THE TRANSITION POETS
The second generation of poets in America, those later singers born
during the vital thirties in which had appeared the earliest books of
the older school, began its work during the decade before the Civil
War. It was not a group that had been launched, as were the earlier
poets of the century, by a spiritual and moral cataclysm, or by a new
strong tide in the national life. It was a school of deliberate art,
the inevitable classical school which follows ever upon the heels of
the creative epoch.
It came as a natural product of mid-century conditions. America, hungry
for culture, had fed upon the romantic pabulum furnished so abundantly
in the thirties and the forties. It looked away from the garish
daylight of the new land of its birth into the delicious twilight of
the lands across the sea, with their ruins and their legends and their
old romance.
We have seen how it was an age of sugared epithet, of adolescent
sadness and longing, of sentiment even to sentimentality. Its dreams
were centered in the East, in that old world over which there hung the
glamour of romance. "I hungrily read," writes Bayard Taylor of this
epoch in his life, "all European books of travel, and my imagination
clothed foreign countries with a splendid atmosphere of poetry and
art.... Italy! and Greece! the wild enthusiasm with which I should
tread those lands, and view the shrines 'where young Romance and Love
like sister pilgrims turn'; the glorious emotions of my soul, and the
inspiration I should draw from them, which I now partly feel. How my
heart leaps at the sound of:
Woods that wave on Delphi's steep,
Isles that gem the Aegean deep.
The isles of Greece! hallowed by Homer and Milton and Byron! My words
are cold and tame compared with my burning thoughts."[69]
The increasing tide of translations that marked the thirties and the
forties, the new editions of English and continental poets--Shelley,
Keats, Heine; the early books of the Victorians--Elizabeth Barrett
Browning, the young Tennyson--came across the sea to these sensitive
souls like visitants from another planet. "I had the misfortune,"
Taylor writes in 1848, "to be intoxicated yesterday--with Tennyson's
new poem, 'The Princess.'... For the future, for a long time at least,
I dare not read Tennyson. His poetry would be the death of mine. His
intense perception of beauty haunts me for days, and I cannot drive it
from me."[70]
Poetry was a thing to be spoken of with awed lips like love or the
deeper longings of the soul. It was an ethereal thing apart from the
prose of life; it was beauty, melody, divinest art--a thing broken into
harshly by the daily round, a thing to be stolen away to in golden
hours, as Stoddard and Taylor stole away on Saturday nights to read
their poets and their own poems, and to lose themselves in a more
glorious world. "My favorite poet was Keats, and his was Shelley, and
we pretended to believe that the souls of these poets had returned to
earth in our bodies. My worship of my master was restricted to a silent
imitation of his diction; my comrade's worship of his master took the
form of an ode to Shelley.... It is followed in the volume before me by
an airy lyric on 'Sicilian Wine,' which was written out of his head, as
the children say, for he had no Sicilian wine, nor, indeed, wine of any
other vintage."[71]
It explains the weakness of the whole school. All too often did these
young poets of the second generation write from out their heads rather
than their hearts. They were practitioners of the poetic art rather
than eager workers in the stuff that is human life. They were inspired
not by their times and the actual life that touched elbows with theirs
in their toil from day to day; they were inspired by other singers.
Poetry they wove from poetry; words from words. Song begotten from
other song perishes with its singer. To endure, poetry must come from
"that inexpressible aching feeling of the heart"--from the impact
of life upon life; it must thrill with the deepest emotions of its
creator's soul as he looks beyond his books and all the printed words
of others into the yearning, struggling world of men.
