Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 13

Title: Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 13

Editor: Charles Dudley Warner

Hamilton Wright Mabie

Lucia Gilbert Runkle

George H. Warner

Release date: November 23, 2010 [eBook #34408] Most recently updated: January 7, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/34408

Credits: Produced by Juliet Sutherland and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net

Socrates, a Greek ecclesiastic of the fifth century, and several other Byzantine writers, inform us, that Ulfilas, belonging to a family of Cappadocia, having been carried away captive by the Goths, when they invaded that country in A.D. 366, was subsequently elevated to the episcopal dignity in his new country, which had been converted to Christianity; that he was sent as a legate to the Emperor Valens, at Constantinople, in the year 377, to ask for a province of the empire, as a refuge for the Goths from the Huns, by whom they had been conquered; that Ulfilas obtained permission for them to settle in Moesia, on the right bank of the Danube; and that, in order to confirm them in the Christian faith, he translated the Old and New Testaments into the Gothic language, and invented for that purpose an especial alphabet; which, from this circumstance, has been named the alphabet of Ulfilas, or the alphabet of the Goths of Moesia. This translation of the Bible is the oldest existing literary monument in the Germanic languages. The principal manuscript is the Codex Argenteus, written in

silver characters on a purple ground. The accompanying facsimile is from the Gospel according to St. Mark, chapter VII., beginning in the 3d verse at the words "Jews eat not," and ending in the 7th verse at "In vain do they worship me, teaching...."

WORLD'S BEST LITERATURE

ANCIENT AND MODERN CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER

EDITOR

HAMILTON WRIGHT MABIE LUCIA GILBERT RUNKLE GEORGE HENRY WARNER

ASSOCIATE EDITORS

Connoisseur Edition Vol. XIII.

NEW YORK THE INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY

Connoisseur Edition

LIMITED TO FIVE HUNDRED COPIES IN HALF RUSSIA No. ..........

Copyright, 1896, by R. S. PEALE AND J. A. HILL All rights reserved

THE ADVISORY COUNCIL

CRAWFORD H. TOY, A. M., LL. D., Professor of Hebrew, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. THOMAS R. LOUNSBURY, LL. D., L. H. D., Professor of English in the Sheffield Scientific School of Yale University, New Haven, Conn. WILLIAM M. SLOANE, Ph. D., L. H. D., Professor of History and Political Science, Princeton University, Princeton, N. J. BRANDER MATTHEWS, A. M., LL. B., Professor of Literature, Columbia University, New York City. JAMES B. ANGELL, LL. D., President of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Mich. WILLARD FISKE, A. M., Ph. D., Late Professor of the Germanic and Scandinavian Languages and Literatures, Cornell University, Ithaca, N. Y. EDWARD S. HOLDEN, A. M., LL. D., Director of the Lick Observatory, and Astronomer, University of California, Berkeley, Cal. ALCÉE FORTIER, LIT. D., Professor of the Romance Languages, Tulane University, New Orleans, La. WILLIAM P. TRENT, M. A., Dean of the Department of Arts and Sciences, and Professor of English and History, University of the South, Sewanee, Tenn. PAUL SHOREY, Ph. D.,

Professor of Greek and Latin Literature, University of Chicago, Chicago, Ill. WILLIAM T. HARRIS, LL. D., United States Commissioner of Education, Bureau of Education, Washington, D. C. MAURICE FRANCIS EGAN, A. M., LL. D., Professor of Literature in the Catholic University of America, Washington, D. C.

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VOLUME XIII

VIGNETTE PORTRAITS

José Echegaray Maria Edgeworth Jonathan Edwards Edward Eggleston

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TORU DUTT

(1856-1877)

n 1874 there appeared in the Bengal Magazine an essay upon Leconte de Lisle, which showed not only an unusual knowledge of French literature, but also decided literary qualities. The essayist was Toru Dutt, a Hindu girl of eighteen, daughter of Govin Chunder Dutt, for many years a justice of the peace at Calcutta. The family belonged to the high-caste cultivated Hindus, and Toru's education was conducted on broad lines. Her work frequently discloses charming pictures of the home life that filled the old garden house at Calcutta. Here it is easy to see the studious child poring over French, German, and English lexicons, reading every book she could lay hold of, hearing from her mother's lips those old legends of her race which had been woven into the poetry of native bards long before the civilization of modern Europe existed. In her thirteenth year Toru and her younger sister were sent to study for a few months in France, and thence to attend lectures at Cambridge and to travel in England. A memory of this visit appears

in Toru's little poem, 'Near Hastings,' which shows the impressionable nature of the Indian girl, so sensitive to the romance of an alien race, and so appreciative of her friendly welcome to English soil.

