The Land of Contrasts Part 7

during his peregrination of Europe. "Here," he said, "is one error which I am absolutely sure of: you call this a statue of Minerva; but I know that's wrong, because I saw _Pallas_ carved on the pedestal!"

When I told this tale to English friends, they saw in it nothing but a proof of the colossal ignorance of the travelling American. To my mind, however, it redounded more to the credit of America than to its discredit. It showed that Americans of defective education felt the need of culture and spared no pains to procure it. A London tradesman with the education of my American friend would probably never extend his ideas of travelling beyond Margate, or at most a week's excursion to "Parry." But this indefatigable tourist had visited all the chief galleries of Europe, and had doubtless greatly improved his taste in art and educated his sense of the refined and beautiful, even though his book-learning had not taught him that the same G.o.ddess might have two different names.

The application of this anecdote to the present condition of American literature is obvious. The great fact is that there is an enormous crowd of readers, and the great hope is that they will eventually work their way up through Miss Laura Jean Libbey to heights of purer air.

America has not so much degraded a previously existing literary palate as given a taste of some sort to those who under old-world conditions might never have come to it. In American literature as in American life we find all the phenomena of a transition period--all the symptoms that might be expected from the extraordinary mixture of the old and the new, the childlike and the knowing, the past and the present, in this Land of Contrasts. The startling difference between the best and the worst writers is often reflected in different works by the same author; or a real and strong natural talent for writing will be found conjoined with an extraordinary lack of education and training. An excellent piece of English--pithy, forcible, and even elegant--will often shatter on some simple grammatical reef, such as the use of "as" for "that" ("he did not know as he could"), or of the plural for the singular ("a long ways off"). Mr. James Lane Allen, the author of a series of refined and delicately worded romances, can write such phrases as "In a voice neither could scarce hear" and "Shake hands with me and _tell_ me good-by." ("The Choir Invisible,"

pp. 222, 297.)

I know not whether the phrase "was graduated," applied not to a vernier, but to a student, be legitimate or not; it is certainly so used by the best American writers. Another common American idiom that sounds queer to British ears is, "The minutes were ordered printed"

(for "to be printed"). Misquotations and misuse of foreign phrases are terribly rife; and even so spirited and entertaining a writer as Miss F.C. Baylor will write: "This Jenny, with the _esprit de l'escalier_ of her s.e.x, had at once divined and resented" ("On Both Sides," p.

26). In the same way one is constantly appalled in conversation by hearing college graduates say "acrost" for "across" and making other "bad breaks" which in England could not be conjoined with an equal amount of culture and education.

The extreme fastidiousness and delicacy of the leading American writers, as above referred to, may be to a large extent accounted for by an inevitable reaction against the general tendency to the careless and the slipshod, and is thus in its way as significant and natural a result of existing conditions as any other feature of American literature. Perhaps a secondary cause of this type of writing may be looked for in the fact that so far the spirit of New England has dominated American literature. Even those writers of the South and West who are freshest in their material and vehicle are still permeated by the tone, the temper, the method, the ideals, of the New England school. And certainly Allibone's dictionary of authors shows that an enormous proportion of American writers are to this day of New England origin or descent.

Among living American writers the two whose names occur most spontaneously to the mind as typical examples are, perhaps, Henry James and W.D. Howells. Of these the former has identified himself so much with European life and has devoted himself so largely to European subjects that we, perhaps, miss to some extent the American atmosphere in his works, though he undoubtedly possesses the American quality of workmanship in a very high degree. Or, to put it in another way, his touch is indisputably American, while his accessories, his _staff.a.ge_, are cosmopolitan. His American hand has become dyed to that it works in. This, however, is more true of his later than of his earlier works. That imperishable little cla.s.sic "Daisy Miller" is a very exquisite and typical specimen of the American suggestiveness of style; indeed, as I have hinted (Chapter IV.), its suggestiveness almost overshot the mark and required the explanation of a dramatic key. His dislike of the obvious and the commonplace sometimes leads Mr. James to become artificial and even obscure,[21] but at its best his style is as perspicuous as it is distinguished, dainty, and subtle; there is, perhaps, no other living artist in words who can give his admirers so rare a literary pleasure in mere exquisiteness of workmanship.

Mr. Howells, unlike Mr. James, is purely and exclusively American, in his style as in his subject, in his main themes as in his incidental ill.u.s.trations, in his spirit, his temperament, his point of view. No one has written more pleasantly of Venice; but just as surely there is a something in his Venetian sketches which no one but an American could have put there. Mr. James may be as patriotic a citizen of the Great Republic, but there is not so much tangible evidence of the fact in his writings; Mr. Howells may be as cosmopolitan in his sympathies as Mr. James, but his writings alone would hardly justify the inference. Mr. Howells also possesses a _bonhomie_, a geniality, a good-nature veiled by a slight mask of cynicism, that may be personal, but which strikes one as also a characteristic American trait. Mr.

James is not, I hasten to say, the reverse of this, but he shows a coolness in his treatment, a lordly indifference to the fate of his creations, an almost pitiless keenness of a.n.a.lysis, which savour a little more of an end-of-the-century European than of a young and genial democracy.

Mr. Howells is, perhaps, not always so well appreciated in his own 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 s.p.a.ce 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 n.o.ble; 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 palaeontological 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 att.i.tude 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 ill.u.s.trated 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 a.s.sociate the name of farce with horse-play and practical joking. They form the best ill.u.s.tration 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 a.n.a.logy 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 a.n.a.lysis 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 t.i.tles (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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s; 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 a.n.a.lysis 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 pa.s.sionate throb which we feel to be our due. His humour and his satire occasionally pa.s.s 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 coa.r.s.eness 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 att.i.tude 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 a.s.s, 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 b.u.t.t for his American characters.

In considering Mr. Howells as an exponent of Americanism in literature, we have left him in an att.i.tude almost of _America.n.u.s 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 s.p.a.ce. 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 d.i.c.kinson 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 inst.i.tute, Amherst College being one of the best-known and worthiest of the smaller American colleges. In this quiet little spot Miss d.i.c.kinson 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 ma.s.s 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 subst.i.tutes for the more regular a.s.sonances appeal "to an unrecognised sense more elusive than hearing"

(Mrs. Todd). In this curious divergence from established rules of verse Miss d.i.c.kinson 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 a.n.a.logue in William Blake; but this "nearest" is far from ident.i.ty. 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 d.i.c.kinson's talent, but deny it to be poetry, may be referred to Th.o.r.eau'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 d.i.c.kinson ever stepped beyond the circle they first drew."

It is difficult to select quite adequate samples of Miss d.i.c.kinson'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 n.o.body! Who are you?

Are you n.o.body, 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 b.u.t.terflies 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 d.i.c.kinsonian 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 ill.u.s.trations are not recondite, literary, or conventional; she finds them at her own door.

The robin, the b.u.t.tercup, 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