Aldrich on Browning in his Pajahmas

To George E. Woodberry

Ponkapog, Mass., June 12, 1899.

Dear Woodberry,--Don't ever go away from home on a ten months' absence without leaving somebody behind to answer your letters for you. I have been swamped, and am only just getting my head out of my correspondence. I found my private affairs in a tangle, too, and not easy to straighten out. But the slug's in the bud, and God's in the sky, and the world is O. K., as Browning incidentally remarks. A propos of Browning, I've been reading his letters to "Ba" and "Ba's" letters to him and think it a shameful thing that they should be printed. All that ponderous love-making--a queer mixture of Greek roots and middle-age sickliness ("Ba" was 40 years old)--is very tedious. Here and there is a fine passage, and one is amused by the way the lovers patronize everybody they don't despise. But as a whole the book takes away from Browning's dignity. A man--even the greatest cannot stand being photographed in his pajahmas. Thank God, we are spared Shakespeare's letters to Anne Hathaway! Doubtless he wrote her some sappy notes. He did everything that ever man did.

. . .In haste as ever,

T.[homas] B.[ailey] A.[ldrich]

P. S. I met Browning on three occasions. He was very cordial to me in a man-of-the-world fashion. I did not care greatly for him personally. Good head, long body, short legs. Seated, he looked like a giant; standing, he just missed being a dwarf. He talked well, but not so well as Lowell. . . .

-from The Friendly Craft: a Collection of American Letters edited by Elizabeth Deering Hanscom, Ph.D. (New York: Macmillan, 1908) p. 202-203.

Aldrich puts Whitman Behind Glass

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 . . .

T. B. Aldrich

-from The Friendly Craft: a Collection of American Letters edited by Elizabeth Deering Hanscom, Ph.D. (New York: Macmillan, 1908) p. 209-210.