History of American Literature Part 18

Mrs. Stowe's knowledge of psychological values is shown in the means taken to make it appear to Senator John Bird that it would be the natural thing for him to defeat his own law, by driving the woman and her child seven miles in the dead of night to a place of greater safety.

All sections of the country do not agree in regard to whether _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ gives a fairly representative picture of slavery. This is a question for the historian, not for the literary critic. We study _Macbeth_ for its psychology, its revelation of human nature, its ethics, more than for its accurate exposition of the Scottish history of the time. We read _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ to find out how the pen of one woman proved stronger than the fugitive slave laws of the United States, how it helped to render of no avail the decrees of the courts, and to usher in a four years' war. We decide that she achieved this result because the pictures, whether representative or not, which she chose to throw on her screen, were such as appealed to the most elemental principles of human nature, such as the mother could not forget when she heard her own children say their evening prayer, such as led her to consent to send her firstborn to the war, such as to make _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ outsell every other book written by an American, to cause it to be translated into more than thirty foreign languages, to lead a lady of the Siamese court to free all her slaves in 1867, and to say that Mrs. Stowe "had taught her as even Buddha had taught kings to respect the rights of her fellow creatures."

It may be noted in this connection that Mark Twain, who was of southern descent and whose parents and relatives owned slaves, introduces in his greatest work, _Huckleberry Finn_ (1884), a fugitive slave to arouse our sympathies. The plot of _Pudd'nhead Wilson_ (1894) turns on one of Mrs.

Stowe's points of emphasis, the fear of the mother that her child would be sold and taken away from her, down the river.

The story of _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ is intensely dramatic, and it accomplished its author's purpose far beyond her expectations. When we study it merely as a literary performance, we shall notice the effect of the handicap under which Mrs. Stowe labored at the time of composition, as well as her imperfect conception of the art technique of the modern novel. There are faults of plot, style, and characterization. Modern fiction would call for more differentiation in the dialogue of the different characters and for more unity of structure, and yet there are stories with all these technical excellencies which do not live a year. We may say with W. P. Trent, a Virginian by birth, and a critic who has the southern point of view: "_Uncle Tom's Cabin_ is alive with emotion, and the book that is alive with emotion after the lapse of fifty years is a great book. The critic of today cannot do better than to imitate George Sand when she reviewed the story on its first appearance--waive its faults and affirm its almost unrivaled emotional sincerity and strength."

ORATORY.--The orators of this period made their strongest speeches on questions connected with human liberty and the preservation of the Union.

Most public speeches die with the success or the failure of the reforms that they champion or the causes that they plead. A little more than half a century ago, schoolboys declaimed the speeches of EDWARD EVERETT (1794-1865), CHARLES SUMNER (1811-1874), and WENDELL PHILLIPS (1811-1884), all born in Ma.s.sachusetts, and all graduates of Harvard. But even the best speeches of these men are gradually being forgotten, although a stray sentence or paragraph may still occasionally be heard, such as Wendell Phillips's reply to those who hissed his antislavery sentiments, "Truth dropped into the pit of h.e.l.l would make a noise just like that," or Edward Everett's apostrophe to "that one solitary adventurous vessel, the _Mayflower_ of a forlorn hope, freighted with the prospects of a future state and bound across the unknown sea."

DANIEL WEBSTER (1782-1852).--New England furnished in Daniel Webster one of the world's great orators. He was born in Salisbury, New Hamps.h.i.+re, and educated at Dartmouth College. It was said half humorously that no one could really be as great as he looked. Whittier called him

"New England's stateliest type of man, In port and speech Olympian; Whom no one met, at first, but took A second awed and wondering look."

Before his death he was known as the best lawyer, the most noted statesman, and the greatest orator in the country. He is still considered America's greatest orator.

[Ill.u.s.tration: DANIEL WEBSTER]

A study of the way in which Webster schooled himself to become a speaker will repay every one who wishes to use our spoken language effectively. In Webster's youth, a stilted, unnatural style was popular for set speeches.

He was himself influenced by the prevailing fas.h.i.+on, and we find him writing to a friend:--

"In my melancholy moments I presage the most dire calamities. I already see in my imagination the time when the banner of civil war shall be unfurled; when Discord's hydra form shall set up her hideous yell, and from her hundred mouths shall howl destruction through our empire."

Such unnatural prose impresses us to-day as merely an insincere play with words, but in those days many thought a stilted, ornate style as necessary for an impressive occasion as Sunday clothes for church. An _Oratorical Dictionary_ for the use of public speakers, was actually published in the first part of the nineteenth century. This contained a liberal amount of sonorous words derived from the Latin, such as "campestral," "lapidescent,"

"obnubilate," and "advent.i.tious." Such words were supposed to give dignity to spoken utterance.

Edward Everett, the most finished cla.s.sical speaker of the time, loved to introduce the "Muses of h.e.l.las," and to make allusions to the fleets "of Tyre, of Carthage, of Rome," and to Hannibal's slaughtering the Romans "till the Aufidus ran blood." He painted Warren "moving resplendent over the field of honor, with the rose of Heaven upon his cheek, and the fire of liberty in his eye."

