428
JOHN HENRY RALEIGH
he brings
in
people like Emily Dickinson, Tuckennan, and Pound, not
to
mention Jefferson's architecture and Audubon's plates and some prose of
Henry James, none of which had much to do with the War experience in
any direct sense. It is all, of course, interesting, but it
is
also desultory.
With the novel the quality goes up considerably, although never
reaching authentic greatness. But until this book anyway much of it
has been under-rated, generally speaking, especially people like Cable
and Tourgee. Even if flawed artistically, these books are fascinating
as sociology. It is true that most all of them have some fundamental
defect. Even De Forest, after Mrs. Stowe one of the best, suffers from
a "fundamental non-radiation," as Mr. Wilson says. And of course
underneath these writers is a vast flat-land containing scores of "ole"
plantations among the roses
in
the moonlight. One wonders why Mr.
Wilson left out Harold Frederic's
The Copperhead,
which he has writ–
ten about before, and only incidentally brings in James'
The Bostonians
whose male protaganist is indubitably and admirably a post Civil War
Southern gentleman. The addition of these two would certainly have
strengthened the
claim
for the merit of Civil War
fiction.~
But if the literature generally constantly tended to be tepid, life
was not, nor were the people who lived it, nor were the written docu–
ments that they produced and the prose which they wrote, nor are the
reconstructions of their lives by Mr. Wilson, whose moving account
of the lives of Calvin and Harriet Beecher Stowe is better than any–
thing that Thomas Nelson Page or Albion Tourgee ever wrote. For
insight into character it certainly surpasses De Forest. Here, in the
life of the Stowes, amidst constant and terrible religious pressures,
continuous labor, enforced separations, years of constant poverty, all
presided over by a tormented honesty and a passionate love that can
never
be
divorced from a sense of righteousness, was the real life of
the times, Northern ex-Calvinist variety. Some of its many qualities can
be given by sample extracts from Calvin Stowe's letters to his wife:
Let me have a competent salary, let me be permitted to study
and teach and lecture every day, let me have my dear little children
around me every evening, and let me sleep in my own bed with my
good wife every night, and Prince Afbert himself is not so happy a
man as I.
But (same letter):
No man can love and respect his wife more than I do mine. Yet
we are not as happy as we might be. I have many faults, and you
have some failings, ....
