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PARTISAN REVIEW
with the simple fact of feeling, having first to filter it through an
elaborate cerebral mechanism.
How sensitive Mr. Chase's intelligence is we can gauge from the
fact that he is able to exhibit as much sympathy as he does for Emily
Dickinson's religious subject matter. As a representative of the phil–
osophy of naturalism-in its Columbia variety, particularly-Mr. Chase
must find a good many of the feelings of this poet about death,
anxiety, nature, and immortality to be rather distastefully morbid.
Yet, in his broad humanism, he is as fair to these things as he can
be. In dealing with Emily Dickinson's ideas, he strikes me as being a
good deal more complicated than he need be, dragging in unnecessarily
references to Stoicism and Gnosticism. Here again, the fact would
seem to be that Emily Dickinson was simply not a strong enough in–
tellect to become a great religious figure, either to make the leap of
unbelief or belief: her
fe elings
were profoundly religious in certain
respects simply because she absorbed the Puritan atmosphere around
her, and these feelings were her only means of confronting the anguish
and solitude of her own life. When Mr. Chase speaks of her "residual
Calvinism," or states quite bluntly that "at twenty-one Emily Dickin–
son was an unbeliever," he seems to suggest that she was some kind
of free-thinker inheriting a set of more or less automatic religious
responses that got into her verse. Her latter statement, indeed, was no
more than the expression of a young girl who felt the bright attrac–
tions of the world around her and was ignorant of those darker
realities of the spirit which her religion taught and which she was to
know later in life. The intellectual wrestle with faith was something
altogether alien to her temperament, something she was quite incap–
able of. Mr. Chase, however, is altogether right in insisting upon
death as her principal theme, and without the reverberation of these
religious feelings her verse might have had no more than the precious
fragility of that of a good many other feminine practitioners.
To suffer and to bear the fruit thereof-for that, and that alone
did God put us upon this earth; and whether we suffer under the
dispensation of Christianity or not, and whether as professors of
literature or New England spinsters, the suffering and the fruit are
proportionate, and Emily Dickinson's poetry has, as had her life, the
ecstasy of her anguish. From this religious point of view her themes
appear perfectly "natural" and understandable, no more morbid than
life itself, and one need not drag in extraordinary intellectual con–
structions and complications to understand her religion. Mr. Chase,
with his usual intellectual candor, does conclude that this religious
