SOURCE: "Chapter XVI: A Female Writer" in The Lady of Godey's: Sarah Josepha Hale, J. B. Lippincott Company, 1931, pp. 263-78.

[In the following excerpt, Finley surveys Hale's writings, discussing her style, her attitudes, and her subject matter.]

Of the many poems written by Sarah Hale only a few are remembered. These few, however, have become part and parcel of American ballad tradition, so much so that scarcely any one ever asks the name of the author. What modern stops to wonder who wrote "If Ever I See," "Our Father in Heaven," "It Snows," "Mary Had a Little Lamb"?—even though for the past few years the authorship of the last named verses has been figuring somewhat in the news.

This consigning of a creator to oblivion the while his creation endures in full flush of appeal is, in a true sense, the highest compliment posterity pays an artist—a compliment won by some through works of exceeding beauty. How many persons can reply offhand to the question—who painted Mona Lisa, the exquisite lady whose inscrutable smile has become proverbial? Sarah Hale won the compliment with a handful of nursery rhymes.

Mrs. Hale has been dead for half a century. The magazine she edited so long has passed with the needs of yesterday. All the many books she wrote are out of print. No attempt was ever made to collect the great mass of her prose and verse that lies scattered, not only through fifty years of the Lady's Book, but in scores of other publications—the dailies, weeklies, monthlies and annuals of her era. Effort now to assemble her magazine and newspaper contributions, were there point to the undertaking, would be doomed to failure; for, as she said in Woman's Record, her writings often were printed unsigned, in accordance with the haphazard custom of the day. Even in the Lady's Book, where she was careful to credit the work of others, many an article, story and poem of her own was printed anonymously. At other times she was content with the initials "S. J. H." or simply "The Editor."

Enormous was her output. Now it survives only in its original printing—all except a poem or two written with modest simplicity for grown-ups and the handful of little lilting rhymes for children, rhymes that almost sing themselves. These, remaining dear to each succeeding generation, have been reprinted a thousand times—in school-book after school-book, in anthologies without end—even unto now.

But fundamentally Sarah Hale was an editor, not a writer. She wrote, to be sure, wrote without ceasing, but as an editor writes—for the day.

Almost from the outset her prose showed a strong journalistic bent, reason of itself why none of it survives. In addition, it was marred by many of the stilted mannerisms of the eighteenth century. For, though as an editor she came to inveigh against prolixity, it was her own worst fault for many years. Never did she wholly overcome a fondness for big words and involved sentences. It will be remembered that, in the autobiographical sketch telling of her hours of study with her husband, she confessed that her "early predilection was for the pompous words and sounding periods of Johnson—the sublime flights and glittering fancies of Counsellor Phillips," and that her husband labored to persuade her that these models of her girlhood study were "sublime nonsense."

Only her first prose, Northwood, shows full results of his teachings. Written unhurriedly and with apparent care, its style departs farther from Addisonian standards than does that of her later writings. Had financial necessity not sidetracked her into the exacting time limits set on editorial work, she might well have developed a thoroughly readable style. For the praise accorded Northwood by contemporary critics was deserved. It displays, not only a command of "pure idiomatic English," but a structural aptitude, especially in the combining of narrative and dialogue, that up to that time had characterized only one American, James Fenimore Cooper.

However, when confronted with the imperative rush of getting a magazine out on time, she unconsciously dropped back into emulation of the diligently studied writers of her youth. From then on, for years, her prose was ponderously Georgian, filled with "sounding periods," though happily devoid of "glittering fancies." Against the latter her husband's warning must have been most emphatic, since never did she indulge in the "sublime flights" so dear to tongue as well as pen throughout the eighteen-hundreds. Herein the nineteenth century outdid its predecessor.

But with the rest of the Victorians she was guilty of stodginess and shared even their conviction that the one sure way to be impressive was to call on God. Following the line of least resistance, she, too, threw the heft of the rhetorical burden on the Almighty. For this she should not be too harshly criticized. She was, in fact, a deeply religious woman, a devout Episcopalian and so truly a Christian that she came closer to loving her neighbor as herself than is vouchsafed most humans. Besides, everybody called on God, from preachers to politicians. Any one wading through old Congressional Records is puzzled, indeed, to know whether it was sermons or speeches then being delivered in the country's law-making halls. Even as late as the turn of the century Bryan's cohorts agitated free silver in the name of the Lord, while Republican orators assured voters that William McKinley and Heaven would fill all dinner-pails. These indiscriminate references to Deity, in season and out, indicated neither conscious sanctity nor unconscious blasphemy. It was a fashionable rhetorical habit—and that was all.

