Edmund Clarence Stedman

“ Can we claim too much for physical adaptation in our measure of the rank to be accorded an actor? For he of all others, not excepting the orator, makes the most direct personal appeal to our tastes. In his own figure he holds the mirror up to Nature, while his voice must be the echo of her various tones. By the law of aristocracy in art, he must be held so much the greater, as he is able to depict the nobler manifestations of her forms and passions. Of course the first excellence is that of truth. ”

“ But now the most penetrative of modern thinkers have subjected it to the test of a stern and ruthless philosophy, to the crucial processes of German ratiocination,—and with what result? They not only admit, but insist upon, its verity; they define it, and declare the method of its working. They enable us to maintain, with some show of courage, that the intuitionists, if not the inspirationists, are right, and that Mr. Howells is wrong. Without the slightest reserve they pronounce genius to be the activity and efflux of the Intellect freed from the domination of the Conscious Will. ”

“ Arnold does justice to his probity and forbearance, to his trust in the canons of art and rigid self-measurement by an exacting standard; he surely must see, on reflection, that such a man's slavery to passion would be a short-lived episode. Before Keats could rise again to higher things, his doom confronted him. His spirit flew hither and thither, by many paths: across each, as in Tourguéneff's prose-poem, yawned the open grave, and behind him the witch Fate pressed ever more closely. ”

“ CERTAINLY all who care for whatsoever things are pure, lovely, and of good report, must be deeply concerned in the record and ending of Lanier's earthly pilgrimage; concerned no less, if ever they chanced to meet him, in the mingled softness and strength of his nature, the loyalty with which he sang his song, pursued his researches, and took the failures and successes of his consecrated life. For, if there ever was a pilgrim who bore a vow, or a life consecrate to an ideal, such a votary was this poet-artist, and so manifestly ordered was his too-brief life. ”

“ Yet Hartmann is sound in his belief that genius always beholds a different world from the apparent, "though only by gazing deeper into the one lying before him as well, because the world is represented in his mind more objective, consequently, purer and clearer." True realism, then, is the basis of creative idealism, and it is narrowness to exclude either from an artist's method, which needs the one for its ground and the other for its glory. Bacon writes of "a more ample greatness, a more exact goodness, and a more absolute variety than can be found in the nature of things." ”

“ Afterward, in his first experience of passion, he yielded to morbid sentiment, self-abandonment, the frenzy of a passing hour. It is not out of nature that genius, in these early crises, should be pitifully sensitive or take stage-strides. The training that would forestall this might, like Aylmer's process, too well remove a birth-mark. We can spare, now and then, a gray head on green shoulders, if thereby we gain a poet. Keats was a sturdy, gallant boy at school,—as a man, free from vices patrician or plebeian, and a gentleman in motive and bearing. ”

“ I would rather seek for it, at the other extreme, in some extravagant gloria of Carlyle's Past and Present:
"Genius, Poet, do we know what these words mean? An inspired Soul once more vouchsafed to us, direct from Nature's own fire-heat, to see the Truth, and speak it and do it."
"Genius is the 'inspired gift of God.' It is the clearer presence of God Most High in a man. Dim, potential, in all men, in this man it has become actual. ”

“ The painter, who in childhood drew with ease the likenesses of his playmates, and afterwards rose to greatness, had he not an innate gift that no industry and training could rival? The musician, seemingly born with musical ear and voice, or with instinctive mastery of instruments,—the inventor, the romancer,—was there nothing unique and exceptional in their capabilities? No, our sturdy friend replied—he would not own that any man of general ability could not equally perfect his eye and hand, ear and voice, by thorough devotion and practice. ”

“ We know how genius makes unconscious studies, while in the daily routine of life. The soul works on, unassisted, and at length bursts out into sudden blaze. How did Booth study? Just as young Franklin weighed the minister's sermons, while mentally intent upon the architecture of the church roof. Night after night the lonely face brightened the shadows of the stage-wings, and the delicate ear drank in the folly, the feeling, the wit and wisdom of the play. ”

“ As the genius of the father refined the intellect and judgment of the son, so the weaknesses coupled with that genius taught him strength of character and purpose. We have heard of nothing more dramatic than the wandering companionship of this gifted pair,—whether the younger is awaiting, weary and patient, the end of the heard but unseen play, or watching over his father at a distance, when the clouds settled thickly upon that errant mind, through long nights and along the desolate streets of a strange city. ”

“ To most Americans, home has been a place to start from, and only loved when left forever. Yet through the sentiment of home and a pleasant sensuous reminiscence of boyhood, "The Bucket" has found its way to numberless hearts. And Woodworth, when writing it, was lifted, for perhaps the only time in his life, to the genuine emotion of the poet, yearning after the sunny meadows, the fons splendidior vitro, and the moss-covered bucket of his rustic days. ”

“ Doubtless an artist, orator, novelist, or poet, with never so little of the sang asur, belongs to the blood—a trying and unconscionable poor relation, but still not a commoner—most likely not so good as a commoner, but let the underlings flout at him, not the knights and nobles. If such considerations weigh not with the justly prosperous master of an Editor's Study, he nevertheless will forbear, on second thought, to wish out of existence this breed of ready subjects for his merry humor. ”

“ A spirited enactment of Malvolio, of Falstaff, or of Richard Crookback has the high merit of faithfully setting forth humanity, though in certain whimsical or distorted phases; but we are more profoundly enriched by the portrayal of higher types. And thus, in making an actor's chosen and successful studies a means of measuring his genius, we find in the self-poise which wins without effort, and must throughout sustain the princely Hamlet, or Othello tender and strong, that grand manner which, in painting, places the art of Raphael and Angelo above that of Hogarth or Teniers. ”

“ The dullest eye will catch glimpses to make one less forlorn; the ear will be suddenly unsealed, and hear the bells of heaven ring; the mouth will be touched with fire, and utter imaginative speech. Were there not something divine in each of us, a poet would find no listeners. Thus the crises of passion, joy and pain, which are inevitable for all, often raise the most plodding to a comprehension of the rapture of the poet, the devotion of the martyr, the assurance of the leader of his kind. ”

“ Shakespeare, Milton, Burns, Shelley, Byron, were not specifically apostles of common sense in their love-affairs, but their own experience scarcely lowered the tone or weakened the vigor of their poetry. Keats's ideality was disturbed by the passion which came upon him suddenly and late; he clung to its object with fiercer longing and anguish as he felt both her and life itself slipping away from his hold. Everything is extreme in the emotion of a poet. ”

“ Do they not set up this prerogative of "genius," and claim it chiefly as their own? Therefore our danger is not a famine, but a gross surfeit, of poets—all claiming to be great, unless the hot gridiron be ready for their broiling. If we are to have no more good bards, so much the better—there will be less ridiculous caracoling on the part of otherwise sensible persons, and less to blush and grieve for. Besides, haven't we still and always the great poets of the past, and haven't they given the world quite as much of the light and charm as is good for it? ”

“ Of a truth the one universal foible of men born great—the most striking illustration, possibly, that could strengthen Disraeli's display of the Infirmities of Genius—is their faith in the entity, the actual existence, of a quality by which they still are classified.
That something does exist, something by which great and original things are done, Mr. Howells no less recognizes. Only it is not genius. There must be no titles in the democracies of art, invention, statesmanship, actions, and affairs. ”

“ Lord Hamlet feels it in his soul. Why should this delicate life be so rudely freighted? Booth, faithful to the action, accepts the passion and the pang. We hardly relish his gasping utterance and utter fall, when the Ghost rehearses his story on those solemn battlements of Elsinore. But think what he is seeing: not the stage-vision for which we care so little, but the spectre of his father,—a midnight visitant from the grave! It has been asserted that no man ever believed he saw a spirit and survived the shock. ”

“ I do not admit that Taste—and I use this hackneyed word in its full meaning—is purely the subjective standard of each individual, and that the taste of one is as good as that of another. Beauty everywhere is "a felt conformity to law"—of course to the law of its habitat; hence, again, the expression of the fitness of things, of the Right under the existing conditions. The personal "impressions" of one whose organization does not enable him to perceive that fitness, are no more to us than the visions of the half-blind who "see men as trees walking." ”

