Whittier's Life and Poetry

THE publication at the same time of a detailed life of Whittier ¹ and a well-annotated collection of his poetry ² in a single volume gives a good opportunity for a study of his life as affecting his poetry, and of his poetry as illustrating the facts which are brought out in the narrative of his life. Mr. Pickard has been diligent in collecting a number of very interesting anecdotes concerning Whittier. Individually of no striking value, they serve, in a cumulative way, to throw a good deal of light on his character, and by the skillful manner in which they are interwoven in the narrative they perform the other function of lightening what must be, from its nature, a somewhat grave record. The letters, which till a considerable part of the two volumes, do not in themselves carry forward the story of Whittier’s life in a very important way; and a merely documentary biography would in this case have been a disappointing book, for though Whittier wrote naturally and freely, he said very little, on the whole, about himself. He put more of his real life into a few of his poems than into all his letters. Yet the letters intensify the impression created by the biographer’s work, and they bear a valuable testimony to the fidelity of the biographer, and in one or two instances to his rare honesty and acumen. It would seem at first glance that there was nothing new to tell about Whittier, and that so retired a life could scarcely afford much scope for speculation, even. But except to the few who knew Whittier intimately the Life and Letters will tell a great deal that is novel and significant ; especially is this true when one considers that the real history of the man lies in the period, sixty years ago, when he was an obscure young man, and that its arena is in the spiritual field, where conquests are not always easily understood until one is made acquainted with what the man renounces as well as what he achieves.

After all, the life of a poet depends for its interest chiefly on the disclosure of the forces at work for the production of his poetry, and it is this disclosure which makes the volumes before us singularly interesting. The circumstances of Whittier’s boyhood were very confined. The family life, touched with the light that shines with such mellow lustre in SnowBound, was one of high principle, yet the pressure of poverty was always upon it. and the hard lines of a New England farm life were drawn severely round the home. As Mr. Pickard well says : “ Our fathers, coming from the milder climate of England, had the traditional English slowness in adapting themselves to changed climatic conditions. The pioneers, and their descendants for four or five generations, adopted the policy of ‘ toughening ’ themselves by exposure to cold, and they saw no reason for making their cattle more comfortable than themselves. Their boys were expected at an early age to take their part in the work of subduing the wilderness, and they housed and dressed themselves much as they had done in the milder climate of the mother country. Almost two centuries passed away before barns were made comfortable, and flannels and overcoats ceased to be regarded as extravagances. Mr. Whittier was accustomed to attribute the delicacy of his health throughout life to the methods of toughening the constitution in vogue when he was a lud. No flannels were worn in the coldest weather, and the garments of homespun, though strong and serviceable, were of open texture compared with modern goods. Only a short spencer for overcoat. and mufflers and mittens, were provided for extremely cold weather; and the drive to the Friends’ meeting at Amesbury, eight miles away, twice a week, on First and Fifth days, with no buffalo robes or warm wraps, was thoroughly chilling and uncomfortable, and the meeting-houses of those days were seldom provided with means of heating. These were among the hardships of the time and country, common to all classes of the people, and were endured as inevitable. But while lamenting this needless exposure to cold. Whittier never complained of other hard youthful experiences, — the unending contest with the rocky acres of his father’s farm, and the difficulties of obtaining an education.”

The spiritual democracy profoundly implied in the Quaker faith, combined with the political democracy of a New England country town, and the necessity for hard labor, conspired to produce in Whittier a sympathy with common life and a perception of its value which find very noble expression in his poetry. In the Cambridge edition of his poems there is a division under the title Songs of Labor and Reform, and in it are disposed those cheery, intelligible, but not especially inspired songs in which the Fishermen, the Shoemakers, the Shipbuilders, the Lumbermen, the Drovers, and the Huskers are each heartily honored. In the dedication which introduces these songs, Whittier says : —

But his deliberate spoken creed is or less consequence than the whole drift of his poetic expression and choice of subject. His verses carry straight to the heart of plain people, not alone because they deal with forms of life which are familiar to such readers, but because they assume, without controversy and without self-consciousness, the worth, the dignity, and the permanence of free human labor. There is a world-wide difference between the poet who treats the plain people as a class and the poet who quietly and absolutely ignores any distinction. Burns sang the song of the people with an inspired independence and brave self-confidence : yet again and again one hears the note of protest, the insistence upon the great truth of "a man’s a man for a.’ that.” There is no need to emphasize the distinction between a formal democracy and a formal aristocracy, but one may well consider the immense advantage which the farmer boy in New England had over the farmer boy in Scotland as regards the consciousness of human equality and individual independence. In the one case, there was the assertion of self ; in the other, ranks and classes were merely outside terms which stood for nothing in his own consciousness. Hence, there was for Whittier an entire freedom in his handling of all sorts and conditions of men. For those of simple life, like himself, he had a special kindliness ; but his democratic instinct showed itself plainly in the absolute negation of all accidental distinctions.