I
The members of this second generation of poets fall into two distinct
groups: first, those who caught not at all the new note that came into
American life and American literature after the war, and so, like the
survivors of the earlier school, went on to the end only echoing and
reechoing the earlier music; and, secondly, those transitional poets
who yielded to the change of times and retuned their instruments to
the new key. Of the first group four only may be mentioned: Thomas
Buchanan Read (1822-1872), George Henry Boker (1823-1890), Bayard
Taylor (1825-1878), and Richard Henry Stoddard (1825-1903). None of
these may be called a poet of the transition; none of these, not even
Taylor, caught the new spirit of recreated America; none of them added
to poetry any notes that have influenced the song or the life or the
spirit of later years. They were poets of beauty without a message, and
they caught no new vision of beauty.
The work of the group began early, only a few years later than that of
the major singers. Taylor's _Ximena_ appeared in 1844; Boker's _Lesson
of Life_ and Read's _Poems_ in 1847; and Stoddard's _Footprints_ in
1849. By 1870 they had settled into their final manner. It was theirs
to strike the last notes, ineffective and all too often decadent, of
that mid-century music that had begun with Bryant and Poe, with Emerson
and Whittier, with Willis and Longfellow.
II
We may pause a moment with Taylor. His personality in the early
seventies undoubtedly was more potent in America than that of any other
poet. His was the leading poetic voice of the Centennial of 1876, that
great national gathering that marks in a way the birth of the new
American spirit.
But Taylor was not at all an original force. His power lay in his
picturesque personality. His Macaulay-like memory charged with enormous
store of literature from all lands and at instant command; his bluff
and hearty manner; and the atmosphere of romance which surrounded
him, made him a marked man wherever he went. He appealed to the
imagination of adolescent America. Like Byron, he had traveled far in
the mysterious East; there was the sensuousness and dreaminess of the
Orient about him; he had "ripened," as he expressed it, "in the suns of
many lands."
The weakness of Taylor was the weakness of Stoddard, of Aldrich, of
the early Stedman, of all the poets of beauty. They had drunk like the
young Tennyson of the fatal draft of Keats. To them beauty concerned
itself with the mere externals of sense. Keats is the poet of rich
interiors, of costly hangings, and embroidered garments. To read him
is to come into the presence of rare wines, of opiates that lap one
in long forgetfulness, of softly whispering flutes and viols, of rare
tables heaped with luscious dainties brought from far, of all the
golden East can bring of luxury of furnishings and beauty of form and
color. "A thing of beauty," he sings, "is a joy forever," but beauty
to Keats is only that which brings delight to the senses. Of beauty
of the soul he knows nothing. His women are Greek goddesses: nothing
more. In Keats, and later in his disciples, Taylor and Stoddard and
Aldrich, we never come face to face with souls in conflict for eternal
principles. Shelley looked at life about him and reacted upon it. He
showed us Prometheus bound to the rock for refusal to yield to tyrannic
law, and then liberated by the new soul of human love. He believed that
he had a vision of a new heaven and earth with Reason as its god and
Love its supreme soul, and he beat out his life in eagerness to bring
men into this new heaven in the clouds. Keats reacted upon nothing save
the material which he found in books: translations from the Greek,
Spenser, Shakespeare, that earlier adolescent dreamer Marlowe, Milton,
Coleridge. With the exception of hints from "Christabel" which we
find worked into "The Eve of St. Agnes" and "Lamia," Keats never got
nearer his own century than Milton's day. He turned in disgust from
the England about him--that England with its Benthamite individualism,
inheritance from the French Revolution, which even then was culminating
in all the misery and riot and civil strife that later we find pictured
in the novels of Dickens and Kingsley--he turned from it to the world
of merely sensuous delight, where selfishly he might swoon away in a
dream of beauty.
Taylor and Stoddard and the early Aldrich reacted not at all on the
America that so sadly needed them. They added sentiment to the music of
Keats and dreamed of the Orient with its life of sensuous surfeit:
The Poet came to the land of the East
When spring was in the air:
The Earth was dressed for a wedding feast,
So young she seemed and fair;
And the Poet knew the land of the East--
His soul was native there.
* * * * *
And further sang the Nightingale:
_Your_ bower not distant lies.
