Chapter III: Part 3

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.

It is natural that Mr. Harris’s home should be simple, and call for little elaborate description. He was born and brought up among simple, sincere people, whose wants were few, whose tastes were easily satisfied, whose lives were natural and untainted by any such influences as make for cerebral hyperæmia, or other neurasthenic complaints incidental, as Dr. Hammond says, to modern city life. The village of Eatonton, in Middle Georgia, was Mr. Harris’s birth-place. Since Mr. Henry Watterson, in his book on Southern humor, and other writers, have made Mr. Harris an older man than he really is, it is well to state, as “official,” that he was born on the 9th of December, 1848. Eatonton is a small town now, but it was smaller then. It was surrounded by plantations, and on one of these Mr. Harris spent his earliest years as other Southern children do. At six he began to read. Among the first of his literary acquaintances was the delightful “Vicar of Wakefield.” The boy’s schooling was such as reading the best of the authors of the periods of Queen Anne and the Georges, and a few terms at the Eatonton Academy, could give. He read his text-books, but was bitterly opposed to getting them by heart. When he was about twelve years old an incident occurred which shaped his whole life. The Eatonton postmaster kept a sort of general store--the “country store” of New England,--and its frequenters were at liberty to read the copies of the Milledgeville and other rural papers which were taken by subscribers. In one of these, _The Countryman_, young Harris found that it was edited by a Mr. Turner, whose acquaintance he had made not very long before, and he thrilled with the thought that he knew a real editor. Finding that a boy was wanted he wrote for the place, secured it, and soon learned all that was to be gathered in so small an office. In addition to this acquirement of knowledge, by the permission of Mr. Turner, he had access to a library of three thousand volumes, which he read under the judicious guidance of their owner. Among these books he lived for several years in the very heart of the agricultural region, and he pondered over his reading to the music of the clicking types, with the scamper of the cat-squirrels over the roof and the patter of the acorns dropped by the jay-birds. For amusement he hunted rabbits with a pack of half-bred harriers, or listened to the tales of the plantation Negro, who was there to be found in primitive perfection of type. It was on the Turner plantation that the original Uncle Remus told his stories to the little boy. So it was that he absorbed the wonderfully complete stores of knowledge of the Negro which have since given him fame. He heard the Negro’s stories and enjoyed them, observed his characteristics and appreciated them. Time went on. The printer boy set type, read books, hunted rabbits, ’possums, and foxes, was seized with an ambition to write, and had begun to do so when Sherman’s army went marching through Georgia. Slocum’s corps was reviewed by Harris sitting astride a fence. This parade left the neighborhood in chaos, and young Harris and _The Countryman_ took a long vacation. At last peace and quiet and the issue of _The Countryman_ were restored. But the paper had had its day.

Mr. Harris was now a full-fledged compositor, and he set his “string” of the Macon Daily _Telegraph_ for some months. Then he left to go to New Orleans as the private secretary of the editor of _The Crescent Monthly_. This position was not arduous, and Mr. Harris found time to write bright paragraphs for the city press at about the same time that George W. Cable was trying his hand at the same kind of work. _The Crescent Monthly_ soon waned, and with its end Mr. Harris found himself back in Georgia as editor of the Forsyth _Advertiser_, which was and is one of the most influential weekly papers in Georgia. He was not only editor, but he set most of the type, worked off the edition on a hand-press, and wrapped and directed his papers for the mail. His editorials here, directed against certain abuses in the State, were widely copied for their pungent criticism and bubbling humor. They attracted the attention of Colonel W. T. Thompson, author of “Major Jones’s Courtship,” who was then editor of the Savannah _Daily News_, and he offered Mr. Harris a place on his staff. It was accepted. This was in 1871. In 1873 Mr. Harris was married. He remained in Savannah until September, 1876, when the yellow-fever epidemic caused him to go up in the mountains to Atlanta, where he became an editor of the _Constitution_. At that time the paper was beginning to make a more than local reputation by the humorous Negro dialect sketches by Mr. S. W. Small, under the name of “Old Si.” Shortly after Mr. Harris’s arrival Mr. Small left the _Constitution_ to engage in another enterprise, and the proprietors, in their anxiety to replace one of the most attractive features of their paper, turned to Mr. Harris for aid. He was required to furnish two or three sketches a week. He took an old Negro with whom he had been familiar on the Turner place, and made him chief spokesman in several character sketches. Their basis was the projection of the old-time Negro against the new condition of things brought about by the War.

