Past Imperfect, Future Perfect: Tenses of Declension
Past Imperfect, Future Perfect – Tenses of Declension
By Gladys S. Lewis
[Dr. Gladys S. Lewis is Professor of English at the University of Central Oklahoma.]
I am a guardian of the meaning of life: a professor of British and American literature. My concentration areas are 16th-19th century texts. By professional involvement, I am "expert" in the writings of Queen Katherine Parr (last wife of Henry VIII), John Bunyan, Charles Dickens, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Oh, yes. I am a closet Tele-tubby for Ernest Hemingway.
Stowe, author of Uncle Tom`s Cabin and 37 other novels, grants me identity as a scholar. I have published one academic book on her anti-slavery masterpiece, and am at work on another. She . has always intrigued me as a subject because of her powerful book which served as a catalyst for the American public`s moral sensibility in the mid-1800s to hasten the destruction of slavery. Even Abraham Lincoln said, when he met her at the White House, "So this is the little woman who made the big war" (Fields 269).
Although I am a woman of the `90s, I am also close to Stowe`s Victorian values: she was an activist for the underling; an ardent (even crusading) Christian, and a devoted churchwoman, wife, mother. Her life as daughter of the famous Lyman Beecher of the last century, sister to seven preacher brothers (the most famous being Henry Ward Beecher), and wife to a Hebrew scholar and preacher, Calvin E. Stowe, immerses me in reveries o what her life must have been like. As a female, she must have felt she could not respond to a call to preach, as her brothers did. Her father, who expected his sons to be preachers, recognized her abilities and once remarked that his young Harriet was a genius and he would "give a hundred dollars if she had been a boy" because she "would do more than any of them" (Wilson 21). Undaunted, she once wrote in a letter to her brother, George, "It is as much my vocation to preach on paper as it is that of my brothers to preach viva voce" (20 February 1830?, Acquisitions, Stowe Day Foundation). She out-preached all the men in her life, with the two-edged dimension of her powerful storyteller-preacher voice and by so doing called a nation to repentance. Feminist scholarship has restored Stowe to the American literary canon. Feminist insights are extremely important now, but those issues were not the reasons or Stowe`s spectacular public reception at the publication of her great book. She was writing to an audience which held the Bible as the authority for life, appealing for the sanctity of the family which was being destroyed in the cruel practices of slavery. She spoke in a Bible-based rhetoric, a persuasive style, which was used by the culture and resonated with morality and emotion understood by her audience.
I have a great deal of patience with those who do not appreciate the biblical sub-text of our literature, because we live in a time when people neither know nor venerate it. However, our rhetoric, our way of talking about ourselves, is unchanged. We still cite our authority (if not the Bible, then the stock market or the Middle East oil cartel, or Madison Avenue ads, or movies, or pop music), list our litany of complaints of how we have declined, and sound a note of hope. We hear every day from multiple settings variations on the words of Thomas Paine, "We have within us the power to begin anew." (Still wincing, I recall a seminar setting when I used the reference to jeremiad rhetoric in our culture and a professional colleague turned on me, saying, "I resent that! I am an agnostic." Staring, I could only think, "What does that have to do with it?" Dating to that time, I began to think ("the silkworms were eating," to use a Hemingway phrase) about rhetoric itself, or our manner of speech, as authority. We respond to a cultural way speech is articulated which grants persuasive power to the speaker.
In the process of my book research on the authority of rhetoric in our culture, again relying on Stowe as a beginning point of reference, I spent three weeks in the Van Pelt Library at the University of Pennsylvania during June of 1999. Because The Library Company of Philadelphia, begun by Benjamin Franklin and the oldest in the nation, is in the same city, I went there one day to investigate holdings and view original documents. As I searched, I suddenly catapulted from my late 20th-century rhetorical stance back to mid-19th-century. The agent was not Mrs. Stowe, but rather her husband, Professor Stowe.
