When General Ward drove the British out of Roxbury in the reign of
George the Third, the valuation of the town was about sixty
thousand dollars. I do not know at what high figure the historic
city that guards the ashes of John Eliot is held now, but I do
know that, in this age of rapacious corporations and untrustworthy
trusts, genius outranks gold, and that Roxbury receives no small
increment of her value from the fact that Edward E. Hale is one of
her most distinguished citizens. To one fond of perceiving the
innate or accidental fitness of things, it is, perhaps, more than a
coincidence that Doctor Hale lives on Highland Street, and that
his house reminds one, with its massive front and Ionic columns, of a
Greek temple.
This large house was built, about sixty years ago, by Mr. Bradford,
for his brother-in-law, Reverend Mr. Kent, and was used for a young
ladies' boarding-school. Even now, on some of the upper panes, girls'
names and girlish sentiments are to be read. When Doctor Hale took the
house, some twenty years ago, he introduced a carpenter to make what
are called "modern improvements."
"Mr. Hale," said the carpenter, after a thorough inspection, "you are
fortunate in your bargain. _This house was built on honor._" Mr. Hale
has had a great mind to make this reply the motto over his doorway.
When Doctor Hale once described his house to an eminent editor of one
of our leading magazines, he said: "You cannot mistake it; it is a
Greek temple just above Eliot Square."
The editor, with the gentle blush that frisky memory will bring to the
cheeks of the staidest, quickly answered: "Yes, I have often
worshipped there."
This is not a biographical paper. The readers of the "Atlantic" will
remember Doctor Hale's description of his father, the first of New
England's great railroad pioneers. Every one knows that our Mr. Hale
was named after his uncle, the great Edward Everett; but perhaps it is
not so generally known that Mrs. Hale is the granddaughter of Lyman
Beecher, and the niece of Mrs. Stowe. What may not be expected of
Doctor Hale's boys, with Beecher, Hale, and Everett blood in their
veins? There is no better selection, and the problem is an interesting
one.
But, to many of us, the most interesting of Doctor Hale's connections
is his distant relation, Helen Kellar. The first time that wonderful,
blind, deaf-mute child, then not eight years old, came to his home,
there happened to be an Egyptian statuette of the god Terminus outside
the piazza steps. The child touched it, and, with her marvellous
discernment, starting back, said in her own way: "Oh, the ugly old
man!"
Helen was then taken to the beautiful alto-relievo of Bernini,
representing the infants Christ and John playing together. It is a
little thing, and slowly the child ran her eye-fingers over the chubby
babes. Suddenly her sightless face lighted with the rarest smile. Her
soul had understood the significance of the holy group by an intuition
that science cannot gauge, and she bent over and kissed the sacred
children.
After all, every home exhibits a clinging pananthropoism, if one may
be permitted to coin the word. Books and pictures and statuary are the
man, just as much as his style. They are his most subtile expression.
They are his unlying interpreters. As you walk into Doctor Hale's
parlor, resting upon the floor, there confronts you a realistic
colored photograph of the compelling Matterhorn. That picture, with
its glacier, its precipices, and its summit, conquered only by
cooeperative achievement, is a fit emblem of a family climbing from
height to height.
We left the table, and Lyman Beecher's splendid portrait, that formed
a strong background for Doctor Hale's impressive head, and stopped for
a moment in the boys' study, opposite the parlor. There is the
portrait of Edward Everett, by Stuart Newton: of Alexander Everett, by
Alexander, and of Mrs. Hale, by Ransom, and a striking picture of the
doctor himself. How many of these sedate portraits have been shocked
by shuttlecock and bumped by football at the hands of Doctor Hale's
rollicking boys, only one of whom, Robert, of rising literary
reputation, is left with his father in the home!
[Illustration: RESIDENCE OF EDWARD EVERETT HALE.]
Across the narrow back hall one takes a quick glimpse of the four
phases of the moon on the stairway, then of hundreds of volumes
lining the walls, billows of books, breaking upon one
everywhere--five thousand of them.
