BLACKWOOD’S
EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.
No. CCCCLVI. OCTOBER, 1853. VOL. LXXIV.
CONTENTS.
UNCLE TOM’S CABIN, 393
RIGHT DIVINE, 424
LADY LEE’S WIDOWHOOD.--PART X., 426
NEW READINGS IN SHAKESPEARE.--NO. III., 451
RAIL AND SADDLE IN SPAIN, 475
THE WANDERER, 488
THACKERAY’S LECTURES--SWIFT, 494
NOTE TO THE ARTICLE ON THE NEW READINGS IN SHAKESPEARE, 518
EDINBURGH:
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PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS, EDINBURGH.
=BLACKWOOD’S
EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.=
No. CCCCLVI. OCTOBER, 1853. VOL. LXXIV.
UNCLE TOM’S CABIN.[1]
Let us imagine one of our critical successors of a century
hence--that is, in the month of October 1953--sitting musingly
before a copy of a work called UNCLE TOM’S CABIN, which a few days
previously he had taken down by chance from one of the least-used
shelves of his library. May one also amuse one’s imagination by a
picture of the possible state of things then existing on the other
side of the Atlantic, by the light of which our shadowy friend of
1953 has read the work which his substantial one of 1853 has just
laid down?
--The present United States of America, after having been, perhaps,
more than once split asunder and soldered together again--or the
whole, or a large portion voluntarily reannexed to the mother
country, and by and by again detached--after these and other,
possibly more or less sudden, violent, and bloody vicissitudes--have
become a great Empire, under the stern, but salutary, one-willed
sway of the Emperor of America: his majesty a jet black, who had
shown consummate and unexpected high qualities for acquiring and
retaining the fear and submission of millions of the stormiest
tempers of mankind; but his lovely empress a white. He has an
immense army devoted to his person and will, composed of men of
every complexion--from black, through copper-middle tints, down to
white; and correspondingly diversified are his banners, but black, of
course, the predominant: a quadroon being commander-in-chief. As for
his majesty’s civil service, he has a coal-black chancellor, equally
at home in the profoundest mysteries of white and black letter; a
mulatto minister of instruction, and a white secretary of state;
black and white clergy, and a similarly constituted bar--here a big
black face frowning out of a white wig, and there a little white
face, grinning out of a black wig, with black and white bands, and
gowns varied _ad libitum_. And the laws which they are concerned in
administering, accord with these harmonious diversities--it being,
for instance, enacted, under heavy penalties, that no black shall, by
gesture, speech, or otherwise, presume to ridicule a white because of
his colour, nor, _vice versâ_, shall a white affect to disparage a
black because of his complexion; that the emperor and empress shall
always be of different colours, and that the succession to the throne
shall alternate between black and white, or mulatto, members of the
imperial family. By this and other provisions have been secured a
complete fusion between North and South, between black and white,
glitteringly typified by intermingled gems in the imperial crown;
the central one being the identical black diamond that figured in
the famous Exhibition in Great Britain in 1851, and presented to the
emperor by one of the descendants of her Majesty Queen Victoria,
then on the British throne! “To this _complexion_” shall it be that
matters have “come at last?”
Or will our sturdy cousins of 1953 be still republican, a united
republic, but with offices, honours, rights, and privileges, equally
distributed, as in our fancied empire, among those of every shade of
colour? Or, after a fearful succession of struggles between black and
white, ... the ... is predominant; ... slavery, after a ... sang--
... or a noble spontaneous....[2]
From a preliminary dissertation prefixed to the book, our critic of
1953 learns that it excited, almost immediately on its appearance,
a prodigious sensation among all classes, both in Europe and
America; that both sexes, high and low, young and old, literate and
illiterate, vulgar and refined, phlegmatic and excitable, shed tears
over it, and wrote and talked about it everywhere; that, within a
few months’ time, impressions of it were multiplied by millions,
and in most languages of the civilised world. That its writer, an
American woman, immediately came over to England, and made her
appearance in public assemblies, called in honour of her; and she was
also “lionised” [a word explained, in a long note, as indicating a
custom prevalent in that day, among weak persons, of running after
any notorious person weak enough to appear pleased with it] among
the fashionables and philanthropists of the day, but preserved,
nevertheless, amidst it all, true modesty of demeanour, and silence
amidst extravagant eulogy. Inflamed with curiosity, our shadowy
successor sits down to peruse a work--then possibly little, if ever,
mentioned--anxious to see what could have produced such a marvellous
effect, in the middle of the intelligent nineteenth century, on
all classes of readers; and whether it produced permanent results,
or passed away as a nine days’ wonder. Having at length closed the
pages of _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_, and judged it according to the critical
canons of 1953, will he deem it adequate to have produced such
effects? _What estimate will he form of our intellectual calibre?_
We cannot tell, and shall not attempt to conjecture. Dismissing,
therefore, but for a while only, the imaginary occupant of our
critical chair a century hence, let us say for ourselves, that
though our silence, and that of one or two quarterly contemporaries,
may have excited notice, both in America and this country, we have
been by no means indifferent spectators of the reception which this
singularly-successful book has met with; regarding it as one of
those sudden phenomena in literature, demanding, even, a deliberate
consideration of cause and effect. We apprehend no one will doubt
that, to excite such attention and emotion among all classes of
readers, in both hemispheres, as this work has excited, it must
possess _something_ remarkable; and what that is, it will be our
endeavour to determine. We ourselves never read this work till within
the last month, and then as a matter of mere critical curiosity,
uninfluenced by the past excitement of others, and the favourable
and unfavourable opinions which we heard expressed as to the merits
of the work. If we could have been biassed at all, it would have
been rather against, than in favour of, a writer who had been over
persuaded by her friends to come to this country, for the purpose of
making a sort of public appearance, at the moment that admiration
of her work was at fever height. Nothing could palliate such an
indiscretion on the part of this lady’s advisers, in the eyes of a
fastidious Englishman, but the belief that she was a simple-minded
enthusiastic crusader against American slavery, considering that
the totally unexpected celebrity of her work had afforded her an
opportunity of accelerating a European movement, in a holy cause,
by her personal presence. Criticism, however, ought not to be
influenced by petty disturbing forces like these, nor will ours.
We shall judge _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_ by its own intrinsic merits or
demerits--occasionally looking for the light which she has thought
proper to reflect upon it from its companion volume, “THE KEY.”
_Uncle Tom’s Cabin_ is a remarkable book unquestionably; and, upon
the whole, we are not surprised at its prodigious success, even as a
mere literary performance; but whether, after all, it will have any
direct effect upon the dreadful INSTITUTION at which it is aimed, may
be regarded as problematical. Of one thing we are persuaded--that
its author, as she has displayed in this work undoubted genius, in
some respects of a higher order than any American predecessor or
contemporary, is also a woman of unaffected and profound piety, and
an ardent friend of the unhappy black. Every word in her pages issues
glistening and warm from the mint of woman’s love and sympathy,
refined and purified by Christianity. We never saw in any other
work, so many and such sudden irresistible appeals to the reader’s
heart--appeals which, moreover, only a wife and a mother could
make. One’s heart throbs, and one’s eyes are suffused with tears
without a moment’s notice, and without anything like effort or
preparation on the writer’s part. We are, on the contrary, soothed
in our spontaneous emotion by a conviction of the writer’s utter
artlessness; and when once a gifted woman has satisfied her most
captious reader that such is the case, she thenceforth leads him on,
with an air of loving and tender triumph, a willing captive to the
last. There are, indeed, scenes and touches in this book which no
living writer, that we know of, can surpass, and perhaps none even
equal.
No English man or woman, again, could have written it--no one, but
an actual spectator of the scenes described, or one whose life is
spent with those moving among them; scenes scarce appreciable by
FREE English readers--fathers, mothers, husbands, wives, brothers
and sisters. We can hardly _realise_ to ourselves human nature tried
so tremendously as, it seems, is only adumbrated in these pages. An
Englishman’s soul swells at the bare idea of such submission to the
tyrannous will of man over his fellow-man, as the reader of this
volume becomes grievously familiar with; and yet we are assured by
Mrs Stowe that she has given us only occasional glimpses of the
indescribable horrors of slavery. To this part of the subject,
however, we shall return. Let us speak first, and in only general
terms, of the literary characteristics of the author, as displayed in
her work.
Mrs Stowe is unquestionably a woman of GENIUS; and that is a word
which we always use charily: regarding genius as a thing _per
se_--different from talent, in its highest development, altogether,
and in kind. Quickness, shrewdness, energy, intensity, may, and
frequently do accompany, but do not constitute genius. Its divine
spark is the direct and special gift of God: we cannot completely
analyse it, though we may detect its presence, and the nature of many
of its attributes, by its action; and the skill of high criticism is
requisite, in order to distinguish between the feats of genius and
the operations of talent. Now, we imagine that no person of genius
can read _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_, and not feel in glowing contact with
genius--generally gentle and tender, but capable of rising, with its
theme, into very high regions of dramatic power. This Mrs Stowe has
done several times in the work before us--exhibiting a passion, an
intensity, a subtle delicacy of perception, a melting tenderness,
which are as far out of the reach of mere talent, however well
trained and experienced, as the prismatic colours are out of the
reach of the born blind. But the genius of Mrs Stowe is of that kind
which instinctively addresses itself to the Affections; and though
most at home with the gentler, it can be yet fearlessly familiar
with the fiercest passions which can agitate and rend the human
breast. With the one she can exhibit an exquisite tenderness and
sympathy; watching the other, however, with stern but calm scrutiny,
and delineating both with a truth and simplicity, in the one case
touching, in the other really _terrible_.
“_Free_ men of the North, and Christians,” says she, in her own
vigorous and earnest way, “cannot know _what slavery is_.... From
this arose a desire,” on the author’s part, “to exhibit it in a
_living dramatic reality_. She has endeavoured to show it fairly in
its best and its worst phases. In its _best_ aspect, she has perhaps
been successful; but oh! who shall say what yet remains untold in
that _valley and shadow of death_ that lies on the other side?...
The writer has only given a faint shadow--a dim picture--of the
anguish and despair that are at this very moment riving thousands of
hearts, shattering thousands of families, and driving a helpless and
sensitive race to frenzy and despair.”
Without going further, the beautiful, accomplished, but ruined and
heart-broken slave Cassy--the bought, abhorring, and ultimately
discarded mistress of the miscreant Legree, and whose heart is
full of despair and murder towards him--affords many instances
of both kinds, the tender and the terrible. Her successor in the
_affections_! of the monster, is the lovely young slave Emmeline, of
but fifteen summers! and Cassy obtains a great ascendancy over her,
winning her love by the story of her own indignities and bereavements.
‘“What use will freedom be to me?” says Cassy, when they
are whispering together in their place of concealment,
where they lie like a couple of hunted hares, momentarily
hidden from the hounds--“Can it give me back my children,
or make me what I used to be?”
There was a terrible earnestness in her face and voice as
she spoke. Emmeline, in her childlike simplicity, was half
afraid of the dark words of Cassy. She looked perplexed,
but made no answer. She only took her hand with a gentle
caressing movement.
“_Don’t!_” said Cassy, trying to draw it away,--(observe,
she only _tries_!)--“_you’ll get me to loving you! and I
swore never to love anything again!_”
“Poor Cassy!... _I’ll_ be like a daughter to you!... I
shall love you whether you love me or not!”
The gentle childlike spirit conquered. Cassy sate down by
her, put her arm round her neck, stroked her soft brown
hair; and Emmeline then wondered at the beauty of her
magnificent eyes, now soft with tears. “O Emmeline!” said
Cassy, “I’ve hungered for my children, and thirsted for
them, and my eyes fail with longing for them! Here! here,”
she exclaimed, striking her breast, “it’s all desolate! all
empty!”’
Of the terrible we have a thrilling, indeed a sickening instance,
in Cassy’s frenzied determination to murder the fiend Legree, whose
brandy she has drugged for the purpose--but we anticipate.
Occasionally, also, Mrs Stowe displays a fine perception of external
nature--irradiating her inanimate scenes with the rich hues of
imagination. At these, however, she generally looks through a sort
of solemn religious medium. Here, for instance, is a startlingly
suggestive picture. It is poor Uncle Tom, sitting at midnight,
exhausted and heart-broken, during a moment’s respite from the
wasting and cruel inflictions of slavery, and reading his Bible by
moonlight.
‘... Tom sate alone by the smouldering fire, that flickered
up redly in his face.
The silver fair-browed moon rose in the purple sky, and
looked down, calm and silent, as God looks on the scene
of misery and oppression--looked calmly on the lone black
man, as he sate, with his arms folded, and his Bible on
his knee. “Is God here?” inquires he. ‘Ah,’ (proceeds the
author,) ‘how is it possible for the _untaught_ heart to
keep its faith unswerving, in the face of dire misrule,
and palpable unrebuked injustice? In that simple heart
waged a fierce conflict: the crushing sense of wrong,
the foreshadowing of a whole life of future misery, the
_wreck of all past hopes, mournfully tossing in the soul’s
sight, like dead corpses of wife, and child, and friend,
rising from the dark wave, and surging in the face of the
half-drowned mariner_? Ah, was it easy _here_ to believe
and hold fast the great password of Christian faith, that
_God_ IS, _and is the_ REWARDER _of them that diligently
seek him_?’
Here, again, is the lovely smile of early morning flung over the
monster Legree (poor Tom’s brutal master), as he wakes from a foul
debauch:--
‘Calmly the rosy hue of dawn was stealing into the room.
The morning star stood, with its solemn holy eye of light,
looking down on the man of sin, from out the brightening
sky. Oh, with what freshness, with what solemnity and
beauty, is each new day born! as if to say to insensate
man, “Behold! thou hast one more chance! _Strive_ for
immortal glory!” There is _no speech nor language_ where
this voice is not heard; but this bold bad man heard it
not. He awoke with an oath and a curse. What to him were
the gold and the purple, the daily miracle of morning? What
to him the sanctity of that star which the Son of God has
hallowed as his own emblem? Brute-like, _he saw without
perceiving_; and, stumbling forward, poured out a tumbler
of brandy, and drank half of it. “I’ve had a h--ll of a
night!” he said.’
’Twas somewhat different, that same morning, with his poor slave Tom,
waking bruised, wearied, and well-nigh spirit-broken.
‘The solemn light of dawn, the angelic glory of the
morning star, had looked in through the rude window of
the shed where Tom was lying; and, as if descending on
that star-beam, came the solemn words, _I am the root and
offspring of David, and the bright and morning star_....
Without shuddering or trembling, he heard the voice of his
persecutor as he drew near. “Well, my boy,” said Legree,
with a contemptuous kick, “how do you find yourself? Didn’t
I tell yer I could larn yer a thing or two? How do yer like
it, eh? How did yer whaling”--he had been fearfully flogged
over-night--“agree with yer, Tom? An’t quite so crank as
yer was last night? Ye couldn’t treat a poor sinner now to
a bit of a sermon, could yer, eh?”
Tom answered nothing.
“Get up, ye beast!” said Legree, kicking him again. This
was a difficult matter for one so bruised and faint; and,
as Tom made efforts to do so, Legree laughed.’
These passages, taken at random, are highly characteristic of the
author of _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_, in more ways than one, as will by and
by be shown.
Up and down the book are to be found strewn, as it were, carelessly,
striking and grand reflections, evincing the deeply thoughtful
moralist, and profoundly convinced believer.
‘True--there was _another life_--a life which, once
believed in, _stands as a solemn significant figure before
the otherwise unmeaning ciphers of time, changing them to
orders of mysterious unknown value_.’
We have not met with this idea before; and it is very striking.
Again--
‘The gift to appreciate, and the sense to feel the finer
shades and relations of moral things, often seems an
attribute of those whose whole life shows a careless
disregard of them. Hence Moore, Byron, Goethe, often
speak words more wisely descriptive of the true religious
sentiment, than another man whose whole life is governed by
it. In such minds, disregard of religion is a more fearful
treason--a more deadly sin.’
Again--
‘Oh! how dares the bad soul to enter the shadowy world of
sleep!--that land whose dim outlines lie so fearfully near
to the mystic scene of retribution!...
Legree felt a secret dislike to Tom--the native antipathy
of good to bad. He saw plainly that when (as was often the
case) his violence and brutality fell on the helpless, Tom
took notice of it; for _so subtle is the atmosphere of
opinion, that it will make itself_ FELT _without words; and
the opinion, even of a slave, may annoy a master_....
What a sublime conception is that of a last judgment!... A
righting of all the wrongs of ages!--a solving of all moral
problems, by an unanswerable wisdom.’
One of these problems--perhaps the greatest at present insoluble by
man--torments poor Tom.
‘It was strange that the religious peace and trust which
had upborne him hitherto should give way to tossings of
soul and despondent darkness. The gloomiest problem of this
mysterious life was constantly before his eyes: _souls
crushed and ruined, evil triumphant, and God silent!_ It
was weeks and months that Tom wrestled, in his own soul, in
darkness and sorrow.’
Which of _us_ cannot here sympathise with the poor, bruised, and
bleeding black?
Yet once more.
‘Is not this truly _feeling after God, and finding him_?
