On the 29th of June, 1852, Henry Clay died. In that month the two great
political parties, in their national conventions, had accepted as a
finality all the compromise measures of 1850, and the last hours of the
Kentucky statesman were brightened by the thought that his efforts had
secured the perpetuity of the Union.
But on the 20th of March, 1852, there had been an event, the
significance of which was not taken into account by the political
conventions or by Clay, which was to test the conscience of the nation.
This was the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Was this only an "event,"
the advent of a new force in politics; was the book merely an abolition
pamphlet, or was it a novel, one of the few great masterpieces of
fiction that the world has produced? After the lapse of forty-four
years and the disappearance of African slavery on this continent, it is
perhaps possible to consider this question dispassionately.
The compromise of 1850 satisfied neither the North nor the South. The
admission of California as a free State was regarded by Calhoun as fatal
to the balance between the free and the slave States, and thereafter a
fierce agitation sprang up for the recovery of this loss of balance, and
ultimately for Southern preponderance, which resulted in the repeal of
the Missouri Compromise, the Kansas-Nebraska war, and the civil war.
The fugitive slave law was hateful to the North not only because it was
cruel and degrading, but because it was seen to be a move formed for
nationalizing slavery. It was unsatisfactory to the South because it
was deemed inadequate in its provisions, and because the South did not
believe the North would execute it in good faith. So unstable did the
compromise seem that in less than a year after the passage of all its
measures, Henry Clay and forty-four Senators and Representatives united
in a manifesto declaring that they would support no man for office who
was not known to be opposed to any disturbance of the settlements of
the compromise. When, in February, 1851, the recaptured fugitive slave,
Burns, was rescued from the United States officers in Boston, Clay urged
the investment of the President with extraordinary power to enforce the
law.
Henry Clay was a patriot, a typical American. The republic and its
preservation were the passions of his life. Like Lincoln, who was
born in the State of his adoption, he was willing to make almost any
sacrifice for the maintenance of the Union. He had no sympathy with the
system of slavery. There is no doubt that he would have been happy in
the belief that it was in the way of gradual and peaceful extinction.
With him, it was always the Union before state rights and before
slavery. Unlike Lincoln, he had not the clear vision to see that the
republic could not endure half slave and half free. He believed that the
South, appealing to the compromises of the Constitution, would sacrifice
the Union before it would give up slavery, and in fear of this menace
he begged the North to conquer its prejudices. We are not liable to
overrate his influence as a compromising pacificator from 1832 to 1852.
History will no doubt say that it was largely due to him that the war on
the Union was postponed to a date when its success was impossible.
It was the fugitive slave law that brought the North face to face with
slavery nationalized, and it was the fugitive slave law that produced
Uncle Tom's Cabin. The effect of this story was immediate and electric.
It went straight to the hearts of tens of thousands of people who had
never before considered slavery except as a political institution for
which they had no personal responsibility. What was this book, and how
did it happen to produce such an effect? It is true that it struck into
a time of great irritation and agitation, but in one sense there was
nothing new in it. The facts had all been published. For twenty years
abolition tracts, pamphlets, newspapers, and books had left little to be
revealed, to those who cared to read, as to the nature of slavery or its
economic aspects. The evidence was practically all in,--supplied largely
by the advertisements of Southern newspapers and by the legislation of
the slaveholding States,--but it did not carry conviction; that is, the
sort of conviction that results in action. The subject had to be carried
home to the conscience. Pamphleteering, convention-holding, sermons, had
failed to do this. Even the degrading requirements of the fugitive slave
law, which brought shame and humiliation, had not sufficed to fuse the
public conscience, emphasize the necessity of obedience to the moral
law, and compel recognition of the responsibility of the North for
slavery. Evidence had not done this, passionate appeals had not done
it, vituperation had not done it. What sort of presentation of the case
would gain the public ear and go to the heart? If Mrs. Stowe, in all her
fervor, had put forth first the facts in The Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin,
which so buttressed her romance, the book would have had no more effect
than had followed the like compilations and arraignments. What was
needed? If we can discover this, we shall have the secret of this
epoch-making novel.
The story of this book has often been told. It is in the nature of a
dramatic incident of which the reader never tires any more than the son
of Massachusetts does of the minutest details of that famous scene in
the Senate Chamber when Webster replied to Hayne.
