dating back to November 2, 1873, when he greeted me for the first time
in a kinship we had just discovered. We had the same great-grandfather,
though each connection was through the mother, we being alike
great-grandchildren of the Reverend Aaron Cleveland, Jr., from whom
President Grover Cleveland was also descended. At the time of this mutual
discovery Stedman was established in New York, and although I sometimes
met him in person, I can find no letters from him until after a period
of more than ten years, when he was engaged in editing his Library of
American Literature. He wrote to me afterwards, and often with quite
cousinly candor,—revealing frankly his cares, hopes, and sorrows, but
never with anything coarse or unmanly. All his enterprises were confided
to me so far as literature was concerned, and I, being nearly ten years
older, felt free to say what I thought of them. I wished, especially,
however, to see him carry out a project of translations from the Greek
pastoral poetry of Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus. The few fragments
given at the end of his volumes had always delighted me and many other
students, while his efforts at the “Agamemnon” of Æschylus dealt with
passages too formidable in their power for any one but Edward FitzGerald
to undertake.
After a few years of occasional correspondence, there came a lull.
Visiting New York rarely, I did not know of Stedman’s business
perplexities till they came upon me in the following letter, which was
apparently called out by one of mine written two months before.
71 West 54th Street, NEW YORK, July 12th, ’82.
MY DEAR COLONEL,—I had gone over with “the majority” [that is,
to Europe], when your friendly card of May 9th was written,
and it finally reached me at Venice. In that city of light,
air, and heavenly noiselessness, my son and myself at last had
settled ourselves in ideal rooms, overlooking the Grand Canal.
We had seclusion, the Molo, the Lagoon, and a good café, and
pure and cheap Capri wine. Our books and papers were unpacked
for the first time, and I was ready to make an end of the big
and burdensome book which I ought to have finished a year ago.
_Dis aliter visum!_ The next morning I was awakened to receive
news, by wire, of a business loss which brought me home,
through the new Gothard tunnel and by the first steamer. Here I
am, patching up other people’s blunders, with the thermometer
in the nineties. I have lived through worse troubles, but
am in no very good humor. Let me renew the amenities of
life, by way of improving my disposition: and I’ll begin by
thanking you for calling my attention to the error _in re_
Palfrey—which, of course, I shall correct. Another friend has
written me to say that Lowell’s father was a Unitarian—not a
Congregationalist. But Lowell himself told me, the other day,
that his father never would call himself a Unitarian, and that
he was old-fashioned in his home tenets and discipline. Mr. L.
[Lowell] was under pretty heavy pressure, as you know, when I
saw him, but holding his own with some composure—for a poet.
Again thanking you, I am,
Always truly yrs.,
E. C. STEDMAN.
This must have been answered by some further expression of solicitude,
for this reply came, two months later,—
University Club, 370 Fifth Avenue, NEW YORK,
Sunday, Sept. 16, 1883.
MY DEAR HIGGINSON,—There _is_ a good deal, say what you will,
in “moral support.” I have proved it during the last few weeks:
’twould have been hard to get through with them, but for just
such words as yours. And I have had them in such abundance
that, despite rather poor displays of human nature in a sample
of my own manufacture, I am less than ever a pessimist.
As for that which Sophocles pronounced the father of
meanness—πενία—both my wife and myself have been used to it
nearly all our lives, and probably shall have, now, to renew
our old acquaintance with it. Though somewhat demoralized by a
few years of Philistine comfort—the _Persicos apparatus_, &c.—I
think we shall get along with sufficient dignity.
We have suffered more, however, than the money-loss, bad as
that is. And hence we are doubly grateful to those who, like
yourself, send a cheery voice to us at just this time.
Ever sincerely yrs.,
EDMUND C. STEDMAN.
