Minding the Light

THE PEACEABLE KINGDOM by JAN DE HARTOG 677 pages. Atheneum. $10.

Like lovers, the one thing religious minorities have in common is the conviction that they are unique. Like lovers, they are of course right. But the passion for God, like other passions, obeys certain plot patterns--all subject to certain beginnings, middles and ends. The kindling, the cooling and the rekindling of the Quakers is the present theme of Dutch Novelist-Playwright Jan de Hartog. In this first of two novels in progress, he takes the history of the Religious Society of Friends from Cromwell's England, 1652, to Pennsylvania, 1755, and the brink of the French-Indian war. The Peaceable Kingdom fs clumsily written. Nevertheless De Hartog, a Friend himself, has managed to indicate the range of religious experience, from hot ecstasy to prim rule of procedure--and sometimes back again. De Hartog's four stages of religion go something like stages of religion go something like this: in the beginning, naturally, there are the seers and prophets. The Peaceable Kingdom opens with young George Fox galloping into Lancashire to spread the inner light, rather like a spiritual pyromaniac. Fox received the standard bloody treatment of prophets, and a bit more, at the hands of mobs and at the hands of the Establishment, too. Religious ecstasy, De Hartog makes clear, is the ultimate revolution, to which society reacts with equal and opposite frenzy.

After the seers and prophets, so De Hartog's plot ordains, come the coders and the organizers. In Lancashire, Fox converted Margaret Fell; indeed, he was later to marry her. But in a curious sense she converted Fox, or at least his message, to what suited her: a religion of "service rather than salvation," as De Hartog puts it. He retells how this judge's wife organized the Quakers in prison, sending them letters and survival kits consisting of socks, mufflers, weevil-proof biscuits, a jar of prunes for the bowels' sake, and of course a Bible. In the most affecting chapters of the novel, De Hartog dramatizes Margaret's voluntary descent into the dungeons of Lancashire Castle, where she lived with imprisoned children, including an eleven-year-old boy condemned to be hanged for murder.

The Old Fire. The second-and third-generation inheritors of a faith tend to reduce a passion into a habit. Short on spirit, long on technicality, they are the lettermen. Abruptly jumping 100 years, switching the scene to Pennsylvania, and abandoning historical characters, De Hartog introduces as his letterman a New World Quaker businessman named Isaac Woodhouse. This Early American success figure may have been sober, industrious and honest even with Indians. But, in De Hartog's words, he also showed a positive "genius for compromise." Quaker slaveowners, for instance, intimidated slaves by showing whips without ever actually using them--a fine distinction suggesting that a proudly "peculiar" people had become sadly less peculiar.

After the lettermen come the revivalists. Boniface Baker, the easygoing grandson of a Fox convert and one of De Hartog's compromisers, suddenly catches the old fire again. In his mid-50s, Baker frees his slaves, parcels his indigo plantation among them, and takes off for the frontier. One solid measure of the book is that it makes this radical gesture oddly plausible.

As a religious novelist, Jan de Hartog has serious limitations. He stammers about the inner light, in the words of one character, "like a bout of drunkenness, that's what it was." He is far less comfortable describing Quaker quietism than hanging, lynching and rape. Dubiously, he maintains that all saints have a sense of humor, for his final examples offering a rowdy trapper named Buffalo McHair and a salty Quaker frontiers worn an doctor named Guilelma Woodhouse, whose like has not been seen since Wallace Beery and Marjorie Main.

For all his awkwardness and superficiality, De Hartog makes the point that, like a divine infection, hope of human betterment got into the blood of a people and stayed. De Hartog may not be up to the poetry of religious experience. But he does rough justice to the prose--to the Quaker witness expressed in prison reform, compassion for the insane, and final opposition to slavery. These were all ways in which a passion to be perfect transformed itself into a simple, immensely difficult resolution to be good.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.