If Art suffers in its relative rank among human interests by this democratic levelling, it is to the gain of what Art intends. It is true, no picture can henceforth move us as men were once moved by pictures. No Borgo Allegro will ever turn out again in triumph for a Madonna of Cimabue or of any one else; whatever feeling Turner or another may excite comes far short of that. But the splendor that clothed the poor, pale, formal image belonged very little to it, but expressed rather the previous need of utterance, and could reach that pitch only when the age had not yet learned to think and to write, but must put up with these hieroglyphics. Art has no more grown un-religious than Religion has, but only less idolatrous. As fast as religion passes into life,—as the spiritual nature of man begins to be recognized as the ground of legislation and society, and not merely in the miracle of sainthood,—the apparatus and imagery of the Church, its dogmas and ceremonies, grow superfluous, as what they stand for is itself present. It is the dawn that makes these stars grow pale. So in Art, as fast as the dream of the imagination becomes the common sense of mankind, and only so fast, the awe that surrounded the earlier glimpses is lost. Its influence is not lessened, but diffused and domesticated as Culture.
Art is the truly popular philosophy. Our picture-gazing and view-hunting only express the feeling that our science is too abstract, that it does not attach us, but isolates us in the universe. What we are thus inwardly drawn to explore is not the chaff andexuviæof things, not their differences only, but their central connection, in spite of apparent diversity. This, stated, is the Ideal, the abrupt contradiction of the actual, and the creation of a world extraordinary, in which all defect is removed. But the defect cannot be cured by correction, for that admits its right to exist; it is not by exclusion that limitation is overcome,—this is only to establish a new limitation,—but by inclusion, by reaching the point where the superficial antagonism vanishes. Then the ideal is seen no longer in opposition, but everywhere and alone existent. As this point is approached, the impulse to reconstruct the actual—as if the triumph of truth were staked on that venture—dies out. The elaborate contradiction loses interest, earliest where it is most elaborate and circumstantial, and latest where the image has least materiality and fixity, where it is only a reminder of what the actual is securely felt to be, in spite of its stubborn exterior.
The modern mind is therefore less demonstrative; our civilization seeks less to declare and typify itself outwardly in works of Art, manners, dress, etc. Hence it is, perhaps, that the beauty of the race has not kept pace with its culture. It is less beautiful, because it cares less for beauty, since this is no longer the only reconcilement of the actual with the inward demands. The vice of the imagination is its inevitable exaggeration. It is our own weakness and dulness that we try to hide from ourselves by this partiality. Therefore it was said that the images were the Bible of the laity. Bishop Durandus already in the thirteenth century declared that it is only where the truth is not yet revealed that this "Judaizing" is permissible.
The highest of all arts is the art of life. In this the superficial antagonisms of use and beauty, of fact and reality, disappear. A little gain here, or the hint of it, richly repays all the lost magnificence. We need not concern ourselves lest these latter ages should be left bankrupt of the sense of beauty, for that is but a phase of a force that is never absent; nothing can supersede it but itself in a higher power. What we lament as decay only shows its demands fulfilled, and the arts it has left behind are but the landmarks of its accomplished purpose.
Fast as the rolling seasons bringThe hour of fate to those we love,Each pearl that leaves the broken stringIs set in Friendship's crown above.As narrower grows the earthly chain,The circle widens in the sky;These are our treasures that remain,But those are stars that beam on high.We miss—oh, how we miss!—hisface,—With trembling accents speak his name.Earth cannot fill his shadowed placeFrom all her rolls of pride and fame.Our song has lost the silvery threadThat carolled through his jocund lips;Our laugh is mute, our smile is fled,And all our sunshine in eclipse.And what and whence the wondrous charmThat kept his manhood boy-like still,—That life's hard censors could disarmAnd lead them captive at his will?His heart was shaped of rosier clay,—His veins were filled with ruddier fire,—Time could not chill him, fortune sway,Nor toil with all its burdens tire.His speech burst throbbing from its fountAnd set our colder thoughts aglow,As the hot leaping geysers mountAnd falling melt the Iceland snow.Some word, perchance, we counted rash,—Some phrase our calmness might disclaim;Yet 't was the sunset lightning's flash,No angry bolt, but harmless flame.Man judges all, God knoweth each;We read the rule, He sees the law;How oft His laughing children teachThe truths His prophets never saw!O friend, whose wisdom flowered in mirth!Our hearts are sad, our eyes are dim;He gave thy smiles to brighten earth,—We trust thy joyous soul to Him!Alas!—our weakness Heaven forgive!We murmur, even while we trust,"How long earth's breathing burdens live,Whose hearts, before they die, are dust!"But thou!—through grief's untimely tearsWe ask with half-reproachful sigh,"Couldst thou not watch a few brief yearsTill Friendship faltered, 'Thou mayst die'?"Who loved our boyish years so well?Who knew so well their pleasant tales,And all those livelier freaks could tellWhose oft-told story never fails?In vain we turn our aching eyes,—In vain we stretch our eager hands,—Cold in his wintry shroud he liesBeneath the dreary drifting sands!Ah, speak not thus!Helies not there!We see him, hear him as of old!He comes! he claims his wonted chair;His beaming face we still behold!His voice rings clear in all our songs,And loud his mirthful accents rise;To us our brother's life belongs,—Dear boys, a classmate never dies!
Fast as the rolling seasons bringThe hour of fate to those we love,Each pearl that leaves the broken stringIs set in Friendship's crown above.As narrower grows the earthly chain,The circle widens in the sky;These are our treasures that remain,But those are stars that beam on high.
We miss—oh, how we miss!—hisface,—With trembling accents speak his name.Earth cannot fill his shadowed placeFrom all her rolls of pride and fame.Our song has lost the silvery threadThat carolled through his jocund lips;Our laugh is mute, our smile is fled,And all our sunshine in eclipse.
And what and whence the wondrous charmThat kept his manhood boy-like still,—That life's hard censors could disarmAnd lead them captive at his will?His heart was shaped of rosier clay,—His veins were filled with ruddier fire,—Time could not chill him, fortune sway,Nor toil with all its burdens tire.
His speech burst throbbing from its fountAnd set our colder thoughts aglow,As the hot leaping geysers mountAnd falling melt the Iceland snow.Some word, perchance, we counted rash,—Some phrase our calmness might disclaim;Yet 't was the sunset lightning's flash,No angry bolt, but harmless flame.
Man judges all, God knoweth each;We read the rule, He sees the law;How oft His laughing children teachThe truths His prophets never saw!O friend, whose wisdom flowered in mirth!Our hearts are sad, our eyes are dim;He gave thy smiles to brighten earth,—We trust thy joyous soul to Him!
Alas!—our weakness Heaven forgive!We murmur, even while we trust,"How long earth's breathing burdens live,Whose hearts, before they die, are dust!"But thou!—through grief's untimely tearsWe ask with half-reproachful sigh,"Couldst thou not watch a few brief yearsTill Friendship faltered, 'Thou mayst die'?"
Who loved our boyish years so well?Who knew so well their pleasant tales,And all those livelier freaks could tellWhose oft-told story never fails?In vain we turn our aching eyes,—In vain we stretch our eager hands,—Cold in his wintry shroud he liesBeneath the dreary drifting sands!
