Shelburne Essays Part 2

A tender glow, exceeding fair, A dream of day without its glare.

For it must be seen that the crudeness of Whittier's education, and the th.o.r.n.y ways into which he was drawn, marred a large part, but by no means all, of his work. There are a few poems in his collection of an admirable craftsmanship in that genre which is none the less difficult--which I sometimes think is almost more difficult--because it lies so perilously near the trivial and mean. There are others which need only a little pruning, perhaps a little heightening here and there, to approach the same perfection of charm. Especially they have that harmony of tone which arises from the unspoiled sincerity of the writer and ends by subduing the reader to a restful sympathy with their mood.

No one can read much in Whittier without feeling that these hills and valleys about the Merrimac have become one of the inalienable domiciles of the spirit--a familiar place where the imagination dwells with untroubled delight. Even the little things, the flowers and birds of the country, are made to contribute to the sense of homely content. There is one poem in particular which has always seemed to me significant of Whittier's manner, and a comparison of it with the famous flower poems of Wordsworth will show the difference between what I call the poetry of the hearth and the poetry of intimate nature. It was written to celebrate a gift of _Pressed Gentian_ that hung at the poet's window, presenting to wayside travellers only a "grey disk of clouded gla.s.s":

They cannot from their outlook see The perfect grace it hath for me; For there the flower, whose fringes through The frosty breath of autumn blew, Turns from without its face of bloom To the warm tropic of my room, As fair as when beside its brook The hue of bending skies it took.

So from the trodden ways of earth Seem some sweet souls who veil their worth, And offer to the careless glance The clouding grey of circ.u.mstance....

There is not a little of self-portraiture in this image of the flower, and it may be that some who have written of Whittier patronisingly are like the hasty pa.s.ser-by--they see only the _grey disk of clouded gla.s.s_.

And the emotion that furnishes the loudest note to most poets is subdued in Whittier to the same gentle tone. To be sure, there is evidence enough that his heart in youth was touched almost to a Byronic melancholy, and he himself somewhere remarks that "Few guessed beneath his aspect grave, What pa.s.sions strove in chains." But was there not a remnant of self-deception here? Do not the calmest and wisest of us like to believe we are calm and wise by virtue of vigorous self-repression? Wordsworth, we remember, explained the absence of love from his poetry on the ground that his pa.s.sions were too violent to allow any safe expression of them. Possibly they were. Certainly, in Whittier's verse we have no reflection of those tropic heats, but only "the Indian summer of the heart." The very t.i.tle, _Memories_, of his best-known love poem (based on a real experience, the details of which have recently been revealed) suggests the mood in which he approaches this subject. It is not the quest of desire he sings, but the home-coming after the frustrate search and the dreaming recollection by the hearth of an ancient loss. In the same way, his ballad _Maud Muller_, which is supposed to appeal only to the unsophisticated, is attuned to that shamelessly provincial rhyme,

For of all sad words of tongue or pen, The saddest are these: "It might have been!"

It is a little so with us all, perhaps, as it was with the judge and the maiden; only, as we learn the lesson of years, the disillusion is likely to be mingled strangely with relief, and the sadness to take on a most comfortable and flattering Quaker drab--as it did with our "hermit of Amesbury."

If love was a memory, religion was for Whittier a hope and an ever-present consolation--peculiarly a consolation, because he brought into it the same thought of home-coming that marks his treatment of nature and the pa.s.sions. Partly, this was due to his inherited creed, which was tolerant enough to soften theological dispute: "Quakerism," he once wrote to Lucy Larcom, "has no Church of its own--it belongs to the Church Universal and Invisible." In great part the spirit of his faith was private to him; it even called for a note of apology to the sterner of his brethren:

O friends! with whom my feet have trod The quiet aisles of prayer, Glad witness to your zeal for G.o.d And love of man I bear.

I trace your lines of argument; Your logic linked and strong I weigh as one who dreads dissent, And fears a doubt as wrong.

But still my human hands are weak To hold your iron creeds: Against the words ye bid me speak My heart within me pleads....

