The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864

WHITTIER

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 the whole head,—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 call ideal 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 an inevitable poet. 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 is all poet. 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 was born, 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 a re-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 it must lay an intense grasp upon the elements of its experience, and, secondly, that it must work 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 great facts of 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 means divine 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 word person an infinite depth. 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 word Man so 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, social breadth, lo! it changed, and became America.

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! And this, 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."

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 poet must? 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 them owe him no hatred in return, whether they pay him 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."

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!"

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 cast
Their 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 a perfect resting 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,"—