THECATHOLIC WORLD.VOL. XXIV.,No.142.—JANUARY, 1877.Copyright:Rev.I. T. Hecker. 1877.JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER.[134]A nationalliterature is the most perfect expression of the best thoughts and highest sentiments of the people of which it is born, and of whose life it is the truest record. No other Englishman may have ever written or thought like Shakspere, but he wrote and thought from the fulness of a mind and heart that drew their inspiration from the life of the English people. He may be great nature’s best interpreter, but she was revealed to him through English eyes, and spoke in English accents. The power to take up into one’s own mind the thoughts of a whole people; to give a voice to the impressions made upon them by nature, religion, and society; to interpret to them their doubts, longings, and aspirations; to awaken the chords of deep and hidden sympathy which but await the touch of inspiration—is genius. Every great author is the type of a generation, the interpreter of an age, the delineator of a phase of national life. Between the character of a people, therefore, and its literature there is an intimate relation; and one great cause of the feebleness of American literature is doubtless the lack of conscious nationality in the American people. We have not yet outgrown the provincialism of our origin, nor assimilated the heterogeneous elements which from many sources have come to swell the current of our life. The growth of a national literature has been hindered also, by our necessary intellectual dependence on England. For, though it was a great privilege to possess from the start a rich and highly-developed language, with this boon we received bonds which no revolution could break. When the British colonies of North America were founded, Shakspere and Bacon had written, Milton was born, and the English language had received a form which nor power nor time could change; and before our ancestors had leisure or opportunity to turn from the rude labors of life in the wilderness to more intellectual pursuits, it had taken on the polish and precision of the age of Queen Anne. Henceforward,to know English, it was necessary to study its classics; and in them Americans found the imprint of a mental type which had ceased to be their own. And being themselves as yet without strongly-marked or well-defined national features of character, they became fatally mere imitators of works which could not be read without admiration, or studied without exciting in those who had thoughts to express the strong desire of imitation. Their excellence served to intimidate those who, while admiring, could not hope to rival their ease and elegance; and thus, in losing something of native vigor and freshness, our best writers have generally acquired only an artificial polish and a foreign grace.It must be remembered, too, that more than any other people we have been and are practical and utilitarian; and this is more specially true of the New Englanders, whose mental activity has been greater than that of any other Americans. We have loved knowledge as the means of power and wealth, and not as an element of refinement and culture. If evidence of this were needed, it would suffice to point to our school system, which is based upon the notion that the sole aim of education should be to fit man for the practical business of life. As the result, knowledge has been widely diffused, but the love of excellence has been diminished. Education, when considered as merely a help to common and immediate ends, neither strengthens nor refines the higher qualities of mind. If we may rely upon our own experience in college, we should say that the prevailing sentiment with young Americans is that it is waste of time to studyanything which cannot be put to practical use either in commercial or professional life; and this in spite of the efforts very generally made by the professors to inspire more exalted ideas. We have known the wretched sophism that it is useless to read logic, because in the world men do not reason in syllogisms, to pass current in a class of graduates. This low and utilitarian view of education does not affect alone our notions of the value of literature, in the stricter sense of the word, but exerts also a hurtful influence upon the study of science. For science, like literature, to be successfully cultivated, in its higher developments at least, must be sought for its own sake, without thought of those ulterior objects to which certainly it may be made to conduce. The love of knowledge for itself, the conviction that knowledge is its own end, is rarely found among us, and we therefore have but little enthusiasm for literary excellence or philosophic truth. The noblest thoughts spring from the heart, and he who seeks to know from a calculating spirit will for ever remain a stranger to the higher and serener realms of mind.Another cause by which the growth of American literature has been unfavorably affected may be found in the unlimited resources of the country, offering to all opportunities of wealth or fame. The demand for ability of every kind is so great that talent is not permitted to mature. The young man who possesses readiness of wit and a sprightly fancy, if he does not enter one of the learned professions or engage in commerce, almost fatally drifts into a newspaper office, than which a place more unfavorable to intellectual pursuits or to true cultureof mind cannot easily be imagined. If a book is the better the farther the author keeps away all thought of the reader, under what disadvantages does not he write whose duty it is made to think only of the reader! To be forced day by day to write upon subjects of which he knows little; to give opinions without having time to weigh arguments or to consider facts; to interpret passing events in the interests of party or in accordance with popular prejudice; to exaggerate the virtues of friends and the vices of opponents; to court applause by adapting style to the capacity and taste of the crowd; and to do all this hurriedly and in a rush, is to be an editor. When we reflect that it is to work of this kind that a very considerable part of the literary ability of the country is devoted, it is manifest that the result must be not only to withdraw useful laborers from nobler intellectual pursuits, but to lower and pervert the standard of taste. They who accustom their minds to dwell upon the picture of human life as presented in a daily newspaper, in which what is atrocious, vulgar, or startling receives greatest prominence, will hardly cultivate or retain an appreciation of elevated thoughts or the graces of composition.As the public is content with crude and hasty writing, the crowd, who are capable of such performance, rush in, eager to carry off the prize of voluminousness, if not of excellence; and, in consequence, we surpass all other nations in the number of worthless books which we print. In fact, the great national defect is haste, and therefore a want of thoroughness in our work.But we have no thought of entering into an extended examinationof the causes to which the feebleness of American literature is to be attributed. The very general recognition of the fact that it is feeble, even when not marred by grosser faults, is probably the most assuring evidence that in the future we may hope for something better.Our weakness, however it may be accounted for, is most perceptible in the highest realms of thought—philosophy and poetry. To the former our contributions are valueless. No original thinker has appeared among us; no one who has even aspired to anything higher than the office of a commentator. This, indeed, can hardly be matter for surprise, since we may be naturally supposed to inherit from the English their deficiency in power of abstract thought and metaphysical intuition. But in poetry they excel all other nations, whether ancient or modern; and as they have transmitted to us their mental defects, we might not unreasonably hope to be endowed with their peculiar gifts of mind. Deprived of the philosophic brow, we might hope for some compensation, at least, in the poet’s eye in a fine frenzy rolling. But even in this we seem not to have been highly favored. Nothing could well be more wretched than American verse-making during the colonial era. We doubt whether a single line of all that was written from the landing of the Pilgrims down to the war of Independence is worth preserving. Pope, when he wrote hisDunciad, found but one American worthy even of being damned to so unenviable an immortality.Freneau, who was the most popular and the most gifted poet of the Revolution, is as completely unknown to this generation as though he had never written; and, indeed,he wrote nothing which, without great loss to the world, may not be forgotten. And to this class, whom nor gods nor columns permit to live, belong nearly all who in America have courted the Muse. In our entire poetical literature there are not more than half a dozen names which deserve even passing notice, and the greatest of these cannot be placed higher than among the third-rate poets of England.Without adopting the crude theory of Macaulay that as civilization advances poetry necessarily declines, we shall be at no loss for reasons to account for this absence of the highest poetic gifts. Neither the character of the early settlers in this country, nor their religious faith, nor their social and political conditions of life, were of the kind from which inspiration to high thinking and flights of fancy might naturally be expected to spring. The Puritans were hard, unsympathetic, with no appreciation of beauty. In their eyes art of every kind was at best useless, even when not tending to give a dangerous softness and false polish to manners. Their religious faith intensified this feeling, and caused them to turn with aversion from what had been so long and so intimately associated, as almost to be identified, with Catholic worship. Their sour looks, their nasal twang, their affected simplicity, their contempt of literature, and their dislike of the most innocent amusements, would hardly lead the Muse, even if invited, to smile on them. Habits of thought and feeling not unlike theirs had, it is true, in Milton, been found to be not incompatible with the highest gifts of imagination and expression. But Milton had not the Puritan contempt of letters. He was, on the contrary, a man of extensivereading and great culture; and his proud and lofty spirit was not too high to stoop to flattery as servile and as elegant as ever a tyrant received. His lines on ecclesiastical architecture and music inIl Penserosoprove that he had a keen perception of the beauty and grandeur of Catholic worship. He was, in fact, in many respects more a Cavalier than a Roundhead. He had, besides, in the burning passions of his age, the bitter strife of party and sect, in the scorn and contempt of the nobles for the low-born—which in the civil wars had been trodden beneath the iron heel of war, only to rise with the monarchy in more offensive form—that which fired him to the adventurous song “that with no middle flight intends to soar,” and made him deify rebellion in Satan, who, rather than be subject, would not be at all.In the primitive and simple social organization of the American colonies there was nothing to fire the soul or kindle the indignation that makes poets. And even nature presented herself to our ancestors rather as a shrew to be conquered than as a mistress to be wooed with harmonious numbers and sweet sounds of melody. If to this we add, what few will deny, that the equality of conditions in our society, however desirable from a political or philanthropic point of view, is to the poetic eye but a flat and weary plain, without any of the inspiration of high mountains and long-withdrawing vales, of thundering cataracts that lose themselves in streams that peacefully glide all unconscious of the roar and turmoil of waters of which they are born, we will find nothing strange in the practical and unimaginative character of the American people. We know of no better example of thetameness of the American Muse than Whittier. He is one of our most voluminous writers of verse, and various causes, most of which are doubtless extrinsic to the literary merit of his compositions, have obtained for him very general recognition. He lacks, indeed, the culture of Longfellow, his wide acquaintance with books and the world, and his careful study of the literatures of the European nations. He lacks also his large sympathies and catholic thought, his elevation of sentiment and power of finished and polished expression.But if Whittier’s garb is plain, his features hard, and his voice harsh, his poetry, both in subject and in style, seems native here and to spring from the soil. He has himself not inaptly described his verse in the lines which he has prefixed to the Centennial edition of his complete poetical works:“The rigor of a frozen clime,The harshness of an untaught ear,The jarring words of one whose rhymeBeat often Labor’s hurried timeOr Duty’s rugged march through storm and strife, are here.“Of mystic beauty, dreamy grace,No rounded art the lack supplies;Or softer shades of Nature’s face,Or softer shades of Nature’s face,I view her common forms with unanointed eyes.”Whittier is, however, far from being a representative American or American poet. He is a Quaker. The broad-brimmed hat, the neat and simple dress, the sober gait, the slow and careful phrase with thee and thou, could not more truly denote him than his verse. Now, whatever idea we may form to ourselves of the typical American, or whether we think such a being exists at all, no one would ever imagine him to be a Quaker.The American is eager; the Quaker is subdued. The American is loud, with a tendency to boastfulnessand exaggeration; the Quaker is quiet and his language sober. He shuns the conflict and the battle, does not over-estimate his strength; while the American would fight the world, catch the Leviathan, swim the ocean, or do anything most impossible. The Quaker is cautious, the American reckless. The American is aggressive, the Quaker is timid. But it is needless to continue the contrast. A great poet is held by no bonds. His eye glances from earth to heaven—the infinite is his home; and that Whittier should be only a Quaker poet is of itself sufficient evidence that he is not a great poet. But in saying this we affirm only what is universally recognized. He is, indeed, wholly devoid of the creative faculty to which all true poetry owes its life; and yet this alone could have lifted most of the subjects which he has treated out of the dulness and weariness of the commonplace. To transform the real, to invest that which is low or mean or trivial with honor and beauty, is the triumph of the poet’s art, the test of his inspiration. His words, like the light of heaven, clothe the world in a splendor not its own, or, like the morning rays falling on the statue of Memnon, strike from dead and sluggish matter sounds of celestial harmony.