Thomas Bailey Aldrich

( Originally Published 1912 )

ONE afternoon I was told that I must be at Oscar's that evening, for Aldrich was coming. The invitation needed no pressure, for at that time I was "playing the sedulous ape, " as Stevenson calls it, to three authors at once — to James (we could read him without nut-crackers then), Howells, and Aldrich, who, for all his simplicity, was the most difficult to imitate.

He came early and stayed late. He was a good Bohemian then, and though his circumstances, changed materially in later life, he always loved a quiet pipe, and was never happier than in the company of people of his own profession. He did not reserve himself for those who had won their laurels, but met as comrades those who were young, struggling, and unknown, without either condescension or the manner of benevolent tolerance from the heights of superiority. That is not to say that he patted everybody on the back. He warmed only to those who appealed to him through a kindred spirit. With others he could be cold and incommunicable enough. He was not of the complaisant kind, who from mere politeness readily acquiesce in what is passing. One could never be mistaken as to his likes and dislikes, for he was frankly outspoken whenever anything jarred him. Nor was he captious or rough in opposition. His weapon was raillery; it flashed in the air and pricked without venom and without leaving any rankling wound.

He literally laughed away those who crossed swords with him, and left them laughing too.

I can see him now, sitting at the round table at Oscar's, holding a briar pipe that was oftener between his fingers than in his mouth, and swinging it in graphic curves as he talked to us. He used it like a painter's brush or pencil. He was dressed in a quiet suit of tweeds, the sobriety of which was relieved by a flowing crimson scarf gathered at the neck by an antique ring. He was partial to crimson in those days, and it became his complexion and the light curls apostrophized by Bayard Taylor. We parted late and in a merry mood, the young fellows among us glorying in the new friend who was so witty, so suave, and so attentive to our ambitions and aspirations. Moreover, Aldrich had just succeeded to the editorship of the Atlantic Monthly, and hopes arose of possible advantages lying for young authors in that direction.

"I'll have an elegy ready for him before breakfast, and try to get ahead of Edgar," said Frank Saltus, referring to Edgar Fawcett, as the lights went out in Oscar's and we dispersed; and on the following morning he came to me, dissembling an air of despondence.

"It's no use. Edgar's beaten us all. He shipped a carload to the Atlantic by the fast freight before daylight — as per invoice, sonnets, ten bales; triolets, ballads, and rondeaux, three bales; novels and short stories, twenty tons in fifteen crates."

Edgar was beyond comparison the most prolific of all of us. His industry and his versatility were amazing. A member of fashionable clubs, and with a home in the best part of the town, he hid himself for work in a mean attic in the slums near Tompkins Square, and wrote there from ten or eleven in the morning till four or five every afternoon. Ile never waited for moods or allowed lassitude to excuse inaction. Like Anthony Trollope, he always had a bit of cobbler's wax in his chair, and lifting himself by application and pertinacity out of any threatening lethargy, he compelled production and found exhilaration in his fecundity without disturbing himself by assaying his output too closely. His most serious work appeared under his own name, of course, but, under one pseudonym he poured forth sensational stories in cheap weeklies, and under another — feminine — pious verse for religious papers.

Aldrich accepted some of his contributions (not by any means the wholesale consignment Saltus imagined), but he was never timid in rejecting what he did not want, nor mealy-mouthed about it. His bitter pills were not sugar coated; he could not flatter, and never ran away from disagreeable duties in an obscuring cloud of euphuisms. On the contrary, he could be amply candid, not to say blunt, when his opinion was pressed for. Edgar insisted on reasons, and, getting them, flew into a temper with them. A vituperative and inflammatory letter from him left Aldrich quite unmoved. He smiled at it, but never answered it.

I remember another of that coterie, a very young author indeed. He acquired daintiness and polish at the sacrifice of force and originality. He was confident of a story into which he thought he had put his best, and was bewildered when Aldrich handed it back to him.

"Isn't it well written?" he asked.

"Very well written."

"I thought you would like some of the touches in it."

"There are beautiful things in it."

"Then what's the matter with it?"

"It isn't interesting."

That was all Aldrich said, and the author took it as irrevocable. Aldrich did not even say he was sorry, but perhaps it was to show his sympathy that he invited the disappointed young man to lunch with him. Lunch-eon did not lighten the gloom of the guest, and before they parted, Aldrich, hesitating as he approached the subject and almost stammering, said, " Is there any trouble — anything the matter — besides that story? Because if you are — hard up, you know, I — I can let you have a little money."

