EDWARD EVERETT HALE.
“THE ROBINSON CRUSOE OF AMERICA.”
DWARD EVERETT HALE is to-day one of the best known and most beloved of American authors. He is also a lecturer of note. He has probably addressed as many audiences as any man in America. His work as a preacher, as a historian and as a story-teller, entitles him to fame; but his life has also been largely devoted to the formation of organizations to better the moral, social and educational conditions of the young people of his own and other lands. Recently he has been deeply interested in the great Chatauqua movement, which he has done much to develop.
His name is a household word in American homes, and the keynote of his useful life may be expressed by the motto of one of his most popular books, “Ten Times One is Ten:”—“Look up and not down! Look forward and not backward! Look out and not in! Lend a hand!”
Edward Everett Hale was born in Boston, Massachusetts, April 3, 1822. He graduated at Harvard University in 1839, at the age of seventeen years. He took a post graduate course for two years in a Latin school and read theology and church history. It was in 1842 that he was licensed to preach by the Boston Association of Congregational Ministers. During the winter of 1844–45 he served a church in Washington, but removed the next year to Worcester, Massachusetts, where he remained for ten years. In 1856 he was called to the South Congregational (Unitarian) Church in Boston, which he has served for more than three decades.
When a boy young Hale learned to set type in his father’s printing office, and afterwards served on the “Daily Advertiser,” it is said, in every capacity from reporter up to editor-in-chief. Before he was twenty-one years old he wrote a large part of the “Monthly Chronicle” and “Boston Miscellany,” and from that time to the present has done an immense amount of newspaper and magazine work. He at one time edited the “Christian Examiner” and also the “Sunday School Gazette.” He founded a magazine entitled “The Old and the New” in 1869, which was afterwards merged into “Scribner’s Monthly.” In 1866 he began the publication of “Lend a Hand, a Record of Progress and Journal of Organized Charity.”
As a writer of short stories, no man of modern times, perhaps, is his superior, if indeed he has any equals. “My Double and How He Undid Me,” published in 1859, was the first of his works to strike strongly the popular fancy; but it was “The Man Without a Country,” issued in 1863, which entitled its author to a prominent place among the classic short story-tellers of America, and produced a deep impression on the public mind. His “Skeleton in a Closet” followed in 1866; and, since that time his prolific pen has sent forth in the form of books and magazine articles, a continuous stream of the most entertaining literature in our language. He has the faculty of De Foe in giving to his stories the appearance of reality, and thus has gained for himself the title of “The Robinson Crusoe of America.”
Mr. Hale is also an historical writer and a student of great attainment, and has contributed many papers of rare value to the historical and antiquarian societies of both Europe and America. He is, perhaps, the greatest of all living authorities on Spanish-American affairs. He is the editor of “Original Documents from the State Paper Office, London, and the British Museum; illustrating the History of Sir Walter Raleigh’s First American Colony at Jamestown,” and other historical works.
Throughout his life, Mr. Hale has always taken a patriotic interest in public affairs for the general good of the nation. While he dearly loves his native New England hills, his patriotism is bounded by no narrow limits; it is as wide as his country. His voice is always the foremost among those raised in praise or in defence of our national institutions and our liberties. His influence has always been exerted to make men and women better citizens and better Americans.
LOST.[¹]
(FROM “PHILIP NOLAN’S FRIENDS.”)
[¹] Copyright, Roberts Bros.
UT as she ran, the path confused her. Could she have passed that flaming sassafras without so much as noticing it? Any way she should recognize the great mass of bays where she had last noticed the panther’s tracks. She had seen them as she ran on, and as she came up. She hurried on; but she certainly had returned much farther than she went, when she came out on a strange log flung up in some freshet, which she knew she had not seen before. And there was no clump of bays. Was this being lost? Was she lost? Why, Inez had to confess to herself that she was lost just a little bit, but nothing to be afraid of; but still lost enough to talk about afterwards she certainly was.
Yet, as she said to herself again and again, she could not be a quarter of a mile, nor half a quarter of a mile from camp. As soon as they missed her—and by this time they had missed her—they would be out to look for her. How provoking that she, of all the party, should make so much bother to the rest! They would watch her now like so many cats all the rest of the way. What a fool she was ever to leave the knoll! So Inez stopped again, shouted again, and listened and listened, to hear nothing but a swamp-owl.