I hear the sound of a Persian lute
From the jasmined window rise,
And, twin-bright stars, through the lattice bars,
I saw the Sultana's eyes.
The Poet said: I will here abide,
In the Sun's unclouded door;
Here are the wells of all delight
On the lost Arcadian shore:
Here is the light on sea and land,
And the dream deceives no more.
"Taylor, Boker, Stoddard, Read, Story, and their allies," confessed
Stedman in his later years, "wrote poetry for the sheer love of it.
They did much beautiful work, with a cosmopolitan and artistic bent,
making it a part of the varied industry of men of letters; in fact,
they were creating a civic Arcadia of their own."[72]
But in making this civic Arcadia of their own they deliberately
neglected the opportunity of reacting upon the actual civic life of
their own land in their own and later times. They lived in one of the
great germinal periods in the history of the race and they deliberately
chose to create a little Arcadia of their own.
No man of the century, save Lowell, was given the opportunity to react
upon the new world of America at a critical moment such as was given
to Taylor at the Centennial in 1876. Subject and occasion there were
worthy of a Milton. A new America had arisen from the ashes of the
war, eager and impetuous. A new era had begun whose glories we of a
later century are just beginning to realize. Who was to voice that
era? The land needed a poet, a seer, a prophet, and in Taylor it had
only a dreamer of beauty, gorgeous of epithet, musical, sensuous. "The
National Ode," when we think of what the occasion demanded, must be
classed as one of the greatest failures in the history of American
literature. Freneau's "The Rising Glory of America," written in 1772,
is an incomparably better ode. There are no lines in Taylor's poem
to grip the heart and send the blood into quicker beat; there are no
magnificent climaxes as in Lowell's odes:
Virginia gave us this imperial man.
Mother of States and undiminished men,
Thou gavest us a country giving him.
New birth of our new soil, the first American.
There is excessive tinkling of rimes; there is forcing of measures that
could have come only of haste; there is lack of incisiveness and of
distinctive poetic phrases that cling in the memory and become current
coin; there is lack of vision and of message. The poet of beauty was
unequal to his task. There was needed a prophet and a creative soul,
and the lack of such a leader at the critical moment accounts in part
perhaps for the poetic leanness of the period that was to come.
III
The poets of the second group, the transition poets, for the most part
were born during the thirties. Like Taylor and Stoddard, they were
poets of beauty who read other poets with eagerness and wrote with
deliberation. Their early volumes are full of exquisitely finished work
modeled upon Theocritus and Heine, upon Keats and Shelley. They reacted
but little upon the life about them; they railed upon America as crude
and raw, a land without adequate art, and were content to fly away into
the world of beauty and forget.
Then suddenly the war crashed in their ears. For the first time they
caught a vision of life, of their country, of themselves, and for the
first time they burst into real song. "For eight years," wrote the
young Stedman in 1861, "I have cared _nothing_ for politics--have been
disgusted with American life and doings. Now for the first time I am
proud of my country and my grand heroic brethren. The greatness of the
crisis, the Homeric grandeur of the contest, surrounds and elevates
us all.... Henceforth the sentimental and poetic will fuse with the
intellectual to dignify and elevate the race."[73]
Edmund Clarence Stedman was of old New England stock. He had inherited
with his blood what Howells termed, in words that might have emanated
from Dr. Holmes himself, "the quality of Boston, the honor and passion
of literature." He was born in Hartford, Connecticut, October 8, 1833.
Bereft of his father when he was but two years of age, and later,
when he was a mere child, forced to leave his mother and live with an
uncle who could little supply the place that only father and mother
can fill in a boy's life, he grew into a headstrong, moody youth who
resented control. He was a mere lad of fifteen when he entered Yale,
the youngest member indeed of his class, and his rustication two years
later was only a natural result. Boyishness and high spirits and
impetuous independence of soul are not crimes, however, and the college
in later years was glad to confer upon him his degree.
