USA > Massachusetts > Berkshire County > Stockbridge > Stockbridge, 1739-1939; a chronicle > Part 17
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They were not more surprised than Catherine Sedgwick herself when, in 1822, A New England Tale turned out to be a best seller, and she found herself hailed as one of the coming fiction writers in America. Redwood, Hope Leslie, Clarence, and The Linwoods followed. Their success was immediate. "Her works were admired," said Bryant, "and added to our household libraries, without asking, as had often been the case in regard to other American authors, permission from the citizens of Great Britain." Judge Theodore's careless, extravagant little girl, eating nuts and sausages between the sessions of morning and afternoon school, feeding her passionate love of reading upon Rollin's Ancient History, had gone away to boarding school, seen Boston and New York, had even traveled as far as Montreal, and come back to write about Stockbridge. The backwoods of America had found a voice, and New England characters like Debby Lenox and Crazy Bet were promoted from life into literature.
Catherine was one of the buffer generation who stood between the rigidities of her father's world and the full sweep of nineteenth-century thought. Bryant speaks of her works as showing "the old Puritan spirit, tempered somewhat by the gentler medium through which it has passed." Like himself, Catherine belonged to the first blooming of Ameri- can literature and, like him, her petals turned towards the sun of New York, rather than the bleak dawn of Boston. There Washington Irving had already achieved the position of gentleman-of-letters and James Fenimore Cooper was hailed as the American Scott.
Catherine resented it when Basil Hall undertook to tell her how to write, for a new confidence had been bred of America's independence. Yet she could not fail to be pleased by the accolade of British praise. "She is the most popular writer, we believe, in the United States. Her works have warmed the national heart," said The Westminster Review.
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Europeans, who looked at "the prosaic types of the founders of the Republic and considered them the only types that America would ever produce," welcomed this "first utterance of a national mind." An American woman whose education sufficed to give her something in common with Europeans was writing about her own country in language they could understand.
It is difficult for us in the twentieth century to separate what those early reviewers considered the fresh and lively treatment of scenes in actual life from the stock-in-trade of romanticism, daggers, hairbreadth escapes and spotless virtue, which Catherine had at her command. Stuffed now away into attics, crowded on top shelves, is her sentimentality, redolent of pinks and lavender. Vanished is the elevating moral tone through which her heroines walked their sinless way. The scene in Hope Leslie, laid upon Laurel Hill, where the Indian maid, Magawisca, shields her lover from a violent death, no longer moves us to tears as so many of her scenes did the hardened Mr. Wesley Harper, one of the original brothers of the publishing firm.
"Mononotto (the wicked Indian) . . . brandished his hatchet over Everell's head, and cried exultingly . .. 'I will pour out this English boy's blood to the last drop, and give his flesh and bones to the dogs and wolves' .
"Everell sunk calmly on his knees, not to supplicate life, but to commend his soul to God . . . The chief raised the deadly weapon, when Magawisca, springing from the precip- itous side of the rock, screamed 'Forbear!' and interposed her arm. It was too late. The blow was levelled-force and direction given; the stroke, aimed at Everell's neck, severed his defender's arm, and left him unharmed. The lopped, quivering member dropped over the precipice. Mononotto staggered and fell senseless, and all the savages, uttering horrible yells, rushed toward the fatal spot.
" 'Stand back!' cried Magawisca. 'I have bought his life with my own. Fly, Everell-nay, speak not, but fly -- thither-to the east!' she cried, more vehemently.
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"Everell's faculties were paralyzed by a rapid succession of violent emotions. He was conscious only of a feeling of mingled gratitude and admiration for his preserver. He stood motionless, gazing on her. 'I die in vain, then?' she cried, in an accent of such despair that he was roused. He threw his arms around her, and pressed her to his heart as he would a sister that had redeemed his life with her own, and then, tearing himself from her, he disappeared."
Naturally Magawisca did not die, and recovered only to be more noble, while Everell was appropriately grateful.
