JULIAN HAWTHORNE.
THE POPULAR NOVELIST AND CONTRIBUTOR.
ULIAN HAWTHORNE has inherited much of his father’s literary ability. His recent celebrity has been largely due to his success in portraying to the readers of popular magazines facts of world-wide interest like the famine in India, but to the special power of vivid statement which belongs to the newspaper reporter, he joins the imaginative power which enables him to recognize the materials of romance and the gift of clear and graceful expression. He is the son of Nathaniel Hawthorne, and was born in Boston in 1846. He traveled abroad with his parents, returning and entering Harvard in 1863. His college life seems to have been devoted more to athletics than to serious learning. He took up the study of civil engineering and went to Dresden to carry it on, but the Franco-Prussian war breaking out while he was visiting at home, he found employment as an engineer under General George B. McClellan in the department of docks in New York. He began soon after to write stories and sketches for the magazines, and losing his position in 1872, he determined to devote himself to literature. He now went abroad, living for several years, first in England and then in Dresden, and again in England, where he remained until 1881, and then after a short stay in Ireland, returned to New York. A number of his stories were published while he was abroad. Of these the most important were “Bressant” and “Idolatry.” For two years he was connected with the London “Spectator,” and he contributed to the “Contemporary Review” a series of sketches called “Saxon Studies,” which were afterwards published in book form. The novel “Garth” followed and collections of stories and novelettes entitled “The Laughing Mill;” “Archibald Malmaison;” “Ellice Quentin;” “Prince Saroni’s Wife;” and the “Yellow Cap” fairy stories. These were all published abroad, but a part of them were afterward reprinted in America. Later he published “Sebastian Strome;” “Fortune’s Fool,” and in 1884 “Dust” and “Noble Blood.” On his return to America he edited his father’s posthumous romance “Dr. Grimshaw’s Secret,” and prepared the biography of his father and mother. Since that time he has contributed a large number of stories and sketches to magazines. His most recent work has been an expedition to India to write for American periodicals an account of the famine in that country. One of our extracts is taken from this account and will very adequately illustrate his power of telling things so that his readers can see them with his eyes. Mr. [♦]Hawthorne’s activity does not abate and his friends and admirers expect from him even better work than he has yet done.
[♦] “Hawthrone’s” replaced with “Hawthorne’s”
THE WAYSIDE AND THE WAR.[¹]
(FROM “NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE AND HIS WIFE.”)
[¹] Copyright, Ticknor & Co.
T was a hot day towards the close of June, 1860, when Hawthorne alighted from a train at Concord station, and drove up in the railway wagon to the Wayside. The fields looked brown, the trees were dusty, and the sun white and brilliant. At certain seasons in Concord the heat stagnates and simmers, until it seems as if nothing but a grasshopper could live. The water in the river is so warm that to bathe in it is merely to exchange one kind of heat for another. The very shadow of the trees is torrid; and I have known the thermometer to touch 112° in the shade. No breeze stirs throughout the long sultry day; and the feverish nights bring mosquitoes, but no relief. To come from the salt freshness of the Atlantic into this living oven is a startling change, especially when one has his memory full of cool, green England. Such was America’s first greeting to Hawthorne, on his return from a seven years’ absence; it was to this that he had looked forward so lovingly and so long. As he passed one little wooden house after another, with their white clap boards and their green blinds, perhaps he found his thoughts not quite so cloudless as the sky. It is dangerous to have a home; too much is required of it.
The Wayside, however, was not white, it was painted a dingy buff color. The larches and Norway pines, several hundred of which had been sent out from England, were planted along the paths, and were for the most part doing well. The well-remembered hillside, with its rude terraces, shadowed by apple-trees, and its summit green with pines, rose behind the house; and in front, on the other side of the highway, extended a broad meadow of seven acres, bounded by a brook, above which hung drooping willows. It was, upon the whole, as pleasant a place as any in the village, and much might be done to enhance its beauty. It had been occupied, during our absence, by a brother of Mrs. Hawthorne; and the house itself was in excellent order, and looked just the same as in our last memory of it. A good many alterations have been made since then; another story was added to the western wing, the tower was built up behind, and two other rooms were put on in the rear. These changes, together with some modifications about the place, such as opening up of paths, the cutting down of some trees, and the planting of others, were among the last things that engaged Hawthorne’s attention in this life.
FIRST MONTHS IN ENGLAND.[¹]
FROM “NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE AND HIS WIFE.”
