The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson/Chapter 8
CHAPTER VIII
HER RELIGION
The village church in the forties as described by her Sister Sue must have bred either mysticism or madness in a soul like that of Emily Dickinson.
It stood on the hill at the head of the village common, swept by the four winds of heaven. Architecture was never thought of or mentioned in those days. The old village church with its Grecian pillars was late in its life a target for any lazy wit, but that it survived beheading once, and lived bravely on in spite of jests, and stands to-day with little external change—rather Grecian in effect—defying its malefactors, bespeaks its integrity of composition.
The original interior was truly an odd picture. There were high pews painted white, with doors fastened securely by brass buttons, affording something of a sense of tribal ownership and comfort in the owner's sentiment of worship. These doors were too often carelessly slammed, but that only set off the noise made by the sexton just as the sermon ended, throwing open the doors of the two cast-iron box stoves with violence and hurling strange-looking geometrical wood, called felly wood, into their vast satanic depths, so that the farmers and their families, who remained for afternoon service at one o'clock, might warm their half-frozen members and refill their foot stoves. During the noon interval, as they sat about the red-hot stove on the circular seats, neighborly visiting was indulged in, with low sad tones. A meagre lunch was drawn from the large yellow muffs to stay them up for the long later service, while from the same capacious quarter small soapstones were drawn to be re-heated for the cold drive home in the early winter dusk.
The light, much weather-stained walls, patched and cracked, were brought into bold relief by the heavy mahogany pulpit and the really immense red damask curtain dropped for a background. Whoever conceived and executed the plan of that end of the meeting-house must have been fresh from a mince-pie dream of Solomon's temple. The pulpit was so high the minister was obliged to infer the effect of his sermon chiefly from the tops of the heads and bonnets before him, to the exclusion of more normal and favorable angles for sympathetic observation of human expression. Dr. Dwight, a nephew of President Dwight, of Yale College, held those ramparts of mahogany, accepting the call in 1850, on condition of a few practical changes to the reverend old building.
The concessions he begged were that the tin kettles hung from the long stovepipes that ran from the stoves down the side aisles to the chimneys in the opposite walls—kettles set to catch the black creosote that dripped from the pipe joints—might be abolished by some ingenuity; and that the big iron catches on the front doors be replaced by some design compelling less racket in the opening and closing. Also that there be some green baize doors, to be drawn when "the house," as everybody called it, was filling. Most people were on the whole not displeased by the changes, but one or two prominent persons exclaimed against such iconoclasms; remarking that we "were getting too refined." Dr. Dwight also influenced the congregation to remain seated during the last hymn, instead of rising and facing the choir. It was an old habit that died hard, and there was smiling among the youngsters the first Sunday it was tried, when one lone spinster spunkily preserved the honored custom.
But it was the supplanting of the bass viol by the organ that was most sternly resented and deplored. "It was a step toward Romanism." It was "a wicked outlay of money." Deacon Leland, although of musical repute, objected stoutly on the ground that it made his wife's head ache. And worse still the organist was a young and handsome girl. There was endless opposition to the new and heavenly aid to worship. Deacon Leland, Deacon Sweetser, and Deacon Mack, who did not dare be good and graceful too, preserved their John Calvin sternness until even their ice cracked under the new force.
There were sermons of mighty power preached from that tall pulpit, a memorable one by Dr. Swift, of South Hadley, "I heard Thy voice in the garden and was afraid," typical of the prevailing mood. His pronouncedly spiritual physique and solemn manner added to the supernatural awe of the text. Adam's apology, not then influenced or dissected by a short process of reductio ad absurdum, or minute German scholarship, became a shrinking experience of every listening soul from the white, ineffable, eternal God. At the close there was left only a wide cold planetary space, void of all save sin and its consequence. The stillness and sobs must have been proof of the power and excitement of his impassioned picture.