At the age of twenty-four the author was married and went to live in
Cincinnati, where her husband held a chair in the Lane Theological
Seminary. There for the first time she was brought into relations
with the African race and saw the effects of slavery. She visited
slaveholders in Kentucky and had friends among them. In some homes she
saw the "patriarchal" institution at its best. The Beecher family were
anti-slavery, but they had not been identified with the abolitionists,
except perhaps Edward, who was associated with the murdered Lovejoy.
It was long a reproach brought by the abolitionists against Henry Ward
Beecher that he held entirely aloof from their movement. At Cincinnati,
however, the personal aspects of the case were brought home to Mrs.
Stowe. She learned the capacities and peculiarities of the negro race.
They were her servants; she taught some of them; hunted fugitives
applied to her; she ransomed some by her own efforts; every day there
came to her knowledge stories of the hunger for freedom, of the ruthless
separation of man and wife and mother and child, and of the heroic
sufferings of those who ran away from the fearful doom of those "sold
down South." These things crowded upon her mind and awoke her deepest
compassion. But what could she do against all the laws, the political
and commercial interests, the great public apathy? Relieve a case here
and there, yes. But to dwell upon the gigantic evil, with no means of
making head against it, was to invite insanity.
As late as 1850, when Professor Stowe was called to Bowdoin College, and
the family removed to Brunswick, Maine, Mrs. Stowe had not felt impelled
to the duty she afterwards undertook. "In fact, it was a sort of general
impression upon her mind, as upon that of many humane people in those
days, that the subject was so dark and painful a one, so involved in
difficulty and obscurity, so utterly beyond human hope or help, that it
was of no use to read, or think, or distress one's self about it." But
when she reached New England the excitement over the fugitive slave law
was at its height. There was a panic in Boston among the colored people
settled there, who were daily fleeing to Canada. Every mail brought her
pitiful letters from Boston, from Illinois, and elsewhere, of the terror
and despair caused by the law. Still more was the impressed by the
apathy of the Christian world at the North, and surely, she said, the
people did not understand what the "system" was. Appeals were made to
her, who had some personal knowledge of the subject, to take up her pen.
The task seemed beyond her in every way. She was not strong, she was in
the midst of heavy domestic cares, with a young infant, with pupils to
whom she was giving daily lessons, and the limited income of the family
required the strictest economy. The dependence was upon the small salary
of Professor Stowe, and the few dollars she could earn by an occasional
newspaper or magazine article. But the theme burned in her mind, and
finally took this shape: at least she would write some sketches and show
the Christian world what slavery really was, and what the system was
that they were defending. She wanted to do this with entire fairness,
showing all the mitigations of the "patriarchal" system, and all that
individuals concerned in it could do to alleviate its misery. While
pondering this she came by chance, in a volume of an anti-slavery
magazine, upon the authenticated account of the escape of a woman with
her child on the ice across the Ohio River from Kentucky. She began to
meditate. The faithful slave husband in Kentucky, who had refused to
escape from a master who trusted him, when he was about to be sold "down
river," came to her as a pattern of Uncle Tom, and the scenes of the
story began to form themselves in her mind. "The first part of the book
ever committed to writing [this is the statement of Mrs. Stowe] was the
death of Uncle Tom. This scene presented itself almost as a tangible
vision to her mind while sitting at the communion-table in the little
church in Brunswick. She was perfectly overcome by it, and could
scarcely restrain the convulsion of tears and sobbings that shook her
frame. She hastened home and wrote it, and her husband being away, read
it to her two sons of ten and twelve years of age. The little fellows
broke out into convulsions of weeping, one of them saying through his
sobs, 'Oh, mamma, slavery is the most cursed thing in the world!' From
that time the story can less be said to have been composed by her than
imposed upon her. Scenes, incidents, conversations rushed upon her with
a vividness and importunity that would not be denied. The book insisted
upon getting itself into being, and would take no denial."
When two or three chapters were written she wrote to her friend, Dr.
