Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 131.djvu/737

Rh neighborhood was equally under the power of the factor. And, poor as their accommodation here was, they had plenty of open air and land-room; whereas if they should be compelled to go to any of the larger ports, it would be to circumstances greatly inferior and a neighborhood in all probability very undesirable for their children.

 

 From The Contemporary Review.

death of the Baronne de Bunsen, aged eighty-five, which has lately taken place at Carlsruhe, should revive the interest in her memoir of her husband, which will long be remembered as one of the very best books of its kind. Hers was the appreciative, not the original mind, and she almost carried out the ideal in "The Princess,"

She was one with her husband in thought and feeling, tastes and actions; she enabled him to carry out his objects by her sympathy and by her active co-operation; she took upon herself the vexing petty cares of life, and left him free to follow out his political and literary career. Yet she was no "housewife," but shared all the best part of his mind upon all occasions. How much individual intellectual power, good sense, and insight into character she possessed, may be seen in the two large, thick volumes, wherein, with a tender reverence for her husband, in whose life her own was so completely merged, she made his character known to a circle far wider than even that in which he moved during his lifetime.

The book is peculiarly interesting to us as the story of one who, though a stranger in the land, and preserving his own individuality quite unbroken, yet identified himself with the best of English life in a manner which no other foreigner has ever done before or since.

Our pride of race, the supercilious habit of looking down on all other nations, as our inferiors in religion and politics, our shyness, exclusiveness, and insularity — our want of facility in other languages — combine to make a barrier into real English society which hardly any outsider from other lands finds it possible to pass. And although this must be the case more or less in every country, so that of the thousands who traverse Europe to and fro, the number of men and women in each generation might almost be counted on one's fingers who have become really intimate with the French, German, or Italian upper class, yet in England the difficulty created by the want of a common language makes the bar far greater than elsewhere. As Lord Houghton once said in a paper upon education, scarcely any English man speaks even French sufficiently well to enjoy talking it, and other tongues are still stranger to his lips. It was the accident of Baron Bunsen having married an Englishwoman, and using her speech as fluently as his own, which first opened the door for him into that jealously-kept sanctuary of English social life, which his sympathy with the nation improved to the utmost. It is this which makes the book so valuable — to see ourselves as others see us; not through the eyes of what we might call "an insolent Frenchman" or "a dogmatic German," whom we could comfortably put aside with the feeling that "he does not understand us," but by one who touched all things as if he loved us, with a gentle, sympathetic reverence for all that was good, and a very kind tenderness even for our faults, which make his strictures tell home.

Bunsen's was a curious life of failure in the objects upon which he had set his heart The gods shaped his ends to entirely contrary courses to those which he had rough-hewn for himself. He abhorred diplomacy, and his life was to be spent in little else. He preferred the learned leisure of a literary and artistic career, and he was condemned to the rush of London society as part of the duties of his position. He had a tender affection for his own country, yet during his lifetime he was almost singularly without influence in Germany, except through the personal friendship of the king, while he caused Prussia to be respected among nations in a manner which none of her internal arrangements before Sadowa and Sedan could have effected. He was not a great diplomatist, yet no ambassador ever took such a position before in England. He was anything but a great writer, yet he had more influence on his generation than many who were both, by sheer force of straightforward honesty in thought and action, true love of God and man, and sympathy with what was highest in thought and feeling wherever he went. It is to the honor of the world that he should have been so successful, for he had none of the adjuncts which generally raise men 