“To him the meanest flower that blows can giveThoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.”Whittier certainly has no fear of trivial and commonplace subjects, but in his treatment of them he rarely, if ever, rises above the level of the verse-maker.It was the opinion of Keats that a long poem is the test of invention; and if we accept this as a canon of criticism, we shall want no other evidence of Whittier’s poverty ofimagination. All his pieces are short, though few readers, we suppose, have ever wished them longer. He cannot give sprightliness or variety to his verse, which like a sluggish stream creeps languidly along. There is no freshness about him, none of the breeziness of nature, none of its joyousness, exuberance, and exultant strength. In his youth, even, he had all the stiffness and slowness of age with its want of graceful motion. His narrations are interrupted and halting, interspersed with commonplace reflections and wearisome details; and when we have jogged along with him to the end, we are less pleased than fatigued. He never with strong arm bears us on over flood and fell, through hair-breadth escapes, gently at times letting us down amidst smiling homes and pleasant scenes, and again, with more rapid flight, hurrying us on breathless to the goal.Some of his descriptive pieces have been admired, but to us they seem artificial and mechanical. They are the pictures of a view-hunter. They lack life, warmth, and coloring—the individuality that comes of an informing soul. He remains external to nature, and with careful survey and deliberate purpose sketches this and that trait, till he has his landscape with sloping hills and meadows green, with flower and shrub and tree and everything that one could wish, except that indefinable something which would make the scene stand out from all the earth, familiar as the countenance of a friend or as a spot known from childhood. He has too much the air of a man who says: Come, let us make a description. In fact, he has taken the trouble to tell us that he has considered the story of Mogg Megoneonly as a framework for sketches of the scenery of New England and of its early inhabitants. His own confession proves his art mechanical. He gets a frame, stretches the canvas, and deliberately proceeds to copy. The true poet fuses man and nature into a union so intimate that both seem part of each. He dreams not of framework and sketches, but of the unity and harmony of life. Where the common eye sees but parts, his sees the living whole. He does not copy, but transforms and re-creates. Before his enraptured gaze the immeasurable heavens break open to their highest, and every height comes out and jutting peak. From him not the humblest flower or blade of grass is hidden; and whatever he beholds becomes the minister of his thought, the slave of his will; passing through his mind receives its coloring, and rises from his page as though some eternal law of harmony had fitted it to this and no other purpose.Whittier is even feebler in his attempts to portray character than in his description of scenery. To Ruth Bonython he gives “the sunny eye and sunset hair.” “Sunny eye” is poor enough; but who will tell us what “sunset hair” is like? Is it purple or gold or yellow or red? She is “tall and erect,” has a “dark-brown cheek,” “a pure white brow,” “a neck and bosom as white as ever the foam-wreaths that rise on the leaping river”;“And her eye has a glance more sternly wildThan even that of a forest child.”And she talks in the following style:“A humbled thing of shame and guilt,Outcast and spurned and lone,Wrapt in the shadows of my crime,With withering heart and burning brain,And tears that fell like fiery rain,I passed a fearful time.”The artifice by which Ruth quiets the suspicion of Mogg Megone, roused by the sight of her tearful eye and heaving bosom, is as remarkable for shrewdness as for poetic beauty:“Is the sachem angry—angry with RuthBecause she cries with an ache in her toothWhich would make a Sagamore jump and cryAnd look about with a woman’s eye?”The same weak and unskilful hand is visible in the characters of Mogg Megone, John Bonython, and Father Rasle, the Jesuit missionary. The descriptive portions of Mogg Megone are disfigured by mere rhetoric and what critics call “nonsense-verses.” As Mogg Megone and John Bonython are stealing through the wood, they hear a sound:“Hark! is that the angry howlOf the wolf the hills among,Or the hooting of the owlOn his leafy cradle swung?”The only reason for hesitating between the wolfs howl and the hooting of the owl was the poet’s want of a rhyme. But it is needless to load our page with these nonsense-verses, since Hudibras claims them to be a poet’s privilege:“But those that write in rhyme still makeThe one verse for the other’s sake;For one for sense, and one for rhyme,I think that’s sufficient at one time.”Whittier’s Quaker faith inspired him early in life with an abhorrence of slavery, and drew him to the abolitionists, by whom, in 1836, he was appointed secretary of the American Anti-Slavery Society. It was about this time that he began to publish his anti-slavery rhymes, which he afterwards collected in a volume entitled,Voices of Freedom. These verses are not remarkable for thought or expression. They have the dull, monotonous ring of all Whittier’s rhymes, and are hardly more poetic than a political harangue. They are partisanin tone and manner; breathe rather hatred of the “haughty Southron” than love of the negro; and are without polish or elegance. Read to political meetings during the excitement of the anti-slavery agitation, they were probably as effective as ordinary stump-speeches. Worthless as they are as poetry, they brought Whittier to public notice. He became the laureate of the abolitionist party, and with its growth grew his fame. The circumstances which madeUncle Tom’s Cabinthe most popular novel of the day made him a popular poet. His verses found readers who cared but little for inspired thought or expression, but who were delighted with political rhymes that painted the Southern slave-owner as the most heartless and brutal of men, who “in the vile South Sodom” feasted day by day upon the sight of human suffering inflicted by his own hand. Pieces like that which begins with the words,“A Christian! Going, gone!Who bids for God’s own image?”were at least good campaign documents in the times of anti-slavery agitation.“A Christian up for sale;Wet with her blood your whips, o’ertask her frame,Make her life loathsome with your wrong and shame:Her patience shall not fail.”This is very commonplace and vulgar, we grant, but it has the merit of not being above the intellectual level of an ordinary political meeting.And then, in the metre of Scott’s “Bride of Netherby,” we have the “Hunters of Men”:“Have ye heard of our hunting o’er mountain and glen,Through canebrake and forest, the hunting of men?Hark! the cheer and the halloo, the crack of the whip,And the yell of the hound as he fastens his grip.All blithe are our hunters, and noble their match—Though hundreds are caught, there are millions to catch.”All we maintain is that this is not poetry, fair sample though it be of Whittier’sVoices of Freedom.Slavery undoubtedly is hateful, and to denounce it cannot but be right. A preacher, however, need not be a poet, even though he should declaim in rhymes; nor is hate of the slave-owner love of the slave, much less love of liberty. We fail to catch in theseVoicesthe swelling sound of freedom. They are rather the echoes of the fierce words of bitter partisan strife. The lips of him who uttered them had not been touched by the burning coal snatched from the altar of liberty, however his heart may have rankled at the thought of Southern cruelty.Whittier’s rhymes of the war are the natural sequel of his anti-slavery verses. The laureate of abolitionism could but sing, Quaker though he was, the bloody, fratricidal strife which he had helped to kindle. At first, indeed, he seemed to hesitate and to doubt whether it was well to light“The fires of hell to weld anew the chainOn that red anvil where each blow is pain.”Safe on freedom’s vantage-ground, he inclined rather to be the sad and helpless spectator of a suicide.“Why take we up the accursed thing again?Pity, forgive, but urge them back no moreWho, drunk with passion, flaunt disunion’s ragWith its vile reptile-blazon.”But soon he came to recognize that God may speak “in battle’s stormy voice, and his praise be in the wrath of man.”Whittier’s war rhymes are not so numerous as hisVoices of Freedom, nor are they in any way remarkable as poetical compositions.The lines on Barbara Frietchie derive their interest from the incident narrated, and not from any beauty of thought or language with which it has been clothed. They are popular because old Barbara Frietchie waving the flag of the Union above Stonewall Jackson’s army as it passed, with measured tread, through the streets of Frederick, is a striking and dramatic figure. There could be no more convincing proof of the barrenness of Whittier’s imagination than the poor use which he has made of so poetical an episode.“In her attic window the staff she setTo show that one heart was loyal yet.”And yet of all his poems this is probably the best known and the most popular.TheVoices of Freedomand theSongs in War Timeboth belong to the class of occasional poetry which more than any other kind is apt to confer a short-lived fame upon authors whose chief merit consists in being fortunate. He who sings the conqueror’s praise will never lack admirers.We are sorry to perceive, in so amiable a man as Whittier is generally supposed to be, the many evidences which this edition of his complete poetical works affords of intense and bitter anti-Catholic prejudice. If he were content with manifesting, even with damnable iteration, his Quaker horror of creeds, we could excuse the simple mind that is capable of holding that men may believe without giving to their faith form and sensible expression; though the mental habit from which alone such a theory could proceed is the very opposite of the poetical. The Catholic Church, which is the groundwork and firm support of all Christian dogmas, cannot be understoodby those who fail to perceive that without doctrinal religion the whole moral order would be meaningless. But Whittier’s prejudice carries him far beyond mere protest against Catholic teaching. He cannot approach any subject or person connected with the church without being thrown into mental convulsions. Let us take, for example, the character of Father Rasle, the martyr, in “Mogg Megone,” one of his earliest and longest poems. This noble and heroic missionary is represented as a heartless and senseless zealot, who “by cross and vow” had pledged Mogg Megone“To lift the hatchet of his sire,And round his own, the church’s, foeTo light the avenging fire.”When Ruth Bonython, half mad with fear and grief, comes to confess to Father Rasle that, seeing the scalp of her lover hanging to Mogg Megone’s belt, she had killed him in his drunken sleep, the Jesuit starts back—“His long, thin frame as ague shakes,And loathing hate is in his eye”—not from horror of the crime, but because in the death of Megone he recognizes the extinction of his long-cherished hopes of revenge.“Ah! weary priest!…Thoughts are thine which have no partWith the meek and pure of heart.…Thoughts of strife and hate and wrongSweep thy heated brain along—Fading hopes for whose successIt were sin to breathe a prayer;Schemes which Heaven may never bless;Tears which darken to despair.”His heart is as stone to the pitiful appeal of the contrite and broken-hearted girl. “Off!” he exclaims—“‘Off, woman of sin! Nay, touch not meWith those fingers of blood; begone!’With a gesture of horror he spurns the formThat writhes at his feet like a trodden worm.”And in the death-scene of the martyr, as painted by Whittier, the coward and the villain, with forcesequally matched, strive for the mastery.The ode “To PiusIX.” will furnish us with another example of religious hate driving its victim to the very verge of raving madness. “Hider at Gaeta,” he exclaims—“Hider at Gaeta, seize thy chance!Coward and cruel, come!“Creep now from Naple’s bloody skirt;Thy mummer’s part was acted well,While Rome, with steel and fire begirt,Before thy crusade fell.* * * * *“But hateful as that tyrant old,The mocking witness of his crime,In thee shall loathing eyes beholdThe Nero of our time!“Stand where Rome’s blood was freest shed,Mock Heaven with impious thanks, and callIts curses on the patriot dead,Its blessings on the Gaul;“Or sit upon thy throne of lies,A poor, mean idol, blood-besmeared,Whom even its worshippers despise—Unhonored, unrevered!”It is some consolation to know that Whittier himself, in reading over these ravings, has been forced to acknowledge their unworthiness by a lame attempt at apology. “He is no enemy of Catholics,” he informs us in a note to this effusion; “but the severity of his language finds its ample apology in the reluctant confession of one of the most eminent Romish priests, the eloquent and devoted Father Ventura.” What is this but making calumny an ally of outrage?In the “Dream of Pio Nono” he introducesSt.Peter, who upbraids the venerable Pontiff in the following style:“Hearest thou the angels singAbove this open hell?ThouGod’s high-priest!Thou the vicegerent of the Prince of Peace!Thou the successor of his chosen ones!I, Peter, fisherman of Galilee,In the dear Master’s name, and for the loveOf his true church, proclaim thee Antichrist.”In a poem on “Italy” Whittier hears the groans of nations across the sea.“Their blood and bonesCried out in torture, crushed by thronesAnd sucked by priestly cannibals.”“Rejoice, O Garibaldi!” he exclaims,“Though thy swordFailed at Rome’s gates, and blood seemed vainly pouredWhere in Christ’s name the crownèd infidelOf France wrought murder with the arms of hell.* * * * *God’s providence is not blind, but, full of eyes,It searches all the refuges of lies;And in his time and way the accursed thingsBefore whose evil feet thy battle-gageHas clashed defiance from hot youth to ageShall perish.”We crave the reader’s indulgence for this disfigurement of our page, and wish with all our heart it had been possible to fill it with more worthy matter.Longfellow, breathing the same air as Whittier, the disciple of a faith commonly supposed to be less mild and sweetly loving than a Quaker’s, has found the tenderest thoughts, the noblest images, and the highest forms of character in the church which our poet cannot even think of without raving.But possibly we should be wrong to complain that the mystic beauty which has in all ages appealed with irresistible power of fascination to the highest and most richly-gifted natures should fail to impress one all of whose thoughts are cast in a straitened and unyielding mould. Whittier has not the far-glancing eye of the poet to which all beauty appeals like the light itself. The partisan habit of an inveterate abolitionist has stiffened and hardened a disposition which was never plastic. It was so long his official duty to write anti-slavery campaign verses that, in treating subjects which should inspire higher thoughts, he is still held captive to the lash of the slave-driver, hears the clanking of chains and the groans of the fettered; and these sights and sounds drive him into mere rant and rhetoric.We willingly bear testimony to the moral tone and purity whichpervade Whittier’s verse. There is nothing to offend the most delicate ear; nothing to bring a blush to a virgin’s cheek. He lacks the power to portray passion, and was not tempted into doubtful paths. He delights in pictures of home, with its innocent joys and quiet happiness; sings of friendship and the endearing ties that bind the parent to the child; or, if he attunes his harp to love, he does it in numbers so sadly sweet that we only remember that the fickle god has wreathed his bowers with cypress boughs and made his best interpreter a sigh.What could be more harmless than the little scene between Maud Muller and the judge—though Heaven only knows what the judge, and above all the American judge, can have done that he should be condemned to play therôleof a lover. Possibly it may have been the judicious nature of the love that induced the poet to think such adeus ex machinânot out of place. At all events, nothing could be more inoffensive.“She stooped where the cool spring bubbled upAnd filled for him her small tin cup.‘Thanks!’ said the judge; ‘a sweeter draughtFrom a fairer hand was never quaffed.’”And how refreshing it is to find a judge making love by talking“Of the grass and flowers and trees,Of the singing birds and humming bees”!We are less edified, however, when, in after-years, we find him a married man, sipping the golden wine but longing for the wayside well and the barefoot maiden:“And the proud man sighed, with secret pain:‘Ah! that I were free again!’”In reading Whittier we seldom come upon a thought so perfectly expressed that it can never afteroccur to us except in the words in which he has clothed it. It is a poet’s privilege thus to marry thoughts to words in a union so divine that no man may put them asunder; and where this high power is wanting themens divinioris not found. For our own part, we hardly recall a line of Whittier that we should care to remember. Nothing that he has written has been more frequently quoted than the couplet:“For of all sad words of tongue or pen.The saddest are these: ‘It might have been.’”To our thinking, this is meaningless. “It might have been” is neither sad nor joyful, except as it is made so by that with which it is associated. He who is drowned may thus have escaped hanging—“It might have been.” The judge might have been Maud’s husband; but she might have thought of sadder things than that she was not his wife.“Snow-Bound,” a winter idyl, is, in the opinion of several critics, Whittier’s best performance. A more hackneyed theme he would probably have found it difficult to choose; nor has he the magic charm that makes the old seem as new. It is the unmistakable snow-storm with which our school-readers made us familiar in childhood. The sun rises “cheerless” over “hills of gray”; sinks from sight before it sets; “the ocean roars on his wintry shore”; night comes on, made hoary “with the whirl-dance of the blinding storm,” and ere bedtime“The white drift piled the window-frame”;and then, of course, we have the horse and cow and cock, each in turn contemplating the beautiful snow. Even the silly ram“Shook his sage head with gesture mute,And emphasized with stamp of foot.”The boys, with mittened hands, and caps drawn down over ears, sally forth to cut a pathway at their sire’s command. And when the second night is ushered in, we are quite prepared for the blazing fire of oaken logs, whose roaring draught makes the great throat of the chimney laugh; while on the clean hearth the apples sputter, the mug of cider simmers, the house-dog sleeps, and the cat meditates. The group of faces gathered round are plain and honest, just such as good, simple country folk are wont to wear, but feebly drawn. In the fitful firelight their features are dim. The father talks of rides on Memphremagog’s wooded side; of trapper’s hut and Indian camp. The mother turns her wheel or knits her stocking, and tells how the Indian came down at midnight on Cocheco town. The uncle, “innocent of books,” unravels the mysteries of moons and tides. The maiden aunt, very sweet and very unselfish, recalls her memories of“The huskings and the apple-bees,The sleigh-rides and the summer sails.”It would be unkind to leave the village schoolmaster out in the biting air, and he is therefore brought in to make us wonder how one small head could contain all he knew.In the very thought of home there is an exhaustless well-spring of poetic feeling. The word itself is all alive with the spirit of sweet poesy which gives charm to the humblest verse; and it would be strange indeed if, in an idyl like “Snow-Bound,” there should not be found passages of real beauty, touches of nature that make the whole world kin. The subject isone that readily lends itself to the lowly mood and unpretending style. Fine thoughts and ambitious words would but distract us. Each one is thinking of his own dear home, and he but asks the poet not to break the spell that has made him a child again; not to darken the dewy dawn of memory, that throws the light of heaven around a world that seemed as dead, but now lives.“O Time and Change!—with hair as grayAs was my sire’s that winter day,How strange it seems, with so much goneOf life and love, to still live on!Ah! brother, only I and thouAre left of all that circle now—The dear home faces whereuponThat fitful firelight paled and shone.Henceforward, listen as we will,The voices of that hearth are still;Look where we may, the wide earth o’er,Those lighted faces smile no more.We tread the paths their feet have worn;We sit beneath their orchard trees;We hear, like them, the hum of beesAnd rustle of the bladed corn;We turn the pages that they read,Their written words we linger o’er.But in the sun they cast no shade,No voice is heard, no sign is made,No step is on the conscious floor!Yet love will dream, and faith will trust(Since He who knows our need is just),That somehow, somewhere, meet we must.Alas! for him who never seesThe stars shine through his cypress-trees;Who hopeless lays his dead away,Nor looks to see the breaking dayAcross the mournful marbles play;Who hath not learned in hours of faithThe truth to flesh and sense unknown—That Life is ever Lord of Death,And Love can never lose its own!”This is true poetry, sad and sweet as a mother’s voice when she lulls her sick babe to rest, knowing that, if he sleep, he shall live.In Whittier’s verse we often catch the unmistakable accent of genuine feeling, and his best lyrics are so artless and simple that they almost disarm criticism. In many ways his influence has doubtless been good; and the critic, whose eye is naturally drawn to what is less worthy, finds it easy to carp at faults which he has not the ability to commit.[134]The Complete Poetical Works of John Greenleaf Whittier.Boston: Osgood &Co.1876.
THECATHOLIC WORLD.VOL. XXIV.,No.142.—JANUARY, 1877.Copyright:Rev.I. T. Hecker. 1877.JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER.[134]A nationalliterature is the most perfect expression of the best thoughts and highest sentiments of the people of which it is born, and of whose life it is the truest record. No other Englishman may have ever written or thought like Shakspere, but he wrote and thought from the fulness of a mind and heart that drew their inspiration from the life of the English people. He may be great nature’s best interpreter, but she was revealed to him through English eyes, and spoke in English accents. The power to take up into one’s own mind the thoughts of a whole people; to give a voice to the impressions made upon them by nature, religion, and society; to interpret to them their doubts, longings, and aspirations; to awaken the chords of deep and hidden sympathy which but await the touch of inspiration—is genius. Every great author is the type of a generation, the interpreter of an age, the delineator of a phase of national life. Between the character of a people, therefore, and its literature there is an intimate relation; and one great cause of the feebleness of American literature is doubtless the lack of conscious nationality in the American people. We have not yet outgrown the provincialism of our origin, nor assimilated the heterogeneous elements which from many sources have come to swell the current of our life. The growth of a national literature has been hindered also, by our necessary intellectual dependence on England. For, though it was a great privilege to possess from the start a rich and highly-developed language, with this boon we received bonds which no revolution could break. When the British colonies of North America were founded, Shakspere and Bacon had written, Milton was born, and the English language had received a form which nor power nor time could change; and before our ancestors had leisure or opportunity to turn from the rude labors of life in the wilderness to more intellectual pursuits, it had taken on the polish and precision of the age of Queen Anne. Henceforward,to know English, it was necessary to study its classics; and in them Americans found the imprint of a mental type which had ceased to be their own. And being themselves as yet without strongly-marked or well-defined national features of character, they became fatally mere imitators of works which could not be read without admiration, or studied without exciting in those who had thoughts to express the strong desire of imitation. Their excellence served to intimidate those who, while admiring, could not hope to rival their ease and elegance; and thus, in losing something of native vigor and freshness, our best writers have generally acquired only an artificial polish and a foreign grace.It must be remembered, too, that more than any other people we have been and are practical and utilitarian; and this is more specially true of the New Englanders, whose mental activity has been greater than that of any other Americans. We have loved knowledge as the means of power and wealth, and not as an element of refinement and culture. If evidence of this were needed, it would suffice to point to our school system, which is based upon the notion that the sole aim of education should be to fit man for the practical business of life. As the result, knowledge has been widely diffused, but the love of excellence has been diminished. Education, when considered as merely a help to common and immediate ends, neither strengthens nor refines the higher qualities of mind. If we may rely upon our own experience in college, we should say that the prevailing sentiment with young Americans is that it is waste of time to studyanything which cannot be put to practical use either in commercial or professional life; and this in spite of the efforts very generally made by the professors to inspire more exalted ideas. We have known the wretched sophism that it is useless to read logic, because in the world men do not reason in syllogisms, to pass current in a class of graduates. This low and utilitarian view of education does not affect alone our notions of the value of literature, in the stricter sense of the word, but exerts also a hurtful influence upon the study of science. For science, like literature, to be successfully cultivated, in its higher developments at least, must be sought for its own sake, without thought of those ulterior objects to which certainly it may be made to conduce. The love of knowledge for itself, the conviction that knowledge is its own end, is rarely found among us, and we therefore have but little enthusiasm for literary excellence or philosophic truth. The noblest thoughts spring from the heart, and he who seeks to know from a calculating spirit will for ever remain a stranger to the higher and serener realms of mind.Another cause by which the growth of American literature has been unfavorably affected may be found in the unlimited resources of the country, offering to all opportunities of wealth or fame. The demand for ability of every kind is so great that talent is not permitted to mature. The young man who possesses readiness of wit and a sprightly fancy, if he does not enter one of the learned professions or engage in commerce, almost fatally drifts into a newspaper office, than which a place more unfavorable to intellectual pursuits or to true cultureof mind cannot easily be imagined. If a book is the better the farther the author keeps away all thought of the reader, under what disadvantages does not he write whose duty it is made to think only of the reader! To be forced day by day to write upon subjects of which he knows little; to give opinions without having time to weigh arguments or to consider facts; to interpret passing events in the interests of party or in accordance with popular prejudice; to exaggerate the virtues of friends and the vices of opponents; to court applause by adapting style to the capacity and taste of the crowd; and to do all this hurriedly and in a rush, is to be an editor. When we reflect that it is to work of this kind that a very considerable part of the literary ability of the country is devoted, it is manifest that the result must be not only to withdraw useful laborers from nobler intellectual pursuits, but to lower and pervert the standard of taste. They who accustom their minds to dwell upon the picture of human life as presented in a daily newspaper, in which what is atrocious, vulgar, or startling receives greatest prominence, will hardly cultivate or retain an appreciation of elevated thoughts or the graces of composition.As the public is content with crude and hasty writing, the crowd, who are capable of such performance, rush in, eager to carry off the prize of voluminousness, if not of excellence; and, in consequence, we surpass all other nations in the number of worthless books which we print. In fact, the great national defect is haste, and therefore a want of thoroughness in our work.But we have no thought of entering into an extended examinationof the causes to which the feebleness of American literature is to be attributed. The very general recognition of the fact that it is feeble, even when not marred by grosser faults, is probably the most assuring evidence that in the future we may hope for something better.Our weakness, however it may be accounted for, is most perceptible in the highest realms of thought—philosophy and poetry. To the former our contributions are valueless. No original thinker has appeared among us; no one who has even aspired to anything higher than the office of a commentator. This, indeed, can hardly be matter for surprise, since we may be naturally supposed to inherit from the English their deficiency in power of abstract thought and metaphysical intuition. But in poetry they excel all other nations, whether ancient or modern; and as they have transmitted to us their mental defects, we might not unreasonably hope to be endowed with their peculiar gifts of mind. Deprived of the philosophic brow, we might hope for some compensation, at least, in the poet’s eye in a fine frenzy rolling. But even in this we seem not to have been highly favored. Nothing could well be more wretched than American verse-making during the colonial era. We doubt whether a single line of all that was written from the landing of the Pilgrims down to the war of Independence is worth preserving. Pope, when he wrote hisDunciad, found but one American worthy even of being damned to so unenviable an immortality.Freneau, who was the most popular and the most gifted poet of the Revolution, is as completely unknown to this generation as though he had never written; and, indeed,he wrote nothing which, without great loss to the world, may not be forgotten. And to this class, whom nor gods nor columns permit to live, belong nearly all who in America have courted the Muse. In our entire poetical literature there are not more than half a dozen names which deserve even passing notice, and the greatest of these cannot be placed higher than among the third-rate poets of England.Without adopting the crude theory of Macaulay that as civilization advances poetry necessarily declines, we shall be at no loss for reasons to account for this absence of the highest poetic gifts. Neither the character of the early settlers in this country, nor their religious faith, nor their social and political conditions of life, were of the kind from which inspiration to high thinking and flights of fancy might naturally be expected to spring. The Puritans were hard, unsympathetic, with no appreciation of beauty. In their eyes art of every kind was at best useless, even when not tending to give a dangerous softness and false polish to manners. Their religious faith intensified this feeling, and caused them to turn with aversion from what had been so long and so intimately associated, as almost to be identified, with Catholic worship. Their sour looks, their nasal twang, their affected simplicity, their contempt of literature, and their dislike of the most innocent amusements, would hardly lead the Muse, even if invited, to smile on them. Habits of thought and feeling not unlike theirs had, it is true, in Milton, been found to be not incompatible with the highest gifts of imagination and expression. But