Harriet Beecher Stowe: a biography for girls

by Martha Foote Crow

In such ways as these Mrs. Stowe was becoming acquainted with the very heart of the English and Scottish people. But it was not only the great and titled that came forward to represent the leading thought in greeting this woman who stood to them for so much. In the villages through which they drove and along the roadsides, the so-called common people were ready with their greetings also. In the doorways everywhere people stood bowing and smiling, and sometimes running out to offer flowers; and little boys ran after her carriage crying out that they knew her by the curls! She wrote: “The butcher came out of his stall and the baker from his shop, the miller dusty with flour, the blooming, comely young mother with her baby in her arms, all smiling and bowing with that hearty intelligent friendly look as if they knew we should be glad to see them.” Then there were in various cities meetings especially for the working men; and as her train went along, even at night, friendly faces were waiting at the stations, good souls watching through the dark to catch one glimpse of the writer or perhaps to grasp her hand; then as the train moved away, saying, “Good night!” with the unmistakable Scotch accent, making her think that she had felt a throb of the living Scotch heart. Mrs. Stowe felt the spirit that prompted this reverential tribute, a spirit that makes one blood of all the families of earth. She, in fact, considered herself altogether inadequate and disproportionate as an object to call forth such outbursts of applause; she was most modest in her reception of them, and believed them to be, as she afterward said to a friend, but the expression of a great spirit of universal brotherhood, surging forward in a huge sympathetic wave. Beneath the weight of these honors the New England simplicity of her character remained unimpaired.

Everything that happened to her she enjoyed to the utmost, and she only wished that she had a relay of bodies and could slip from a tired one into a rested one now and then! She began to be so talked out and worn out that there was hardly a chip of her left. To breakfast with forty people, lunch with three hundred, take tea with a thousand, and go to an evening mass meeting and perhaps to more receptions the same night, would be rather trying to a delicate woman who had come abroad chiefly to seek rest after the strain of writing a great book. Mrs. Stowe began to feel a weariness that made seeing people a burden. For besides answering innumerable letters of invitation and congratulation, besides all the receptions and dinners and the babble of innumerable voices, she found that she could not lay her pen entirely aside, but must write full accounts of everything she saw and enjoyed and heard to send to her children at home. It is said that the most valuable document of his time is the “Diary of John Wesley,” because, I suppose, it is so full of unprejudiced and minutely truthful accounts of things that the dignified historians have no time to busy themselves with. In the same way, the series of letters that Mrs. Stowe wrote, afterward published in two volumes, called “Sunny Memories,” contain observations of men and things that scarcely another person of her time would have had the opportunity to gain or to give; these volumes, besides being amusing and enlightening, will have for the future a distinct historic value.

There were many good times to be enjoyed as they went along on their journeys. They kept a bright lookout for ruins and all things that would touch into life their memories of English romance and poetry. They saw that “city of colleges,” Oxford, which seemed to them a veritable mountain of museums, colleges, halls, courts, parks, chapels, and lecture rooms. They took dinner at the White Hart Inn, where the scene of Shakespeare’s “Merry Wives” was laid; they wandered through chambers hung with tapestries woven to tell the tale of Medea and Jason; they had a pleasant drive in Hyde Park as Harriet had read of the heroines of romance doing in old novels; they felt sincere “dispositions to melancholies” beside the churchyard where the “Elegy” was composed, and found out only later that their tears had been shed at the wrong churchyard! They rode on the coach top and listened to the stories told by the driver just as they would have done in their own country; they visited the fishing ground of old Isaak Walton; they went through the great palace at Windsor, and there, above all the splendors they were chiefly interested in one little wicker baby-carriage they happened to see standing waiting for its occupant! All the great works of art Mrs. Stowe saw moved her tremendously; they satisfied a lifelong hunger. How the lofty arches of the cathedrals touched her heart! She realized at once that these triumphs of architectural art give aspiration its noblest symbol, and she found a preparation of mind for religious emotions in the dusky choirs and the flame-like arches gorgeous with evening light. Then when she crossed to the continent and entered the galleries and saw the paintings there and on the walls of the churches, she was again astonished, delighted, and satisfied as never before. She was especially overcome when she saw the “Descent from the Cross” by Rubens. She said: “Art has satisfied me at last. I have been conquered and that is enough.” This was said before she went to Italy, where further enjoyments awaited her in later journeys. A young student of life wishing to make a visit to the great storehouses of delight in art and history in the European world and not able to cross the ocean for the purpose, could not do better than read these perfectly sincere and vital comments upon art, history and things in general found in Mrs. Stowe’s “Sunny Memories.”