[¹] Copyright, Ticknor & Co.
E are told, truly enough, that goodness does not always command good fortune in this world, that just hopes are often deferred until it is too late to enjoy their realization, that fame and honor only discover a man after he has ceased to value them; and a large and respectable portion of modern fiction is occupied in impressing these sober lessons upon us. It is pleasant, nevertheless, to believe that sometimes fate condescends not to be so unmitigable, and that a cloudy and gusty morning does occasionally brighten into a sunny and genial afternoon. Too long a course of apparently perverse and unreasonable accidents bewilders the mind, and the few and fleeting gleams of compensation seem a mockery. One source of the perennial charm of Goldsmith’s “Vicar of Wakefield” is, I think, that in it the dividing line between the good and the bad fortune is so distinctly drawn. Just when a man has done his utmost, and all seems lost, Providence steps in, brings aid from the most unexpected quarter, and kindles everything into brighter and ever brighter prosperity. The action and reaction are positive and complete, and we arise refreshed and comforted from the experience.
It was somewhat thus with Hawthorne, though the picture of his career is to be painted in a lower and more delicate tone than that of Goldsmith’s brilliant little canvas. Up to the time of publication of “The Scarlet Letter,” his external circumstances had certainly been growing more and more unpromising; though, on the other hand, his inner domestic life had been full of the most vital and tender satisfactions. But the date of his first popular success in literature also marks the commencement of a worldly prosperity which, though never by any means splendid (as we shall presently see), at any rate sufficed to allay the immediate anxiety about to-morrow’s bread-and-butter, from which he had not hitherto been free. The three American novels were written and published in rapid succession, and were reprinted in England, the first two being pirated; but for the last, “The Blithedale Romance,” two hundred pounds were obtained from Messrs. Chapman and Hall for advance sheets. There is every reason to believe that during the ensuing years other romances would have been written; and perhaps they would have been as good as, or better than, those that went before. But it is vain to speculate as to what might have been. What actually happened was that Hawthorne was appointed United States Consul to Liverpool, and for six years to come his literary exercises were confined to his consular despatches and to six or eight volumes of his English, French and Italian Journals. It was a long abstinence; possibly it was a beneficent one. The production of such books as “The Scarlet Letter” and “The House of Seven Gables” cannot go on indefinitely; though they seem to be easily written when they are written, they represent a great deal of the writer’s spiritual existence. At all events, it is better to write too little than too much.
THE HORRORS OF THE PLAGUE IN INDIA.
(FROM THE “COSMOPOLITAN MAGAZINE.”)
MET the local inspectors at the railway station leading a horse which they had kindly provided for me. We made a tour of half a dozen villages, alighting to investigate anything that appeared suspicious. The first and largest of the villages rambles along on either side of a street scarcely wider than an ordinary footpath. The houses were mud huts, whitewashed, or built of a kind of rubble, with the roofs of loose tiles common in India. Cocoa palms were numerous all over the region, and there were solid groves of them outside the settlements, coming down to the water’s edge. The inhabitants for the most part professed the Roman Catholic faith; crosses stood at every meeting of the ways, and priests in black gowns with wide-brimmed black hats stole past us occasionally. Of native inhabitants, however, we saw very few; those who were not in the graveyards had locked up their houses and fled the town. All the houses in which death or sickness had occurred had been already visited by the inspectors, emptied of their contents and disinfected. Those which were still occupied were kept under strict supervision. One which had been occupied the day before was now found to be shut. The inspectors called up a native and questioned him. From his replies it appeared that there had been symptoms of the disease. We dismounted and made an examination. Every door and window was fastened, but by forcing open a blind we were able to see the interior. It was empty of life and of most of the movable furniture; but the floor of dried mud was strewn with the dead carcasses of rats. Undoubtedly the plague had been here. The house was marked for destruction, and we proceeded.
Low, flat ledges of rock extended into the sea. A group of creatures in loin-cloths and red turbans were squatting or moving about between two or three heaps of burning timber. These were made of stout logs piled across one another to a height of about four feet. Half-way in the pile was placed a human body; it was not entirely covered by the wood, but a leg projected here, an arm there. The flames blazed up fiercely, their flickering red tongues contrasting with the pale blue of the calm sea beyond. The smoke arose thick and unctuous, and, fortunately, was carried seaward. One of the pyres had burnt down to white ashes, and nothing recognizable as human remained. The people whose bodies were here burned had died in the segregation huts the night before.
