SERAPIS.A Romance byGeorg Ebers, from the German by Clara Bell.Authorized Edition.In one vol. Paper cover, 50 cts. Cloth binding, 90 cts.
“A new novel by Ebers is always a pleasure; and ‘Serapis’ has all the qualities conspicuous in the Egyptian novels that preceded it, with an intensified dramatic and descriptive power that tempts one to pronounce it one of the very best of the series. Nothing is lost from that perfectly preserved atmosphere of something foreign to our own experience in time and place, which one felt instinctively to be foreign whether or not one were Egyptologist enough to recognize it as perfect; while at the same time the interest is kept up by a stress of human feeling which makes the thrilling events chronicled hold one as if they happened before one’s eyes. The early Christians are represented, not as martyrs and haloed heroes, but as human beings with a great deal of human nature in them; the touch of the Christian Bishop quite indifferent to the conversion and the fate of a young Christian maiden as soon as he learned that she preferred to be an Aryan Christian, being especially—shall we say natural, or artistic? The heroine is not a young girl ardent in the Christian faith, as is customary in similar historical stories, but one clinging fiercely to the old faiths; the description of the torture to her soul, even after she began to turn to the light, in the sacrilegious destruction of the old gods and temples, being given with wonderful vividness. The mere outward descriptions are singularly effective; whether of a young girl resting in a garden on soft cushions under the gilt-coffered ceiling of the arcade, peeling a luscious peach as she listens to the plash of the fountains and watches the buds swelling on the tall trees, while among the smooth, shining leaves of the orange and lemon trees gleamed the swelling fruit,—or of a maiden devoted to the worship of Isis waiting for her Christian lover,—or finally of the magnificent Serapeum, never more glorious than when the Christians had resolved on its destruction and the cunning priests, with the aid of mirrors, caused a ray of the setting sun—a shaft of intense brightness—to fall on the lips of the statue of the god as if in derision of his enemies. Of dramatic effects there are many intensely dramatic; more especially the scene where Constantine mounts the ladder with his axe to overthrow the god, almost as sensitive himself to his own daring as the young agonized girl, watching him as if the first blow he should deal to the beautiful and unique work of art might wreck her love for him, as his axe would wreck the ivory. Even more powerful than this, perhaps, is the scene where Theophilus, struggling in vain to persuade even his own followers to the destruction of the great image, seizes the crucifix of his own Lord, and trembling almost at his own audacity, dashes it to the ground in fragments, to show that even the symbol of his own religion is as nothing compared with the spirit; falling then upon his knees in an ecstasy of remorseful prayer, and gathering up the bits of broken ivory to kiss them devoutly. The book is so full of scenes and effects like this, that while quite as instructive in its way as the other Egyptian novels, it is more strikingly interesting as a story.”—The Critic, N. Y.