Whittier's Quest for Humility

WHITTIERS QUEST FOR HUMILITY By John J. McAleer* Whittier's success as a poet crowned the last third of a long and busy life. The age that acclaimed him saw him as a humble, self-effacing idealist who, with agreeable art, purveyed good will in easily retained verses. The present age, finding "His manhood better than his verses," to cite his own appraisal of Bryant, has felt that Whittier's celebrated meekness hurt his art by making him too compliant to the demands of his editors. Yet how are we to reconcile this image of a diffident poet and benign humanitarian with the youth who brazenly courted fame and the "fighting Quaker" of maturer years who spoke out fearlessly for the truth he believed in? Shortly after Whittier's death his official biographer, Samuel Pickard, said of him, "It would be a mistake ... to suppose that gentleness was a necessity of his nature; it was in reality the result of a resolute self-control, and the habitual government of a tempestuous spirit."1 Pickard's assertion must have given his readers gentle amusement, for it was documented only by the modest avowals of Whittier himself, and the familiar record of his long and blameless life stood opposed to it. Yet many of Whittier's unpublished letters, written to editors and literary friends, confirm and elucidate Pickard's claim. Moreover, these letters indicate that modern critics, Van Wyck Brooks and George Arms among them, have erred in passing over Whittier's personal struggle for humility to dismiss his subservience to his editors with the curt rebuke, "no pride of artistry."2 Often, in fact, Whittier was pained cruelly *Associate Professor of English at Boston College and Associate Editor of the Shakespeare Newsletter, Dr. McAleer is currently editing the letters of Whittier. 1 Samuel T. Pickard, Life and Letters of John Greenleaf Whittier (London, 1895), p. 551. 2 Van Wyck Brooks, The Flowering of New England (New York, 1936), p. 399; George Arms, The Fields Were Green (Stanford, 1953), p. 35; Vernon L. Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought (New York, 1927), II, 359. 31 32Bulletin of Friends Historical Association by affronts to his pride; yet he bore his humiliations uncomplainingly , convinced that they were the needful chastisements of a wilful nature and the means of subduing it. It is time now, however, that we saw him not as a benign idealist preaching to his neighbor in didactic quatrains, but as a man who fought with uncommon courage to restrain a haughty nature, often eschewing even that most pardonable of vices, artistic pride, because he felt it jeopardized his efforts to achieve true self-discipline. By nature Whittier was not modest, meek, selfless, and serene. His struggle to acquire these characteristics is the central fact of his life. He was precisely the man and poet he was because, from his twenty-sixth year, he fought an unrelenting battle with himself to be rid of passions singularly alien to the creed to which he adhered . And, indeed, upon what ground more suited might such a battle be fought than within the bosom of a gifted Quaker who, in the midst oí a sttuggle for success, has awakened suddenly to an acute consciousness of his religious ideals? To suppose, as Whittier's biographers usually do, that the Quaker virtues "were the dominant characteristics of Whittier's own nature"3 is to deny him his most admirable distinction. What he did possess of these virtues was earned by fierce discipline. What deficiencies remained he covered as well as he could. In 1878, when past seventy, he told Elizabeth Phelps with rare frankness, "I have suffered dreadfully from coarseness, self-seeking vanity, and asinine stupidity among associates, as well as from the coldness or open hostility, and, worst, the ridicule of the outside world, but I now see that it was best, and that I needed it all."4 In 1828, when Whittier was twenty-one, he wrote John Neal, editor of the Portland Yankee, "The friendless boy has been mocked at; and, years ago, he vowed to triumph over the scorners of his boyish endeavors. With the unescapable sense of wrong burning like a volcano...