Ah, speak not thus!Helies not there!We see him, hear him as of old!He comes! he claims his wonted chair;His beaming face we still behold!His voice rings clear in all our songs,And loud his mirthful accents rise;To us our brother's life belongs,—Dear boys, a classmate never dies!
It was some ten years ago that we first met John Greenleaf Whittier, the poet of the moral sentiment and of the heart and faith of the people of America. It chanced that we had then been making notes, with much interest, upon the genius of the Semitic nations. That peculiar simplicity, centrality, and intensity which caused them to originate Monotheism from two independent centres, the only systems of pure Monotheism which have had power in history,—while the same characteristics made their poetry always lyrical, never epic or dramatic, and their most vigorous thought a perpetual sacrifice on the altars of the will,—this had strongly impressed us; and we seemed to find in it a striking contrast to the characteristic genius of the Aryan or Indo-Germanic nations, with their imaginative interpretations of the religious sentiment, with their epic and dramatic expansions, and their taste for breadth and variety. Somewhat warm with these notions, we came to a meeting with our poet, and the first thought, on seeing him, was, "The head of a Hebrew prophet!" It is not Hebrew,—Saracen rather; the Jewish type is heavier, more material; but it corresponded strikingly to the conceptions we had formed of the Southern Semitic crania, and the whole make of the man was of the same character. The high cranium, so lofty especially in the dome,—the slight and symmetrical backward slope of thewholehead,—the powerful level brows, and beneath these the dark, deep eyes, so full of shadowed fire,—the Arabian complexion,—the sharp-cut, intense lines of the face,—the light, tall, erect stature,—the quick axial poise of the movement,—all these answered with singular accuracy to the picture of those preacher-races which had been shaping itself in our imagination. Indeed, the impression was so strong as to induce some little feeling of embarrassment. It seemed slightly awkward and insipid to be meeting a prophet here in a parlor and in a spruce masquerade of modern costume, shaking hands, and saying, "Happy to meet you," after the fashion of our feeble civilities.
All this came vividly to remembrance, on taking up, the other day, Whittier's last book of poems, "In War-Time,"—a volume that has been welcomed all over the land with enthusiastic delight. Had it been no more, however, than a mere private reminiscence, it should, at present, have remained private. But have we not here a key to Whittier's genius? Is not this Semitic centrality and simplicity, this prophetic depth, reality, and vigor, without great lateral and intellectual range, its especial characteristic? He has not the liberated, light-winged Greek imagination,—imagination not involved and included in the religious sentiment, but playing in epic freedom and with various interpretation between religion and intellect; he has not the flowing, Protean, imaginative sympathy, the power of instant self-identification with all forms of character and life, which culminated in Shakspeare; but that imaginative vitality which lurks in faith and conscience, producing what we may callideal force of heart, this he has eminently; and it is this central, invisible, Semitic heat which makes him a poet.
Imagination exists in him, not as a separable faculty, but as a pure vital suffusion. Hence he is aninevitablepoet. There is no drop of his blood, there is no fibre of his brain, which does not crave poetic expression. Mr. Carlyle desires to postpone poetry; but as Providence did not postpone Whittier, his wishes can hardly be gratified. Ours is, indeed, one of the plainest of poets. He is intelligible and acceptable to those who have little either of poetic culture or of fancy and imagination. Whoever has common sense and a sound heart has the powers by which he may be appreciated. And yet he is not only a real poet, but he isallpoet. The Muses have not merely sprinkled his brow; he was baptized by immersion. His notes are not many; but in them Nature herself sings. He is a sparrow that half sings, half chirps, on a bush, not a lark that floods with orient hilarity the skies of morning; but the bush burns, like that which Moses saw, and the sparrow herself is part of the divine flame.
This, then, is the general statement about Whittier. His genius is Hebrew, Biblical,—more so than that of any other poet now using the English language. In other words, he is organically a poem of the Will. He is a flower of the moral sentiment,—and of the moral sentiment, not in its flexible, feminine, vine-like dependence and play, but in its masculine rigor, climbing in direct, vertical affirmation, like a forest-pine. In this respect he affiliates with Wordsworth, and, going farther back, with Milton, whose tap-root was Hebrew, though in the vast epic flowering of his genius he passed beyond the imaginative range of Semitic mind.
In thus identifying our bard, spiritually, with a broad form of the genius of mankind, we already say with emphasis that his is indeed a Life. Yes, once more, a real Life. He is a nature. He wasborn, not manufactured. Here, once again, the old, mysterious, miraculous processes of spiritual assimilation. Here, a genuine root-clutch upon the elements of man's experience, and an inevitable, indomitable working-up of them into human shape. To look at him without discerning this vital depth and reality were as good as no looking at all.
Moreover, the man and the poet are one and the same. His verse is no literary Beau-Brummelism, but are-presentation of that which is presented in his consciousness. First, there is inward vital conversion of the elements of his experience, then verse, or version,—first the soul, then the body. His voice, as such, has little range, nor is it any marvel of organic perfection; on the contrary, there is many a voice with nothing at all in it which far surpasses his in mere vocal excellence; only in this you can hear the deep refrain of Nature, and of Nature chanting her moral ideal.
We shall consider Whittier's poetry in this light,—as a vital effluence, as a product of his being; and citations will be made, not by way of culling "beauties,"—a mode of criticism to which there are grave objections,—but of illustrating total growth, quality, and power. Our endeavor will be to get at, so far as possible, the processes of vital action, of spiritual assimilation, which go on in the poet, and then to trace these in his poetry.
God gave Whittier a deep, hot, simple, strenuous, and yet ripe and spherical, nature, whose twin necessities were, first, that itmustlay an intense grasp upon the elements of its experience, and, secondly, that itmustwork these up into some form of melodious completeness. History and the world gave him Quakerism, America, and Rural Solitude; and through this solitude went winding the sweet, old Merrimac stream, the river that we would not wish to forget, even by the waters of the river of life! And it is into these elements that his genius, with its peculiar vital simplicity and intensity, strikes root. Historic reality, the greatfactsof his time, are the soil in which he grows, as they are with all natures of depth and energy. "We did not wish," said Goethe, "to learn, but to live."
Quakerism and America—America ideally true to herself—quickly became, in his mind, one and the same. Quakerism meansdivine democracy. George Fox was the first forerunner, the John Baptist, of the new time,—leather-aproned in the British wilderness. Seeing the whole world dissolving into individualism, he did not try to tie it together, after the fashion of great old Hooker, with new cords of ecclesiasticism; but he did this,—he affirmed a Mount Sinai in the heart of the individual, and gave to the wordpersonaninfinitedepth. To sound that word thus was his function in history. No wonder that England trembled with terror, and then blazed with rage. No wonder that many an ardent James Naylor was crazed with the new wine.
Puritanism meant the same thing at bottom; but, accepting the more legal and learned interpretations of Calvin, it was, to a great degree, involved in the past, and also turned its eye more to political mechanisms. For this very reason it kept up more of fellowship with the broad world, and had the benefit of this in a larger measure of social fructification. Whatever is separated dies. Quakerism uttered a word so profound that the utterance made it insular; and, left to itself, it began to be lost in itself. Nevertheless, Quakerism and Puritanism are the two richest historic soils of modern time.
Our young poet got at the heart of the matter. He learned to utter the wordManso believingly that it sounded down into depths of the divine and infinite. He learned to say, with Novalis, "He touches heaven who touches a human body." And when he uttered this word, "Man," in full,socialbreadth, lo! it changed, and becameAmerica.
