Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 17, No. 102, June, 1876

It has often been observed, too, that French newspaper-men seem exceptionally well off. They frequent costly cafés, occasionally indulge in petits soupers in cabinets particuliers, and, altogether, taking prices into account, appear to be in the enjoyment of larger means than their brethren of the pen elsewhere. Of course, the success of a French newspaper is, even in the absence of advertisements, intelligible in the case of the Figaro or Petit Journal, with their circulation of 70,000 and 150,000 a day; but in the case of such papers as the Débats, whose circulation is not very large, it is difficult to explain.

The position of a journalist in Paris seems to stand in many respects higher than elsewhere. Of course, the fact of contributions not being anonymous adds immeasurably to the writer's personal importance, if it also gets him into scrapes. Elsewhere, editors are men of mark, and certainly no one in the journalistic world can possibly be made more of than Mr. Delane in London. But the editorial writers in his paper, who would in Paris be men of nearly as much mark as rising members of Parliament in England, are completely "left out in the cold," gaining no reputation even among acquaintance, since they are required to preserve the strictest secrecy as to their connection with the paper. Altogether, we are disposed to believe that Paris—official "warnings," press prosecutions and possible duels notwithstanding—must be accepted as the journalist's paradise. To be courted, caressed and feared is as much as any reasonable newspaper writer can expect, and a great deal more than he is likely to get out of his work elsewhere.

    R.W.

LITERATURE OF THE DAY

Cities of Northern and Central Italy. By Augustus J.C. Hare. New York: George Routledge & Sons.

Those who know Mr. Hare's Walks in Rome and Days near Rome will welcome another series of Italian itineraries from the same pen. These volumes are primarily guide-books; they tell us the best hotels, the price of cabs, the distances by rail or high-road. But the parts of traveler and manual are inverted: whereas you take your Murray or Baedeker in your hand and carry it whither you list, Mr. Hare takes you by the hand, leads you in the way you should go, makes you pause the requisite time before the things you are to look at, points to every view, lets you miss no effect, does not force his own opinions upon you, except now and then when he loses his temper a little on the debatable ground between religion and politics, repeats that quotation you are vainly trying to recall, or delights you by the beauty and aptness of a new one. He gives to a course of systematic sight-seeing the freedom and variety of a ramble with a cultivated and sympathetic companion. We would not be ungrateful to that inestimable impersonality, Murray, for all are his debtors, even Mr. Hare for the plan of his books; but, remembering how, with the latest edition in hand, we have panted up four or more flights of stairs in a Roman or Venetian palace in search of a picture removed years before, we are not sorry to find him here taken to task for leaving uncorrected statements which had ceased to be true. Moreover, Murray is no guide in matters of art; his authorities are often captains of the British Philistines; while Mr. Hare generally gives all that has been said by competent judges, sometimes imperturbably recording two conflicting opinions, and leaving the reader to decide. The range of quotation is indeed remarkable, from Dean Milman to Ouida, including many writers too little known in this country, such as Burckhardt, Ampère and Street.

