MR. JULIAN HAWTHORNE'S TALES.*
Jr one of the chief objects of fiction be, as we think it is, to keep human life alive,—for a great deal of it is almost as little alive as anything which breathes and eats and goes through a certain monotonous round of duties can be,—Mr. Julian Hawthorne is undoubtedly very successful as a writer of fiction. Even these shorter tales of his, though more fantastic and imaginative than will quite suit the steady, plodding reader a English novels, have more in them to keep the imagination awake than hundreds of those regular three-volumers which stock the conventional fancies,—or whatever melancholy equiva- lents may be supposed to stand in place of non-existent fancies,—of the romance-reading public. The first of these stories especially is full of the kind of eerie power of which Nathaniel Hawthorne first discovered to the world the exist- ence, and of which his son appears to have retained, by right of direct inheritance, the happy secret. But we cannot quite agree with him in the literary principle which he lays down, that " in order to appreciate the delicate flavour of a ghost, it is indispensable that the palate should not be alloyed by a contemporary diet of flesh and blood. In other words, the reality of the personages amidst which the disembodied spirit appears, should be insisted on no further than is necessary to the telling �The Laughing MW, and other Stories. 13y Julian Hawthorne. London: Macmillan.
them apart; only that side in the human figures which is most in accord with the superhuman, should be made prominent." That was hardly Shakespeare's notion, when he made the ghost of the murdered King show himself to the ordinary guard before ever Hamlet had heard of his midnight excursions ; nor was it Scott's,, when he made the White Lady of Avenel so excellent a horse- woman, and so active in defeating the Sub-Prior's intentions on behalf of Halbert Glendinning. Nor, indeed, to tell the truth, does Mr. Julian Hawthorne act in keeping with his own literary canon, when, in the first of these tales, he contrasts the old sailor and his brown, stubby-legged son Peter, who clings so steadily to his big trout, even after he has been drawn by it into the river, with the heroine of the charmed necklace, and their common daily life with the eerie legendary history of her birth. There is a heightening of preternatural effect due to contrasts as well as to harmonies, and if we are not much mistaken, Mr. Julian Hawthorne is a master of both methods. Sometimes he paints everything in the same dim, mysterious light, as his father best loved to do. Some- times he brings out the ghostly touches by placing them side by side with strong real colours, as Shakespeare did when he painted Polonius descanting pedantically on the character of Hamlet's mental malady, in close contrast to the fever-fits and ague - fits caused by the ghost's appeal to Hamlet's own shaken mind. We suspect that Mr. Julian Haw- thorne's theory was rather an impromptu one, discovered by way of apology for the rather small amount of real life depicted in these stories, than a result of deep-rooted literary conviction. But for our own parts, we do not think that any apology was needed for the rather hazy and dusky pictures of life here presented to us. Where there is real originality of any kind in our fiction, we have only to be thankful, and take it for what it is, without grumbling at it for what it is not. Mr. Julian Hawthorne is certainly original, and probably he would not be half so original if, instead of following the natural bent of his own imagination, he half-filled his canvas with pictures of reality, conceived only to balance the vivid fancies with which his mind was brimming over.
The first two and the last of these stories are clearly the most original,—though the last is not properly a story at all, but a striking little parable or " myth," of a kind to which the pre- sent day is but little accustomed, and yet so skilfully and lightly treated, that its didactic side is wholly merged in the imagina- tive shiver which it sends through the mind of the reader. The first, however, called the Laughing Mill, is in every respect the most finished of the four, and wherever found would stamp its author as a man of genius. The curious success with which the younger, like the elder, Hawthorne, con- trives to saturate what in any one else's hands would be merely physical objects with the spirit of unhappy events in which they had been implicated,—the art with which he makes an old mill-wheel seem to be a sort of conspirator in the murder which had once been committed by its instru- mentality, and persuades his readers that its occasional fits of harsh and jarring discord are spasms of diabolic laughter at the evil intentions of its brother-conspirators ; the vivid picture of the recluse old scholar's gloating delight in the young girl whom he has saved from the wreck, of his absorbing desire to keep her freshness and youth wholly for himself; the contrast between his tender selfishness on the one hand, and his vulgarer rival's coarse selfishness on the other, and the delineation of the com- plete break-down of the former's reason and principle when he finds himself cheated, and his treasure betrayed, are all very striking characteristics of this effective tale. Even the elder Hawthorne never produced more weird effects with- in anything like the same compass. We do not mean, of course, that this tale will compare for a moment with the Scarlet Letter; but with almost any of the Twice-told Take, or of the Mosses on an Old Manse, it would compare so well that we should hardly know where to rank it amongst them. And yet there is absolutely no imitation. It is simply that a genius of the same order is working out in very different materials very similar effects. Just such a likeness in genius, and just such an absolute disimilarity in materials, may be traced between the elder Hawthorne's fine parable called the Stone Face, and Mr. Julian Hawthorne's Christmas Guest in the present volume. In both parables there is the same noble idealism, and in both the same complete absence of anything like conventional treatment or didactic morality.
This is not a book from which we could give any extract likely to show the reader the stuff of which it is really made; so we will simply add to what we have already said, that the single tale which does not in any way deal with the dark side of human life,—which, by the way, it is a mistake to call, as Mr. Julian Hawthorne does, " the impossible side,"—is very lively and dashing, though it has none of the specific originality of the other three.
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