared then. To any person less knowing than myself, it would have seemed as if a dandelion ball was floating in the air; but I knew better, and I watched her sailing, sailing away till lost behind the trees. The crown was gone, too; I discovered nothing in the neighborhood of the red mushroom, except a tiny yellow blossom already wilted by the heat of the sun.

Well, I am at home. I sit down this misty autumn morning in my lonely room, and wish for some work or if not that, for something to play with. I am too old for dolls, but very young in the way of amusement. Ah—the closet! I'll unlock that; the key is at hand—in my writing-desk.

Open Sesame! On the top shelf sits little Fancie, her eyes shining like diamonds in her soft, dusky cobweb. She nods, so do I, and we are in Greenside again—on a summer evening. How the crickets sing; and the tree-toads harp in the trees as if they were a picket guard entirely surrounding us. Hueston's big dog barks in the lane at just the right distance. What security I used to feel when I was a little child, tucked away in my bed, and heard a dog bark a mile away; too far off ever to come up and bite, and yet near enough to frighten prowling robbers!

"When in the breeze the distant watch-dog bayed," I was about to say; but Polly, who is at Greenside with me, calls, "Just hear the mosquitoes."

The blinds must be closed. What a delicious smell comes in! The dew wetting all the shrubs and flowers distils sweet odors. What a family of moths have rushed in; this big, brown one, with white and red markings, is very enterprising. He has voyaged twice down the lamp chimney, as if it were the funnel of a steamship.

Get out, moth!

"Sho," she answers in a husky voice, as if very dry, "It is my nature to; that's all you know, turning us to moral purposes, and making us a tiresome metaphor. We are much like you human creatures—only we don't compare ourselves continually with others. We just scorch ourselves as we please. My cousin, Noctilia Glow-worm, who is out late o' nights on the grass-bank in poor company—the Katydids, who board for the season with the widow Poplar—a two-sided, deceitful woman—she does not care where I go, and never shrieks out, 'A burnt moth dreads the lamp chimney.' If she sees me wingless, she coughs, and throws out a green light, but says nothing. Don't mind me; there's more coming."

It can't be moths making such a noise on the second shelf. It is Tom, who calls out to us, from his room, to come, and help him catch a bat.

"Now air is hushed, save where the weak-eyed bat
With short shrill shriek flits by on leathern wings."

"Always mouthing something," somebody mutters. But we rush into Tom's room, and behold him in the middle of the floor, flopping north and south, east and west, with a towel. No bat is to be seen. I hear a pretty singing, however, and declare it to be from a young swallow fallen down the chimney; but as there is no fire-place in the room, my opinion goes for nothing. Tom maintains that it is a bat; that it flew in by the window; and that it is behind the bureau. He is right, for the bat whirrs up to the ceiling and from that height accosts us in a squeaking voice:

"I am weak-eyed, am I? and my wings are leathery? Catch me, and you will find my wings are like down, my eyes as bright as diamonds. How much you know, writing yourselves down in books as Naturalists! My name is Vespertila; my family are from Servia, at your service. Could you offer me a fly, or a beetle? I was chasing Judge Blue Bottle, or I should not have been trapped. Go to sleep, dears, and leave me to fan you. When you are asleep, I'll bite a hole in your ear, and sup bountifully on your red blood."

Flop went our towels, and down went Miss Vespertila behind the bed crying. Polly crept up to her; and caught her in a towel. What black beads of eyes had Miss Vespertila from Servia, where her grandfather, General Vampire, still commands a brigade of rascals! Her teeth were sharp, and white as pearls. Polly held her up, and she cunningly combed her furry wings with her hind feet, and said:

"Polly, dear, I itch dreadfully; do you mind plain speaking? I am full of bat lice. Ariel caught them, and the folks say that Queen Mab often buys fine combs—"

"Slanderer!" cried Polly, "fly to your witch home!"

She shook the towel out of the window, and the bat soared away.

"What's coming next?" we all asked. "There are the rabbits to hear from, the pigeons, the sparrows, the mole, and the striped snake who lives by the garden gate?"

Slap, Bang! Fancie has pulled the door to. The cunning Queen Imagin placed her in the closet, perhaps for this purpose. But I have the key. I shall unlock it to-morrow, for I must have the picnic over again, under the beech tree, where the brown thrush built her nest, and reared her young ones, who ate our crumbs, and chirped merrily when we laughed.—Lolly Dinks's Mother.

