Edward Hicks, Primitive Quaker. His Religion in Relation to His Art (review)

BOOK REVIEWS121 On other big questions the author is modestly suggestive, but feels that many volumes are needed to tell the whole story. Why was the migration predominantly Southern? From discomfort in a slave-supported society. To include the Carolinas as part of the Quaker West is a valuable insight, for in colonial times Quakers went west from the ChesapeakeDelaware and other "carrying" or "Eastern" provinces to the Carolinas. Quakers north of Virginia otherwise faced the sea and England, or moved into the northern New England, upstate New York, and Canadian backcountry. One way of putting it is that when the West, from Virginia to Georgia, became Southern, Quakers left it, except for a "heroic remnant" (p. 24). The Separation of 1827 was the result of "damaging influence . . . from the East" (p. 68)—a polarization over the relative authority of the Inner Light and the Bible. Errol Elliott says that George Fox did not consider the Scriptures secondary. Why did the Hicksites and Wilburites attract only splinters from Ohio to Iowa, and then dwindle or die? Their "museum-like isolation" (p. 75) was too fossilized to meet new conditions (p. 25), and they lacked the support of London Yearly Meeting. This work is the most comprehensive of a dozen new books about Western Friends. University of VermontT. D. Seymour Bassett Edward Hicks, Primitive Quaker. His Religion in Relation to His Art. By Eleanore Price Mather. Pendle Hill Pamphlet 170. March, 1970. 35 pp. 55jS. Once an American typographer, with the skill of a carver of minutiae in ivory, or of a miniature watchmaker, put the Lord's Prayer on the tip of a little metal slug, for reading under high magnification. For that matter, the Ten Commandments take up only part of the face of a double tablet of clay, if the traditional representations can be believed. Audubon sometimes joked of his elephant folio of bird paintings as his "pamphlet." The little word atom is not so small or invisible a discrete particle in terms of Armageddon. Small indeed! Possibly the last word unless Heaven forfends. That a country like ours, so much given to the biggest plane, army, air forceor even the biggest and also the emptiest "gift book" in the prevailing fever for bigness—still harbors a Pendle Hill Pamphlet series gives hope. In a modest thirty-five pages of a depth and sensibility not always to be found in more pretentious endeavors, Eleanore Price Mather has given Friends and others a work to treasure. Edward Hicks, Primitive Quaker takes a place of distinction among the studies of the artist who is seen at last, through a birthright Friend's eyes, rather than through the eyes of those who have merely admired him from afar, for what he truly was, equal parts preacher and painter: "In the entire history 122QUAKER HISTORY of painting we can scarcely find an artist, from Fra Angelico down, whose work was more intimately involved with his religious traditions and convictions." (Or, one might add, against more adamant odds.) Admirers of Hicks will surely not want to be without this gentle, perceptive, so very special tribute. Others will be the poorer for not now discovering the sometimes irascible, but finally irresistible , follower of Elias Hicks, the justly world-famous advocate of peace and love, Edward Hicks (1780-1849), late of Newtown Meeting, Bucks County, Pennsylvania . Thanks to Mrs. Mather, there is a treat in store for them, "come-lately" though they may seem to the rest of us, who by this time are legion. Adelphi, MarylandAlice Ford ...