Chapter 56

George Fox, born 1624, was of decent stock, in ordinary lower life--as he grew along toward manhood, work'd at shoemaking, also at farm labors--loved to be much by himself, half-hidden in the woods, reading the Bible--went about from town to town, dress'd in leather clothes--walk'd much at night, solitary, deeply troubled ("the inward divine teaching of the Lord")--sometimes goes among the ecclesiastical gatherings of the great professors, and though a mere youth bears bold testimony--goes to and fro disputing--(must have had great personality)--heard the voice of the Lord speaking articulately to him, as he walk'd in the fields--feels resistless commands not to be explain'd, but follow'd, to abstain from taking off his hat, to say _Thee_ and _Thou_, and not bid others Good morning or Good evening-was illiterate, could just read and write-testifies against shows, games, and frivolous pleasures--enters the courts and warns the judges that they see to doing justice--goes into public houses and market-places, with denunciations of drunkenness and money-making--rises in the midst of the church-services, and gives his own explanations of the ministers' explanations, and of Bible passages and texts--sometimes for such things put in prison, sometimes struck fiercely on the mouth on the spot, or knock'd down, and lying there beaten and bloody--was of keen wit, ready to any question with the most apropos of answers--was sometimes press'd for a soldier, (_him_ for a soldier!)--was indeed terribly buffeted; but goes, goes, goes--often sleeping out-doors, under hedges, or hay stacks--forever taken before justices--improving such, and all occasions, to _bear testimony_, and give good advice--still enters the "steeple-houses," (as he calls churches,) and though often dragg'd out and whipt till he faints away, and lies like one dead, when he comes-to--stands up again, and offering himself all bruis'd and bloody, cries out to his tormenters, "Strike--strike again, here where you have not yet touch'd! my arms, my head, my cheeks,"--Is at length arrested and sent up to London, confers with the Protector, Cromwell,--is set at liberty, and holds great meetings in London.

Thus going on, there is something in him that fascinates one or two here, and three or four there, until gradually there were others who went about in the same spirit, and by degrees the Society of Friends took shape, and stood among the thousand religious sects of the world. Women also catch the contagion, and go round, often shamefully misused. By such contagion these ministerings, by scores, almost hundreds of poor travelling men and women, keep on year after year, through ridicule, whipping, imprisonment, &c.--some of the Friend-ministers emigrate to New England--where their treatment makes the blackest part of the early annals of the New World. Some were executed, others maim'd, par-burnt, and scourg'd--two hundred die in prison--some on the gallows, or at the stake.

George Fox himself visited America, and found a refuge and hearers, and preach'd many times on Long Island, New York State. In the village of Oysterbay they will show you the rock on which he stood, (1672,) addressing the multitude, in the open air--thus rigidly following the fashion of apostolic times.--(I have heard myself many reminiscences of him.) Flushing also contains (or contain'd--I have seen them) memorials of Fox, and his son, in two aged white-oak trees, that shaded him while he bore his testimony to people gather'd in the highway.--Yes, the American Quakers were much persecuted--almost as much, by a sort of consent of all the other sects, as the Jews were in Europe in the middle ages. In New England, the cruelest laws were pass'd, and put in execution against them. As said, some were whipt--women the same as men. Some had their ears cut off--others their tongues pierc'd with hot irons--others their faces branded. Worse still, a woman and three men had been hang'd, (1660.)--Public opinion, and the statutes, join'd together, in an odious union, Quakers, Baptists, Roman Catholics and Witches.--Such a fragmentary sketch of George Fox and his time--and the advent of "the Society of Friends" in America.

Strange as it may sound, Shakspere and George Fox, (think of them! compare them!) were born and bred of similar stock, in much the same surroundings and station in life--from the same England--and at a similar period. One to radiate all of art's, all literature's splendor--a splendor so dazzling that he himself is almost lost in it, and his contemporaries the same--his fictitious Othello, Romeo, Hamlet, Lear, as real as any lords of England or Europe then and there--more real to us, the mind sometimes thinks, than the man Shakspere himself. Then the other--may we indeed name him the same day? What is poor plain George Fox compared to William Shakspere--to fancy's lord, imagination's heir? Yet George Fox stands for something too--a thought--the thought that wakes in silent hours--perhaps the deepest, most eternal thought latent in the human soul. This is the thought of God, merged in the thoughts of moral right and the immortality of identity. Great, great is this thought--aye, greater than all else. When the gorgeous pageant of Art, refulgent in the sunshine, color'd with roses and gold--with all the richest mere poetry, old or new, (even Shakespere's) with all that statue, play, painting, music, architecture, oratory, can effect, ceases to satisfy and please--When the eager chase after wealth flags, and beauty itself becomes a loathing--and when all worldly or carnal or esthetic, or even scientific values, having done their office to the human character, and minister'd their part to its development--then, if not before, comes forward this over-arching thought, and brings its eligibilities, germinations. Most neglected in life of all humanity's attributes, easily cover'd with crust, deluded and abused, rejected, yet the only certain source of what all are seeking, but few or none finding it I for myself clearly see the first, the last, the deepest depths and highest heights of art, of literature, and of the purposes of life. I say whoever labors here, makes contributions here, or best of all sets an incarnated example here, of life or death, is dearest to humanity--remains after the rest are gone. And here, for these purposes, and up to the light that was in him, the man Elias Hicks--as the man George Fox had done years before him--lived long, and died, faithful in life, and faithful in death.

