for me. There is that in them suggestive of the flavor of rare old
wine. There are helpers and helpers, from some types of which we pray
evermore to be delivered. But there are the true, the born helpers,
whom those in need of effectual advice and furtherance should as
heartily pray to fall into the way of. These last do not always appear
duly classified, labeled and shelved, to be taken down in answer to
all trivial and promiscuous complaints, since, as has been noted, the
true helper always proceeds, not by system, but by instinct, which
through practice becomes in him unerring, and sufficient to guide
him without stumbling. Such a helper is Edward Eggleston. He is a
philanthropist who exists chiefly for the sake of doing good to his
fellows, and who grows fat in doing it. It is a destiny from which he
can not escape, and would not if he could.
One who observes much has often to deplore the absence from our modern
life and institutions of any sphere large enough for the exercise and
display of the full sum of the powers and faculties of any of our
recent or contemporary great men of the people. Compare one of our
most gifted men with the stage upon which he is compelled to act,
and the disproportion is startling. How much that is above price is
thus lost beyond recovery, and often how little we get from such
beyond the results of some special popular talent, perhaps itself not
representative of the strongest faculties of the person. I first got
acquainted with Dr. Eggleston through his novels “The Circuit Rider”
and “Roxy,” and being then in the novel-reading phase of intellectual
development, I of course believed them unrivaled in contemporary
literature, as they fairly are of their kind. My enthusiasm lasted till
I heard him preach from the pulpit, and straightway my admiration
for the writer was lost in astonishment at the preacher. Never had I
heard such sermons; and I still believe I never have. But upon closer
acquaintance, my astonishment at the preacher was swallowed up in
wonder at the conversational powers of my new friend. Never had I heard
such a talker--never have I heard such a one. But the best unveiling
was the last, when I discovered under all these multifarious aspects
the characteristics and attributes of a born philanthropist. Hitherto I
had known only the writer, the preacher, and the talker; now I began to
know the man.
In Paris, London, Venice, Florence, in the remote towns and villages
of England and the Continent, wherever it has been the fortune of Dr.
Eggleston to pitch his tent for a season, his domicile has everywhere
been known and frequented by those in need of spiritual or material
comfort; and few of such have ever had occasion to complain of failure
in getting their reasonable wants satisfied. In these dispensations
he has the warmest encouragement and support of Mrs. Eggleston and
their daughters, by whom these beautiful and humane traits are fully
shared. I once expressed my wonder as to how, amidst the severest
professional labors, he could stand so much of this extraneous work,
without detriment to his constitution. “What! do you call that
work?” was the characteristic answer. Fortunately a splendid physique
defeats the ill-effects that would seem inevitable. And indeed every
literary man should possess the nerves of a farmer and the physique
of a prize-fighter as a natural basis of success. Dr. Eggleston is a
good sailor and an expert climber, and with these accomplishments, and
a perpetually cheerful humor, he manages to keep his body in trim. He
can row you out to Joshua’s Rock, or to Caldwell, if that lies in your
way; or lead you with unerring precision through tangled labyrinths,
to visit the choice nooks and scenes of the neighborhood, such as the
lovely Paradise, the dark Inferno, and the mysterious Dark Brook.
There is something broadly and deeply elemental in Dr. Eggleston’s
joyous appreciation of nature, his touching love of little children,
and his insight into the springs of animal life. His home habits
are simple and beautiful, abounding in all the Christian graces,
courtesies, and cordialities which help to maintain the ideal
household. Everybody knows something of his personal appearance, if
not by sight, then by report--the great bulk of frame, the large
leonine head, now slightly grizzled, the deep, sharp, kindly eyes,
the movements deliberate but not slow; and more, perhaps, of his
conversation--precise, rapid, multifarious, swarming with ideas and
the suggestions of things which the rapidity of his utterance prevents
him from elaborating--original, opulent of forms, rich in quotation and
allusion. And then the laugh--vast, inspiriting, uplifting. But there
is such a thing as friendship becoming too friendly!
