Chapter 14

"I was not asked if I should like to come. I have not seen my host here since I came, Or had a word of welcome in his name. Some say that we shall never see him, and some That we shall see him elsewhere, and then know Why we were bid. How long I am to stay I have not the least notion. None, they say, Was ever told when he should come or go. But every now and then there bursts upon The song and mirth a lamentable noise, A sound of shrieks and sobs, that strikes our joys Dumb in our breasts; and then, someone is gone. They say we meet him. None knows where or when. We know we shall not meet him here again."

Mr. Howells has, naturally enough, the defects of his qualities; and if it were my purpose here to present an exhaustive study of his writings, rather than merely to touch lightly upon his "American" characteristics, it would be desirable to consider some of these in this place. In his desire to avoid the merely pompous he sometimes falls into the really trifling. His love of analysis runs away with him at times; and parts of such books as "A World of Chance" must weary all but his most undiscriminating admirers. His self-restraint sometimes disappoints us of a vivid colour or a passionate throb which we feel to be our due. His humour and his satire occasionally pass from the fine to the thin.

It is, however, with Mr. Howells in his capacity of literary critic alone that my disappointment is too great to allow of silence. For the exquisiteness of a writer like Mr. Henry James he has the keenest insight, the warmest appreciation. His thorough-going conviction in the prime necessity of realism even leads him out of his way to commend Gabriele d'Annunzio, in whom some of us can detect little but a more than Zolaesque coarseness with a total lack of Zola's genius, insight, purpose, or philosophy. But when he comes to speak of a Thackeray or a Scott, his attitude is one that, to put it in the most complimentary form that I can think of, reminds us strongly of Homeric drowsiness. The virtue of James is one thing and the virtue of Scott is another; but surely admiration for both does not make too unreasonable a demand on catholicity of palate? Mr. Howells could never write himself down an ass, but surely in his criticism of the "Wizard of the North" he has written himself down as one whose literary creed is narrower than his human heart. The school of which Mr. Henry James is a most accomplished member has added more than one exquisite new flavour to the banquet of letters; but it may well be questioned whether a taste for these may not be acquired at too dear a cost if it necessitates a loss of relish for the steady good sense, the power of historic realisation, the rich humanity, and the marvellously fertile imagination of Walter Scott. It is not, I hope, a merely national prejudice that makes me oppose Mr. Howells in this point, though, perhaps, there is a touch of remonstrance in the reflection that that great novelist seems to have no use for the Briton in his works except as a foil or a butt for his American characters.

In considering Mr. Howells as an exponent of Americanism in literature, we have left him in an attitude almost of _Americanus contra mundum_--at any rate in the posture of one who is so entirely absorbed by his delight in the contemporary and national existence around him as to be partially blind to claims separated from him by tracts of time and space. My next example of the American in literature is, I think, to the full as national a type as Mr. Howells, though her Americanism is shown rather in subjective character than in objective theme. Miss Emily Dickinson is still a name so unfamiliar to English readers that I may be pardoned a few lines of biographical explanation. She was born in 1830, the daughter of the leading lawyer of Amherst, a small and quiet town of New England, delightfully situated on a hill, looking out over the undulating woods of the Connecticut valley. It is a little larger than the English Marlborough, and like it owes its distinctive tone to the presence of an important educational institute, Amherst College being one of the best-known and worthiest of the smaller American colleges. In this quiet little spot Miss Dickinson spent the whole of her life, and even to its limited society she was almost as invisible as a cloistered nun except for her appearances at an annual reception given by her father to the dignitaries of the town and college. There was no definite reason either in her physical or mental health for this life of extraordinary seclusion; it seems to have been simply the natural outcome of a singularly introspective temperament. She rarely showed or spoke of her poems to any but one or two intimate friends; only three or four were published during her lifetime; and it was with considerable surprise that her relatives found, on her death in 1886, a large mass of poetical remains, finished and unfinished. A considerable selection from them has been published in three little volumes, edited with tender appreciation by two of her friends, Mrs. Mabel Loomis Todd and Col. T.W. Higginson.

Her poems are all in lyrical form--if the word form may be applied to her utter disregard of all metrical conventions. Her lines are rugged and her expressions wayward to an extraordinary degree, but "her verses all show a strange cadence of inner rhythmical music," and the "thought-rhymes" which she often substitutes for the more regular assonances appeal "to an unrecognised sense more elusive than hearing" (Mrs. Todd). In this curious divergence from established rules of verse Miss Dickinson may be likened to Walt Whitman, whom she differs from in every other particular, and notably in her pithiness as opposed to his diffuseness; but with her we feel in the strongest way that her mode is natural and unsought, utterly free from affectation, posing, or self-consciousness.