Doth a man reproach thee for being proud or ill-natured, envious or conceited, ignorant or detractive, consider with thyself whether his reproaches be true. If they are not, consider that thou art not the person whom he reproaches, but that he reviles an imaginary being, and perhaps loves what thou really art, although he hates what thou appearest to be. If his reproaches are true, if thou art the envious, ill-natured man he takes thee for, give thyself another turn, become mild, affable and obliging, and his reproaches of thee naturally cease. His reproaches may indeed continue, but thou art no longer the person he reproaches.—Epictetus.

LITERATURE

"Of the making of many books there is no end," said the Wise Man of old. Of the making of good books there is frequently an end, say we. The good books of one year may be counted on the fingers of one hand. Among those of the present year none ranks higher than Taine's "Art in Greece," a translation of which, by Mr. John Durand, is published by Messrs. Holt & Williams. The French are a nation of critics, and Taine is the critic of the French. This could not have been said with truth during the lifetime of Sainte-Beuve, but since his death it is true. There is nothing, apparently, which Taine is not competent to criticise, so subtle is his intellect, and so wide the range of his studies, but what he is most competent to criticise is Art. We have heard great things of a History of English Literature by him, but as it has not yet appeared in an English dress (although Messrs. Holt & Williams have a translation of it in press) we shall reserve our decision until it appears. Art, it seems to us, is the specialty to which Taine has devoted himself, with the enthusiasm peculiar to his countrymen, and a thoroughness peculiar to himself. Others may have accumulated greater stores of art-knowledge—the knowledge indispensable to the historian of Art, and the biographer of artists—but none has so saturated himself with the spirit of Art as Taine. We may not always agree with him, but he is always worth listening to, and what he says is worthy of our serious consideration. We think he is too philosophical sometimes, but then the fault may be in us. It may be that we are so accustomed to the materialism of the English critics that we fail, at first, to apprehend the spirituality of this most refined and refining of Frenchmen. No English critic could have written his "Art in Greece," because no English critic could put himself in his place. We know what the English think of Greek Art, or may, with a little reading: what Taine thinks of it is—that it is what it is, simply because the Greeks were what they were. Before he tells us what Greek Art is, he tells us what the Greeks were. Nor does he stop here, but goes on to tell us, or rather begins by telling us, what kind of a country it was in which they dwelt, what skies shone over them, what mountains looked down upon them, in the shadow of what trees they walked within sight of the wine-dark sea. He begins at the beginning, as the children say. Whether he succeeds in convincing us that it was Greece alone which made the Greeks what they were, depends somewhat upon the cast of our minds, and somewhat upon our power to resist his eloquence. We think, ourselves, that he lays too much stress upon the mere outward environment of the Grecian people. The influence exercised over their lives, by the Institutions which grew up out of these lives—the influence, in short, of their purely physical culture—is admirably described, as is also the difference between this culture and ours:

"Modern people are Christian, and Christianity is a religion of second growth which opposes natural instinct. We may liken it to a violent contraction which has inflected the primitive attitude of the human mind. It proclaims, in effect, that the world is sinful, and that man is depraved—which certainly is indisputable in the century in which it was born. According to it, man must change his ways. Life here below is simply an exile; let us turn our eyes upward to our celestial home. Our natural character is vicious; let us stifle natural desires and mortify the flesh. The experience of our senses and the knowledge of the wise are inadequate and delusive; let us accept the light of revelation, faith and divine illumination. Through penitence, renunciation and meditation let us develop within ourselves the spiritual man; let our life be an ardent awaiting of deliverance, a constant sacrifice of will, an undying yearning for God, a revery of sublime love, occasionally rewarded with ecstasy and a vision of the infinite. For fourteen centuries the ideal of this life was the anchorite or monk. If you would estimate the power of such a conception and the grandeur of the transformation it imposes on human faculties and habits, read, in turn, the great Christian poem and the great pagan poem, one the 'Divine Comedy' and the other the 'Odyssey' and the 'Iliad.' Dante has a vision and is transported out of our little ephemeral sphere into eternal regions; he beholds its tortures, its expiations and its felicities; he is affected by superhuman anguish and horror; all that the infuriate and subtle imagination of the lover of justice and the executioner can conceive of he sees, suffers and sinks under. He then ascends into light; his body loses its gravity; he floats involuntarily, led by the smile of a radiant woman; he listens to souls in the shape of voices and to passing melodies; he sees choirs of angels, a vast rose of living brightness representing the virtues and the celestial powers; sacred utterances and the dogmas of truth reverberate in ethereal space. At this fervid height, where reason melts like wax, both symbol and apparition, one effacing the other, merge into mystic bewilderment, the entire poem, infernal or divine, being a dream which begins with horrors and ends in ravishment. How much more natural and healthy is the spectacle which Homer presents! We have the Troad, the isle of Ithica and the coasts of Greece; still at the present day we follow in his track; we recognize the forms of mountains, the color of the sea; the jutting fountains, the cypress and the alders in which the sea-birds perched; he copied a steadfast and persistent nature: with him throughout we plant our feet on the firm ground of truth. His book is a historical document; the manners and customs of his contemporaries were such as he describes; his Olympus itself is a Greek family."