Bailey, of Washington, the editor of The National Era, to which she
had contributed, that she was planning a story that might run through
several numbers of the Era. The story was at once applied for, and
thereafter weekly installments were sent on regularly, in spite of all
cares and distractions. The installments were mostly written during the
morning, on a little desk in a corner of the dining-room of the cottage
in Brunswick, subject to all the interruptions of house-keeping, her
children bursting into the room continually with the importunity of
childhood. But they did not break the spell or destroy her abstraction.
With a smile and a word and a motion of the hand she would wave them
off, and keep on in her magician's work. Long afterwards they recalled
this, dimly understood at the time, and wondered at her power of
concentration. Usually at night the chapters were read to the family,
who followed the story with intense feeling. The narrative ran on for
nine months, exciting great interest among the limited readers of the
Era, and gaining sympathetic words from the anti-slavery people, but
without making any wide impression on the public.
We may pause here in the narrative to note two things: the story was not
the work of a novice, and it was written out of abundant experience and
from an immense mass of accumulated thought and material. Mrs. Stowe was
in her fortieth year. She had been using her pen since she was twelve
years old, in extensive correspondence, in occasional essays, in short
stories and sketches, some of which appeared in a volume called The
Mayflower, published in 1843, and for many years her writing for
newspapers and periodicals had added appreciably to the small family
income. She was in the maturity of her intellectual powers, she was
trained in the art of writing, and she had, as Walter Scott had when he
began the Waverley Novels at the age of forty-three, abundant store of
materials on which to draw. To be sure, she was on fire with a moral
purpose, but she had the dramatic instinct, and she felt that her object
would not be reached by writing an abolition tract.
"In shaping her material the author had but one purpose, to show the
institution of slavery truly, just as it existed. She had visited in
Kentucky; had formed the acquaintance of people who were just, upright,
and generous, and yet slave-holders. She had heard their views, and
appreciated their situation; she felt that justice required that their
difficulties should be recognized and their virtues acknowledged. It was
her object to show that the evils of slavery were the inherent evils of
a bad system, and not always the fault of those who had become involved
in it and were its actual administrators. Then she was convinced that
the presentation of slavery alone, in its most dreadful forms, would
be a picture of such unrelieved horror and darkness as nobody could be
induced to look at. Of set purpose, she sought to light up the darkness
by humorous and grotesque episodes, and the presentation of the milder
and more amusing phases of slavery, for which her recollection of the
never-failing wit and drollery of her former colored friends in Ohio
gave her abundant material."
This is her own account of the process, years after. But it is evident
that, whether consciously or unconsciously, she did but follow the
inevitable law of all great dramatic creators and true story-tellers
since literature began.
For this story Mrs. Stowe received from the Era the sum of three hundred
dollars. Before it was finished it attracted the attention of Mr. J. P.
Jewett, of Boston, a young and then unknown publisher, who offered to
issue it in book form. His offer was accepted, but as the tale ran on
he became alarmed at its length, and wrote to the author that she was
making the story too long for a one-volume novel; that the subject was
unpopular; that people would not willingly hear much about it; that one
short volume might possibly sell, but that if it grew to two that might
prove a fatal obstacle to its success. Mrs. Stowe replied that she did
not make the story, that the story made itself, and that she could not
stop it till it was done. The publisher hesitated. It is said that a
competent literary critic to whom he submitted it sat up all night with
the novel, and then reported, "The story has life in it; it will sell."
Mr. Jewett proposed to Professor Stowe to publish it on half profits if
he would share the expenses. This offer was declined, for the Stowes had
no money to advance, and the common royalty of ten per cent on the sales
was accepted.
Mrs. Stowe was not interested in this business transaction. She was
thinking only of having the book circulated for the effect she had at
heart. The intense absorption in the story held her until the virtual
end in the death of Uncle Tom, and then it seemed as if the whole vital
force had left her. She sank into a profound discouragement. Would this
appeal, which she had written with her heart's blood, go for nothing, as
all the prayers and tears and strivings had already gone? When the last
proof sheets left her hands, "it seemed to her that there was no hope;
that nobody would read, nobody would pity; that this frightful system,
which had already pursued its victims into the free States, might at
last even threaten them in Canada." Resolved to leave nothing undone to
attract attention to her cause, she wrote letters and ordered copies
of her novel sent to men of prominence who had been known for their
anti-slavery sympathies,--to Prince Albert, Macaulay, Charles Dickens,
Charles Kingsley, and Lord Carlisle. Then she waited for the result.
