[Speech of Edmund Clarence Stedman as chairman of the dinner given
by the Authors' Club to Richard Henry Stoddard, New York City,
March 26, 1897.]
GENTLEMEN:--The members of the Authors' Club are closely
associated to-night with many other citizens in a sentiment felt by one
and all--that of love and reverence for the chief guest of the evening.
He has our common pride in his fame. He has what is, I think, of even
more value to him, our entire affection. We have heard something of late
concerning the "banquet habit," and there are banquets which make it
seem to the point. But there are also occasions which transfigure even
custom, and make it honored "in the observance." Nor is this a feast of
the habitual kind, as concerns its givers, its recipient, and the city
in which it is given. The Authors' Club, with many festivals counted in
its private annals, now, for the first time, offers a public tribute to
one of its own number; in this case, one upon whom it long since
conferred a promotion to honorary membership. As for New York, warder of
the gates of the ocean, and by instinct and tradition first to welcome
the nation's visitors, it constantly offers bread and salt--yes, and
speeches--to authors, as to other guests, from older lands, and many of
us often have joined in this function. But we do not remember that it
has been a habit for New York to tender either the oratorical bane or
the gustatory antidote to her own writers. Except within the shade of
their own coverts they have escaped these offerings, unless there has
been something other than literary service to bring them public
recognition. In the latter case, as when men who are or have been
members of our club become Ambassadors, because they are undeniably
fitted for the missions to Great Britain and France, even authors are
made to sit in state. To-night's gathering, then, is, indeed,
exceptional, being in public honor of an American author here
resident--of "one of our own"--who is not booked for a foreign mission,
nor leaving the country, nor returning, nor doing anything more unusual
than to perform his stint of work, and to sing any song that comes to
him--as he tells us,
"Not because he woos it long,
But because it suits its will,
Tired at last of being still."
Our homage is rendered, with love and enthusiasm, for his service to
"mere literature"--for his indomitable devotion throughout half a
century to the joy and toil of his profession, in which he has so fought
the fight and kept the faith of a working man of letters. It is rendered
to the most distinguished poet, of his country and generation, still
remaining with us and still in full voice. It is rendered to the
comrade--to the man who, with his modesty and fortitude and the absence
of self-seeking--with the quips and quirks that cover his gravest moods,
with his attachment for the city which has given him that which Lamb so
loved, "the sweet security of streets"--it is rendered, I say, to the
man who best preserves for us, in his living presence, the traditions of
all that an English-speaking poet and book-fellow should be to
constitute a satisfying type.
There is, perhaps, a special fitness in our gathering at this time. I
sometimes have thought upon the possible career of our poet if his life
had been passed in the suburbs of the down-east Athens, among serenities
and mutualities so auspicious to the genius and repute of that shining
group lately gathered to the past. One thing is certain, he would not
have weathered his seventieth birthday, at any season, without receiving
such a tribute as this, nor would a public dinner have reminded him of
days when a poet was glad to get any dinner at all. Through his birth,
Massachusetts claims her share in his distinction. But, having been
brought to New York in childhood, he seems to have reasoned out for
himself the corollary to a certain famous epigram, and to have thought
it just as well to stay in the city which resident Bostonians keep as
the best place to go to while still in the flesh. Probably he had not
then realized the truth, since expressed in his own lines:--
"Yes, there's a luck in most things, and in none
More than in being born at the right time!"
His birthday, in fact, comes in midsummer, when New York is more inert
than an analytic novel. This dinner, then, is one of those gifts of love
which are all the more unstinted because by chance deferred.
It was in the order of things, and no cause for blame, that, after this
town passed from the provincial stage, there was so long a period when
it had to be, as De Quincey said of Oxford Street, a stony-hearted
mother to her bookmen and poets; that she had few posts for them and
little of a market. Even her colleges had not the means, if they had the
will, to utilize their talents and acquirements. We do owe to her
newspapers and magazines, and now and then to the traditional liking of
Uncle Sam for his bookish offspring, that some of them did not fall by
the way, even in that arid time succeeding the Civil War, when we
learned that letters were foregone, not only inter arma, but for a long
while afterward. Those were the days when English went untaught, and
when publishers were more afraid of poetry than they now are of verse.
Yet here is one who was able to live through it all, and now sees a
changed condition, to the evolution of which he contributed his full
share. But he is no more a child of the past than of the present, nor
need he repine like Cato, as one who has to account for himself to a new
generation. He is with us and of us, and in the working ranks, as ever.
For all this he began long enough ago to have his early poetry refused
by Poe, because it was too good to be the work of an obscure stripling,
and to have had Hawthorne for his sponsor and friend. His youth showed
again how much more inborn tendency has to do with one's life than any
external forces--such as guardianship, means, and what we call
education. The thrush takes to the bough, wheresoever hatched and
fledged. Many waters cannot quench genius, neither can the floods drown
it. The story of Dickens's boyhood, as told by himself, is not more
pathetic--nor is its outcome more beautiful--than what we know of our
guest's experiences--his orphanage, his few years' meagre schooling, his
work as a boy in all sorts of shifting occupations, the attempt to make
a learned blacksmith of him, his final apprenticeship to iron-moulding,
at which he worked on the East Side from his eighteenth to his
twenty-first year. As Dr. Griswold put it, he began to mould his
thoughts into the symmetry of verse while he moulded the molten metal
into shapes of grace. Mr. Stoddard, however, says that a knowledge of
foundries was not one of the learned Doctor's strong points. Yet the
young artisan somehow got hold of books, and not only made poetry, but
succeeded in showing it to such magnates as Park Benjamin and Willis.
