MISS JEWETT'S "TALES OF NEW ENGLAND."* Miss JEWETT'S tales are
rather very lively sketches than tales, and, indeed, furnish us with a very good second to Miss Wilkins's admirable tales like "A Humble Romance," "A Far-away Melody," and "A New England Nun." Bat they have not nearly as much of the narrative-interest in them as Miss Wilkins's, though in other respects they have much the same graphic texture and simplicity of outline. Miss Jewett not seldom reminds us of Mrs. Ga,skell's Cranford. Her picture • of "The Dulham. Ladies," her second story, is cast in exactly the same mould, and might illustrate the unity of the English race, for these Dulham ladies, becoming gradually aware that their hair was turning grey, and that they needed some artificial help to recover the personal consideration of their neighbours, and then going to buy fronts which end in making even their own servant wonder at their innocence and their little knowledge of the world, is as like Mrs. Gaskell's picture of some of the quaint doings at • Cranford as if Cranford had been situated in New England, instead of three thousand miles away. The dialect is different, and the old servant evidently feels herself more nearly on an equality with her mistresses,—if not, indeed, in some respects their superior, — than the old servant in Cranford. But in all other respects, and especially in portraying the innocent self-satisfaction felt by the Misses Dobin over their new device to set-off their elderly persons to advantage, the humour of Miss .Jewett's sketch is set in precisely the same key as the humour of Cranford. Indeed, Miss Jewett seems to us to describe generally a kind of society which is somewhat more English and less New English. than Miss Wilkins's. She is always reminding us of Miss Mitford or Mrs. Gaskell, while in Miss Wilkins's pages we are more struck with the difference than with the likeness between the old and the new stock. Perhaps the reason is that Miss Wilkins in her pictures of New England concerns herself a great deal more with the tenacity of purpose, and the trials to which that tenacious fibre of character is exposed, than Miss Jewett. Miss Jewett, on the other hand, dwells less on the hardship of the New England life, less on its poverty, less on its Puritan frugality, than Miss Wilkins. She paints the same kind of life, but she studies the general sentiment of the situation more than the resolute volition of her heroines and heroes,—which last seems to have grown to an almost preternatural rigidity in the New England character; and we find, therefore, more in common between the New England of Miss Jewett and the old England of Miss Mitford or Mrs. Gaskell, than we do between Miss Wilkins's sketches and the truest pictures of village life in our own land. Perhaps, too, Miss Jewett has moved in a New England society which, though hardy and frugal, is a little less close to the edge of absolute want than Miss Wilkins's. For the most part, her sketches are sketches of a middle-class rather than of those who have to work themselves to the bone to earn their living. Miss Jewett's
• Woe of Now Frgiand. By Farah Orne Jewott. London : James R. Osgood, NoUva,tne. and Co.
society is less close-run by a few shades of comfort than that in displaying which Miss Wilkins exhibits so much art and skill. Miss Jewett studies New England nature where it is not quite so much on the strain, a little more at its ease, than Miss Wilkins ; and the consequence is that her sketches have less of explicit development in them, less of beginning, middle, and end, than those of Miss Wilkins, which almost always tell you how some set purpose was worked out, or some per- verse habit of mind came to its crisis. Miss Jewett's most characteristically New England tale is "A Native of Winby," narrating how a Winby lad who had gone to the Far West, made his fortune, become a General in the war with the South, and had been elected to the Senate, comes back to his native place, revisits the school in which he had received his first lessons, and finds the greatest difficulty in conveying to the new generation of children the inarticulate romance of his present memories and of his childish aspirations. That is an admirable sketch of a go-a- head man's reserve and awkwardness in imparting his experi- ence to the children who are now learning on the very benches on which he conned his early lessons ; and it is told with con- summate skill. • But "The Dulbam Ladies" and "A Lost Lover," either of which, with very slight alterations, might be sketches of English middle-class life, interest us more than those which have all the sternness and curious hardness of outline which seem to characterise the simplicity of the New England character. "An Only Son," again, is pure New England, and much more like one of Miss Wilkins's stories than any other in this volume. There is the same unconquerable re- serve in it which Miss Wilkins, too, delights to depict, the same tenacity of resolve, and the same not ungenial ending. It is evident enough that Miss Jewett and Miss Wilkins have both the same general social characteristics before them, and that both sketch them with great truth p but Miss Jewett on the whole commands a landscape of somewhat lees severe features than Miss Wilkins. Both of them delight in sketching the reticence of Puritan self-sacrifice, of which the following passage gives a happy specimen. Two good women are watching together in the house of a friend who is just dead,—one of those people who did not let their left hand know what their right hand did. One of the watchers tells to the other this story of her departed friend :— " I can toll you the biggest thing she ever done, and I don't know's there's anybody left but me to tell it. I don't want it forgot,' Sarah Pinson went on, looking up at the clock to see how the night was going. It was that pretty-looking Trevor girl, who taught the Corners school, and married so well afterwards, out in New York State. You remember her, I dare say?'—' Cer- tain,' said Mrs. Crowe, with an air of interest,—' She was a splendid teacher, folks said, and give the school a great start ; but she'd overdone herself getting her education, and working to pay for it, and she all broke down one spring, and Tempy made her come and stop with her a while,—you remember that P Well, she had an uncle, her mother's brother out in Chicago, who was well off and friendly, and used to write to Lizzie Trevor, and I dare say make her some presents; but 130 was a lively, driving man, and didn't take time to stop and think about his folks. He hadn't seen her since she was a little girl. Poor Lizzie was so pale and weakly that she just got through the term o' school. She looked as she was just going straight off in &decline. Tempy, she cosseted her up a while, and then, next thing folks knew, she was tellin' round how Miss Trevor had gone to see her uncle, and meant to visit Nis gary Falls on the way, and stop over night. Now I happened to know, in ways I won't dwell on to explain, that the poor girl was in debt for her schoolin' when she came here, and her last quarter's pay had just squared it off at last, and left her without a cent ahead, hardly; but it had fretted her thinking of it, so she paid it all ; those might have dunned her that she owed it to. An' I taxed Tempy about the girl's goin' off on such a journey, till she owned up, rather'n have Lizzie blamed, that she'd given her sixty dollars, same's if she was rolling in riches, and sent her off to have a good rest and vacation,'—' Sixty dollars ! ' exclaimed Mrs. Crowe. Tempy only had ninety dollars a year that came in to her ; rest of her livin' she got by helpin' about, with what she raised off this little piece o' ground, sand one side an' clay the other. An' how often I've heard her tell, years ago, that she'd rather see Niagary than any other sight in the world ! ' The women looked at each other in silence ; the magnitude of the generous sacrifice was almost too groat for their comprehension."
Miss Jewett is sometimes a little too discursive. "The Courting of Sister Wisby," though it ends in a very humorous sketch of New England manners and whims, is much too long in getting to the point. Even a sketch which is not exactly a story, should have a perspective of its own. There Miss Wilkins never fails; Miss Jewett sometimes does.
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