LITERARY NOTICES.
Gala Days. By Gail Hamilton, Author of 'Country Living and Country Thinking.' Ticknor & Fields, Boston. For sale by D. Appleton & Co., New York.
Who will not welcome another book from the pen of Gail Hamilton, nor name a 'gala day' indeed the one devoted to a perusal of these pleasant pages? As Americans, we are very proud of Gail Hamilton. We regard her books as blessings to the community. We know of no familiar essays comparable to hers; we prefer them greatly to those of Elia. Everything she touches assumes a sudden interest, no matter how trivial in itself it may be. She pours sunshine over the pettiest details of every-day life. We have known and felt all she tells us, lived it as life, and instantaneously recognize it as truth; but who before has ever recorded it for us—nay, who could do it for us, save this gifted woman, who accepts all with a spirit so brave and true? How acute her analysis of character! Every house has its own Halicarnassus. He is a typal man, as is shown in the fact that husbands, brothers, sons, and lovers are constantly called 'Halicarnassus' by the ladies most closely associated with them. Halicarnassus—tantalizing and antagonistic, slow to work and ready to jeer, the plague and pest of the home hearth, but at the same time its pride and joy, true and helpful in all real emergencies, though full of irritating taunts and desperate indolence. Such books keep our spirits up in these days of national calamity and domestic losses. Their charm is indescribable. Their style is sharp and brusque, but telling of wide culture; keen, but tender; clear as mountain brook, but varied and full as a river. Gail Hamilton will write of the daily trifles of which life is made, then boldly grapple with the highest truths; she mounts from the hut to the skies, and pours the light of heaven on all she touches by the way. Humor and pathos, fun and earnestness, fiery indignation and loving charity, detailed truths and bold imaginations meet in her singularly rich, graphic, natural, and original pages. We have often heard fault found with them by the artificial, as fault is always found with things fresh and natural; but for ourselves we would not willingly lose a single line she has ever written. No affectation, no cant, no sickly feeling, no weakness, no inflation, no appealing for petty sympathy, no writing for the sake of seeming fine, does she ever indulge in. She coins words at will, for she writes from her heart and is no purist; but we feel them to be appropriate, and requisite to express the shade of thought in question: we may laugh at them at first, but so natural and naive are they that we soon find them stealing into our own vocabulary.
The beneficial effect of such writings upon American women cannot be overestimated. They act as invigorating tonics, courses of beefsteak and iron upon the somewhat too fragile loveliness, the exacting and fastidious fine-ladyism, the morbid helplessness, far too prevalent among them. Their ideal of womanhood has been wrong, narrow and contracted, wanting in strength, breadth, and charity. Miss Muloch and Gail Hamilton, while cherishing the sanctity of womanhood, are giving broader views, higher aims, truer delicacy, and greater self-reliance to their plastic sex. Their lessons and examples are bracing as the sea breeze, and soothing as air fresh from the piny mountain.
Gail Hamilton dares to call things by their right names; humbugs die and shams perish as her clear, deep eyes gaze upon them. She has the bravery of virtue, and battles courageously with wrong, selfishness, and weakness, though we always feel it is a woman's arm that strikes the blow, and the Halicarnassuses of earth are ready to kneel to receive it. But that she has explicitly forbidden all intrusion into her privacy, we would say more about her. Meantime we frankly offer her our sympathy and humble admiration, our true and leal homage, our grateful appreciation of her strong, womanly, truthful, pure, and generous nature. Move on in peace, fair iconoclast of false idols, stripper of tinsel shrines, bringer of pleasant hours to the quiet home-hearth, vigorous painter of home tasks and duties; and may Halicarnassus feed upon your pungent and salty wit, drink the wine of your valiant and patriotic heart, and bask in the sunshine of your loyal and loving soul forever and ever!
Our Old Home: A Series of English Sketches. By Nathaniel Hawthorne. Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1863. For sale by D. Appleton & Co., New York.
Messrs. Ticknor & Fields are daily doing their countrymen service by publishing good books, and thus increasing the means for promoting general and solid culture. To them as well as to the gifted author are due our thanks for this agreeable volume of truthful and instructive sketches. It is, in fact, the portfolio of a genuine artist. He tells us that the picture to have been evolved from a combination of these faithful outlines is now never to be completed. This is certainly to be regretted so far as artistic enjoyment is concerned; but, in regard to exact portrayal of subject matter, sketches are ofttimes more valuable, because more precise, than the finished work as seen through the haze of the artist's imagination, wrought upon by the softening influences of time, distance, and the necessary requirements of beauty in every such creation.
Americans, until recently, have been prone either to sneer indiscriminately at everything foreign, or to undervalue their own country and advantages, and find nothing tolerable which was not the growth of the eastern shore of the Atlantic. These tendencies are now, we think, giving place to a calmer impartiality, a broader and more enlightened spirit of inquiry. Patriotism is no longer a mere matter of scoff among politicians, self-sacrifice the object of newspaper sneers, our country a spread-eagle figure for a Fourth-of-July oration. American men and women now know that in a good cause they can cheerfully resign fortune, and even bravely send forth to the battle field, or to the still more fatal hospital, the dearest members of their household; and they hence feel lifted up above petty scoffs and political or commercial jealousies. Having proven their continued manhood and womanhood, they can look their brother men of whatever nation in the face, quietly yielding precedence where deserved, and as quietly claiming their own dues. The spirit of Hawthorne's book is strictly in accordance with this growing feeling. Fanatics, either for or against England and the English, may find too much praise or too much blame; but the impartial reader cannot fail to be impressed by the author's fairness, even by the keen-sighted appreciation of either virtues or faults resulting from a sincere and long-seated affection.
The chapter on "Outside Glimpses of English Poverty" is written as if with the heart's blood of the writer; and we may all of us ponder it well, lest some day its graphic but melancholy outlines may only too vividly delineate the condition of our own poor. Let it teach every man of us to strive without ceasing to bridge the wide chasm almost necessarily dividing rich and poor. Let us untiringly pour into that chasm love, pity, help, forbearance, our best of constructive thinking, but last as well as first, love—Christian love—until vice and despair no longer find excuse in circumstance.