Made all his wrongs and sorrows known,
And all earth’s languages his own!
It was a long time before people could look at the book fairly and judge of its literary rank; and even to this day there are writers who call “Uncle Tom” merely a colossal piece of journalism. It was indeed written at white heat and with the swiftness of a bird’s flight. “Hurry! help! hurry! help!” must have been ringing in her ears as she wrote.
During the winter that she wrote the book she had been running through with her children the novels of Scott, and Scott is the writer to whom she is the nearest of kin in the art of writing. There was a time when the tireless hand of that great story-teller was seen by an observer in a window across the way, to go back and forth, back and forth, through the evening and the night and into the wee sma’ hours. This makes us think of Mrs. Stowe’s smooth fluent script and the lightning swiftness of her little hand. She wrote like the wind, listening not for the cackle of literary critics, but to the inner voice that kept saying, “Write!”
So it happens that its lapses of style, its carelessness of technical laws have been a stumbling block to some good souls that have fed on other traditions and theories. The truth is that words grow from age to age; laws of style perish and new laws blossom out of their graves; but a torch of human sympathy once truly set alight will burn on forever.
Mr. Howells in “My Literary Passions” says that he felt the greatness of the book when he first read it; and as often as he has read it since he has seen more and more clearly that it is a very great novel. He says that the art in it is very simple and perhaps primitive, yet it is still a work of art. Its power, however, is to him inexplicable.
This is one of the greatest things that could be said about the book. It does possess that consummate quality which supreme works of art always have, namely, that their power over us is great, but that we do not see why it should be so great. Their charm is inexplicable. Mrs. Stowe’s fellow genius, George Sand, said that in art there is but one rule—to paint and to move. By this law, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” is a great work of art. It painted; it made a great people see; and it moves the whole world. The same generous critic said that Mrs. Stowe may not have “talent, but she has genius as humanity feels genius. And we ought to feel,” she said, “that genius is heart, that power is faith, that talent is sincerity, and success is sympathy, since this book overcomes us, since it penetrates the breast, pervades the spirit, and fills us with a strange sentiment of mingled tenderness and admiration for a poor negro ... gasping on a miserable pallet, his last sigh exhaled toward God.”
Time alone can pass final judgment on “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Let a few centuries move by and if as an Epic of Compassion, dissevered from variable historical associations, it continues to console and to strengthen, then its place among masterpieces will be secure.
For “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” is not a story of slavery; the system of slavery only happened to be the material out of which the story was made. It has a far wider meaning as a story of human love and pity. As such its mission is to carry comfort to any souls that are in doubt and sorrow. It makes us feel that to have faith is possible and it reinforces our belief that God will help in time of need. A reading of “Uncle Tom” has led myriads of distraught souls to a rereading of the Bible, that book so beloved by the black hero because it gave him strength to bear his sore trials. In his “Life” of his mother, published by her son in 1889, Mr. Charles E. Stowe says that “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” shows that “under circumstances of utter desolation and despair, the religion of Christ can enable the poorest and most ignorant human being, not merely to submit, but to triumph—that the soul of the lowest and weakest, by its aid, can become strong in superhuman virtue, and rise above every threat and terror and danger in a sublime assurance of an ever-present love and an immortal life.”