Milton had not the Puritan contempt of letters. He was, on the contrary, a man of extensivereading and great culture; and his proud and lofty spirit was not too high to stoop to flattery as servile and as elegant as ever a tyrant received. His lines on ecclesiastical architecture and music inIl Penserosoprove that he had a keen perception of the beauty and grandeur of Catholic worship. He was, in fact, in many respects more a Cavalier than a Roundhead. He had, besides, in the burning passions of his age, the bitter strife of party and sect, in the scorn and contempt of the nobles for the low-born—which in the civil wars had been trodden beneath the iron heel of war, only to rise with the monarchy in more offensive form—that which fired him to the adventurous song “that with no middle flight intends to soar,” and made him deify rebellion in Satan, who, rather than be subject, would not be at all.In the primitive and simple social organization of the American colonies there was nothing to fire the soul or kindle the indignation that makes poets. And even nature presented herself to our ancestors rather as a shrew to be conquered than as a mistress to be wooed with harmonious numbers and sweet sounds of melody. If to this we add, what few will deny, that the equality of conditions in our society, however desirable from a political or philanthropic point of view, is to the poetic eye but a flat and weary plain, without any of the inspiration of high mountains and long-withdrawing vales, of thundering cataracts that lose themselves in streams that peacefully glide all unconscious of the roar and turmoil of waters of which they are born, we will find nothing strange in the practical and unimaginative character of the American people. We know of no better example of thetameness of the American Muse than Whittier. He is one of our most voluminous writers of verse, and various causes, most of which are doubtless extrinsic to the literary merit of his compositions, have obtained for him very general recognition. He lacks, indeed, the culture of Longfellow, his wide acquaintance with books and the world, and his careful study of the literatures of the European nations. He lacks also his large sympathies and catholic thought, his elevation of sentiment and power of finished and polished expression.But if Whittier’s garb is plain, his features hard, and his voice harsh, his poetry, both in subject and in style, seems native here and to spring from the soil. He has himself not inaptly described his verse in the lines which he has prefixed to the Centennial edition of his complete poetical works:“The rigor of a frozen clime,The harshness of an untaught ear,The jarring words of one whose rhymeBeat often Labor’s hurried timeOr Duty’s rugged march through storm and strife, are here.“Of mystic beauty, dreamy grace,No rounded art the lack supplies;Or softer shades of Nature’s face,Or softer shades of Nature’s face,I view her common forms with unanointed eyes.”Whittier is, however, far from being a representative American or American poet. He is a Quaker. The broad-brimmed hat, the neat and simple dress, the sober gait, the slow and careful phrase with thee and thou, could not more truly denote him than his verse. Now, whatever idea we may form to ourselves of the typical American, or whether we think such a being exists at all, no one would ever imagine him to be a Quaker.The American is eager; the Quaker is subdued. The American is loud, with a tendency to boastfulnessand exaggeration; the Quaker is quiet and his language sober. He shuns the conflict and the battle, does not over-estimate his strength; while the American would fight the world, catch the Leviathan, swim the ocean, or do anything most impossible. The Quaker is cautious, the American reckless. The American is aggressive, the Quaker is timid. But it is needless to continue the contrast. A great poet is held by no bonds. His eye glances from earth to heaven—the infinite is his home; and that Whittier should be only a Quaker poet is of itself sufficient evidence that he is not a great poet. But in saying this we affirm only what is universally recognized. He is, indeed, wholly devoid of the creative faculty to which all true poetry owes its life; and yet this alone could have lifted most of the subjects which he has treated out of the dulness and weariness of the commonplace. To transform the real, to invest that which is low or mean or trivial with honor and beauty, is the triumph of the poet’s art, the test of his inspiration. His words, like the light of heaven, clothe the world in a splendor not its own, or, like the morning rays falling on the statue of Memnon, strike from dead and sluggish matter sounds of celestial harmony.“To him the meanest flower that blows can giveThoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.”Whittier certainly has no fear of trivial and commonplace subjects, but in his treatment of them he rarely, if ever, rises above the level of the verse-maker.It was the opinion of Keats that a long poem is the test of invention; and if we accept this as a canon of criticism, we shall want no other evidence of Whittier’s poverty ofimagination. All his pieces are short, though few readers, we suppose, have ever wished them longer. He cannot give sprightliness or variety to his verse, which like a sluggish stream creeps languidly along. There is no freshness about him, none of the breeziness of nature, none of its joyousness, exuberance, and exultant strength. In his youth, even, he had all the stiffness and slowness of age with its want of graceful motion. His narrations are interrupted and halting, interspersed with commonplace reflections and wearisome details; and when we have jogged along with him to the end, we are less pleased than fatigued. He never with strong arm bears us on over flood and fell, through hair-breadth escapes, gently at times letting us down amidst smiling homes and pleasant scenes, and again, with more rapid flight, hurrying us on breathless to the goal.Some of his descriptive pieces have been admired, but to us they seem artificial and mechanical. They are the pictures of a view-hunter. They lack life, warmth, and coloring—the individuality that comes of an informing soul. He remains external to nature, and with careful survey and deliberate purpose sketches this and that trait, till he has his landscape with sloping hills and meadows green, with flower and shrub and tree and everything that one could wish, except that indefinable something which would make the scene stand out from all the earth, familiar as the countenance of a friend or as a spot known from childhood. He has too much the air of a man who says: Come, let us make a description. In fact, he has taken the trouble to tell us that he has considered the story of Mogg Megoneonly as a framework for sketches of the scenery of New England and of its early inhabitants. His own confession proves his art mechanical. He gets a frame, stretches the canvas, and deliberately proceeds to copy. The true poet fuses man and nature into a union so intimate that both seem part of each. He dreams not of framework and sketches, but of the unity and harmony of life. Where the common eye sees but parts, his sees the living whole. He does not copy, but transforms and re-creates. Before his enraptured gaze the immeasurable heavens break open to their highest, and every height comes out and jutting peak. From him not the humblest flower or blade of grass is hidden; and whatever he beholds becomes the minister of his thought, the slave of his will; passing through his mind receives its coloring, and rises from his page as though some eternal law of harmony had fitted it to this and no other purpose.Whittier is even feebler in his attempts to portray character than in his description of scenery. To Ruth Bonython he gives “the sunny eye and sunset hair.” “Sunny eye” is poor enough; but who will tell us what “sunset hair” is like? Is it purple or gold or yellow or red? She is “tall and erect,” has a “dark-brown cheek,” “a pure white brow,” “a neck and bosom as white as ever the foam-wreaths that rise on the leaping river”;“And her eye has a glance more sternly wildThan even that of a forest child.”And she talks in the following style:“A humbled thing of shame and guilt,Outcast and spurned and lone,Wrapt in the shadows of my crime,With withering heart and burning brain,And tears that fell like fiery rain,I passed a fearful time.”The artifice by which Ruth quiets the suspicion of Mogg Megone, roused by the sight of her tearful eye and heaving bosom, is as remarkable for shrewdness as for poetic beauty:“Is the sachem angry—angry with RuthBecause she cries with an ache in her toothWhich would make a Sagamore jump and cryAnd look about with a woman’s eye?”The same weak and unskilful hand is visible in the characters of Mogg Megone, John Bonython, and Father Rasle, the Jesuit missionary. The descriptive portions of Mogg Megone are disfigured by mere rhetoric and what critics call “nonsense-verses.” As Mogg Megone and John Bonython are stealing through the wood, they hear a sound:“Hark! is that the angry howlOf the wolf the hills among,Or the hooting of the owlOn his leafy cradle swung?”The only reason for hesitating between the wolfs howl and the hooting of the owl was the poet’s want of a rhyme. But it is needless to load our page with these nonsense-verses, since Hudibras claims them to be a poet’s privilege:“But those that write in rhyme still makeThe one verse for the other’s sake;For one for sense, and one for rhyme,I think that’s sufficient at one time.”Whittier’s Quaker faith inspired him early in life with an abhorrence of slavery, and drew him to the abolitionists, by whom, in 1836, he was appointed secretary of the American Anti-Slavery Society. It was about this time that he began to publish his anti-slavery rhymes, which he afterwards collected in a volume entitled,Voices of Freedom. These verses are not remarkable for thought or expression. They have the dull, monotonous ring of all Whittier’s rhymes, and are hardly more poetic than a political harangue. They are partisanin tone and manner; breathe rather hatred of the “haughty Southron” than love of the negro; and are without polish or elegance. Read to political meetings during the excitement of the anti-slavery agitation, they were probably as effective as ordinary stump-speeches. Worthless as they are as poetry, they brought Whittier to public notice. He became the laureate of the abolitionist party, and with its growth grew his fame. The circumstances which madeUncle Tom’s Cabinthe most popular novel of the day made him a popular poet. His verses found readers who cared but little for inspired thought or expression, but who were delighted with political rhymes that painted the Southern slave-owner as the most heartless and brutal of men, who “in the vile South Sodom” feasted day by day upon the sight of human suffering inflicted by his own hand. Pieces like that which begins with the words,“A Christian! Going, gone!Who bids for God’s own image?”were at least good campaign documents in the times of anti-slavery agitation.“A Christian up for sale;Wet with her blood your whips, o’ertask her frame,Make her life loathsome with your wrong and shame:Her patience shall not fail.”This is very commonplace and vulgar, we grant, but it has the merit of not being above the intellectual level of an ordinary political meeting.And then, in the metre of Scott’s “Bride of Netherby,” we have the “Hunters of Men”:“Have ye heard of our hunting o’er mountain and glen,Through canebrake and forest, the hunting of men?Hark! the cheer and the halloo, the crack of the whip,And the yell of the hound as he fastens his grip.All blithe are our hunters, and noble their match—Though hundreds are caught, there are millions to catch.”All we maintain is that this is not poetry, fair sample though it be of Whittier’sVoices of Freedom.Slavery undoubtedly is hateful, and to denounce it cannot but be right. A preacher, however, need not be a poet, even though he should declaim in rhymes; nor is hate of the slave-owner love of the slave, much less love of liberty. We fail to catch in theseVoicesthe swelling sound of freedom. They are rather the echoes of the fierce words of bitter partisan strife. The lips of him who uttered them had not been touched by the burning coal snatched from the altar of liberty, however his heart may have rankled at the thought of Southern cruelty.Whittier’s rhymes of the war are the natural sequel of his anti-slavery verses. The laureate of abolitionism could but sing, Quaker though he was, the bloody, fratricidal strife which he had helped to kindle. At first, indeed, he seemed to hesitate and to doubt whether it was well to light“The fires of hell to weld anew the chainOn that red anvil where each blow is pain.”Safe on freedom’s vantage-ground, he inclined rather to be the sad and helpless spectator of a suicide.“Why take we up the accursed thing again?Pity, forgive, but urge them back no moreWho, drunk with passion, flaunt disunion’s ragWith its vile reptile-blazon.”But soon he came to recognize that God may speak “in battle’s stormy voice, and his praise be in the wrath of man.”Whittier’s war rhymes are not so numerous as hisVoices of Freedom, nor are they in any way remarkable as poetical compositions.The lines on Barbara Frietchie derive their interest from the incident narrated, and not from any beauty of thought or language with which it has been clothed. They are popular because old Barbara Frietchie waving the flag of the Union above Stonewall Jackson’s army as it passed, with measured tread, through the streets of Frederick, is a striking and dramatic figure. There could be no more convincing proof of the barrenness of Whittier’s imagination than the poor use which he has made of so poetical an episode.“In her attic window the staff she setTo show that one heart was loyal yet.”And yet of all his poems this is probably the best known and the most popular.TheVoices of Freedomand theSongs in War Timeboth belong to the class of occasional poetry which more than any other kind is apt to confer a short-lived fame upon authors whose chief merit consists in being fortunate. He who sings the conqueror’s praise will never lack admirers.We are sorry to perceive, in so amiable a man as Whittier is generally supposed to be, the many evidences which this edition of his complete poetical works affords of intense and bitter anti-Catholic prejudice. If he were content with manifesting, even with damnable iteration, his Quaker horror of creeds, we could excuse the simple mind that is capable of holding that men may believe without giving to their faith form and sensible expression; though the mental habit from which alone such a theory could proceed is the very opposite of the poetical. The Catholic Church, which is the groundwork and firm support of all Christian dogmas, cannot be understoodby those who fail to perceive that without doctrinal religion the whole moral order would be meaningless. But Whittier’s prejudice carries him far beyond mere protest against Catholic teaching. He cannot approach any subject or person connected with the church without being thrown into mental convulsions. Let us take, for example, the character of Father Rasle, the martyr, in “Mogg Megone,” one of his earliest and longest poems. This noble and heroic missionary is represented as a heartless and senseless zealot, who “by cross and vow” had pledged Mogg Megone“To lift the hatchet of his sire,And round his own, the church’s, foeTo light the avenging fire.”When Ruth Bonython, half mad with fear and grief, comes to confess to Father Rasle that, seeing the scalp of her lover hanging to Mogg Megone’s belt, she had killed him in his drunken sleep, the Jesuit starts back—“His long, thin frame as ague shakes,And loathing hate is in his eye”—not from horror of the crime, but because in the death of Megone he recognizes the extinction of his long-cherished hopes of revenge.