CATHARINE MARIA SEDGWICK During the first half of the nineteenth century, Miss Sedgwick would doubtless have been considered the queen of American letters, but, in the opinion of her friends, the beauty of her character surpassed the merit of her books. In 1871, Miss Mary E. Dewey, her life-long neighbor, edited a volume of Miss Sedgwick's letters, mostly to members of her family, in compliance with the desire of those who knew and loved her, "that some printed memorial should exist of a life so beautiful and delightful in itself, and so beneficent in its influence upon others." Truly a "life beautiful in itself and beneficent in its influence," the reader will say, as he lays down this tender volume. Catharine Maria Sedgwick was born at Stockbridge, Mass., in 1789, the first year of the presidency of George Washington. She was a descendant from Robert Sedgwick, major-general under Cromwell, and governor of Jamaica. Her father, Theodore Sedgwick, was a country boy, born in 1746, upon a barren farm in one of Marriage was necessary in those days, his daughter suggests, and the year of conventional widowhood having expired, Mr. Sedgwick, then at the age of twenty-three, married Miss Pamela Dwight, the mother of his four sons, all successful lawyers, and his three daughters, all exemplary women. The second Mrs. Sedgwick Theodore Sedgwick rose to distinction by his energies and talents but, as we have seen, he was of sufficiently humble origin, which could not have been greatly redeemed by expulsion from college; while at the age of twenty-three, that must have been his chief exploit. Social lines were very firmly drawn in that old colonial society, before the plough of the Revolution went through it, and there was no more aristocratic family than the Dwights, in Western Massachusetts. Madame Quincy gives an account of a visit, in her girlhood, paid to the mother of Miss Pamela, Madame Dwight, in her "mansion-house," and says that her husband, Brig.-Gen. Joseph Dwight, was "one of the leading men of Massachusetts in his day." Madame Dwight was presumably not inferior to her husband. She was daughter of Col. Williams, of Williamstown, who commanded a brigade in the old French War, and whose son founded Williams College. A daughter of Madame Dwight, The intermarriage of the Williamses, Dwights, and Hopkinses formed a fine, aristocratic circle, into which the Sedgwicks were not very cordially welcomed. "My mother's family (of this," says Mrs. Sedgwick, "I have rather an indefinite impression than any knowledge) objected to my father on the score of family, they priding themselves on their gentle blood; but as he afterwards rose far beyond their highest water-mark, the objection was cast into oblivion by those who made it." A few years after this marriage, the war of the Revolution began. Mr. Sedgwick entered the army, served as an officer under Washington, whose acquaintance and favor he enjoyed, and from that time, for forty years until his death, he was in public life, in positions of responsibility and honor. He was member of the Continental Congress, member of the House of Representatives, Speaker of the House, Sen Judge Sedgwick was a staunch Federalist and, in spite of the fact that he himself was not born in the purple, he shared the common Federalist contempt for the masses. "I remember my father," says Miss Sedgwick, "one of the kindest-hearted men and most observant of the rights of all beneath him, habitually spoke of the people as 'Jacobins,' 'sans-culottes,' and 'miscreants.' He—and this I speak as a type of the Federalist party—dreaded every upward step they made, regarding their elevation as a depression, in proportion to their ascension, of the intelligence and virtue of the country." "He was born too soon," says his daughter apologetically, "to relish the freedoms of democracy, and I have seen his brow lower when a free and easy mechanic came to the front door, and upon one occasion, I remember his turning off the east steps (I am sure not kicking, but the demonstration was unequivocal) a grown up lad who kept his hat on after being told to remove it." In these days one would hardly tell him to remove it, let alone hustling him off the steps. The incident shows how far education, prosperity, wealth, and forty years of public life When this was written, Miss Sedgwick had made the discovery that, while the Federalists had the better "education, intellectual and moral," the "democrats had among them much native sagacity" and an earnest "determination to work out the theories of the government." She is writing to her niece: "All this my dear Alice, as you may suppose, is an after-thought. Then I entered fully, and with the faith and ignorance of childhood, into the prejudices of the time." Those prejudices must have been