Complete Prose Works Part 49

I have thought (even presented so incompletely, with such fearful hiatuses, and in my own feebleness and waning life) one might well memorize this life of Elias Hicks. Though not eminent in literature or politics or inventions or business, it is a token of not a few, and is significant. Such men do not cope with statesmen or soldiers--but I have thought they deserve to be recorded and kept up as a sample--that this one specially does. I have already compared it to a little flowing liquid rill of Nature's life, maintaining freshness. As if, indeed, under the smoke of battles, the blare of trumpets, and the madness of contending hosts--the screams of pa.s.sion, the groans of the suffering, the parching of struggles of money and politics, and all h.e.l.l's heat and noise and compet.i.tion above and around--should come melting down from the mountains from sources of unpolluted snows, far up there in G.o.d's hidden, untrodden recesses, and so rippling along among us low in the ground, at men's very feet, a curious little brook of clear and cool, and ever-healthy, ever-living water.

_Note.--The Separation_.--The division vulgarly call'd between Orthodox and Hicksites in the Society of Friends took place in 1827, '8 and '9.

Probably it had been preparing some time. One who was present has since described to me the climax, at a meeting of Friends in Philadelphia crowded by a great attendance of both s.e.xes, with Elias as princ.i.p.al speaker. In the course of his utterance or argument he made use of these words: "The blood of Christ--the blood of Christ--why, my friends, the actual blood of Christ in itself was no more effectual than the blood of bulls and goats--not a bit more--not a bit." At these words, after a momentary hush, commenced a great tumult. Hundreds rose to their feet.... Canes were thump'd upon the floor. From all parts of the house angry mutterings. Some left the place, but more remain'd, with exclamations, flush'd faces and eyes. This was the definite utterance, the overt act, which led to the separation. Families diverg'd--even husbands and wives, parents and children, were separated.

Of course what Elias promulg'd spread a great commotion among the Friends. Sometimes when he presented himself to speak in the meeting, there would be opposition--this led to angry words, gestures, unseemly noises, recriminations. Elias, at such times, was deeply affected--the tears roll'd in streams down his cheeks--he silently waited the close of the dispute. "Let the Friend speak; let the Friend speak!" he would say when his supporters in the meeting tried to bluff off some violent orthodox person objecting to the new doctrinaire. But he never recanted.

A reviewer of the old dispute and separation made the following comments on them in a paper ten years ago: "It was in America, where there had been no persecution worth mentioning since Mary Dyer was hang'd on Boston Common, that about fifty years ago differences arose, singularly enough upon doctrinal points of the divinity of Christ and the nature of the atonement. Whoever would know how bitter was the controversy, and how much of human infirmity was found to be still lurking under broad-brim hats and drab coats, must seek for the information in the Lives of Elias Hicks and of Thomas Shillitoe, the latter an English Friend, who visited us at this unfortunate time, and who exercised his gifts as a peace-maker with but little success. The meetings, according to his testimony, were sometimes turn'd into mobs. The disruption was wide, and seems to have been final. Six of the ten yearly meetings were divided; and since that time various sub-divisions have come, four or five in number. There has never, however, been anything like a repet.i.tion of the excitement of the Hicksite controversy; and Friends of all kinds at present appear to have settled down into a solid, steady, comfortable state, and to be working in their own way without troubling other Friends whose ways are different."

_Note_.--Old persons, who heard this man in his day, and who glean'd impressions from what they saw of him, (judg'd from their own points of views,) have, in their conversation with me, dwelt on another point.

They think Elias Hicks had a large element of personal ambition, the pride of leadership, of establishing perhaps a sect that should reflect his own name, and to which he should give especial form and character.