Calvin Stowe was a remarkable man for his time. I`ve never been able to decide if he could withstand the public furor generated by the Beechers and the high energy level of his wife because of being a stereotypically withdrawn academic, or if he simply was secure in himself and so non–threatened he just relaxed and enjoyed all of it. I rather think it is the latter. Supportive of his wife`s public ventures in a day when men were supposed to keep their wives subdued and private, she, in turn, honored him and leaned on his advice. He seemed to unfold in her expansiveness, chuckling when she engaged in some of her hi finks with, "Isn`t Wife a piece of work?"
Professor Stowe was invited to go to Prussia specifically to study that country`s educational system in 1836, shortly after he and Harriet were married. He returned with elaborate studies of education in Prussia, Russia, and other European countries, and made reports on it, most notably to the Ohio General Assembly and the Governor of Ohio. I had always wanted to read the report. At The Library Company, I saw a copy noted in the catalog. I also requested another writing effort, his introduction to John Gillies`s biography of the great revivalist (with the Wesley`s), George Whitfield, published in 1859. I read the educational report and was drawn into both his writing and the similarities between the Prussian system then and ours now.
But Professor Stowe came alive to me most vividly that afternoon through the power of the rhetorical style of language in the Whitfield biography introduction, and our minds touched across death and the years. I began with a smug smile as I read his review of the deck f England, primarily because of the way he judged some of the writers whom I personally admire. Then, I sat straighter as his words caught me with their crisp allusions: "We come to the time of the Georges with little improvement. The nation seemed to sink lower and lower. Even vice seemed to lose the life and vigor which had before given it a show of respectability. It was, as a whole, an age of imbecility and worthlessness . . . a stagnant pool of lifeless corruption." He went on to review the religious problems of 18th-century England, and, as a proponent of the positive contributions of the Puritans to American culture, I nodded when he wrote, "The ejection of the Puritans, by long- continued and relentless persecution, had been the curse, and had well-nigh proved the utter ruin of the people, like the ejection of the Huguenots from France" (4). He warmed more to his subject when he added, "But God had thought of mercy toward the noble old British nation . . .[It was] still to be the defense of the Protestant faith, the nursery of civil and religious freedom, and the instructress of the world, not to be left a hopeless moral waste. It was to be saved, and saved in God`s own way, by the foolishness of preaching. The wickedness brought in by the throne, was to be met and counteracted by the pulpit".
Thoroughly hooked, I followed his account of the events of the Wesleyan revivals in general and Whitfield, in particular, as he added that "this revival of religion breathed a new spirit into all the departments of life and gave the first start to the great activity which followed." He skillfully made a transition from specific preachers to preachers as a group, saying, "The preachers of the gospel on earth must be men" as opposed to angels. He explained in a gentle, non-chauvinistic tone, using the word "men" in the earlier generic sense of mankind, "Men must be guided to salvation by men, not angels."
Then, back he went to six specific kinds of men "God needs as preachers," and dealt with each at length. First, God needs "Pious men," and he elaborated on the spiritual characteristics the preacher of the gospel must have. Next, God needs as preachers "Educated men" converted "by the foolishness of preaching but not foolish preaching," and he credits a Dr. South for the phrasing. God must have "Brave men," those with courage, who are "self-collected, simple-heart-ed, kind, gentle, unmoved." The fourth kind are "Prudent men," those who have common sense and think about what they do. He writes, "God looks on with most surprising indifference when his own people bring themselves into difficulties by their own follies." Then, God needs "Working men" who are not lazy, who perform with diligence their tasks as preachers. My favorite category is his last one, "Gentlemen." Says the Professor, "Civility is like sunshine: it costs nothing, and it makes everything around us bright and pleasant. A minister has no right to be a clown: and in the literal, as well as the spiritual sense, should they who bear the vessels of the Lord have clean hands. Paul, with all his ardor and zeal, his invincible hardihood, his indomitable courage, his ceaseless enterprise, was always perfectly gentlemanly…. polite and courteous before King Agrippa and the procurator Festus." I can sense his pause, then, "And who can imitate Christ without being in all respects the gentleman!–without actually being that which the finished gentleman labors to appear to be? Roughness and vulgarity find no countenance in the Bible. Among the great variety of characters described in the Old Testament and the New, I remember but one clown among them all, the notorious Nabal: and he is most pointedly con-demned, and his own wife testifies of him that he was a fool, and the Scripture shows us that he was a glutton and a drunkard."
