BEECHER'S NORWOOD.[83]
[Our delay in noticing this book by a distinguished author till the reading public have probably forgotten it, has been purely unintentional. We placed it, soon after its publication, in the hands of one of our collaborateurs, a genuine New Englander by birth, education, and association, to prepare a notice or a review of it, as he might judge proper. He read it, no inconsiderable feat, but was taken very ill, and lay for many months with faint hopes of recovery. During his illness and for some time after his recovery the book was forgotten. He now, at this late day, sends us his judgment, and we hasten to pay our respects to the author, and our debt to the publishers.—Ed. Cath. World.]
The Beecher family is certainly a remarkably gifted family, though we think the father, Dr. Lyman Beecher, was the best of them all. Yet his two daughters, Miss Catharine Beecher and Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, are women of rare abilities, and have made their mark on the times and sad havoc with New England theology. Dr. Edward Beecher has written several notable books, among which may be mentioned The Papal Conspiracy and the Conflict of the Ages, which prove him almost equally hostile to Rome and to Geneva. Henry Ward Beecher is the most distinguished of the sons, and probably ranks as the most popular, certainly the most striking, pulpit orator in the country. But none of the family are remarkable for purity of taste, refined culture, or classical grace and polish as writers. They would seem to owe their success partly to their audacity, but principally to a certain rough vigor and energy of character, and to their sympathy with the popular tendencies of their country. They rarely take, never knowingly take, the unpopular side of a question, or attempt to stem the current of popular opinion. They are of the world, and the world loves them. They never disturb its conscience by condemning its moral ideal, or calling upon it to strive after a higher and purer ideal. They have in an eminent degree the genius of commonplace. There are in Uncle Tom's Cabin and The Ministers Wooing passages of rare force and vigor, but they are not very original, nor very recondite. The Beecher genius is not lyrical or dramatic, but essentially militant and prosaic. It can display itself only against an antagonist, and an antagonist at least about to fall under the ban of public opinion. They have some imitative ability, but little creative power, and rarely present us with a living character. We remember only two living characters in all Mrs. Stowe's writings, Dred and the Widow Scudder; and we are not certain that these are not copies of originals.
The author of Norwood is less of an artist than his sister, Mrs. Stowe, and under the relation of art his novel is below criticism. It contains many just observations on various topics, but by no means original or profound; it seizes some few of the traits of New England village life; but its characters, with the exception of Judge Bacon, Agate Bissell, and Hiram Beers, are the abstractions or impersonations of the author's theories. The author has little dramatic power, and not much wit or humor. The persons or personages of his book are only so many points in the argument which he is carrying on against Calvinistic orthodoxy for pure naturalism. The substance of his volume seems to be made up of the fag-ends of his sermons and lectures. He preaches and lectures all through it, and rather prosily into the bargain. His Dr. Wentworth is a bore, and his daughter Rose, the heroine of the story, is a species of bluestocking, and neither lovely nor lovable. As a type of the New England cultivated and accomplished lady she is a failure, and is hardly up to the level of the New England school-ma'am. The sensational incidents of the story are old and worn out, and the speculations on love indicate very little depth of feeling or knowledge of life, or of the human heart. The author proceeds on a theory, and so far shows his New England birth and breeding, but he seldom touches reality.
As a picture of New England village life it is singularly unfortunate, and still more so as a picture of village life in the valley of the Connecticut, some twenty miles above Springfield, in Massachusetts, where the scene is laid, and where the tone and manners of society in a village of five thousand inhabitants, the number Norwood is said to contain, hardly differ in refinement and polish from the tone and manners of the better classes in Boston and its vicinity. There are no better families, better educated, better bred, more intellectual in the State, than are to be found in no stinted numbers in the towns of the Connecticut valley, the garden of Massachusetts. The book is full of anachronisms. The peculiar New England traits given existed to a certain extent, in our boyhood, in back settlements or towns not lying near any of the great thoroughfares; but they have very generally disappeared through the influence of education, the railroads, which run in all directions through the State, and the almost constant intercourse with the society of the capital.
