But the relief from the necessity of seeing people, which would have been so great a pleasure to her if she had not been too tired for it, did not stay with her very long in France, nor in Switzerland whither they next went. Here also the fame of the author had gone before her. All knew the book; they stood in rows to see the author and to ask her to write another that should while away their long winter evenings as “Uncle Tom” had done. “Remember,” they said, “our winter nights here are very long!”
At last they came to Italy. Here every day opened to her a new world of wonders. And when she reached Rome she cried out, “Rome is a world! Rome is an astonishment! Rome is an enchantress! Think of strolling leisurely through the Forum, of seeing the very stones that were laid in the time of the Republic, of rambling over the ruined Palace of the Cæsars, of walking under the Arch of Titus, of seeing the Dying Gladiator, and whole ranges of rooms filled with the wonders of art, all in one morning!... In the Palace of the Cæsars, where the very dust is a mélange of exquisite marbles, I saw for the first time an acanthus growing, and picked my first leaf!”
It was during her second visit to Europe that Mrs. Stowe met the Brownings. That was in April, 1857. Mrs. Browning said of this visit that she and her husband had been charmed by Mrs. Stowe’s simplicity and earnestness, her gentle voice and refinement of manner. Never, said Mrs. Browning, did lioness roar so softly![14] After that and till the end of the life of Mrs. Browning, correspondence was carried on between the two great women, in which the chief subject discussed was the possibility of spiritual communications between us and those that have passed into the other life. Both these great thinkers believed that such communications were within the range of possibility if we were able to realize them spiritually, but not through any material means then known. The same warm and permanent kind of friendship existed between Mrs. Stowe and George Eliot.
Mrs. Stowe was in Europe first in 1853, again in 1856-7, and the third time in 1859-60. In the intervals she was very hard at work in her home in Brunswick, Maine, and afterwards in a new home in Andover, Massachusetts, whither her husband had been called to the Theological Seminary. First she was writing the “Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” a compendium of the facts and materials she had used in writing the novel. Following this was the second anti-slavery work, a novel entitled “Dred.” This was an even more passionate treatment of the subject of slavery than was “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” though it did not have the concentration and the pathos of the latter. Just as a novel, however, it marked an advance in method and handling, and if one should look behind the preaching one would find a distinct promise for finer workmanship to come in later books. This promise was fulfilled in “The Minister’s Wooing,” “The Pearl of Orr’s Island,” and “Agnes of Sorrento,” three novels that belong to this time of quickening by contact with the old world.
But these years between the time of her first novel and the beginning of the sixties were the days of the drawing tighter and tighter of the cords, the bursting of which was to produce our Civil War. To every varying of the needle she was sensitive. To every pang in her country’s agony she was sharply responsive. She wrote to a friend in England: “Sudden, sharp remedies are mercy.” Hating war, she yet said, if by war, then war it must be.
CHAPTER XVIII
A UNIQUE JUBILEE
One day twenty farmers came to the Stone Cabin in Andover where the Stowes lived and sat down with Professor Stowe to ask the question, Will it be a long war? And he had answered buoyantly, Oh, no, short and decisive it will certainly be!
A year passed and it was not yet over; 1862 came in and the fierce battles of Shiloh, Cedar Mountain, Manassas and Antietam formed the bitter record of that one summer alone. In the very heart of the country soldiers by the thousand from the north and from the south stood glaring at each other, pressing forward, warding off, moving warily even upon the critical spaces about the city of Washington, while occasionally the Confederate raiders slipped through and ran almost up to the city itself. The resistance of the Confederate army was proving much more stubborn than had been dreamed possible, and by November of 1862 long streets of tents full of soldiers waiting for orders were making white cities for miles and miles throughout the surroundings of Washington. The people began to fear the horror of a long, devastating war.
Almost worse than this was the feeling of criticism into which discouragement was concentrating. Grief at the defeats of the army of the Potomac was reacting in troubles among President Lincoln’s advisers. The northern abolitionists could not understand why he was so slow—why he did not stop the war at once. And he, poor man, in the midst of the most harassing executive difficulties, with personal sorrow for the recent death of his little son eating at his heart and national sorrow for the loss in deadly battle of many hundreds of soldiers overshadowing him, did not know which way to turn for strength, wisdom and good generalship. “I cannot create generals,” he said.
As the month for Thanksgiving Day, 1862, approached it would seem that no one could have the heart to celebrate. On the farms of New England and Ohio and Nebraska the women were beginning to have to carry the whole burden of home and town. In a New Hampshire countryside, not far from where the Stowes were living, fourteen strong daughters of the mountains went one night after their own farm work was done to the barn of an aged neighbor whose three sons had gone to the war, and before morning had husked for him one hundred bushels of corn. This sort of thing was being done everywhere.