THE END OF HIGGINSON’S TERM in the Massachusetts legislature had not stopped him from battling institutional xenophobia or discrimination against Irish, German, and Jewish immigrants. “The Pilgrims landed,” he reminded nativists; “that is the essential point. They were not the indigenous race.” He continued to advocate equal rights for women even though he had parted company with his allies at The Woman’s Journal when they endorsed Benjamin Butler, presumably a woman suffrage candidate, for governor. In 1884 he alienated himself further when he refused to censure Grover Cleveland in the presidential race, as Lucy Stone had done, because of the man’s peccadilloes. (Cleveland had sired a child out of wedlock.) A “mugwump,” Higginson had lost patience with the Republicans and defected to the new youth movement, casting his vote as an independent and believing that a new age—and a new political party—loomed on the horizon. But much to the chagrin of his friends, he naively advised women to put off equal rights until political corruption no longer existed.
Regardless, and without a trace of irony, Higginson would call the nineteenth century the woman’s century. Women may not have secured the vote—men still wouldn’t give up their dinners—but change was afoot, he claimed, and as if to prove it, when he left The Woman’s Journal, he wrote a weekly column for Harper’s Bazaar about American social life. Yet this was no suffrage forum. Mary Booth, Bazaar’s editor, had warned Higginson early on that it was “inexpedient,” as she put it, “to advocate women’s suffrage therein, either explicitly or implicitly.” The magazine abstained from questions of religion and politics, she told him, “while maintaining a firm and progressive attitude…. In a word, it has always sought to carry out the Emersonian doctrine of always affirming and never denying.” (Why not affirm suffrage? He seems not to have asked.)
Taking the job and toeing the line, Higginson wrote pieces that were decidedly progressive, humorous, firm, and on occasion as dry as those he had written thirty years earlier. “The Mendelssohn family had not the slightest objection to their gifted Fanny’s composing as much music as she pleased,” he noted, “provided it appeared under the name of her brother Felix.” Collected in 1887 in the book Women and Men, these short essays, neither fusty nor unsympathetic, chattily—and encouragingly—discuss women’s education, economics, and illness (arguing, in the last instance, that men are more prone to nervousness), but they don’t sizzle.
Higginson and daughter, Margaret, on tricycle, Cambridge, 1885.
He also published a rugged and quite good biography of Margaret Fuller, “in a literary way,” he boasted with good reason, “almost the best thing I ever did.” Countering the lily-livered Fuller memoir compiled by his cousin William Henry Channing, Emerson, and James Freeman Clarke, Higginson set out to convert the tragedy of her life into an intrepid triumph over inertia and the status quo. (Returning from Rome in 1850 with her son and husband, Fuller had drowned in a shipwreck just four hundred yards off Fire Island, New York. Assuming that she had brought along her manuscript about the revolutions of 1848, a distraught Emerson dispatched Thoreau to Fire Island to determine whether any of its pages had washed up on the beach, and when none were found, the saga of Fuller as incomplete genius was born.) But as Higginson saw it, Fuller’s commitment to the activist life had been as rich and rewarding as his own—indeed, it had inspired him—and he never forgot what she had said the country needed: “no thin idealist, no coarse realist, but a man whose eye reads the heavens, while his feet step firmly on the ground, and his hands are strong and dexterous for the use of human implements.”
With writing still his only source of income, he was as prolific as ever, contributing to a bevy of journals, including The Atlantic, The Century, The Nation, The Literary World, The Critic, The Forum, Scribner’s, Harper’s, and The Independent, but he frequently declined engagements, blaming an unnamed nervous ailment that clouded his vision, or he excused himself on behalf of his wife, Minnie, who had taken to her bed for months at a time with an unexplained illness. His face lined, his hair silvery, he still brimmed with optimism, campaigning, as ever, for an American literature and for democracy, the two intimately related: “I affirm that democratic society, the society of the future, enriches and does not impoverish human life, and gives more, not less, material for literary art,” he had declared in 1870. Two decades later he still insisted that the root of all living language, its snap and pop, comes from “actual life—the life of every day,” which is to say from the people: “You must go to the men around the anvil, the shoemakers on their benches, and the gossips in the village shops. They make the words, they make them strongly.”
