EDUCATION IN THE HOME
The account of Harriet’s education may sound somewhat meager to those
who do not look beneath the surface. But it must be remembered that her
own family formed an educational institution in itself. New England was
celebrated, as Mrs. Stowe afterwards said, for “crisp originalities
of character.” And even against this background the Beecher family
stood out as a “sharp-cut and peculiar set.” These highly individual
qualities in her parents and in her brothers and sisters made a
constant current of life beneath the roof of the Beecher parsonage. It
was an education to hear her father discuss things, whether at dinner
or at wood-sawing or on a picnic; for he was like a high-mettled horse
in a pasture, as Mrs. Stowe said of one of her characters in her novel,
“My Wife and I”; he enjoyed once in a while having a free argumentative
race all round the theological lot. But this discussion was by no means
left to the leader alone; all the children were expected to take
part. The home circle thus became a great lyceum of thought. The rule
of these debates was that each one should contribute his thought and
bear his part with boldness, independence and originality. In this way
the father trained the children in toughness, tenacity and endurance.
Harriet’s father would have disowned any child that refrained in
fair argument from putting forth every atom of logical strength he
possessed. Every boy was expected, in supporting his opinions, to exert
himself to the utmost, but without sophistry or unfairness. Against
a refusal to argue or a resort to evasion or trick, the father’s
anger burned like fire. And no child was allowed to find fault if his
arguments were roughly handled, or to grumble and get angry if he were
bruised or floored in fair debate. A stranger looking upon some hotly
contested discussion might have said that the doctor and his children
were angry with each other. Never! They were only in earnest. Moreover,
the great household was filled with a spirit of active service, carried
out with cheerfulness and even hilarity. Or if perchance the will for
obedience deflected a little from perfection, the father’s sharp call,
“Mind your mother. Quick! No crying! Look pleasant!” was sufficient to
bring stragglers into line at once.
The work and plans and interests of the household went on like a
great well-balanced machine, in which one little cog, that good child
Harriet, was taking its part according to its ability. Harriet was
also getting ready to perform a greater part, for all these home
experiences were turning in a direction that gave her a special
preparation for her life-work.
At this time Harriet’s older sister, Catherine, was considered by far
the more promising daughter. She did become a most efficient woman, who
wrote a long list of educational books and who had a great influence
on the schools of her time throughout the country. When Harriet was
in the early teens, however, Catherine was simply a brilliant young
woman, efficient, sparkling and full of life. She caused a breath of
mirth to flow through the home every minute, even the stern father
being indulgent toward her pranks and jokes. She made every occurrence
the subject of a bit of composition in prose or in verse, like the
“epithet” for the kit. Everything was turned into literary expression;
the disappearance of a favorite calf inspired a threnody; if a precious
brown-edged platter was smashed, an epic poem was forthwith composed;
if a marriage took place among the cousins, a ballad appeared into
which the names of all the guests were woven and which was learned by
heart by every one and was quoted for months.
In such an atmosphere as this it is not strange that the bent of
Harriet’s mind toward writing should have been strengthened. The wonder
is not that she developed in that direction, but that she did not
begin to write even earlier than she did. We shall see that the reasons
for that were sufficient.
A great deal has been said about Harriet’s father, but her mother must
have a special word also. It could be said of her, as it has been of
another ideal woman of history, that to know her was in itself an
education. Roxana Foote Beecher belonged to the old Guilford Foote
family, so conspicuous for intellectual and social attainments in
the early New England days. One of Harriet’s sisters, in writing to
her daughter of the Foote homestead at Nut Plains near Guilford,
said: “These Footes are a people by themselves in their literary
accomplishments, their good sense and fine breeding. Their homestead
almost talks to you from its very walls of the days gone by. I never
felt more sure of spirit companionship of the highest order, and your
father thinks few parlors in all the land have gathered a more noble
company. The place is full of rich and inspiring associations.”
In this Foote family there were traditions that must have been
especially inspiring to a child like Harriet Beecher. One of the
stories centered about a young girl named Lucinda Foote, who was born
in Chester, Connecticut, only a few years before Roxana Beecher’s time.
She displayed great taste for study and attained a distinction that
not many other girls of her time gained. She was the daughter of the
Reverend John Foote, the minister in Chester, a man distinguished for
his scholarship.
