IN 1908, AFTER TWO DAYS of gruesome race riots in Springfield, Illinois, not far from the place where Lincoln lay entombed, Higginson joined with John Dewey, William Dean Howells, and W. E. B. Du Bois to demand suffrage for black Americans, as Du Bois put it, on the same terms as whites. From this challenge came the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
Higginson then retreated; revolutions do go backward, as he once said. He talked of conciliation between black and white instead of the demand for equal rights. It’s difficult to know exactly why except in the terms he himself offered: political expediency and prudence, the same combination that lay behind his telling Dickinson not to publish her poems right away; the public was not ready for her, nor she for it. A curious mix of caution and courage, Higginson yet showed himself to be, in the end, mordantly skeptical about the capacity for people to change. “No white community will ever consent to the political supremacy of either the black man or the colored man or the yellow man,” he wrote to the National Negro Conference. “I make this declaration philosophically and as a result of observation and reflection and absolutely without feeling of prejudice, for I have none.”
Thomas Wentworth Higginson at 80, in 1903.
“CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS IS INDEED, in spite of its cheer, a book of ghosts, a roll of names, some still vivid but many faded,” observed Henry James, “redolent of a New England in general and a Boston in particular that will always be interesting to the moralist.” To James, Higginson was a man of compunction and good deeds, not an artist. He was echoing the minority view of Higginson—today the majority view—first put forward in 1871 by Theodore Tilton, then editor of The Independent.
He is too much of a moralist to lose himself in literature, and so fails of realizing the highest success in that department; and too much of a litterateur to throw himself into reform to sink or swim with some great movement or cause; and so fails to awaken the enthusiasm or quite command the sympathies of the reforming class. In fact, he never quite loses himself in anything, and so never quite finds himself in anything, never touches the high mark of his power, never realizes the ideal set for him by warm-hearted friends.
Higginson pasted Tilton’s criticism into his scrapbook.
Yet no one would dispute his magnanimity or fair-mindedness. His seventieth and seventy-fifth and eightieth birthdays prompted testimonial dinners in Boston and Cambridge, with speeches and newspaper articles ritually praising his physique, his energy, and, more keenly, his kind but sad mouth. A portrait painted when he was eighty depicts him seated, his hair white as bone, whiskers white as sugar. He wears a double-breasted wool jacket and large necktie with stripes. He looks forward, almost defiantly, but at the same time seems uncomfortable sitting still. There is a hint of a watch fob and the glitter of a ring, but his hands are thin, and the outlines of his skinny knees poke through folds of cloth. His eye, though heavy lidded, is fixed on the future. “There are so many younger writers to be recognized & encouraged,” he said. He liked to summarize Goethe: “The old trees must fall in order to give the younger growth a chance…. It is not the 19th century but the twentieth, which now becomes interesting.”
More and more he meditated on the meaning of fame, that bugbear of a subject: spurred by ambition since youth, he frequently stood on the Boston Common in front of Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s bronze memorial to Robert Gould Shaw and the Massachusetts Fifty-fourth, thinking about what might have been, “but for some inches of space, one trivial turn of Fate’s arrow, I had been riding there, foredoomed to Shaw’s glory immortal.” Did he secretly covet that glory? Of course. But the price was martyrdom, and his paternalism, if that’s what it was, had inspired him to save, not sacrifice, the troops in his command.
If Dickinson had dreamed of posthumous fame, Higginson sensed that for him the pendulum would likely swing in the other direction. “All teaches us that fame is, in numberless cases, the most fleeting of all harvests; that it is, indeed, like parched corn, which must be eaten while it is smoking hot or not at all,” he wrote. The titles of his essays tell their own story: “Favorites of a Day,” “A Contemporaneous Posterity,” “Concerning High-Water Marks,” “The Literary Pendulum.” As for himself, he said he was like a horse that never won a race but “was prized as having gained a second place in more races than any other horse in America.”
LESS THAN FIVE MONTHS after Higginson’s death, in 1911, George Santayana, the Harvard professor of philosophy who had been a student of William James’s and, in his turn, was a teacher of T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and Walter Lippmann, delivered a lecture in California that, when published, influenced an entire generation of moderns. “The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy,” as it was called, described America as a country with two mentalities. Predictably excoriating the busy Americans “occupied intensely in practical affairs,” Santayana also criticized their obverse: those soggy writers who floated in the “backwater” of an abstract, fatuous transcendentalism. Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Whittier, Bryant, and Holmes (the so-called fireside poets) toppled from the canonical mantel on which they had been enshrined—and Higginson sank with them into the sea of obscurity.
