Background of Mr Hawthorne's Stories. 183 or the heart desire, as a magnificent, comprehensive, majestic symbol of religious faith. All splendour was included within its verge, and She gazed with delight even at the multithere was space for all. plicity of ornament. She was glad at the cherubim that fluttered upon the pilasters, and of the marble doves, hovering, unexpectedly, with green olive-branches of precious stones. She could spare nothing, now, of the manifold magnificence that had been lavished, in a hundred places, richly enough to have made world-famous shrines in any other church, but which here melted away into the vast, sunny breadth, Yet each contributed its little all and were of no separate account. towards the grandeur of the whole. . . . The pavement! it stretched out illimitably, a plain of many-coloured marble, where thousands of worshippers might kneel together, and shadowless angels tread among them without brushing their heavenly garments against those earthly ones. The roof! the dome! Rich, gorgeous, filled with sunshine, cheerfully sublime, and fadeless after centuries, those lofty depths seemed to translate the heavens to mortal comprehension, and help the spirit upward to a yet higher and wider sphere. Must not the faith that built this matchless edifice, and warmed, illuminated, and overflowed from it, include whatever can satisfy human aspirations at the loftiest, or minister to human necessity at the sorest? had a material home, was it not here?" If Religion Of the strange story which binds these charming criticisms together, we have not time to speak at length. Only let it be noted that one trait very characteristic of Mr Hawthorne's habit of thought reappears. Those who have read The House with the Seven Gables, and The Scarlet Letter (the latter by far the most powerful and sustained imaginative effort that Mr Hawthorne has yet made), will understand to what we allude. His fictions have, almost without exception, a peculiar background. The commonplace events of the present are shrouded in the ghost-like shadows of the past. The influences of the dead This new English haunt and afflict the footsteps of living men. earth has seen the Indian and the Puritan, and Monarchy and Revolution; and two centuries of English civilization and English crime cannot be lightly lost. It is the moral feeling, however, that he communicates to this association which is most peculiar to himself. The crime of yesterday is curiously interwrought with the retribution of to-day. It follows the present with menacing tenacity, and clings to it with an immitigable grasp. It is continually rising up in judgment against us. Why do the bright eyes lose their lustre, and why are the rosy lips paled, and how has a dark shadow fallen upon the fair brow of the young girl-darker than is meet for the blooming youth of We are told that her health is delicate an English maiden? and uncertain; and we know that her mother died of the same mysterious blight. Mr Hawthorne finds another explanation,— an explanation not endorsed by the Faculty. It is the family curse, the cruel sin of the grim Puritan grandfather, that falls upon the maiden's head, and spoils her innocent youth. And so in Transformation, the Count of Monte Bene represents the pleasant rural life of old Etruria, and inherits the playful unreflective virtues of the ancestor who had piped to the Nymphs and caroused with Pan, "while Italy was yet guiltless of Rome." The marble of Praxiteles preserves to us in unfaded youth the form of this sylvan Sire; and with Mr Hawthorne's picture of the famous statue,—striking, as it does, the key-note to his story, —we take our leave of a capricious and fantastic, but captivating romance: "The Faun is the marble image of a young man, leaning his right arm on the trunk or stump of a tree: one hand hangs carelessly by his side; in the other he holds the fragment of a pipe, or some such sylvan instrument of music. His only garment-a lion's skin, with the claws upon his shoulder-falls half way down his back, leaving the Jimbs and entire front of the figure nude. The form, thus displayed, is marvellously graceful, but has a fuller and more rounded outline, more flesh, and less of heroic muscle than the old sculptors were wont to assign to their types of masculine beauty. The character of the face corresponds with the figure; it is most agreeable in outline and feature, but rounded and somewhat voluptuously developed, especially about the throat and chin; the nose is almost straight, but very slightly curves inward, thereby acquiring an indescribable charm of geniality and humour. The mouth, with its full yet delicate lips, seems so nearly to smile outright, that it calls forth a responsive smile. The whole statue-unlike anything else that ever was wrought in that severe material of marble-conveys the idea of an amiable and sensual creature, easy, mirthful, apt for jollity, yet not incapable of being touched by pathos. It is impossible to gaze long at this stone image without conceiving a kindly sentiment towards it, as if its substance were warm to the touch, and imbued with actual life. It comes very close to some of our pleasantest sympathies. "Perhaps it is the very lack of moral severity, of any high and heroic ingredient in the character of the Faun, that makes it so delightful an object to the human eye and to the frailty of the human The being here represented is endowed with no principle of virtue, and would be incapable of comprehending such; but he would be true and honest by dint of his simplicity. We should expect from him no sacrifice or effort for an abstract cause; there is not an atom of martyr's stuff in all that softened marble; but he has a capacity for strong and warm attachment, and might act devotedly through its impulse, and even die for it at need. It is possible, too, that the Faun might be educated through the medium of his emotions, so that the coarser animal portion of his nature might eventually be thrown into the background, though never utterly expelled. "The animal nature, indeed, is a most essential part of the Faun's The Faun of Praxiteles. 