There begins the genesis of the conscious poet. All the depths of his heart rang with the resonance of these imaginations,—Man, America; meaning divine depth of manhood, divine spontaneity and rectitude of social relationship.
But what! what is this? Just as he would raise his voice to chant the new destinies of man, a harsh, heartless, human bark, and therewith a low, despairing stifle of sobbing, came to his ear! It is the bark of the auctioneer, "Going! going!"—it is the sobbing of the slave on the auction-block! Andthis, too, O Poet, this, too, is America! So you are not secure of your grand believing imaginations yet, but must fight for them. The faith of your heart would perish, if it did not put on armor.
Whittier's poetic life has three principal epochs. The first opens and closes with the "Voices of Freedom." We may use Darwin's phrase, and call it the period of Struggle for Life. His ideal itself is endangered; the atmosphere he would inhale is filled with poison; a desolating moral prosaicism springs up to justify a great social ugliness, and spreads in the air where his young hopes would try their wings; and in the imperfect strength of youth he has so much of dependence upon actual surroundings, that he must either war with their evil or succumb to it. Of surrender his daring and unselfish soul never for a moment thought. Never did a trained falcon stoop upon her quarry with more fearlessness, or a spirit of less question, than that which bore our young hero to the moral fray; yet the choice was such as we have indicated.
The faith for which he fought is uttered with spirit in a stanza from "The Branded Hand."
"In thy lone and long night-watches, sky above and wave below,Thou didst learn a higher wisdom than the babbling schoolmen know:God's stars and silence taught thee, as His angels only can,That the one, sole sacred thing beneath the cope of heaven is Man."
"In thy lone and long night-watches, sky above and wave below,Thou didst learn a higher wisdom than the babbling schoolmen know:God's stars and silence taught thee, as His angels only can,That the one, sole sacred thing beneath the cope of heaven is Man."
Our poet, too, conversing with God's stars and silence, has come to an understanding with himself, and made up his mind. That Man's being has an ideal or infinite value, and that all consecrated institutions are shams, and their formal consecration a blasphemous mockery, save as they look to that fact,—this in his Merrimac solitudes has come forth clearly to his soul, and, like old Hebrew David, he has said, "My heart is fixed." Make other selections who will, he has concluded to face life and death on this basis.
Did he not choose as a poetmust? Between a low moral prosaicism and a generous moral ideal was it possible for him to hesitate? Are there those whose real thought is, that man, beyond his estimation as an animal, represents only a civil value,—that he is but the tailor's "dummy" and clothes-horse of institutions? Do they tell our poet that his notion of man as a divine revelation, as a pure spiritual or absolute value, is a mere dream, discountenanced by the truth of the universe? He might answer, "Let the universe look to it, then! In that case, I stand upon my dream as the only worthy reality." What were a mere pot-and-pudding universe to him? Does Mr. Holyoke complain that these hot idealisms make the culinary kettles of the world boil over? Kitchen-prudences are good for kitchens; but the sun kindles his great heart without special regard to them.
These "Voices of Freedom" are no bad reading at the present day. They are of that strenuous quality, that the light of battle brings to view a finer print, which lay unseen between the lines. They are themselves battles, and stir the blood like the blast of a trumpet. What a beat in them of fiery pulses! What a heat, as of molten metal, or coal-mines burning underground! What anger! What desire! And yet we have in vain searched these poems to find one trace of base wrath, or of any degenerate and selfish passion. He is angry, and sins not. The sun goes down and again rises upon his wrath; and neither sets nor rises upon aught freer from meanness and egoism. All the fires of his heart burn for justice and mercy, for God and humanity; and they who are most scathed by themowehim no hatred in return, whether theypayhim any or not.
Not a few of these verses seem written for the present day. Take the following from the poem entitled, "Texas"; they might be deemed a call for volunteers.
"Up the hill-side, down the glen,Rouse the sleeping citizen,Summon forth the might of men!* * * * *"Oh! for God and duty stand,Heart to heart and hand to hand,Round the old graves of the land."Whoso shrinks or falters now,Whoso to the yoke would bow,—Brand the craven on his brow!"Perish party, perish clan!Strike together, while ye can,Like the arm of one strong man."
"Up the hill-side, down the glen,Rouse the sleeping citizen,Summon forth the might of men!
* * * * *
"Oh! for God and duty stand,Heart to heart and hand to hand,Round the old graves of the land.
"Whoso shrinks or falters now,Whoso to the yoke would bow,—Brand the craven on his brow!
"Perish party, perish clan!Strike together, while ye can,Like the arm of one strong man."
The Administration might have gone to these poems for a policy: he had fought the battle before them.
"Have they wronged us? Let us, then,Render back nor threats nor prayers;Have they chained our freeborn men?Let us unchain theirs!"
"Have they wronged us? Let us, then,Render back nor threats nor prayers;Have they chained our freeborn men?Let us unchain theirs!"
Or look at these concluding stanzas of "The Crisis," which is the last of the "Voices." Has not our prophet written them for this very day?
"The crisis presses on us; face to face with us it stands,With solemn lips of question, like the Sphinx in Egypt's sands!This day we fashion Destiny, our web of Fate we spin;This day for all hereafter choose we holiness or sin;Even now from starry Gerizim, or Ebal's cloudy crown,We call the dews of blessing or the bolts of cursing down."By all for which the Martyrs bore their agony and shame,By all the warning words of truth with which the Prophets came,By the Future which awaits us, by all the hopes which castTheir faint and trembling beams across the darkness of the Past,And by the blessed thought of Him who for Earth's freedom died,O my people! O my brothers! let us choose the righteous side."So shall the Northern pioneer go joyful on his way,To wed Penobscot's waters to San Francisco's bay,To make the rugged places smooth, and sow the vales with grain,And bear, with Liberty and Law, the Bible in his train;The mighty West shall bless the East, and sea shall answer sea,And mountain unto mountain call, 'Praise God, for we are free!'"
"The crisis presses on us; face to face with us it stands,With solemn lips of question, like the Sphinx in Egypt's sands!This day we fashion Destiny, our web of Fate we spin;This day for all hereafter choose we holiness or sin;Even now from starry Gerizim, or Ebal's cloudy crown,We call the dews of blessing or the bolts of cursing down.
"By all for which the Martyrs bore their agony and shame,By all the warning words of truth with which the Prophets came,By the Future which awaits us, by all the hopes which castTheir faint and trembling beams across the darkness of the Past,And by the blessed thought of Him who for Earth's freedom died,O my people! O my brothers! let us choose the righteous side.
"So shall the Northern pioneer go joyful on his way,To wed Penobscot's waters to San Francisco's bay,To make the rugged places smooth, and sow the vales with grain,And bear, with Liberty and Law, the Bible in his train;The mighty West shall bless the East, and sea shall answer sea,And mountain unto mountain call, 'Praise God, for we are free!'"
These are less to be named poems than pieces of rhythmic oratory,—oratory crystallized into poetic form, and carrying that deeper significance and force which from all vitalized form are inseparable. A poem, every work of Art, must rest in itself; oratory is a means toward a specific effect. The man who writes poems may have aims which underlie and suffuse his work; but they must not be partial, they must be coextensive with the whole spirit of man, and must enter his work as the air enters his nostrils. The moment a definite, partial effect is sought, the attitude of poetry begins to be lost. These battle-pieces are therefore a warfare for the possession of the poet's ideal, not the joyous life-breath of that ideal already victorious in him. And the other poems of this first great epoch in his poetical life, though always powerful, often beautiful, yet never, we think, show aperfectresting upon his own poetic heart.
