EDITOR AND AUTHOR: FIRST VENTURES.
The winter of 1828-29 was passed by Whittier in Boston. He once with characteristic modesty told the writer that he drifted into journalism that winter, as editor of the American Manufacturer, in the following way: He had gone to Boston to study and read. He undertook the writing for the Manufacturer not because he had much liking for questions of tariff and finance, but because his own finances would thereby be improved. Mr. Whittier's chief personal trait is extreme shyness and distrust of himself, and he deprecated the idea that he had any special power as a writer at the time of which we are speaking, saying that he had to study up his subjects before writing. But undoubtedly he must have wielded a vigorous pen, and been known to possess a cool and careful head, or he would not have been invited to assume the editorship of such a paper. He himself admitted, in the course of the conversation, that at that time he had political ambitions, and made a study of political economy and civil politics.
In 1830 we find Whittier at Haverhill again. In March of that year he was occupying the position of editor of the Essex Gazette, and "issued proposals to publish a 'History of Haverhill,' in one volume of two hundred pages, duodecimo, price eighty-seven and one-half cents per copy. 'If the material swelled the volume above two hundred pages, the price was to be one dollar per copy.'" But the limited encouragement offered, and the amount of work required to compile the volume, led the young editor to abandon the project. Whittier was editor of this Gazette for six months,—from January 1 to July 10, 1830. On May 4, 1836, after he had returned from Philadelphia, he resumed the editorship of the journal, retaining the position until December 17 of the same year.
He left the Gazette at the time of his first connection with it, to go to Hartford for the purpose of editing the New England Weekly Review of that city. His first acquaintance with this Connecticut periodical had been made while attending the Academy at Haverhill. While there he happened to see a copy of the Review, then edited by George D. Prentice. He was pleased with its sprightly and breezy tone, and sent it several articles. Great was his astonishment on finding that they were accepted and published with editorial commendation. He sent numerous other contributions during the same year.
One day in 1830, he was at work in the field, when a letter was brought to him from the publishers of the Hartford paper, in which they said that they had been asked by Mr. Prentice to request him to edit the paper during the absence of Mr. Prentice in Kentucky, whither he had gone to write a campaign life of Henry Clay. "I could not have been more utterly astonished," said Mr. Whittier once, "if I had been told that I was appointed prime minister to the great Khan of Tartary."
Mr. Whittier was at this time a member of the National Republican party. He afterward belonged to the anti-slavery Liberty party, a faction of the Abolitionists which had separated from the Garrison band. In 1855 Mr. Whittier acted with the Free Democratic party. In the conversation alluded to a moment ago, the poet laughingly remarked that the proprietors of the paper had never seen him when he went to Hartford in 1830 to take charge of their periodical. They were much surprised at his youth. But at the first meeting he discreetly kept silence, letting them do most of the talking. Here most assuredly, if never again, his Quaker doctrine of silence stood him in good stead; since, if we may believe him, he was most wofully deficient in a knowledge of the intricacies of the political situation of the time.
Whittier was twenty-four years old when he published his first volume. It is a thin little book entitled "Legends of New England" (Hartford: Hanmer and Phelps, 1831), and is a medley of prose and verse. The style is juvenile and extravagantly rhetorical, and the subject-matter is far from being massive with thought. The libretto has been suppressed by its author, and it would be ungracious as well as unjust to criticise it at any length, or quote more than a single morsel of its verses, which are inferior to the prose. But one may be pardoned for giving two or three specimens of the prose stories, for they are intrinsically interesting. In the preface we have a striking passage, which may be commended to those who accuse Whittier of hatred of the Puritan fathers, and undue partiality toward the Quakers. He says: "I have in many instances alluded to the superstition and bigotry of our ancestors, the rare and bold race who laid the foundation of this republic; but no one can accuse me of having done injustice to their memories. A son of New England, and proud of my birthplace, I would not willingly cast dishonor upon its founders. My feelings in this respect have already been expressed in language which I shall be pardoned, I trust, for introducing in this place:—
Oh!—never may a son of thine,
Where'er his wandering steps incline,
Forget the sky which bent above
His childhood like a dream of love,
The stream beneath the green hill flowing,
The broad-armed tree above it growing,
The clear breeze through the foliage blowing;
Or hear unmoved the taunt of scorn,
Breathed o'er the brave New England born;
Or mark the stranger's jaguar hand
Disturb the ashes of thy dead—
The buried glory of a land
Whose soil with noble blood is red,
And sanctified in every part,
Nor feel resentment, like a brand,
Unsheathing from his fiery heart!"