"That is Thomas Arnold's portrait--father of Matthew," said Doctor
Hale, pointing from his sofa, and then settling back into
reminiscences:--"Longfellow over there, and Dean Stanley. I liked
Stanley, and I think Stanley liked me. We were on very cordial terms.
He sat at the desk where you are, and I gave him Gladstone's article
on America, published that fall. There was a carriage at the door. I
was to show him some historical places. It was October, and cold. I
told the boys to bring some rugs. They came to the carriage with a lot
of Arab shawls. Stanley had just come from the desert, and with
marvellous dexterity he wound a shawl about him so that he looked like
an Arab sheik. I got a little frightened at the oriental look of it,
and said: 'Oh, we shall be in all the newspapers.' With reluctance he
consented to throw a cape over his shoulders instead. But I always
regretted that I did not allow him to go through the streets as an
Arab dean. When I bade him good-by that night, he said, with his
wonted thoughtfulness, 'Let me pay for this carriage; you would never
have had it if it hadn't been for me.'
"'No,' said I, 'when I go to Westminster you shall pay for me. When
you are in Boston, I shall pay for you.'
"When we got out of the carriage the hackman took off his hat and
said: 'If the carriage were mine, you shouldn't pay a cent. Doctor
Stanley is a good and great man, and I am proud to have carried him.'
That's pretty good for a Boston hackman."
As my eyes roamed over the mass of portfolios stacked in an orderly
manner in the case at the foot of his lounge, my imagination conjured
many an interview that Mr. Hale must have had with immortals,
contemporaries, and friends of the man before me.
And what invaluable letters must those portfolios contain! Doctor Hale
evidently caught my curiosity and my glance.
"You would like to see some autographs?" he generously asked.
"Yes, indeed, but I am afraid there is not time now. Tell me about
some of your most interesting ones."
Then it proved that Doctor Hale had advantages in the line of
presidential autographs, because of his eminent and political
ancestry. His collection in this respect is complete, and in this way,
he says, he began it.
"I was sitting one evening tearing up old papers, after my father's
death, and among them noticed a letter on the character of Washington.
Not considering it worth keeping, I took it to tear it up, when out
dropped a yellow paper, ancient and faded. It proved to be a letter of
George Washington himself, which had been enclosed in the other letter
by my father, evidently to illustrate a point in character which the
writer had raised. Then and there I resolved to make a collection of
presidential autographs. I don't dare to tell you how many family
commissions I hold in my portfolio. To me the collection is almost the
history of my family. I have been tempted to publish a couple of
volumes of national history of the nineteenth century, to be taken
bodily from my own portfolio of autographs. It might be rather
interesting."
"Changing the subject, when did you first meet Emerson?"
"Let me see, I first heard Emerson when I was eleven years old. He was
delivering his lecture on Mohammed. I first spoke to him in Harvard
College chapel, when a mutual acquaintance had just taken the highest
honors. Emerson said of him, with his keenest look:
"'I didn't know he was so fine a fellow. Now, if some misfortune could
only happen to him; if he could be turned out of college, or could be
unpopular in his class, or his father could fail in business, all
would be well with him.'
"This seemed at the time cynical, but when I read of the hardships of
Emerson's early life, and heard of the unhappy end of the man of
college honors, I understood it and was astounded at his penetration.
"I have a letter of Emerson's (and you can take a copy of it if you
like) which cleared up an anecdote that was told of him at the time.
It was said that on one of his ocean trips he committed 'Alaric' or
some other long poem to memory, in order to while away a few otherwise
unprofitable days. It proved to be 'Lycidas,' and I never heard of any
one else who has committed 'Lycidas' to memory on an ocean trip for
pastime. Who else but Emerson would have thought of it?"
CONCORD, _January 26_.
