Hannah Thurston: A Story of American Life
By . New York: G. P. Putnam.
MR. BAYARD TATLOR evidently does not subscribe to the theory which “Friends in Council” attributes to a large class: “ that men cannot excel in more things than one; and that, if they can, they had better be quiet about it.” Having already achieved a reputation as a traveller, a poet, and a secretary to a foreign legation, he now enters the lists with the novelists, who must look well to their laurels, if they would not have them snatched from their brows by this new-comer.
The book is called “A Story of American Life.” It is American life, just as the statue of the Venus de’ Medici or the Apollo Belvedere is the representation of the human figure. No Athenian belle, no Delphic athlete, stood for those beautiful shapes; but the nose was modelled from one copy, the limbs from another, the brow from a third, and the result is a joy forever. So the American life portrayed in this story is a conglomeration, and partially a caricature, of the various isms which have disturbed the strata of our social life. That any American village should present within its outmost: circle the collection of peculiarities gathered here would be little less than marvellous. That they are found in so many American villages as to justify their being attributed to American villages in general is preposterous. Certainly, this picture does not daguerreotype New' England, however it may be in New York, — and though New England is small and provincial and New York is large and cosmopolitan, still we respectfully submit that any characteristic which may belong to New York and does not belong to New England is local and not national; and though a writer, for his own convenience and the better to convey his moral, may, if he choose, group all the wickednesses and weaknesses of the land in one secluded spot, he ought not to convey to strangers so wrong an idea of our rural social life as to make that spot the exponent of all, — So much for the title.
We now open the book, and are immediately in the midst of scenes which have an indescribable familiarity. We have a confused sense of having met these people before. Certainly they have a strong family-likeness to denizens of modern novels, The sewing-circles and small-talk savor of the cheap wit of Widow Bedott. Jutnapore must have descended in a right line from Borrioboola-Gha. The traditional spinsters with their “ withered bosoms ” march in four abreast. The hereditary clergymen, hungry, sectarian, sanctimonious, rabid, form into line with the precision acquired by long drill. The hero and heroine stand up as good as married in the first chapter. The features of the hero are instantly recognizable. There is the small stir, the rising of the curtain, and some one steps upon the stage, “ tall and sunburnt, with a moustache,” — ’t is he! Alonzo! — “with easy selfpossession and a genial air,” — the very man, — “ habitual manners slightly touched with reserve, but no man could unbend more easily,” — who but lie, our old acquaintance?— “ a rich baritone voice,” “strung with true masculine fibre,” striking in among the sharps and flats and bringing them all into harmony,—that is the invariable way. “ Generally, the least intellectual persons sing with the truest and most touching expression, because voice and intellect are rarely combined, [the reason seems to us rather a restatement of the fact,] but Maxwell Woodbury’s fine organ had not been given to him at the expense of his brain.” Certainly not. He never would have been our hero, if it had. When you add, that “ his manners were thoroughly refined, and his property large enough and not too large for leisure,” why, one might almost send a sheriff to arrest him, trusting to this description to make sure of his identity. The heroine is of course the “pale, quiet, earnest-looking girl,” who, in the midst of snoods, frocks, jackets, pocket-handkerchiefs, and other commonplace handicraft, is embroidering with green silk upon warm brown cloth the thready stems and frail diminishing fronds of a group of fern-leaves, — who alone among assured matrons and faded spinsters is visited by “ a flitting blush, delicate and transient as the shadow of a rose tossed upon marble,”—and who matches the “glorious lay ” of the hero, that “ thrilled and shook her with its despairing solemnity,” with an Alpine song, that, pure and sweet, sets the hero once more face to face with the Rosenlaui glacier and the jagged pyramid of the Wetter horn.
