But all these suggestions recall for me once more what such things mean to a people like the French, or, let one say, Europeans as well. I wonder what poetry or even painting will do, if they shall rise to such a state in this country that we shall find our masters of literature holding audience with this degree of interest like Fort, or as did all the great masters of literature in Paris, hold forth in the name of art, a divine Tuesday set apart for the admirable worship of poetry, or of things esthetic. I can imagine Amy Lowell doing something of this sort after the custom of those masters she so admires, with her seemingly quenchless enthusiasms for all that is modern in poetry. I think we shall wait long for that, for the time when we shall have our best esthetics over the coffee, at the curbside under the trees with the sun shining upon it, or the shadow of the evening lending its sanction, under the magnetic influence of such a one as Paul Fort or Francis Jammes, or Emile Verhaeren—as it was once to be had among such as Verlaine, Baudelaire and that high company of distinguished painters who are now famous among us.
The studio of Gertude Stein, that quiet yet always lively place in the rue de Fleurus, is the only room I have ever been in where this spirit was organized to a similar degree, for here you had the sense of the real importance of painting, as it used to be thought of in the days of Pissarro, Manet, Degas, and the others, and you had much, in all human ways, out of an evening there, and, most of all, you had a fund of good humour thrust at you, and the conversation took on, not the quality of poetic prose spoken, as you had the quality of yourself and others, a kind of William James intimacy, which, as everyone knows, is style bringing the universe of ideas to your door in terms of your own sensations. There may have been a touch of all this at the once famed Brook Farm, but I fancy it was rather chill in its severity.
There is something of charm in the French idea of taking their discussions to the sunlight or the shadow under the stars, either within or outside the café, where you feel the passing of the world, and the poetry is of one piece with life itself, not the result of stuffy studios, and excessively ornate library corners, where books crowd out the quality of people and things. You felt that the café was the place for it, and if the acrobat came and sang, it was all of one fabric and it was as good for the poetry, as it was for the eye and the ear that absorbed it. Despite the different phases of the spectacle of Tuesday, at the Closerie de Lilas, you had the feeling of its splendour, its excellence, and, most of all, of its reality, its relationship to every other phase of life, and not of the hypersensitivity of the thing as we still consider it among ourselves in general; and if you heard the name of Paul Fort, or Francis Jammes, it was a definite issue in daily life, equal with the name of the great statesmen in importance, you were being introduced into a sphere of activities of the utmost importance, that poetry was something to be reckoned with.
It was not merely to hear oneself talk that artists like Mallarmé held forth with distinction, that artists like de Regnier and Fort devote themselves, however secretly, or however openly to the sacred theme. They had but one intention, and that to arrive at, and assist in the realization of the best state of poetry, that shall have carried the art further on its way logically, and in accordance with the principles which they have created for their time; endeavoring always to create fresh values, new points of contact with the prevailing as well as with the older outlines of the classics. It was, then, a spectacle, from our removed point of view, the gathering of the poetic multitude around the café tables, over the Dubonnet, the grenadines, and the café noir, of a Tuesday evening. It gave one a sense of perpetuity, of the indestructibility of art, in spite of the obstacles encountered in the run of the day, that the artist has the advantage over the layman in being qualified to set down, in shapes imperishable, those states of his imagination which are the shapes of life and of nature.
We may be grateful to Amy Lowell for having assembled for our consummation, in a world where poetry is not as yet the sublime issue as it was to be felt at every street corner, much of the spirit of the rue de Rome, the Café Novelles D'Athènes, and the Closerie de Lilas, as well as the once famed corner of the Café D'Harcourt where the absinthe flowed so continuously, and from which some very exquisite poetry has emanated for all time. It is the first intimation we have of what our best English poetry has done for the best French poets of the present, and what our first free verse poet has done for the general liberation of emotions and for freedom of form in all countries. He has indicated the poets that are to follow him. He would be the first to sanction all this poetic discussive intensity at the curbside, the liberty and freedom of the café, the excellence of a divine Tuesday evening.
EMILY DICKINSON
If I want to take up poetry in its most delightful and playful mood, I take up the verses of that remarkable girl of the sixties and seventies, Emily Dickinson, she who was writing her little worthless poetic nothings, or so she was wont to think of them, at a time when the now classical New England group was flourishing around Concord, when Hawthorne was burrowing into the soul of things, Thoreau was refusing to make more pencils and took to sounding lake bottoms and holding converse with all kinds of fish and other water life, and Emerson was standing high upon his pedestal preaching of compensations, of friendship, society and the oversoul, leaving a mighty impress upon his New England and the world at large as well.
I find when I take up Emily Dickinson, that I am sort of sunning myself in the discal radiance of a bright, vivid, and really new type of poet, for she is by no means worn of her freshness for us, she wears with one as would an old fashioned pearl set in gold and dark enamels. She offsets the smugness of the time in which she lived with her cheery impertinence, and startles the present with her uncommon gifts. Those who know the irresistible charm of this girl—who gave so charming a portrait of herself to the stranger friend who inquired for a photograph: "I had no portrait now, but am 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," this written in July, 1862—shall be of course familiar with the undeniable originality of her personality, the grace and special beauty of her mind, charm unique in itself, not like any other genius then or now, or in the time before her, having perhaps a little of relationship to the crystal clearness of Crashaw, like Vaughan and Donne maybe, in respect of their lyrical fervour and moral earnestness, yet nevertheless appearing to us freshly with as separate a spirit in her verse creations as she herself was separated from the world around her by the amplitude of garden which was her universe. Emily Dickinson confronts you at once with an instinct for poetry, to be envied by the more ordinary and perhaps more finished poets. Ordinary she never was, common she never could have been, for she was first and last aristocrat in sensibility, rare and untouchable if you will, vague and mystical often enough, unapproachable and often distinctly aloof, as undoubtedly she herself was in her personal life. Those with a fondness for intimacy will find her, like all recluses, forbidding and difficult, if not altogether terrifying the mind with her vagueries and peculiarities.