If the sky had been clear, she would have had no cause for anxiety. In that case they would have light enough to find her in. She would have had the sunset glow to steer by; and she would have had no difficulty in finding them. But with this horrid gray over everything she dared not turn round, without fearing that she might lose the direction in which the theory of the moment told her she ought to be faring. And these openings which she had called trails—which were probably broken by wild horses and wild oxen as they came down to the bayou to drink—would not go in one direction for ten paces. They bent right and left, this way and that; so that without some sure token of sun or star, it was impossible, as Inez felt, to know which way she was walking.
And at last this perplexity increased. She was conscious that the sun must have set, and that the twilight, never long, was now fairly upon her. All the time there was this fearful silence, only broken by her own voice and that hateful owl. Was she wise to keep on in her theories of this way or that way? She had never yet come back, either upon the fallen cottonwood tree, or upon the bunch of bays which was her landmark; and it was doubtless her wisest determination to stay where she was. The chances that the larger party would find her were much greater than that she alone would find them; but by this time she was sure that, if she kept on in any direction, there was an even chance that she was going farther and farther wrong.
But it was too cold for her to sit down, wrap herself never so closely in her shawl. The poor girl tried this. She must keep in motion. Back and forth she walked, fixing her march by signs which she could not mistake even in the gathering darkness. How fast that darkness gathered! The wind seemed to rise, too, as the night came on, and a fine rain, that seemed as cold as snow to her, came to give the last drop to her wretchedness. If she were tempted for a moment to abandon her sentry-beat, and try this wild experiment or that, to the right or left, some odious fallen trunk, wet with moss and decay, lay just where she pressed into the shrubbery, as if placed there to reveal to her her absolute powerlessness. She was dead with cold, and even in all her wretchedness knew that she was hungry. How stupid to be hungry when she had so much else to trouble her! But at least she would make a system of her march. She would walk fifty times this way, to the stump, and fifty times that way; then she would stop and cry out and sound her war-whoop; then she would take up her sentry-march again. And so she did. This way, at least, time would not pass without her knowing whether it was midnight or no.
“Hark! God be praised, there is a gun! and there is another! and there is another! They have come on the right track, and I am safe!” So she shouted again, and sounded her war-whoop again, and listened,—and then again, and listened again. One more gun! but then no more! Poor Inez! Certainly they were all on one side of her. If only it was not so piteously dark! If she could only walk half the distance in that direction which her fifty sentry-beats made put together! But when she struggled that way through the tangle, and over one wet log and another, it was only to find her poor wet feet sinking down into mud and water! She did not dare keep on. All that was left for her was to find her tramping-ground again, and this she did.
“Good God, take care of me! My poor dear father—what would he say if he knew his child was dying close to her friends? Dear mamma, keep watch over your little girl!”—
WM. DEAN HOWELLS.
(THE REALISTIC NOVELIST OF AMERICA.)
HE West has contributed many notable men to our nation within the last half of the present century. There seems to be something in the spirit of that developing section to stimulate the aspirations and ambitions of those who grow up in its atmosphere. Progress, Enterprise, “Excelsior” are the three words written upon its banner as the motto for the sons of the middle West. It is there we go for many of our leading statesmen. Thence we draw our presidents more largely than from any other section, and the world of modern literature is also seeking and finding its chiefest leaders among the sons and daughters of that region. True they are generally transplanted to the Eastern centres of publication and commercial life, but they were born and grew up in the West.
Notably among the examples which might be cited, we mention William Dean Howells, one of the greatest of modern American novelists, who was born at Martin’s Ferry, Ohio, March 1st, 1837. Mr. Howells did not enjoy the advantage of a collegiate education. At twelve years of age he began to set type in his father’s printing office, which he followed until he reached manhood, employing his odd time in writing articles and verses for the newspapers, and while quite young did editorial work for a leading daily in Cincinnati. At the age of twenty-one, in 1858, he became the editor of the “Ohio State Journal” at Columbus. Two years later he published in connection with John James Piatt a small volume of verse entitled “Poems of two Friends.” These youthful effusions were marked by that crystal like clearness of thought, grace and artistic elegance of expression which characterize his later writings. Mr. Howells came prominently before the public in 1860 by publishing a carefully written and most excellent “Life of Abraham Lincoln” which was extensively sold and read during that most exciting presidential campaign, and no doubt contributed much to the success of the candidate. Mr. Lincoln, in furnishing data for this work, became well acquainted with the young author of twenty-three and was so impressed with his ability in grasping and discussing state affairs, and good sense generally, that he appointed him as [♦]consul to Venice.