“Ah! weary priest!…Thoughts are thine which have no partWith the meek and pure of heart.…Thoughts of strife and hate and wrongSweep thy heated brain along—Fading hopes for whose successIt were sin to breathe a prayer;Schemes which Heaven may never bless;Tears which darken to despair.”His heart is as stone to the pitiful appeal of the contrite and broken-hearted girl. “Off!” he exclaims—“‘Off, woman of sin! Nay, touch not meWith those fingers of blood; begone!’With a gesture of horror he spurns the formThat writhes at his feet like a trodden worm.”And in the death-scene of the martyr, as painted by Whittier, the coward and the villain, with forcesequally matched, strive for the mastery.The ode “To PiusIX.” will furnish us with another example of religious hate driving its victim to the very verge of raving madness. “Hider at Gaeta,” he exclaims—“Hider at Gaeta, seize thy chance!Coward and cruel, come!“Creep now from Naple’s bloody skirt;Thy mummer’s part was acted well,While Rome, with steel and fire begirt,Before thy crusade fell.* * * * *“But hateful as that tyrant old,The mocking witness of his crime,In thee shall loathing eyes beholdThe Nero of our time!“Stand where Rome’s blood was freest shed,Mock Heaven with impious thanks, and callIts curses on the patriot dead,Its blessings on the Gaul;“Or sit upon thy throne of lies,A poor, mean idol, blood-besmeared,Whom even its worshippers despise—Unhonored, unrevered!”It is some consolation to know that Whittier himself, in reading over these ravings, has been forced to acknowledge their unworthiness by a lame attempt at apology. “He is no enemy of Catholics,” he informs us in a note to this effusion; “but the severity of his language finds its ample apology in the reluctant confession of one of the most eminent Romish priests, the eloquent and devoted Father Ventura.” What is this but making calumny an ally of outrage?In the “Dream of Pio Nono” he introducesSt.Peter, who upbraids the venerable Pontiff in the following style:“Hearest thou the angels singAbove this open hell?ThouGod’s high-priest!Thou the vicegerent of the Prince of Peace!Thou the successor of his chosen ones!I, Peter, fisherman of Galilee,In the dear Master’s name, and for the loveOf his true church, proclaim thee Antichrist.”In a poem on “Italy” Whittier hears the groans of nations across the sea.“Their blood and bonesCried out in torture, crushed by thronesAnd sucked by priestly cannibals.”“Rejoice, O Garibaldi!” he exclaims,“Though thy swordFailed at Rome’s gates, and blood seemed vainly pouredWhere in Christ’s name the crownèd infidelOf France wrought murder with the arms of hell.* * * * *God’s providence is not blind, but, full of eyes,It searches all the refuges of lies;And in his time and way the accursed thingsBefore whose evil feet thy battle-gageHas clashed defiance from hot youth to ageShall perish.”We crave the reader’s indulgence for this disfigurement of our page, and wish with all our heart it had been possible to fill it with more worthy matter.Longfellow, breathing the same air as Whittier, the disciple of a faith commonly supposed to be less mild and sweetly loving than a Quaker’s, has found the tenderest thoughts, the noblest images, and the highest forms of character in the church which our poet cannot even think of without raving.But possibly we should be wrong to complain that the mystic beauty which has in all ages appealed with irresistible power of fascination to the highest and most richly-gifted natures should fail to impress one all of whose thoughts are cast in a straitened and unyielding mould. Whittier has not the far-glancing eye of the poet to which all beauty appeals like the light itself. The partisan habit of an inveterate abolitionist has stiffened and hardened a disposition which was never plastic. It was so long his official duty to write anti-slavery campaign verses that, in treating subjects which should inspire higher thoughts, he is still held captive to the lash of the slave-driver, hears the clanking of chains and the groans of the fettered; and these sights and sounds drive him into mere rant and rhetoric.We willingly bear testimony to the moral tone and purity whichpervade Whittier’s verse. There is nothing to offend the most delicate ear; nothing to bring a blush to a virgin’s cheek. He lacks the power to portray passion, and was not tempted into doubtful paths. He delights in pictures of home, with its innocent joys and quiet happiness; sings of friendship and the endearing ties that bind the parent to the child; or, if he attunes his harp to love, he does it in numbers so sadly sweet that we only remember that the fickle god has wreathed his bowers with cypress boughs and made his best interpreter a sigh.What could be more harmless than the little scene between Maud Muller and the judge—though Heaven only knows what the judge, and above all the American judge, can have done that he should be condemned to play therôleof a lover. Possibly it may have been the judicious nature of the love that induced the poet to think such adeus ex machinânot out of place. At all events, nothing could be more inoffensive.“She stooped where the cool spring bubbled upAnd filled for him her small tin cup.‘Thanks!’ said the judge; ‘a sweeter draughtFrom a fairer hand was never quaffed.’”And how refreshing it is to find a judge making love by talking“Of the grass and flowers and trees,Of the singing birds and humming bees”!We are less edified, however, when, in after-years, we find him a married man, sipping the golden wine but longing for the wayside well and the barefoot maiden:“And the proud man sighed, with secret pain:‘Ah! that I were free again!’”In reading Whittier we seldom come upon a thought so perfectly expressed that it can never afteroccur to us except in the words in which he has clothed it. It is a poet’s privilege thus to marry thoughts to words in a union so divine that no man may put them asunder; and where this high power is wanting themens divinioris not found. For our own part, we hardly recall a line of Whittier that we should care to remember. Nothing that he has written has been more frequently quoted than the couplet:“For of all sad words of tongue or pen.The saddest are these: ‘It might have been.’”To our thinking, this is meaningless. “It might have been” is neither sad nor joyful, except as it is made so by that with which it is associated. He who is drowned may thus have escaped hanging—“It might have been.” The judge might have been Maud’s husband; but she might have thought of sadder things than that she was not his wife.“Snow-Bound,” a winter idyl, is, in the opinion of several critics, Whittier’s best performance. A more hackneyed theme he would probably have found it difficult to choose; nor has he the magic charm that makes the old seem as new. It is the unmistakable snow-storm with which our school-readers made us familiar in childhood. The sun rises “cheerless” over “hills of gray”; sinks from sight before it sets; “the ocean roars on his wintry shore”; night comes on, made hoary “with the whirl-dance of the blinding storm,” and ere bedtime“The white drift piled the window-frame”;and then, of course, we have the horse and cow and cock, each in turn contemplating the beautiful snow. Even the silly ram“Shook his sage head with gesture mute,And emphasized with stamp of foot.”The boys, with mittened hands, and caps drawn down over ears, sally forth to cut a pathway at their sire’s command. And when the second night is ushered in, we are quite prepared for the blazing fire of oaken logs, whose roaring draught makes the great throat of the chimney laugh; while on the clean hearth the apples sputter, the mug of cider simmers, the house-dog sleeps, and the cat meditates. The group of faces gathered round are plain and honest, just such as good, simple country folk are wont to wear, but feebly drawn. In the fitful firelight their features are dim. The father talks of rides on Memphremagog’s wooded side; of trapper’s hut and Indian camp. The mother turns her wheel or knits her stocking, and tells how the Indian came down at midnight on Cocheco town. The uncle, “innocent of books,” unravels the mysteries of moons and tides. The maiden aunt, very sweet and very unselfish, recalls her memories of“The huskings and the apple-bees,The sleigh-rides and the summer sails.”It would be unkind to leave the village schoolmaster out in the biting air, and he is therefore brought in to make us wonder how one small head could contain all he knew.In the very thought of home there is an exhaustless well-spring of poetic feeling. The word itself is all alive with the spirit of sweet poesy which gives charm to the humblest verse; and it would be strange indeed if, in an idyl like “Snow-Bound,” there should not be found passages of real beauty, touches of nature that make the whole world kin. The subject isone that readily lends itself to the lowly mood and unpretending style. Fine thoughts and ambitious words would but distract us. Each one is thinking of his own dear home, and he but asks the poet not to break the spell that has made him a child again; not to darken the dewy dawn of memory, that throws the light of heaven around a world that seemed as dead, but now lives.“O Time and Change!—with hair as grayAs was my sire’s that winter day,How strange it seems, with so much goneOf life and love, to still live on!Ah! brother, only I and thouAre left of all that circle now—The dear home faces whereuponThat fitful firelight paled and shone.Henceforward, listen as we will,The voices of that hearth are still;Look where we may, the wide earth o’er,Those lighted faces smile no more.We tread the paths their feet have worn;We sit beneath their orchard trees;We hear, like them, the hum of beesAnd rustle of the bladed corn;We turn the pages that they read,Their written words we linger o’er.But in the sun they cast no shade,No voice is heard, no sign is made,No step is on the conscious floor!Yet love will dream, and faith will trust(Since He who knows our need is just),That somehow, somewhere, meet we must.Alas! for him who never seesThe stars shine through his cypress-trees;Who hopeless lays his dead away,Nor looks to see the breaking dayAcross the mournful marbles play;Who hath not learned in hours of faithThe truth to flesh and sense unknown—That Life is ever Lord of Death,And Love can never lose its own!”This is true poetry, sad and sweet as a mother’s voice when she lulls her sick babe to rest, knowing that, if he sleep, he shall live.In Whittier’s verse we often catch the unmistakable accent of genuine feeling, and his best lyrics are so artless and simple that they almost disarm criticism. In many ways his influence has doubtless been good; and the critic, whose eye is naturally drawn to what is less worthy, finds it easy to carp at faults which he has not the ability to commit.[134]The Complete Poetical Works of John Greenleaf Whittier.Boston: Osgood &Co.1876.
THE
VOL. XXIV.,No.142.—JANUARY, 1877.
Copyright:Rev.I. T. Hecker. 1877.
A nationalliterature is the most perfect expression of the best thoughts and highest sentiments of the people of which it is born, and of whose life it is the truest record. No other Englishman may have ever written or thought like Shakspere, but he wrote and thought from the fulness of a mind and heart that drew their inspiration from the life of the English people. He may be great nature’s best interpreter, but she was revealed to him through English eyes, and spoke in English accents. The power to take up into one’s own mind the thoughts of a whole people; to give a voice to the impressions made upon them by nature, religion, and society; to interpret to them their doubts, longings, and aspirations; to awaken the chords of deep and hidden sympathy which but await the touch of inspiration—is genius. Every great author is the type of a generation, the interpreter of an age, the delineator of a phase of national life. Between the character of a people, therefore, and its literature there is an intimate relation; and one great cause of the feebleness of American literature is doubtless the lack of conscious nationality in the American people. We have not yet outgrown the provincialism of our origin, nor assimilated the heterogeneous elements which from many sources have come to swell the current of our life. The growth of a national literature has been hindered also, by our necessary intellectual dependence on England. For, though it was a great privilege to possess from the start a rich and highly-developed language, with this boon we received bonds which no revolution could break. When the British colonies of North America were founded, Shakspere and Bacon had written, Milton was born, and the English language had received a form which nor power nor time could change; and before our ancestors had leisure or opportunity to turn from the rude labors of life in the wilderness to more intellectual pursuits, it had taken on the polish and precision of the age of Queen Anne. Henceforward,to know English, it was necessary to study its classics; and in them Americans found the imprint of a mental type which had ceased to be their own. And being themselves as yet without strongly-marked or well-defined national features of character, they became fatally mere imitators of works which could not be read without admiration, or studied without exciting in those who had thoughts to express the strong desire of imitation. Their excellence served to intimidate those who, while admiring, could not hope to rival their ease and elegance; and thus, in losing something of native vigor and freshness, our best writers have generally acquired only an artificial polish and a foreign grace.
It must be remembered, too, that more than any other people we have been and are practical and utilitarian; and this is more specially true of the New Englanders, whose mental activity has been greater than that of any other Americans. We have loved knowledge as the means of power and wealth, and not as an element of refinement and culture. If evidence of this were needed, it would suffice to point to our school system, which is based upon the notion that the sole aim of education should be to fit man for the practical business of life. As the result, knowledge has been widely diffused, but the love of excellence has been diminished. Education, when considered as merely a help to common and immediate ends, neither strengthens nor refines the higher qualities of mind. If we may rely upon our own experience in college, we should say that the prevailing sentiment with young Americans is that it is waste of time to studyanything which cannot be put to practical use either in commercial or professional life; and this in spite of the efforts very generally made by the professors to inspire more exalted ideas. We have known the wretched sophism that it is useless to read logic, because in the world men do not reason in syllogisms, to pass current in a class of graduates. This low and utilitarian view of education does not affect alone our notions of the value of literature, in the stricter sense of the word, but exerts also a hurtful influence upon the study of science. For science, like literature, to be successfully cultivated, in its higher developments at least, must be sought for its own sake, without thought of those ulterior objects to which certainly it may be made to conduce. The love of knowledge for itself, the conviction that knowledge is its own end, is rarely found among us, and we therefore have but little enthusiasm for literary excellence or philosophic truth. The noblest thoughts spring from the heart, and he who seeks to know from a calculating spirit will for ever remain a stranger to the higher and serener realms of mind.
