Her own letter to Mrs. Lewes, written from Florida in March, 1876, may be considered one of the most beautiful and interesting pieces of writing she ever achieved.
Although this letter is accessible in a life of Mrs. Stowe published by her son during her life, I am tempted to reproduce a portion of it in these pages for those who have not seen it elsewhere. It is a positive loss to cut such a letter, but it covers too much space to quote in full. She dates in
ORANGE BLOSSOM TIME, MANDARIN,
March 18, 1876.
MY DEAR FRIEND, — I always think of you when the orange-trees are in blossom; just now they are fuller than ever, and so many bees are filling the branches that the air is full of a sort of still murmur. And now I am beginning to hear from you every month in “Harper’s.” It is as good as a letter. “Daniel Deronda” has succeeded in awaking in my somewhat worn-out mind an interest. So many stories are tramping over one’s mind in every modern magazine nowadays that one is macadamized, so to speak. It takes something unusual to make a sensation. This does excite and interest me, as I wait for each number with eagerness. I wish I could endow you with our long winter weather, — not winter, except such as you find in Sicily. We live here from November to June, and my husband sits outdoors on the veranda and reads all day. We emigrate in solid family; my two dear daughters, husband, self, and servants come together to spend the winter here, and so together to our Northern home in summer. My twin daughters relieve me from all domestic care; they are lively, vivacious, with a real genius for practical life…. It was very sweet and kind of you to write what you did last. I suppose it is so long ago you may have forgotten, but it was a word of tenderness and sympathy about my brother’s trial; it was womanly, tender, and sweet, such as at heart you are. After all, my love of you is greater than my admiration, for I think it more and better to be really a woman worth loving than to have read Greek and German and written books….
It seems now but a little while since my brother Henry and I were two young people together. He was my two years junior, and nearest companion out of seven brothers and three sisters. I taught him drawing and heard his Latin lessons, for you know a girl becomes mature and womanly long before a boy…. Then he married and lived a missionary life in the new West, all with a joyousness, an enthusiasm, a chivalry, which made life bright and vigorous to us both. Then in time he was called to Brooklyn…. I well remember one snowy night his riding till midnight to see me, and then our talking, till near morning, what we could do to make headway against the horrid cruelties that were being practiced against the defenseless blacks. My husband was then away lecturing, and my heart was burning itself out in indignation and anguish. Henry told me he meant to fight that battle in New York; that he would have a church that would stand by him to resist the tyrannic dictation of Southern slaveholders. I said: “I, too, have begun to do something; I have begun a story, trying to set forth the sufferings and wrongs of the slaves.” “That’s right, Hattie,” he said; “finish it, and I will scatter it thick as the leaves of Vallombrosa,” — and so came “Uncle Tom,” and Plymouth Church became a stronghold….
And when all was over, it was he and Lloyd Garrison who were sent by government once more to raise our national flag on Fort Sumter. You must see that a man does not so energize without making many enemies. Half of our Union has been defeated … and there are those who never saw our faces that to this hour hate him and me. Then he has been a progressive in theology. He has been a student of Huxley and Spencer and Darwin, — enough to alarm the old school, — and yet remained so ardent a supernaturalist as equally to repel the radical destructionists in religion. He and I are Christ-worshipers, adoring Him as the Image in the Invisible God and all that comes from believing this. Then he has been a reformer, an advocate of universal suffrage and woman’s rights, yet not radical enough to please that reform party who stand where the socialists of France do, and are for tearing up all creation generally. Lastly, he had had the misfortune of a popularity which is perfectly phenomenal. I cannot give you any idea of the love, worship, idolatry, with which he has been overwhelmed. He has something magnetic about him, that makes everybody crave his society, that makes men follow and worship him….
