Complete Works of Harriet Beecher Stowe

by Harriet Beecher Stowe

  Among other responsibilities assumed by her at this time was that of getting Professor Stowe to consent to publish a book. This was no laughing matter; at first the book was planned merely as an article on the “Talmud” for the “Atlantic Magazine.” Afterwards Professor Stowe enlarged the design. Later in speaking of his manuscript she says: “You must not scare him off by grimly declaring that you must have the whole manuscript complete before you set the printer to work; you must take the three quarters he brings you and at least make believe begin printing, and he will immediately go to work and finish up the whole; otherwise what with lectures and the original sin of laziness, it will all be indefinitely postponed. I want to make a crisis that he shall feel that now is the accepted time, and that this must be finished first and foremost.”

  And again she says: “My poor Rab has been sick with a heavy cold this week, and if it hadn’t been for me you wouldn’t have had this article which I send in triumph. I plunged into the sea of Rabbis and copied Mr. Stowe’s insufferable chaldonic characters so that you might not have your life taken by wrathful printers…. Thus I have ushered into the world a document which I venture to say condenses more information on an obscure and curious subject than any in the known world — Hosanna!”

  In these busy years she went away upon her Boston trips more and more rarely, but she writes after her return from one of them in 1868: “I don’t think I ever enjoyed Boston so much as in this visit. Why was it! Every cloud seemed to turn out its silver lining, everybody was delightful, and the music has really done me good. I feel it all over me now. I think of it with a sober certainty of waking bliss! our little ‘hub’ is a grand ‘hub.’ Three cheers for it!… I have had sent me through the War Department a French poem which I think is full of real nerve and strength of feeling. I undertook the reading only as a duty, but found myself quite waked up. The indignation and the feeling with which he denounces modern skepticism, that worst of all unbelief, the denial of all good, all beauty, all generosity, all heroism, is splendid. He is a live man this, and I wish you would read his poem and send it to Longfellow, for it does one’s heart good to see the French made the vehicle of so much real heroic sentiment. The description of a slave hunt is splendidly and bitterly satirical and indignant and full of fine turns of language. Thank God that is over. No matter what happens to you and me, that great burden of sin and misery has tumbled off from our backs and rolled into the sepulchre, where it shall never arise more…. I have been the most industrious of beings since my return, and am steaming away on the obstacle that stands between me and my story, which I long to be at…. I want to get one or two special bits of information out of Garrison, and so instead of sending my letter at random to Boston I will trouble you (who have little or nothing to do!) to get this letter to him. My own book, instead of cooling, boils and bubbles daily and nightly, and I am pushing and spurring like fury to get to it. I work like a drag-horse, and I’ll never get in such a scrape again. It isn’t my business to make up books, but to make them. I have lots to say.”…

  The story which had so taken possession of her mind and heart was “Oldtown Folks,” the one which she at the time fancied the best calculated of all her works to sustain the reputation of the author of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” The many proofs of her own interest in it seem to show that she had been moved to a livelier and deeper satisfaction in this creation than in any of her later productions. She writes respecting it: “It is more to me than a story; it is my resume of the whole spirit and body of New England, a country that is now exerting such an influence on the civilized world that to know it truly becomes an object.” But there were weary lengths of roads to be traveled by a woman already overladen with responsibilities and in delicate health before such a book could reach its consummation.

  “I must cry you mercy,” she begins one of the notes to her publisher, “and explain my condition to you as well as possible.” The “condition” was frequently to be explained! Proofs were not ready when they were promised, the press was stopped, and both author and publisher required all the tender regard they really had for each other and all the patience they possessed to keep in tune. She says, “I am sorry to trouble you or derange your affairs, but one can’t always tell in driving such horses as we drive where they are going to bring up.”

  She started off in this long journey very hopefully, writing that she would like to begin printing at once, because “to have the first part of my book in type will greatly assist me in the last.” A month later she writes: “Here goes the first of my nameless story, of which I can only say it is as unlike everything else as it is like the strange world of folks I took it from. There is no fear that there will not be as much matter as ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin,’ — there will. There could be an endless quantity if I only said all I can see and think that is strange and curious. I partake in — —’s disappointment that it is not done, but it is of that class of things that cannot be commanded; as my friend Sam Lawson (vide MSS.) says, ‘There’s things that can be druv and then agin there’s things that can’t,’ and this is that kind — as had to be humored. Instead of rushing on, I have often turned back and written over with care, that nothing that I wanted to say might be omitted; it has cost me a good deal of labor to elaborate this first part, namely, to build my theatre and to introduce my actors. My labor has all, however, been given to the literary part. My printers always inform me that I know nothing of punctuation, and I give thanks that I have no responsibility for any of its absurdities! Further than beginning my sentence with a capital, I go not, — so I hope my friend Mr. Bigelow, who is a direct and lineal descendant of ‘my Grandmother,’ will put those things all right.”

