judges dissent. Longfellow said: "It is one of the greatest triumphs
recorded in literary history, to say nothing of the higher triumph of
its moral effect." George Sand said: "Mrs. Stowe is all instinct; it
is the very reason that she appears to some to have no talent.... I
cannot say that she has talent as one understands it in the world of
letters, but she has genius as humanity feels the need of it,--the
genius of goodness, not that of the man of letters, but of the
saint.... In matters of art, there is but one rule, to paint and to
move." I give but a paragraph of a paper which Senator Sumner called
"a most remarkable tribute, such as was hardly ever offered by such a
genius to any living mortal."
Apologists for the slave system have declared that "Uncle Tom's Cabin"
is a libel upon the system. One must do that before he can begin his
apology; but the remarkable fact is that not even in the South was the
libel detected at the first. That was an after-thought. Whittier knew
a lady who read the story "to some twenty young ladies, daughters of
slave-holders, near New Orleans and amid the scenes described in it,
and they with one accord pronounced it true." It was not till the sale
of the book had run to over 100,000 copies that a reaction set in and
then, strange to say, the note of warning was sounded by that
infallible authority upon American affairs, the London Times.
In 1852, the year following the publication of "Uncle Tom" Prof. Stowe
accepted a chair in the Theological Seminary at Andover, and that
village became the home of the family during the ten following happy
years. In 1853, Mr. and Mrs. Stowe went to England upon the invitation
of Anti-Slavery friends who guaranteed and considerably overpaid the
expenses of the trip. "Should Mrs. Stowe conclude to visit Europe,"
wrote Senator Sumner, "she will have a triumph." The prediction was
fulfilled. At Liverpool she is met by friends and breakfasted with a
little company of thirty or forty people; at Glasgow, she drinks tea
with two thousand; at Edinburgh there was "another great tea party,"
and she was presented with a "national penny offering consisting of a
thousand golden sovereigns on a magnificent silver salver." She had
the Highlands yet to see as the guest of the Duke of Argyll, not to
mention London and Paris. After five months, she sailed from Liverpool
on her return, and is it any wonder that she wrote, "Almost sadly as a
child might leave its home, I left the shores of kind, strong Old
England, the mother of us all!"
In 1856, Mrs. Stowe visited Europe a second time for the purpose of
securing an English copyright upon "Dred," having learned something of
business by her experience with "Uncle Tom." It will be interesting
to know that in England "Dred" was considered the better story, that
100,000 copies of it were sold there in four weeks, and that her
English publisher issued it in editions of 125,000 copies each. "After
that," writes Mrs. Stowe, "who cares what the critics say?"
She was abroad nearly a year, visiting France, Switzerland, and Italy,
and returned in June, 1857, to experience another sad bereavement. Her
son Henry was a Freshman in Dartmouth college and, while bathing in
the Connecticut river, he was drowned. This was a severe trial to Mrs.
Stowe and the more so because, whatever her religion may have done for
her, the theology in which she had been educated gave no comfort to
her soul. "Distressing doubts as to Henry's spiritual state were
rudely thrust upon my soul." These doubts she was able to master at
least temporarily, by assuming that they were temptations of the
devil, but three years later in Florence, on a third voyage to Europe,
she wrote her husband, in reply to his allusions to Henry, "Since I
have been in Florence, I have been distressed by inexpressible
yearnings for him,--such sighings and outreachings, with a sense of
utter darkness and separation, not only from him but from all
spiritual communion with my God." It will be interesting to know that
relief was brought her in this painful crisis, by the ministrations of
spiritualism.
Mrs. Stowe returned in 1860 from her third visit to Europe to find the
country hovering upon the verge of Civil War. The war brought her
another sore bereavement. At the battle of Gettysburg, her son, Capt.