What the shy young heart of Emily Dickinson felt—whether she steeled herself not to think or no—no modern mind can safely conjecture. That she had a terror of God on the Sabbath, and loved his creatures and his sunshine with renewed dearness on Monday, is a pretty shrewd guess. The awful God of the sanctuary, and the God of her flowers, or the wood, or her friends was a reconcilement easily baffling to one wiser and older than she. She flouted the external glooms in her reactionary moods, made fun of the worthy saints of local fame, dashed into sacrilege and out again before she was caught, all the while dutifully accompanying her family with due meekness to the family pew, until the time came when she gradually was allowed to set up her own church within her own heart at home.
The form and substance of her religion were hardly on speaking terms. Her letters are full of flashes like this—called forth by one of the protracted seasons of revival called an awakening—"I know of no choicer ecstasy than to see Mrs. F roll out in crepe every morning, I presume to intimidate Antichrist." She scorned hypocrisy and writes to Sister Sue:
A counterfeit, a plated person I would not be,
Whatever strata of
Iniquity my nature under-lie
Truth is good, health and safety is good—
And the sky.
How meagre is a lie!
And vocal when we die!
To her nephew, detained from church, she wrote:
Sanctuary privileges
For Ned, as he is unable to attend—
The Bible is an antique volume
Written by faded men,
At the suggestion of Holy Spectres—
Subjects—Bethlehem—
Eden—the ancient Homestead—
Satan—the Brigadier,
Judas—the great Defaulter,
David—the Troubadour.
Sin—a distinguished Precipice
Others must resist,
Boys that "believe"
Are very lonesome—
Other boys are "lost."
Had but the tale a warbling Teller
All the boys would come—
Orpheus' sermon captivated,
It did not condemn.
To Ned—
The Devil, had he fidelity,
Would be the finest friend—
Because he has ability,
But Devils cannot mend.
Perfidy is the virtue
That would he but resign,—
The Devil, so amended,
Were durably divine.
Often and often her best quips and most startling suggestions come in her allusions to the Bible, which she uses with a familiarity unknown to her time, and with a spirit of equality almost jocular; using words—to others of her same conventional training—unbelievably yoked. "As the Bible boyishly says—new every morning and fresh every evening"—is one of her adverbs forever fresh in the family quotation.
Paul took the marine walk at great risk.
"I have finished the faith," he said; we rejoice he did not say discarded it.
Vinnie is picking a few seeds, for if a pod die, shall it not live again?
More seriously she exclaims:
Gethsemane and Cana are a travelled route—
So loved her that he died for her, says the explaining Jesus.
Could character be more shrewdly epitomized than by this terse antithesis:
To do a magnanimous thing and take oneself by surprise, if one is not in the habit of it, is precisely the finest of joys. Not to do a magnanimous thing, notwithstanding it never be known, notwithstanding it cost us existence, is rapture herself spurned.
The Church dominated all life, social and public, in Amherst in the mid-century, but the religion of Emily Dickinson was not a blend of any she received by inheritance or instruction. The gentle belief of her mother in a God who would hold back the rain until after the hay was in, or who sent the undesirable showers to prove the faith of his meek followers in his chastening for their good, or the fear of God that sent her forth in her best shawl of a pleasant afternoon to collect the annual missionary money for her church; her minute abstinence from all labor on the seventh day, her punctilious conscientiousness in rectitude and mercy, in deeds of kindness and faithfully restrained tongue, was too limited, too earthbound for Emily. This guileless little being, timid, yet one of the most persevering of saints, gave little to her daughter which explains or defines. This pattern of a good and amiable housewife and mother had little exhibition in her offspring, except for the gentleness which was always a predominant characteristic, the supreme gentleness of action and feeling.