At Catherine's zenith she was ranked close to Cooper, but even in her lifetime her vogue began to pass and by 1880 she was "more respected than read." As life went on ethical angles claimed more and more of her attention. She wrote little essays on the value of women learning how to cook, the undesirability of gossip, and the importance of manners. "Illiterate and vulgar language is an obvious sign of ill- breeding. Profane and indelicate terms are rather violations of morality. Cant phrases, and what is called slang, which school girls as well as college boys are addicted to, is ill-bred." Her friends rejoiced that her power over the human heart was given over to the highest and noblest ends, and good Doctor Bellows rated her as among the most efficient mission- aries in the Lord's vineyard.
Like others of her generation Catherine had revolted from a Calvinistic upbringing and found spiritual liberation in William Ellery Channing's conception of a benevolent God. A New England Tale, criticizing the older religion, "miffed the Calvinists," yet although her religion lapsed often into moralizing, it was still intensely vital and maintained, like that of Mark Hopkins, a personal urgency, minus the ancient curse.
Catherine's personality had little to do with her books. Only in her journals and letters does it come out refreshingly alive. "My author existence has always seemed something
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accidental, and independent of my inner self," she wrote. Her portraits vary from that of a middle-aged, hook-nosed schoolmarm to that of a handsome young woman, synthesiz- ing piety and romance, wrapped in a Byronic cloak, appropriate to her literary calling. Neither is recognizable in Anne Ashburner's description: "There was an absence of all stiffness about her-the long, natural curls of an unstudied headdress, the bonnet untied and as often in the hand." She had a natural independence of thought and did as she pleased, leading skating parties of boys and girls upon the meadows where the river had overflowed and letting herself be pulled about on a sled in a manner which some of the village considered most unsuitable.
Catherine moved, like the sun, within her family orbit, staying first with one brother and then another. Although she never married, the legend of forty-eight suitors amply supported her feminine charm. She demanded affection and gave it in return. "God only knows how I have loved my brothers," she wrote, "the union of principle, of taste, and of affection, I have had with them." In the midst of nieces and nephews, her life had a rounded fullness usually asso- ciated with marriage and children. One never thought of her as an old maid.
With Catherine, Stockbridge had taken another step on its career. Other literary figures heard about the lovely village where the authoress lived, and wanted to taste its charms. That was the time, too, when women were becoming emancipated and could indulge in friendships with other women, based upon more than the comparison of patterns, recipes, and children.
So it was that in the autumn of 1835 a handsome young creature, worn down with unhappy domesticity and bursting with intellectual eagerness, was deposited with Catherine for a visit by a tired and exasperated husband. After this,
Catherine Sedgwick
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Fanny Kemble Butler came often to Berkshire. "It is a region entirely inhabited by Sedgwicks and their belongings," she wrote, and made friends with all the family. Mrs. Basil Hall had found Catherine passable but thought her brothers awkward, country bumpkins, who took turns staring in admiration at her husband. To Fanny, however, they were refreshing after the monotony of her days at Butler Place. Later, when her marriage had ended in divorce, she bought a house in Lenox. Here, by her dramatic genius and the amplitude of her personality, she triumphed over the separation from her children which was the tragedy of her life.
The informality of Berkshire enchanted her. Character- istically she flung herself into elaborate descriptions of the countryside, which were becoming the fashion. "I look at it [a sketch of the Stockbridge Bowl] very often with yearning . for the splendid, rosy sunsets over the dark blue .
mountain tops, and for the clear and lovely expanse of the waters reflecting both, above all for the wild white-faced streams that come leaping down the steep stairways of the hills." In Italy, she thought with longing of Berkshire solitudes, where she could ride for hours without seeing anyone. Man, however, was still untutored. "The ugly, mean, matter-of-fact farm houses or white-washed, stiff, staring villages" could not compare with the picturesque houses of the Italian peasants.