These succeeded well; but tiring of them after awhile, he wrote one night the first sketch as it appears in the published volume, “Uncle Remus.” To the North this was a revelation of an unknown life. The slight but strong frame in which the old Negro’s portrait was set, the playful propinquity of smiles and tears, and the fresh humor and absolute novelty of the folk-lore tale existing as a hidden treasure in the South, were revealed for the first time to critical admiration. The sketches were widely copied in leading journals, like the staid _Evening Post_ of New York. Both the _Constitution_ and Mr. Harris soon found that they had a national reputation. When the volume containing the collected sketches was published, it was an immediate success. It was soon reprinted in England; and still sells steadily in large numbers, giving exquisite pleasure to thousands of children and their elders. A second collection of tales, most of which were published in _The Century_, but some of which made their first appearance in _The Critic_, was republished in 1883, and in that year Mr. Harris was introduced anew to the general public as the writer of a sketch in Harper’s _Christmas_, which showed for the first time that the firm and artistic hand which drew the Negro to perfection had mastered equally well the most difficult art of elaborate character-drawing and of dramatic development. “Mingo,” the first successful short story of Mr. Harris, was followed by “At Teague Poteet’s” in _The Century_.

I have dwelt somewhat at length on the incidents of Mr. Harris’s career for three reasons: first, because the facts have never before been printed; second, because they illustrate in a remarkable way the influence of environment on a literary intellect, whose steady, healthy, progressive growth and development can be clearly traced; and third, because it is evident that Mr. Harris is a young man who has passed over the plains of apprenticeship and is mounting the hill of purely literary fame, whose acclivity he has overcome by making a further exertion of the strength and power which he has indicated though not fully displayed. At present he lives two lives. One is that of his profession. His duties are arduous, and consume much of his time. Much of the best work in the _Constitution_, which has given that paper fame as a representative of “the new South,” is due to Mr. Harris. In the history of Southern journalism he will occupy a high place for having introduced in that part of the United States personal amenities and freedom from sectional tone. He has discussed national topics broadly and sincerely, in a style which is effective in “molding public opinion,” but which is not literature. His second life begins where the other ends. It is literally divided as day is from night, for his editorial work is done at the _Constitution_ office in the day-time, and his literary work is done at home at night. On the one side he works for bread and butter, on the other he works for art, and from the motive that always exists in the best literary art. At home he is hardest at work when apparently most indolent, and he allows his characters to gallop around in his brain and develop long before he touches pen to paper. When he reaches this stage his work is slow and careful, and in marked contrast to his editorial work, which is dashed off at white heat, as such work must be.

Perhaps the best illustration I can give of his methods is to describe the genesis of “At Teague Poteet’s,” which may also be interesting as giving an insight into the work of creative authorship. The trial of two United States Deputy-Marshals for the killing of an under-witted, weak, unarmed, and inoffensive old man, who was guilty only of the crime of having a private still for “moonshine”--not a member of the mountain band,--was progressing in Atlanta when the subject of simple proper names as titles of stories came up in the _Constitution_ office. One of the staff cited Scott’s “Ivanhoe,” Thackeray’s “Pendennis,” and Dickens’s “David Copperfield” as instances of books which were likely to attract readers by their titles, and taking up a Georgia state-directory, the speaker’s eye fell on the name Teague Poteet. He suggested to Mr. Harris that if he merely took that name and wove around it the story of the moonshiner’s trial, it would attract as many readers as Uncle Remus; and it was further suggested that Mr. Harris should make a column sketch of the subject for the next Sunday’s _Constitution_. From this simple beginning Teague Poteet grew after several months’ incubation, and when it was published in _The Century_ it will be remembered how the public hailed it as disclosing a new phase of American life, similar to those revealed by Cable, Craddock and the rest of the new generation. No one unfamiliar with the people can fully appreciate how truthful and exact is the description of characteristics; or how accurately the half-humorous, half-melancholy features of the stern drama of life in the locality are wrought out, yielding promise of greater things to come.

