I have said that Mr. Stedman’s town house could not be characterized as rich in picturesque external adjuncts. The street in which it is situated—West Fifty-fourth—is of a piece with the prevailing character of New York domestic architecture. It is a long stretch of brown-stone houses, ranged in line, like a regiment of soldiers turned into stone. But the impassive chocolate features, like some mask worn by a fairy princess, conceal a most enchanting interior. Once within the front door, the charm of a surprise awaits one. Color, warmth, and grace greet the eye at the outset. If it be the poet’s gift to turn the prose of life into poetry, it is certain that the same magical art has here been employed to make household surroundings minister to the æsthetic sense. There is a pervading harmony of tone and tints throughout the house, the rich draperies, the soft-toned carpets, and the dusk of the tempered daylight, are skillfully used as an effective background to bring into relief the pictures, the works of art, and the rare bits of bric-à-brac. One is made sensible, by means of a number of clever devices, that in this home the arts and not the upholstery are called upon to do the honors. These admirable results are due almost entirely to the taste and skill of Mrs. Stedman, who possesses an artist’s instinct for grouping and effect. She has also the keen scent and the patience of the ardent collector. A tour of the house is a passing in review of her triumphs, of trophies won at sales, bits picked up in foreign travel, a purchase now and then of some choice collection, either of glass or china, or prints and etchings. Among the purchases has been that of a large and beautiful collection of Venetian glass, whose delicate grace and iridescent glow make the lower rooms a little museum for the connoisseur. But more beautiful even than the glass is the gleam of color from the admirable pictures which adorn the walls. Mr. Stedman is evidently a believer in the doctrine that there is health in the rivalry of the arts. His pictures look out from their frames at his books, as if to bid them defiance. The former are of an order of excellence to make even a literary critic speak well of them; for Mr. Stedman has a passion for pictures which he has taken the pains to train into a taste. He was a familiar figure, a few years ago, at the Academy of Design receptions on press-night. He was certain to be found opposite one of the best water-colors or oil-paintings of the Exhibition, into the frame of which, a few minutes later, his card would be slipped, on which the magic word “Sold” was to be read. It was in this way that some charming creations of Wyant, of Church, and other of our best artists, were purchased. Perhaps the pearl of his collection is Winslow Homer’s “Voice from the Cliffs,” the strongest figure-picture this artist has yet produced. The walls divide their spaces between such works of art and a numerous and interesting collection of gifts and souvenirs from the poet’s artist and literary friends. Among these is a sketch in oil of Miss Fletcher, the author of “Kismet,” by her stepfather, Eugene Benson; a bronze bas-relief of Bayard Taylor, who was an intimate friend of Mr. Stedman’s; and a companion relief of the latter poet, hanging side by side with that of his friend as if lovingly to emphasize their companionship.
The usual parallelogram of the New York parlor is broken, by the pleasantly irregular shape of the rooms, into a series of unexpected openings, turnings and corners. At the most distant end, beyond the square drawing-room, the perspective is defined by the rich tones of a long stretch of stained glass. The figures are neither those of nymph nor satyr, nor yet of the æsthetic young damsel in amber garments whom Burne-Jones and William Morris would have us accept as the successor of these. Here sit two strangely familiar-looking stolid Dutchmen in colonial dress, puffing their pipes in an old-time kitchen. They are Peter Stuyvesant and Govert Loockermans, in the act of being waited upon by “goede-vrouw Maria, ... bustling at her best to spread the New Year’s table.” Lest the gazer might be in need of an introduction to these three jovial creations of the poet’s fancy, there are lines of the poem intertwined with the holly which serves as a decorative adjunct. No more fitting entrance could have been chosen to the Stedman dining-room than this. If there was no other company, there was always the extra plate and an empty chair awaiting the coming guest. It has pleased the humor of Boston to lance its arrows of wit at New York for the latter’s pretensions to establishing literary circles and coteries. When literary Boston was invited to the Stedmans to dinner, these satirical arrows seemed suddenly to lose their edge. During the four or five years that Mr. and Mrs. Stedman occupied their charming house, New York had as distinctly a literary center as either Paris or London. On Sunday evenings, the evenings at home, there was such a varied assemblage of guests as only a metropolis can bring together. Not only authors and artists, critics and professional men, but fashion and society, found their way there. At the weekly dinners were to be met the distinguished foreigner, the latest successful novelist or young poet, and the wittiest and the most beautiful women. As if in humorous mockery of the difficulties attendant upon literary success and recognition, the dining-room in its size and seating capacity might not inaptly be likened to that Oriental figure of speech by which the rich found heaven so impossible of access. The smallness of the room only served, however, like certain chemical apparatus, to condense and liberate the brilliant conversational gases. If the poet were in his most gracious mood, the more favored guests, after dinner, might be allowed a glimpse of the library. Books were scattered so profusely over the house, that