The title of this chapter is almost a misnomer; for the style, or technique, of the poet whose works we are considering is so very simple and unoriginal that he can hardly be said to have a distinctive style of his own,—unless a few persistent mannerisms establish a claim to it. His diction, however, is always pictorial, and glows with an intense Oriental fervor. Fused in this interior vital heat, his thoughts do not sink, like powerful Jinn, into the deep silence-sphere of the mind, to fetch thence sparkling treasures, rich and strange: rather, they run to and fro with lightning swiftness amid the million surface-pictures of the intellect; rearranging, recombining, and creatively blending its images, and finally pouring them out along the page to charm our fancy and feeling with old thoughts and scenes painted in fresh colors and from new points of view. There is more of fancy than of creative imagination in Whittier.

The artistic quality, or tone, of his mind is a fusion of that of Wordsworth and that of Byron. In his best ballads and other lyrics you have the moral sincerity of Wordsworth and the sweet Wordsworthian simplicity (with a difference); and in his reform poems you have the Byronic indignation, and scorn of Philistinism and its tyrannies. As a religious poet, he reveals the quiet piety and devoutness of Cowper; and his rural and folk poems show that he is a debtor to Burns.

He has been a diligent reader,—"a close-browed miser of the scholar's gains,"—and his writings are full of bookish allusions. But, if the truth must be told, his doctor's gown does not often sit gracefully upon his shoulders. His readers soon learn to know that his strength lies in his moral nature, and in his power to tell a story melodiously, simply, and sweetly. Hence it is, doubtless, that they care little for his literary allusions,—think, perhaps, that they are rather awkwardly dragged in by the ears, and at any rate hasten by them impatiently that they may inhale anew the violet-freshness of the poet's own soul. What has just been said about bookish allusions does not apply to the beautiful historical ballads produced by Whittier in the mellow maturity of his powers. These fresh improvisations are as perfect works of art as the finest Greek marbles. In them Whittier at length succeeds in freeing himself completely from the shackles of didacticism. Such ballads as "The Witch's Daughter" and "Telling the Bees" are as absolutely faultless productions as Wordsworth's "We are Seven" and his "Lucy Gray," or as Uhland's "Des SÄnger's Fluch," or William Blake's "Mary." There is in them the confident and unconscious ease that marks the work of the highest genius. A shower of lucid water-drops falls in no truer obedience to the law of perfect sphericity than flowed from the pen of the poet these delicate creations in obedience to the law of perfect spontaneity. Almost all of Whittier's lyrics have evidently been rapidly written, poured forth in the first glow of feeling, and not carefully amended and polished as were Longfellow's works. And herein he is at fault, as was Byron. But the delicate health of Whittier, and his toilsome early days, form an excuse for his deficiency in this respect. His later creations, the product of his leisure years, are full of pure and flawless music. They have no harmony or rhythmic volume of sound, as in Tennyson, Swinburne, Milton, and Shakspere; but they set themselves to simple melodious airs spontaneously. As you read them, your feet begin to tap time,—only the music is that of a good rural choir rather than that of an orchestra.

The thought of each poem is generally conveyed to the reader's understanding with the utmost lucidity. There is no mysticism, no obscurity. The story or thought unfolds itself naturally, and without fatigue to our minds. A great many poems are indeed spun out at too great length; but the central idea to be conveyed is rarely lost sight of.

To the list of his virtues as an artist, it remains to add his frequent surprising strength. This is naturally most marked in the anti-slavery poems. When he wrote these, he was in the flush of manhood, his soul at a white heat of moral indignation. He is occasionally nerved to almost super-human effort: it is the battle-axe of Richard thundering at the gates of Front de B[oe]uf. For nervous energy, there is nothing in the Hebrew prophets finer than such passages as these:—

As Whittier has grown older, and the battles of his life have become (as he expressed it to the writer) like "a remembered dream," his genius has grown mellow and full of graciousness. His art culminated in "Home Ballads," "Snow-Bound," and "The Tent on the Beach." He has kept longer than most poets the lyric glow; only in his later poems it is "emotion remembered in tranquillity."