The flow of language in these prose pieces is smooth and easy, and the narratives are in the same vein and style as the "Twice Told Tales," or Irving's stories, only they are very much weaker than these, and more extravagant and melodramatic in tone. "The Midnight Attack" describes the adventure of Captain Harmon and thirty Eastern rangers on the banks of the Kennebec River in June, 1722. A party of sleeping Indians are surprised by them and all shot dead by one volley of balls. An idea of the style of the piece will be obtained from the following paragraphs. The men are waiting for the signal of Harmon:—
"'Fire!' he at length exclaimed, as the sight of his piece interposed full and distinct between his eye and the wild scalp-lock of the Indian. 'Fire, and rush on!'
"The sharp voice of thirty rifles thrilled through the heart of the forest. There was a groan—a smothered cry—a wild and convulsive movement among the sleeping Indians; and all again was silent.
"The rangers sprang forward with their clubbed muskets and hunting knives; but their work was done. The red men had gone to their audit before the Great Spirit; and no sound was heard among them save the gurgling of the hot blood from their lifeless bosoms."
It was one of the superstitions of the New England colonists that the rattlesnake had the power of charming or fascinating human beings. Whittier's story, "The Rattlesnake Hunter," is based upon this fact. An old man with meagre and wasted form is represented as devoting his life to the extermination of the reptiles among the hills and mountains of Vermont, the inspiring motive of his action being the death of his young and beautiful wife, many years previously, from the bite of a rattlesnake.
"The Human Sacrifice" relates the escape of a young white girl from the hands of the Matchit-Moodus, an Indian tribe formerly dwelling where East Haddam now stands. The Indians are frightened from their purpose of sacrificing the girl by a rumbling noise proceeding from a high hill near by. In his note on the story Mr. Whittier says: "There is a story prevalent in the neighborhood, that a man from England, a kind of astrologer or necromancer, undertook to rid the place of the troublesome noises. He told them that the sound proceeded from a carbuncle—a precious gem, growing in the bowels of the rock. He hired an old blacksmith shop, and worked for some time with closed doors, and at night. All at once the necromancer departed, and the strange noises ceased. It was supposed he had found the precious gem, and had fled with it to his native land." This story of the carbuncle reminds us of Hawthorne's story on the same subject.
The following remarks are prefixed to the poem, "The Unquiet Sleeper": "Some fifty or sixty years since an inhabitant of ——, N. H., was found dead at a little distance from his dwelling, which he left in the morning in perfect health. There is a story prevalent among the people of the neighborhood that, on the evening of the day on which he was found dead, strange cries are annually heard to issue from his grave! I have conversed with some who really supposed they had heard them in the dead of the night, rising fearfully on the autumn wind. They represented the sounds to be of a most appalling and unearthly nature."
"The Spectre Ship" is the versification of a legend related in Mather's "Magnalia Christi." A ship sailed from Salem, having on board "a young man of strange and wild appearance, and a girl still younger, and of surpassing beauty. She was deadly pale, and trembled even while she leaned on the arm of her companion." They were supposed by some to be demons. The vessel was lost, and of course soon reappeared as a spectre-ship.