“ One does not need to be a painter or a poet to see, in his extraordinary work, that he frequently was the servant rather than the master; that he was swept away, like his own Elijah, by the horses and chariot of fire, and that when, like Paul, he reached the third heaven—whether he was in the body or out of it, he could not tell. ”

“ One may expect them to doubt even the existence of that high faculty which answers the heart's desire for what is imaginative, stirring—romantic, if you choose; which depicts forcibly because it feels intensely, and which moreover, as if through inspiration, masters its field without the painful study to which they devote themselves, and with the careless felicity of nature itself. Nor are they quite without justification. The photographic method has its use—no realism can be too faithful in the description of matters excellent and beautiful in themselves. ”

“ Real life includes the commonplace—it never yet was confined to it. Creations of the first order, though out of common experience, seem usual and among the verities, and this because nature is what must be depicted, and not alone in its superficial, every-day guises. We find nothing improbable in the most fantastic or ethereal conceptions of Cervantes, Shakespeare, Spenser—the world of their imaginings is a real world. They do not conflict with the "sanity of true genius," of which Lamb says that, where it seems most to recede from humanity, it will be found the truest to it. ”

“ Bryant will never be constrained to imitate. His period is our own. While most of his noonday contemporaries have passed into neglect under the test of time, his poetry holds its assured position in the affections and judgment of the tasteful. It has a perennial charm. It is conceived in the abiding spirit of true art, subject in structure to the genius of our language, and is therefore not flat, stale, and unprofitable, when the fashion of the day, on which charlatans depend, has faded with the day itself. ”

“ Neither, I think, will painters doubt it; for I suspect that they also have such visions,—they who are born with the sense that makes visible to the inward eye the aspect of forms and faces which they have imagined or composed, and with the faculty that retains them until the art of reproduction has done its service. We, who are not painters, at times see visions with our clouded eyes,—one face swiftly blotting out another, as if in mockery at our powerlessness to capture and depict them. ”

“ What is called the stirrings of genius, the hour of consecration, the moment of inspiration, is nothing but the liberation of the intellect, when the latter, for the time exempt from service to the will. ”

“ Then the fortunate soul reflects on its own possession, and knows why its creations are good. Then it exclaims with Mozart—"People err if they think my art has cost me no trouble; I assure you, my dear friend, no one has taken such pains with the study of composition as I." And thus the critic justly says of Mozart that effects now hackneyed were, in his works, "the joint production of lofty genius and profound contrapuntal knowledge." Yes, genius will work; it is impelled "to scorn delights and live laborious days." ”

“ The world is thus jealous of its preconceived opinions, or of rivalry to an established favorite, and will always array the old against the new. It begrudges a chance hand the right to hit the bull's-eye more than once, and measures each successive shot with unkind exactness; so that only those who have the root of the matter in them, and do better and better, are at all advanced by fresh trials after one triumph. ”

“ With the elder Booth, subjected to the varying fortunes and excitements of the early American stage, the evil influence gained sad ascendency, and his finest renditions grew "out of tune and harsh." In depicting the pathetic frenzy of Lear, such actors as he and Kean, when at their best, can surpass all rivals; and the grotesque, darkly powerful ideals of Richard and Shylock are precisely those in which they will startle us to the last, gathering new, though fitful, expressions of hate and scorn, as their own natures sink from ethereal to grosser atmospheres. ”

“ If this should by chance be true, if all these thinkers have not been quite distraught, then the difference between a vital realism and that which we outlive and outgrow is not, as Mr. Howells puts it with respect to genius, a difference "in degree." It is the difference between radical and superficial methods, between insight and outsight—between work by men who have the gift, and that by plodding yet complacent craftsmen with no intensity of "natural aptitude" and no "mastery" that can rank them with the masters. I do not think realism a modern discovery, whether French, English, or American ”

“ The eyes are black and luminous, the pupils contrasting sharply with the balls in which they are set. If the profile and forehead evince taste and a balanced mind, it is the hair and complexion, and, above all, those remarkable eyes,—deep-searching, seen and seeing from afar,—that reveal the passions of the father in their heights and depths of power. The form is taller than either that of the elder Booth or Kean, lithe, and disposed in symmetry; with broad shoulders, slender hips, and comely tapering limbs, all supple, and knit together with harmonious grace. ”