more effortless than the easy play of his wit. One thrust at a gang of politicians junketing at their constituents' expense deserves to be recalled as a fair example of his skill: BLUE CUT, TENN., May 2, 1885.-The second section of the train bearing the Illinois Legislature to New Orleans was stopped near this station by bandits last night. After relieving the bandits of their watches and money, the excursionists proceeded on their journey with increased enthusiasm.' Political sarcasms like the foregoing, though frequently employed, have ordinarily been powerless to influence either the character of American politics or the fortunes of any particular politician. On the contrary, they have had, like Ford jokes, a certain advertising value, being considered less marks of discontent than the banter of satisfaction with which healthy Americans accompany their doings. Most unusual, therefore, is the spectacle of the national frame of mind changed in consequence of the work of a humorist. Yet that result may fairly be claimed for the "Dooleys" written by Finley Peter Dunne during the Spanish-American War. The American public, conscious of a chivalrous mission in the war, uncertain of the strength of the adversary, and angry at the bustling incompetence and greedy profiteering at home, lost its sense of humour. Its regeneration from the slough of perfervid earnestness was accelerated by the cool remarks of the Irish saloonkeeper of Archey Road, Chicago. As Mr. Dooley commented on the great charge of the army mules at Tampa with reflections on other jackasses, pictured the Cuban towns captured by war-correspondents and the Spanish fleet sunk by dispatch boats, celebrated General Miles's uniform and the pugnacity of "Cousin George Dooley" (Admiral Dewey), the national fever cooled, and the nation, realizing its superfluous power, burst into saving laughter. "We're a gr-reat people," said Mr. Hennessy, earnestly. "We ar-re," said Mr. Dooley. "We ar-re that. An' th' best iv it is, we know we ar-re." Mr. Dooley for some years continued to give his opinions on the men and affairs of peace with a shrewdness that recalls I S. Thompson, Eugene Field, vol. ii., p. 204. the pungent insight of Josh Billings and makes him one of the most quotable writers. Americans of the present generation are not likely to forget some of his sayings, least of all the remark of Father Kelly: "Hogan," he says, "I'll go into th' battle with a prayer book in wan hand an' a soord in th' other," he says; "an' if th' wurruk calls f'r two hands, 'tis not th' soord I'll dhrop," he says. When not busied with comments on current events, Mr. Dooley sometimes had leisure to relate incidents of the life about him in the gas-house district. As an interpreter of the city, however, he yields to Sydney Porter ("O. Henry").1 The O. Henry story is the last word in deft manipulation, but as a humorist Porter is not deeply philosophical. His neat situations, surprising turns, and verbal cleverness show a refinement upon the methods of predecessors, indeed, but not a new comic attitude. Unsurpassed in daring extravaganza when he can give himself completely to gaiety, he becomes immediately sober in the presence of thought or sentiment. In these respects he represents the norm of recent American humour at a high pitch of technical perfection, and his death in 1910 may fittingly be taken as the close of the period. Just at present, judicious Americans are importing their best current humour from Canada. 1 See Book III, Chap. VI. CHAPTER X Later Poets N the expanding, heterogeneous America of the second half of the nineteenth century, poetry lost its clearly defined tendencies and became various and experimental. It did not cease to be provincial; for although no one region dominated as New England had dominated in the first half of the century, the provincial accent was as unmistakable, and the purely national accent as rare, as before. The East, rapidly becoming the so-called "effete East," produced a poetry to which the West was indifferent; the West, still the West of "carnivorous animals of a superior rank," produced a poetry that the cultivated classes of the East regarded as vulgar. In a broad way it may perhaps be said that the poetry of this period was dedicated either to beauty or to "life"; to a revered past, or to the present and the future; to the civilization of Asia and Europe, or to the ideals and manners of America, at least the West of America. The virtue of the poetry of beauty was its fidelity to a noble tradition, its repetition, with a difference, of familiar and justly approved types of beauty; its defect was mechanical repetition, petty embellishment. The virtue of the poetry of "life" was fidelity to experience, vitality of utterance; its defect, crudity, meanness, insensitiveness to fineness of feeling and beauty of expression. Where the poets are many and all are minor it is difficult to make a choice, but on the whole it seems that the outstanding poets of the East