"It is a bright, lovely morning, and four orange-pickers are busy gathering our fruit. Our trees on the bluff have done better than any in Florida.
"This winter I study nothing but Christ's life. First I read Farrar's account and went over it carefully. Now I am reading Geikie. It keeps my mind steady, and helps me to bear the languor and pain, of which I have more than usual this winter."
CHAPTER XVIII.
OLDTOWN FOLKS, 1869.
Professor Stowe the Original of "Harry" in "Oldtown Folks."—Professor Stowe's Letter to George Eliot.—Her Remarks on the Same.—Professor Stowe's Narrative of his Youthful Adventures in the World of Spirits.—Professor Stowe's Influence on Mrs. Stowe's Literary Life.—George Eliot on "Oldtown Folks."
This biography would be signally incomplete without some mention of the birth, childhood, early associations, and very peculiar and abnormal psychological experiences of Professor Stowe. Aside from the fact of Dr. Stowe's being Mrs. Stowe's husband, and for this reason entitled to notice in any sketch of her life, however meagre, he is the original of the "visionary boy" in "Oldtown Folks;" and "Oldtown Fireside Stories" embody the experiences of his childhood and youth among the grotesque and original characters of his native town.
March 26, 1882, Professor Stowe wrote the following characteristic letter to Mrs. Lewes:—
Mrs. Lewes,—I fully sympathize with you in your disgust with Hume and the professing mediums generally.
Hume spent his boyhood in my father's native town, among my relatives and acquaintances, and he was a disagreeable, nasty boy. But he certainly has qualities which science has not yet explained, and some of his doings are as real as they are strange. My interest in the subject of spiritualism arises from the fact of my own experience, more than sixty years ago, in my early childhood. I then never thought of questioning the objective reality of all I saw, and supposed that everybody else had the same experience. Of what this experience was you may gain some idea from certain passages in "Oldtown Folks."
The same experiences continue yet, but with serious doubts as to the objectivity of the scenes exhibited. I have noticed that people who have remarkable and minute answers to prayer, such as Stilling, Franke, Lavater, are for the most part of this peculiar temperament. Is it absurd to suppose that some peculiarity in the nervous system, in the connecting link between soul and body, may bring some, more than others, into an almost abnormal contact with the spirit-world (for example, Jacob Boehme and Swedenborg), and that, too, without correcting their faults, or making them morally better than others? Allow me to say that I have always admired the working of your mind, there is about it such a perfect uprightness and uncalculating honesty. I think you are a better Christian without church or theology than most people are with both, though I am, and always have been in the main, a Calvinist of the Jonathan Edwards school. God bless you! I have a warm side for Mr. Lewes on account of his Goethe labors.
Goethe has been my admiration for more than forty years. In 1830 I got hold of his "Faust," and for two gloomy, dreary November days, while riding through the woods of New Hampshire in an old-fashioned stagecoach, to enter upon a professorship in Dartmouth College, I was perfectly dissolved by it.
Sincerely yours,
C. E. Stowe.
In a letter to Mrs. Stowe, written June 24, 1872, Mrs. Lewes alludes to Professor Stowe's letter as follows: "Pray give my special thanks to the professor for his letter. His handwriting, which does really look like Arabic,—a very graceful character, surely,—happens to be remarkably legible to me, and I did not hesitate over a single word. Some of the words, as expressions of fellowship, were very precious to me, and I hold it very good of him to write to me that best sort of encouragement. I was much impressed with the fact—which you have told me—that he was the original of the "visionary boy" in "Oldtown Folks;" and it must be deeply interesting to talk with him on his experience. Perhaps I am inclined, under the influence of the facts, physiological and psychological, which have been gathered of late years, to give larger place to the interpretation of vision-seeing as subjective than the professor would approve. It seems difficult to limit—at least to limit with any precision—the possibility of confounding sense by impressions derived from inward conditions with those which are directly dependent on external stimulus. In fact, the division between within and without in this sense seems to become every year a more subtle and bewildering problem."