In person Mr. Harris has few peculiarities. In stature he is of the average height of the people of his section, rather under the average height of the people of the Eastern and Middle States. The Northern papers have spoken of Mr. Cable as a little man. He and Mr. Harris are about of a size, which is not much excelled in their section except by the lank giants of the mountains. His features are small. His face is tanned and freckled. His mouth is covered by a stubbly red mustache, and his eyes are small and blue. Both his eyes and mouth are extremely mobile, sensitive and expressive. There is probably no living man more truly diffident; but his diffidence is the result of excessive sympathy and tenderness, which cause the bright blue eyes to well up at any bit of pathos just as they fairly sparkle with humor. His amusements and tastes are few and simple. His constant companions are Shakspeare, Job, St. Paul, and Ecclesiastes. He is devoted to his family, which consists of his mother, his wife, four exceedingly bright boys and a girl, and the flock of mocking-birds that winters in his garden. He never goes into society or to the theatre. He once acted as dramatic critic of the _Constitution_, but his misery at being obliged to see and criticise dull actors was so acute that he soon resigned the position. The small-talk of society has no attractions for him. His home is enough. When his children are tired and sleepy and are put to bed, he writes at the fireside where they have been sitting. It is warm in winter, and cool in summer, and never lonely; and so strong is his domestic instinct that although he had a room built specially as a study, he soon deserted its lonely cheerlessness for the comforts of his home, where his tender and kindly nature makes him loved by every one.

ERASTUS BRAINERD.

PROF. J. A. HARRISON

PROF. J. A. HARRISON

AT LEXINGTON, VA.

Professor Harrison’s home is in Lexington, a quaint old town in the “Valley of Virginia.” Situated on North River, an affluent of the James, Lexington is surrounded by mountains covered with a native growth of beautiful foliage. In the distance tower aloft the picturesque Peaks of Otter; nearer by is seen the unique Natural Bridge. For nearly a century it has been a university town. Two institutions of learning have generated about the place an intellectual atmosphere. More than one literary character has made it a home. It is, indeed, an ideal spot for the studious scholar and the diligent _littérateur_.

James Albert Harrison was born at Pass Christian, Mississippi, the latter part of 1848. His first lessons were given by private tutors. Later, his family moved to New Orleans and he entered the public schools of that city. From the public schools he went to the High School, at the head of his class. But shortly afterwards, in 1862, New Orleans fell and his family went into exile. They wandered about the Confederacy some time, from pillar to post, till finally they stuck in Georgia till the close of the War. This fortunate event kept him from becoming a midshipman on the _Patrick Henry_. Finally the family returned to New Orleans. Deprived of regular instruction he had been giving himself up to voracious, but very miscellaneous, reading; but now, under a learned German Jew, he began to prepare himself for the University of Virginia, where he remained two years--until, he says, “I had to go to work.” After teaching a year near Baltimore he went to Europe, and studied two years at Bonn and Munich. On his return, in 1871, he was elected to the chair of Latin and Modern Languages in Randolph Macon College, Virginia. In 1875 he was called to the chair of English and Modern Languages in Vanderbilt University; but he remained where he was till the next year. Then he accepted the corresponding chair in Washington and Lee University, which he has held ever since. There, in September, 1885, the happiest event of his life took place. He was married to a daughter of Virginia’s famous “War Governor,” Governor Letcher.