And the inimitably tender conclusion:

And so beside the Silent Sea I wait the m.u.f.fled oar; No harm from Him can come to me, On ocean or on sh.o.r.e.

I know not where His islands lift Their fronded palms in air; I only know I cannot drift Beyond His love and care.

O brothers! if my faith is vain, If hopes like these betray, Pray for me that my feet may gain The sure and safer way.

And Thou, O Lord! by whom are seen Thy creatures as they be, Forgive me if too close I lean My human heart on Thee!

Not a strenuous mood it may be, or very exalted--not the mood of the battling saints, but one familiar to many a troubled man in his hours of simpler trust. We have been led to Whittier through the familiar poetry of Cowper; consider what it would have been to that tormented soul if for one day he could have forgotten the awe of his divinity and _leaned his human heart on G.o.d_. It is not good for any but the strongest to dwell too much with abstractions of the mind. And, after all, change the phrasing a little, subst.i.tute if you choose some other intuitive belief for the poet's childlike faith, and you will be surprised to find how many of the world's philosophers would accept the response of Whittier:

We search the world for truth; we cull The good, the pure, the beautiful, From graven stone and written scroll, From all old flower-fields of the soul; And, weary seekers of the best, We come back laden from our quest, To find that all the sages said Is in the Book our mothers read.

Such a rout of the intellect may seem ignominious, but is it any more so than the petulance of Renan because all his learning had only brought him to the same state of skepticism as that of the gamin in the streets of Paris? Our tether is short enough, whichever way we seek escape. It is worth noting that in his essay on Baxter (he who conceived of the saints' rest in a very different spirit) Whittier blames that worthy just for the exaltation of his character. "In our view," he says, "this was its radical defect. He had too little of humanity, he felt too little of the attraction of this world, and lived too exclusively in the spiritual and the unearthly."

And if Whittler's faith was simple and human, his vision of the other world was strangely like the remembrance of a home that we have left in youth. There is a striking expression of this in one of his prose tales, now almost forgotten despite their elements of pale but very genuine humour and pathos, as if written by an attenuated Hawthorne. The good physician, Dr. Singletary, and his friends are discussing the future life, and says one of them:

"Have you not felt at times that our ordinary conceptions of heaven itself, derived from the vague hints and Oriental imagery of the Scriptures, are sadly inadequate to our human wants and hopes? How gladly would we forego the golden streets and gates of pearl, the thrones, temples, and harps, for the sunset lights of our native valleys; the woodpaths, where moss carpets are woven with violets and wild flowers; the songs of birds, the low of cattle, the hum of bees in the apple-blossoms--the sweet, familiar voices of human life and nature! In the place of strange splendours and unknown music, should we not welcome rather whatever reminded us of the common sights and sounds of our old home?"

It was eminently proper that, as the poet lay awaiting death, with his kinsfolk gathered about him, one of them should have recited the stanzas of his psalm _At Last_:

When on my day of life the night is falling, And, in the winds from unsunned s.p.a.ces blown, I hear far voices out of darkness calling My feet to paths unknown,

Thou who hast made my home of life so pleasant, Leave not its tenant when its walls decay; O Love Divine, O Helper ever present, Be Thou my strength and stay!

I have but Thee, my Father! let Thy spirit Be with me then to comfort and uphold; No gate of pearl, no branch of palm I merit, Nor street of shining gold.

Suffice it if--my good and ill unreckoned, And both forgiven through Thy abounding grace-- I find myself by hands familiar beckoned Unto my fitting place.

I would not call this the highest religious poetry, pure and sweet as it may be. Something still is lacking, but to see that want fulfilled one must travel out of Whittier's age, back through all the eighteenth century, back into the seventeenth. There you will find it in Vaughan and Herbert and sometimes in Marvell--poets whom Whittier read and admired. Take two poems from these two ages, place them side by side, and the one thing needed fairly strikes the eyes. The first poem Whittier wrote after the death of his sister Elizabeth (who had been to him what Mrs. Unwin had been to Cowper) was _The Vanishers_, founded on a pretty superst.i.tion he had read in Schoolcraft:

Sweetest of all childlike dreams In the simple Indian lore Still to me the legend seems Of the shapes who flit before.