[♦] ‘cousul’ replaced with ‘consul’
During four years’ residence in that city Mr. Howells, in addition to his official duties, learned the Italian language and studied its literature. He also here gathered, the material for two books, “Venitian Life” and “Italian Journeys.” He arranged for the publication of the former in London as he passed through that city in 1865 on his way home. The latter was brought out in America on his return, appearing in 1867. Neither of these works are novels. “Venetian Life” is a delightful description of the manners and customs of real life in Venice. “Italian Journeys” is a charming portrayal—almost a kinetoscopic view—of his journey from Venice to Rome by the roundabout way of Genoa and Naples, with a visit to Pompeii and Herculaneum, including artistic etchings of notable scenes.
The first attempt of Mr. Howells at story-telling, “Their Wedding Journey,” appeared in 1871. This, while ranking as a novel, was really a description of an actual bridal tour across New York. “A Chance Acquaintance” (1873) was a more complete novel, but evidently it was a venture of the imagination upon ground that had proven fruitful in real life. It was modeled after “The Wedding Journey,” but described a holiday season spent in journeying up the St. Lawrence River, stopping at Quebec and Saguenay.
Since 1874 Mr. Howells has published one or more novels annually, among which are the following: “A Foregone Conclusion” (1874), “A Counterfeit Presentment” (1877), “The Lady of the Aroostook” (1878), “The Undiscovered Country” (1880), “A Fearful Responsibility” (1882), “A Modern Instance” and “Dr. Breen’s Practice” (1883), “A Woman’s Reason” (1884), “Tuscan Cities” and “The Rise of Silas Lapham” (1885), “The Minister’s Charge” and “Indian Summer” (1886), “April Hopes” (1887), “Annie Kilburn” (1888), “Hazard of New Fortune” (1889). Since 1890 Mr. Howells has continued his literary activity with increased, rather than abating, energy. Among his noted later novels are “A Traveler from Altruria” and “The Landlord at Lion’s Head” (the latter issued in 1897). Other notable books of his are “Stops at Various Quills,” “My Literary Passion,” “Library of Universal Adventure,” “Modern Italian Poets,” “Christmas Every Day” and “A Boy’s Town,” the two last mentioned being for juvenile readers, with illustrations.
Mr. Howells’ accurate attention to details gives to his stories a most realistic flavor, making his books seem rather photographic than artistic. He shuns imposing characters and thrilling incidents, and makes much of interesting people and ordinary events in our social life. A broad grasp of our national characteristics and an intimate acquaintance with our institutions gives him a facility in producing minute studies of certain aspects of society and types of character, which no other writer in America has approached. For instance, his “Undiscovered Country” was an exhaustive study and presentation of spiritualism, as it is witnessed and taught in New England. And those who admire Mr. Howells’ writings will find in “The Landlord at Lion’s Head” a clear-cut statement of the important sociological problem yet to be solved, upon the other; which problem is also characteristic of other of his books. Thoughtful readers of Mr. Howells’ novels gain much information on vital questions of society and government, which broaden the mind and cannot fail to be of permanent benefit.
From 1872 to 1881 Mr. Howells was editor of the “Atlantic Monthly,” and since 1886 he has conducted the department known as the “Editor’s Study” in “Harper’s Magazine,” contributing much to other periodicals at the same time. He is also well known as a poet, but has so overshadowed this side of himself by his greater power as a novelist, that he is placed with that class of writers. In 1873 a collection of his poems was published. While in Venice he wrote “No Love Lost; a Romance of Travel,” which was published in 1869, and stamped him as a poet of ability.
THE FIRST BOARDER.
(FROM “THE LANDLORD AT LION’S HEAD.” 1897.)
By Permission of Messrs. Harper & Brothers, Publishers.
HE table was set for him alone, and it affected him as if the family had been hurried away from it that he might have it to himself. Everything was very simple; the iron forks had two prongs; the knives bone handles; the dull glass was pressed; the heavy plates and cups were white, but so was the cloth, and all were clean. The woman brought in a good boiled dinner of corned beef, potatoes, turnips and carrots, from the kitchen, and a teapot, and said something about having kept them hot on the stove for him; she brought him a plate of biscuit fresh from the oven; then she said to the boy, “You come out and have your dinner with me, Jeff,” and left the guest to make his meal unmolested.
The room was square, with two north windows that looked down the lane he had climbed to the house. An open door led into the kitchen in an ell, and a closed door opposite probably gave access to a parlor or a ground-floor chamber. The windows were darkened down to the lower sash by green paper shades; the walls were papered in a pattern of brown roses; over the chimney hung a large picture, a life-size pencil-drawing of two little girls, one slightly older and slightly larger than the other, each with round eyes and precise ringlets, and with her hand clasped in the other’s hand.
