THE German professor in Mr. Henry James's last batch of novelettes passes a criticism upon literary Boston which ad mirably sums up its present curious final phase of complete decadence. He pronounces upon it in the particular embodiment of Mr. Louis Leverett as having reached "the period of culture in which the faculty of appreciation preponderates over the faculty of creation." judgment, which its brilliant author carefully places in the mouth of a specially unpleasant character - in order doubtless to blunt the edge of its sting for his fellow-citizens in the hub of the universe In this Mr. James has put his finger with his usual analytic subtlety on the exact weak point of Boston dilettantism. Quite recently the novelist's brother, Dr. William James - who displays as a metaphysician and psychologist all the acuteness, originality, and vigor which are hereditary in his father's family, with all the undercurrent of mysticism as well - has pointed out in the Atlantic Monthly that the intellect of Boston is now fast ripening to decay. There are, he says, just as many able and intelligent men in the city as ever; there is just as much culture, just as much literary ferment, just as much philosophical learning; but there is no productiveness. Nothing comes of it all. The elder men are passed away or aged; the younger men stand at the mere dead-level of cultivated appreciation and receptivity, without ever rising to the higher pitch of active creativeness. Hawthorne and his fellows are gone; Emerson and Longfellow are almost silent; and the new generation is a generation of readers and thinkers only, not of producers and originators. Dr. James does not account for the falling-off; or, rather, he accounts for it, more suo, by saying that it is due to the inscrutable action of individuality; which amounts to much the same thing in the end. Yet the question is an interesting one; and it bears a good deal upon a very common English misconception as to the real position of Boston in the American world. In England, people generally imagine that American literature and Boston literature are one and the same thing. Not that many people would consciously assert anything of the sort, because when they hear of an American writer they never think of inquiring whether he is a Bostonian or not; but if t if they were asked to mention the chief American authors, they would at once mention such names as Longfellow, Hawthorne, Prescott, Motley, and Lowell New-Englanders all of them with perhaps Washington Irving, who was a Bostonesque New-Yorker. To the average English mind the Boston littérateurs form the acknowledged specimens of the American author, just as the cultivated New-Englander of the old Puritan families is universally figured in England as "the best type of American gentleman." Both are in fact very much what we are accustomed to at home; and both are equally alien to the general tone of thought and feeling in America as a whole. The truth is, Boston culture has always been an exotic on American soil. It went over to New England with such theological thinkers as the Mathers and Winthrops, whose whole feelings and interests were those of an old civilization and a somewhat pedantic style of learning. It lived on and lived down the natural impulses of a new country only by the aid of that stern theocracy which the imported Puritan spirit kept alive in the government of Massachusetts for a hundred and fifty years. As Presbyterianism passed into Unitarianism, it woke up, at the beginning of the present century, into a first flush of literary activity. But Boston had all along been in such close connection with English thought and English culture that this activity was wholly of the imitative sort. All that was written there was just an outlying part of English literature. Longfellow and Prescott are as English as Tennyson and Froude-a great deal more English than Swinburne or Carlyle. Hawthorne has a strong and subtle originality; but it is an originality purely personal, further removed in many points from the ordinary feelings of America than from the ordinary feelings of England. Most of these men find their themes in the Old World, or in that historical and colonial New England which was only a single element of the Old World one side, and it struggles through Bret Harte's falsetto pathos on the other. There is more than a tinge of it in Mr. Leland: there is still more in the queer rubbish of the Josh Billings order, which somehow strikes a chord in the American heart wholly wanting in the English vascular system. But it is noticeable above all in the rhapsodies of Walt Whitman, in whose best work one cannot help finding a sort of rough-hewn elementary poetry, without form and void, yet strangely original; while in his worst, one stands aghast at the utter wordiness and meaninglessness of the man's chaotic concatenations. Now that this protoplasmic school has crept even into Boston and transplanted, with all its beliefs and prejudices, into the midst of the new. Miles Standish in Puritan Massachusetts, Evangeline in old French Acadia, the Cinque Ports, the Rhine castles, the Flemish towns - these are Longfellow's pet themes. "The Scarlet Letter" shows the same turning to the essentially English past in Hawthorne. Many of the EnglishAmerican writers were European in all their tastes and habits. Washington Irving lived in Spain, and was most at home among the Moorish legends of the Alhambra. Motley took his subject from the Holland where he spent the best years of his life. Hawthorne was American consul at Liverpool. The whole Boston school is from first to last essentially firmly established itself there, one feels European. Such literatures, based upon that perhaps a real American literature "the best models," and without any na- may be actually preparing itself to "begin tional root of sentiment or feeling, always to be." It is still in the jelly-fish stage of die down at last into an era of Claudians. development, no doubt, and somewhat So the Boston movement has died down slimy at times; but it is the starting-point in its turn into a mere universal diffusion for a