“The services Deacon Enos offered to his God were all given with the exactness of an ancient Israelite. No words could have persuaded him of the propriety of meditating while the choir were singing, or of sitting down, even through infirmity, before the close of the longest prayer that ever was offered. A mighty contrast was he to his fellow-officer, Deacon Abrams, a tight, little, tripping, well-to-do man, who used to sit beside him with his hair brushed straight up like a little blaze, his coat buttoned up trig and close, his psalm-book in hand, and his quick, gray eyes turned first on one side of the broad aisle, and then on the other, and then up into the gallery like a man who came to church on business and felt responsible for everything that was going on in the house.”
The observant child Harriet, sitting on the bench in the children’s row from Sabbath to Sabbath in the Litchfield church, must have watched these grave deacons that seem so much like story-book people as she gives her accurate memories of them.
“At this instant Deacon Enos Dudley’s mild and venerable form arose before me, as erst it used to rise from the deacon’s seat, a straight close slip just below the pulpit. I recollect his quiet and lowly coming into meeting, precisely ten minutes before the time, every Sunday, his tall form a little stooping, his best suit of butternut-colored Sunday clothes, with long flaps and wide cuffs, on one of which two pins were always to be seen stuck in with the most reverent precision. When seated, the top of the pew came just to his chin, so that his silvery placid head rose above it like the moon above the horizon. His head was one that might have been sketched for a St. John—bald at the top, and around the temples adorned with a soft flow of bright, fine hair.... He was then of great age, and every line of his patient face seemed to say, ‘And now, Lord, what wait I for?’ Yet still, year after year, he was to be seen in the same place with the same dutiful regularity.” Those two pins set precisely upon the deacon’s cuff ought to be immortalized along with the two-pronged stick in Defoe’s famous “Journal.” In either case it was not in the least necessary to mention the slight circumstance; yet by the very casualness of the reference is given the precious air of verisimilitude that the artist most desires.
Mrs. Stowe was one of the earliest among us to choose our own ancestral life as a field for story-telling. To fix her place in the literary procession, we must recall that it was only in 1849 that Longfellow’s “Kavanagh” appeared, and that that great book, “The Scarlet Letter” of Hawthorne and that popular one, “The Wide, Wide World,” by Sarah Warner, were being written at the same time that Mrs. Stowe was writing “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” “The Blithedale Romance” and “Queechy” and “The Lamplighter” came in the early fifties. The true literary descendants of Mrs. Stowe in the realm of New England tales are Mary Wilkins Freeman, Sarah O. Jewett and Kate Douglas Wiggin. It will perhaps be a help to remember, too, that at the same time when Mrs. Stowe was giving us our racy Mary Scudder, George Eliot was introducing Mrs. Poyser in “Middlemarch” to the British public.
In this New England field Mrs. Stowe had therefore a unique opportunity. She had seen that life; having been separated from it, it grew precious to her, and, as her artistic instinct developed, seemed worthy of preservation. No one else has reproduced as she has done the first Christmas of New England, the days in the harbor of Cape Cod, the first day on shore, Christmas tide in Plymouth Harbor, and Elder Brewster’s Christmas sermon. These were the first fruits of the seed planted when little Harriet, unperceived in a dim corner of the garret study of Dr. Lyman Beecher, began to peer into the pages of Cotton Mather’s “Magnalia” and thought it an excellent story-book.
Finally the more and more highly developed artistic skill of the novelist and the widened taste of the woman, and the deep and ineradicable religious nature of her soul united in the production of the novel, “The Minister’s Wooing,” a book in which Mrs. Stowe lets her passionate interest in old New England life have full sway. It is a story built solely upon religious feeling. Nothing like it had been done before, though since she led the way myriads of novels like it in this respect have been attempted. It was a torch borne onward into the dark. Mrs. Stowe maintained the right of the soul’s interests to a place among themes fit for artistic treatment in the novel as Elizabeth Barrett Browning did in poetry. Both were pioneers in this field of artistic endeavor. But people were totally unaccustomed to think of the novel in the terms of theology, and they at once classed “The Minister’s Wooing” as a theological treatise. This was not in the least true. It was a novel pure and simple, however seriously it dealt with the effects on certain souls of certain kinds of theological speculation. Gladstone appreciated the true position of the book. In a letter to Mrs. Stowe he called it a “beautiful and noble picture of Puritan life,” “exhibited upon a pattern felicitous beyond example as far as my knowledge goes.” Our knowledge also goes no farther, even to this day.
The “pattern” shows us the problem of a pure, young New England girl, Mary Scudder by name, whose mind is formed by religious aspiration, of the power of which her lover has no understanding. He reveres her and she stands to him as a religion, as often happens with a sincere and questioning soul. The lover goes to sea and after a while Mary hears that his ship has gone down and that he is lost. When a long time has gone by the Minister wooes her and, believing that the lover is forever gone, Mary consents to marry this man whom she reveres, though she does not give him the love she gave the lost lover. Shall I tell how the story comes out? I certainly will not, for that might destroy the charm that this novel will have for its reader. And the story must be read to be enjoyed. For who could give any idea of the charm of the heroine and the manliness of the lover? There are historic characters, Aaron Burr and Dr. Hopkins and President Stiles, delineated with genius. Like Shakespeare, Mrs. Stowe, while disregarding dates and sequences of events, has been loftily true to the spirit of things. One may look in this book for a true picture, if not for actual events in their exact order.