Very likely. Such indeed seems the means, all through progress and civilization, by which strong men and strong convictions achieve anything definite. But the basic foundation of Elias was undoubtedly genuine religious fervor. He was like an old Hebrew prophet. He had the spirit of one, and in his later years look'd like one. What Carlyle says of John Knox will apply to him:

He is an instance to us how a man, by sincerity itself, becomes heroic; it is the grand gift he has. We find in him a good, honest, intellectual talent, no transcendent one;--a narrow, inconsiderable man, as compared with Luther; but in heartfelt instinctive adherence to truth, in _sincerity_ as we say, he has no superior; nay, one might ask, What equal he has? The heart of him is of the true Prophet cast. "He lies there," said the Earl of Morton at Knox's grave, "who never fear'd the face of man." He resembles, more than any of the moderns, an old Hebrew Prophet. The same inflexibility, intolerance, rigid, narrow-looking adherence to G.o.d's truth.

_A Note yet. The United States to-day_.--While under all previous conditions (even convictions) of society, Oriental, Feudal, Ecclesiastical, and in all past (or present) Despotisms, through the entire past, there existed, and exists yet, in ally and fusion with them, and frequently forming the main part of them, certain churches, inst.i.tutes, priesthoods, fervid beliefs, &c., practically promoting religious and moral action to the fullest degrees of which humanity there under circ.u.mstances was capable, and often conserving all there was of justice, art, literature, and good manners--it is clear I say, that, under the Democratic Inst.i.tutes of the United States, now and henceforth, there are no equally genuine fountains of fervid beliefs, adapted to produce similar moral and religious results, according to our circ.u.mstances. I consider that the churches, sects, pulpits, of the present day, in the United States, exist not by any solid convictions, but by a sort of tacit, supercilious, scornful suffrance. Few speak openly--none officially--against them. But the ostent continuously imposing, who is not aware that any such living fountains of belief in them are now utterly ceas'd and departed from the minds of men?

_A Lingering Note_.--In the making of a full man, all the other consciences, (the emotional, courageous, intellectual, esthetic, &c.,) are to be crown'd and effused by the religious conscience. In the higher structure of a human self, or of community, the Moral, the Religious, the Spiritual, is strictly a.n.a.logous to the subtle vitalization and antiseptic play call'd Health in the physiologic structure. To person or State, the main verteber (or rather _the_ verteber) is Morality.

That is indeed the only real vitalization of character, and of all the supersensual, even heroic and artistic portions of man or nationality.

It is to run through and knit the superior parts, and keep man or State vital and upright, as health keeps the body straight and blooming. Of course a really grand and strong and beautiful character is probably to be slowly grown, and adjusted strictly with reference to itself, its own personal and social sphere--with (paradox though it may be) the clear understanding that the conventional theories of life, worldly ambition, wealth, office, fame, &c., are essentially but glittering mayas, delusions.

Doubtless the greatest scientists and theologians will sometimes find themselves saying, It isn't only those who know most, who contribute most to G.o.d's glory. Doubtless these very scientists at times stand with bared heads before the humblest lives and personalities. For there is something greater (is there not?) than all the science and poems of the world--above all else, like the stars shining eternal--above Shakspere's plays, or Concord philosophy, or art of Angelo or Raphael--something that shines elusive, like beams of Hesperus at evening--high above all the vaunted wealth and pride--prov'd by its practical outcropping in life, each case after its own concomitants--the intuitive blending of divine love and faith in a human emotional character--blending for all, for the unlearn'd, the common, and the poor.

I don't know in what book I once read, (possibly the remark has been made in books, all ages,) that no life ever lived, even the most uneventful, but, probed to its centre, would be found in itself as subtle a drama as any that poets have ever sung, or playwrights fabled.

Often, too, in size and weight, that life suppos'd obscure. For it isn't only the palpable stars; astronomers say there are dark, or almost dark, unnotic'd orbs and suns, (like the dusky companions of Sirius, seven times as large as our own sun,) rolling through s.p.a.ce, real and potent as any--perhaps the most real and potent. Yet none recks of them. In the bright lexicon we give the spreading heavens, they have not even names.

Amid ceaseless sophistications all times, the soul would seem to glance yearningly around for such contrasts--such cool, still offsets.

Notes:

[42]In Walter Scott's reminiscences he speaks of Burns as having the most eloquent, glowing, flashing, illuminated dark-orbed eyes he ever beheld in a human face; and I think Elias Hicks's must have been like them.