O. C. AURINGER.
[Nearly a third of Dr. Eggleston’s mature life has been covered by
the period since this article was written, and during this period his
most finished literary work has been produced. “The Faith Doctor,”
his last novel, was published in 1891; a few years later two school
readers for young children, “Stories of American Life and Adventure”
and “Stories of Great Americans for Little Americans” appeared. These
books the author estimates highly. In 1899 “The Beginners of a Nation”
was published, and in 1901 “The Transit of Civilization,”--the crowning
labor of his life and the outcome of historical researches which he
has been carrying on for twenty years. The year just past has been
devoted to the preparation of a new school history of the United
States. Dr. Eggleston’s health is unstable, and he may not continue
his writing, but he has in contemplation a volume relating to life in
the United States in the seventeenth century, and also a somewhat
autobiographical work, not so much concerning himself as phases of life
that he has seen.--EDITORS.]
EDWARD EVERETT HALE
EDWARD EVERETT HALE
ON ROXBURY HEIGHTS, BOSTON
The pulpit of Boston--what a fellowship of goodly names the phrase
recalls! Knotty old stub-twist Cotton Mather,
“With his wonderful inkhorn at his side”;
saintly Ellery Channing; courtly Edward Everett; soaring Emerson;
sledge-hammer Beecher, _père_; Parker, the New England Luther;
golden-mouthed Starr King; mystic, Oriental Weiss; Freeman
Clarke--steady old “Saint James”; Father Taylor, the Only; quaint,
erratic Bartol, the last of the Transcendentalists; impetuous Phillips
Brooks; and manly, practical Everett Hale. Can you measure the light
they have spread around--its range, its brilliancy? The Christian
pulpit of Boston has been a diadem of light to half the world. It
has been distinctively not an ecclesiastical, but a patriotic,
educational, and intellectual force. Yet, out of the whole cluster
of preacher-authors, one can strictly claim for literature only
our American Kingsley--Edward Everett Hale. It is not so much by
warrant of his studies in Spanish history that we class him among the
_literati_--although in some degree he has proved the successor of
Prescott in this field, and has lately prepared “The Story of Spain”
for Putnam’s Nations Series; but it is in virtue of his novels, his
help-stories for young folks, and his books of travel.
Mr. Hale’s home is in Roxbury (the “Highland” region), five-minutes’
ride, by steam car, from the heart of Boston. “Rocksbury,” as it was
spelled in the old documents, is a rocky and craggy place, as its
name indicates. If you are curious to know where the rocks came from,
just turn to Dr. Holmes’s “Dorchester Giant,” and read about that
plum-pudding, as big as the State House dome, which was demolished by
the giant’s wife and screaming boys:
“They flung it over to Roxbury hills,
They flung it over the plain,
And all over Milton and Dorchester too
Great lumps of pudding the giants threw;
They tumbled as thick as rain.”
Speaking of rocks, there is still to be seen, hardly a stone’s-throw
beyond Mr. Hale’s residence, a natural Cyclopean wall--sheer, somber,
Dantesque, overgrown with wilding shrubs, the rocks cramped and locked
together in the joints and interspaces by the contorted roots of huge
black and scarlet oaks, which, directly they emerge from the almost
perpendicular cliff, turn and shoot straight up toward the zenith. On
the summit of these rocks is the Garrison residence, presented to the
anti-slavery agitator by his admirers, and now the home of his son,
Mr. Francis J. Garrison. Other neighbors of Mr. Hale are William Lloyd
Garrison, Jr., and the venerable Charles K. Dillaway, President of
the Boston Latin School Association, and master of the school fifty
years ago, when young Hale was conjugating his τύπτω τύφω on its old
teetering settees. Mr. Dillaway bears his years well, and recently
celebrated his golden wedding. They have a well-combed and fruity
look, these old walled and terraced lawns and gardens of steep Roxbury
Height. In the Loring, the Hallowell, and the Auchmuty houses, and in
Shirley Hall, there yet remain traces of the slave-holding Puritan
aristocracy of two centuries ago. The Hale residence, by its old-time
hugeness and architectural style, seems as if it ought to be storied
in a double sense; but it really has no history other than that which
its present occupant is giving it. It is none too large for one who
has seen grow up in it a family of five sons and a daughter,--none too
large (if one may judge from the plethoric library) for its owner’s
ever-growing collection of books and manuscripts. The house, which is
of a cream color with salmon facings, is set back from the street some
fifty feet, affording a small front lawn, divided from the sidewalk
by a row of trees. The second-story front windows are beneath the
roof of the great Doric porch, and between the pillars of this porch
clamber the five-leaved woodbine and the broad-leaved aristolochia, or
Dutchman’s pipe. It is characteristic of Mr. Hale that he supports in
his Roxbury home an old, an almost decrepit man-servant, who has lived
with him for half a lifetime, and may be, for all I know, the original
of “My Double.” A picture of this “Old Retainer” was exhibited by Mr.