Soon after our first meeting in New York I was called to an editorial position in Boston, and for many years I saw him constantly. At least once a week and some-times every day I called for him toward noon at the office of the Atlantic in Park Street, that snug little room, at the head of a narrow winding stairway, which overlooks the Old Granary Burial Ground.

"The Contributors' Club," he said, for my information, using his pipe as an indicator, when I first gazed out on the closely packed tombstones of the fathers and mothers of old Boston.

It always seemed to me that he belonged to other times than our own, and that he had strayed, like a traveller returned, out of an earlier century, the eighteenth or a remoter one. There was something of Herrick in him, something of Sir Philip Sidney, and something of Lovelace. At the latest he would have been at home in the age of Queen Anne. A sword and a cocked hat; ruffles of lace and a coat of lavender velvet, strapped with gold; a doublet of creamy satin, also frilled and embroidered; knee breeches and silk hose, would have become him better than the quiet clothes he always wore.

Without swagger, he had the swing and gayety of a cavalier; an ancient grace, precise but not solemn; a blithe heart and a habit of seeing things through the airy fancy and high resolves of a still earlier gallantry, even the gallantry of a knight-errant riding through the forest of the world with songs on his lips and a wit as nimble as his sword. And one could imagine him thus, without levity or any sense of the fantastic.

Nor did advancing years stiffen him or rob him of his winsome ease and placid urbanity: these were part of him to the end. Not a bit effeminate, and not illiberal or prudish, he resented, wherever he encountered it, everything that had a suspicion of vulgarity. The humour and the wit of others delighted him and stimulated him while they were refined, but the moment they ceased to be that, his merriment ceased and his disapproval was expressed by a frigidity of manner in sudden contrast to his habitual geniality.

He never seemed to be busy, and could always spare time to relight the slow-burning pipe which he smoked with the insouciance and economy of an Oriental. What-ever the hour, no welcome visitor was dismissed, so far as I could see, and reversing his chair away from his desk, often astride it, he would cheerfully turn his back on manuscripts and proofs, and let the printer's devil wait, regardless of the urgency of his errand. His conversation was even better than his writings, and, like them, crisp, pointed, and inimitably and impressively whimsical. It seemed to be impossible for him to say a commonplace thing, or to say anything that did not end in some unexpected turn to evoke the smiles or laughter of the listener.

"You've only got to touch him, and he goes off like a Roman candle," Doctor Holmes once said of him to me.

And yet he was a painstaking editor, and sooner or later, in some mysterious way, got through all the work that was so precariously deferred. Not a line was printed that he had not scanned, and to a greater extent than most editors have the patience for, in that round, legible hand of his, which bears so extraordinary a resemblance to Longfellow's, he personally corresponded with even the least important of his contributors, writing treasured letters to them, which, no matter how brief, always had some glint of his abounding and pervasive wit and humour.

After all, he was always a boy until the premature death of his son, which threw unwonted and unfamiliar shadows upon the rest of his days, and dimmed the gayety which hitherto had been inextinguishable. Not with-standing his gayety, he was quickly emotional and spontaneously sympathetic with any unhappiness or misfortune that came to his knowledge. A friend who had complained to him of being depressed received a few hours later what appeared to be a bottle of medicine. It was packed with all a druggist's neatness and precision, in a white wrapper, and duly sealed with red wax. The wrapper removed, a pinkish liquid was discovered, together with written directions: "Tincture of Cocktailia. Shake well before using. A wineglassful to be taken before meals. Dr. Aldrich."

But trifles like that were not the measure of his kindness. He was easily moved, and as ready with service as with sympathy. Among his dearest friends was an illustrious actor whom he saved from himself in long periods of depression, walking, riding, and rowing with him during the day, and accompanying him to the theatre at night in order to protect him from a gnawing and disastrous appetite. In a measure it was due to his patience and his cheerfulness that ultimately his friend recovered his self-control.

Most of the time Aldrich was not Aldrich to me. In a country newspaper a printer's error had made his name "T. Baldrich," and it so tickled' him that as "T. Baldrich" I usually addressed him.

When I was building a country cottage, in which he took as much interest as if it had been his own, we one morning entered a decorator's in Park Street, who showed us a wonderful opalescent window which had in it all the radiance of morning, noon, and evening. It was backed by another sheet of glass on which a ship had been outlined, and against the light she swam in tropic splendour, the colours changing with the hours. Not a result of design, but of an unaccountable accident in the kiln, it was unique, and attempts made to repro-duce it had been without success. I asked the price, and we left the shop. A few days later the window was delivered at our cottage, and with it a note from Aldrich hoping that sometimes when we looked at it we might remember a friend.