She had not long to wait. The success of the book was immediate. Three
thousand copies were sold the first day, within a few days ten thousand
copies had gone, on the 1st of April a second edition went to press, and
thereafter eight presses running day and night were barely able to keep
pace with the demand for it. Within a year three hundred thousand copies
were sold. No work of fiction ever spread more quickly throughout the
reading community or awakened a greater amount of public feeling. It was
read by everybody, learned and unlearned, high and low, for it was an
appeal to universal human sympathy, and the kindling of this spread the
book like wildfire. At first it seemed to go by acclamation. But this
was not altogether owing to sympathy with the theme. I believe that
it was its power as a novel that carried it largely. The community was
generally apathetic when it was not hostile to any real effort to be rid
of slavery. This presently appeared. At first there were few dissenting
voices from the chorus of praise. But when the effect of the book began
to be evident it met with an opposition fiercer and more personal than
the great wave of affectionate thankfulness which greeted it at first.
The South and the defenders and apologists of slavery everywhere were
up in arms. It was denounced in pulpit and in press, and some of the
severest things were said of it at the North. The leading religious
newspaper of the country, published in New York, declared that it was
"anti-Christian."
Mrs. Stowe was twice astonished: first by its extraordinary sale, and
second by the quarter from which the assault on it came. She herself
says that her expectations were strikingly different from the facts.
"She had painted slaveholders as amiable, generous, and just. She had
shown examples among them of the noblest and most beautiful traits of
character; had admitted fully their temptations, their perplexities, and
their difficulties, so that a friend of hers who had many relatives in
the South wrote to her: 'Your book is going to be the great pacificator;
it will unite both North and South.' Her expectation was that the
professed abolitionists would denounce it as altogether too mild in
its dealings with slaveholders. To her astonishment, it was the extreme
abolitionists who received, and the entire South who rose up against
it."
There is something almost amusing in Mrs. Stowe's honest expectation
that the deadliest blow the system ever suffered should have been
received thankfully by those whose traditions, education, and interests
were all bound up in it. And yet from her point of view it was not
altogether unreasonable. Her blackest villain and most loathsome agent
of the system, Legree, was a native of Vermont. All her wrath falls
upon the slave-traders, the auctioneers, the public whippers, and
the overseers, and all these persons and classes were detested by the
Southerners to the point of loathing, and were social outcasts. The
slave-traders and the overseers were tolerated as perhaps necessary in
the system, but they were never admitted into respectable society. This
feeling Mrs. Stowe regarded as a condemnation of the system.
Pecuniary reward was the last thing that Mrs. Stowe expected for her
disinterested labor, but it suits the world's notion of the fitness of
things that this was not altogether wanting. For the millions of copies
of Uncle Tom scattered over the world the author could expect nothing,
but in her own country her copyright yielded her a moderate return that
lifted her out of poverty and enabled her to pursue her philanthropic
and literary career. Four months after the publication of the book
Professor Stowe was in the publisher's office, and Mr. Jewett asked him
how much he expected to receive. "I hope," said Professor Stowe, with a
whimsical smile, "that it will be enough to buy my wife a silk dress."
The publisher handed him a check for ten thousand dollars.
Before Mrs. Stowe had a response to the letters accompanying the books
privately sent to England, the novel was getting known there. Its career
in Great Britain paralleled its success in America. In April a copy
reached London in the hands of a gentleman who had taken it on the
steamer to read. He gave it to Mr. Henry Vizetelly, who submitted it to
Mr. David Bogue, a man known for his shrewdness and enterprise. He took
a night to consider it, and then declined it, although it was offered
to him for five pounds. A Mr. Gilpin also declined it. It was then
submitted to Mr. Salisbury, a printer. This taster for the public sat up
with the book till four o'clock in the morning, alternately weeping
and laughing. Fearing, however, that this result was due to his
own weakness, he woke up his wife, whom he describes as a rather
strong-minded woman, and finding that the story kept her awake and made
her also laugh and cry, he thought it might safely be printed. It seems,
therefore, that Mr. Vizetelly ventured to risk five pounds, and the
volume was brought out through the nominal agency of Clarke & Company.