To this there is no special objection. Every man has a right to heap virtues and graces upon his hero, and to heighten their effect by as much uncouthness and insincerity as he chooses to attribute to the subordinates ; but so far as he professes to represent life, he should keep within the bounds of natural laws. If he chooses to introduce time-honored personages, we shall not quarrel with him, although we certainly think it desirable that some fresh piquancy in their characters shall be the vindication of their reappearance. We may regret that a subtle, but palpable ridicule is cast upon foreign missions,—a cause which, whether successful or unsuccessful in its immediate objects, will forever stand recorded as one of the most unselfish, the most sublime, and the most Christ-like movements that have ever been originated by man. The hero does, indeed, patronize them to the extent of saying that he has “ seen something of your missions in India, and believes that they are capable of accomplishing much good,” — adding, however, lest his words excite hopes too sanguine, “ Still, you must not expect immediate returns. It is only the lowest caste that is now reached, and the Christianizing of India must come, eventually, from the highest,” — Words which we shall be very ready to take as opinion, but very slow to receive as oracle, since, from the time when the Founder of Christianity was upon the earth, and the common people heard him gladly, while the higher classes thrust him out of their synagogues, till the present day, the history of Christianity has been the history of an influence rising from the lower layers of society into the upper, rather than filtering down from the upper into the lower.
Since, also, however vulgarly the Grindles may put it, it is true that drunkenness is the agony of wives, the dread of mothers, — that it does destroy hopes, desolate hearths, break hearts, — that within the last two years it has added to its terrible deeds wide disasters to our arms, long sorrow to our country, and fruitless death in a thousand households,—we think it would have been well, if the discredit cast upon temperance measures, and the discomfiture visited upon its advocates, had been accompanied by a less covert recognition of the evil and by a more obvious sympathy with its victims. Since the methods taken to insure self-control are insufficient, would it not have been possible to indicate better ? Since Woodbury does not think abstinence to be the cure of intemperance, could he not justify his practice by a higher principle than self-indulgence, lay it on a deeper foundation than dilettanteism ?
We regret, also, that in a book by Bayard Taylor there should have been found room for such a paragraph as this : —
“The churches in the village undertook their periodical ‘ revivals,’ which absorbed the interest of the community while they lasted. It was not the usual season in Ptolemy for such agitations of the religious atmosphere,—but the Methodist clergyman, a very zealous and impassioned speaker, having initiated the movement with great success, the other sects became alarmed lest, he should sweep all the repentant sinners of the place into his own fold. As soon as they could obtain help from Tiberius, the Baptists followed, and the Rev. Lemuel Styles was constrained to do likewise. For a few days the latter regained the ground he had lost, mid seemed about to distance his competitors. Luckily for him, . . . . the material for conversion, drawn upon from so many different quarters, was soon exhausted; but the rival churches stoutly held out, until convinced that neither had any further advantage to gain over the other.”
No one who has given to the religious phenomena of the day the smallest degree of intellectual and sympathetic attention can fail to pronounce this a gross and illbred caricature. Ridicule is the legitimate weapon of Truth ; but ridicule that strikes rudely and indiscriminately, wounding without benefiting, is not found in the hands of Christian courtesy. We regret these blemishes, and such as these, the more because we are persuaded that the effects produced were not intended by the author. We believe, not only from his previous reputation, but from the spirit of the book, winch warms, deepens, and clarifies itself as it goes on, that he aimed only at results pure, healthful, and desirable. It is by no design of his, that young feet, already wavering downward, will not be strengthened to pause, to turn, to steady themselves, but will rather be lured on by his words. It is no purpose of his to make the crusts of Materialism harden still more hopelessly above the stifled soul. He designs to ridicule only that which is ridiculous. There are evidences of a purpose to relieve the darkness of his coloring in each instance by lines of light, but it is not made palpable enough for running readers. lie has seen the weakness that generally develops itself in, and the hypocrisy that almost invariably clings to the skirts of a great popular movement, and it is these alone which he aims to bring down. In this he is right. He errs in that his vision is neither clear nor broad. He does not always wisely discriminate as to the nature or extent of the disease, or the effect of the remedy which he applies. The cause of the difficulty has baffled his researches. The people upon whom his strictures fall, and to whom strictures belong, will be inflamed, but they will not be enlightened; and they who do see the real nature of the movement, its bane as well as its blessing, and who are constantly laboring to separate the chaff from the wheat, will not be helped, but hindered, by his wellmeant efforts.
