IV
In this transition group, poets of external beauty, Spätromantiker yet classicists in their reverence for rule and tradition and in their struggle for perfection, the typical figure is Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1836–1907). By birth he was a New Englander, a native of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where he spent that boyhood which he made classic in the Story of a Bad Boy. Three years in New Orleans whither his father had moved for business reasons, years that seem to have made slight impression upon him, and then, his father dying and a college course becoming out of the question, he went with his mother to New York, where he resided for fourteen years, or between 1852 and 1866. It was a period of activity and of contact with many things that were to influence his later life. He held successively the positions of counting-room clerk, junior literary critic on the Evening Mirror, sub-editor of the Home Journal, literary adviser to Derby and Jackson, and managing editor of the Illustrated News. He formed a close friendship with Taylor and Stoddard and Stedman, and he saw something of the Bohemian group that during the late fifties and early sixties made headquarters at Pfaff's celebrated resort, 647 Broadway. Then came his call to Boston as editor of Every Saturday, his adoption as a Brahmin, his residence on Beacon Street, and his admission to the inner circle of the Atlantic Monthly.
Aldrich's literary life was from first to last a struggle between his Bohemian New York education and his later Brahmin classicism. His first approach to poetry had been through G. P. Morris and Willis on the Mirror and the Journal. From them it was that he learned the strain of sentimentalism which was to produce such poems as "Mabel, Little Mabel," "Marian, May, and Maud," and "Babie Bell." Then swiftly he had come under the spell of Longfellow's German romance, with its Emma of Ilmenau maidens, its delicious sadness and longing, and its worship of the night—that dreamy old-world atmosphere which had so influenced the mid century. It possessed the young poet completely, so completely that he never freed himself entirely from its spell. Longfellow was his poet master:
O Poet-soul! O gentle one!
Thy thought has made my darkness light;
The solemn voices of the night
Have filled me with an inner tone.
I'll drink thy praise in olden wine,
And in the cloak of fine conceite
I'll tell thee how my pulses beat,
How half my being runs to thine.
Then had come the acquaintance with Taylor and Stoddard, and through them the powerful influence of Keats and Tennyson.
To study the evolution of Aldrich as a poet, one need not linger long over The Bells (1855), that earliest collection of echoes and immaturities; one will do better to begin with his prose work, Daisy's Necklace, published two years later, a book that has a significance out of all proportion to its value. As we read it we are aware for the first time of the fact which was to become more and more evident with every year, that there were two Aldriches: the New York romanticist dreaming over his Hyperion, his Keats, his Tennyson, and the Boston classicist, severe with all exuberance, correct, and brilliant. The book is crude, a mere mélange of quotations and echoes, fantastic often and sentimental, yet one cannot read a chapter of it without feeling that it was written with all seriousness. When, for example, the young poet speaks of "The Eve of St. Agnes," we know that he speaks from his heart: "I sometimes think that this poem is the most exquisite definition of one phase of poetry in our language. Musical rhythm, imperial words, gorgeous color and luxurious conceit seemed to have culminated in it." But in the Prologue and the Epilogue of the book there is the later Aldrich, the classicist and critic, who warns us that the work is not to be taken seriously: that it is a mere burlesque, an extravaganza.
In his earlier work he is a true member of the New York school. He looks at life and poetry from the same standpoint that Taylor and Stoddard had viewed them in their attic room on those ambrosial nights when they had really lived. Taylor's Poems of the Orient, inspired by Shelley's "Lines to an Indian Air" and by Tennyson's "Recollections of the Arabian Nights," made a profound impression upon him. Stoddard, who soon was to issue his Book of the East, was also to the young poet like one from a rarer world. When in 1858 Aldrich in his twenty-second year issued his gorgeous oriental poem, The Course of True Love Never Did Run Smooth, he dedicated it to Stoddard, "under whose fingers this story would have blossomed into true Arabian roses." To his next volume he was to add Cloth of Gold, a grouping of sensuous lyrics breathing the soul of "The Eve of St. Agnes": "Tiger Lilies," "The Sultana," "Latakia," "When the Sultan Goes to Ispahan," and others. Even as Taylor and Stoddard, he dreamed that his soul was native in the East:
I must have known
Life otherwhere in epochs long since fled,
For in my veins some Orient blood is red,
And through my thoughts are lotus blossoms blown.