Webster was cured of such tendencies by an older lawyer, Jeremiah Mason, who graduated at Yale about the time Webster was born. Mason, who was frequently Webster's opponent, took pleasure in ridiculing all ornate efforts and in p.r.i.c.king rhetorical bubbles. Webster says that Mason talked to the jury "in a plain conversational way, in short sentences, and using no word that was not level to the comprehension of the least educated man on the panel. This led me to examine my own style, and I set about reforming it altogether." Note the simplicity in the following sentences from Webster's speech on _The Murder of Captain Joseph White_:--

"Deep sleep had fallen on the destined victim, and on all beneath his roof. A healthful old man, to whom sleep was sweet, and the first sound slumbers of the night held him in their soft but strong embrace.... The face of the innocent sleeper is turned from the murderer, and the beams of the moon, resting on the gray locks of his aged temple, show him where to strike."

In his speech on _The Completion of the Bunker Hill Monument_, we find the following paragraph, containing two sentences which present in simple language one of the great facts in human history:--

"America has furnished to the world the character of Was.h.i.+ngton! And if our American inst.i.tutions had done nothing else, that alone would have ent.i.tled them to the respect of mankind."

He knew when ill.u.s.trations and figures of rhetoric could be used to advantage to impress his hearers. In discussing the claim made by Senator Calhoun of South Carolina that a state could nullify a national law, Webster said:--

"To begin with nullification, with the avowed intent, nevertheless, not to proceed to secession, dismemberment, and general revolution, is as if one were to take the plunge of Niagara, and cry out that he would stop half way down."

To show the moral bravery of our forefathers and the comparative greatness of England, at that time, he said:--

"On this question of principle, while actual suffering was yet afar off, they raised their flag against a power, to which, for purposes of foreign conquest and subjugation, Rome, in the height of her glory, is not to be compared; a power which has dotted over the surface of the whole globe with her possessions and military posts, whose morning drumbeat, following the sun, and keeping company with the hours, circles the earth with one continuous and unbroken strain of the martial airs of England."

For nearly a generation prior to the Civil War, schoolboys had been declaiming the peroration of his greatest speech, his _Reply to Hayne_ (1830):--

"When my eyes shall be turned to behold for the last time the sun in heaven, may I not see him s.h.i.+ning on the broken and dishonored fragments of a once glorious Union; on States dissevered, discordant, belligerent; on a land rent with civil feuds, or drenched, it may be, in fraternal blood!"

This peroration brought Webster as an invisible presence into thousands of homes in the North. The hearts of the listeners would beat faster as the declaimer continued:--

"Let their last feeble and lingering glance rather behold the gorgeous ensign of the republic, now known and honored throughout the earth, still full high advanced, its arms and trophies streaming in their original l.u.s.ter, not a stripe erased or polluted, nor a single star obscured...."

When the irrepressible conflict came, it would be difficult to estimate how many this great oration influenced to join the army to save the Union. The closing words of that speech, "Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!" kept sounding like the voice of many thunders in the ear of the young men, until they shouldered their muskets. His _Seventh of March Speech_ (1850), which seemed to the North to make compromises with slavery, put him under a cloud for awhile, but nothing could stop youth from declaiming his _Reply to Hayne_.

Although the majority of orators famous in their day are usually forgotten by the next generation, it is not improbable that three American orations will be quoted hundreds of years hence. So long as the American retains his present characteristics, we cannot imagine a time when he will forget Patrick Henry's speech in 1775, or Daniel Webster's peroration in his _Reply to Hayne_, or Abraham Lincoln's _Gettysburg Address_ (p. 344), entrusting the American people with the task of seeing "that government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth."

RALPH WALDO EMERSON, 1803-1882

[Ill.u.s.tration: RALPH WALDO EMERSON]

LIFE.--Ralph Waldo Emerson, the most distinguished of New England transcendentalists, came from a family of clergy. Peter Bulkeley, his ancestor, was the first pastor of Concord in 1635. William Emerson, his grandfather, was pastor in Concord at the opening of the Revolutionary War and witnessed the fight of Concord Bridge from the window of the Old Manse, that famous house which he had built and which Hawthorne afterwards occupied. By that Bridge there stands a monument, commemorating the heroic services of the men who there made the world-famous stand for freedom. On the base of this monument are Ralph Waldo Emerson's lines:--

"By the rude bridge that arched the flood, Their flag to April's breeze unfurled, Here once the embattled farmers stood, And fired the shot heard round the world."

Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston in 1803. His father, who was pastor of the First Church in Boston, died when Ralph Waldo was eight years old, leaving in poverty a widow with six children under ten years of age. His church promptly voted to pay his widow five hundred dollars a year, for seven years, but even with this help the family was so poor that in cold weather it was noticed that Ralph and his brother went to school on alternate days. The boys divined the reason, and were cruel enough to call out, "Whose turn is it to wear the coat to-day?" But the mother struggled heroically with poverty, and gave her sons a good education. Ralph Waldo entered Harvard in 1817. He saved the cost of his lodging by being appointed "President's Freshman," as the official message bearer was called, and earned most of his board by waiting on the table at the college Commons.