And may we not hope that the yearning, troubled, helpless
heart of man, pressed by the insufferable anguish of this
short life, or wearied by its utter vanity, never extends
its ignorant pleading to God in vain? Is not the veil which
divides us from an almighty and most merciful Father, much
thinner than we, in the pride of our philosophy, are apt
to imagine? And is it not the most worthy conception of
Him, to suppose that the more utterly helpless and ignorant
the human being is that seeks His aid, the more tender and
condescending will be His communication with that soul?’
Character is often drawn by our author with delicate discrimination;
and, at the same time, she almost as often exhibits a poverty and
crudeness in dealing with such subjects, which would be surprising,
but that it is evidently referrible to haste and inattention. Her
mind, too, is so intent upon the great, noble, and holy purpose of
her book, that she often does not give herself time to develop or
mature her own happiest conceptions. The momentary exigencies of her
story require the introduction of an additional figure; on which,
having paused for a moment to call up the image of one before her
mind’s eye, she forthwith gives a few strokes, possibly intending,
at a future time, to complete and retouch them; but that future time
never comes, for she has got into new scenes, and moves on, crowded
with new characters and associations. In this respect her book may
be compared to the _studio_ of a great painter, where the visitor
sees some pictures in all the splendour of their completeness, and
others in various stages of incompleteness--some exhibiting the
master’s hand, and others that of a hasty and unskilled workman; all
which may, perhaps, be visibly accounted for by the painter’s being
absorbed by some masterpiece, itself, however, only approaching
completeness. We feel bound, nevertheless, to express our opinion
that an additional solution of the matter is to be found in her
probably limited range of observation of actual life, at all events
of such life as Europeans can appreciate. In delineating the
character of slaves and the “slave-trader, kidnapper, negro-catcher,
negro-whipper,” as she herself groups them, she handles her pencil
with the confident ease of a master. “The writer,” says she herself,
at the close of her work, “has lived for many years on the frontier
line of slave states, and has had great opportunities of observation
among those who formerly were slaves.” To her sadly-familiar eye
“there are some things about these slaves which cannot lie: those
deep lines of patient sorrow upon the face--that attitude of
crouching and humble subjection--that sad habitual expression of
hope deferred in the eye--would tell their story, if the slave never
spoke.” We shall, however, presently have ample opportunities of
showing Mrs Stowe’s profound appreciation of the negro character;
one of a far more composite construction than any but a philosopher
might suppose, and also of great interest to those who are
contemplating _the future of the negro race_, as a large, though many
may unhappily deem it an unsightly element, in ascertaining the fates
of the human family. “This is an age of the world, truly,” says our
author, “when nations are trembling and convulsed. A mighty influence
is abroad, surging and heaving the world as with an earthquake. And,”
she asks, “is America safe? Every nation that carries in its bosom
great and unredressed Injustice, has in it the elements of this great
convulsion.”
While the pathos of Mrs Stowe is deep and pure, her _humour and
satire_ are genuine and racy, but quiet. Gloomy as is the prevalent
tone of her work, her reader’s feelings are discreetly relieved
by many little touches of quaint dry drollery. Master Shelby, for
instance, is a sharp youth of thirteen, the eldest son of Uncle Tom’s
first and kind-hearted master; and he has taken it in hand to teach
Tom (old enough to be almost his grandfather) his letters. Chloe is
Uncle Tom’s wife, and the cook of Mr Shelby; and it seems that she
is a capital cook, to boot, as Master Shelby has found out. He often
visits Uncle Tom’s cabin, to teach old Tom his letters--and also
partake of certain good things which Aunt Chloe used to prepare for
her favourite; who displays no little art in inflaming her ambition
by faintly undervaluing the culinary skill of one of her rivals,
a cook at a neighbouring plantation. The whole scene is admirably
sketched, and forms one of the earliest in the work. Excited to the
utmost, she prepares a delicious supper for Master George, who, it
will be seen, does it full justice.
‘By this time Master George had arrived at that
pass to which even a boy can come (under uncommon
circumstances)--_i. e._, when he could not eat another
morsel; and, therefore, he was at leisure to notice _the
pile of woolly heads and glistening eyes which were
regarding their operations hungrily from the opposite
corner_. [Who does not see the turgid youngster?--But one
does not dislike him; for] “Here!--you, Mose! Peto!” [said
he, addressing the young sables--the children of Uncle Tom
and Aunt Chloe]--breaking off liberal bits, and throwing
them at them--“You want some, don’t you?”’
One Black Sam, a friendly fellow-slave of Uncle Tom’s, is
unconsciously caught in the attitude of deeply considering the
interests of _number One_, as soon as he hears of the departure of
poor Uncle Tom, who has been suddenly sold to another master, leaving
a vacancy in his somewhat confidential office, which _some one_ must
supply. “One touch of” _selfishness_ “makes the whole world kin”--and
here is how it strikes our black brother.
‘Never did fall of any prime minister at court occasion
wider surges of sensation than the report of Tom’s fate
among his compeers on the place. It was the topic in every
mouth, everywhere; and nothing was done in the house or in
the field, but to discuss its probable results.
Black Sam, as he was called, from his being about three
shades blacker than any other son of ebony on the place,
was revolving the matter profoundly in all its phases and
bearings, with a comprehensiveness of vision, and a strict
look-out to his own personal well-being, that would have
done credit (says good, sly Mrs Stowe) to any white patriot
at Washington.
“It’s an ill wind dat blows _nowhar_--dat ar a fact,”
said Sam, sententiously, giving an additional hoist to
his pantaloons, and adroitly substituting a long nail in
place of a missing suspender-button. “Yes, it’s an ill wind
blows nowhar,” he repeated. “Now, dar, _Tom’s_ down--wal,
’course der’s room for some nigger to be _up_; and why
not _dis_ nigger?--dat’s de idee! Tom, a-ridin’ round de
country--boots blacked--pass in his pocket--all grand as
Cuffee; who but he? Now, why shouldn’t Sam?--_dat’s_ what
_I_ want to know!”’
There are, however, many indications throughout the work of the
writer’s humorous powers being checked and restrained, either
purposely or unconsciously, as if from a severe sense of the purpose
with which she writes--as though before her mind’s eye was ever the
bleeding heart of the negro. We have an indistinct recollection of
more than one disposition, or rather juxta-position, of persons and
incidents most suggestive of _fun_: but they are suddenly discarded,
the reader breathlessly following the grave and ardent writer, over
whose pale countenance the smile had but furtively flickered for an
instant, like a glance of moonlight on a gloomy sea. Here is one
of the passages to which we allude. Mr St Clare and his heartless
lackadaisical wife are conversing about his newly-acquired slave,
Uncle Tom, for whom he feels no little regard; but she is speaking of
him in a disparaging, contemptuous tone.
‘“Tom isn’t a bad hand, now, at explaining Scripture, I’ll
dare swear,” said St Clare. “He has a natural genius for
religion. I wanted the horses out early this morning, and
stole up to Tom’s _cubiculum_[3] there, over the stables,
and there I heard him holding a meeting by himself; and, in
fact, I haven’t heard anything quite _so savoury_ as Tom’s
prayer this some time. He put in for me with a zeal that
was quite apostolic.”
“Perhaps he guessed you were listening! I’ve heard of
_that_ trick before!”
“If he did he wasn’t very polite; for _he gave the Lord his
opinion of me pretty freely_! Tom seemed to think there
was decidedly room for improvement in me, and seemed very
earnest that I should be converted.”
“I hope you’ll lay it to heart,” said Miss Ophelia, (who is
the pious, simple-minded, conscientious, elderly spinster,
and cousin of Mr St Clare.)’
How much of the pious disinterested character of the poor slave, the
heartless distrust of his mistress, the humorous, good-natured levity
of his master, and the earnest goodness of Ophelia, does this quiet
touch reveal to us!
On another occasion, Mrs St Clare, who has no more intellect or
feeling than her thimble, or thread paper, is conversing with her
lovely little daughter, Eva, who is pleading with her mamma on behalf
of the poor little negress, Topsy (of whom more anon), and meekly
suggesting the possibility of Topsy’s being human! and consequently
capable of improvement.
‘“Mamma, I think Topsy is different from what she used to
be; she’s _trying_ to be a good girl.”
“She’ll have to try a good while before _she_ gets to be
good,” said Mrs St Clare, with a careless laugh.
“Well, you know, mamma, poor Topsy! everything has always
been against her!”
“Not since she’s been _here_, I’m sure. If she hasn’t been
talked to”--(not by the silly speaker, let our readers
understand, but by good Miss Ophelia aforesaid, for whom
poor Topsy has been _bought!_ good-humouredly by Mr St
Clare, simply to try whether moral and religious training
can make anything of the little sooty gnome)[4]--“and
preached to, and every earthly thing done that anybody
_could_ do; and she’s just so ugly, and always will be, you
can’t make anything of the creature!”
“But, mamma, it’s so different to be brought up as I’ve
been, with so many friends--so many things to make me good
and happy; and to be brought up as she has been, all the
time, till she came here!”
“Most likely,” said Mrs St Clare, yawning. “Dear me! how
hot it is!”
“Mamma, you believe, don’t you, that Topsy could become an
angel, as well as any of us, if she were a Christian?”
“Topsy! what a ridiculous idea! Nobody but you would ever
think of it! I suppose she could, though!”
“But, mamma, isn’t God her father, as much as ours? Isn’t
Jesus her Saviour?”
“Well, that may be. I suppose God made everybody.--Where’s
my smelling-bottle?”’
This is very masterly. It has a sort of rich stillness of satire,
and, at the same time, a truthfulness and suggestiveness which make
the reader first admire the writer’s acute perception of character
and power of felicitous dialogue, and then pause and ponder the
state of mind and feeling revealed--that of frivolous, ignorant,
indifferent _acquiescence_!
The above extract incidentally indicates another excellence of Mrs
Stowe. Her dialogue is almost always admirable; brief, lively,
pointed, and characteristic--that is, when she does not, so to speak,
crowd too much sail upon it, in her intense anxiety to be didactic
and hortatory on the great subject on which her eyes are ever fixed.
When she yields to the promptings of her own power over character and
expression, she exhibits high dramatic capabilities. She perceives
a fine _situation_ with the unerring intuition of genius, and
inspires her characters with fitting sentiments, conferring upon
them appropriate eloquence. Akin to this is the easy strength of
her narrative. She hurries her reader along with her, breathless.
The flight and pursuit of poor Eliza and her child--the incidents
selected to heighten the interest in their fate--the introduction of
Marks and Tom Loker, and their interview with Haley--their encounter
at the rocky pass with George and his wife and child, are, in parts,
worthy of the pencil of Sir Walter Scott: but, it must be added,
that that consummate master of his art would never have drawn up
suddenly in his exciting course, to interpolate drivelling allusions
to Austria and the Hungarians, Poland, Ireland, and England--or tame
and even irritating moralisings at the very crisis of the adventure,
as is but too often the case with Mrs Stowe. But this very fault,
and a serious one to a reader of fiction it is, must be referred to
a cause infinitely and eternally honourable to the author--her pure
and noble purpose in writing the book. With our eye fixed on that
purpose, we will forgive her five times as many faults of style and
arrangement as she is fairly chargeable with.
“In every work regard the writer’s _end_.”
And in the application of this obviously just critical canon, we
are disposed to look, in the present case, with peculiar benignity
on miscarriages as to _means_. One or two of them, however, we must
lightly indicate (for we are in our critical chair) in addition to
those at which we have already glanced.
We shall begin with a small matter. It is evident that the writings
of one English author at least of the present day have made a deep
impression on Mrs Stowe. This is Mr Dickens, with whom, indeed, she
has much in common; but he must not attribute it to mere gallantry,
if we express our opinion that there are parts of _Uncle Tom’s
Cabin_ which he never can surpass, which he never has surpassed.
She probes human nature every whit as tenderly and truly as he; her
sympathies are as keen and subtle, her spirit is as generous, as his;
her perception of the humorous as quick and vivid as his own. She
shows also his--so to speak--structural faults; which, in a general
way, we may indicate by saying, that condensation and directness
of course would greatly improve the compositions of both. A lively
reader hates to be detained on his way, in order to have traced out
for him the source and operation of the _motives_ by which characters
are actuated. He likes to be given credit for a capacity to do that
for himself. It occurs to us, that had Mr Dickens passed his life
among the same scenes as Mrs Stowe, making allowance for certain
special circumstances affecting the latter, he would have produced
a work very similar, in both its faults and excellencies, to _Uncle
Tom’s Cabin_. That she is a reader, and doubtless an admirer of his,
is abundantly evident; for she has closely copied his manner, and
that not in its most favourable manifestations, but rather the more
obvious mannerisms. Mr Dickens might have written this passage for
her.
‘_Carriage sticks fast_, while Cudjoe on the outside is
heard making a great muster among the horses. After various
ineffectual pullings and twitchings, just as Senator is
losing all patience, the carriage suddenly rights itself
with a bounce, two front wheels go down into another abyss,
and Senator, woman, and child, all tumble promiscuously on
to the front seat; Senator’s hat is jammed over his eyes
and nose quite unceremoniously, and he considers himself
fairly extinguished; child cries, and Cudjoe on the outside
delivers animated addresses to the horses, who are kicking,
and floundering, and straining under repeated cracks of the
whip. Carriage springs up with another bounce--down go the
hind wheels--Senator, woman, and child, fly over on to the
back seat, his elbows encountering her bonnet, and both
her feet being jammed into his hat, which flies off in the
concussion. After a few moments the “slough” is passed, and
the horses stop, panting; the Senator finds his hat, the
woman straightens her bonnet, and hushes her child, and
they brace themselves firmly for what is yet to come.’
Here again--
‘If any want to get up an inspiration, under this head,
“the beauty of old women,” we refer them to our good
friend Rachel Halliday, just as she sits there in her
little rocking chair. _It had a turn for quaking and
squeaking--that chair had--either from having taken cold in
early life, or from some asthmatic affection, or perhaps
from nervous derangement._ But as she gently swung backward
and forward, the chair kept up a kind of “creechy-crawchy”
that would have been intolerable in any other chair. But
old Simon Halliday often declared it was as good as any
music to him, and the children all avowed _that they
wouldn’t_ miss of hearing mother’s chair for anything in
the world.’
Another little mannerism acquired from the same quarter is the use,
in grave composition, of the colloquial, “can’t,” “won’t,” “didn’t,”
“couldn’t,” &c. &c. These are little bits of vulgar slip-slop which
are sad eyesores to readers of taste; and we cannot for the life of
us see what end is gained by introducing them into black and white,
except, perhaps, in fitting dialogue.
We have already intimated a considerable want of tact in Mrs Stowe,
in twitching aside, as it were, her reader, when in full course of
following her breathless, to listen to some very self-obvious and
commonplace moralising. Here is one most provoking instance. Poor
beautiful Eliza Harris, supported by almost supernatural energy, is
flying from misery and infamy--her little son close-clasped in her
arms--with but a little time to improve her precarious chances of
escape to Canada; knowing that her little one is _sold_, and that the
blood-hounds may almost then, even, be snuffing on her track! ’Tis
early--very early--in a frosty February morning; the sparkling stars
are looking down, as it were, out of the cold silent heavens with
pitying looks on the poor fugitive. She hastily hushes her child into
silence, as “with vague terror he clings round her neck.” He could
have walked;--but let good Mrs Stowe’s own fleet pencil tell of her
heroine’s feathery movements:--
‘Her boy was old enough to have walked by her side, and
in an indifferent case she would only have led him by the
hand; but now the bare thought of putting him out of her
arms made her shudder; and she strained him to her bosom
with a convulsive grasp as she went rapidly forward. The
frosty ground creaked beneath her feet, and she trembled
at the sound; every quaking leaf and fluttering shadow
sent the blood backward to her heart, and quickened her
footsteps. She wondered within herself at the strength that
seemed to be come upon her--for she felt the weight of
her boy as if it had been a feather, and every flutter of
fear seemed to increase the supernatural power that bore
her on; while from her pale lips burst forth, in frequent
ejaculations, the prayer to a Friend above--“Lord, help!
Lord, save me!”’
While the reader--perhaps herself a palpitating mother, almost
blinded with her tears--is flying along with the dear fugitive and
her child, bah! she is arrested, to listen to twaddle--we must say
it--as follows:--
‘If it were _your_ Harry, mother, or _your_ Willy, that
were going to be torn from you by a brutal trader to-morrow
morning--if you had seen the man, and heard that the
papers were signed and delivered, and you had only from
twelve o’clock till morning to make good your escape--how
fast could _you_ walk? How many miles could you make in
those few brief hours, with the darling at your bosom--the
little sleepy head on your shoulder--the small soft arms
trustingly holding on to your neck?’
Forgive us, dear Mrs Stowe, if we gently reproach you for thus
marring your own beautiful narrative, and also giving English
mothers credit for being so obtuse and phlegmatic as to be unable to
realise all these thoughts and feelings as they are hasting along
with you!
And there are very many such instances of defective workmanship.
A considerable portion of these consists of preaching--always,
doubtless, perfectly orthodox and evangelical, but smacking too
strongly--will she forgive us?--of the _conventicle_ twang.
After all, however, Mrs Stowe must be tried by the canon already
cited--“regard the writer’s _end_;” and doubtless she knows that
portion of the American public for which she chiefly writes, and what
kind and amount of _hard-hitting_, so to speak, is necessary to make
an impression on sensibilities enclosed in rhinoceros hide. We do not
say that it is so; but we suppose that Mrs Stowe has classes of hard
people in view, and knew the rough force requisite to hit home.