Little Lucinda Foote studied the “learned languages,” as they were
called, that is, Latin and Greek, and when she was only twelve years
old she was examined in them by the President of Yale College, the
great Ezra Stiles. He testified in a parchment which is one of the
precious treasures among her descendants that she had shown commendable
progress in these studies, giving the meaning of passages in the
Æneid of Virgil, the select Orations of Cicero and also in the Greek
Testament, and that she was “fully qualified except in regard to sex
to be received as a pupil in the freshman class in Yale University.”
It may satisfy a natural curiosity to add that this child afterwards
privately pursued a full collegiate course, including Hebrew, under
President Stiles; was married at the age of eighteen; had ten children
and lived to be sixty-two years old! In fact, as the elderly Mrs.
Cornwall, wife of the physician in Chester, Harriet Beecher may
possibly have seen her as she passed through the village in the stage
coach on her way to visit her aunts in Guilford.
The traditions of this highly intellectual family were carried
on excellently by Roxana Foote. Even in her girlhood, when the
spinning-wheel was her daily companion, it was a habit of hers to adorn
one end of the wheel beam with the pile of fleecy rolls ready for the
spinning and then to lay on the other end an open book which, with
its face down, waited for the minute when her conscience would allow
her to leave her work and pore for a while over its pages. Roxana’s
grandfather, General Ward, used to tell a story about his three
granddaughters. He said that when the three girls came down in the
morning Harriet Ward’s voice would be heard briskly calling, “Here!
take the broom; sweep up; make a fire; make haste!” Betsy Chittenden
would say, “I wonder what ribbon it’s best to wear at that party?” But
Roxana Foote would say, “Which do you think was the greater general,
Hannibal or Alexander?”
Roxana took advantage of every opportunity for culture. From a French
gentleman who, after the massacres at San Domingo had taken refuge in
this country and settled in Guilford, she learned French and became
able to speak it fluently. He lent her the best French authors, which
she studied as she spun flax, tying the book, face forward, to the
distaff. She had a brother who went into business in New York; while
visiting him she studied drawing and painting with water colors and
in oils; afterwards when any problem in perspective puzzled her she
flew to the encyclopedia and was not content till she had overcome the
difficulty. She was highly gifted in artistic execution of many kinds.
She painted miniature portraits upon ivory for various members of her
family and for her pupils and rarely failed to get a good likeness.
Her needlework was a marvel in its delicacy and complexity; bobbin
lace and cobweb stitch like hers have now passed out of memory. The
house was full of works of ingenuity devised by her which adorned wall
and furniture and drapery. Her famous Russian stove, made with the aid
of a mason from the description in her encyclopedia, warmed six rooms
with less fuel than many of her neighbors used for a single fire.
In fact, the second Mrs. Beecher declared that this wonderful stove
entirely annihilated the winter indoors.
Under her mother’s guidance, Catherine, at about fourteen, decorated
with landscapes a new chamber set of beautiful white wood, the bureau,
dressing-table, candlestand, washstand and bedstead. She surrounded
the pictures with garlands of flowers and fruits, and then varnished
them according to a recipe in the same encyclopedia. Once Dr. Beecher
sent home a whole bale of cotton which he bought just because it was
cheap. Roxana found a use for this commodity. She conceived the idea
of making a carpet of it--a thing unheard of in the little Long Island
town where they began their housekeeping together. In that primitive
place they still covered their floors with sand dampened and smoothed
over, marking this smooth surface with the broom in zig-zag lines if
they wanted decoration. But Mrs. Beecher’s artistic mind took a higher
flight. She carded and spun the bale of cotton, had it woven, cut and
sewed it to fit the parlor, and then stretched it on the garret floor
to begin the operations. Here she brushed it over with thin paste to
make a stiff foundation. Meantime she had sent to her brother in New
York for paints and had learned from the invaluable encyclopedia how to
use them. She painted flowers and leaves in groups on this background,
taking for models the plants in her own garden. The carpet, when it
was done, was the admiration of the whole town, but the deacons, when
they came to the door, did not dare to step on anything so splendid;
they also thought it a sin to make the room so magnificent that the
splendors of Heaven would lose their attractiveness! “Do you think,”
said one of them, “that you can have all of this and Heaven besides?”