The scene of “The Minister’s Wooing” was laid at Newport. Mrs. Stowe’s next New England story, “The Pearl of Orr’s Island,” gives a picture of the Maine coast, not far from Brunswick, near Harpswell, and deals with a later time. Both, however, undertake the difficult task of representing life a century or so back. Whittier called “The Pearl” the “most charming New England idyl ever written.” He liked it far better than the “Minister’s Wooing.” Its plot is simpler and there are fewer characters; but it has the clear background of a whole town with its quiet life streaked with tragedy, as life especially is along the sea coast where the waves take their annual toll regardless of human loves and ties. Mara Lincoln, the heroine, dies in the midst of the story, but her loyal friend, Sally Kittridge, takes her place in our interest; and after many sea-yarns, some ministrations by Aunt Ruey and Aunt Roxy, typical characters of the town, a touch of far-away Gothicism in the fact that the body of a beautiful woman floated ashore tightly holding a handsome Spanish boy to her breast, and the unraveling of the puzzle about her, we are allowed a happy wedding-bell ending to the story at last.
“Oldtown Folks,” published in 1869, Mrs. Stowe considered more than a story; it was her “résumé of the whole spirit and body of New England.” In writing it, she tried, she said, to make her “mind as still and passive as a looking-glass, or a mountain lake,” and then to give “the images reflected there.” We are not, then, to take any of the opinions expressed in the book as conclusively Mrs. Stowe’s opinions, but to think of her as reporting impartially the point of view taken by the Calvinists, Arminians, High Church Episcopalians, skeptics and simple believers in the story. It has been said of Mrs. Stowe that she remained without change the Calvinist, the old New Englander, the Beecher, to the end of life. A close study of her work and spirit will reveal that she made the most amazing progress in thought, in spirit and in art. She herself knew this. One of her old friends who met her at one time rather late in her life was afraid of what would happen if she should be told that her friend did not hold exactly the same views as of old. “Why,” exclaimed Mrs. Stowe, “I should be ashamed to believe the same this year that I did last!” For “Oldtown Folks” Mrs. Stowe gathered her “images” in large part from scenes reported to her by her husband as he remembered them from his own boyhood. Together they went to the home of his youth, South Natick, Massachusetts, and there studied the places where the “visionary boy,” who was none other than Professor Stowe himself, passed through the lonely and dream-haunted experiences of his youth. From Professor Stowe’s account of the people and customs in the old village, and from her own memories, Mrs. Stowe organized a picture of the time a generation before her own.
The consummate masterpiece in the work is the character of Sam Lawson, a literary grandson of the Vicar of Wakefield, an own cousin to Ichabod Crane, and a sort of stepfather to Huckleberry Finn. Sam Lawson was a “tall, shambling, loose-jointed man, with a long, thin visage, prominent, watery blue eyes, very fluttering and seedy habiliments, who occupied the responsible position of first do-nothing-in-ordinary in our village of Oldtown.” Why is it that such a character invariably endears itself to our whole country? Mrs. Stowe gives us a sort of explanation of the strange phenomenon. She says that the lovable, lazy genius and factotum of the town was a necessary appendage of every New England village; for Yankee life was so “harried by work and thrift and industry,” that society would “burn itself out with the intense friction if it were not for the lubricating power of a decided do-nothing!” But that, perhaps, was not all. Sam was the undeveloped artist and had a touch of the artist’s charm. He was a great singer; he could sing all parts, bass, tenor, counter, soprano, going from one to another at any point in the midst of the hymn; and as a story-teller he was beyond compare. “‘Why, didn’t you ever hear ’bout that?’” he would begin. “‘Want to know! Wal, I’ll tell ye, then. I know all ’bout it.’” And with this the story started out and the blissful listening of boys by the roadside or of friends around some fireside—not his own—would begin. He was a New England Scheherazade, with stories enough to last for a thousand and one long, lonely, winter nights. Sam Lawson “filled this post with ample honor.” He would leave any work that ought to be done for his wife and large family of children and spend hours tinkering some boy’s knife, tending a dog’s sprained leg, or baiting hooks for a troop of boys in their fishing. He was a soft-hearted old body and would knock the fish in the head to put it out of torment. “‘Why, lordy massy!’” he would say, “‘I can’t bear to see no kind o’ critter in torment. These ’ere pouts ain’t to blame for bein’ fish, and ye ought to put ’em out of their misery. Fish has their rights as well as any of us.’” When Sam was engaged to put a clock in order, he would get it all to pieces about the kitchen and then go away to start in on some other body’s job, saying that “‘Some things can be druv and then agin some things can’t, and clocks is that kind. They’s jest got to be humored. Now this ’ere’s a ’mazin’ good clock; give me my time on’t and I’ll have it so ’twill keep straight on to the millennium.’” Speaking of the millennium starts a theological argument and under cover of this he leaves the kitchen with the clock wheels scattered all over, and goes off fishing. Sam Lawson’s philosophy of life is summed up in this: “‘It’s all fuss, fuss and stew, stew, till we get somewhere; and then it’s fuss, fuss and stew, stew, to get back agin; jump here and scratch your eyes out, and jump there and scratch ’em in agin—that ’ere’s life.’”