All these, however, and other similar little matters which might
be mentioned, are mere motes in sunbeams, when regarded by the
eye of a just and generous criticism; which only regrets, every
now and then, that the gifted authoress had not had the advantage
of submitting her MS., or her printed sheets, to the eye of some
competent censor, capable of seizing the scope of her noble purpose,
and solicitous to remove every obstacle in the way of her attaining
it. But she evidently did not write for us in England--in Europe;
nor did this pious daughter of genius dream of the world-wide fame
which she was destined to acquire. She has assured us, in print,
that, “when writing _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_,” she was “entirely unaware
and unexpectant of the importance which would be attached to its
statements and opinions.” We implicitly believe her; and our heart
gives her its entire confidence, as to a simple-minded and gifted
Christian woman, writing out of the fulness of her heart, in order
to open before the eyes of free shuddering Christendom a hideous
and blood-smeared page of living humanity. She has repeatedly and
solemnly asseverated that she has taken the greatest possible pains
not to mis-state or exaggerate the case against slavery; that she
speaks from long personal observation; and, in short, “that this
work, more than any other work of fiction that ever was written,
has been a collection and arrangement of real incidents, of actions
really performed, of words and expressions really uttered, grouped
together with reference to a general result, in the same manner
that the mosaic artist groups his fragments of various stones into
one general picture. His is a mosaic of gems--this is a mosaic of
facts.... The book had a purpose entirely transcending artistic
purpose, and accordingly encounters, at the hands of the public,
demands not usually made on fictitious works. It is treated as a
reality--sifted, tried, and tested as a reality; and, therefore, as a
reality it may be proper that it should be defended.... It is a very
inadequate representation of slavery, and necessarily so, for this
reason--that slavery, in some of its workings, is too dreadful for
the purpose of art. A work which should represent it strictly as it
is, would be a work which could not be read.” “The writer,” she adds,
in the preface to her _Key_, “has aimed, as far as was possible,
to say what is true.... She has used the most honest and earnest
endeavours to learn the truth.” ... “And the book is commended to the
candid attention and earnest prayers of all Christians throughout
the world.” These are grave statements, especially when falling from
the pen of one who had already secured a world-wide hearing; and by
the light of such statements _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_ ought to be read,
unless Mrs Stowe’s means of knowledge, or her truthfulness, can be
seriously impeached. Looked at in this light, the writer is regarded
as actuated by a magnificent spirit: one which cannot stoop to regard
petty carping and cavilling, and need concern itself with nothing
but grave and temperate objections based upon facts. It will not do
for her American critics to aver, that, “without being actuated by
wrong motives in the preparation of this work, she has done a wrong
which no ignorance can excuse, and no penance can expiate”[5]--unless
such an allegation can be sustained by unequivocal evidence of
exaggeration, misrepresentation, and falsehood. All we shall say at
present is, that if Mrs Stowe is to be believed by her reader, he
will lay down her book, on having deliberately read it, with feelings
and thoughts too painful and deep for utterance, and which _ought_ to
lead to action.
The title of Mrs Stowe’s book--“_Uncle Tom’s Cabin_”--is far from
commensurate with the scope of the fiction, or rather series of
“pictures,” of which it consists. The cabin is not the scene of any
events of importance to the story. It is not impossible that her
intention originally was to confine her pencil to the delineation of
Tom, his residence, family, relations, and the incidents which befell
item _personally_ through the operation of slavery. Uncle Tom and
his fortunes might have constituted a work by itself, and those of
George and Eliza Harris, a second. The former might have been called
_Uncle Tom_, and the latter _George and Eliza_; or _The Cabin_,
and _The Flight_; for there are two classes of adventures quite
separate from each other--the experiences of the submissive, and the
adventures of the recalcitrant, slave. It is true that the authoress
seeks to link them together, at starting, by making Uncle Tom and
Eliza Harris fellow-slaves of the same master and mistress, and Uncle
Tom and Eliza’s child, Harry, the subjects of a joint sale to the
slave-trader; but beyond this slight connection there is none other.
Eliza, with her sold child, pays only one hasty affrighted midnight
visit to the cabin of Uncle Tom; but her husband is never shown near
it. At the very end of the story, however, Mrs Stowe seems to have
had suggested to her the propriety of coupling the fates of her
characters together in some way or other--so that, in a manner which
may provoke the smile of a veteran novelist, she contrives to make a
female slave, Cassy, whom Tom encounters at the close of his career,
prove to be the mother of Eliza Harris; and a lady passenger, who
happens, by the merest accident on earth, to be in the steamboat in
which the aforesaid slave is escaping, turns out to be the sister of
George Harris! Rather a fortunate coincidence this, it must be owned.
Thus it is, that, under the title “_Uncle Tom’s Cabin--a Picture of
Slave Life in America_,” there are two distinct threads of story,
only nominally and arbitrarily connected together; while on each
is strung a series of interesting, affecting, and even horrifying
incidents, developing character, and the working of institutions upon
it.
Let us now give some account of the style in which she has executed
her work.
The tale opens with a very skilfully contrived scene, the object
being to arrest attention, without plunging into horrors which might
at first shock a reader, and render him incredulous; and yet it is
very startling to a European not familiar with slavery. It is a
_tête-à-tête_ between a respectable Kentuckian planter, involved
by over-speculation, and the slave-dealer Haley, an impudent,
swaggering, hard-hearted, gaudily-dressed brute, who bargains over
his brandy-and-water for flesh and blood, just as he would do in
respect of a bale of cotton. Mrs Stowe opens the wretch’s character,
as it were an oyster, with a firm and practised hand. It is quickly
seen that the subject of chaffering is the sale of poor Tom, with
whom Mr Shelby is reluctantly compelled to part, as some of his
heaviest “paper” had found its way into the hands of Mr Haley. In
this introductory dialogue we meet with new and fearful phraseology,
as applied to human beings. Mrs Stowe, with much tact, contrives,
by a word or two, to excite the reader’s interest in Tom long
before he comes on the scene. In enumerating his good qualities,
Mr Shelby speaks of poor Tom’s religious character as a guarantee
of his fidelity. This is how it strikes the slave-dealer. “Some
folks don’t believe there’s pious niggers, Shelby; but I _do_. I
had a feller, now, in this yer last lot I took to Orleans--’twas
as good as a meetin’ now, really, to hear that critter pray!...
He fetched me a good sum, too; for I bought him cheap of a man
that was ’bliged to sell out” (a tasteful allusion to the exact
quandary of his companion!) “so I realised six hundred on him.
Yes.--I consider religion a valeyable thing in a nigger, when it’s
the genuine article, and no mistake!” By and by, in bursts little
Harry, romping about the room, trotted out by Mr Shelby, to amuse
his hateful companion by his quaint antics; who had first asked, as
the child entered--while the two gentlemen! were haggling about the
price of Tom--“Well; haven’t you a boy or a gal that you could throw
in with Tom?”... After a while, Mr Haley adds--“I’ve got a friend
that’s going into this yer branch of the business--and wants to buy
up handsome boys to raise for the market--fancy articles entirely!”
Mr Shelby having hinted his reluctance to separate the child from
his beautiful mother, who had just withdrawn him from the room,
Mr Haley favours his companion with the result of his experiences
in such matters; deprecating doing anything rashly (“though these
critters arn’t like white folks, you know”), lest--lest--it should
injure the mother’s health, and lower _her_ price in the market!
And he mentions a grievous blunder made by a friend of his, who too
suddenly sold away a mother’s baby, on which she “jist went ravin’
mad, and died in a week--_clear waste, sir, of a thousand dollars_,
jist for want of management--there’s where’t is. It’s always best
to do the humane thing, sir; that’s been _my_ experience.” (By this
time, our gentleman reader is disposed to fling friend Haley through
the window; and our lady reader--but, oh! as for her, we have much
more serious matter in store). Mr Shelby, it is intimated, was
desirous to help Mr Haley down stairs with a kick, but he was Mr
Shelby’s _creditor_! On the former’s return, his debtor’s scruples
have been overcome; and poor good old Tom, and little Harry, have
become the property of Mr Haley, who is to take them away the next
morning! The whole of this introductory scene is highly creditable
to Mrs Stowe’s powers: it is graphic and dramatic, character and
incident being hit off with a quiet strength, auguring well for
the rest of her performance. She has not overdrawn Haley. She has
given us quite enough to startle and disgust us with--the _system_,
more than the individual, and has at the same time relieved the
reader’s mind by a just perceptible strain of drollery and piquant
satire. But how distinctly you see, all the while, the dismayed and
ungratefully-treated patriarch, old Tom, and the beautiful mother,
with bleeding heart soon to come before us--the one, his big heart
heaving with grief and astonishment; the mother’s, bleeding and
broken! The first few chapters of this work will satisfy the most
fastidious reader that he is sitting down before the production of
a great artist. The scene enacting in Uncle Tom’s cabin, during
the time that his master is selling him to Haley, and consigning
him to those of unknown suffering and death, is first-rate, and
peculiarly racy to European readers; who, though strangers to such
scenes, _feel_ that _this_ must be painted to the very life. From
the first to the end of the eighth chapter, including also the
tenth, we are conducted, indeed, “from gay to grave, from lively to
severe;” the lights and shadows of negro life are brought before
us with equal vividness and distinctness, by scenes most happily
contrived, without a tinge of exaggeration, or a disfiguring touch
of coarseness. Mr and Mrs Shelby are just what they ought to be,
without any marked characteristics; the reader’s attention being thus
fixed undisturbedly on the new figures of Haley, Uncle Tom and Aunt
Chloe, George and Eliza Harris, Marks, and Tom Loker, as well as
the skittish, frolicsome, mischievous, and selfish negro servants.
The story, too, is advancing; Tom is on his journey, manacled and
fettered, in the slave-waggon with Haley, whose pursuit after Eliza
and her child has been hitherto in vain, in spite of his grim
auxiliaries; and George also has started safe on the desperate race
for freedom: the little we have seen of him induces us heartily to
say--God speed you! brave soul, you are worthy of the prize--may you
win it!
The ninth chapter introduces us to quite a different scene--Senator
Bird, and his bustling little soft-hearted wife, who became the host
and hostess of fugitive Eliza--the pallid, the breathless--with
tottering knees and bleeding feet--who has been led by the
Kentuckian, who had helped her up the bank of the river, to the
house of the senator and his wife, just as they are discussing--the
abolition question. They, their children, and their quiet home-scene,
are beautifully sketched--as are the means by which Eliza and her
child are conducted to a place of temporary succour and safety.
The eleventh chapter introduces us to a different time and
locality--an evening in a remote Kentucky hotel. The wild Kentuckian
guests squat about and straddle their legs, and chew, and spit,
before us. What a gathering of _hats_ of all shapes and sizes--“quite
a Shakspearian study!”--is before us! We see them all, and can
conjecture the stranger aspect of those who wear them! It is here
that our disguised friend George turns up, in the way we have
mentioned. ’Tis here that he says, with erect form and flashing eye,
to his former kind master, Mr Wilson, “I’ve said _Mas’r_ for the last
time to any man! I’m free!”
“Take care. You may be taken,” replies good Mr Wilson, apprehensively.
“All men are free and equal _in the grave_, if it comes to that, Mr
Wilson,” says lion-hearted George, who is armed to the teeth....
“Good-by, sir; if you hear that I’m taken, you may know that I’m
dead!” He stood up like a rock, and put out his hand with the air of
a prince. Well done, Mrs Stowe! And how tenderly she presently smites
the rock of his resolution, till the pent-up waters of a husband and
a father gush forth! So do those of Mr Wilson, as he accepts poor
George’s little commission, to give to his wife the pin which she had
formerly given to him as a Christmas present, and beseech her to get
to Canada if ever she have the means, “and,” he adds, “tell her to
bring up our boy A FREE MAN!”
Chapter XII. gives us a hateful glimpse of an auction sale of slaves;
after which we accompany friend Haley, with poor Tom and some other
human cattle, in _La Belle Rivière_, a boat on the Ohio, “floating
gaily down the stream,” stuffed full of slaves, “under a brilliant
sky, _the stripes and stars of free America waving and fluttering
overhead_!” Who can read without a shudder of the young mother,
whose infant has been deceitfully sold from her--who is suddenly
told of her bereavement: “she did not scream, the shot had passed
too straight and direct through her heart for cry or tear. Dizzily
she sate down. Her slack hands fell lifeless by her side. Her eyes
looked straight forward, but she saw nothing. All the noise and the
hum of the boat, the groaning of the machinery, mingled dreamily to
the bewildered ear; and the poor dumb-stricken heart had neither
cry nor tear to show for its utter misery. She was quite calm.” In
vain, during the bright starlight solitude and silence, had poor Tom,
forgetting his own griefs--his forlorn wife and children--crawled for
a moment to her side, and tried to whisper a word of comfort from the
New Testament. Her heart was palsied; and some time afterwards the
good old slave was startled from his doze. “Something black passed
by him quickly, ... he heard a splash in the water.... No one else
had seen or heard anything. He got up and searched--the woman’s
place was vacant--the poor bleeding heart was still at last, and the
river rippled and dimpled just as brightly as if it had not closed
above that heart!”--“Where alive is that gal?” said her new master,
perplexedly, in the morning, searching every corner of the boat in
vain; and then trying to make up his mind to the loss of so many
dollars’ worth, with what philosophy he might.
Chapter XIII. finds Eliza and her husband in the Quaker settlement,
all prim, precise, kindly, thoughtful, and resolute about securing
the safety of the fugitives. “Thou’rt safe here by daylight,” said
his hospitable host Simeon, “for every one in the settlement is a
Friend, and all are watching. Moreover, it is safer to travel by
night.” Thus ends the chapter. The next three, XIV., XV., XVI.,
in continuation with chapters XVIII., XIX., XX., XXII., XXIII.,
XXIV., XXV., XXVI., XXVII., XXVIII., XXIX., (that is, fourteen, or
upwards of a third of the entire work) find us in widely distant
and different scenes,--travelling up the magnificent Mississippi,
and finally housed at New Orleans, and moving among a new set of
characters: Tom having, on the voyage, changed hands, and become the
property of Mr St Clare, grateful for his having saved the life of
his daughter Eva--for she falls over boat side into the water, and
Tom plunges in after her. This is a somewhat startling incident, and
it was not quite necessary to peril the fragile little creature’s
life, in order to supply her father with an inducement to buy Tom.
Story-tellers should never use greater machinery to bring about their
ends than is adequate. The doing so generally argues a deficiency
of power or invention. In the present instance the gentle reader’s
feelings are shocked, and needlessly; for as little Evangeline St
Clare was the only and idolised child of her father, who was onboard,
and wanted a coachman--having dismissed his own for drunkenness--what
more natural than for Tom, having gained, as in a very pretty and
natural way he had done, the affection of little Eva on the voyage,
to occur to her, and to her father, as a good successor to his
discarded Jehu? A silvery word or two from Eva’s sweet little lips
would have sufficed, and Tom, in the quietest way in the world, would
have become the sable chattel of Mr St Clare. Observe, the very idea
had occurred to Eva before her sudden and superfluous immersion, and
she herself had told him of her intention.
‘... “So, Uncle Tom, where are you going?”
“I don’t know, Miss Eva.”
“Don’t know,” quoth she, concernedly.
“No, I am going to be sold to somebody. I don’t know who.”
“My papa can buy you,” said Eva quickly, “and if he buys
you, you will have good times. I mean to ask him to[6] this
very day.”
“Thank you, my little lady,” said Tom.’
Five minutes afterwards Mrs Stowe has heart enough to let the
benevolent little creature go overboard, simply to be rescued by Tom!
Nor is the incident told forcibly; and it elicits no unusual trait
of character in anybody. Having thus introduced Tom to new places and
persons, let us give a general account of this elaborate episodical
portion of Mrs Stowe’s undertaking.
The figures in the foreground of this large picture are--Mr and Mrs
St Clare, his cousin Miss Ophelia, his daughter Eva (or Evangeline),
Topsy, and Uncle Tom. Those in the background are Mr St Clare’s
brother, his youthful son Henrique, and a confused heap of domestic
slaves--all as happy as happy can be, under the protection of their
wealthy, indolent, good-natured proprietor, Mr St Clare; but there
is also, almost hid in the dark shadow, _one Prue_! As for Tom, the
lines have fallen to him in exceedingly _pleasant places_; he leads
a life of only nominal servitude--the huge pet of pretty little
Eva, and consequently a favourite of her father. Here Mrs Stowe has
evidently expended much greater pains than on any other portion of
her work; but we doubt greatly whether she will be satisfied with
our judgment on the subject. Speaking as English critics, we are of
opinion that Topsy is worth all the others, ten times over; then
comes Mrs St Clare; then the cook, ladies’-maids, and the valet
Adolph; then Miss Ophelia, then Eva, and then Mr St Clare. The others
have nothing distinctive about them, and seem introduced simply
to “draw out” the characters and opinions of Mr St Clare and his
daughter Eva.
