The men who gathered at Pfaff’s were very conscious of Boston, though their consciousness came out in various ways. The most violent said that the thought of it made them as ugly as sin; others loved it though they left it, as Whitman did “the open road”; and some, on the outskirts of “Bohemia,” were not too aggressively like Stedman, who admitted much later, “I was very anxious to bring out my first book in New York in Boston style, having a reverence for Boston, which I continued to have.” Aldrich was of like mind, and readily accepted Osgood’s invitation to “the Hub” and to the editorship of Every Saturday. Years after he wrote to Bayard Taylor, who could understand: “I miss my few dear friends in New York—but that is all. There is a finer intellectual atmosphere here than in our city.... The people of Boston are full-blooded readers, appreciative, trained.” And later, to Stedman: “In the six years I have been here, I have found seven or eight hearts so full of noble things that there is no room in them for such trifles as envy and conceit and insincerity. I didn’t find more than two or three such in New York, and I lived there fifteen years. It was an excellent school for me—to get out of!” Boston was his native heath, in spite of his own saying: “Though I am not genuine Boston, I am Boston-plated.”
Aldrich’s literary career began and ended with the writing of poetry, but what he did in the interims of poetical silence contributed to the peculiar character of his work even though it was a source of distraction and sometimes of prolonged interruption. As a reader and editor he was schooled from very young manhood in the exercise of a peculiarly fine artistic taste, a taste so exacting in detail that the Atlantic under his direction was described by a foreign critic as “the best edited magazine in the English language.” He did not reserve the exercise of this rectitude of judgment for the work of others, but applied it with perhaps increased austerity to himself. His verse will consequently endure close examination, and the later collections will show the virtues and defects of scrupulous rejection and of the revision in each succeeding publication of the work which he chose to preserve.
The virtues of work so carefully perfected are evident. His effects are, in the end, all calculated, for he gave no quarter to what he had produced with zest if it did not ring true to his critical ear. His poetic machinery is therefore well oiled and articulated. His metaphors are sound and his diction happily adjusted. “The vanilla-flavored adjectives and the patchouli-scented participles” criticized by his kindly senior, Dr. Holmes, are pared away. So in the little steel engravings that are the best expressions of his peculiar talent there is a fine simplicity, but it is the simplicity of an accomplished woman of the world rather than of a village maid. And herein lie the shortcomings of Aldrich’s poetry—that it is the poetry of accomplishment. As a youth in New York, writing while Halleck’s popularity was at its height, he was not independent enough to be more original than his most admired townsman. The verses in “The Bells: a Collection of Chimes” are most of them clearly imitative; and from the day of “Babie Bell” on, whatever of originality was Aldrich’s belonged to the library and the drawing-room and the literary club rather than to the seas, woods, and mountains.
It is logical, then, that his longer narrative poems have least of his own stamp in them. From a literary point of view they are well enough, but they are literary grass of the field and have no more claim on the primary attention of a modern reader than do the bulk of prose short stories written in the same years by Aldrich and his fellows. The only one that stands out is “Pauline Pavlovna,” and that because it has the dramatic vigor and the startling unexpectedness of conclusion which mark the best of his prose tales. It is logical, too, that in his more ambitious odes—such as “Spring in New England” and the “Shaw Memorial Ode,” which open and close the second volume of his poems—he did not appear to the best advantage. Memorials of the Civil War are adequate only if written with epic vision, but the best that Aldrich did with such material was to make it the ground for heartfelt tributes to the nobility of his fallen friends. Read Moody’s “Ode in Time of Hesitation” beside Aldrich’s slender lyric based on the same man and the same memorial, and the difference is self-evident. Aldrich’s biographer has commented on the rarity of his æsthetic sense, “among modern poets with their preoccupations, philosophical, religious and political.” In this not unjust criticism of Aldrich—which marks a distinction rather than a superiority—lies the reason why he should have left the writing of national odes to poets who were sometimes capable of such preoccupation.
In writing on personal and local and occasional themes Aldrich dealt with more congenial material. When celebrating his fellow-authors and the places he loved he could invoke beauty with an unpreoccupied mind; and he did so with unvarying success, addressing the choicest of the limited public in which he was really interested. The kind of folk he cared for “Drank deep of life, new books and hearts of men,” like Henry Howard Brownell. As a youth he wrote delightedly of a certain month when he could see “her” every day and browse in a library of ten thousand volumes. He was a literary poet for literary people. As such he was most successful in poems which ranged in length from the sonnet to the quatrain. In the tiny bits like “Destiny,” “Heredity,” “Identity,” “Memory,” “I’ll not confer with Sorrow,” “Pillared Arch and Sculptured Tower,” he achieved works as real as Benvenuto’s jewel settings. It was a fulfillment of the wish recorded in his “Lyrics and Epics”:
I would be the lyric Ever on the lip, Rather than the epic Memory lets slip. I would be the diamond At my lady’s ear Rather than a June rose Worn but once a year.
No more charming tribute was ever paid Aldrich than this of Whittier’s narrated by a friend who had been visiting for a week with the poet in his old age: “Every evening he asked me to repeat to him certain short poems, often ‘Destiny,’ and once even ‘that audacious “Identity,”’ as he called it; but at the end he invariably said, ‘Now thee knows without my saying so that I want “Memory,”’ and with his wonderful far-off gaze he always repeated after me: ‘Two petals from that wild-rose tree.’”
In his address at a meeting held in memory of Edmund Clarence Stedman in January, 1909, Hamilton Mabie struck the main note in two complementary statements: “Mr. Stedman belongs with those who have not only enriched literature with works of quality and substance, but who have represented it in its public relationships,” and, “Stedman was by instinct and temperament a man of the town.” He elected to live in Manhattan just as deliberately as Aldrich elected to live in Boston; and in this distinction lies something much broader than the mere difference between the two men.
Stedman was born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1833. After the death of his father and the remarriage of his mother, he was brought up from 1839 to 1850 under charge of an uncle. A member of the class of 1853 at Yale, he was “rusticated” (see p. 282) and then expelled for persistent misbehavior. Until 1863 he was in journalism, as petty proprietor in two Connecticut towns, and later as member of the New York Tribune staff, ending with two years as war correspondent. In 1863 he went into Wall Street, and in 1869 became a member of the New York Stock Exchange. From this date to the end of his life in 1908 he knew little real repose, oscillating from over-exertion in business to over-exertion in writing, with occasional enforced vacations. His work as poet was inseparable from his labors as editor and critic. In this field he wrote “Victorian Poets,” 1875, “Poets of America,” 1885, and “The Nature and Elements of Poetry,” 1892; and edited the “Library of American Literature” (with Ellen Hutchinson) 1888–1889, “A Victorian Anthology,” 1895, and “An American Anthology,” 1900.