In the first week an edition of seven thousand was worked off. It made
no great stir until the middle of June, but during July it sold at the
rate of one thousand a week. By the 20th of August the demand for it was
overwhelming. The printing firm was then employing four hundred
people in getting it out, and seventeen printing-machines, besides
hand-presses. Already one hundred and fifty thousand copies were sold.
Mr. Vizetelly disposed of his interest, and a new printing firm began to
issue monster editions. About this time the publishers awoke to the fact
that any one was at liberty to reprint the book, and the era of cheap
literature was initiated, founded on American reprints which cost the
publisher no royalty. A shilling edition followed the one-and-sixpence,
and then one complete for sixpence. As to the total sale, Mr. Sampson
Low reports: "From April to December, 1852, twelve different editions
(not reissues) were published, and within the twelve months of its first
appearance eighteen different London publishing houses were engaged in
supplying the great demand that had set in, the total number of editions
being forty, varying from fine illustrated editions at 15s., 10s., and
7s. 6d. to the cheap popular editions of 1s. 9d. and 6d. After carefully
analyzing these editions and weighing probabilities with ascertained
facts, I am able pretty confidently to say that the aggregate number of
copies circulated in Great Britain and the colonies exceeds one and a
half millions." Later, abridgments were published.
Almost simultaneously with this furor in England the book made its way
on the Continent. Several translations appeared in Germany and France,
and for the authorized French edition Mrs. Stowe wrote a new preface,
which served thereafter for most of the European editions. I find
no record of the order of the translations of the book into foreign
languages, but those into some of the Oriental tongues did not
appear till several years after the great excitement. The ascertained
translations are into twenty-three tongues, namely: Arabic, Armenian,
Chinese, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Flemish, French, German, Hungarian,
Illyrian, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, modern Greek, Russian,
Servian, Siamese, Spanish, Swedish, Wallachian, and Welsh. Into some
of these languages several translations were made. In 1878 the British
Museum contained thirty-five editions of the original text, and eight
editions of abridgments or adaptations.
The story was dramatized in the United States in August, 1852, without
the consent or knowledge of the author, and was played most successfully
in the leading cities, and subsequently was acted in every capital in
Europe. Mrs. Stowe had neglected to secure the dramatic rights, and
she derived no benefit from the great popularity of a drama which still
holds the stage. From the phenomenal sale of a book which was literally
read by the whole world, the author received only the ten per cent on
the American editions, and by the laws of her own country her copyright
expired before her death.
The narrative of the rise and fortunes of this book would be incomplete
without some reference to the response that the author received from
England and the Continent, and of her triumphant progress through the
British Isles. Her letters accompanying the special copies were almost
immediately replied to, generally in terms of enthusiastic and fervent
thankfulness for the book, and before midsummer her mail contained
letters from all classes of English society. In some of them appeared
a curious evidence of the English sensitiveness to criticism. Lord
Carlisle and Sir Arthur Helps supplemented their admiration by a protest
against the remark in the mouth of one of the characters that "slaves
are better off than a large class of the population of England." This
occurred in the defense of the institution by St. Clare, but it was
treated by the British correspondents as the opinion of Mrs. Stowe.
The charge was disposed of in Mrs. Stowe's reply: "The remark on that
subject occurs in the dramatic part of the book, in the mouth of an
intelligent Southerner. As a fair-minded person, bound to state for both
sides all that could be said, in the person of St. Clare, the best
that could be said on that point, and what I know IS in fact constantly
reiterated, namely, that the laboring class of the South are in many
respects, as to physical comfort, in a better condition than the poor
in England. This is the slaveholder's stereo-typed apology; a defense it
cannot be, unless two wrongs make one right."
In April, 1853, Mr. and Mrs. Stowe and the latter's brother, Charles
Beecher, sailed for Europe. Her reception there was like a royal
progress. She was met everywhere by deputations and addresses, and
the enthusiasm her presence called forth was thoroughly democratic,
extending from the highest in rank to the lowest. At Edinburgh there
was presented to her a national penny offering, consisting of a thousand
golden sovereigns on a magnificent silver salver, an unsolicited
contribution in small sums by the people.
