AMERICAN SPECTACLES.* THIICYEIDES, says the legend, chiefly composed his history
beneath a plane-tree when an exile in Thrace. Our well- known American author knows a trick worth two of that. Besides ransacking the British Museum, the Record Office, and the Prussian Archives, and borrowing "by the cart-load" from the Royal Munich Library, the Kaiser's friend loaded his canoe, the 'Rob Roy,' with a cargo of books and plans, which he floated up and down the rivers and canals of Germany,—a system, he thinks, offering facilities of com- position not attainable in the old historic rut. Very probably it is so ; but what the present instalment of Mr. Bigelow's aquatic system brings us is a collection of articles, or essays, effervescing with learning, knowledge of German humanity, bright thoughts, and expressions grave and humorous,—a salmagundi, in a word, which, though full of instruction and charm, is not history. The conscious possessor of the panoply of attainments guaranteed by the canoe system treads with the heel of contempt on such poor worms as Sybel and Treitschke. The latter scribbler having dared to allot fifteen hundred closely printed pages to the period which the present volume knocks off in three hundred and forty of pica, suggests to his successor this jeer: "To my mind the publisher of such a book should be heavily fined."
Of Mr. Bigelow's own talent for allowing the incursion of irrelevant details into his work one or two samples will suffice. Germany's fields of political electrification between 1815 and 1848 were a home-growth that was by no means induced by the revolutionary currents of Vienna and Palermo. Our author, nevertheless, gives separates biographies of Kossuth and Mazzini many pages long, not a paragraph of which re-
• History of the German Straggl. for Liberty. By Ponitney Bigelow,
Illustrated with Portraits. 3 vols. Vol. ILL, 181.5-48. London: r and Brothers. [10e. ed.]
lates, however remotely, to the "German struggle for liberty." Again, a chapter of the book ticketed "American Influence" is given up to Tocqueville, although our author does not venture to hint that the Democracy in America had a run in Germany. Perhaps it afforded later on a suggestion that the United States, with its "strange absence of policemen," must be a nice country for emigrants. In an essay on German literature and art Heine appears, but less for his poetry than for his Jewish birth, on which is pivoted a long- drawn-out and fully documented sermon on the Anti- Semitism of Wagner, with "his stovepipe hat and trousers," while his operas are almost entirely tabooed. Mr. Bigelow's German friends will enjoy the paragraph in which he deals with Schubert's "immortal 600 Volkslieder, the delight of nursery and drawing-room," and calls his vocal sublimities, with those of Beethoven and Mozart, "mighty forces which were felt in every peasant's cabin." Volleslieder, we need hardly say, are popular traditional songs ; to give that designation to such prodigies of scientific vocal music as the Wanderer, or Am Meer, or the Schone Midlerin cycle affords a curious example of how the best informed men occasionally stumble.
The "struggle for liberty" opened in 1817 with the famous festival of the Wartburg, near Eisenach, where Luther flung his inkstand at the Devil's head, and Tann- hauser, as edited by Wagner, made love to the Holy Elizabeth. University students flocked to the castle from all parts of Germany, and after a banquet given them by G-oethe's friend, Karl August of Saxe-Weimar, kindled the symbolical bonfires so well known in history. The author gives a picturesque description of this episode, but no sooner are the students started up the hill than the road is blocked by an excursus on the Jews, which is itself padded with another excursus on the Rothschilds, whose pedigree is brought down to 1880 in a complete Who's Who. We shall not say nihil ad rem when we are told that an article on this notable gathering was published in the Isis, "a periodical which ranked with our Spectator of London" P The author is at his best in his full memorial of the great propagator of gymnastics, Turnvater Jahn, which no American or English- man will read without losing his temper. This great enemy of that vile German vice, the academic duel, was no demagogue, but an honest Monarchist : his intimate relations with the Minister Hardenberg, who himself dissented from Metternich's proofs that gymnastics meant treason, did not save the vener- able patriot from years of persecution and imprisonment.
Mr. Bigelow gives a telling account of the atrocious Carls- bad Decrees of 1819, under which thinkers and students were thrown into prison by the hundred for illegal reading, writing, or talking. As preface to that execrable business, the author describes the descent of Metternich from his coach at the 'White Lion,' adding statistics I la Baedeker, ancient and modern, of the popular health resort where "jaded business men from Chicago and Kansas City," Polish and Galician Jews with curls and gaberdines, crowned heads, and bagmen jostle each other, as the devotees of the Spruclel know, on terms of democratic equality. Some of the orators and scribes who lecture us from the depths of their ignorance on German affairs should study Mr. Bigelow's valuable narrative of the rise of the Zollverein. Prior to that reform the traders and travellers crossing Germany in its breadth were stopped at thirty-six Custom-houses belonging to the States traversed. Prussia, taken singly, was divided into sixty-seven separate fiscal provinces, each with its own tariff and methods of valuation, an ultra-Chinese system which the "King of ships," as Frederick the Great said, swept away in 1818 to make room for a complete unification of import-duties. The territorial inter-tessellation from which the Monarchy and some of its neighbours suffered was at its worst in Thuringia, and in 1819 the Duke of Schwarzburg-Sonders- hausen, wanting the wherewithal to build a theatre, agreed to the fiscal absorption of hie minute duchy by Prussia on reasonable cash terms. Parallel unified fiscal groups grew elsewhere in Germany, junctions were effected in various directions, and twenty years later, when Hesse-Darmstadt joined the Northern Union, the Zollverein was on the high road to completion. Mr. Bigelow rightly explains that all this was a financial movement with Free-trade tariffs, and that "Protection was a principle that only came in with Bismarck."
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