Returning to Norwich, the home of his uncle, he pursued for a time the
study of law. Later he connected himself with the local newspaper, and
in 1853, at the age of twenty, he was married. Two years later, he left
newspaper work to become the New York representative of a firm which
was to engage in the manufacture and sale of clocks. Accordingly in the
summer of 1855 he took up for the first time his residence in the city
that was to be so closely connected with the rest of his life.
The clock factory made haste to burn and Stedman again was out of
employment, this time in the great wilderness of New York. For a time
he was a real estate and commission broker, later he was a clerk in
a railroad office. Still later he attracted wide attention with his
ephemeral poem "The Diamond Wedding," and on the strength of this work
became a correspondent of the _Tribune_. In 1861 he went to the front
as war correspondent of the Washington _World_, and his letters during
the early years of the struggle were surpassed by those of no other
correspondent. In 1862 he was given a position in the office of the
Attorney-General and a year later he began his career as a broker in
Wall Street, a career that was to hold him in its grip for the rest of
his life.
Pan and Wall Street are far from synonymous. There was poetry in
Stedman's soul; there were within him creative powers that he felt
were able to place him among the masters if he could but command time
to study his art. He worshiped beauty and he was compelled to keep his
eye upon the stock-ticker. He read Keats and Tennyson, Moschus and
Theocritus, but it was always after the freshness of his day had been
given to the excitement of the market place. Time and again he sought
to escape, but the pressure of city life was upon him. He had a growing
family now and there were no resources save those that came from his
office. It was a precarious business in which he engaged; it was
founded upon uncertainty; failure might come at any moment through no
fault of his own. Several times during his life he was on the brink of
ruin. Time and again his health failed him, but he still struggled on.
The financial chapter of his biography is one of the most pathetic in
literary annals. But through toil and discouragement, amid surroundings
fatal to poetic vision, he still kept true to his early literary
ideals, and his output when measured either in volumes or in literary
merit is remarkable.
The first period of Stedman's poetic life produced little save
colorless, passionless lyrics, the echoes of a wide reading in other
poets. He went, like all of his clan, to books rather than life. He was
early enamoured of the Sicilian idylists. It was a dream that never
quite deserted him, to make "a complete, metrical, English version
of the idyls of Theocritus, Moschus, and Bion"--an idle dream indeed
for a vigorous young poet in a land that needed the breath of a new
life. Why dawdle over Theocritus when fields are newly green and youth
is calling? Stedman himself seems to have misgivings. "When the job
[the collecting of the various texts] was nearly ended, I reflected
that one's freshest years should be given to original work, and such
excursions might well be deferred to the pleasures of old age. My time
seemed to have been wasted."[74]
During this earlier period poetry was to him an artistic thing to be
judged coldly from the standpoint of art and beauty. He worked with
extreme care upon his lines. For a time he considered that he had
reached his highest level in "Alcetryon," and he waited eagerly for
the world to discover it. William Winter, his fellow poet of beauty,
hailed it as "not unworthy of the greatest living poet, Tennyson";
Professor Hadley of Yale pronounced it "one of the most successful
modern-antiques that I have ever seen." Then Lowell, with one of his
flashes of insight, told the whole truth: "I don't believe in these
modern antiques--no, not in Landor, not in Swinburne, not in any of
'em. They are all wrong. It is like writing Latin verses--the material
you work in is dead." It was the voice of an oracle to the young
poet. Twenty-three years later he wrote of his chagrin when Lowell
had praised his volume in the _North American Review_ and had said
nothing of his _piece de resistance_ "Alectryon." "Finally I hinted
as much to him. He at once said that it was my 'best piece of work,'
but no 'addition to poetic literature,' since we already have enough
masterpieces of that kind--from Landor's _Hamadryad_ and Tennyson's
_OEnone_ down to the latest effort by Swinburne or Mr. Fields.... Upon
reflection, I thought Lowell right. A new land calls for new song."[75]
The episode is a most significant one. It marks the passing of a whole
poetic school.