The guest seemed helpless to take his gaze from it, and he sat fallen back in his chair gazing at it, when the woman came in with a pie.
“Thank you, I believe I don’t want any dessert,” he said. “The fact is, the dinner was so good that I haven’t left any room for pie. Are those your children?”
“Yes,” said the woman, looking up at the picture with the pie in her hand. “They’re the last two I lost.”
“Oh, excuse me!” the guest began.
“It’s the way they appear in the spirit life. It’s a spirit picture.”
“Oh! I thought there was something strange about it.”
“Well, it’s a good deal like the photographs we had taken about a year before they died. It’s a good likeness. They say they don’t change a great deal, at first.”
She seemed to refer the point to him for his judgment; but he answered wide of it:
“I came up here to paint your mountain, if you don’t mind, Mrs. Durgin—Lion’s Head, I mean.”
“Oh, yes. Well I don’t know as we could stop you, if you wanted to take it away.” A spare glimmer lighted up her face.
The painter rejoined in kind. “The town might have something to say, I suppose.”
“Not if you was to leave a good piece of intervale in place of it. We’ve got mountains to spare.”
“Well, then, that’s arranged. What about a week’s board?”
“I guess you can stay, if you’re satisfied.”
“I’ll be satisfied if I can stay. How much do you want?”
The woman looked down, probably with an inward anxiety between the fear of asking too much and the folly of asking too little. She said, tentatively, “Some of the folks that come over from the hotels say they pay as much as twenty dollars a week.”
“But you don’t expect hotel prices?”
“I don’t know as I do. We’ve never had any body before.”
The stranger relaxed the frown he had put on at the greed of her suggestion; it might have come from ignorance or mere innocence, “I’m in the habit of paying five dollars for farm board, where I stayed several weeks. What do you say to seven for a single week?”
“I guess that’ll do,” said the woman, and she went out with the pie, which she had kept in her hand.
IMPRESSIONS ON VISITING POMPEII.[¹]
FROM “ITALIAN JOURNEYS.” 1867.
[¹] Copyright, Houghton, Mifflin & Co.
HE cotton whitens over two-thirds of Pompeii yet interred: happy the generation that lives to learn the wondrous secrets of that sepulchre! For, when you have once been at Pompeii, this phantasm of the past takes deeper hold on your imagination than any living city, and becomes and is the metropolis of your dream-land forever. O marvellous city! who shall reveal the cunning of your spell? Something not death, something not life,—something that is the one when you turn to determine its essence as the other! What is it comes to me at this distance of that which I saw in Pompeii? The narrow and curving, but not crooked streets, with the blazing sun of that Neapolitan November falling into them, or clouding their wheel-worn lava with the black, black shadows of the many-tinted walls; the houses, and the gay columns of white, yellow, and red; the delicate pavements of mosaic; the skeletons of dusty cisterns and dead fountains; inanimate garden-spaces with pygmy statues suited to their littleness; suites of fairy bed-chambers, painted with exquisite frescos; dining-halls with joyous scenes of hunt and banquet on their walls; the ruinous sites of temples; the melancholy emptiness of booths and shops and jolly drinking-houses; the lonesome tragic theatre, with a modern Pompeian drawing water from a well there; the baths with their roofs perfect yet, and the stucco bass-reliefs all but unharmed; around the whole, the city wall crowned with slender poplars; outside the gates, the long avenue of tombs, and the Appian Way stretching on to Stabiæ; and, in the distance, Vesuvius, brown and bare, with his fiery breath scarce visible against the cloudless heaven; these are the things that float before my fancy as I turn back to look at myself walking those enchanted streets, and to wonder if I could ever have been so blest. For there is nothing on the earth, or under it, like Pompeii....
THE HOUSES OF POMPEII AND THEIR PAINTED WALLS.
From “Italian Journeys.”
The plans of nearly all the houses in the city are alike: the entrance-room next the door; the parlor or drawing-room next that; then the impluvium, or unroofed space in the middle of the house, where the rains were caught and drained into the cistern, and where the household used to come to wash itself, primitively, as at a pump; the little garden, with its painted columns, behind the impluvium, and, at last, the dining-room.