It is difficult to say what her chief interests were, she was so full
of activities. She loved works on philosophy and on science, and was
ingenious in making devices for experiments in natural philosophy. She
was intensely interested in all the new books of poetry. Writing to
her sailor brother Samuel, she besought him to come up to Litchfield
to visit them. “Just pack yourself into the chaise,” she said, “and
come up here and see how pleasant it is in winter. You might fancy
yourself at sea now and then when we have a brisk breeze, with the help
of a little imagination. You might find sundry other things to amuse
you. I have a new philosophical work you may study and some new poems
you may read.” This was in November, 1814, when Harriet was two years
old; while her mother was writing Harriet was clinging about her neck
praying her to stop writing and make her a doll baby!
Mrs. Beecher was modest and retiring in the highest degree, so that she
could not speak with a stranger or a guest without having the beautiful
color sweep over her face; and she was so shy that she could never
lead the weekly “female prayer-meeting”; yet she had so much tact that
she never angered her impetuous husband, and she was the life and the
center of the Beecher home.
But details like these, after all, give us very little insight into her
real character. We may perhaps judge what sort of woman she was by the
influence she had upon her children.
From what Harriet said of her we can see that she must have been the
very quintessence of womanliness, of motherliness. Harriet said:
“Mother was one of those strong, restful, yet widely sympathetic
natures, in whom all around seemed to find comfort and repose. She was
of a temperament peculiarly restful and peace-giving. Her union of
spirit with God, unruffled and unbroken even from very early childhood,
seemed to impart to her an equilibrium and healthful placidity that
no earthly reverses ever disturbed.” In almost every book that Mrs.
Stowe wrote she pays tribute to her mother in her pictures of motherly
feeling. All the mother influence upon St. Clair in “Uncle Tom’s
Cabin” is Harriet’s offering upon the altar of her own mother’s memory.
Harriet’s brother, Henry Ward Beecher, said that the loss of his mother
was like a cheating of his heart’s best possession. All his life long
he felt that there was a moral power in his memory of her--one of those
invisible blessings that faith comprehends, but that cannot be weighed
or estimated.
We may come a little nearer yet to an understanding of Roxana Foote’s
character if we take a quotation from one of her letters written to
Dr. Beecher before their marriage. Old-time love-letters were of a
more serious kind than those of to-day. When the prevailing thought
of a time dwelt upon religious questions it was but natural that the
spiritual condition of the one beloved should be of the deepest concern
to the lover. With such a thought we may read this passage which is
given as a light upon the inner impulses and character of Harriet’s
mother.
Roxana’s lover had, it seems, asked her certain perplexing questions
as to her religious experience. In answer she said: “You ask, when I
feel a degree of joy, whether it arises from anything I perceive in
the character of God that charms me, or from anything that I perceive
in myself that I think will charm God? I think the former.... In
contemplating the character of God, His mercy and goodness are most
present to my mind, and as it were swallow up His other attributes.
The overflowing goodness that has created multitudes of human beings
that He might communicate to them a part of His happiness, and which
openeth His hand and filleth all things with plenteousness, I can
contemplate with delight.... I can not now describe what have been my
feelings before, but on Sunday night I experienced emotions which I can
find no language to describe. I seemed carried to Heaven and thought
that neither height nor depth nor things present, nor things to come,
should be able to separate me from the love of God, which is in Christ
Jesus. Yet, if I feel a degree of joy, I fear to indulge it and tremble
at every emotion of pleasure. Last night I was almost in Heaven, but
sunk to earth again by fears that I should rejoice without cause, but
when I prayed my fears seemed to remove.”[2]
When we read such a love-letter as this we can a little understand how
every son of that mother should become a notable minister of the Gospel
and each daughter a source of wide influence for good.
It is also a matter beyond dispute that a mother with such tastes
and accomplishments as Mrs. Beecher possessed would see to it that
the education of her daughters on the artistic side should not be
neglected. And in fact there was need--at any rate we should think
so to-day. In the Litchfield Female Academy there was indeed some
instruction in art. Painting, embroidery and the piano were at that
time considered the essential things in the proper education of a young
lady. The description that _Aurora Leigh_ gives of the instruction she
received at the hands of her English aunts in the first book of Mrs.