Higginson spoke out against privileges accruing to a single class, caste, race, or gender, and as for the new “aristocracy of the dollar,” who converted dreams of justice into dreams of gold, he believed that “the aristocracy of the millionaires is only a prelude to the aristocracy of the millions.” (Andrew Carnegie loved Higginson’s lecture on the subject.) An evolutionary gradualist, he would loosely ally himself with Edward Bellamy’s utopian Nationalist clubs but called himself a progressive cooperationist, not a nationalist. The nationalization of industry seemed to him undemocratic; this position was in keeping with his faith in a free market democracy, although he admitted government ownership of energy and railroads not a bad idea. Nor were workingmen’s compensation, compulsory education, and profit sharing. “Sow a victim, and you reap a socialist,” he observed with sympathy for the worker. Yet he apparently said nothing when seven hundred strikes occurred in Massachusetts in 1887 and, unlike Howells, did not protest the execution of the Haymarket anarchists. These were battles for a new generation. He had fought his.
FIFTEEN
Pugilist and Poet
Death claimed her far too early, he later recalled, but she would persist.
Though himself frequently ill, Higginson kept up their correspondence as best he could. Still, there were long lapses between his letters to Emily. And hers to him, though when she could, she wrapped small gifts for his daughter—a Valentine, a poem, a book, a turquoise brooch in a square wooden box with roses painted on the lid—that have disappeared from public view. But since her nephew Gib’s death, in 1883, an unexplained illness had stalked her, and in the summer of 1884 she took a turn for the worse. She blacked out, fell, and when she woke, a physician was glooming over her. “The doctor calls it ‘revenge of the nerves,’” she quipped, “but who but Death had wronged them?” For several days she seemed delirious, or at least not quite rational. More herself by the following February, she sent John Cross’s George Eliot’s Life to Higginson, now piquantly observing that “Biography first convinces us of the fleeing of the Biographied—.”
She had begun to flee.
And she added to her letter the four lines of poetry originally written for Sue after the death of Gilbert:
Pass to thy Rendezvous of Light,
Pangless except for us—
Who slowly ford the Mystery
Which thou hast leaped across!
Not yet would she say good-bye, but this was a prelude.
“I WORK TO DRIVE the awe away, yet awe impels the work,” Dickinson had written her cousins the previous spring. Otis Lord had died in March; it was a severe blow, and it may be that she never quite recovered. “How can the sun shine, Vinnie?” Emily reportedly asked on hearing the news. “I have not been strong for the last year,” she then told a friend. “The Dyings have been too deep for me, and before I could raise my Heart from one, another has come.”
“The Crisis of the sorrow of so many years is all that tires me,” she explained to Elizabeth Holland, referring to the passing of her father, her mother, Charles Wadsworth, her darling nephew. “All this and more, though is there more? More than Love and Death? Then tell me it’s name!”
Working to drive the awe away, awe impelling the work: the remark echoes the one she had made to Higginson back in 1862, that “I sing, as the Boy does by the Burying Ground—because I am afraid.” Writing calmed anxiety and an
swered questions by posing them, particularly about love and death and what she had told Higginson was “the Flood subject,” or immortality. And immortality implied not just everlasting life in religious terms but poetry, “Exterior—to Time—.”
Awe impels the work. “Circumference, thou bride / of awe,—possessing, thou / Shalt be possessed by / Every hallowed Knight / That dares to covet thee”: these perplexing, evocative lines she sent Daniel Chester French, the architect and Amherst native, on the unveiling of his statute of John Harvard in Cambridge. “Success is dust, but an aim forever touched with dew,” she added, as if to remind him that the moment shall pass, fresh as it seems. And frequently she returned to those twinned subjects, poetry and immortality, in these last years. “My Business is Circumference,” she had informed Higginson so many years before, and that was still true. Circumference, the reaching of limits and beyond them, was its own form of immortality, which relieved both the joy and pain of living. For when undergoing some sort of crisis just before and during the war, as we recall, she had written an astonishing number of poems, many of her greatest, but afterward the quantity declined to as few as ten in a year. And before her last illness she had been writing again at a steady rate, twenty poems annually and, by the editor Ralph Franklin’s count, as many as forty-two in 1884, the year Lord died.