Hale’s daughter this year in the Paris Salon, over the title of “A New
England Winter.” I may, perhaps, be pardoned for mentioning, in this
connection, that Mrs. Hale is, on the mother’s side, a Beecher--the
niece of Henry Ward Beecher--and inherits the moral enthusiasm of that
religious family.
To return to Mr. Hale. As for his library, it may be said that, like
his own exterior, his thinking-shop is plain and little adorned. It
is his nacre shell lined with the fair pearl of his thought. The room
is just back of one of the large front drawing-rooms, and “gives”
upon a little _cul-de-sac_ of a side-street. It is a small room, and
is crammed with plain bookshelves and cases of drawers. In this room
most of Mr. Hale’s writing is done. He has a good collection of books
and maps relating to Spanish-American subjects. Among these is a
_fac-simile_ of Cortez’s autograph map of Lower California, made for
Mr. Hale by order of the Spanish Government from the original copy
preserved in the national archives.
Mr. Hale being, by his own frequent confessions, the most terribly
be-bored man in the universe, and having always had a hankering after
Sybaritic islands where map-peddlers, book agents, and pious beggars
might never mark his flight to do him wrong, it seemed providential,
in a twofold sense, that a wealthy friend in Roger Williams’s city,
the writer of a work on the labor question, should have carried out
the brilliant idea of building the hard-worked author a summer retreat
in the soft sea-air of Rhode Island. For the dreary romance of the
Newport region--its vast, warm, obliterating Gulf Stream fogs, and the
crusty lichens that riot and wax fat in the moisty strength thereof,
the warm tints of rock and sky, naiad caves and tangled wrack and
shell, and reveries by fire of flotage wood--you must peep into Colonel
Higginson’s “Oldport Days” or Mr. Hale’s “Christmas in Narragansett.”
The latter book is full of charming description and autobiographical
chit-chat. Manuntuck, where for twelve years the Hales have summered,
is a little hamlet to the south of Newport and far down on the opposite
side of the bay. It is six or eight miles from anywhere; it is almost
at the jumping-off point; if the organizer of charities gets there, he
will either have to walk or hire a team. The real southern limit of
New England, according to Mr. Hale, is formed by a certain “long comb
of little hills, of which the ends are gray stones separate from each
other.” On a high ridge of these hills is Colonel Ingham’s cottage.
In front of the house is the geological beach, about a mile and a
half wide. In good weather Montauk Point--the end of Long Island--is
visible, as is also Gay’s Head on Martha’s Vineyard. Just back of the
house is a lovely lake, and further back are other lakes bordered
by swamps filled with pink and white rhododendrons, and many plants
interesting to botanists. It is the region dwelt in of old by the
Narragansett Indians. The swamp where in 1675 the great battle was
fought is not far away. The Indians called the region Pettaquamscut.
Mr. Hale is not reserved about himself in his books. But in his
fictitious writings you must beware of taking him too literally. He
hates to wear his heart upon his sleeve. When you imagine that at
last he is standing before you _in propriâ personâ_--whish! he claps
on his magic cap, with a thimbleful of fern-seed sewed in it, and
fades from your sight or recognition. He has recently told us of his
habits of work, and how he sleeps and eats. What he says goes far
toward explaining how he can throw off such amazing quantities of
work. A man who eats five times a day, sleeps nine hours (including,
with tolerable regularity, an hour after dinner), and takes plenty
of out-door exercise, can perform as much as half a dozen dyspeptic,
half-starved night-moths. Mr. Hale, it seems, does his writing and
thinking in the lump, working his way regularly by a dead lift of
three hours a day--inclusive, often, of a half or a full hour’s bout
before breakfast--the early work based upon a _Frühstück_ of coffee
and biscuit. Another secret of his power to produce work is his habit
of getting others, especially young people, to work for him. For at
least thirteen years he has employed an amanuensis for a part of his
writings. If he wishes to edit, in compact shape, certain hearty and
relishing old narratives, he sets his young friends to reading for him,
and by their joint labors the work is done. His “Family Flight” series
of travels (which we are given to understand has been quite successful)
is the joint work of himself and his traveled sister. In short, he
takes all the help he can get, printed or personal, for whatever
writing he has on hand. Mr. Hale takes his exercise chiefly by walking,
or in the horse-cars, as business or professional duty calls him hither
and thither. As a hunger-producer the average suburban horse-car line
of Boston is scarcely excelled by a corduroy road or a mud avenue of
New Orleans; and the bracing sea-air of the Boston Highlands adds its
whet and stimulant.
When a young man of eighteen, Hale had the same fluent speech, the
same gift of telling, impromptu oratory, that makes him to-day so much
sought after as the spokesman of this cause and that. He likes to be
at a meeting of the Massachusetts Historical Society, or the Oriental
Society at Worcester, but finds it not profitable or possible regularly
to attend clubs or ministers’ meetings. Like the two earthenware pots
floating down the stream of Æsop’s fable, there are in Mr. Hale’s
nature two clashing master-traits--the social, humanitarian, and
democratic instinct, and the dignified reserve and exclusiveness of the
Edward Everett strain in his blood. He is a tremendous social magnet
turning now its attracting and now its repelling pole to the world;
to-day bringing comfort and hope to a score of drowning wretches, and
to-morrow barricading himself in his study and sending off to the
printer passionate and humorous invectives against the ineffable brood
of the world’s bores. It is naturally, therefore, a rather formidable
matter for a stranger to get access to the penetralia of the Roxbury
mansion.
A certain lady friend of Mr. Hale’s was much disturbed by the above
statement when it first appeared in _The Critic_. She affirms that
the Doctor is a very approachable man. The following quotation from a
letter of her niece (who, out of friendship for Mr. Hale, gives part
of her time to helping him in his work) certainly seems irrefutable
testimony in her favor:--“I was at Mr. Hale’s to-day from eleven to
one o’clock. He receives an immense number of letters on all sorts of
subjects, particularly charity undertakings, and we register them for
him (I with three other girls) in a blank-book, so that he can refer
to them at any time. He is very methodical; he is, indeed, a wonderful
man, and you can realize the vast amount of work he does, by sitting
an hour in the room with him and hearing ring after ring at the front
door. One man wants a place as coachman; then comes a woman wishing
a letter of introduction; and I could fill a page with the different
requests, all listened to with so much patience, and immediately
attended to.” Yet I know of a man who called five times in the vain
endeavor to see Mr. Hale and get him to marry him. At last, in his
despair, he went to a friend of the “Colonel’s,” a lady who bravely
volunteered to storm the castle in the prospective bridegroom’s behalf.
She effected her object by calling with the couple at six o’clock in
the morning, yet felt sure she got a masterly beshrewing for her pains!