As a slight return I sent him, the following Christmas, an etching by Pennell, of Trafalgar Square, in which all objects were reversed — St. Martin's Church, for in-stance, appearing in the west instead of in the east. Aldrich declared himself pleased with this effect. "To correct it I have merely to stand on my head and look between my legs. What if the church 'is upside down?

It is then on the right side of the square, and all my topographical scruples are satisfied."

Confident and even aggressive among intimates, he was curiously shy among strangers, especially in public gatherings of all kinds, and had a strong aversion to speech-making. I remember a great garden party, given by Governor Claflin, at Newton, under the auspices of the Atlantic, to celebrate one of the many birthdays of Harriet Beecher Stowe. He was expected to be one of the chief celebrants of the occasion, but he shunned the crowd and moved about the edge of it, until at last we found ourselves out of sight and hearing of it. The master of the ceremonies pursued him, and discovered him like a truant school-boy.

"Here, Aldrich, you must keep your end up! Come on ! "

Aldrich was inarticulate and as soon as his pursuer disappeared flew with me for the station. Soon afterward, and long before the ceremonies had ended, we were at his cottage on Lynn Terrace, not hearing speeches or making them, but listening to the breakers tumbling against the rocks of that pleasant sea-side retreat. I suspect that he realized his disgrace : it was not the con-sequence of any reluctance to do homage to Mrs. Stowe, but rather of his unconquerable dislike of gregariousness and publicity.

Another day I found him walking up and down in front of the door that led from the publishing offices to the almost monastic seclusion of the editorial room. "I am afraid to go in," he confided. "I am afraid they'll laugh at this," he added, touching his brand-new silk hat, a sort of head-gear which I had never seen him in before. There was something of playful exaggeration in his embarrassment, and yet it was not wholly assumed. He was very boyish.

To the last and in his ripest years he escaped cynicism and apathy. He thought and spoke with undivided feeling from firm, unwavering principles. In many ways he was "old-fashioned" and he deplored — more than deplored — the slap-dash methods which pass without censure in many of the popular books of the day : the ungraceful and untrained plungings of that new school of writers which violates every classic tradition and formula of the literary art, and flings its work at the reader like so many entrails. Perhaps he was too fastidious for his age; and, at all events, whatever others were doing, he persistently lived up to an ideal which appraised moral responsibility at no less a value than the symmetry and orderliness which he strove for and achieved in his own literary art. Stories of mean things and squalid situations repelled him even when they were well told.

Those who listened to him laughed more than he did himself. His funniest things were usually said gravely, and rarely with any more consciousness than a smile or a low chuckle revealed. They were always without premeditation or effort.

We were lunching, as we often did, at Ober's, where at one end of the restaurant there is a bar. A bon vivant of our acquaintance appeared and, nodding to us, took a drink and departed. Before we had done he had been in three times. On the third visit Aldrich remonstrated with him: "Look here, B I don't believe in you any more. You're nothing but a pro-cession in the Boston Theatre."

He and his boys — the celebrated twins — were walking down Tremont Street, and one of them, pointing to the window of a surgical instrument shop, asked, "Bric-a-bracs?"

"No, broken backs," Aldrich replied.

Another day he was taking me home with him to the little house in Charles Street, which was filled from top to bottom with rare and beautiful things. We passed through Mount Vernon Street — much more dignified and select then than it is now — and he waved his hand at the substantial houses. "Now," he said, "you are in England. You can imagine the people sitting in the balconies and letting their h's drop with a crack to the pavement below."

All sorts of chances were inspirations to his fancy and cues to his humour. He was describing a very rough voyage he had made from Europe when his eye caught the colossal statue of George Washington in the Public Garden. "Even that would have been seasick," he said.

It was impossible to be with him without sharing his high spirits, and he gave more to his friends in his letters and conversation than he reserved for his books. The last time I saw him was at a dinner which we left together on a snowy winter's night. Though he had turned seventy he had preserved the jauntiness and grace of youth. He seemed perennial. I was surprised when in reply to a comment of mine made in all honesty — "Aldrich, you are scarcely changed from what you were thirty years ago "— he shook his head and said in a sad voice, "I feel my years, old fellow."

It was hardly a month later that, in the West Indies, I heard of his death, and, notwithstanding all those seventy years my first feeling, after respect and sorrow was that it had come before its time, and stolen one who was still in his prime.