A History of American Literature

The story began its appearance in the National Era, June 5, 1851, and was announced to run for three months, but as it was allowed to take its own course it was not actually concluded until April of the next year. Although it had already attracted the widest attention, the question of publication in book form was in some doubt until it was undertaken by an obscure Boston firm, and the outcome was so uncertain that the Stowes did not dare to assume half the risk of publication for a prospect of half the proceeds. Three thousand copies were sold on the day of issue, and three hundred thousand in America within the first year. In England, also, after an initial hesitation, reprinting was soon started, and by the close of the year eighteen different houses had put on forty editions, and in the end a million and a half copies were circulated in Great Britain and the colonies.23 Mrs. Stowe’s “fortune was made” of course; but of quite as much moment to her was the fact that her influence was made in the great fight in which she was enlisted. In 1853 she sailed for what turned out to be a sort of triumphal tour in Great Britain, in the course of which large sums of money were given her for use in antislavery outlay. Leading men and women, who had been formerly indifferent, became through her book secondary sources of influence. Moreover, there was value even in the opposition she had aroused. Whittier wrote to Garrison: “What a glorious work Harriet Beecher Stowe has wrought. Thanks for the Fugitive Slave Law! Better would it be for slavery if that law had never been enacted; for it gave occasion for ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin.’” And Garrison wrote in turn to Mrs. Stowe: “I estimate the value of anti-slavery writing by the abuse it brings. Now all the defenders of slavery have let me alone and are abusing you.” The volume of objection was so great and so much of it was directed at the honesty of the work that the author reluctantly compiled soon after a “Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” in which she presented documentary evidence for every kind of fact used in the story; and of this she was able to write: “Not one fact or statement in it has been disproved as yet. I have yet to learn of even an attempt to disprove.”

The only fair basis for criticizing “Uncle Tom” is as a piece of propagandist literature. It was not even a “problem novel.” It was a story with an avowed “purpose”: “to awaken sympathy and feeling for the African race, as they exist among us; to show their wrongs and sorrows, under a system so necessarily cruel and unjust as to defeat and do away the good effects of all that can be attempted for them, by their best friends, under it.” Mrs. Stowe felt no pride in it as a story, referring with perfect composure to the criticisms on its artistry. But as a popular document she composed it with the greatest of art. It was based on a profound conviction and on unassailable facts. It was a passionate assault on slavery, but it was candid in its acknowledgments that many a slaveholder was doing his best to alleviate the system. Far more than half the book is devoted to kindly masters and well-treated bondsmen; the tragedy of Uncle Tom is emphasized by the frustrated or careless benevolence of the Shelbys and St. Clare. The appeals to antislavery prejudice, moreover, could not have been more effective. The democratic movement which had swept Europe in 1848 was fresh in the minds of all thinking people. The challenge to Biblical Christian principle was made in a day when the citation of Scriptural authority was almost universally effective. The natural resentment at beholding virtue thwarted by viciousness was stimulated at every turn in the story. And the frank association of beauty of character with beauty of form served its purpose. “Let it be considered, for instance,” wrote Ruskin in “Modern Painters,” “exactly how far in the commonest lithograph of some utterly popular subject – for instance, the teaching of Uncle Tom by Eva – the sentiment which is supposed to be excited by the exhibition of Christianity in youth, is complicated by Eva’s having a dainty foot and a well-made slipper.” This was a chance illustration for Ruskin, who was writing about pictorial art, but the point of it is fully illustrated by the visible charms of Eliza, Eva, Emmeline, and Cassie, as well as of George Harris, George Shelby, and St. Clare. Uncle Tom was almost the only good character who needed the defense “Handsome is that handsome does.” It is not at all likely that Mrs. Stowe calculated on these various appeals – democratic, theological, sentimental. In fact we have her word for it that the book “wrote itself.” With a moderately developed talent for story-writing she happened to have just the tone of mind and the level of culture which were attuned to the temper of her day, and she employed them to the utmost effect. Moreover, she used them just as Whittier used his powers in some of his moralistic poetry, not relying on her narrative to carry its own burdens but expounding it as she went along and appending a chapter of “Concluding Remarks” with various odds and ends of afterthought – matters which do not belong in a novel and which do not even belong together in any well-organized chapter, but matters which in a persuasive document doubtless were of great value in bringing back to the application the minds of those readers who may have been diverted by the sheer human interest of the tale.

