HANNAH T HURSTON.*
Jr Bayard Taylor has not placed himself, as we are half inclined to suspect, in the front rank of novelists, he has produced a very re- markable book, a really original story admirably told, crowded with life-like character, full of delicate and subtle sympathy with ideas the most opposite to his own, and lighted up through. out with that playful humour which suggests always wisdom, rather than mere fun. The first impression, indeed, of the few Englishmen who know Mr. Taylor's previous writings will probably be one of exceeding surprise. They knew, indeed, that he could describe with a power which belongs to few, even in this age of description, and the sketches of nature scattered through these volumes, beautiful as they are, will not be beyond their anticipation ; but no one attributed to Mr. Taylor the true creative power. Yet there are a dozen characters interwoven into the plot of this book, every one of whom is to the reader as a remem- bered friend, a living and moving figure, whom he can recog- nize and watch as if be were in the flesh, whose action he can study, and in whom the slightest incoherence would startle him as incoherences in actual life might do. Their vividness is the more striking, because Mr. Taylor in his St. Petersburg leisure has evidently been endeavouring to give to his book something of artistic perfection, and has subordinated all his characters to the two central figures as strictly as if he were preparing a drama for exacting but able actors, and has forced all to assist, each in his or her degree, in the development of his moral purpose.
* Hannah Thurston. By Bayard Taylor. London: Sampson and Low.
The idea of Hannah Thurston is that of Tennyson's "Princess," to account for and to justify the existing relation of woman to man, and when we say that it is readable alter that fine poem we have, perhaps, given it the highest praise. The idea, however, is worked out one step farther than the point at which the poet stopped, and amidst a very different scene. Hannah Thurston, the centre figure, is a Quaker girl, bred up in a New England village, the child of a mother whose character is one of the most exquisite modern fiction has produced, and who tells in the first thirty pages of the second volume a story, such as the author of "Paul Ferroll " may read with a sigh, confessing how far she has been outdone. Compressed by the social system amidst which she has to live, and which is the narrowest, perhaps, existing on earth, panting with desire for a higher and more harmonious life, with a mind choked with the thirst for beauty no New Englander can gratify, and for the social perfection which is as distant there as here, Hannah Thurston has thrown herself into the world of ideas. Behind the deep hedge of the "unco' gude" which surrounds New England society stands always a band of "reformers," whose imagi- nations are as unsatisfied by the Calvinistic theology as by the mate- rial life arouud them, who must have work as well as objects of meditation, and who throw themselves sometimes with absurd vehemence, sometimes with evil fervour, but always with startling earnestness, into projects of social reform. The Tribune has been in its time the mouthpiece of more "isms" in New York alone than France has produced in a century, and Bayard Taylor, like Nathaniel Hawthorne, has sympathized for a moment with all. Hannah Thurston takes as her part the advocacy of woman's rights, becomes a lecturer so like, and yet so different from, the Dinah of "Adam Bede," and at thirty renounces marriage in favour of the mission she fancies herself called to perform. She is at the height of her village influence, recognized by all as a woman whom it is possible for men to love, yet with something in her beyond womanhood, when she meete Maxwell Woodbury, Mr. Taylor's type of a man, who may be shortly described as a good "Rochester," and finds her theories imperfect. The plot consists in the gradual victory of earthly love over Hannah's dreamy imagination,- the slow recognition, worked out with exquisite art, of the great truth that woman desires a place in the world which is not that of man's equal ally. She finds in her lover's cold reasoning power the product, not of temperament. but of wide experience, something which first chills and then strengthens her own imagination, recognizes as their intercourse proceeds that there is a radical inherent difference in the intellect of the sexes, discovers soon after that the one is the complement of the other, and then, moved by instinct and not by any one or all these reasonings, loves with all her heart and soul. She still, however, struggles hardto retain the strong mental stimulus—sti- mulus as of alcohol, wh ich her theories have afforded, and Woodbury, an able man of the world, marries her with a promise that she shall be as independent, as much mistress of her own actions, as if she had been but an intimate male friend. The promise clouds her life, and she finds that the independence is a chain, for it com- pels her to pass life hungering to discover the wishes her husband will not express, lest they should interfere with her independence. She realizes at last. that the sense of sacrifice adds in woman only to the fullness of love, that submission to woman is gain not de- privation, and acknowledges that, after all, it is in the union and not in the equality of the sexes that social happiness is to be found.
