which, for all its defects of taste and style and construction, still has amazing power. Richard Hildreth's The Slave; or Memoirs of Archy Moore (1836) and Mrs. M. V. Victor's once popular "dime novel" Maum Guinea; or, Christmas among the Slaves (1861) no longer move. They both lack the ringing voice, the swiftness, the fullness, the humour, the authentic passion of the greater book.

It has often been pointed out that Mrs. Stowe did not mean to be sectional, that she deliberately made her chief villain a New Englander, and that she expected to be blamed less by the South than by the North, which she thought peculiarly guilty because it tolerated slavery without the excuse either of habit or of interest. Bitterly attacked by Southerners of all sorts, however, she defended herself with A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin; Presenting the Original Facts and Documents upon which the Story is Founded (1853), and then, after a triumphant visit to Europe and a removal to Andover, essayed another novel to illustrate the evil effects of slavery especially upon the whites. Dred; A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856) has had its critical partisans, but posterity has not sustained them. Grave faults of construction, slight knowledge of the scene (North Carolina), a less simple and compact story than in Uncle Tom's Cabin, and a larger share of disquisition, these weigh the book down, and most readers carry away only fragmentary memories, of Dred's thunderous eloquence, of Tom Gordon's shameless abuse of his power as master, and of Old Tiff's grotesque and beautiful fidelity.

I

After Dred Mrs. Stowe wrote no more anti-slavery novels, although during the Civil War she sent to the women of England an open letter reminding them that they, so many of whom now sympathized with the defenders of slavery, had less than ten years ago hailed Uncle Tom's Cabin as a mighty stroke for justice and freedom. A considerable part of her later life (she died I July, 1896) was spent in Florida, where she had taken a plantation on the St. John's River for the double purpose of establishing there as a planter one of her sons who had been wounded at Gettysburg and of assisting the freedmen, about whom and their relation to the former masters she had more * Also known as Nina Gordon from the English title.

enlightened views than were then generally current in the North. Now an international figure, she let her pen respond too facilely to the many demands made upon it: she wrote numerous didactic and religious essays and tales, particularly attentive to the follies of fashionable New York society, in which she had had little experience; she was chosen by Lady Byron to publish the most serious charges ever brought against the poet. In another department of her work, however, Mrs. Stowe stood on surer ground, and her novels of New England life-particularly The Minister's Wooing (1859), The Pearl of Orr's Island (1862), Oldtown Folks (1869), Poganuc People (1878)—cannot go unmentioned.

Weak in structure and sentimental she remained. Her heroines wrestle with problems of conscience happily alien to all but a few New England and Nonconformist British bosoms; her bold seducers, like Ellery Davenport in Oldtown Folks and Aaron Burr in The Minister's Wooing, are villains to frighten schoolgirls; she writes always as from the pulpit, or at least the parsonage. But where no abstract idea governs her she can be direct, accurate, and convincing. The earlier chapters of The Pearl of Orr's Island must be counted, as Whittier thought, among the purest, truest idyls of New England. It is harder now to agree with Lowell in placing The Minister's Wooing first among her novels, and yet no other imaginative treatment so well sets forth the strange, dusky old Puritan world of the later eighteenth century, when Newport was the centre at once of Hopkinsian divinity and the African slave trade. Mrs. Stowe wisely did not put on the airs of an historical romancer but wrote like a contemporary of the earlier Newport with an added flavour from her own youthful recollections. This flavour was indispensable to her. When her memory of the New England she had known in her girlhood and had loved so truly that Cotton Mather's Magnalia had seemed "wonderful stories . . . that made me feel the very ground I trod on to be consecrated by some special dealing of God's providence," when this memory worked freely and humorously upon materials which it was enough merely to remember and set down, she was at her later best. These conditions she most fully realized in Poganuc People, crisp, sweet, spare (for

her), never quite sufficiently praised, and in Oldtown Folks, like the other a series of sketches rather than a novel, but-perhaps all the more because of that still outstanding, for fidelity and point, among the innumerable stories dealing with New England.

CHAPTER VI

Lincoln

HE man of many minds who upon the surface, at least, is variable is not thought of ordinarily as a great leader.

TH

And yet in some of the greatest of men a surface variableness has not in the long run prevented a consummate achievement. There is Cæsar, to be pondered upon by all who consider such men second rate. And in American history, there is Lincoln. His life as man of action brings this out well enough. He wavered during many years, hesitating between politics and law, not drivingly conscious of his main bent. Still more clearly is this brought out by his personal life and by those literary and mystical phases that are linked so intimately with the personal. The changes of his mood are at times bewildering. He is often like a wayfarer passing through successive strata of light and darkness, the existence of which does not seem to be explained by circumstance, of whose causes neither he nor his observers have explanation. Did they arise from obscure powers within? Were they the reaction of an ultra-sensitive nature to things without that most people were not able to perceive? He speaks of himself in one of his letters as superstitious. Should the word give us a hint? Whatever theory of him shall eventually prevail, it is sure to rest on this fact: he was a shrouded and a mysterious character, a man apart, intensely reticent, very little of whose inner life has been opened to the world.

It is significant that he was not precocious. The touching picture, preserved in several memories-the lonely, illiterate boy with a passion for reading, indulging the passion at night by a cabin fire-this picture has nothing of early cleverness. Of the qualities that appear after his advent, it is the moral not the mental ones that were clearly foreshadowed in his youth. The

simplicity, the kindliness, the courage, the moderation of the matured man have their evident beginnings in the boy. His purely mental characteristics appeared so gradually, so unostentatiously, that his neighbours did not note their coming. Today, seen in the perspective of his career, their approach is more discernible. To one who goes carefully through the twelve volumes of the chronological edition of Lincoln's writings, though the transition from characterlessness to individuality is nowhere sudden, the consciousness of a steady progress in mental power, of a subtle evolution of the literary sense, is unmistakable. The revelation gains in celerity as one proceeds. But there is no sunburst, no sudden change of direction. And yet, for all the equivocality of the early years, one ends by wondering why the process has seemed vague. It is like that type of play whose secret is not disclosed until just before the curtain but which, once disclosed, brings all preceding it into harmony.

So of the literary Lincoln. Looking back from the few great performances of his fruition, why did we not earlier foresee them? There are gleams all along that now strike us as the careless hints of a great unseen power that was approaching. But why-considering the greatness of the final achievementwere they no more than gleams?

Here is an original literary artist who never did any deliberate literary work, who enriched English style in spite of himself under pressure of circumstances. His style is but the flexibility with which his expression follows the movements of a peculiar mind. And as the mind slowly unfolds, becomes overcast, recedes, advances, so, in the main, does the style. The usual symptoms of the literary impulse are all to seek. He is wholly preoccupied with the thing behind the style. Again the idea of a nature shrouded, withdrawn, that dwells within, that emerges mysteriously. His youth, indeed, has a scattered, unemphatic intimation of something else. What might be called the juvenilia of this inscrutable mind include some attempts at verse. They have no literary value. More significant than his own attempts is the fact that verse early laid a strong hold upon him. Years later, when the period of his juvenilia may be counted in the past, as late as 1846, in denying the authorship of a newspaper poem he added: "I would give all I am