Augustine St Clare and his brother Alfred are of Canadian
descent--the sons of a wealthy Louisianian planter; their mother
having been a lovely and pious Huguenot French lady, whose family had
been early emigrants to Louisiana; and these two had been her only
children. It is with Augustine[7] that we are at present concerned;
and he having been crossed in love, through the cunning cupidity of
the young lady’s guardians--in disgust, and to show his indifference
towards one whom he erroneously supposed to have jilted him, married
the wealthy reigning belle of the season--“a fine figure, a pair of
bright dark eyes, and--a hundred thousand dollars.” Her husband was
of a “sensitive temperament”--“gay, easy, unpunctual, unpractical,
_sceptical_.” Indeed, he himself declares, as to this last, “religion
is a remarkably scarce article at our house.” Almost immediately
after his marriage, he received a letter from the lady to whom he had
been “so passionately--romantically” attached, explaining the true
state of matters. She was yet unmarried, and wrote fervently to him,
supposing him also unmarried!
“Thus ended the whole romance and ideal of life for Augustine St
Clare,” whose wife was the mere incarnation of silliness, vanity,
selfishness, and tyranny, as far as she dared to show this last.
Her husband treated her, from first to last, with undisguised
but laughing contempt; but it may be doubtful whether she really
appreciated the extent to which he civilly despised her.
‘“Mr St Clare, I wish you wouldn’t whistle,” said Marie;
“it makes my head worse.”
“I won’t,” replied St Clare. “Is there anything else you
would wish me not to do?”
“I wish you _would_ have some kind of sympathy for my
trials; you never have any feeling for me!”
“My dear accusing angel!” said St Clare.
“It’s provoking to be talked to in that way!”
“Then, how _will_ you be talked to? I’ll talk to order--any
way you’ll mention, only to give satisfaction.”...
“St Clare always laughs when I make the least allusion to
my ill health,” said Marie, with the voice of a suffering
martyr. “I only hope the day won’t come when he’ll remember
it!” she added, and put her handkerchief to her eyes. Of
course, there was a rather foolish silence.’
Happy couple! But we think we have such in our own island home! Mrs
St Clare was “beautiful, accomplished, and an heiress--having no
doubt that Augustine was a most fortunate man in having obtained
her.” “It is a great mistake,” justly observes Mrs Stowe, “to suppose
that a woman with no heart will be an easy creditor in the exchange
of affection. There is not on earth a more merciless exactor of love
from others than a thoroughly selfish woman; and the more unlovely
she grows, the more jealously and scrupulously she exacts love to
the uttermost farthing.” At length she brings her husband a solitary
child--Evangeline--whom he names after his gifted, beloved, and
sainted mother. From the time of Eva’s birth, her mother’s health
“gradually sunk. A life of constant inaction, bodily and mental--the
friction of ceaseless ennui and discontent, united to the ordinary
weakness which attended the period of maternity, in the course of
a few years changed the blooming young belle into a yellow, faded,
sickly woman, whose time was divided among a variety of fanciful
diseases, and who considered herself in every sense the most ill-used
and suffering person in existence.”
Such a woman as this, being worse than a mere cipher in his
establishment, and Eva’s health requiring change of air, he had
taken her to Vermont for a season; bringing back with him his
cousin Ophelia--a spinster of forty-five; a model of propriety,
exactitude, and a sort of hard conscientiousness. She was the
absolute bond-slave of the “_ought_.” Her standard of right was so
high, so all-embracing, so minute, and making so few concessions to
human frailty, that, though she strove with heroic ardour to reach
it, she never actually did so, and of course was burdened with a
constant and often harassing sense of deficiency. This gave a severe
and somewhat gloomy cast to her religious character.
The contrast between this starched, prim, yet worthy beau-ideal
of Duty and “gay, easy, unpunctual, unpractical” St Clare is well
conceived, and nearly as well carried out before the reader,
who gradually conceives a kind of respect for her, which seems
continually on the point of warming into regard; but the predominant
idea in his mind is, that Miss Ophelia would make an excellent
housekeeper in--somebody else’s establishment: for himself,
she would--he fears--be too good, and, too hard--and--“tall,
square-formed, and angular.” What a treasure, however, thinks he, for
a widowed cousin--three hundred miles off, with eight or ten wild
boys and girls to break in! Mrs Stowe tells us, that Miss Ophelia
is “the representative of a very numerous class of the very best of
northern people, of activity, zeal, unflinching conscientiousness,
clear _intellectual_ discrimination between truth and error, and
great logical and doctrinal correctness;[8] but with a want of
that SPIRIT OF LOVE, without which, in the eye of Christ, the most
perfect character is as deficient as a wax flower, wanting in life
and perfume.... Yet that blessed principle is not dead, but only
sleepeth, and always answers to the touch of the true magnet--divine
love.” She, however, “_unconsciously_ represents one _great_ sin--the
prejudice of caste, and colour.” Even in the New England States,
where slavery has been abolished by law, this prejudice flourishes
in full and fell vigour, despite, even, the melting sunbeams of
Christianity! Those who will nobly stint themselves of luxuries,
and almost necessaries, to send the gospel to the _distant_ dark
heathens--at home, loathe the sight and contiguity of their black
brother, and exhibit it even in the house of God. “Supposing,” Mrs
Stowe says, solemnly and finely, “our Lord was now on earth as he was
once, what course is it probable that he would pursue with regard
to this unchristian prejudice of colour? There was a class of men
in those days, as much despised by the Jews as the negroes are by
us; and it was a complaint made of Christ that he was a friend of
publicans and sinners. And if Christ should enter, on some communion
season, into a place of worship, and see the coloured man sitting
afar off by himself, would it not be just in His spirit to go there
and sit with him, rather than to take the seats of his richer and
more prosperous brethren?”
The character of Miss Ophelia is most happily developed, by means,
principally, of Topsy--the Gem of the book, of whom more anon; and
that character is, as will be seen, _proper_ to the moral climate of
New England; whereas, according to Mrs Stowe herself, “Mrs St Clare
is the type of a class of women not peculiar to any latitude, nor any
condition in society ... she may be found in England, or America.”
The same, indeed, is to be said of “Alfred and Augustine St Clare,
who represent,” she says, “two classes of men which are to be found
in all countries, the radically aristocratic and democratic men.” In
defining _her_ “aristocrat” and “democrat,” it must be borne in mind
that she is speaking of American exhibitions of those characters,
and as connected with the relation of slaveholders. On this subject
we might make many observations; but content ourselves with saying,
that, in the main, we concur with Mrs Stowe’s views, as expounded by
herself, with reference to the perilousness of intrusting man with
practically irresponsible authority over his fellow-man. That state
of society is essentially vicious, and foully rotten before the eyes
of our Almighty Maker, _who hath made of one blood all nations of men
for to dwell on all the face of the earth_, which does not make THE
LAWS the indifferent and easily accessible protector, vindicator, and
avenger of every human being living in that state.
The two brothers discuss frequently, and with considerable force,
the question of slavery, as to its consistency or inconsistency with
an enlightened and civilised system of laws, and the spirit and
precepts of Christianity.
Why Mrs Stowe should have thought it necessary to represent her
favourite St Clare as a _sceptic_ on religious subjects, is not quite
clear; unless, indeed, she intends to intimate that it is a dark
and grievous characteristic of the whole class which he represents.
Perhaps it may be, unfortunately, so; and, indeed, she seems, with
bitter sarcasm, to hint that one thing which tends to produce this
result is, the cool accommodation of the principles and precepts
of the Gospel to the existing order of things in the slave states,
in even their vilest aspects. Upon the whole, however, Mrs Stowe
succeeds in satisfying the reader that her gentleman hero is a manly
fellow, with all his faults. His love of his little daughter, his
grief as he perceives her withering away before his eyes under the
blight of consumption, his anguish and despair when she is taken from
him, are all told touchingly--very touchingly, with true pathos. So
also the fondness with which he cherishes the memory of his mother.
He forms the resolution to give poor Tom his freedom; but as it is
necessary, for the exigencies of the story, to get poor Tom into
worse hands, there is no other way occurs to the author than to make
Mr St Clare die abruptly; and the most suitable mode of bringing
about that result is, when his moral being has been soothed and
solemnised by a religious conversation with his cousin Ophelia, in
which he says he “does not know what makes him think so much of
his mother that night.” He “has a strange kind of feeling as if
she were near him ...;” he by and by says, “I believe I’ll go down
street and hear the news to-night.” He gets into a café; and while
reading the paper, an affray arises between two partially intoxicated
_gentlemen_; he “attempts to wrest a bowie knife from one of them,
who gives him a fatal stab with it in the side.” He is brought home
on a shutter, wrapped in a cloak, to the consternation of all in the
house, and dies the same evening, having first said to Tom, “pray!”
He dies, “opening his eyes with a sudden light, as of joy and
recognition, and saying ‘mother’--and then he was gone.”
Eva is evidently a favourite creation of the author’s, and she
is undoubtedly a gentle and sweet little spirit, suggesting the
tenderest thoughts of love and pity; but a mere worldly reader is apt
to think, with a little impatience, that she is so very good; she
talks so much beyond her years;[9] and _challenges_ our admiration,
with the confidence of a _pattern_ child. No one can find fault with
anything she says or does; but unfortunately, you see that the writer
from the first intended her to be a little piece of perfection.
Frail and sensitive human nature is a little irritated by this, and
suspects something factitious. It says, peevishly, “I know many good
and charming children, but here’s an angel in flesh!” When, however,
our excellent and pious author herself tells us, that “the gentle
Eva is an impersonation, in childish form, of the love of Christ--”
worldly criticism utters not another word, but reverences the
writer’s motives. Here is little Eva’s death--
‘St Clare saw a spasm of mortal agony pass over the
face.... “Eva!” said he, presently, gently. She did not
hear. “Oh, Eva, tell us what you see! What is it?” A
bright, a glorious smile passed over her face, and she
said, brokenly,--“Oh, love--joy--peace!” gave one sigh, and
passed from death to life.’
It might have been grander, perhaps, if her _voiceless_ response, had
been that “glorious smile,” reflecting the ineffable happiness--the
suddenly seen glory of heaven. Are not these words, again, more
likely to have fallen from an adult, than a mere child?--Let the
spectator’s eye now be turned heavily towards the darkest portion
of the background--and there is crouching a grisly figure--old
Prue--“cross old Prue”--as even sweet Eva styled her! This creature
is introduced and disposed of by the author, with a certain dreadful
power; she is seen for but a short space--but in that short space,
what a tale of horror does she tell!
Prue was a tall, bony, coloured woman, with a scowling expression of
countenance, and a sullen, grumbling voice. Her office was, to carry
on her head a basket of rusks and hot rolls to Mr St Clare’s house.
‘She set down her basket (in the kitchen), squatted herself
down, and resting her elbows on her knees, said--“O, Lord!
I wish I’se dead!”
“Why do you wish you were dead?” asked Miss Ophelia.
“I’d be out of my misery,” said the woman, gruffly, without
taking her eyes from the floor.’
She is among the merry, saucy, black and quadroon servants, who jibe
her, as soon as Miss Ophelia is gone. The only one who notices her is
Tom, who offers to carry her basket for her, and tries to persuade
her to leave off drinking--to which misery has driven her. She wishes
herself in hell--Tom shuddering the while--to be out of her misery.
‘“Where was you raised?” he asked.
“Up in Kentuck. A _man kept me to breed chil’en for
market_, and sold ’em as fast as they got big enough; last
of all, he sold me to a speculator, and my mas’r (a baker),
got me o’ him.”
“What set you into this bad way of drinkin?”
“To get shet of my misery.”’
And she proceeds to describe that misery; and many a tender mother
has sickened and shuddered over the next eighteen lines.
A few days afterwards _another woman_ came in old Prue’s place, to
bring the rusks. On being asked about her by Dinah, another servant,
she says, mysteriously, “Prue isn’t coming any more!”
‘“Why not?” inquires Dinah. “She an’t dead, is she?”
“We doesn’t exactly know. She’s down cellar,” said the
woman, glancing at Miss Ophelia. After Miss Ophelia had
taken the rusks, Dinah followed the woman to the door.
“What _has_ got Prue, anyhow?” she said.
The woman seemed desirous, yet reluctant, to speak, and
answered in a low, mysterious tone. “Well, you mustn’t tell
nobody. Prue, she got drunk agin--and they had her down
cellar--and thar they left her all day; and I hearn ’em
saying that the flies had got to her--and she’s dead!”’
The unhappy wretch had been whipped to death in a cellar, left
there, and--“the flies had got to her!” Miss Ophelia’s honest soul
was fired with indignation on hearing it; and when she expressed her
kindled womanly feelings to Mr St Clare, he received it with levity,
“peeling his orange,” while good excited Miss Ophelia is denouncing
it as “perfectly abominable”--and answering her with badinage; gaily
adding, “My dear cousin, _I_ didn’t do it, and I can’t help it; I
would, if I could!”
Let us turn, however, from this revolting incident, to Mrs Stowe’s
_chef-d’œuvre_--the inimitable TOPSY--a true _psychological_
curiosity--a character quite new to _us_, and delineated by the
pencil of a consummate limner. The portrait will not bear an
additional touch, nor the loss of one that has been given it. It
exactly satisfies the critical eye.
We have already given the reader Topsy’s presentation to Miss
Ophelia. Here is the little black imp _in propriâ personâ_ before
you, as Mr St Clare paraded her before the astounded eye of his prim
cousin:--
‘She was eight or nine years of age--one of the blackest
of her race; and her round, shining eyes, glittering
as glass beads, moved with quick and restless glances
over everything in the room. Her mouth, half open with
astonishment at the wonders of the new mas’r’s parlour,
displayed a white and brilliant set of teeth. Her woolly
hair was braided in sundry little tails, which stuck out
in every direction. The expression of the face was an odd
mixture of shrewdness and cunning, over which was oddly
drawn, like a kind of veil, an expression of the most
doleful gravity and solemnity. She was dressed in a single
filthy, ragged garment, made of bagging; and stood with
her hands demurely folded before her. Altogether there
was something queer and goblin-like about her appearance.
“Here, Topsy,” said Mr St Clare, giving a whistle, as a
man would to call the attention of a dog, “give us a song,
now, and show us some of your dancing.” The black glassy
eyes glittered with a kind of wicked drollery, and The
Thing struck up, in a clear shrill voice, an odd negro
melody, to which she kept time with her hands and feet,
spinning round, clapping her hands, knocking her knees
together, in a wild, fantastic sort of time, and producing
in her throat all those strange guttural sounds which
distinguish the native music of her race; and, finally,
turning a somerset or two, and giving a prolonged closing
note, as odd and unearthly as that of a steam whistle, she
came suddenly down on the carpet, and stood with her hands
folded, and a most sanctimonious expression of meekness and
solemnity over her face, only broken by the cunning glances
which she shot, askance, from the corners of her eyes. Miss
Ophelia stood silent, perfectly paralysed with amazement.’
A world of scrubbing and cleansing brings to sight “great welts
and calloused (?) spots”--ineffaceable marks of the system under
which she had grown up that far, at the sight of which the heart
of Miss Ophelia--who had a horrid repugnance to the touch of a
nigger!--“became pitiful within her!” She had compelled Jane, one of
the quadroon maids, to assist her in the task of ablution, as she
did, tossing her head with disgust; the “young one” “scanning, with a
keen and furtive glance of her flickering eyes, the ornaments which
Jane wore in her ears!”
When arrayed, at last, in a suit of decent clothing, and her hair had
been cropped close to her head, Miss Ophelia sits down to question
the thing; who tells her, with a grin showing all her glittering
teeth, that she does not know how old she is; that she never had a
mother; never was born; never had no father, nor mother, nor nothin.
“I was raised by a speculator, with lots of others. Old Aunt Sue used
to take care on us.”
‘“Have you ever heard anything about GOD, Topsy?” She
looked bewildered, and grinned.
“Do you know who made you?”
“Nobody, as I knows on,” said the child, with a short
laugh. “I ’spect I _grow’d_! Don’t think nobody ever made
me!”’...
“Virgin soil here,” indeed, as St Clare slily suggested to his
dismayed cousin. By and by--behold Topsy, washed and shorn, arrayed
in a clean gown, with well-starched apron, standing reverently before
Miss Ophelia, with an expression of solemnity well befitting a
funeral, while she carefully initiates her sooty little charge into
the mysteries of bed-making. Topsy pays profound attention to all the
directions about under-sheets, bolsters, and turning down; but not
too profound to prevent her, the young disciple, when her teacher’s
back was turned for a moment, snatching a pair of gloves and a
ribbon, which she adroitly slipped into her sleeves, and stood with
her hands duly folded as before!
Being required, by and by, to reduce her lessons to practice, out
drops from her sleeve an end of the purloined ribbon! at which she
looks, when furiously challenged, with innocent wonder. She declares
solemnly she had never seen it till that minute; and when angrily
shaken by Miss Ophelia, out dropped the gloves from the other
sleeve! Topsy now owns to the gloves, steadily denying the ribbon;
but, threatened with a whipping, confesses to both, with woeful
expressions of penitence. Being adjured to “_confess_” if she has
taken anything else, the little wretch owns to having taken “Miss
Eva’s red thing she wears round her neck,” and Rosa’s red earrings,
and having burnt them! “Burnt them! why did you do that?” inquires
the astounded lady. “’Cause I’se wicked--I is! It’s mighty wicked,
anyhow. I can’t help it!” But in a moment or two’s time, Eva and Rosa
make their appearance, with necklace and earrings as usual, never
having parted with them.
“I’m sure I can’t tell what to do with such a child,” said
Miss Ophelia in despair. “What did you tell me you took
these things for, Topsy?”