Itiooks very didactic all that, as we have put it, but as Mr. Taylor tells the story, every idea rising naturally out of the exquisitely natural incident, there is nothing didactic about it beyond a conversation or two between Hannah Thurston and her lover, absolutely necessary to the development of his purpose. They will be found just as interesting to all young ladies as the stock pair of lovers, and they are the centre of a group of abso- lutely original figures. Mr. Taylor has discerned the truth which Americans are so slow to learn, that if their literature is ever to be original it must draw its sap from the soil. He is not afraid to lay his scene in the village of Ptolemy, "which has Mulligans- villa on the east, Anacreon on the north, and Atauga city on the west," or to confine his characters to people to be found only in an American village. And most original characters they are. From Mr. Merryfield, the weak but well-to-do farmer, who at fifty has found that he has ideas, and accepts with weak honesty and fullness of conviction all manner of "isms," believes in woman's rights and spirit-rapping, teetotalism and vegetable dietetics, but staggers when asked to yield up his farm as a basis for a model community, to Eliza Clancy, the old spinster, who makes frocks for her spiritual child, the little brown convert of Jutnapore, and the Rev. Mr. Styles, who fears that BO many lamps at the sewing union "looks a little like levity," every character is original and distinct, and every one has that flavour of something like yet different from ourselves which we find in all Americans. Mrs. Waldo, indeed, wife of the Cimmerian clergyman (the Cimmerians are a sect of Baptists, one of the little sects "who exist through force of obstinacy "), the large-hearted, cheerful woman, with a benevolence too great for her creed, and a social tact she has little chance of displaying, and a liberality of view she is afraid for her husband's position to betray, is true of any Protestant country under the sun. But we feel that Mrs. Merryfield, with her face "all amiability relieved by dyspepsia," her sullen inde- pendence in imbecility, her belief in prophets and "isms," would be impossible in any place save New England, where a terrible social compression produces an infinity of mental cones,— bard little excrescences projected out of a substance naturally soft to pulpiness. So is Mrs. Babb, the rigid angular house- keeper, who does her duty so strictly, lest Jason, whose second wife she has been, might " not let her sit next him on the steps of the golden city," utterly American. We could find the thing, the hard steely belief in a physical form of the life to come, among the Antinominan labourers of whom Essex and Suffolk are fun, but the mode of the thing is Yankee, from the comic beginning to the most tragic end. Seth Wattles, too, the " ideaed" tailor, who thinks because he is a social reformer, and she a social reformer, that, therefore, Hannah Thurston will marry him, is absolutely American, though there are few among us who could not find on the spot an original for this sketch -
" Seth was an awkward, ungainly person, whose clothes were a con- tinual satire on his professional skill. The first impression which the man made was the want of compact form. His clay seemed to have been modelled by a bungling apprentice, and imperfectly baked after- wards. The face was long and lumpy in outline, without a proper co- herence between the features—the forehead being sloping and contracted at the temples, the skull running backwards in a high, narrow ridge. Thick hair, of a faded brown colour, parted a little on one side, was brushed behind his ears, where it hung in stiff half-curls upon a broad, falling shirt-collar, which revealed his neck down to the crest of the breast-bone. His eyes were opaque grey, prominent, and devoid of ex- pression. His nose was long and coarsely constructed, with blunt end and thick nostrils ; and his lips, though short, of that peculiar, shape- less formation, which prevents a clear line of division between them. Heavy, and of a pale, purplish red colour, they seemed to run together at the inner edges. His hands were large and hanging, and all his joints apparently knobby and loose. His skin had that appearance of oily clamminess which belongs to such an organization. Men of this character seem to be made of sticks and putty. There is no nerve, no elasticity, no keen, alert, impressible life in any part of their bodies."
All these characters, their ways and their follies, their weak- nesses and their strength, are described with a genial sympathy, an appreciation of both sides of his subjects, sometimes a loving liking for the work of his own brain, such as can only be felt by a man to whom varied experience has given the true spirit of toleration, that which tolerates nothing, but accepts all good and evil as having its appointed place and meaning in the world. His style, which, except that he every now and then indulges in a physical-intellectual flight, such as no American can always avoid, is simple masculine English, just mellowed by a fleeting tinge of humour, helps the impression of his thoughts, while Ile finds or makes ample opportunities for his special descriptive power — a power in its essence that of the painter, but, as it were, har- dened by the habit of making scenes plain as well as pictorial. The reader in these six lines sees as well as enjoys the prospect of Ptolemy :— " Rising out of the Southern valleys, he sped along, over the cold, rolling uplands of the watershed, and reached Mulligansville towards noon. Here the road turned westward, and a farther drive of three miles brought him to the brink of the long descent to East Atauga Creek. At this point, a superb winter landscape was unfolded before Vtolemy, with its spires, its one compactly-built, ambitious street, its scattered houses and gardens, lay in the centre of the picture. On the white floor of the valley were drawn, with almost painful sharpness and distinctness, the outlines of farm-houses and barns, fences, isolated trees, and the winding lines of elm and alder which marked the courses of the streams. Beyond the mouth of the further valley rose the long, cultivated sweep of the western hill, flecked with dull purple patches of pine forest. Northward, across the white meadows and the fringe of trees along Roaring Brook, rose the sunny knoll of Lakeside, sheltered by the dark woods behind, while further, stretching far away between the steep shores, gleamed the hard, steel-blue sheet of the lake. The air was so intensely clear that the distance was indicated only by a dif- ference in the hue of objects, not by their diminished distinctness."
We have, we perceive, failed to convey the precise impres- sion—that of a new kind of power, which this novel has made upon our own minds. No flavour was ever yet tasted through a description, and it is the flavour undefined and indefinable which is spread through every page of Hannah Thurston (exoept, perhaps, the very last scene, which is a failure) that renders it so appetizing. But we shall have fulfilled our purpose if we only induce our readers to test for themselves whether America has not produced a third novelist, Hawthorne and Holmes being the other two, whom Englishmen can thoroughly appreciate and enjoy.
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