Hollow Affectation

Thomas Bailey Aldrich considers Whitman's verse curious but ineffective

(To Edmund Clarence Stedman)

PONKAPOG, MASS., Nov. 20, 1880

MY DEAR EDMUND,— . .

You seemed to think

that I was going to take exception to your paper on Walt Whitman. It was all admirably said, and my own opinion did not run away from yours at any important point. I place less value than you do on the endorsement of Swinburne, Rossetti and Co., inasmuch as they have also endorsed the very poor paper of If Whitman

had been able (he was not able, for he tried it and failed) to put his thought into artistic verse, he would have attracted little or no attention, perhaps. Where he is fine, he is fine in precisely the way of conventional poets. The greater bulk of his writing is neither prose nor verse, and certainly is not an improvement on either. A glorious line now and then, and a striking bit of color here and there, do not constitute a poet — especially a poet for the People. There never was a poet so calculated to please a very few. As you say, he will probably be hereafter exhumed and anatomized by learned surgeons—who prefer a subject with thin shoulder-blades or some abnormal organ to a well-regulated corpse. But he will never be regarded in the same light as Villon. Villon spoke in the tone and language of his own period: what is quaint or fantastic to us was natural to him. He was a master of versification. Whitman's manner is a hollow affectation, and represents neither the man nor the time. As the voice of the 19th century he will have little significance in the 21st. That he will outlast the majority of his contemporaries, I haven't the faintest doubt - but

it will be in a glass case or a quart of spirits in an anatomical museum. While we are on the topic of poetry, and I've the space to say it, I want to tell you that I thought the poem on Gifford exquisite, particularly the second division. The blank verse was wholly your own, "not Lancelot's nor another's". as mine always is.

...

I am curious to see your review of Mrs. Fields's "Under the Olive." Here's a New England woman blowing very sweet breath through Pandean pipes! What unexpected antique music to come up from Manchester-bythe-Sea! I admire it all greatly, as a reproduction. Mrs. Fields's work in this represents only her intellect and its training: I don't find her personality anywhere. The joys and sorrows she sings are our own to-day, but she presents them in such a manner as to make them seem aside from our experience. To my thinking a single drop of pure Yankee blood is richer than a thousand urnfuls of Greek dust. At the same time, I like a cinerary urn on the corner of my mantel-shelf, for decoration. This is the narrow view of a man who doesn't know Greek literature

except through translation. . . . Her poem must have interested you vastly. It is the most remarkable volume of verse ever printed by an American woman. Don't you

think so? Your review will answer me. While we are on marbleized classical subjects, let me beg you to read my sketch of "Smith" in the January number of the "Atlantic." Plutarch beaten on his own ground!

Overshadowing Fame

Thomas Bailey Aldrich discusses his own and others'

poems

MY

(To Hamilton W. Mabie)

MT. VERNON ST., BOSTON, Dec. 4, 1897

Y DEAR MABIE, · -Your paper in the last "Chap Book" places me in all sorts of grateful debt to you. After thanking you for the judicial kindness of the criticism I want to tell you how deeply it interested me at certain special points. You have, in a way, made me better acquainted with myself. Until you said it, I was not aware, or only vaguely aware, of how heavily we younger writers were overshadowed and handicapped by the fame of the reformatory and didactic group of poets, the chiefs of which were of course Whittier and Lowell: the others were only incidentally reformers, and Holmes was no reformer at all. But they all with their various voices monopolized the public ear. So far as I am concerned, I did not wholly realize this, for even long before I had won an appreciable number of listeners these same men had given me great encouragement. I don't think that any

four famous authors were ever so kind to an obscure young man as Hawthorne, Whittier, Lowell, and Holmes were to me. I wish to show you, some day, a letter which Hawthorne wrote to me thirty-four years ago.

I like to have you say that I have always cared more for the integrity of my work than for any chance popularity. And what you say of my "aloofness " as being "due in part to a lack of quick sympathies with contemporary experience" (though I had never before thought of it) shows true insight. To be sure, such verse as "Elmwood," ‚” “Wendell Phillips,” “Unguarded Gates,” and the "Shaw Memorial Ode" would seem somewhat to condi

tion the statement; but the mood of these poems is not habitual with me, nor characteristic. They did, however, grow out of strong convictions. . . . I have always been instinctively shy of "topics of the day." A good poem on some passing event is certain of instant success; but when the event is passed, few things are more certain of oblivion. Jones' or Smith's lines "to my lady's eyebrow" - which is lovely in every age- will outlive 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 about all the shrill didactic singers high and dry "on the sands of time." Enviable Jones, or Smith! . .

Believe me, your sincere friend,

T. B. ALDRICH

Of the curative properties of poetry, and of the kind. that should be taken homeopathically

...

I

2d mo., 9, 1888

AM delighted to have such a favorable report from thee by Sarah's nice letter. Sitting by the peat fire, listening to Lowell's reading of his own verses! A convalescent princess with her minstrel in attendance! There may be a question as to curative properties of Dr. Lowell's dose, but that its flavor was agreeable I have no doubt. My own experience of the poetry cure was not satisfactory. Some years ago, when I was slowly getting up from illness, an honest friend of mine, an orthodox minister, in the very kindness of his heart thought to help me on by administering a poem in five cantos, illustrating the five points of Calvinism. I could only take a homeo

Newspaper Jokes

disagreed with my stomach, probably because I was a Quaker.

Charles Godfrey Leland deplores the change in American humor

(To Miss Mary A. Owen)

HOTEL VICTORIA, FLORENCE, Feb. 3d, 1895

[ANY thanks for the letter, which is indeed a

MAN

letter worth reading, which few are in these days when so few people write anything but notes or rubbish. Be sure of one thing, that yours are always read with a relish. For it is marvellously true that as tools are never wanting to an artist, there is always abundance to make a letter with to those who know how to write. There is always something to "right about" or to turn round to and see! Dapprimo, I thank you for the jokes from the newspapers. They are very good, but I observe that since I was in America, the real old extravaganza, the wild eccentric outburst, is disappearing from country papers. No editor bursts now on his readers all at once with the awful question, "If ink stands why does n't it walk?" Nor have I heard for years of the old-fashioned sequences, when one man began with a verse of poetry and every small newspaper reprinted it, adding a parody. Thus they began with Ann Tiquity and then added Ann Gelic and Ann O'Dyne-till they had finished the Anns. Emerson's "Brahma" elicited hundreds of parodies, till he actually suppressed it.

Then there were the wild outbursts of poems such as

I seen her out a-walking

In her habit de la rue,

And 't aint no use a-talking

But she's pumpkins and a few.