CHAPTER VII

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 Ægean 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 reëchoing 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 _pièce de résistance_ "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, _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.

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.

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 Letters Series, A. H. Smyth. 1896; _Life of Bayard Taylor_, R. H. Conwell.

RICHARD HENRY STODDARD. (1825-1903.) _Footprints_, New York, 1849; _Poems_, Boston, 1852; _Songs of Summer_, Boston, 1857; _The King's Bell_, New York, 1862; _Abraham Lincoln: an Horatian Ode_, New York, 1865; _The Book of the East, and Other Poems_, Boston, 1871; _Poems_, New York, 1880; _The Lion's Cub, with Other Verse_, New York, 1890; _Recollections, Personal and 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 of the Great War and Other Poems_, New York, 1863; _The Blameless Prince, and Other Poems_, Boston, 1869; _The Poetical Works of Edmund Clarence Stedman_, Boston, 1873; _Favorite Poems_. Vest Pocket Series, 1877; _Hawthorne and Other Poems_, 1877; _Lyrics and Idyls with Other Poems_, London, 1879; _The Poetical Works of Edmund Clarence Stedman_. Household Edition, 1884; _Songs and Ballads_, 1884; _Poems Now First Collected_, 1897; _Mater Coronata_, 1901; _The Poems of Edmund Clarence Stedman_, 1908; _Life and Letters of Edmund Clarence Stedman_. By Laura Stedman 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 It. A Literary Episode_ [Prose], New York, 1857; _The Course of 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.