i
Was it Emerson who said of the poems by Emily Dickinson that they were “poetry pulled up by the roots, with the earth and dew clinging to them”? I can’t be sure, for someone has culpably made off with my copy of Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s Ponkapog Papers, in which there is a pleasant essay on Emily Dickinson. Aldrich, of course, said in his meticulous way that poetry should not be pulled up by the roots; but modern feeling does not agree with him, holding the bit of earth and the sparkle of dewy freshness evidence incontrovertible that the flower is authentic and not mere paper or wax. Emily Dickinson lived from 1830 to 1886, a recluse who in her lifetime wrote over 600 poems, hardly any of which were published until after her death. And then?
Ah, but the estimation in which she is held, and a sequence of fame, steadily grows. Almost forty years after her death, she is more read and more delighted in than ever. “A mystic akin only to Emerson,” W. P. Dawson, the English critic, says in his own anthology. “Among American poets I have named two—Poe and Emily Dickinson.” And a reviewer for the London Spectator said not long ago: “Mr. Conrad Aiken in his recent anthology of American poets calls Emily Dickinson’s poetry ‘perhaps the finest by a woman in the English language.’ I quarrel only with his ‘perhaps.’”
Splendid news, therefore, that we now have a new one-volume edition of her work! The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson contains all the verse which appeared in Poems, First Series, in Poems, Second Series, and in Poems, Third Series, and also those in the book brought out as recently as 1914, The Single Hound. The total body of Emily Dickinson’s work is therefore presented, and all in a new and proper arrangement, making the edition definitive. Emily Dickinson’s niece and biographer, Martha Dickinson Bianchi, has written an introduction for the work.
Having begun, in spontaneity and pleasure, with poetry, let us stick to it a while. Here are three more volumes by women poets, sisters, the Brontës, no less. Clement K. Shorter has edited them and C. W. Hatfield has provided the bibliographies and notes. They are The Complete Poems—of Charlotte Brontë, of Anne Brontë, of Emily Jane Brontë, respectively. Each is a first complete collection, and each contains a large percentage of poems never before published. I need not say anything of the romance investing the lives of these three women. Shut in a lonely parsonage in bleak moorland country, haunted by ill health and destined to die young, they made their lives one of the most extraordinary adventures in the history of the literary spirit. Their verse, of course, shows the Byronic influence.
The indefatigable J. C. Squire has been busy compiling an A Book of American Verse with ingratiating results. Himself a poet, an editor who selects new verse and a critic, Mr. Squire has ranged over the whole field of American literature from its beginnings and has been at once personal and catholic in his inclusions. His most recent collection of his own work, Essays on Poetry, includes short papers on Matthew Arnold, Thomas Hardy, A. E. Housman, W. B. Yeats, and some others.
Walter de la Mare: A Biographical and Critical Study, by R. L. Mégroz, is the first book devoted to the life and writings of this poet and prose writer of such marked distinction. Mr. Mégroz says that the purpose of his volume is “to show the poet of dream in a human light and in relation to the rest of society.” It is difficult to think of a living writer of more interest for such a study than the author of the Memoirs of a Midget, the close friend of Rupert Brooke, and the poet of happiest childhood as well as of soberly reflective and tranquil age. Mr. Mégroz’s book has the charm of its subject, and more.
One need not be a professor or scholar in the technical sense to write a good book on English literature, and the proof of it, if a fresh one be needed, is T. Earle Welby’s A Popular History of English Poetry. Mr. Welby is an amateur, unless his amateur standing may have been impaired by his articles in the London Saturday Review and his other book, a critical study of Swinburne. A Popular History of English Poetry is said to be the only one-volume book of its sort, but whether it is or not, it is remarkably welcome. Its survey runs from Chaucer (there is even a prefatory chapter on pre-Chaucer) to Meredith and Hardy and Masefield and de la Mare. And it deserves the adjective in front of the word “History” in its title. Anyone who knows or cares about poetry at all can read with delighted ease and will learn something in every chapter. Mr. Welby has both a fertile knowledge and a light touch. His judgments are neither vague characterizations nor conventional utterances; he has taste and he has an opinion, and he gives you each.