Alice James had in fact thought the Dickinson poems were “sicklied o’er with T. W. Higginson,” and the poet Amy Lowell would dismiss Higginson as a bungler too dim for the dauntless poet. “There is not, to my mind, a sadder page in history than the picture of good, well-meaning Mr. Higginson trying to guide Emily’s marvelous genius,” Lowell wrote to Mrs. Todd. “You will find that all the modern poets and critics rate her as I do, and it is owing to you, who have collected her poems and letters with such care, that we know what she was, and a debt of gratitude do we all owe you.” Mabel Todd was content not to share the limelight with Higginson, now deceased, and willing to pass on to him the blame for editorial folderol.
But Dickinson survived her early editors as a modernist first class, her work transcendent yet concrete, knotty and well wrought. Her conscience agonized, her inward look was availing: she had a knack for seeing the unseen—and for the “uncertain certainty” (her phrase) of consciousness. In 1913, after Sue’s death, Mattie, now Martha Dickinson Bianchi and herself an aspiring poet, inherited the poems in her mother’s possession and, Lavinia having died in 1899, secured the rights to them. In 1914, she renewed the copyright on the collections edited by Higginson and Todd and published 147 poems in a volume called The Single Hound to commemorate—and rehabilitate—the relationship between Sue and Emily that Mabel had suppressed. The timing was perfect. Dickinson was hailed as an “unconscious and uncatalogued Imagiste,” a Puritan with a pagan imagination writing short, concentrated, subtle poems “dug out of her native granite.”
Dickinson, it was soon said, had discarded the Calvinism of her forebears while preserving their sense of tragedy and with a hard-won faith had resisted the incursions of religious evangelism and its secular counterpart, pie-eyed transcendentalism. This is the theme of Conrad Aiken’s 1924 influential reevaluation of Dickinson (Aiken was a student of Santayana’s). As epigrammatic symbolist, Puritan, and freethinker, she fended off the call of the genteel with its requirement that upper-class ladies sew for soldiers, join a Browning club, and recite Hiawatha. Instead, the vigorous and self-sufficient Emily Dickinson stood for the life of the impassioned mind, the embodied soul.
Yet for all her gifts, to the literary establishment Dickinson remained a wacky Old Maid. “Once adjust oneself to the spinsterly angularity of the mode,” Aiken concluded, sounding far more conservative than Higginson, “its lack of eloquence or rhetorical speed, its naive and often prosaic directness, one discovers felicities of thought and phrase on every page.”
And Higginson? Symbolizing prudery, he stayed the emblem of weak-kneed gentility, lacking substance, his mind an old music box (to borrow from Santayana) of worn-out tunes. Dickinson’s early biographer, the poet Genevieve Taggard, belittled him as a brave, humane meddler—the “hero of a hundred Atlantic paragraphs”—wh
o went to war “in high feather” and by the early 1930s, was lumped with the dull “Cambridge” group of academics. Dickinson was avant-garde, Higginson an heirloom. And since the modernists of the first part of the twentieth century disdained the grubby world of politics and held themselves aloof not just from old-fashioned narrative but from public events and national crimes, they turned their aesthetic back on racism (to say nothing of women’s rights and suffrage). Higginson’s brave political iconoclasm—which had attracted Dickinson—thus fell by the literary wayside. Few litterateurs read or cared about his pungent writing on Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey, or the slave called Gabriel. As a consequence, and out of context, he became easy to ridicule, as in Adrienne Rich’s fine poem “I Am in Danger—Sir—,” where Dickinson appears as “‘Half-cracked’ to Higginson.’”
Rarely was Higginson evaluated by literary people with the kind of evenhandedness of the Dickinson scholar who in 1968 observed that “one should not demand more acumen of an individual than of the whole tribe of critics of the 1890s.” Yet that’s not the whole story either. Returning to Cambridge after the war had not been good for Higginson’s future; in Newburyport and Worcester, he shone; in Beaufort, he shone; he rallied the troops through oratory and his moral courage. But after the war he slowly adopted the hypnotic equitability that helped brand him Dickinson’s half-baked editor. Too bad: he was the women’s rights activist who declared in 1852 that “we must choose between the past forms which once embodied the eternal spirit, and the other forms which are to renew and embody it now…. The old has the court, the senate, the market; the new has the poets, the people, and posterity.”
