Complete Prose Works
genius--amid the social and domestic circles of that period--indifferent
to reverberations that seem'd enough to wake the dead, and in a sphere
far from the pageants of the court, the awe of any personal rank
or charm of intellect, or literature, or the varying excitement of
Parliamentarian or Royalist fortunes--this curious young rustic goes
wandering up and down England.
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