The manifest inferiority of our mixed languages to their one simple language is stated in the following paragraph, with which we must leave Taine for the present:

"Almost the whole of our philosophic and scientific vocabulary is foreign; we are obliged to know Greek and Latin to make use of it properly, and, most frequently, employ it badly. Innumerable terms find their way out of this technical vocabulary into common conversation and literary style, and hence it is that we now speak and think with words cumbersome and difficult to manage. We adopt them ready made and conjoined, we repeat them according to routine; we make use of them without considering their scope and without a nice appreciation of their sense; we only approximate to that which we would like to express. Fifteen years are necessary for an author to learn to write, not with genius, for that is not to be acquired, but with clearness, sequence, propriety and precision. He finds himself obliged to weigh and investigate ten or twelve thousand words and diverse expressions, to note their origin, filiation and relationships, to rebuild on an original plan, his ideas and his whole intellect. If he has not done it, and he wishes to reason on rights, duties, the beautiful, the State or any other of man's important interests, he gropes about and stumbles; he gets entangled in long, vague phrases, in sonorous common-places, in crabbed and abstract formulas. Look at the newspapers and the speeches of our popular orators. It is especially the case with workmen who are intelligent but who have had no classical education; they are not masters of words, and, consequently, of ideas; they use a refined language which is not natural to them; it is a perplexity to them and consequently confuses their minds; they have had no time to filter it drop by drop. This is an enormous disadvantage, from which the Greeks were exempt. There was no break with them between the language of concrete facts and that of abstract reasoning, between the language spoken by the people and that of the learned; the one was a counterpart of the other; there was no term in any of Plato's dialogues which a youth, leaving his gymnasia, could not comprehend; there is not a phrase in any of Demosthenes' harangues which did not readily find a lodging-place in the brain of an Athenian peasant or blacksmith. Attempt to translate into Greek one of Pitt's or Mirabeau's discourses, or an extract from Addison or Nicole, and you will be obliged to recast and transpose the thought; you will be led to find for the same thoughts, expressions more akin to facts and to concrete experience; a flood of light will heighten the prominence of all the truths and of all the errors; that which you were wont to call natural and clear will seem to you affected and semi-obscure, and you will perceive by force of contrast why, among the Greeks, the instrument of thought being more simple, it did its office better and with less effort."

Among the good books of the year, two belong to a special walk of letters in which we have not hitherto excelled the English Translation. There are periods in the history of English Poetry when translation has played an important part. Such a period occurred just before the Shakspearean era, and it was noted for translations from the Latin poets. Chapman was the first English writer to perceive the greatness of the Greek poets, and, like the poet that he was, he attempted to translate the father of poets, Homer. Chapman's Homer is a noble work, with all its faults; but it is not what Homer should be in English. It was followed by other translations mostly of the Latin poets, the best, perhaps, being Dryden's Virgil, until, finally, the English mind returned to Homer, or supposed it did, in the pretty, musical numbers of Pope. Who will may read Pope's Homer. We cannot. Nor Cowper's either, although it contains some good, manly writing. We can read Lord Derby's Homer, or could, until Mr. Bryant published his translation of the "Iliad," when the necessity no longer existed. No English translation of Homer will compare with Mr. Bryant's; and we are glad that we are soon to have the whole of the "Odyssey," as we already have the whole of the "Iliad." The first volume of Mr. Bryant's translation of the "Odyssey" (J.R. Osgood & Co.) fully sustains the reputation of the writer. It is so admirably done, that, if we did not know to the contrary, we should think we were reading an original poem. The stiffness which generally inheres in translations is wanting; nowhere is there any sense of restraint, but everywhere a delightful sense of ease—the freedom of one great poet shining through the freedom of another great poet, as the sun shines through the sky. It is the ideal English translation of Homer; and we congratulate Mr. Bryant upon having finished it (for we believe he has); and congratulate ourselves that it is the work of an American poet.