My brother is hopelessly generous and confiding. His inability to believe evil is something incredible, and so has come all this suffering…. But you see why I have not written. This has drawn on my life, — my heart’s blood. He is myself; I know you are the kind of woman to understand me when I say I felt a blow at him more than at myself. I who know his purity, honor, delicacy, know that he has been from childhood of an ideal purity, — who reverenced his conscience as his king, whose glory was redressing human wrong, who spoke no slander, no, nor listened to it…. My brother’s power to console is something peculiar and wonderful. I have seen him at deathbeds and funerals, where it would seem as if hope herself must be dumb, bring down the very peace of Heaven and change despair to trust. He has not had less power in his own adversity….
Well, dear, pardon me for this outpour. I loved you, — I love you, — and therefore wanted you to know just what I felt….
This friendship was one that greatly enlisted Mrs. Stowe’s sympathies and enriched her life. Her interest in any woman who was supporting herself, and especially in any one who found a daily taskmaster in the pen, and above all when, as in this case, the woman was one possessed of great moral aspiration half paralyzed in its action because she found herself in an anomalous and (to the world in general) utterly incomprehensible position, made such a woman like a magnet to Mrs. Stowe. She inherited from her father a faith in the divine power of sympathy, which only waxed greater with years and experience. Wherever she found a fellow-mortal suffering trouble or dishonor, in spite of hindrance her feet were turned that way. The genius of George Eliot and the contrasting elements of her life and character drew Mrs. Stowe to her side in sisterly solicitude. Her attitude, her sweetness, her sincerity, could not fail to win the heart of George Eliot. They became loving friends.
It was the same inborn sense of fraternity which led her, when a child, on hearing of the death of Lord Byron, to go out into the fields and fling herself, weeping, on the mounded hay, where she might pray alone for his forgiveness and salvation. It is wonderful to observe the influence of Byron upon that generation. It is on record that when Tennyson, a boy of fifteen, heard some one say, “Byron is dead,” he thought the whole world at an end. “I thought,” he said one day, “everything was over and finished for every one; that nothing else mattered. I remember that I went out alone and carved ‘Byron is dead’ into the sandstone.”
From this time forward Mrs. Stowe was chiefly bound up in her life and labors at the South. In 1870, speaking of some literary work she was proposing to herself, she said: “I am writing as a pure recreative movement of mind, to divert myself from the stormy, unrestful present…. I am being chatelaine of a Florida farm. I have on my mind the creation of a town on the banks of the St. John. The three years since we came this side of the river have called into life and growth a thousand peach-trees, a thousand orange-trees, about five hundred lemons, and seven or eight hundred grapevines. A peach orchard, a vineyard, a lemon grove, will carry my name to posterity. I am founding a place which, thirty or forty years hence, will be called the old Stowe place…. You can have no idea of this queer country, this sort of strange, sandy, half-tropical dreamland, unless you come to it. Here I sit with open windows, the orange buds just opening and filling the air with sweetness, the hens drowsily cackling, the men planting in the field, and callas and wild roses blossoming out of doors. We keep a little fire morning and night. We are flooded with birds; and by the bye, it is St. Valentine’s Day…. I think a uniform edition of Dr. Holmes’s works would be a good thing. Next to Hawthorne he is our most exquisite writer, and in many passages he goes far beyond him. What is the dear Doctor doing? If you know any book good to inspire dreams and visions, put it into my box. My husband chews endlessly a German cud. I mu
st have English. Has the French book on Spiritualism come yet? If it has, put it in…. I wish I could give you a plateful of our oranges…. We had seventy-five thousand of these same on our trees this year, and if you will start off quick, they are not all picked yet. Florida wants one thing, — grass. If it had grass, it would be paradise. But nobody knows what grass is till had grass, it would be paradise. But nobody knows what grass is till they try to do without it.”
Three months later she wrote: “I hate to leave my calm isle of Patmos, where the world is not, and I have such quiet long hours for writing. Emerson could insulate himself here and keep his electricity. Hawthorne ought to have lived in an orange grove in Florida…. You have no idea how small you all look, you folks in the world, from this distance. All your fusses and your fumings, your red-hot hurrying newspapers, your clamor of rival magazines, — why, we see it as we see steamboats fifteen miles off, a mere speck and smoke.”
