RICHARD HENRY STODDARDRICHARD HENRY STODDARDIN NEW YORK
RICHARD HENRY STODDARD
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 isnot 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 ofThe Mail and Expressare 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 whatmore 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 surelyaremarvels, 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 friendshipformed 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 theTribune,—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 TaylorMr.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.”
WhenMr.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 ayoung 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 theRev.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 beenMr.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 hewas forty-five when he regained his freedom from official bondage.
It was in 1870 thatMr.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 ofThe 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 toThe Criticsince its foundation; until recently he was a leading review-writer for theTribune; and he is still to be found now and then in the poets’ corner ofThe 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 themost 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-eastcorner 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 fashionableSt.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 toMr.Stoddard’s, at the corner of Rutherford Place and Sixteenth Street; and a Friends’ School andMeeting-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.
It has taken us a long while to get here, but here we are at last; and I, for my part, am in no hurry to get away again. It is just such a house as you would expect to find a man like Stoddard in: a poet’s home and literary workshop. There is no space, and no need, for a parlor. The front room (to the left as you enter the house) is called the library. Its general air is decidedly luxurious. There is a profusion of easy chairs and lounges, and of graceful tables laden with odd and precious bits of bric-à-brac. There is more bric-à-brac on the mantel-piece. The walls are covered close with paintings. At the windows hang heavy curtains; and the portière at a wide doorway at the back of the apartment frames a pleasant glimpse of the dining-room. Rugs of various dimensions cover the matting almost without break. The fireplace is flanked on each side by high book-casesof artistically carved dark wood, filled with books in handsome bindings. A full-length portrait of an officer in uniform fills the space above the mantel-piece: it is Colonel Wilson Barstow, of General Dix’s staff, who served at Fortress Monroe during the war, and died in 1868. It hangs where it does because the Colonel was Mrs. Stoddard’s brother. Between the front windows is a plaster medallion of the master of the house, by his old friend Launt Thompson. (A similar likeness of “Willy” Stoddard, and a plaster cast of his little hand, both byMr.Thompson, are the only perishable mementoes his parents now possess—save “a lock of curly golden hair”—to remind them of their first-born, dead since ’61.) On the east wall is a canvas somewhat more than a foot square, giving a full-length view ofMr.Stoddard, standing, as he appeared to T. W. Wood in 1873, when the snow-white hair against which the laurel shows so green to-day had just begun to lose its glossy blackness. Alongside of this hangs a larger frame, showing W. T. Richards’s conception of “The Castle in the Air” described in the first poem of Stoddard’s that attracted wide attention,—
A stately marble pile whose pillars riseFrom deep-set bases fluted to the dome.
The spacious windows front the rising sun,And when its splendor smites them, many-paned,Tri-arched and richly-stained,A thousand mornings brighten there as one.
The painting has grown mellow with the flight of a quarter-century. It shows the influence of Turner very plainly, and is accepted by the painter of the scene in words as a fair interpretation in color of thechâteau en Espagneof his song. It was a favorite of Sandford Gifford’s—another dear friend of the poet’s, whose handiwork in lake and mountain scenery lights up other corners of the room. Kindred treasures are a masterly head, by Eastman Johnson, of a Nantucket fisherman, gazing seaward through his glass; a glimpse of the Alps, presented by Bierstadt to Mrs. Stoddard; a swamp-scene, by Homer Martin, in his earlier manner; a view of the Bay of Naples, by Charles Temple Dix, the General’s son; and bits of color by Smillie, Jarvis McEntee, S. G. W. Benjamin, and Miss Fidelia Bridges. Two panels (“Winter” and “Summer”) were given to the owner by a friend who had once leased a studio to J. C. Thom, a pupil of Edouard Frère. When the artist gave up the room, these pictures were sawed out of the doors on which he had painted them. Besides two or three English water-colors, there are small copies by the late Cephas G. Thompson, whose art Hawthorne delighted to praise, of Simon Memmi’s heads of Petrarch and Laura, at Florence. Amore personal interest attaches to an oil-painting by Bayard Taylor—a peep at Buzzard’s Bay from Mattapoisett, disclosing a part of the view visible from Mrs. Stoddard’s early home. Not all of these works are to be found in the library; for in our hurried tour of inspection we have crossed the threshold of the dining-room, where such prosaic bits of furniture as a sideboard, dinner-table and straight-backed chairs hold back the flood of books. One wave has swept through, however, and is held captive in a small case standing near the back windows. The summer light that finds its way into this room is filtered through a mass of leaves shading a veranda similar to the one in front.