The kindly Willis said that he had brains enough to make a reputation,
but that "writing was hard work to do, and ill paid when done." But the
youth was bound to take the road to Arcady. He asked for nothing better
than this ill-paid craft. His passion for it, doubtless was strengthened
by his physical toil and uncongenial surroundings. For one I am not
surprised that much of his early verse, which is still retained in his
works, breathes the spirit of Keats, though where and how this strayed
singer came to study that most perfect and delicate of masters none but
himself can tell. The fact remains that he somehow, also, left his
moulding and trusted to his pen. To use his own words, he "set
resolutely to work to learn the only trade for which he seemed
fitted--that of literature." From that time to this, a half century, he
has clung to it. Never in his worst seasons did he stop to think how the
world treated him, or that he was entitled to special providences. He
accepted poverty or good-luck with an equal mind, content with the
reward of being a reader, a writer, and, above all, a poet. He managed
not to loaf, and yet to invite his soul--and his songs are evidence that
the invitation was accepted. If to labor is to pray, his industry has
been a religion, for I doubt if there has been a day in all these fifty
years when, unless disabled bodily, he has not worked at his trade.
We all know with what results. He has earned a manly living from the
first, and therewithal has steadily contributed a vital portion to the
current, and to the enduring, literature of his land and language.
There was one thing that characterized the somewhat isolated New York
group of young writers in his early prime--especially himself and his
nearest associates, such as Taylor and Boker, and, later, Aldrich and
Winter. They called themselves squires of poesy, in their romantic way,
but they had neither the arrogance nor the chances for a self-heralding,
more common in these chipper modern days. They seem to have followed
their art because they adored it, quite as much as for what it could do
for them.
Of Mr. Stoddard it may be said that there have been few important
literary names and enterprises, North or South, but he has "been of the
company." If he found friends in youth, he has abundantly repaid his
debt in helpful counsel to his juniors--among whom I am one of the
eldest and most grateful. But I cannot realize that thirty-seven years
of our close friendship have passed since I showed my first early work
to him, and he took me to a publisher. Just as I found him then, I find
him any evening now, in the same chair, in the same corner of the study,
"under the evening lamp." We still talk of the same themes; his jests
are as frequent as ever, but the black hair is silvered and the active
movements are less alert. I then had never known a mind so stored with
bookish lore, so intimate with the lives of rare poets gone by, yet to
what it then possessed he, with his wonderful memory, has been adding
ever since.
If his early verse was like Keats, how soon he came to that unmistakable
style of his own--to the utterance of those pure lyrics, "most musical,
most melancholy"--"to the perfection of his matchless songs," and again,
to the mastery of blank verse, that noblest measure, in "The Fisher and
Charon"--to the grace and limpid narrative verse of "The King's Bell,"
to the feeling, wisdom--above all, to the imagination--of his loftier
odes, among which that on Lincoln remains unsurpassed. This is not the
place to eulogize such work. But one thing may be noted in the progress
of what in Berkeley's phrase may be called the planting of arts and
letters in America. Mr. Stoddard and his group were the first after Poe
to make poetry--whatever else it might be--the rhythmical creation of
beauty. As an outcome of this, and in distinction from the poetry of
conviction to which the New England group were so addicted, look at the
"Songs of Summer" which our own poet brought out in 1857. For beauty
pure and simple it still seems to me fresher and more significant than
any single volume produced up to that date by any Eastern poet save
Emerson. It was "poetry or nothing," and though it came out of time in
that stormy period, it had to do with the making of new poets
thereafter.
In conclusion, I am moved to say, very much as I wrote on his seventieth
birthday, that our poet's laborious and nobly independent life, with all
its lights and shadows, has been one to be envied. There is much in
completeness--its rainbow has not been dissevered--it is a perfect arc.
As I know him, it has been the absolute realization of his young desire,
the unhasting, unresting life of a poet and student, beyond that of any
other writer among us. Its compensations have been greater than those of
ease and wealth. Even now he would not change it, though at an age when
one might well have others stay his hands. He had the happiness to win
in youth the one woman he loved, with the power of whose singular and
forceful genius his own is inseparably allied. These wedded poets have
been blessed in their children, in the exquisite memory of the dead, in
the success and loyalty of the living. His comrades have been such as he
pictured to his hope in youth--poets, scholars, artists of the
beautiful, with whom he has "warmed both hands before the fire of life."
None of them has been a more patient worker or more loved his work. To
it he has given his years, whether waxing or waning; he has surrendered
for it the strength of his right hand, he has yielded the light of his
eyes, and complains not, nor need he, "for so were Milton and Mæonides."
What tears this final devotion may have caused to flow, come from other
eyes than his own. And so, with gratulation void of all regrets, let us
drink to the continued years, service, happiness of our strong and
tender-hearted elder comrade, our white-haired minstrel, Richard Henry
Stoddard.