In the year 1850 appeared the "Songs of Labor, and other Poems"; and in these we reach the transition to his second epoch. Here he has already recognized the pure ground of the poem,—
"Art's perfect forms no moral need,And beauty is its own excuse,"—
"Art's perfect forms no moral need,And beauty is its own excuse,"—
but his modesty declines attempting that perfection, and assigns him a lower place. He must still seek definite uses, though this use be to lend imagination or poetic depth to daily labor:—
"But for the dull and flowerless weedSome healing virtue still must plead,And the rough ore must find its honors in its use."So haply these my simple laysOf homely toil may serve to showThe orchard-bloom and tasselled maizeThat skirt and gladden duty's ways,The unsung beauty hid life's common things below."
"But for the dull and flowerless weedSome healing virtue still must plead,And the rough ore must find its honors in its use.
"So haply these my simple laysOf homely toil may serve to showThe orchard-bloom and tasselled maizeThat skirt and gladden duty's ways,The unsung beauty hid life's common things below."
Not pure gold as yet, but genuine silver. The aim at a definite use is still apparent, as he himself perceives; but there is nevertheless a constant native play into them of ideal feeling. It is no longer a struggle for room to draw poetic breath in, but only the absence of a perfectly free and unconscious poetic respiration. Yet they are sterling poems, with the stamp of the mint upon them. And some of the strains are such as no living man but Whittier has proven his power to produce. "Ichabod," for example, is the purest and profoundestmorallament, to the best of our knowledge, in modern literature, whether American or European. It is the grief of angels in arms over a traitor brother slain on the battle-fields of heaven.
Two years later comes the "Chapel of the Hermits," and with it the second epoch in Whittier's poetic career. The epoch of Culture we name it. The poet has now passed the period of outward warfare. All the arrows in the quiver of his noble wrath are spent. Now on the wrong and shame of the land he looks down with deep, calm, superior eyes, sorrowful, indeed, and reproving, but no longer perturbed. His hot, eloquent, prophetic spirit now breathes freely, lurk in the winds of the moment what poison may; for he has attained to those finer airs of eternity which hide ever, like the luminiferous ether, in this atmosphere of time; so that, like the scholar-hero of Schiller, he is indeed "in the time, but not of it." Still his chant of high encouragement shall fly forth on wings of music to foster the nobilities of the land; still over the graves of the faithful dead he shall murmur a requiem, whose chastened depth and truth relate it to other and better worlds than this; still his lips utter brave rebuke, but it is a rebuke that falls, like the song of an unseen bird, out of the sky, so purely moral, so remote from earthly and egoistic passion, so sure and reposeful, that verse is its natural embodiment. The home-elements of his intellectual and moral life he has fairly assimilated; and his verse in its mellowness and rhythmical excellence reflects this achievement of his spirit.
But now, after the warfare, begins questioning. For modern culture has come to him, as it comes to all, with its criticism, its science, its wide conversation through books, its intellectual unrest; it has looked him in the eye, and said, "Are you sure?The dear old traditions,—they are indeedtraditions. The sweet customs which have housed our spiritual and social life,—these arecustoms. Of what are yousure?" Matthew Arnold has recently said well (we cannot quote the words) that the opening of the modern epoch consists in the discovery that institutions and habitudes of the earlier centuries, in which we have grown, are not absolute, and do not adjust themselves perfectly to our mental wants. Thus are we thrown back upon our own souls. We have to ask the first questions, and get such answer as we may. The meaning of the modern world is this,—an epoch which, in the midst of established institutions, of old consecrated habitudes of thought and feeling, of populous nations which cannot cast loose from ancient anchorage without peril of horrible wreck and disaster, has got to take up man's life again from the beginning. Of modern life this is the immediate key.
Our poet's is one of those deep and clinging natures which hold hard by the heart of bygone times; but also he is of a nature so deep and sensitive that the spiritual endeavor of the period must needs utter itself in him. "Art thou sure?"—the voice went sounding keenly, terribly, through the profound of his soul. And to this his spirit, not without struggle and agony, but at length clearly, made the faithful Hebrew response, "I trust." Bravely said, O deep-hearted poet! Rest there! Rest there and thus on your own believing filial heart, and on the Eternal, who in it accomplishes the miracle of that confiding!
Not eminently endowed with discursive intellect,—not gifted with that power, Homeric in kind and more than Homeric in degree, which might meet the old mythic imaginations on, or rather above, their own level, and out of them, together with the material which modern time supplies, build in the skies new architectures, wherein not only the feeling, but theimaginationalso, of future ages might house,—our poet comes with Semitic directness to the heart of the matter: he takes the divineYea, though it be but a simpleYea, and no syllable more, in his own soul, and holds childlike by that. And he who has asked the questions of the time and reached this conclusion,—he who has stood alone with his unclothed soul, and out of that nakedness before the Eternities said, "I trust,"—he is victorious; he has entered the modern epoch, and has not lost the spiritual crown from his brows.
The central poem of this epoch is "Questions of Life."
"I am: how little more I know!Whence came I? Whither do I go?A centred self, which feels and is;A cry between the silences;A shadow-birth of clouds at strifeWith sunshine on the hills of life;A shaft from Nature's quiver castInto the Future from the Past;Between the cradle and the shroudA meteor's flight from cloud to cloud."
"I am: how little more I know!Whence came I? Whither do I go?A centred self, which feels and is;A cry between the silences;A shadow-birth of clouds at strifeWith sunshine on the hills of life;A shaft from Nature's quiver castInto the Future from the Past;Between the cradle and the shroudA meteor's flight from cloud to cloud."
Then to outward Nature, to mythic tradition, to the thought, faith, sanctity of old time he goes in quest of certitude, but returns to God in the heart, and to the simple heroic act by which he that believesbelieves.
"To Him, from wanderings long and wild,I come, an over-wearied child,In cool and shade His peace to find,Like dew-fall settling on the mind.Assured that all I know is best,And humbly trusting for the rest,I turn....From Nature and her mockery, Art,And book and speech of men apart,To the still witness in my heart;With reverence waiting to beholdHis Avatar of love unfold,The Eternal Beauty new and old!"
"To Him, from wanderings long and wild,I come, an over-wearied child,In cool and shade His peace to find,Like dew-fall settling on the mind.Assured that all I know is best,And humbly trusting for the rest,I turn....From Nature and her mockery, Art,And book and speech of men apart,To the still witness in my heart;With reverence waiting to beholdHis Avatar of love unfold,The Eternal Beauty new and old!"