From her father there descended upon her the inward quality of her own outward grace. He was one of the most just, loyal and reserved souls that ever avoided cant or religious over-expression. He became a member of the village church rather late in life, having served its parish in almost all capacities. His confession of faith was a simply expressed desire "to be a better man," that was touching in the extreme to those who heard his clear and crisp statement at the evening meeting of his friends and neighbors. He was a man of sterling purity against whom no one ever had taken up a reproach, a friend of the entire community, a notable figure of the County Bar: fulfilling nobly his ideal, expressed in a letter to his wife dated March 19, 1828, a few weeks before their marriage. "Let us prepare for a life of rational happiness. I do not expect or wish for a life of pleasure! May we be happy and useful and successful, and each be an ornament in society and gain the respect and confidence of all with whom we may be connected."[1]
Emily, of course, attended church with her family and heard the long sermons of her day on "foreordination—whereby"—etc. The incident of her dear friend and parson, Dr. Dwight, attempting to convert her, remains as a cherished family annal, for she could never be brought to consider God as an enemy, or herself as hateful in his sight. What a contrast her own cry: "Could pathos compete with that simple statement, — "Not that we first loved Him, but that He first loved us'?" But the contribution to Faith that Emily Dickinson made to the world will some day be definitely recognized. Her way of loving God, knowing Him, serving Him, was as ancient as Brother Lawrence, as modern as William James. Brother Lawrence in the seventeenth century saying the smallest action for the love of God is all, and Emily saying, "The simplest solace with a loved aim has a heavenly quality," are really more than paraphrase. The similarity of their source of power parallels in his letters as well as its daily exhibition.
She had the soul of a monk of the Middle Ages bound up in the flesh of Puritan descent, and, from Heaven only knows where, all the fiery quality of imagination for which genius has been burned at the stake in one form or another since the beginning. She accepted the results of her training, as she shows in her attitude that if He be against us all other allies are useless! Even this is not so much resignation of the true brand as shrewd observation in result.
One of the students of her poetry — himself a preacher of brilliant reputation — writes of her: "Her power is really the unusual degree in which she reflects the divine.
...If her genius was inspiration, it was something to which every soul that is human has a claim, in some humble degree, to share; and the way in which she lived deserved study for the light it may throw upon what mankind can do to come into its own share of the same gift."
She was not a pantheist, though she saw each tree and bush "afire with God," and each revelation of twilight and dawn or starry sky as spread forth by the Eternal. Each personality had a dignity that lent it awe to her. She was respectful to every mortal as to every worm that crawls. She could mock or epigramize the mean or outrageous, but never inflict a false or wounding touch or thought upon a sincere and unspoiled nature.
Toward her family and her daily circle, servants, friends, chance comers, she was the spirit of loveliness incarnate. "Whatever it is, Emily will get it for you!" she vowed dramatically to her weeping children adorers, who fled to her in dismay in any incredible panic. The fruit of her religion was incessant sweet ministration; she was incarnate devotion, service; wanting nothing for herself except to give to some one else.
There must have been the most lofty, holy inspiration, indeed, to perfect such fragrant living. Like Saint Francis, she might have preached to the birds, and included not only "Sister Lark," but Bumble Bee, in her sermon. And when the immortal in her friends began, and when she approached death and the mystery of the superhuman, who shall attempt to follow her except by repetition of her own words, those phrases she brought back from her perpetual adorations of the Unknown, from her adventures in the dark ways of thought and spirit? She may not have had a consciously phrased conviction, such as her family called "creed"; she may not have connected the old First Church with what she called her "Father's House"; she certainly never considered God her judge or her enemy; but her faith was that of one who has never ceased to be a mortal. She was a part of God, and God was in her so truly that no outward effort was necessary nor was it to her possible to exaggerate the harmony between the Creator and His created child. The adjustment was never broken. She would have spoken to God more simply than to her honorable parent—with less constraint; would have been quite capable of offering God her sweetest flower or her frailest fern, sure of His acceptance.
While to her family religion was a sad and solemn duty, preparing them for death and presided over by a dread and awful Majesty, whose wrath was to be appeased by dreary observance and repeated incantations to remove the curse left by Adam hanging over their innocent and timorous heads—to Emily it was not so at all. They might take her to church and seat her decorously where they sat, like a silent shadow or an inappropriate sunbeam, but from the first word of the prayer till the last word of the benediction, though her body was present, only Emily knew where her soul spent those hours of motionless pause. Hiatus was an art with her, and one she fully employed. There may have been steppingstones in the sermon that caught her back, in her daring the wide flood of her own fancy, but hardly more than that. The devil was her favorite character in the drama of piety, and she invented him even more deliciously than others presented him to her. In him she seemed to recognize an artless but joyous comrade of her own unrelated moments of wit. An untrammelled twain they two, at whom God winked, in true Old Testament fashion.