Browning’s great poem, “Aurora Leigh,” belongs to about the same period
and will be considered sufficiently laughable by the girls of to-day.
Ideas in New England were not very different from these. In the Academy
in Litchfield they painted flowers that were delicate and stiff; they
worked samplers and coats of arms in chenille and floss; pastoral
pieces were in great favor, representing fair young shepherdesses
sitting with crooks in their hands on green chenille banks, tending
animals of uncertain description which were to be received by faith
as sheep. There were mourning pieces with a willow tree by a family
monument and weeping mourners with faces artfully concealed by flowing
pocket-handkerchiefs. The sweet confiding innocence, said Mrs. Stowe
with gentle irony in “Oldtown Folks,” which regarded the making of
objects like these as more suited to the tender female character than
the pursuit of Latin and mathematics was characteristic of the ancient
régime. Did not Penelope embroider, and all sorts of princesses,
ancient and modern? And was not embroidery a true feminine grace?[3]
We may well doubt if Harriet took much interest in these beasts of
floss and chenille and probably preferred, as we should think she
would, her childhood landscapes of gray and brown mosses. But when she
was older and could follow her home instruction in painting she gained
a skill that made sketching landscapes and other work in water color a
resource to her all her life.
In music, too, Harriet was not without opportunities for culture. Her
mother, Roxana, played the guitar from her girlhood. Her father was
devoted to the violin which always lay near him in the attic study to
be taken up whenever the strain of his work made him feel the need of
relaxation. Under the influence of such parents it is not strange that
every member of the Beecher family began singing at a very early age.
One of Harriet’s sisters said that she learned to read music by note
as soon as she learned to read print. Dr. Beecher must have had the
soul of music within him. He once said that if he could play what he
heard inside his soul he would beat Paganini. But not being able to do
that he had to content himself with “Merrily O” and other melodies of
a simple sort. But whatever he may have lacked in execution he managed
at every church he served as minister to infuse into the singing a
portion of his own buoyant enthusiasm. In earlier days the Puritan
singing had been of a plaintive and minor kind. Lyman Beecher called
forth a song of a bolder, livelier, more triumphant character, and
uniting his endeavors with those of Lowell Mason, the great leader in
later New England hymnology, he worked a great change in the psalmody
of his country.
We do not think of the New England meeting-house as being the home of
music, but to Harriet Beecher the singing in the Sabbath service must
have meant a great deal. The Puritan music, with its solemn undertone
of deep emotion, had a mysterious power over her. When the “wild
warble” of “St. Martin’s,” which ran like this:
[Music: St. Martin’s]
or “China” with its weird yet majestic movement of which this first
line may remind us:
[Music: China]
when these old beloved tunes swelled and reverberated through the
church they expressed to her a solemn assurance of victory. In the old
fuguing tunes, too, there was a wild freedom and energy of motion that
came from the heart of a people who had been courageous in combat and
unshaken in endurance. They were like the ocean when it is aroused by
stormy winds when deep calleth unto deep in tempestuous confusion, from
which at last is evolved peace and harmony. Whatever a trained musician
might say of such a tune as old “Majesty,” no person of imagination and
sensibility could ever hear it well rendered by a large choir without
deep emotion. So thought Harriet; and when back and forth from every
side of the church came the different parts shouting
On cherubim and seraphim,
Full royally He rode,
And on the wings of mighty winds,
Came flying all abroad,
there was at least one young heart in the audience that could scarcely
contain its rapture and that held itself quite still until the tempest
sank away to peace in the words:
He sat serene upon the floods,
Their fury to restrain,
And He, as sovereign Lord and King,
Forevermore shall reign.
Stirred to the depths by songs such as this on Sunday, Harriet came
home to a family that were making the rafters ring with music all
the week. A fine-toned upright piano, which some lucky accident had
brought within the means of the poor minister, had been early brought
all the way from New Haven; Harriet said that never was ark of the
covenant brought into the tabernacle with such gladness as when this
magical instrument came into their abode. Then indeed was the house
filled with music. Catherine and Harriet had regular instruction from a
charming and beautiful performer. Edward and William learned to play on
the flute. Dr. Beecher brought out his fiddle, and many evenings were
given to concerts in which piano, violin, flute and voice united, and
Scotch ballads and hymns and chorals resounded through the house.