After four years' travel in Europe the Dutts returned to India to resume their student life, and Toru began to learn Sanskrit. She showed great aptitude for the French language and a strong liking for the French character, and she made a special study of French romantic poetry. Her essays on Leconte de Lisle and Joséphin Soulary, and a series of English translations of poetry, were the fruit of her labor. The translations, including specimens from Béranger, Théophile Gautier, François Coppée, Sully-Prud'homme, and other popular writers, were collected in 1876 under the title 'A Sheaf Gleaned in French Fields.' A few copies found their way into Europe, and both French and English reviewers recognized the value of the harvest of this clear-sighted gleaner. One critic called these poems, in which Toru so faithfully reproduced the spirit of one alien tongue in the forms of another, transmutations rather than translations.

But marvelous as is the mastery shown over the subtleties of thought and the difficulties of translation, the achievement remains that of acquirement rather than of inspiration. But Toru's English renditions of the native Indian legends, called 'Ancient Ballads of[Pg 5076] Hindustan,' give a sense of great original power. Selected from much completed work left unpublished at her too early death, these poems are revelations of the Eastern religious thought, which loves to clothe itself in such forms of mystical beauty as haunt the memory and charm the fancy. But in these translations it is touched by the spirit of the new faith which Toru had adopted. The poems remain, however, essentially Indian. The glimpses of lovely landscape, the shining temples, the greening gloom of the jungle, the pink flush of the dreamy atmosphere, are all of the East, as is the philosophic calm that breathes through the verses. The most beautiful of the ballads is perhaps that of 'Savitri,' the king's daughter who by love wins back her husband after he has passed the gates of death.

Another, 'Sindher,' re-tells the old story of that king whose great power is unavailing to avert the penalty which follows the breaking of the Vedic law, even though it was broken in ignorance. Still another, 'Prehlad,' reveals that insight into things spiritual which characterizes the true seer or "called of God." Two charming legends, 'Jogadhya Uma,' and 'Buttoo,' full of the pastoral simplicity of the early Aryan life, and a few miscellaneous poems, complete this volume upon which Toru's fame will rest.

A posthumous novel written in French makes up the sum of her contribution to letters. 'Le Journal de Mlle. D'Arvers' was found completed among her posthumous papers. It is a romance of modern French life, whose motive is the love of two brothers for the same girl. The tragic element dominates the story, and the author has managed the details with extraordinary ease without sacrificing either dignity or dramatic effect. The story was edited by Mademoiselle Bader, a correspondent of Toru, and her sole acquaintance among European authors. In 1878, the year after the poet's death, appeared a second edition of 'A Sheaf Gleaned in French Fields' containing forty-three additional poems, with a brief biographical sketch written by her father. The many translators of the 'Sakoontala' and of other Indian dramas show how difficult it is for the Western mind to express the indefinable spirituality of temper that fills ancient Hindu poetry. This remarkable quality Toru wove unconsciously into her English verse, making it seem not exotic but complementary, an

echo of that far-off age when the genius of the two races was one.

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JOGADHYA UMA

OUR CASUARINA-TREE

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JOHN S. DWIGHT

(1813-1893)

ohn Sullivan Dwight was born in Boston, Massachusetts, May 13th, 1813. After graduation at Harvard in 1832, he studied at the Divinity School, and for two years was pastor of a Unitarian church in Northampton, Massachusetts. He then became interested in founding the famous Brook Farm community, which furnished Hawthorne with the background for 'The Blithedale Romance'; and he is mentioned in the preface to this book with Ripley, Dana, Channing, Parker, etc. This was a "community" scheme, undertaken by joint ownership in a farm in West Roxbury near Boston; associated with the names of Hawthorne, Emerson, George William Curtis, and C.A. Dana,—a scheme which Emerson called "a perpetual picnic, a French Revolution in small, an age of reason in a patty-pan." This community existed seven years, and to quote again from Emerson,—"In Brook Farm was this peculiarity, that there was no head. In every family is the father; in every factory a foreman; in a shop a master; in a boat the skipper; but in this Farm no authority; each was master or mistress of their actions;

happy, hapless anarchists."

