pleasantly irregular shape of the rooms, into a series of unexpected
openings, turnings and corners. At the most distant end, beyond the
square drawing-room, the perspective is defined by the rich tones of a
long stretch of stained glass. The figures are neither those of nymph
nor satyr, nor yet of the æsthetic young damsel in amber garments whom
Burne-Jones and William Morris would have us accept as the successor
of these. Here sit two strangely familiar-looking stolid Dutchmen in
colonial dress, puffing their pipes in an old-time kitchen. They are
Peter Stuyvesant and Govert Loockermans, in the act of being waited
upon by “goede-vrouw Maria, ... bustling at her best to spread the
New Year’s table.” Lest the gazer might be in need of an introduction
to these three jovial creations of the poet’s fancy, there are lines
of the poem intertwined with the holly which serves as a decorative
adjunct. No more fitting entrance could have been chosen to the Stedman
dining-room than this. If there was no other company, there was always
the extra plate and an empty chair awaiting the coming guest. It has
pleased the humor of Boston to lance its arrows of wit at New York
for the latter’s pretensions to establishing literary circles and
coteries. When literary Boston was invited to the Stedmans to dinner,
these satirical arrows seemed suddenly to lose their edge. During the
four or five years that Mr. and Mrs. Stedman occupied their charming
house, New York had as distinctly a literary center as either Paris
or London. On Sunday evenings, the evenings at home, there was such a
varied assemblage of guests as only a metropolis can bring together.
Not only authors and artists, critics and professional men, but fashion
and society, found their way there. At the weekly dinners were to be
met the distinguished foreigner, the latest successful novelist or
young poet, and the wittiest and the most beautiful women. As if in
humorous mockery of the difficulties attendant upon literary success
and recognition, the dining-room in its size and seating capacity might
not inaptly be likened to that Oriental figure of speech by which the
rich found heaven so impossible of access. The smallness of the room
only served, however, like certain chemical apparatus, to condense and
liberate the brilliant conversational gases. If the poet were in his
most gracious mood, the more favored guests, after dinner, might be
allowed a glimpse of the library. Books were scattered so profusely
over the house, that each room might easily have been mistaken for
one. But in a large square room at the top of the house is the library
proper--workshop and study together. This building his poet’s nest
under the eaves of his own cornice is the one evidence of the recluse
in Stedman’s character. When he is about to pluck his own plumage
that his fledglings may be covered, he turns his back on the world.
All the paraphernalia of his toil are about him. The evidences of the
range and the extent of his reading and scholarship are to be found
in taking down some of the volumes on the shelves. Here are the Greek
classics, in the original, with loose sheets among the pages, where are
translations of Theocritus or Bion, done into finished English verse.
Mr. Stedman’s proficiency in Doric Greek is matched by his familiarity
with the modern French classics, whose lightness of touch and airy
grace he has caught in “Aucassin and Nicolette,” “Toujours Amour,” and
“Jean Prouvaire’s Song.” With a delicate sense of fitness, the dainty
verse of Coppée, Béranger, Théodore de Banville, the sonnets of Victor
Hugo, and, indeed, his whole collection of the French poets, is bound
in exquisite vellum or morocco. Among these volumes the poet’s own
works appear in several rare and beautiful editions. There are the
“Songs and Ballads,” issued by the Bookfellows Club, the essay on
Edgar Allan Poe in vellum (the first so bound in America), and other
beautifully illustrated and printed copies of his poems. The shelves
and tables are laden with a wealth of literary treasure. But there
is one volume one holds with a truly reverent delight. It is Mrs.
Browning’s own copy of “Casa Guidi Windows,” with interlineations and
corrections. It was the gift of the poetess to Mrs. Kinney, Stedman’s
mother, who was among Mrs. Browning’s intimate friends. “How John Brown
took Harper’s Ferry,” it is pleasant to learn, was an especial favorite
with the great songstress.