[43] The true Christian religion, (such was the teaching of Elias Hicks,) consists neither in rites or Bibles or sermons or Sundays--but in noiseless secret ecstasy and unremitted aspiration, in purity, in a good practical life, in charity to the poor and toleration to all. He said, "A man may keep the Sabbath, may belong to a church and attend all the observances, have regular family prayer, keep a well-bound copy of the Hebrew Scriptures in a conspicuous place in his house, and yet not be a truly religious person at all." E. believ'd little in a church as organiz'd-even his own--with houses, ministers, or with salaries, creeds, Sundays, saints, Bibles, holy festivals, &c. But he believ'

d always in the universal church, in the soul of man, invisibly rapt, ever-waiting, ever-responding to universal truths.--He was fond of pithy proverbs. He said, "It matters not where you live, but how you live."

He said once to my father, "They talk of the devil--I tell thee, Walter, there is no worse devil than man."

GEORGE FOX (AND SHAKSPERE)

While we are about it, we must almost Inevitably go back to the origin of the Society of which Elias Hicks has so far prov'd to be the most mark'd individual result. We must revert to the latter part of the 16th, and all, or nearly all of that 17th century, crowded with so many important historical events, changes, and personages. Throughout Europe, and especially in what we call our Mother Country, men were unusually arous'd--(some would say demented.) It was a special age of the insanity of witch-trials and witch-hangings. In one year 60 were hung for witchcraft in one English county alone. It was peculiarly an age of military-religious conflict. Protestantism and Catholicism were wrestling like giants for the mastery, straining every nerve. Only to think of it--that age! its events, persons--Shakspere just dead, (his folios publish'd, complete)--Charles 1st, the shadowy spirit and the solid block! To sum up all, it was the age of Cromwell!

As indispensable foreground, indeed, for Elias Hicks, and perhaps sine qua non to an estimate of the kind of man, we must briefly transport ourselves back to the England of that period. As I say, it is the time of tremendous moral and political agitation; ideas of conflicting forms, governments, theologies, seethe and dash like ocean storms, and ebb and flow like mighty tides. It was, or had been, the time of the long feud between the Parliament and the Crown. In the midst of the sprouts, began George Fox--born eight years after the death of Shakspere. He was the son of a weaver, himself a shoemaker, and was "converted" before the age of 20. But O the sufferings, mental and physical, through which those years of the strange youth pa.s.s'd! He claim'd to be sent by G.o.d to fulfill a mission. "I come," he said, "to direct people to the spirit that gave forth the Scriptures." The range of his thought, even then, cover'd almost every important subject of after times, anti-slavery, women's rights, &c. Though in a low sphere, and among the ma.s.ses, he forms a mark'd feature in the age.

And how, indeed, beyond all any, that stormy and perturb'd age! The foundations of the old, the superst.i.tious, the conventionally poetic, the credulous, all breaking--the light of the new, and of science and democracy, definitely beginning--a mad, fierce, almost crazy age!

The political struggles of the reigns of the Charleses, and of the Protectorate of Cromwell, heated to frenzy by theological struggles.

Those were the years following the advent and practical working of the Reformation--but Catholicism is yet strong, and yet seeks supremacy. We think our age full of the flush of men and doings, and culminations of war and peace; and so it is. But there could hardly be a grander and more picturesque and varied age than that.

Born out of and in this age, when Milton, Bunyan, Dryden and John Locke were still living--amid the memories of Queen Elizabeth and James First, and the events of their reigns--when the radiance of that galaxy of poets, warriors, statesmen, captains, lords, explorers, wits and gentlemen, that crowded the courts and times of those sovereigns still fill'd the atmosphere--when America commencing to be explor'd and settled commenc'd also to be suspected as destin'd to overthrow the old standards and calculations--when Feudalism, like a sunset, seem'd to gather all its glories, reminiscences, personalisms, in one last gorgeous effort, before the advance of a new day, a new incipient genius--amid the social and domestic circles of that period--indifferent to reverberations that seem'd enough to wake the dead, and in a sphere far from the pageants of the court, the awe of any personal rank or charm of intellect, or literature, or the varying excitement of Parliamentarian or Royalist fortunes--this curious young rustic goes wandering up and down England.

