Edward Hicks: Painter of the Peaceable Kingdom (review)

52Bulletin of Friends Historical Association Edward Hicks: Painter of the Peaceable Kingdom. By Alice Ford. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 1952. xvi, 136 pages. 41 illustrations, 3 in color. $8.50. TTHERE are at least two great areas of focus in considering the life of Edward Hicks: his art and his ministry. A fair-sized biography could be written on either point of focus, but the real life, the exciting life of Hicks is to be found in the mighty tension caused by these two absolute commissions residing in one soul. Not only did each commission seem to require a full life for fulfillment, but they seemed to be in moral contradiction. The writing of Alice Ford shows up all sides of his life and brings us to the heart of his personal conflict. We can feel nothing but gratitude to her for producing what will likely remain the standard work on Edward Hicks. In a very few years the world has come to know of the Bucks County sign-painter who became one of the greatest American "primitives ." The thousands of people who pass his "Peaceable Kingdom" in the Museum of Modern Art must feel, even in a hurried glance, something of his spiritual force. What the world does not know is that he was a truly great minister of the spoken word. His Journal (Memoirs) is not a polished work of art, but it is tremendously virile and this is best realized by comparison with the journals of most of his contemporaries. Their writings are too often like closed-up rooms, the same stale air, the same old customs, the conventional words. Hicks's Memoirs are like a flashing mountain stream, chaotic, feverish, contradictory , and yet here and there crystal pools of pure water. I know of no journal of his period that so vividly portrays the genuine inward travail of the Quaker worship and ministry. He is racy where others are tame; he is extreme where they are all reserve. I have read Edward Hicks's Journal many times and have come to feel that he was a great minister, greater than Alice Ford leads us to see. Perhaps this is to say that no biography of Hicks will quite take the place of the Memoirs, or perhaps it is to say that no less a person than a Georges Bernanos is needed to portray the amazing inward drama of this tortured, priestly man. More than once Alice Ford calls him fanatic; we must ask what this means. The fanatic is by the dictionary "one who is exaggerately zealous for a belief or a cause." This he is, and worse—he is possessed with contradictory fanaticisms. But it is these very contradictions that made his life great and fruitful. If he was a fanatic, it was the fanaticism of Leo Tolstoy and Eric Gill. For example, he could at once condemn the vanity of art and yet continue to the end turning out his masterpieces; he could thunder on temperance, but drink for his health and paint tavern signs; with a tongue of fire he scorched his fellow-ministers, but also he was as gentle and loving as the apostle John; a thorough Hicksite, yet starts his Memoirs with a long defense of his orthodoxy; he believed that people ought to stay at home and mind their business, and yet he made Book Reviews53 long journeys in the ministry. The words of Leon Bloy apply to him: "It is characteristic of love to he impatient, and extreme love is extremely impatient." One simple statement of fact tells us a great deal about the worth of this impatient fanatic: when he died, three to four thousand people came to his funeral. Alice Ford has gathered together valuable material concerning the Hicks's family life and she has experüy bound it together to produce a unified picture which has not before this been seen. It is a pathetic, a deeply moving account. I have known the story, but reading it here I found myself reduced to tears, for this obscure artisan who defied the iconoclasm of Quakerism possessed a keen sense of how poor and brief our lives...