country as he deserves--and this in spite of the facts that his novels
are widely read and his name is in all the magazines. What I mean is,
that in the conversation of the cultured circles of Boston or New York
too much stress is apt to be laid on the prosaic and commonplace
character of his materials. There are, perhaps, unusually good reasons
for this point of view. Cromwell's wife and daughters would probably
prefer to have him painted wartless, but posterity wants him warts and
all. So those to whom the average--the _very_ average--American is an
every-day and all-day occurrence cannot abide him in their literature;
while we who are removed by the ocean of space can enjoy these
pictures of common life, as enabling us, better than any idealistic
romance or study of the rare and extraordinary, to realise the life of
our American cousins. To those who can read between the lines with any
discretion, I should say that novels like "Silas Lapham" and "A Modern
Instance" will give a clearer idea of American character and
tendencies than any other contemporary works of fiction; to those who
can read between the lines--for it is obvious that the commonplace and
the slightly vulgar no more exhaust the field of society in the United
States than elsewhere. But to me Mr. Howells, even when in his most
realistic and sordid vein, always _suggests_ the ideal and the noble;
the reverse of the medal proclaims loudly that it _is_ the reverse,
and that there is an obverse of a very different kind to be seen by
those who will turn the coin. It seems to me that no very great
palæontological skill is necessary to reconstruct the whole frame of
the animal from the portion that Mr. Howells sets up for us. His
novels remind me of those maps of a limited area which indicate very
clearly what lies beyond, by arrows on their margins. In nothing does
Mr. Howells more clearly show his "Americanism" than in his almost
divinely sympathetic and tolerant attitude towards commonplace,
erring, vulgar humanity. "Ah, poor real life, which I love!" he writes
somewhere; "can I make others share the delight I find in thy foolish
and insipid face!" We must remember in reading him his own theory of
the duty of the novelist. "I am extremely opposed to what we call
ideal characters. I think their portrayal is mischievous; it is
altogether offensive to me as an artist, and, as far as the morality
goes, I believe that when an artist tries to create an ideal he mixes
some truth up with a vast deal of sentimentality, and produces
something that is extremely noxious as well as nauseous. I think that
no man can consistently portray a probable type of human character
without being useful to his readers. When he endeavors to create
something higher than that, he plays the fool himself and tempts his
readers to folly. He tempts young men and women to try to form
themselves upon models that would be detestable in life, if they were
ever found there."
Perhaps the delicacy of Mr. Howells' touch and the gentle subtlety of
his satire are nowhere better illustrated than in the little
drawing-room "farces" of which he frequently publishes one in an
American magazine about Christmas time. I call them farces because he
himself applies that name to them; but these dainty little comediettas
contain none of the rollicking qualities which the word usually
connotes to English ears. They have all the _finesse_ of the best
French work of the kind, combined with a purity of atmosphere and of
intent that we are apt to claim as Anglo-Saxon, and which, perhaps, is
especially characteristic of America. One is tired of hearing, in this
connection, of the blush that rises to the innocent girl's cheek; but
why should even those who are supposed to be past the age of blushing
not also enjoy humour unspiced by even a suggestion of lubricity? The
"Mikado" and "Pinafore" have done yeoman's service in displacing the
meretricious delights of Offenbach and Lecocq; and Howells' little
pieces yield an exquisite, though innocent, enjoyment to those whose
taste in farces has not been fashioned and spoiled by clumsy English
adaptations or imitations of intriguing _levers-de-rideau_, and to
those who do not associate the name of farce with horse-play and
practical joking. They form the best illustration of what has been
described as Mr. Howells' "method of occasionally opening up to the
reader through the bewilderingly intricate mazes of his dialogue clear
perceptions of the true values of his characters, imitating thus the
actual trick of life, which can safely be depended on to now and then
expose meanings that words have cleverly served the purpose of
concealing." If I hesitate to call them comediettas "in porcelain," it
is because the suggested analogy falls short, owing to the greater
reconditeness, the purer intellectual quality, of Mr. Howells' humour
as compared with Mr. Austin Dobson's. So intensely American in quality
are these scenes from the lives of Mr. and Mrs. Willis Campbell, Mr.
and Mrs. Roberts, and their friends, that it sometimes seems to me
that they might almost be used as touchstones for the advisability of
a visit to the United States. If you can appreciate and enjoy these
farces, go to America by all means; you will have a "good time." If
you cannot, better stay at home, unless your motive is merely one of
base mechanic necessity; you will find the American atmosphere a
little too rare.
A recent phase of Mr. Howells' activity--that, namely, in which, like
Mr. William Morris, he has boldly risked his reputation as a literary
artist in order to espouse unpopular social causes of whose justice he
is convinced--will interest all who have hearts to feel as well as
brains to think. He made his fame by consummately artistic work,
addressed to the daintiest of literacy palates; and yet in such books
as "A Hazard of New Fortunes" and "A Traveller from Altruria" he has
conscientiously taken up the defence and propagation of a form of
socialism, without blanching before the epicure who demands his
literature "neat" or the Philistine householder who brands all
socialistic writings as dangerous. Mr. Howells, however, knows his
public; and the reforming element in him cannot but rejoice at the
hearing he has won through its artistic counterpart. No one of his
literary brethren of any importance has, so far as I know, emulated
his courage in this particular. Some, like Mr. Bellamy, have made a
reputation by their socialistic writings; none has risked so
magnificent a structure already built up on a purely artistic
foundation. It is mainly on account of this phase of his work, in
which he has not forsaken his art, but makes it "the expression of his
whole life and the thought and feeling mature life has brought to
him," that Mr. Howells has been claimed as _the_ American novelist,
the best delineator of American life.[22]
Mr. Howells the poet is not nearly so well known as Mr. Howells the
novelist; and there are doubtless many European students of American
literature who are unaware of the extremely characteristic work he has
done in verse. The accomplished critic, Mr. R.H. Stoddard, writes thus
of a volume of poems published by Mr. Howells about three years
ago:[23] "There is something here which, if not new in American
poetry, has never before made itself so manifest there, never before
declared itself with such vivacity and force, the process by which it
emerged from emotion and clothed itself in speech being so
undiscoverable by critical analysis that it seems, as Matthew Arnold
said of some of Wordsworth's poetry, as if Nature took the pen from
his hand and wrote in his stead." These poems are all short, and their
titles (such as "What Shall It Profit?" "The Sphinx," "If,"
"To-morrow," "Good Society," "Equality," "Heredity," and so forth)
sufficiently indicate that they do not rank among the lighter
triflings with the muse. Their abiding sense of an awful and
inevitable fate, their keen realisation of the startling contrasts
between wealth and poverty, their symbolical grasp on the great
realities of life and death, and the consummate skill of the artistic
setting are all pervaded with something that recalls the paintings of
Mr. G.F. Watts or the visions of Miss Olive Schreiner. One specimen
can alone be given here:
"The Bewildered Guest
"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.