far behind her when her first story was written, "A New England Tale," in which it happens, inadvertently we may believe, all the worst knaves are blue-blooded and at least most of the She could have learned some condescension and humanity from her mother who, in spite of her fine birth, seems to have been modest and retiring to a degree. She was very reluctant to have her husband embark upon a public career; had, her daughter says, "No sympathy with what is called honor and distinction"; and wrote her husband a letter of protest which is worth quoting if only to show how a well-trained wife would write her doting husband something more than a century ago: "Pardon me, my dearest Mr. Sedgwick, if I beg you once more to think over the matter before you embark in public business. I grant that the 'call of our country,' the 'voice of fame,' and the 'Honorable' and 'Right-Honorable,' are high sounding words. 'They play around the head, but they come not near the heart.'" However, if he decides for a public career, she will submit: "Submission is my duty, and however hard, I will try to practice what reason teaches me I am under obligation to do." That address, "my We may be sure that this gentle mother would have encouraged no silly notions of social distinctions in the minds of her children. Even Mr. Sedgwick seems to have had a softer and more human side to his nature than we have yet seen. Miss Sedgwick enjoys repeating a story which she heard from a then "venerable missionary." The son of the village shoemaker, his first upward step was as boy-of-all-work of the clerk of courts. He had driven his master to the court session in dignified silence, broken on arrival by a curt order to take in the trunk. "As he set it down in the entry," says Miss Sedgwick, "my father, then judge of the Supreme Judicial Court, was coming down stairs, bringing his trunk himself. He set it down, accosted the boy most kindly, and gave him his cordial hand. The lad's feelings, chilled by his master's haughtiness, at once melted, and took an impression of my father's kindness that was never effaced." The individual is so much a creature of his environment, that I must carry these details a little farther. Forty years in public life, Judge Just one word more about this home, the like of which it would be hard to find in our generation: "No bickering or dissention was ever These passages have a twofold value. They tell us in what school Miss Sedgwick was educated, and they give us a specimen of her literary style. Language is to her a supple instrument, and she makes the reader see what she undertakes to relate. Judge Sedgwick died in Boston, in 1813, when Miss Sedgwick was twenty-three. The biographical Dictionaries say he was a member of Dr. Channing's church. As Miss Sedgwick relates the facts, he had long desired to "make a public profession of religion," but had been deterred because he could not conscientiously join the church of his family, in Stockbridge, with its Calvinistic confession, and was too tender of the feelings of his pastor to join another,—"unworthy motives," says Miss Sedgwick. Briefly stated, he now sent for Dr. Channing and re Miss Dewey calls her volume "The Life and Letters" of Miss Sedgwick, but the Life is very scantily written. She has given us a picture rather than a biography. Indeed, to write a biography of Miss Sedgwick is no easy task, there was so much of worth in her character and so little of dramatic incident in her career. Independent in her circumstances, exempt from struggle for existence or for social position, unambitious for literary fame and surprised at its coming, unmarried and yet domestic in tastes and habits, at home in any one of the five households of her married brothers and sisters, she lived for seventy-seven years as a favored guest at the table of fortune. She saw things happen to others, but they did not happen to her. It was with her as with Whittier's sweet Quakeress: "For all her quiet life flowed on As meadow streamlets flow, Where fresher green reveals alone The noiseless ways they go." It is not singular if she began her existence at a somewhat advanced stage. She was quite sure she remembered incidents that took place before "Education in the common sense," says Miss Sedgwick, "I had next to none." For schools, she fared like other children in Stockbridge, with the difference that her father was "absorbed in political life," her mother, in Catharine's youth an invalid, died early, and no one, she says, "dictated my studies or overlooked my progress. I remember feeling an intense ambition to be at the head of my class, and generally being there. Our minds were not weakened by Nevertheless, when in 1838, six of the Sedgwick family travelled together through France and Italy, doing much of those