But it is not to the actual traveler only that these volumes will be of use and give pleasure. They are not bad preparatory reading for those who are going abroad, suggesting what should be studied beforehand; they will be dear to those who sit within the blank limits of a home in this raw New World trying to revive the fading outlines and colors of scenes which, though unforgotten, tend to mingle with the visions of Dreamland; and they are capital wishing-carpets for those who can travel only in fancy. In the introduction there is an excellent passage on the distinctive differences between the great Italian cities: "Each has its own individual sovereignty; its own chronicles; its own politics, domestic and foreign; its own saints, peculiarly to be revered—patrons in peace and protectors in war; its own phase of architecture; its own passion in architectural material, brick or stone, marble or terra-cotta; …its own proverbs, its own superstitions and its own ballads." Mr. Hare contrives to convey much of the characteristic impression of each town. Pretty little wood-cuts are called in to his aid, but the best illustrations of his text are the poetical quotations and exquisite prose-bits from Ruskin, Swinburne, Symonds and others whose pens sometimes turn into the pencil of a great painter. The author's own descriptions are extremely faithful and charming. To those who have made the journey from Florence to Rome a single fine page of the introduction brings back a thrill of that long ecstasy. In these few quiet words he spreads Thrasymene before us: "It has a soft, still beauty especially its own. Upon the vast expanse of shallow pale-green waters, surrounded by low-lying hills, storms have scarcely any effect, and the birds which float over it and the fishing-boats which skim across its surface are reflected as in a mirror. At Passignano and Torricella picturesque villages, chiefly occupied by fishermen, jut out into the water, but otherwise the reedy shore is perfectly desolate on this side, though beyond the lake convents and villages crown the hills which rise between us and the pale violet mountains beyond Montepulciano." Nothing can be more lifelike than the following picture of the tract around Siena: "Scarcely do we pass beyond the rose-hung walls which encircle the fortifications than we are in an upland desert, piteously bleak in winter, but most lovely when spring comes to clothe it. The volcanic nature of the soil in these parts gives a softer tint than usual to the coloring. The miles upon miles of open gray-green country, treeless, hedgeless, houseless, swoop toward one another with the strangest sinuosities and rifts and knobs of volcanic earth, till at last they sink in faint mists, only to rise again in pink and blue distances, so far off, so pale and aërial, that they can scarcely be distinguished from the atmosphere itself. Only here and there a lonely convent with a few black cypress spires clustered round it, or a solitary cross which the peasants choose as their midday resting-place, cuts the pellucid sky. Here in these great uplands, where all is so immense, the very sky itself seems more full of space than elsewhere: it is not the deep blue of the South, but so soft and aërial that it looks as if it were indeed the very heaven itself, only very far away."

The chapter on Ravenna is the best in the book: it is an admirable piece of work, a complete monograph. Everything is there—history, legends, art—and the quotations and illustrations are peculiarly beautiful and convincing.

Mr. Hare, like many gentlemen of similar tastes and tendencies, does not seem to have a strong sense of humor, although now and then he condescends to smile as he repeats some local legend, such as that of the crucifix at S. Francesco delle Cariere, which awoke an overwearied devotee, who had fallen asleep on his knees before it, with "un soavissimo schiaffo," the gentlest slap, and bade him go to sleep in the dormitory. He speaks of an ancient custom, not mentioned by Murray, of harboring lost cats in the cloister of San Lorenzo at Florence: "The feeding of the cats, which takes place when the clock strikes twelve, is a most curious sight.... From every roof and arch and parapet-wall, mewing, hissing and screaming, the cats rush down to devour." It sounds like a wicked parody on the poetic assembling of the Venetian pigeons at the daily scattering of grain in the square of St. Mark's.

