Part 8 (1/2)
”Sat.u.r.day 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 ill.u.s.trated 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 b.a.l.l.s, 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 G.o.d 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 d.i.c.kinson 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 enn.o.bled by the majesty of death that ”almost a powdered footman might dare to touch it now,” and yet no beggar would accept ”the _eclat_ 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 G.o.d, 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 d.i.c.kinson 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 censors.h.i.+p 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 compet.i.tors.
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 quant.i.ty 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-siecle-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 a.s.sistance; 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.