At a reception in Stafford House, London, the Duchess of Sutherland
presented her with a massive gold bracelet, which has an interesting
history. It is made of ten oval links in imitation of slave fetters. On
two of the links were the inscriptions "March 25, 1807," the date of
the abolition of the slave-trade, and "August 1, 1838," the date of the
abolition of slavery in all British territory. The third inscription
is "562,848--March 19, 1853," the date of the address of the women of
England to the women of America on slavery, and the number of the women
who signed. It was Mrs. Stowe's privilege to add to these inscriptions
the following: "Emancipation D. C. Apl. 16, '62;" "President's
Proclamation Jan. 1, '63;" "Maryland free Oct. 13, '64;" "Missouri free
Jan. 11, '65;" and on the clasp link, "Constitution amended by Congress
Jan. 31, '65. Constitutional Amendment ratified." Two of the links are
vacant. What will the progress of civilization in America offer for the
links nine and ten?
One of the most remarkable documents which resulted from Uncle Tom
was an address from the women of England to the women of America,
acknowledging the complicity in slavery of England, but praying aid in
removing from the world "our common crimes and common dishonor," which
was presented to Mrs. Stowe in 1853. It was the result of a meeting at
Stafford House, and the address, composed by Lord Shaftesbury, was put
into the hands of canvassers in England and on the Continent, and as far
as Jerusalem. The signatures of 562,848 women were obtained, with their
occupations and residences, from the nobility on the steps of the throne
down to maids in the kitchen. The address is handsomely engrossed on
vellum. The names are contained in twenty-six massive volumes, each
fourteen inches high by nine in breadth and three inches thick, inclosed
in an oak case. It is believed that this is the most numerously signed
address in existence. The value of the address, with so many names
collected in haphazard fashion, was much questioned, but its use was
apparent in the height of the civil war, when Mrs. Stowe replied to it
in one of the most vigorous and noble appeals that ever came from her
pen. This powerful reply made a profound impression in England.
This is in brief the story of the book. It is still read, and read the
world over, with tears and with laughter; it is still played to excited
audiences. Is it a great novel, or was it only an event of an era of
agitation and passion? Has it the real dramatic quality--the poet's
visualizing of human life--that makes works of fiction, of imagination,
live? Till recently, I had not read the book since 1852. I feared to
renew acquaintance with it lest I should find only the shell of an
exploded cartridge. I took it up at the beginning of a three-hours'
railway journey. To my surprise the journey did not seem to last half an
hour, and half the time I could not keep back the tears from my eyes. A
London critic, full of sympathy with Mrs. Stowe and her work, recently
said, "Yet she was not an artist, she was not a great woman." What is
greatness? What is art? In 1862 probably no one who knew General Grant
would have called him a great man. But he took Vicksburg. This woman did
something with her pen,--on the whole, the most remarkable and effective
book in her generation. How did she do it? Without art? George Sand
said, "In matters of art there is but one rule, to paint and to move.
And where shall we find conditions more complete, types more vivid,
situations more touching, more original, than in Uncle Tom?" If there
is not room in our art for such a book, I think we shall have to stretch
our art a little. "Women, too, are here judged and painted with a master
hand." This subtle critic, in her overpoweringly tender and enthusiastic
review, had already inquired about the capacity of this writer. "Mrs.
Stowe is all instinct; it is the very reason that she appears to
some not to have talent. Has she not talent? What is talent? Nothing,
doubtless, compared to genius; but has she genius? I cannot say that she
has talent as one understands it in the world of letters, but she has
genius as humanity feels the need of genius,--the genius of goodness,
not that of the man of letters, but of the saint." It is admitted that
Mrs. Stowe was not a woman of letters in the common acceptation of that
term, and it is plain that in the French tribunal, where form is of
the substance of the achievement, and which reluctantly overlooked the
crudeness of Walter Scott, in France where the best English novel seems
a violation of established canons, Uncle Tom would seem to belong where
some modern critics place it, with works of the heart, and not of the
head. The reviewer is, however, candid: "For a long time we have striven
in France against the prolix explanations of Walter Scott. We have cried
out against those of Balzac, but on consideration have perceived that
the painter of manners and character has never done too much, that every
stroke of the pencil was needed for the general effect. Let us learn
then to appreciate all kinds of treatment, where the effect is good, and
where they bear the seal of a master hand."