Turning out numerous "annuals," two anthologies, cookbooks, translations and much verse in addition to editing Godey's, Mrs. Hale had little time during the forties and fifties for finished writing. But about 1860 her style changed for the second time, becoming more straightforward and thereafter reproducing much of the vivid quality of the earlier Northwood.

Not solely because it exemplifies the happiest prose styie of its author is Northwood interesting. Published in 1827, it was one of America's first attempts at novel-writing, and as such has been accorded far less attention by literary historians than it deserves. Charles Brockden Brown had offered the public his essay-like fiction from 1798 until his death in 1810. William Wirt had published The British Spy in 1803; and by 1821 Cooper with The Spy was well on his literary career. But this was about the sum total of American novel-length fiction.

Northwood has three other claims to fame:

It was the first American novel of consequence written by a woman.

It was the first novel—by either man or woman—to deal with the question of slavery.

It is the most accurate and detailed picture of the domestic habits, customs and manners of the post-Colonial period contemporaneously recorded.

In the last respect, the author, being a potential editor, knew precisely what she was doing. Her eye on the "century hence" when "this unpretending book may be a reference," she went into such minutiæ as the color of decorative paint, "coffee and toast" for breakfast and the correct apparel for "bridesmen" at weddings.

While dealing primarily with the problem of emancipation, Northwood displayed a range of interests as wide as the activities of its times. Nor did it stop there; repeatedly it anticipated attitudes more characteristic of the twentieth than the nineteenth century. Into the mouths of her characters the author put her own ideas on education, feminism, child-training, sumptuary laws, industrialism, immigration, centralized government, international relations. She foresaw the United States as a world power and as such extending association to Great Britain—this last a rather amazing conception in view of the animosity then still fostered between the lately severed countries. But Mrs. Hale had a faculty for stripping facts of emotions as well as for taking into account those natural laws which in the final analysis so inexorably govern. In blood of race she sensed the functioning of one of these laws, and so, though born out of the prejudices of the Revolution, she could yet look for an inevitable drawing together of the two great Anglo-Saxon nations for the protection of their common institutions, liberties and culture.

"Great Britain once called herself our mother," she caused a Northwood character to say, "and though far from being an indulgent one we do not deny her maternity; but there is a period when nations as well as individuals quit their minority, and if the parent country would continue the parallel of relationship which subsists in families, she will not consider her independent offspring as her natural enemy… .

"And do we not see instances where the mother finds not only a useful friend in the child she once discarded, but a support in age—one who will afford an asylum when no other protector is to be found?

"When Alexander sacked Tyre the Carthaginians conveyed many of the Tyrians to a place of safety: they remembered they were descendants of a Tyrian colony… . And will Great Britain be exempted from the operation of those universal laws of nature which have governed all created things on this globe and their works? … The nations of Europe will band against her, for she has trampled them down in her day of triumph; and she has the light of freedom which tyrants hate. The nations will gather against her and she will be sore beset.

"And then will America remember… ."

America remembered on the sixth of April, 1917, ninety years after Northwood was written.

There is much wisdom to be gleaned from this early American novel. The woman who wrote it, inexperienced as she then was, had done some exceptionally clear thinking. She knew, for instance, that "the art of self-government is indispensable to woman's felicity." She had learned that "persons who dare not commune with their own hearts, are not only dependent on society for their pleasures, but must seek it as a refuge from anxiety and remorse." She faced poverty for herself and children fearlessly, because she had already observed that "excessive luxury and rational liberty were never yet found compatible." Though the complacent artificiality of Victorianism was to cozen most people, she had long viewed "selfishness as an insidious passion, mingling itself with motives, and inspiring actions which claim to proceed from holy and benevolent feelings."

And, above all, she held to the following:

There can be no excellency attained without industry. The mind of the idle, like the garden of the slothful, will be overgrown with briars and weeds; and indolence, under whatever fashionable name … , is a more dangerous enemy to practical goodness and to moral and intellectual improvement, than even dissipation… . Those who tread a devious path may possibly retrace their steps, or by a circuitous route finally reach the goal; but those who never stir, how can they win the race!

She "stirred." And, if for herself she avoided devious paths, she retained nonetheless enough of eighteenth-century broadmindedness to keep her charitable in the midst of obduracy, charitable enough to set genius above weakness, befriending such men as Dr. William Morton and Edgar Allan Poe.