With a solemn undercurrent truly tragic, too searching and chill to contemplate unmoved, she had the inhuman, elfin strain that has nothing whatever to do with manmade rites or professions. There was a side of her that escaped, as a retiring sunbeam to its native sky, leaving mere chairs and tables on their certain spots in the drab pattern of the carpet left below.
"With reticence before and mystery behind,"
as Carman puts it, like the wind of which he is speaking, she passed through the heroic convulsions of that country church, unharmed and undetained.
The thought persists, though put aside repeatedly, of her possible reincarnation. How else did those hanging gardens of Babylon in her nature get themselves implanted? Characteristics of Richelieu—craving for the sultry Orient—how came these in the nature of a New England Puritan, nun and worshipper, mystic and philosopher, woman and eternal child? How else account for her?
Both personal memory of countless hours with her, and the open-minded re-reading of her poems and family letters lead to the conclusion that awe summed up her attitude toward religion and love toward life. She could write, "To die before one fears to die may be a boon," yet in one hour her wondering conclusion could be swallowed up in the near joy of a little exquisite service for a dear one. To those with whom she lived and her brother's family, she was all loveliness, all glimmering whiteness, all spirit—an avenging angel with a fiery sword against whatever evil befell them. Christ with the lashing words of contempt for the money-changers was her true spiritual progenitor then, and at all times she belonged by face and mien to the sweet fields of Nazareth and Cana of Galilee as truly as to the Egypt of Cleopatra and the generations yet unborn.
This may sound like a wild and contradictory claim, but Emily was a unique and universal being; all times, all sympathies, all hopes, all fears, all throbs of timeless hearts beat on in her. Only God and eternity and the dazzling thought of immortality were worth her while, though her patient little hands wrought out their daily ministries in dumb rectitude. She moved about with a rapt manner at her simplest duties, making the bread her father loved best from her hands, or the exquisite caramels she sent to her favored ones, and the large sunny kitchen, with its windows both to the east and west, saw her often standing with her listening manner, of Domremy, sharing "the voices," perhaps, of a less troubled, less martial throng of phantoms; apparitions of her own thought and fancy. This, it must be confessed, led sometimes to catastrophe, but flight was ever her imminent salvation and mute defense.
Only her wit flew over the walls that hedged her in. And this even beat against high heaven at times, but with never a sacrilegious intention and almost a certainty innate that even her Father in heaven could be trusted to enjoy her sally into the uncharted dark where angels dared not go. She had a confidence in her, toward heaven, unlike any ever revealed. Though she said of Thomas that "his faith in anatomy was stronger than his faith in faith," her own faith in faith was stronger than any expression she either received or gave, in words.
After her father's death she went about always wondering where he could be, and even to her brother's children saying unforgettable things in her search for a clue to what, and where, he was, and "what kind" he had become. To more than one friend she wrote, "Footlights cannot improve the grave—only immortality." And no acting of tragedy in later years ever effaced the memory of her husky whisper, "Where is he? Emily will find him!"
It was of her mother after her death that she wrote later with less rebellion, "Like a flake gathered by the wind she is now part of the drift called Infinity. We don't know where she is, though so many tell us," expressing her maturing doubt of the infallibility of that high pulpit to divulge what her heart cried out to know. There was far more, then, that was native to Emily's feeling for the Eternal in the prayer of Saint Augustine:
"O Truth who art Eternity!
And Love who art Truth!
And Eternity who art Love!
Thou art my God, to Thee do I
Sigh night and day."
While her work still fascinated her, there came a morning in June, 1884, when without warning Emily was smitten as her father before her, and though she lived for two years after,
"The green world went on a sudden blind,"
and it was impossible for her to write more than an occasional pencilled note. She wrote her Sister Sue at this time, "You must let me go first, Sue, because I live in the sea always now, and know the road."
