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feeling. So in his enthusiasm at having proved that the girl is really strict, for she repulsed his warmer advances, —and has the courage to demand the conventional contract that vindicates con

fessions of passion, he prays her to allow him to present her to his mother. She can tell his mother of her past.

Miss Webster reflects. She answers him in monosyllables. The mention of her past brings up pictures of drinkingsaloons in the West, where her father was the landlord or bar-tender. As her horse starts and rears before a drunken tramp in the road, she shudders. The face of the man is disfigured by vice, but she has recognized it as that of her father, who is wont to follow her thus from one place to another, that he may expose her or obtain fresh supplies of money. She considers it quite probable that he may at any moment knock at the door of the widow's house; yet while the young assessor, that evening, is put out of sorts by a trifle and cannot follow the moves of his chessmen, she masters her imminent dread, and concentrates her mind upon the game, with final suc

cess.

The plot of the novel is complicated, but the character of Miss Webster is clear enough. While she does not hold it to be incumbent on her to speak of the humbleness of her origin and connections, she will not disavow them should they become known. Her nature is self-reliant and independent; she is quite free from servile social hypocrisy. She allows herself a certain license in large interests, such as the attainment of worldly position; but she balances her excess in this direction by drawing a line for her own conduct well inside the conventional allowance of flattery. The servility and eavesdropping inquisitive ness of the widow and her daughters disgust her. Nor does she condescend to fabricate explanations for them, even when she notices that some of her directions, such as her order to have all

her letters put at once into her private box, excite suspicion. Her aims are of importance enough to justify the utmost bravery in their pursuit. When they shall prove impracticable, she is ready to grasp other plans with new and full energy, without spending overmuch time in regret and mortification.

Miss Webster, in short, is one of the personages that have been evolved in German literature at the same time that native American literature has been forming its Daisy Millers and Alices; she is an embodiment of the practical, active type of the American girl, as these are of the passive, sentimental, retiring type. Her appearance is quite common; indeed, there is scarcely an American heroine in German fiction who has not more or less of Miss Webster's forward

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A greater variety of character is found among the delineations of American men, although even here the types may be reduced to two. Gutzkow, Freytag, and their followers make their Americans or Americanized Germans single men, unincumbered by a wife or family. This, too, is the case in Spielhagen's early romances; for Leo goes to America, and returns thence alone. In Paul Lindau's Mayo, the hero is compelled to quit the military service because of a gambling debt, and betroths himself afterward in America. But the action of the novel plays itself out with this betrothal. Mayo threatened, therefore, but did not break the standing order of the day.

This has been done thoroughly for the first time by Spielhagen in his tale A New Pharaoh, where a group of Americans compose the centre of the novel's action. We shall see later what their quality is. In the mean time it must be noted that Spielhagen follows the new current by representing Americans in Germany; whereas Paul Lindau fell back into the practice of the old school of Sealsfield, Gerstaecker, and Ruppius, when he transported his hero to the United States.

The first chapter of Mayo opens with a street and bachelor-lodgings scene in Berlin; the story continues, however, with narrations of life in the wild West, and closes finally in a Kansas parlor. Miss Webster makes her début, as we have seen, in a provincial town; Ackermann, Saalfeld, and Von Fink reside in provincial cities. Spielhagen places his Curtis family in none of these habitual literary backgrounds. He finds strong enough contrasts outside of the picturesque old haunts of the fatherland for his Americans, and boldly sets them in the middle of the new imperial capital of Berlin, and in the midst of its fashionable, ambitious society. With his surroundings Mr. Curtis offers a quite new figure per se, new, that is, in German literature. The Beautiful American Girls, by the same author, contains the germ of the character; so also is it implied by Auerbach in A Villa on the Rhine, and by Freytag in Debit and Credit; but the full-fledged business swindler appears, massive and successful, for the first time here, and on German soil.

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The romances of Gerstaecker and Ruppius swarm with American swindlers; swindle, sham, and vulgarity were the contents, too, of Die Europa müden. But the cultivated writers of the new school, the authors who include Americans among the phenomena of social life, and treat them as observers and students treat a chance specimen that has fallen

in their way, depict us generally as radicals. Republicanism, emancipation, reformation, renovation, innovation, these are the marks they have found in the Yankee, the features that compose his type.

