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: