THE

INTERNATIONAL

MONTHLY

MAGAZINE

Of Literature, Science and Art.

VOLUME I.
AUGUST, 1850.

NEW-YORK:
STRINGER & TOWNSEND, 222 BROADWAY.
FOR SALE BY ALL BOOKSELLERS.
BY THE NUMBER, 25 Cts; THE VOLUME, $1; THE YEAR, $3.

VOLUME I. AUGUST TO NOVEMBER, 1850.

INTERNATIONAL WEEKLY MISCELLANY

Of Literature, Art, and Science.

Vol. I. NEW YORK,

CONTENTS: THIS ISSUE

INTRODUCTION.

Of the revolutions of the age, one of the most interesting and important is that which has taken place in the forms of Literature and the Modes of its Publication. Since the establishment of the Edinburgh Review the finest intelligences of the world have been displayed in periodicals. Brougham, Jeffrey, Sidney Smith, Mackintosh, Macaulay, have owed nearly all their best fame to compositions which have appeared first in journals, magazines and reviews; the writers of Tales and Essays have uniformly come before the public by the same means, which have recently served also for the original exhibition of the most elaborate and brilliant Fictions, so that we are now receiving through them by almost every ship from Europe installments of works by Dickens, Bulwer, James, Croly, Lever, Reynolds, Mrs. Marsh, Mrs. Ellis, and indeed nearly all the most eminent contemporary novelists. So complete is the change, that all mind, except the heaviest and least popular, is likely to flow hereafter through the Daily, Weekly, Monthly or Quarterly Miscellanies, which compete with universities, parliaments, churches, and libraries, for ascendency in the government of mankind.

In this country we must keep pace with the movements abroad. It will not answer that we issue literary productions as soon as possible after their completion. The impatient readers demand chapters by chapters, as they are spun from the brain and the heart of the author; facts, upon the instant of their discovery; and suggestions, as they flash from the contact of imagination and reflection.

The International Weekly Miscellany will be a result of efforts to satisfy a plain necessity of the times. It will combine the excellencies of all contemporary periodicals, with features that will be peculiar to itself.

I. A leading object will be to present the public, with the utmost rapidity and at the cheapest possible rate, the best of those works in Popular Literature which are appearing abroad in serials, or in separate chapters. With this view, we print in the first number the initial portions of the brilliant nautical romance now in course of publication in Blackwood's Magazine, under the title of "The Green Hand," by the author of the most celebrated fiction of its class in English literature, "Tom Cringle's Log;" and other works will be selected and carried on simultaneously, as they shall come to us with the stamp of sufficient merit.

II. The foreign periodicals are continually rich in novelettes of from two or three to a dozen chapters, which—being too short for separate volumes—are rarely reproduced at all in this country. Of these the International will contain the choicest selections.

III. Of the Quarterly Reviews the most admirable papers will be presented in full; and those works will in all cases be carefully examined for such valuable and striking passages as will be likely to interest the American reader, to whom the entire articles in which they appear may be unattractive.

IV. The Literary, Religious, Political and Scientific newspapers and magazines will be consulted for whatever will instruct or entertain in their several departments. The leading articles in the great journals, upon Affairs, and Philosophy, and Art, which are now very unfrequently reprinted in America, will appear in the International in such fullness and combination as to display the springs and processes of the world's action and condition.

V. But the work will not be altogether Foreign, nor a mere compilation. In its republications there will be a constant effort to display what is most interesting and important to the American; and in its original portions it will be supported by some of the ablest and most accomplished writers in all the fields of knowledge and opinion.

VI. As a Literary Gazette and Examiner, it is believed that it will equal or surpass any work now or ever printed in the United States. It will contain the earliest announcements of whatever movements in the literary world are of chief interest to general readers; its Reviews of Books will be honest and intelligent; and its extracts, when they can be given in advance of the publication of the works themselves, will be the choicest and most valuable possible. Without cant or hypocrisy, or the influence of any clique of feeble-minded and ambitious aspirants in letters, the International Miscellany will in this respect, the publishers trust, win and preserve the respect and confidence of all who look to published critical judgments as guides for the reading or purchase of books.