Yet this radical and, in later years, this apostle of moderation was the man Emily Dickinson trusted, for there was something of the radical and conservative, activist and recluse, in her nature, too. Innovator, maverick, and marvel, anatomist of the heart and mind, she scribbled poems on the backside of recipes for cocoanut cake, and when her father insisted that the neighborhood pastor question her for heresy, she submitted. “It is remarkable,” Hawthorne once noted, “that persons who speculate the most boldly often conform with the most perfect quietude to the external regulations of society.” Nor did she fuss over sanitary commissions or suffrage. “‘George Washington was the Father of his Country,’” she joked. “‘George Who?’ That sums all Politics to me.” The world that counted would catch up to her, not her to it.
LIKE DICKINSON, Higginson never stopped writing. Seated either in his cozy book-lined study, his desk near a window, or in the larger room on the second floor where he installed a typewriter, he flooded newspapers and magazines with essays and reviews. He opposed all proposals to restrict immigration, he advocated religious tolerance—including toleration for atheism—and woman suffrage. (He turned down membership in the National Institute of Arts, Science and Letters until it admitted women.) He produced new books on Whittier and on Longfellow as well as a short biography of his grandfather. And aware that the end was near, he assigned that portion of himself assignable, donating to the Boston Public Library his huge collection on literature by and about women, over one thousand volumes gathered over the years while he was hoping to write their history. He called the massive library his Galatea Collection and included in it his letters from the un-Galatea, Emily Dickinson.
He planned to translate Aristophanes’ The Birds from the Greek (“very good for elder years,” he chortled). And though he spoke at the funerals of almost all his friends, he did not visibly sadden or tire. Or withdraw from the present. He did not condemn technology or mass culture. “I wish we had automobiles when I was a boy,” he joked. “The old times were good, but the new times are better.”
And he offered what had become his credo: “Best of all, is to lead, even at the very last, a life so full and useful that the thought of death occurs but as a momentary interruption; an incident that may come to us as easily, perhaps, as when a steamer moves from the wharf—so noiselessly that we do not know ourselves to be riding on a new element until we look back on the receding and irrevocable shore.”
He had not forgotten his Whitman after all.
Joy! shipmate—joy!
(Pleas’d to my Soul at death I cry;)
Our life is closed—our life begins;
The long, long anchorage we leave,
The ship is clear at last—she leaps!
She swiftly courses from the shore;
Joy! shipmate—joy!
NOR DID HE EVER FORGET EMILY. Within a week of his eighty-fifth birthday, on December 22, 1908, Higginson, along with Henry James and William Dean Howells, was commissioned by Harper’s Bazaar to write a short piece on the afterlife. Consenting, Higginson said he had little to add to his essay on immortality, written nearly forty years earlier: “that I am glad we live in a universe large enough, and that humanity is vast enough, to give an hundred souls an hundred different methods of reaching truth.” And besides, for him, poetry supplied all the intimations of immortality he ever needed; dare you see a soul at the white heat.
And so when he sat down to write the piece, he bade farewell, albeit indirectly, to her one last time, again quoting from the Brontë poem “Last Lines” that she had asked him to read at her funeral.
Though earth and man were gone,
And suns and universe ceased to be,
And Thou were left alone,
Every existence would exist in Thee.
THE NIGHT WAS GENTLE. Purple crocuses had poked through the damp earth, the forsythia were in yellow bloom, the city smelled of honeysuckle and spring. A slight breeze rippled over gauzy curtains, lamps burned low, and at half past eleven, Thomas Wentworth Higginson died.
The funeral took place two days later, on May 13, 1911, and while unfussy in some respects, it was completely unlike Dickinson’s obsequies some twenty-five years earlier. For this was a public event, full of pomp and circumstance, although Higginson had specifically requested there be no eulogy. There was, as ever, a simplicity to his character.
