Edmund Clarence Stedman

“ His didacticism was inherent in the stiff, vicious, Gallic drum-beat of his artificial style—so falsely called "classical," so opposed to the true and live method of the antique rather than in his genius and quality. It is impossible that one with so marked a poetic temperament, and using verse withal as almost his sole mode of expression, should not have been a poet. In the manner of his time, how far above his rivals! Every active literary period has one poet at least. To me he seems like the tree which, pressed hard about by rocks, adorns them and struggles into growth and leafage. ”

“ That it has impressed mankind everywhere and always is a matter of record. I have much faith in a universal instinct; and I believe that I still have with me the majority even of modern realists, and that the majority is right, in refusing to discredit the gift of high and exceptional qualities to individuals predestined by heredity or otherwise, and I believe that without this gift—traditionally called genius—no poet has afforded notable delight and service. I know that men of genius often waive their claim ”

“ None, save your husband, knows so well as I what a largesse of sympathy, admiration, remembrance, the genius of Arnold and the heart of Arnold have obtained from you. That I, who—if only for my waste of the last few years—am not worthy to kneel by his grave, should have you strive to lift me has unsealed the fountains of my aging eyes. ”

“ The interview with the New York reporters passed off very well. I went through the operation like a man.
After lunch, I went to see Mr. Edmund Clarence Stedman, who had shown me a great deal of kindness during my first visit to America. I found in him a friend ready to welcome me.
The poet and literary critic is a man of about fifty, rather below middle height, with a beautifully chiseled head. In every one of the features you can detect the artist, the man of delicate, tender, and refined feelings. ”

“ Mary Shelley objected to it on the score that it had no human interest. It certainly is a kind of aër potabilis, a wine that lacks body; it violates Goethe's dictum, to wit: "Two things are required of the poet and the artist, that he should rise above reality and yet remain within the sphere of the sensuous." But there is always a law above law for genius, and all things are possible to it—even the entrance to a realm not ordered in life and emotion according to the conditions of this palpable warm planet to which our feet are bound. ”

“ From the grave of her who died so young, to his books and lawyer's gown,
And the ceaseless clangor of mind with mind in the close and wrangling town—
They two, the boy and the grandsire, lived at the manor-house, and grew,
The one to all manly arts apace, the other a youth anew—
Pleased with the boy's free spirit, and teaching him, step by step, to wield
The mastery over living things, and the craft of flood and field.
Apt, indeed, was the scholar; and born with a subtle art to gain
The love of all dumb creatures at will ”

“ At the present moment we have a living, breathing, practical contradiction of the oft-repeated assertion that a poet cannot also be a man of business. Edmund Clarence Stedman is one of the active members of the Stock Exchange, and although of slight, delicate organization, with an excess of nervous force, he finds opportunity and mental strength for some of the finest poetical productions in the language. ”

“ But, oh, those orbs—too wildly bright— No more eclipse thine own, And never shall I find the light Of days forever flown! Edmund Clarence Stedman [1833-1908]
LANGSYNE, WHEN LIFE WAS BONNIE" Langsyne, when life was bonnie, An' a' the skies were blue, When ilka thocht took blossom, An' hung its heid wi' dew, When winter wasna winter, Though snaws cam' happin' doon, Langsyne, when life was bonnie, Spring gaed a twalmonth roun'. Langsyne, when life was bonnie, An' a' the days were lang; When through them ran the music That comes to us in sang, We never wearied liltin' The auld love-laden tune ”

“ At present, I believe that the other men have not the "like gift," that the difference is one of quality, not of quantity or "degree." The unique gift, the individuality of the faculty or faculties, constitutes the genius.
Mr. Howells rightly lays stress upon the well-known danger, even to a candid mind, of nursing a pet theory. It is just as unwise for an inventive author, even in a mood of self-analysis, to toy with a theoretical paradox, for literary methods grow by what they feed on. ”

“ We hear them say, "Who reads Milton now, or Byron, or Coleridge?" It is just as well. Otherwise a new voice might not be welcomed,—would have less chance to gain a hearing. Yet I think that even the younger generation will agree with me that there are lacking qualities to give distinction to poetry as the most impressive literature of our time; qualities for want of which it is not now the chief force, but is compelled to yield its eminence to other forms of composition, especially to prose fiction, realistic or romantic, and to the literature of scientific research. ”

“ The whirlwind followed upon my brain and beat my thoughts to rack:
Who knows the many a month I lay ere memory floated back?
Even now, I tell you, I wonder whether this woman called Estelle
Is flesh and blood, or a beautiful lie, sent up from the depths of hell. ”

“ Whom most she loved; nor had his office ceased
But for her mandate: "Seek again thine own;
⁠The walks of men shall draw thy steps no more!"
⁠Softly, as from a feast
The guest departs that hears a low recall,
He went, and left behind his harp and coronal.
"Return!" she cried, "unto thine own return!
⁠Too long the pilgrimage; too long the dream
In which, lest thou shouldst be companionless,
Unto the oracles thou hadst access,—
The sacred groves that with my presence yearn." ”

“ At thine old tasks thou’lt not be quite forlorn,
Remembering where is peace; and thou shalt say,
“I know where beauty has not felt the curse,—
Where, though I age, all round me is so young
That in its youth my soul’s youth mirrored seems;
Yes, in their rippling verse,
For all our toil, they have not falsely sung
Who said there still was rest beyond our dreams.” TO BAYARD TAYLOR.
WITH A COPY OF THE ILIAD.
Bayard, awaken not this music strong,
While round thy home the indolent sweet breeze
Floats lightly as the summer breath of seas
O’er which Ulysses heard the Sirens’ song. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Life and Letters of Edmund Clarence Stedman ”

