And in this novel, in which Colonel Esmond tells his own story, the author shows his surpassing power in making us see his principal characters, especially his dear mistress and her daughter, not so much as they really were, but as they appeared to the man who loved them. Thackeray gives to our understanding very good reason to doubt whether Lady Castlewood had all the perfections he attributes to her, but he compels our hearts to join in Esmond’s worship, and to feel even toward the wayward Beatrix a share of the passion of her lover.
UNCLE TOM’S CABIN
HARRIET BEECHER STOWE
“Uncle Tom’s Cabin” is a novel which was written for a purpose. It was an attack upon the system of negro slavery and was intended to awaken the people of the North to a realization of the horrors and essential wickedness of that institution. So well did it accomplish its purpose that it became an important feature of the history of the abolition movement, which led to the organization of the Republican party and finally to the overthrow of slavery. No other American novel had such a circulation nor left so deep an impression upon its time. But it has long outlived its moral purpose, and the persistent demand both for the book and for the play which is taken from it shows that “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” has a vitality of its own, which entitles it to a high rank among works of fiction. What are the elements of its excellence?
It is not in all respects a finished production. The style is uneven and marred by occasional crudities and weaknesses. The author evidently lacks a good deal in the matter of literary education. Words are used unnecessarily which are colloquial, very rare, or perhaps not found in the dictionary at all. Thus: “The rocking chair of the good Quakeress Rachel Halliday kept up a subdued creechy-crawchy”; Rachel collects “needments” for Eliza out of her household stores; St. Clare speaks of the “cheatery” of his negroes, and other phrases are used which are equally obsolete or unconventional. Some of the sentences are awkward in the extreme, and there are involved paragraphs, with inconsistent similes and metaphors.
Besides this, there is a certain femininity pervading the book, which appears in minute descriptions of household duties and utensils, and in a certain religious flavor of the Sunday-school variety, which obtrudes itself in inappropriate places.
But although the mere literary quality of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” is not high, the work is characterized by great dramatic power, and permeated with a feeling so intense that the expression of it rises in many places into eloquence. The great feature of this somber and absorbing novel is its convincing character. The truth of the dreadful facts which it recounts are shown, not merely by contemporary records, but the events are described in such a way as to bring with them the consciousness that they must have occurred. This overpowering impression of reality and the tragic pathos of the tale itself contain the secret of its power.
The main plot of the novel flows on in a very natural manner. Uncle Tom, a faithful, conscientious negro, is the property of a Kentucky master who is compelled by necessity to tear him away from his family and sell him “down the river.” First he becomes the property of St. Clare, an excellent man, upon whose death he is purchased by one Legree, an incarnate fiend, by whom he is whipped to death for refusing to become the instrument of his master’s cruelty. Other incidents, like the escape of Eliza and her husband, who finally obtain their liberty in Canada, are subsidiary to the main design.
Many of the characters are so natural that they must have been taken from living models. The cultured, cynical, yet sensitive and kindly St. Clare, and his querulous wife Marie; Eva, their affectionate, spiritual, fairy-like child; the grotesque Topsy; the prim and precise Miss Ophelia, with strong New England instincts and prejudices; Haley the slave-trader, the “man of humanity,”—seem especially lifelike. Legree’s brutality is almost inconceivable, and its only justification is found in the fact that such men, abnormal as they were, actually existed and controlled the destinies of great numbers of human beings.
Some of the episodes are quite as effective as the main current of the narrative; for example, the stealing of Lucy’s baby by the slave trader on the way down the Ohio, followed by the suicide of the mother. We know that children were sold in just that fashion, and the simple narrative tells us exactly what it meant. There is a terrible power, too, in the whispered story about poor Prue: “She’s got drunk again and they put her down cellar, and they left her all day, and I hearn them saying that the flies had got to her, and she’s dead.” No detailed account of the actual barbarities inflicted upon the wretched creature could give a stronger impression of the hideous reality than the whispers of the other slaves who knew of it and yet were afraid to speak.
To make a fine work of art, the subject ought to be worthy and the treatment artistic. Mrs. Stowe fails a little in the latter point, but there was never a novelist with a more impressive theme. It is that theme, after all, which has given to her work the chief part of its permanent value.