It must be admitted to the art critic that the book is defective
according to the rules of the modern French romance; that Mrs. Stowe
was possessed by her subject, and let her fervid interest in it be felt;
that she had a definite purpose. That purpose was to quicken the sense
of responsibility of the North by showing the real character of slavery,
and to touch the South by showing that the inevitable wrong of it lay in
the system rather than in those involved in it. Abundant material was in
her hands, and the author burned to make it serviceable. What should she
do? She might have done what she did afterwards in The Key, presented to
the public a mass of statistics, of legal documents. The evidence would
have been unanswerable, but the jury might not have been moved by
it; they would have balanced it by considerations of political and
commercial expediency. I presume that Mrs. Stowe made no calculation of
this kind. She felt her course, and went on in it. What would an artist
have done, animated by her purpose and with her material? He would have
done what Cervantes did, what Tourgenieff did, what Mrs. Stowe did. He
would have dramatized his facts in living personalities, in effective
scenes, in vivid pictures of life. Mrs. Stowe exhibited the system of
slavery by a succession of dramatized pictures, not always artistically
welded together, but always effective as an exhibition of the system.
Cervantes also showed a fading feudal romantic condition by a series
of amusing and pathetic adventures, grouped rather loosely about a
singularly fascinating figure.
Tourgenieff, a more consummate artist, in his hunting scenes exhibited
the effect of serfdom upon society, in a series of scenes with no
necessary central figure, without comment, and with absolute concealment
of any motive. I believe the three writers followed their instincts,
without an analytic argument as to the method, as the great painter
follows his when he puts an idea upon canvas. He may invent a theory
about it afterwards; if he does not, some one else will invent it for
him. There are degrees of art. One painter will put in unnecessary
accessories, another will exhibit his sympathy too openly, the technique
or the composition of another can be criticised. But the question is, is
the picture great and effective?
Mrs. Stowe had not Tourgenieff's artistic calmness. Her mind was fused
into a white heat with her message. Yet, how did she begin her story?
Like an artist, by a highly dramatized scene, in which the actors, by
a few strokes of the pen, appear as distinct and unmistakable
personalities, marked by individual peculiarities of manner, speech,
motive, character, living persons in natural attitudes. The reader
becomes interested in a shrewd study of human nature, of a section
of life, with its various refinement, coarseness, fastidiousness and
vulgarity, its humor and pathos. As he goes on he discovers that every
character has been perfectly visualized, accurately limned from the
first; that a type has been created which remains consistent, which is
never deflected from its integrity by any exigencies of plot. This clear
conception of character (not of earmarks and peculiarities adopted as
labels), and faithful adhesion to it in all vicissitudes, is one of the
rarest and highest attributes of genius. All the chief characters in the
book follow this line of absolutely consistent development, from Uncle
Tom and Legree down to the most aggravating and contemptible of all,
Marie St. Clare. The selfish and hysterical woman has never been so
faithfully depicted by any other author.
Distinguished as the novel is by its character-drawing and its pathos,
I doubt if it would have captivated the world without its humor. This
is of the old-fashioned kind, the large humor of Scott, and again of
Cervantes, not verbal pleasantry, not the felicities of Lamb, but
the humor of character in action, of situations elaborated with great
freedom, and with what may be called a hilarious conception. This
quality is never wanting in the book, either for the reader's
entertainment by the way, or to heighten the pathos of the narrative by
contrast. The introduction of Topsy into the New Orleans household saves
us in the dangerous approach to melodrama in the religious passages
between Tom and St. Clare. Considering the opportunities of the subject,
the book has very little melodrama; one is apt to hear low music on the
entrance of little Eva, but we are convinced of the wholesome sanity of
the sweet child. And it is to be remarked that some of the most exciting
episodes, such as that of Eliza crossing the Ohio River on the floating
ice (of which Mr. Ruskin did not approve), are based upon authentic
occurrences. The want of unity in construction of which the critics
complain is partially explained by the necessity of exhibiting the
effect of slavery in its entirety. The parallel plots, one running
to Louisiana and the other to Canada, are tied together by this
consideration, and not by any real necessity to each other.