possible fresh evolution - not a mere of literary and philosophic taste, mixed with a general disposition to criticise everything intelligently, and to rest satisfied for the most part with negative results. The crude but pregnant suggestiveness of Emerson has naturally given place to a habit of reading Hartmann and Schopenhauer, Renan and Herbert Spencer, and deciding that there is a great deal to be said against every point of view. Of the purely objective, critical, and analytic standpoint thus produced, Mr. Henry James is himself a singularly favorable outcome. But behind and beyond this wholly English Bostonian literature there has always been a little surface-seething here and there of a native literature, racy of the soil, which is purely tentative as yet, and mostly very formless, but which truly represents some tendencies at least of the American mind. Of course this under lying and nascent American literature is anything but "cultured;" though sometimes, as in the case of Poe, it makes great pretences to extraordinary erudition -a common trick of half-educated cleverness. It wholly despises precedent and artistic rules. It is democratic, rude, but truly native. It appeals to the feelings of the ordinary half-taught American mind. Among the New-Englanders, Lowell and Hawthorne have, each in different ways, some small touches of the real American spirit, though it is in the West and the Middle States that one sees it most strongly. It comes out in Mark Twain on pretty echo of alien Europe. From The Graphic. HAWK-CATCHING IN HOLLAND. upon the THE plain of Valkensvaard is not so celebrated in story as those of Châlons, Waterloo, or Marathon; and yet for many centuries it was better known and regarded with greater interest, throughout the west of Europe than any battle-field in the world. For here it was great "Falcons' Field" of Brabant - that the hawks were caught every year to supply the wants of the most noted sportsmen of the day. Kings, princes, and potentates sent hither their falconers, charged to select and purchase, and carry back to their several countries, the falcons that might be caught; and high indeed were the prices paid for the most likelylooking birds. No such assemblage now congregates annually in the rooms of the Falcon Inn. The poor little village has lost its great attraction, and descended from its high position to a level with its rustic neighbors. For all that the traveller who steams past it knows, it might never have been the falconer's autumn rendezvous, or the chief mart for the birds which in the Middle Ages were more valuable than horses or any other animal. There remain still, it is true, in the place itself a few traces of departed fame. The little inn, kept by a descend ant of that great hawk-catching family, creature - the tyrant of the hedgerow the Botts, is decorated profusely with has a mortal terror of hawks, and esdrawings of hawks, and with a few stuffed pecially of the redoubtable peregrine; specimens, set up in attitudes more and, as he jumps about at the end of his natural than those in vogue at the leash, or in his cage, he has perpetually museums. Its furniture, moreover, be- an anxious eye turned towards the open lying its humble exterior, betokens a wish sky. No sooner, therefore, does a pereto accommodate the grandee who occa- grine pass within his range of vision, that sionally came himself to see how his is to say, within a mile or so, than he hawks were caught, and to pick and immediately gives warning by a series of choose his own particular fancy amongst piteous shrieks and all the violent actions the string of captives. There is to be inspired by horror and despair. The falseen, moreover, at one end of the village, coner, aroused in a moment by the noise, a long, low building now degraded to has in the twinkling of an eye put the farm purposes where in the palmy days trembling shrike out of the way, and then gone by, grand auctions were held of the proceeds to set in motion his hawk-catchhawks caught in the year. But by far the ing apparatus. The first of his objects is most interesting relic of the ancient to attract the notice of the passing travelrégime is Adrien Mollen himself, formerly ler of the air; and for this purpose he falconer to the Royal Heron-Hawking sometimes sets out on the open ground a Club at Loo, and now sole representative trained or newly-taught hawk having a of the hawk-catching industry which once dummy " fastened to its feet. The furnished employment for a score of ex- decoy hawk pulls and picks at the dummy, perts. He is an old man, but hale and and seems to his fellow in the air to be hearty, tall and straight, with an eye as discussing some meal; and thus a powerkeen as one of his own falcons, and all ful attraction is first of all provided in the the intelligence of manner which comes shape of curiosity, to say nothing of the from the successful practice of a most chance that there may be something also difficult art. It is Adrien Mollen who for the new-comer. But the principal has for years past supplied the "passage motive upon which the trap-catcher relies hawks" to most English and French fal- is more direct and certain. He lets fly a coners. They are caught in the months pigeon, to which a long string is attached, of October and November, on their pas- and which, after some attempts to escape, sage to the south as they pass over the at length finds its way into a small hut svaard or plain, and then, after being built for its accommodation. The wild kept a few days in the unpretentious but hawk, which has of course seen this comfortable mews of the old falconer, are pigeon, comes sailing up overhead, and, despatched to the various clubs and in- as there is nothing to frighten him, dedividuals by whom they were bespoken. scends within a few score feet of the This year some twenty peregrines, a gos- ground to see what has become of it. hawk, and a few merlins have been se- Now is the time for the grand attempt. cured in the old style, and all were A second pigeon, which has been kept purchased in advance before they even outside with a second cord attached to it, found