sunny lands on foot, Miss Sedgwick was interpreter for the party in both countries, apparently easy mistress of their respective languages. It is remarkable what fine culture seems to have been attainable by a New England child born more than a hundred years ago, when Harvard and Yale were, as we are told, mere High Schools, and Radcliffe and Wellesley were not even dreamed of. Instead of Radcliffe or Wellesley, Miss Sedgwick attended a boarding school in Albany, at the age of thirteen and, at the age of fifteen, another in Boston, the latter for six months, and the former could not have been more than two years. Both, according to her, gave her great social advantages, and did little for her scholarship. Miss Bell, the head of the Albany school, "rose late, was half the time out of the school, and did very little when in it." Miss Paine's school in Boston, let us hope, It will be seen that she had the ability to study The more we know of her home life, the less wonder we have at her mental development. She says that "at the age of eight, my father, whenever he was at home, kept me up and at his side till nine o'clock in the evening, to listen to him while he read aloud to the family Hume, or Shakspere, or Don Quixote, or Hudibras. Certainly I did not understand them, but some glances of celestial light reached my soul, and I caught from his magnetic sympathy some elevation of feeling, and that love of reading which has been to me an education." A She thinks she was ten years old when she read Rollin's Ancient History, spending the noon intermission, when of course she ought to have been at play, out of sight under her desk, where she "read, and munched, and forgot myself in Cyrus's greatness." A winter in New York, where she afterward spent so much of her time, was her first absence from home. She had a married sister there whose husband was in government employ, and her oldest brother was there studying law. She was eleven years old; the date was 1801; and her business in New York seems to have been to attend a French Dancing School of which at that era there was but one in the city. She saw her first play, and used to dry the still Her mother died when Miss Sedgwick was seventeen; her father when she was twenty-three. All her brothers and sisters were married and living, three of them in New York city, one in Albany, and one, her youngest brother, in Lenox. With this brother in Lenox, Miss Sedgwick for many happy years, had her home, at least her summer home, having five rooms in an annex to his house built for her, into which she gathered her household gods Theoretically, we have arrived with this maiden at the age of twenty-three, but we must go back and read from one or two early letters. She is ten years old when, under date of 1800, she writes her father: "My dear papa,—Last week I received a letter from you which gave me inexpressible pleasure." This is the child's prattle of a girl of ten summers. She writes very circumspectly for her years of a new brother-in-law: "I see—indeed I think I see in Mr. Watson everything that is amiable. I am very much pleased with him; indeed we all are." The following is dated 1801, when she is eleven: "You say in your last letters that the time will soon come when you will take leave of Congress forever. That day shall I, in my own mind, celebrate forever; yes, as long as I live I shall reflect upon the dear time when my dear papa left a public life to live in a retired one with his dear wife and children; then you will have the pleasure to think, when you quit the doors of the House, that you are going to join your family forever; but, my dear papa, I cannot feel as you will when looking back on There was something in the relations of this Sedgwick family, not perhaps without parallel, but very beautiful. These brothers and sisters write to each other like lovers. To her brother Robert, Miss Sedgwick writes, "I have just finished, my dear brother, the second perusal of your kind letter received to-day.... I do love my brothers with perfect devotedness, and they are such brothers as may put gladness into a sister's spirit.... Never, my dear Robert, did brother and sister have a more ample experience of the purity of love, and the sweet exchange of offices of kindness that binds hearts indissolubly together." There are three letters from Robert Sedgwick to show how he reciprocated this affection. He says: "I can never be sufficiently grateful to my Maker for having given me such a sister. If I had no other sin to answer for than that of being so unworthy of her as I am, it would be more than I can bear, and yet when I read your letters I almost think that I am what I should be. I know I have a strong aspiration to be such, and I am sure they make me better as well Here is a love-letter