CHAPTER VII WHITTIER WHITTIER'S good sense and modest dignity are nowhere better expressed than in the verses introductory to his collected work. I love the old melodious lays Which softly melt the ages through, Arcadian Sidney's silvery phrase, Sprinkling our noon of time with freshest morning dew. Yet, vainly in my quiet hours To breathe their marvellous notes I try; I feel them, as the leaves and flowers In silence feel the dewy showers, And drink with glad, still lips the blessing of the sky. The rigour of a frozen clime, The harshness of an untaught ear, The jarring words of one whose rhyme Beat often Labour's hurried time, Or Duty's rugged march through storm and strife, are here. Of mystic beauty, dreamy grace, Or softer shades of Nature's face, I view her common forms with unanointed eyes. Nor mine the seer-like power to show A more intense despair or brighter hope to find. Yet here at least an earnest sense And hearty in its vehemence, As if my brother's pain and sorrow were my own. O Freedom! if to me belong Nor mighty Milton's gift divine, Nor Marvell's wit and graceful song, As theirs, I lay, like them, my best gifts on thy shrine! The New England Quaker, confessing that he could not achieve poetry, has in the act of confession made a beautiful poem, sound in stanzaic structure, and not unmelodious. Whittier compels admiration in spite of the undeniable crudities of his lyre, crudities that he so charmingly acknowledged. Spontaneity, sincerity, passion, these are his high gifts; they triumph over all his verbal difficulties. They lift him not among the great poets, whose company he humbly knew he could not join, but among the genuine poets, who have said their heart in English words, who are true to the earth though they do not rise upon the earth-spurning wings of absolute song. Whittier's earliest inspiration was the anti-slavery fervour, and of this passion, the tensest, most noble, that swept over New England and roused its dull muse to ecstasy, Whittier was the authentic laureate. It is impossible for a New Englander (even one who fancies himself a thoroughly emancipated modern) to detach Whittier's ruggedly heroic verses from the harsh soil of history, to see them except through the noon air of his pacific and serene personality. To hear his verses, as it were from his own lips, gives them double dramatic force. His shy Quaker voice is hoarse with rage, the lips of innocence are white with scorn. The casual reader of "Ichabod" might be unimpressed, for the verses are plain, ordinary, lighted by no flash of selfexplanatory beauty. But when the poem is understood as the divine indignation of a benevolent Quaker at Webster's surrender to the slave power, it becomes incandescent, and one imagines that Webster, cynical politician who bent his shaggy brows histrionically upon his opponents, must have shrivelled beneath those lyric curses of naïve righteousness. It is the devastating wrath of a peaceful man! Whether Whittier's blasting scorn affected Webster, who was a shrewdly! dishonest actor upon a primitive stage of oratory, the poem and the poet's subsequent magnanimity are still profoundly impressive sixty years after the conflict. Poems on current events are as a rule ephemeral; emotion that is strong enough to make such poems permanent is a mighty fact in literature. In Whittier's occasional verses the vehicle of the emotion seems to have been heated by its very resistance to the idea. He is so intense in his meaning that his technically defective verses are not quite bad, certainly never ludicrous. Sometimes his fiery challenge dashes against the stubborn * hardness of his words like the dissonance of swift water over rocks. For example the lines from "Toussaint L'Ouverture": To hear above his scar-worn back "Frequent" is a feebly mischosen word. But the two lines and the verses in which they are set are powerful. "The Slave Ships" is naïvely terrible. One stanza has the naked simplicity of genius: Red glowed the western waters His fiery mesh of hair. Amidst a group of blindness A solitary eye Gazed from the burdened slaver's deck Into that burning sky. To make sure that the plain power of that and other stanzas is genuine poetic art, that we are not misled by the tragedy of the subject into ascribing to the verses more effect than is inwardly theirs, we have only to read the mild melodramatic poems which Longfellow dutifully contributed to the cause, verses unspontaneous, uninspired. The reader's patriotic sympathies cannot fill utterly bad verses with the breath of life. The noblest enthusiasm cannot flame in wholly unpoetic verse. All the earnest belief in the world will not forge poetry. The abundance of dead unremembered verses by others on the same themes that Whittier rushed into rough rhythms is proof of his individual genius. It may be that our knowledge of his seraphic gentleness throws into relief the Hebraic violence of his prophecies; it may be that the facts of biography lend adventitious merit to his poetry; but even so, the failure of other equally sincere enthusiasts, and his almost unfailing success in striking out some white hot lines in poem after poem on the same subject, acclaim his genius when all temporal and historic prejudices are deducted. The difference between a good hymn and a bad hymn lies not in a difference of religious sincerity, and the reader's accessible emotions will be the same in both cases; the difference is in the psalmists' poetic powers. Even when denuded of their attendant circumstances and read by somebody not familiar with our national struggle, the following verses must surely stand out strong, like a speech of Lincoln's: Hoarse, horrible and strong, Rises to Heaven that agonizing cry, HOW LONG, O GOD, HOW LONG? And these verses written "apropos of the adoption of Pinckney's resolutions" (prosaic words that send one to a handbook of history), hear how they ring! Shall our New England stand erect no longer, |