Originally published in Howitt's Journal (William Lovett) vol.1 #7 (13 Feb 1847).
The Last Aldini. By George Sand. Translated by Matilda M. Hays, Author of Helen Stanley. London: E. Churton. 1847.
An English edition of the works of Madame Dudevant, is an event in our literature, and we owe Miss Hays a debt of gratitude for the undertaking. The Last Aldini forms the first of the series. The translation is admirable in every respect, and conveys an excellent idea of the singularly eloquent style of the original. The great genius of the author who writes under the name of George Sand, has long been acknowledged in France, but has been appreciated here by a comparatively small number; and, indeed, her audience should always be fit, though we hope it will not be few. They who read her must bring to her an earnest and inquiring intellect, and a pure and noble spirit; they must also be prepared to face existing evils, speculations, manners, and moralities, from which we in this country, however we may be aware of them, choose to turn away our eyes, and they must be able to read with toleration descriptions of habits and modes of thought among different classes, and in other countries, brought out with a dramatic truth and graphic power, which may give offence to those who have not made up their mind to prove all things, and hold fast what is good. Without these requisites, Madame Dudevant will be misunderstood; with them, her works will be found to be creations of wonderful variety, interest, and power; written with a purpose always good, frequently profound and elevated, never base or licentious. In this she is eminently distinguished from a certain class of French literature with which she has been confounded.
Madame Dudevant is not satisfied with painting the outside of things, but searches into their depths, She has penetrated the thousand forms of evil that lie hidden beneath the world's great "whited sepulchre;" the woes disguised under apparent ease; the deep-seated sorrow peculiar to woman; the struggles of the people; the mine of unwrought gold that lies latent under the crushing weight of poverty and toil, making itself apparent from time to time, as some genius too strong to be repressed, rises at intervals to astonish the world. But she does not write "moral" at the end of her story; she leaves her purpose to be discovered by her readers. Neither does she proclaim her characters to be of this or the other description, but leaves them all to develope themselves. She does not tell us, this is a man of wit; that, a man of intellect; another, an unprincipled man of the world: she endows them with the wit, the intellect, the levity, she has conceived, and places them before us; she throws herself into her characters with equal truth of painting, whether she chooses to describe a voluptuous Venetian lady, or the free spirits among the Italian actors, as in "The Last Aldini;" or a pure heroic virtue, as in "The Compagnon du Tour de France." One will be enthusiastically admired by some who may be offended with the other. A growing sympathy with the people has been apparent in all her later works, and an influence more ennobling could scarcely be found in literature, than a wide circulation among them of the last work we have named. We shall hope to see it shortly in its English form in the present edition, Clever as "The Last Aldini" is, there are many to follow it, incomparably superior.
Select Writings of Robert Chambers. Vol. 1.—Essays Familiar and Humorous. London: W.S. Orr.
Robert Chambers is one of those happily constituted human beings whose wise head and warm heart find ever a coadjutor in a hand ready and able to work with them. Whatever he writes is calculated to instruct and improve. The Essays which compose this volume, are selected from no less than four hundred separate papers written by himself for the Chambers' Journal. In those pages they have been universally read; but they are not, on that account, the less welcome in this collected form.
He says in his preface, that it was his design from the first to be the essayist of the middle class—that class in which he was born, and to which he continues to belong. He has sought less to attain elegance than to avoid dulness; he has endeavoured to be brief, direct, and he knows that he has been earnest. All that he has aimed at he has attained, Every page abounds with the most genuine humour, kindly affection, manly good sense, and the broadest spirit of tolerance and philanthropy.
In an immensely reading age like the present, where happily there is a demand for a plentiful supply of wholesome mental food, Robert Chambers can hardly make a more acceptable present to the public than his Essays in a collected and cheap form.
Heroic Odes and Bacchic Melodies. By George St. Edmonde. E. Churton, London.
The writer of this volume is evidently a young man gifted with considerable poetical power, and amazing animal spirits. Life is no dull, gloomy affair with him: his Heroic Odes and Bacchic Melodies well up from warm, rejoicing spirit, that as yet has had no experience of sadder or more sober realities of existence. We should, however, have liked the book better, had there been less of the wine-bibber in it.