During the next few years we had ample correspondence of a wholly
literary and cheerful tone. He became engaged upon his Library of
American Literature with a congenial fellow worker, Miss Ellen
Hutchinson, and I was only one of many who lent a hand or made
suggestions. He was working very hard, and once wrote that he was going
for a week to his boyhood home to rest. During all this period there was,
no doubt, the painful business entanglement in the background, but there
was also in the foreground the literary work whose assuaging influence
only one who has participated in it can understand. Then came another
blow in the death of his mother, announced to me as follows:—
44 East 26th St., NEW YORK, Dec. 8th, 1889.
MY DEAR HIGGINSON,—Yes: I have been through a kind of Holy
Week, and have come out in so incorporeal a state that I strive
painfully, though most gratefully, to render thanks to some, at
least, of my beautiful mother’s friends and mine who have taken
note of her departure. I have always wished that she and you
could know more of each other—though nothing of yours escaped
her eager taste and judgment, for she was not only a natural
critic, but a very _clanswoman_, with a most loyal faith in
her blood and yours. Most of all, she was a typical woman, an
intensely human one, to the last, though made of no common
clay. She was of an age to die, and I am glad that her fine
intelligence was spared a season of dimness. Still, _I_ have
suffered a loss, and doubtless one that will last a lifetime.
Sincerely yours,
E. C. STEDMAN.
The laborious volumes of literary selections having been completed, there
followed, still under the same pressure, another series of books yet
more ambitious. His “Victorian Poets” (1875, thirteenth edition 1887)
was followed by the “Poets of America” (1885), “A Victorian Anthology”
(1895), and “An American Anthology” (1900). These books were what gave
him his fame, the two former being original studies of literature, made
in prose; and the two latter being collections of poetry from the two
nations.
If we consider how vast a labor was represented in all those volumes,
it is interesting to revert to that comparison between Stedman and his
friend Aldrich with which this paper began. Their literary lives led
them apart; that of Aldrich tending always to condensation, that of
Stedman to expansion. As a consequence, Aldrich seemed to grow younger
and younger with years and Stedman older; his work being always valuable,
but often too weighty, “living in thoughts, not breaths,” to adopt the
delicate distinction from Bailey’s “Festus.” There is a certain worth
in all that Stedman wrote, be it longer or shorter, but it needs a good
deal of literary power to retain the attention of readers so long as
some of his chapters demand. Opening at random his “Poets of America,”
one may find the author deep in a discussion of Lowell, for instance,
and complaining of that poet’s prose or verse. “Not compactly moulded,”
Stedman says, even of much of Lowell’s work. “He had a way, moreover,
of ‘dropping’ like his own bobolink, of letting down his fine passages
with odd conceits, mixed metaphors, and licenses which, as a critic, he
would not overlook in another. To all this add a knack of coining uncouth
words for special tints of meaning, when there are good enough counters
in the language for any poet’s need.” These failings, Stedman says, “have
perplexed the poet’s friends and teased his reviewers.” Yet Lowell’s
critic is more chargeable with diffuseness than is Lowell himself in
prose essays, which is saying a good deal. Stedman devotes forty-five
pages to Lowell and thirty-nine even to Bayard Taylor, while he gives to
Thoreau but a few scattered lines and no pretense at a chapter. There
are, unquestionably, many fine passages scattered through the book,
as where he keenly points out that the first European appreciation of
American literature was “almost wholly due to grotesque and humorous
exploits—a welcome such as a prince in his breathing-hour might give
to a new-found jester or clown”; and when he says, in reply to English
criticism, that there is “something worth an estimate in the division of
an ocean gulf, that makes us like the people of a new planet.”
Turning back to Stedman’s earlier book, the “Victorian Poets,” one finds
many a terse passage, as where he describes Landor as a “royal Bohemian
in art,” or compares the same author’s death in Florence at ninety, a
banished man, to “the death of some monarch of the forest, most untamed
when powerless.” Such passages redeem a book from the danger of being
forgotten, but they cannot in the long run save it from the doom which
awaits too great diffuseness in words. During all this period of hard
work, he found room also for magazine articles, always thoroughly done.
Nowhere is there a finer analysis, on the whole, of the sources of
difficulty in Homeric translation than will be found in Stedman’s review
of Bryant’s translation of Homer, and nowhere a better vindication of a
serious and carefully executed book (“Atlantic Monthly,” May, 1872). He
wrote also an admirable volume of lectures on the “Nature and Elements of
Poetry” for delivery at Johns Hopkins University.