“Uncle Tom” was a success which, of course, could not be duplicated. The second antislavery novel, “Dred, a Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp,” sold enormously on the strength of its predecessor and on its own merits, but it could only fan the embers which had previously been inflamed. The task had been done; and though it was well repeated, and though the application pointed this time to the degrading effects of slavery on the master class, “Dred” could never be anything but an aftermath to “Uncle Tom.”

With a removal to Andover, Massachusetts, in 1852, Mrs. Stowe accompanied her husband to his last post in another theological school, settling into a congenial New England village in comfort at last and among cultured and orthodox neighbors. And here she continued to write until her final move to Hartford, doing her best work in the field of provincial stories of New England life and character. The first of these, “The Minister’s Wooing,” was her contribution to the newly established Atlantic Monthly. With her recent successes fresh in the public mind, she was an indispensable “selling feature” for the ambitious magazine. With this novel she made her first attempt, since the forgotten “Mayflower” volume, to write a story in which the moral should take care of itself. There was a moral, to be sure, and a striking one, for it pointed to a distrust of the older New England Calvinism and made clear the distinction between a religion that uplifts and a theology that turns to scorn the religion it assumes to fortify. In Simeon Brown she developed the obnoxious professor of the declining faith.

He was one of that class of people who, of a freezing day, will plant themselves directly between you and the fire, and there stand and argue to prove that selfishness is the root of all moral evil… He was one of those men who suppose themselves submissive to the divine will, to the uttermost extent demanded by the extreme theology of that day, simply because they have no nerves to feel, no imagination to conceive what endless happiness or suffering is, and who deal therefore with the great problem of the salvation or damnation of myriads as a problem of theological algebra, to be worked out by their inevitable x, y, z.24

It answers to the refrain of “The Deacon’s Masterpiece,” which appeared while she was writing the book: “Logic is logic. That’s all I say.”

It is no accident, therefore, that she represents Simeon, this piece of corrugated inflexibility, as equally far from Dr. Hopkins, the large-hearted Puritan who was bigger than his creed, and from young James Marvin, who wanted to be better than he was but had no creed at all. In the chapter “Which Treats of Romance” Mrs. Stowe perhaps did not let the moral wholly take care of itself, since she came into court as a special pleader for beauty as an ally of religion and brought an indictment against the niggardliness of a life founded on a dogmatic dread of eternal fire. The moral of the book, if one must be given in a sentence, is that love realized is even finer than love renounced.

Like “Uncle Tom” and “Dred,” “The Minister’s Wooing” has its element of instruction as well as of edification, for it is a studied and faithful picture of Rhode Island life just after the Revolution – a period about as remote from Mrs. Stowe as the slave-story epoch is from the modern reader. And because it is less of an allegory the characters are more lifelike, not having to carry each his Christian’s pack of argument on his shoulders. As Lowell stated,25 they were set in contrast not by the simple and obvious method in fiction of putting them in different social ranks – aristocrat and commoner, master and man, Roundhead and Cavalier, pioneer, Indian and townsman. Between Mrs. Stowe’s village folk caste distinctions were of little moment; a careful realism was taxed to show the vital and homely differences between one individual and another. Her success in this respect is what gives any distinction to “The Pearl of Orr’s Island” (1862). The Pearl herself, who is a bit of labeled symbolism (chap. xxviii), – a Little Eva transported to the Maine coast and thence to heaven, – is almost the only insignificant character. Moses Pennell, an exotic, is comparatively lifelike, and the actual village people are as real as can be.