There are a few little slips—so few that it is strange there should be any—among which is his mention of the "St. Christopher" of the doges' palace as "the only known fresco of Titian," forgetting the celebrated one in the Scuola del Santo at Padua, of which he has spoken in a previous volume. He occasionally makes an assertion to which many will demur; as, for instance, that "The real glory of the Italian towns consists not in their churches, but in their palaces." The best refutation of this paradox is in his own pages. Most people will be startled, too, by hearing of "the want of architectural power in Michael Angelo," although this remark is followed by a criticism which strikes us as extremely just on the stupendous slumberers on the monuments of the Medici: "The disproportionate figures are slipping off the pitiable pedestals which support them." Among the throng of indefinable emotions and sensations which beset one in the Medicean chapel of San Lorenzo, we have always been conscious of distinct discomfort from the attitude of these sleepers, who could only maintain their posture by an immense muscular effort incompatible with their sublime repose. As regards practical matters, few travelers or foreign residents in Italy will endorse Mr. Hare's statement that making a bargain in advance for lodgings or conveyances is not a necessary precaution, or his denial of the almost universal attempt to overcharge which is recognized and resisted by all natives. But Mr. Hare has illusions, and Italian probity is one of them. All his remarks about the present government of Italy (of which he speaks as "the Sardinian government" with an emphasis akin to the Buonaparte of old French monarchists) are to be taken with the utmost reservation, as most readers will see for themselves after meeting his allusion to the massacre at Perugia in 1859 as in some sort a defensive action on the part of the papal troops. Mr. Hare's reasoning on all that relates to this subject is weak and illogical, sometimes puerile. Any one who loves what is venerable and picturesque must share the impatience and regret with which he sees so much beauty and antiquity disappearing before the besom of progress or the rage for improvement, especially in Rome. But we must remember that Italy is not the first, but the last, European country in which this has come about: in England, France and Germany what delights the eyes of the few has long been giving place to what betters the condition or serves the interest of the masses. Moreover, the Italians themselves, of whatever political complexion, black or red, are totally indifferent to these losses and changes which we lament so deeply. If there be a sad want of good taste and good sense in Cavaliere Rosa's management of the excavations, there is at least no lack of zeal. Formerly, next to nothing was done to preserve or protect the monuments, and many of the finest were irrecognizable and all but inaccessible from dirt and dilapidation. The reverence of the papal Romans for their treasures of either classic or Christian art is well illustrated by Retzsch's outline, in which a lovely statue of Apollo, broken and half buried, defiled by dogs and swine, serves as a seat for a loutish herd, who tries to copy a miserable modern Virgin and Child from a wayside shrine. Such a temper of mind in an intelligent, high-principled Englishman can only arise from a moral bias which distorts every view; but the discussion of these causes and effects would be out of place here, and we only smile in passing at the charge of "excessive cruelty" in the suppression of the monastery of San Vivaldo. Mr. Hare's treatment of the legitimate topics of his book deserves all admiration and praise. His style is simple, pleasant and picturesque; in future editions a few careless tricks should be corrected, such as the use of from, with hence, thence, whence, and a muddled sentence here and there, of which a very slight instance occurs in the pretty extract about Lake Thrasymene: there is a most confusing one about a girl who refused to kiss the emperor Otho, which reads as if she would not kiss her own father. It would be almost a pity to spoil a laugh by particularizing whether a tree or nut is meant in the story of "S. Vivaldo, who became a hermit and lived in a hollow chestnut, in which he was found dead in 1300."

Books Received

The Little, or A, B, C, Book of German; that is, High School Primer; Child's Story Book and Dictionary. By Professor C.C. Schaeffer. Philadelphia: Charles Brothers & Co.

Pocket Manual of Rules of Order for Deliberative Assemblies. By Major Henry M. Robert, U.S.A. Chicago: S.C. Griggs & Co.

Cabin and Plantation Songs, as sung by the Hampton Students. Arranged by Thomas P. Fenner. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons.

The Spectator. (Selected Papers.) By Addison and Steele. Edited by John Habberton. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons.

Characteristics from the Writings of J.H. Newman. By Wm. Samuel Lilly. New York: D. and J. Sadlier & Co.

Brief Biographies. Vol. III. French Political Leaders. By Edward King. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons.

The Life of William, Earl of Shelburne. Vol. II. By Lord Edmond Fitzmaurice. New York: MacMillan & Co.

Jonathan: A Novel. By C.C. Fraser-Tytler. (Leisure-Hour Series.) New York: Henry Holt & Co.

Faith and Modern Thought. By Ransom B. Welch, D.D., LL.D. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons.

Fetich in Theology; or, Doctrinalism Twin to Ritualism. By John Miller. New York: Dodd & Mead.

The American Kennel and Sporting Field. By Arnold Burges. New York: J.B. Ford & Co.

On Dangerous Ground. By Mrs. Bloomfield H. Moore. Philadelphia: Porter & Coates.

Filth-Diseases, and their Prevention. By John Simon, M.D. Boston: James Campbell.