If asked to name the finest poems of Whittier, would not the following instinctively recur to the mind: "Snow-Bound," "Maud Muller," "Barbara Frietchie," "The Witch's Daughter," "Telling the Bees," "Skipper Ireson's Ride," "King Volmer and Elsie," and "The Tent on the Beach"?

To these one would like to add several exquisite hymns and short secular lyrics. But the poems mentioned would probably be regarded by most critics as Whittier's finest works of art. They merit this distinction certainly; and they furnish remarkable instances for those who desire to study the poet's greater versatility in the ballad line, as they are all good representatives of his wonderfully long range.

The foregoing remark must be our cue for beginning to pass in review the artistic deficiencies of Whittier. He has three crazes that have nearly ruined the mass of his poetry. They are the reform craze, the religious craze, and the rhyme craze. Of course, as a man, he could not have a superfluity of the first of these; but, as a poet, they have been a great injury to him. We need not deny that he has taken the manlier course in subordinating the artist to the reformer and preacher; but in estimating his poetic merits we ought to regard his work from an absolute point of view. Let us not be misunderstood. It is gladly and freely conceded that the theory that great poetry is not necessarily moral, and that the aim of poetry is only to please the senses, is a petty and shallow one, and that the true function of the great poet is also to bear witness to the ideal and noble, to the moral and religious. Let us heartily agree with Principal Shairp when he says that the true end of the poet "is to awaken men to the divine side of things; to bear witness to the beauty that clothes the outer world, the nobility that lies hid, often obscured, in human souls; to call forth sympathy for neglected truths, for noble but oppressed persons, for downtrodden causes, and to make men feel that through all outward beauty and all pure inward affection God himself is addressing them." We may admit all this, and yet find fault with the moralizations and homilies of Whittier. The poetry of Dante and Milton is full of ethical passion, and occasionally a little sermon is wedged in; yet they do not treat us to endless broadsides of preaching, as Whittier does in his earlier poems, and in some of his later ones. But there is this distinction: the moral in Dante and Milton and Shakspere and Emerson is so garnitured with beauty that while our souls are ennobled our imaginations are gratified. But in many of Whittier's poems we have the bare skeleton of the moral, without the rounded contour and delicate tints of the living body of beauty. His reform poems have been called stump-speeches in verse. His anti-slavery poems are, with a few exceptions, devoid of beauty. They should have been written in the manner he himself commends in a review of Longfellow's "Evangeline": he should have depicted the truth strongly and attractively, and left to the reader the censure and the indignation. Mr. Whittier seems to know his peculiar limitations as well as his critics. He speaks of himself as one—

and he has once or twice expressed himself in prose in a way that seems to show that he recognizes the artistic mistake in the construction of his earlier poems. The omission of the moral envoi from so many of his maturer creations strengthens one in this surmise. In 1867 Whittier published the following letter in the New York Nation:

"To the Editor of the Nation:

"I am very well aware that merely personal explanations are not likely to be as interesting to the public as to the parties concerned; but I am induced to notice what is either a misconception on thy part, or, as is most probable, a failure on my own to make myself clearly understood. In the review of 'The Tent on the Beach' in thy paper of last week, I confess I was not a little surprised to find myself represented as regretting my life-long and active participation in the great conflict which has ended in the emancipation of the slave, and that I had not devoted myself to merely literary pursuits. In the half-playful lines upon which this statement is founded, if I did not feel at liberty to boast of my anti-slavery labors and magnify my editorial profession, I certainly did not mean to underrate them, or express the shadow of a regret that they had occupied so large a share of my time and thought. The simple fact is that I cannot be sufficiently thankful to the Divine Providence that so early called my attention to the great interests of humanity, saving me from the poor ambitions and miserable jealousies of a selfish pursuit of literary reputation. Up to a comparatively recent period my writings have been simply episodical, something apart from the real object and aim of my life; and whatever of favor they have found with the public has come to me as a grateful surprise rather than as an expected reward. As I have never staked all upon the chances of authorship, I have been spared the pain of disappointment and the temptation to envy those who, as men of letters, deservedly occupy a higher place in the popular estimation than I have ever aspired to.

"Truly thy friend,
"John G. Whittier.

"Amesbury, 9th, 3d mo., 1867."

One is reminded by this letter that Wordsworth once said to Dr. Orville Dewey, of Boston, that, "although he was known to the world only as a poet, he had given twelve hours' thought to the condition and prospects of society for one to poetry." In a letter read at the third decade meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society in Philadelphia, Mr. Whittier said: "I am not insensible to literary reputation; I love, perhaps too well, the praise and good-will of my fellow-men; but I set a higher value on my name as appended to the Anti-Slavery Declaration of 1833 than on the title-page of any book."

In his earlier years our poet was wholly ignorant of the fact that an artist should love beauty for its own sake. The simple-hearted Quaker and Puritan farmer-youth thought it almost a sin to spend his time in the cultivation of the beautiful. In his dedication of the "Supernaturalism of New England" to his sister, he says:—

"Poor fellow!" we say at first. And yet there is something refreshing and noble in such a spirit. It is with difficulty that the Germanic mind can bring itself to the study of the beautiful as something of co-equal worth with the moral. Let us leave that, says the Teuton, to the nation whose word for love of art is "virtue." How Whittier would have abhorred in his youth and early manhood the following sentiment by one of the Latin race:—

"The arts require idle, delicate minds, not stoics, especially not Puritans, easily shocked by dissonance, inclined to sensuous pleasure, employing their long periods of leisure, their free reveries, in harmoniously arranging, and with no other object but enjoyment, forms, colors, and sounds." (Taine's English Literature, II. 332.)

Or the following from the same work:—

"The Puritan destroys the artist, stiffens the man, fetters the writer, and leaves of artist, man, writer, only a sort of abstract being, the slave of a watchword. If a Milton springs up among them, it is because, by his wide curiosity, his travels, his comprehensive education, and by his independence of spirit, loftily adhered to even against the sectarians, Milton passes beyond sectarianism." (I. 397, 398.)

Here is another passage from Whittier on this same subject. It is almost a pity to give it, since the author has apparently repudiated the sentiment by omitting the lines from his complete works. In the introduction to "Supernaturalism of New England" he says:—

"If in some few instances, like Burns in view of his national thistle, I have—

'Turned my weeding-hook aside,
And spared the symbol dear,'

I have been influenced by the comparatively innocent nature and simple poetic beauty of the traditions in question; yet not even for the sake of poetry and romance would I confirm in any mind a pernicious credulity, or seek to absolve myself from that stern duty which the true man owes to his generation, to expose error whenever and wherever he finds it."

One more instance. In one of his sketches he is describing an old custom called "Pope Night," which has been kept up in the Merrimack Valley in unbroken sequence from the time of the Guy Fawkes plot. The plot is commemorated by bonfires and effigies of the Pope and others, and Whittier quotes these lines of a song which is sung on the occasion:—

Mr. Whittier was so broad-minded in regard to all matters pertaining to true growth, and withal so conscientious a student of the best versification, that is, the most natural, that we soon find him striving, at least, to free himself from all these minor faults.

Consequently his mannerisms more and more drop away. He is a born preacher. And presently we see in him a decided advance toward the delineation of what is simply true and beautiful, without the appreciable pause by the way, "to point a moral and adorn a tale." For a preacher is not a poet; and true poetic fire must be dimmed at once, and the divine afflatus be a lack-lustre thing, when appeals by pious exhortation are brought in to fill out rhyme and metre. Many of Whittier's purely religious poems are the most exquisite and beautiful ever written. The tender feeling, the warm-hearted trustfulness, and the reverent touch of his hymns speak directly to our hearts. The prayer-hymn at the close of "The Brewing of Soma" ("Dear Lord and Father of mankind," etc.), and such poems as "At Last" and "The Wish of To-day," are unsurpassed in sacred song. Some one has said that in Whittier's books we rarely meet with ideas expressed in such perfection and idiosyncrasy of manner that ever afterward the same ideas must recur to our minds in the words of this author and no other; that is to say, there are few dicta, few portable and universally-quoted passages in his writings. But exception must be made in favor of his best hymns. Their stanzas haunt the mind with their beauty, and you are obliged to learn them by heart before you can have peace. These purely religious productions show Whittier's work at high-water mark, and as long as the English language is spoken, they will be employed by those who require a vehicle for thought, by which the true worship may be served. There is only one poet in the world whose works will not suffer by reading his entire poetical productions in consecutive perusal, and that is Shakspere. Poetry should be read solely for the refreshment and elevation of the mind, and only when one's mood requires it. Unquestionably, if so read, all mannerisms that Mr. Whittier might have been accused of at an early stage in his authorship would not appear so conspicuous.

One of the mannerisms of our poet is his inclination toward the four-foot line with consecutive or alternate rhymes. Almost all of Burns's poetry is written as just described; and it is evident Mr. Whittier's ear was naturally inclined to it, from his early love for Burns, his patron saint, as it were, in those then untrodden fields. An ear educated by Tennyson, and the other Victorian poets, might be unable to grasp even the beauty of thought unless conveyed by their especial methods. One is pleased when rhymes are so masked, so subtly intertwined, and parted by intervening lines, that each shall seem like a delicate echo of that which preceded it,—the assonance just remembered, and no more.

A minor mannerism of Whittier is his frequent use of the present participle in ing, with the verb to be; "is flowing," "is shining," etc. The jingle of the ing evidently caught the poet's rhyme-loving ear, and sometimes it really has a very pretty effect. Certain it is he has used it with great skill, and given his readers insight into another of his versatile gifts.

As to the originality of our poet there is this to be said: He has a distinctively national spirit or vision; he is democratic in his feelings, and treats of indigenous subjects. His vehicle, his poetic forms and handling, he has treated as minor subjects for thought. He is democratic, not so powerfully and broadly as Whitman, but more unaffectedly and sincerely. He has not the magnificent prophetic vision, or Vorstellungskraft, of Whitman, any more than he has the crushing mastodon-steps of Whitman's ponderous rhythm. But he has thrown himself with trembling ardor and patriotism, into the life of his country. It is this fresh, New-World spirit that entitles him to be called original: he is non-European. He has not travelled much, nor mingled in the seething currents of Western and Southern life; but his strong sympathy has gone forth over the entire land. He also reflects faithfully the quiet scenes of his own Merrimack Valley. From his descriptions of these scenes we receive the impression of freshness and originality; and we recognize a master hand that can so portray them as to make us see the same places, though only on the printed page.

One regrets using a critical pen at all in discussing such a writer. It would be ungracious to call to a severe account one who places the most modest estimate upon his own work, and who has distinctly stated that, up to "about the year 1865, his writings were simply episodical, something apart from the real object and aim of [his] life." It is hard to criticise severely one who is unjust to himself through excess of diffident humility. In the exquisite Proem to his complete poems he would fain persuade us that he cannot breathe such notes as those of—

But not so, O gentle minstrel of Essex! There are poems of thine which thousands prefer to the best of Spenser's or Sidney's, and which will continue to exist as long as beauty is its own excuse for being. Thou too hast been in Paradise, to fetch thence armfuls of dewy roses for our delight; not mounting thither by the "stairway of surprise," but along the common highway of daily duty and noble endeavor, unmindful of the dust and heat and chafing burdens, but singing aloud thy songs of lofty cheer, all magically intertwined with pictures of wayside flowers, and the homely beauty of lowliest things. And thou hast imparted to us the "groping of the keys of the heavenly harmonies," that no one who loves thy songs, ever loses from his life.