Everywhere in this earlier work sensuous beauty, soft music faintly heard in an atmosphere breathing sandal-wood, and oriental perfume:
Lavender and spikenard sweet,
And attars, nedd, and richest musk.
Everywhere rich interiors, banquets fit for Porphyro to spread for Madeline, and, dimly seen in the spice-breathing twilight, the maiden of his dreams:
The music sang itself to death,
The lamps died out in their perfume:
Abbassa, on a silk divan,
Sate in the moonlight of her room.
Her handmaid loosed her scented hair
With lily fingers; from her brow
Released the diamond, and unlaced
The robe that held her bosom's snow;
Removed the slippers from her feet
And led her to an ivory bed.
Had Aldrich persisted in such work, he would have become simply another Stoddard, an echoer of soft sweetness, out of print in the generation following his death. But for Aldrich there was a restraining force. The classicist, the Brahmin, within the sentimental young poet was to be awakened by the greatest of the classicists and the Brahmins, Dr. Holmes, himself. "You must not feed too much on 'apricots and dewberries,'" he wrote in 1863. "There is an exquisite sensuousness that shows through your words and rounds them into voluptuous swells of rhythm as 'invisible fingers of air' lift the diaphanous gauzes. Do not let it run away with you. You love the fragrance of certain words so well that you are in danger of making nosegays when you should write poems.... Your tendency to vanilla-flavored adjectives and patchouli-scented participles stifles your strength in cloying euphemisms."[76]
Wise criticism, but the critic said nothing of a deeper and more insidious fault. There was no originality in Aldrich's earlier work. Everywhere it echoed other poetry. Like Taylor and Stoddard, the poet had so saturated himself with the writings of others that unconsciously he imitated. One can illustrate this no better perhaps than by examining a passage which Boynton in a review of the poet cites as beauty of the highest order. It is from the poem "Judith":
Thy breath upon my cheek is as the air
Blown from a far-off grove of cynnamon,
Fairer art thou than is the night's one star;
Thou makest me a poet with thine eyes.
Beautiful indeed it is, but one cannot help thinking of Keats' "Eve's one star" and Marlowe's:
Oh, thou art fairer than the evening air
Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars;
Brighter art thou than flaming Jupiter.
* * * * *
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.
One has, too, an uneasy feeling that the whole poem would never have been written but for Arnold's "Sohrab and Rustum" and Tennyson's narratives.
Aldrich's later life was a prolonged struggle against the poetic habits of this New York period of his training. The second side of his personality, however, that severe classical spirit which made war with his romantic excesses, more and more possessed him. "I have a way," he wrote in 1900, "of looking at my own verse as if it were written by some man I didn't like very well, and thus I am able to look at it rather impersonally, and to discover when I have fallen into mere 'fine writing,' a fault I am inclined to, while I detest it."[77]
Imitation was his besetting sin. It was his realization of this fact more than anything else that caused him to omit from later editions such wide areas of his earlier work. Of the forty-eight poems in The Bells he suffered not one to be reprinted; of his second volume he reprinted only two fragments: "Dressing the Bride" and "Songs from the Persian"; of the forty-seven lyrics in his third volume he admitted only seven into his definitive edition, and of the twenty in his fourth volume he spared but five. Of the vast number of lyrics that he had produced before the edition of 1882 only thirty-three were deemed of enough value to be admitted into his final canon.
It was not alone on account of its lack of finish that this enormous mass of poetical material was condemned. The poet had been born with nothing in particular to say. Nothing had compelled him to write save a dilettante desire to work with beautiful things. His life had known no period of storm and stress from which were to radiate new forces. His poems had been therefore not creations, but exercises to be thrown aside when the mood had passed. Exquisite work it often was, but there was no experience in it, no depth of life, no color of any soil save that of the dream-world of other poets.
The Aldrich of the later years became more and more an artist, a seeker for the perfect, a classicist. "The things that have come down to us," he wrote once to Stedman, "the things that have lasted, are perfect in form. I believe many a fine thought has perished being inadequately expressed, and I know that many a light fancy is immortal because of its perfect wording."[78] He defended himself again and again from the charge that he was a mere carver of cherry stones, a maker of exquisite trifles. "Jones's or Smith's lines," he wrote in 1897, "'to my lady's eyebrow'—which is lovely in every age—will outlast nine-tenths of the noisy verse of our stress and storm period. Smith or Jones who never dreamed of having a Mission, will placidly sweep down to posterity over the fall of a girl's eyelash, leaving our shrill didactic singers high and dry on the sands of time."[79]
He has summed it up in his "Funeral of a Minor Poet":
Beauty alone endures from age to age,
From age to age endures, handmaid of God,
Poets who walk with her on earth go hence
Bearing a talisman.
And again in his poem "Art":
"Let art be all in all," one time I said
And straightway stirred the hypercritic gall:
I said not, "Let technique be all in all,"
But art—a wider meaning.
His essay on Herrick was in reality an apology for himself: "It sometimes happens that the light love song, reaching few or no ears at its first singing, outlasts the seemingly more prosperous ode which, dealing with some passing phase of thought, social or political, gains the instant applause of the multitude.... His workmanship places him among the masters.... Of passion, in the deeper sense, Herrick has little or none. Here are no 'tears from the depth of some divine despair,' no probing into the tragic heart of man, no insight that goes much further than the pathos of a cowslip on a maiden's grave."
All this is true so far as it goes, but it must never be forgotten that beauty is a thing that concerns itself with far more than the externals of sense. To be of positive value it must deal with the soul of man and the deeps of human life. A poet now and then may live because of his lyric to a girl's eyelash, but it is certain that the greater poets of the race have looked vastly deeper than this or they never would have survived the years. Unless the poet sees beyond the eyelash into the soul and the deeps of life, he will survive his generation only by accident or by circumstance, a fact that Aldrich himself tacitly admitted in later years by dropping from the final edition of his poems all lyrics that had as their theme the merely trivial.
To the early Aldrich, life had been too kind. He had known nothing of the bitterness of defeat, the losing battle with fate, the inexorableness of bereavement. He had little sympathy with his times and their problems, and with his countrymen. Like Longfellow, he lived in his study and his study had only eastern windows. Herrick, whom he defended as a poet immortal because of trifles made perfect, can never be charged with this. No singer ever held more to his own soil and the spirit of his own times. His poems everywhere are redolent of England, of English meadows and streams, of English flowers. He is an English poet and only an English poet. But so far as one may learn from his earlier work, Aldrich might have lived in England or indeed in France. From such lyrics as "The Winter Robin" one would guess that he was English. Surely when he longs for the spring and the return of the jay we may conclude with certainty that he was not a New Englander.
During his earlier life he was in America but not of it. Even the war had little effect upon him. He was inclined to look at life from the standpoint of the aristocrat. He held himself aloof from his generation with little of sympathy for the struggling masses. He was suspicious of democracy: "We shall have bloody work in this country some of these days," he wrote to Woodberry in 1894, "when the lazy canaille get organized. They are the spawn of Santerre and Fouquier-Tinville."[80] And again, "Emerson's mind would have been enriched if he could have had more terrapin and less fish-ball."
The mighty westward movement in America after the war concerned him not at all. Much in the new literary movement repelled him. He denounced Kipling and declared that he would have rejected the "Recessional" had it been offered to the Atlantic. Realism he despised:
The mighty Zolaistic Movement now
Engrosses us—a miasmatic breath
Blown from the slums. We paint life as it is,
The hideous side of it, with careful pains
Making a god of the dull Commonplace,
For have we not the old gods overthrown
And set up strangest idols?
A poet should be a leader of his generation. He should be in sympathy with it; he should interpret the nation to itself; he should have vision and he should be a compeller of visions. It is not his mission weakly to complain that the old is passing and that the new is strange and worthless. The America of the seventies and the eighties was tremendously alive. It was breaking new areas and organizing a new empire in the West; it was lifting up a splendid new hope for all mankind. It needed a poet, and its poets were looking eastward and singing of the fall of my lady's eyelash.