To the war period that followed this era in the poet's life belong the
deepest notes of Stedman's song. In his _Alice of Monmouth_, he is no
longer the mere poet of beauty, he is the interpreter of the thrill,
the sacrifice, the soul of the great war. The poem has the bite of life
in it. "The Cavalry Song" thrills with the very soul of battle:
Dash on beneath the smoking dome,
Through level lightnings gallop nearer!
One look to Heaven! no thoughts of home:
The guidons that we bear are dearer.
CHARG-E!
Cling! Clang! forward all!
Heaven help those whose horses fall!
Cut left and right!
The poem "Wanted--a Man" written in the despondent autumn of 1862, came
not from books, but hot from a man's heart:
Give us a man of God's own mold,
Born to marshal his fellow men;
One whose fame is not bought or sold
At the stroke of a politician's pen;
Give us the man of thousands ten,
Fit to do as well as to plan;
Give us a rallying-cry, and then,
Abraham Lincoln, give us a MAN!
O, we will follow him to the death,
Where the foeman's fiercest columns are!
O, we will use our latest breath,
Cheering for every sacred star!
His to marshal us high and far;
Ours to battle, as patriots can
When a Hero leads the Holy War!--
Abraham Lincoln, give us a MAN!
Poems like this will not die. They are a part of the deeper history of
America. They are worth more than ships or guns or battlements. Only a
few notes like this did Stedman strike. Once again its deep note rang
in "The Hand of Lincoln":
Lo, as I gaze, that statured man,
Built up from yon large hand, appears:
A type that Nature wills to plan
But once in all a people's years.
What better than this voiceless cast
To tell of such a one as he,
Since through its living semblance passed
The thought that bade a race be free!
Another deep note he struck in that war period that so shook him, a
note called forth by personal bereavement and put into immortal form in
"The Undiscovered Country," a song that was to be sung at the funerals
of his wife and his sons, and later at his own:
Could we but know
The land that ends our dark, uncertain travel,
Where lie those happier hills and meadows low--
Ah, if beyond the spirit's inmost cavil,
Aught of that Country could we surely know,
Who would not go?
Aside from a handful of spontaneous love songs--"At Twilight,"
"Autumn Song," "Stanzas for Music," "Song from a Drama," "Creole Love
Song"--nothing else of Stedman's poetic work greatly matters. He is a
lyrist who struck a few true notes, a half dozen perhaps--thin indeed
in volume, but those few immortal.
As the new period progressed, the period in America that had awakened
to the full realization that "a new land needs new song," he became
gradually silent as a singer and gave himself more and more to prose
criticism, a work for which nature had peculiarly endowed him.
IV
In this transition group, poets of external beauty, _Spaetromantiker_
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 _melange_ 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.
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 Caesar," "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.
And, moreover, in addition to all this it is a quivering section of
human life. One reads on and on and then--sharply draws his breath at
the rapier thrust of the closing lines.
What a world of distance between the early sensuous poet of the New
York school and the seer of the later period who could pen a lyric
beginning,
O short-breathed music, dying on the tongue
Ere half the mystic canticle be sung!
O harp of life so speedily unstrung!
Who, if 't were his to choose, would know again
The bitter sweetness of the last refrain,
Its rapture and its pain?
Or this in its flawless perfectness:
At noon of night, and at the night's pale end,
Such things have chanced to me
As one, by day, would scarcely tell a friend
For fear of mockery.
Shadows, you say, mirages of the brain!
I know not, faith, not I.
Is it more strange the dead should walk again
Than that the quick should die?
A few of his later sonnets, "Outward Bound," redolent of his early
love of the sea, "When to Soft Sleep We Give Ourselves Away," "The
Undiscovered Country," "Enamored Architect of Airy Rhyme," and "I Vex
Me Not with Brooding on the Years," have hardly been surpassed in
American literature.