When the better days came, she still took out her writing and made her last corrections, playing with her beloved iridescent words to the last, but, in her own words, reminiscent of an oft-repeated family caution, "it was already growing damp"—"I must go in, the fog is rising," she warned, at the end of her briefest last message. Perhaps she was too elemental, too close to the very basis of being, to belong to mere humanity.
It was on May 16, 1886, that her family gave her back to immortality with a strange relief, as of setting a winged thing free. At the simple funeral in the old house, Colonel Higginson read a poem of Emily Brontë's, the last words she ever wrote, prefacing it by saying:
"This poem on Immortality was a favorite of Emily Dickinson, who has just put it on—if she could ever have been said to have put it off."
"No coward soul is mine,
No trembler in the world's storm-troubled sphere:
I see Heaven's glories shine,
And faith shines equal, arming me from fear.
"0 God within my breast,
Almighty, ever-present Deity!
Life—that in me has rest,
As I—undying Life—have power in thee!
"Vain are the thousand creeds
That move men's hearts: unutterably vain;
Worthless as withered weeds,
Or idlest froth amid the boundless main.
"To waken doubt in one
Holding so fast by thine infinity;
So surely anchored on
The steadfast rock of immortality.
"With wide-embracing love
Thy spirit animates eternal years,
Pervades, and broods above,
Changes, sustains, creates, and rears.
"Though earth and man were gone,
And suns and universes ceased to be,
And Thou wert left alone,
Every existence would exist in Thee!
"There is not room for Death,
Nor atom that his might could render void;
Thou—Thou art Being and Breath,
And what Thou art may never be destroyed!"
On an improvised bier of pine boughs, entirely covered by a pall of blue sand-violets which fell so low it swept the grass on either side as they passed, she was borne in a soft white coffin by laborers, who had all worked upon her father's land and reverenced her almost as the Madonna, across the few intervening fields carpeted with the young summer flowers, followed only by those closest to her, to the old cemetery where her father and mother had preceded her. A singularly lovely and fitting ending of her visible journey into the mortal world.
In her own room stood the old mahogany bureau, filled with her friend's letters marked to be burned unread, and her own manuscript poems. Her sacred wishes were carried out by her family to the utmost—until they came to her own work. It seemed to them too much to ask of them to destroy this wealth of her inner genius, with its gift for the world of poets and kindred natures throughout all time. They knew that Emily Dickinson belonged not alone to them. And in rescuing her work from destruction to which she destined it in her naïve panic before impending discovery, they were sure their decision would have been justified even by her if she could have foreseen their meaning to later generations. Her sister Lavinia, her brother Austin, were the ones to decide—technically—but it was the Sister Sue who realized that there had been visions of her own continuing in this world through her written words, long animating the quiet performance of daily routine by the white-robed little poet-philosopher, mystic, flitting about the old house under the tall pines. That the verdict of the world would have been Treason, had they acted otherwise, has been abundantly proved.
They have all gone that same green path she took, now, and it remains for the last living member of her own family to submit Emily's work to the final judgment of others, and her life, as far as it concerns others, as a beautiful inspiration. For which may her shy soul pardon the revelation; may it never be a betrayal to her spirit, still so vivid and real that to grieve her would be the supreme act of blasphemy against the Holy Ghost, which truly was her guest on this earth. Wherever she is, whatever she knows, may she know this!
The following appreciation, written by her brother's wife at the time of Emily Dickinson's death, for the "Springfield Republican," was requested by Colonel Higginson for the introduction to the first volume of her poems, but was withheld, and remains to be the last confirming witness of a contemporary.