Colonel Higginson rightly finds her nearest analogue in William Blake; but this "nearest" is far from identity. While tenderly feminine in her sympathy for suffering, her love of nature, her loyalty to her friends, she is in expression the most unfeminine of poets. The usual feminine impulsiveness and full expression of emotion is replaced in her by an extraordinary condensation of phrase and feeling. In her letters we find the eternal womanly in her yearning love for her friends, her brooding anxiety and sympathy for the few lives closely intertwined with her own. In her poems, however, one is rather impressed with the deep well of poetic insight and feeling from which she draws, but never unreservedly. In spite of frequent strange exaggeration of phrase one is always conscious of a fund of reserve force. The subjects of her poems are few, but the piercing delicacy and depth of vision with which she turned from death and eternity to nature and to love make us feel the presence of that rare thing, genius. Hers is a wonderful instance of the way in which genius can dispense with experience; she sees more by pure intuition than others distil from the serried facts of an eventful life. Perhaps, in one of her own phrases, she is "too intrinsic for renown," but she has appealed strongly to a surprisingly large band of readers in the United States, and it seems to me will always hold her audience. Those who admit Miss Dickinson's talent, but deny it to be poetry, may be referred to Thoreau's saying that no definition of poetry can be given which the true poet will not somewhere sometime brush aside. It is a new departure, and the writer in the _Nation_ (Oct. 10, 1895) is probably right when he says: "So marked a new departure rarely leads to further growth. Neither Whitman nor Miss Dickinson ever stepped beyond the circle they first drew."

It is difficult to select quite adequate samples of Miss Dickinson's art, but perhaps the following little poems will give some idea of her naked simplicity, terseness, oddness,--of her method, in short, if we can apply that word to anything so spontaneous and unconscious:

"I'm nobody! Who are you? Are you nobody, too? Then there's a pair of us. Don't tell! They'd banish us, you know.

"How dreary to be somebody! How public, like a frog, To tell your name the livelong day To an admiring bog!"

* * * * *

"I taste a liquor never brewed, From tankards scooped in pearl; Not all the vats upon the Rhine Yield such an alcohol!

"Inebriate of air am I, And debauchee of dew, Reeling, through endless summer days, From inns of molten blue.

"When landlords turn the drunken bee Out of the foxglove's door, When butterflies renounce their drams, I shall but drink the more!

"Till seraphs swing their snowy hats, And saints to windows run, To see the little tippler Leaning against the sun!"

* * * * *

"But how he set I know not. There seemed a purple stile Which little yellow boys and girls Were climbing all the while,

"Till when they reached the other side, A dominie in grey Put gently up the evening bars, And led the flock away."

* * * * *

"He preached upon 'breadth' till it argued him narrow-- The broad are too broad to define; And of 'truth' until it proclaimed him a liar-- The truth never flaunted a sign. Simplicity fled from his counterfeit presence As gold the pyrites would shun. What confusion would cover the innocent Jesus To meet so enabled a man!"

The "so _enabled_ a man" is a very characteristic Dickinsonian phrase. So, too, are these:

"He put the belt around my life-- I heard the buckle snap." "Unfitted by an instant's grace For the contented beggar's face I wore an hour ago."

* * * * *

"Just his sigh, accented, Had been legible to me."

* * * * *

"The bustle in a house The morning after death Is solemnest of industries Enacted upon earth-- The sweeping up the heart, And putting love away We shall not want to use again Until eternity."

Her interest in all the familiar sights and sounds of a village garden is evident through all her verses. Her illustrations are not recondite, literary, or conventional; she finds them at her own door. The robin, the buttercup, the maple, furnish what she needs. The bee, in particular, seems to have had a peculiar fascination for her, and hums through all her poems. She had even a kindly word for that "neglected son of genius," the spider. Her love of children is equally evident, and no one has ever better caught the spirit of

"Saturday Afternoon

"From all the jails the boys and girls Ecstatically leap, Beloved, only afternoon That prison doesn't keep.

"They storm the earth and stun the air, A mob of solid bliss. Alas! that frowns could lie in wait For such a foe as this!"