There is no doubt that Mrs. Stowe was wholly possessed by her theme,
rapt away like a prophet in a vision, and that, in her feeling at the
time, it was written through her quite as much as by her. This idea
grew upon her mind in the retrospective light of the tremendous stir the
story made in the world, so that in her later years she came to regard
herself as a providential instrument, and frankly to declare that she
did not write the book; "God wrote it." In her own account, when she
reached the death of Uncle Tom, "the whole vital force left her."
The inspiration there left her, and the end of the story, the weaving
together of all the loose ends of the plot, in the joining together
almost by miracle the long separated, and the discovery of the
relationships, is the conscious invention of the novelist.
It would be perhaps going beyond the province of the critic to remark
upon what the author considered the central power of the story, and
its power to move the world, the faith of Uncle Tom in the Bible.
This appeal to the emotion of millions of readers cannot, however, be
overlooked. Many regard the book as effective in regions remote from our
perplexities by reason of this grace. When the work was translated into
Siamese, the perusal of it by one of the ladies of the court induced her
to liberate all her slaves, men, women, and children, one hundred and
thirty in all. "Hidden Perfume," for that was the English equivalent of
her name, said she was wishful to be good like Harriet Beecher Stowe.
And as to the standpoint of Uncle Tom and the Bible, nothing more
significant can be cited than this passage from one of the latest
writings of Heinrich Heine:--
"The reawakening of my religious feelings I owe to that holy book the
Bible. Astonishing that after I have whirled about all my life over all
the dance-floors of philosophy, and yielded myself to all the orgies of
the intellect, and paid my addresses to all possible systems, without
satisfaction like Messalina after a licentious night, I now find myself
on the same standpoint where poor Uncle Tom stands,--on that of the
Bible! I kneel down by my black brother in the same prayer! What a
humiliation! With all my science I have come no further than the poor
ignorant negro who has scarce learned to spell. Poor Tom, indeed, seems
to have seen deeper things in the holy book than I.... Tom, perhaps,
understands them better than I, because more flogging occurs in
them; that is to say, those ceaseless blows of the whip which have
aesthetically disgusted me in reading the Gospels and the Acts. But a
poor negro slave reads with his back, and understands better than we
do. But I, who used to make citations from Homer, now begin to quote the
Bible as Uncle Tom does."
The one indispensable requisite of a great work of imaginative fiction
is its universality, its conception and construction so that it will
appeal to universal human nature in all races and situations and
climates. Uncle Tom's Cabin does that. Considering certain artistic
deficiencies, which the French writers perceived, we might say that it
was the timeliness of its theme that gave it currency in England and
America. But that argument falls before the world-wide interest in it
as a mere story, in so many languages, by races unaffected by our own
relation to slavery.
It was the opinion of James Russell Lowell that the anti-slavery element
in Uncle Tom and Dred stood in the way of a full appreciation, at least
in her own country, of the remarkable genius of Mrs. Stowe. Writing in
1859, he said, "From my habits and the tendency of my studies I cannot
help looking at things purely from an aesthetic point of view, and what
I valued in Uncle Tom was the genius, and not the moral." This had been
his impression when he read the book in Paris, long after the whirl of
excitement produced by its publication had subsided, and far removed by
distance from local influences. Subsequently, in a review, he wrote, "We
felt then, and we believe now, that the secret of Mrs. Stowe's power lay
in that same genius by which the great successes in creative literature
have always been achieved,--the genius that instinctively goes to the
organic elements of human nature, whether under a white skin or a black,
and which disregards as trivial the conventions and fictitious notions
which make so large a part both of our thinking and feeling.... The
creative faculty of Mrs. Stowe, like that of Cervantes in Don Quixote
and of Fielding in Joseph Andrews, overpowered the narrow specialty
of her design, and expanded a local and temporary theme with the
cosmopolitanism of genius."
A half-century is not much in the life of a people; it is in time an
inadequate test of the staying power of a book. Nothing is more futile
than prophecy on contemporary literary work. It is safe, however, to say
that Uncle Tom's Cabin has the fundamental qualities, the sure insight
into human nature, and the fidelity to the facts of its own time which
have from age to age preserved works of genius.