Since the reversal of fortune which overwhelmed Mr. Stedman five years
ago, this charming home has been temporarily leased. The family,
however, were altogether fortunate in securing Bayard Taylor’s old home
in East Thirtieth Street, during an absence in Europe of the latter’s
wife and daughter. Here the conditions surrounding Stedman’s home life
have been necessarily changed. The arduous literary labor attendant
on the publishing of his recently completed volume on the “Poets of
America,” which completes the series of contemporaneous English and
American poets, together with his work on the “Library of American
Literature” (of which he and Miss Hutchinson are the joint editors),
the writing of magazine articles, poems and critiques, and the
increased cares of his business struggles, make him too hard-worked
a man to be available for the lighter social pleasures. The Sunday
evenings are, however, still maintained, as his one leisure hour,
and the hospitality is as generous as the present modest resources
of the household will permit. Mr. Stedman’s early career, and the
native toughness of fibre which has enabled him to fight a winning
battle against tremendous odds during his whole life, furnished
him with the fortitude and endurance with which he met his recent
calamity. The heroic element is a dominant note in his character. At
the very outset of his career he gave proof of the stuff that was in
him. Entering Yale College in 1849, and suspended in ’53 for certain
boyish irregularities, the man in him was born in a day. At nineteen
he went into journalism, married at twenty, and in another year was
an editor and a father. Ten years later, after service in all the
grades of newspaper life, the same energy of decision marked his next
departure. He gave up journalism, and went into active business in
Wall Street that he might have time for more independent, imaginative
writing. The bread-winning was so successful that in another ten years
he had gained a competence, and was about to retire from business, to
devote himself entirely to literary pursuits. He now returns to the
struggle with fortune with the old unworn, undaunted patience. He
has been sustained in the vicissitudes of his career by the cheering
companionship of his wife. Ever in sympathy with her husband’s work and
ambitions, Mrs. Stedman has possessed the gift of adaptability which
has enabled her to meet with befitting ease and dignity the varying
fortunes which have befallen them. In the earlier nomadic days she was
the Blanche, who, with the poet, rambled through the “faery realm” of
Bohemia. The “little King Arthur” is a grown man now, his father’s
co-worker and devoted aid. The king has abdicated in favor of a tiny
princess, who rules the household with her baby ways. This is another
Laura, _ætat_ four, who, with her mother, Mrs. Frederick Stedman,
completes the family circle. It needs the reiterated calls for grandpa
and grandma to impress one with the reality of the fact that this
still youthful-looking couple are not masquerading in the parts. Mr.
Stedman, in spite of his grayish beard and mustache, is a singularly
young-looking man for his years. He is slight, with slender figure
and delicate features. His motions and gestures are full of impulse
and energy. He has the bearing of a man who has measured his strength
with the world. The delicate refinement and finish of his work, as
well as its power and vigor, are foreshadowed in his _personnel_. His
manner is an epitome of his literary style. His face has the charm
which comes from high-bred features molded into the highest form of
expression--that of intellectual energy infused with a deep and keen
sympathetic quality. Something of this facial charm he inherits from
his mother, now Mrs. Kinney. As the lovely and brilliant wife of the
Hon. William B. Kinney, when the latter was American Minister at the
Court of Turin, this gifted lady won a European reputation for the
sparkling radiance of her beauty.
As a talker Mr. Stedman possesses the first and highest of
qualities--that of spontaneity. The thought leaps at a bound into
expression. So rapid is the flow of ideas, and so fluent its delivery,
that one thought sometimes trips on the heels of the next. His talk,
in its range, its variety, and the multiplicity of subjects touched
upon, even more, perhaps, than his work, is an unconscious betrayal
of his many-sided life. The critic, the poet, the man of business and
the man of the world, the lover of nature, and the keen observer of
the social machinery of life, each by turn takes the ascendant. The
whole, woven together by a brilliant tissue of short, epigrammatic,
trenchant sentences, abounding in good things one longs to remember and
quote, forms a most picturesque and dazzling ensemble. Added to the
brilliancy, there is a genial glow of humor, and such an ardor and
enthusiasm in his capacity for admiration, as complete Mr. Stedman’s
equipment as a man and a conversationalist. He would not be a poet did
he not see his fellow-man aureoled with a halo. His natural attitude
toward life and men is an almost boyish belief and delight in their
being admirable. It is only on discovering they are otherwise that the
critic appears to soften the disappointment by the rigors of analysis.
Stedman is by nature an enthusiast. He owes it to his training that
he is a critic. As an enthusiast he has the fervor, the intensity,
the exaltation, which belong to the believer and the lover of all
things true and good and beautiful. He is as generous as he is ardent,
and his gift of praising is not to be counted as among the least of
his qualities. But the critic comes in to temper the ardor, to weigh
the value, and to test the capacity. And thus it is found that there
are two men in Mr. Stedman, one of whom appears to be perpetually in
pursuit of the other, and never quite to overtake him.
If poets are born and not made this side of heaven, so are sportsmen.