GOOD-BYE MY FANCY

AN OLD MAN'S REJOINDER

In the domain of Literature loftily consider'd (an accomplish'd and veteran critic in his just out work[44] now says,) 'the kingdom of the Father has pass'd; the kingdom of the Son is passing; the kingdom of the Spirit begins.' Leaving the reader to chew on and extract the juice and meaning of this, I will proceed to say in melanged form what I have had brought out by the English author's essay (he discusses the poetic art mostly) on my own, real, or by him supposed, views and purports. If I give any answers to him, or explanations of what my books intend, they will be not direct but indirect and derivative. Of course this brief jotting is personal. Something very like querulous egotism and growling may break through the narrative (for I have been and am rejected by all the great magazines, carry now my 72d annual burden, and have been a paralytic for 18 years.)

No great poem or other literary or artistic work of any scope, old or new, can be essentially consider'd without weighing first the age, politics (or want of politics) and aim, visible forms, unseen soul, and current times, out of the midst of which it rises and is formulated: as the Biblic canticles and their days and spirit--as the Homeric, or Dante's utterance, or Shakspere's, or the old Scotch or Irish ballads, or Ossian, or Omar Khayyam. So I have conceiv'd and launch'd, and work'd for years at, my 'Leaves of Grass'--personal emanations only at best, but with specialty of emergence and background--the ripening of the nineteenth century, the thought and fact and radiation of individuality, of America, the secession war, and showing the democratic conditions supplanting everything that insults them or impedes their aggregate way. Doubtless my poems illustrate (one of novel thousands to come for a long period) those conditions; but "democratic art" will have to wait long before it is satisfactorily formulated and defined--if it ever is.

I will now for one indicative moment lock horns with what many Think the greatest thing, the question of _art_, so-call'd. I have not seen without learning something therefrom, how, with hardly an exception, the poets of this age devote themselves, always mainly, sometimes altogether, to fine rhyme, spicy verbalism, the fabric and cut of the garment, jewelry, _concetti_, style, art. To-day these adjuncts are certainly the effort, beyond all else, yet the lesson of Nature undoubtedly is, to proceed with single purpose toward the result necessitated, and for which the time has arrived, utterly regardless of the outputs of shape, appearance or criticism, which are always left to settle themselves. I have not only not bother'd much about style, form, art, etc., but confess to more or less apathy (I believe I have sometimes caught myself in decided aversion) toward them throughout, asking nothing of them but negative advantages--that they should never impede me, and never under any circumstances, or for their own purposes only, assume any mastery over me.

From the beginning I have watch'd the sharp and sometimes heavy and deep-penetrating objections and reviews against my work, and I hope entertain'd and audited them; (for I have probably had an advantage in constructing from a central and unitary principle since the first, but at long intervals and stages--sometimes lapses of five or six years, or peace or war.) Ruskin, the Englishman, charges as a fearful and serious lack that my poems have no humor. A profound German critic complains that, compared with the luxuriant and well-accepted songs of the world, there is about my verse a certain coldness, severity, absence of spice, polish, or of consecutive meaning and plot. (The book is autobiographic at bottom, and may-be I do not exhibit and make ado about the stock passions: I am partly of Quaker stock.) Then E.C. Stedman finds (or found) mark'd fault with me because while celebrating the common people _en masse_, I do not allow enough heroism and moral merit and good intentions to the choicer classes, the college-bred, the _état-major_. It is quite probable that S. is right in the matter. In the main I myself look, and have from the first look'd, to the bulky democratic _torso_ of the United States even for esthetic and moral attributes of serious account--and refused to aim at or accept anything less. If America is only for the rule and fashion and small typicality of other lands (the rule of the _état-major_) it is not the land I take it for, and should to-day feel that my literary aim and theory had been blanks and misdirections. Strictly judged, most modern poems are but larger or smaller lumps of sugar, or slices of toothsome sweet cake--even the banqueters dwelling on those glucose flavors as a main part of the dish. Which perhaps leads to something: to have great heroic poetry we need great readers--a heroic appetite and audience. Have we at present any such?