Here Mr. Dwight edited The Harbinger, a periodical published by that community; taught languages and music, besides doing his share of the manual labor. In 1848 he returned to Boston and engaged in literature and musical criticism; and in 1852 he established Dwight's Journal of Music, which he edited for thirty years. Many of his best essays appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, and he contributed to various periodicals.

He was one of the pioneers of scholarly, intelligent, original, and literary musical criticism in America, and he possessed fine general attainments and a distinct style. It is because of his clear perception of the indispensableness of the arts—and especially of the art of music—to life, and because of his clear statement of their vital relationship, that his work belongs to literature.

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MUSIC AS A MEANS OF CULTURE

From the Atlantic Monthly, 1870, by permission of Houghton, Mifflin and Company

We as a democratic people, a great mixed people of all races, overrunning a vast continent, need music even more than others. We need some ever-present, ever-welcome influence that shall insensibly tone down our self-asserting and aggressive manners, round off the sharp, offensive angularity of character, subdue and harmonize the free and ceaseless conflict of opinions, warm out the genial individual humanity of each and every unit of society, lest he become a mere member of a party, or a sharer of business or fashion. This rampant liberty will rush to its own ruin, unless there shall be found some gentler, harmonizing, humanizing culture, such as may pervade whole masses with a fine enthusiasm, a sweet sense of reverence for something far above us, beautiful and pure; awakening some ideality in every soul, and often lifting us out of the hard hopeless prose of daily life. We need this beautiful corrective of our crudities. Our radicalism will pull itself up by the roots, if it do not cultivate the instinct of reverence. The first impulse of freedom is

centrifugal,—to fly off the handle,—unless it be restrained by a no less free impassioned love of order. We need to be so enamored of the divine idea of unity, that that alone—the enriching of that—shall be the real motive for assertion of our individuality. What shall so temper and tone down our "fierce democracy"? It must be something better, lovelier, more congenial to human nature than mere stern prohibition, cold Puritanic "Thou shalt not!" What can so quickly magnetize a people into this harmonic mood as music? Have we not seen it, felt it?

The hard-working, jaded millions need expansion, need the rejuvenating, the ennobling experience of joy. Their toil, their church, their creed perhaps, their party livery, and very vote, are narrowing; they need to taste, to breathe a larger, freer life. Has it not come to thousands, while they have listened to or joined their voices in some thrilling chorus that made the heavens seem to open and come down? The governments of the Old World do much to make the people cheerful and contented; here it is all laissez-faire, each for himself, in an ever keener strife of competition. We must look very much to music to do[Pg 5086] this good work for us; we are open to that appeal; we can forget ourselves in that; we blend in joyous fellowship when we can sing together; perhaps quite as much so when we can listen together to a noble orchestra of instruments interpreting the highest inspirations of a master. The higher and purer the character and kind of music, the more of real genius there is in it, the deeper will this influence be.

Judge of what can be done, by what already, within our own experience, has been done and daily is done. Think what the children in our schools are getting, through the little that they learn of vocal music,—elasticity of spirit, joy in harmonious co-operation, in the blending of each happy life in others; a rhythmical instinct of order and of measure in all movement; a quickening of ear and sense, whereby they will grow up susceptible to music, as well as with some use of their own voices, so that they may take part in it; for from these spacious nurseries (loveliest flower gardens, apple orchards in full bloom, say, on their annual fête days) shall our future choirs and oratorio choruses be replenished with good sound material....

