FOURTEEN
Francis Ayrault is himself in mourning, for whom we don’t know, and now alone in the world except for a five-year-old stepsister, he retires to an old family farmhouse, off the beaten track, where he will lose himself, literally, to his dreams.
Completed the summer after Emily Dickinson died, The Monarch of Dreams is a throwback to the kind of romance Higginson had not written in twenty years. It is also his tribute to the intrepid woman who committed her life to her art, who insisted on writing her own way, on publishing as she saw fit when and only when she chose to do so, who remained faithful to her vision of the elasticity, luxuriance, and magic of language, who questioned everything and did not for a moment alter her path for anyone. In a sense she was the poet, the monarch of dreams, he could never be. And in the end, to justify his own failure, he had to condemn what he valued most and believed he could not have.
This is the story: In the spring of 1861, just after the firing on Fort Sumter, the careworn Ayrault, descended “from a race of day-dreamers with a taste for ideal and metaphysical pursuits,” decides to experiment in controlling his own dreams.
The bedroom door locked, the farmhouse quiet, Frank, as his sister calls him, falls asleep, his dreams soon blotting out everything, all his daylight interests and every person he knows, including his sister. Night after night silent hordes mill about him, unfeeling, resembling himself, siphoning off his individuality and his will. “‘Does all dreaming without action,’ he wonders, ‘thus leave a man lost within the crowd of himself?’” He does not control his dreams; they control him.
War inches nearer, regiments are recruited, and men rally to the cause, rousing Frank from his torpor. He enlists and “felt himself a changed being,” writes Higginson, reverting to his pet metaphor for his own army days: “he was as if floating in air and ready to take wing for some new planet.” But though Higginson in 1862 may have been moved to action, his pale alter ego stays pinioned to his dreams. The night before his regiment is scheduled to head to the front, Frank falls asleep and dreams that a colossal mob of figures—all himself—pins his arms and blocks his path while from afar he hears drums beating and the crackle of fireworks. A whistle shrieks, and the local train, jam-packed with flesh-and-blood soldiers, chugs out of the station, carrying “the lost opportunity of his life away—away—away.”
Higginson’s sister thought he must be having a breakdown. “It is a warning not a glorification,” he wearily replied. But she was more perceptive than he knew. For what he intended as admonishment was at the same time a celebration: the romantic artist dwells in realms of possibility, and though punished, Frank conducted the very experiment that had long tempted Higginson, attracted since boyhood to poetry, literature, even the fantasy of a perfect woman, his Laura, whoever she might be. But he had never been able to lose himself in his fantasies, throwing caution and duty to the wind.
For though he might aspire to the lofty realm of beauty, Higginson owed allegiance to the world of action, and because his intellectual precocity was channeled early into both scholarship and civic duty, he could not therefore break free, as John Brown or Dickinson had, and light out for a territory of one. “To live and die only to transfuse external nature into human words, like Thoreau; to chase dreams for a lifetime, like Hawthorne; to labor tranquilly and see a nation imbued with one’s thoughts, like Emerson,—this it is to pursue literature as an art”: this is what he wanted, what he most admired, and what he had to censure in himself.
Fortunately, though, in his early years the salutary influence of Theodore Parker, Margaret Fuller, and Emerson more or less bridged the gap between public service and private longing. Build your own world, Emerson had said. That was not so easy; better to build your own character, which linked one to the world. Higginson copied a sentence from Emerson’s essay “Man the Reformer” onto the flyleaf of one of his journals, remarking that no other sentence had ever influenced him more: “Better that the book should not be quite so good, & the bookmaker abler & better, & not himself often a ludicrous contrast to all that he has written.” Then he added, this “has made me willing to vary my life & work for personal development, rather than to concentrate it & sacrifice myself to a specific result.”
This was partly true. “The trouble with me is too great a range of tastes and interests,” Higginson once acknowledged. “I love to do everything, to study everything, to contemplate and to write. I never was happier than when in the army entirely absorbed in action duties; yet I love literature next, indeed almost better.” He could not choose. He thus never completely surrendered himself to poetry or to action, whether in politics, in the army, or after the war, in an unerring commitment to one of his causes.
And after the war it just wasn’t possible for him to be both an imaginative writer and a public citizen. So he shuttled back and forth, unlike Dickinson, who, replying to Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Vision of Poets, brought beauty and truth together in poetry.
I died for Beauty—but was scarce
Adjusted in the Tomb
When One who died for Truth, was lain
In an adjoining Room—
He questioned softly “Why I failed”?
“For Beauty”, I replied—
“And I—for Truth—Themself are One—
We Brethren are”, He said—
And so, as Kinsmen, met a Night—
We talked between the Rooms—
Until the Moss had reached our lips—
And covered up—Our names—
Beauty and truth are “Kinsmen,” united in words, not deeds, and even though death covers up “names,” achieved no doubt in the pursuit of beauty and truth, the poet speaks after death, keeping beauty and truth linked and alive.
Years later Higginson singled out “I died for Beauty—” as one of the poems that took his breath away, and doubtless he saw in it the reconciliation, through poetry, of a conflict he never quite resolved. But there was another, unspoken issue for Higginson. The dilemma of Frank Ayrault, isolated by his self-absorption and yielding to his dreams “as a swimmer yields his body to a strong current,” suggests Higginson worried that, alas, at bottom he had nothing, neither beauty nor truth, to dream about. This anxiety also lies at the heart of “A Night in the Water,” when, as Higginson submerges himself in the river, the world as he knows it dissolves: “I began to doubt everything, to distrust the stars, the line of low bushes for which I was wearily striving, the very land on which they grew, if such visionary things could be rooted anywhere,” Higginson wrote. “I had no well-defined anxiety, felt no fear, was moved to no prayer, did not give a thought to home and friends.” But without the shore he was nowhere, he was nothing. And yet if he was unable to dive into the dark waters of his own imagination or fully into the world of action, here, in this tour de force, he swam out much farther than he had planned.
Then he stepped back. Unlike Dickinson, he always stepped back. Most of his short stories are set pieces wagging fingers at moony young men for their addiction to art or beauty. More successful than these efforts are his polemical writings and some of his nature essays. (Few of his accomplishments—and none of his disappointments—ever meant more to him than Thoreau’s admiration of “Snow.”) When he joined the ranks of the literary professional, he wrote with restraint, wit, and unpretentious ease, but when no longer an impassioned advocate, he did not produce documents quite as powerful as his essays about slave uprisings and women’s rights—and about army life in the South with the black troops he adored.
It would be interesting to know if he mailed Dickinson an early version of Monarch of Dreams and, if he had, how she responded. He had started the story in 1877, just after Mary’s death. But he could not complete it. He didn’t know how it should end. And then when he decided to remarry, he put the tale away. Marriage supplied the regularity he needed; as he had told his friends, “I’m adrift in the universe without it.” He, too, hugged the shore.
In 1886, right after Dickinson died—her death likely motivating him to finish it at last—he picked up the story again. For he was now justifying the road he, not she, had taken: safe and solid and wide awake. Pleased with the result even though The Atlantic rejected it, he published Monarch of Dreams at his own expense when no other editor stepped into the breach. “My favorite child,” he called the slim, leather-covered book. And yet he really didn’t accept the story’s pat lesson: that a life of reverie concentrates the self too much, making solipsists of us all. After all, Higginson was himself a dreamer. His active pursuit of abolition and social justice had itself come by way of the dream of a better world.
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.