Prof. Harrison comes of a literary family. His father, who was a leading citizen of New Orleans, and quite wealthy till some time after the War, belonged to the Harrison family of Virginia. His mother was a descendant of the Mayor of Bristol in Charles II.’s time, as is shown by a family diary begun in 1603 and continued to the present day. On this side, too, he is related to John Hookham Frere, the translator of Aristophanes. Others of his literary kinsfolk are Miss F. C. Baylor, author of “On Both Sides” and “Behind the Blue Ridge,” and Mrs. Tiernan, author of “Homoselle,” “Suzette,” etc. In Prof. Harrison’s library there are about 3000 volumes, in 15 or 20 different languages, while here and there through the house are scattered bric-à-brac, pictures, and a heterogeneous collections of odds and ends picked up in travel--feather-pictures and banded agates from Mexico, embroideries and pipes from Constantinople, souvenirs from Alaska, British America, Norway, Germany, France, Spain, Italy and Greece. His naturally good taste in art and music has been well cultivated. His conversation is delightful--now racy with anecdote, now bristling with repartee, again charming with instruction. More than any other man, I think, he is a harbinger of better things at the South. He is a real son of the new South. In him the old and the new are harmoniously blended. To the polish, the suavity, the refinement of the old South are added the earnestness, the enthusiasm, the wider and more useful culture of the new. Up to this time his life has been spent in study, in travel, in teaching, and in writing.

In teaching and in scholarly work Professor Harrison has been unusually active. Since 1871 he has taught nine months of every year; and almost every year has seen from his pen some piece of scholarly work in the domain of English, French or German literature and philology. Heine’s “Reisebilder,” “French Syntax,” “Negro English,” “Creole Patois,” “Teutonic Life in Beowulf,” ten lectures on “Anglo-Saxon Poetry” before Johns Hopkins University--these, with several other publications, bear witness to his industry and his scholarship. But his chief claim to regard in this department of literature is in originating the “Library of Anglo-Saxon Poetry,” and in his work on the “Handy Anglo-Saxon Dictionary.” The first volume of the Library, that on Beowulf, at once took the first place with English and American scholars, and was adopted as a text-book in Oxford and other universities. In the lecture-room Professor Harrison is pleasant, genial, helpful and alert. His students like him as a man, and take pride in showing his name on their diplomas. He had not been teaching two years before he convinced every one that only thorough scholarship could win that signature.