Mr. Hale’s plain dressing is said to be something of a grievance
to certain well-meaning members of his congregation, but it is an
indispensable part of his personality, and is, I doubt not, adopted
for moral example as much as from inherent dislike of show and sham.
I have a picture in my mind now of Mr. Hale as I saw him crossing the
Harvard College yard, one Commencement Day, in a by-no-means glossy
suit of black, and wearing the inevitable soft slouch hat. A work-worn,
weary, and stooping figure it was, the body slightly bent, as if from
supporting such a weight of head. There are certain photographs of Hale
in which I see the powerful profile of Huntington, the builder of the
Central Pacific Railroad.
Mr. Hale believes in the American people most heartily, and holds
them to have been always in advance of their political leaders. He
is full of plans for social betterments and the discomfiture of the
devil’s regiments of the line. In fact he has too much of this kind
of flax on his distaff for his own good. One of his hobbies being
cheap and good literature for the people, he is thoroughly in sympathy
with the Chautauqua system of popular instruction. He delivered an
address at the Framingham meeting not very long ago, and is one of the
Counselors of the Literary and Scientific Circle. His idea of popular
instruction is in some respects fully realized in this great Chautauqua
organization, with its grove and Hall of Philosophy, its Assembly,
its annual reunions, and central and local reading-circles affording
to each of its thousands of readers the college-student’s general
outlook upon the world. Speaking of Mr. Hale’s democratic sympathies,
it is worthy of record here that when Walt Whitman published his first
quarto, and the press in general was howling with derision over that
remarkable trumpet-blast, Edward Everett Hale discovered the stamp
of genius and manly power in it, and reviewed it favorably in _The
North American Review_. (It must be remembered that the first quarto
of Whitman did not include the poems on sex. These were of later
production.) It is characteristic of him that he has said that although
he has not seen that notice since its appearance in the _Review_ in
1856, he thinks he would nevertheless stand by every word of it to-day.
W. S. KENNEDY.
[Within a year or two Dr. Hale has resigned his duties of pastor to
Prof. Edward Cummings of Harvard University, and is free to enjoy the
life of busy leisure which he has so richly earned.--EDITORS.]
JOEL CHANDLER HARRIS (UNCLE REMUS)
JOEL CHANDLER HARRIS (UNCLE REMUS)
AT ATLANTA
Joel Chandler Harris is at home in a neat cottage of the familiar
Southern type, which nestles near the bosom of a grove of sweet gum
and pine trees in the little village of West Point, about three miles
from the heart of the “Southern Chicago,” as Georgians delight to call
Atlanta. In the grove a mocking-bird family sings. Around the house are
a few acres of ground, which are carefully cultivated. In one corner
graze a group of beautiful Minerva-eyed Jerseys. At one side of the
house hives of bees are placed near a flower garden sloping down to the
street, which passes in front of the house several rods distant. At the
foot of the road is a bubbling mineral spring, whose sparkling water
supplies the needs of the household. A superb English mastiff eyes with
dignified glance the casual visitor whose coming is apt to be announced
by the bark of two of the finest dogs in the country, one a bulldog,
the other a white English bull-terrier. Mr. Harris’s neighbors are
few, but one who is his closest friend calls for mention. It is Mr.
Evan P. Howell, whose manor is across the way. He is a member of a
distinguished Georgia family, whose name is known at the North through
Howell Cobb, a former Secretary of the Treasury. Mr. Howell himself has
become known to the general public as having declined the Manchester
Consulate to retain his present position as chief editor and owner of
the Atlanta _Constitution_, in whose pages, by Mr. Howell’s persuasion,
Uncle Remus made his first appearance. The interior of the cottage is
simple and unassuming. Bric-à-brac and trumpery “articles of bigotry
and virtue” are absent. The places they generally occupy are taken up
with wide windows and generous hearths. Of literary litter there is
none. There are few books, but they have been read and re-read, and
they are the best of books. The house is not a library, a museum, nor
an art-gallery, but it is evidently a home in which children take the
place of inanimate objects of devotion.