Flitting, pa.s.sing, seen, and gone, Never reached nor found at rest, Baffling search, but beckoning on To the Sunset of the Blest.

From the clefts of mountain rocks, Through the dark of lowland firs, Flash the eyes and flow the locks Of the mystic Vanishers!

Now Vaughan, too, wrote a poem on those gone from him:

They are all gone into the world of light, And I alone sit lingering here; Their very memory is fair and bright, And my sad thoughts doth clear.

It glows and glitters in my cloudy breast, Like stars upon some gloomy grove, Or those faint beams in which this hill is dress'd, After the sun's remove.

I see them walking in an air of glory, Whose light doth trample on my days: My days, which are at best but dull and h.o.a.ry, Mere glimmering and decays.

It is not a fair comparison to set one of Whittier's inferior productions beside this superbest hymn of an eloquent age; but would any religious poem of the nineteenth century, even the best of them, fare much better? There is indeed one thing lacking, and that is _ecstasy_.

But ecstasy demands a different kind of faith from that of Whittier's day or ours, and, missing that, I do not see why we should begrudge our praise to a genius of pure and quiet charm.

I have already intimated that too complete a preoccupation with the reforming and political side of Whittier's life has kept the biographers from recognising that charm in what he himself regarded as his best poem. In 1872, in the full maturity of his powers and when the national peace had allowed him to indulge the peace in his own heart, he wrote his exquisite idyl, _The Pennsylvania Pilgrim_. Perhaps the mere name of the poem may suggest another cause why it has been overlooked. Whittier has always stood pre-eminently as the exponent of New England life, and for very natural reasons. And yet it would not be difficult to show from pa.s.sages in his prose works that his heart was never quite at ease in that Puritan land. The recollection of the sufferings which his people had undergone for their faith' sake rankled a little in his breast, and he was never in perfect sympathy with the austerity of New England traditions. We catch a tone of relief as he turns in imagination to the peace that dwelt "within the land of Penn":

Who knows what goadings in their sterner way O'er jagged ice, relieved by granite grey, Blew round the men of Ma.s.sachusetts Bay?

What hate of heresy the east-wind woke?

What hints of pitiless power and terror spoke In waves that on their iron coast-line broke?

It was no doubt during his early residence in Philadelphia that he learned the story of the good Pastorius, who, in 1683, left the fatherland and the society of the mystics he loved to lead a colony of Friends to Germantown. The Pilgrim's life in that bountiful valley between the Schuylkill and the Delaware--

Where, forest-walled, the scattered hamlets lay Along the wedded rivers--

offered to Whittier a subject admirably adapted to his powers. Here the faults of taste that elsewhere so often offend us are sunk in the harmony of the whole and in the singular unity of impression; and the lack of elevation that so often stints our praise becomes a suave and mellow beauty. All the better elements of his genius are displayed here in opulent freedom. The affections of the heart unfold in unembittered serenity. The sense of home seclusion is heightened by the presence of the enveloping wilderness, but not disturbed by any harsher contrast.

Within is familiar joy and retirement una.s.sailed--not without a touch of humour, as when in the evening, "while his wife put on her look of love's endurance," Pastorius took down his tremendous ma.n.u.script--

And read, in half the languages of man, His _Rusca Apium_, which with bees began, And through the gamut of creation ran.

(The ma.n.u.script still exists; pray heaven it be never published!) Now and then the winter evenings were broken by the coming of some welcome guest--some traveller from the Old World bringing news of fair Von Merlau and the other beloved mystics; some magistrate from the young city,

Lovely even then With its fair women and its stately men Gracing the forest court of William Penn;

or some neighbour of the country, the learned Swedish pastor who, like Pastorius, "could baffle Babel's lingual curse,"

Or painful Kelpius, from his forest den By Wissahickon, maddest of good men.