Emerson was descended from such a long line of clergymen that it was natural for him to decide to be a minister. After graduating at Harvard and taking a course in theology, he received a call from Cotton Mather's (p.

46) church and preached there for a short time; but he soon resigned because he could not conscientiously conform to some of the customs of the church. Although he occasionally occupied pulpits for a few years after this, the greater part of his time for the rest of his life was spent in writing and lecturing.

When he was temporarily preaching in Concord, New Hamps.h.i.+re, in 1827, he met Miss Ellen Tucker, then sixteen years old. This meeting was for two reasons a noteworthy event in his life. In the first place, her inspiration aided in the development of his poetical powers. He seemed to hear the children of Nature say to her:--

"Thou shalt command us all,-- April's cowslip, summer's clover, To the gentian in the fall, Blue-eyed pet of blue-eyed lover."

[Ill.u.s.tration: ELLEN TUCKER]

His verses tell how the flower and leaf and berry and rosebud ripening into rose had seemed to copy her. He married her in 1829 and wrote the magnificent prophecy of their future happiness in the poem beginning:--

"And Ellen, when the graybeard years,"

a poem which he could not bear to have published in his lifetime, for Mrs.

Emerson lived but a few years after their marriage. In the second place, in addition to stimulating his poetical activity, his wife's help did not end with her death; for she left him a yearly income of twelve hundred dollars, without which he might never have secured the leisure necessary to enable him "to live in all the faculties of his soul" and to become famous in American literature.

In the fall of 1833 he sailed for Europe, going by way of the Mediterranean. Returning by way of England, he met Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Carlyle, whose influence he had already felt. His visit to Carlyle led to a lifelong friends.h.i.+p. Emerson helped to bring out an American edition of the _Sartor Resartus_ (1836) before it was published in England.

[Ill.u.s.tration: EMERSON'S STUDY]

After returning from Europe, Emerson permanently settled at Concord, Ma.s.sachusetts, the most famous literary town of its size in the United States. The appreciation of the Concord people for their home is shown by the naive story, told by a member of Emerson's family, of a fellow townsman who read of the rapidly rising price of building lots in Chicago, and remarked, "Can't hardly believe that any lands can be worth so much money, so far off." After Henry D. Th.o.r.eau (p. 194) had received a medal at school for proficiency in geography, he went home and asked his mother if Boston was located in Concord. It was to Concord that Emerson brought his second wife, Lidian Jackson Emerson, whom he married in 1835. In Concord he wrote his most famous _Essays_, and from there he set out on his various lecturing tours. There he could talk daily to celebrities like Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Th.o.r.eau, and Bronson Alcott. Louisa May Alcott relates that when eight years old she was sent to the Emerson home to inquire about the health of his oldest son, a boy of five. Emerson answered her knock, and replied, "Child, he is dead!" Years later she wrote, "I never have forgotten the anguish that made a familiar face so tragical, and gave those few words more pathos than the sweet lamentation of the _Threnody_" Like Milton and Tennyson, Emerson voiced his grief in an elegy, to which he gave the t.i.tle _Threnody_. In this poem the great teacher of optimism wrote:--

"For this losing is true dying; This is lordly man's down-lying, This his slow but sure reclining, Star by star his world resigning."

Aside from domestic incidents, his life at Concord was uneventful. As he was by nature averse to contests, he never took an extreme part in the antislavery movement, although he voiced his feelings against slavery, even giving antislavery lectures, when he thought the occasion required such action. His gentleness and tenderness were inborn qualities. Oliver Wendell Holmes said that Emerson removed men's "idols from their pedestals so tenderly that it seemed like an act of wors.h.i.+p."

He widened his influence by subst.i.tuting the platform for the pulpit, and year after year he enlarged his circle of hearers. He lectured in New England, the South, and the West. Sometimes these lecture tours kept him away from home the entire winter. In 1847 he lectured in England and Scotland. He visited Carlyle again, and for four days listened to "the great and constant stream" of his talk. On this second trip abroad, Emerson met men like De Quincey, Macaulay, Thackeray, and Tennyson. Emerson gained such fame in the mother country that, long after he had returned, he was nominated for the Lord Rectors.h.i.+p of Glasgow University and received five hundred votes against seven hundred for Disraeli, one of England's best known statesmen.

Something of his character and personality may be learned from the accounts of contemporary writers. James Russell Lowell, who used to go again and again to hear him, even when the subject was familiar, said, "We do not go to hear what Emerson says so much as to hear Emerson." Hawthorne wrote, "It was good to meet him in the wood paths or sometimes in our avenue with that pure intellectual gleam diffusing about his presence like the garment of a s.h.i.+ning one." Carlyle speaks of seeing him "vanish like an angel" from his lonely Scotch home.