The Press. — London, England, 1856-05-10 00:00:00

448 I have most felt the infinite. rhat eternal, if not And her sketches of Indian life and scenery are tame after the brilliant writings of Wash ington Irving, Cooper, and Audubon. In England, France, and Italy her provincialism of mind is shown tediously in her diary ; but on the Indian life we expected more from her, as that subject is fresh. The following is curious, and is worth setting down in the commonplace-book of a professional wit, as it suggests a variety of ingenious similitudes : Still, in travelling through this conntry, I could not but be struck with the force of a symbol. Wherever the hog comes the rattlesnake disappears; the omnivorous tra veller, safe in its stupidity, willingly and easily makes a meal of the most dangerous of reptiles, and one which the Indian looks on with a mystic awe. Even so the white settler pursues the Indian, and is victor in the chase. To the feeling between the savage and civilised races Mme. Ossoli thus testifies : I have spoken of the hatred felt by the white man for the Indian ; with white women it seems to amount to disgust, to loathing. How I could endure the dirt, the peculiar smell of the Indians, and their dwellings, was a great marvel in the eyes of my lady acquaintance ; indeed, I wonder why they did not quite give me up, as they cer tainly looked on me with great distaste for it. "Get you gone, you Indian dog " was the felt, if not the breathed, expression towards the hapless owners of the soil—all their claims, all their sorrows quite forgot in abhorrence of their dirt, their tawny skins, and the vices the whites have taught them. A person who hail seen them during great part of a life expressed his prejudices to me with such violence that I was no longer surprised that the Indian children threw sticks at him as he passed. A lady said, " Ile what you will for them they will be ungrateful; the savage cannot be washed out of them. Bring up an Indian child, and see it' you can attach it to yuu." Mine. Ossoli was a sort of female transcendentalist, educated under American influences. Her mind loved to dwell upon paper constitutions, with visionary views of human perfectibility. We cannot discern practical sense in her reflections. Miss Martineau may often have been too vehement, and may have caused offence by the freedom of her utterances, but there wits often keen and close argument in her hardheaded views of reality. Political ladies are not liked amongst us. except as high-bred (lames of fashion legislating for Almacks. We rather recoil from strongly-pronounced female cha racters; but several of our English lady philanthropists, like Mrs. Fry and others, have been eminently pntctical. We need not mention one in oar own time, bright with every intellectual accomplishment, Ana animated with the loftiest ardour, who has applied rare practical talents to the good of her fellow creatures. It is evident that Mine. Ossoli's mind was visionary without being distinctively original, and that the fertility of her ideas was not in proportion to the facility of her expression. We are often amused with her numerous Americanisms. Lord and Lady Falkland come in for the following burst of democracy:— At Halifax we took in the Governor of Nova Scotia, re turning from his very unpopular administration. His lady was with him, a daughter of William the Fourth and the celebrated Mrs. Jordan. The English on board, and the Americans, following their lead, as usual, see.ned to attach much importance to her left-handed alliance with one of the dullest families that ever sat upon a throne (and that is a bold word, too). none to her descent from one whom Natore had endowed with her most splendid re galia— genius that fascinated the attention of all kinds and classes of men, grace and winning qualities that no heart could resist. Was the cesttis buried with her, that no sense of its preeminent value lingered, as fir as I could perceive, in the thoughts cfany except myself? That is simply a ridiculous way of looking at things. Imagine the people on the steam boat thinking of " the cestua " of the late Mrs. Jordan ! Yet we are glad to find this Ameri can lady testifying to some of our superiorities. The following is worth notice : At the first sight of the famous Liverpool Docks, ez• tending miles on each side of our lsnding, we felt our selves in a slower, solider, and not on that account less truly active, state of things than at home. That impres- sion is confirmed. There is not as we travel that rushing, tearing, and swearing, that snatching of baggage, that prodigality of shoe•leather and lungs, which attend the course of the traveller in the United States; but we do not lose our " goods," we do not miss our car. The dinner, if ordered in time, is cooked properly, and served punctually, and at the end of the day more that is permanent seems to have come