"The Panorama and other Poems," together with "Later Poems,"[13]having the dates of 1856 and 1857, constitute the transition to his third and consummate epoch. Much in them deserves notice, but we must hasten. And yet, instead of hastening, we will pause, and take this opportunity to pick a small critical quarrel with Mr. Whittier. We charge him, in the first place, with sundry felonious assaults upon the good letterr. In the "Panorama," for example, we findlawrhyming withfor! You, Mr. Poet, you, who indulge fastidious objections to the whipping of women, to outrage that innocent preposition thus! And to select the wordlawitself, with which to force it into this lawless connection! Secondly,romanceandalliesare constantly written by him with the accent on the first syllable. These be heinous offences! A poet, of all men, should cherish the liquid consonants, and should resist the tendency of the populace to make trochees of all dissyllables. In a graver tone we might complain that he sometimes—rarely—writes, not by vocation of the ancient Muses, who were daughters of Memory and immortal Zeus, but of those Muses in drab and scoop-bonnets who are daughters of Memory and George Fox. Some lines of the "Brown of Ossawatomie" we are thinking of now. We can regard them only as a reminiscence of his special Quaker culture.
With the "Home Ballads," published in 1863, dawns fully his final period,—long may it last! This is the epoch of Poetic Realism. Not that he abandons or falls away from his moral ideal. The fact is quite contrary. He has so entirely established himself in that ideal that he no longer needs strivingly to assert it,—any more than Nature needs to pin upon oak-trees an affirmation that the idea of an oak dwells in her formative thought. Nature affirms the oak-idea by oaks; the consummate poet exhibits the same realism. He embodies. He lends a soul to forms. The real and ideal in Art are indeed often opposed to each other as contraries, but it is a false opposition. Let the artist represent reality, and all that is in him, though it were the faith of seraphs, will go into the representation. The sole condition is that he shallselect his subject from native, spontaneous choice,—that is, leave his genius to make its own elections. Let one, whose genius so invites him, paint but a thistle, and paint it as faithfully as Nature grows it; yet, if the Ten Commandments are meantime uttering themselves in his thought, he will make the thistle-top a Sinai.
It is this poetic realism that Whittier has now, in a high degree, attained. Calm and sure, lofty in humility, strong in childlikeness,—renewing the play-instinct of the true poet in his heart,—younger now than when he sat on his mother's knee,—chastened, not darkened, by trial, and toil, and time,—illumined, poet-like, even by sorrow,—he lives and loves, and chants the deep, homely beauty of his lays. He is as genuine, as wholesome and real as sweet-flag and clover. Even when he utters pure sentiment, as in that perfect lyric, "My Psalm," or in the intrepid, exquisite humility—healthful and sound as the odor of new-mown hay or balsam-firs—of "Andrew Rykman's Prayer," he maintains the same attitude of realism. He states God and inward experience as he would state sunshine and the growth of grass. This, with the devout depth of his nature, makes the rare beauty of his hymns and poems of piety and trust. He does not try tomakethe facts by stating them; he does not try to embellish them; he only seeks to utter, to state them; and even in his most perfect verse they are not half so melodious as they were in his soul.
All perfect poetry is simple statement of facts,—facts of history or of imagination. Whoever thinks to create poetry by words, and inclose in the verse a beauty which did not exist in his consciousness, has got hopelessly astray.
This attitude of simple divine abiding in the present is beautifully expressed in the opening stanzas of "My Psalm."
"I mourn no more my vanished years:Beneath a tender rain,An April rain of smiles and tears,My heart is young again."The west winds blow, and, singing low,I hear the glad streams run;The windows of my soul I throwWide open to the sun."No longer forward nor behindI look in hope and fear;But, grateful, take the good I find,The best of now and here."I plough no more a desert land,To harvest weed and tare;The manna dropping from God's handRebukes my painful care."I break my pilgrim-staff, I layAside the toiling oar;The angel sought so far awayI welcome at the door."
"I mourn no more my vanished years:Beneath a tender rain,An April rain of smiles and tears,My heart is young again.
"The west winds blow, and, singing low,I hear the glad streams run;The windows of my soul I throwWide open to the sun.
"No longer forward nor behindI look in hope and fear;But, grateful, take the good I find,The best of now and here.
"I plough no more a desert land,To harvest weed and tare;The manna dropping from God's handRebukes my painful care.
"I break my pilgrim-staff, I layAside the toiling oar;The angel sought so far awayI welcome at the door."
It is, however, in his ballads that Whittier exhibits, not, perhaps, a higher, yet a rarer, power than elsewhere,—a power, in truth, which is very rare indeed. Already in the "Panorama" volume he had brought forth three of these,—all good, and the tender pathos of that fine ballad of sentiment, "Maud Muller," went to the heart of the nation. In how many an imagination does the innocent maiden, with her delicate brown ankles,
"Rake the meadow sweet with hay,"
"Rake the meadow sweet with hay,"
and
"The judge ride slowly down the lane"!
"The judge ride slowly down the lane"!
But though sentiment so simple and unconscious is rare, our poet has yet better in store for us. He has developed of late years the precious power of creatinghomely beauty,[14]—one of the rarest powers shown in modern literature. Homely life-scenes, homely old sanctities and heroisms, he takes up, delineates them with intrepid fidelity to their homeliness, and, lo! there they are, beautiful as Indian corn, or as ploughed land under an October sun! He has thus opened an inexhaustible mine right here under our New-England feet. What will come of it no one knows.
These poems of his are natural growths; they have their own circulation of vital juices, their own peculiar properties; they smack of the soil, are racy and strong and aromatic, like ground-juniper, sweet-fern, and thearbor vitæ. Set them out in the earth, and would they not sprout and grow?—nor would need vine-shields to shelter them from the weather! They are living and local, and lean toward the west from the pressure of east winds that blow on our coast. "Skipper Ireson's Ride,"—can any one tell what makes that poetry? This uncertainty is the highest praise. This power of telling a plain matter in a plain way, and leaving it there a symbol and harmony forever,—it is the power of Nature herself. And again we repeat, that almost anything may be found in literature more frequently than this pure creative simplicity. As a special instance of it, take three lines which occur in an exquisite picture of natural scenery,—and which we quote the more readily as it affords opportunity for saying that Whittier's landscape-pictures alone make his books worthy of study,—not so much those which he sets himself deliberately to draw as those that are incidental to some other purpose or effect.
"I see far southward, this quiet day,The hills of Newbury rolling away,With the many tints of the season gay,Dreamily blending in autumn mistCrimson and gold and amethyst.Long and low, with dwarf trees crowned,Plum Island lies, like a whale aground,A stone's toss over the narrow sound.Inland, as far as the eye can go,The hills curve round, like a bended bow;A silver arrow from out them sprung,I see the shine of the Quasycung;And, round and round, over valley and hill,Old roads winding, as old roads will,Here to a ferry, and there to a mill."
"I see far southward, this quiet day,The hills of Newbury rolling away,With the many tints of the season gay,Dreamily blending in autumn mistCrimson and gold and amethyst.Long and low, with dwarf trees crowned,Plum Island lies, like a whale aground,A stone's toss over the narrow sound.Inland, as far as the eye can go,The hills curve round, like a bended bow;A silver arrow from out them sprung,I see the shine of the Quasycung;And, round and round, over valley and hill,Old roads winding, as old roads will,Here to a ferry, and there to a mill."
Can any one tell what magic it is that is in these concluding lines, so that they even eclipse the rhetorical brilliancy of those immediately preceding?
Our deep-hearted poet has fairly arrived at his poetic youth. Never was he so strong, so ruddy and rich as to-day. Time has treated him as, according to Swedenborg, she does the angels,—chastened indeed, but vivified. Let him hold steadily to his true vocation as a poet, and never fear to be thought idle, or untrue to his land. To give imaginative and ideal depth to the life of the people,—what truer service than that? And as for war-time,—does he know that "Barbara Frietche" is the true sequel to the Battle of Gettysburg, is that other victory which the nationaskedof Meade the soldier and obtained from Whittier the poet?