Fanny invested daily life with theatrical overtones. One day, getting out of her carriage, she turned to the man who was driving and announced in her most dramatic manner: "You have been driving with Fanny Kemble." "Madam," was the quick Yankee answer, "you have rid with John Smith." Her outspoken frankness shocked many people. When she gave a Shakespeare reading in Stockbridge, shades of the Society for the Preservation of Christian Morals
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stalked abroad. Word got about that she was going to read The Merry Wives of Windsor. Not since Mr. Fisk had propriety been so offended. Something of his spirit, too, underwent a reincarnation in Fanny's words as she came forward without waiting to be introduced and began: "Ladies and gentlemen, I have been met in my robing room by a committee of your town and they have requested me not to read The Merry Wives of Windsor. Ladies and gentle- men, I have been met in my robing room by the clergymen of your town and they have requested me not to read The Merry Wives of Windsor. Ladies and gentlemen, I have been met in my robing room by the school teachers of your town and they have requested me not to read The Merry Wives of Windsor. Ladies and gentlemen, I now take pleasure in reading to you-The Merry Wives of Windsor."
Shortly after Fanny's first visit, another celebrated English woman came up to see Catherine. Ear trumpet in hand, Miss Harriet Martineau arrived to take notes on the New England scene. Stockbridge rose to the occasion and "Lafayetted" her, putting that jaundiced but intrepid devotee of causes into a lenient frame of mind, so that when her turn came to be taken to the Agricultural Fair she shared American amusement over the supercilious Basil. When offered a "piece" of pie, for instance, he had answered that "bit" was the correct expression.
Never before had Miss Martineau been the cause of such a jubilee. She liked being given roses by the village children. In fact, she liked Stockbridge so much that she came to visit once more, boarding on the top of the Hill for the sum of two dollars a week. From her window, she watched the people going to the red-brick church on the village green below. Black specks would gather from every side, disappear and, at a given moment, emerge again like ants. Houses and
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trees were planted on a carpet of green, which stretched from the bottom of the Hill to her very doorstep.
Miss Martineau breakfasted every morning at half-past seven upon "excellent" bread, potatoes, hung beef, eggs, and strong tea; but in the matter of the bread, her good humor must have run away with her for we have Fanny Kemble's authority that there was no good bread in Berkshire county. Fanny maintained that both Catherine and her brother Charles were martyrs to dyspepsia on this account, and Fanny sent a recipe for making "effervescing bread" to Catherine.
Harriet loved to walk, and found, like Anne Ashburner, that Americans did not. She rambled about, hunted up marsh flowers, and even tramped to Lenox. Arm in arm with her friend Catherine she walked beside the "sweet Housa- tonic." Although bluestockings, they were also women and must have discussed their friends. Catherine was all enthusiasm about Fanny Kemble, whom she considered "a captivating creature, steeped to the very lips in genius." Harriet could not agree: "There was a green-room cast of mind about all the Kembles." Catherine thought Pierce Butler rigid and exacting while in Harriet's opinion, Fanny had "sported so perversely with other people's peace that her notorious misfortunes were self-inflicted."
As the two friends continued their walk, there was always literature to be discussed, if they kept safely to the subject of Harriet's works, Devotional Exercises and Addresses and Illustrations of Political Economy, since Harriet thought the less said about Catherine's novels the better. There was the great question of slavery, too, which occupied everyone's mind. Catherine and her family were extremely timid about expressing their feelings on this subject, her friend reproached her, adding that it was an American trait. She herself did not mind being socially ostracized for openly espousing the Abolitionist cause. Now it was Catherine's
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turn to disagree. Why, one of her own novels had been banned in the South for the mere mention of slavery. With so many states hypersensitive upon the subject, the Abo- litionists were simply making trouble and secession might be the result.
The intransigeant Harriet was nothing if not obstinate. "A human decree which contravenes the laws of nature must give way," she declaimed, "when the two are brought into conflict." The probable outcome of the matter, as she saw it, would be the dissolution of the Union. The friends became more and more edgy as they walked by the river bank for Harriet had not reckoned upon the patriotism of Daniel Webster's generation. "The dissolution of the Union!" cried the gentle Catherine, turning suddenly fierce and snatching her arm away. "The Union is sacred and must be preserved at all costs."
They were an ill-assorted pair, the angular English woman and the softer American, and their friendship did not long survive. Harriet considered Catherine addicted to flattery, like others of her race, and did not hesitate to tell her so, pointing out that when she opened her letters she found only praise of herself, instead of what she really wanted to hear. Catherine's feelings were hurt and she considered her literary lioness inclined to be "rash and rough." Now, a few English violets on the bank beside the Sedgwick house, a present to Catherine, are all that is left in Stockbridge of Miss Harriet Martineau.