When we come to consider the formal educational influence to which Whittier was subjected, it would seem as if no poet could well have been less indebted to schools. He took the chance learning of the district school, though here he had the good fortune twice to fall into the hands of genuine teachers. The story of such higher training as he had is well told by his biographer. Whittier had won the interest and favorable regard of Mr. Thayer, the editor of the Haverhill paper to which the farmer’s son had contributed some verses. “ Mr. Thayer had such a high opinion of his young contributor that, in January, 1827, he went to his father, as Mr. Garrison had done a few months earlier, to urge him to give his son a classical education. A new academy was soon to be opened in Haverhill, and he could attend it and spend a part of each week at his home. The old gentleman took into consideration the fact that, two years before, Greenleaf had seriously injured himself by attempting farm work that was too heavy for him, and was at length inclined to yield, though protesting it was contrary to Friends’ custom to acquire the polish of literary culture. The mother asked Mr. Thayer if he would take Greenleaf into his family, and this was readily promised. . . . The young man had permission to attend the academy, but he must pay his own way. This task he set about with a glad heart. An opportunity soon appeared. A man who worked in the summer upon his father’s farm made a cheap kind of slipper in the winter, and he offered to instruct young Whittier in the art. The offer was gladly accepted, and, as it was the simplest kind of sandal that was to be made, the mystery of the trade was soon acquired. The retail price of the slippers was only twenty-five cents a pair, and he received but eight cents a pair for his work ; and yet during the winter of 1826—27 enough was earned to pay the expense of a term of six months at the academy. He calculated so closely every item of expense that he knew before the beginning of the term that he would have twenty-five cents to spare at its close, and he actually had this sum of money in his pocket when his half year of study was over. It was the rule of his whole life never to buy anything until he bad the money in hand to pay for it; and although his income was small and uncertain until past middle life, he was never in debt.”

Twelve months in all he spent at this academy, where he had an introduction to the knowledge of French, but found the fullest reward in an ardent study of classic English literature. Aside from this slight foray into a larger world, it is hard to discover any education in Whittier’s case which was not native, indigenous. Unlike Longfellow, Hawthorne, Emerson, Bryant, Lowell, and Holmes, he was an uncollegiate man; unlike these and Irving, an untraveled man. Any education not native, indigenous ? Well, there was one force so familiar that one might forget for a moment it was not native, indigenous. The Bible, in the English tongue, has so inwoven itself in the very texture of our thought and experience as to have effaced almost all obvious traces of Hebraic, of Hellenic, of Oriental origin. Time was, and we are not far out if we make that time to have been the period of Whittier’s boyhood, when the Bible was read as a whole, with little discrimination as to its parts; when the effort was made not so much to read it as if one were a contemporary of its scenes as to realize those scenes upon the plane of the reader. The historic sense was not cultivated, but the imaginative was, and the prophets and apostles walked the streets and hills of New England, in the imagination of the people, much as they showed themselves once in Venice to painters and to those who looked on the pictures painted.

We must not fail to take into account the profound educative influence of the Bible in its entirety upon Whittier’s genius. His earliest poems were largely paraphrases of Scriptural themes, but even more indicative of its influence is the almost unconscious witness which he gives in poem after poem not immediately connected with the Bible. His strong imagination fed upon it, and as its very phraseology is blended with his familiar and bis poetic speech, so, more than this, his whole nature drew upon the fountains of its waters. It is interesting to observe how, throughout his poetry, allusions to Biblical characters and passages fall as naturally from his lips as Greek or Roman allusions from Milton’s. When he sees a storm coming over Lake Asquam, and throws the whole scene into one of his most striking poems of nature, how instinctively he begins !

When, like a Hebrew prophet himself, he pronounces judgment upon Webster in one of the loftiest, sternest, yet most compassionate poems in our literature, not only does he name his poem Ichabod, but there is scarcely a stanza which does not yield some word, some phrase, traceable to Biblical language, yet so absolutely his own that a reader unfamiliar with the Bible would not for an instant suspect any foreign influence. He wrote this poem in 1850. Most interesting is it to note that in the afterpiece, The Lost Occasion, written thirty years later, there is but a single phrase,

which recalls the Bible ; and the poem is unusually, for Whittier, decorated with secular ornament: —

The change marks not only the large, generous spirit of the poet, mellowed by the lapse of years, but the expansion of intellectual sympathy.

