Complete Works of Harriet Beecher Stowe

by Harriet Beecher Stowe

  “I intend to devote myself to literature,” said I. “I always had a facility for writing, while I never felt the call or impulse toward public speaking; and I think the field of current literature opens a wide scope. I have had already some success in having articles accepted and well spoken of, and have now some promising offers. I have an opportunity to travel in Europe as correspondent of two papers, and I shall study to improve myself. In time I may become an editor, and then perhaps at last proprietor of a paper. So runs my scheme of life, and I hope I shall be true to myself and my religion in it. I shall certainly try to. Current literature, the literature of newspapers and magazines, is certainly a power.”

  “A very great power, Harry,” said my uncle; “and getting to be in our day a tremendous power, a power far outgoing that of the pulpit, and that of books. This constant daily self-asserting literature of newspapers and periodicals is acting on us tremendously for good or for ill. It has access to us at all hours and gets itself heard as a preacher cannot, and gets itself read as scarcely any book does. It ought to be entered into as solemnly as the pulpit, for it is using a great power. Yet just now it is power without responsibility. It is in the hands of men who come under no pledge, pass no examination, give no vouchers, though they hold a power more than that of all other professions or hooks united. One cannot be a doctor, or a lawyer, or a minister, unless some body of his fellows looks into his fitness to serve society in these ways; but one may be turned loose to talk in every family twice a day, on every subject, sacred and profane, and say anything he chooses without even the safeguard of a personal responsibility. He shall speak from behind a screen and not be known. Now you know old Dante says that the souls in the other world were divided into three classes, those who were for God and those who were for the Devil, and those who were for neither, but for themselves. It seems to me that there ‘s a vast many of these latter at work in our press —— smart literary adventurers, who don’t care a copper what they write up or what they write down, wholly indifferent which side of a question they sustain, so they do it smartly, and ready to sell their wit, their genius, and their rhetoric to the highest bidder. Now, Harry, I ‘d rather see you a poor, threadbare, hard-worked, country minister than the smartest and brightest fellow that ever kept his talents on sale in Vanity Fair.”

  “Well,” said I, “isn’t it just here that your principle of living out a gospel should come? Must there not be writers for the press who believe in the Sermon on the Mount, and who are pledged to get its principles into life-forms as fast as they can?”

  “Yea, verily,” said my uncle; “but do you mean to keep faithful to that? You have, say, a good knack at English; you can write stories, and poems, and essays; you have a turn for humor; and now comes the Devil to you and says, ‘ Show me up the weak points of those reformers; raise a laugh at those temperance men, — those religionists, who, like all us poor human trash, are running religion, and morals, and progress into the ground.’ You can succeed; you can carry your world with you. You see, if Virtue came straight down from heaven with her white wings and glistening robes, and always conducted herself just like an angel, our trial in life wouldn’t be so great as it is. But she doesn’t. Human virtue is more apt to appear like a bewildered, unprotected female, encumbered with all sorts of irregular bandboxes, dusty, disheveled, out of fashion, and elbowing her way with ungainly haste and ungraceful postures. You know there are stories of powerful fairies who have appeared in this way among men, to try their hearts; and those who protect them when they are feeble and dishonored, they reward when they are glorious. Now, your smart, flippant, second-rate wits never have the grace to honor Truth when she loses her way, and gets bewildered and dusty, and they drive a flourishing business in laughing down the world’s poor efforts to grow better.”

  “I think,” said I, “that we Americans have one brilliant example of a man who had keen humor, and used it on the Christian side. The animus of the ‘Biglow Papers’ is the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount translated into the language of Yankee life, and defended with wit and drollery.”

  “You say truth, Harry, and it was no small thing to do it; for the Anti-Slavery cause then was just in that chaotic state in which every strange bird and beast, every shaggy, irregular, unkempt reformer, male and female, was flocking to it, and there was capital scope for caricature and ridicule; and all the fastidious, and conservative, and soft-handed, and even-stepping people were measureless in their contempt for this shocking rabble. Lowell stood between them and the world, and fought the battle with weapons that the world could understand. There was a gospel truth in ‘John P. Robinson, he,’ and it did what no sermon could; this is the more remarkable because he used for the purpose a harlequin faculty, that has so often been read out of meeting and excommunicated that the world had come to look at it as ex officio of the Devil. Whittier and Longfellow made valiant music of the solemn sort, but Lowell evangelized wit.”

  “The fortunate man,” said I, “to have used a great opportunity!”

  “Harry, the only way to be a real man is to have a cause you care for more than yourself. That made your father — that made your New England Fathers — that raises literature above some child’s play, and makes it manly — but if you would do it you must count on one thing — that the Devil will tempt you in the outset with the bread question as he did the Lord. Command that these stones be made bread’ is the first onset — you’ll want money, and money will be offered for what you ought not to write. There ‘s the sensational novel, the blood and murder and adultery story, of which modern literature is full — you can produce it — do it perhaps as well as anybody — it will sell. Will you be barkeeper to the public, and when the public call for hot brandy sling give it to them, and help them make brutes of themselves? Will you help to vulgarize and demoralize literature if it will pay?”