were Emily Dickinson, Aldrich, Bayard Taylor, R. H. Stoddard, Stedman, Gilder, and Hovey; and of the West, Bret Harte, Joaquin Miller, Sill, Riley, and Moody.' None of these has gained more with time than has Emily Dickinson. Despite her defective sense of form, which makes her a better New Englander than Easterner, she has acquired a permanent following of discriminating readers through her extraordinary insight into the life of the mind and the soul. This insight is that of a latter-day Puritan, completely divorced from the outward stir of life, retiring, by preference, deeper and deeper within. Born in 1830 at Amherst, Massachusetts, she lived there all her life, and in 1886 died there. The inwardness and moral ruggedness of Puritanism she inherited mainly through her father, Edward Dickinson, lawyer and treasurer of Amherst College, a Puritan of the old type, whose heart, according to his daughter, was "pure and terrible." Her affection for him was so largely compounded with awe that in a sense they were strangers. "I have a brother and sister," she wrote to her poetical preceptor, Thomas Wentworth Higginson'; "my mother does not care for thought, and father, too busy with his briefs to notice what we do. He buys me many books, but begs me not to read them, because he fears they jiggle the mind. They are religious, except me." Of course, she too was religious, and intensely so, breathing as she did the intoxicating air of Transcendentalism. In person she described herself as "small, like the wren; and my hair is bold like the chestnut burr; and my eyes, like the sherry in the glass that the guest leaves." "You ask of my companions. Hills, sir, and the sundown, and a dog large as myself." These, and not her family, were actually her companions, together with a few books and her own soul. She had an alert introspection that brought her more than the wealth of the Indies. There is no better example of the New England tendency to moral revery than this last pale Indiansummer flower of Puritanism. She is said literally to have spent years without passing the doorstep, and many more years without leaving her father's grounds. After the death of her parents, not to mention her dog Carlo, she retired still further within herself, till the sounds of the everyday world must have come to her as from a previous state of existence. "I find ecstacy in living," she said to Higginson, and spoke truly, as her poems show. In an unexpected light on orchards, in a wistful mood of meadow or wood-border held secure for a 1 See Book III, Chap. XIII. moment before it vanished; in the few books that she read— her Keats, her Shakespeare, her Revelation; in the echoes, obscure in origin, that stirred within her own mind and soul, now a tenuous melody, now a deep harmony, a haunting question, or a memorable affirmation;-everywhere she displayed something of the mystic's insight and joy. And she expressed her experience in her poems, forgetting the world altogether, intent only on the satisfaction of giving her fluid life lasting form, her verse being her journal. Yet the impulse to expression was probably not strong, because she wrote no poems, save one or two, as she herself asserts, until the winter 1861-62, when she was over thirty years old. In the spring of 1862 she wrote a letter to Higginson beginning, "Are you too deeply occupied to say if my verse is alive? The mind is so near itself it cannot see distinctly, and I have none to ask." Discerning the divine spark in her shapeless verse, he welcomed her advances, and became her "preceptor," loyally listened to but, as was inevitable, mainly unheeded. Soon perceiving this, Higginson continued to encourage her, for many years, without trying to divert her lightning-flashes. In "H. H."-Helen Hunt Jackson,' herself a poetess of some distinction, and her early schoolmate at Amherst—she had another sympathetic friend, who, suspecting the extent of her production, asked for the post of literary executor. At length, in 1890, a volume edited by Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd was published, Poems by Emily Dickinson, arranged under various heads according to subject. The book succeeded at once, six editions being sold in the first six months; so that a second series, and later a third, seemed to be justified. From the first selection to the third, however, there is a perceptible declension. The subject division adopted by her editors serves well enough: Life, Love, Nature, Time and Eternity. A mystical poetess sequestered in a Berkshire village, she naturally concerned herself with neither past nor present, but with the things that are timeless. Apparently deriving no inspiration from the war to which Massachusetts, including her preceptorial colonel, gave itself so freely, she spent her days in brooding over the mystery of pain, the true nature of success, the refuge of the tomb, the witchcraft of the bee's murmur, the election of love, * See also Book III, Chaps. vi and XI. VOL. III-3 |