Yet great as was Whittier’s debt to the Bible on his intellectual side, so that his very diction was tinged and marked by Biblical phrase, we should fail of accounting for his profoundest power if we did not recognize how surely he penetrated the outward form of the book, and entered into its secret places. It can scarcely be questioned that the religious associations and training of Whittier conspired to this end. Under the limitations imposed by the hard lines of New England country life, and by the restrictive principles of the Society of Friends, the Bible was the great literature on which he fed, and upon which, as material, his imagination first had free play. But the cardinal doctrines of the Friends emphasized those spiritual properties of the Bible which had been largely suppressed in the theology and philosophy current in Whittier’s boyhood. These doctrines he not only heard at meeting, but he found them exemplified in the journals and memoirs which formed his father’s library, and constituted for a long time his principal supply of reading. Hence there grew in his receptive nature that conception of God as eternal Goodness which is the deep note sounded in his poetry. Hence, also, through the doctrine of the elevation of the spirit and the negation of the form taught by Quakerism came that steadfast adherence to the great elemental, underlying principles of Christian faith, which from the beginning never have been lost out of sight, though frequently obscured. The belief in God as goodness, the unquestioning confidence in his fatherhood, the perfect trust which interprets all disorder as finite, and order as infinite and eternal, — these large, inexhaustible sources of content were his. and found such transparent expression in his verse that they impart to it something of the same imperishable quality.

If Whittier, like some of his fellow Friends, had been distinctly a mystic, his verse partaking strongly of this characteristic would have been welcome to likeminded eremitic souls. But there were two constituents in his personality which forbade such an issue : his humor, which is scarcely less than another word for sanity, and his grip on human life in its homeliest and in its most exalted expression. The humor which pervades so much of his writing as a kindly, smiling presence was perhaps even more demonstrative in his talk, his familiar converse with men and women. One recognized it, not as a plaything which he used, but as a certain constant element in his nature, which might suddenly become a shaft of wit, but always was at hand to correct a one-sided view of things and persons. It was not used as a weapon for wounding, and we suspect it was often withheld, reserved for his own private delectation. Persons often mistook Whittier’s charity for blind good nature; but he was keenly discriminating, and occasionally even his friends were set up as targets for his winged shafts, as when, after praising a notable woman of the day for her great qualities, he suddenly turned and said, But she has n’t a particle of magnetism, and she has worn the same bonnet for twenty years.”

So, too, his private life no less than his published verse bears witness to an abiding and intense interest in all things human. If he turned homely life into song, it was because this life constantly lay close to his thought. He was no recluse, though he shrank from publicity, and particularly from occasions which seemed to put him on a pedestal. When, in 1877, the publishers of The Atlantic gave a dinner in honor of his seventieth birthday, they were in the greatest consternation at discovering that Whittier himself intended to dine quietly at home. It was only at the last hour that he yielded to the solicitation of friends, and out of compunction for his hosts came to his own celebration. In late years, his summer outings were almost secret hidings, so reluctant was he to be the centre of a crowd. But in the common intercourse of life, in the meeting with friends unceremoniously, and in the simple affairs of the neighborhood, he was unfailingly open and honest. Otherwise he scarcely could have been the keen, shrewd observer, the unerring judge of men, that he was. It has been said on authority that no important nominations were made in his district without a preliminary conference with Whittier, and during the great political movement of which he knew the inception, and out of the penumbra of which the nation was slowly passing when he died, he was constantly consulted by statesmen, who resorted to him not as to a mystic oracle, but as to one of the most sagacious, broad-minded, and politic men of his generation. The secret of his power unquestionably lay in his lofty moral sense, his clear conception of righteousness; but this was rendered immediately serviceable in counsel and action by qualities which are not always so evidently allied to a high moral sense, — by keen insight into character, by just discrimination, by a judicial faculty which was more than a balance of opinions, it was a balance of mind. Thus it is that Whittier’s religious spirit, as it finds expression in his verse, guarded from the peril of other-worldliness by his sane humor and his practical touch with men and women, appeals to that in the religious nature which is universal.