from Theodore, her eldest brother: "Having this moment perused your letter the third time, I could not help giving you an answer to it, though there be nothing in it interrogative. Nor was it meant to be tender or sentimental, or learned, but like all your letters, it is so sweet, so excellent, so natural, so much without art, and yet so much beyond art, that, old, cold, selfish, unthankful as I am, the tears are in my eyes, and I thank Why did Miss Sedgwick never marry? We are not distinctly told; but she did not need to, with such lovers in her own family. Besides, how could she find any one, in her eyes, equal to those brothers, and how could she marry any one of lower merit? "I am satisfied," she writes, "by long and delightful experience, that I can never love any body better than my brothers. I have no expectation of ever finding their equal in worth and attraction, therefore—do not be alarmed; I am not on the verge of a vow of celibacy, nor have I the slightest intention of adding any rash resolutions to the ghosts of those that have been frightened to death by the terrors of maiden life; but therefore—I shall never change my condition until I change my mind." This is at the age of twenty-three. Later in life, after many changes had come, she seems to have wished she had not been so We might call this statement the Confessions of an Old Maid who might have done better. She closes her testimony with an acknowledgment that she "ought to be grateful and humble," and the "hope, through the grace of God, to rise more above the world, to attain a higher and happier state of feeling, to order my house for that better world where self may lose something of its engrossing power." This religious attitude was not unusual, nor merely conventional and unmeaning. All the Sedgwick family seem to have been constitutionally religious. The mother was almost painfully meek in her protest against her husband's embarking upon a public career; Mr. Sedgwick has been deterred from joining a church only by some impossible articles of puritan divinity, but cannot die happy until he has received the communion from Dr. Channing; "both my sisters were very religious," says Miss Sedgwick; while the letters I have quoted from two of her brothers, young lawyers and men of the world, have the devoutness of the psalms. "I can never be sufficiently grateful to my Maker for having given me such a Since it was a religious impulse that turned Miss Sedgwick's mind to literature, it is worth while to follow the thread of her spiritual history. This was written at the age of twenty when she was looking for a religious experience that never came, and would have considered herself one of the wicked: "On no subject would I voluntarily be guilty of hypocricy, and on that which involves all the importance of our existence I should shrink from the slightest insincerity. You misunderstood my last letter. I exposed to you a state of mind and feeling produced, not by religious impressions, but by the convictions of reason." Of course "reason" was no proper organ of religion; but besides this defect, her interest in serious things was liable to interruption "by the cares and pleasures of the world" and, perhaps worst of all, "I have not a fixed belief on some of the most material points of our religion." One does not ... God grant, in his infinite mercy, that we may all touch the garment of our Savior's righteousness and be made whole." The editor of these letters tells us that Miss Sedgwick is now a member of Dr. Mason's church in New York city, having joined at the age of twenty, or soon after the letter in which she says she is not satisfied on certain points of doctrine. Dr. Mason is described as an undiluted Calvinist, "who then was the most conspicuous pulpit orator in the country—a man confident in his faith and bold to audacity." Miss Sedgwick stands the strong meat of Calvinism ten years, when we have this letter. "I presume you saw the letter I wrote Susan, in which I said that I did not think I should go to Dr. Mason's Church again.... You know, my dear Frances, that I never adopted some of the articles of the creed of that church and some of those upon which the doctor is fond of expatiating, and which appear to me What perhaps stimulated the zeal of Dr. Mason to insist upon doctrines always objectionable to Miss Sedgwick, was an attempt then being made to establish a Unitarian church in New York city. She has not joined in the movement, but does not know but it may come to that. It is a critical moment in Miss Sedgwick's history, and it happened at this time she went to hear Dr. Mason's farewell sermon. "As usual," she says, "he gave the rational Christians an anathema. He said they had fellowship with the devil: no, he would not slander the devil, they