At a very early age Professor Harrison began to write doggerel for the New Orleans _Picayune_ and _Times_. While a student at the University of Virginia he wrote an article for the Baltimore _Episcopal Methodist_ called “Notre Dame de Paris,” which attracted much attention. His next piece of literary work was a paper on Björnstjerne Björnson, which won the $50 gold medal given by _The University Magazine_. As he was not a matriculate at the time, the prize could not be awarded. In 1871 his “first literary effort,” as he calls it, appeared in _Lippincott’s Magazine_. It was entitled “Goethe and the Scenery about Baden-Baden.” Then essay after essay followed in quick succession from his pen. Soon after this his connection with _The Southern Magazine_ began, which resulted in a series of essays on French, German, English, Swedish, and Italian poets. These were published by Hurd & Houghton, in 1875, under the title of “A Group of Poets and their Haunts,” and the edition was immediately sold. In literary circles, especially in Boston, this book won for the young author firm standing-ground. His first work is chiefly remarkable for the overflow of a copious vocabulary and the almost riotous display of a rich fancy and abundant learning. We are swept along with the stream in which trees torn up by the roots from Greek and Latin banks come whirling, dashing, plunging by in countless numbers; the waters spread out on all sides, but we are not always quite sure of the channel. Since then the waters have subsided, and we see a broad channel and a current swift and clear. In 1876 Professor Harrison made a visit to Greece, and on his return published through Houghton, Osgood & Co. a volume of “Greek Vignettes.” The London _Academy_ expressed the general opinion of this book in the following sentence: “It is so charmingly written that one can hardly lay it down to criticise it.” In 1878 a visit to Spain resulted in another book, “Spain in Profile,” which was followed in 1881 by the “History of Spain.” In 1885 the Putnams began to publish the Story of the Nations, and Professor Harrison’s “Story of Greece” was given the place of honor as the initial volume of the series. His chief characteristics, as shown in these works, are critical insight and descriptive power. His versatile fancy, too, is ever giving delightful surprises, as in this little note anent Dr. Holmes’s seventy-fifth birthday: “He is the Light of New England, as Longfellow was the Love, and Emerson the Intellect. I saw a wonderful cactus in Mexico, all prickles and blossoms--Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes all over; but the blossoms hid the prickles.” Some of his most elaborate descriptions are found in “Spain in Profile,” such as the “Alhambra,” “A Spanish Bull-fight”; others again in _The Critic_ (“Venice from a Gondola,” “A Summer in Alaska,” etc.) to which he has long been a constant contributor. His critical insight is shown in such reviews as those of Ruskin, Poe, Balzac, and Froude’s “Oceana,” and in such brief essays as “An Italian Critic,” “Two Views of Shelley,” “George Sand and Diderot,” etc. His contributions to other periodicals have been numerous. His articles in _The Nation_, _Literary World_, _Current_, _Independent_, _Home Journal_, _Lippincott’s_, _Manhattan_, _Overland Monthly_, _American Journal of Philology_, _Anglia_, etc., would fill several volumes. Two charming stories--“P’tit-José-Ba’tiste,” a Creole story, and “Dieudonnée,” a West Indian Creole story--testify to his skill in this kind of writing. Since 1895 he has been professor of English and Romance languages in the University of Virginia. Several trips to different parts of Europe, visits to Alaska, British America, Mexico, and the West Indies, during which he studied the languages as well as the customs of the peoples, have given him many a “peep over the edge of things.”

W. M. BASKERVILL.

COL. JOHN HAY

COL. JOHN HAY

IN WASHINGTON

It was a happy thought that inspired _The Critic’s_ series of Authors at Home. The very idea was benevolence. One of its charms is the reader’s sense of mutuality--reciprocity. Has not Col. Hay, for instance, been a welcomed guest beneath many, many roof-trees, beside many, many hearthstones; and are his own doors to be shut with a “Procul, O procul este, profani!”? One can fancy the gratitude of posterity for these contemporary sketches of those whose lips have been touched and tongues loosened by the song-inspirer--of those who have “instructed our ignorance, elevated our platitudes, brightened our dullness, and delighted our leisure.” For the lack of a _Critic_ in the past, how little we know of those authors at home whom we forgather with in imagination! A scrap of this memoir, that biography, and yonder letter, makes a ragged picture at best. There was only one Boswell, and he, as Southey says, has gone to heaven for his “Johnson,” if ever a man went there for his good works. The mind’s eye, of course, pictures Rogers at one of his famous breakfasts; the galaxy at Holland House; Coleridge monotoning, with Lamb furnishing puns for periods; “smug Sydney,” ten miles from a lemon, scattering pearls before Yorkshire swine; Dr. Johnson at Thrale’s, drinking tea and bullying his betters; Dryden enthroned at the Kit-kat; but all the portraits, save those by Boswell, are unsatisfactory--mere outlines without coloring, and lacking that essential background, the “at home.”

Great political revolutions are the results or causes of literary schools; and the future student of our literature will note with more emphasis than we, that one of the incidents or results of the war between the sections was the birth of a new school of writers whose works are distinctively original and distinctively American. To this class, who have won, and are winning, fame for themselves while conferring it upon their country, belongs Col. Hay. His earlier writings have the characteristics of freshness, vigor and intensity which indicate an absence of the literary vassalage that dwarfed the growth and conventionalized or anglicized American writers as a class. Travel and indwelling among the shrines of the Old World’s literary gods and goddesses, have not un-Americanized either the man or the author. The facile transition from “Jim Bludso” to “A Woman’s Love” is paralleled by that from a bull-fight to a Bourbon duel.