“Why, missis said I must _’fess_; and I couldn’t think of
nothing else to ’fess,” said Topsy, rubbing her eyes.
“But, of course, I didn’t want you to confess to things you
didn’t do. That’s telling a lie just as much as the other.”
“Laws, now, is it?” said Topsy, with an air of innocent
wonder!’
Here is an impressive contrast:--
‘Eva stood looking at Topsy. There stood the two children,
representatives of the two extremes of society. The fair,
high-bred child, with her golden head, her deep eyes, her
spiritual, noble brow, and prince-like movements; and her
black, keen, subtle, cringing, yet acute neighbour. They
stood the representatives of their races. The Saxon, born
of ages of cultivation, command, education, physical and
moral eminence; the African, born of ages of oppression,
submission, ignorance, toil, and vice.’
If Miss Ophelia’s conscientiousness was--to use the slang of the
phrenologists--“largely developed,” that of Topsy was about equal
to the conscientiousness of a squirrel or a monkey; and good Miss
Ophelia observes her _protegée_, “lithe as a cat, and active as a
monkey,” and to the full as wantonly mischievous, with dumb despair.
One of her fancies was to deck herself in Miss Ophelia’s choicest
ornaments, and rehearse in them, like an actress, before the glass,
singing, whistling, and making grimaces. Once surprised by the lady,
with her “very best scarlet Indian crape shawl wound round her head
for a turban,” “Topsy,” says she, at the end of all patience, “what
_does_ make you act so?”
“Dun no, missis. I ’spects ’cause I’se so wicked.”
“I don’t know what I shall do with you, Topsy.”
“Law, missis, _you must whip me_. My old missis allers
whipped me. I an’t used to workin’ without I gets whipped.”
“Why, Topsy, I don’t want to whip you. You _can_ do well if
you choose; why won’t you?”
“Laws, missis, I’se used to whippin’. I ’spects it’s good
for me.”’
Though one might almost as well, one would have thought, have tried
to teach a hedgehog astronomy, Miss Ophelia devoted herself to
teaching the gnome the Catechism; and, after a patient year and a
half’s efforts, here were some of the blessed results, as exhibited
before laughing Mr St Clare, before whom were confident catechist and
hopeful catechumen:--
“_Q._--Our first parents, being left to the freedom of
their own will, fell from the state wherein they were
created.” Topsy’s eyes twinkled, and she looked inquiringly.
“What is it, Topsy?” said Miss Ophelia.
“Please, missis, was dat ar _state_ Kintuck?”
“What state, Topsy?”
“Dat state dey fell out of. I used to hear Mas’r tell how
as we com down from Kintuck!”’
But what the sedulous didactic teaching of Miss Ophelia failed to
do, would have doubtless been effected by sweet little Eva, had
she lived: from whom, one day, fell the first word of kindness she
had ever heard in her life; and the sweet tone and manner struck
strangely on the wild rude heart, and a sparkle of something like a
tear shone in the keen, round, glittering eye.
Twice again this strange creature flits across the scene, and on one
of these occasions says--
‘“Old missus whipped me a deal harder, and used to pull
my har, and knock my head agin the door; but it didn’t do
me no good! I ’spects if theys to pull every spear o’ har
out of my head, it wouldn’t do no good, neither! I’se so
wicked! Laws! I’se nothing but a nigger, no ways!” ...
“But, Topsy, if you’d only try to be good, you might”----
“Couldn’t never be nothin but a nigger, if I was never so
good! If I could be skinned, and come white, I’d try then!”’
Poor Topsy!--these words go to the heart of all but--a moral _leper
white as snow_! There is in them a huge volume of anguish and
reproach.
It required the potent eloquence of little Eva’s death to dispel the
last lingering feelings of Miss Ophelia’s repugnance towards the
unhappy little black, in whom also the same solemn event had worked
a marked change. “The callous indifference was gone ... there was a
_striving_ for good--a strife, irregular, interrupted, suspended,
oft--but yet renewed again.” The finishing touch to this singular and
masterly delineation is exquisite in every way:--
‘One day, when Topsy had been sent for by Miss Ophelia, she
came, hastily thrusting something into her bosom. “What are
you doing there, you limb? You’ve been stealing something,
I’ll be bound,” said the imperious little Rosa (a quadroon
slave), who had been sent to call her, seizing her at the
same time roughly by the arm.
“You go ’long, Miss Rosa!” said Topsy, pulling from her;
“’tan’t none o’ your business!”
“None o’ your sa’ce!” said Rosa. “I saw you hiding
something--I know yer tricks,” and Rosa seized her
arm, and tried to force her hand into her bosom; while
Topsy, enraged, kicked and fought valiantly for what she
considered her rights. The clamour and confusion of the
battle drew Miss Ophelia and St Clare both to the spot.
“She’s been stealing!” said Rosa.
“I han’t, neither!” vociferated Topsy, sobbing with passion.
“Give me that, whatever it is!” said Miss Ophelia, sternly.
Topsy hesitated; but, on a second order, pulled out of her
bosom a little parcel done up in the foot of one of her
own old stockings. Miss Ophelia turned it out. There was a
small book which had been given to Topsy by Eva, containing
a single verse of Scripture arranged for every day in the
year; and in a paper, the curl of hair which she had given
on that memorable day when she had taken her last farewell.
St Clare was a good deal affected at the sight of it; the
little book had been rolled in a long strip of black crape,
torn from the funeral weeds.
“What did you wrap _this_ round the book for?” said he,
holding up the crape.
“’Cause--’cause--’cause ’twas Miss Eva. Oh, don’t take ’em
away, please!” she said; and, sitting flat down on the
floor, and putting her apron over her head, she began to
sob vehemently.’[10]
“Topsy,” says Mrs Stowe, “stands as the representative of a large
class of the children who are growing up under the institution of
slavery--quick, active, subtle, and ingenious--apparently utterly
devoid of principle and conscience--keenly penetrating, by an
instinct which exists in the childish mind, the degradation of their
condition, and the utter hopelessness of rising above it.” In a note
to a friend on the same subject, she writes very beautifully--“There
lies, buried down in the heart of the most seemingly stupid and
careless slave, a bleeding spot that bleeds and aches, though he
could scarcely tell why--and this sore spot is the degradation of his
position.”
Miss Ophelia, having had a formal gift of Topsy from Mr St Clare,
takes her home to Vermont, where we are told, she “grew rapidly in
grace and favour with the family,” at first sufficiently staggered
by the quaint apparition. “At the age of womanhood she was at her
own request baptised; and finally recommended and approved as a
missionary to one of the stations in Africa.” Of course the mode
of training Topsy was beyond the scope of the writer’s purpose;
but we could have wished to see a good deal more of Topsy, in the
progress of her mental and moral development. But as it is, the
sketch is pregnant with instruction, encouragement, and warning: and
were it for this one portrait alone, Mrs Stowe would be entitled to
the blessings of generations of blacks yet unborn. With the divine
penetration of genius consecrated by holiness, she has wrought down
to the seat of our common nature, in the black, crushed beneath whole
piled up mountains of prejudice, scorn, and despair.
We must now return to poor Tom, whose course is henceforth brief, and
of deepening gloom, and whose _sun goes down in blood_.
Detestable Mrs St Clare, released from the humanising presence of her
husband, as though she had been a deadly snake half-crushed by the
presence of authority, makes amends for past inaction, by darting
venomously at every one within her reach. She orders off a poor
girl to the whipping-house, to be flogged, _naked_, by the common
flogger--a huge man--in the presence of as many of both sexes as
chose to look on, and be entertained by her shrieks, and the sight
of her quivering ensanguined flesh.[11] Mrs St Clare contemptuously
discarded the entreaties of Miss Ophelia, based mainly, with a
womanly energy, on the mere sense of sex: and in disgust, Miss
Ophelia returns, with Topsy, to her own country. Moreover, though
poor Tom had been repeatedly promised his freedom by her husband,
as she well knows, she ruthlessly sells him, with all the other
slaves. Tom is told of his fate--to be forthwith sent to the slave
mart. “The Lord’s will be done!” he exclaimed, folding his arms, and
sighing heavily. He appeals to Miss Ophelia, who makes a hopeless
attempt on Mrs St Clare, relying on her deceased husband’s promise.
“Indeed,” says that charming lady, delicately clad in most elegantly
made mourning for him whose solemn wishes she was violating, as he
lay scarce cold in his grave--“Indeed I shall do no such thing! Tom
is one of the most valuable slaves in the place! It could not be
afforded any way!” ... “But consider his chance of getting a bad
master----” “O! that’s all humbug----:” and the good lady turns a
scornfully deaf ear to the solemn assurance, that Mr St Clare had
made the promise to Eva on her deathbed. Marie St Clare is the type,
we are told, of a class.
‘When Marie comes under a system of laws which gives her
_absolute control_ over her dependants--which enables her
to separate them, at her pleasure, from their dearest
family connections, or to inflict upon them the most
disgraceful, degrading, and violent punishments, _without
even the restraint which seeing_ the execution might
possibly induce--then it is that the character arrives at
full maturity.’
Here we part with this viper; assuring the class whom she may
represent, that they are burthened with the execration of the
civilised world--most piercing of all, those of her fair, Free
sisters.
Now one’s heart aches to see poor Tom, the helpless, sorrowful
inmate, amongst a great quantity of uproarious and _quasi_-merry
other live lumber--of a New Orleans slave-market. O sickening scene!
But here the two figures arresting the eye--and whose brief tale is
told with melting pathos and simplicity--are Susan and Emmeline, both
beautiful, mother and daughter; the latter only fifteen, just budding
into womanhood: both with hearts trembling at the fear of approaching
separation--and what kind of life before them? The mother to be sold
for the purpose of breeding other slaves; the daughter--oh speak it
not in the ears of Free fathers and mothers--of Christian men or
women--to be “sold to a life of shame!” She has “the same soft, dark
eye” as her mother, “with longer lashes, and her curling hair is of
a luxuriant brown.” And in passing, we are told, with an appalling
irony, that “the gentleman to whom they belong, and to whom the money
for their sale is to be transmitted, is a member of a Christian
church in New York, who will receive the money, and go thereafter to
the sacrament of _his Lord_ AND THEIRS, and think no more of it.”
The hurriedly-whispered dialogue of these two would break a heart of
stone to overhear: they are--that forlorn mother and daughter--trying
to express a hope--a faint hope--poor souls!--that they may be sold
together! In order to aid this result, and disguise her beauty, the
mother and she comb out her luxuriant tresses, so as to “look plain
and decent;” but in the morning, when the watchful owner comes round
to look at his human cattle--“How’s this?” he said, stepping in
front of Susan and Emmeline, “where’s your curls, gal?” He is told,
timidly, that they thought it looked “more respectable so.”
‘“Bother!--You go right along, and curl yourself real
smart,” he added, giving a crack to a ratan he held in his
hand; “and be back in quick time, too! You go and help
her,” to her mother--“them curls may make a hundred dollars
difference in the sale of her!”’
Can horror go deeper? Yes, one step. The loathsome monster,
Legree--of whom in a moment--is presently attracted by her beauty.
“He put out his heavy, dirty hand, and drew the girl towards
him”--oh, Mrs Stowe! shall we go on?--“passed it over her neck and
bust; felt her arms; looked at her teeth, and then pushed her back
against her mother, whose patient face showed the sufferings she had
been going through, at every motion of the hideous stranger.”
‘The girl was frightened, and began to cry.
“Stop that, you minx!” said the salesman, “no whimpering
_here_! The sale’s going to begin!”’
Presently the mother is put up on the block, and bought by a
benevolent purchaser; in descending from it she gazes wistfully
at her lovely daughter; and implores her purchaser--“O, do buy my
daughter!” He tries to do so; but alas! she has inflamed the sensual
monster Legree: he quietly bids against Benevolence, resolved to
secure his victim: “the hammer falls; he has got the girl, body and
soul, unless God help her!” But will HE? The chapter ends ominously
with a passage from his Word--
“_When he maketh inquisition for blood, he forgetteth not
the cry of the humble!_”
This Legree also purchases Tom, having quickly appreciated his
“points,” as a “valleyable nigger:” and here you may see the _cobra_,
uncoiled for you, in all its hideousness.
‘He was a short, broad, muscular man, in a checked
shirt, considerably open at the bosom, and pantaloons
much the worse for dirt and wear, who elbowed his way
through the crowd, like one who is going actively into a
business; and coming up to the group, began to examine
them systematically. From the moment that Tom saw him
approaching, he felt an immediate and revolting horror at
him, that increased as he came near. He was evidently,
though short, of gigantic strength. His round, bullet
head, large, light-grey eyes, with their shaggy, sandy
eyebrows, and stiff, wiry, sun-burned air, were rather
unprepossessing items, it is to be confessed; his large
coarse mouth was distended with tobacco, the juice of
which, from time to time, he ejected from him with great
decision and explosive force; his hands were immensely
large, hairy, sun-burned, freckled, and very dirty, and
garnished with long nails, in a very foul condition. This
man proceeded to a very free personal examination of the
lot. He seized Tom by the jaw, and pulled open his mouth,
to inspect his teeth (!) made him strip up his sleeve,
to show his muscle; turned him round, made him jump and
spring, to show his paces.
“Where was you raised?” he added briefly to these
investigations. “In Kintuck, mas’r,” said Tom, looking
about as if for deliverance. “What have you done?” “Had
care of mas’r’s farm,” said Tom. “Likely story!” said the
other shortly, as he passed on.’
Legree’s exterior only very faintly adumbrates the interior horrors
of his character, as the reader soon finds out. He seems specially
pleased with one of his purchases--the sweet Emmeline, who, as they
approach “home,” feels the hot foul breath of the serpent upon her.
‘“Well, my little dear,” said he, turning to Emmeline, and
laying his hand on her shoulder, “we’re almost home!” When
Legree scolded and stormed, Emmeline was terrified; but
when he laid his hand upon her, and spoke as he now did,
she felt as if she had rather he would strike her. _The
expression of his eyes made her soul sick, and her flesh
creep._
“You didn’t ever wear earrings!” he said, taking hold of
her small ear with his coarse fingers.
“No, mas’r,” said Emmeline, trembling, and looking down.
“Well, I’ll give you a pair, when we get home, if you’re a
good girl. You needn’t be so frightened! I don’t mean to
make you work so very hard! You’ll have fine times with me,
and live like a lady! Only be a good girl!”’
Alas, sweet Emmeline! motherless Emmeline! was there no MAN--no
father, no brother, near you, to fell the monster to the earth? No,
none; and you are close to the residence of your eager and brutal
proprietor. There he had destined her as the successor of one of
whom he was tired--but whom yet he feared: and that was CASSY; a
being whom we did not suppose Mrs Stowe, with all our trust in her
previously exhibited powers, equal to conceiving and supporting. She
occasionally reminds us of some of the greatest passages in Greek
tragedy.
‘“Come, mistress”--quoth Legree to Emmeline, having reached
the house, and dismissed all his other purchases to their
prescribed localities in the plantation--“You go in here
with _me_!” A dark wild face was seen, for a moment, to
glance at the window of the house; and as Legree opened the
door, a female voice said something in a quick imperative
tone.’
This was--Cassy; and here is her figure.
‘She was tall and slenderly formed, with remarkably
delicate hands and feet, and dressed in neat and
respectable garments. By the appearance of her face, she
might have been between thirty-five and forty; and it was
a face that, once seen, could never be forgotten--one of
those that, at a glance, seemed to convey to us an idea of
a wild, painful, and romantic history. Her head was high,
and her eyebrows marked with beautiful clearness. Her
straight, well-formed nose, her finely cut mouth, and the
graceful contour of her head and neck, showed that she must
once have been beautiful; but her face was deeply wrinkled
with lines of pain, and of proud and bitter endurance.
Her complexion was sallow and unhealthy, her cheeks thin,
her features sharp, and her whole form emaciated. But her
eye was the most remarkable feature--so large, so heavily
black, overshadowed by long lashes of equal darkness, and
so wildly, mournfully despairing. There was a fierce pride
and defiance in every line of her face, in every nerve of
the flexible lip, in every motion of her body; but in her
eye was a deep, settled, night of anguish--an expression so
hopeless and unchanging, as to contrast fearfully with the
scorn and pride expressed by her whole demeanour.’
Her relations to Legree were of a mysterious character. The first
that Tom saw of her was when she suddenly, and to the surprise of
all her fellow-slaves, made her appearance, as one of themselves, in
the cotton-fields, walking by his side, erect and proud, in the dim
grey of the dawn. She works with the others, but infinitely quicker
and more effectively. Observing Tom generously transfer some cotton
of his own picking to the sack of a feeble female fellow-slave, whom
he had just seen brutally maltreated by the driver--she approached
him, and transferred some of her own cotton to his bag, telling him
in a fearful whisper, “that he knew nothing about that place, or he
would not have done what he had: that when he had been there a month,
he would have ceased helping anybody, finding it hard enough to take
care of his own skin.”
“The Lord forbid, _missus_,” quoth Tom, instinctively recognising her
superiority over the others.
‘“The Lord never visits these parts,” said she, bitterly.
