Two Books by Mr. Aldrich

IN an unsigned review of The Queen of Sheba, contributed to the Atlantic in 1878 by Mr. Howells, then editor of the magazine, occurs the following passage :

“ There is nothing pleasanter, to the generous lover of literature, than to follow the constant advance of some favorite author, — to watch his star tranquilly increase, while the sky is streaked everywhere with meteoric lights that flash and expire, with rockets that climb the heavens to apotheosize into sticks. Mr. Aldrich’s growth as a poet has been one of the most notable facts of our recent literary history ; and his latest essay in fiction is stamped with the same tokens of maturing power. By power we do not mean the convulsive force that so often goes by that name in literature, but the quiet ability to imagine clearly, and the art to execute with delicacy and distinction ; the conscience that forbids the artist to let anything go from his hand without the last refining touch. It matters very little what the material is ; with this power the work becomes excellent.”

It is twenty-five years since these words were written. Yet happening to turn to them just now, after reading Mr. Aldrich’s latest book,¹ one has a renewed consciousness of the integrity of a literary career which commands admiration to-day for the same qualities that gave it distinction a quarter of a century ago. In the interval, how many literary reputations have been manufactured, placed upon the market, and gone into assignment ! We have witnessed the glorification and the swift oblivion of many an impassioned seeker of the mot juste, many an apostle of the crude, the rank, and the barbaric. Prose poets and " effectivists " and the " new journalists ” have had their day and gone their ways, and meantime Mr. Aldrich, in his old easy mastery over the fit word and the wellpoised phrase and the haunting cadence, has been quietly producing books that live.

Ponkapog Papers is a volume made up of a delectable medley of notes and essays. In the Leaves from a Note Book, with which it opens, are mingled reminiscences of travel, anecdotes of a life rich in literary associations, memoranda for unwritten stories, bits of character-study, paragraphs of criticism, with here and there a swift, mordant thrust at the Philistines, or a touch of pure light comedy. The very variety and air of whimsical inconsecutiveness are of the essence of its charm. At one moment the reader is in Tokio or Paris, the next in Lowell’s room at Elmwood or at Fields’s desk in the Old Corner Bookstore ; then he is smiling at the exquisite irony of that paragraph about Robert Browning’s ancestor the butler, or gazing with dimmed eyes at that cavalry sabre which hangs over the mantel — over so many mantels, North and South ! — with its precious, undying memories. Is it lovely fancies that the reader would seek ? Then let him turn to such sentences as these: " The young girl in my story is to be as sensitive to praise as a prism is to light. Whenever anybody praises her she breaks into colors.” Is it a glimpse into the secrets of the artist’s workshop ? Then hear what Mr. Aldrich has to say about the expressive value of suggestion : " I like to have a thing suggested rather than told in full. When every detail is given, the mind rests satisfied, and the imagination loses the desire to use its own wings. The partly draped statue has a charm which the nude lacks. Who would have those marble folds slip from the raised knee of the Venus of Melos? Hawthorne knew how to make his lovely thought lovelier by sometimes half veiling it.”

It is passages such as these that make one regret the author’s decision not to write that projected essay on The Art of Short Story-Writing. If he would only fence a little longer with Mr. Henry James over that disputable matter of Plot and Character ! What a pity to see two such accomplished swordsmen merely salute each other with the foils in passing, instead of giving the delighted audience the pleasure of witnessing a passado or two ! Among the longer essays in Ponkapog Papers, likewise, one wishes that the discussion of Historical Novels, that " sphere of misbegotten effort,” were longer still. But perhaps it is sufficient to laugh one’s opponent out of court, as Mr. Aldrich has done, in a serene and wholesome fashion.

Since Lamb’s day there have been few more perfect examples of the literature of sentiment than Poor Yorick and Tom Folio. The first sketch is the more anecdotal, and deals with the twofold associations that endear the memory of a great actor and an intimate friend. Its charm is in its restraint; in what is left halftold ; there is no sacrifice of the modesty of friendship, no surrender to the halfmorbid curiosity that follows the private life of the noted actor, Tom Folio, on the other hand, deals, with no less perfect taste, and with a more purely literary sentiment, with an old-time habitùe? of Boston book-shops, whose talk, “sweet and racy with old-fashioned phrases,” is still remembered by a few ancient strollers along the narrow pavements of the North End. There is room here to quote the last sentence only ; and it is given for the benefit of those backward-looking readers who think that the essay of sentiment went out of existence, or out of the grasp of the literary workman, with Lamb, or, at latest, with Irving and Curtis : “ Strolling to-day through the streets of the older section of the town, I miss many a venerable landmark submerged in the rising tide of change, but I miss nothing quite so much as I do the sight of Tom Folio entering the doorway of the Old Corner Bookstore, or carefully taking down a musty volume from its shelf at some melancholy old bookstall on Cornhill.” Nothing of its genre could be more delicately perfect.

