We had the advantage of reading that truly
extraordinary book for the first time in Paris, long after the whirl
of excitement produced by its publication had subsided, in the
seclusion of distance, and with a judgment unbiased by those political
sympathies which it is impossible, perhaps unwise, to avoid at home.
We felt then, and we believe now, that the secret of Mrs. Stowe's
power lay in that same genius by which the great successes in creative
literature have always been achieved,--the genius that instinctively
goes right to the organic elements of human nature, whether under a
white skin or a black, and which disregards as trivial the
conventional and factitious notions which make so large a part both of
our thinking and feeling. Works of imagination written with an aim to
immediate impression are commonly ephemeral, like Miss Martineau's
'Tales,' and Elliott's 'Corn-law Rhymes;' but the creative faculty of
Mrs. Stowe, like that of Cervantes in 'Don Quixote' and of Fielding in
'Joseph Andrews,' overpowered the narrow specialty of her design, and
expanded a local and temporary theme with the cosmopolitanism of
genius.
"It is a proverb that 'There is a great deal of human nature in men,'
but it is equally and sadly true that there is amazingly little of it
in books. Fielding is the only English novelist who deals with life in
its broadest sense. Thackeray, his disciple and congener, and Dickens,
the congener of Smollett, do not so much treat of life as of the
strata of society; the one studying nature from the club-room window,
the other from the reporters' box in the police court.
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