“Oldtown Folks” (1869) is Mrs. Stowe’s most effective and least adulterated novel. The people of the story are many and varied, ranging from Sam Lawson, the village Rip Van Winkle, to the choicest of Old Boston adornments of society. While the book had no social purpose it had the avowed narrative “object … to interpret to the world the New England life and character in that particular time in its history which may be called the seminal period” – a statement followed by the complacent and thoroughly provincial assertion that “New England was the seed-bed of this great American Republic, and of all that is likely to come of it.” It should be remembered in Mrs. Stowe’s defense that when she wrote these words the cleavage between North and South could account for many asperities from both sides and that to most Easterners “Trans-Mississippi” meant territory rather than people. In “breadth of canvas,” to resort to the slang of criticism, “Oldtown Folks” is in Mrs. Stowe’s whole output what “Middlemarch” is in George Eliot’s. It is filled with popular tableaux – in the old Meeting House, in the Grandmother’s Kitchen, at the Manor House, in the coach on its grave progress to Boston, in the school and its surroundings; and it is red-lettered with festivals in which the richest flavor of social life in the early nineteenth century is developed.

As a life story of the four youthful characters it does not linger vividly in mind. One does not recall them and their subjective experiences half so clearly as one does their intellectual and social and material surroundings. Yet the shape of their life experience was determined by just these external influences; and how clearly they belonged to a bygone period appears at a glance of comparison with any similar twentieth-century story.26

Margaret Deland’s “The Iron Woman,” for example, is a companion picture of four young people, but with how great a difference! The new industrialism, the decline of a theology which is only a relic in the iron woman, Mrs. Maitland, the post-Victorian attitude toward sex and the family, suggest the vast change in the fashions of human thought in a half century; and this is no less convincing because the conclusions of Mrs. Deland’s characters are practically identical with those of Mrs. Stowe’s. With Mrs. Stowe marriage is a finality and sexual sin a damnation in the sight of God. With Mrs. Deland marriage is an expedient and a protection for the woman who may otherwise be abandoned, and sin is punished in remorse and loss of reputation. Mrs. Stowe is moved by the thought of hell; Mrs. Deland, by the possibility of Promethean tortures from within. And in the later book capital and labor loom up to afford the background supplied in the earlier story by the church and its communicants.

In the quarter century remaining to her after the writing of “Oldtown Folks,” Mrs. Stowe’s life was a quiet fulfillment of her earlier career. From a Florida plantation on which she spent her winters she worked for the welfare of the negro and the upbuilding of the South. She labored as before in coöperation with the church, but her repugnance for the grimness of Calvinism had led her to become an Episcopalian. As a novelist she kept on in the exposition of New England and Northern life to the mild gratification of the reading public which she had already won – a reading public who enjoyed what Lowell almost too cleverly called “water gruel of fiction, thinned with sentiment and thickened with morality.” Her enduring fame will doubtless rest on the fact that she was a story-writer of moderate talent who in one memorable instance devoted her gift to the making of American history.

BOOK LIST

Harriet Beecher Stowe. Works. The writings of Harriet Beecher Stowe, with biographical introductions. 1899. 16 vols. These appeared in book form originally as follows: Mayflower, 1843; Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 1852; A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 1853; Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands, 1854; Dred, 1856; The Minister’s Wooing, 1859; The Pearl of Orr’s Island, 1862; Agnes of Sorrento, 1862; House and Home Papers, 1864; Little Foxes, 1865; Religious Poems, 1867; Queer Little People, 1867; The Chimney Corner, 1868; Oldtown Folks, 1869; Pink and White Tyranny, 1871; Oldtown Fireside Stories, 1871; My Wife and I, 1871; We and Our Neighbors, 1875; Poganuc People, 1878; A Dog’s Mission, 1881.

Biography and Criticism

The standard life is by Charles E. Stowe. 1890. The biographical introductions in the standard set are valuable.

Crowe, Martha Foote. Harriet Beecher Stowe. 1913.

Erskine, John. Leading American Novelists. 1910.

Fields, Mrs. Annie. Life and Letters of Harriet Beecher Stowe. 1897.

Stowe, C. E. and L. B. Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe. 1911.

The following are among the more important of the many magazine articles that appeared in the months just after the death of Mrs. Stowe:

Burton, Richard. Century, Vol. XXX, p. 690.

Cooke, G. W. New England Magazine (N. S.), Vol. XV, p. 3.

Fields, Mrs. Annie. Atlantic, Vol. LXXVIII, p. 15.

Higginson, T. W. Nation, Vol. LXIII, p. 24.

Lee, G. S. Critic, Vol. XXX, p. 281.