George Fox, born 1624, was of decent stock, in ordinary lower life--as he grew along toward manhood, work'd at shoemaking, also at farm labors--loved to be much by himself, half-hidden in the woods, reading the Bible--went about from town to town, dress'd in leather clothes--walk'd much at night, solitary, deeply troubled ("the inward divine teaching of the Lord")--sometimes goes among the ecclesiastical gatherings of the great professors, and though a mere youth bears bold testimony--goes to and fro disputing--(must have had great personality)--heard the voice of the Lord speaking articulately to him, as he walk'd in the fields--feels resistless commands not to be explain'd, but follow'd, to abstain from taking off his hat, to say _Thee_ and _Thou_, and not bid others Good morning or Good evening-was illiterate, could just read and write-testifies against shows, games, and frivolous pleasures--enters the courts and warns the judges that they see to doing justice--goes into public houses and market-places, with denunciations of drunkenness and money-making--rises in the midst of the church-services, and gives his own explanations of the ministers'

explanations, and of Bible pa.s.sages and texts--sometimes for such things put in prison, sometimes struck fiercely on the mouth on the spot, or knock'd down, and lying there beaten and b.l.o.o.d.y--was of keen wit, ready to any question with the most apropos of answers--was sometimes press'd for a soldier, (_him_ for a soldier!)--was indeed terribly buffeted; but goes, goes, goes--often sleeping out-doors, under hedges, or hay stacks--forever taken before justices--improving such, and all occasions, to _bear testimony_, and give good advice--still enters the "steeple-houses," (as he calls churches,) and though often dragg'd out and whipt till he faints away, and lies like one dead, when he comes-to--stands up again, and offering himself all bruis'd and b.l.o.o.d.y, cries out to his tormenters, "Strike--strike again, here where you have not yet touch'd! my arms, my head, my cheeks,"--Is at length arrested and sent up to London, confers with the Protector, Cromwell,--is set at liberty, and holds great meetings in London.

Thus going on, there is something in him that fascinates one or two here, and three or four there, until gradually there were others who went about in the same spirit, and by degrees the Society of Friends took shape, and stood among the thousand religious sects of the world.

Women also catch the contagion, and go round, often shamefully misused.

By such contagion these ministerings, by scores, almost hundreds of poor travelling men and women, keep on year after year, through ridicule, whipping, imprisonment, &c.--some of the Friend-ministers emigrate to New England--where their treatment makes the blackest part of the early annals of the New World. Some were executed, others maim'd, par-burnt, and scourg'd--two hundred die in prison--some on the gallows, or at the stake.

George Fox himself visited America, and found a refuge and hearers, and preach'd many times on Long Island, New York State. In the village of Oysterbay they will show you the rock on which he stood, (1672,) addressing the mult.i.tude, in the open air--thus rigidly following the fashion of apostolic times.--(I have heard myself many reminiscences of him.) Flushing also contains (or contain'd--I have seen them) memorials of Fox, and his son, in two aged white-oak trees, that shaded him while he bore his testimony to people gather'd in the highway.--Yes, the American Quakers were much persecuted--almost as much, by a sort of consent of all the other sects, as the Jews were in Europe in the middle ages. In New England, the cruelest laws were pa.s.s'd, and put in execution against them. As said, some were whipt--women the same as men. Some had their ears cut off--others their tongues pierc'd with hot irons--others their faces branded. Worse still, a woman and three men had been hang'd, (1660.)--Public opinion, and the statutes, join'd together, in an odious union, Quakers, Baptists, Roman Catholics and Witches.--Such a fragmentary sketch of George Fox and his time--and the advent of "the Society of Friends" in America.