Something of this character inheres even in Freytag's heroes; for although Von Fink has probed the quicksilvery bottom of American business corruption, he has also gained an insight into New World enterprise and been infected by American boldness. His engineering scheme on his Polish estate is a result of his American experiences. Mosenthal's hero is open in his acknowledgment of the source whence came the radical blood that he attempts to infuse into the sluggish social and agricultural veins of the fatherland. Gutzkow's Ackermann is a foil among foils; but his quality is meant to be typically American, and as such we have in him a practical, vigorous fellow, whose reforming theories permeate his very being, have hands and feet," as the phrase goes, while the theories of his Catholic friends nestle in the brain, and those of his socialist friends in the heart. Leo, in Durch Nacht zum Licht, adds to his own original political revolutionism by contact with American life. He is not altered, perhaps, but he is intensified; and this essence of stimulation is the one and invariable trait which German authors of eminence assign as of one accord to the specifically American in their American or Americanized personages.

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familiar figure, but he has a new associate. And this second hero, who is a born American, turns aside from the narrow path of idealism into the broad way of financial business. We have, in a word, the types that have formed themselves in both literatures, the German and American: the type that was evolved out of the practical experiences and inner consciousness of Germans, and that which has been transposed from the pages of Bret Harte and Mark Twain, as well as from those of James and even of Howells. For Mr. Curtis is a swindling and successful Colonel Sellers; his son, the thin-blooded young man of Henry James's books; Anne Curtis, the frank, strong-minded American girl; and Mrs. Curtis, the invalid mother, is of a type familiar to us in the writings of Howells.

Frankness as a trait of American girls is made to figure conspicuously in foreign literatures, and is often shown in German fiction to have its source in a general physical and moral courage; but the American girl's purity as respects love is not conceded. American literature has stormed the fortress of Old World literary prepossessions and held up its Daisy Millers in vain; the storming effects only a partial breach. The new image is recorded but as a momentary phantom, which is likely to "materialize into flesh of the traditional quality so soon as it is imbued with passion and assailed by temptation.

In the hands of German authors the American girl is not represented as clinging to the maiden period with zest and keen appreciation of its superior freedom; while on the other hand Daisy Miller's coquetry goes so far only because it answers to no check of inner consciousness. It is the untethered lamb that frisks in every field with silly willfulness, quite ignorant of the prevalence and the nature of lions. Miss Webster, on the contrary, and all her German sort remain undevoured only

because no king of the beasts of their ambition or imagination has crossed their paths.

The heroism of the German American girl is the familiar ewig weibliche literary heroism of surrender. The American example, that substitutes a self-retention for the European self-sacrifice, is not followed out, although it might be thought to have an attraction for a nation so scientific; female self-retention being after all a logical form of the universal human instinct of self-preservation. It is exaggerated into an extreme, moreover, in respect of all other objects than lovers.

One last trait that must be mentioned because of its invariable use is the American sense of superiority. It may be introduced, as by Gustav Freytag, to be put to shame; but - it is there. The Yankee or the Americanized German feels himself better, smarter, and freer than Bismarck's Prussians or the Reich's Unterthanen. The coarser the personage and the more narrow-minded, especially the more material is his view of life, the more indiscriminate are his criticisms of German peculiarities. sickly, scholarly Ralph, in A New Pharaoh, shows his appreciation of German learning by making his last pilgrimage to its seat, and deprecates only certain political and social conditions, while hist coarse father has a cut-and-dried theory that Germans are born stupid, and so deserve to be gulled and swindled.

The

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It is true that the self-made or the self-making girl of German literature is scarcely a substitute for the native American girl. She is apt to appear rather like an exaggeration; yet a certain resemblance cannot be denied. She is similar to our own Alices in that, if not a type of the average American

maiden, she is American girl.

at least a copy of an The German representation of the American character possesses indeed the merit of originality; yet this self-made girl and the reforming energetic young hero, do they not both illustrate the effect of American examples?

Lida von Krockow.

RECENT DANTE LITERATURE.

MODERN comment upon Dante appears to share the positive and searching spirit of the century, which bases itself upon "the document" and is skeptical of all but proven facts. This temper of our time, provided it shall not mistake the means for the end, is the best augury for the art of the imminent future as well as a virtue of present criticism. It restores to humanity the personages of history, removing from them the cloak of legend with which Oblivion subtly covers great men dead. The coming generation of writers, thanks to those who now take pains to divest truth of all that is fictitious, will find themselves free to interpret with imaginative art that which is at present discussed, judged, and announced.