ii
To leave the poets for the moment but to keep in the sense of an exquisite color and form: Echo de Paris, by Laurence Housman, is a bit of severely ornamented reminiscence which I think of first when now I think of decorative prose—not so much because of its own brief perfection as because of its subject. Oscar Wilde’s influence is not a negligible thing in a contemporary literature which embraces Cabell, Hergesheimer, Elinor Wylie, Carl Van Vechten, and others, both American and English, who value words somewhat as James Huneker valued them, for their sound, shape, smell and taste. I take from the London Times a description of Echo de Paris:
“At the end of September, 1899, three friends are sitting in a café near the Place de l’Opera. They are awaiting a guest for luncheon, and from their amicable chatter we learn that it is Wilde who is expected. Presently he appears, and while they take their aperitifs holds his audience with that marvelous conversation which long before had made him legendary. It is substantially the record of an actual conversation, Mr. Housman tells us, for he was the host on this occasion. Apart from the actuality of the setting, he has imagined a dramatic incident which he believes, though symbolical, will represent the existing emotional situation. As Wilde talks, with an apparent indifference to his personal disaster, another man is seen coming along the street. He advances toward the group, all of whom he knows well, especially Wilde, who befriended him before his imprisonment, but, after clearly recognizing them, passes on without a sign. Wilde continues to weave his unwritten stories; but he has been deeply hurt and gracefully disentangles himself from a luncheon which, faced with the spectators of his pain, would have been more than even he could bear.
“The difficulty of producing a reasonable imitation of Wilde’s conversation has been overcome so successfully that we sometimes feel that one of his essays is being read by one of the characters in his comedies—there is that combination of verbal wit and bold intellectual paradox. In these pages we are made to feel something of the reality on which his reputation was built.”
Judges so diverse as Sinclair Lewis, James Branch Cabell, and Carl Van Vechten have uttered words of extreme praise for Elinor Wylie’s Jennifer Lorn. I don’t know of a recent work before which one feels an equal impotence of the descriptive faculty. This novel of an eighteenth century exquisite and his bride is as brightly enameled as the period it deals with; every paragraph is lacquered. You have perhaps stood long before some Eastern carpet with old rose, cream, ivory and dark blue in enigmatical patterns, your eye delighting in its intricacy. Have you tried afterward to tell someone about it? Then, precisely, you know the difficulty of reporting Jennifer Lorn. It is worth noting, though, that the novel does not merely purvey an eighteenth century story; it seeks to purvey it, with delicate, inner irony in the eighteenth century manner. The adroit printing and binding in simulation of an eighteenth century format was inevitable, perhaps; but it was not so inevitable that it should be so delightfully well-done.
An autobiography would seem to belong in Chapter 12 of this book; I saved out Thomas Burke’s autobiographical volume because the spirit of it, and the color of his writing, seemed to place it here. He calls it The Wind and the Rain; it is the most intimate book he has ever written, and the best since Limehouse Nights (from some standpoints it is better than that work). In The Wind and the Rain, Thomas Burke returns to Limehouse, telling of his boyhood and youth, of the squalor of his early years, of the loneliness and hunger of his City days, of the moments of spiritual exaltation that came to him at night in London streets. He recalls his friendship with old Quong Lee, a storekeeper in the Causeway; his one-room house with an Uncle; his adventures in the kitchen of the Big House at Greenwich where his Uncle worked; his rapturous hours in the street; his four wretched years in an orphanage; his running away and being sheltered by the queer woman in the queer house; his first job; his friendship with a girl of thirteen and its abrupt end; his discovery of literature and pictures and music; his first short story accepted when he was still an office-boy; and then his first success. This somewhat long recitation speaks for itself and will kindle the imagination of anyone who ever read Thomas Burke or saw Griffith’s film, “Broken Blossoms.”
Hugh Walpole’s critical study of Anthony Trollope is welcome both because a good account of Trollope is needed and because Walpole’s own work used to be likened to that of the author of Barchester Towers. I believe the comparison is pretty well obsolete—Mr. Walpole is now rather the object than the subject of comparisons—but those who know Walpole best have long known of his very definite interest in Trollope and his gradual acquisition of materials for a survey of Trollope’s work. The Anthony Trollope by Walpole is a book to set beside Frank Swinnerton’s Gissing and R. L. Stevenson; we have a right to hope that the fashion will spread among the novelists; and I should like nothing better than to record a similar book by Arnold Bennett, even if, as is very probable, he would consent to do one only on a French subject—in which case he would probably select Stendhal.