Frederick Stowe, was struck by the fragment of a shell and, though the
wound healed, he never really recovered. His end was sufficiently
tragic. With the hope of improving his health by a long sea voyage, he
sailed from New York for San Francisco by way of Cape Horn. That he
reached San Francisco in safety, writes his brother, "is known: but
that is all. No word from him or concerning him has ever reached the
loving hearts that have waited so anxiously for it, and of his
ultimate fate nothing is known." Whatever may have been the "spiritual
state" of this son, Mrs. Stowe had now somewhat modernized her
theology and could say, "An endless infliction for past sins was once
the doctrine that we now generally reject.... Of one thing I am
sure,--probation does not end with this life." To stamp out that very
heresy had been no small part of Dr. Beecher's mission in Boston.
In 1863, Prof. Stowe having resigned his chair in Andover, Mrs. Stowe
removed with her family to Hartford where for the remaining
thirty-three years of her life, she made her summer home. The winter
of 1866, she spent with her husband in Florida and, the year
following, she bought in that semi-tropical state an orange orchard,
the fruit of which the year previous had "brought $2,000 as sold at
the wharf." Here for sixteen winters Mr. and Mrs. Stowe made their
home, until her "poor rabbi," as she affectionately calls him, became
too feeble to bear the long journey from Hartford. There she built a
small Episcopal church and she invites her brother Charles to become
an Episcopalian and come and be her minister.
Her son says that "Mrs. Stowe had some years before this joined the
Episcopal church for the purpose of attending the same communion as
her daughters." That she desired to attend the same communion as her
daughters does not seem a sufficient reason for leaving the communion
of her husband. Certainly, she had other reasons. From her fourth
year, she had known the service and, as read by her grandmother at
that time, its prayers "had a different effect upon me," she says,
"from any other prayers I heard in early life." Moreover, she had a
mission to the negro race and believed that the Episcopal service is
specially adapted to their needs: "If my tasks and feelings did not
incline me toward the Church," she writes her brother, "I should still
choose it as the best system for training immature minds such as those
of our negroes. The system was composed with reference to the wants of
the laboring class of England, at a time when they were as ignorant as
our negroes are now."
The picture of her southern life which she gives in a letter to George
Eliot, is very attractive, her husband "sitting on the veranda reading
all day," but during these years, Mrs. Stowe must have spent much of
her own time at a writing-table since, for the ten years after 1867,
when the Florida life began, she published a volume, sometimes two
volumes, a year. In 1872, she was tempted by the Boston Lecture Bureau
to give readings from her own works in the principal cities of New
England, and the following year, the course was repeated in the cities
of the West. Her audiences were to her amazing. "And how they do
laugh! We get into regular gales," she writes her lonely husband at
home.
Her seventieth birthday was celebrated at a gathering of two hundred
of the leading literary men and women of the land, at the residence of
Ex-Governor Claflin in Newton. There were poems by Whittier, Dr.
Holmes, J. T. Trowbridge, Mrs. Whitney, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Mrs.
Fields, and others, many excellent speeches, and finally a speech by
the little woman herself. This garden party, says her son, was the
last public appearance of Mrs. Stowe.
Her "rabbi" left her a widow in 1886, dying at the age of 84. Mrs.
Stowe survived him ten years, dying in 1896, at the age of 85, leaving
behind her a name loved and honored upon two continents.
VII
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT
[Illustration: LOUISA MAY ALCOTT]
Miss Alcott has been called, perhaps truly, the most popular
story-teller for children, in her generation. Like those elect souls
whom the apostle saw arrayed in white robes, she came up through great
tribulation, paying dearly in labor and privation for her successes,
but one must pronounce her life happy and fortunate, since she lived
to enjoy her fame and fortune twenty years, to witness the sale of a
million volumes of her writings, to receive more than two hundred
thousand dollars from her publishers, and thereby to accomplish the
great purpose upon which as a girl she had set her heart, which was,
to see her father and mother comfortable in their declining years.
Successful as Miss Alcott was as a writer, she was greater as a woman,
and the story of her life is as interesting,--as full of tragedy and
comedy,--as the careers of her heroes and heroines. In fact, we have
reason to believe that the adventures of her characters are often not
so much invented as remembered, the pranks and frolics of her boys
and girls being episodes from her own youthful experience. In the
preface to "Little Women," the most charming of her books, she tells
us herself that the most improbable incidents are the least imaginary.