The poet’s “den,” on the second floor, embraces the main room and an alcove, and is lighted by three windows overlooking the street. His writing-desk—a mahogany one, of ancient make—stands between two of the windows. Above it hangs a large engraving of Lawrence’s Thackeray, beneath which, in the same frame, you may read “The Sorrows of Werther” in the balladist’s own inimitable hand. As you sit at the desk, Mrs. Browning looks down upon you from a large photograph on the wall at your right—one which her husband deemed the best she ever had taken. A delicate engraving hangs beside it of Holmes’s miniature of Byron—a portrait of which Byronhimself said, “I prefer that likeness to any which has ever been done of me by any artist whatever.” It shows a head almost feminine in its beauty. An etching of Hugo is framed above a striking autograph thatMr.Stoddard paid a good price for—at a time, as he says, when he thought he had some money. The sentiment is practical: “Donnez cent francs aux pauvres de New York. Donnez moins, si vous n’êtes pas assez riche; mais donnez.Victor Hugo.” The manuscript, which looks as if it might have been written with a sharpened match, is undated and unaddressed. Every one, therefore, is at liberty to regard it as a personal appeal or command to himself. Close beside the Byron portrait is an etching ofMr.Stedman; into its frame the owner has thrust that gentleman’s visiting card, on which, over the date “Feb. 14, 1885,” are scribbled these lines:
It is a Friar of whiskers grayThat kneels before your shrine,And, as of old, would once more prayTo be yourValentine.
Among the treasures of mingled literary and artistic interest in this room is a small portrait of Smollett. It is painted on wood, and the artist’s name is not given.Mr.Stoddard has not found it reproduced among the familiar likenesses of the novelist. Along the wall above the mantel-piece runs a rare print of Blake’s “CanterburyPilgrimage,” with the designation of each pilgrim engraved beneath his figure. It is noteworthy for its dissimilarity, as well as its likeness, to the poet-painter’s more familiar works. The main wall in the alcove I have spoken of displays a life-size crayon head ofMr.Stoddard, done by Alexander Laurie in 1863. It also gives support to several rows of shelves, running far and rising high, filled chock-full of books less prettily bound than those in the library, but of greater value, perhaps, to the eyes that have so often pored upon them. It is the poet’s collection, to which he has been adding ever since he was a boy, of English poetry of all periods; and it has been consulted to good purpose by many other scholars than the owner. Under an engraving of Raphael’s portrait of himself, at the back of the larger room, is a case filled with books of the same class, but rarer still—indeed, quite priceless to their owner; for they are the tomes once treasured by kindred spirits, and inscribed with names writ in that indelible water which still preserves the name of Keats.
Of the books of this class, from the libraries of famous authors—some being presentation copies, and others containing either the owners’ signatures or their autographic annotations of the text,—may be mentioned volumes that once belonged to Edmund Waller, Thomas Gray, Sir JoshuaReynolds, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles Lamb, William Wordsworth, John Keats, Robert Southey, Hartley Coleridge, Lord Byron, Thomas Lisle Bowles, Felicia Hemans, Thomas Campbell, William Motherwell, and Caroline Norton. Among signatures or documents in the manuscript of famous men are the names of William Alexander, Earl of Sterling; Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke; Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst, author of “Gorboduc”; Samuel Garth, author of “The Dispensary,” and others. Among the manuscripts cherished byMr.Stoddard are letters or poems from the pens of William Shenstone, Burns, Cowper, Sheridan, Southey, Wordsworth, Sir Walter Scott, Thomas Moore, Campbell, Dickens, Thackeray, Bryant, Longfellow, Poe, Lowell, Bayard Taylor, Ebenezer Elliott, “the Corn Law Rhymer”; Walter Savage Landor, James Montgomery, Felicia Hemans, Thomas Hood, Bryan Waller Procter (“Barry Cornwall”), Miss Mitford, Lord Tennyson, Swinburne, Frederick Locker-Lampson, N. P. Willis, Charles Brockden Brown, J. G. Whittier, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Leigh Hunt, Washington Irving, Robert Browning, Mrs. Browning, and scores of other English and American poets and writers of distinction.