But this leads directly to the whole subject of literary discussions. It is too big to deal with here, and yet I can’t drop it without some reference to the two most provocative books of the sort in recent memory. Dr. Joseph Collins is a well-known New York neurologist whose literary hobby has been cultivated in private during a number of years. It was the rich pungency of his conversation which first led to insistences that he write a book about authors. He did. The Doctor Looks at Literature, with its praise of Proust and its incisiveness regarding D. H. Lawrence, its appreciation of Katherine Mansfield and its penetrating study of James Joyce, was something new, sparkling, resonant and simply not to be missed. Dr. Collins’s second book, Taking the Literary Pulse, is as strongly brewed and as well-flavored. I find it even more interesting because it deals to a much greater extent with American writers—Sherwood Anderson, Edith Wharton, Amy Lowell and others—and because of the uncompromised utterance in the first chapter on literary censorship, a subject which most discussion merely muddles.
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Of collections of essays, I have no hesitation in putting first the anthology by F. H. Pritchard, Essays of To-Day. Not only are the inclusions amply representative of the best work by contemporary English essayists, but to my mind Mr. Pritchard has supplied, in his Introduction, one of the most inspiring essays of the lot. He writes, naturally, about the essay as a form of art, and shows quite simply how the essay and the lyric poem are “the most intimate revelations of personality that we have in literature.” His wisdom is equaled by a power of expression which can best be intimated by quoting a few of his words regarding the lyric:
“Ordered by the strict limitations of rhythm, and obedient to the recurrences of rime and meter, the unruly ideas are fashioned into a lyric, just as scattered particles, straying here and there, are drawn together and fused into crystalline beauty. The difference, indeed, is one of temperature”—the difference between lyric and essay. “The metal bar, cold or lukewarm, will do anywhere, but heat it to melting-point and you must confine it within the rigid limits of the mold or see it at length but an amorphous splash at your feet.”
Then follow thirty-four selections, each prefaced by a short biographical note on its author. Youth and old age, reminiscences, the spirit of place and of holiday, and various interrelations between life and letters are the subjects. Kenneth Grahame, Joseph Conrad, Maurice Hewlett, E. V. Lucas, Robert Lynd, W. B. Yeats, Hilaire Belloc, Rupert Brooke, C. E. Montague, E. Temple Thurston, Alice Meynell, George Santayana, Gilbert K. Chesterton and Edmund Gosse are some of the writers who achieve inclusion; and the variety of the essays is great—irony, humor, romantic feeling, delight in places and sadness all have their moment.
Such a collection, one feels, cannot but lead the reader to books by some of the authors represented; and I hope such readers will not miss Robert Lynd’s The Blue Lion. Here are some chapters dealing apparently with children, birds, flowers, taverns and the like, but animated by that interest in, sympathy for and appreciation of human nature which is the field of the essay’s most fertile cultivation.
It is, to a great extent, the field which Robert Cortes Holliday has occupied himself with since the day of his Walking-Stick Papers; and while the title of his new book is Literary Lanes and Other Byways, the “other byways” are frequently the most engaging to tread. Mr. Holliday, for example, has been interviewing the ancient waiters on the subject of the golden years at a lost Delmonico’s; and he has also become an authority on nightwear. But there is plenty of contact between life and literature in Literary Lanes. One essay is devoted to the subject of the vamp in literature; another to books as presents; another harvests bons mots from the inner circles of celebrated wits; “and,” as Mr. Holliday would say, “and so on.”
Stephen McKenna’s By Intervention of Providence is a felicitous blend of diary, essay and short story, written by this novelist during an extended visit to the West Indies. The atmosphere of the West India islands is conveyed with some care, while the digressions to the essay or the short story are anecdotal, philosophical, and frequently humorous. “From day to day,” Mr. McKenna explains, “I set down whatever fancy tempted me to write. The result can only be called ‘Essays’ in the Johnsonian sense of that word. I desire no more accurate definition of what is in part a series of letters, in part a journal, in part vagrant reminiscences, in part idle reflection, in part stories which I do not ask the reader to believe.” But the potpourri, however unusual, will be welcomed alike by the traveler and the arm-chair tourist.