Another cause by which the growth of American literature has been unfavorably affected may be found in the unlimited resources of the country, offering to all opportunities of wealth or fame. The demand for ability of every kind is so great that talent is not permitted to mature. The young man who possesses readiness of wit and a sprightly fancy, if he does not enter one of the learned professions or engage in commerce, almost fatally drifts into a newspaper office, than which a place more unfavorable to intellectual pursuits or to true cultureof mind cannot easily be imagined. If a book is the better the farther the author keeps away all thought of the reader, under what disadvantages does not he write whose duty it is made to think only of the reader! To be forced day by day to write upon subjects of which he knows little; to give opinions without having time to weigh arguments or to consider facts; to interpret passing events in the interests of party or in accordance with popular prejudice; to exaggerate the virtues of friends and the vices of opponents; to court applause by adapting style to the capacity and taste of the crowd; and to do all this hurriedly and in a rush, is to be an editor. When we reflect that it is to work of this kind that a very considerable part of the literary ability of the country is devoted, it is manifest that the result must be not only to withdraw useful laborers from nobler intellectual pursuits, but to lower and pervert the standard of taste. They who accustom their minds to dwell upon the picture of human life as presented in a daily newspaper, in which what is atrocious, vulgar, or startling receives greatest prominence, will hardly cultivate or retain an appreciation of elevated thoughts or the graces of composition.
As the public is content with crude and hasty writing, the crowd, who are capable of such performance, rush in, eager to carry off the prize of voluminousness, if not of excellence; and, in consequence, we surpass all other nations in the number of worthless books which we print. In fact, the great national defect is haste, and therefore a want of thoroughness in our work.
But we have no thought of entering into an extended examinationof the causes to which the feebleness of American literature is to be attributed. The very general recognition of the fact that it is feeble, even when not marred by grosser faults, is probably the most assuring evidence that in the future we may hope for something better.
Our weakness, however it may be accounted for, is most perceptible in the highest realms of thought—philosophy and poetry. To the former our contributions are valueless. No original thinker has appeared among us; no one who has even aspired to anything higher than the office of a commentator. This, indeed, can hardly be matter for surprise, since we may be naturally supposed to inherit from the English their deficiency in power of abstract thought and metaphysical intuition. But in poetry they excel all other nations, whether ancient or modern; and as they have transmitted to us their mental defects, we might not unreasonably hope to be endowed with their peculiar gifts of mind. Deprived of the philosophic brow, we might hope for some compensation, at least, in the poet’s eye in a fine frenzy rolling. But even in this we seem not to have been highly favored. Nothing could well be more wretched than American verse-making during the colonial era. We doubt whether a single line of all that was written from the landing of the Pilgrims down to the war of Independence is worth preserving. Pope, when he wrote hisDunciad, found but one American worthy even of being damned to so unenviable an immortality.
Freneau, who was the most popular and the most gifted poet of the Revolution, is as completely unknown to this generation as though he had never written; and, indeed,he wrote nothing which, without great loss to the world, may not be forgotten. And to this class, whom nor gods nor columns permit to live, belong nearly all who in America have courted the Muse. In our entire poetical literature there are not more than half a dozen names which deserve even passing notice, and the greatest of these cannot be placed higher than among the third-rate poets of England.
Without adopting the crude theory of Macaulay that as civilization advances poetry necessarily declines, we shall be at no loss for reasons to account for this absence of the highest poetic gifts. Neither the character of the early settlers in this country, nor their religious faith, nor their social and political conditions of life, were of the kind from which inspiration to high thinking and flights of fancy might naturally be expected to spring. The Puritans were hard, unsympathetic, with no appreciation of beauty. In their eyes art of every kind was at best useless, even when not tending to give a dangerous softness and false polish to manners. Their religious faith intensified this feeling, and caused them to turn with aversion from what had been so long and so intimately associated, as almost to be identified, with Catholic worship. Their sour looks, their nasal twang, their affected simplicity, their contempt of literature, and their dislike of the most innocent amusements, would hardly lead the Muse, even if invited, to smile on them. Habits of thought and feeling not unlike theirs had, it is true, in Milton, been found to be not incompatible with the highest gifts of imagination and expression. But Milton had not the Puritan contempt of letters. He was, on the contrary, a man of extensivereading and great culture; and his proud and lofty spirit was not too high to stoop to flattery as servile and as elegant as ever a tyrant received. His lines on ecclesiastical architecture and music inIl Penserosoprove that he had a keen perception of the beauty and grandeur of Catholic worship. He was, in fact, in many respects more a Cavalier than a Roundhead. He had, besides, in the burning passions of his age, the bitter strife of party and sect, in the scorn and contempt of the nobles for the low-born—which in the civil wars had been trodden beneath the iron heel of war, only to rise with the monarchy in more offensive form—that which fired him to the adventurous song “that with no middle flight intends to soar,” and made him deify rebellion in Satan, who, rather than be subject, would not be at all.
In the primitive and simple social organization of the American colonies there was nothing to fire the soul or kindle the indignation that makes poets. And even nature presented herself to our ancestors rather as a shrew to be conquered than as a mistress to be wooed with harmonious numbers and sweet sounds of melody. If to this we add, what few will deny, that the equality of conditions in our society, however desirable from a political or philanthropic point of view, is to the poetic eye but a flat and weary plain, without any of the inspiration of high mountains and long-withdrawing vales, of thundering cataracts that lose themselves in streams that peacefully glide all unconscious of the roar and turmoil of waters of which they are born, we will find nothing strange in the practical and unimaginative character of the American people. We know of no better example of thetameness of the American Muse than Whittier. He is one of our most voluminous writers of verse, and various causes, most of which are doubtless extrinsic to the literary merit of his compositions, have obtained for him very general recognition. He lacks, indeed, the culture of Longfellow, his wide acquaintance with books and the world, and his careful study of the literatures of the European nations. He lacks also his large sympathies and catholic thought, his elevation of sentiment and power of finished and polished expression.
But if Whittier’s garb is plain, his features hard, and his voice harsh, his poetry, both in subject and in style, seems native here and to spring from the soil. He has himself not inaptly described his verse in the lines which he has prefixed to the Centennial edition of his complete poetical works:
“The rigor of a frozen clime,The harshness of an untaught ear,The jarring words of one whose rhymeBeat often Labor’s hurried timeOr Duty’s rugged march through storm and strife, are here.“Of mystic beauty, dreamy grace,No rounded art the lack supplies;Or softer shades of Nature’s face,Or softer shades of Nature’s face,I view her common forms with unanointed eyes.”
“The rigor of a frozen clime,The harshness of an untaught ear,The jarring words of one whose rhymeBeat often Labor’s hurried timeOr Duty’s rugged march through storm and strife, are here.“Of mystic beauty, dreamy grace,No rounded art the lack supplies;Or softer shades of Nature’s face,Or softer shades of Nature’s face,I view her common forms with unanointed eyes.”
“The rigor of a frozen clime,The harshness of an untaught ear,The jarring words of one whose rhymeBeat often Labor’s hurried timeOr Duty’s rugged march through storm and strife, are here.
“The rigor of a frozen clime,
The harshness of an untaught ear,
The jarring words of one whose rhyme
Beat often Labor’s hurried time
Or Duty’s rugged march through storm and strife, are here.
“Of mystic beauty, dreamy grace,No rounded art the lack supplies;Or softer shades of Nature’s face,Or softer shades of Nature’s face,I view her common forms with unanointed eyes.”
“Of mystic beauty, dreamy grace,
No rounded art the lack supplies;
Or softer shades of Nature’s face,
Or softer shades of Nature’s face,
I view her common forms with unanointed eyes.”
Whittier is, however, far from being a representative American or American poet. He is a Quaker. The broad-brimmed hat, the neat and simple dress, the sober gait, the slow and careful phrase with thee and thou, could not more truly denote him than his verse. Now, whatever idea we may form to ourselves of the typical American, or whether we think such a being exists at all, no one would ever imagine him to be a Quaker.
The American is eager; the Quaker is subdued. The American is loud, with a tendency to boastfulnessand exaggeration; the Quaker is quiet and his language sober. He shuns the conflict and the battle, does not over-estimate his strength; while the American would fight the world, catch the Leviathan, swim the ocean, or do anything most impossible. The Quaker is cautious, the American reckless. The American is aggressive, the Quaker is timid. But it is needless to continue the contrast. A great poet is held by no bonds. His eye glances from earth to heaven—the infinite is his home; and that Whittier should be only a Quaker poet is of itself sufficient evidence that he is not a great poet. But in saying this we affirm only what is universally recognized. He is, indeed, wholly devoid of the creative faculty to which all true poetry owes its life; and yet this alone could have lifted most of the subjects which he has treated out of the dulness and weariness of the commonplace. To transform the real, to invest that which is low or mean or trivial with honor and beauty, is the triumph of the poet’s art, the test of his inspiration. His words, like the light of heaven, clothe the world in a splendor not its own, or, like the morning rays falling on the statue of Memnon, strike from dead and sluggish matter sounds of celestial harmony.
“To him the meanest flower that blows can giveThoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.”
“To him the meanest flower that blows can giveThoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.”
“To him the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.”
Whittier certainly has no fear of trivial and commonplace subjects, but in his treatment of them he rarely, if ever, rises above the level of the verse-maker.
It was the opinion of Keats that a long poem is the test of invention; and if we accept this as a canon of criticism, we shall want no other evidence of Whittier’s poverty ofimagination. All his pieces are short, though few readers, we suppose, have ever wished them longer. He cannot give sprightliness or variety to his verse, which like a sluggish stream creeps languidly along. There is no freshness about him, none of the breeziness of nature, none of its joyousness, exuberance, and exultant strength. In his youth, even, he had all the stiffness and slowness of age with its want of graceful motion. His narrations are interrupted and halting, interspersed with commonplace reflections and wearisome details; and when we have jogged along with him to the end, we are less pleased than fatigued. He never with strong arm bears us on over flood and fell, through hair-breadth escapes, gently at times letting us down amidst smiling homes and pleasant scenes, and again, with more rapid flight, hurrying us on breathless to the goal.
Some of his descriptive pieces have been admired, but to us they seem artificial and mechanical. They are the pictures of a view-hunter. They lack life, warmth, and coloring—the individuality that comes of an informing soul. He remains external to nature, and with careful survey and deliberate purpose sketches this and that trait, till he has his landscape with sloping hills and meadows green, with flower and shrub and tree and everything that one could wish, except that indefinable something which would make the scene stand out from all the earth, familiar as the countenance of a friend or as a spot known from childhood. He has too much the air of a man who says: Come, let us make a description. In fact, he has taken the trouble to tell us that he has considered the story of Mogg Megoneonly as a framework for sketches of the scenery of New England and of its early inhabitants. His own confession proves his art mechanical. He gets a frame, stretches the canvas, and deliberately proceeds to copy. The true poet fuses man and nature into a union so intimate that both seem part of each. He dreams not of framework and sketches, but of the unity and harmony of life. Where the common eye sees but parts, his sees the living whole. He does not copy, but transforms and re-creates. Before his enraptured gaze the immeasurable heavens break open to their highest, and every height comes out and jutting peak. From him not the humblest flower or blade of grass is hidden; and whatever he beholds becomes the minister of his thought, the slave of his will; passing through his mind receives its coloring, and rises from his page as though some eternal law of harmony had fitted it to this and no other purpose.
Whittier is even feebler in his attempts to portray character than in his description of scenery. To Ruth Bonython he gives “the sunny eye and sunset hair.” “Sunny eye” is poor enough; but who will tell us what “sunset hair” is like? Is it purple or gold or yellow or red? She is “tall and erect,” has a “dark-brown cheek,” “a pure white brow,” “a neck and bosom as white as ever the foam-wreaths that rise on the leaping river”;
“And her eye has a glance more sternly wildThan even that of a forest child.”
“And her eye has a glance more sternly wildThan even that of a forest child.”
“And her eye has a glance more sternly wild
Than even that of a forest child.”
And she talks in the following style:
“A humbled thing of shame and guilt,Outcast and spurned and lone,Wrapt in the shadows of my crime,With withering heart and burning brain,And tears that fell like fiery rain,I passed a fearful time.”
“A humbled thing of shame and guilt,Outcast and spurned and lone,Wrapt in the shadows of my crime,With withering heart and burning brain,And tears that fell like fiery rain,I passed a fearful time.”
“A humbled thing of shame and guilt,
Outcast and spurned and lone,
Wrapt in the shadows of my crime,
With withering heart and burning brain,
And tears that fell like fiery rain,
I passed a fearful time.”
The artifice by which Ruth quiets the suspicion of Mogg Megone, roused by the sight of her tearful eye and heaving bosom, is as remarkable for shrewdness as for poetic beauty:
“Is the sachem angry—angry with RuthBecause she cries with an ache in her toothWhich would make a Sagamore jump and cryAnd look about with a woman’s eye?”
“Is the sachem angry—angry with RuthBecause she cries with an ache in her toothWhich would make a Sagamore jump and cryAnd look about with a woman’s eye?”
“Is the sachem angry—angry with Ruth
Because she cries with an ache in her tooth
Which would make a Sagamore jump and cry
And look about with a woman’s eye?”
