CHAPTER II.
THE ARTIST.
The title of this chapter is almost a misnomer; for the style, or technique, of the poet whose works we are considering is so very simple and unoriginal that he can hardly be said to have a distinctive style of his own,—unless a few persistent mannerisms establish a claim to it. His diction, however, is always pictorial, and glows with an intense Oriental fervor. Fused in this interior vital heat, his thoughts do not sink, like powerful Jinn, into the deep silence-sphere of the mind, to fetch thence sparkling treasures, rich and strange: rather, they run to and fro with lightning swiftness amid the million surface-pictures of the intellect; rearranging, recombining, and creatively blending its images, and finally pouring them out along the page to charm our fancy and feeling with old thoughts and scenes painted in fresh colors and from new points of view. There is more of fancy than of creative imagination in Whittier.
The artistic quality, or tone, of his mind is a fusion of that of Wordsworth and that of Byron. In his best ballads and other lyrics you have the moral sincerity of Wordsworth and the sweet Wordsworthian simplicity (with a difference); and in his reform poems you have the Byronic indignation, and scorn of Philistinism and its tyrannies. As a religious poet, he reveals the quiet piety and devoutness of Cowper; and his rural and folk poems show that he is a debtor to Burns.
He has been a diligent reader,—"a close-browed miser of the scholar's gains,"—and his writings are full of bookish allusions. But, if the truth must be told, his doctor's gown does not often sit gracefully upon his shoulders. His readers soon learn to know that his strength lies in his moral nature, and in his power to tell a story melodiously, simply, and sweetly. Hence it is, doubtless, that they care little for his literary allusions,—think, perhaps, that they are rather awkwardly dragged in by the ears, and at any rate hasten by them impatiently that they may inhale anew the violet-freshness of the poet's own soul. What has just been said about bookish allusions does not apply to the beautiful historical ballads produced by Whittier in the mellow maturity of his powers. These fresh improvisations are as perfect works of art as the finest Greek marbles. In them Whittier at length succeeds in freeing himself completely from the shackles of didacticism. Such ballads as "The Witch's Daughter" and "Telling the Bees" are as absolutely faultless productions as Wordsworth's "We are Seven" and his "Lucy Gray," or as Uhland's "Des Sänger's Fluch," or William Blake's "Mary." There is in them the confident and unconscious ease that marks the work of the highest genius. A shower of lucid water-drops falls in no truer obedience to the law of perfect sphericity than flowed from the pen of the poet these delicate creations in obedience to the law of perfect spontaneity. Almost all of Whittier's lyrics have evidently been rapidly written, poured forth in the first glow of feeling, and not carefully amended and polished as were Longfellow's works. And herein he is at fault, as was Byron. But the delicate health of Whittier, and his toilsome early days, form an excuse for his deficiency in this respect. His later creations, the product of his leisure years, are full of pure and flawless music. They have no harmony or rhythmic volume of sound, as in Tennyson, Swinburne, Milton, and Shakspere; but they set themselves to simple melodious airs spontaneously. As you read them, your feet begin to tap time,—only the music is that of a good rural choir rather than that of an orchestra.