Phelps (Ward), E. S. McClure’s, Vol. VII, p. 3.

Ward, W. H. Forum, Vol. XXI, p. 727.

TOPICS AND PROBLEMS

Contrast the conditions of authorship and the circumstances of publication for Jane Austen and Mrs. Stowe. Compare those of George Eliot and Mrs. Stowe.

With reference to “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” read Agnes Repplier’s essay “Books that have Hindered Me” in “Points of View.”

Read “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” for Mrs. Stowe’s attitude toward the people of the South in distinction to her attitude toward the institution of slavery.

Read “Oldtown Folks” or “The Minister’s Wooing” for Mrs. Stowe’s exposition of the orthodox theology in either. If you can read both, note whether there is any difference in her attitude toward the faith of her fathers in the two books.

Compare Mrs. Stowe’s New England village characters with those of Oliver Wendell Holmes in any of his three novels.

Compare for the broad picture of a community and an epoch George Eliot’s “Middlemarch” and Mrs. Stowe’s “Oldtown Folks.”

Develop more fully the comparison or the contrast between “Oldtown Folks” and Mrs. Deland’s “The Iron Woman.”

CHAPTER XXI

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

In the roster of American men of letters it is hard to think of any other who is so completely the product of a district and the spokesman for it as Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–1894). His whole lifetime was passed in two neighborhoods – that of Harvard College in old Cambridge and that of Beacon Hill in oldest Boston. He was born in the college town in 1809, the same year with Lincoln. His father, the Reverend Abiel Holmes, was a fine exponent of the old orthodoxy and of the old breeding and a historian of the American Revolution. He was an inheritor of the blood of the Bradstreet, Phillips, Hancock, Quincy, and Wendell families, a kind of youth whose “aspect is commonly slender, – his face is smooth, and apt to be pallid, – his features are regular and of a certain delicacy, – his eye is bright and quick, – his lips play over the thought he utters as a pianist’s fingers dance over their music.”27 It was a type for whose aptitudes Holmes felt the greatest respect. He thanked God for the republicanism of nature which every now and then developed a “large, uncombed youth” who strode awkwardly into intellectual leadership. He acknowledged a Lincoln when he came to maturity, but he expected more of a Chauncey or an Ellery or an Edwards because of his inheritance.

A prevailing alertness of mind in Holmes’s generation offset the natural conservatism which belongs to an aristocracy. For a hundred years Harvard had been more liberal than Yale. The cleavage was already taking place between Unitarian and Trinitarian or Congregational believers. To be sure, the eyes of Abiel Holmes were focused on the past, and he sent his son to be schooled under the safe influences of Phillips Andover Academy, which were fostered by the orthodox theological seminary just across the road. But even here Wendell – as he was called – decided against entering the ministry because a certain clergyman “looked and talked so like an undertaker.” And when he entered college in his home town, while he faced the traditional required course of classical languages, history, mathematics, and moral philosophy, the wind from over the sea was blowing through it, and he breathed the atmosphere which was passing into the blood of Emerson and Thoreau and George Ripley and the other Transcendentalists-to-be.

In his college days he was a little cheerful student of average performance who refused then as always to take himself soberly, although he did not lack inner seriousness. He practised his gift for writing and was rewarded by the acceptance of some of his efforts in the fashionable Annuals of the day – repositories of politely sentimental tales, sketches, and poems in fancy bindings which ornamented the marble-topped tables in the “best rooms.” Under his apparently aimless amiability, however, there was an independence of judgment which twice recorded itself, in 1829 and ’30. The first time was on the occasion of an issue in his father’s church when the son was forced to agree with the liberal majority, who literally took the pastor’s pulpit from him, so that he had to reëstablish himself in North Cambridge. Few harder tests could be devised than one between loyalty to conviction and loyalty to family interests. The other sign of independence was his choice of a profession. A boy of his heritage was socially if not divinely predestined for some sort of intellectual life. If he went to college, assurance was made doubly sure that he would not become a business man. From the outset he rejected the ministry as his “calling.” He shrank from the formal complexities of the law as he did from the logic of the theologians. The thought of teaching did not seem to enter his mind. Literature could not afford him a livelihood. By elimination, then, only medicine was left to him, but in his day medicine did not occupy a position of dignity equal with the other professions. Medical science was still in earliest youth, and the practice of “physic” was jointly discredited by the barber, the veterinary, the midwife, the “yarb doctor,” and the miscellaneous quack. This young “Brahmin,” however, saw the chance for contributing to the progress of a budding science, and made his decision with quiet disregard of social prejudice.