The happy girlhood which she portrays was her own, in spite of
forbidding conditions. The struggle in which her cheerful nature
extorted happiness from unwilling fortune, gives a dramatic interest
to her youthful experiences, as her literary disappointments and
successes do to the years of her maturity.
Miss Alcott inherited a name which her father's genius had made known
on both sides of the sea, before her own made it famous in a hundred
thousand households. Alcott is a derivative from Alcocke, the name by
which Mr. Alcott himself was known in his boyhood. John Alcocke, born
in New Haven, Ct., married Mary, daughter of Rev. Abraham Pierson,
first president of Yale College. He was a man of considerable fortune
and left 1,200 acres of land to his six children, one of whom was
Capt. John Alcocke, a man of some distinction in the colonial service.
Joseph Chatfield Alcocke, son of Capt. John, married Anna, sister of
Rev. Tillotson Bronson, D.D. Of this marriage, Amos Bronson Alcott,
father of Louisa, was born, Nov. 29, 1799. The fortunes of Joseph
Chatfield Alcocke were those of other small farmers of the period, but
Mrs. Alcocke could not forget that she was the sister of a college
graduate, and it was worth something to her son to know that he was
descended from the president of a college. The mother and son early
settled it that the boy should be a scholar, and the father loyally
furthered their ambitions, borrowing of his acquaintances such books
as he discovered and bringing them home for the delectation of his
studious son. At the age of thirteen, Bronson became a pupil in a
private school kept by his uncle, Dr. Bronson, and at eighteen, he set
out for Virginia with the secret purpose of teaching if opportunity
offered, at the same time taking along a peddler's trunk out of which
to turn an honest penny and pay the expenses of his journey.
Circumstances did not favor his becoming a Virginia teacher, but
between his eighteenth and twenty-third years, he made several
expeditions into the Southern States as a Yankee peddler, with rather
negative financial results, but with much enlargement of his
information and improvement of his rustic manners. Mr. Alcott was
rather distinguished for his high-bred manners and, on a visit to
England, there is an amusing incident of his having been mistaken for
some member of the titled aristocracy.
At the age of twenty-five, Mr. Alcott began his career as a teacher in
an Episcopal Academy at Cheshire, Ct. His family were Episcopalians,
and he had been confirmed at sixteen. Since the age of eighteen when
he started for Virginia as a candidate for a school, he had been
theorizing upon the art of teaching and had thought out many of the
principles of what, a century later, began to be called the "New
Education." He undertook, perhaps too rapidly, to apply his theories
in the conduct of the Cheshire Academy. His experiments occasioned a
vast amount of controversy, in which Connecticut conservatism gained a
victory, and Mr. Alcott retired from the school at the end of two
years' service. His results however had been sufficient to convince
him of the soundness of his principles, and to launch him upon the
troubled career of educational reform.
Among a few intelligent friends and sympathizers who rallied to Mr.
Alcott's side in this controversy, was Rev. Samuel J. May, a Unitarian
minister then of Brooklyn, Ct., at whose house, in 1827, Mr. Alcott
met Mr. May's sister Abbie, who shared fully her brother's enthusiasm
for the new education and its persecuted apostle. Miss May began her
relations with Mr. Alcott as his admirer and champion, a dangerous
part for an enthusiastic young lady to play, as the sequel proved
when, three years later, she became Mrs. Alcott.
Mrs. Alcott was the daughter of a Boston merchant, Col. Joseph May,
and his wife, Dorothy Sewall, daughter of Samuel Sewall and his wife,
Elizabeth Quincy, sister of Dorothy Quincy, wife of John Hancock. By
the marriage of Joseph May and Dorothy Sewall, two very distinguished
lines of ancestry had been united. Under her father's roof, Mrs.
Alcott had enjoyed every comfort and the best of social advantages.
She was tall, had a fine physique, good intellect, warm affections,
and generous sympathies, but it would have astonished her to have been
told that she was bringing to the marriage altar more than she
received; and however much it may have cost her to be the wife of an
unworldly idealist, it was precisely his unworldly idealism that first
won her admiration and then gained her heart.