185 composition; for the characteristics of the brute creation meet and combine with those of humanity in this strange yet true and natural conception of antique poetry and art. Praxiteles has subtly diffused throughout his work that mute mystery which so hopelessly perplexes us whenever we attempt to gain an intellectual or sympathetic knowledge of the lower orders of creation. The riddle is indicated, however, only by two definite signs; these are the two ears of the Faun, which are leaf-shaped, terminating in little peaks, like those of some species of animals. Though not so seen in the marble, they are probably to be considered as clothed in fine, downy fur. In the coarser representations of this class of mythological creatures, there is another token of brute kindred-a certain caudal appendage; which, if the Faun of Praxiteles must be supposed to possess it at all, is hidden by the lion's skin that forms his garment. The pointed and furry ears, therefore, are the sole indications of his wild, forest nature. "Only a sculptor of the finest imagination, the most delicate taste, the sweetest feeling, and the rarest artistic skill-in a word, a sculptor and a poet too-could have first dreamed of a Faun in this guise, and then have succeeded in imprisoning the sportive and frisky thing in marble. Neither man nor animal, and yet no monster; but a being in whom both races meet on friendly ground! The idea grows coarse as we handle it, and hardens in our grasp. But, if the spectator broods long over the statue, he will be conscious of its spell; all the pleasantness of sylvan life, all the genial and happy characteristics of creatures that dwell in woods and fields, will seem to be mingled and kneaded into one substance, along with the kindred qualities in the human soul. Trees, grass, flowers, woodland streamlets, cattle, deer, and unsophisticated man! The essence of all these was compressed long ago, and still exists within that discoloured marble surface of the Faun of Praxiteles." ART. VIII.-La Verité sur la Russie. Par le PRINCE PIERRE DOLGOROUKOFF. Paris, 1860. WE have here a work of no common merit, on the actual condition of the Russian Empire. It is marred, indeed, by prejudices so strong, and antipathies so poignant, that the utmost assumption of dispassionateness fails to disguise them. But although Prince Dolgoroukoff, in depicting, for instance, the iniquities of the Russian bureaucracy, is apt to turn portrait into caricature, we cannot question that his grievance is essentially true, and that the work, viewed as a whole, presents the ablest exposé of Russian government and Russian society that has yet reached the west of Europe. The three principal works hitherto published on this subject, in our generation, have been written respectively by a Russian, a German, and a Frenchman. No one of these can be said to be absolutely out of date. The work of De Custine relates to Russia twenty-one years ago; that of Haxthausen dates from ten and fifteen years ago; and that of Tegoborski describes the author's country as it existed within the last six or seven years. Yet, with these and other rivals, such as Tourgueneff in the field, Prince Dolgoroukoff has contrived to write a book on the same subject altogether new; and he has compressed into one volume much more that a politician would desire to read, than his three leading predecessors have produced in twelve. Haxthausen and Custine were foreign travellers, superficially acquainted of necessity with a government almost as intolerant of inquiry as the Chinese; Tegoborski failed in depth of thought and clearness of view; but M. de Dolgoroukoff, though sometimes falling into empiricism, sometimes running into extremes, writes with the knowledge of a Russian, and with much of the comprehensive view of a statesman. The distinguished author of this work held, we believe, at one time, a station of some eminence in the Russian Government; and though subsequently banished the empire under the reign of Nicholas, and now probably more than ever in mauvaise odeur in Russia, we understand that he is no longer in legal or involuntary exile. From Paris, he therefore publishes this work in the language of his adoption; and in his preface he defends himself against the possible presumption of a want of nationality, in choosing to convey his views in the French language rather than the Russian. While the former, he says, is the language of Europe, the latter is, for his purposes of authorship, no language 1 Mémoires et Voyages en la Russie pendant 1839. 2 Etudes sur la force productive de la Russie, 1852-54. Character of this Book. 187 at all; for the circulation of such a work as his would be at once arrested in Russia. With this introduction for his work, he next introduces himself to the European public, with antecedents which form in themselves a qualification, of which the internal evidence of his work bears reciprocal evidence : "I have largely studied," says M. de Dolgoroukoff, "the history of my country; I have known the greater part of the men who, during five-and-twenty years, have held power in Russia, and the greater part of those who hold it at this day; I am acquainted with their I have lived in the two biography and their intimate relations. capitals and in the interior of the country; I have suffered banishment; I stand in relations with persons in the most different social positions, from the most elevated to the most unassuming. lished now in a foreign country, I design henceforth to write on Russia, in the intimate belief of seeing the truth, placed in the great day of publicity, even by a pen so feeble as mine, prove useful to my beloved country."-Pp. 3-4. Estab The emancipation of the serfs is at this moment constituting an epoch in Russian history, and probably the greatest in all the changes of internal organization that the empire has yet undergone. It is immediately à propos of this that Prince Dolgoroukoff writes. And though his work apparently diverges from that subject into a general view of the constitution of the Russian government, he does so, less in order to present his readers with a complete view of the position of his country, than because the emancipation of the serfs presents quite as much of an administrative difficulty as of a territorial or social question. His elaborate and reiterated philippics against the Russian bureaucracy form, therefore, a part, though perhaps an exaggerated and disproportionate part, of the didactic aim of his work; for he holds it impossible to explain the situation of the serf question irrespectively of the bureaucratic organization, by which he represents all gress as trammelled. Prince Dolgoroukoff, therefore, unlike those writers on the state of Russia with whom we have compared him, has the advantage of coming forward as the man of his epoch, to explain the question which now divides interests in Russia, and arrests attention throughout Europe. pro We must take up the subject very much in the same way. The great problem of serf-emancipation having been brought forward, it must be worked out, if worked out at all, in great degree at any rate by the government of the country; and the first question is, accordingly, the general character of that government, and its attitude towards this as one of the chief examples of social and political reform. The author himself commences by offering a general view of the state of government in Russia. He looks on the State as a sort of whited sepulchre, pleasing |