Study in Paris, successful research work, practice in Boston, and a year’s teaching at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire led to an appointment on the medical faculty at Harvard which he held actively from 1847 to 1882 and as emeritus until his death. As a practitioner he was not remarkably successful. At the first his extremely youthful appearance and his jocosity of manner stood in the way. People could not be expected to flock to the office of a young man who was known to have said that “all small fevers would be gratefully received.” And later his interest in things literary was regarded with distrust by prospective patients. As a teacher, on the other hand, he was unusually effective because of the traits which made him a poor business-getter. He was vivacious and deft in his methods. He knew how to put his ideas in order, he was a master hand at expounding them, and he was ingenious in providing neat formulas for memorizing the myriad details of physiology and anatomy.

His profession supplied Holmes with a background of thought which was different from any of his contemporaries. It supplied him with titles and whole poems, such as “Nux Postcœnatica,” “The Stethoscope Song,” and “The Mysterious Illness,” h literary essays, such as “The Physiology of Versification,” and with a whole volume of medical essays. It furnished the motives for his three “medicated novels,” – prenatal influence in “Elsie Venner,” physical magnetism (by its opposite) in “A Mortal Antipathy,” and telepathy in “The Guardian Angel.” It was the basis for scores of passages and hundreds of allusions in the four volumes of the “Breakfast Table” series. And, furthermore, in the natural sympathy which it generated in him for every branch of progressive science it gave ground for the felicitous toast:28 “The union of Science and Literature – a happy marriage, the fruits of which are nowhere seen to better advantage than in our American Holmes.” This is not to say that Holmes was alone in his consciousness of science. Thoreau was fully as aware of it in the field of plant and animal study; all things considered, Emerson and Whitman were more responsive to its deeper spiritual implications. It is rather that Holmes had his special avenue of approach through the lore of the physician.

The Boston to which Holmes removed when he began his professional career was all-sufficing to him for the rest of his life. On Beacon Hill, the stronghold of the old social order, there was an eager, outreaching intellectual life. On its slope was the Boston Athenæum; just below were the Old Corner Book Store and the little shop maintained by Elizabeth Peabody. The theaters were rising at its foot. Music was being fostered under the wise persistence of James S. Dwight, Washington Allston was doing the best of his painting, and the traditions of good statesmanship were being maintained by men like Wendell Phillips and Charles Sumner. To cap all, good-fellowship reigned and many a quiet dinner became a feast of reason and a flow of soul. “Nature and art combined to charm the senses; the equatorial zone of the system was soothed by well-studied artifices; the faculties were off duty, and fell into their natural attitudes; you saw wisdom in slippers and science in a short jacket.” Although Holmes discounted it in the moment of utterance, he was not unfriendly to the dictum: “Boston State-house is the Hub of the Solar System. You couldn’t pry that out of a Boston man if you had the tire of all creation straightened out for a crowbar.”

Moreover, as the half century of his Boston residence progressed there was no waning in the intellectual life. The obvious leaders, whose names are known to everyone, were surrounded by a large circle of thinking men and women. At the corner of the Common, just across from the Statehouse, was the mansion of George Ticknor, then retired from his Harvard professorship but hospitable in the offer of his rich library to the new generation of scholars. William Ticknor founded a publishing business into which he soon took young James T. Fields, a house which under various firm names has had a distinguished and unbroken career. Elizabeth Peabody was a radioactive center of all sorts of enterprises and enthusiasms – the Pestalozzian Temple School, the “conversations” on history, the book shop, and the temporary publishing of the Dial. Francis H. Underwood was the untiring champion of the idea which with perfect unselfishness he handed over to the abler founders of the Atlantic Monthly. And scores of others with less definite fruits of no less definite interest in life talked well and listened well and wrote well for the passing reader of the day.