But other feminine friendships sprang up in her place. Mrs. Anna Jameson, the well-known art critic, fitted into the picture admirably. Like Harriet, she was serious; like Fanny, unhappily married. Then came Frederika Bremer, the Swedish novelist and believer in women's rights; Lucy Stone, the Abolitionist, who spoke in Stockbridge; and Sara Parton, alias Fanny Fern, who visited there. Fanny was
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popular as the author of several works, among them Fern- leaves from Fanny's Portfolio and Little Ferns for Fanny's Little Friends. So, too, came her brother, N. P. Willis, handsome and foppishly dressed, author of Pencillings by the Way and Loiterings of Travel, of whom Oliver Wendell Holmes had said that he was "the remembrance of the Conte D'Orsay and the anticipation of Oscar Wilde."
Now literature had come to the village it was complicating the daily routine of life. Young Theodore Sedgwick had inherited his father's house and his tradition of hospitality. His wife, Susan Ridley, followed in Pamela's footsteps and superintended the curing of hams, the making of soap and training of servants, and was also the author of a brace of uplifting volumes for the young. Her abilities were more social than literary, however, and she boasted the only parlor bell in the village. "I went by invitation to a party at Mrs. Susan's," wrote Harry Hopkins, "who presided with the dignity and the grace of a duchess,-it makes a fellow feel elegant to be where she is." Of a Sunday evening, sweet meats and cream, apples, almonds, and wine would be passed around and Anne Ashburner, when she came to call, always wondered whom she would find.
In the first place there were likely to be a good many of the family about, giving rise to the complaint of the young New York society man, Mr. Devereux Barker: "For the first ten days I was here I was out all the time at evening parties, picnics, expeditions to the ice glen, and all sorts of things. I was charmed for a while, but at last, when I was driving home of an evening, it came to seem to me that the Katydids and the frogs and the tree-toads had but one song and that was "Sedg-wick, Sedg-wick, Sedg-wick!" Since then I have kept to the house, and the most seductive invitations failed to lure me from it."
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The Judge had left his family comfortably off, and under the shelter provided by his broad shoulders, they had been reared in an atmosphere as nearly resembling leisure as could be found in that part of the country. When they grew up, they displayed a propensity either to come back to Stock- bridge if they went away or else never to go away at all. Theodore had given up his law practice in Albany on account of poor health and led the life of a country gentleman. Harry and Robert came home for summer vacations. Charles, the youngest, who never thought himself as clever as his brothers, stayed in Lenox and was busy doing everything that no one else had time for. When nothing practical offered, letters, displaying a lambent quality of charm and humor, expressed his overflowing family love. His wife kept a boarding school for young ladies in Lenox and found time to write advice to the young on the side, as well as novels-diluted editions of Catherine's.
The talk which Anne Ashburner heard on a Sunday even- ing, voiced the liberalism in politics corresponding to the unitarianism in religion which flourished in spirits freed from the narrow tenets of an earlier day. The extravagant lack of national confidence displayed by the Federalists had given way to an almost complacent satisfaction in the United States. Theodore had become an ardent Democrat, edited A Collection of the Political Writings of William Leggett, the radical journalist, and supported the movement for liberal education sponsored by Horace Mann. Americans, proud of their own institutions, were anxious to help other democ- racies whenever they could. Harry and Robert supported the Greek government in its case against two New York com- panies; their cousin, Senator Henry Dwight, in Washington defended Greek rights in the matter of neutral shipping while young Timothy Field went out to fight for the Greek cause.