The same weak and unskilful hand is visible in the characters of Mogg Megone, John Bonython, and Father Rasle, the Jesuit missionary. The descriptive portions of Mogg Megone are disfigured by mere rhetoric and what critics call “nonsense-verses.” As Mogg Megone and John Bonython are stealing through the wood, they hear a sound:
“Hark! is that the angry howlOf the wolf the hills among,Or the hooting of the owlOn his leafy cradle swung?”
“Hark! is that the angry howlOf the wolf the hills among,Or the hooting of the owlOn his leafy cradle swung?”
“Hark! is that the angry howl
Of the wolf the hills among,
Or the hooting of the owl
On his leafy cradle swung?”
The only reason for hesitating between the wolfs howl and the hooting of the owl was the poet’s want of a rhyme. But it is needless to load our page with these nonsense-verses, since Hudibras claims them to be a poet’s privilege:
“But those that write in rhyme still makeThe one verse for the other’s sake;For one for sense, and one for rhyme,I think that’s sufficient at one time.”
“But those that write in rhyme still makeThe one verse for the other’s sake;For one for sense, and one for rhyme,I think that’s sufficient at one time.”
“But those that write in rhyme still make
The one verse for the other’s sake;
For one for sense, and one for rhyme,
I think that’s sufficient at one time.”
Whittier’s Quaker faith inspired him early in life with an abhorrence of slavery, and drew him to the abolitionists, by whom, in 1836, he was appointed secretary of the American Anti-Slavery Society. It was about this time that he began to publish his anti-slavery rhymes, which he afterwards collected in a volume entitled,Voices of Freedom. These verses are not remarkable for thought or expression. They have the dull, monotonous ring of all Whittier’s rhymes, and are hardly more poetic than a political harangue. They are partisanin tone and manner; breathe rather hatred of the “haughty Southron” than love of the negro; and are without polish or elegance. Read to political meetings during the excitement of the anti-slavery agitation, they were probably as effective as ordinary stump-speeches. Worthless as they are as poetry, they brought Whittier to public notice. He became the laureate of the abolitionist party, and with its growth grew his fame. The circumstances which madeUncle Tom’s Cabinthe most popular novel of the day made him a popular poet. His verses found readers who cared but little for inspired thought or expression, but who were delighted with political rhymes that painted the Southern slave-owner as the most heartless and brutal of men, who “in the vile South Sodom” feasted day by day upon the sight of human suffering inflicted by his own hand. Pieces like that which begins with the words,
“A Christian! Going, gone!Who bids for God’s own image?”
“A Christian! Going, gone!Who bids for God’s own image?”
“A Christian! Going, gone!
Who bids for God’s own image?”
were at least good campaign documents in the times of anti-slavery agitation.
“A Christian up for sale;Wet with her blood your whips, o’ertask her frame,Make her life loathsome with your wrong and shame:Her patience shall not fail.”
“A Christian up for sale;Wet with her blood your whips, o’ertask her frame,Make her life loathsome with your wrong and shame:Her patience shall not fail.”
“A Christian up for sale;
Wet with her blood your whips, o’ertask her frame,
Make her life loathsome with your wrong and shame:
Her patience shall not fail.”
This is very commonplace and vulgar, we grant, but it has the merit of not being above the intellectual level of an ordinary political meeting.
And then, in the metre of Scott’s “Bride of Netherby,” we have the “Hunters of Men”:
“Have ye heard of our hunting o’er mountain and glen,Through canebrake and forest, the hunting of men?Hark! the cheer and the halloo, the crack of the whip,And the yell of the hound as he fastens his grip.All blithe are our hunters, and noble their match—Though hundreds are caught, there are millions to catch.”
“Have ye heard of our hunting o’er mountain and glen,Through canebrake and forest, the hunting of men?Hark! the cheer and the halloo, the crack of the whip,And the yell of the hound as he fastens his grip.All blithe are our hunters, and noble their match—Though hundreds are caught, there are millions to catch.”
“Have ye heard of our hunting o’er mountain and glen,
Through canebrake and forest, the hunting of men?
Hark! the cheer and the halloo, the crack of the whip,
And the yell of the hound as he fastens his grip.
All blithe are our hunters, and noble their match—
Though hundreds are caught, there are millions to catch.”
All we maintain is that this is not poetry, fair sample though it be of Whittier’sVoices of Freedom.
Slavery undoubtedly is hateful, and to denounce it cannot but be right. A preacher, however, need not be a poet, even though he should declaim in rhymes; nor is hate of the slave-owner love of the slave, much less love of liberty. We fail to catch in theseVoicesthe swelling sound of freedom. They are rather the echoes of the fierce words of bitter partisan strife. The lips of him who uttered them had not been touched by the burning coal snatched from the altar of liberty, however his heart may have rankled at the thought of Southern cruelty.
Whittier’s rhymes of the war are the natural sequel of his anti-slavery verses. The laureate of abolitionism could but sing, Quaker though he was, the bloody, fratricidal strife which he had helped to kindle. At first, indeed, he seemed to hesitate and to doubt whether it was well to light
“The fires of hell to weld anew the chainOn that red anvil where each blow is pain.”
“The fires of hell to weld anew the chainOn that red anvil where each blow is pain.”
“The fires of hell to weld anew the chain
On that red anvil where each blow is pain.”
Safe on freedom’s vantage-ground, he inclined rather to be the sad and helpless spectator of a suicide.
“Why take we up the accursed thing again?Pity, forgive, but urge them back no moreWho, drunk with passion, flaunt disunion’s ragWith its vile reptile-blazon.”
“Why take we up the accursed thing again?Pity, forgive, but urge them back no moreWho, drunk with passion, flaunt disunion’s ragWith its vile reptile-blazon.”
“Why take we up the accursed thing again?
Pity, forgive, but urge them back no more
Who, drunk with passion, flaunt disunion’s rag
With its vile reptile-blazon.”
But soon he came to recognize that God may speak “in battle’s stormy voice, and his praise be in the wrath of man.”
Whittier’s war rhymes are not so numerous as hisVoices of Freedom, nor are they in any way remarkable as poetical compositions.The lines on Barbara Frietchie derive their interest from the incident narrated, and not from any beauty of thought or language with which it has been clothed. They are popular because old Barbara Frietchie waving the flag of the Union above Stonewall Jackson’s army as it passed, with measured tread, through the streets of Frederick, is a striking and dramatic figure. There could be no more convincing proof of the barrenness of Whittier’s imagination than the poor use which he has made of so poetical an episode.
“In her attic window the staff she setTo show that one heart was loyal yet.”
“In her attic window the staff she setTo show that one heart was loyal yet.”
“In her attic window the staff she set
To show that one heart was loyal yet.”
And yet of all his poems this is probably the best known and the most popular.
TheVoices of Freedomand theSongs in War Timeboth belong to the class of occasional poetry which more than any other kind is apt to confer a short-lived fame upon authors whose chief merit consists in being fortunate. He who sings the conqueror’s praise will never lack admirers.
We are sorry to perceive, in so amiable a man as Whittier is generally supposed to be, the many evidences which this edition of his complete poetical works affords of intense and bitter anti-Catholic prejudice. If he were content with manifesting, even with damnable iteration, his Quaker horror of creeds, we could excuse the simple mind that is capable of holding that men may believe without giving to their faith form and sensible expression; though the mental habit from which alone such a theory could proceed is the very opposite of the poetical. The Catholic Church, which is the groundwork and firm support of all Christian dogmas, cannot be understoodby those who fail to perceive that without doctrinal religion the whole moral order would be meaningless. But Whittier’s prejudice carries him far beyond mere protest against Catholic teaching. He cannot approach any subject or person connected with the church without being thrown into mental convulsions. Let us take, for example, the character of Father Rasle, the martyr, in “Mogg Megone,” one of his earliest and longest poems. This noble and heroic missionary is represented as a heartless and senseless zealot, who “by cross and vow” had pledged Mogg Megone
“To lift the hatchet of his sire,And round his own, the church’s, foeTo light the avenging fire.”
“To lift the hatchet of his sire,And round his own, the church’s, foeTo light the avenging fire.”
“To lift the hatchet of his sire,
And round his own, the church’s, foe
To light the avenging fire.”
When Ruth Bonython, half mad with fear and grief, comes to confess to Father Rasle that, seeing the scalp of her lover hanging to Mogg Megone’s belt, she had killed him in his drunken sleep, the Jesuit starts back—
“His long, thin frame as ague shakes,And loathing hate is in his eye”—
“His long, thin frame as ague shakes,And loathing hate is in his eye”—
“His long, thin frame as ague shakes,
And loathing hate is in his eye”—
not from horror of the crime, but because in the death of Megone he recognizes the extinction of his long-cherished hopes of revenge.
“Ah! weary priest!…Thoughts are thine which have no partWith the meek and pure of heart.…Thoughts of strife and hate and wrongSweep thy heated brain along—Fading hopes for whose successIt were sin to breathe a prayer;Schemes which Heaven may never bless;Tears which darken to despair.”
“Ah! weary priest!…Thoughts are thine which have no partWith the meek and pure of heart.…Thoughts of strife and hate and wrongSweep thy heated brain along—Fading hopes for whose successIt were sin to breathe a prayer;Schemes which Heaven may never bless;Tears which darken to despair.”
“Ah! weary priest!…
Thoughts are thine which have no part
With the meek and pure of heart.…
Thoughts of strife and hate and wrong
Sweep thy heated brain along—
Fading hopes for whose success
It were sin to breathe a prayer;
Schemes which Heaven may never bless;
Tears which darken to despair.”
His heart is as stone to the pitiful appeal of the contrite and broken-hearted girl. “Off!” he exclaims—
“‘Off, woman of sin! Nay, touch not meWith those fingers of blood; begone!’With a gesture of horror he spurns the formThat writhes at his feet like a trodden worm.”
“‘Off, woman of sin! Nay, touch not meWith those fingers of blood; begone!’With a gesture of horror he spurns the formThat writhes at his feet like a trodden worm.”
“‘Off, woman of sin! Nay, touch not me
With those fingers of blood; begone!’
With a gesture of horror he spurns the form
That writhes at his feet like a trodden worm.”
And in the death-scene of the martyr, as painted by Whittier, the coward and the villain, with forcesequally matched, strive for the mastery.
The ode “To PiusIX.” will furnish us with another example of religious hate driving its victim to the very verge of raving madness. “Hider at Gaeta,” he exclaims—
“Hider at Gaeta, seize thy chance!Coward and cruel, come!“Creep now from Naple’s bloody skirt;Thy mummer’s part was acted well,While Rome, with steel and fire begirt,Before thy crusade fell.* * * * *“But hateful as that tyrant old,The mocking witness of his crime,In thee shall loathing eyes beholdThe Nero of our time!“Stand where Rome’s blood was freest shed,Mock Heaven with impious thanks, and callIts curses on the patriot dead,Its blessings on the Gaul;“Or sit upon thy throne of lies,A poor, mean idol, blood-besmeared,Whom even its worshippers despise—Unhonored, unrevered!”
“Hider at Gaeta, seize thy chance!Coward and cruel, come!“Creep now from Naple’s bloody skirt;Thy mummer’s part was acted well,While Rome, with steel and fire begirt,Before thy crusade fell.* * * * *“But hateful as that tyrant old,The mocking witness of his crime,In thee shall loathing eyes beholdThe Nero of our time!“Stand where Rome’s blood was freest shed,Mock Heaven with impious thanks, and callIts curses on the patriot dead,Its blessings on the Gaul;“Or sit upon thy throne of lies,A poor, mean idol, blood-besmeared,Whom even its worshippers despise—Unhonored, unrevered!”
“Hider at Gaeta, seize thy chance!Coward and cruel, come!
“Hider at Gaeta, seize thy chance!
Coward and cruel, come!
“Creep now from Naple’s bloody skirt;Thy mummer’s part was acted well,While Rome, with steel and fire begirt,Before thy crusade fell.* * * * *“But hateful as that tyrant old,The mocking witness of his crime,In thee shall loathing eyes beholdThe Nero of our time!
“Creep now from Naple’s bloody skirt;
Thy mummer’s part was acted well,
While Rome, with steel and fire begirt,
Before thy crusade fell.
* * * * *
“But hateful as that tyrant old,
The mocking witness of his crime,
In thee shall loathing eyes behold
The Nero of our time!
“Stand where Rome’s blood was freest shed,Mock Heaven with impious thanks, and callIts curses on the patriot dead,Its blessings on the Gaul;
“Stand where Rome’s blood was freest shed,
Mock Heaven with impious thanks, and call
Its curses on the patriot dead,
Its blessings on the Gaul;
“Or sit upon thy throne of lies,A poor, mean idol, blood-besmeared,Whom even its worshippers despise—Unhonored, unrevered!”
“Or sit upon thy throne of lies,
A poor, mean idol, blood-besmeared,
Whom even its worshippers despise—
Unhonored, unrevered!”