of it than on the full•drive system. The manner in which Americans devour their food is doubtless a main cause of " the dyspcpsy" which torments them all. lik THE PRESS. Nothing can be more flimsy then Mme. Ossoli's views on England. Her sketches of such literary celebrities as she saw are flat and insipid. She reveals to us that the People's Journal is to be accepted as "a sign of the times ": The People's Journal comes nearer being a fair sign of the times than any other publication of England, apparently, if we except Punch. As for the Times, on which you all use yout scissors so industriously, it is managed with vast ability no doubt, but the blood would tingle many a time to the fingers' ends of the body politic, before that solemn organ which claims to represent the heart would dare to best in unison. Still it would require all the wise management of the Times, or wisdom enough to do without it, and a wide range and diversity of talent, indee3, almost sweeping the circle, to make a People's Journal for England. Thu present is only a bud of the future flower. We may smile and pass on. At Paris she saw Mlle. Rachel, and attempts to utter raptures about her ; but we soon are made to see that mere susceptibility cannot give the pictorial light word-colouring necessary to realise a brilliant portrait. The authoress of •' Jane Eyre" in her last novel drew a magnificent sketch of Rachel, vastly different in power from the attempt of Mme. Ossoli. She ex presses the general perception in saying : It is she who has made me acquainted with the true way of viewing French tragedy. I had no idea of its powers and symmetry till now, and have received from the revela tion high pleasure and a crowd of thoughts. The French language from her lips is a divine dialect ; it is stripped of its national and personal peculiarities, and becomes what any language must, moulded by such a genius, the pure music of the heart and soul. I never could remember her tone in speaking any word ; it was too perfect; you had received the thought quite direct. Yet. hail I never heard her speak a word, my mind would be fillet: by her attitudes. A rival to Rachel will approach us this year in Mme. Ristori, and the contrast of the two actresses will be worth studying. Alluding to the counter-effect produced by the ungifted members of Rachel's family acting with her, Mine. Ossoli observcs : I saw Rachel one night with her brother and sister. The sister imitated her so closely that yau could not help seeing she had a manner, and an imitable manner. Her brother was in the play her lover---a wretched automaton, and pre senting the most unhappy family likeness to herself. Since then I have hardly cared to go and see her. W could wish with geniuses, as with the phoenix, to see only one of the family at a time. Sha deselibes Mr. Carlyle in one of his collo- quial harangues : He seemed to me quite isolated, lonely as the desert; yet never was man more fitted to prize a man, could he find one to match his mood. He finds such, hut only in the past. He sings rather than talks. He pours upon yon a kind of satirical, heroical, critical poem, with regular cadences, and generally catching tip near the beginning some singular epithet, which serves as a refrain when his song is full, or with which as with a knitting•kneedle lie catches up the stitches if he has chanced now and then to let fall a raw. " Cadences "—" refrain"—" knitting-needle"— " stitches "—all in one little sentence ! • The pervading tone of thought of this book on religious questions is like that of Unita rianism in hysterics. There is not in its pages that guarded good sense and appro priate reticence which English readers like to see in wcrks from female pens. Selections from the Letters of Robert Southey. Edited by his Son-in-Law, John Wood Wurter, B.D. In Four Vols. Vols. I. and 11. London : Longmnns. THERE are reasons why of the whole mass of English epistolary correspondence thero is very little worth perusal for its own sake. English. men are averse to the expressism of deep feel lings in their intercourse with one another, ex cept upon extra.mlinary occasions. For the wit of the world, for keen, terse sayings about human nature and social conventions, we are not famous; while the subtle, undefinable flavour of household merriment evaporates when transferred to print, like that of certain deli cate wines which wilt not bear exportation. Chesterfield and Cowper are the two most notable exceptions. The exotic wit of the first, and the winning familiarity and tender ness of the second, are both equally unaffected —equally free from the labour of the study or the uncouth puelihties of the nu - : sere- But these two stand almost alone in their excel lence. Letters we have in abundance charac terised by sensible thought and a vigorous SATURDAY, style ; but then they might often just as well be essays or reports. They