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Anne never felt as homesick at the Sedgwicks as she did everywhere else; nor did their world seem so different from that she had left behind. She could talk over the latest Waverley with Catherine, or an article in The Westminster Review. Here, too, she would find familiar town figures: Judge Byington, a well-rounded gentleman, who enjoyed a distinguished reputation on the bench yet could discuss with her father peaches and apple trees as well as books; or William Pitt Palmer, the young poet, who made the little red schoolhouse famous by The Smack in School, and who used to tell of how as a boy he had walked all the way to Albany to see General Lafayette. There, too, would be other village characters, the storekeeper, the tailor; and in 1837, like birds of bright if battered plumage, a group of Italian patriots, among them Castillia, Confalonieri, Foresti and Albinola, who had been released from the horrors of an Austrian dungeon. The historian, Sismondi, had given them letters to Catherine and, her warm heart touched by their sad faces, she had bustled about and asked her friends to take Italian lessons. The foreigners were so gentle and unassuming that it was easy to be nice to them and later on Albinola, who had prospered in New York, gave Stockbridge a fountain, in memory of the peace and hospitality he had found there.
Anne might also have seen the poet William Cullen Bryant, who was Harry's particular friend. Bryant also had revolted from a narrow Federalist upbringing and as a journalist in New York his liberal opinions were gaining substantial recognition. Yet, despite the luster of his prose career, he would always remain the country poet whom Berkshire hills and streams had fashioned for their own. Like others of his generation, Bryant made the nineteenth- century transition between the old religious autocracy of Jonathan Edwards and the modern uplift note. At the time
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that Albert Hopkins was still troubled about the probable burning of his brother Harry's soul, little children were absorbing the new and kindly optimism of the lines:
"He who from zone to zone, Guides through the boundless sky thy certain flight, In the long way that I must tread alone, Will lead my steps aright."
Bryant had long been established as a well-known jour- nalist in New York when, in 1850, Nathaniel Hawthorne decided to come to Stockbridge "for a cheap, pleasant, and healthy residence." This he found in a small red house with a picket fence in front of it, at the northern end of the Stock- bridge Bowl. In the enthusiasm of arrival, he said he could not write with that view of the lake and mountains under his window.
Hawthorne had just written The Scarlet Letter and was on the threshold of his great fame, so that although, as usual, he longed for solitude, it was harder than ever to avoid callers. His wife thought they saw more people than they had in Salem. Fanny Kemble in particular must have been a nuisance. Dressed in queer clothes, she would invade his privacy and carry off his little Julian on a big black horse to return him again with a dramatic flourish, "Take your son, Julian the apostate!" With Catherine, Hawthorne had little in common. She belonged to an earlier generation, and the new literary effulgence in Concord, and the Brook Farm experiment, affected her as little as Berkshire affected him. Yet they would have agreed about what Catherine called the "fog" in which the Transcendentalists lived and moved, had he cared to get behind the barrage of word games, breakfast. parties and children's festivals with which she surrounded her declining years.
As always, Hawthorne arranged his life to his own liking. He took a daily walk to the Lenox post office; and although
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he worked every morning, he found hours in which to lie on his back and look at Monument Mountain, "the headless sphinx wrapped in a Persian shawl," or tell his children stories of Greek heroes until the children and the stories mingled with the countryside to be later transmuted into The Wonder-Book and Tanglewood Tales. After the fluffy sentimentality of most contemporary descriptions of the landscape, Hawthorne's meticulous observations have all the reassurance of fact. Yet he disposed of his Berkshire interlude by a few descriptions recording, as in a dry-point etching, the effect of tumbling brooks, leafless trees and clouds. During his stay, he wrote The House of the Seven Gables, a novel brewed in Salem, the sinister, crabbed New England wherein he had been formed. The open hills and lakes of Berkshire had come too late; they could afford him neither the inspira- tion they had to Bryant, nor the release they had to Fanny Kemble.
Hawthorne sent the manuscript of his novel to G. P. R. James, the English author of more than one hundred his- torical novels, who had recently come to Stockbridge and taken William Ashburner's house. James was delighted and found it difficult to take his attention off The House of the Seven Gables and concentrate upon "a packet of seventy gabbles," the themes of Mrs. Charles Sedgwick's girls, which she had sent him to review.
James was as flamboyant as Hawthorne was saturnine. Thackeray's parody of his style hardly exaggerates it. “It was upon one of those balmy evenings of November, which are known only in the valleys of Languedoc and among the mountains of Alsace, that two cavaliers might have been perceived by the naked eye threading one of the rocky and romantic gorges that skirt the mountain land between the Marne and the Garonne. The rosy tints of the declining luminary were gilding the peaks and crags."
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