CHAPTER IV

THE POPULAR SPOKESMEN OF THE MID-CENTURY

I. INTRODUCTION

The Prophet versus The Spokesman.-As between the poet philosophers, often called the Concord group, and the popular spokesmen who centred more about Boston and Cambridge, there are certain points of clear contrast. The former concerned themselves almost exclusively with the nature and improvement of the individual; the latter were laboring with the nation as a whole, and attempting to uplift or reform its institutions. The New England prophets cried down existing evils and pointed to their certain consequences; the spokesinen looked for causes and did their best to remove them. A further distinction can be made with reference to the contrasted form of their messages. It is not the function of the prophet to please: his message is disturbing and almost certain to be unpopular. His cause is desperate, and his audience, if they listen at all, will listen only under protest. The prophet, therefore, speaks with high seriousness, and embellishes his discourse with parable and suggestive allusion. He challenges attention; he stimulates thought, and leaves his readers or his hearers to their own best devices, not applying the moral of what he has said or written. But the spokesman has a different task. He is attempting to move men to immediate action. He must be heard, he must be understood, and that at once. His work, therefore, has certain characteristics that appeal to the popular mind. In form it is symmetrical and familiar; in content easy to understand at a glance; the narrative scheme is frequently used, and in most cases the moral is definitely applied.

II. JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER (1807-1892)

Whittier a Practical Man.-The life of Whittier, like that of several others of the New England group, practically spanned the century. He was as near to the war of the Revolution in childhood as are the present generation of college students to the war of the Rebellion. He died while this same group of college students were in their kindergarten days. The briefest study of Whittier's life to one hitherto unacquainted with him is usually attended with a distinct experience of surprise. His picture, as it is commonly published, is that of a genial, gray-haired, elderly man, with a far-away expression and an almost deprecating poise of the head and turn of the lip. If he had been the poet simply of "Snow-Bound" and "The Barefoot Boy," we should feel that his look expounded his life, and satisfy ourselves by summing him up as a complacently contemplative Quaker, whose whole career was passed in placid rumination. But this was a part and only a lesser part of Whittier's activity. For he was a most eminently practical man.

Whittier's Education.-He was born of parents who lived respectably but perforce with such economy that they were not able to give their son a liberal schooling. Hence, in addition to his farm work, he learned to make shoes, and with his extra earnings gathered together a sum sufficient to carry him through six months at Haverhill Academy. The money for further education he earned by dispensing in districtschool teaching the scanty knowledge that he had already gathered. From this he drifted into a kind of journalism, writing for The Boston Philanthropist and The Haverhili Gazette, and actually doing editorial work on The New England Review of Hartford. Thus early, by knocking about among people in town and country, and acquainting himself with men of all sorts of professions and prejudices, he prepared himself for a life of intellectual activity.

Whittier and the Abolition Movement.-In the course of his youthful experience he had become acquainted with William Lloyd Garrison, and largely through his influence

he became more and more closely connected with the antislavery movement. He believed that the way to achieve reform was through legislation, and that political pressure could best be exerted through swaying public opinion. His convictions were strong; they were not unusual; but he was better able to express them than the majority, and through all the long years which preceded the war, and until its conclusion in 1865, he wrote from time to time spirited popular verses which carried thousands of readers with them. Five of these bits of verse may be cited to show the history of his relation to the abolition movement. First, "Expostulation," written in 1834; then "Massachusetts to Virginia," a clear protest against the enforcement of the fugitive slave law with reference to the case of Anthony Burns. Next, in "Ichabod," Whittier was the voice of the North speaking with hasty indignation at Webster's famous Seventh of March speech (1851), in which he seemed to have sold his loyalty to the North for the sake of strengthening his political future. Next, "Barbara Frietchie," a typical war-ballad, no better and no worse than many others. Last, that fine outburst of reverent praise, "Laus Deo," at the close of the war.

Whittier's Poems of New England.-At the same time that Whittier was writing in this vein, he was using his poetical powers even more ably in terms of many poems about New England life. They may roughly be classified as verses on the early history of New England, and poems on his own times. He loved to look back to the lives and achievements of his ancestors, and when he found incidents in history which combined picturesqueness of quality with that sturdiness of moral character with which the old settlers were blessed, he delighted, in such poems as "Abraham Davenport," "Cassandra Southwick," "The Wreck of Rivermouth," "The Garrison of Cape Ann," and "Skipper Ireson's Ride," to pay his tribute to them. In all these appear the sources of poetic popularity always to be found in favorite poems. These are short, clear stories couched in simple language and in more or less conventional verse, and capped with a moral which would be evident enough even if it were not printed in black on white.

Whittier's greatest poem, "Snow-Bound," falls in the remaining group-his poems of contemporary New England. It could stand alone out of all his poems as earning for the poet a permanent place in letters. With satisfaction and sympathy it upholds the noble and simple life of the peasant class. It is hardly too much to say that it deserves to be ranked with Gray's "Elegy," Goldsmith's "Deserted Village,” and Burns's "Cotter's Saturday Night."

Whittier's "Puritan Pluck."-It has become a habit for the present generation, as it moves daily farther from the fixed traditions of early New England days, to think and speak of the old-time Puritans in a rather patronizing tone. It is the fashion to refer with impatience to what we term their antipathy to art, to speak superciliously of their austere manners and customs, and to flout as Puritan relics the survival of any traditions which are more than ordinarily conservative. It is well to remember that the "Puritan principle," though perhaps confined in its course to a path which to-day seems narrow, was coupled with indomitable "Puritan pluck." It is this combination which demands respect in the person of the Quaker-Puritan John Greenleaf Whittier. We recognize the truth of his self-criticism. He could not emulate

"the old melodious lays―

The songs of Spenser's golden days."

There does often appear in his verses

“The rigor of a frozen clime.

The jarring words of one whose rhyme
Beat often Labor's hurried time,

Or Duty's rugged march through storm and strife.'

But in the support of that noble and long unpopular cause to which he devoted himself, we recognize a courageous consecration as great as that of the martyrs of Lexington and Concord. Overcome with bodily weakness which compelled him to withdraw from the swift currents of active life, in his own way he accomplished more than many who

were in the thick of that conflict. Rightly he cried out in his agony that God should "make the balance good."

Oh power to do! Oh baffled will!

Oh prayer and action! Ye are one.
Who may not strive may yet fulfil
The harder task of standing still

And good but wished with God is done.

Then when it was given him to rejoice at the end of the conflict, and to live on to a noble old age, he was able in his “simple lays of homely toil" to show, as only a few poets have done, "The unsung beauty hid life's common things below." Whittier, in his best work, was a frankly "provincial" poet, and in this fact is the source of his strength. He loved the past and the present of his own people and the country that they lived in, no less than did Burns and Wordsworth.

III. JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL (1819-1891)

Lowell's Early Surroundings.-In James Russell Lowell the student finds the same practical qualities which belong to Whittier, the same inclination to think about the problems of the day, and the same ability to express himself on questions of the hour. Lowell seems, however, to have been drawn into active life in spite of his expressed and strongly recurring desire to devote himself to art. No one could have been brought up among more genuinely literary circumstances than was he. His early home was in a dignified old mansion in Cambridge, within sight of the Charles, surrounded by magnificent trees, the visible reminders of those rich memories which clustered about the estate. Born of cultured parents, accustomed from youth to their conversation and that of their friends, and given almost from babyhood to priceless hours in the large and well-appointed family library, he enjoyed an education which was calculated to endow him with a love for letters.

Lowell's Early Manhood.-In college he took his own time and picked his own path, achieving results hardly more