_ By J. ROSS BROWNE. New York:
Harper & Brothers.
If the author of this amusing book had been less devoted to his purpose
of making fun, we think he could have made us a picture of German life
which we should have been very glad to have in the absence of much
honest information on the subject and the presence of a great deal of
flimsy idealizing. As it is, we fear that his work, for the most part a
truthful portraiture, will present itself only as a caricature to those
unacquainted with the original, and that, for all Mr. Browne says to the
contrary, many worthy people must go on thinking German life a romantic,
Christmas-tree affair, full of pretty amenity, and tender ballads, and
bon-bons. But some day, the truth will avenge itself, and without the
least air of burlesque show us that often narrow and sordid existence,
abounding in sensual appetites, coarse or childish pleasures, and paltry
aims, and varnished with a weak and extravagant sentimentality,--that
social order still so feudally aristocratic and feudally plebeian, in
which the poor are little better than vassals, and their women toil in
the fields like beasts of burden, and the women of all classes are
treated with rude and clumsy disesteem.
Mr. Browne's book is devotedly funny, as we hinted, but, in spite of
this, is really very amusing.
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