Wrapped in the regimental flag of the First South Carolina, Higginson’s casket was borne from Buckingham Street to the First Parish Church, near the Cambridge Common, on the shoulders of African American men, members of Company L, Sixth Regiment, Massachusetts Volunteer Militia (Colored), and accompanied by its color guard, J. Homer Pryor, Captain. The delegation included Sergeant W. E. Carter and Privates Henry Falson, Edward R. Chelmsford, Thomas Brown, Edward A. Brewer, Charles Bassett, Isaac Lassiter, Toland J. Edwards, William H. Wilson Jr., Henry Grouse, and William F. Scott. They entered the vestibule of the old church to the low beating of a drum, and had they glanced around, they could have seen the place packed with luminaries, black and white, past and present, crowding the aisles as the light streamed through the tall windows: Higginsons, Channings, Cabots, Eliots, Putnams, and Storrows, the mayor of Cambridge, the presidents of Harvard, Emerson’s children, Charles Francis Adams, Colonel N. P. Hallowell of the Massachusetts Fifty-fifth, councilmen and aldermen, former governor John D. Long, George Mifflin of Houghton Mifflin, members of the Massachusetts Historical Society and representatives of the Cambridge and Boston public libraries, as well as the students, also black and white, he had helped through college, perhaps Virginia Alberta Scott, Radcliffe’s first black student, and of course the sons and daughters, all black, of Civil War veterans. From Higginson’s antislavery days, only Franklin Sanborn remained, and he was there too, sitting unstooped among the wreaths and banners.
There was a reading from Psalms; one of Higginson’s early hymns, “To Thine Eternal Arms, O God” then a poem, a song, a benediction. The Loyal Legion played taps as the casket was removed from the church.
The body had been cremated, the ashes buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery to the roll of more drums, and the flag of the First South Carolina Regiment was presented to the Loyal Legion post. His headstone did not bear a quotation, just a few lines commemorating Higginson’s military rank and his service to the country’s first soldiers of Afri
can descent.
On a busy roadway, Route 21, in Beaufort, South Carolina, stands a plaque similarly commemorating the regiment and its commander. But the pendulum has indeed swung far from him, and he is hardly remembered.
EXCEPT, OF COURSE, by Dickinson herself: “I will not let thee go,” she had told him, “except I bless thee.”
Because I could not stop for Death—
He kindly stopped for me—
The Carriage held but just Ourselves—
And Immortality
….….
Since then—’tis Centuries—and yet
Feels shorter than the Day
I first surmised the Horses’ Heads
Were toward Eternity—
Acknowledgments
I could not have written this book without relying on the brilliance of the many Emily Dickinson scholars, editors, and enthusiasts who have, for more than a century, illuminated and recited and sung and set to music her work, or without the dedicated historians who have paid scrupulous tribute to Thomas Wentworth Higginson and his varied accomplishments. Their contribution to this book is threaded throughout the notes, but here I’d like to thank by name a few of those people who have graciously come to my aid, in one way or another, during the past six years.
I am greatly obliged to the following collections and individuals for access to archival material: Daria D’Arienzo, curator, and Margaret R. Dakin, assistant to the head of Archives and Special Collections, Amherst College Library; Albert Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia Library (Papers and forgeries of Emily Dickinson, MSS 7658, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Special Collections, University of Virginia Library); Earle Havens, acting keeper of Rare Books and Manuscripts, Department of Rare Books & Manuscripts, and Special Collections, Boston Public Library, as well as Sean P. Casey and Barbara Davis; Leilani Dawson, the Brooklyn Historical Society; Michael Ryan and Jennifer B. Lee, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University; Leslie A. Morris, curator of Modern Books and Manuscripts, Houghton Library, Harvard University, as well as Mary Haegert, Susan Halpert, Jennie Rathbun, Emily Walhout, and Thomas Ford, photographic liaison for Houghton Library, and Carmella Napoleone at Imaging Services; Tevis Kimball, curator, and Kate Boyle, Special Collections, Jones Library, Amherst, Massachusetts; Patricia Michaelis, director, Library and Archives Division, Kansas State Historical Society; Mary M. Huth, assistant director, Rare Books & Special Collections, Rush Rhees Library, University of Rochester; Karen V. Kukil, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College; the Harriet Beecher Stowe House and Library; Christopher Dens-more, curator, Friends Historical Library, Swarthmore College Library; Nicolette A. Schneider, Syracuse University Special Collections Research Center; Peter J. Knapp, special collections librarian and college archivist, Watkinson Library, Trinity College; Diane E. Kaplan, head of Public Services, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University.
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