John Greenleaf Whittier Part 11

What strange, glad voice is that which calls From Wagner's grave and Sumter's walls?

From Mississippi's fountain-head A sound as of the bison's tread!

There rustled freedom's Charter Oak!

In that wild burst the Ozarks spoke!

Cheer answers cheer from rise to set Of sun. We have a country yet!"

To sum up now our a.n.a.lysis of the poet's character. We have seen that the central trait of his mind is love of freedom. (Even his religion, which is so profound an element in his nature, and so all-pervasive in his writings, will be found, on a deep a.n.a.lysis, to be a yearning for freedom from the trappings of sense and time, in order to attain to a spiritual union with the Infinite.) This love of freedom, this hatred of oppression, intensified by persecution, both ancestral and personal, stimulated by contact with Puritan democracy, as well as by the New England Transcendental movement, and flowering out luxuriantly in the long struggle against slavery,--this n.o.ble sentiment, and that long self-sacrificing personal warfare in behalf of the oppressed, form the true glory of Whittier's character. Shy, timid, almost an invalid, having a nervous horror of mobs and personal indignities, he yet forgot himself in his love of Man, overcame and underwent,--suffered social martyrdom for a quarter of a century, never flinching, never holding his peace for bread's sake or fame's sake, not stopping to count the cost, taking his life in his hand, and never ceasing to express his high-born soul in burning invective and scathing satire against the oppressor, or in words of lofty hope and cheer for the suffering idealist and lover of humanity, whoever and wherever he was. Whittier is a hero as well as a poet. He will be known to posterity by a few exquisite poems, but chiefly by his moral heroism and patriotism. As a thinker and a poet he belongs, with Bryant and Longfellow, to the pre-scientific age. The poetry of the future (of the new era of self-consciousness) will necessarily differ widely from that of the first half of this century. It will not be distinctively the poetry of Wordsworth, or Cowper, or Byron, or Longfellow, or Whittier. When the present materialistic and realistic temper of mind disappears from literature, and really n.o.ble ideal poetry returns, it will be vast in its scope and range, robust in its philosophy, unfettered by petty rhymes and cla.s.sicisms, but powerfully rhythmic and harmonious. The writings of Shakspere, Goethe, Jean Paul, Hugo, Tennyson, Whitman, and Emerson are the magnificent proem to it. It will be built upon a scientific and religious cosmism. It will not discuss Apollo and Luna and Neptune, and the nymphs and muses, but will draw its imagery from the heaven-staining red-flames of the sun, the gulfs of s.p.a.ce, the miracles of organic and inorganic life, and human society. It will draw its inspiration not more from the storied past than from the storied future foreseen by its prophetic eye. It will idealize human life and deify nature. It will fall in the era of imagination. (After it will come another age of criticism.) It will fall in the age of splendid democracies. And in that age men will look back with veneration, not so much, perhaps, to the scholar-poets as to the hero-poets, like Whittier, who put faith in the rights of man and woman, who did believe in divine democracy, and were not ashamed of it, but nursed it patiently through its puling infancy, well a.s.sured of its undying grandeur when it should come to man's estate.

We subjoin fittingly to this chapter a characteristic letter of Mr.

Whittier's, in which he speaks lovingly of Robert Burns, that other poet of freedom and independence of thought for all men.

At the Burns festival in Was.h.i.+ngton, 1869, the following letter from John G. Whittier was read:

"AMESBURY, 1st month, 18th day, 1869.

"DEAR FRIEND,--I thank the club represented by thee for remembering me on the occasion of its annual festival. Though I have never been able to trace my ancestry to the Land o' Cakes, I have--and I know it is saying a great deal--a Scotchman's love for the poet whose fame deepens and broadens with years. The world has never known a truer singer. We may criticise his rustic verse and compare his brief and simple lyrics with the works of men of longer scrolls and loftier lyres; but after rendering to Wordsworth, Tennyson and Browning the homage which the intellect owes to genius, we turn to Burns, if not with awe and reverence, [yet] with a feeling of personal interest and affection. We admire others; we love him. As the day of his birth comes round, I take down his well-worn volume in grateful commemoration, and feel that I am communing with one whom living I could have loved as much for his true manhood and native n.o.bility of soul as for those wonderful songs of his which shall sing themselves forever.

