[Speech of Rev. Samuel A. Eliot at the fifteenth annual dinner of the
New England Society in the City of Brooklyn, December 21, 1894. The
President of the Society, Robert D. Benedict, presided. In introducing
Mr. Eliot, he said: "I am not aware that there were any poets among
the Pilgrim Fathers. They had something else to do besides versifying.
But poesy has found many a home among the hills of New England. And
many a home, not only in New England, but in Old England also, was
saddened during the year that is gone to hear that the song of one of
the poets of New England was hushed forever. I give you as the next
sentiment: 'The Poets and Poetry of New England,' and I call upon the
Rev. Samuel A. Eliot, of the Church of the Saviour, in this city, to
respond."]
MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN OF THE NEW ENGLAND SOCIETY IN
BROOKLYN:--I have been given to understand, sir, that in these
unpuritanic days lovers keep late hours; and as I listened to the wooing
of fair Brooklyn by the eloquent son[1] of New York I thought we might
be here till papa turned out the gas. Brooklyn is a New England maiden
and a trifle coy, and it may take even more than an hour's pleading and
persuasive wooing to win her. [Applause.] You ask me, sir, to turn our
thoughts back from these considerations of pressing and immediate
problems, from discussion of international and even intercontinental
relations, to the beginnings and the causes of our rejoicings here. I am
glad to do that, for I love to trace the connections and contrasts of
past and present, and to mark the growth and evolution of that New
England genius and character which are illustrated at these tables.
The early history of New England seems to many minds as dry and
unromantic as it was hard and narrow. No mist of distance softens the
harsh outlines, no mirage of tradition lifts events and characters into
picturesque beauty. There seems a poverty of sentiment. The
transplanting of a people breaks the successions and associations of
history. No memories of conqueror and crusader stir for us poetic fancy.
Instead of the glitter of chivalry there is but the sombre homespun of
Puritan peasants. In place of the "long-drawn aisle and fretted vault"
of Gothic cathedral there is but the rude log meeting-house and
schoolhouse. Instead of Christmas merriment there is only the noise of
axe and hammer or the dreary droning of psalms. It seems a history bleak
and barren of poetic inspiration, at once plebeian and prosaic.
How is it then that out of the hard soil of the Puritan thought and
character, out of the sterile rocks of the New England conscience, have
sprung the flowers of poetry which you bid me celebrate to-night? From
those songless beginnings have burst, in later generations, melodies
that charm and uplift our land--now a deep organ peal filling the air
with music, now a trumpet blast thrilling the blood of patriotism, now a
drum-beat to which duty delights to march, now a joyous fantasy of the
violin bringing smiles to the lips, now the soft vibrations of the harp
that fill the eyes with tears. What is it in the Puritan heritage,
externally so bare and cold, that make it intrinsically so poetic and
inspiring?
There is no poetry in the darkness of the Puritan's creed nor in the
rigid rectitude of his morality. His surly boldness, his tough hold on
the real, his austere piety enforce respect, but do not allure
affection. The genial graces cannot bear company with ruthless bigotry
and Hebraic energy. Nor is there any poetry in the mere struggle for
existence, and the mean poverty that marked the outward life. The
Pilgrims were often pinched for food; they suffered in a bitter climate;
they lived in isolation. We think lightly of these things because we
cannot help imagining that they knew that they were founding a mighty
nation. But that knowledge was denied them. Generations of them sank
into nameless graves without any vision of the days when their
descendants should rise up and call them blessed. Nor is there any
inspiration in the measure of their outward success. Judged by their own
ideals, the Puritans failed. They would neither recognize nor approve
the civilization that has sprung from the seeds of their planting. They
tried to establish a theocracy; they stand in history as the heroes of
democracy. Alike in their social and religious aims they ignored
ineradicable elements in human nature. They attempted the impossible.
How then have their deeds become the source of song and story? Why all
the honor that we pay them? It is not because in danger, in sacrifice,
and in failure, they were stout-hearted. Many a freebooter or soldier of
fortune has been that. It is, as one said whose name I bear, "because
they were stout-hearted for an ideal--their ideal, not ours, of civil
and religious liberty. Wherever and whenever resolute men and women
devote themselves, not to material, but to spiritual ends, there the
world's heroes are made," and made to be remembered, and to become the
inspiration of poem and romance and noble daring.
Scratch a New Englander to-day, it is said, and you find the Puritan.
That is no less true of the poets than of the warriors and the men of
facts and figures. The New England poets derived their nourishment from
the deep earth of that wholesome past, into which the roots of all our
lives go down. The mystical and mediæval side of Puritanism finds its
embodiment in Hawthorne; its moral ideals shine in Bryant; its
independency is incarnated in Emerson. Emerson is the type of the
nineteenth-century Puritan, in life pure, in temperament saintly, in
spirit detached from the earth, blazing a path for himself through the
wilderness of speculation, seeing things from the centre, working for
the reconstruction of Christian society and the readjustment of the
traditional religion. An enfranchised Puritan is a Puritan still. Of
such is Holmes, who shot his flashing arrows at all shams and
substitutes for reality, and never failed to hit the mark; of such is
Whittier,
"Whose swelling and vehement heart
Strains the strait-breasted drab of the Quaker apart;"
of such is Lowell, to whom belongs the supreme distinction of having
written the greatest poem yet produced on this continent.