Though not at all ubiquitous, Col. Hay is a man of many homes,--that of his birth, Indiana; that of his Alma Mater, “Brown,” whose memory he has gracefully and affectionately embalmed in verse; that of his Mother-in-Law, Illinois, having been admitted to her bar in 1861. This great year--1861--the pivot upon which turned so many destinies,--saw him “at home” in the White House. Next to his own individual claims upon national recognition, his relations to the martyred President, the well-known confidence, esteem and affection which that great guider of national destiny felt for his youthful secretary, have rendered his name as familiar as a household word. At home in the tented fields of the Civil War, at home in the diplomatic circles of Paris, Vienna, and Madrid, Col. Hay, after an exceptionally varied experience, planted his first vine and fig-tree in Cleveland, Ohio, and his second in the City of Washington. Between these two homes he vibrates. The summer finds him in his Euclid Avenue house, which occupies the site where that of Susan Coolidge once stood. Around its far-reaching courtyard and uncramped, unfenced spaciousness, she moved--that happiest of beings, one endeared to little stranger hearts all over the land.

Among the many handsome residences erected within a few years in Washington, Col. Hay’s is one of the largest. Its solid mass of red brick, massive stone trimmings, stairway and arched entrance, Romanesque in style, give it an un-American appearance of being built to stay. The architect, the late H. H. Richardson, seems to have dedicated the last efforts of dying genius to the object of making the structure bold without and beautiful within. The great, broad hall, the graceful and roomy stairway, the large dining-room on the right, wainscoted in dark mahogany, with its great chimney-place and great stone mantel-piece extending beyond on either side; the other chimney-places with African marble mantelpieces; the oak wainscoting of the large library, and the colored settles on either side of the fireplace; the cosey little room at the entrance; the charming drawing-room--in brief, it seems as though Mr. Richardson contemplated a monument to himself when he designed this beautiful home. The library is the largest room; and it was there that I found Col. Hay at home in every sense. The walls are shelved, hung (not crowded) with pictures; the works of _virtu_ break the otherwise staring ranks of books.

The author’s house is situated at the corner of H and Sixteenth Streets. Its southern windows look out upon Lafayette Park, and beyond it at the confronting White House, peculiarly suggestive to Col. Hay of historic days and men; and as he labors on his History of Lincoln, I imagine, the view of the once home of the martyr is a source at once of sadness and of inspiration. In the same street, one block to the west, lived George Bancroft; diagonally across the park, and in full view, is the house where was attempted the assassination of Secretary Seward, and near where Philip Barton Key was killed by Gen. Sickles; opposite the east front of Col. Hay’s house is St. John’s, one of the oldest Episcopal churches in the District of Columbia, much frequented by the older Presidents. It was here that Dolly Madison exhibited her frills and fervor. Before the days of American admirals, tradition says that one of the old commodores, returning from a long and far cruise in which he had distinguished himself, and starting for St. John’s on a Sunday morning, entered the church as the congregation was about repeating the Creed. As soon as he was in the aisle, the people stood up, as is the custom. The old commodore, being conscious of meritorious service, mistook the movement for an expression of personal respect, and with patronizing politeness, waved his hand toward the Rev. Dr. Pyne and the congregation, and said: “Don’t rise on my account!” The whitened sepulchre of a house to the west of Col. Hay’s, was the residence of Senator Slidell--the once international What-shall-we-do-with-him? The eastern corner of the opposite block was the home and death-place of Sumner. In the immediate neighborhood are the three clubs of Washington--the Metropolitan, Cosmos, and Jefferson. The first has the character of being exclusive, the second of being scientific, and the third liberal. In the one they eat terrapin; in the other, talk anthropology; while in the last, Congressmen, Cabinet officers and journalists are “at home,” and a spirit of cosmopolitanism prevails.