It is some consolation to know that Whittier himself, in reading over these ravings, has been forced to acknowledge their unworthiness by a lame attempt at apology. “He is no enemy of Catholics,” he informs us in a note to this effusion; “but the severity of his language finds its ample apology in the reluctant confession of one of the most eminent Romish priests, the eloquent and devoted Father Ventura.” What is this but making calumny an ally of outrage?
In the “Dream of Pio Nono” he introducesSt.Peter, who upbraids the venerable Pontiff in the following style:
“Hearest thou the angels singAbove this open hell?ThouGod’s high-priest!Thou the vicegerent of the Prince of Peace!Thou the successor of his chosen ones!I, Peter, fisherman of Galilee,In the dear Master’s name, and for the loveOf his true church, proclaim thee Antichrist.”
“Hearest thou the angels singAbove this open hell?ThouGod’s high-priest!Thou the vicegerent of the Prince of Peace!Thou the successor of his chosen ones!I, Peter, fisherman of Galilee,In the dear Master’s name, and for the loveOf his true church, proclaim thee Antichrist.”
“Hearest thou the angels sing
Above this open hell?ThouGod’s high-priest!
Thou the vicegerent of the Prince of Peace!
Thou the successor of his chosen ones!
I, Peter, fisherman of Galilee,
In the dear Master’s name, and for the love
Of his true church, proclaim thee Antichrist.”
In a poem on “Italy” Whittier hears the groans of nations across the sea.
“Their blood and bonesCried out in torture, crushed by thronesAnd sucked by priestly cannibals.”
“Their blood and bonesCried out in torture, crushed by thronesAnd sucked by priestly cannibals.”
“Their blood and bones
Cried out in torture, crushed by thrones
And sucked by priestly cannibals.”
“Rejoice, O Garibaldi!” he exclaims,
“Though thy swordFailed at Rome’s gates, and blood seemed vainly pouredWhere in Christ’s name the crownèd infidelOf France wrought murder with the arms of hell.* * * * *God’s providence is not blind, but, full of eyes,It searches all the refuges of lies;And in his time and way the accursed thingsBefore whose evil feet thy battle-gageHas clashed defiance from hot youth to ageShall perish.”
“Though thy swordFailed at Rome’s gates, and blood seemed vainly pouredWhere in Christ’s name the crownèd infidelOf France wrought murder with the arms of hell.* * * * *God’s providence is not blind, but, full of eyes,It searches all the refuges of lies;And in his time and way the accursed thingsBefore whose evil feet thy battle-gageHas clashed defiance from hot youth to ageShall perish.”
“Though thy sword
Failed at Rome’s gates, and blood seemed vainly poured
Where in Christ’s name the crownèd infidel
Of France wrought murder with the arms of hell.
* * * * *
God’s providence is not blind, but, full of eyes,
It searches all the refuges of lies;
And in his time and way the accursed things
Before whose evil feet thy battle-gage
Has clashed defiance from hot youth to age
Shall perish.”
We crave the reader’s indulgence for this disfigurement of our page, and wish with all our heart it had been possible to fill it with more worthy matter.
Longfellow, breathing the same air as Whittier, the disciple of a faith commonly supposed to be less mild and sweetly loving than a Quaker’s, has found the tenderest thoughts, the noblest images, and the highest forms of character in the church which our poet cannot even think of without raving.
But possibly we should be wrong to complain that the mystic beauty which has in all ages appealed with irresistible power of fascination to the highest and most richly-gifted natures should fail to impress one all of whose thoughts are cast in a straitened and unyielding mould. Whittier has not the far-glancing eye of the poet to which all beauty appeals like the light itself. The partisan habit of an inveterate abolitionist has stiffened and hardened a disposition which was never plastic. It was so long his official duty to write anti-slavery campaign verses that, in treating subjects which should inspire higher thoughts, he is still held captive to the lash of the slave-driver, hears the clanking of chains and the groans of the fettered; and these sights and sounds drive him into mere rant and rhetoric.
We willingly bear testimony to the moral tone and purity whichpervade Whittier’s verse. There is nothing to offend the most delicate ear; nothing to bring a blush to a virgin’s cheek. He lacks the power to portray passion, and was not tempted into doubtful paths. He delights in pictures of home, with its innocent joys and quiet happiness; sings of friendship and the endearing ties that bind the parent to the child; or, if he attunes his harp to love, he does it in numbers so sadly sweet that we only remember that the fickle god has wreathed his bowers with cypress boughs and made his best interpreter a sigh.
What could be more harmless than the little scene between Maud Muller and the judge—though Heaven only knows what the judge, and above all the American judge, can have done that he should be condemned to play therôleof a lover. Possibly it may have been the judicious nature of the love that induced the poet to think such adeus ex machinânot out of place. At all events, nothing could be more inoffensive.
“She stooped where the cool spring bubbled upAnd filled for him her small tin cup.‘Thanks!’ said the judge; ‘a sweeter draughtFrom a fairer hand was never quaffed.’”
“She stooped where the cool spring bubbled upAnd filled for him her small tin cup.‘Thanks!’ said the judge; ‘a sweeter draughtFrom a fairer hand was never quaffed.’”
“She stooped where the cool spring bubbled up
And filled for him her small tin cup.
‘Thanks!’ said the judge; ‘a sweeter draught
From a fairer hand was never quaffed.’”
And how refreshing it is to find a judge making love by talking
“Of the grass and flowers and trees,Of the singing birds and humming bees”!
“Of the grass and flowers and trees,Of the singing birds and humming bees”!
“Of the grass and flowers and trees,
Of the singing birds and humming bees”!
We are less edified, however, when, in after-years, we find him a married man, sipping the golden wine but longing for the wayside well and the barefoot maiden:
“And the proud man sighed, with secret pain:‘Ah! that I were free again!’”
“And the proud man sighed, with secret pain:‘Ah! that I were free again!’”
“And the proud man sighed, with secret pain:
‘Ah! that I were free again!’”
In reading Whittier we seldom come upon a thought so perfectly expressed that it can never afteroccur to us except in the words in which he has clothed it. It is a poet’s privilege thus to marry thoughts to words in a union so divine that no man may put them asunder; and where this high power is wanting themens divinioris not found. For our own part, we hardly recall a line of Whittier that we should care to remember. Nothing that he has written has been more frequently quoted than the couplet:
“For of all sad words of tongue or pen.The saddest are these: ‘It might have been.’”
“For of all sad words of tongue or pen.The saddest are these: ‘It might have been.’”
“For of all sad words of tongue or pen.
The saddest are these: ‘It might have been.’”
To our thinking, this is meaningless. “It might have been” is neither sad nor joyful, except as it is made so by that with which it is associated. He who is drowned may thus have escaped hanging—“It might have been.” The judge might have been Maud’s husband; but she might have thought of sadder things than that she was not his wife.
“Snow-Bound,” a winter idyl, is, in the opinion of several critics, Whittier’s best performance. A more hackneyed theme he would probably have found it difficult to choose; nor has he the magic charm that makes the old seem as new. It is the unmistakable snow-storm with which our school-readers made us familiar in childhood. The sun rises “cheerless” over “hills of gray”; sinks from sight before it sets; “the ocean roars on his wintry shore”; night comes on, made hoary “with the whirl-dance of the blinding storm,” and ere bedtime
“The white drift piled the window-frame”;
“The white drift piled the window-frame”;
“The white drift piled the window-frame”;
and then, of course, we have the horse and cow and cock, each in turn contemplating the beautiful snow. Even the silly ram
“Shook his sage head with gesture mute,And emphasized with stamp of foot.”
“Shook his sage head with gesture mute,And emphasized with stamp of foot.”
“Shook his sage head with gesture mute,
And emphasized with stamp of foot.”
The boys, with mittened hands, and caps drawn down over ears, sally forth to cut a pathway at their sire’s command. And when the second night is ushered in, we are quite prepared for the blazing fire of oaken logs, whose roaring draught makes the great throat of the chimney laugh; while on the clean hearth the apples sputter, the mug of cider simmers, the house-dog sleeps, and the cat meditates. The group of faces gathered round are plain and honest, just such as good, simple country folk are wont to wear, but feebly drawn. In the fitful firelight their features are dim. The father talks of rides on Memphremagog’s wooded side; of trapper’s hut and Indian camp. The mother turns her wheel or knits her stocking, and tells how the Indian came down at midnight on Cocheco town. The uncle, “innocent of books,” unravels the mysteries of moons and tides. The maiden aunt, very sweet and very unselfish, recalls her memories of
“The huskings and the apple-bees,The sleigh-rides and the summer sails.”
“The huskings and the apple-bees,The sleigh-rides and the summer sails.”
“The huskings and the apple-bees,
The sleigh-rides and the summer sails.”
It would be unkind to leave the village schoolmaster out in the biting air, and he is therefore brought in to make us wonder how one small head could contain all he knew.
In the very thought of home there is an exhaustless well-spring of poetic feeling. The word itself is all alive with the spirit of sweet poesy which gives charm to the humblest verse; and it would be strange indeed if, in an idyl like “Snow-Bound,” there should not be found passages of real beauty, touches of nature that make the whole world kin. The subject isone that readily lends itself to the lowly mood and unpretending style. Fine thoughts and ambitious words would but distract us. Each one is thinking of his own dear home, and he but asks the poet not to break the spell that has made him a child again; not to darken the dewy dawn of memory, that throws the light of heaven around a world that seemed as dead, but now lives.
“O Time and Change!—with hair as grayAs was my sire’s that winter day,How strange it seems, with so much goneOf life and love, to still live on!Ah! brother, only I and thouAre left of all that circle now—The dear home faces whereuponThat fitful firelight paled and shone.Henceforward, listen as we will,The voices of that hearth are still;Look where we may, the wide earth o’er,Those lighted faces smile no more.We tread the paths their feet have worn;We sit beneath their orchard trees;We hear, like them, the hum of beesAnd rustle of the bladed corn;We turn the pages that they read,Their written words we linger o’er.But in the sun they cast no shade,No voice is heard, no sign is made,No step is on the conscious floor!Yet love will dream, and faith will trust(Since He who knows our need is just),That somehow, somewhere, meet we must.Alas! for him who never seesThe stars shine through his cypress-trees;Who hopeless lays his dead away,Nor looks to see the breaking dayAcross the mournful marbles play;Who hath not learned in hours of faithThe truth to flesh and sense unknown—That Life is ever Lord of Death,And Love can never lose its own!”
“O Time and Change!—with hair as grayAs was my sire’s that winter day,How strange it seems, with so much goneOf life and love, to still live on!Ah! brother, only I and thouAre left of all that circle now—The dear home faces whereuponThat fitful firelight paled and shone.Henceforward, listen as we will,The voices of that hearth are still;Look where we may, the wide earth o’er,Those lighted faces smile no more.We tread the paths their feet have worn;We sit beneath their orchard trees;We hear, like them, the hum of beesAnd rustle of the bladed corn;We turn the pages that they read,Their written words we linger o’er.But in the sun they cast no shade,No voice is heard, no sign is made,No step is on the conscious floor!Yet love will dream, and faith will trust(Since He who knows our need is just),That somehow, somewhere, meet we must.Alas! for him who never seesThe stars shine through his cypress-trees;Who hopeless lays his dead away,Nor looks to see the breaking dayAcross the mournful marbles play;Who hath not learned in hours of faithThe truth to flesh and sense unknown—That Life is ever Lord of Death,And Love can never lose its own!”
“O Time and Change!—with hair as gray
As was my sire’s that winter day,
How strange it seems, with so much gone
Of life and love, to still live on!
Ah! brother, only I and thou
Are left of all that circle now—
The dear home faces whereupon
That fitful firelight paled and shone.
Henceforward, listen as we will,
The voices of that hearth are still;
Look where we may, the wide earth o’er,
Those lighted faces smile no more.
We tread the paths their feet have worn;
We sit beneath their orchard trees;
We hear, like them, the hum of bees
And rustle of the bladed corn;
We turn the pages that they read,
Their written words we linger o’er.
But in the sun they cast no shade,
No voice is heard, no sign is made,
No step is on the conscious floor!
Yet love will dream, and faith will trust
(Since He who knows our need is just),
That somehow, somewhere, meet we must.
Alas! for him who never sees
The stars shine through his cypress-trees;
Who hopeless lays his dead away,
Nor looks to see the breaking day
Across the mournful marbles play;
Who hath not learned in hours of faith
The truth to flesh and sense unknown—
That Life is ever Lord of Death,
And Love can never lose its own!”
This is true poetry, sad and sweet as a mother’s voice when she lulls her sick babe to rest, knowing that, if he sleep, he shall live.
In Whittier’s verse we often catch the unmistakable accent of genuine feeling, and his best lyrics are so artless and simple that they almost disarm criticism. In many ways his influence has doubtless been good; and the critic, whose eye is naturally drawn to what is less worthy, finds it easy to carp at faults which he has not the ability to commit.
[134]The Complete Poetical Works of John Greenleaf Whittier.Boston: Osgood &Co.1876.