Rhetorically, he and I returned to an earlier position as he took me to the specific with lessons for the group, a fine Puritan tradition. Whitfield had all these characteristics in his life, and, in addition, what all ministers must have to lesser or greater degree: "a voice of most wonderful compass and thrilling tone;" "person and manners in the highest degree attractive;" "skill and tact in rhetorical action that was perfectly marvelous;" and "amazing power of emotion exciting corresponding emotion in others." Then, he turned to all believers. "The style or type of religion necessary for an effective preacher, essential to real success in actually winning souls, is unquestionably the devotional. What, after all, is religion? What gives to religious institutions their power? What is the great characteristic of the scriptures, which most distinguishes them from other books? What is it that we all think of, and desire and long for, when religion is most necessary to us? When our earthly hopes are stricken down–when we are in trouble, in bereavement or approaching the confinements of the grave–what then, is the great element in religion which we most need and must have? Obviously it is the devotional element–that which brings the spirit into contact with the Maker, and raises it above the power of earth by giving it a taste of heaven. It is this that we desire when religion becomes a matter of urgent necessity with us. It is this, and little besides this, which we bring to the notice of others, when we find them in want of the consolations of religion. It is this which is really the power of religion–which has sustained martyrs in dungeons, on the rack, and at the stake–it is this that now gives peace and joy in the midst of sorrow to thousands of afflicted souls–and makes an unbelieving world feel that religion is a mighty element in the human soul, the philosophy of which is, to the faithless mind, an inexplicable mystery.
"Devotion is the fruit of faith, and again faith flows from devotion. They act and react on each other. It is devotion, the fruit of faith–the legitimate offspring of faith and love–which brings us directly into contact with God; devotion is the natural expression, the development of our faith in and our love towards him. He is the Father of all created beings; but there is a special tenderness in his paternal relations with those who draw near him in prayer, and who have in their hearts that spirit of adoption whereby they cry continually, `Abba, Father!`
"The longer I live, the less confidence I have in any form of religion which does not produce and cherish very much of the devotional element; and the more respect I have for the Christian who prays deeply, feelingly, and often, and in his life lives habitually as he prays, however little he may have of what the world calls talent or greatness. In religion, goodness is greatness; and without goodness, human greatness in the sight of God is but meanness and rebellion …. How eminently devotional was the earthly career of Christ!… "In the time of the church`s need, God has always raised up men, and himself qualified them for the peculiar services required…Pray ye, therefore, the Lord of the harvest, that he would send forth laborers into his harvest"
I sat long over the musty smell of the book and the clarity of the words to indulge myself in thought and reflection. In an afternoon when I was attempting to study what my generation credits as authority in the piggy-back of speech style on a Bible no longer recognized, Professor Stowe gave me a refreshing trip to my roots in faith and literature. The bondage of the Stowes`s world was real and palpable, all the way from slavery of race to serfdom of gender. Our current confinements are more sophisticated and complex with a societal nod to shared authority, but no less threatening. My academic task is to work at understanding and projecting how we do what we do linguistically. But my interlude with Professor Stowe called me to a spiritual past that offers in its same commitment to the Word a key to all present and future texts. Although nostalgia tricks with recollections of a perfect past, we know it was imperfect. Victorian America was an industrial-agricultural-domestic slaveholding quagmire. And while we expect the future to be imperfect, we hope and strive to make it perfect. But for all the failures between beginning and end, my afternoon with Preacher-Professor Stowe reminded me that the cure for all our declensions lies in the present tense orientation of being worthy laborers in the Lord`s harvest wherever we find our fields.
Works Cited
Fields, Annie Adams. Life and Letters of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Boston: Houghton, 1897.
Stowe, Calvin E. Introduction. Memoirs of Rev. George Whitfield. By John Gillies. Philadelphia, 1859.
Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Letter to George Beecher. 20 February 1830?. Acquisitions. Stowe Center. Hartford, Connecticut.
Wilson, Forrest. Crusader in Crinoline: The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1941.
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