The author of “Pike County Ballads” and “Castilian Days,” and the biographer of Lincoln, is about sixty-four years of age. In person, of average height; gray hair, mustache and beard, and brown eyes; well built, well dressed, well bred and well read, he is pleasant to look at and to talk with. He is a good talker and polite listener, and altogether an agreeable and instructive companion. As a collector he seems to be jealous as to quality rather than greedy as to quantity. His shelves are not loaded down with so many pounds of print bound in what-not, and his pictures and works of art “have pedigrees.” I found great pleasure in examining a fine old edition of Lucan’s “Pharsalia,” printed at Strawberry Hill, with notes by Grotius and Bentley. A much more interesting work was “The Hierarchie of the Blessed Angells, Printed by Adam Islip, 1635.” On the fly-leaf was written: “E. B. Jones, from his friend A. C. Swinburne.” My attention was called to the following lines:

Mellifluous Shake-speare, whose enchanting quill,
Commanded mirth and passion, was but Will.

They suggested the Donnelly extravaganza; and I discovered Col. Hay to be of the opinion which well-informed students of English literature generally hold--namely, that Mr. Donnelly’s ingenuity is equalled only by his ignorance. There was also a presentation copy of the first edition of Beckford’s “Vathek,” and De Thou’s copy of Calvin’s Letters, with De Thou’s and his wife’s ciphers intertwined in gilt upon its side and back, expressive of a partnership even in their books; and rare and costly editions of Rogers’s “Italy” and “Poems.” It will be recollected that the banker-poet engaged Turner to illustrate his verses, and the total cost to the author was about $60,000. Among objects of special interest are the bronze masks of Mr. Lincoln, one by Volk (1860), the other by Clark Mills (1865). It is a test of credulity to accept them as the counterfeit presentments of the President. There is such a difference in the contour, lines and expression, that, as Col. Hay remarked, the contrast exhibits the influences and effects of the great cares and responsibilities under which Mr. Lincoln labored; and although both casts were made in life, and at an interval of only five years, the latter one represents a face fifteen years older than the first.

Over the library door are two large bronze portraits, hanging on the same line; one is of Howells, the other of James. Residence abroad, and that attention to and study of art to which “An Hour with the Painters” bears evidence, enabled Col. Hay to make a selection of oils and water-colors, pen-and-inks and drawings which is not marred by anything worthless. Before referring to these, I must not pass a portrait of Henry James, when twenty-one years of age, painted by Lafarge. A Madonna and Child, by Sassoferrato; St. Paul’s, London, by Canaletto; a woman’s portrait by Maes; four pen-and-ink sketches by Du Maurier, and one by Zamacois; two by Turner--of Lucerne and the Drachenfels (see “Childe Harold,” or the guide-book, for Byron’s one-line picture of the castellated cliff); a water-color by Girtin, Turner’s over-praised teacher; and a collection of original drawings by the old masters--Raphael, Correggio, Teniers, Guido, Rubens and others,--surely there is nothing superfluous in his collection; and the same elegant and discriminating taste is exhibited in all of Col. Hay’s surroundings. The poet has laid aside his lyre temporarily, and with Mr. Nicolay, late Marshal of the Supreme Court, devoted himself to preparing for _The Century_ what, at the time it was written, was the most exhaustive memoir of a man and his times ever written on this side of the Atlantic. Conscious of the depth, height, and breadth of their theme, the writers did not propose to leave anything for successors to supply on the subject of Mr. Lincoln’s administration.

Reflecting that though scientific workers were plentiful in Washington there was but a sprinkling of literary men, I asked Col. Hay what he thought of the capital’s possibilities as a “literary centre.” His opinion was that the great presses and publishing-houses were the nucleus of literary workers; but that the advantages afforded, or to be afforded, by the National Library and other Government facilities, must of necessity invite authors to Washington, from time to time, on special errands, or for temporary residence.