Life may have been harder for Mrs. Alcott than she anticipated, but
she knew very well that she was abjuring riches. Two years before her
marriage, her brother had written her: "Mr. Alcott's mind and heart
are so much occupied with other things that poverty and riches do not
seem to concern him much." She had known Mr. Alcott three years and
had enjoyed ample opportunity to make this observation herself.
Indeed, two months after her marriage, she wrote her brother, "My
husband is the perfect personification of modesty and moderation. I am
not sure that we shall not blush into obscurity and contemplate into
starvation." That she had not repented of her choice a year later, may
be judged from a letter to her brother on the first anniversary of her
marriage: "It has been an eventful year,--a year of trial, of
happiness, of improvement. I can wish no better fate to any sister of
my sex than has attended me since my entrance into the conjugal
state."
That Mr. Alcott, then in his young manhood, had qualities which, for a
young lady of refinement and culture, would compensate for many
privations is evident. Whether he was one of the great men of his
generation or not, there is no doubt he seemed so. When, in 1837, Dr.
Bartol came to Boston, Mr. Emerson asked him whom he knew in the
city, and said: "There is but one man, Mr. Alcott." Dr. Bartol seems
to have come to much the same opinion. He says: "Alcott belonged to
the Christ class: his manners were the most gentle and gracious, under
all fair or unfair provocation, I ever beheld; he had a rare inborn
piety and a god-like incapacity in the purity of his eyes to behold
iniquity."
These qualities were not visible to the public and have no commercial
value, but that Mr. Alcott had them is confirmed by the beautiful
domestic life of the Alcotts, by the unabated love and devotion of
Mrs. Alcott to her husband in all trials, and the always high and
always loyal appreciation with which Louisa speaks of her father, even
when perhaps smiling at his innocent illusions. The character of Mr.
Alcott is an important element in the life of Louisa because she was
his daughter, and because, being unmarried, her life and fortunes were
his, or those of the Alcott family. She had no individual existence.
Two years after the marriage of Mr. and Mrs. Alcott, Louisa, their
second daughter was born in Germantown, Pa., where Mr. Alcott was in
charge of a school belonging to the Society of Friends, or Quakers.
The date was November 29, 1832, also Mr. Alcott's birthday, always
observed as a double festival in the family. In 1834, Mr. Alcott
opened his celebrated school in Masonic Temple in Boston, Mass., under
the auspices of Dr. Channing and with the assured patronage of some of
the most cultivated and influential families in the city. As
assistants in this school, he had first Miss Sophia Peabody afterward
Mrs. Hawthorne, her sister Miss Elizabeth Peabody, and finally
Margaret Fuller.
The school opened prosperously and achieved remarkable success until,
in 1837, the publication of Mr. Alcott's "Conversations on the
Gospels" shocked the piety of Boston newspapers, whose persistent and
virulent attacks frightened the public and caused the withdrawal of
two-thirds of the pupils. Mr. Emerson came to Mr. Alcott's defence,
saying: "He is making an experiment in which all the friends of
education are interested," and asking, "whether it be wise or just to
add to the anxieties of this enterprise a public clamor against some
detached sentences of a book which, on the whole, is pervaded by
original thought and sincere piety." In a private note, Mr. Emerson
urged Mr. Alcott to give up his school, as the people of Boston were
not worthy of him. Mr. Alcott had spent more than the income of the
school in its equipment, creating debts which Louisa afterward paid;
all his educational ideals were at stake, and he could not accept
defeat easily. However, in 1839, a colored girl was admitted to the
school, and all his pupils were withdrawn, except the little negress
and four whites, three of whom were his own daughters. So ended the
Temple school. The event was very fateful for the Alcott family, but,
much as it concerned Mrs. Alcott, there can be no doubt she much
preferred that the school should end thus, than that Mr. Alcott should
yield to public clamor on either of the issues which wrecked the
enterprise.