“ New forms may fold the speech, new lands Arise within these ocean-portals, But Music waves eternal wands,— Enchantress of the souls of mortals! So thought I,—but among us trod A man in blue, with legal baton, And scoffed the vagrant demigod, And pushed him from the step I sat on. Doubting I mused upon the cry, "Great Pan is dead!"—and all the people Went on their ways:—and clear and high The quarter sounded from the steeple. Edmund Clarence Stedman [1833-1908]
UPON LESBIA—ARGUING My Lesbia, I will not deny, Bewitches me completely ”

“ The appropriateness of the design is apparent for one who is a collector of the literature of the French drama, and the author of several books relating to the stage both in America and France.
In the plate of Edmund Clarence Stedman, the author of “The Poets of America,” we see Pan piping in the sylvan glades; the shepherd and the nymph are charmed by the music, and the god is apparently at the height of his effort. The frame surrounding the design bears the words, Le Cœur au Metier, which were suggested by the address of Matthew Arnold to the Authors’ Club in 1883. ”

“ It is hard to better the truth "by her own sweet and cunning hand put on." Bryant's successors—Whittier, Lowell, Whitman, Lanier, Taylor—have great fidelity to nature. Excellence of the American school.How can they help it, brought up in her own realm? Their touches are spontaneous, and that is everything. A city-bred poet is apt to strike false notes as soon as he hints at an intimacy with nature, and a false note is as quickly detected in poetry as in music, even by those who cannot sound the true one. As for truth to life—that depends on the poet's sympathetic perception. ”

“ As Lear or Shylock, he will certainly grow in power as he grows in years, and may even gain upon his masterly performance of Richelieu. But in one department, and that of an important order, he will perhaps never reach the special eminence at which we place a few historic names.
Our exception includes those simply powerful characters, the ideal of which his voice and magnetism cannot in themselves sustain. At certain lofty passages he relies upon nervous, electrical effort, the natural weight of his temperament being unequal to the desired end. ”

“ One who underrates the significance of our literature, prose or verse, as both the expression and stimulant of national feeling, as of import in the past and to the future of America, and therefore of the world, is deficient in that critical insight which can judge even of its own day unwarped by personal taste or deference to public impression. He shuts his eyes to the fact that at times, notably throughout the years resulting in the Civil War, this literature has been a "force."—Edmund Clarence Stedman. ”

“ And a new-born light shall fill the eyes whose earlier lustre wanes.
In seven years, it is written, a man shall shift his mood;
Good shall seem what was evil, and evil the thing that was good:
Ye that welcome the coming and speed the parting guest,
Tell me, O winds of summer! am I not half-confest?
For along the tide of this mellow month new fancies guide my helm,
Another form has entered my heart as rightful queen of the realm;
From under their long black lashes new eyes—half-blue, half-gray—
Pierce through my soul, to drive the ghost of the old love quite away.
Shadow of years! ”

“ The force of the heroic epics, whose authorship is in the crypt of the past, seems to be not that of a single soul, but of a people; not that of a generation, but of a round of eras. Yet the final determination of poetic utterance is toward self-expression. The minstrel's soul uses for its medium that slave of imaginative feeling, language. It is a voice—a voice; and the emotion of its possessor will not be denied. The poet is the Mariner, whose heart burns within him until his tale is told:
"I pass, like night, from land to land ”

“ Till the earth seemed to boil with the heat of our toil.
But in less than five minutes we felt them recoil,
Heard their shrill rally sound, and, like hares from the hound,
Each ran for himself: one and all fled the ground!
Then we goaded them up to their guns, where they cowered,
And the breeze cleared the field where the battle-cloud lowered. ”

“ And like a field in Spring the ground was ploughed with shot and shell.
There was the ancient graveyard, its hummocks crushed and red,
And there, between them, side by side, the wounded and the dead:
The mangled corpses fallen above,—the peaceful dead below,
Laid in their graves, to slumber here, a score of years ago;
It seemed their waking, wandering shades were asking of our slain,
What brought such hideous tumult now where they so still had lain!
Bright rose the sun of Gettysburg that morrow morningtide,
And call of trump and roll of drum from height to height replied. ”

“ Wores says, he has no scruples about facts, "for he does not pretend to draw things as they are, or should be, but as they seem." Now, it is probable that the Aryan artist is born with a more analytic vision than that of the Orient ”

“ Her delicate fingers, twisting them, and chanting low as she wound;
The rune she sang rang sweet and clear like the chime of a witch's bell;
Its echo haunts me even now, with the word, Estelle! Estelle! ”

“ What is called descriptive poetry never can be The poet inferior to the painter in depicting nature;.very satisfying, since the painter is so much more capable than the poet of transferring the visible effects of nature,—those addressed to the eye. I suppose it is out of the power of one not reared in England, and in that very part of England which lies between Derwentwater and the Wye, to comprehend thoroughly the truth and beauty of Wordsworth's pastoral note and landscape. Neither can a foreigner rightly estimate the American idylists ”

“ Toil is her inspiration, exploration her instinct: she broods, she suffers, she wonders, but must still explore and design. The new learning is her guide, but to what unknown lands? The clew is almost found, yet still escapes her. Of what use are beauty, love, worship, even justice, when above her are the magic square and numbers of destiny, and the passing-bell that sounds the end of all? ”

“ At last one lady said: "Please give us examples of men who possess genius rather than talent." As she spoke, the door opened, and in walked Mrs. Edmund Clarence Stedman, wife of the poet, and with her a most distinguished-looking woman, Mrs. ”