We offer the like congratulation to Mr. Bayard Taylor for his translation of "Faust," which occupies the same place, as regards German Poetry, that Mr. Bryant's translation of Homer does to Greek Poetry. The difficulty of the task which Mr. Taylor set himself, the task of rendering the original in the measures of the original, was never met before by any English translator of "Faust"—never even attempted, we believe—and, to say that he has accomplished it, is to say that Mr. Taylor is a very skilful poet—how skilful we never knew before, highly as we have always valued his poetical powers. He enables us to understand the Intention of Goethe in "Faust," as no one besides himself has done; and, among the obligations that we owe him for the enjoyment he has given us, we must not forget the obligation we are under to him for his Notes. They are scholarly, and to the point. There is not one too many, not one which we could afford to lose, now that we have it. What might have been written, under the pretense of Notes—what another translator might not have been able to resist writing—is fearful to think of—Life is so short, and Goethe's Art so long!

The year has been fertile in American verse. How much Poetry it has produced is a question into which we do not care to enter. It has witnessed the publication of two volumes by Mr. Bret Harte; of one volume by Mr. John Hay; and of one volume by Mr. William Winter. The title of Mr. Winter's volume, "My Witness," (J.R. Osgood & Co.) is a happy one. It is not every American writer who can afford to place his verse on the stand as his witness; and it is not every American writer whose verse will substantiate what he is so desirous of proving, viz., that he is an American poet.

Mr. Winter is not without faults—what American writer is?—but he endeavors to write simply. The virtue of simplicity—always a rare one, and never so rare as at present—he possesses. We have Tennyson, who is not simple; we have Browning, who is not simple; we have Swinburne, who is not simple; and we have Mr. Joaquin Miller, who is not simple.

Mr. Winter's book has its defects—among which we observe an occasional lapse into Latinity—but with all its defects it is a very poetical book. Mr. Winter reminds us, more than any recent American poet, of the English poets of the reigns of Charles the First and Second. He has, at his best, all their graces of style, and he has, at all times, the grace of Purity, to which they laid no claim. With the exception of Carew (whom, we dare say, he has never read), Mr. Winter is the daintiest and sweetest of amatory poets. He has the fancy of Carew, without his artificiality; he has Carew's sweetness, without his grossness of suggestion.

There is a tinge of sadness in some of Mr. Winter's poems, and the critics, we suppose, will censure him for it. If so, they will be in the wrong. The poet has the right to express his moods, sad or merry, and he is no more to be judged by his sad moods than his merry ones. He is to be judged by both, and the sum of both—if the critic is able to add it up—is the poet. As far as he is revealed in his book, that is, but no further. There is such a thing as Dramatic Poetry, as some critics are aware, and there is such a thing as Representative Poetry, as few critics are aware. The former deals with the passions, the latter with those shadowy and evanescent sensations which we call feelings. Mr. Winter is not a dramatic poet, but he is, in his own way, a representative poet. His poem "Lethe" represents one set of feelings; "The White Flag" another; and "Love's Queen" another. We like the last best. For, while we believe the others to be equally genuine, they do not impress us as being the best expression of his genius. What we feel most after finishing his volume, what seems to us most characteristic of his poetry, is loveliness—the tender loveliness that lingers in the mind after we have seen the sun-set of a quiet summer evening, or after we have heard music on a dreamy summer night. If this poetic melancholy be treason, the critics may make the most of it. Mr. Winter has nothing to fear. He has the authority of the greatest poets with which to defend himself, and confute the critics.