MY DEAR HALE:--I know by much experience of my own what it is to
have Everett on the brain, and you, who have it in the blood, may
easily believe that it could only be "Alaric" that I was crooning
at sea. But it was not that, but Milton's "Lycidas," which I told
of in a lecture on Memory, to which I must think you refer; though
nothing of it was ever printed or reported that I know, and it
must have been read (_i.e._, the lecture) when you were very
young. I ought to be proud that the anecdote could reach you, but
the mystery of the memory interested me much.
I wrote you yesterday about Stirling's pamphlet, which I hope will
come speedily to you. I do not recall the title, but it was,
perhaps, "Remarks on Mr. Huxley's Protoplasm."
Yours,
R. W. EMERSON.
"Here's another story of Emerson," continued my host, with a twinkle,
"that reminds me of the story of the man who said he couldn't make a
speech like Henry Clay, but he had once held the statesman's hat when
Clay was speaking. When Mr. Emerson delivered his second Phi Beta
address, the desk had been removed from the pulpit of the church, so
that he had at the beginning to kneel uncomfortably to read his
manuscript. I went back in the vestry and found the desk, and, in the
first pause in Emerson's address, placed it before him. The audience
of course applauded. When the oration was over, Lowell, who presided,
congratulated Mr. Emerson on his success, and Emerson's first words
were, 'Where's that saint, Edward Hale?'"
[Illustration: SITTING-ROOM.]
"Have you any special reminiscence of Hawthorne?"
"Hardly any at all. Personally, Hawthorne was very reticent in
society. My own recollections of him, when I first saw him, were
that he hardly spoke a word to anybody. This little scrap of
Hawthorne's, which you may use, if you care to, was sent to the
'Boston Miscellany,' a magazine that my brother edited, and to
which all Young America at that time contributed. Lowell published
his first stories and articles in the 'Miscellany,' after those in
'Harvardiana.'
"But with Lowell my relations were singularly intimate. He was also
intimate with my brother Nathan. Our room in college was convenient
for him, as his was at a distance from recitations. He was a class in
advance of me. Those were the days when we borrowed Emerson's volume
of Tennyson's first poems, and copied the poems in our scrap-books.
Lowell was deep in the old dramatists then, and read papers on them in
the Alpha Delta, which was the literary club to which we both
belonged. The intimacy which was then begun lasted through our lives.
He edited 'The Atlantic' when I published my first stories there.
[Illustration: HIGHLAND STREET, WITH THE HALE PLACE ON THE RIGHT.]
"By the way, it is reported that Ruskin will be made poet laureate! My
candidate, however, is Jean Ingelow. The Queen ought to have named a
woman. Talking on the subject, I have seen with these eyes the
original correspondence with which Prince Albert offered the
laureateship to Samuel Rogers. Rogers was greatly pleased, but after
consideration declined, because he was so old. The Prince then wrote
to Rogers to ask him to name the laureate. Rogers named Tennyson. Then
came a letter from the prime minister, in which he said: 'We are not
acquainted with the works of this gentleman, and will you be good
enough to let me know whether he has ever written anything which would
make it improper for a woman to name him for this post?'"
Mr. Hale stopped and laughed heartily. "Just think of that!" he added,
with glee.
After some skirmishing about the bush--for the office of
"interlocutor" is not very familiar to me--I asked Doctor Hale:
"What do you consider the best thing you ever did?" He did not seem
annoyed or perplexed by the question. He thrust his arms behind his
head, extended himself the full length of the lounge, and regarded me
with his deep-set eyes. Doctor Hale's face wrinkles in a curious way
around his eyes. These are the features of his face. They are fine,
deep, sad, careless of human opinion--except it has to be conciliated
for a high purpose--and alert as a boy's, ready for a truth or for a
friend. I believe that a divine physiognomist would read Doctor Hale's
career in his gray eyes and their high ramparts. "Why, the young man's
head has an entirely different shape," said the elder Darwin of his
son Charles, on the young man's return from his voyage in the
"Beagle." It struck me oddly that in a like manner Doctor Hale's eyes
had been a mirror of his life.
"I think," began Doctor Hale thoughtfully, "that 'In His Name,' as a
bit of literary work, is to be regarded as the best book I ever wrote.