have, no distinct epistolary ment—they are valuable perhaps as throwing light on other subjects; but they are not valuable as letters. Is there anything, therefore, of this nature in the correspondence of Robert Southey to justify the publication of four volumes of his letters, in addition to those which have ap peared in the voluminous biography of his son? It would be odd indeed if the life of a literary man like Southey did nut furnish MI with many interesting anecdotes of his con temporaries, and many interesting data upon literature. But the public will require to know whether they have not been already exhausted—whether Mr. Cottle and the Rev. Mr. Southey have not already told us all that can be known—and it' so, we cannot but think they will consider the history of Southey's own mind a very secondary affair. Yet this we have to tell our readers is the primary object of the present series. To the titlepa:.• the editor has prefixed a remark of M. Savage Lander, that " Southey's letters show " his true character;" and he tells us in his preface, that to show " the growth of Southey's mind " was the leading purpose of his labours, But Southey's mind was not of such an extra ordinary texture, nor did it produce such extraordinary fruits, as to warrant the belief that its development will excite such surpass ing interest. In energy of purpose, breadth of reading, and facility of expression, he has had, perhaps, few superiors. But he was neither a deep nor an original thinker; his evanescent theories have had not the slightest influence on society ; and it is a. matter of the most perfect indifference to the world at large whether he was a Pantisocratist or a Tory. He was a man of too little natural force to impress his generation. He loaded himself with big tomes of knowledge, but had got too little powder to make them go off with effect. His writings hit the public like a spent shot. We consider, therefore, that this promised series will be a very superfluous production. The beauty of Southey's prose style is little discernible in his letters. The attempts at humour which they eontlin are feeble and sprawling; and they are too frequently dis figured by a grossness of expression in which men of fastidious morality do not disdain to indulge. As, however, the volumes are now published, we must make the best of them; and we will readily admit that those few which are more purely business letters, and contain a record' of his early struggles his exemplary economy, will be read 11( great interest But then all this sort of fact should have been incorporated with his biography, and not given to the world hidden under a rile of con-espondenee of a compels tively valueless nature. We subjoin an extract illustrative of the carefulness and foresight which rendered him so conspicuous among his literary brethren. The following was written to his friend Mr. May in 1807, soon after his settlement at Keswick : The exptnse of getting my scattered things together, of book-shelves, and of a few decencies, for the want of which the prospect of removal has hitherto been an ex cuse, I shall be well able to meet by the end of the year; if, till then, you will supply me with 501., it will be a great convenience. The state of my affairs with Longman is this :—When last in London I lied 1001. of him iu fore payment for the first edition of " Espriella," or rather, in part'of forepay-ment ; formy share of its profits will, in all probability, lie more. He has on sale, on our joint me count, the " Specimens," the " Metrioal Tales," and " Mailoc." A small edition of " Madoc "is just completed, and " Espriella " and " Palmerin " are both nearly cow pleted also. S'ow as the printers are, I fully expect both to be published within six weeks at farthest. Of the old books ( the fourth edition of " Madoc " and the " Metrical Titles " the sale cannot have been much, or 1 should have been made acquainted with it; but every copy which sells is clear profit. By the " Specimens " Bedford's mis- management will, T suspect, make me lose credit, and pre• vent me from getting money : T shall try to remedy both evils by a supplementary volume. " Espeiella " mite, beyond doubt, sell off an elitism in little time, and T think there is good chance of its having a great sale. " inerin " will not be less than 501. by :2liristmas ;—not, more than 1001. I shall draw on Longman for 501. at present, which my last year's reviewing, with the help of the Athenamin, entitles tee, I suppose, to do; and, as so° n es I have the like sum in his Mums again, will appropriate it to the repayment of what 1 now request of you. l am in great hopes—indeed, in expectation, that the produce of all these books will enable me, at the end of the year , t o make you a more considerable payment. My reviewing used to exceed 801. for the last three years. I did little this year, because I would pot, much as