AMERICA OF THE 'FIFTIES
Letters of Fredrika Bremer. (Oxford University Press. 11s. net.) Two travelling novelists, Dickens and Fredrika Bremer, wrote their impressions of America within a year or so of one another, and those impressions were diametrically opposed.
It was the lesser artist who painted the favourable picture. Long letters descriptive of her visit were immediately trans-
lated and had a great and deserved success. But perhaps they were a little too long for the modern reader. The new edition which lies before us is in reality a selection. Not a word too much has been given, and, indeed, the reader is left longing for more. The Swedish Miss Austen, as she has been called, arrived in New York in the year 1849. Her fame had long preceded her. Already a middle-aged woman, she was re- ceived with enthusiasm tempered with a little good-natured ridicule. Hawthorne described her as " the funniest little fairy person," compared her to " a withered briar rose," and said she was " worthy to be the maiden aunt of the whole human race." Totally unselfconscious and full of sympathy and humour, her personality, however, was soon as popular as her books. For two years she was handed on with enthusiastic letters of introduction from host to host, and soon knew as much of domestic life in the northern and southern States as a guest could know, her life " a daily warfare against kindness, politeness and curiosity.'' New York, with its (for those days) incredibly huge hotels, bewildering traffic and luxurious but dull banquets, where people sat for hours " eating and remaining silent," she soon exchanged for the plain living and high thinking of Boston. Lowell, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Emerson, Irving and all the great lights of the time paid her court and admitted her at once to an intimacy which made the New World into a new home.
The little novelist's head, however, was not turned. She still saw clearly. The affectations of that somewhat trans- cendental society did not escape her. She meets Alcott at dinner and is amused at the worship offered to him. " He drank water and we drank (—) fog," she writes. She bows with the rest before Emerson but longs for a more positive prophet, seeing that even his world " floats in an element of disintegration." Longfellow's nobility of sentiment and appearance delight her, but she notes that he admires no one unless it be Carlyle, and is chilled by the sphinx-like appear- ance and the " icy Alp nature " which seems to her to show through a polite geniality. The Quakers please her. " Chris- tian love shows in them seasoned with a little innocent worldly cunning and a delicate sharpness of temper."
A convinced abolitionist, she yet fell in love with the patriarchal life of South Carolina and was charmed by the happy negroes. The talk of the good slave owners about the bad ones, however, confirmed her in her original horror of the system, and out of their own mouths she condemned the Southerners while still regarding them and their Northern brethren as on the whole the most open-hearted and r fraternal " people who had ever existed.
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