The story of 'The Man Without a Country' has circulated in much larger
numbers. It was forged in the fire, and I think its great popularity
is due to the subject."
"And what is your best literary work at present?"
After some hesitation Doctor Hale answered:
"I think my sermons are the best."
This serious answer caused no little astonishment; for one naturally
thinks of Doctor Hale as an author rather than as a hard-working
minister.
[Illustration: DOCTOR HALE IN HIS STUDY.]
"I attach a great deal of importance to the weekly printing and
circulating of sermons," he continued. "It is more than fifteen years
since I began printing them for our people. It keeps a man at his best
work. It does away with slipshod carelessness. I should advise every
minister to print his sermons. The fact of it is," he continued, with
increasing vivacity, "five-sixths of my work in this office is parish
work. I am a person who has never lost sight of my profession. People
complain that my books always carry a moral. I wouldn't write if they
didn't."
"How did you come to write--as an author, I mean?"
"Until 1861 I was only known in Boston as an energetic minister of an
active church. I didn't want anything else. I believe now, as then,
that if anything is going to be done, it is to be done through that
agency. Then the war came along. I was in the Massachusetts Rifle
Corps, and," he said this with a pardonable twinkle of pride, "I have
drilled a major-general. Then I was on the Sanitary Commission. To
save the country--that brought me into public life, and I have never
got back into simple parish life again. Then came 'The Man Without a
Country.' In 1871 'Ten Times One is Ten' was published. From that book
came a peculiarity of my life. It brought me into close contact with
all parts of the world. From it sprang the 'Lend a Hand' and the
'King's Daughters,' and a dozen such working societies, and indirectly
the Epworth League and the Christian Endeavor. They copied the idea,
with many of my mottoes."
The speaker stopped while the writer pondered how many a girl, from
East to West and North to South, carried upon her throat a plain
silver cross tied with a purple ribbon, her proudest ornament. It is
an inspiring picture and comes quickly to call. To make an era in
Christian self-surrender, to girdle the world with unselfish crosses,
to hammer high purposes into young souls, that is a better life than
to have written the best novel of the decade.
"Yes," said Doctor Hale, with the authority of his threescore years
and eleven, "the parish is at the basis of my life, and takes
five-sixths of my time. All this would have been impossible without
it."
In these days, when some of our eminent critics consider a moral
purpose detrimental to the literary value of a story, it is refreshing
to learn from the mouth of one of our most popular authors that his
success is due entirely to the inspiration of a Christian ideal. It
takes the modern school of critics to pat the Lord Jesus Christ upon
the back. Charles Kingsley and Doctor Hale will not be snuffed out by
them because they have chosen to Christianize their literary work.
Edward E. Hale regards the ministry as the most practical business in
the world. The theory that the minister spends his mornings reading
Hebrew, and his afternoons praying with dying old women, is exploded
in his career. He knocks about in the most active of city life. It
came out that the day before I called he went up to the State House to
argue in favor of an honest bill of some kind. He then signed the
lease of the "Noonday Rest," a club where working girls are to get
good food. He made himself responsible for fifteen hundred dollars a
year because the poor girls had to be cared for, and he "knew it would
come back to him all right." Then the duties of Vice-President of the
Industrial Aid called for his attention. "I am the man of business,"
he said, with flashing eyes. Of such are the charities of his life.
Even while the writer was sitting in the chair that Dean Stanley
occupied, and revolving the problem whether Doctor Hale summoned from
some other planet the time in which to write his sermons, we were
interrupted by a messenger from the Society for Prevention of Cruelty
to Animals, who came for about fifty pounds of stories which Doctor
Hale had read in order to determine the four winners of prizes.
"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 Athenaeum. 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 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.
[Illustration: THE LIBRARY.]
"Doctor Hale, you yourself have hinted at it, namely, that the worst
thing your friends say about you is, that you have too many irons in
the fire. Do you think that thereby you have missed an opportunity in
life?"
