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.
V
The best refutation of Aldrich is furnished by Aldrich himself. The years between 1881 and 1890, the period of his editorship of the Atlantic Monthly, were a time of small production, of pause and calm, of ripening, of final adjustment. Following his resignation of the editorship, he began again actively to produce poetry and now for ten or twelve years he worked in contemporary life—in occasional and commemorative odes, monodies and elegies; in studies of the deeper meanings of life; in problems of death and of destiny. The volumes of 1891, 1895, and 1896 contain the soul of all his poetry. From them he omitted practically nothing when at last he made up the definitive edition of his work. The Aldrich of the sixties and the seventies had been trivial, artificial, sentimental; the Aldrich who wrote in the nineties had a purpose: he worked now in the deeps of life; he was in earnest; he had a message. It is significant in view of his oft expressed theories of poetry that when in 1897 Stedman asked him to indicate his best lyrics for publication in the American Anthology, he chose these: "Shaw Memorial Ode," "Outward Bound," "Andromeda," "Reminiscence," "The Last Cæsar," "Alice Yeaton's Son," "Unguarded Gates," "A Shadow of the Night," "Monody on Wendell Phillips," "To Hafiz," "Prescience," "Santo Domingo," "Tennyson," "Memory," "Twilight," "Quits"—all but one of them, "Prescience," first published after 1891. There are no "apricots and dewberries" about these masterly lyrics; they deal with no such trivialities as the fall of an eyelash. They thrill with the problems of life and with experience. It was not until this later period that the poet could say to a bereaved friend: "You will recall a poem of mine entitled 'A Shadow of the Night.' There is a passage here and there that might possibly appeal to you"—a severe test, but one that reveals the true poet. What has he for his generation? What has he for the crises of life, inevitably must be asked at last of every poet. His change of ideals he voiced in "Andromeda":
The smooth-worn coin and threadbare classic phrase
Of Grecian myths that did beguile my youth
Beguile me not as in the olden days:
I think more grace and beauty dwell with truth.
Now in the rich afternoon of his art the poet is no longer content to echo the music of masters. He has awakened to the deeper meanings of life; he is himself a master; he now has something to say, and the years of his apprenticeship have given him a flawless style in which to say it. No other American poet has approached the perfect art of these later lyrics. Who else on this side of the water could have written "The Sisters' Tragedy," with its melody, its finish, its distinction of phrase?
Both still were young, in life's rich summer yet;
And one was dark, with tints of violet
In hair and eye, and one was blonde as she
Who rose—a second daybreak—from the sea
Gold tressed and azure-eyed.