Miss Emily Dickinson of Amherst
The death of Miss Emily Dickinson, daughter of the late Edward Dickinson, at Amherst on Saturday, makes another sad inroad on the small circle so long occupying the old family mansion. It was for a long generation overlooked by death, and one passing in and out there thought of old-fashioned times, when parents and children grew up and passed maturity together, in lives of singular uneventfulness unmarked by sad or joyous crises. Very few in the village, except among older inhabitants, knew Miss Emily personally, although the facts of her seclusion and her intellectual brilliancy were familiar Amherst traditions. There are many houses among all classes, into which her treasures of fruit and flowers and ambrosial dishes for the sick and well were constantly sent, that will forever miss those evidences of her unselfish consideration, and mourn afresh that she screened herself from close acquaintance. As she passed on in life, her sensitive nature shrank from much personal contact with the world, and more and more turned to her own large wealth of individual resources for companionship, sitting henceforth, as some one said of her, "in the light of her own fire." Not disappointed with the world, not an invalid until within the past two years, not from any lack of sympathy, not because she was insufficient for any mental work or social career—her endowments being so exceptional—but the "mesh of her soul," as Browning calls the body, was too rare, and the sacred quiet of her own home proved the fit atmosphere for her worth and work. All that must be inviolate. One can only speak of "duties beautifully done"; of her gentle tillage of the rare flowers filling her conservatory, into which, as into the heavenly Paradise, entered nothing that could defile, and which was ever abloom in frost or sunshine, so well she knew her subtle chemistries; of her tenderness to all in the home circle; her gentlewoman's grace and courtesy to all who served in house and grounds; her quick and rich response to all who rejoiced or suffered at home, or among her wide circle of friends the world over. This side of her nature was to her the real entity in which she rested, so simple and strong was her instinct that a woman's hearthstone is her shrine.
Her talk and her writings were like no one's else, and although she never published a line, now and then some enthusiastic literary friend would turn love to larceny, and cause a few verses surreptitiously obtained to be printed. Thus, and through other natural ways, many saw and admired her verses, and in consequence frequently notable persons paid her visits, hoping to overcome the protest of her own nature and gain a promise of occasional contributions, at least, to various magazines. She withstood even the fascinations of Mrs. Helen Jackson, who earnestly sought her coöperation in a novel of the No Name series, although one little poem somehow strayed into the volume of verse which appeared in that series. Her pages would ill have fitted even so attractive a story as "Mercy Philbrick's Choice," unwilling though a large part of the literary public were to believe that she had no part in it. "Her wagon was hitched to a star"—and who could ride or write with such a voyager? A Damascus blade gleaming and glancing in the sun was her wit. Her swift poetic rapture was like the long glistening note of a bird one hears in the June woods at high noon, but can never see. Like a magician she caught the shadowy apparitions of her brain and tossed them in startling picturesqueness to her friends, who, charmed with their simplicity and homeliness as well as profundity, fretted that she had so easily made palpable the tantalizing fancies forever eluding their bungling, fettered grasp. So intimate and passionate was her love of Nature, she seemed herself a part of the high March sky, the summer day and bird-call. Keen and eclectic in her literary tastes, she sifted libraries to Shakespeare and Browning; quick as the electric spark in her intuitions and analyses, she seized the kernel instantly, almost impatient of the fewest words by which she must make her revelation. To her life was rich, and all aglow with God and immortality. With no creed, no formulated faith, hardly knowing the names of dogmas, she walked this life with the gentleness and reverence of old saints, with the firm step of martyrs who sing while they suffer. How better note the flight of this "soul of fire in a shell of pearl" than by her own words?
Morns like these, we parted;
Noons like these, she rose;
Fluttering first, then firmer,
To her fair repose.
- ↑ Springfield Republican: "In his State, and particularly in its western section, he has long ranked among the few 'first citizens,' honored for his years and public services, respected for his sterling good sense and independence of character, revered for his spotless integrity and patriotic self-sacrifice to public duty, beloved even by all who came near to him for the simple truthfulness and chivalric tenderness that lay deep and broad in the base of his nature. He has left an example of service as a public-spirited citizen and faithful official that both in quality and quantity should alone make him an historic character in Massachusetts. He was indeed a New England Chevalier Bayard, without fear and without reproach. He possessed and exhibited that rarest and yet most needed of all qualities in these days of cowardly conformity and base complaisance,—the courage of his convictions. This was the essence of his life. This is his noblest bequest to his community and his State."