OLD-TOWN FOLKS.* THE only objection we have to make to
this novel is that we seem to have read it before. Taken by itself, it is a very good novel indeed, full to repletion of delicate sketches of very original cha- racters, and clever bite of dialogue, and vivid descriptions of natural scenery. Sam Lawson, the loose-brained Yankee, or Sam Slick with a slight crack in his head, who can do almost anything, but never does it, except when doing it happens to be a kind of play ; who cannot work steadily, because, as he says, if he does, his "mind kind o' gives out, ye see ;" who is perpetually talking, but never to consecutive purpose, who is deeply pious in the Puritan way, but permanently puzzled by his own creed, and is kind to all except to his immediate belongings, is, as far as we know, absolutely original in fiction, a being who could be found only in New England, and be sketched only by Mrs. Beecher Stowe ; and even she, keen as her insight into him is, has to expend too much paint, too many words to make his portrait complete. He bores us until we lose sight of the genuine humour displayed in creating such a figure, and are half ungrateful for the author's pains. The old grand- mother, too, with her cakes and her theology, her Calvinistic opinions and kindly ways,—Mrs. Poyser turned Puritan ; Aunt Lois, with her clear intellect and harsh temper, her acid utter- ances and motherly heart, and tendency to ripen as she grew old, till in old age she would be a peach of a woman ; Miss Asphyxia Smith, an American Sally Brass, with religious belief superadded ; the Deacon, who, with deep piety, had such a kindliness that he never would "happen to see" small offences requiring discipline ; the stately minister of the old school, who would not preach the Gospel according to Edwards, and whose wife was always called Lady Lothrop ; and above all, Miss Mehitable, are all of the first order of excellence in their kind. It would, for instance, be hard to improve on this :—
"Singularly plain as she [Miss Mehitable] was in person, old, withered, and poor, she yet commanded respect, and even rever- ence, through the whole of a wide circle of acquaintance ; for she was well known to some of the most considerable families in Boston, with whom, by her mother's side, she was connected. The interest in her was somewhat like that in old lace, old china, and old Cashmere shawls ; which, though often excessively un- comely, and looking in the eyes of uninterested people like mere rub- bish, are held by connoisseurs to be beyond all price. Miss Mehitable herself had great pride of character, in the sense in which pride is an innocent weakness, if not a species of virtue. She had an innate sense that she belonged to a good family,—a perfectly quiet conviction that she was a Bradford by her mother's side, and a Rossiter by her father's aide, come what might in this world. She was too well versed in the duties of good blood not to be always polite and considerate to the last degree to all well-meaning common people, for she felt the noblesse oblige as much as if she had been a duchess. And, for that matter, in the circles of Oldtown everything that Miss Mehitable did and said had a certain weight, quite apart from that of her really fine mental powers. It was the weight of past generations, of the whole colony of Massachu- setts; all the sermons of five generations of ministers were in it, which to a God-fearing community is a great deal. But in her quaint, uncomely body was lodged, not only a most active and even masculine mind, but a heart capable of those passionate extremes of devotion which belong to the purely feminine side of woman. She was capable of a romantic excess of affection, of an extravagance of hero-worship, which, had she been personally beautiful, might perhaps have made her the heroine of some poem of the heart. It was among the quietly accepted sorrows of her life, that for her no such romance was possible. Men always admired her as they admired other men, and talked to her as they talked with each other. Many, during the course of her life, had formed friendships with her, which were mere relations of comradeship, but which never touched the inner sphere of the heart. That heart, so warm, so tender, and so true, she kept, with a sort of conscious shame, hidden far behind the intrenchments of her intellect. With an instinctive fear of ridicule she scarcely ever spoke a tender word, and generally veiled a soft emotion under some quaint phrase of drollery. She seemed for ever to feel the strange contrast between the burning romantic heart and the dry and withered exterior."