"They know little of Burns who regard him as an aimless versifier--'the idle singer of an idle lay.' Pharisees in the Church, and oppressors in the State, knew better than this. They felt those immortal sarcasms which did not die with the utterer, but lived on to work out the divine commission of Providence. In the shout of enfranchised millions, as they lift the unt.i.tled Quaker of Rochdale into the British Cabinet, I seem to hear the voice of the Ayrs.h.i.+re poet:--

"'For a' that and a' that, It's comin' yet for a' that; That man to man the world o'er Shall brothers be for a' that.'

"With hearty sympathy and kind greetings for the Burns Club of Was.h.i.+ngton,

"I am, very truly, thy friend, "JOHN G. WHITTIER."

CHAPTER II.

THE ARTIST.

The t.i.tle of this chapter is almost a misnomer; for the style, or technique, of the poet whose works we are considering is so very simple and unoriginal that he can hardly be said to have a distinctive style of his own,--unless a few persistent mannerisms establish a claim to it.

His diction, however, is always pictorial, and glows with an intense Oriental fervor. Fused in this interior vital heat, his thoughts do not sink, like powerful Jinn, into the deep silence-sphere of the mind, to fetch thence sparkling treasures, rich and strange: rather, they run to and fro with lightning swiftness amid the million surface-pictures of the intellect; rearranging, recombining, and creatively blending its images, and finally pouring them out along the page to charm our fancy and feeling with old thoughts and scenes painted in fresh colors and from new points of view. There is more of fancy than of creative imagination in Whittier.

The artistic quality, or tone, of his mind is a fusion of that of Wordsworth and that of Byron. In his best ballads and other lyrics you have the moral sincerity of Wordsworth and the sweet Wordsworthian simplicity (with a difference); and in his reform poems you have the Byronic indignation, and scorn of Philistinism and its tyrannies. As a religious poet, he reveals the quiet piety and devoutness of Cowper; and his rural and folk poems show that he is a debtor to Burns.

He has been a diligent reader,--"a close-browed miser of the scholar's gains,"--and his writings are full of bookish allusions. But, if the truth must be told, his doctor's gown does not often sit gracefully upon his shoulders. His readers soon learn to know that his strength lies in his moral nature, and in his power to tell a story melodiously, simply, and sweetly. Hence it is, doubtless, that they care little for his literary allusions,--think, perhaps, that they are rather awkwardly dragged in by the ears, and at any rate hasten by them impatiently that they may inhale anew the violet-freshness of the poet's own soul. What has just been said about bookish allusions does not apply to the beautiful historical ballads produced by Whittier in the mellow maturity of his powers. These fresh improvisations are as perfect works of art as the finest Greek marbles. In them Whittier at length succeeds in freeing himself completely from the shackles of didacticism. Such ballads as "The Witch's Daughter" and "Telling the Bees" are as absolutely faultless productions as Wordsworth's "We are Seven" and his "Lucy Gray," or as Uhland's "Des Sanger's Fluch," or William Blake's "Mary."

There is in them the confident and unconscious ease that marks the work of the highest genius. A shower of lucid water-drops falls in no truer obedience to the law of perfect sphericity than flowed from the pen of the poet these delicate creations in obedience to the law of perfect spontaneity. Almost all of Whittier's lyrics have evidently been rapidly written, poured forth in the first glow of feeling, and not carefully amended and polished as were Longfellow's works. And herein he is at fault, as was Byron. But the delicate health of Whittier, and his toilsome early days, form an excuse for his deficiency in this respect.

His later creations, the product of his leisure years, are full of pure and flawless music. They have no harmony or rhythmic volume of sound, as in Tennyson, Swinburne, Milton, and Shakspere; but they set themselves to simple melodious airs spontaneously. As you read them, your feet begin to tap time,--only the music is that of a good rural choir rather than that of an orchestra.

The thought of each poem is generally conveyed to the reader's understanding with the utmost lucidity. There is no mysticism, no obscurity. The story or thought unfolds itself naturally, and without fatigue to our minds. A great many poems are indeed spun out at too great length; but the central idea to be conveyed is rarely lost sight of.

To the list of his virtues as an artist, it remains to add his frequent surprising strength. This is naturally most marked in the anti-slavery poems. When he wrote these, he was in the flush of manhood, his soul at a white heat of moral indignation. He is occasionally nerved to almost super-human effort: it is the battle-axe of Richard thundering at the gates of Front de Boeuf. For nervous energy, there is nothing in the Hebrew prophets finer than such pa.s.sages as these:--

"Strike home, strong-hearted man!

Down to the root Of old oppression sink the Saxon steel."

