al power of the story, and
its power to move the world, the faith of Uncle Tom in the Bible.
This appeal to the emotion of millions of readers cannot, however, be
overlooked. Many regard the book as effective in regions remote from our
perplexities by reason of this grace. When the work was translated into
Siamese, the perusal of it by one of the ladies of the court induced her
to liberate all her slaves, men, women, and children, one hundred and
thirty in all. "Hidden Perfume," for that was the English equivalent of
her name, said she was wishful to be good like Harriet Beecher Stowe.
And as to the standpoint of Uncle Tom and the Bible, nothing more
significant can be cited than this passage from one of the latest
writings of Heinrich Heine:--

"The reawakening of my religious feelings I owe to that holy book the
Bible. Astonishing that after I have whirled about all my life over all
the dance-floors of philosophy, and yielded myself to all the orgies of
the intellect, and paid my addresses to all possible systems, without
satisfaction like Messalina after a licentious night, I now find myself
on the same standpoint where poor Uncle Tom stands,--on that of the
Bible! I kneel down by my black brother in the same prayer! What a
humiliation! With all my science I have come no further than the poor
ignorant negro who has scarce learned to spell. Poor Tom, indeed, seems
to have seen deeper things in the holy book than I.... Tom, perhaps,
understands them better than I, because more flogging occurs in
them; that is to say, those ceaseless blows of the whip which have
aesthetically disgusted me in reading the Gospels and the Acts. But a
poor negro slave reads with his back, and understands better than we
do. But I, who used to make citations from Homer, now begin to quote the
Bible as Uncle Tom does."

The one indispensable requisite of a great work of imaginative fiction
is its universality, its conception and construction so that it will
appeal to universal human nature in all races and situations and
climates. Uncle Tom's Cabin does that. Considering certain artistic
deficiencies, which the French writers perceived, we might say that it
was the timeliness of its theme that gave it currency in England and
America. But that argument falls before the world-wide interest in it
as a mere story, in so many languages, by races unaffected by our own
relation to slavery.

It was the opinion of James Russell Lowell that the anti-