The turnpikes did much to destroy the rustic manners and language of the population of the interior villages, and the railroads have completed what they left undone. Save in a few localities, there is no longer a rustic population in Massachusetts, and very little distinction between the countryman and the citizen. In small country villages you may find Hiram Beers still, but Tommy Taft, Polly Marble, and Agate Bissell are of a past generation, and even in the past belonged to Connecticut rather than to the Old Bay State. Strangers suppose the people of the several New England States have all the same characteristics, and are cut out and made up after the same pattern; but in reality, except in the valley of the Connecticut, where there is a blending of the characteristics of the adjoining States, the differences between the people of one State and those of another are so strongly marked that a careful observer can easily tell, on seeing a stranger, to which of the six New England States he belongs, without hearing him speak a word, and not unfrequently the section of his State from which he comes. There is no mistaking a Berkshire countryman for a Cape Codder, or a Vermonter for a true son of the Old Bay State, or a Rhode Islander. The gait, the air, the manners, the physiognomy even, tell at once the man's native State. The Vermonter is the Kentuckian of the East, as the Georgian is the Yankee of the South, and we have found no two cities in the Union, and there are few east of the Rocky Mountains that we have not visited, where the citizens of the one have so many points of resemblance with those of the other, as Boston, the metropolis of New England, and Charleston, the real capital of South Carolina. Accidental differences of course there are, but the type of character is the same, and the purest and best American type we have met with. And we are very disinterested in our judgment, for we are natives of neither city nor State. In both we have the true English type with its proper American modifications. No two cities stood firmer, shoulder to shoulder, during the American war of independence, "the times that tried men's souls," than Boston and Charleston. They became opposed not till, under the lead of Philadelphia and the Pennsylvania and Kentucky politicians, Congress had fastened on the country the so-called American system, which struck a severe blow at the commerce of New England, and compelled its capitalists to seek investment for their capital in manufactures. It is a little singular that New England, which up to 1842 had voted against every protective tariff that had been adopted, should have the credit or discredit of originating and securing the adoption of the protective system. The ablest speech ever made against the system in Congress was made in 1824 by Mr. Webster, then a member of the House of Representatives from Boston. We express no opinion on the question between free-trade and so-called protection; we only say that Pennsylvania and Kentucky, not the New England States, are chiefly responsible for the protective system; the very remote cause, at least, of the late terrible civil war between the North and South, in which, if the victory was for the Union, the South are likely to be the gainers in the long run, and the North the losers.
But we are wandering. Mr. Beecher speaks truly of the diversity and originality of individual character in New England, which you discover when you have once broken through the thin crust of conventionalism; but he seems not to have observed equally the marked differences of character between the people of the several States. The wit of a Massachusetts man is classical and refined; of the Connecticut man sly, and not incapable of being coarse; of the Vermonter it is broad farce, and nobody better than he can keep a company of good fellows in a roar till morning. The Bay State man has a strong attachment to tradition and to old manners and customs, and his innovating tendency is superinduced, and is as repugnant to his nature as Protestantism is to the perfervidum ingenium Scottorum. He is naturally a conservative, as the Scotch are, if we may so speak, naturally Catholic; and it was only a terrible wrench of the Scottish nature that induced the loyal Scots to adopt the Reformation. The Connecticut man excels the Bay State man in ingenuity, in inventive genius, in doing much with little; is less conservative by nature, and more enterprising and adventurous, and in his exterior conduct more under the influence of public opinion. Each is proud of his State, and the Connecticut man especially, who has acquired wealth elsewhere, is fond of returning to his early home to display it; but attachment to the soil is not very strong in either, and neither will make heavy sacrifices for simple love of country. The Bay State man is more influenced by his principles, his convictions, like the South Carolinian, and the Connecticut man more by his interests.
The Vermonter has no conservative tendency by nature; he cares not the snap of his finger for what his father believed or did; is personally independent, generally free from snobbishness, no slave to public opinion, and for the most part has the courage of his convictions; but he loves his State, loves her green hills and fertile valleys, and when abroad holds a fellow-Vermonter dear as his brother. A Georgian and a Connecticut man are fighting in Georgia; the Connecticut man looking on will wish his countryman to get the better of his Georgian opponent, but will not interpose till he has inquired into the cause of the dispute, and ascertained on which side is the law. A Georgian and a Vermonter are fighting under the same circumstances; the Vermonter comes up, looks, knocks the Georgian down, rescues his countryman, and investigates the cause and the law afterward. The Vermonter pays no attention to the personal responsibility he may incur; the Connecticut man tries to keep always clear of the law; and if he makes up his mind to do a great wrong to some one, he takes care to do it under cover of law, so that no hold can be got of him. The Bay State man is much the same; and the Connecticut man has less of patriotism than the Vermonter. We speak of what was the case in our own youth and early manhood; yet the character of the whole American people has so changed during the last forty years that we can hardly any longer recognize them, and in the judgment of an old man they have changed not for the better.
We have no space to remark on the characteristic differences of the three remaining New England States. These States have still less resemblance to each other. The people of Maine differ widely from the people of New Hampshire, and the people of Rhode Island have very few traits in common with the people of any of the other New England States. The author of Norwood has lost no little of his own original New England character or overlaid it with his Westernism. He is not in sympathy with the true New England character, as found in any of the New England States, and is more disposed to exaggerate, in his descriptions, its few eccentricities than to bring out its higher and nobler qualities. No doubt the Puritan settlers of Massachusetts and Connecticut set out with the intention of founding what they regarded as a Christian commonwealth, in which the evangelical counsels should be recognized and enforced as laws. They would have organized and maintained society, except in not enjoining celibacy, after the mode of a Catholic monastery. They attempted by constant vigilance and the strict enforcement of very rigorous laws to shut out all vice and immorality from their community. They were rigorists in morals, somewhat rigid and stern in their personal character, and have been generally supposed to be much more so than they really were. Their experiment of a Christian commonwealth as it existed in their own ideal failed, partly through their defective faith and the absence of supernatural grace, and partly through their exacting too much of human nature, or even of men in the flesh, except an elect few. But they, nevertheless, succeeded in laying the foundation of a Christian as distinguished from a pagan republic, or in founding the state, the first in history, on truly Christian principles; that is, on the rights of God, and which better than any other known state has protected the rights of man.