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firm that Mr. Longfellow's translation in blank verse is and will remain the definitive English text. In it the original metre is retained, the system of rhyme only remitted; the flexibility and freedom of poetic construction are its prerogative; its fidelity to the diction of Dante is unsurpassable even by literal prose. No poet has, more than Longfellow, possessed the power of sweetly compelling words to his will, and of meeting halfway the spirit of alien speech. This gift availed him supremely in his work of translating the Commedia, where upon the limpid element of his art the divine epic "floats double, swan and shadow."

Therefore it does not appear to us that there was lacking a version of the Commedia in which substance should not "be sacrificed for form's sake," but instead that the value of Professor Norton's translation consists in its individual excellence, and in the quick appeal which prose, devoid of the slight barriers that verse sets before the eye rather than the mind, is able to make to the reader's intelligence. Narrative is, perhaps, more directly persuasive when it renounces the conditions and the privileges

With Explanatory Notes and Historical Comments. By CHARLES STERRETT LATHAM. Edited by GEORGE RICE CARPENTER, and with a Preface by CHARLES ELIOT NORTON. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 1891.

of poetic form. An interesting testimony, however, to the intrinsic relation of blank verse with the English language is noted in the frequency with which Professor Norton's prose falls into impeccable iambic pentameters. Rhythmic or semi-rhythmic, his translation always maintains a tonality which is at once elevated and natural; the austere sweetness of the phrases is a pleasure to the intellect and to the ear. Of course, the most exacting test of a prose version occurs in certain famous passages, as the episodes of Francesca da Rimini and of Count Ugolino, the apology of Fortune, the description of the Wood of Harpies and of the Image. In these, Professor Norton has admirably succeeded in the lyric expression of pity, tender or poignant, and in music softly revolving about its theme, or in agitated swift movement, or in portentous chords like those of the opening of a Beethoven symphony.

In the comparison of the English with the Italian text, a very few points of verbal question appear as in the inadvertence which reads, "As false sight doth the beast when it is growing dusk " (Inf. ii. 48), instead of, when it (the beast) shies, the verb ombrare or adombrare, to take fright, to shy. In Francesca's speech, the verse "Mi prese del costui piacer sì forte" is rendered, "Seized me for the pleasing of him so strongly," with non-recognition of the antique use of the word piacere: avvenenza, vaghezza, charm, comeliness. As an example of Professor Norton's felicity in obtaining an exquisite result by means of spontaneous and simple art may be cited the inscription over the infernal gateway: Through me is the way into the woeful city; through me is the way into eternal woe; through me is the way among the lost people." In it is heard the hollow note of bells that toll for dead souls.

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In the prefatory chapter Mr. Norton expounds briefly and luminously the

scheme of the Commedia, the great epic of the human will that seeks, in conforming itself to the Divine Will, that liberty which is law. Otherwise his comment is confined to infrequent exegetical footnotes. It is to hoped that with this translation as a basis, he will, when the Commedia is completed, supplement his work with such a body of comment as his long study of Dante would make of extreme value to younger students.

Mr. Latham's work enjoys the advantage of being the first English translation and comment of the Epistles of Dante; therefore its contents may be noted somewhat in detail. Nor can the honorable and pathetic circumstances attendant upon its production be passed over in silence. In 1883, Mr. Latham, a student at Harvard College, full of ardor in literary and in athletic pursuits, was stricken by paralysis. Despite the chains with which disease bound him bodily, his spirit was unconquered, and only longed to prove its valor in equal competition with men who were in possession of every power. Arrangements were made by which Mr. Latham was enabled to continue his college course. Notes upon the lectures and directions for reading were regularly sent to him; the prescribed examinations were held at his bedside; and in 1888 he obtained his degree as of the class of 1884. During the previous year he had studied the works and career of Dante, and desired to compete for the Dante Prize, choosing among the subjects proposed that of the translation and comment of the Letters. Extracts from his correspondence with Professor Norton show Mr. Latham's nobility of character, and the energy, modesty, and talent which were his. He perceived that his physical deprivation had initiated him into the verities of life, its meaning and its uses. "When I compare myself with other men of my own age," he said, "I am confident that I

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