The most considerable essay in Ponkapog Papers is devoted to Robert Herrick, an exquisite artist in verse, with whom Mr. Aldrich finds himself in natural sympathy. As in the briefer essays on Leigh Hunt and Barry Cornwall, Miss Emily Dickinson, and Mr. Young’s Wishmaker’s Town, the manner chosen is that of the fully informed, but witty and urbane talker, rather than that of the professional critic with his parade of apparatus and his canons known and named only by himself. Mr. Aldrich talks discriminatingly, it need hardly be said, with praise for what is praiseworthy, and with a good hatred of what he characterizes as the “ eccentric, obscure, and chaotic.” The lover of Herrick must be hard to please who will not enjoy such a genial picture of the life and work of the Devon parson ; and when Mr. Aldrich passes, in the second portion of the essay, to an estimate of the value of Herrick’s poetry, his finely chiseled sentences have the weight and the quality which are only found when a master is speaking of a master.

The magic of unforced talk; the instinctive avoidance of the crude and the commonplace; the flexibility of sympathy that turns swiftly from one aspect of the human spectacle to another, touching wisely and wittily upon all; — this is the charm of Mr. Aldrich’s essay writing. His latest volume of fiction² bears everywhere the stamp of the same characteristics. The story-writer who takes in his hand A Sea Turn and Other Matters will think first, perhaps, of the training that lies back of such skillful tale-telling, the " vine-like fluency " which, in Mr. Aldrich’s own words, " seems impromptu, and is never the result of anything but austere labor.”There are six dainty volumes of fiction already standing to Mr.

Aldrich’s credit, and in all the six there is never a dull or a feeble page. It is fiction for the “ town ” perhaps, as eighteenth-century writers loved to say when they meant the refined, the thoughtful, the cultivated; the readers, in short, who are found in our twentieth-century America more often in the country village than among the masses of the great cities. “ No shop-girl” —qua shop-girl, for in her private capacity she may possess a pretty taste in letters — " need apply: " such might be the inscription over the portal of the House of Stories which Mr. Aldrich has wrought. Here is no crass sensationalism, or sham history, or vulgar intrigue, but swift, wide-ranging, dexterous story-telling, told for the persons whom he thinks it worth while to please. These persons belong to the “ town ; ” they are readers with trained imagination and literary prescience. They will recognize in the dozen brief pages of An Untold Story a consummate art which makes most “told” stories seem mere bungling. In A Sea Turn, the title story, they will see the comedy of situation handled for once with flawless skill, without sacrifice of truth to character, or of fidelity to local coloring. In Shaw’s Folly and Thomas Phipps are character-studies of penetrating insight and engaging humor ; while in The White Feather, Mr. Aldrich touches, as many times in his earlier prose and poetry, but always poignantly and adequately, upon the tragic side of the civil war.

It is a rare achievement to utilize such varied themes as these in a style suited to each mood, — brocaded deftly when ornament is needed, but mainly in a smooth supple texture of words that ripple into light or shadow like the play of sunshine on the bare arm of an athlete. In the deluge of contemporary books, — hastily invented, slovenly written, and wholly forgotten before they are half read, — there is food for contemplation as well as an exquisite pleasure in finding volumes like Ponkapog Papers and A Sea Turn, which are written in the way that will never go out of fashion. In that essay on Herrick, already referred to, Mr. Aldrich remarks : " A fine thing incomparably said instantly becomes familiar, and has henceforth a sort of dateless excellence. Though it may have been said three hundred years ago, it is as modern as yesterday; though it may have been said yesterday, it has the trick of seeming to have been always in our keeping.” The secret of that " dateless excellence ” is possessed by Mr. Aldrich himself.