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The return to poetry must not be deferred longer. And first let me speak of John Farrar’s book of verse, The Middle Twenties, which is more than usually interesting because it is the first collection of his serious work in a half dozen years. There has been none since his book, Forgotten Shrines. I do not forget Songs for Parents, but that is somewhat of a piece with his book of plays for children, The Magic Sea Shell, and it is likely it would continue popular for this reason alone. His work as an editor and an anthologist, with many other activities, have tended to obscure Farrar the poet, and have certainly taken time and energy the poet could ill spare. But I know that much of the hardest work Mr. Farrar has done these past few years has been upon the verse in The Middle Twenties. The result ought to satisfy him, though probably it won’t; he is not easily pleased with his own work. But all the poems in The Middle Twenties keep to a high level and the volume has more than variety, it has positive and effective contrast. Whether he is most successful in the “Amaryllis” group, gay and rollicking, or in the savage pain and passion of “The Squaw” is for the reader’s own decision. But from the flaming “Ego,” the opening poem, to the fine understanding of such work as “War Women” the book affords a range of subject, treatment, and emotional feeling which leaves no reader indifferent.
Nellie Burget Miller’s In Earthen Bowls explains its title in these lines which open the book:
Such a volume makes its candid appeal to the audience—very large—which asks insistently for poems of a simple sincerity and a direct relation to daily lives. Their lives are the earthen bowls in which they want to be able to see the suggestion of something radiant and feel the stir of something divine. In the fifty-seven poems in her book, Mrs. Miller has not tried to build an imaginary world, but has appealed to the love of nature, and to the feelings of happiness and grief, for her lyrical expression. The evidence of her success has been recorded in several ways. She has, for one thing, been made the chairman of the literary division of the National Federation of Women’s Clubs. She has also been chosen poet laureate of her State, Colorado.
Essentially the same qualities of mood and appeal characterize Martha Haskell Clark’s book, The Home Road. Mrs. Clark has been a contributor of verse to Harper’s and Scribner’s magazines and to several of the enormously popular women’s magazines, so-called. Her poems are concerned, as her title indicates, chiefly with the longing, often wistful and sometimes delightful, for an old home or fireside, old friends and holidays and memories. The language is as simple as the feeling. Curtis Hidden Page, professor of English at Dartmouth and compiler of English Poets of the Nineteenth Century, writes the preface to The Home Road.
Here is an anthology of recitations! Grace Gaige’s Recitations—Old and New for Boys and Girls seems to me of more than ordinary interest, because the author is the buyer of books for one of the largest stores in the world. It is a store of so widespread a reputation that one thinks of it as constantly creating book readers from the mere fact of its having a book department. And certainly Miss Gaige is in an unequaled position to know what, in the way of a book, people want. Well, she does. And having found no present-day book that quite met the problem, she has made one. Her Recitations—Old and New for Boys and Girls has a foreword by Christopher Morley and contains poems dealing with every imaginable subject. They are divided into sections in a natural grouping: poems about and for children, poems about fairies, about birds and other animals, about flowers and seasons; humorous poems, patriotic poems, holiday poems—I can’t remember them all. But despite the classification, the range is so great that over 200 poems had to go under “Miscellaneous.” You are sure to find it there, if nowhere else!
How were they chosen? With just three things in mind, (1) their interest, (2) their proved popularity, and (3) their special fitness for recitation. The triple crown of the collection is the threefold index, of authors, of titles, and of first lines. And although people want poems for recitation, and though these poems are for recitation, there is nothing to debar this mammoth anthology as a book for reading. As such, it will be found a work of the utmost satisfaction.
A book that particularly deserves inclusion in this chapter is the new illustrated edition of Jay William Hudson’s novel, Abbé Pierre. The great success of this charming story is of the kind that goes steadily on, year after year; and while our present-day taste is rather against the illustration of novels, a book of this character (like David Harum) can be greatly enhanced by the right pictures. Mr. Hudson has got exactly the thing, I think, in the sixteen pencil drawings and the endpapers by Mr. Edwin Avery Park. This artist will also become familiar to readers by his work in collaboration with Maitland Belknap in Princeton Sketches. Mr. Park traveled in the parts of France where the scenes of Abbé Pierre are laid and has caught both the spirit and character of place and tale. His drawings have been rather carefully reproduced as half-tones, and with other details of the book’s new dress, make a volume of a sort in entire keeping with the novel’s quality.