Louisa was seven years old when this misfortune occurred which shaped
the rest of her life, fixing the straitened circumstances in which she
was to pass her youth and preparing the burdens which ultimately were
to be lifted by her facile pen. Happily the little Alcotts, of whom
there were three, were too young to feel the perplexities that
harassed their parents and their early years could hardly have been
passed more pleasantly or profitably if they had been the daughters of
millionaires. The family lived very comfortably amidst a fine circle
of relatives and friends in Boston, preached and practised a
vegetarian gospel,--rice without sugar and graham meal without butter
or molasses,--monotonous but wholesome, spent their summers with
friends at Scituate and, in town or country, partly owing to the
principles of the new education, partly to the preoccupation of the
parents, the children of the family were left in large measure to the
teaching of nature and their own experience.
Very abundant moral instruction there was in this apostolic family,
both by example and precept, but the young disciples were expected to
make their own application of the principles. The result, in the case
of Louisa, was to develop a girl of very enterprising and adventurous
character, who might have been mistaken for a boy from her sun-burned
face, vigorous health, and abounding animal spirits. It was her pride
to drive her hoop around the Common before breakfast and she tells us
that she admitted to her social circle no girl who could not climb a
tree and no boy whom she had not beaten in a race. Her autobiography
of this period, she has given us, very thinly disguised, in "Poppy's
Pranks."
Meanwhile, her mental faculties were not neglected. Mr. Alcott began
the education of his children, in a kindergarten way, almost in their
infancy, and before his Boston school closed, Louisa had two or three
years in it as a pupil. What his method of education could do with a
child of eight years is shown by a poem written by Louisa at that age.
The family were then living in Concord, in the house which, in "Little
Women," is celebrated as "Meg's first home." One early Spring day,
Louisa found in the garden a robin, chilled and famished, and wrote
these lines:
"Welcome, welcome, little stranger,
Fear no harm, and fear no danger;
We are glad to see you here,
For you sing, Sweet Spring is near.
Now the white snow melts away;
Now the flowers blossom gay:
Come, dear bird, and build your nest,
For we love our robin best."
It will be remembered that this literary faculty, unusual at the age
of eight, had been attained by a girl in the physical condition of an
athlete, who could climb a tree like a squirrel.
Readers of "Little Women" will remember what a child's paradise "Meg's
first home" was, with its garden full of fruit-trees and shade, and
its old empty barn which the children alternately turned into a
drawing-room for company, a gymnasium for romps, and a theatre for
dramatic performances. "There," says Louisa, "we dramatized the fairy
tales in great style," Jack the Giant-killer and Cinderella being
favorites, the passion for the stage which came near making Louisa an
actress, as also her sister Anna, getting early development.
The fun and frolic of these days were the more enjoyed because they
alternated with regular duties, with lessons in housework with the
mother and language lessons with the father, for which he now had
abundant leisure. As he had no other pupils, he could try all his
educational experiments in his own family. Among other exercises, the
children were required to keep a journal, to write in it regularly,
and to submit it to the examination and criticism of the parents.
Facility in writing thus became an early acquisition. It was furthered
by a pretty habit which Mrs. Alcott had of keeping up a little
correspondence with her children, writing little notes to them when
she had anything to say in the way of reproof, correction, or
instruction, receiving their confessions, repentance, and good
resolutions by the next mail.
Some of these maternal letters are very tender and beautiful. One to
Louisa at the age of eleven, enclosed a picture of a frail mother
cared for by a faithful daughter, and says, "I have always liked it
very much, for I imagined that you might be just such an industrious
daughter and I such a feeble and loving mother, looking to your labor
for my daily bread." There was prophecy in this and there was more
prophecy in the lines with which Louisa replied:
"I hope that soon, dear mother,
You and I may be
In the quiet room my fancy
Has so often made for thee,--
The pleasant, sunny chamber,
The cushioned easy-chair,
The book laid for your reading,
The vase of flowers fair;
The desk beside the window
When the sun shines warm and bright,
And there in ease and quiet,
The promised book you write.
While I sit close beside you,
Content at last to see
That you can rest, dear mother,
And I can cherish thee."
The versification is still juvenile, but there is no fault in the
sentiment, and Miss Alcott, in a later note, says, "The dream came
true, and for the last ten years of her life, Marmee sat in peace with
every wish granted."