But, as we intimated, the book, like fame, increases in going. Under all the wit and humor, which are often very charming, under all the satire, which is none the less enjoyable because occasionally halfhidden, under the somewhat multifarious machinery, which the peculiar structure of the book renders necessary, there rises slowly into view and presently into prominence the outline of a purpose as noble as it is rare. In the teeth of popular prejudice, Bayard Taylor has had the courage to take for his heroine a woman “ strong-minded,” austere in her faith, past her first youth, given to public speaking, and imbued, we might almost say to stubbornness, with ultra ideas of “ woman’s rights.” True, he has given her to us in the most modified form possible to such a character, utterly pure, unselfish, true, refined, without ambition, impelled by the highest motives, and guided by the highest principles. But the conjunction of these two classes of qualities in one person is the real Malakoff. That accomplished and the work is done. In this conception lies the true originality of the book. In this attempt lies the true consciousness of power. He who can make his hero say,—“It was my profound appreciation of those very elements in your character which led you to take up these claims of woman and make them yourown, that opened the way foryou to my heart: I reverence the qualities,without accepting all the conclusions born of them,” — has a deeper insight than most of his fellows. He shows that he looks at things, and not at the traditions of things. lie is not led away by the cry of the mob, and the gleam of gold so pure and solid almost changes into indignation our regret that he has ever suffered himself to be deceived by the glare of tawdry tinsel.
Yet even here he has not struck all truth. It is the most improbable thing in the world that any woman should have built up such a wall around herself as is represented here. It is morally impossible that such a woman as Hannah Thurston should have done it. It is simply unnatural. It might, perhaps, happen, just as a woman might happen to have been born with five fingers on each hand. But it is not with freaks of Nature, it is with Nature, that we have to deal. Girls may please themselves with fine-sounding phrases about equal powers and equal rights in marriage, but they generally vanish with the first approach of a living affection. No idea of independence or equality ever, we dare affirm, came between a great nature and its great love. No woman of exalted aims and large capacities, it may be safely said, will over beheld back from love, or even, from marriage, by any scruples as to her relative standing. The stumbling-block in the way of such a woman as Hannah Thurston would not be a dread of the “ submission of love,” but rather of a submission without love, a submission of mere contiguity to somewhat hard, false, coarse, unjust, naming itself with a name to which it had no title. If she trusted her lover thoroughly, she would intrust all risks to love. She would know with her head and feel with her heart, that, with the chivalry, the intensity, the reverence, the elevation of such a sentiment as she imagined, there could be neither bondage nor freedom, neither mine nor thine, but a oneness that would bring all relations into harmony with itself. The very essence of love is humility, and at the same time its glory is that it abolishes all laws, all rights, all powers, and is to itself alone law, rigid, and power. By the completeness of self-abnegation may the footsteps of love be traced. This partially the author recognizes, choosing it for the conclusion of the whole matter, but erring in that he makes it come with resistance and reluctance, the conquest of love, instead of spontaneously and unconsciously, its necessary concomitant.
In the hero of the story and his relations to the heroine, with occasional questionable traits, we find often a generosity, delicacy, and devotion which give promise of good. A man who can conceive a character so much above the common level, where the common level has always been low, cannot fail by continued observation and candid thinking to rise still higher. Frequently already, seeming hardly to be conscious of it, he impinges upon a farreaching, deep-lying, but generally unrecognized truth. When men shall have come to study the nature of woman, instead of haranguing about her duties, a great point will have been gained.
The blemishes which we have pointed out, and others which we have not pointed out, are only blemishes, and chiefly upon the surface. They mar, but they do not vitiate.
The limits of a magazine will not admit that adequate analysis and criticism which the ability of the book, both in point of subject and treatment, deserves. We have only space to say, that, making every allowance for every fault, it has the merit of being a pioneer, and an able pioneer, in a tract which has been hitherto, so far as we know, unbroken wilderness. Its author has not solved the problem, — ho does not even understand all its conditions ; but he is travelling in the direction of the true solution: and he otters us the rare, we had almost said the solitary, spectacle of a man and an opponent bringing to the discussion of the “ Woman’s-Rights question ” an appreciable degree of sense, justice, and moral dignity.