It was from this later period that Aldrich chose almost all of
his poems in that compressed volume which was to be his lasting
contribution to poetry, _A Book of Songs and Sonnets_. It is but a
fraction of his work, but it is all that will survive the years. He
will go down as the most finished poet that America has yet produced;
the later Landor, romantic yet severely classical; the maker of trifles
that were miracles of art; and finally as the belated singer who awoke
in his later years to message and vision and produced with his mastered
art a handful of perfect lyrics that rank with the strongest that
America has given to song.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
JAMES BAYARD TAYLOR. (1825-1878.) _Ximena; or, the Battle of
Sierra Morena, and other Poems_, Philadelphia, 1844; _Rhymes
of Travel, Ballads, Lyrics, and Songs_, Boston and London,
1851; _Poems of the Orient_, Boston, 1854; _Poems of Home and
Travel_, 1855; _The Poet's Journal_, 1862; _The Picture of St.
John, a Poem_, 1866; _Translation of Faust_, 1870-1871; _The
Masque of the Gods_, 1872; _Lars: a Pastoral of Norway_, 1873;
_The Prophet: a Tragedy_, 1874; _Home Pastorals, Ballads, and
Lyrics_, 1875; _The National Ode_, 1876; _Prince Deukalion_,
1878; _Poetical Works_, Household Edition, 1880, 1902; _Life and
Letters of Bayard Taylor_, edited by Marie Hansen Taylor and
Horace E. Scudder. 2 vols. 1884; _Bayard Taylor_, American Men of
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Conwell.
RICHARD HENRY STODDARD. (1825-1903.) _Footprints_, New York,
1849; _Poems_, Boston, 1852; _Songs of Summer_, Boston, 1857;
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Literary_, by Richard Henry Stoddard. Edited by Ripley Hitchcock,
New York, 1903.
EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN. (1833-1908.) _The Prince's Ball_, New
York, 1860; _Poems, Lyrical and Idyllic_, New York, 1860; _The
Battle of Bull Run_, New York, 1861; _Alice of Monmouth. An Idyl
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and George M. Gould. 2 vols. New York, 1910.
THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH. (1836-1907.) _The Bells. A Collection
of Chimes_, New York, 1855; _Daisy's Necklace and What Came of
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True Love Never Did Run Smooth_, New York, 1858; _The Ballad
of Babie Bell, and Other Poems_, New York, 1859; _Pampinea,
and Other Poems_, New York, 1861; _Poems_. With Portrait, New
York, 1863; _The Poems of Thomas Bailey Aldrich_. Boston, 1865;
_Cloth of Gold, and Other Poems_, 1874; _Flower and Thorn. Later
Poems_, 1877; _Friar Jerome's Beautiful Book, and Other Poems_,
1881; _XXXVI Lyrics and XII Sonnets_, 1881; _The Poems of Thomas
Bailey Aldrich_. Illustrated by the Paint and Clay Club, 1882;
_Mercedes, and Later Lyrics_, 1884; _The Poems of Thomas Bailey
Aldrich_. Household Edition, 1885; _Wyndham Towers_, 1890; _The
Sisters' Tragedy, with Other Poems, Lyrical and Dramatic_,
1891; _Mercedes. A Drama in Two Acts, as Performed at Palmer's
Theatre_, 1894; _Unguarded Gates, and Other Poems_, 1895; _Later
Lyrics_, 1896; _Judith and Holofernes, a Poem_, 1896; _The
Works of Thomas Bailey Aldrich_, Riverside Edition, 1896; _The
Poems of Thomas Bailey Aldrich_. Revised and Complete Household
Edition, 1897; _A Book of Songs and Sonnets Selected from the
Poems of Thomas Bailey Aldrich_, 1906; _The Life of Thomas Bailey
Aldrich_, by Ferris Greenslet, 1908.