As years went on, our correspondence inevitably grew less close. On
March 10, 1893, he wrote, “I am so driven at this season, ‘let alone’
financial worries, that I have to write letters when and where I can.”
Then follows a gap of seven years; in 1900 his granddaughter writes on
October 25, conveying affectionate messages from him; two years after,
April 2, 1903, he writes himself in the same key, then adds, “Owing to
difficulties absolutely beyond my control, I have written scarcely a line
for myself since the Yale bicentennial [1901]”; and concludes, “I am
very warmly your friend and kinsman.” It was a full, easy, and natural
communication, like his old letters; but it was four years later when I
heard from him again as follows, in a letter which I will not withhold,
in spite of what may be well regarded as its over-sensitiveness and
somewhat exaggerated tone.
2643 Broadway, NEW YORK CITY,
Evening, March 20th, 1907.
MY DEAR KINSMAN,—Although I have given you no reason to be
assured of it, you are still just the same to me in my honor
and affection—you are never, and you never have been, otherwise
in my thoughts than my kinsman (by your first recognition of
our consanguinity) and my friend; yes, and early teacher, for I
long ago told you that it was your essays that confirmed me, in
my youth, in the course I chose for myself.
I am going on to Aldrich’s funeral, and with a rather lone
and heavy heart, since I began life here in New York with
him before the Civil War, and had every expectation that he
would survive me: not wholly on the score of my seniority,
but because I have had my “three calls” and more, and because
he has ever been so strong and young and debonair. Health,
happiness, ease, travel, all “things _waregan_,” seemed
his natural right. If I, too, wished for a portion of his
felicities, I never envied one to whom they came by the very
fitness of things. And I grieve the more for his death, because
it seems to violate that fitness.
Now, I can’t think of meeting you on Friday without first
making this poor and inadequate attempt to set one thing
right. Your latest letter—I _was_, at least, moved by it to
address myself at once to a full reply, but was myself attacked
that day so sorely by the grippe that I went to bed before
completing it and was useless for weeks; the letter showed
me that you thought, as well you might, that I had been hurt
or vexed by something you had unwittingly done or written. I
can say little to-night but to confess that no act, word, or
writing, of yours from first to last has not seemed to contain
all the friendship, kindness, recognition, that I could ever
ask for.... Perhaps I have the ancestral infirmity of clinging
to my fealties for good and all; but, as I say, you are my
creditor in every way, and I constantly find myself in sympathy
with your writings, beliefs, causes, judgments.—Now I recall
it, the very choice you made of a little lyric of mine as
the one at my “high-water” mark gave me a fine sense of your
comprehension—it seemed to me a case of _rem acu tetigit_. I
am thoroughly satisfied to have one man—and that man _you_—so
quick to see just where I felt that I had been fortunate....
For some years, I venture to remind you, you have seen scarcely
anything of mine in print. Since 1900 I have had three long and
disabling illnesses, from two of which it was not thought I
could recover. Between these, what desperate failure of efforts
to “catch up.” Oh, I can’t tell you, the books, the letters,
the debts, the broken contracts. Then the deaths of my wife and
my son, and all the sorrows following; the break-up of my home,
and the labor of winding up so much without aid. But from all
the rack I have always kept, separated on my table, all your
letters and remembrances—each one adding more, in my mind, to
the explanation I had _not_ written you....
Your attached kinsman and friend,
EDMUND C. STEDMAN.
Stedman came from Mount Auburn to my house after the funeral of Aldrich,
with a look of utter exhaustion on his face such as alarmed me. A little
rest and refreshment brought him to a curious revival of strength and
animation; he talked of books, men, and adventures, in what was almost a
monologue, and went away in comparative cheerfulness with his faithful
literary associate, Professor George E. Woodberry. Yet I always associate
him with one of those touching letters which he wrote to me before the
age of the typewriter, more profusely than men now write, and the very
fact that we lived far apart made him franker in utterance. The following
letter came from Keep Rock, New Castle, New Hampshire, September 30,
1887:—
“You are a ‘noble kinsman’ after all, of the sort from whom
one is very glad to get good words, and I have taken your
perception of a bit of verse as infallible, ever since you
picked out three little ‘Stanzas for Music’ as my one best
thing. Every one else had overlooked them, but I knew that—as
Holmes said of his ‘Chambered Nautilus’—they were written
‘better than I could.’ By the way, if you will overhaul
Duyckinck’s ‘Encyclopedia of Literature’ _in re_ Dr. Samuel
Mitchill, you will see who first wrote crudely the ‘Chambered
Nautilus.’”