All these people would interest us strongly, but that we seem to have known them all so well, or rather to be perpetually reminded by them of some other and slightly better described character, heard of in some former stage of existence. Dr. Lothrop, for instance, is only the hero of the Minister's Wooing with everything
* Old-Town Foal. By trarr:et Beecher Stowe. In 3 vols. London: Sampson .Low, Son, and Manton. 1869.
distinctive taken out of him ; Ellery, the bad hero, is Aaron Burr over again totally unaltered,—we wonder what it is that so attracts Mrs. Stowe's gaze to the least American man who ever became prominent in America ;—Miss Ophelia, of Uncle Tom's Cabin, has just been cut up into Aunt Lois and Miss Mehitable, and so on through every character introduced. They are mere remnants, which the author, in thrifty mood, is working up, so that nothing may be wasted, and working up naturally with less than the carefulness she would bestow on new materials. We have a sense all through of something wanting, as if a great artist, in a mood unfavourable to his genius, had set to copying himself.
This impression of a twice-told tale is strengthened by the same- ness of the atmosphere Mrs. Stowe throws over all her pictures. That atmosphere is no doubt the one grand peculiarity of New England, and no doubt also Mrs. Stowe has rendered it with wonderful artistic force. No other society probably ever was completely pervaded by the Calvinistic view of Christianity, so pervaded that every institution, character, and event was influenced by the prevalent belief, till it became the atmosphere of life, with- out which nothing was intelligible, nothing hard, nothing soft, no light, no darkness; and it is a marvellous effort of skill to make us feel its presence as merely on-lookers, more keenly than those who lived among it. But still the atmosphere is unnatural, and when repeated in many pictures always with precisely the same effect comes at last to weary us, as rather an art trick than a display of the highest art. Many of the semi-religious, semi-social discus- sions are admirable, and Mrs. Stowe has exactly that kind and degree of appreciative unbelief in Calvinism which would enable her to describe it most perfectly ; but still we get tired even of the admirable when it is repeated so very often, all the more tired, perhaps, because of the outside position,—as of one sitting on a stool just outside the world, and rather wonder- ing bow the stool got there,—which it pleases the authoress to assume. This paragraph, for instance, on the poetic influence which the Old Testament exercised over the New Englanders is not only tract, but subtly true, is true, for example, of those among the modern Jews who, like these New Englanders, devoutly believe :—
"Among the many insensible forces which formed the minds of New- England children, was this constant, daily familiarity with the letter of the Bible. It was for the most part read twice a day in every family of any pretensions to respectability, and it was read as a reading-book in every common school,—in both cases without any attempt at expla- nation. Such parts as explained themselves were left to do so. Such as were beyond our knowledge were still read, and left to make what impression they would. For my part, I am impatient of the theory of those who think that nothing that is not understood makes any valuable impression on the mind of a child. I am certain that the constant contact of the Bible with my childish mind was a very great mental stimulant, as it certainly was a cause of a singular and vague pleasure. The wild, poetic parts of the prophecies, with their bold figures, vivid exclamations, and strange Oriental names and images, filled me with a quaint and solemn delight. Just as a child brought up under the shadow of the great cathedrals of the Old World, wandering into them daily, at morning, or eventide, beholding the many-coloured windows flamboyant with strange legends of saints and angels, and neither under- standing the legends, nor comprehending the architecture, is yet stilled and impressed, till the old minster grows into his growth and fashions his nature, so this wonderful old cathedral book insensibly wrought a sort of mystical poetry into the otherwise hard and sterile life of New England. Its passionate Oriental phrases, its quaint, pathetic stories, its wild, transcendent bursts of imagery, fixed an indelible mark in my imagination. Where Kedar and Tarshish and Pul and Dud, Chit Vim and the Isles, Dan and Beersheba, were, or what they were, I knew not, but they were fixed stations in my realm of cloud-land. I knew them as well as I knew ray grandmother's rocking-chair, yet the habit of hearing of them only in solemn tones, and in the readings of religions hours, gave to them a mysterious charm. I think no New-Englander, brought up under the regime established by the Puritans, could really estimate how much of himself had actually been formed by this constant face-to-face intimacy with Hebrew literature."