But Northwood is far from a dry and didactic volume. It contains many a sly dig that even yet brings a smile. Who could help chuckling over the sentence, "You may easily tell a rich Yankee farmer—he is always pleading poverty."

Mrs. Hale had the keenly observant mind of the true journalist. Hers was that sensitivity which registers both the little and the big—the homely, human interest of every day, on the one hand; and, on the other, the wider events of social import. So that, while she could wax editorially enthusiastic over the trim of a bonnet, it was never all chit-chat with the magazines she edited. At a time when there was little dissemination of news and smaller interpretation of it, she subjected public affairs to a running fire of comment, not only as these affected women and the home, but in respect to the big thing she called "our American experiment." In an age when public prints dealt most effectively with trivialities, she was acutely conscious of movements and trends; witness her early sensing of the menace of slavery. She searched for the meaning of events, trying always to calculate what they might portend. An editor's greatest gift, appreciation of the significance of facts, was hers.

Thus she is found sending Eliza Leslie to Niagara Falls in pursuit of a descriptive story with which to bait the reader by amusing him, while she herself sat at her desk attempting to figure out just how important steam as applied to overland transportation was likely to prove, how it would affect the growth of the country commercially, what relation it was going to have to education and the home.

Illustrative of the journalistic aptitude of Sarah Hale is her book of essays, Traits of American Life, published in 1835. The following selections have been culled at random:

To speak without metaphor—the engrossing pursuit of Americans is wealth.

What in the rising man was industry and economy, becomes in the rich man parsimony and avarice.

Any man who has money may obtain the reputation of taste by the mere purchasing of works of art.

Political controversies are never entered into with any wish to gain knowledge, but only a triumph for the party.

We shall never be free in spirit, while bigotry and intolerance are cherished among us.

Americans have two ardent passions; the love of liberty and the love of distinction.

Few individuals enter into public life who would not be wealthier and happier as private citizens—but then they would not be known, would not see their names in the newspaper, except for raising a curious calf, or a mammoth cabbage.

There is small danger of being starved in our land of plenty; but the danger of being stuffed is imminent.

This is a speculating and selfish age; and to think "money will answer all things" is too much the characteristic of Americans… . God of my country! is there no word of power that can exorcise this demon from among us!

We are aware that a certain class of political economists affect to believe that luxury is beneficial to a nation—but it is not so. The same reasoning which would make extravagance in dress commendable, because it employed manufacturers and artists, would also make intemperance a virtue in those who could afford to be drunk, because the preparation of the alcohol employs laborers, and the consumption would encourage trade.

The glories of conquests and the luxuries of wealth alike tend to make the few masters, and the many slaves.

As a good journalist must, she spoke her mind—did Sarah Hale. But seldom did she preach. She was not a Puritan, unbelievable as it may seem to the twentieth century that any one Victorian in point of time could be otherwise.

As she wrote Matthew Vassar, she "did not believe in sumptuary laws." She had faith in the midst of Victorianism's most pedantic and reactionary mandates that right conditions would create uprightness of mind, body and heart. Possessing the editor's knowledge that there are two sides to every question, she was liberal to a degree uncharacteristic of her times.

"I can tolerate anything better than the puritanical zeal which exalts itself at the expense of every social virtue and innocent enjoyment" are words spoken by a character in Northwood. The author of Northwood made those words a precept of her editorial life.

The tolerance of Mrs. Hale is well exemplified in her books on etiquette. She wrote several. Coming out of a social order that stressed recreative restraint, they are unique. She devoted whole chapters to games, dancing and like "frivolities." Especially did she go to lengths to devise "Happy Sundays for Children," as she entitled one chapter wherein she said:

There is something monstrous in linking Sunday and sadness in the brain of a child… . We all teach our children and hold for ourselves that Sunday is a "day of rest." So it is. But upon this subject it seems to me there is a mistaken view. The word "rest" implies not idleness or tedious vacuity of thought, but a rest from the wearying secular cares of earth and from physical toil… . We are far from meaning that the day should not be marked to children as something distinct from other days; but let it be by linking holiness with happiness, by changing their amusements, not annihilating them.¹

Fully aware of the war then waging between Jacksonian scorn of form and manner and Victorian worship of them, she had as little use for one extreme as for the other. Yet, for all his bluff disdain, the democrat, she suspected, was the more worth saving. So her appeal here was to sincerity.

While other social arbiters were concerned over such momentous questions as whether a "genteel female" should insist upon a gentleman's wholly "restraining himself in demonstrations of affection," Mrs. Hale was insisting on essentials:

Rules of courtesy are necessary in every family and for all stations of life in our country, because here all have a chance for improvement.