In Stedman’s case the two appeared in one, to prove the duality
possible. Summer after summer, in the hard-won vacations, the two have
sailed the inland lakes and fished in the trout streams together;
the fisherman oblivious of all else save the movements of that most
animate of inanimate insects--the angler’s fly; the poet equally
absorbed in quite another order of motion--that of nature’s play. The
range of Mr. Stedman’s acquaintance among backwoodsmen and seafaring
men is in proportion to the extent of his journeyings. “There are at
least a hundred men with whom I am intimate who don’t dream I have
ever written a line,” I once overheard him say in the midst of a story
he was telling of the drolleries of some forest guide who was among
his “intimates.” This talent for companionship with classes of men
removed from his own social orbit has given Stedman that breadth of
sympathy and that sure vision in the fields of observation which makes
his critical work so unusual. He knows men as a naturalist knows the
kingdom of animal life. He can thus analyze and classify, not only the
writer, but the man, for he holds the key to a right comprehension of
character by virtue of his own plastic sensibility. His delight in
getting near to men who are at polaric distances from him socially,
makes him impatient of those whom so-called culture has removed to
Alpine heights from which to view their fellow-beings. “There’s so
and so,” he once said, in speaking of a second-rate poet whose verses
were æsthetic sighs to the south wind and the daffodil; “he thinks of
nothing but rhyming love and dove. I wonder what he would make out of
a man--a friend of mine, for instance, in the Maine woods, a creature
as big as Hercules, with a heart to match his strength. I should like
to see what he would make of him.” Stedman’s own personality is infused
with a raciness and a warmth peculiar to men who have the power of
freshening their own lives by that system of wholesome renewal called
human contact. Much of the secret of his social charm comes from his
delight in, and ready companionship with, all conditions of men.
In his present study in the little house in Thirtieth Street there
are several photographs, scattered about the room, of a quaint and
picturesque seaside house. This is the summer home on the island of
New Castle, N. H. It has a tower which seems to have been built over
the crest of the waves, and a _loggia_ as wide and spacious as a
Florentine palace. No one but a sailor or a sea-lover could have chosen
such a spot. To Mr. Stedman, New Castle was a veritable _trouvaille_.
It fulfilled every condition of pleasure and comfort requisite in a
summer home. The sea was at his doors, and the elms and fields ran down
to meet it. The little island, with its quaint old fishing village,
its old colonial houses, its lanes and its lovely coast line, is the
most picturesque of microcosms ever set afloat. There is no railroad
nearer than three miles, and to reach it one crosses as many bridges
as span a Venetian canal. Mr. Stedman himself, the poet John Albee,
Barrett Wendell (one of Boston’s clever young authors), Prof. Bartlett,
of Harvard, and Jacob Wendell’s family, make a charming and intimate
little coterie. At Kelp Rock Mr. Stedman is only the poet, the genial
host, and the _bon camarade_. Business cares and thoughts are relegated
to the world whence they came. The most approachable of authors at
all times, at New Castle, with the sea and the sunshine to keep his
idleness in countenance, he seems fairly to irradiate companionship.
His idleness is of an order to set the rest of the world a lesson in
activity. In his play he is even more intense, if possible, than in
his work. The play consists of five or six hard-writing hours in his
tower during the morning. This is followed by an afternoon of sailing,
or fishing, or walking, any one of which forms of pleasure is planned
with a view to hard labor of some kind, some strenuous demand on the
physical forces. The evening finds him and his family, with some of the
group mentioned and often with stray visitors from the outer world,
before the drift-wood fire in the low-raftered hall, where talk and
good-cheer complete the day.
With such abundantly vigorous energies, Mr. Stedman’s quarter of a
century of productiveness is only an earnest of his future work. He
has doubly pledged himself hereafter to the performance of strictly
original creative writing. As critic he has completed the work which
he set himself to do--that of rounding the circle of contemporaneous
poetry. In giving to the world such masterpieces of critical writing
as the “Victorian Poets” and “Poets of America,” he owes it to his own
muse to prove that the critic leaves the poet free.
ANNA BOWMAN DODD.
[Since this sketch was written (November, 1885) Mr. Stedman has sold
his Fifty-fourth Street house, leased a house in East Twenty-sixth
Street, bought one in West Seventy-eighth Street (1890) and sold it in
1895, at the same time that he disposed of “Kelp Rock.” His permanent
home is now at Lawrence Park--“Casa Laura,” named after his wife and
granddaughter--although he spent last winter in apartments in New York.
His most recent works are his Victorian and American Anthologies and
“Mater Coronata,” the poem written for the Bicentennial Celebration of
Yale University.--EDITORS.]
