Arts and Letters

The range of social and climatic conditions in this country could hardly be more strikingly brought out than in the contrast between Joel Chandler Harris, the faithful recorder of a cross-section of Georgia life, and Edward Everett Hale, the New Englander who became neighbor to the whole country. The stamp of New England education was on Dr. Hale from the beginning. He came of a family notable for intelligence and individuality of character; he was born in Boston; he was prepared for college in the Latin School; he was graduated from Harvard; he studied theology and entered the Unitarian ministry. During a long life of varied and tireless activities his home was in Roxbury. He was predestined to be an editor, and knew how to set type almost as soon as his head was level with the case. He loved history, and wrote it as a journalist writes of the events of the day. He was a story-teller by nature, and wrote tales as if he were writing history. He had something of Defoe's gift of giving fiction the simple and convincing detail of fact. He was never an exact writer; but he had a genius for getting at the truth. He was neither emotional nor dramatic; but his heart was in his work of whatever kind, and he was a rare preacher of the gospel of helpfulness. His aim was practical, he was never a student of style, his strength lay in invention rather than in imagination; but it was his good fortune to write a short story so close to the facts of human nature that it almost defies the endeavor to class it with fiction. The Man Without a Country has the pathos of a tragedy of personal life, staged so simply that it escapes all suggestion of artifice, and, unless duly authenticated as fiction, it will some day be read as history. A citizen of one of the centers of light and leading in the New World, Dr. Hale was brother to all men; in the informal, unconventional society of America he accepted the ultimate inferences of democracy not with the timidity of the man of academic training, but with the joyful courage of a serene faith in the spiritual worth of humanity. He organized helpfulness as if it were the chief business of mankind, wrote its legends and text-books, and spoke and acted as if society were a league of men and women bent on helping instead of preying upon one another. He had the saving common sense, the habit of industry, and the illuminating humor of one to whom men as men were dear and companionable.