The first mark of a well-bred person is a sensitive regard for the feelings of others.

The first indispensable requisite of good society is education.

The most welcome guest in society will ever be the one to whose mind everything is a suggestion, and whose words suggest something to everybody.

Society appears to impose on its members a number of arbitrary rules which continually restrict them in their actions. It tells them how they must eat and drink and dress and walk and talk and so on… . But if the ordinances of society are examined it will be found … that they all tend to one end—the preservation of harmony, and the prevention of one person from usurping the rights, or intruding on the province of another.

These sayings are quoted from Mrs. Hale's most popular book on etiquette, Manners, or Happy Homes and Good Society All the Year Round. It ran through many editions; and, while it fully explained why one should eat with a fork instead of a knife, its real object was to convince a sprawling pioneer America that "a certain formality of manner, or etiquette as it is usually called, is both a mark of respect for others and of one's own self-respect" and that correct conduct is predicated on right feeling.

But more important than manner to Sarah Hale was achievement. Of all her prose works the one she considered most important was Woman's Record or Sketches of All Distinguished Women from "The Beginning" till A.D. 1850. Arranged in Four Eras. With Selections from Female Writers of Every Age. Illustrated by Two Hundred and Thirty Portraits Engraved on Wood by Lossing and Barritt. It was first published in 1853.

The thing is stupendous. It begins with Abigail, wife of King David of Israel, and ends with a list of contemporary women "labouring with their husbands in foreign mission fields." The index contains more than two thousand names. The purpose of the undertaking was, as usual with the lady editor, the glorification of woman. Most enthusiastically received, Woman's Record was considered a standard work for many years. It still has value in that it is the only compilation including the name of every American woman who had the slightest claim to fame prior to 1850.

A biographical sketch of Mrs. Hale herself appears along with the rest. It quotes, however, from her verse only, for, as she naïvely pointed out, "sufficient specimens of my prose will be extant in this work." Of the poems she selected only one is remembered to-day, "It Snows," first printed in the Lady's Book for January, 1837, and gaining an immediate popularity. It was reprinted in many journals and in various annuals and almanacs, and became a favorite piece in McGuffey's Fifth Reader. The first of its five stanzas reads:

"It Snows!" cries the School-boy—"hurrah!" and his shout
Is ringing through parlor and hall,
While swift, as the wing of a swallow, he's out,
And his playmates have answered his call:
It makes the heart leap but to witness their joy—
Proud wealth has no pleasures, I trow,
Like the rapture that throbs in the pulse of a boy,
As he gathers his treasures of snow;
Then lay not the trappings of gold on thine heirs,
While health, and the riches of Nature are theirs.

In truth, Mrs. Hale rather fancied herself as a versifier; and time has not wholly gainsaid her. But, as against the few of her rhymes that have survived, literally reams of them have perished. Yet in her day she was widely acclaimed as a "poetess."

It was a rhythmical age. People loved the measured sound of iambic and trochee feet wholly aside from content. To the primitive taste of a mass mind that possessed no criteria of its own, any verse, if only it held an eartickling swing, was satisfying. Rhyme and meter were the "jazz" of Victorianism. Writers sat up nights evolving new forms, new rhythms to attract, even so great a poet as Poe catering to his rub-a-dub public—

Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme
To the tintinabulation that so musically wells
From the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells—
From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.

Poe did it supremely, of course. So did Longfellow, who, discarding the accepted form of blank verse, as in the "Song of Hiawatha" and "Evangeline," managed without rhymes to endow old cadences borrowed from the ancient Greek with modern charm.

While some of the best American poetry was written between 1830 and 1880, it is also true that during that span of fifty years more metered trash was published in this country than ever before had been recorded in all the history of the ages. Every crossroad boasted a local "poet" or half a dozen "poetesses." The latter in particular inundated press and public with their burblings. Small was their grammar, through no fault of their own, and consequently poetic license was requisitioned to cover a multitude of rather elementary lacks. Anyway, to jingle was the thing; so jingle they did—these crossroad poets, male and female. As for the poetesses, had not most of them been presented by friends and admirers with gold pens especially destined for literary purposes? And was it not obligatory that they so use them?

From about 1840 on the Book carried advertisements that read like this:

Rapp's Gold Pens: Goose Quill size, $2; Swan Quill size, $2.50; Condor Quill size, $5. Without holders.