Again she writes: “You ought to see us riding out in our mule-cart. Poor ‘Fly!’ the last of pea-time, who looks like an animated hair- trunk and the wagon and harness to match! It is too funny, but we enjoy it hugely. There are now in our solitude five Northern families, and we manage to have quite pleasant society.
“But think of our church and school-house being burned down just as we were ready to do something with it. I feel it most for the colored people, who were so anxious to have their school and now have no place to have it in. We have all been trying to raise what we can for a new building and intend to get one up by March.
“If I were North now I would try giving some readings for this and perhaps raise something.”
It was a strange contrast and one at variance with her natural taste, which brought her before the public as a reader of her own stories in the autumn and winter of 1872-73. She was no longer able to venture on the effort of a long story, and yet it was manifestly unwise for her to forego the income which was extended to her through this channel. She wrote: “I have had a very urgent business letter, saying that the lyceums of different towns were making up their engagements, and that if I were going into it I must make my engagements now. It seems to me that I cannot do this. The thing will depend so much on my health and ability to do. You know I could not go round in cold weather…. I feel entirely uncertain, and, as the Yankees say, ‘didn’t know what to do nor to don’t. My state in regard to it may be described by the phrase ‘Kind o’ love to — hate to — wish I didn’t — want ter.’ I suppose the result will be I shall not work into their lecture system.”
In April she wrote from Mandarin: “I am painting a Magnolia grandiflora, which I will show you…. I am appalled by finding myself booked to read. But I am getting well and strong, and trust to be equal to the emergency. But I shrink from Tremont Temple, and — does not think I can fill it. On the whole I should like to begin in Boston.” And in August she said: “I am to begin in Boston in September…. It seems to me that is a little too early for Boston, isn’t it? Will there be anybody in town then? I don’t know as it’s my business, which is simply to speak my piece and take my money.”
Her first reading actually took place in Springfield, not Boston, and the next day she unexpectedly arrived at our cottage at Manchester-by- the-Sea. She had read the previous evening in a large public hall, had risen at five o’clock that morning, and found her way to us. Her next readings were given in Boston, the first, in the afternoon, at the Tremont Temple. She was conscious that her effort at Springfield had not been altogether successful, — she had not held her large audience; and she was determined to put the whole force of her nature into this afternoon reading at the Tremont Temple. She called me into her bedroom, where she stood before the mirror, with her short gray hair, which usually lay in soft curls around her brow, brushed erect and standing stiffly. “Look here, my dear,” she said; “now I am exactly like my father, Dr. Lyman Beecher, when he was going to preach,” and she held up her forefinger warningly. It was easy to see that the spirit of the old preacher was revived in her veins, and the afternoon would show something of his power. An hour later, when I sat with her in the anteroom waiting for the moment of her appearance to arrive, I could feel the power surging up within her. I knew she was armed for a good fight.
That reading was a great success. She was alive in every fibre of her being: she was to read portions of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” to men, women, and children many of whom had taken no part in the crisis which inspired it, and she determined to effect the difficult task of making them feel as well as hear. With her presence and inspiration they could not fail to understand what her words had signified to the generation that had passed through the struggle of our war. When her voice was not sufficient to make the audience hear, the people rose from their seats and crowded round her, standing gladly, that no word might be lost. It was the last leap of the flame which had burned out a great wrong. From this period, although she continued to write, she lived chiefly for several winters in the retirement of the Florida orange grove, which she always enjoyed. Her sympathy was strong with the new impetus benevolent work in cities had received, and she helped it from her “grotto” in more ways than one. Sometimes she would write soothing or inspiriting letters, as the case might demand, to individuals.
The following note, written at the time of the Boston fire in 1872, will show how alive she was to the need of that period.