Having, in a previous number, furnished a brief sketch of the phenomena, purely physical, which characterized the epidemic of St. Médard, it remains to notice those of a mental and psychological character.
One of the most common incidents connected with the convulsions of that period was the appearance of a mental condition, called, in the language of the day, a state ofecstasy, bearing unmistakable analogy to the artificial somnambulism produced by magnetic influence, and to thetranceof modern spiritualism.
During this condition, there was a sudden exaltation of the mental faculties, often a wonderful command of language, sometimes the power of thought-reading, at other times, as was alleged, the gift of prophecy. While it lasted, the insensibility of the patients was occasionally so complete, that, as Montgéron says, "they have been pierced in an inhuman manner, without evincing the slightest sensation";[15]and when it passed off, they frequently did not recollect anything they had said or done during its continuance.
At times, like somnambulism, it seemed to assume something of a cataleptic character, though I cannot find any record of that most characteristic symptom of catalepsy, the rigid persistence of a limb in any position in which it may be placed. What was called the "state of death," is thus described by Montgéron:—
"The state of death is a species of ecstasy, in which the convulsionist, whose soul seems entirely absorbed by some vision, loses the use of his senses, wholly or in part. Some convulsionists have remained in this state two or even three days at a time, the eyes open, without any movement, the face very pale, the whole body insensible, immovable, and stiff as a corpse. During all this time, they give little sign of life, other than a feeble, scarcely perceptible respiration. Most of the convulsionists, however, have not these ecstasies so strongly marked. Some, though remaining immovable an entire day or longer, do not continue during all that time deprived of sight and hearing, nor are they totally devoid of sensibility; though their members, at certain intervals, become so stiff that they lose almost entirely the use of them."[16]
The "state of death," however, was much more rare than other forms of this abnormal condition. The Abbé d'Asfeld, in his work against the convulsionists, alluding to the state of ecstasy, defines it as a state "in which the soul, carried away by a superior force, and, as it were, out of itself, becomes unconscious of surrounding objects, and occupies itself with those which imagination presents"; and he adds,—"It is marked by alienation of the senses, proceeding, however, from some cause other than sleep. This alienation of the senses is sometimes complete, sometimes incomplete."[17]
Montgéron, commenting on the above, says,—"This last phase, during which the alienation of the senses is imperfect, is precisely the condition of most of the convulsionists, when in the state of ecstasy. They usually see the persons present; they speak to them; sometimes they hear what is said to them; but as to the rest, their souls seem absorbed in the contemplation of objects which a superior power discloses to their vision."[18]
And a little farther on he adds,—"In these ecstasies the convulsionists are struck all of a sudden with the unexpected aspect of some object, the sight of which enchants them with joy. Their eyes beam; their heads are raised toward heaven; they appear as if they would fly thither. To see them afterwards absorbed in profound contemplation, with an air of inexpressible satisfaction, one would say that they are admiring the divine beauty. Their countenances are animated with a lively and brilliant fire; and their eyes, which cannot be made to close during the entire duration of the ecstasy, remain completely motionless, open, and fixed, as on the object which seems to interest them. They are in some sort transfigured; they appear quite changed. Even those who, out of this state, have in their physiognomy something mean or repulsive, alter so that they can scarcely be recognized.... It is during these ecstasies that many of the convulsionists deliver their finest discourses and their chief predictions,—that they speak in unknown tongues,—that they read the secret thoughts of others,—and even sometimes that they give their representations."[19]
A provincial ecclesiastic, quoted by Montgéron, and who, it should be remarked, found fault with many of the doings of the convulsionists, admits the exalted character of these declamations. He says,—"Their discourses on religion are spirited, touching, profound,—delivered with an eloquence and a dignity which our greatest masters cannot approach, and with a grace and appropriateness of gesture rivalling that of our best actors.... One of the girls who pronounced such discourses was but thirteen years and a half old; and most of them were utterly incompetent, in their natural state, thus to treat subjects far beyond their capacity."[20]
Colbert, already quoted, bears testimony to the same effect. Writing to Madame de Coetquen, he says,—"I have read extracts from these discourses, and have been greatly struck with them. The expressions are noble, the views grand, the theology exact. It is impossible that the imagination, and especially the imagination of a child, should originate such beautiful things. Sublimity full of eloquence reigns throughout these productions."[21]
To judge fairly of this phenomenon, we must consider the previous condition and acquirements of those who pronounced such discourses. Montgéron, while declaring that among the convulsionists there were occasionally to be found persons of respectable standing, adds,—"But it must be confessed that in general God has chosen the convulsionists among the common people; that they were chiefly young children, especially girls; that almost all of them had lived till then in ignorance and obscurity; that several of them were deformed, and some, in their natural state, even exhibited imbecility. Of such, for the most part, it was that God made choice, to show forth to us His power."[22]
The staple of these discourses—wild and fantastic enough—may be gathered from the following:—
"The Almighty thus raised up all of a sudden a number of persons, the greater part without any instruction; He opened the mouths of a number of young girls, some of whom could not read; and He caused them to announce, in terms the most magnificent, that the times had now arrived,—that in a few years the Prophet Elias would appear,—that he would be despised and treated with outrage by the Catholics,—that he would even be put to death, together with several of those who had expected his coming and had become his disciples and followers,—that God would employ this Prophet to convert all the Jews,—that they, when thus converted, would immediately carry the light unto all nations,—that they would reëstablish Christianity throughout the world,—and that they would preach the morality of the gospel in all its purity, and cause it to spread over the whole earth."[23]
Montgéron, commenting (as he expresses it) upon "the manner in which the convulsionists are supernaturally enlightened, and in which they deliver their discourses and their predictions," says,—
"Ordinarily, the words are not dictated to them; it is only the ideas that are presented to their minds by a supernatural instinct, and they are left to express these thoughts in terms of their own selection. Hence it happens that occasionally their most beautiful discourses are marred by ill-chosen and incorrect expressions, and by phrases obscure and badly turned; so that the beauty of some of these consists rather in the depth of thought, the grandeur of the subjects treated, and the magnificence of the images presented, than in the language in which the whole is rendered.
"It is evident, that, when they are thus left to clothe in their own language the ideas given them, they are also at liberty to add to them, if they will. And, in fact, most of them declare that they perceive within themselves the power to mix in their own ideas with those supernaturally communicated, which suddenly seize their minds; and they are obliged to be extremely careful not to confound their own thoughts with those which they receive from a superior intelligence. This is sometimes the more difficult, inasmuch as the ideas thus coming to them do not always come with equal clearness.
"Sometimes, however, the terms are dictated to them internally, but without their being forced to pronounce them, nor hindered from adding to them, if they choose to do so.