Included in this choice collection are the manuscripts of Hunt’s “Abou Ben Adhem,” Thackeray’s“Sorrows of Werther,” Bryant’s “Antiquity of Freedom,” Longfellow’s “Arrow and Song” (“I shot an arrow into the air”), Mrs. Browning’s “Castrucci Castricanni,” pages of Bryant’s translation of Homer, Tennyson’s “Tears, Idle Tears,” Lord Houghton’s “I Wandered by the Brookside,” Barry Cornwall’s “Mother’s Last Song,” Sheridan’s “Clio’s Protest” (containing the famous lines,
They write with ease to show their breeding,But easy writing’s cursed hard reading),
Poe’s sonnet “To Zante,” Holmes’s “Last Leaf,” Lowell’s “Zekle’s Courtin’” and a manuscript volume containing nearly all of Bayard Taylor’s “Poems of the Orient.” His library of English poets contains many now scarce first editions—Drayton’s Poems, 1619; Lord Sterling’s “Monarchic Tragedies,” 1602; Brooke’s “Alaham Mustapha,” 1631; Milton’s Poems, 1645; the early editions of Suckling, etc.
The most precious of allMr.Stoddard’s literary relics is a lock of light brown or golden hair—the veriest wisp,—that came to him from his friend and brother poetMr.George H. Boker of Philadelphia.Mr.Boker had it from Leigh Hunt’s American editor, S. Adams Lee, to whom it was given by Hunt himself. It was “the distinguished physicianDr.Beatty” who gave it tothe English poet; and it was Hoole, the translator of Tasso, who gave it to Beatty. The next previous owner to Hoole wasDr.Samuel Johnson. Further back than this, Leigh Hunt could not trace it; but he believed it to be a portion of the lock attached to a miniature portrait of Milton known to have existed in the time of Addison and supposed to have been in his possession. That it came from the august head of the poet of “Paradise Lost” had never been doubted down toDr.Beatty’s day; so at least wrote Hunt, in a manuscript of whichMr.Stoddard preserves a copy, in Lee’s handwriting, in a volume of Hunt’s poems edited by that gentleman. There is a fine sonnet of Hunt’s on these golden threads, written when they passed into his possession; and Keats’s poem, “On Seeing a Lock of Milton’s Hair,” has made the relic still more memorable. It is smaller now than it was when these great spirits were sojourning on earth, for Leigh Hunt gave a part of it to Mrs. Browning. “Reverence these hairs, O Americans! (as indeed you will),” he wrote, “forin themyour great Republican harbinger on this side of the Atlantic appears, for the first time, actually andbodilypresent on the other side of it.” A companion locket holds a wisp of silver hairs from the head of Washington.
It would be a serious oversight to ignore anymember of the little Stoddard household—to make no mention of that gifted woman who caught the contagion of writing from her husband, and has won not only his cordial “Well done,” but the admiration of such authoritative critics as Hawthorne and Stedman, to name but these two; or of that son who is now an only child, and therefore trebly dear to both his parents. Mrs. Stoddard is known and admired as a poet; the bound volumes ofHarper’s Monthlybear abundant testimony to her skill as a writer of short stories; and her powers as a novelist are receiving fresh recognition through the republication, by Cassell & Co., of “Two Men,” “The Morgesons” and “Temple House.” The son, Lorimer, a youth of twenty-four, has chosen the stage as his profession, and in that very popular piece, “The Henrietta,” has made his mark in the character of the young nobleman. In speaking of the home of the Stoddards, some reference to the long-haired little terrier, Œnone, may be pardoned. She has been an inmate of the house for many years; and she trots here and there about it, upstairs and down, as freely and with as few misadventures as if she were not stone-blind.
The blindness of Œnone reminds me that her master (whom rheumatism once robbed of the use of his right hand for many years) is graduallylosing the use of his eyes. I found him this summer, on his return from a few weeks’ sojourn in the Adirondacks, reading and writing with the aid of a powerful magnifying-glass. He said the trip had done him little good in this respect; and the glare of the sunlight upon the salt water at Sag Harbor, whither he was about to repair for the rest of the season, was not likely to prove more beneficial. This seashore town, where his friend Julian Hawthorne long since established himself, has of late years taken Mattapoisett’s place as the Stoddards’ summer home.
A personal description ofMr.Stoddard should be unnecessary. At this late day few of his readers can be unfamiliar with his face. It has been engraved more than once, and printed not only with his collected poems, but in magazines of wider circulation than the books of any living American poet. It is not likely to disappoint the admirer of his work, for it is a poet’s face, as well as a handsome one. The clear-cut, regular features are almost feminine in their delicacy; but in the dark eyes, now somewhat dimmed though full of thought and feeling, there is a look that counteracts any impression of effeminacy due to the refinement of the features, or the melodious softness of the voice. The hair and beard of snowy whiteness make a harmonious setting for the poet’s ruddy countenance. Though slightlybowed, as he steps forward to meet you (with left hand advanced)Mr.Stoddard still impresses you as a man of more than middle height. His cordial though undemonstrative greeting puts the stranger at his ease at once; for his manner is as gentle as his speech is frank.
Joseph B. Gilder.