their way into the bow-net. The is pulled out of a refuge in which it also process by which these captives are taken had been ensconced, and as it flutters up is exceedingly ingenious; and it would is struck down at a blow by the peregrine. well repay any lover of natural history, to In another moment it is killed, and the say nothing of falconers, to run over to hawk, sooner or later, according to the Brabant one November just to see the state of its appetite, begins to take its hawk-catchers at work. The "Falcons' meal. When once the meal has been Plain" is a great expanse of heath, three begun the rest of the process is easy miles long, and from a mile to two miles enough. A steady pull at the strong wide. In the midst of it the falconer string to which the pigeon is tied, by builds a small semi-subterraneous hut, means of soft jesses round its legs, draws within which he can sit at his ease, smok- it slowly along with the hawk upon it, ing, reading, or working throughout the towards a ring sunk in the turf. The day. At his side, but just outside the hawk is too much occupied with his meal hut, is posted a small but valuable assist- to pay much attention to this rather ant, a shrike or butcher-bird, which has strange mode of involuntary travelling; been caught ready for this occasion at and when once the two birds have been about the end of September. This little drawn close enough up to the ring, another cord is pulled, a bow-shaped net swings up from the ground, and the passage-hawk is secured. The bird-catcher may now at last issue from his place of concealment. He makes up to the net, seizes his victim with well-gloved hands, puts a ball of worsted under its talons, which are soon buried viciously in its soft mass, claps a hood on its head, and draws a sock over its body, which holds the still struggling and ferocious creature as in a strait waistcoat, and enables it to be laid down quietly on its back in the hut, while the falconer hurries back to prepare his tackle for effecting a fresh capture. so. From The Jewish Chronicle. THE TALMUD AND THE BIBLE. that the Jews have been able to preserve their individuality as a nation. Scattered apart in many lands, they required a comman bond of custom to preserve their identity with their distant brethren. This was afforded by the Talmud. Without such distinctive customs it would have been impossible to resist the influence of the surrounding peoples. Thus the Talmud has formed at once a link with fellow-Jews all over the world and a barrier against the customs of the nations. It has consequently contributed to form the Jewish exclusiveness, and brought upon us the mistrust that follows exclusiveness. It was by a sure instinct that the enemies of the Jews always attempted to destroy the copies of the Talmud during periods of persecution. The dietary regulations and the restrictions against intermarriage are direct injunctions against submersion into the "customs of the nations." Much has been urged against this exclusiveness, but it will be sufficiently justified if it can be shown to have resulted in special excellences in the national character. Further, the injunctions of the Talmud have tended to make the Jew more healthy than his neighbors. The habits of cleanliness and of pure diet have had momentous effects on the lives of Jews. When we remember the utter neglect of the simplest hygienic laws displayed during the Middle Ages we can quite understand how the sanitary principles of the Talmud have given hereditary healthfulness to the Jews. To give but one point, for two thousand years Jews have always lived on healthy meat, whereas their neighbors, up to the present day, have had no check against the use of diseased food. The remarkable statistics published a short time since, and showing that the Jewish side of Whitechapel had only half the death rate of the non-Jewish, were a direct result of the Talmudic injunctions with regard to diet. And during the Middle Ages the equally noteworthy immunity of the Jews from pestilence, while it brought upon them popular odium and persecution, was a convincing testimony to the dietary principles of the Talmud. Indirectly, the Talmud, by thus giving the corpus sanum, THE work of the Talmud has been to make the Bible really operative on the Jewish nation. If the Jews are what the genius genius of Mahomet declared them to be "the people of the Book" - it is because the Talmud has enabled them to be It is practically an application of the legal element of the Pentateuch to the affairs of life. The "Priestly Codex" of the middle books of the Pentateuch is the statute law on which the Talmud gives the judicial decisions. It is therefore utterly misleading, and a direct inversion of the real facts, to assert that the written and the oral law are antagonistic. As in every legislative system, reference is more frequently made to previous decisions than to the words of the act. But it is clearly the statute law which gives authority to legal decisions, and in the final resort it is the Bible that gives force to the dinim of the Talmud. It must be granted that at times the doctors of Talmudic law during the Middle Ages paid too exclusive attention to the decisions of the Talmudic doctors rather than to the Biblical law whence they were derived. Abraham Ibn Ezra says once of a rabbi he met on his travels, "He reads in Taharoth [the final order of the Mishna] and does not know his Bible." But such cases were rare, and do not nullify the general principle that the Talmud is but the legislation of the Bible in practical aided in giving the Jew the mens sana, operation. It is due to this legislation | which is one of his chief characteristics. For EIGHT DOLLARS, remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage. Remittances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office money-order, if possible. If neither of these can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter. All postmasters are obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks and money-orders should be made payable to the order of LITTELL & Co. Single Numbers of THE LIVING AGE, 18 cents. |