Mr. Whittier's next work was the editing, in 1832, of the "Remains" of his gifted friend, J. G. C. Brainard. Students of Whittier's poems know that for many years the genius and writings of Brainard exercised a potent influence on his mind. Brainard undoubtedly possessed genius. He was at one time editor of the Connecticut Mirror. He died young, and his work can be considered as hardly more than a promise of future excellence. Whittier, in his Introduction to the "Remains," shows a nice sense of justice, and a delicate reserve in his eulogistic estimate of his dead brother-poet and friend. That he did not falsely attribute to him a rare genius will be evident to those who read the following portion of Brainard's spirited ballad of "The Black Fox":—
"'How cold, how beautiful, how bright
The cloudless heaven above us shines;
But 'tis a howling winter's night,—
'Twould freeze the very forest pines.
'The winds are up while mortals sleep;
The stars look forth while eyes are shut;
The bolted snow lies drifted deep
Around our poor and lonely hut.
'With silent step and listening ear,
With bow and arrow, dog and gun,
We'll mark his track, for his prowl we hear,
Now is our time—come on, come on.'
O'er many a fence, through many a wood,
Following the dog's bewildered scent,
In anxious haste and earnest mood,
The Indian and the white man went.
The gun is cock'd, the bow is bent,
The dog stands with uplifted paw;
And ball and arrow swift are sent,
Aim'd at the prowler's very jaw.
—The ball, to kill that fox, is run
Not in a mould by mortals made!
The arrow which that fox should shun
Was never shap'd from earthly reed!
The Indian Druids of the wood
Know where the fatal arrows grow—
They spring not by the summer flood,
They pierce not through the winter snow!"[12]
Whittier's Introduction to Brainard's poems reveals a mind matured by much reading and thought. We hardly recognize in the author and editor of Hartford the shy girlish boy we so recently left on the farm at Haverhill. There has evidently been a good deal of midnight oil burned since then.
The following sentiments respecting the resources and the proper field of the American poet show that thus early had Whittier taken the manly and patriotic resolution to find in his native land the chief sources of poetic inspiration: "It has been often said that the New World is deficient in the elements of poetry and romance; that its bards must of necessity linger over the classic ruins of other lands; and draw their sketches of character from foreign sources, and paint Nature under the soft beauty of an Eastern sky. On the contrary, New England is full of romance; and her writers would do well to follow the example of Brainard. The great forest which our fathers penetrated, the red men, their struggle and their disappearance, the powwow and the war-dance, the savage inroad and the English sally, the tale of superstition and the scenes of witchcraft,—all these are rich materials of poetry. We have, indeed, no classic vale of Tempe, no haunted Parnassus, no temple gray with years, and hallowed by the gorgeous pageantry of idol worship, no towers and castles over whose moonlight ruins gathers the green pall of the ivy; but we have mountains pillaring a sky as blue as that which bends over classic Olympus, streams as bright and beautiful as those of Greece and Italy, and forests richer and nobler than those which of old were haunted by sylph and dryad."
It is easy to see here a foreshadowing of "Mogg Megone," "The Bridal of Pennacook," the "Supernaturalism of New England," and a hundred poems and ballads of Whittier's founded on native themes. The sentiments in the quotation just made remind one of Emerson's "Nature," the preface of Whitman to his first portentous quarto, "Leaves of Grass," and Wordsworth's essay on the nature of the poetic art. But however laudable was the Quaker poet's resolve to choose indigenous subjects, it cannot be said that either he or Bryant attained to more than an indigeneity of theme. In form and style they are imitative. Emerson and Whitman are our only purely original poets.
Whittier was editor of the New England Weekly Review for about eighteen months, at the end of which time he returned to the farm at Haverhill, and engaged in agricultural pursuits for the next five or six years. In 1831 or 1832 he published "Moll Pitcher," a tale of the Witch of Nahant. This youthful poem seems to have completely disappeared, and Mr. Whittier will no doubt be devoutly thankful that the writer has been unable to procure a copy.