  “No,” said I, “not if I know myself.”

  “Then you’ve got to begin life with some motive higher than to make money, or get a living, and you’ll have sometimes to choose between poisonous nonsense that brings pay and honest truth that nobody wants.”

  “And I must tell the Devil that there is a higher life than the bread-life?” said I.

  “Yes; get above that, to begin with. Remember the story of General Marion, who invited some British officers to dine with him and gave them nothing but roasted potatoes. They went away and said it was in vain to try to conquer a people when their officers would live on such fare rather than give up the cause. Do you know, Harry, what is my greatest hope for this State? It’s this: Two or three years ago there was urgent need to carry this State in an election, and there was no end of hard money sent up to buy votes among our poor farmers; but they couldn’t be bought. They had learned, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone,’ to some purpose. The State went all straight for liberty. What I ask of any man who wants to do a life-work is ability to be happy on a little.”

  “Well,” said I, “I have been brought up to that. I have no expensive habits. I neither drink nor smoke. I am used to thinking definitely as to figures, and I am willing to work hard, and begin at the bottom of the ladder, but I mean to keep my conscience and my religion, and lend a helping hand to the good cause wherever I can.”

  “Well, now, my boy, there are only two aids that you need for this — one is God, and the other is a true, good woman. God you will have, but the woman — she must be found.” I felt the touch on a sore spot, and so answered, purposely misunderstanding his meaning. “Yes, I have not to go far for her — my mother.”

  “Oh yes, my boy — thank God for her; but, Harry, you can’t take her away from this place; her roots have spread here; they are matted and twined with the very soil; they run under every homestead and embrace every grave. She is so interwoven with this village that she could not take root elsewhere; beside that, Harry, look at the clock of life — count the years, sixty-five, sixty-six, sixty-seven, and the clock never stops! Her hair is all white now, and t
hat snow will melt by and by, and she will be gone upward. God grant I may go first, Harry.”

  “And I, too,” said I fervently. “I could not live without her.”

  “You must find one like her, Harry. It is not good for man to he alone; we all need the motherly, and we must find it in a wife. Do you know what I think the prettiest story of courtship I ever read? It’s the account of Isaac’s marriage with Rebecca, away hack in the simple old times. You remember the ending of it,—’And Isaac brought her into his mother Sarah’s tent, and took Rebekah, and she became his wife, and Isaac was comforted after his mother’s death.’ There’s the philosophy of it,” he added; “it’s the mother living again in the wife. The motherly instinct is in the hearts of all true women, and sooner or later the true wife becomes a mother to her husband; she guides him, cares for him, teaches him, and catechises him all in the nicest way possible. Why, I ‘m sure I never should know how to get along a day without Polly to teach me the requirings and forbiddens of the commandments; to lecture me for going out without my muffler, and see that I put on my flannels in the right time; to insist that I shall take something for my cough, and raise a rebellion to my going out when there ‘s a northeaster. So much for the body, and as for the soul-life, I believe it is woman who holds faith in the world — it is woman behind the wall, casting oil on the fire that burns brighter and brighter, while the Devil pours on water; and you’ll never get Christianity out of the earth while there ‘s a woman in it. I’d rather have my wife’s and your mother’s opinion on the meaning of a text of Scripture than all the doctors of divinity, and their faith is an anchor that always holds. Some jackanapes or other, I read once, said every woman wanted a master, and was as forlorn without a husband as a masterless dog. It’s a great deal truer that every man wants a mother; men are more forlorn than masterless dogs, a great deal, when no woman cares for them. Look at the homes single women make for themselves; how neat, how cosy, how bright with the oil of gladness, and then look at old bachelor dens! The fact is, women are born comfort-makers, and can get along by themselves a great deal better than we can.”

  “Well,” said I, “I don’t think I shall ever marry. Of course, if I could find a woman like my mother, it would be another thing. But times are altered — the women of this day are all for flash and ambition and money. There are no more such as you used to find in the old days.”

  “Oh, nonsense, Harry; don’t come to me with that sort of talk. Bad sort for a young man — very. What I want to see in a young fellow is a resolution to have a good wife and a home of his own as quick as he can find it. The Roman Catholics weren’t so far out of the way when they said marriage was a sacrament. It is the greatest sacrament of life, and that old Church does yeoman service to humanity in the stand she takes for Christian marriage. I should call that the most prosperous state when all the young men and women were well mated and helping one another according to God’s ordinances. You may be sure, Harry, that you can never be a whole man without a wife.”

  “Well,” I said, “there’s time enough for that by and by; if I’m predestinated I suppose it’ll come along when I have my fortune made.”

  “Don’t wait to be rich, Harry. Find a faithful, heroic friend that will strike hands with you, poor, and begin to build up your nest together, — that’s the way your father and mother did, and who enjoyed more? That’s the way your Aunt Polly and I did, and a good time we have had of it. There has always been the handful of meal in the barrel and the little oil in the cruse, and if the way we have always lived is poverty, all I have to say is, poverty is a pretty nice thing.”

