Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
And the cheer of Hampshire’s woodmen swept down from Holyoke Hill.
The voice of Massachusetts! Of her free sons and daughters,
Deep calling unto deep aloud, the sound of many waters!
Against the burden of that voice what tyrant power shall stand?
No fetters in the Bay State! No slave upon her land!
When at last the long controversy was over and release from the
struggle came to Whittier, his poetry grew richer and mellower. He was
not made to be a fighter, and it was with a sigh of relief that he
turned to the Elysian fields he had dreamed of, while he was turning
with his plow the rough stubble of a cause. Looking back upon those
arduous days, he sketched half whimsically his own portrait in _The
Tent on the Beach_.
And one there was, a dreamer born,
Who, with a mission to fulfill,
Had left the Muses’ haunts to turn
The crank of an opinion-mill,
Making his rustic reed of song
A weapon in the war with wrong,
Yoking his fancy to the breaking-plough
That beam-deep turned the soil for truth to spring and grow.
Too quiet seemed the man to ride
The wingéd Hippogriff Reform;
Was his a voice from side to side
To pierce the tumult of the storm?
A silent, shy, peace-loving man,
He seemed no fiery partisan
To hold his way against the public frown,
The ban of Church and State, the fierce Mob’s hounding down.
For while he wrought with strenuous will
The work his hands had found to do,
He heard the fitful music still
Of winds that out of dream-land blew.
The din about him could not drown
What the strange voices whispered down;
Along his task-field weird processions swept,
The visionary pomp of stately phantoms stepped.
The common air was thick with dreams,--
He told them to the toiling crowd;
Such music as the woods and streams
Sang in his ear he sang aloud;
In still, shut bays, on windy capes,
He heard the call of beckoning shapes,
And, as the gray old shadows prompted him,
To homely moulds of rhyme he shaped their legends grim.
Many excellent things he did in those quiet later years; old time
pictures like _Snowbound_, with its homely fireside economy long since
buried under the snows of forgotten winters; vigorous tales like
_Abraham Davenport_; ballads like _Skipper Ireson’s Ride_, that have
something of the spirit of the primitive. He had given thirty years of
his life to the cause of social justice, and surely none would grudge
him in old age his rambles in pleasanter fields. It was well that he
could turn to the past, for the America of the new exploitative age,
the New England of Lowell and Lawrence, he never understood. Black
slavery he understood, but wage slavery he comprehended no more than
did Garrison. To the end he remained a primitive soul, ill equipped to
understand a materialistic philosophy of society. There is something
pathetic in his _Songs of Labor_. His economics, like his democracy,
was of a bygone time, having no kinship with a scrambling free-soilism
or a rapacious capitalism. There is scant room in this world for the
Friend with his unmilitant dream of the fellowship. With his passion
for freedom, established in the gospel of righteousness, the Quaker
Whittier was fast becoming an anachronism in industrial New England
that was concerned about very different things. How old-fashioned he
had become is suggested by certain lines that phrase his greetings
to later times. Spare, somewhat halting in rhythm, yet transparently
sincere, they constitute an apologia that New England need feel no
shame for.
Yet here at least an earnest sense
Of human right and weal is shown;
A hate of tyranny intense,
And hearty in its vehemence,
As if my brother’s pain and sorrow were my own.
O Freedom! if to me belong
Nor mighty Milton’s gift divine,
Nor Marvell’s wit and graceful song,
Still with a love as deep and strong
As theirs, I lay, like them, my best gifts on thy shrine!
III • Harriet Beecher Stowe • A Daughter of Puritanism
No more Puritan mind than Mrs. Stowe’s ever contributed to the
literature of New England. Her remarkable native gifts were
unconsciously given specific shape by a rigid environment. For years
the artist in her struggled to subdue the moralist, and never quite
succeeded. Before she dipped her pen in ink her mind had taken its
set. She could not hope to escape being a preacher. Daughter of a
minister and wife of a minister, with brothers and sons ministers,
she lived all her life in an atmosphere of religion. She was baptized
in creeds and prattled the language of sermons as the vernacular of
childhood. Born at a critical time for the old New England faith, her
youth was passed amid the storm clouds of the Unitarian controversy,
in an atmosphere charged with electricity. Connecticut was the very
citadel of the Edwardean orthodoxy, and Litchfield was as rugged in
its faith as the hills it nestled among; and when the old-school
Calvinism of Boston was in danger of utter rout, it naturally turned
to a Connecticut Daniel to save the venerable cause. Stout old Lyman
Beecher was a host in himself. Son of a Connecticut blacksmith and
himself brought up at the forge before he quitted it to seek learning
at Yale College under Timothy Dwight, able, kindly, practical, with
pronounced literary tastes and a capable pen, he was a stalwart
Edwardean, militantly conservative, who damned our perverse human
nature with incontrovertible logic. Harriet was eight years old
when Channing preached his Baltimore sermon, and fourteen when her
father was summoned to Hanover Street Church, Boston. Her childish
heart had already been given to Baxter’s _Saint’s Rest_, and her
imagination awakened by Cotton Mather’s _Magnalia Christi Americana_.