“I send inclosed one hundred dollars to the fund for the Firemen. I could wish it a hundred times as much, and then it would be inadequate to express how much I honor those brave, devoted men who put their own lives between Boston and mine. No soldiers that fell in battle for our common country ever deserved of us all greater honor than the noble men whose charred and blackened remains have been borne from the ruins of Boston; they are worthy to be inscribed on imperishable monuments.
“I would that some such honorary memorial might commemorate their heroism.”
Meanwhile, the comfort she drew in from the beauty of nature and the calm around her seemed yearly to nourish and renew her power of existence. Questions which were difficult to others were often solved to her mind by practical observation. It amused her to hear persons agitating the question as to where they should look to supply labor for the South. “Why,” she remarked once, “there was a negro, one of those fearfully hot days in the spring, who was digging muck from a swamp just in front of our house, and carrying it in a wheelbarrow up a steep slope, where he dumped it down, and then went back for more. He kept this up when it was so hot that we thought either one of us would die to be five minutes in the sun. We carried a thermometer to the spot where he was working, to see how great the heat was, and it rose at once to one hundred and thirty-five degrees. The man, however, kept cheerfully at his work, and when he went to his dinner sat with the other negroes out in the white sand without a bit of shade. Afterward they all lay down for a nap in the same unsheltered locality. Toward evening, when the sun was sufficiently low to enable me to go out, I went to speak to this man. ‘Martin,’ said I, ‘you’ve had a warm day’s work. How do you stand it? Why, I couldn’t endure such heat for five minutes.’ ‘Hoh! hoh! No, I s’pose you couldn’t. Ladies can’t, missus.’ ‘But, Martin, aren’t you very tired?’ ‘Bress your heart, no, missus.’ So Martin goes home to his supper, and after supper will be found dancing all the evening on the wharf near by! After this, when people talk of bringing Germans and Swedes to do such work, I am much entertained.”
Many were the pleasant descriptions of her home sent forth to tempt her friends away from the busy North. “Here is where we read books,” she said in one of her letters, written in the month of March. “Up North nobody does, — they don’t have time; so if —— will mail his book to Mandarin, I will ‘read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest.’ We are having a carnival of flowers. I hope you read my ‘Palmetto Leaves,’ for then you will see all about us…. Our home is like a martin-box…. I cannot tell you the quaint odd peace we have here in living under the oak. ‘Behold,
she dwelleth under the oak at Mamre.’ All that we want is friends, to whom we may say that solitude is sweet. We have some neighbors, however, who have made pretty places near us. Mr. Stowe keeps up a German class of three young ladies, with whom he is reading Faust for the nine hundred and ninety-ninth time, and in the evening I read aloud to a small party of the neighbors. We have made up our home as we went along, throwing out a chamber here and there, like twigs out of the old oak…. The orange blossoms have come like showers of pearl, and the yellow jessamine like golden fleeces, and the violets and the lilies, and azaleas. This is glorious, budding, blossoming spring, and we have days when merely to breathe and be is to be blessed. I love to have a day of mere existence. Life itself is a pleasure when the sun shines warm, and the lizards dart from all the shingles of the roof, and the birds sing in so many notes and tones the yard reverberates; and I sit and dream and am happy, and never want to go back North, nor do anything with the toiling, snarling world again. I do wish I could gather you both in my little nest.”
She was like her father, Dr. Lyman Beecher, in many things. The scorching fire of the brain seemed to devour its essence, and she endured, as he did before her, some years of existence when the motive power almost ceased to act. She became “like a little child,” wandering about, pleased with flowers, fresh air, the sound of a piano, or a voice singing hymns, but the busy, inspiring spirit was asleep.
Gradually she faded away, shrouded in this strange mystery, hovered over by the untiring affection of her children, sweet and tender in her decadence, but “absent.”
Complete Works of Harriet Beecher Stowe Page 969