  “But,” said I bitterly, “you talk of golden ages. There are no such women now as you found, the women now are mere effeminate dolls of fashion — all they want is ease and show and luxury, and they care nothing who gives it — one man is as good as another if he is only rich.”

  “Tut, tut, boy! Don’t you read your Bible? Away back in Solomon’s time it’s written, ‘Who can find a virtuous woman? Her price is above rubies.’ Are rubies found without looking for them, and do diamonds lie about the street? Now, just attend to my words — brave men make noble women, and noble women make brave men. Be a true man first, and some day a true woman will be given you. Yes, a woman whose opinion of you will hold you up if all the world were against you, and whose ‘Well done!’ will be a better thing to come home to than the senseless shouting of the world who scream for this thing to-day and that to-morrow.”

  By this time the horse had turned up the lane, and my mother stood smiling in the door. I marked the soft white hair that shone like a moonlight glory round her head, and prayed inwardly that the heavens would spare her yet a little longer.

  CHAPTER IX. COUSIN CAROLINE

  “You must go and see your Cousin Caroline,” said my mother, the first evening after I got home; “you’ve no idea how pretty she ‘s grown.”

  “She is what I call a pattern girl,” said my Uncle Jacob, “a girl that can make the most of life.”

  “She is a model housekeeper and manager,” said Aunt Polly.

  Now if Aunt Polly called a girl a model housekeeper, it was the same for her that it would be for a man to receive a doctorate from a college; in fact, it would be a good deal more, as Aunt Polly was one who always measured her words, and never said anything pro forma, or without having narrowly examined the premises.

  Elderly people who live in happy matrimony are in a gentle way disposed to be match-makers. If they have sense, as my elders did, they do not show this disposition in any very pronounced way. They never advise a young man directly to try his fortune with “So and so,” knowing that that would, in nine cases out of ten, be the direct way to defeat their purpose. So my mother’s gentle suggestion, and my Uncle Jacob’s praise, and Aunt Polly’s indorsement were simply in the line of the most natural remarks.

  Cousin Caroline was the daughter of Uncle Jacob’s brother, the only daughter in the family. Her father was one of those men most useful and necessary in society, composed of virtues and properties wholly masculine. He was strong, energetic, shrewd, acridly conscientious, and with an intensity of self-will and love of domination. This rugged rock, all granite, had won a tender woman to nestle and flower in some crevice of his heart, and she had clothed him with a garland of sons and one flower of a daughter. Within a year or two her death had left this daughter the mistress of her father’s family. I remembered Caroline of old, as my school companion; the leading scholar in every study, always good-natured, steady, and clear-headed, ready to help me when I faltered in a translation or the solution of an algebraic problem. In those days I never thought of her as pretty. There were the outlines and rudiments which might bloom into beauty, but thin, pale, colorless, and deficient in roundness and grace.

  I had seen very little of Caroline through my college life; we had exchanged occasionally a cousinly letter, but in my last vacation she was away upon a visit. I was not, therefore, prepared for the vision which bloomed out upon me from the singers’ seat, when I looked up on Sunday and saw her, standing in a shaft of sunlight that lit up her whole form with a kind of glory. I rubbed my eyes with astonishment, as I saw there a very beautiful woman, and beautiful in quite an uncommon style, one which promised a more lasting continuance of personal attraction than is usual with our New England girls. I own, that a head and bust of the Venus di Milo type; a figure at once graceful, yet ample in its proportions; a rich, glowing bloom, speaking of health and vigor, — gave a new radiance to eyes that I had always admired in days when I never had thought of even raising the question of Caroline’s beauty. These charms were, set off, too, by a native talent for dress, —— that sort of instinctive gift that some women have of arranging their toilette so as exactly to suit their own peculiar style. There was nothing fussy, or furbelowed, or gaudy, as one often sees in the dress of a country beauty, but a grand and severe simplicity, which in her case was the very perfection of art.

  My Uncle Ebenezer Simmons lived
at a distance of nearly two miles from our house, but that evening, after tea, I announced to my mother that I was going to take a walk over to see Cousin Caroline. I perceived that the movement was extremely popular and satisfactory in the eyes of all the domestic circle.

  Whose thoughts do not travel in this direction, I wonder, in a small country neighborhood? Here comes Harry Henderson home from college, with his laurels on his brow, and here is the handsomest girl in the neighborhood, a pattern of all the virtues. What is there to be done, except that they should straightway fall in love with each other, and taking hold of hands walk up the Hill Difficulty together? I presume that no good gossip in our native village saw any other arrangement of our destiny as possible or probable.

  I may just as well tell my readers first as last that we did not fall in love with each other, though we were the very best friends possible, and I spent nearly half my time at my uncle’s house, besetting her at all hours, and having the best possible time in her society; but our relations were as frankly and clearly those of brother and sister as if we had been children of one mother.