In these “Sunny Memories” we see how much it meant to her to come into friendly relations with many people whose names had been well known to her through their books. To a writer the companionship of other writers means much. Mrs. Stowe had here her great opportunity. It would not be possible to go over the large circle of great names she came to know by more than the printed letters. John Ruskin, George Eliot, Charles Kingsley were among them, besides the long lists of people whose titles were not their only claim to interest. In Paris there was another circle of great people, and when she came to Italy, there were the Brownings with whom a warm friendship arose, and many other very congenial people. Then on one of her return journeys she had the pleasure of having for companions Mr. and Mrs. Nathaniel Hawthorne and Mr. and Mrs. James T. Fields.

Among the happiest times that Mrs. Stowe had were the social gatherings in England with some of these literary friends. Seated at dinner where there were perhaps thirty or more at the table, with Macaulay at her right and Milman at her left, she was sometimes embarrassed with riches; she wanted to hear what they were both saying; but by the use of the faculty by which we play the piano with both hands, she got on, she said, very comfortably.

We can quite imagine that in these conversations it must have been sometimes a little startling to have this fresh vivid intelligence turned upon the customs that have in England had the benefit of long settled tradition. At one dinner she said that it had always seemed to her a curious thing that in the height of English civilization one vestige of savagery should remain, namely, sending a whole concourse of strong men out to hunt a single poor little fox or hare, creatures so feeble and insignificant who can do nothing to defend themselves; to her it hardly seemed consistent with manliness. Now, she said, if you had some of our American buffaloes, or a Bengal tiger, the affair would be something more dignified and generous. The gentlemen who heard this only laughed and went on to tell more stories about fox hunting!

Mrs. Stowe was of course confronted with the traditional question as to how the English ladies compared with those of America in beauty. When her turn came she said within herself, “Now for it, patriotism!” Then she assured the questioner that she had never seen more beautiful women anywhere than she had in her own country. But she had to admit that the English ladies held their beauty longer than did those of this country. Why was it? Was it the sea coal and fog that made the women of England preserve their glowing, radiant, blooming freshness till long past fifty? Tell us, Muses and Graces! she cried. Then she suggested various reasons: our close-heated rooms, our hot biscuits and hot corn cakes made with saleratus, our worry over maid service, our climate, and so on. The American woman is possessed, she thought, with the ambition to do the impossible, which is the cause of the death of a third of the women of this country, and by the impossible she means that they try to play not only the head of the family but the head, hand, and foot, all at once! Certainly the undaunted bravery of the American woman in her difficult home arrangements can never be enough admired. Speaking of stoves, she said that she never saw one in England. (This was in 1853.) Bright coal fires in grates of polished steel were still the lares and penates of old England. If there was one thing in her own country that she was inclined to mourn, it was the closing up of the cheerful open fire, with its bright lights and dancing shadows, and the planting on our domestic hearth of that sullen, stifling gnome, the air-tight. She agreed with Hawthorne in thinking the movement fatal to patriotism; for who would fight for an air-tight?

One of the things that Mrs. Stowe noticed in England was that the distinguished people live so remarkably public a life. English newspapers told a great deal more about the concerns of the notable people than American papers tell: where the nobility were staying now, where they would go next, what they had for dinner, what they wore—all these things the English newspapers deemed important. And Mrs. Stowe was surprised also to have them take somewhat the same interest in her, even recording it when she had a dress made, and complaining that she sent it to a dress-maker of whom they did not approve!

When Mrs. Stowe came to France she noticed the ready enthusiasm of the French for all things beautiful, and she compared this with the Puritan distrust of beauty for its own sake which she had seen and felt in New England. She was, of course, not the only one who has felt this about our serious forefathers and their view of life. Now she had found a people that could be equally enthusiastic about a barrel of potatoes and the adorning of a room. She observes: “But did not He that made the appetite for food make also that for beauty? and while the former will perish with the body, is not the latter immortal?” By this we see how far the soul of Harriet Beecher has progressed since the days when she found her love of literature a snare in the way of her spiritual progress.

Mrs. Stowe was delighted with Paris. She was released from care; she was unknown and unknowing. She employed herself in wandering about the shops, the streets and boulevards, seeing and hearing the life of Paris. She wished the children at home could see these Tuileries with their statues and fountains, these family groups under the trees, the men and women chatting, reading aloud or working muslin, the children driving hoops, playing ball, all chattering volubly. Afterwards she was able to give the children the opportunity to see all this when she brought the whole company to spend a winter in Paris to study French.