So far, the influences of his education and circumstances upon Whittier’s poetic expression have not been difficult to trace, and they are fairly open to view to any one who knows the New England of Whittier’s youth, and reads his poetry with an appreciation of the spiritual forces which were immanent in Quakerism and in the Friends’ interpretation of the Bible. But there is a third force to be reckoned with, and it is in the pages of his biography that one discovers it most emphatically. Yet even here, a scrutiny of his poems, taken in their chronological order, offers a hint. There is at the end of the Cambridge Whittier a list of the poems in the order of their production, dating from the poem The Exile’s Departure, in 1825. A reference to the index shows the earlier poems to be included in the Appendix, where Whittier placed them, since they had been too effectively published to permit him to follow his wiser judgment and east them out altogether.

Let any one read these early poems — and there are many others not included in the volume — and ask himself what evidence they bear of the Whittier he knows ; indeed, what signs they give of poetic power at all. It is hard to discover anything beyond fluency, dexterity, a certain loftiness of spirit, and a marked religiousness of tone. Now and then one strikes a dramatic force ; but if he wants poetry, he can find more of it in Kettell that is better than this of Whittier’s, and yet never has got beyond a Kettellian immortality. Nevertheless, a reference to Mr. Pickard’s pages will show that not only Whittier’s mother and sisters and near friends treasured these verses, but they were copied into other papers than those in which they were first printed, and the young poet was treated to phrases which assured him fame. Fame was indeed to come, but for verses unwritten and undreamed of.

Now, these smooth, commonplace poems were not merely the productions of a boy, to pass into vigorous verse as maturity came. A little glimpse of one turn of his mind is seen in Moll Pitcher. It is not impossible that the young journalist, with his home-bred wit and his curiosity about the world around him, might, under conditions of peace and prosperity, have pursued with increase of skill the legendary themes of New England, and have become a sort of Allan Ramsay. The actual development came, not by orderly process, but by a kind of cataclysm. Mr. Pickard has divined the change in Whittier’s mental attitude, and it is not difficult to apply the result in his poetical career. “ Up to 1832,”he say’s, when he returned from Hartford to his home in Haverhill, Mr. Whittier’s highest ambition had been to make his mark in politics. . . . It was in this direction that he was looking for his life work. . . . His work as a political editor had brought him in contact with the leaders of his party, and his marked ability as a writer and his honesty and sagacity in the party councils were appreciated. He was becoming known as an anti-slavery man. it is true, but that did not then disqualify one for leadership in either party, in New England. Besides, his Quakerism was a good excuse for his conscience. Our orthodox fathers in that generation were taking more kindly to Quakers than to heretics in other sects, like Unitarians and Universalists, and were ready to humor what were regarded as their whims. So that up to 1833, when Wintrier was in the twenty-sixth year of his age, whatever thought he had for the future, outside of his work as a farmer, was in the direction of politics. In 1833, his attention had been called by Garrison, of whom he had seen little for the past three years, to the importance of arousing the nation to a sense of its guilt in the matter of slavery. He did not need any change of heart to become an abolitionist. As a birthright Quaker, he inherited the traditions of his sect against the institution of slavery. But he had been hoping, by moral means, and by efforts within the lines of the old parties, to secure the gradual extinction of a system so out of harmony with our otherwise free institutions. A word from Garrison caused him thoroughly to study the situation. All the literature of the subject within his reach was examined carefully. . . . He found that both the great parties of the North were beginning to discipline their members who were too urgent in pressing measures that might lose to them the support of the Southern States. He had learned something of this change in the popular feeling from the experience of his friend Garrison, who had been imprisoned at Baltimore for his free utterance of antislavery sentiments. . . . Whittier counted the cost with Quaker coolness of judgment before taking a step that closed to him the gates of both political and literary preferment. He realized more fully than did most of the early abolitionists that the institution of slavery would not fall at the first blast of their horns. When he decided to enter upon this contest, he understood that his cherished ambitions must be laid aside, and that an entire change in his plans was involved. He took the step deliberately and after serious consideration.”

The immediate product was the vigorous pamphlet Justice and Expediency, an historical arraignment of the institution of slavery, thoroughly reasoned out, and driven home with warmth and felicity. How Strong the blow was may be guessed from the fact that Dr. Crandall, of Washington, was imprisoned for lending it to a brother physician. It was Whittier’s gauntlet thrown down resolutely, and thenceforth he stood committed as that despised and hated fanatic an abolitionist. But Whittier differed widely from some of the more pronounced abolitionists, from Garrison in particular, by his willingness to use political weapons, and his skill in handling them. The two chapters in Mr. Pickard’s Life, headed Enlistment in the War against Slavery, and Initiation into Politics, show clearly the remarkable fight which Whittier made, and the astuteness with which he plied the arts of the politician. There are one or two expressions in his letters, in the early years of his engagement in politics, which make one see how sharp a partisan was in the making; but after his political sagacity had been consecrated to a great cause, there is keenness still of invention and persistency of management, but no trace of selfishness or double dealing, or suppression of higher to lower ends. His handling of Caleb Cushing, as detailed here, was masterly.

