Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
a course their lives ran between the farm and the meeting-house. A
domestic economy and a parochial theology absorbed their energies,
and they took on sharp and angular imprints from a severe routine.
It was a school of discipline that created individual character,
and Mrs. Stowe possessed a loving eye for the odd and original. She
delighted in emphasizing the theological differences that ran through
Yankee families, giving little twists to character, and rising to the
tongue in scraps of confirmatory Scripture. Large-hearted, motherly
Grandmother Badger, in _Old-Town Folks_, was a stern Calvinist who
daily threw predestination in the face of her easy-going Arminian
husband, and exchanged syllogisms in a Sabbath-day “battle of the
Infinities” with her son from Yale. Theology provided the staple of
talk in the farmer’s kitchen; it was the axis on which turned the
simple country life. _Old-Town Folks_ and _Poganuc People_ are cross
sections of old New England, with its lingering prejudices in favor of
rank,[454] its Arminian Parson Lothrop in wig and gold cane, and its
Calvinist Dr. Cushing hostile to all democratic Jacobinism, its country
yokels, its stubborn yeomen who parade their independence by voting the
democratic ticket openly in the face of gentlemanly Federalists, its
sharp contrasts of a stately old order and a somewhat bumptious new,
yet with the hard New England granite snugly laid up and bonded with
the mortar of religion--a strange dead world that emerges distinctly
through the haze of Victorian sentiment. For Mrs. Stowe was a child
of her own romantic generation as well as a daughter of Puritanism,
and it was easy for her to discover suggestions of Utopia in a world
where minister and people mingled theology with their corn-huskings and
apple-bees.
Between these sketches and the Abolition novels stands _The
Minister’s Wooing_, with its Puritan heroine bleached into pure
holiness under the cold sunshine of Hopkinsian theology, and its
unworldly minister who demonstrated the sincerity of his creed of
disinterested benevolence--of willing to be damned for the glory of
God--by voluntarily yielding his betrothed to an earlier lover. It
is a love story without sex, as befits the wooing of a Puritan nun
by her spiritual father, set against a Yankee background of capable
housekeeping and dignified tea-drinking, subdued to proper decorum by
religion, and touched with tragedy by the shadow of damnation that
falls on the unregenerate--a world in which the beauty of holiness is
somewhat pale and austere, and where disinterested benevolence finds a
thin and obdurate soil to strike root in. Mrs. Stowe was drawn to the
theme, very evidently, by the impulse of her two Utopian enthusiasms,
her interest in Abolition and her affection for the ways of old New
England. Such romance as blossomed under those bleak skies she loved
to gather into a Yankee nosegay, and in her sympathetic hands the old
slave-running Newport becomes almost lovable and human. She might
find the theology hard, but she forgave the sermon out of love for
the preacher. As the historian of the human side of Calvinism she
tempered dogma with affection. In unsympathetic print those old sermons
were almost unbelievably harsh and ungainly; as theologians those
bewigged preachers were dry as the chips of last year’s woodpile; but
as husbands and fathers and neighbors, they were usually kind and
unselfish and helpful. Her father Lyman Beecher was an arid dogmatist
on the Lord’s Day, but on week-days he fished and hunted rabbits and
went nutting with his sons, made garden or smoked hams, or helped a
neighbor with plowing or haying, and was an unusually capable and
cheery member of a busy little world. In the light of such domestic
exegesis the bleakness of his theology was softened, and the dogmatic
theologian became a very human person.
Thus instructed Mrs. Stowe found no difficulty in discovering the human
side of Dr. Samuel Hopkins, or understanding how the hard doctrine
might cover the gentlest of souls--that the very intensity of devotion
to the logic of a stern creed betokened a depth of religious sincerity
that would find issue in generous deeds. A thinker who can dig from
the harsh soil of Calvinism the doctrine of disinterested benevolence
will discover a tender conscience in his own bosom. One might hazard
a guess, indeed, that the story of Samuel Hopkins was an unconscious
defense of the New England ministers against the sharp charges of
the Abolitionists that the clergy were half-hearted in the cause or
openly hostile. With her conviction of the unselfish nobility of their
lives, Mrs. Stowe must have taken a secret pleasure in revealing the
good Doctor as a forerunner of the Abolitionists, and in pointing
out that the crabbed logician of the Edwardean school, the theologian
immersed in the abstractions of a grotesque system, was nevertheless
a light set upon a hill, a primitive Christian with heart overflowing
with loving-kindness, who understood the iniquity of slavery and
turned shepherd to the outcast to his own hurt. The figure of the
unworldly minister is drawn with loving hand and his angularities made
less rugged. His noble spirituality shrivels and consumes the mean
excuses of his slave-running parishioner; it spreads quietly over
the countryside, and his daily life is a sermon that quickens hearts
that his theology leaves cold. There is preaching aplenty in the
book--quite too much for later stomachs; but it scarcely detracts from
the significance of the story as a document of Puritan New England,
revealing how a tender conscience was stirring beneath the crabbed
exterior of the old Calvinism.
