It is a curious illustration of the attraction of opposites, that, among
our elder poets, the war we are waging finds its keenest expression in
the Quaker Whittier. Here is, indeed, a soldier prisoner on parole in a
drab coat, with no hope of exchange, but with a heart beating time to
the tap of the drum. Mr. Whittier is, on the whole, the most American of
our poets, and there is a fire of warlike patriotism in him that burns
all the more intensely that it is smothered by his creed. But it is not
as a singular antithesis of dogma and character that this peculiarity of
his is interesting to us. The fact has more significance as illustrating
how deep an impress the fathers of New England stamped upon the
commonwealth they founded. Here is a descendant and member of the sect
they chiefly persecuted, more deeply imbued with the spirit of the
Puritans than even their own lineal representatives. The New Englander
is too strong for the sectarian, and the hereditary animosity softens to
reverence, as the sincere man, looking back, conjures up the image of a
sincerity as pure, though more stern, than his own. And yet the poetic
sentiment of Whittier misleads him as far in admiration, as the pitiful
snobbery of certain renegades perverts them to depreciation, of the
Puritans. It is not in any sense true that these pious and earnest men
brought with them to the New World the deliberate forethought of the
democracy which was to develop itself from their institutions. They
brought over its seed, but unconsciously, and it was the kindly nature
of the soil and climate that was to give it the chance to propagate and
disperse itself. The same conditions have produced the same results also
at the South, and nothing but slavery blocks the way to a perfect
sympathy between the two sections.
Mr. Whittier is essentially a lyric poet, and the fervor of his
temperament gives his pieces of that kind a remarkable force and
effectiveness. Twenty years ago many of his poems were in the nature of
_conciones ad populum_, vigorous stump-speeches in verse, appealing as
much to the blood as the brain, and none the less convincing for that.
By regular gradations ever since his tone has been softening and his
range widening. As a poet he stands somewhere between Burns and Cowper,
akin to the former in patriotic glow, and to the latter in intensity of
religious anxiety verging sometimes on morbidness. His humanity, if it
lack the humorous breadth of the one, has all the tenderness of the
other. In love of outward nature he yields to neither. His delight in it
is not a new sentiment or a literary tradition, but the genuine passion
of a man born and bred in the country, who has not merely a visiting
acquaintance with the landscape, but stands on terms of lifelong
friendship with hill, stream, rock, and tree. In his descriptions he
often catches the _expression_ of rural scenery, a very different thing
from the mere _looks_, with the trained eye of familiar intimacy. A
somewhat shy and hermitical being we take him to be, and more a student
of his own heart than of men. His characters, where he introduces such,
are commonly abstractions, with little of the flesh and blood of real
life in them, and this from want of experience rather than of sympathy;
for many of his poems show him capable of friendship almost womanly in
its purity and warmth. One quality which we especially value in him is
the intense home-feeling which, without any conscious aim at being
American, gives his poetry a flavor of the soil surprisingly refreshing.
Without being narrowly provincial, he is the most indigenous of our
poets. In these times, especially, his uncalculating love of country has
a profound pathos in it. He does not flare the flag in our faces, but
one feels the heart of a lover throbbing in his anxious verse.
Mr. Whittier, if the most fervid of our poets, is sometimes hurried away
by this very quality, in itself an excellence, into being the most
careless. He draws off his verse while the fermentation is yet going on,
and before it has had time to compose itself and clarify into the ripe
wine of expression. His rhymes are often faulty beyond the most
provincial license even of Burns himself. Vigor without elegance will
never achieve permanent success in poetry. We think, also, that he has
too often of late suffered himself to be seduced from the true path to
which his nature set up finger-posts for him at every corner, into
metaphysical labyrinths whose clue he is unable to grasp. The real life
of his genius smoulders into what the woodmen call a _smudge_, and gives
evidence of itself in smoke instead of flame. Where he follows his truer
instincts, he is often admirable in the highest sense, and never without
the interest of natural thought and feeling naturally expressed.