Two years after, he wrote, April 9, 1889:—
“The newspapers warn me that you are soon to go abroad....
I must copy for you now the song which you have kindly
remembered so many years. In sooth, I have always thought well
of your judgment as to poetry, since you intimated (in ‘The
Commonwealth,’ was it not?) that these three stanzas of mine
were the thing worth having of my seldom-written verse. I
will write on the next page a passage which I lately found in
Hartmann (a wonderful man for a pessimist), and which conveys
precisely the idea of my song.”
To this he adds as a quotation the passage itself:—
“The souls which are near without knowing it, and which can
approach no nearer by ever so close an embrace than they
eternally are, pine for a blending which can never be theirs so
long as they remain distinct individuals.”
The song itself, which he thought, as I did, his high-water mark,
here follows. Its closing verse appears to me unsurpassed in American
literature.
STANZAS FOR MUSIC
(From an Unfinished Drama)
Thou art mine, thou hast given thy word;
Close, close in my arms thou art clinging;
Alone for my ear thou art singing
A song which no stranger hath heard:
But afar from me yet, like a bird,
Thy soul, in some region unstirred,
On its mystical circuit is winging.
Thou art mine, I have made thee mine own;
Henceforth we are mingled forever:
But in vain, all in vain, I endeavor—
Though round thee my garlands are thrown,
And thou yieldest thy lips and thy zone—
To master the spell that alone
My hold on thy being can sever.
Thou art mine, thou hast come unto me!
But thy soul, when I strive to be near it—
The innermost fold of thy spirit—
Is as far from my grasp, is as free,
As the stars from the mountain-tops be,
As the pearl, in the depths of the sea,
From the portionless king that would wear it.
XII
EDWARD EVERETT HALE
EDWARD EVERETT HALE
The life of Edward Everett Hale has about it a peculiar interest as a
subject of study. The youngest member of his Harvard class,—that of
1839,—he was also the most distinguished among them and finally outlived
them all. Personal characteristics which marked him when a freshman in
college kept him young to the end of his days. When the Reverend Edward
Cummings came to Dr. Hale’s assistance in the South Congregational
Church, he was surprised to find practically no young people in the
parish, and still more surprised to know that their pastor was ignorant
of the fact. These parishioners were all young when Dr. Hale took them in
charge, and to him they had always remained so, for he had invested them
with his own fresh and undying spirit.
Probably no man in America, except Beecher, aroused and stimulated quite
so many minds as Hale, and his personal popularity was unbounded. He had
strokes of genius, sometimes with unsatisfying results; yet failures
never stood in his way, but seemed to drop from his memory in a few
hours. An unsurpassable model in most respects, there were limitations
which made him in some minor ways a less trustworthy example. Such and
so curiously composed was Edward Everett Hale. He was the second son of
a large family of sons and daughters, his parents being Nathan and Sarah
Preston (Everett) Hale, and he was born in Boston, April 3, 1822. His
father was the editor of the leading newspaper in Boston, the “Daily
Advertiser,” and most of his children developed, in one way or another,
distinct literary tastes. The subject of this sketch had before him, as a
literary example and influence, the celebrated statesman and orator whose
name he bore, and who was his mother’s brother.
My own recollections of him begin quite early. Nearly two years younger
than he, I was, like him, the youngest of my Harvard class, which was
two years later than his. My college remembrances of him are vivid and
characteristic. Living outside of the college yard, I was sometimes very
nearly late for morning prayers; and more than once on such occasions,
as I passed beneath the walls of Massachusetts Hall, then a dormitory,
there would spring from the doorway a tall, slim young student who had,
according to current report among the freshmen, sprung out of bed almost
at the last stroke of the bell, thrown his clothes over the stairway,
and jumped into them on the way down. This was Edward Everett Hale; and
this early vision was brought to my mind not infrequently in later life
by his way of doing maturer things.