were worse, etc." Very possibly this preaching had its proper effect upon many hearers, and they gave the "rational Christians" a wide berth, but it precipitated Miss Sedgwick into their ranks. She was not then a thorough-going Unitarian, saying, "there are some of your articles of unbelief that I am not Protestant enough to subscribe to"; a little more gentleness on the part of Dr. Mason could have kept her, but she could not stand "what seems to me," she says, "a gross violation of the religion of the Redeemer, and an insult to a She joined the tabooed circle in 1821, and wrote from Stockbridge, "Some of my friends here have, as I learn, been a little troubled, but after the crime of confessed Unitarianism, nothing can surprise them"; she longs to look upon a Christian minister who does not regard her as "a heathen and a publican." An aunt, very fond of her, said to her, one day as they were parting, "Come and see me as often as you can, dear, for you know, after this world we shall never meet again." These religious tribulations incited her to write a short story, after the parable of the Pharisee and the Publican, to contrast two kinds of religion, of one of which she had seen more than was good. The story was to appear as a tract, but it outgrew the dimensions of a tract, and was published as a book under the title of "A New England Tale." It is not a masterpiece of literature but, like all of Miss Sedgwick's works, it contains some fine delineations of character and vivid descriptions of local scenery. It can be read to-day with interest and pleasure. As a dramatic presentation of the self-righteous and the meek, in a New Miss Dewey says The New England Tale gave Miss Sedgwick an "immediate position in the world of American literature." Her brother Theodore wrote, "It exceeds all my expectations, fond and flattering as they were"; her brother Harry, "I think, dear Kate, that your destiny is fixed. As you are such a Bibleist, I only say don't put your light under a bushel." That the book did not fall still-born is evident when he says further, "The orthodox do all they can to put it down." On the other hand, her publisher wanted to print a cheap edition of 3,000 copies for missionary purposes. I should like to see that done to-day by some zealous liberal-minded publisher. The New England Tale appeared in 1822, when Cooper had only published "Precaution" and "The Spy." In 1824, Miss Sedgwick published "Redwood," of which a second edition was "Clarence" was published in 1830, and I am glad to say, she sold the rights to the first edi If Miss Sedgwick had written none of these more elaborate works, she would deserve a permanent place in our literature for a considerable library of short stories, among which I should name "A Berkshire Tradition," a pathetic tale of the Revolution; "The White Scarf," a romantic story of MediÆval France; "Fanny McDermot," a study of conventional morality; "Home," of which the Westminster Review said, "We wish this book was in the hands of every mechanic in England"; "The Poor Rich Man and the Rich Poor Man" of which Joseph Curtis, the philanthropist, said, "in all his experiences he had never known so much good fruit from the publication of any book"; and, not least, "Live and let Live: or This was high praise, considering that there was then no higher literary authority in America than Dr. Channing. However, a message from Chief Justice Marshall, through Judge Story, belongs with it: "Tell her I have read with great pleasure everything she has written, and wish she would write more." She had gained an enviable position in literature and she had done a great deal of useful work during the fifteen years since the timid appearance of "A New England Tale," but she seems to have regarded her books as simply a "by-product": "My author existence has always seemed something accidental, extraneous, and independent of my inner self. My books have been a pleasant occupation and excitement in my life.... But they constitute no portion of my happiness—that is, of such as I derive from the dearest relations of life. When I feel that my writings have made any one hap In 1839, Miss Sedgwick went to Europe in company with her brother Robert, and other relatives. The party was abroad two years and, on its return, Miss Sedgwick collected her European letters and published them in two volumes. They give one a view of Europe as seen by an intelligent observer still in the first half of the last century. She breakfasted with Rogers, the banker and poet, with whom she met Macaulay whose conversation was to her "rich and delightful. Some might think he talks too much; but none, except from their own impatient vanity, could wish it were less." She had tea at Carlyle's, found him "simple, natural and kindly, his