Strange as it may sound, Shakspere and George Fox, (think of them!

compare them!) were born and bred of similar stock, in much the same surroundings and station in life--from the same England--and at a similar period. One to radiate all of art's, all literature's splendor--a splendor so dazzling that he himself is almost lost in it, and his contemporaries the same--his fict.i.tious Oth.e.l.lo, Romeo, Hamlet, Lear, as real as any lords of England or Europe then and there--more real to us, the mind sometimes thinks, than the man Shakspere himself.

Then the other--may we indeed name him the same day? What is poor plain George Fox compared to William Shakspere--to fancy's lord, imagination's heir? Yet George Fox stands for something too--a thought--the thought that wakes in silent hours--perhaps the deepest, most eternal thought latent in the human soul. This is the thought of G.o.d, merged in the thoughts of moral right and the immortality of ident.i.ty. Great, great is this thought--aye, greater than all else. When the gorgeous pageant of Art, refulgent in the sunshine, color'd with roses and gold--with all the richest mere poetry, old or new, (even Shakespere's) with all that statue, play, painting, music, architecture, oratory, can effect, ceases to satisfy and please--When the eager chase after wealth flags, and beauty itself becomes a loathing--and when all worldly or carnal or esthetic, or even scientific values, having done their office to the human character, and minister'd their part to its development--then, if not before, comes forward this over-arching thought, and brings its eligibilities, germinations. Most neglected in life of all humanity's attributes, easily cover'd with crust, deluded and abused, rejected, yet the only certain source of what all are seeking, but few or none finding it I for myself clearly see the first, the last, the deepest depths and highest heights of art, of literature, and of the purposes of life. I say whoever labors here, makes contributions here, or best of all sets an incarnated example here, of life or death, is dearest to humanity--remains after the rest are gone. And here, for these purposes, and up to the light that was in him, the man Elias Hicks--as the man George Fox had done years before him--lived long, and died, faithful in life, and faithful in death.

GOOD-BYE MY FANCY

AN OLD MAN'S REJOINDER

In the domain of Literature loftily consider'd (an accomplish'd and veteran critic in his just out work[44] now says,) 'the kingdom of the Father has pa.s.s'd; the kingdom of the Son is pa.s.sing; the kingdom of the Spirit begins.' Leaving the reader to chew on and extract the juice and meaning of this, I will proceed to say in melanged form what I have had brought out by the English author's essay (he discusses the poetic art mostly) on my own, real, or by him supposed, views and purports. If I give any answers to him, or explanations of what my books intend, they will be not direct but indirect and derivative. Of course this brief jotting is personal. Something very like querulous egotism and growling may break through the narrative (for I have been and am rejected by all the great magazines, carry now my 72d annual burden, and have been a paralytic for 18 years.)

No great poem or other literary or artistic work of any scope, old or new, can be essentially consider'd without weighing first the age, politics (or want of politics) and aim, visible forms, unseen soul, and current times, out of the midst of which it rises and is formulated: as the Biblic canticles and their days and spirit--as the Homeric, or Dante's utterance, or Shakspere's, or the old Scotch or Irish ballads, or Ossian, or Omar Khayyam. So I have conceiv'd and launch'd, and work'd for years at, my 'Leaves of Gra.s.s'--personal emanations only at best, but with specialty of emergence and background--the ripening of the nineteenth century, the thought and fact and radiation of individuality, of America, the secession war, and showing the democratic conditions supplanting everything that insults them or impedes their aggregate way.

Doubtless my poems ill.u.s.trate (one of novel thousands to come for a long period) those conditions; but "democratic art" will have to wait long before it is satisfactorily formulated and defined--if it ever is.

I will now for one indicative moment lock horns with what many Think the greatest thing, the question of _art_, so-call'd. I have not seen without learning something therefrom, how, with hardly an exception, the poets of this age devote themselves, always mainly, sometimes altogether, to fine rhyme, spicy verbalism, the fabric and cut of the garment, jewelry, _concetti_, style, art. To-day these adjuncts are certainly the effort, beyond all else, yet the lesson of Nature undoubtedly is, to proceed with single purpose toward the result necessitated, and for which the time has arrived, utterly regardless of the outputs of shape, appearance or criticism, which are always left to settle themselves. I have not only not bother'd much about style, form, art, etc., but confess to more or less apathy (I believe I have sometimes caught myself in decided aversion) toward them throughout, asking nothing of them but negative advantages--that they should never impede me, and never under any circ.u.mstances, or for their own purposes only, a.s.sume any mastery over me.

