In nearly all of Miss Dawson’s work that I have seen is an elusive
something defying analysis, even description—something that is not in
the words. I do not know how she gets it where it is; I never could
either surprise her secret by swift strokes of attention, come upon
it by patient still-hunting, nor in any way get at the trick of it.
I can name it only in metaphor as a light behind the words; a light
like that of Poe’s “red litten eves”; a light such as falls at sunset
upon desolate marshes, tingeing the plumage of the tall heron and
prophesying the joyless laugh of the loon. That selfsame light shines
somewhere through and under Doré’s long parallel cloud-bands along his
horizons, and I have seen it, with an added bleakness, backgrounding
the tall rood in the Lone Mountain cemetery of San Francisco. I dare
say it is all very easy—to Miss Dawson: she simply writes and some
“remote, unfriended, melancholy” ancestor stands by to “do the rest.”
The publication of Miss Dawson’s _An Itinerant House and Other Stories_
is an event, doubtless, which does not seem at present—at least not
to that cave-bat, “the general reader”—to cut much of a figure, but I
shall miss my guess if it do not hold attention when Father Time has
much that the world admires snugly tucked away in his wallet—“alms
for oblivion.” This is a guess only: I am not a believer in the
doctrine that good literary work has some inherent quality compelling
recognition and conferring vitality. Good literary work, like anything
else, endures if the conditions favor, perishes if they do not; so my
guess, upon examination, dwindles to a hope compounded of rather more
desire than expectation.
Miss Dawson’s book is not to be judged as other books. It will help
the reader to a just appreciation of this wonderful woman’s work
in letters if he understand beforehand that the world she sees is
not the world we see; that her men and women are as unearthly as
their environment, making no demands whatever on our sympathies, our
affections, our admiration. Indeed, she cares nothing for them herself,
putting an end to their strange, unhuman existence when done with them
as indifferently as a tired player removes the chessmen from board to
box. This, for example, is how she disposes of a few that have become
superfluous:
“Mrs. Anson proved a hard-faced, cold-hearted Cape Cod woman, a scold
and drudge, who hated us as much as we disliked her. Homesick and
unhappy, she soon went East and died. Within a year Anson was found
dead where he had gone hunting in the Saucelito woods, supposed a
suicide; Dering was hung by the Vigilantes and the rest were scattered
on the four winds.”
But when Miss Dawson’s narrative flows with a loitering current you may
commonly hear the sound of slow music and get glimpses of a darkened
stage.
These stories have all a good deal of the supernatural and very little
of the natural. The lover of “realism” (who is sometimes pleased
to call himself a “veritist”) may with great profit diligently let
them alone; as may also the mere idler, who reads with a delinquent
advertence, to pass the time. Miss Dawson is too true an artist to
write for a slack attention: every page of her book is rich with
significances underlying the narrative like gold in the bed of a
stream. And this is especially true of the poems.
Those poems, by the way—how came they there? Why is there a poet in
every story, whose verses have nothing to do with the action of the
piece, though always in harmony with its spirit? I think I know the
secret of this irrelevant feature of the work, and a pathetic one it
is: Miss Dawson puts her poetry into her prose because she can not get
it published otherwise—the more shame to our schools and public. Not
all her verse is as good as the prose that carries it. Some of it is
ungrammatical, and two whole pages of one piece have only the finals
“ain” and “aining”—an insupportable performance. Much of it lacks
ease, fluency; but all is worth reading and reading again; and in the
“Ballade of the Sea of Sleep” are an elevation and largeness that no
living poet has excelled.
The scene of all Miss Dawson’s stories is San Francisco—her San
Francisco—San Francisco as she sees it from her eyrie atop of “Russian
Hill.” To her it is a dream city—a city of wraiths and things forbidden
to the senses—of half-heard whispers from tombs of men long dead and
damned—of winds that sing dirges, clouds that are signs and portents,
fogs peopled with fantastic existences pranking like mad, as is the
habit of all sea-folk on shore leave—a city where it is never morning,
where the birds never sing, where children are unknown, and where at
night the street-lights at the summits of the hills “flare as if out of
the sky,” signaling mysterious messages from another world. In short,
this sister to Hugo has breathed into the gross material San Francisco
so strange a soul that to him who has read her book the name of the
town must henceforth have a meaning that never before attached to any
word of human speech. Wherefore I say of this book that it is a work
of supreme genius; and I try to have faith to believe that whatever
else may befall it, while the language in which it is written remains
intelligible to men it will not fail to challenge the attention and
engage the interest of the judicious.
To those who have feared the effect upon Miss Dawson’s powers of
time, sorrow, privation and hope deferred, it is a joy to note that
her latest and longest story, “A Gracious Visitation”—the one written
especially for this volume, the others being from twenty to thirty
years old—is the best. It is indeed a marvelous creation, and I know of
nothing in literature having a sufficient resemblance to it to serve
as a basis of comparison. In point of mere originality, I should say
it is unsurpassed and unsurpassable; the ability to figure to oneself
a story more novel and striking would, in a writer, imply the ability
to write one—which I think the most capable writer would be slowest to
claim. The best of the other stories is by no means the one that gives
its title to the book. I shall not undertake to say which is best, but
shall conclude by quoting the “envoy” of “The Ballade of the Sea of
Sleep”;
Archangels, princes, thrones, dominions, powers,
Which of you dwarf the centuries to hours,
Or swell the moments into æons’ sweep?
Is it the Prince of Darkness, then, who cowers
Below the dream-waves of the Sea of Sleep?
1897.