Sunday evening was a particularly pleasant time in the Beecher home.
Something of the old law about Sunday observance ending at sundown
still held in New England. And when the boys, who were closely
watching, had at last seen the required three stars come out--why, that
decided the matter; it was really evening, the Sabbath was over, and
playing could now begin without making their consciences prick. When
the preaching was done for the day, Dr. Beecher would join the family,
and music would be in order. Never was the father so entertaining as
at this time. He was lively, sparkling, jocose. He got out the old
yellow music book and his faithful friend, the violin, and played
“Auld Lang Syne,” “Bonnie Doon,” “Mary’s Dream” and other favorites.
On week day evenings a concert like this ended with “Money Musk” and
“College Hornpipe,” and perhaps after the mother had gone to bed the
father would exhibit the wonders of a double shuffle remembered from
the corn-huskings of his youth; but it is said that the results on the
feet of his stockings made the female authorities frown on them to such
a degree that after a while the exhibition became a rare treat.
But there were other ways in which the high spirits of this sometimes
frisky parent amused the family. For instance, in pursuance of a
sort of dare the musical father went through the house before the
housekeeper was up, energetically playing “Yankee Doodle.” At another
time when he was tired of theological study he began to play the fiddle
under the schoolroom (in the days when they had a school in the home),
much to the delight of the pupils; but the mother came downstairs, took
the instrument gently from his hands, carried it upstairs, and laid it
on the desk in the schoolroom. This closed that incident and gave us an
example of the mother’s tact in managing a rather difficult situation.
But not to dwell upon the jocose side of things which kept the life in
the Beecher home from becoming too serious and dull for the welfare of
a company of little ones who were full of activity that needed outlet,
it is plain that there were many broadening educative influences about
Harriet Beecher in her own immediate home.
These were also supplemented by others of a still wider character. When
Harriet stayed at the Foote homestead in Nut Plains down near Guilford
she slept in a bed that was hung with curtains of printed India linen
on which bloomed strange mammoth plants with endless convolutions of
branches in whose hollows appeared Chinese summer houses adorned with
countless bells which gay Chinese attendants were ever in the act of
ringing with a hammer. There were also sleepy-looking mandarins, and
birds bigger than the mandarins. Drowsy little girl Harriet wondered
why the bells did not ring when struck, and why the mandarins never
came out of their summer houses.
These Oriental treasures were brought by a famous sea-faring uncle
of Harriet’s, Uncle Samuel Foote. He had been a sailor at sixteen, a
commander of a ship at twenty-one. And he, of course, was Harriet’s
hero of romance. He it was that brought the frankincense from Spain,
the mementos of the Alhambra and of the ancient Moors. He sent mats and
baskets, almonds and raisins from Mogadore, Oriental caps and slippers,
South American ingots of silver and hammocks wrought by the Southern
Indian tribes. And when he came speaking French and Spanish and full
of the very atmosphere of a great and wonderful world that lay beyond
the rims of the mountains, what stories of adventure the children
could hear! What discussions about the respective value of Turk and
Christian! What keen observations upon all life everywhere!
And this uncle always brought a box of books, the newest thing,
the latest. He it was that sent up into the hills the wonderful
“Salmagundi” of Irving the minute it was printed. He kept track of
everything that Roxana might desire and saw to it that she received the
last word in philosophy, art and poetry.
Still other opportunities were given to the acutely observing little
girl to know the great outside world, its interests, its burdens. There
was, for instance, Aunt Mary Hubbard who, returning from San Domingo,
opened a vista into a life full of romance and tragedy. This admired
aunt braids strangely into the pattern of Harriet’s life, as we shall
see in a later chapter. Then Harriet’s father was always off for some
tour of theological interest, bringing back a refreshing atmosphere
of the outside world. We must also remember that Litchfield was full
of young men who came to attend the Law School and who made the town
more or less breezy. Among them was a French count who remembered the
Beecher family to his latest days. These students and the young ladies
of the Academy came from all parts of the country, each adding to the
enlargement of life that such a collection of personalities always
brings.