the other of my two Barnumite scenic memories, my
having anciently admired her as the Eliza of Uncle Tom's Cabin, her
swelling bust encased in a neat cotton gown and her flight across the
ice-blocks of the Ohio, if I rightly remember the perilous stream,
intrepidly and gracefully performed. We lived and moved at that time,
with great intensity, in Mrs. Stowe's novel--which, recalling my prompt
and charmed acquaintance with it, I should perhaps substitute for The
Initials, earlier mentioned here, as my first experiment in grown-up
fiction. There was, however, I think, for that triumphant work no
classified condition; it was for no sort of reader as distinct from any
other sort, save indeed for Northern as differing from Southern: it knew
the large felicity of gathering in alike the small and the simple and
the big and the wise, and had above all the extraordinary fortune of
finding itself, for an immense number of people, much less a book than a
state of vision, of feeling and of consciousness, in which they didn't
sit and read and appraise and pass the time, but walked and talked and
laughed and cried and, in a manner of which Mrs. Stowe was the
irresistible cause, generally conducted themselves. Appreciation and
judgment, the whole impression, were thus an effect for which there had
been no process--any process so related having in other cases _had_ to
be at some point or other critical; nothing in the guise of a written
book, therefore, a book printed, published, sold, bought and "noticed,"
probably ever reached its mark, the mark of exciting interest, without
having at least groped for that goal _as_ a book or by the exposure of
some literary side. Letters, here, languished unconscious, and Uncle
Tom, instead of making even one of the cheap short cuts through the
medium in which books breathe, even as fishes in water, went gaily
roundabout it altogether, as if a fish, a wonderful "leaping" fish, had
simply flown through the air. This feat accomplished, the surprising
creature could naturally fly anywhere, and one of the first things it
did was thus to flutter down on every stage, literally without
exception, in America and Europe. If the amount of life represented in
such a work is measurable by the ease with which representation is taken
up and carried further, carried even violently furthest, the fate of
Mrs. Stowe's picture was conclusive: it simply sat down wherever it
lighted and made itself, so to speak, at home;