After referring to the frescos on the walls that have remained for nearly two thousand years and the wonder of the art by which they were produced, Mr. Howells thus continues:
Of course the houses of the rich were adorned by men of talent; but it is surprising to see the community of thought and feeling in all this work, whether it be from cunninger or clumsier hands. The subjects are nearly always chosen from the fables of the gods, and they are in illustration of the poets, Homer and the rest. To suit that soft, luxurious life which people led in Pompeii, the themes are commonly amorous, and sometimes not too chaste: there is much of Bacchus and Ariadne, much of Venus and Adonis, and Diana bathes a good deal with her nymphs,—not to mention frequent representations of the toilet of that beautiful monster which the lascivious art of the time loved to depict. One of the most pleasing of all the scenes is that in one of the houses, of the Judgment of Paris, in which the shepherd sits upon a bank in an attitude of ineffable and flattered importance, with one leg carelessly crossing the other, and both hands resting lightly on his shepherd’s crook, while the goddesses before him await his sentence. Naturally, the painter has done his best for the victress in this rivalry, and you see
“Idalian Aphrodite beautiful,”
as she should be, but with a warm and piquant spice of girlish resentment in her attitude, that Paris should pause for an instant, which is altogether delicious.
“And I beheld great Here’s angry eyes.”
Awful eyes! How did the painter make them? The wonder of all these pagan frescos is the mystery of the eyes,—still, beautiful, unhuman. You cannot believe that it is wrong for those tranquil-eyed men and women to do evil, they look so calm and so unconscious in it all; and in the presence of the celestials, as they bend upon you those eternal orbs, in whose regard you are but a part of space, you feel that here art has achieved the unearthly. I know of no words in literature which give a sense (nothing gives the idea) of the stare of these gods, except that magnificent line of Kingsley’s, describing the advance over the sea toward Andromeda of the oblivious and unsympathizing Nereids. They floated slowly up and their eyes
“Stared on her, silent and still, like the eyes in the house of the idols.”
VENETIAN VAGABONDS.[¹]
(FROM “VENETIAN LIFE.” 1867.)
[¹] By special permission of the author and of Houghton, Mifflin & Co.
HE lasagnone is a loafer, as an Italian can be a loafer, without the admixture of ruffianism, which blemishes lost loafers of northern race. He may be quite worthless, and even impertinent, but he cannot be a rowdy—that pleasing blossom on the nose of our fast, high-fed, thick-blooded civilization. In Venice he must not be confounded with other loiterers at the café; not with the natty people who talk politics interminably over little cups of black coffee; not with those old habitués, who sit forever under the Procuratie, their hands folded upon the top of their sticks, and stare at the ladies who pass with a curious steadfastness and knowing skepticism of gaze, not pleasing in the dim eyes of age; certainly, the last persons who bear any likeness to the lasagnone are the Germans, with their honest, heavy faces comically anglicized by leg-of-mutton whiskers. The truth is, the lasagnone does not flourish in the best café; he comes to perfection in cheaper resorts, for he is commonly not rich.
It often happens that a glass of water, flavored with a little anisette, is the order over which he sits a whole evening. He knows the waiter intimately, and does not call him “Shop!” (Bottéga) as less familiar people do, but Gigi, or Beppi, as the waiter is pretty sure to be named. “Behold!” he says, when the servant places his modest drink before him, “who is that loveliest blonde there?” Or to his fellow-lasagnone: “She regards me! I have broken her heart!” This is his sole business and mission, the cruel lasagnone—to break the ladies’ hearts. He spares no condition—neither rank nor wealth is any defence against him. I often wonder what is in that note he continually shows to his friend. The confession of some broken heart, I think. When he has folded it and put it away, he chuckles, “Ah, cara!” and sucks at his long, slender Virginia cigar. It is unlighted, for fire consumes cigars. I never see him read the papers—neither the Italian papers nor the Parisian journals, though if he can get “Galignani” he is glad, and he likes to pretend to a knowledge of English, uttering upon the occasion, with great relish, such distinctively English words as “Yes” and “Not,” and to the waiter, “A-little-fire-if-you-please.” He sits very late in the café, he touches his hat—his curly French hat—to the company as he goes out with a mild swagger, his cane held lightly in his left hand, his coat cut snugly to show his hips, and genteely swaying with the motion of his body. He is a dandy, of course—all Italians are dandies—but his vanity is perfectly harmless, and his heart is not bad. He would go half an hour to put you in the direction of the Piazza. A little thing can make him happy—to stand in the pit at the opera, and gaze at the ladies in the lower boxes—to attend the Marionette or the Malibran Theatre, and imperil the peace of pretty seamstresses and contadinas—to stand at the church doors and ogle the fair saints as they pass out. Go, harmless lasagnone, to thy lodging in some mysterious height, and break hearts if thou wilt. They are quickly mended.