_To Ronge._

"Maddened by Earth's wrong and evil, 'Lord!' I cried in sudden ire, 'From thy right hand, clothed with thunder, Shake the bolted fire!'"

_What the Voice Said._

"Hands off! thou t.i.the-fat plunderer! play No trick of priestcraft here!

Back, puny lordling! darest thou lay A hand on Elliott's bier?

Alive, your rank and pomp, as dust, Beneath his feet he trod: He knew the locust-swarm that cursed The harvest-fields of G.o.d.

"On these pale lips, the smothered thought Which England's millions feel, A fierce and fearful splendor caught, As from his forge the steel.

Strong-armed as Thor,--a shower of fire His smitten anvil flung; G.o.d's curse, Earth's wrong, dumb Hunger's ire,-- He gave them all a tongue!"

_Elliott._

"And Law, an unloosed maniac, strong, Blood-drunken, through the blackness trod, Hoa.r.s.e-shouting in the ear of G.o.d The blasphemy of wrong."

_The Rendition._

"All grim and soiled, and brown with tan, I saw a Strong One, in his wrath, Smiting the G.o.dless shrines of man Along his path."

_The Reformer._

As Whittier has grown older, and the battles of his life have become (as he expressed it to the writer) like "a remembered dream," his genius has grown mellow and full of graciousness. His art culminated in "Home Ballads," "Snow-Bound," and "The Tent on the Beach." He has kept longer than most poets the lyric glow; only in his later poems it is "emotion remembered in tranquillity."

If asked to name the finest poems of Whittier, would not the following instinctively recur to the mind: "Snow-Bound," "Maud Muller," "Barbara Frietchie," "The Witch's Daughter," "Telling the Bees," "Skipper Ireson's Ride," "King Volmer and Elsie," and "The Tent on the Beach"?

To these one would like to add several exquisite hymns and short secular lyrics. But the poems mentioned would probably be regarded by most critics as Whittier's finest works of art. They merit this distinction certainly; and they furnish remarkable instances for those who desire to study the poet's greater versatility in the ballad line, as they are all good representatives of his wonderfully long range.

The foregoing remark must be our cue for beginning to pa.s.s in review the artistic deficiencies of Whittier. He has three crazes that have nearly ruined the ma.s.s of his poetry. They are the reform craze, the religious craze, and the rhyme craze. Of course, as a man, he could not have a superfluity of the first of these; but, as a poet, they have been a great injury to him. We need not deny that he has taken the manlier course in subordinating the artist to the reformer and preacher; but in estimating his poetic merits we ought to regard his work from an absolute point of view. Let us not be misunderstood. It is gladly and freely conceded that the theory that great poetry is not necessarily moral, and that the aim of poetry is only to please the senses, is a petty and shallow one, and that the true function of the great poet is also to bear witness to the ideal and n.o.ble, to the moral and religious. Let us heartily agree with Princ.i.p.al Shairp when he says that the true end of the poet "is to awaken men to the divine side of things; to bear witness to the beauty that clothes the outer world, the n.o.bility that lies hid, often obscured, in human souls; to call forth sympathy for neglected truths, for n.o.ble but oppressed persons, for downtrodden causes, and to make men feel that through all outward beauty and all pure inward affection G.o.d himself is addressing them." We may admit all this, and yet find fault with the moralizations and homilies of Whittier. The poetry of Dante and Milton is full of ethical pa.s.sion, and occasionally a little sermon is wedged in; yet they do not treat us to endless broadsides of preaching, as Whittier does in his earlier poems, and in some of his later ones. But there is this distinction: the moral in Dante and Milton and Shakspere and Emerson is so garnitured with beauty that while our souls are enn.o.bled our imaginations are gratified.

But in many of Whittier's poems we have the bare skeleton of the moral, without the rounded contour and delicate tints of the living body of beauty. His reform poems have been called stump-speeches in verse. His anti-slavery poems are, with a few exceptions, devoid of beauty. They should have been written in the manner he himself commends in a review of Longfellow's "Evangeline": he should have depicted the truth strongly and attractively, and left to the reader the censure and the indignation. Mr. Whittier seems to know his peculiar limitations as well as his critics. He speaks of himself as one--

"Whose rhyme Beat often Labor's hurried time, Or Duty's rugged march through storm and strife,"

and he has once or twice expressed himself in prose in a way that seems to show that he recognizes the artistic mistake in the construction of his earlier poems. The omission of the moral _envoi_ from so many of his maturer creations strengthens one in this surmise. In 1867 Whittier published the following letter in the New York _Nation_: