Litchfield enquirer., 1859-07-07
From the Ns,o Fork Tribune. l

l From the New Fork TTibune.1
 MRs. SrowE's NEW NovEL-It has always
 seemed to us that the anti-savery element n
 the two former novels of Mrs. Stow stood in the way of a full appreciation of her remarka. ble genius, at least in her own country. It was so easy to account for the unexampled popu. larity of !" Uncle Tom," by attributing it to a cheap sympathy with sentimental philanthropy! As people began to recover from the first en- chantment, they began also to resent it, and began to complain that dose of that insane Garrison root which takes the reason prisoner had been palmed upon them without their knowing it, and that their ordinary water gruel of fiction, thinned with sentiment and thickened with moral, had been hocussed with the bewil- dering hasheesh of Abolition. We had the advantage of reading that extraordinary book in Europe, long after the whirl of excitement produced by it's publication had subsided, in the seclusion of distance and with judgement nndisturbed by those political sympathies which 1 it is impossible, perhaps unwise, to avoid at home. We felt then, and 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 instinctvcly goes right to the organic elements of human nature, whether under white skin or black, and which dis regards as trivial the conventional and facti- tious notions, which make so large part both of our thinking and feeling. Works of imagi- nation written with an aim at immediate in,- pression are commonly ephemeral, like Miss Martineauxs Tales and Elliott's Corn-law yer. ses but the creative faculty of Mrs. Stowe like that of Cervantes in Don Quixote" and i of Fielding in Joseph Andrews" oyerpowered the narrow speciality of her design, and expan- ded local and temporary theme with the cos mopotism of genius.
 It is proverb that "thcre is 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 it's broadest sense.- Thackeray, his disciple and congener, and Dickens, the congener of Smolett do not so much treat of Life as of tine strata of society -the one studying nature from the Club-room window, the other from the reporters box in the Police Court. It may bc that the general obliteration of distinctions of rank in tl!is coun- try which is generally considered detriment to the novelist, will in the end turn to his ad- vantage by compelling him to depend for his effects on the contrasts and collisions of inmate character, rather than on those slallower traits superinduced by particular social arrangements or hereditary associations Shakespeare drew his ideal, aud Fielding natural men and women; Thacktray draws either gentlemen or snobs, and Dickens either unnatural men or the odd- ties natural only in the lowest grades of highly artificial system of society. The first two knew human nature of the two latter, one knows what is called the World, and the other the Streets of London. Is it possible that the very social democracy which here robs tie novelist of so much romance, so much costume, so much antithesis of caste, so much, in short, that is purely external, will give him a set-off in making it easier for him to get at that element of universal humanity which nei- ther of the two extremes of ar aristocratc sys- tenn, nor the salient and picturesque points of contrast between the two, can alone lay open to him.
 We hope to see this problem solved by Mrs. Stowe. That kind of romantic interest which Scott evolved from the relations of lord and vassal, of chief and clansnlan, from the social more than the moral contrast of Roundhead and Cavalier, of far-descended 2auper and monreau riehe; which Cooper found in the clash of savagery with civilization, and the shaggy virtue bred on the border-land between the two Indian by habit, white by tradition, Mrs. Stowe seems in her former novels to have sought in form of society alien to her sympa- thies, and too romote for exact study or for the requirement of local truth, which is the slow result of unconscious observation. There can be no stronger proof of the greatness of her genius, of her possessing that conceptive facul- ty which belongs to the higher order of ima- gination, than the avidity with which Uucle Tom" was read at the South. .. It settled the point that this book was true to human nature. even if not infinitely so to plantation life.
 If capable of 50 great d triumph where sue cess must depend so largely on the sympathetic insight of her mere creative power, have We not right to expect something far more in Keeping with the requirements of Art, now that her wonderful eye is to be the mirror of familiar scenes, and of society in which she was bred, of which she has seen so many vari- cities; and that, too, in the country where it is most naive and original It IS great satis- faction to us, that in the Ministers Wooing" she has chosen her theme and laid her scene amid New England habits and traditions. There is no other writer who IS capable of per petuating for us, in a work of Art, style of 1 thought and manners which railways and news papers will soon render as obsolete as the mas tadon or the saurians. Thus far the story has fully justified our hopes. The leading charac- ters are all kfresh and individual creations Mrs. Katy Scudder, the notable yankee house. wife Mary, in whom Cupid is to try concu- sions with Calvin James MaIvyn, the adven- turous boy of the coast, in whose heart the wild religion of nature swells till the strait swathings of Puritanism are burst; Dr. Hop kius. the conscientious minister, come upon time when the social prestige of the clergy is ! waning. and whose independence will test the 1 voluntary system of ministerial support; Slime on Brown the man of theolooic dialectics, in