In the light of such antecedents and such training Mrs. Stowe’s
passionate concern over slavery becomes easily comprehensible. Her
Puritan conscience was quickened by her warm human sympathies. She had
come close to the hateful thing during the years spent at Cincinnati,
where the Abolition sentiment of the Lane Seminary students aroused
such bitter opposition that President Lyman Beecher was forced to
approve the decision of the trustees to forbid any discussion of
slavery, with the result that so great a hegira of students took
place from Lane to Oberlin that the seminary was forced to close.
Only the fact that two miles of Ohio mud provided defensive outworks
saved the building and the houses of the teachers from the hands of
the Cincinnati mob. She had visited in Kentucky; she had been to the
slave markets; she had seen her father and brother aid runaway slaves
by means of the underground railway. A profound sense of the iniquity
of the system oppressed her, and when the Fugitive Slave Bill came
to fill up the measure of her wrath, she poured out her heart in
_Uncle Tom’s Cabin_. Despite its obvious blemishes of structure and
sentimentalism it is a great human document that stripped away the
protective atmosphere from the sacred institution, and laid bare its
elementary injustice. It brought the system home to the common feeling
and conscience. The strong religious coloring emphasized the Abolition
argument that slavery trafficked in Christian souls, and rendered it
hateful to every humanitarian instinct. It was noble propaganda, and
the humor and pathos, the passion for social righteousness, still
linger in its pages to make a later generation wonder that our fathers
should so long have tolerated this evil thing.
Five years later she published _Dred, A Tale of the Great Dismal
Swamp_, a thoughtfully elaborated statement of the complex problem,
with a suggested solution that only thrust into relief the fact that it
had indeed become an irrepressible conflict--the same solution that had
been hinted at thirty years before in Kennedy’s _Swallow Barn_, namely,
a system of paternalistic emancipation, based on the historical analogy
of the extinction of English villeinage, the slaves to be treated as
wards by the masters and educated for gradual emancipation. It was a
feudal solution of a feudal problem, but it took higher humanitarian
ground than human nature can, and Mrs. Stowe recognized the complex of
passion and interests in which the problem was involved, by removing
her southern emancipationist to Canada to try his experiment. More
striking, perhaps, is the shift from the Christian pacifism of _Uncle
Tom’s Cabin_ to the economics of _Dred_. The former had made appeal
to the humanitarianism of the North; the latter proposed to appeal to
the self-interest of the South. The slave states, Mrs. Stowe’s heroine
argued, were being ruined by slavery, and if they were to expect a sane
economic future, they must destroy the wasteful system. The contrast
between Yankee thrift under free labor and plantation shiftlessness
under slave labor had been pointed out by Whittier in his _Justice and
Expediency_ as early as 1833 and by Caruthers in his _Kentuckian in
New York_ in 1834--statements that perhaps drew Mrs. Stowe’s attention
to the economic phases involved; nevertheless the recognition of the
complexity of the problem, and the attempt to deal with it adequately,
lessened the popular appeal of _Dred_. The book is more skillfully
done than _Uncle Tom_, it is far richer in background material--in
vivid sketches of poor whites, of revivalist preachers, of plantation
life--it provides in Old Tiff a delightful study of the negro servant
and it suggests the perennial fear of a negro uprising; but it lacks
the singleness of appeal that makes for telling propaganda. It was not
its melodrama that hindered its success. The public had swallowed that
in _Uncle Tom_ with a hearty appetite. It was rather the dissipation
of dramatic interest, the want of a striking figure to capture the
imagination and sympathy. It is a better sociological study but a
weaker story.
It was hard for the New England conscience to quit the pulpit and turn
artist; and it was particularly hard for Mrs. Stowe with her ardent
nature and multiplying domestic cares. She could bring her soul under
discipline but not her art. She never trained herself in craftsmanship,
never learned restraint, but suffered her pen to range freely as her
emotions directed. The creative instinct was strong in her but the
critical was wholly lacking. Richly endowed though she was her work
has suffered the fate that pursues those who forget that beauty alone
survives after emotion subsides.
Footnotes
[454] “It’s a hard struggle for our human nature to give up titles and
ranks, though,” said Miss Mehitable. “For my part, I have a ridiculous
kindness for them yet. I know it’s all nonsense; but I can’t help
looking back to the court we used to have at the Government House in
Boston.” (_Old-Town Folks_, Chapter VI.)
Part Three: The Transcendental Mind
Chapter I • The Genesis of Transcendentalism
From the doctrine of the open mind that was the core of Unitarianism,
came the transcendental movement that marked the full flowering of
the New England renaissance. It was the native response of the mind
of New England to the summons of revolutionary romanticism, and its
ardor was the greater for being so long delayed. Creatively influenced
though it was by French Utopianism and German mysticism, its manners
and mode of thought received a particular impress from an environment
long preparing and that was natively congenial. “Practically,” says
its most penetrating historian, transcendentalism “was an assertion of
the inalienable worth of man; theoretically it was an assertion of the
immanence of divinity in instinct, the transference of supernatural
attributes to the natural constitution of mankind.”[455] It was the
glowing expression of philosophic Utopianism, the flaring up of old
fires of idealism, before the scientific and materialistic reactions