  Who so well as authors can fully understand and sympathize with the burden of a long story in the head, long bills on the table, tempting offers to write for this and that in order to bring in two hundred dollars from a variety of pleasant editors who desire the name on their list, house and grounds to be looked after, cooks to be pacified, visits to be made; — it is no wonder that Mrs. Stowe wrote: “The thing has been an awful tax and labor, for I have tried to do it well. I say also to you confidentially, that it has seemed as if every private care that could hinder me as woman and mother has been crowded into just this year that I have had this to do.”

  Happily more peaceful days were in store for her. Her daughters, now grown to womanhood, were beginning to take the reins of home work and government into their own hands; and as the darkest hour foreruns the dawn, so almost imperceptibly to herself her cares began to fade away from her.

  A new era opened in Mrs. Stowe’s life when she made her first visit to Florida, in the winter of 1867. She was tired and benumbed with care and cold. Suddenly the thought came to her that she would go to the South, herself, and see what the stories were worth which she was constantly hearing about its condition. In the mean time, if she could, she would enjoy the soft air, and find retirement in which she might continue her book. She says in one of her letters: —

  “Winter weather and cold seem always a kind of nightmare to me. I am going to take my writing-desk and go down to Florida to F — —’s plantation, where we have now a home, and abide there until the heroic agony of betweenity, the freeze and thaw of winter, is over, and then I doubt not I can write my three hours a day. Meanwhile, I have a pretty good pile of manuscript…. The letters I have got about blossoming roses and loungers in linen coats, while we have been frozen and snowed up, have made my very soul long to be away. Cold weather really seems to torpify my brain. I write with a heavy numbness. I have not yet had a good spell of writing, though I have had all through the story abundant clairvoyance, and see just how it must be written; but for writing some parts I want warm weather, and not to be in the state of a ‘froze and thawed apple.’… The cold affects me precisely as extreme hot weather used to in Cincinnati, — gives me a sort of bilious neuralgia. I hope to get a clear, bright month in Florida, when I can say something to purpose.

 
“I did want to read some of my story to you before I went. I have read it to my husband; and though one may think a husband a partial judge, yet mine is so nervous and so afraid of being bored that I feel as if it were something to hold him; and he likes it — is quite wakeful, so to speak, about it. All I want now, to go on, is a good frame, as father used to say about his preaching. I want calm, soft, even dreamy, enjoyable weather, sunshine and flowers. Love to dear A —— , whom I so much want to see once more.”

  Unhappily, she could not get away so soon as she desired. There were contracts to be signed and other business to arrange. These delays made her visit southward much shorter than she intended, but it proved to be only the introduction, the first brief chapter, as it were, of her future winter life in Florida. Before leaving she wrote as follows to her publisher: —

  “I am so constituted that it is absolutely fatal to me to agree to have any literary work done at certain dates. I mean to have this story done by the 1st of September. It would be greatly for my pecuniary interest to get it done before that, because I have the offer of eight thousand dollars for the newspaper use of the story I am planning to write after it. But I am bound by the laws of art. Sermons, essays, lives of distinguished people, I can write to order at times and seasons. A story comes, grows like a flower, sometimes will and sometimes won’t, like a pretty woman. When the spirits will help, I can write. When they jeer, flout, make faces, and otherwise maltreat me, I can only wait humbly at their gates, watch at the posts of their doors.

  “This story grows even when I do not write. I spent a month in the mountains in Stockbridge composing before I wrote a word.

  “I only ask now a good physical condition, and I go to warmer climes hoping to save time there. I put everything and everybody off that interferes with this, except ‘Pussy Willow,’ which will be a pretty story for a child’s ‘series.’”

  At last she sailed away, about the 1st of March, 1867, with that delightful power of knowing what she wanted, and being content when she attained her end, which is too rare, alas! Her letters glowed and blossomed and shone with the fruit and flowers and sunshine of the South. It was hardly to be expected that her literary work could actually reach the printers’ hands under these circumstances as rapidly as if she had been able to write at home: therefore it was with no sense of surprise that we received from her, during the summer of 1868, what proved to be a chapter of excuses instead of a chapter of her book: “I have a long story to tell you of what has prevented my going on with my story, which you must see would so occupy all the nerve and brain force I have that I have not been able to write a word except to my own children. To them in their needs I must write chapters which would otherwise go into my novel.”

  About this period she found herself able to come again to Boston for a few days’ visit. There were often long croonings over the fire far into the night; her other-worldliness and abstractions brought with them a dreamy quietude, especially to those whose harried lives kept them only too much awake. Her coming was always a pleasure, for she made holidays by her own delightful presence, and she asked nothing more than what she found in the companionship of her friends.

  After her return to Hartford and in December of the same year, I find some curious notes showing how easily she was attracted by new subjects of interest away from the work she had in hand; not that she saw it in that light, or was aware that her story was in the least retarded by such digressions, but her keen sympathy with everything and everybody made it more and more difficult for her to concentrate her power upon the long story which she considered after all of the first importance. She writes to the editor of the “Atlantic Monthly:” “I see that all the leading magazines have a leading article on ‘Planchette.’