The same qualities which marked his personal appearance marked his
career. He was always ready for action, never stopped for trifles, always
lacked but little of being one of the heroes or men of genius of his
time. Nor can any one yet predict which of these will be the form finally
taken by his fame. His capacity for work was unlimited, and he perhaps
belonged to more societies and committees than any man living. In this
field his exhaustless energy had play, but his impetuous temperament
often proved a drawback, and brought upon him the criticism of men of
less talent but more accurate habits of mind. No denominational barriers
existed for him. Ready to officiate in all pulpits and welcome in all, he
left it unknown to the end of his life whether he did or did not believe
in the Bible miracles, for instance. Nor did anybody who talked with him
care much. His peculiar and attractive personality made him acceptable
to all sorts of people and to men of all creeds; for his extraordinary
versatility enabled him in his intercourse with other minds to adapt his
sympathy and his language to the individual modes of thought and belief
of each and all of them.
Some of his finest literary achievements were those which he himself
had forgotten. Up to the last degree prolific, he left more than one
absolutely triumphant stroke behind him in literature. The best bit of
prose that I can possibly associate with him was a sketch in a newspaper
bearing the somewhat meaningless title “The Last Shake,” suggested by
watching the withdrawal of the last man with a hand-cart who was ever
allowed to shake carpets on Boston Common. He was, no doubt, a dusty and
forlorn figure enough. But to Hale’s ready imagination he stood for a
whole epoch of history, for the long procession of carpet-shakers who
were doing their duty there when Percy marched to Lexington, or when
the cannonade from Breed’s Hill was in the air. Summer and winter had
come and gone, sons had succeeded their fathers at their work, and the
beating of the carpets had gone on, undrowned by the rising city’s roar.
At last the more fastidious aldermen rebelled, the last shake was given,
and Edward Everett Hale wrote its elegy. I suppose I kept the little
newspaper cutting on my desk for five years, as a model of what wit and
sympathy could extract from the humblest theme.
Another stroke was of quite a different character. Out of the myriad
translations of Homer, there is in all English literature but one version
known to me of even a single passage which gives in a high degree the
Homeric flavor. That passage is the description of the Descent of Neptune
(Iliad, Book XIII), and was preserved in Hale’s handwriting by his friend
Samuel Longfellow, with whom I edited the book “Thalatta,”—a collection
of sea poems. His classmate, Hale, had given it to him when first
written, and then had forgotten all about it. Had it not been printed by
us there, it might, sooner or later, have found its way into that still
unpublished magazine which Hale and I planned together, when we lived
near each other in Worcester, Massachusetts,—a periodical which was to
have been called the “Unfortunates’ Magazine,” and was to contain all the
prose and verse sent to us by neighbors or strangers with request to get
it published. I remember that we made out a title-page between us, with
a table of contents, all genuine, for the imaginary first number. Such
a book was to some extent made real in “Thalatta,” and the following is
Hale’s brilliant Homeric translation:—
THE DESCENT OF NEPTUNE
There sat he high retired from the seas;
There looked with pity on his Grecians beaten;
There burned with rage at the God-king who slew them.
Then rushed he forward from the rugged mountain;
He beat the forest also as he came downward,
And the high cliffs shook underneath his footsteps;
Three times he trod, his fourth step reached his sea-home.
There was his palace in the deep sea-water,
Shining with gold and builded firm forever;
And there he yoked him his swift-footed horses
(Their hoofs are brazen, and their manes are golden)
With golden thongs; his golden goad he seizes;
He mounts upon his chariot and doth fly;
Yea, drives he forth his steeds into the billows.
The sea-beasts from the depths rise under him—
They know their King: and the glad sea is parted,
That so his wheels may fly along unhinder’d.
Dry speeds between the waves his brazen axle:—
So bounding fast they bring him to his Grecians.
Earlier than this, in his racy papers called “My College Days,” we get
another characteristic glimpse of Hale as a student. The Sunday afternoon
before being examined for admission to college, he reports that he read
the first six books of the Æneid (the last six having already been
mastered) at one fell swoop,—seated meantime on the ridge-pole of his
father’s house!