RICHARD HENRY STODDARD
RICHARD HENRY STODDARD
IN NEW YORK
Among those New York men-of-letters who are “only that and nothing
more”--who are known simply as writers, and not as politicians or
public speakers, like George William Curtis in the older, or Theodore
Roosevelt in the younger, generation,--there is no figure more familiar
than that of Richard Henry Stoddard. The poet’s whole life since he
was ten years old has been passed on Manhattan Island; no feet, save
those of some veteran patrolman, “have worn its stony highways” more
persistently than his. The city has undergone many changes since the
boy landed at the Battery one Sunday morning over half a century ago,
and with his mother and her husband wandered up Broadway, but his
memory keeps the record of them all.
It is not only New York that has changed its aspect in the hurrying
years; the times have changed, too, and the conditions of life are
not so hard for this adopted New Yorker as they were in his boyhood
and early youth. Perhaps he is not yet in a position to display the
motto of the Stoddards, “Post Nubes Lux,” which he once declared would
be his when the darkness that beclouded his fortunes had given place
to light. But his labors to-day, however irksome and monotonous, are
not altogether uncongenial. He is not yet free from the necessity of
doing a certain amount of literary hackwork (readers of _The Mail
and Express_ are selfish enough to hope he never will be); but he
has sympathetic occupation and surroundings, leisure to write verse
at other than the “mournful midnight hours,” a sure demand for all
he writes (a condition not last or least in the tale of a literary
worker’s temporal blessings), and, above all, that sense of having
won a place in the hearts of his fellow-men which should be even more
gratifying to a poet than the assurance of a niche in the Temple of
Fame. Such further gratification as this last assurance may give, Mr.
Stoddard certainly does not lack.
The story of the poet’s life has been told so often, and in volumes so
readily accessible to all (the best account is to be found in “Poets’
Homes,” Boston, D. Lothrop Co.), that I do not need to rehearse it
in detail. Like the lives of most poets, especially the poets of
America, it has not been an eventful one, if by eventful we imply those
marvelous achievements or startling changes of fortune that dazzle
the world. Yet what more marvelous than that the delicate flower
of poetry should be planted in a soil formed by the fusion of such
rugged elements as a New England sailing-master and the daughter of a
“horse-swapping” deacon? Or that, once planted there, it should have
not only survived, but grown and thriven amid the rigors of such an
early experience as Stoddard’s? These surely _are_ marvels, but marvels
to which mankind was passably accustomed even before Shelley told us
that the poet teaches in song only what he has learned in suffering.
Mr. Stoddard was born July 2, 1825, at Hingham, Mass., the home of his
ancestors since 1638. The Stoddards were seafaring folk; the poet’s
father being one of those hardy New England captains whose bones now
whiten the mid-sea sands. It was a step-father that brought Richard and
his mother to New York; and here the boy had his only schooling and an
unpromising practical experience of life. The reading and writing of
poetry kept his soul alive during these dark days, and his achievements
did not fail of appreciation. Poe paid him the back-handed compliment
of pronouncing a poem he had written too good to be original; while
N. P. Willis more directly encouraged him to write. So also did Park
Benjamin, Lewis Gaylord Clarke, and Mrs. Caroline M. Kirkland. But the
first friendship formed with a writer of his own age resulted from
a call on Bayard Taylor--already the author of “Views Afoot” and one
of the editors of the _Tribune_,--who had accepted some verses of the
poet’s, and who was, later on, the means of making him acquainted with
another young poet and critic--the third member of a famous literary
trio. This was Edmund Clarence Stedman, a younger man than the other
two by eight years or so; then (in 1859) but twenty-six years old,
though he had already made himself conspicuous by “The Diamond Wedding”
and “How Old Brown took Harper’s Ferry.” With Taylor Mr. Stoddard’s
intimacy continued till the death of that distinguished traveler,
journalist, poet, translator and Minister to Germany; with Stedman his
friendship is still unbroken. He has had many friends, and many are
left to him, but none have stood closer than these in the little circle
in which he is known as “Dick.”
When Mr. Stoddard met the woman he was to marry, he had already
published, or rather printed (at his own expense), a volume called
“Footprints.” The poems were pleasantly noticed in two or three
magazines, and one copy of them was sold. As there was no call for the
remainder of the edition, it was committed to the flames. Encouraged
by this success, the young poet saw no impropriety in becoming the
husband of a young lady of Mattapoisett. Elizabeth Barstow was her
name, and the tie that bound them was a common love of books. It was
at twenty-five (some years before his first meeting with Taylor or
Stedman) that the penniless poet and the ship-builder’s daughter were
made one by the Rev. Ralph Hoyt, an amiable clergyman of this city,
“who found it easier to marry the poet than to praise his verses.”