From the beginning I have watch'd the sharp and sometimes heavy and deep-penetrating objections and reviews against my work, and I hope entertain'd and audited them; (for I have probably had an advantage in constructing from a central and unitary principle since the first, but at long intervals and stages--sometimes lapses of five or six years, or peace or war.) Ruskin, the Englishman, charges as a fearful and serious lack that my poems have no humor. A profound German critic complains that, compared with the luxuriant and well-accepted songs of the world, there is about my verse a certain coldness, severity, absence of spice, polish, or of consecutive meaning and plot. (The book is autobiographic at bottom, and may-be I do not exhibit and make ado about the stock pa.s.sions: I am partly of Quaker stock.) Then E.C. Stedman finds (or found) mark'd fault with me because while celebrating the common people _en ma.s.se_, I do not allow enough heroism and moral merit and good intentions to the choicer cla.s.ses, the college-bred, the _etat-major_.

It is quite probable that S. is right in the matter. In the main I myself look, and have from the first look'd, to the bulky democratic _torso_ of the United States even for esthetic and moral attributes of serious account--and refused to aim at or accept anything less. If America is only for the rule and fashion and small typicality of other lands (the rule of the _etat-major_) it is not the land I take it for, and should to-day feel that my literary aim and theory had been blanks and misdirections. Strictly judged, most modern poems are but larger or smaller lumps of sugar, or slices of toothsome sweet cake--even the banqueters dwelling on those glucose flavors as a main part of the dish.

Which perhaps leads to something: to have great heroic poetry we need great readers--a heroic appet.i.te and audience. Have we at present any such?

Then the thought at the centre, never too often repeated. Boundless material wealth, free political organization, immense geographic area, and unprecedented "business" and products--even the most active intellect and "culture"--will not place this Commonwealth of ours on the topmost range of history and humanity--or any eminence of "democratic art"--to say nothing of its pinnacle. Only the production (and on the most copious scale) of loftiest moral, spiritual and heroic personal ill.u.s.trations--a great native Literature headed with a Poetry stronger and sweeter than any yet. If there can be any such thing as a kosmic modern and original song, America needs it, and is worthy of it.

In my opinion to-day (bitter as it is to say so) the outputs through civilized nations everywhere from the great words Literature, Art, Religion, &c., with their conventional administerers, stand squarely in the way of what the vitalities of those great words signify, more than they really prepare the soil for them--or plant the seeds, or cultivate or garner the crop. My own opinion has long been, that for New World service our ideas of beauty (inherited from the Greeks, and so on to Shakspere--_query_--perverted from them?) need to be radically changed, and made anew for to-day's purposes and finer standards. But if so, it will all come in due time--the real change will be an autochthonic, interior, const.i.tutional, even local one, from which our notions of beauty (lines and colors are wondrous lovely, but character is lovelier) will branch or offshoot.

So much have I now rattled off (old age's garrulity,) that there is not s.p.a.ce for explaining the most important and pregnant principle of all, viz., that Art is one, is not partial, but includes all times and forms and sorts--is not exclusively aristocratic or democratic, or oriental or occidental. My favorite symbol would be a good font of type, where the impeccable long-primer rejects nothing. Or the old Dutch flour-miller who said, "I never bother myself what road the folks come--I only want good wheat and rye."

The font is about the same forever. Democratic art results of democratic development, from tinge, true nationality, belief, in the one setting up from it.

Note:

[44] Two new volumes, "Essays Speculative and Suggestive," by John Addington Symonds. One of the Essays is on "Democratic Art," in which I and my books are largely alluded to and cited and dissected. It is this part of the vols. that has caused the off-hand lines above--(first thanking Mr. S. for his invariable courtesy of personal treatment).

OLD POETS