She had not been sending Higginson as many poems as previously: the year of Mary’s death she sent eight but only two in 1878, the year after, and one in 1879, when Higginson remarried. But she mailed six in 1880, two in 1881, and four in 1882. (These last include “How happy is the little Stone,” “Come show thy Durham Breast to her who loves thee best,” “Obtaining but our own extent,” and possibly “The Moon upon her fluent route.”) The next year, 1883, she sent “No Brigadier throughout the Year.”
No Brigadier throughout the Year
So civic as the Jay—
A Neighbor and a Warrior too
With shrill felicity
Pursuing Winds that censure us
A February Day,
The Brother of the Universe
Was never blown away—
The Snow and he are intimate—
I’ve often seen them play
When Heaven looked upon us all
With such severity
I felt apology were due
To an insulted sky
Whose pompous frown was Nutriment
To their temerity—
The Pillow of this daring Head
Is pungent Evergreens—
His Larder—terse and Militant—
Unknown—refreshing things—
His Character—a Tonic—
His Future—a Dispute—
Unfair an Immortality
That leaves this Neighbor out—
Though the subject of this poem is the blue jay—she had attached a clipping about birds to her manuscript—it is tempting to read it, once offered to Higginson, as a lighthearted homage to him, a brigadier in his own right as civic as the jay; a neighbor, a warrior, a “Brother of the Universe” intimate with “Snow” (Higginson’s essay) and with nature (“pungent Evergreens”), his character a tonic deserving, without doubt, of a certain immortality. He admired the poem enormously, but when he included it in Poems, Second Series, he placed it under the rubric of “Nature,” not “Life.” He was a shy, self-effacing man.
Had she changed her mind about publishing in these later years? Chiding Dickinson for her intractability, Helen Hunt Jackson flatly stated that “it is a cruel wrong to your ‘day & generation’” not to publish and asked to serve as Dickinson’s literary executor should Jackson outlive her. “Surely, after you are what is called ‘dead,’” Jackson pushed, “you will be willing that the poor ghosts you have left behind, should be cheered and pleased by your verses, will you not?”
Jackson had recommended Dickinson’s work to Thomas Niles, the editor at Roberts Brothers who had published the No Name Series. “The kind but incredible opinion of ‘H. H.’ and yourself, I would like to deserve—,” Dickinson wrote Niles in response to his inquiry, mailing him “How happy is the little Stone,” which she’d recently given Higginson: “How happy is the little Stone / ,” it begins in mock innocence, “That rambles in the Road alone, / And does’nt care about Careers / And Exigencies never fears—.”
A year passed. In the spring of 1883, as if to reopen the discussion, she mailed Niles “Further in Summer than the Birds” and “It sifts from leaden sieves,” poems Higginson had received in 1866 and 1871; perhaps his enthusiasm had encouraged her to try them out on Niles. She also sent him one of her favorite books, a volume of poems by the Brontë sisters: she was as serious as they.
Niles was nonplussed. “I would not for the world rob you of this very rare book,” he burbled. “If I may presume to say so, I will instead take a M.S. collection of your poems, that is,” he diffidently added, “if you want to give them to the world through the medium of a publisher.” Apparently she did not, although it’s not quite clear what she did want, for she kept mailing poems, sending “No Brigadier throughout the Year,” and when he said that “the Bird seemed true,” dispatching three more: “a Thunderstorm—a Humming Bird, and a Country Burial,” she called them, as if poems with titles—she did not ordinarily use them—might be more suitable for a benighted public.