Then the thought at the centre, never too often repeated. Boundless material wealth, free political organization, immense geographic area, and unprecedented "business" and products--even the most active intellect and "culture"--will not place this Commonwealth of ours on the topmost range of history and humanity--or any eminence of "democratic art"--to say nothing of its pinnacle. Only the production (and on the most copious scale) of loftiest moral, spiritual and heroic personal illustrations--a great native Literature headed with a Poetry stronger and sweeter than any yet. If there can be any such thing as a kosmic modern and original song, America needs it, and is worthy of it.

In my opinion to-day (bitter as it is to say so) the outputs through civilized nations everywhere from the great words Literature, Art, Religion, &c., with their conventional administerers, stand squarely in the way of what the vitalities of those great words signify, more than they really prepare the soil for them--or plant the seeds, or cultivate or garner the crop. My own opinion has long been, that for New World service our ideas of beauty (inherited from the Greeks, and so on to Shakspere--_query_--perverted from them?) need to be radically changed, and made anew for to-day's purposes and finer standards. But if so, it will all come in due time--the real change will be an autochthonic, interior, constitutional, even local one, from which our notions of beauty (lines and colors are wondrous lovely, but character is lovelier) will branch or offshoot.

So much have I now rattled off (old age's garrulity,) that there is not space for explaining the most important and pregnant principle of all, viz., that Art is one, is not partial, but includes all times and forms and sorts--is not exclusively aristocratic or democratic, or oriental or occidental. My favorite symbol would be a good font of type, where the impeccable long-primer rejects nothing. Or the old Dutch flour-miller who said, "I never bother myself what road the folks come--I only want good wheat and rye."

The font is about the same forever. Democratic art results of democratic development, from tinge, true nationality, belief, in the one setting up from it.

Note:

[44] Two new volumes, "Essays Speculative and Suggestive," by John Addington Symonds. One of the Essays is on "Democratic Art," in which I and my books are largely alluded to and cited and dissected. It is this part of the vols. that has caused the off-hand lines above--(first thanking Mr. S. for his invariable courtesy of personal treatment).

OLD POETS

Poetry (I am clear) is eligible of something far more ripen'd and ample, our lands and pending days, than it has yet produced from any utterance old or new. Modern or new poetry, too, (viewing or challenging it with severe criticism,) is largely a-void--while the very cognizance, or even suspicion of that void, and the need of filling it, proves a certainty of the hidden and waiting supply. Leaving other lands and languages to speak for themselves, we can abruptly but deeply suggest it best from our own--going first to oversea illustrations, and standing on them. Think of Byron, Burns, Shelley, Keats, (even first-raters, "the brothers of the radiant summit," as William O'Connor calls them,) as having done only their precursory and 'prentice work, and all their best and real poems being left yet unwrought, untouch'd. Is it difficult to imagine ahead of us and them, evolv'd from them, poesy completer far than any they themselves fulfill'd? One has in his eye and mind some very large, very old, entirely sound and vital tree or vine, like certain hardy, ever-fruitful specimens in California and Canada, or down in Mexico, (and indeed in all lands) beyond the chronological records--illustrations of growth, continuity, power, amplitude and _exploitation_, almost beyond statement, but proving fact and possibility, outside of argument.

Perhaps, indeed, the rarest and most blessed quality of transcendent noble poetry--as of law, and of the profoundest wisdom and estheticism--is, (I would suggest,) from sane, completed, vital, capable old age.

The final proof of song or personality is a sort of matured, accreted, superb, evoluted, almost divine, impalpable diffuseness and atmosphere or invisible magnetism, dissolving and embracing all--and not any special achievement of passion, pride, metrical form, epigram, plot, thought, or what is call'd beauty. The bud of the rose or the half-blown flower is beautiful, of course, but only the perfected bloom or apple or finish'd wheat-head is beyond the rest. Completed fruitage like this comes (in my opinion) to a grand age, in man or woman, through an essentially sound continuated physiology and psychology (both important) and is the culminating glorious aureole of all and several preceding. Like the tree or vine just mention'd, it stands at last in a beauty, power and productiveness of its own, above all others, and of a sort and style uniting all criticisms, proofs and adherences.

Let us diversify the matter a little by portraying some of the American poets from our own point of view.

Longfellow, reminiscent, polish'd, elegant, with the air of finest conventional library, picture-gallery or parlor, with ladies and gentlemen in them, and plush and rosewood, and ground-glass lamps, and mahogany and ebony furniture, and a silver inkstand and scented satin paper to write on.