But her action had been observed by the driver, across the
field: and flourishing his whip, he came up to her. “What!
what!” he said to the woman, with an air of triumph, “YOU
a-foolin! Go along! yer under _me_ now--mind yourself, or
ye’ll cotch it!” A glance like sheet-lightning suddenly
flashed from her dark eyes; and facing about, with
quivering lip and dilated nostrils, she drew herself up,
and fixed a glance, blazing with rage and scorn, on the
driver. “DOG!” she exclaimed, “touch _me_, if you dare!
I’ve power enough yet to have you torn by the dogs, burnt
alive, cut to inches!--I’ve only to say the word!”
“What de debel you here for, den?” said the man, cowed,
and retreating a step or two. “Didn’t mean no harm, Misse
Cassy!” and he slinks to another quarter of the field.’
Weighing time comes in the evening.
‘“So,” says Legree, to his myrmidon, “Misse Cassy did her
day’s work?”
“Iss! she pick like de debil and all his angels!”
“She’s got ’em all in her, I believe!” said Legree; and
growled a brutal oath.’
At length it is Cassy’s time, and she delivers her basket to be
weighed with a haughty, negligent air: Legree looking in her eyes
with a sneering, yet inquiring glance. She fixed her black eyes on
him steadily--her lips moved slightly, and she said something in
French. What it was, no one knew, but the expression of Legree’s face
became demoniacal; and he half-raised his hand, as if to strike--a
gesture which she regarded with fierce disdain, and turned, and
walked away. Then Tom comes up; and--poor fellow--for once we rejoice
to say, shows something like a spirit: for being ordered to try his
hand on flogging the poor female slave--falsely accused of not having
picked her quantity--he steadily refuses; and after having received a
shower of blows from Legree, firmly repeats, “This yer thing I can’t
feel it right to do,” wiping the blood from his face; “and massa,
I _never_ shall do it--_never!_” All the shivering wretches around
exhibit consternation at his audacity; and Legree looked stupefied
and confounded; but at last he burst forth:--
‘“What, ye blasted black beast! tell _me_ ye don’t think it
_right_ to do what I tell ye! What have any of you cussed
cattles to do with thinking what’s right? I’ll put a stop
to it. Why, what do ye think ye are? Maybe ye think ye’r a
gentleman, Master Tom, to be a-telling your master what’s
right, and what an’t; so you pretend it’s wrong to flog the
gal?”
“I think so, mas’r,” said Tom; “the poor crittur’s sick
and feeble, ’twould be downright cruel, and it’s what I
never will do, nor begin to, mas’r. If you mean to kill me,
kill me; but as to my raising my hand agin any one here, I
never shall: I’ll die first.” Tom spoke in a mild voice,
but with a decision that could not be mistaken. Legree
shook with anger; his greenish eyes glared fiercely, and
his very whiskers seemed to curl with passion; but, like
some ferocious beast that plays with its victim before he
devours it, he kept back his strong impulse to proceed to
immediate violence, and broke out into bitter raillery.
“Well, here’s a pious dog, at last, let down among us
sinners! a saint, a gentleman, and no less, to talk to us
sinners about our sins! Powerful holy crittur he must be!
Here, you rascal; you make believe to be so pious, didn’t
you never hear out of yer Bible, ‘Servants, obey your
masters’? An’t I your master? Didn’t I pay down twelve
hundred dollars cash for all there is in yer old cussed
black shell? An’t yer mine now, body and soul?” he said,
giving Tom a violent kick with his heavy boot; “tell me!”
In the very depth of physical suffering, bowed by brutal
oppression, this question shot a gleam of joy and triumph
through Tom’s soul. He suddenly stretched himself up, and
looking earnestly to heaven, while the tears and blood that
flowed down his face mingled, he exclaimed--“No, no, no!
my soul an’t yours, mas’r! You havn’t bought it; ye can’t
buy it; it’s been bought and paid for by one that’s able to
keep it. No matter--no matter, you can’t harm me!”
“I can’t!” said Legree, with a sneer; “we’ll see. Here,
Sambo! Quimbo! give this dog such a breakin in as he won’t
get over this month.”
The two gigantic negroes that now laid hold of Tom, with
fiendish exultation in their faces, might have formed no
unapt personification of powers of darkness. The poor woman
screamed with apprehension, and all rose, as by a general
impulse, while they dragged him unresisting from the place.’
Sambo and Quimbo are two huge black fiends, each savage, sycophantic
towards Legree, rivals of each other in his good graces, and
abhorring poor Tom, whom some expressions of Legree show to have been
designed to become his chief overlooker.
While Tom is lying in an exposed outhouse at midnight, groaning and
bleeding, alone, the night damp and close, the thick air swarming
with myriads of musquitoes, which increased the restless torture of
his wounds, whilst a burning thirst--a torture beyond all others,
filled up the uttermost measure of physical anguish--
“Oh, good Lord, _do_ look down! Give me the victory--give me the
victory over all!” prayed poor Tom, in his anguish, when a footstep
is heard behind him--the light of a lantern flashes in his eyes,
and he recognises Cassy, come to him like a ministering angel. At
length she sits beside him, when he has become somewhat more easy
and composed for a while under the soothing applications of his
companion; and she mutters a few words, in rejoinder to his feeble
but trustful exclamations, of despair and atheism--“There’s no God,
or he’s taken sides against us; all goes against us, heaven and
earth! Everything is pushing us into hell! Why shouldn’t we go?” In
a few scorching words of misery she tells him that she, “a woman
delicately bred,” has been for four long years in the hell--of
Legree’s presence and power--her whole body and soul, cursing every
moment of her life--the slave of his brutal passions; “and now he
has got a new one--a young thing, only fifteen! And she’s brought
her Bible here--_here_, to hell with her!” She adds, that she has
witnessed scenes of savage cruelty, of mortal cruelty, which “would
make any one’s hair rise, and teeth chatter to hear--but it is
useless resisting. There’s not a white person who could testify if
you were burned alive!” She lets fall a hint that sweet Emmeline is
trying bravely to struggle against her fate--at present!
She gives Tom an outline of her history. She had been the idolised
daughter of a lovely slave, and educated in the most expensive manner
at a convent; but her father, before he could fulfil his intention
of freeing her, died of cholera; and she was _sold_ to a man, who
concealed from her that he had given two thousand dollars for her.
Imagining that she was his free choice, and he handsome, fond, and
indulgent, she lived a little while with him as in Paradise, and
had two children--a boy, _Henry_, and a girl, _Elise_. A cousin of
his caught sight of her, and resolved to possess her, succeeded
by shameful arts in alienating his affection from her, and then
persuading him to sell her, with her two children. He forced her,
recoiling from his embraces, to live with him, and sold off her two
idolised children. In a moment of frenzy----All she recollects is,
that “something snapped in her head--there was a great bowie-knife
gleaming on the table.... She caught it--flew upon him--all grew
dark, and she knew nothing more till she woke, long afterwards,
when she found that he had left her to be sold; and, to realise the
most from her, had secured her good attendance. As the fever left
her, “they made her get up and dress every day; and gentlemen used
to come in, and stand, and smoke their cigars, and look at me, and
ask questions, and debate my price!--They threatened to whip if I
were not gayer, and didn’t take pains to make myself agreeable.” She
was ultimately bought by a planter, a Captain Stuart; and the child
she had by him--so like her lost Henry!--when, two weeks old, she
kissed, cried over, and--poisoned with laudanum--“I held him close to
my heart, while he slept to death!” At length, Captain Stuart dies
of fever. “Everybody died that wanted to live; and I, that wanted
to die, _lived_” to be “sold, passed from hand to hand, till I grew
faded, wrinkled, had a fever--and--this wretch (Legree) bought me,
and--here I am!... In the judgment-day, I will stand up before God a
witness against them that have ruined me and my children, body and
soul!--When I was a girl, I thought I was religious. I used to love
God and prayer! Now, I’m a lost soul, pursued by devils that torment
me day and night. They keep pushing me on--and--I’ll do it, too, some
of these days!” she said, clenching her hand, while an insane light
gleamed in her heavy black eyes.
Legree in his lair resembles a huge tiger. As painted by the author,
with graphic force,--sitting in his desolate apartment, drowning
reflection in brandy-and-water,--admitting Sambo and Quimbo to his
savage debauches,--and in their absence having his fierce bloodhounds
for his companions--(anything better than being alone)--it seems
wonderful that any human being could obtain over him any kind of
influence, and much less ascendancy; yet Cassy has, in spite of
himself, acquired--“the kind of influence which a strong impassioned
woman can ever keep on the most brutal man.” Of late, however, she
had become “more irritable and restless under the hideous yoke of her
servitude, and her irritability sometimes burst forth in the ravings
of insanity; and this liability made her an object of dread to
Legree, who had that superstitious horror of insane persons which is
common to coarse and uninstructed minds. When he brought Emmeline to
the house, all the smouldering embers of womanly feeling flashed up
in the exhausted heart of Cassy, and she took part with the girl.”
One night, very late, she was gliding about unknown, and came to
the window of the room where he was wildly carousing with the
twin-fiends, Sambo and Quimbo. “She rested her small slender hand on
the window behind, and looked fixedly at them--a world of anguish,
scorn, and fierce bitterness in her black eyes,” as she saw them
“singing, whooping, upsetting chairs, and making all manner of
ludicrous and horrid grimaces at each other. ‘_Would it be a sin
to rid the world of such a wretch?_’ said she to herself.” Many
subsequent scenes in his career passing before us must more and more
have inclined Cassy to answer the fearful question in the negative;
as though it had shaped itself--“Is it any harm to kill a rattlesnake
that has located itself near your house?”
‘When he first bought her, Cassy was, indeed, a woman
delicately bred; and then he crushed her without scruple
beneath the hoof of his brutality. But as time, and
debasing influences, and despair, hardened womanhood
within her, and waked the fires of fiercer passions, she
had become, in a manner, his mistress; and he alternately
tyrannised over, and dreaded her. This influence had become
more harassing and decided, since partial insanity had
given a strange, weird, unsettled cast to all her language.’
In fact, her tormentor was on one occasion much nearer a ghastly
climax than he had any idea of; for she had drugged his brandy--left
him helpless--the back door unlocked--and then gone silently, at
midnight, to Tom, to tell him that the hour of liberty was at hand.
‘“I shall have it, Misse, in God’s time,” said he.
“Ah, but you may have it to-night!” said Cassy, with a
flash of sudden energy. “Come on!”
Tom hesitated. “Come!” she whispered, fixing her black eyes
on him. “He’s asleep--sound! an axe is there! I’ll show
you the way! I’d have done it myself--only my arms are so
weak! Come along!”
“Not for ten thousand worlds, Misse!” said Tom firmly,
stopping, and holding her back.... He flings himself on the
floor, grasping her arms, imploring her for the love of God
to abstain. “We must suffer, and wait the Lord’s time!”
“Wait!” said Cassy. “_Haven’t_ I waited? till my head is
dizzy, and my heart sick? What has he made me suffer? What
has he made hundreds of poor creatures suffer? Isn’t he
wringing the life blood out of you? I’m called on! I’m
called on! they call on me! His time’s come, and I’ll have
his heart’s blood!”
“No! no! no!” exclaimed Tom, holding her small hands, which
were clasped with spasmodic violence.’
The slave triumphed, and saved the life of--his murderer. He
suggests to Cassy the attempt to escape, however desperate, “without
blood-guiltiness;” and while he is speaking to her, “there flashed
through her mind a plan so _simple_ and _feasible_ in all its
details, as to awaken an instant hope.” We suspect that our readers
will hardly be of her opinion. This was the nature of “the stratagem”
which had occurred to her. Legree was very superstitious; and it
is evident that some not very recent and barbarous murder of one
of his slaves had largely developed his superstitious fears, and
especially with reference to a particular apartment. Cassy, having
taken Emmeline into her counsels, resolves to terrify Legree with
the idea of this room being haunted, in order that, having a secret
access to it, she may, when the proper time arrives, make it her
safe and undisturbed retreat. She forthwith commences operations
by training Legree’s mind into a more and more terrified mood with
reference to this apartment, causing all sorts of strange, dismal,
unearthly noises to issue from it, ghosts to be seen gliding in white
out of it, and so forth. Thus far she succeeds; and having, in the
meanwhile, made up two little beds in a huge box in the dreaded room,
and provided food, candle-light, and clothes for their journey, she
puts her scheme in operation. Late in the evening, she and Emmeline
affect to make their escape, contriving to be seen in the act by
Legree; on which he gallops homeward--orders out Sambo and Quimbo,
and a posse of other willing myrmidons, and also the bloodhounds,
and away they start on their cruel and perhaps bloody errand. In the
meantime, the supposed fugitives have returned home unobserved, and
taken up their abode in the haunted chamber. There they listen to the
hunting party--men, horses, dogs--returning wearied and disappointed.
The next day the search is renewed, with the like ill success; and,
after a day or two’s seclusion in their hiding-place--near which
ghosts are seen to glide, and from which unearthly noises issue--the
adventurous pair start on their perilous journey--Cassy disguised
as a Creole Spanish lady, dressed entirely in black, and Emmeline
as her servant. She found no difficulty in assuming and sustaining
the character. “Brought up from early life in the highest society,
her language, air, and movements were all in accordance with it;
and she had still sufficient left of her once splendid wardrobe and
sets of jewels, to enable her to complete her personation. A small
black bonnet on her head, covered by a veil thick with embroidery,
concealed her face.” It was near sunrise when the two terrified and
breathless travellers paused, for a moment, in a little knot of
trees near the town. Having purchased a trunk in the outskirts, she
requested the seller to send it with her; and thus, escorted by a boy
wheeling her trunk, and Emmeline behind her carrying her carpet-bag
and sundry bundles, she made her appearance at a small tavern, like
a lady of consideration, and there encountered George Shelby, who,
with herself, was awaiting the arrival of the boat. He handed her
courteously to it, and provided her with a good state-room; but Cassy
found it expedient, on the plea of indisposition, to keep her room,
and her bed--sedulously attended, it may be imagined, by her maid
Emmeline--during the whole time they were on the Red River. Arrived
at the Mississippi, they entered the good steamboat _Cincinnati_.
How she disclosed herself to George Shelby, and became acquainted
with Madame de Thoux--how the latter proved to be Emily, the
long-lost sister of George Harris, and Cassy the mother of George’s
wife--somewhat compendious work, it must be owned--has been seen. It
was, in truth, as the author seems to have suspected, _rather_ “a
singular coincidence in their fortunes.” In due time they find their
way to Montreal, where George and Eliza had established themselves
in a neat tenement in the outskirts of the town, very happy and
contented, he having found constant occupation in the shop of a
worthy machinist. Cassy is now ending her days happily, “a devout and
tender Christian.” Emmeline continued with them; and, on her passage
to France, her beauty captivated the first mate of the vessel,
and, shortly after entering the port, she became his wife. Before,
however, this happy result has been effected, has occurred the
crowning act of the tragedy--the martyrdom of poor Tom; who, being
suspected by Legree of knowing of their escape, will not deny that he
was privy to it, but will afford him no information. On this Legree,
mortally infuriated, tells him that he “means to kill him”--“I’ve
made up my mind to kill you.”
“‘It’s very likely, Mas’r!’ said Tom, calmly.”
We shall spare our readers the frightful scene, as one of simple
butchery. One might as well describe, in detail, the slaughter of an
ox by the slaughterer and his two assistants. He is felled to the
ground by a blow of Legree, and Sambo and Quimbo flog him to death.
These two grim instruments of their master’s murderous vengeance are
filled with sudden remorse, when they shortly after revisit their
victim, and hear from him words of resignation and forgiveness. They
ask him “Who is _Jesus_, anyhow?” and on Tom, in a heavenly spirit,
telling them, they ask _Him_ for mercy.
“Poor critturs!” said Tom, “I’d be willing to bar all I have, if
it’ll only bring you to Christ! O Lord! _give me these two more
souls, I pray!_” To very many of _our_ readers, these expressions
will appear somewhat forced and _peculiar_; whilst others may
recognise in them language with which poor Tom had become familiar
in those scenes of religious exercise to which, we are told, he had
been accustomed for four years before his introduction to the reader.
“‘Tom,’ said Mr Shelby to Haley, ‘is a good, steady, sensible, pious
fellow. He got religion _at a camp meeting_, four years ago; and
I believe he really _did_ get it. I have trusted him, since then,
with everything I have: money, house, horses--and let him come and
go round the country; and I always found him true and square in
everything.” If such results follow “camp meetings,” they might be
advantageously tried, and on a large scale, too, in this country.
Some little time afterwards occurs the interview between dying Tom
and young Mr Shelby, who had come to ransom him.
“‘Who--who--who shall separate us from the love of Christ?’ he said,
in a voice that contended with mortal weakness; and with a smile he
fell asleep.”
Regarded merely as a stroke of art, this closing scene may be
contemplated with qualified feelings; but we shall offer no remarks
upon what has evidently been conceived in a high religious, a
nobly human spirit, and executed with no little power. Viewed in
this light--and it ought to be viewed in no other, by a critic
who has seized the scope and entered into the spirit of his
author--objections to the development of Uncle Tom’s character melt
away. He is not drawn to meet the views, or satisfy the exacting
spirit of mere worldly persons, sickly novel-readers, or conceited
supercilious critics. No, Tom is conceived in a lofty spirit, and
adorned with all the meekness, the gentleness, the long-suffering,
which can be drawn from the inexhaustible sources of our holy
religion alone; he is set sublimely on a pinnacle to attract towards
his oppressed race, represented by his crushed and bleeding form,
the pitying eye of Christendom--to awaken, to encourage, to _warn_.
