44 East 26th St., New York, Dec. 8th, 1889.
My dear Higginson,—Yes: I have been through a kind of Holy Week, and have come out in so incorporeal a state that I strive painfully, though most gratefully, to render thanks to some, at least, of my beautiful mother’s friends and mine who have taken note of her departure. I have always wished that she and you could know more of each other—though nothing of yours escaped her eager taste and judgment, for she was not only a natural critic, but a very clanswoman, with a most loyal faith in her blood and yours. Most of all, she was a typical woman, an intensely human one, to the last, though made of no common clay. She was of an age to die, and I am glad that her fine intelligence was spared a season of dimness. Still, I have suffered a loss, and doubtless one that will last a lifetime.
Sincerely yours,
E. C. Stedman.
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 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 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 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.
2643 Broadway, New York City, Evening, March 20th, 1907.