Whittier stands for morality (not in any all-accepting philosophic or Hegelian sense, but) filter'd through a Puritanical or Quaker filter--is incalculably valuable as a genuine utterance, (and the finest,)--with many local and Yankee and _genre_ bits--all hued with anti-slavery coloring--(the _genre_ and anti-slavery contributions all precious--all help.) Whittier's is rather a grand figure, but pretty lean and ascetic--no Greek-not universal and composite enough (don't try--don't wish to be) for ideal Americanism. Ideal Americanism would take the Greek spirit and law, and democratize and scientize and (thence) truly Christianize them for the whole, the globe, all history, all ranks and lands, all facts, all good and bad. (Ah this _bad_--this nineteen-twentieths of us all! What a stumbling-block it remains for poets and metaphysicians--what a chance (the strange, clear-as-ever inscription on the old dug-up tablet) it offers yet for being translated--what can be its purpose in the God-scheme of this universe, and all?)

Then William Cullen Bryant--meditative, serious, from first to last tending to threnodies--his genius mainly lyrical--when reading his pieces who could expect or ask for more magnificent ones than such as "The Battle-Field," and "A Forest Hymn"? Bryant, unrolling, prairie-like, notwithstanding his mountains and lakes--moral enough (yet worldly and conventional)--a naturalist, pedestrian, gardener and fruiter--well aware of books, but mixing to the last in cities and society. I am not sure but his name ought to lead the list of American bards. Years ago I thought Emerson pre eminent (and as to the last polish and intellectual cuteness may-be I think so still)--but, for reasons, I have been gradually tending to give the file-leading place for American native poesy to W. C. B.

Of Emerson I have to confirm my already avow'd opinion regarding his highest bardic and personal attitude. Of the galaxy of the past--of Poe, Halleck, Mrs. Sigourney, Allston, Willis, Dana,

John Pierpont, W. G. Simms, Robert Sands, Drake, Hillhouse, Theodore Fay, Margaret Fuller, Epes Sargent, Boker, Paul Hayne, Lanier, and others, I fitly in essaying such a theme as this, and reverence for their memories, may at least give a heart-benison on the list of their names.

Time and New World humanity having the venerable resemblances more than anything else, and being "the same subject continued," just here in 1890, one gets a curious nourishment and lift (I do) from all those grand old veterans, Bancroft, Kossuth, von Moltke--and such typical specimen-reminiscences as Sophocles and Goethe, genius, health, beauty of person, riches, rank, renown and length of days, all combining and centering in one case.

Above everything, what could humanity and literature do without the mellow, last-justifying, averaging, bringing-up of many, many years--a great old age amplified? Every really first-class production has likely to pass through the crucial tests of a generation, perhaps several generations. Lord Bacon says the first sight of any work really new and first-rate in beauty and originality always arouses something disagreeable and repulsive. Voltaire term'd the Shaksperean works "a huge dunghill"; Hamlet he described (to the Academy, whose members listen'd with approbation) as "the dream of a drunken savage, with a few flashes of beautiful thoughts." And not the Ferney sage alone; the orthodox judges and law-givers of France, such as La Harpe, J. L. Geoffrey, and Chateaubriand, either join'd in Voltaire's verdict, or went further. Indeed the classicists and regulars there still hold to it. The lesson is very significant in all departments. People resent anything new as a personal insult. When umbrellas were first used in England, those who carried them were hooted and pelted so furiously that their lives were endanger'd. The same rage encounter'd the attempt in theatricals to perform women's parts by real women, which was publicly consider'd disgusting and outrageous. Byron thought Pope's verse incomparably ahead of Homer and Shakspere. One of the prevalent objections, in the days of Columbus was, the learn'd men boldly asserted that if a ship should reach India she would never get back again, because the rotundity of the globe would present a kind of mountain, up which it would be impossible to sail even with the most favorable wind.

"Modern poets," says a leading Boston journal, "enjoy longevity. Browning lived to be seventy-seven. Wordsworth, Bryant, Emerson, and Longfellow were old men. Whittier, Tennyson, and Walt Whitman still live."

Started out by that item on Old Poets and Poetry for chyle to inner American sustenance--I have thus gossipp'd about it all, and treated it from my own point of view, taking the privilege of rambling wherever the talk carried me. Browning is lately dead; Bryant, Emerson and Longfellow have not long pass'd away; and yes, Whittier and Tennyson remain, over eighty years old--the latter having sent out not long since a fresh volume, which the English-speaking Old and New Worlds are yet reading. I have already put on record my notions of T. and his effusions: they are very attractive and flowery to me--but flowers, too, are at least as profound as anything; and by common consent T. is settled as the poetic cream-skimmer of our age's melody, _ennui_ and polish--a verdict in which I agree, and should say that nobody (not even Shakspere) goes deeper in those exquisitely touch'd and half-hidden hints and indirections left like faint perfumes in the crevices of his lines. Of Browning I don't know enough to say much; he must be studied deeply out, too, and quite certainly repays the trouble--but I am old and indolent, and cannot study (and never did.)