XI. Edmund Clarence Stedman.
The sudden death of Edmund Clarence Stedman at New York on January 18, 1908, came with a strange pathos upon the readers of his many writings, especially as following so soon upon that of his life-long friend and compeer, Aldrich. Stedman had been for some years an invalid, and had received, in his own phrase, his “three calls,” that life would soon be ended. He was born at Hartford, Connecticut, on October 8, 1833, and was the second son of Colonel Edmund Burke Stedman and his wife Elizabeth Clement (Dodge) Stedman. His great-grandfather was the Reverend Aaron Cleveland, Jr., a Harvard graduate of 1735, and a man of great influence in his day, who died in middle life under the hospitable roof of Benjamin Franklin. Stedman's mother was a woman of much literary talent, and had great ultimate influence in the training of her son, although she was early married again to the Honorable William B. Kinney, who was afterwards the United States Minister to Turin. Her son, being placed in charge of a great-uncle, spent his childhood in Norwich, Connecticut, and entered Yale at sixteen, but did not complete his course there, [140] although in later life he was restored to his class membership and received the degree of Master of Arts. He went early into newspaper work in Norwich and then in New York, going to the front for a time as newspaper correspondent during the Civil War. He abandoned journalism after ten years or thereabouts, and became a member of the New York Stock Exchange without giving up his literary life, a combination apt to be of doubtful success. He married, at twenty, Laura Hyde Woodworth, who died before him, as did one of his sons, leaving only one son and a grand-daughter as his heirs. His funeral services took place at the Church of the Messiah on January 21, 1908, conducted by the Reverend Dr. Robert Collyer and the Reverend Dr. Henry van Dyke.Those who happen to turn back to the number of the Atlantic Monthly for January, 1898, will read with peculiar interest a remarkable paper entitled “Our two most honored poets.” It bears no author's name, even in the Index, but is what we may venture to call, after ten years, a singularly penetrating analysis of both Aldrich and Stedman. Of the latter it is said: “His rhythmic sense is subtle, and he often attains an aerial waywardness of melody which is of the very essence of the lyric gift.” [141] It also remarks most truly and sadly of Stedman that he “is of those who have suffered the stress of the day.” The critic adds: “Just now we felt grateful to Mr. Aldrich for putting all this [that is, life's tragedies] away in order that the clarity and sweetness of his art might not suffer; now we feel something like reverence for the man [Mr. Stedman] who, in conditions which make for contentment and acquiescence, has not been able to escape these large afflictions.” But these two gifted men have since passed away, Aldrich from a career of singular contentment, Stedman after ten years of almost constant business failure and a series of calamities relating to those nearest and dearest. One of the most prominent men in the New York literary organizations, and one who knew Stedman intimately, writes me thus in regard to the last years of his life : “As you probably know, Stedman died poor. Only a few days ago he told me that after paying all the debts hanging over him for years from the business losses caused by--'s mismanagement, he had not enough to live on, and must keep on with his literary work. For this he had various plans, of which our conversations developed only a possible rearrangement of his past writings; an article now and then for the magazines (one, I am told, he left completed); and reminiscences [142] of his old friends among men of letters — for which last he had, during eight months past, been overhauling letters and papers, but had written nothing. He was ailing, he said — had a serious heart affection which troubled him for years, and he found it a daily struggle to keep up with the daily claims on his time. You know what he was, in respect of letters,--and letters. He could always say ‘No’ with animation; but in the case of claims on his time by poets and other of the writing class, he never could do the negative. He both liked the claims and didn't. The men who claimed were dear to him, partly because he knew them, partly because he was glad to know them. He wore himself quite out. His heart was exhausted by his brain. It was a genuine case of heart-failure to do what the head required.” There lies before me a mass of private letters to me from Stedman, 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 [143] 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 Aeschylus dealt with passages too formidable in their power for any one but Edward Fitz-Gerald 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.
[145] This must have been answered by some further expression of solicitude, for this reply came, two months later,--
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 [146] 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:--
[147] 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 [148] 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 [149] 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 [150] 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.
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 [153] 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.[154] 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.
[156] [157]