The bold extravagance of her diction (which is not, however, _mere_ extravagance) and her ultra-American familiarity with the forces of nature may be illustrated by such stanzas as:

"What if the poles should frisk about And stand upon their heads! I hope I'm ready for the worst, Whatever prank betides."

* * * * *

"If I could see you in a year, I'd wind the months in balls, And put them each in separate drawers Until their time befalls.

"If certain, when this life was out, That yours and mine should be, I'd toss it yonder like a rind, And taste eternity."

For her the lightnings "skip like mice," the thunder "crumbles like a stuff." What a critic has called her "Emersonian self-possession" towards God may be seen in the little poem on the last page of her first volume, where she addresses the Deity as "burglar, banker, father." There is, however, no flippancy in this, no conscious irreverence; Miss Dickinson is not "orthodox," but she is genuinely spiritual and religious. Inspired by its truly American and "_actuel_" freedom, her muse does not fear to sing of such modern and mechanical phenomena as the railway train, which she loves to see "lap the miles and lick the valleys up," while she is fascinated by the contrast between its prodigious force and the way in which it stops, "docile and omnipotent, at its own stable door." But even she can hardly bring the smoking locomotive into such pathetic relations with nature as the "little brig," whose "white foot tripped, then dropped from sight," leaving "the ocean's heart too smooth, too blue, to break for you."

Her poems on death and the beyond, on time and eternity, are full of her peculiar note. Death is the "one dignity" that "delays for all;" the meanest brow is so ennobled by the majesty of death that "almost a powdered footman might dare to touch it now," and yet no beggar would accept "the _éclat_ of death, had he the power to spurn." "The quiet nonchalance of death" is a resting-place which has no terrors for her; death "abashed" her no more than "the porter of her father's lodge." Death's chariot also holds Immortality. The setting sail for "deep eternity" brings a "divine intoxication" such as the "inland soul" feels on its "first league out from land." Though she "never spoke with God, nor visited in heaven," she is "as certain of the spot as if the chart were given." "In heaven somehow, it will be even, some new equation given." "Christ will explain each separate anguish in the fair schoolroom of the sky."

"A death-blow is a life-blow to some Who, till they died, did not alive become; Who, had they lived, had died, but when They died, vitality begun."

The reader who has had the patience to accompany me through these pages devoted to Miss Dickinson will surely own, whether in scoff or praise, the essentially American nature of her muse. Her defects are easily paralleled in the annals of English literature; but only in the liberal atmosphere of the New World, comparatively unshadowed by trammels of authority and standards of taste, could they have co-existed with so much of the highest quality.

A prominent phenomenon in the development of American literature--so prominent as to call for comment even in a fragmentary and haphazard sketch like the present--is the influence exercised by the monthly magazine. The editors of the leading literary periodicals have been practically able to wield a censorship to which there is no parallel in England. The magazine has been the recognised gateway to the literary public; the sweep of the editorial net has been so wide that it has gathered in nearly all the best literary work of the past few decades, at any rate in the department of _belles lettres_. It is not easy to name many important works of pure literature, as distinct from the scientific, the philosophical, and the instructive, that have not made their bow to the public through the pages of the _Century_, the _Atlantic Monthly_, or some one or other of their leading competitors. And probably the proportion of works by new authors that have appeared in the same way is still greater. There are, possibly, two sides as to the value of this supremacy of the magazine, though to most observers the advantages seem to outweigh the disadvantages. Among the former may be reckoned the general encouragement of reading, the opportunities afforded to young writers, the raising of the rate of authors' pay, the dissemination of a vast quantity of useful and salutary information in a popular form. Perhaps of more importance than any of these has been the maintenance of that purity of moral tone in which modern American literature is superior to all its contemporaries. Malcontents may rail at "grandmotherly legislation in letters," at the undue deference paid to the maiden's blush, at the encouragement of the mealy-mouthed and hypocritical; but it is a ground of very solid satisfaction, be the cause what it may, that recent American literature has been so free from the emasculate _fin-de-siècle-ism_, the nauseating pseudo-realism, the epigrammatic hysteria, that has of late been so rife in certain British circles. Moreover, it is impossible to believe that any really strong talent could have been stifled by the frown of the magazine editor. Walt Whitman made his mark without that potentate's assistance; and if America had produced a Zola, he would certainly have come to the front, even if his genius had been hampered with a burden of more than Zolaesque filth.

