A Chat About New Books [pp. 414-426]

A CHAT ABOUT NE W BOOKS.
wretched Darnell, Dr. Mitchell says of Roland Blake: "A less
ready and less finely made man would have caused cruel mischief. Men of practical capacity who are also imaginative are
advantaged thereby: large ranges of the possible lie open to their
reason, and the improbable is not set aside as foolish."
Roland Blake is an American novel, although the eagle is not
made to scream, and neither apology nor defiance is assumed
towards our English neighbors. The production of such works
is what our literature needs, to save it from becoming hopelessly
Anglicized or being deluged with snobbery.
Amaryllis at the Fair (Harper & Brothers) is a story by Richard Jeffries. The influence of the reading of American humorous
writers is marked here-an unusual thing in an English novel.
Mr. Jeffries tells of an untrained girl living among coarse, selfish,
and semi-pagan rustics. If there are many such peopleand country-places as Mr. Jeffries tells of in his blunt way, that country
will, in no long time, need to be re-converted to the rudiments of
Christianity.
Mr. Robert Buchanan's A Look Round Literature (Scribner &
Welford) is, as might have been expected from the author's previous reputation, impudent, superficial, and impertinent. Inflated
rhetoric is necessary, in Mr. Buchanan's opinion, to divert the
reader's attention from the fact that he has nothing to say.
Prometheus is as quickly coated with Mr. Buchanan's wash of
words as Victor Hugo, Ouida, IEschylus, and George Eliot! A
talk with the latter is included in the volume. To report the
conversation of a dead person, one ought to have a thoroughly
reliable memory and a thoroughly unimpeachable reputation.
The dead are always wrong in a dialogue with the man who lives
to report it. How few of us could resist the temptation to make
ourselves more clever than we were in the presence of a celebrity! How easy it is to polish a repartee that might have been
uttered, had we thought of it! It will be seen how in this dialogue-which is a good sample of the turgidity of the book"myself" shines. Miss Evans, Mr. Lewes, and Mr. Buchanan
were the persons present:
"George Eliot. We are absolutely the creatures of our secretions. So
true is this that the slightest disturbance of the cerebral circulation, say a
temporary congestion, will pervert the entire stream of moral sentiment.
"Myself. All this is doubtless very correct. I hold, nevertheless, that
the soul, the ego, is invulnerable, despite all temporary aberrations-clouds
obscuring the moon's disc, so to speak.
"George Eliot. Say rather disintegrations with the very substance of the
[June,
4I8