“I was a little taken in,” he said, with a boyish laugh, after the messenger, stunned dumb by that kindly reception of Doctor Hale’s (which is denied to no one), had departed staggering; “I thought they were to be short stories, and they turned out to be sixty-thousand-word books.”
Doctor Hale’s study, which he calls his office, was once used as the school-room for day scholars, and had a piazza, on one side of it. This Mr. Hale has boarded up and uses the space—three feet wide—for his thousands of pamphlets. I stepped in there while the messenger from the society with the long name was occupying our host’s attention, and, for all the world, it seemed like a touch from Dickens or a section from the Athenæum. That pamphlet alcove, narrow, musty, yet busy, a composite of the stage-coach days and our electric era, gave me a graver suspicion of Doctor Hale’s cosmopolitan interests than any word he had uttered or anything I had hitherto seen in the temple.
When I came back Doctor Hale was again stretched upon the lounge. He began almost fiercely upon his favorite topic, and I can do no better than to give his own words:
“I have written twenty-five books, but I’m not an author; I’m a parish minister. I don’t care a snap for the difference between Balzac and Daudet. That isn’t important in life. I do care about the difference between the classes of men who migrate to this country of mine.”
Here I interrupted him:
“Is it better to do twenty things than one?”
“Not best for every one; but for a man who writes forty sermons a year, it is better not to get into one rut. To write those sermons well he must come 298 into touch with forty things or forty men. As a man of letters, I say the same thing. An author must be an all-around man and take a many-sided view of life. My friends think it harms me. I say it does not.”
Although I was burning to ask a vital and perhaps an impertinent question—for as he was so kind to me I wished not to be intrusive—I waited while he chatted about his connection with Harvard.
It is one of Doctor Hale’s happiest memories that he was an overseer of Harvard University when the modern plan was introduced of having more than one person to take charge of the chapel services. The new custom was initiated by appointing the clerical members of the overseers and faculty to take the chapel in turn. Doctor Hale thinks there were nine of them. So he took a ninth part. That system in turn gave way to the present system, by which five or six men are appointed annually. Each in turn is given a room in college, so as to enter into intimate pastoral relationship with the boys. This system has proved wonderfully successful. In the inauguration of each of its phases Doctor Hale was senior in the board, and heavily influential in the working of the experiment. It is not to be wondered at, that of the experiences of his long life he values making the acquaintance of a “couple of thousand of as fine young men as the day can produce.”
This is only another illustration of Doctor Hale’s wide sweep and influence.