Technically pens were sized according to these standards until close to the year of the Centennial. The holders that were extra—bone, onyx, silver, pearl, ivory, gold—are not so long gone out of general use but that even yet one is occasionally seen.

Of course, Mrs. Hale, who started life with a mere goose quill, acquired a gold pen. Did she not in Godey's for April, 1845, print "The Gold Pen—A Poem, Inscribed to the Gentleman Who Presented the Gift," and sign same with her full name, a most unusual indulgence in her own magazine? She certainly did. But even so she was not one of the jinglers.

Neither was she a poet, in the true sense. Her work in the rhythmical medium of her period resulted in verse, not poetry—some of it very good. All of it was better than the average of the bulk then being produced, though none of it equaled the best. In any case, she possessed not a little facility for manipulating form to produce pleasing effects; and, as it was the common habit of many rhymsters to copy any new and happy structural combination, much of her verse sounds familiar, as the result of its rhythm having been imitated by others, even though the actual words she wrote may have gained no lasting currency. A case in point is her "Christmas Hymn," first published in Godey's for February, 1841—"music by G. Kingsley." It had been composed for a children's festival. The first and last stanzas were:

Hail, hail the happy morn
When Christ our Lord was born!
Sound, sound His Praise!
The Prince of Righteousness,
He came our world to bless,
The glorious hymn of "Peace"
On earth to raise.

Sound, sound the loudest strain!
Let earth and sky and main
The anthem raise!
Father, Thy love we bless,
Saviour, we ask Thy peace,
Spirit, we beg Thy grace,
When God we praise.

An old favorite unblushingly borrowed without credit by many a vellum- or plush-bound annual or gift book of nineteenth-century vintage, originally appeared in Godey's for January, 1850—under the New Hampshire-inspired title "Our Granite Hills." It has been reprinted under a dozen different headings since. The opening stanza will suffice to recall it to mind:

What glowing thoughts, what glorious themes
To mountain-tops belong!
The law from Sinai's summit came;
From Sion, sacred song;—
And Genius, on Parnassian heights,
His banner first unfurled;
And from the Seven-hilled city waved
The sword that swayed the world!
Then let us raise the hymn of praise—
To us the hills are given;
And mountain-tops are altars, set
To lift the soul to heaven.

Taste changes with the times, as Mrs. Hale herself suggested in the preface to her Dictionary of Poetical Quotations, published in 1850, a revision of the work of one John F. Addington done some twenty years before. After explaining that, as Addington antendated most of the modern poets, they were of necessity omitted from his compilation, she cited as further ground for the revision this: "The old dramatic poets wrote according to their lights," and, therefore, Addington's selections were not "always in accordance with the present standards of public taste"—a truism even more pertinent now than then. The nineteenth century wrote according to its lights; new lights illumine the new century. Rightly or wrongly, every year all but the very best of the old slips further into the background.

It was Mrs. Hale's first slender book of children's songs, Poems for Our Children, that contained the verses of hers which, taking their place as nursery classics, have resisted time. The three best known are "Mary's Lamb," "Birds" and "Prayer." McGuffey's Second Reader for 1857 used "Birds" as Lesson V, giving it a new title, "The Bird's Nest," and adding a third stanza not appearing with the two originally printed; "Mary's Lamb" was Lesson XLVII. "Prayer" was used in the first (1836) edition of the Second Reader as Lesson LXII. None was signed, of course. McGuffey's, like the almanacs, did not take the trouble to note authors' names—not until the dignity of the famous Fifth Reader was reached. There "It Snows" was credited to "Mrs. Hale."

"Birds," the first poem of Poems for Our Children, read originally as follows:

If ever I see,
On bush or tree
Young birds in a pretty nest,
I must not, in my play,
Steal the birds away,
To grieve their mother's breast.

My mother I know
Would sorrow so,
Should I be stolen away—
So I'll speak to the birds,
In my softest words,
Nor hurt them in my play.

"Prayer," the final poem of the little book, came to be included, it seems, in every nineteenth-century collection of children's verse. And there is many a youngster even yet taught this easily memorized version of the Lord's Prayer:

Our Father in heaven,
We hallow thy name!
May thy kingdom so holy,
On earth be the same—
O, give to us, daily,
Our portion of bread!
It is from thy bounty
That all must be fed.

Forgive our transgressions,
And teach us to know
That humble compassion
That pardons each foe—
Keep us from temptation,
From weakness and sin—
And thine be the glory
Forever—Amen!

Notes

¹Manners by Sarah J. Hale, Boston, 1868.