ART

THE PRODIGAL SON, BY EDOUARD DUBUFE

The sublime lesson of forgiveness, inculcated by the story of the Prodigal Son, is among the earliest and most familiar in the memories of a nation of Bible readers like our own. Every one of us, perhaps unconsciously, carries in mind a simple, straight-forward conception of this subject, formed in early childhood—a time when the imagination rarely goes beyond an attempt to realize the unlooked for forgiveness of the once deserted parent, or the captivating visions of adventure suggested by the changing fortunes of the wanderer during his absence in a "far country."

With the painter the picture is his vision, and the panels are the realities. As a man of a different order of thought would have chosen another incident of the story for illustration, so also would a painter of a less independent school have permitted himself to be bound down by the historical facts of the architectural and costume fashions of the time of narration. Dubufe has so far discarded the unities of time and place, if any can really be said to exist—as no date was fixed in the relation of the parable by Christ—that he has adopted the mingled costumes of Europe and the East, which obtained in the fifteenth century, and has placed his figures in a Corinthian porch under the light of Italian skies. Apart from the conception and the "telling of the story," about which there will be various opinions, this picture may be justly regarded as a magnificent work of art.

The great David, a pupil of whose pupil Edouard Dubufe was, and Horace Vernet, appear to have been the guides selected by him, rather than the greatest of his masters—Paul Delaroche. The influence of both is to be traced in this work, although it may be said to take rank above any production of either of them. In drawing, color, and composition, rendering of textures, and the exhibition of the resources of the palette, now better known to French painters than ever before, the picture leaves nothing to be desired. The faces of the principal figures are full of that "expression to the life" in which the English are justly considered to excel, while the admirable focus of the groups, the color, and interest, are as un-English as excellent. Fault-finding in more than one or two unimportant details would be hypercriticism where so much is perfect, and it becomes our happy privilege, in this notice, to commend and to point out, to "lay" readers about Art, the manifold beauties of its technical execution. A critical examination will show that the composition is on the pyramidal principle, and the arrangement of groups principally in threes. In the central portion of the canvas, where the marble pillars of the porch fall off in perspective, the Profligate stands holding up a golden cup in his right hand, as in the act of proposing a toast. His red costume and commanding figure attract the eye, and the attention falls at once and equally on him and on the magnificent woman whose arms embrace his neck, and whose eyes, as her chin rests close on his breast, gaze with dangerous fascination into his face. Her dress is of rich white satin, and, with the delicate green and gold sheen of her rival's robe—she with whom the Prodigal's right hand toys in caress—makes up a wonderfully brilliant prismatic chord, having the effect of focusing the richer, but not less gorgeous, pigments spread everywhere on the canvas. The faces of the women are very beautiful, and are made voluptuous by a subtle art which, through all their beauty, tells a story of unrestrained lives of passion and pleasure.

The face of the magnificent creature at the Prodigal's left hand is a wondrous piece of drawing. It is thrown back against him and from the spectator, in order that she may look up into his face—at the moment a dissipated, spiritless face, without even the flush of the wine which dyes her's so rosily—a face at once weak and weary, and yet revealing a possible intensity, indeed, the face of a French woman who "has lived," rather than that of a man.

Up to this centre leads the other groups. Below, and seated on the rich rugs which cover the marble pavement, musicians and singers pause to listen to impassioned words from a laurel-crowned poet, while further on a sort of orchestra plays time for the sensuous dance of lithe-bodied Oriental dancers—each woman of them more ravishing than the other. Minor incidents, like dice-play and love-making, give interest to the remaining space, and keep up the revel.

Throughout, the drawing is true, and good, and graceful. The hands of the figures demand especial mention. The hand of one of the women, near the central group, grasped by her lover at the wrist as he kisses her shoulder, is particularly exquisite in form and color; the more remarkable, perhaps, because the position of it is so trying in nature and so difficult to draw.

The type of feature chosen for the women, the dancing girls excepted, is essentially Gallic. As remarked before, the face of the Prodigal, also, is French; but the musicians and the poet have faces of their own which seem to belong to the university of genius. The mere revelers, curiously enough, have a likeness to the figures in some old Italian pictures; one of them looks like a copy of Judas Iscariot, made younger.