  “There is a lady of my acquaintance who has developed more remarkable facts in this way than any I have ever seen; I have kept a record of these communications for some time past, and everybody is very much struck with them.

  “I have material to prepare a very curious article. Shall you want it?

  And when?”

  We can imagine the feeling of a publisher waiting for copy of her promised story on reading this note! Also the following of a few days later: —

  “I am beginning a series of articles called ‘Learning to Write,’ designed to be helpful to a great many beginners…. I shall instance Hawthorne as a model and speak of his ‘Note Book’ as something which every young author aspiring to write should study…. My materials for the ‘Planchette’ article are really very extraordinary,… but I don’t want to write it now when I am driving so hard upon my book…. It costs some patience to you and certainly to me to have it take so long, yet I have conscientiously done all I could, since I began. Now the end of it is in plain sight, but there is a good deal to be done to bring it out worthily, and I work upon it steadily and daily. I never put so much work into anything before.”

  A week later she says again: —

  “I thank you very much for your encouraging words, for I really need them. I have worked so hard that I am almost tired. I hope that you will still continue to read, and that you will not find it dull…. I have received the books. What a wonderful fellow Hawthorne was!”

  There is something truly touching to those who knew her in that phrase “almost tired.” Indeed, she was truly tired through and through, and these later letters from which I have made the foregoing extracts are all written by an amanuensis.

  Happily the time was near for a second flight to Florida, and she wrote with her own rested hand en route from Charleston: —

  “Room fragrant with violets, banked up in hyacinths, flowers everywhere, windows open, birds singing.”

  She enclosed some fans, upon which she had been painting flowers busily during the journey in order to send them back to Boston to be sold at a fair in behalf of the Cretans: “Make them do the Cretes all the good you can,” she said.

  It appears that by this time “Oldtown Folks” was fairly off her hands, and she was free once more. She evidently found Mandarin very much to her mind, and wrote contentedly therefrom, save for a vision of having to go to Canada in the early spring to obtain the copyright of her story.

  The visits to Florida had now become necessary to her health. She saw the next step to take was to surrender her large house in Hartford and pass her winters altogether at the South. She wrote from Florida: “I am leaving the land of flowers on the 1st of June with tears in my eyes, but having a house in Hartford, it must be lived in. I wish you and —— would just come to see it. You have no idea what a lovely place it has grown to be, and I am trying to sell it as hard as a snake to crawl out of his skin. Thus on, till reason is pushed out of life. There’s no earthly sense in having anything, — lordy massy, no! By the bye, I must delay sending you the ghost in the Captain Brown house till I can go to Natick and make a personal inspection of the premises and give it to you hot.”

  Her busy brain was again at work with new plans for future books and articles for magazines.

  “Gladly would I fly to you on the wings of the wind,” she says, “but I am a slave, a bound thrall to work, and I cannot work and play at the same time. After this year I hope to have a little rest, and above all things I won’t be hampered with a serial to write…. We have sold out in Hartford.”

  All this routine of labor was to have a new form of interruption, which gave her intense joy. “I am doing just what you say,” she wrote, “being first lady-in-waiting on his new majesty. He is very pretty, very gracious and good, and his little mamma and he are a pair…. I am getting to be an old fool of a grandma, and to think there is no bliss under heaven to compare with a baby.” Later she wrote on the same subject: “You ought to see my baby. I have discovered a way to end the woman controversy. Let the women all say that they won’t take care of the babies till the laws are altered. One week of this discipline would bring all the men on their marrow-bones. Only tell us what you want, they would say, and we will do it. Of course you may
imagine me trailing after our little king, — first granny-in-waiting.”

  In the summer of 1869 there was a pleasant home at St. John’s Wood, in London, which possessed peculiar attractions. Other houses were as comfortable to look at, other hedges were as green, other drawing rooms were gayer, but this was the home of George Eliot, and on Sunday afternoons the resort of those who desired the best that London had to give. Here it was that George Eliot told us of her admiration and deep regard, her affection, for Mrs. Stowe. Her reverence and love were expressed with such tremulous sincerity that the speaker won our hearts by her love for our friend. Many letters had already passed between Mrs. Stowe and herself, and she confided to us her amusement at a fancy Mrs. Stowe had taken that Casaubon, in “Middlemarch,” was drawn from the character of Mr. Lewes. Mrs. Stowe took it so entirely for granted in her letters that it was impossible to dispossess her mind of the illusion. Evidently it was the source of much harmless household amusement at St. John’s Wood. I find in Mrs. Stowe’s letters some pleasant allusions to this correspondence. She writes: “We were all full of George Eliot when your note came, as I had received a beautiful letter from her in answer to one I wrote from Florida. She is a noble, true woman; and if anybody doesn’t see it, so much the worse for them, and not her.” In a note written about that time Mrs. Stowe says she is “coming to Boston, and will bring George Eliot’s letters with her that we may read them together;” but that pleasant plan was only one of the imagination, and was never carried out.