--

Falling in Love Again.

houses in Venice, and one so interesting for its occupants. I say nothing of the Falieri. I do not care to dig up the dead but what a world this is, when no more honour is paid to the man who has done more to bring Venice into good repute than any man in the last hundred years, except perhaps Ruskin. . . . Americans are always floating past and staring about, and probably they don't know that in this very palace the only true history of Egypt and Rameses II is now actually building itself up day by day. Hang it, there is no chance for modest merit. By the way, I want to tell you something. I fell in love with you over again the other day. I chanced upon an English copy of the "Italian Journeys” and re-read it with intense enjoyment. What felicity, what delicacy. Your handling of the English language charms me to the core, and you catch characters and shades nu-an-ces· of it. Why do I break out upon you in this bold manner? Well, for this, you are writing another story, probably it is all executed, in fact, now. Probably it is to be another six-months' child. It will be as good as the other, no doubt, and that is saying everything. But, it is time you quit paddling along shore, and strike out into the open. Ask Mrs. Howells (with my love) if it is not so. The time has come for you to make an opus — not only a study on a large canvas, but a picture. Write a long novel, one that we can dive into with confidence, and not feel that we are to strike bottom at the first plunge. Permit me the extent of the figure want to swim in you, not merely to lave our faces. I have read Mr. James's "Roderick Hudson " up to September, and I give in. It is not too much to call it great. What consummate art it all is, no straining, but easily the bull'seye every time. Another noticeable thing is that, while it is calm and high in culture, there is none of the sneer in it or the cant of culture, and I wonder if the author him

we

self knows that his characters never seem to be used by him as stalking-horses to vent an opinion which the author does not quite care to father. His characters always seem to speak only for themselves. I take it there is no better evidence of the author's success than that.

MY

II

(To William Dean Howells, July, 1876)

Y DEAR, DEAR FRIEND: I have come into this land of Family and Chance Acquaintances and find it hot and dirty, and in debt, and I am in sympathy with it. It is only when I think of you and the dear friends whose presence would make the peninsula of the White Sea a paradise that I have heart and resolve to do as Cranmer told Ridley to do under similar circumstances, play the man, though I am burnt to a crisp. . . . Mrs. Warner is sunning herself in the thought that she is at home. That woman is a deep and designing patriot, and would dwell here forever, if her plans were not upset by her private and ill-concealed affection for me. God bless you for your generous notice of the “Levant” book. It quite took my breath away, and I am not sure I should have survived, if it were not that Mr. Prime and General McClellan and others of that sort in New York are saying, publicly and privately, that it is the best book written on Egypt. I myself still doubt, however, if it is as good in all respects as the Pentateuch. . . .

...

MARK

III

...

[ARK [Twain] says that "to give a humorous book to Ripley is like sending a first-chop paper of chewing tobacco to a young ladies' seminary for them to review." . .

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!

With our love,

T. B. ALDRICH

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 99 "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