We who have undergone the shock of material, intellectual and spiritual
growth too often fail to recognize our debt to the deserted cause. Our
poets remind us that our very freedom is our inheritance from the system
we reject. It was inevitable that our six great poets should have been
in literature, idealists; in politics, abolitionists; in religion,
Unitarians. It was the progressive independency of a Puritan ancestry
declaring itself. Save, perhaps, in Longfellow, no gloss or glamour of
Europe obscures their poetry. No hush of servility rests on it. No
patronage summoned it, and no indifference silenced it. Our poetry is
the genuine utterance of democracy, and betrays in every syllable the
fibre of freemen.
New England poetry is well nigh as Puritan in its form as in its spirit.
There is in it a true Cromwellian temper. Our poets have been patriots,
firm and prophetic believers in their country's destiny, loving their
country so well that they dared to tell the sometimes unwelcome truth
about her. The Biblical strain is in our poetry. If our English Bible
were lost to us we could reconstruct almost all of its best verses out
of Whittier's poems. The thunders of Sinai still roll in Lowell's fiery
denunciations of smug conventionalities and wickedness in high places.
The music of the psalmist is in Longfellow's meditations, and all the
prophet's vision in Emerson's inspired utterance. The Puritan restraint
is on New England poetry. There is no noisy rhetoric, no tossing about
of big adjectives and stinging epithets, no abuse of our noble English
tongue by cheap exaggerations. Our poets do not need to underscore words
or to use heavy headlines and italics. Their invective has been mighty
because so restrained and so compressed. There is none of the common
cant or the common plausibilities. There is no passing off of
counterfeits for realities, no "pouring of the waters of concession into
the bottomless buckets of expediency."
Thus do our poets declare their inheritance. But they do not stop there.
To the indomitable power of the Puritan conscience they have added a
wealth of imaginative sympathy. They have made sweetness to be the issue
of strength, and beauty to be the halo of power. They have seen the
vision of the rainbow round the throne. They have touched with divine
light the prosaic story of New England, and found the picturesque in
what seemed commonplace. They have seen the great in the little, and
ennobled the humbler ways of existence with spiritual insight. They have
set to music the homely service and simple enjoyments of common life.
They have touched the chords that speak to the universal heart. The very
provincialism of our poets endears them to us. Their work, as some
foreign critic said, has been done in a corner. We do not deny it. But,
verily we believe, that New England is the corner lot of our national
estate. Our poets have preserved for us in ballads our homespun legends.
They have imaged in verse the beauty of New England's hills and waters.
As we read there comes the whiff of fragrance which transports us to the
hillside pasture where the sweet fern and sorrel grow, or the salt
breeze of the sea blows again on our cheeks, or the rippling Merrimac
sings in our ears, or the heights of Katahdin or Wachusett, lift our
eyes upward. Finally, our poets, in their characters, disprove the
reproach that a democracy can produce only average men. As they wrote,
they were.
The harp of New England is silent. The master hands sweep the chords no
more. But shall we dare to think that the coming generation will have no
songs and no singers? Shall we build the sepulchre of poetry? Shall we
express ourselves only in histories and criticisms? Shall man no longer
behold God and nature face to face? "Things are in the saddle to-day,"
said Emerson; and indeed it may well depress us to see our greatness as
a nation measured by the number of bushels of wheat raised, or the
number of hogs packed. "The value of a country," said Lowell, "is
weighed in scales more delicate than the balance of trade. On a map of
the world you may cover Judea with your thumb, Athens with a finger tip,
and neither of them figures in the prices current, yet they still live
in the thought and action of every civilized man. Material success is
good, but only as the necessary preliminary of better things. The
measure of a nation's true success is the amount it has contributed to
the thought, the moral energy, the intellectual happiness, the
spiritual hope and consolation of mankind." Before we can have a rebirth
of poetry, we must have a fresh infusion of the Puritan devotion to
ideal ends. We must be baptized again into the spirit of non-conformity,
of intellectual and moral honesty, the spirit which does not suffer men
to go with the crowd, when reason and conscience and a living God bid
them go alone. There never was a time when we needed more the background
of Puritanism. We need in our business and our politics a sterner sense
of the fear of God, and in our home life a renewed simplicity. If we are
to build up to the level of our best opportunities, we must build down
to solid foundation on the sense of obligation. We have new times, new
land and new men. Shall we not have new thought, new work and new
worship? [Applause.]