"Finally, in regard to certain subjects,—for example, the lights which illumine their minds, and oblige them to announce the second coming of the Prophet Elias, and all that has reference to that great event,—their lips pronounce a succession of words wholly independently of their will; so that they themselves listen like the auditors, having no knowledge of what they say, except only as, word for word, it is pronounced."[24]
Montgéron appears, however, to admit that the exaltation of intelligence which is apparent during the state of ecstasy may, to some extent, be accounted for on natural principles. Starting from the fact, that, during the convulsions, external objects produce much less effect upon the senses than in the natural state, he argues that "the more the soul is disembarrassed of external impressions, the greater is its activity, the greater its power to frame thoughts, and the greater its lucidity."[25]He admits, further,—"Although most of the convulsionists have, when in convulsion, much more intelligence than in their ordinary state, that intelligence is not always supernatural, but may be the mere effect of the mental activity which results when soul is disengaged from sense. Nay, there are examples of convulsionists availing themselves of the superior intelligence which they have in convulsion to make out dissertations on mere temporal affairs. This intelligence, also, may at times fail to subjugate their passions; and I am convinced that they may occasionally make a bad use of it."[26]
In another place, Montgéron says plainly, that "persons accustomed to receive revelations, but not raised to the state of the Prophets, may readily imagine things to be revealed to them which are but the promptings of their own minds,"[27]—and that this has happened, not only to the convulsionists, but (by the confession of many of the ancient fathers[28]) also to the greatest saints. But he protests against the conclusion, as illogical, that the convulsionists never speak by the spirit of God, because they do not always do so.
He admits, however,[29]that it is extremely difficult to distinguish between what ought to be received as divinely revealed and what ought to be rejected as originating in the convulsionist's own mind; nor does he give any rule by which this may be done. The knowledge necessary to the "discerning of spirits" he thinks can be obtained only by humble prayer.[30]
The power of prophecy is one of the gifts claimed by Montgéron as having been bestowed on various convulsionists during their ecstatic state. Yet he gives no detailed proofs of prophecies touching temporal matters having been literally fulfilled, unless it be prophecies by convulsionist-patients in regard to the future crises of their diseases. And he admits that false predictions were not infrequent, and that false interpretations of visions touching the future were of common occurrence. He says,—
"It is sometimes revealed to a convulsionist, for example, that there is to happen to some person not named a certain accident, every detail of which is minutely given; and the convulsionist is ordered to declare what has been communicated to him, that the hand of God may be recognized in its fulfilment.... But, at the same time, the convulsionist receiving this vision believes it to apply to a certain person, whom he designates by name. The prediction, however, is not verified in the case of the person named, so that those who heard it delivered conclude that it is false; but itisverified in the case of another person, to whom the accident happens, attended by all the minutely detailed particulars."[31]
If this be correctly given, it is what animal magnetizers would call a case of imperfect lucidity.
The case as to the gift of tongues is still less satisfactorily made out. A few, Montgéron says, translate, after the ecstasy, what they have declaimed, during its continuance, in an unknown tongue; but for this, of course, we have their word only. The greater part know nothing of what they have said, when the ecstasy has passed. As to these, he admits,—
"The only proof we have that they understand the words at the time they pronounce them is that they often express, in the most lively manner, the various sentiments contained in their discourse, not only by their gestures, but also by the attitudes the body assumes, and by the expression of the countenance, on which the different sentiments are painted, by turns, in a manner the most expressive, so that one is able, up to a certain point, to detect the feelings by which they are moved; and it has been easy for the attentive observer to perceive that most of these discourses were detailed predictions as to the coming of the Prophet Elias," etc.[32]
If it be presumptuous, considering the marvels which modern observations disclose, to pronounce that the alleged unknown languages were unmeaning sounds only, it is evident, at least, that the above is inconclusive as to their true character.
Much more trustworthy appears to be the evidence touching the phenomenon of thought-reading.
The fact that many of the convulsionists were able "to discover the secrets of the heart" is admitted by their principal opponents. The Abbé d'Asfeld himself adduces examples of it.[33]M. Poncet admits its reality.[34]The provincial ecclesiastic whom I have already quoted says that he "found examples without number of convulsionists who discovered the secrets of the heart in the most minute detail: for example, to disclose to a person that at such a period of his life he did such or such a thing; to another, that he had done so and so before coming hither," etc.[35]The author of the "Recherche de la Vérité," a pamphlet on the phenomena of the convulsions, which seems very candidly written, acknowledges as one of these "the manifestation of the thoughts and the discovery of secret things."[36]
Montgéron testifies to the fact, from repeated personal observation, that they revealed to him things known to himself alone; and after adducing the admissions above alluded to, and some others, he adds,—"But it would be superfluous further to multiply testimony in proof of a fact admitted by all the world, even by the avowed adversaries of the convulsions, who have found no other method of explaining it than by doing Satan the honor to proclaim him the author of these revelations."[37]
Besides these gifts, real or alleged, there was occasionally observed, during ecstasy, an extraordinary development of the musical faculty. Montgéron tells us,—"Mademoiselle Dancogné, who, as was well known, had no voice whatever in her natural state, sings in the most perfect manner canticles in an unknown tongue, and that to the admiration of all those who hear her."[38]
As to the general character of these psychological phenomena, the theologians of that day were, with few exceptions, agreed that they were of a supernatural character,—the usual question mooted between them being, whether they were due to a Divine or to a Satanic influence. The medical opponents of the movement sometimes took the ground that the state of ecstasy was allied to delirium or insanity,—and that it was a degraded condition, inasmuch as the patient abandoned the exercise of his free will: an argument similar to that which has been made in our day against somewhat analogous phenomena, by a Bostonian.[39]
In concluding a sketch, in which, though it be necessarily a brief one, I have taken pains to set forth with strict accuracy all the essential features which mark the character of this extraordinary epidemic, it is proper I should state that the opponents of Jansenism concur in bringing against the convulsionists the charge that many of them were not only ignorant and illiterate girls, but persons of bad character, occasionally of notoriously immoral habits; nay, that some of them justified the vicious courses in which they indulged by declaring these to be a representation of a religious tendency, emblematic of that degradation through which the Church must pass, before, recalled by the voice of Elias, it regained its pristine purity.
Montgéron, while admitting that such charges may justly be brought against some of the convulsionists, denies the general truth of the allegation, yet after such a fashion that one sees plainly he considers it necessary, in establishing the character and divine source of the discourses and predictions delivered in the state of ecstasy, to do so without reference to the moral standing of the ecstatics. When one of his opponents (the physician who addressed to him the satirical letter already referred to) ascribes to him the position, that one must decide the divine or diabolical state of a person alleged to be inspired by reference to that person's morals and conduct, he replies,—"God forbid that I should advance so false a proposition!" And he proceeds to argue that the Deity often avails Himself, as a medium for expressing His will, of unworthy subjects. He says,—
"Who does not know that the Holy Spirit, whose divine rays are never stained, let them shine where they will, 'bloweth where it listeth,' and distributes its gifts to whom best it seems, without always causing these to be accompanied by internal virtues? Does not Scripture inform us that God caused miracles to be wrought and great prophecies to be delivered by very vicious persons, as Judas, Caiaphas, Balaam, and others? Jesus Christ himself teaches us that there will be workers of iniquity among the number of those who prophesy and of those who will work miracles in his name, declaring that on the Day of Judgment many will say unto him, 'Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name, and in thy name done many wonderful works?' and that he will reply to them, 'Depart from me, ye that work iniquity.'"