With a view to

MARTIN FARQUHAR TUPPER.

The recent appearance of some half dozen editions—some of them very beautiful in typography and pictorial illustrations—of The Proverbial Philosophy of Mr. Martin Farquhar Tupper, reminds us of the observation of Dana, that something "resembling poetry" is oftentimes borne into instant and turbulent popularity, while a work of genuine character may be lying neglected by all except the poets. But "the tide of time," says the profound essayist, "flows on, and the former begins to settle to the bottom, while the latter rises slowly and steadily to the surface, and goes forward, for a spirit is in it." We are not without the hope that Richard H. Dana will one day be in as frequent demand as Martin Farquhar Tupper is now.

The merits of this "gentleman of acknowledged genius and sovereign popularity," we have never been able to discover. If oddity were always originality, if quaintness and beauty were synonymous, if paradox were necessarily wisdom, we should be ready to grant that Mr. Tupper is a wise, beautiful and original thinker. But thought, after all, is an affair of mind, and though a man of genius may write what is far more brilliant than common sense ever is, yet no man can utter valuable truth on mortal and prudential subjects, unless he possesses a vigorous and powerful understanding. Now Mr. Tupper's art consists in contriving, not thought, but things that look like thoughts; fancies, in imitation of truths. The Proverbial Philosophy, in fact, appears to us one of the most curious impositions we have ever met with. When you first read one of the aphorisms, it strikes you as a sentiment of extraordinary wisdom. But look more closely at it; try to apply it; and you will find that it is merely a trick of words. What flashed upon you as a profound distinction in morals, turns out to be nothing but a verbal antithesis. What was paraded, as a kind of transcendental analogy between things not before suspected of resemblance, discovered by the "spiritual insight" of the moral seer, is in fact no more than a grave clench,—a solemn quibble,—a conceit; arising not from the perfection of mind, but the imperfection of language. Those conceptions, fabricated by Fancy out of the materials that Fancy deals in, and colored by the rays of a poetic sentiment, wear the same relation to truths, that the prismatic hues of the spray of a fountain in the sunshine bear to the gems which it perhaps outshines. It dazzles and delights, but if we try to apprehend it we become bewildered; and finally discover that we were deceived by a brilliant phantom of air. You may admire Mr. Tupper; you may enjoy him; but you cannot understand him: the staple of his sentences is not stuff of the understanding. Take one of Mr. Tupper's and one of Lord Bacon's aphorisms; they flash with an equal bravery. But try them upon the glassy surface of life. Bacon's cut it as if it were air: Tupper's turn into a little drop of dirty water. One was a diamond, the other but an icicle: one was the commonest liquor artificially refrigerated; the other was a crystal in form, but in its substance the pure carbon of truth. If these bright delusions which Mr. Tupper turns out to the wonder and praise of his admirers, were really thoughts, is it to be supposed that he would go on in this way, stringing them together, or evolving one out of the other, as a spider weaves its unending line, or as a boy blows soap bubbles from the nose of a tobacco pipe! Fancies, conceits, intellectual phantoms, may be engendered out of the mind, brooding in self-creation upon its own suggestions: but truth is to be mined from Nature, to be wrung from experience, to be seized as the victor's trophy on the battlefield of action and suffering. The flowers of poetry may bud spontaneously around the meditative spirit of genius, but the harvest of Truth, though, to be reaped by mind, must grow out of Reality.

RICHARD HENRY WILDE AND DANTE.

It appears that our accomplished and lamented countryman, Richard Henry Wilde, whose "Researches and Considerations concerning the Love and Imprisonment of Tasso" have been made use of with so discreditable a freedom by a recent English biographer of that poet, is—if another pretender prove not less successful—to be deprived also of the fame he earned by his discoveries in regard to Dante. A correspondent of The Spectator, under the signature of G. Aubrey Bezzi, writes as follows:—