XXIII JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER England. Ir has been seen that literary activity centred in New York during the first third of the century, as it had prevailed in Philadelphia so long as this city was Revolt in the metropolis of the land and capital of the New new nation. Meanwhile there was less enterprise among New England writers. There was ability enough, as there had always been, but the well-worn channels in which it had run were getting dry. Theological science is vast enough to occupy the human mind forever, but if it is narrowed to a few points like predestination and election it may become so deep that the perseverance of the saints cannot fathom its mysteries. After one hundred and seventy-five years of discussion there was little new to be said, and little interest or literature in the ceaseless repetition of the old arguments. Nothing but chaff and dust came of prolonged thrashing of the old straw. That there was little else to discuss was due to the inhospitality of New England toward outer-world books. Elizabethan and Queen Anne writers were as the sons of Belial in the eyes of those who sat in the receipt of custom, and no large invoices of frivolous dramas or unsanctified essays or unorthodox sermons were landed in Salem or Boston previous to the adoption of the Constitution and the beginning of our national life. Therefore the sceptre departed from this Israel and went southward to a more hospitable region, and under its patronage an early harvest of literature followed, such as it was. At last, however, a revolt took place in Massachusetts, succeeding one which had sprung up in England long before, against a narrow and exclusive ecclesiasticism. Here it was helped on by a movement derived from a larger one abroad, consequent upon a time of general unrest and upheaval. German idealism, French communism, and English radicalism began to be heard of, and the alert New Englander became uneasy. The independent spirit which he had inherited from Pilgrim and Puritan had found its legitimate result in civil liberty and freedom from monarchy; why should he not break with the ecclesiastical tyranny of the standing order, and with its practical prohibition of foreign literature? The answer came to each part of this question almost simultaneously. The Unitarian movement represented the reaction from the discipline and the bondage of a narrow system of divinity, and a new spirit in letters was a secondary and legitimate result. Whittier's and Before observing the effect of this reaction upon leaders in the new movement toward a larger and freer literature some attention should be paid to a New Englander whose antecedents did not bind him to Education. the hard and fast traditions of the elders. John Greenleaf Whittier as a Quaker had about as much in common with the Puritan as a Samaritan with a Jew. He believed in essential righteousness, but not in the Hebrew criminal code for Englishmen's sons and daughters. Consequently he had nothing to revolt against which his forefathers had not been made to hate by the persecutions from the dominant class in former generations. The sense of narrow dogmatism which gradually dawned upon the more liberally inclined of the standing order was an old story to the descendants of Friends who had been hauled and whipped from town to town at the tail of a cart as the mildest of penalties for aspiring to the exclusive right of first settlers to worship God according to their conscience. He had no break to effect with the prevailing doctrinal sentiment. His ancestors were born opposing it and fared accordingly. And when at last the early springtime of a new literature came, the first bluebird note of it on the chilly eastern coast was the song of the Quaker poet in the valley of the Merrimac. It was not the outcry of a restless spirit struggling with convictions inbred from generation to generation, but a simple strain of melody, such as had been heard before at intervals from Theocritus to Burns. The Essex county boy, far from neighbors, but close to nature had been born with the rhyming gift, and with that other faculty which creates the poetry that is more than verse. The rhyme came first, to be sure, and with it the aspiration for something better than the dull round of farm life, in his instance not to be gratified in the usual advantages of prolonged academic education. His was rather the schooling of public libraries, the printing office, and later of the editorial chair-the place where so many of our early authors were obliged to earn the living which made their lighter labors possible. Whittier, however, was not so entirely a poet that he could not do yeoman service on a newspaper. His practical interest in public affairs and politics was serviceable to his party and to himself, placing him in the legislature of his native state and winning him successive positions of influence in one editorial office after another. Other serial publications than his own were open to his verse, and literary fame began to reward his early efforts and betoken better things to come. Early The production of this newspaper period of his poetical composition was what might be expected from a farm-bred young man of northeastern Massachusetts. In common with most American writers of that generation he believed that there was a wealth of Indian tradition which might be turned into the riches of American verse. In the first complete collection of his poems Whittier placed the "Bridal of Pennacook" at the beginning, as if typifying his earliest poetic ambition, finding the legend on the banks of his own Merrimac, thus indicating that he would not go far afield for themes. Like Scott, and Irving afterward, he introduces the oldfashioned "chronicle of border wars" to give an air of credibility to a legend which might as well have been gathered from the landlord of the mountain inn as from the fourth book in his representative library of "Bunyan, Watts, and a file of almanacs." But this was a custom of the time. The apostrophe to the river which flowed unbridged and unobstructed from mountain to sea is in the truer manner of a dweller on its banks. So also is the description of lodge and wigwam, decorated with spoils of chase and war and of the chief's magic skill and the daughter's woodland freedom and love; of the wedding feast to the river sagamores and the sachems from the crystal hills to the far southeast. The story of Indian pride, always greater than Indian love, carries with it the gloom which belongs to the forest pagan even in his days of peace. And in his hour of treachery and blood "Mogg Magone" shows how dark was the strife and dire the revenge and bitter the hate between the savage and the encroaching alien. "He laughs at his jest. Hush-what is there? The sleeping Indian is striving to rise, With his knife in his hand, and glaring eyes! "Ruth starts erect - with bloodshot eye, And lips drawn tight across her teeth, Give me the knife!' The outlaw turns, But, fitfully there, the hearth-fire burns, Are dimly pictured in light and shade, Plunging down in the darkness. Hark, that cry! That shadowy arm down the lighted wall! 'Ruth — daughter Ruth!' the outlaw shrieks But no sound comes back- he is standing alone So the "Legendary Poems" hint of a remote time when the Norseman touched upon this dreary coast and sailed |