And he proceeds thus:—"If, therefore, all that our enemies allege against the character of the convulsionists were true, it does not follow that God would not employ such persons as the ministers of His miracles and His prophecies, provided, always, that these miracles and these prophecies have a worthy object, and tend to a knowledge of the truth, to the spread of charity, and to the reformation of the morals of mankind."[40]
These accusations of immorality are, probably, greatly exaggerated by the enemies of the Jansenists; yet one may gather, even from the tenor of Montgéron's defence, that there was more or less truth in the charges brought against the conduct of some of the convulsionists, and that the state of ecstasy, whatever its true nature, was by no means confined to persons of good moral character.
Such are the alleged facts, physical and mental, connected with this extraordinary episode in the history of mental epidemics.
On the perusal of such a narrative as the above, the questions which naturally suggest themselves are,—To what extent can we rationally attach credit to it? And, if true, what is the explanation of phenomena apparently so incredible?
As to the first, the admission of a distinguished contemporary historian, noted for his skeptical tendencies, in regard to the evidence for these alleged miracles, is noteworthy. It is in these words:—"Many of them were immediately proved on the spot before judges of unquestioned integrity, attested by witnesses of credit and distinction, in a learned age, and on the most eminent theatre that is now in the world; nor were the Jesuits, though a learned body, supported by the civil magistrate, and determined enemies to those opinions in whose favor the miracles were supposed to have been wrought, ever able distinctly to refute or detect them."[41]
Similar is the admission of another celebrated author, at least as skeptical as Hume, and writing at the very time, and on the very spot where these marvellous events were occurring. Diderot, speaking of the St.-Médard manifestations, says,—"We have of these pretended miracles a vast collection, which may brave the most determined incredulity. Its author, Carré de Montgéron, is a magistrate, a man of gravity, who up to that time had been a professed materialist,—on insufficient grounds, it is true, but yet a man who certainly had no expectation of making his fortune by becoming a Jansenist. An eye-witness of the facts he relates, and of which he had an opportunity of judging dispassionately and disinterestedly, his testimony is indorsed by that of a thousand others. All relate what they have seen; and their depositions have every possible mark of authenticity; the originals being recorded and preserved in the public archives."[42]
Even in the very denunciations of opponents we find corroboratory evidence of the main facts in question. Witness the terms in which the Bishop of Bethléem declaims against the scenes of St. Médard:—"What! we find ecclesiastics, priests, in the midst of numerous assemblies composed of persons of every rank and of both sexes, doffing their cassocks, habiting themselves in shirt and trousers, the better to be able to act the part of executioners, casting on the ground young girls, dragging them face-downward along the earth, and then discharging on their bodies innumerable blows, till they themselves, the dealers of these blows, are reduced to such a state of exhaustion that they are obliged to have water poured on their heads! What! we find men pretending to sentiments of religion and humanity dealing, with the full swing of their arms, thirty or forty thousand blows with heavy clubs on the arms, on the legs, on the heads of young girls, and making other desperate efforts capable of crushing the skulls of the sufferers! What! we find cultivated ladies, pious and of high rank, doctors of law, civil and canonical, laymen of character, even curates, daily witnessing this spectacle of fanaticism and horror in silence, instead of opposing it with all their force; nay, they applaud it by their presence, even by their countenance and their conversation! Was ever, throughout all history, such another example of excesses thus scandalous, thus multiplied?"[43]
De Lan, another opponent, thus sketches the same scenes:—"Young girls, bareheaded, dashed their heads against a wall or against a marble slab; they caused their limbs to be drawn by strong men, even to the extent of dislocation;[44]they caused blows to be given them that would kill the most robust, and in such numbers that one is terrified. I know one person who counted four thousand at a single sitting; they were given sometimes with the palm of the hand, sometimes with the fist; sometimes on the back, sometimes on the stomach. Occasionally, heavy cudgels or clubs were employed instead[45].... Some convulsionists ran pins into their heads, without suffering any pain; others would have thrown themselves from the windows, had they not been prevented. Others, again, carried their zeal so far as to cause themselves to be hanged up by a hook," etc.[46]
Modern medical writers of reputation usually admit the main facts, and seek a natural explanation of them. In the article, "Convulsions," in the great "Dictionnaire des Sciences Médicales," (published in 1812-22,) which article is from the pen of an able physiologist, Dr. Montègre, we find the following, in regard to the St.-Médard phenomena:—"Carré de Montgéron surrounded these prodigies with depositions so numerous and so authentic, that, after having examined them, no doubt can remain.... However great my reluctance to admit such facts, it is impossible for me to refuse to receive them." As to thesuccors, so-called, he frankly confesses that they seem to him as fully proved as the rest. He says,—"There are the same witnesses, and the incidents themselves are still more clear and precise. It is not so much of cures that there is question in this case, as of apparent and external facts, in regard to which there can be no misconception."
Dr. Calmeil, in his well-known work on Insanity, while regarding this epidemic as one of the most striking examples of religious mania, accepts the relation of Montgéron as in the main true. "From various motives," says he, "these theomaniacs sought out the most frightful bodily tortures. Would it be credible, if it were not that the entire population of Paris concurred in testifying to the fact, that more than five hundred women pushed the rage of fanaticism or the perversion of sensibility to such a point, that they exposed themselves to burning fires, that they had their heads compressed between boards, that they caused to be administered on the abdomen, on the breast, on the stomach, on every part of the body, blows of clubs, stampings of the feet, blows with weapons of stone, with bars of iron? Yet the theomaniacs of St. Médard braved all these tests, sometimes as proofs that God had rendered them invulnerable, sometimes to demonstrate that God could cure them by means calculated to kill them, had they not been the objects of His special protection, sometimes to show that blows usually painful only caused to them pleasant relief. The picture of the punishments to which the convulsionists submitted, as if by inspiration, so that no one might doubt, as Montgéron has it, that it was easy for the Almighty to render invulnerable and insensible bodies the most frail and delicate, would induce us to believe, if the contrary were not so conclusively established, that a rage for homicide and suicide had taken possession of the greater part of the sect of the Appellants."[47]
Though I am acquainted with no class of phenomena occurring elsewhere that will match the "Great Succors" of St. Médard, yet we find occasional glimpses of instincts somewhat analogous to those claimed for the convulsionists, in other examples.
In Hecker's "Epidemics of the Middle Ages" there is a chapter devoted to what he calls the "Dancing Mania," the account of which he thus introduces:—"So early as the year 1374, assemblages of men and women were seen at Aix-la-Chapelle, who had come out of Germany, and who, united by one common delusion, exhibited to the public, both in the streets and in the churches, the following strange spectacle. They formed circles hand in hand, and, appearing to have lost all control over their senses, continued dancing, regardless of the bystanders, for hours together, in wild delirium, until at length they fell to the ground in a state of exhaustion. They then complained of extreme oppression, and groaned as if in the agonies of death, until they were swathed in cloths bound tightly round their waists; upon which they recovered, and remained free from complaint until the next attack. This practice of swathing was resorted to on account of the tympany[48]which followed these spasmodic ravings; but the bystanders frequently relieved patients in a less artificial manner,by thumping and trampling upon the parts affected. While dancing they neither saw nor heard, being insensible to external impressions through the senses, but were haunted by visions." And again,—"In Liege, Utrecht, Tongres, and many other towns of Belgium, the dancers appeared with garlands in their hair, and their waists girt with cloths, that they might, as soon as the paroxysm was over, receive immediate relief from the attack of tympany. This bandage, by the insertion of a stick, was easily twisted tight;many, however, obtained more relief from kicks and blows, which they found numbers of persons ready to administer."[49]