It is undoubtedly to the predominance of the magazine, among other causes, that are due the prevalence and perfection of the American short story. It has often been remarked that French literature alone is superior in this _genre_; and many of the best American productions of the kind can scarcely be called second even to the French in daintiness of phrase, sureness of touch, sense of proportion, and skilful condensation of interest. Excellent examples of the short story have been common in American literature from the times of Hawthorne, Irving, and Poe down to the present day. Mr. Henry James, perhaps, stands at the head of living writers in this branch. Miss Mary E. Wilkins is inimitable in her sketches of New England, the pathos, as well as the humour of which she touches with a master hand. It is interesting to note that, foreign as her subject would seem to be to the French taste, her literary skill has been duly recognised by the _Revue des Deux Mondes_. Bret Harte and Frank Stockton are so eminently short-story writers that the longer their stories become, the nearer do they approach the brink of failure. Other names that suggest themselves in a list that might be indefinitely extended are those of Miss Jewett, Mrs. Elizabeth Phelps Ward, Mr. Richard Harding Davis, Mr. T.B. Aldrich, Mr. Thos. Nelson Page, Mr. Owen Wister, Mr. Hamlin Garland, Mr. G.W. Cable, and (in a lighter vein) Mr. H.C. Bunner.

This chapter may fitly close with a straw of startling literary contrast, that seems to me alone almost enough to bring American literature under the rubric of this volume's title. If a critic familiar only with the work chiefly associated with the author's name were asked to indicate the source of the following quotations, I should be surprised if he were to guess correctly in his first hundred efforts. Indeed, I should not be astonished if some of his shots missed the mark by centuries of time as well as oceans of space. One hesitates to use lightly the word Elizabethan; but at present I do not recall any other modern work that suggests it more strongly than some of the lines I quote below:

"So wanton are all emblems that the cloak Which folds a king will kiss a crooked nail As quickly as a beggar's gabardine Will do like office."

* * * * *

"Thou art so like to substance that I'd think Myself a shadow ere thyself a dream."

* * * * *

"Not so much beauty, sire, As would make full the pocket of thine eye."

* * * * *

"A vein That spilt its tender blue upon her eyelid, As though the cunning hand that dyed her eyes Had slipped for joy of its own work."

* * * * *

"What am I who doth rail against the fate That binds mankind? The atom of an atom, Particle of this particle the earth, That with its million kindred worlds doth spin Like motes within the universal light. What if I sin--am lost--do crack my life Against the gateless walls of Fate's decree? Is the world fouler for a gnat's corpse? Nay, The ocean, is it shallower for the drop It leaves upon a blade of grass?"

* * * * *

"There is a boy in Essex, they do say, Can crack an ox's ribs in one arm-crotch."

All these passages are taken from the tragedy of "Athelwold," written by Miss Amelie Rives, the author of a novel entitled "The Quick and the Dead."

FOOTNOTES:

[20] I confess I should have felt myself on still firmer ground in making the above comparison if I had been able to select "Peter Ibbetson" instead of "Trilby" as the American favourite. It is distinctly the finest, the most characteristic, and the most convincing of Mr. Du Maurier's novels, though it is easy to see why it did not enjoy such a "boom" as its successor. In "Peter Ibbetson" our moral sense does not feel outraged by the fact of the sympathy we have to extend to a man-slayer; we are made to feel that a man may kill his fellow in a moment of ungovernable and not unrighteous wrath without losing his fundamental goodness. On the other hand, it seems to me, Mr. Du Maurier fails to convert us to belief in the possibility of such a character as Trilby, and fails to make us wholly sympathise with his pæans in her praise. It seems psychologically impossible for a woman to sin so repeatedly as Trilby, and so apparently without any overwhelming temptation, and yet at the same time to retain her essential purity. It is a prostitution of the word "love" to excuse Trilby's temporary amourettes with a "_quia multum amavit_."

[21] His extraordinary article on George Du Maurier in _Harper's Magazine_ for September, 1897, is, perhaps, so far as style is concerned, as glaring an example of how not to do it as can be found in the range of American letters.

[22] Perhaps Mr. George W. Cable is entitled to rank with Mr. Howells in this respect as a man who refused to disguise his moral convictions behind his literary art, and thus infallibly and with full consciousness imperilled his popularity among his own people.

[23] "Stops of Various Quills," by W.D. Howells (Harper & Brothers, New York, 1895).

XI

Certain Features of Certain Cities