The Romance of a Schee/master. By Edmonclo de Amicis. The
translation by Mary A. Craig. 3 vols. (Osgood, MeIlvaine, and Co.)—In writing The Romance of a Schoolmaster, that distinguished Italian author, Signor de Arateig, has evidently worked within the limitations of a self-denying ordinance. He has dispensed with all the ordinary sources of interest in fiction—for even the hero's single love-affair is of little narrative importance—and has relied exclusively upon such effects as can be achieved by that rigorous, unadorned veracity which is the asceticism of repre- sentative art. In his choice of theme, not less than in his method of treatment, he seems determined to show how much can be got out of little, for the attempt to make an attractive story out of the routine of the daily life of a master in an Italian communal school is some- thing like the act of a man who, with £1,000 a year at his command, chooses to live upon sixpence a day. Of course, there is no reason why the most startling elements of excitement should not come into such a life as that of Emilio Ratti. Jane Eyre was a governess, and Eugene Aram was, like Ratti, a schoolmaster, but in the strange eventful histories related by Charlotte BrontS and Lord Lytton, their calling is a mere accident, an expedient, and its prosaic details are studiously kept in the background. Not so in the unromantic romance of Signor de Amicis. Village schoolhouses are described with the minuteness of an inspector's report ; ineignitcant conversations are given with the precision of an affidavit ; individual characters are put on the canvas with the fullness of delineation usually reseryed for heroes and villains, only that they may disappear in a few pages and be seen no more. It is obvious that a book written in this fashion ought to be dull and wearisome, but, curiously enough, The Romance of a Schoolmaster is neither one nor the other. Its author is a realist ; but, unlike many realists, he impresses us with a sense of reality. The book has not the kind of interest which belongs to ordinary fiction, but it has that other kind which belongs to successful biography. It is a really vivid picture of a typical commonplace life, and, though not everybody's book, it will find an appreciative audience.
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