But we think we could piece together that paragraph from the Minister's Wooing and the Pearl of Orr's Island, and repeated as it is by one who clearly appreciates without sympathizing, sees as it were without divining, who, as she says in her preface, doubts many things, believes at heart very few things, it has on our minds the effect of a very clever sentence, very often repeated, as if the speaker had a mental pride in it because he felt he had not the mental power to go deeper. The next extraction is very clever, and is, not that we remember, a replica ; but it is not original, and when studied is exceedingly shallow. It is a speech by Ellery (Aaron Burr) objecting to be converted, and is about as fair a proof of predestination to sin as the predominance of fair children in Norway is a proof that mankind was predestinated to be blonde :— " 'I should have to take up the cross and all that, and I don't want to, and don't mean to ; and as to all these pleasant, comfortable churches, where a fellow can get to heaven without it, I have the misfortune of
not being able to believe in them ; so there you see precisely my eitua- tion.'—' These horrid old Calvinistic doctrines,' said Miss Debby, are the ruin of children.'—' My dear, they are all in the Thirty-Nine Articles as strong as in the Cambridge platform, and all the other plat- forms, for the good reason that John Calvin himself had the overlooking of them. And, what is worse, there is an abominable sight of truth in them. Nature herself is a high Calvinist, old jade ! and there never was a man of energy enough to feel the force of the world he deals with that wasn't a predestinarian, from the time of the Greek Tragedians down to the time of Oliver Cromwell, and ever since. The hardest doctrines are the things that a fellow sees with his own eyes going on in the world around him. If you had been in England, as I have, where the true Church prevails, you'd see that pretty much the whole of the lower classes there are predestinated to be conceived and born in sin, and shapen in iniquity ; and come into the world in such circum- stances that to expect even decent morality of them is expecting what is contrary to all reason. This is your Christian country, after eighteen hundred years' experiment of Christianity. The elect, by whom I mean the bishops and clergy and upper classes, have attained to a position in which a decent and religious life is practicable, and where there is leisure from the claims of the body to attend to those of the soul. These, however, to a large extent are smothering in their own fat, or, as your service to-day had it, "Their heart is fat as brawn ;" and so they don't, to any great extent, make their calling and election sure. Then, as for heathen countries, they are a peg below those of Chris- tianity. Taking the mass of human beings in the world at this hour, they are in such circumstances that, so far from its being reasonable to expect the morals of Christianity of them, they are not within sight of ordinary human decencies. Talk of purity of heart to a Malay or Hottentot! Why, the doctrine of a clean shirt is an uncomprehended mystery to more than half the human race at this moment. That's what I call visible election and reprobation, get rid of it as we may or
There are a hundred such speeches in the book, all amusing to those who have not read much better translations of them by Mrs. Stowe herself, and all pervaded by a certain want of depth which impairs the pleasure they might give.
We have said nothing of the story, on purpose ; Mrs. Beecher Stowe's novels are not to be judged by their stories, nor are they read for them_ Sometimes, as in the Minister's Wooing, they are extraordinarily good and simple ; sometimes, as in the Pearl of Orr's Island, they are very bad ; and occasionally, as in Old-Town Folks, they are neither good nor bad, but poor with the poorness of the Minerva Press. That does not matter at all, but what does matter is that the world should lose the aid of a woman of high genius because she admires her early work in oils so much that she is perpetually tempted to reproduce it in water-colours. That is waste, and so is the determined effort Mrs. Stowe has now twice made to explain Aaron Burr, and in explaining, to explain how a man may be a half-good profligate. We doubt if it is given to any woman to paint that character perfectly, though Currer Bell so nearly succeeded; but it certainly is not given to Mrs. Stowe. Her Aaron, Burr is about as likely a person to revolutionize the States, or to conceive the idea of so doing, as any handsome lad at a club who lisps Rochefoucauld and Voltaire, while he
believes in everybody he sees, and is awed by every churchyard he goes through.
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