Realizing that man cannot live by poetry alone, particularly when he
has given hostages to fortune (as Bacon, not Shakspeare, puts it) he
set to work to teach himself to write prose, “and found that he was
either a slow teacher, or a slow scholar, probably both.” But prose and
verse together, though by no means lavish in their rewards to-day, were
still less bountiful in the early ’50s; and even when the slow pupil
had acquired what the slow teacher had to impart, he was in a fair
way to learn by experience whether or no “love is enough” for husband
and wife and an increasing family of children. Not long before this,
however, it had been Mr. Stoddard’s good fortune to become acquainted
with Hawthorne, and through the romancer’s friendly intervention he
received from President Pierce an appointment in the New York Custom
House. He was just twenty-eight years of age when he entered the
granite temple in Wall Street, and he was forty-five when he regained
his freedom from official bondage.
It was in 1870 that Mr. Stoddard lost his position in the Custom House.
Shortly afterwards he became a clerk in the New York Dock Department,
under Gen. McClellan; and, in 1877, Librarian of the City Library--an
anomalous position, better suited to his tastes and capabilities in
title than in fact, since the Library is a library only in name, its
shelves being burdened with books that would have come under Lamb’s
most cordial ban. The librarianship naturally came to an end in not
more than two years. Since then, or about that date, Mr. Stoddard has
been the literary editor of _The Mail and Express_--a position in
which he has found it hard to do his best work, perhaps, but in which
he has at least given a literary tone to the paper not common to our
dailies. He has also been an occasional contributor to _The Critic_
since its foundation; until recently he was a leading review-writer for
the _Tribune_; and he is still to be found now and then in the poets’
corner of _The Independent_. Of the books he has written or edited
it is unnecessary to give the list; it can be found in almost any
biographical dictionary. The volume on which his fame will rest is his
“Poetical Works,” published by the Scribners. It contains some of the
most beautiful lyrics and blank-verse ever written in America--some of
the most beautiful written anywhere during the poet’s life-time. His
verse is copious in amount, rich in thought, feeling, and imagination,
simple and sensuous in expression. The taste of readers and lovers of
English poetry must undergo a radical change indeed, if such poems as
the stately Horatian ode on Lincoln, the Keats and Lincoln sonnets,
the “Hymn to the Beautiful,” “The Flight of Youth,” “Irreparable,”
“Sorrow and Joy,” “The Flower of Love Lies Bleeding,” or the pathetic
poems grouped in the collective edition of the poet’s verses under the
general title of “In Memoriam,” are ever to be forgotten or misprized.
In prose, too--the medium he found it so difficult to teach himself
to use,--he has put forth (often anonymously) innumerable essays and
sketches betraying a ripe knowledge of literature and literary history
together with the keenest critical acumen, and flashing and glowing
with alternate wit and humor. Long practice has given him the mastery
of a style as individual as it is pleasing: once familiar with it, one
needs no signature to tell whether he is the author of a given article.
The Stoddards’ home has been, for sixteen years, the first of a row of
three-story-and-basement houses, built of brick and painted a light
yellow, that runs eastward along the north side of East Fifteenth
Street, from the south-east corner of Stuyvesant Square. Like its
neighbors it is distinguished from the conventional New York house
by a veranda that shades the doorway and first-floor windows. The
neighborhood to the east is unattractive; to the west, delightful.
Stuyvesant Square--“Squares” it should be, for Second Avenue, with
its endless file of horse-cars, trucks, carriages and foot-travelers,
bisects the stately little park--is one of the most beautiful as well
as one of the most “aristocratic” quarters of the city. (Was it not
from Stuyvesant Square that the late Richard Grant White dedicated one
of his last books to a noble English lady?) It is the quarter long
known to and frequented by the Stuyvesants, the Rutherfords, the Fishs,
the Jays. Senator Evarts’s city home is but a block below the Square.
The twin steeples of fashionable St. George’s keep sleepless watch over
its shaded walks and sparkling fountains. By the bell of the old church
clock the poet can regulate his domestic time-piece; for its sonorous
hourly strokes, far-heard at night, are but half-muffled by the loudest
noises of the day; or should they chance to be altogether hushed,
the passer-by has but to raise his eyes to one of the huge faces to
see the gilt hands gleaming in the sun or moonlight. St. George’s is
on the opposite side of the Square to Mr. Stoddard’s, at the corner
of Rutherford Place and Sixteenth Street; and a Friends’ School and
Meeting-House fill the space between this and the Fifteenth Street
corner. Past the latter, the poet--true to the kindred points of club
and home--is a constant wayfarer. For the Century Association, of which
he is one of the oldest members, commands his interest now as it did
when housed at No. 109 in the same street that holds the Stoddards’
household gods. The number at which the family receive their friends
and mail, and give daily audience (vicariously) to the inevitable
butcher and baker, is 329.