Arts and Letters

The man whose name is next on our honor-roll was neither an interpreter of national aspiration, nor a stern judge of taste and manners, nor yet a prophet with a message to the Philistine. His was the joy of holding up the mirror to three stages in a national evolution.

Our distinctively American literature dates from 1830. For the most part the books published this side of the sea had been cheap reprints of foreign writings. The few native writers of importance unconsciously found inspiration in the European volumes which were their intellectual nourishment. But two generations of republican-democrats had now produced a third, which was the offspring of American tradition and education. Insensibly the literary and artistic output was more and more expressive of the environment in which it was engendered, and, the process once begun, the American quality grew more and more intense, until even British models were utterly neglected. There is of course a common and enduring element in all literature, especially in poetry, but the fine essence becomes in time peculiarly national, even local, and sometimes parochial. The doorstep poet is often preëminently the more extensive in his art because so intensive and penetrating in that mystery of vision and insight which creates not alone verse or rhythm or cadence or musical regularity; but recreates, represents, and gives definition to what was, but is not, to what is imagined, but not yet found. Born in this transition, and nurtured in the new American life, Aldrich became the bond of union between the three cohorts of American writers—those of the early nineteenth century, those of the later generation, which again were finding inspiration amid novel conditions subsequent to the Civil War, and the very last, which discovers a people imperious in temper, interested in itself as never before, and aware of a nationality that embraces the breeding-stocks of every race and clime. To the soul of this new people, to its abode, to its musing, to its energizing, present and coming interpreters must direct their attention and find for it some voice.

Throughout the long career of his authorship Aldrich was an attentive listener to the men, a careful observer of the nature, among whom and amid which he found himself. His theme was neither one nor the other, but the interrelations of both, the man personally and socially both in his home and in his habitat. At twenty he published a fugitive piece of verse which was so appreciated that he was encouraged to further literary effort, and for half a century his pen was busy. Throughout that long period he was the exemplification of the artist in literature. The writing impulse was intermittent: his genius was not in perpetual bloom, his fruitage was irregular. But from first to last he was intimate with his own production, which, though never academic, was alert against crudity, and careful in workmanship; he was himself a stern critic of what he made public. The sense of spontaneity which his readers felt was due to his art. In long parturition he matured his thought, and found the intimate connection between conception in idea and the expression of it in verbal signs which alone gives reality through sight and hearing. Born in New Hampshire and by the accident of his father's business demands a Louisianian in childhood, it was New York which made him an elect journalist, an author of promise. Boston summoned him, and his powers ripened in New England, whence he sprang. Conscientious in his study of contemporary literature, he was sensitive also to European movements. Hence his work as a whole possesses much variety in its essential unity, and is marked by the charm and grace of wide experience. There is little that is polemic in it, and most of it bears the stamp of Arcadian lightness. There were times when he ate his bread in tears, but his inborn joyousness consigned the influences of trial for the most part to oblivion. His drama is never tragic, because melancholy of the sort that grips was not natural, and, when insistent, was due to causes which could be and were dismissed by force of will. Nor is either his poetry or his prose stamped with the hall-mark of passion. Prosperity was essentially and peculiarly his blessing, and the permanent elements of his genius exhibit the temporary emergence of American letters into the blithe upper air from out the storm-and-stress period in which they began, and again from beneath the desperate urgency in which they struck the war-note during the struggle of the Civil War.