B. G. LOVEJOY.

[Since his residence in London as Ambassador to the Court of St. James and his resignation from the position of Secretary of State, Col. Hay has divided his time between Washington and his summer home at Lake Sunapee, in New Hampshire.--EDITORS.]

THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON

THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON

AT CAMBRIDGE

Colonel Higginson looks back on the anti-slavery period as on something quite unusual in human experience. He believes there has been no other movement of the moral consciousness in man since the period of the Puritan upheaval which has given such mental quickening and force to those taking part in it. He sees in it the better part of his training as an author; and it has guided him in his relations to the social and intellectual agitations of his time. His training as a reformer he cannot forget; and he still remains first of all the friend of human progress. In 1850, he lost his pulpit in Newburyport because of his zealous advocacy of the anti-slavery cause, in season and out of season. At the same time, he was the Freesoil candidate for Congress in the northeastern district of Massachusetts. He became the pastor of a Free Church in Worcester, not connected with any sect, and organized quite as much in behalf of freedom in politics as for the sake of freedom in religion. He was connected with all the most stirring anti-slavery scenes in Boston, and he eagerly favored physical resistance to the encroachments of the pro-slavery party. He joined in the Anthony Burns riot, in which he was wounded, and which failed only through a misunderstanding. He was a leader in organizing Freesoil parties for Kansas, and spent six weeks in the Territory in that behalf. He was one of those who planned a party for the rescuing of John Brown after his sentence at Harper’s Ferry; and he early offered his services to the Governor of Massachusetts on the breaking out of the Civil War. His zeal for the blacks was so well known, that it inspired the following lines of some anonymous poetizer:

There was a young curate of Worcester
Who could have a command if he’d choose ter;
But he said each recruit
Must be blacker than soot
Or else he’d go preach where he used ter!

In fact, he recruited two companies in the vicinity of Worcester, and was given a captain’s commission. While yet in camp he received the appointment to the colonelcy of the First South Carolina Volunteers--“the first slave regiment mustered into the service of the United States during the late Civil War,”--nearly six months previous to Colonel Shaw’s famous regiment, the 54th Mass. Volunteers.

Col. Higginson signed the first call, in 1850, for a national convention of the friends of woman’s suffrage, which was held in Worcester. One of the leaders of that movement since, his fifteen-years’ defence of it in the columns of _The Woman’s Journal_ shows the faithfulness of his devotion. His connection with the Free Religious Association proves that he has been true to the faith of his youth, and to his refusal to connect himself with any sect in entering the pulpit. When that association lost its pristine glow and devotion, with the passing of the transcendental period, he still remained faithful to his early idea, that all religious truth comes by intuition. His addresses before it on “The Sympathy of Religions” and on “The Word Philanthropy” indicate the direction of his faith in humanity and in its development into ever better social, moral, and spiritual conditions.

Whatever the value of the independent movement in politics, which has given us a change in the political administration of the country for the first time in a quarter of a century, it doubtless owes its inception and strength largely to those men, like Curtis, Higginson, and Julian, who were enlisted heart and soul in the anti-slavery agitation, and who got there a training which has made them impatient of party manipulation and wrong-doing. Had these men not been trained to believe in man more than in party, there would have been no independent organization and no revolution in our politics. In 1880, Colonel Higginson was on the committee of one hundred for the organization of a new party in case Grant was nominated for a third term; and four years previously he placed himself in line with the Independents. In 1884, he was the mover of the resolution in the Boston Reform Club for the calling of a convention, out of which grew the independent movement of that year. The resolutions reported by him were taken up in the New York convention and the spirit of them carried to successful issue. He was a leading speaker for the Independents during the campaign, giving nearly thirty addresses in the States of Massachusetts, Vermont, Connecticut, New York, and New Jersey. The chairman of the Massachusetts committee wrote him after the campaign of the great value of his services, and thanked him in the most flattering terms in behalf of the Independents of the State.