“Suffering is,” indeed, “the badge of all _their_ tribe;” and
Europe has felt it to be so more strongly and directly, since the
publication of this work, than it ever felt before. In the soft,
glorious sunlight of Christian sympathy, the blackness of our poor
brother’s skin--his skin torn with the incessant lash--disappears.
Uncle Tom is actuated by religious principles which _will not
admit_ of his speaking or doing otherwise than he is represented as
speaking and doing. His condition was that of _a slave_; it was a
very hard one often, but had not always been such; and he was on
the eve of escaping from it by lawful means, more than once, but
the will of Providence had decreed otherwise. The sudden death of
St Clare was permitted to consign unoffending Tom to the hideous
Legree. But is not such an occurrence frequent in God’s ordinary
all-wise, but inscrutable direction of human affairs? Presented to
us under the conditions dictated by the objects and purposes of Mrs
Stowe, how could she, without outraging propriety and defeating her
whole, her only, and righteous purpose, have represented him, for
instance, organising a revolt against the oppressor, in the course
of which he and his maddened fellow-sufferers would have imbrued
their hands in the blood of Legree? With Mrs Stowe’s proved powers
of description, and her mastery over the feelings, she could have
flashed before our eyes characters, scenes, and actions which only
St Domingo could have paralleled! Instead, however, of playing the
part of a mad incendiary, she has calmly and magnanimously addressed
herself to the tribunal of public opinion, to the sense of justice,
and of religion, by which all civilised mankind profess to be
guided. She solemnly appeals to “the whole American church, of all
denominations, unitedly to seek the entire abolition of slavery
throughout America and throughout Christendom.” To “every individual
Christian, who wishes to do something for the abolition of slavery,”
she says--“Begin by doing what lies in your power for the coloured
people in your vicinity.... The contest is to be carried on ‘with
love unfeigned’--‘through every degree of opposition and persecution,
a divine unprovokable spirit of love, which must finally conquer....
We must love both the slaveholder and the slave, never forgetting
that both are our brethren.... We must use, as means, an earnest
application of all straightforward, honourable, and just measures,
for the removal of the system of slavery. Every man in his place
should remonstrate against it. All its sophistical arguments should
be answered, its biblical defences unmasked, by correct reasoning,
and interpretation. Every mother should teach the evil of it to
her children; every clergyman should fully and continually warn
his church against any complicity with such a sin.” _These_ are
the weapons, not carnal, but of holy temper, with which Mrs Stowe
would enter upon this warfare; and who shall rebuke her, and say
her Nay? Not _we_. We say to her, with a tender recollection that
it is a WOMAN of whom we are writing, All hail, thou impersonation
of Christian love and purity! Thou very genius of philanthropy!
Verily thou wilt _have thy reward_. Not merely in the praises of men,
though _they_ have been accorded already with an almost unanimous
and universal assent; but in the reflections of a chastened and
subdued--a warm, a loving, and devout spirit.
Taken as a _literary_ whole, _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_ is a work standing
before the critical eye in large proportions, but somewhat
irregularly and inartificially disposed; exhibiting, here and
there, minor and easily removable marks of haste, and inexperienced
workmanship. It would have been easy to contrive incidents, and
that without deranging her general scheme, which would have kept
curiosity on the stretch from first to last, and secured a sort
of poetical justice which might have satisfied the minds of many
of her readers;--by dealing, for instance, with Marie St Clare, a
beautiful but venomous little reptile,--and the huge speckled monster
Legree,--in a spirit of retribution, making their own acts entail
upon them condign and appropriate punishment; but how could that
have aided the declared moral purpose of the writer? She has done
well, on the contrary, in representing a Haley, a Legree, a Marie St
Clare, as still--_cumbering the ground_, as so many of the centres of
innumerable circles of despotic barbarity.
The main defect of the construction of her work as a “story”--for
such she terms it--is, its want of connectedness. The reader is
hurried incessantly from side to side of the dividing line between
the fortunes of Uncle Tom, and those of George and Eliza Harris,
with the episodical incidents depending on them; coming to each with
sympathies attuned to the _other_; which, again, as soon as they have
begun to be attracted to the new object, are suddenly dissociated,
to address themselves to the one which they had but recently quitted
so abruptly.
With all its defects, however, this book is an instrument worthy
of contributing to effect a grand purpose, to attack and subvert A
SYSTEM: the only condition, in this view, being, that it is founded,
not upon exaggeration and misrepresentation, but upon TRUTH. The
moment that the work had attracted universal notice, it was obvious
that it must challenge attention to the point of--TRUE, or FALSE, in
its representations of the condition of American slavery. Mrs Stowe
has cheerfully accepted the challenge thrown out to her--accepted
it in a calm and temperate spirit, and with the resolute confidence
of one believing herself right. She formally consents to have her
book tried by the test proposed, always protesting that she has
painted slavery _as it is_--has done ample justice to large portions
of humane Southern slaveholders; but insisting that _that_ is no
answer to her case, which is, that the SYSTEM is one altogether
opposed to the spirit of Christianity, and subversive of the rights,
and destructive of the best interests, of man. It is one, she would
say, that tends to stamp out, in every newly-born slave, the noble
image of his Maker, to _depress him beneath the level of humanity_;
and it is no answer to this to assert, as is asserted by one of the
keenest and sternest of her opponents, that “the peculiar falsity
of the book consists in making _exceptional_ or impossible cases
the representatives of the system.”[12] To establish her great
_principle_, on the one hand, and to controvert by _evidence_, on the
other, the charge in point of fact, of having made the exception the
rule, she has published what she calls _A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin_,
which is, in fact, simply a series of _Proofs and Illustrations_ of
the truth of her representations. We have examined this _Key_ to the
_Cabin_ with some attention, and are of opinion that its alleged
_facts_ are such as must be _answered_; or those whose accusations
provoked its publication, will have succeeded in only placing a
professed Fiction upon the solid basis of Fact. No one who reads this
_Key_ will tolerate being simply told, that _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_ is
founded on falsehood. She quotes (evidently, and even avowedly,)
under the guidance of gentlemen of adequate experience and knowledge
of the subject, from the authentic records of judicial decision,
dealing with cases so appalling as, for a moment, even to make
one think Legree painted in colours less dark than he might have
been;--and also exhibits a vast mass of documents which cannot be
disposed of, but by counterproof. We, of course, can deal with such
statements but as we find them; knowing that they derive their value
from the trustworthiness of a conscientious writer, _conclusively
confirmed by the absence of substantial disproof_.--This volume, in
a word, we commend to the serious consideration of every reflecting
European and American reader of _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_.
It were idle to class among these latter those who read simply to
indulge a spurious whimpering sentimentality, or to have a morbid
curiosity stimulated and inflamed by scenes of suffering and horror.
But the Christian statesman, the enlightened politician, in either
hemisphere, is bound, we think, to deal with the existence of this
book, and the extensive effects produced by it, as a signal FACT.
Great as are its literary merits, they are by no means sufficient,
of themselves, to account for the universal attention which it has
excited. It is because--to descend to a homely illustration--this
book has acted like the sudden flash of the policeman’s lantern
on a scene of secret midnight crime; it has painted in such vivid
colours a condition of humanity hidden from European observation,
as has attracted and fixed upon it the startled eyes of thinking
Europe--of a FREE Christian people. In vain is it to hang beside it
hasty recriminatory daubs of countervailing _white_ slavery, or of
the charms of slavery, as exhibited by a _quasi_ paradisaical state,
where such monsters as Legree, Mrs St Clare, Haley, Marks, and Tom
Loker, exist not. All such attempts have already proved, as might
have been anticipated, ridiculous failures, as far as they had been
designed to stultify and falsify _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_, and divert
from it the stern eye of public morality. How to deal with slavery
is a tremendous problem for enlightened Christian statesmanship.
It cannot tolerate the meddling of an unfortunate, impulsive,
unreasoning, unreflecting, however ardent and generous, so-called
humanity. True humanity, in this instance, consists in a sincere,
comprehensive, deliberate, and resolute effort to rouse the PUBLIC
OPINION of America on behalf of its slave population; and we believe
that that public opinion will ere long find--with more embarrassment
and danger the longer the discovery takes to be made--that slavery is
an ulcer, a foul spreading ulcer, eating its way, perilously, to the
very vitals of the body politic.
_Will slavery--American slavery--will slavery at all--be in existence
on the earth, a century hence?_ It is a vast question, and we will
not presume to answer it. Perhaps our imaginary brother of the
twentieth century may read what is here being written by his brother
of the nineteenth, and applaud our caution. Slavery _may_ then have
become a thing of the past; or, in the fortunes of the world, in the
mysterious, sublime, and even then unaccomplished destiny of the
human race, that institution may still have its monstrous strangling
coils encircling large and helpless sections of the family of man.
But if our shadowy brother of 1953 come to any other conclusions than
are favourable to the intelligence of us of 1853, in respect of our
reception of _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_, as Maga will doubtless be then in
flourishing existence, we look to our lineal successors, in our seat
of critical justice, to take up the cudgels for us, and vindicate our
opinions and cautious vaticinations. And, in the mean time, Harriet
Beecher Stowe, be it known a century hence, that we are ashamed of
neither yourself, nor our reception of your book; that one not of the
least important names of the present century is your own--already,
and though you should never write another book. We doubt, indeed,
whether you ever will do so--whether, at least, it will, or can be,
a great book; for this one embodies your life-long experiences,
heart-yearnings, and long-cherished thoughts. Your whole soul is
wrapped up in its single noble purpose; so, _Sis fœmina Unius Libri_.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] _Uncle Tom’s Cabin: A Picture of Slave Life in America._ By
HARRIET BEECHER STOWE. 1852.
_The Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Presenting the original Facts and
Documents upon which the Story is founded._ By HARRIET BEECHER STOWE,
author of _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_. 1853.
[2] Here the MS. becomes unfortunately illegible for some lines.
[3] Is this word a suggestion from good Mrs Stowe’s husband?
[4] Topsy--an incomparable sketch--excited at first sight no
pleasureable sensations in good, starched Miss Ophelia. “Now,
Augustine (Mr St Clare), what upon earth is _this_ for? Your house
is so full of these little plagues already, that a body can’t set
their foot down without treading on ’em! I get up in the morning, I
find one asleep behind the door, see one black head poking out from
under the table, one lying on the door-mat; and they are mopping, and
mowing, and grinning between all the railings, and tumbling over the
kitchen floor! What on earth did you want to bring _this_ one for?”
“For you _to educate_--didn’t I tell you? You’re always preaching
about educating. I thought _I would make you a present of a
fresh-caught specimen_, and let you try your hand on her, and bring
her up in the way she should go!... The fact is, this concern (!)
belonged to a couple of drunken creatures, that kept a low restaurant
which I have to pass every day, and I am tired of hearing her
screaming, and them beating and swearing at her. She looked bright
and funny, too, as if something might be made of her; so _I bought
her_ (!) and I’ll give her to you. Try, now--and give her a good
orthodox New England bringing up, and see what it’ll make of her!”
“Well--I’ll do what I can,” said Miss Ophelia; and she approached her
new subject, very much as a person might be supposed to approach a
black spider--supposing him to have benevolent designs towards it!
[5] _New York Courier_, Nov. 5, 1852. Quoted, _Key_, p. 97.
[6] “I mean to ask him _to_.” This is a form of expression
continually occurring in this work. It is also one used by the
vulgar in this country; but Mrs Stowe puts it into the mouths alike
of educated and uneducated--black and white. We might notice many
analogous vulgarisms in at least English eyes, but the critic is
disposed heartily to act on the principle--
“Verum ubi plura nitent ... non ego paucis Offendar maculis.”
[7] Mrs Stowe is evidently very anxious to ingratiate her favourite
hero with her readers--and perhaps with young ladies she may
succeed--by constantly dwelling on his “large, blue, flashing
eyes”--“large, melancholy, blue eyes”--“his _fine face_, classic
as that of a Greek statue”--and so forth; but sterner touches are
requisite to make him a _manly_ hero. It seems also somewhat odd
to see him “sitting on the floor, and laying his head back in Miss
Ophelia’s lap”--who lays her “hand on his forehead”--he saying to
her, “Don’t _take on_, so awfully serious!”
[8] “Her theological tenets were all made up, labelled in the most
positive and distinct forms, and put by, like the bundles in her
patch trunk; there were just so many of them, and there were never to
be any more. Underlaying all, deeper than anything else, higher and
broader, lay the strongest principle of her being--conscientiousness.
_Nowhere is conscience so dominant and all-absorbing as with New
England women._” [Bless them!] “It is the granite formation which
lies deepest, and rises out, even to the tops of the highest
mountains.” This last we suspect to be a touch of her relative--The
“Professor!”
[9] Here, however, is an exquisite touch. When Eva can no longer
walk, Tom carried her; and on one occasion her father seeks to
perform that office. “Oh, papa! let Tom take me! Poor fellow, it
pleases him; and you know, _it’s all he can do_, and he wants to do
something!”
“So do I, Eva--.”
“Well, papa, you can do everything, and are everything to me. You
read to me,--you sit up at nights; but Tom _has only this_ one thing,
and his singing!”
[10] The next sentence in the text is a striking instance of the
superfluous and even irritating habit of Mrs Stowe already alluded
to. As if she had not painted so vividly as to touch the most stolid
feelings, she adds--“It was a curious mixture of the pathetic and
the ludicrous--the little old stocking, black crape, text-book, fair
soft curl, and Topsy’s utter distress.” Surely this is writing under
the picture of a horse--“This is a horse: do you see its hair, head,
neck, body, legs, hoofs, and tail? And it has eyes and nostrils!”
[11] The luckless girl bore her own penal letter-missive--“An order,
written in Mrs St Clare’s _delicate Italian hand_, to the master of a
whipping establishment, to give the bearer fifteen lashes!” and this
for only a hastily-uttered saucy expression!
[12] See the _New York Enquirer_, Nov. 5, 1852. _Key_, 97.
RIGHT DIVINE.
[No state of things can subsist without the Divine
permission. It is therefore obviously true how “the powers
that be” must be “ordained of God.”
Yet truth is polygonous, and the Locke theory may be also
true. All existing and operating governments, of whatever
form, may be and work by Divine appointment, and yet
receive their authority by delegation from the People,[13]
that is, from the free Society at large.
But the case may arise (as we have a remarkable instance
in California) where a mass of civilised men go forth in
complete maturity, and in perfect independence of the
mother country; carrying only so much of the government as
is contained in certain maxims and general principles which
they have imbibed with their mother’s milk. We see at once
that they would choose for themselves whether they would
rub on under the auspices of Justice Lynch, or depute a
corporation of some sort to take the management of their
affairs. Now, as it is clearly the affair of society that
John should not encroach upon Thomas’s diggings, or Thomas
put John to a violent death for his aggressions, some
consultation, like the following, will sooner or later have
to be held.]
SCENE.--THE CAPITAL OF “WHAT NOT.”
Persons--JOHN, THOMAS, EXECUTIVE, and CHORUS. _Thirty-two.
_ Varlets--MUTE PERSONS.
JOHN.--O great Executive, be good as great,
And save me from that brutal ruffian Thomas.
THOMAS.--Hold, sir! no names; remember where you are:
I hoped you’d had enough of that before.
EXECUTIVE.--Nay, gentlemen, this is unseemly.
CHORUS.-- Very;
’Twere well if John and Thomas did not fight!
EX.--Well, good my masters, what am I to do?
I fain would help you; but I seem to lack
The means of action: how provide you now?
J. (_whimpering_).--I keep a dozen cudgel-men.
E. (_to Thomas_).--And you?
T.--A score.
E.--Heyday! why, this must cost you something:
But I presume it answers?
C.-- Does it though?
Lord bless your worship; Thomas and his men
Rob, beat, and laugh at John; who’d do the same
Had he the power: and, indeed, I’ve heard
That John intends to keep ten other varlets;
And, O that Tom and Jack would cease to fight!
E.--Why, so they may, if you will but be calm;
Let each man pay a trifle--scarce worth naming--
And _I_ will keep a thousand cudgel-men.
C.--Apapai! this is downright Beadledom.
E.--My thousand varlets shall protect you all;
Each man shall have his thousand--all and each.
C.--I see; but recollect yourself, my friend;
This were a standing army; don’t you see?
J.--Ay, recollect yourself, good sir, you are our servant,
And hold your office only at our pleasure.
T.--Ay, marry, do you; and if we should find
That we grow weary of you, or see cause
To wish you changed, pray, how will this be done,
You, with your thousand knaves? Answer me that.
C.--Answer me that.
J.-- I pause for a reply.
E.--Dear masters mine, a little patience, pray:
If you would change me, it can still be done:
You are a million; and my thousand knaves,
What would they do against you?
J.-- Out, you fox!
Your thousand knaves, with discipline and arms,
Will beat ten thousand peaceful men like me.
E. (_blandly_).--O! gentlemen, it must be as you please,
For, after all, the affair is yours, not mine;
Even _with_ constables, I do not seek
The task of ruling spirits such as you.
C.--O me! how John and Thomas will dispute!
This must not be: come, list to me, my boys;
Hark to me, Thomas; John, a word i’ your ear:
Our friend is right, as usual; his stout knaves
May beat ten thousand of us;--that’s a warning
That we must not attack him (_aside_) with that force.
