BOOKS OF THE DAY
he Author of Uncle Tom's Cabin
sader in Crinoline. The Life of _Harriet Beecher Stowe. By Forrest Wilson. (Hutchinson. as.)
MS is a fascinating book. It is, in a sense, too long. The setting a background is sketched too generously ; and the person who moves against the background is too much accompanied by the whole cl the Beecher family to which she belonged. At times, and especially' ' the first half, the book seems to be a biography of the Beechers ther than of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Bin in another, and perhaps truer, sense there is nothing in the book that can be spared. The g—and especially the setting in Cincinnati, where Harriet lived 1832 to 1850, and where she amassed the experience that went o Uncle Tom's Cabin—is, after all, necessary. The records of Beecher family, whether they are necessary or no, are profoundly teresting. The author deserves to be congratulated warmly on his k. If his style has sometimes a glittering snappiness, and if he etimes dawdles along, he has produced a book which deserves live. It is a lively and stirring record of a stirring epoch in erican life—the epoch that preceded and followed the Civil War. It is informed by a just and industrious scholarship : the author s sought his material in libraries all over the United States, from California to Florida and from Cincinnati to Boston. Above all, gr. Forrest Wilson's book shows a just and balanced judgement. There is no denigration and no " debunking " ; but there is none of e mere laudation which is the pitfall of the ordinary biographer. 'et Beecher Stowe emerges with an amazing precision in all her amic energy and with all her defects and qualities. Crusader in 'incline is a biography to be remembered and cherished.
Harriet Beecher Stowe was an astonishing person. She was almost to exact contemporary of Florence Nightingale and had almost as bog a life: she died in 1896 at the age of 85 and Florence Nightin- le in I9I0 at the age of 90. They were both crusaders and they were both possessed by a driving spirit. There is no record that they ever met: Harriet never collected Miss Nightingale as she llected so many other English celebrities—George Eliot, Ruskin Lady Byron. But how fascinating it would be to write an ginary conversation between the two, in the manner of Landor- 'th the spirit of Lytton Strachey (who wrote a memorable essay Miss Nightingale) hovering ironically in the background! What d Miss Nightingale have said and what would have been the stes of Mrs. Beecher Stowe?
There is a difference between the two, even if they were both crusaders in crinolines." Florence Nightingale was a genuine sader, consumed by a devouring passion. It may almost be said- haps not altogether justly and yet without serious injustice—that . Beecher Stowe " finked " into her crusade against negro slavery. had a natural passion for writing: her passion carried her into ling a novel based on her experiences in Cincinnati ; and, lo and old! when the book appeared it became (perhaps to her astonish- t) a match flung into a powder magazine. Popular feeling seized n it and made it a signal for explosion: it spread like a flame ough the States, and it spread like a flame through England. The band of the authoress sent copies to Dickens Macaulay, Carlyle the- Prince Consort "Palmerston, who had not read a novel thirty years, read it through from cover to cover three times— Et only for the story, but for the statesmanship of it ' " and when ▪ s. Stowe came to England she was lionised everywhere. Her el went through the world: Heine read it in German on his -bed in Paris ; it was the record of the century. Naturally, the ress felt that she had been inspired. "Not I," she said, "wrote all came before me in visions." It might be, as Mr. Forrest n says, "superficially far from being a great work of art," with two distinct and only vaguely connected stories, with its senti- tality, its affected stifle, and its overloaded morality and preach- But as he also says, and says justly, "it was great because it the essential simplicity of naive art." It is sad to record that just as Mrs. Beecher Stowe had almost entally run into a crusade and a furore of success in 1850, so, again almost accidentally, she ran about 1870 into a scandal and $icell of unpopularity. She had met Lady Byron in England. Byron had told stories, not very savoury, about Lord Byron. Stowe was impelled—by a romantic feeling that it was her duty 1-adY Byron (now dead), and perhaps also by some passion for
riclame—to publish the stories. The result was a catastrophe. What was meant for another crusade proved only to be a calamity. Her judgement had failed. But judgement was not her gift. She lived on her nerves and her instincts.
There are so many riches in Crusader in Crinoline that it may justly be called a great conversation piece. So many figures appear— Henry Ward Beecher, Longfellow, Russell Lowell, Ruskin, Queen Victoria—and the light falls on them all. It is a pity that the exigencies of war have led to the printing of the book on a paper and in a style which hardly do it justice. ERNEST BARKER.
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