We esteem ourselves the freest people on this planet; yet perhaps we have as little real freedom as any other, for we are the slaves of our own feverish enterprise, and of a barren theory of discipline, which would fain make us virtuous to a fault through abstinence from very life. We are afraid to give ourselves up to the free and happy instincts of our nature. All that is not pursuit of advancement in some good, conventional, approved way of business, or politics, or fashion, or intellectual reputation, or professed religion, we count waste. We lack geniality; nor do we as a people understand the meaning of the word. We ought to learn it practically of our Germans. It comes of the same root with the word genius. Genius is the spontaneous principle; it is free and happy in its work; it is artist and not drudge; its whole activity is reconciliation of the heartiest pleasure with the purest loyalty to conscience, with the most holy, universal, and disinterested ends. Genius, as Beethoven gloriously illustrates in his Choral Symphony (indeed, in all his symphonies),

finds the keynote and solution of the problem of the highest state in "Joy," taking his text from Schiller's Hymn. Now, all may not be geniuses in the sense that we call Shakespeare, Mozart, Raphael, men of genius. But all should be partakers of this spontaneous, free, and happy method of genius; all should live[Pg 5087] childlike, genial lives, and not wear all the time the consequential livery of their unrelaxing business, nor the badge of party and profession, in every line and feature of their faces. This genial, childlike faculty of social enjoyment, this happy art of life, is just what our countrymen may learn from the social "Liedertafel" and the summer singing-festivals of which the Germans are so fond. There is no element of national character which we so much need; and there is no class of citizens whom we should be more glad to adopt and own than those who set us such examples. So far as it is a matter of culture, it is through art chiefly that the desiderated genial era must be ushered in. The Germans have the sentiment of art, the feeling of the beautiful in

art, and consequently in nature, more developed than we have. Above all, music offers itself as the most available, most popular, most influential of the fine arts,—music, which is the art and language of the feelings, the sentiments, the spiritual instincts of the soul; and so becomes a universal language, tending to unite and blend and harmonize all who may come within its sphere.

Such civilizing, educating power has music for society at large. Now, in the finer sense of culture, such as we look for in more private and select "society," as it is called, music in the salon, in the small chamber concert, where congenial spirits are assembled in its name—good music of course—does it not create a finer sphere of social sympathy and courtesy? Does it not better mold the tone and manners from within than any imitative "fashion" from without? What society, upon the whole, is quite so sweet, so satisfactory, so refined, as the best musical society, if only Mozart, Mendelssohn, Franz, Chopin, set the tone! The finer the kind of music heard or made together, the better the society. This bond of union only reaches the few; coarser, meaner, more prosaic natures are not drawn to it. Wealth and fashion may not dictate who shall be of it. Here congenial spirits meet in a way at once free, happy, and instructive, meet with an object which insures "society"; whereas so-called society, as such, is often aimless, vague, modifying and fatiguing, for the want of any

subject-matter. Here one gets ideas of beauty which are not mere arbitrary fashions, ugly often to the eye of taste. Here you may escape vulgarity by a way not vulgar in itself, like that of fashion, which makes wealth and family and means of dress its passports. Here you can be as exclusive as you please, by the soul's light, not wronging any[Pg 5088] one; here learn gentle manners, and the quiet ease and courtesy with which cultivated people move, without in the same process learning insincerity.

Of course the same remarks apply to similar sincere reunions in the name of any other art, or of poetry. But music is the most social of them all, even if each listener find nothing set down to his part (or even hers!) but tacet.

We have fancied ourselves entertaining a musical house together, but we must leave it with no time to make report or picture out the scene. Now, could we only enter the chamber, the inner sanctum, the private inner life of a thoroughly musical person, one who is wont to live in music! Could we know him in his solitude! (You can only know him in yourself, unless he be a poet and creator in his art, and bequeath himself in that form in his works for any who know how to read.) If the best of all society is musical society, we go further and say: The sweetest of all solitude is when one is alone with music. One gets the best of music, the sincerest part, when he is alone. Our poet-philosopher has told us to secure solitude at any cost; there's nothing which we can so ill afford to do without. It is a great vice of our society, that it provides for and disposes to so little solitude, ignoring the fact that there is more loneliness in company than out of it. Now, to a musical person, in the mood of it, in the sweet hours by himself, comes music as the nearest friend, nearer and