(_Aloud_).--You pay a tithe of what your fellows cost you,
And waive the privilege of private war,
A right that wrongs me foully; those he keeps
Will see fair play between you; he, no doubt,
Will use his power most justly.
[EXECUTIVE bows to each of them, and exit in a state of
edifying meekness. Loud cheers from JOHN and THOMAS.]
CH. (_proceeds_).--Should he not,
So help me, Hookey Walker, he shall rue it;
The wiser sort will grieve and bide their time;
And fools will raise their thousands, eight or nine;
And our friend’s arm shall crush them; if the time,
The melancholy time, should come, when Fate, grown sick
Of his vagaries, shall have spun his thread,
Some twelve or fourteen thousands will be found
To work the righteous sentence; he will fall;
Vox Populi Vox Dei; and the Rights
Of kings and constables are both divine.
_Tableau._--JOHN and THOMAS stand apart, in thoughtful
attitudes, their respective followers having gone to seek
employment under the new system. The CHORUS stands pensive,
but firm, in the centre of the stage. Scene closes.
H. G. K.
FOOTNOTES:
[13] Populus, not Plebs. These terms are often confounded, by the use
of a word which may be said to be the translation of either. I do not
here object to a nation’s being all Plebs, but protest against this
reading when it is not.
LADY LEE’S WIDOWHOOD.
PART X.--CHAP. XLVII.
“You seem so much better to-day,” said Mr Payne next morning to Mr
Levitt, “that I think I shall leave you alone with the Captain, and
go down to Larches, where I have not paid my customary visit for a
couple of weeks past.”
“By all means,” said the invalid; “I should like to go with you if
I could. I’ve a little curiosity to see that young lady of yours”
(which Mr Payne knew to signify that his friend felt a warm interest
in Orelia, though he had never seen her since she was a child).
“She’s handsome, you say?”
“Really,” said Mr Payne, “making due deduction for a parent’s
partiality, I should say you wouldn’t often see a finer young woman.”
“And accomplished too!--and high spirited. Payne, do you know, I wish
you’d take Durham down with you. I’m quite well enough to do without
anybody now.”
“To be sure,” said Mr Payne; “if you think you can spare him, I shall
be delighted. ’Twill do Orelia good, too, for she, and a friend of
hers, who is staying with her, seem to me to be falling into a sort
of religious melancholy; and, to tell you the truth, it has caused me
a good deal of anxiety.”
“And if--if the two should take a fancy to each other--Payne,
I needn’t say that my heir would lose nothing in my estimation
with your daughter for a wife. I once indulged in some little
castle-building of that kind, of which Durham was not the hero.”
“Ah, we won’t speak of that now, my dear friend,” said Mr Payne
hastily. “I’ll go at once, and ask the Captain to join me.”
Accordingly, he went off to propose the visit to Durham.
“It needn’t be dull for you,” said Mr Payne, “even if you shouldn’t
succeed in finding Langley. Besides my daughter there’s a friend of
hers, a very charming person, whom I think you must know--Lady Lee.”
Fane answered shortly and stiffly that he had that pleasure.
“Come,” said Mr Payne, “this is fortunate. We’ll start after lunch,
and get down to Larches by dinner-time. Frewenham is just fifty miles
from here.”
Fane agreed. Since finding out that Orelia lived near Frewenham,
he divined at once why Langley’s steps should be drawn in that
direction, and made sure of finding him there. Accordingly, after
lunch, they set off, and repaired in Mr Levitt’s carriage to the
railway, which took them the greater part of their journey.
Fane was but a silent companion. He was about, then, to see Lady
Lee again--to be under the same roof with her; that was the text
on which his thoughts discoursed. Was it not foolhardy to run into
the dangerous proximity?--to expose himself to the influence of
charms which could never be his? On the other hand, would it not be
mere weakness to avoid it? Why should he permit his movements to be
governed, his feelings played upon, by a woman who had preferred
another to him?--who was probably awaiting but the expiration of her
period of mourning to be the wife of another--of a man he despised.
Besides, he had some curiosity to see how she would receive and treat
him. Yes, that was it! Curiosity was the feeling that made him wish
to see her again.
And Fane, though as sensible a fellow as you would be likely to meet,
and by no means given to self-deception, really persuaded himself
that his anxiety once more to behold Lady Lee proceeded entirely
from curiosity. If he had a lurking doubt about that, there were
plenty of other plausible reasons to satisfy his conscience; for,
even admitting curiosity to be too trivial a feeling to cause him
to accept Mr Payne’s invitation, yet how could he help accompanying
him? Mr Payne was such an old friend of his uncle’s--and his uncle
wished it too; and then he should be glad to see Orelia again--he
had a great regard for Orelia! Above all, there was the prospect of
securing his cousin Langley--oh, there were reasons enough why he
should be anxious and eager for the termination of the journey, quite
independent of the prospect of seeing Lady Lee. Moreover, there was
nothing he despised so much as a man who would give a second thought
to a woman after he had ascertained that she didn’t care for him.
Didn’t care for him!--here he left arguing, and branched off into
recollections--such as he had a thousand times before banished, and
resolved to have done with for ever. Was her treatment of him, at
one time, that of a woman who didn’t care for him? Was she a likely
person to be guilty of setting traps for a man just to feed her
vanity? Wasn’t she the reverse of everything hollow, trifling, and
insincere? These questions resulted in the satisfactory and novel
general axiom that women were unaccountable beings, and as changeable
as the moon.
They had quitted the railway at Frewenham, and Fane stood at the door
of the principal hotel awaiting the harnessing of a horse to the gig
which was to convey them to Larches (which operation Mr Payne was
superintending), when he felt a hand laid gently on his arm, and a
voice said, “Bless me, Captain Fane, is that you? Who’d have thought
it!”
Fane turned and beheld Miss Fillett. Kitty was dressed in
sober-coloured and sober-cut garments, very different from the
coquettish array in which she had been accustomed, when Fane last saw
her, to go flirting about the precincts of the Heronry. Her very face
seemed to have lost its pert expression; at least, if not quite lost,
it was driven to lurk in the corners of her mouth and eyes. Beside
her walked a youth of about fourteen, in whose features might be
traced a strong family likeness to Kitty.
“How d’ye do, Kitty? You’ve come here with your lady, have you?” said
Fane.
“This is my nittive place,” answered Miss Fillett. “I’m living with
my own femily, though I do see my lady and Miss Payne from time to
time. My lady took me from here when she married. This is my brother,
Captain,” looking at the youth at her side. “Go on, Thomas,” she
said to this relative, “and wait for me at the meeting-house door;
and mind you have nothink to say to them depraved boys that’s always
playing marbles there.”
Thomas departed. “Why, goodness gracious, Captain, what bekim of you
that time you left us so suddin?” said Kitty, coming close up to
Fane, and speaking in a low earnest tone. “There was certain persons
fretted after you, I can tell you.”
Fane felt his colour rise in spite of himself. “I suspect you’re
mistaken, Kitty,” he said, affecting to laugh.
“To go off in that hasty way, without so much as saying good-by,”
Kitty went on, “and when there was persins, perhaps, wishing to
see you, if ’twas only to bid farewell--’twasn’t quite the thing,
Captain.”
“Perhaps not, Kitty,” said the Captain, “but we can’t always do what
we wish, you know.”
“No,” said Kitty, “Hevin knows we can’t--in particular, when our
wish is to do what is right. I’ve wanted to see you this long time,
Captain Fane, about a matter in which I’ve took blame to myself. Ever
since the loss of dear Master Juley, which my lady never will forgive
me, though I’d have laid down my life for him, Hevin knows, Captain,
my conscience have pricked me”--
Kitty stopt suddenly as she looked up the street. Fane’s eyes
following the direction of hers, he beheld a man in black advancing
on the opposite side of the way. His face hung down over his white
neckcloth; so that, in order to look round him, his eyes, which were
of a leaden colour, were forced to peer in a stealthy stare from
under his thick black eyebrows. His depressed nose, and his advancing
lips, rounding smugly and smilingly over the teeth, gave him some
resemblance to a sheep or goat.
“’Tis the Rev. Mr Fallalove,” said Kitty, “the minister of our
chapel. O, what will he think of me talking to you, sir! I’ll meet
you, sir,” added Kitty, in a rapid under-tone, “outside the town, on
the road to Larches, at ten o’clock to-morrow morning. I’ve really
got something to tell you, sir--something you’d give a good deal,
perhaps, to know.” Fane promised to come--and Kitty, dropping a
demure curtsey, walked away to greet the Rev. Mr Fallalove; while Mr
Payne appearing with the gig, he and Fane drove off to Larches.
“Go on and announce yourself, while I take my coat off,” said Mr
Payne to Fane, standing in the lobby at Larches--“through the
drawing-room’s your way.”
Fane advanced--the door of the dining-room was open, and he paused,
looking at its occupants, who, taking his step for that of a servant,
did not look towards him.
Orelia, the queenly Orelia, seated at the head of the table, was
eating her soup with her usual lofty composure. She was worth more
attention than Fane bestowed on her, for his gaze never rested on
her, nor on the martyr Priscilla, whose face was swathed up like a
mummy’s, but who smiled, nevertheless, in spite of her teeth. He was
altogether absorbed in the contemplation of Lady Lee, who sat at the
foot of the table, her soup untouched, her cheek resting on her hand,
her look turned aside towards a small foot which peeped from beneath
her black dress.
How long he might have so stood is uncertain; but Mr Payne’s
advancing step and voice now caused them all to look up, and they saw
Fane standing in the doorway. Lady Lee visibly started; her bosom
and shoulders gave one quick heave, and her colour flushed up for a
moment. Orelia’s spoon stopped on its way to her mouth--she calmly
laid it down, and rose to receive her visitors.
Fane, acting up to his principle that it would be mere weakness to
allow himself to show any feeling beyond strict civility towards
her ladyship, rather, as is customary in such cases, overdid his
part, and threw such an extreme amount of indifference into his
salutation, that the warmth with which she came forward to meet him
was dissipated in a moment. Chilled and hurt, she resumed her seat in
silence.
Fane, supporting his character of chance and uninterested visitor
with great success, conversed fluently on a variety of topics,
though it would have puzzled him to remember his own remarks half
an hour after. It was one of the few occasions in his life when he
had acted a part, and he, of course, overacted it. He was pointedly
amusing to Orelia; he listened with great attention to the inanities
of Priscilla, lending the most courteous ear to a protracted account
of her toothache; but when Lady Lee spoke, which only happened
once or twice, though her voice made his heart beat, he manifested
no consciousness of her presence. Once or twice, addressing some
trivial remark to her, he caught her eyes fixed on him with a look of
sorrowful surprise, but they were immediately averted.
Mr Payne did not find Fane more sociable, when the ladies left them
to their wine, than he had on the journey. At tea with the ladies
he resumed his former demeanour; and afterwards Orelia, thinking to
do him and Hester a kindness, set her father and Priscilla down to
double dummy, in a remote corner, and sat by the card-table herself.
Fane felt rather awkward, and glanced at Lady Lee, who was reading.
Presently he found himself approaching her--not that he would have
owned himself impelled to take that course--not at all; he set
it all down to civility--he couldn’t leave her sitting there by
herself, you know. But he would be very guarded; he would try to hit
the line between the confidence of friends and the reserve of new
acquaintances, so that his present demeanour might blend harmoniously
into their ancient intimacy on the one hand, and the distant civility
that was to exist between them in future, on the other.
Lady Lee did not seem so absorbed in her book as not to notice his
approach; for though she did not look round, she coloured a little,
and tremulously turned over two leaves at once, without discovering
the gap thus left in the narrative. She laid the volume down when he
took a seat near and addressed her.
“This must be a pleasant place of your friend’s when the flowers are
in bloom,” said Fane.
“Very.”
“No doubt you feel quite at home here.”
“Certainly; the happiest years of my life were spent here.”
“I trust,” said Fane, “they may soon lose the distinction of being
the happiest.”
“That is very unlikely,”--(with a sigh.)
A pause. Strange to say, the thought that Lady Lee had no happiness
immediately in store for her, did not altogether displease Fane.
“Happiness often takes us unawares,” said Fane; “and,” he added,
“another of its peculiarities, as we all know, is to slip from us
as we prepare to close our grasp on it. Most of us experience much
oftener its elusive power than its pleasant surprises.”
“Yours used to be a more cheerful philosophy,” said Lady Lee. “I
remember, in one of our last conversations, you denounced those views
of life which are tinged with complaint or despondency, as unmanly
and untrue.”
“I suspect our philosophy comes more from without than within,” he
said; “and we preach hope or cynicism as we happen to be prosperous
or disappointed.”
“I should regret,” said Lady Lee, in a low tone, “to hear that you
had any real cause for such a change.”
“Our opinions as to what might or might not be a real cause would
possibly differ,” returned Fane. “Of course, if one has bound up
one’s happiness in some ideal which turns out to be a delusion, there
is perhaps no one to blame but one’s-self. I say perhaps, because the
deception may have been so complete as to excuse the credulity; but,
at any rate, one must not then find fault with views of life which
others, more fortunate, are justified in adhering to.”
“It must be a weaker belief in good than I had fancied Captain Fane’s
to be, which a single error can shake,” said Lady Lee.
“But if the error is so important as to upset all calculation,”
said Fane. “If I have been all my life----. But I will not talk of
myself,” he said, breaking off, as he perceived how near dangerous
ground he was treading. “What is the book you are reading?”
“It has a radical fault in your eyes,” said Lady Lee; “it is written
by a woman.”
“Ah!” said Fane, “I remember I used to think it a kind of desecration
for a woman to confide her sentiments to the world; and the finer
the sentiments, the more it seemed to me a pity that they should
ever be blown on by the rude breath of the public. If she must write
them, let her write them in her journal, or her letters to a chosen
few--perhaps a chosen one; but to trot her feelings out, to show the
form and paces of her mind to cold-eyed critics and gaping fools, I
would as soon see the woman I loved capering in the scantiest gauze
at the opera. So I used to say.”
“Used to say!” said Lady Lee. “Are your opinions on this point
changing too?”
“Yes,” said Fane, with a good deal of unconscious bitterness in
his tone--“yes; I begin to think that if a woman’s sentiments do
not influence her life in its chief actions, it is of no great
consequence what becomes of them; let her trumpet them in the
marketplace, if she likes, after the manner of a proclamation. I
don’t mean to say they should be always manifesting themselves
in every petty action, but they should colour her existence, and
influence its main outlines. But if these sentiments and feelings
would never have found expression at all if not in writing--if, by
presenting them to the public, she is robbing her daily life of no
delicate tint--then my objections to female authorship are gone;
but with them is also gone some of my belief in the excellence of
feminine nature.”
Can he have left Doddington on some love enterprise, and been
disappointed? whispered Lady Lee’s heart; or can the sharpness of
his tone be meant for me? A dim thought that he might be alluding to
her marriage with Sir Joseph crossed her mind. Poor woman! no wonder
she was puzzled; she could not see the handsome, self-complacent,
coxcombical image of Sloperton, which to Fane’s fancy sat between
them, like Banquo’s ghost, and seemed to push him from his stool.
“Perhaps,” she said presently--“perhaps you are on principle getting
rid of some of the tenets of your former faith, stripping yourself,
that you may be the lighter to run the race of ambition; for you
never denied you were ambitious, you know.”
“I never did,” said Fane; “but I do now. For do but consider, Lady
Lee, if my faith in my ideals has vanished, if the companionship and
reflected interest which these give to a man’s efforts are no longer
among his prospects, where is he to look for the stimulus and reward
of ambition?”
“You show a dreary picture,” said Lady Lee, with an unconscious sigh;
“but then ambition is a dreary thing, and does not seem, in general,
to look for sympathy as its reward.”
“True,” said Fane; “and when I see men long past their youth
joining in the contest for fame, I always ask myself where lies
their inducement?--Not in love, for they have outlived it--not in
friendship, for they reject it--not even in applause, for to that
they seem not to listen. They seem actuated by an insane desire to
climb to a barren eminence, and there die. For my own part, I could
not value nor wish for fame, unless I could read it focussed and
reflected in ----. But I will not trouble you with my abandoned
aspirations and opinions; I leave them, with my other theories, to
some one who has not yet discovered that he is a dreamer of dreams.”
Fane imagined that he had conducted the conversation so as to show
perfect indifference and independence. It never occurred to him that
he would not have talked thus, nor on such subjects, to a woman he
did not care about.
When Lady Lee went to her room that night, Orelia followed her, and,
sitting down by her side on the sofa at the foot of the bed, looked
inquiringly into her eyes. Lady Lee knew what she meant, but, having
nothing to say, said nothing. She only turned away and sighed; and
Orelia, kissing her forehead, bid her good night.
Ah, if Fane could have afterwards seen Lady Lee whispering her sorrow
to her pillow in the watches of the night, what a pebble he must
have been had he not run to comfort her. But he couldn’t see her,
for there was a solid wall separating her room from the one where he
strode to and fro musingly.
If it is hard for two, who would gladly give up all and everything
for each other, to find inseparable obstacles interposed between
them, must it not be the devil’s spite for them to discover, perhaps
in the next world, that they were divided in this one by some merely
imaginary bar--some difference that a word would have dissipated?