Theocratic New England lay enveloped for her in a haze of romance, more
fascinating than any Sir Walter had woven about the Scottish Highlands;
she had discovered there noble figures and heroic deeds to kindle
an ardent hero worship. At fourteen she was converted--too easily
it seems, for she could not demonstrate to the satisfaction of her
spiritual counselors that she had been sufficiently under conviction
of sin. Thereafter to the end of her life the greatest of all dramas
for her was the drama of the soul concerned with the great business of
salvation.
The surest clue to Mrs. Stowe’s literary secret is to be found in
her sympathetic understanding of the spiritual life of Puritan New
England. She was a lifelong student of New England psychology, with
its “profound, unutterable, and therefore unuttered melancholy” that
resulted from open-eyed contemplation of grim fact. The past that
lay bleak and stern behind the sober present she understood as few
others did. Before her sympathetic eyes it fell into just proportions,
and quite naturally she became the historian of her people. The
autobiographical material that fills her later work--her husband’s
recollections in _Old-Town Folks_, and her own in _Poganuc People_--is
much more than autobiography; it is intimate history of New England,
written by one who in distilling her own experience was writing
the chronicle of a race. In a brilliant chapter of the former work
she gives a remarkable analysis of the intellectual development of
Puritan New England, and provides the setting against which her own
intellectual life should be placed. To overlook it is to miss the most
suggestive commentary on her work that has ever been written.
This daughter of Puritanism traces her intellectual antecedents
back to the long struggle of Puritan rationalism with feudal custom
and medieval ideas. The old English Puritans, “by nature the most
reverential and most loyal portion of the community,” in destroying the
divine-right sovereignty of King Charles, were impelled to transfer
that sovereignty to a higher King. In pulling down the temporal, they
erected a divine sovereignty; and their passionate attachment to the
new Sovereign was the natural response to “the pleading and yearning
within them of a faculty robbed of its appropriate object, and longing
for support and expression.” But the theologies to which they yielded
intellectual allegiance were a “legacy from past monarchical and
medieval ages.” To free themselves from this unhappy legacy, and create
a democratic theology, was an arduous work that needed two hundred
years to accomplish; and not until the Revolution spread a new social
philosophy through America, did the work go forward rapidly. Wanting
such a democratic philosophy Puritan New England wandered in the old
theological fogs. It was Jonathan Edwards who first turned the New
England mind to rationalism, and began that long “controversy” that
was to unsettle so much. But unhappily the rationalism of Edwards
was turned aside to reactionary ends, and his _Treatise on True
Virtue_ was “one of the strongest attempts to back up by reasoning
the old monarchical and aristocratic ideas of the supreme right of
the king and upper classes.” Nevertheless he set all New England to
rationalizing, and it was this severe discipline that carried her
people soberly through the Revolutionary War, and preserved them from
the excesses which followed the Revolution in France. And it was this
same discipline that prepared them for the eventual re-discovery of
the humanity of Jesus and the democracy of his religion. New England
had been struggling towards democracy through the bog of its feudal
theology; it became consciously democratic with the appearance of the
new theology (_Old-Town Folks_, Chapter XXIX).
This rationalistic bias of eighteenth-century New England suffices to
explain for Mrs. Stowe the stern temper and angular individuality of
the old Puritan Yankee. Her particular hero and saint was Jonathan
Edwards, and her lesser hero and saint was Samuel Hopkins; and in both
it was the courageous rationalism that appealed to her. In them, and
more particularly in the former, she discovered the creative force that
quickened a religion that was falling into dead formalism, that gave
it fresh vitality and made it the central fact of everyday New England
life. Across the world of her youth lay the shadow--or the light--of
the great Edwards, and the great Hopkins was his intellectual heir.
In another chapter of _Old-Town Folks_ she sketches the Edwardean
influence in bold outline.
The ministers of the early colonial days of New England, though
well-read, scholarly men, were more statesmen than theologians.
Their minds ran upon the actual arrangements of society, which were
in great measure left in their hands, rather than on doctrinal and
metaphysical subtleties. They took their confession of faith just
as the great body of Protestant reformers left it, and acted upon
it as a practical foundation, without much further discussion,
until the time of President Edwards. He was the first man who began
the disintegrating process of applying rationalistic methods to the
accepted doctrines of religion, and he rationalized far more boldly
and widely than any publishers of his biography have ever dared to
let the world know. He sawed the great dam and let out the whole
waters of discussion over all New England, and that free discussion
led to all the shades of opinion of our modern days. Little as he
thought it, Waldo Emerson and Theodore Parker were the last results
of the current set in motion by Jonathan Edwards. (Chapter XIX.)
In this flood let loose by the metaphysical saw of Jonathan Edwards,
Mrs. Stowe found the material for her New England tales. In no other
pages does one realize so fully the tremendous, vital significance
of religion to the children of Puritanism, nor appreciate how narrow