II
Another transition figure, typical of a group of writers and at the same time illustrative of the change that came over the tone of American literature after the war period, is Harriet Prescott Spofford. A country girl, born in a Maine village, educated in the academy of a country town in New Hampshire, compelled early to be the chief support of an invalided father and mother, she turned from the usual employments open to the women of her time—work in the cotton mills and school teaching—to the precarious field of literature. That could mean only story-writing for the family weeklies of the day, for a bourgeois public that demanded sentimental love stories and romance. Success made her ambitious. She applied herself to the study of fiction—American, English, French. How wide was her reading one may learn from her essays later published in the Atlantic, "The Author of 'Charles Auchester'" and "Charles Reade." The new realism which was beginning to be felt as a force in fiction, she flouted with indignation:—"he never with Chinese accuracy, gives us gossiping drivel that reduces life to the dregs of the commonplace." Rather would she emulate the popular novelist Elizabeth Sheppard: "At his, Disraeli's, torch she lit her fires, over his stories she dreamed, his 'Contarini Fleming' she declared to be the touchstone of all romantic truth."[106] The essay reveals the author like a flash-light. She too dreamed over Disraeli and the early Bulwer-Lytton, over Charlotte Brontë and Poe, over George Sand and French romance until at last when she submitted her first story to the Atlantic, "In a Cellar," Lowell for a time feared that it was a translation.
Other American women have had imaginations as lawless and as gorgeously rich as Harriet Prescott Spofford's; Augusta J. Evans Wilson, for instance, whose St. Elmo (1866) sold enormously even to the end of the new period, but no other American woman of the century was able to combine with her imaginings and her riotous colorings a real distinction of style. When in the fifth volume of the Atlantic appeared "The Amber Gods," judicious readers everywhere cried out in astonishment. Robert Browning and others in England praised it extravagantly. A new star had arisen, a novelist with a style that was French in its brilliancy and condensation, and oriental in its richness and color.
The Amber Gods fails of being a masterpiece by a margin so small that it exasperates, and it fails at precisely the point where most of the mid-century fiction failed. In atmosphere and style it is brilliant, so brilliant indeed that it has been appraised more highly than it deserves. Moreover, the motif, as one gathers it from the earlier pages, is worthy of a Hawthorne. The amber beads have upon them an ancestral curse, and the heroine with her supernatural beauty, a satanic thing without a soul, is a part of the mystery and the curse. Love seems at length to promise Undine-like a soul to this soulless creature:
He read it through—all that perfect, perfect scene. From the moment when he said,
"I overlean,
This length of hair and lustrous front—they turn
Like an entire flower upward"—his voice low, sustained, clear—till he reached the line,
"Look at the woman here with the new soul"—
till he turned the leaf and murmured,
"Shall to produce form out of unshaped stuff
Be art—and, further, to evoke a soul
From form be nothing? This new soul is mine!"—till then he never glanced up.
But there is lack of constructive skill, lack of definiteness, lack of reality. The story sprawls at the end where it should culminate with compelling power. The last sentence is startling, but it is not connected with the motif and is a mere sensational addition. Everywhere there is the unusual, the overwrought, incoherent vagueness. It is not experience, it is a revel of color and of sensuousness; it is a Keats-like banquet, sweets and spicery.
The parallelism with Keats may be pressed far. She was first of all a poet, a lyrist, a dweller in Arcady rather than in a New England village. She, like so many others of her generation, had fallen under the spell of the young Tennyson, and her world is a world of cloying sweetness, of oriental sensuousness, of merely physical beauty. Poems like "Pomegranate-Flowers" and "In Titian's Garden" show her tropical temperament:
And some girl sea-bronzed and sparkling,
On her cheek the stain ensanguined,
Bears aloft the bossy salver:
As the innocent Lavinia
Brought them in old days of revel
Fruits and flowers amesh with sunbeams—
No red burnish of pomegranates,
No cleft peach in velvet vermeil,
No bright grapes their blue bloom bursting,
Dews between the cool globes slipping,
Dews like drops of clouded sapphire,
But the brighter self and spirit,
Glowed illusive in her beauty.
The same poetic glamour she threw over all the work that now poured in swift profusion from her pen: Sir Rohan's Ghost, Azarian, and a score of short stories in the Atlantic and Harper's and other periodicals. It had been felt that the faults so manifest in "In a Cellar" and "The Amber Gods" would disappear as the young author gained in maturity and knowledge of her art, but they not only persisted, they increased. Like Charlotte Brontë, whom in so many ways she resembled, she knew life only as she dreamed of it in her country seclusion or read of it in romance. At length toleration ceased. In 1865 The North American Review condemned Azarian as "devoid of human nature and false to actual society," and then added the significant words: "We would earnestly exhort Miss Prescott to be real, to be true to something." It marks not alone the end of the first period in Miss Prescott's career; it marks the closing of an era in American fiction.
Wonder has often been expressed that one who could write "The Amber Gods" and Sir Rohan's Ghost should suddenly lapse into silence and refuse to work the rich vein she had opened. The change, however, was not with the author; it was with the times. Within a year Howells was assistant editor of the Atlantic. The artificiality of style and the high literary tone demanded in the earlier period disappeared with the war, and in their place came simplicity and naturalness and reality. The author of Azarian continued to write her passionate and melodious romance, but the columns of the Atlantic and Harper's at length were closed to her tales. A volume of her work of this period still awaits a publisher.
She now turned to poetry—there was no ban upon that; the old régime died first in its prose—and poured out lyrics that are to be compared even with those of Taylor and Aldrich, lyrics full of passion and color and sensuous beauty. Among the female poets of America she must be accorded a place near the highest. Only "H. H." could have poured out a lyric like this:
In the dew and the dark and the coolness
I bend to the beaker and sip,
For the earth is the Lord's, and its fullness
Is held like the cup to my lip.
For his are the vast opulences
Of color, of line, and of flight,
And his was the joy of the senses
Before I was born to delight.
Forever the loveliness lingers,
Or in flesh, or in spirit, or dream,
For it swept from the touch of his fingers
While his garments trailed by in the gleam.
When the dusk and the dawn in slow union
Bring beauty to bead at the brim,
I take, 't is the cup of communion,
I drink, and I drink it with Him!
A chapter of analysis could not so completely reveal the soul of Harriet Prescott Spofford.
For a time she busied herself making books on art decoration applied to furniture, and then at last she yielded to the forces of the age and wrote stories that again commanded the magazines. With work like "A Rural Telephone," "An Old Fiddler," and "A Village Dressmaker," she entered with real distinction the field that had been preëmpted by Miss Cooke and Miss Jewett, the depiction of New England life in its actuality. Then at the close of her literary life she wrote deeper tales, like "Ordronnaux," a story with the same underlying motif as "The Amber Gods"—the creation of a soul in soulless beauty—but worked out now with reality, and experience, and compelling power. But it was too late. Could she have learned her lesson when Rose Terry Cooke learned hers; could she, instead of wasting her powers upon the gorgeous Azarian, have sent forth in 1863 her volume Old Madame and Other Tragedies, she might have taken a leading place among American novelists.