The enlistment in the war against slavery was for no limited term, but for the war, and the whole complexion of Whittier’s life was thereby affected. To stand up before mobs, to act as secretary to anti-slavery conventions, to go forth preaching the gospel of emancipation, to write letters and editorials and give himself freely in sacrifice, — this is the history of thirty years. And what became then of his poetry, of that literary ambition which smote him early, sent him to the academy, and set him planning books in his early manhood ? The answer is most impressive. He had, and he knew he had, a poetic voice. Pamphlets and editorials were well enough, but they were secondary. This poetic voice, also, he brought to the altar. From singing smooth lays, he suddenly pitched the key in those Voices of Freedom which, beginning with remote themes like Toussaiut L’Ouverture. soon seized upon the story of the day and turned it into a cry, a lyric summons. As the editor of the Cambridge Whittier says : “ He rushed into verse in a tumultuous fashion, careless of the form, eager only to utter the message which half choked him with its violence. There was a fierce note to his poetry, rough, but tremendously earnest. This was the first effect, such a troubling of the waters as gave a somewhat turbid aspect to the stream, and for a while his verse was very largely declamatory, rhymed polemics.”

There never was a nobler illustration in literature of the great law Whosoever shall lose his life shall save it.” Whittier perceived the application in his own case. “ In later life,” says Mr. Pickard, “ in giving counsel to a boy of fifteen, Mr. Whittier said that his own early ambition had been to become a prominent politician, and from this ideal he was persuaded only by the earnest appeals of his friends. Taking their advice, he united with the persecuted and obscure band of abolitionists, and to this course he attributed all his after-success in life. Then, turning to the boy, he placed his hand on his head, and said in his gentle voice, ‘ My lad, if thou wouldst win success, join thyself to some unpopular but noble cause.' ” The resolution which he took was a loosening of the bands that held him, and his whole nature leapt into the light.

The movement of his life as traced in the biography is illustrated in the chronological list of his poems. The broadening of his outlook upon the world, past and present, finds exemplification in the ever-widening range of his choice of subjects, and the tranquillity of his later days is delightfully reflected in the mellow tones of poetry which has exchanged the smooth shallowness of early manhood for the liquid flow through a deep-cut channel. That ingenuity, moreover, which was heightened by the necessity of encountering an unscrupulous enemy in politics, may be said to reappear in the fertile invention which characterizes so much of his poetry. It will be remembered how jauntily Sir Walter Scott, when he wanted a motto for the heading of a chapter in one of his novels, used indifferently some snatch of a Scottish song, or two or three lines of his own, invented on the spur of the moment, and accredited to some indefinite Old Ballad or Old Play. So it was with Whittier. If he had a story or legend handy when he wished to give expression to some poetic thought or kindly sentiment, well and good, he used it; but if he had not, then he made it ; and many of his poems which have all the air of a leaf out of some old book, as ’The Gift of Tritemius, for example, are wholly his own.

This power of invention expresses the freedom with which he worked, the spontaneity of his mind. Longfellow was a masterly artist. Not only by practice, but still more through his native gift of a most delicate ear, he came to have an exquisite sense of fitness. Every poetic conception was instinctively given its most apt expression. His sonnets demonstrate his wonderful technical skill, but quite as remarkable was his unerring choice of measure for Hiawatha on the one hand, and Evangeline on the other. With Whittier it was not so. His distinctive power of expression lay in what might be called his natural voice, which was melodious within a certain easy range, flexible to a certain extent, but not trained to its full capacity. Such training as he had came by use; hence it was that the first, spontaneous expression which was necessary to his free nature was marred often by infelicities which were the result of a lack of specific literary training in his early years. In later life he made fewer slips. Nevertheless. as Longfellow’s finely modulated instrument will carry some of his light conceptions farther down the years than they would be likely to win through their own force, so we may reasonably have confidence that the entire naturalness of Whittier’s art. despite its narrow technical range, — he never wrote a sonnet, for example, —will continue long to please the lovers of poetry.