The Land of Contrasts Part 8

"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.

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 t.i.tle. If a critic familiar only with the work chiefly a.s.sociated 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 s.p.a.ce. 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 gra.s.s?"

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

All these pa.s.sages are taken from the tragedy of "Athelwold," written by Miss Amelie Rives, the author of a novel ent.i.tled "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 paeans 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 prost.i.tution 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 ent.i.tled 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

One of the dicta in M. Bourget's "Outre Mer" to which I cannot but take exception is that which insists on the essential similarity and monotony of all the cities of the United States. Pa.s.sing over the question of the right of a Parisian to quarrel with monotony of street architecture, I should simply ask what single country possesses cities more widely divergent than New York and New Orleans, Philadelphia and San Francisco, Chicago and San Antonio, Was.h.i.+ngton and Pittsburg? If M. Bourget merely means that there is a tendency to h.o.m.ogeneity in the case of modern cities which was not compatible with the picturesque though uncomfortable reasons for variety in more ancient foundations, his remark amounts to a truism. For his implied comparison with European cities to have any point, he should be able to a.s.sert that the recent architecture of the different cities of Europe is more varied than the contemporary architecture of the United States. This seems to me emphatically not the case. Modern Paris resembles modern Rome more closely than any two of the above-named cities resemble each other; and it is simply the universal tendency to note similarity first and then unlikeness that makes the brief visitor to the United States fail to find characteristic individuality in the various great cities of the country. We are also too p.r.o.ne to forget that the United States, though continental in its proportions, is after all but a single nation, enjoying the same inst.i.tutions and speaking practically one tongue; and this of necessity introduces an element of sameness that must be absent from the continent of Europe with which we are apt to compare it. If we oppose to the United States that one European country which approaches it most nearly in size, we shall, I think, find the balance of uniformity does not incline to the American side. When all is said, however, it cannot be denied that there _is_ a great deal of similarity in the smaller and newer towns and cities of the West, and Mr. W.S. Caine's likening them to "international exhibitions a week before their opening" will strike many visitors as very apposite. It is only to the indiscriminate and unhedged form of M. Bourget's statement that objection need be made.

Architecture struck me as, perhaps, the one art in which America, so far as modern times are concerned, could reasonably claim to be on a par with, if not ahead of, any European country whatsoever. I say this with a full realisation of the many artistic nightmares that oppress the soil from the Atlantic to the Pacific, with a perfect recollection of the acres of petty, monotonous, and mean structures in almost every great city of the Union, with a keen appreciation of the witty saying that the American architect often "shows no more self-restraint than a bunch of fire-crackers." It is, however, distinctly true, as Mr.

Montgomery Schuyler well puts it, that "no progress can result from the labour of architects whose training has made them so fastidious that they are more revolted by the crudity of the forms that result from the attempt to express a new meaning than by the failure to make the attempt;" and it is in his freedom from this fastidious lack of courage that the American architect is strong. His earlier efforts at independence were, perhaps, hardly fortunate; but he is now entering a phase in which adequate professional knowledge cooperates with good taste to define the limits within which his imagination may legitimately work. I know not where to look, within the last quarter of a century or so, for more tasteful designs, greater sincerity of purpose, or happier adaptations to environment than the best creations of men like Mr. H.H. Richardson, Mr. R.M. Hunt, Mr. J.W. Root, Mr.

G.B. Post, and Messrs. McKim, Mead, and White. Some of the new residential streets of places as recent as Chicago or St. Paul more than hold their own, as it seems to me, with any contemporaneous thoroughfares of their own cla.s.s in Europe. To my own opinion let me add the valuable testimony of Mr. E.A. Freeman, in his "Impressions of the United States" (pp. 246, 247):

I found the modern churches, of various denominations, certainly better, as works of architecture, than I had expected. They may quite stand beside the average of modern churches in England, setting aside a few of the very best.... But I thought the churches, whose style is most commonly Gothic of one kind or another, decidedly less successful than some of the civil buildings. In some of these, I hardly know how far by choice, how far by happy accident, a style has been hit upon which seemed to me far more at home than any of the reproductions of Gothic. Much of the street architecture of several cities has very successfully caught the leading idea of the true Italian style.

New York, the gateway to America for, perhaps, nine out of ten visitors, is described by Mr. Richard Grant White, the American writer, as "the das.h.i.+ng, dirty, demi-rep of cities." Mr. Joaquin Miller, the poet of the Sierras, calls it "an iron-fronted, iron-footed, and iron-hearted town." Miss Florence Marryat a.s.serts that New York is "_without any exception_ the most charming city she has ever been in." Miss Emily Faithful admits that at first it seems rough and new, but says that when one returns to it from the West, one recognises that it has everything essential in common with his European experiences. In my own note-book I find that New York impressed me as being "like a lady in ball costume, with diamonds in her ears, and her toes out at her boots."

Here, then, is evidence that New York makes a pretty strong impression on her guests, and that this impression is not by any means the same in every case. New York is evidently a person of character, and of a character with many facets. To most European visitors it must, on the _whole_, be somewhat of a disappointment; and it is not really an advantageous or even a characteristic portal to the American continent. For one thing, it is too overwhelmingly cosmopolitan in the composition of its population to strike the distinctive American note.

It is not alone that New York society imitates that of France and England in a more p.r.o.nounced way than I found anywhere else in America, but the names one sees over the shops seem predominantly German and Jewish, accents we are familiar with at home resound in our ears, the quarters we are first introduced to recall the dinginess and shabbiness of the waterside quarters of cities like London and Glasgow. More intimate acquaintance finds much that is strongly American in New York; but this is not the first impression, and first impressions count for so much that it seems to me a pity that New York is for most travellers the prologue to their American experiences.