"I am glad you asked that question," he reassured me with his most
winning smile. "I don't think I have," he said slowly. "I might have
written better verses; by the way"--I thought he was changing the
subject--"I am just editing a collection of my verses for Roberts
Brothers, to be called 'For Fifty Years.' On the title-page this
quotation from the 'Ingham Papers' will be printed as a motto for the
poems. Read it aloud to me."
Judge how I was moved as I read the following words to him:
"Poor Ingham was painfully conscious that he had no peculiar genius
for one duty rather than another. If it were his duty to write verses,
he wrote verses; to lay telegraph, he laid telegraph; to fight
slavers, he fought slavers; to preach sermons, he preached sermons.
And he did one of these things with just as much alacrity as the
other; the moral purpose entirely controlling such mental aptness or
physical habits as he could bring to bear."
As my voice died away among the volumes, it flashed across me that in
these words could be found Doctor Hale's mental and spiritual
biography.
"Is this your epitaph?" I asked, very soberly.
"I am willing to stand by this as my epitaph," he repeated after me,
in his gravest tones.
Now this scene was not an interview, but a revelation, and I felt that
it "was good to be there." But, as an engagement called us to go out
together, we arose.
"I wish you could have seen more of my parish work," he said, as we
walked in the rain. He recurred to his favorite topic eagerly. "For
that is my real life."
[Illustration: THE DINING-ROOM.]
"Sermons?" The word started him off.
"I have no patience with the idea that it takes six days of grinding
to write a sermon. What nonsense! A sermon consists of about two
thousand five hundred words. I take a cup of coffee before breakfast
and write about six pages--that is, six hundred and fifty words. In
the morning I dictate to my amanuensis one thousand five hundred
words. I am intensely interested in the subject, and this takes only a
quarter of an hour. In the afternoon I look it over and add five or
six hundred words, and the sermon is done. In all, I haven't put my
hand for over two hours to paper."
Although I have written a sermon or two myself, and had a different
experience, I did not argue the point. I have a faint suspicion that
it would take most people fifty years of experience to arrive at such
a wonderful facility.
Power? Where did Doctor Hale get the strength to carry through his
hundred duties?--editing--writing--aiding public work and public and
private charities--correspondence--for he is the busiest man in
Boston, and his business increases upon him week by week in an
appalling ratio.
"How on earth do you do it all? Where do you get the power? What is
it?"
"The simple truth is," and I quote his words exactly, "that any child
of God, who in any adequate way believes that he can partake of the
divine nature, knows that he has strength enough for any business
which looks the right way; that is, which helps to bring God's kingdom
into the world. Well, if you are working with Aladdin's lamp, or with
Monte Cristo's treasures, you are not apt to think you will fail. Far
less will you think you will fail if you are working with the
omnipotence of the Lord God behind you. When people talk to me,
therefore, about optimism or good spirits or expecting success, if I
know them well enough I say that I am promised infinite power to work
with, and that whenever I have trusted it fairly and squarely, I have
found that the promise was true."
He stopped, and under the shelter of a high steeple we separated: and
the parish priest, the author, the eager citizen, the helper of poor
girls and struggling young men, the man of power, the Christian
cosmopolitan, strode down the street, and was lost in the mist.
I could not help calling to mind a pretty story told of him while he
was travelling in the West. As the train stopped at some forsaken
hamlet in California, twenty girls were seen upon the platform. On
hearing that Edward E. Hale was to pass through, they had begged off
from school in order to greet him. They were "King's Daughters," and
Doctor Hale was their inspiration and their chief. Each girl was
loaded with a different flower, with which she garlanded her hero.
Such a tender and reverential free-masonry as this, founded by
himself, greets him daily through the mail, and overwhelms him when he
travels from his own home.
As the author of "The Man Without a Country," "In His Name," and "Ten
Times One is Ten," he sways our imagination and our hearts. But let
him also be known as a man content to be a parish minister, and as one
who never fails to lend a hand when the chance is given to him.
[Illustration: E. E. HALE IN 1847. FROM A PAINTING BY RICHARD HINSDALE.]