Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v3.djvu/140

122 Later Essayists question that, if one excepts Margaret Fuller, there was no woman among our authors more ardent than Emma Lazarus in her interminable search for aesthetic culture, no woman whose conversation, to quote the words of the great editor Charles A. Dana, was.more "deeply interesting and intensely- instructive." Stedman once said that she was the "natural companion of scholars and thinkers," a comment borne out by Emerson's abiding affection and admiration for her. In the field of prose, some of her most memorable achievements were her essays on Russian Christianity versus American Judaism, and her paper on Disraeli. The first of these, written some twoscore years ago at the time of Russian massacres, presents, without undue apology, or undue praise of her race, the basic attitude that should be taken in regard to the persecution of the Jews, and as the problem is still one that civilization has not solved with fearless honour, let us listen again to Emma Lazarus, as, reverting to the thought expressed by one of our most high-minded statesmen, she concludes that essay: Mr. Evarts has put the question upon the only ground which Americans need consider or act upon. It is not that it is the oppression of Jews by Russians — it is the oppression of men and women by men and women ; and we are men and women ! To this trio of noble women — Margaret FuUer, Julia Ward Howe, Emma Lazarus— there should be added the name of Harriet Beecher Stowe (1812-96),' who, like Hale with his one great story, and Julia Ward Howe with her one great poem, is remembered on account of her one great novel. Uncle Tom's Cabin has thrown her essays into the shade, where their existence remains unknown to the large majority of present- day readers. Yet those who love to have recourse to old pages of The Atlantic Monthly find her an essayist of charm and range. Her House and Home Papers, published under the pseudonym of Christopher Crowfield, wherein the father of the family discusses all manner of domestic topics, have their key- note in the thought that whereas to keep a house is a practical affair "in the region of weights, measure, colour ... to keep a home lies not merely in the sphere of all these, but it takes in ' See Book III, Chap. xi.