Higginson had also read these—“The Wind begun to rock the Grass,” “A Route of Evanescence,” and “Ample make this Bed,”—and it seems he had praised them. No doubt she hoped Niles would too. “Ample make this Bed—/ Make this Bed with Awe—/ In it wait till Judgment break / Excellent and Fair,” she wrote. When mailed to Niles, the poem can be read as a covert bid for his good opinion. Yet it’s impossible to know if she would have consented, after all, to a book had Niles been keener. When he subsequently thanked her for the “specimens,” he noncommittally asked if he might hang on to them; possibly his polite apathy confirmed Dickinson’s dim view of publishers: insensitive and meretricious.
Higginson was different. For though she masqueraded as his student, both of them had acceded to the ruse, he admitting after her death that he knew he could teach her nothing. At the same time it does not seem as though she mentioned Niles to him. She kept her secrets well.
Writing Wentworth during that same spring of 1883—and calling herself his “Pupil” out of well-worn, reassuring habit—Emily revived their dwindling correspondence. “Emblem is immeasurable—,” she told him, “that is why it is better than Fulfillment, which can be drained.” Her prose more nimble than his, her poetry more audacious and trenchant, she continued to flatter and upstage him, dipping into his work and rewriting it for her own use, for as she noted, he said great things inadvertently. Listen to his long-winded comment on the line “And yet I live!” in Petrarch’s Sonnet 251, which he compares with Shakespeare: “What immeasurable distances of time and thought are implied in the self-recovery of those words. Shakespeare might have taken from them his ‘Since Cleopatra died,’—the only passage in literature which has in it the same wide spaces of emotion.” As was her habit, Emily briskly rephrased Higginson. “Antony’s remark to a friend, ‘since Cleopatra died’ is said to be the saddest ever lain in Language—,” she wrote to Otis Lord. “That engulfing ‘Since’—.”
In the spring of 1884, after Otis Lord had suffered his lethal stroke, she wrote to her cousins, “I hardly dare to know that I have lost another friend. Till the first friend dies, we think ecstasy impersonal, but then discover that he was the cup from which we drank it, itself as yet unknown.” Yet in spite of her own illness and the wearing horror of so many deaths, there was something indomitable about Emily Dickinson, who could still with scrupulous care watch the bobolinks in the meadow and reiterate that blossoms and books were the solace of sorrow. They were. “‘Supernatural,’ was only the Natural, disclosed—,” she had said to Higginson in one of her first, tantalizing letters:
Not “Revelation”—’tis—that waits,
But our unfurnished eyes—
Her robust passion for nature unimpaired almost twenty years later, she committed herself to joy in the very act of living, even if that commitment required necessary delusions that, as she and Higginson would both suggest, keep human behavior ethical. They had not abdicated belief; they redefined it. As Dickinson wrote in a late poem,
Those—dying then,
Knew where they went—
They went to God’s Right Hand—
That Hand is amputated now
And God cannot be found—
The abdication of Belief
Makes the Behavior small—
Better an ignis fatuus
Than no illume at all—
“FAITH IS DOUBT,” Emily told Sue. Perhaps in a bleak moment or when he wrote to her in the letters that do not survive, Wentworth had agreed with her. Mostly he did not. “What channel needs our faith except the eyes?” he had asked in an early poem, and in 1891 he said that “next to the yearnings of human affections, the most irresistible suggestion of immortality comes from looking up at the unattainable mystery of the stars.” Emily was more specific, more poignant. “I hear robins a great way off,” she lyrically wrote to her cousins, “and wagons a great way off, and rivers a great way off, and all appear to be hurrying somewhere undisclosed to me. Remoteness is the founder of sweetness; could we see all we hope, or hear the whole we fear told tranquil, like another tale, there would be madness near. Each of us gives or takes heaven in corporeal person, for each of us has the skill of life.”
And some, she might have added, possess the skill of poetry. She did include this ebullient poem about singing:
The most triumphant bird
I ever knew or met,
Embarked opon a twig today,
And till Dominion set,
I perish to behold
Emily Dickinson, in photograph marked “Emily Dickinson, died Dec. 1886,” from daguerreotype taken ca. 1853 and discovered by Professor Philip Gura.
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