conversation as picturesque as his writings." She "had an amusing evening at Mr. Hallam's"; he made her "quite forget he was the sage of the 'Middle Ages.'" At Hallam's she met Sydney Smith who was "in the vein, and we saw him, I believe, to advantage. His wit is not, as I expected, a succession of brilliant explosions but a sparkling stream of humor." In Geneva, she visited her friends, the Sis Soon after Miss Sedgwick's return from Europe, she became connected with the Women's Prison Association of New York City, of which from 1848 to 1863 she was president. An extract from one letter must suffice to suggest the nature of her activities in connection with this and kindred philanthropies: "It is now just ten, and I have come up from the City Hall, in whose dismal St. Giles precincts I have been to see a colored ragged school.... My Sundays are not days of rest.... My whole soul is sickened; and to-day when I went to church filled with people in their fine summer clothes, and heard a magnificent sermon from Dr. Dewey, and thought of the streets and dens through which I had just walked, I could have cried out, Why are ye here?" A fellow-member of the Prison Association, who often accompanied her on her visits to hospitals and prisons, "especially the Tombs, Always a philanthropist, Miss Sedgwick was not a "reformer" in the technical sense; that is, she did not enlist in the "movements" of her generation, for Temperance, or Anti-Slavery, or Woman's Rights. She shrunk from the excesses of the "crusaders," but she was never slow in striking a blow in a good cause. "Uncle Tom's Cabin" was published in 1852, but its indictment of slavery is not more complete than Miss Sedgwick made in "Redwood," her second novel, twenty-five years before. A planter's boy sees a slave starved to famishing and then whipped to death. It hurt his boy heart, but he afterward became hardened to such necessary severity and he tells the story to a fellow planter with apologies for his youthful sentimentality. Does "Uncle Tom's Cabin" show more clearly the two curses of slavery: She sympathized with the abolitionists in their purpose but not always with their methods: "The great event of the past week has been the visit of the little apostle of Abolitionism—Lucy Stone." This was in 1849 when Mrs. Stone was thirty-one. "She has one of the very sweetest voices I ever heard, a readiness of speech and grace that furnish the external qualifications of an orator—a lovely countenance too—and the intensity, entire forgetfulness and the divine calmness that fit her to speak in the great cause she has undertaken." But in spite of this evident sympathy with the purpose of the Abolitionists, Miss Sedgwick declined to attend a meeting of the Anti-Slavery Society, saying: "It seemed to me that so much had been intemperately said, so much rashly urged, on the death of that noble martyr, John Brown, by the Abolitionists, that it was not right to appear among them as one of them." Not even Lucy Stone, however, could have felt more horror at the institution of slavery. The Compromise Measures of 1850 made her shudder: "my hands are cold as ice; the blood As she was not in the Anti-Slavery crusade, so she was not in the Woman's Rights crusade. She wished women to have a larger sphere, and she did much to enlarge the sphere of her sex, but it was by taking it and making it, rather than by talking about it. "Your might must be your right," she says in a chapter on The Rights of Women, in "Means and Ends." Voting did not seem to her a function suited to women: "I cannot believe it was ever intended that women should lead armies, harangue in halls of legislation, bustle up to ballot-boxes, or In 1857, after a silence of twenty-two years, in which only short stories and one or two biographies came from her hand, she published another two-volume novel entitled, "Married or Single." It is perhaps her best work; at least it has been so considered by many readers. She was then sixty-seven and, though she had ten more years to live, they were years of declining power. These last years were spent at the home of her favorite niece, Mrs. William Minot, Jr., in West Roxbury, Mass., and there tenderly and reverently cared for, she died in 1867. Bryant, who was her life-long friend, and who, at her instance wrote some of his hymns, gives this estimate of her character: "Admirable as was her literary life, her home life was more so; and beautiful as were the examples set forth in her writings, her own example was, if possible, still more beautiful. Her unerring sense of rectitude, her love of truth, her ready sympathy, her active and cheerful beneficence, her winning and gracious manners, the perfection of high breeding, make up a character, the
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