each room might easily have been mistaken for one. But in a large square room at the top of the house is the library proper—workshop and study together. This building his poet’s nest under the eaves of his own cornice is the one evidence of the recluse in Stedman’s character. When he is about to pluck his own plumage that his fledglings may be covered, he turns his back on the world. All the paraphernalia of his toil are about him. The evidences of the range and the extent of his reading and scholarship are to be found in taking down some of the volumes on the shelves. Here are the Greek classics, in the original, with loose sheets among the pages, where are translations of Theocritus or Bion, done into finished English verse. Mr. Stedman’s proficiency in Doric Greek is matched by his familiarity with the modern French classics, whose lightness of touch and airy grace he has caught in “Aucassin and Nicolette,” “Toujours Amour,” and “Jean Prouvaire’s Song.” With a delicate sense of fitness, the dainty verse of Coppée, Béranger, Théodore de Banville, the sonnets of Victor Hugo, and, indeed, his whole collection of the French poets, is bound in exquisite vellum or morocco. Among these volumes the poet’s own works appear in several rare and beautiful editions. There are the “Songs and Ballads,” issued by the Bookfellows Club, the essay on Edgar Allan Poe in vellum (the first so bound in America), and other beautifully illustrated and printed copies of his poems. The shelves and tables are laden with a wealth of literary treasure. But there is one volume one holds with a truly reverent delight. It is Mrs. Browning’s own copy of “Casa Guidi Windows,” with interlineations and corrections. It was the gift of the poetess to Mrs. Kinney, Stedman’s mother, who was among Mrs. Browning’s intimate friends. “How John Brown took Harper’s Ferry,” it is pleasant to learn, was an especial favorite with the great songstress.
Since the reversal of fortune which overwhelmed Mr. Stedman five years ago, this charming home has been temporarily leased. The family, however, were altogether fortunate in securing Bayard Taylor’s old home in East Thirtieth Street, during an absence in Europe of the latter’s wife and daughter. Here the conditions surrounding Stedman’s home life have been necessarily changed. The arduous literary labor attendant on the publishing of his recently completed volume on the “Poets of America,” which completes the series of contemporaneous English and American poets, together with his work on the “Library of American Literature” (of which he and Miss Hutchinson are the joint editors), the writing of magazine articles, poems and critiques, and the increased cares of his business struggles, make him too hard-worked a man to be available for the lighter social pleasures. The Sunday evenings are, however, still maintained, as his one leisure hour, and the hospitality is as generous as the present modest resources of the household will permit. Mr. Stedman’s early career, and the native toughness of fibre which has enabled him to fight a winning battle against tremendous odds during his whole life, furnished him with the fortitude and endurance with which he met his recent calamity. The heroic element is a dominant note in his character. At the very outset of his career he gave proof of the stuff that was in him. Entering Yale College in 1849, and suspended in ’53 for certain boyish irregularities, the man in him was born in a day. At nineteen he went into journalism, married at twenty, and in another year was an editor and a father. Ten years later, after service in all the grades of newspaper life, the same energy of decision marked his next departure. He gave up journalism, and went into active business in Wall Street that he might have time for more independent, imaginative writing. The bread-winning was so successful that in another ten years he had gained a competence, and was about to retire from business, to devote himself entirely to literary pursuits. He now returns to the struggle with fortune with the old unworn, undaunted patience. He has been sustained in the vicissitudes of his career by the cheering companionship of his wife. Ever in sympathy with her husband’s work and ambitions, Mrs. Stedman has possessed the gift of adaptability which has enabled her to meet with befitting ease and dignity the varying fortunes which have befallen them. In the earlier nomadic days she was the Blanche, who, with the poet, rambled through the “faery realm” of Bohemia. The “little King Arthur” is a grown man now, his father’s co-worker and devoted aid. The king has abdicated in favor of a tiny princess, who rules the household with her baby ways. This is another Laura, ætat four, who, with her mother, Mrs. Frederick Stedman, completes the family circle. It needs the reiterated calls for grandpa and grandma to impress one with the reality of the fact that this still youthful-looking couple are not masquerading in the parts. Mr. Stedman, in spite of his grayish beard and mustache, is a singularly young-looking man for his years. He is slight, with slender figure and delicate features. His motions and gestures are full of impulse and energy. He has the bearing of a man who has measured his strength with the world. The delicate refinement and finish of his work, as well as its power and vigor, are foreshadowed in his personnel. His manner is an epitome of his literary style. His face has the charm which comes from high-bred features molded into the highest form of expression—that of intellectual energy infused with a deep and keen sympathetic quality. Something of this facial charm he inherits from his mother, now Mrs. Kinney. As the lovely and brilliant wife of the Hon. William B. Kinney, when the latter was American Minister at the Court of Turin, this gifted lady won a European reputation for the sparkling radiance of her beauty.
As a talker Mr. Stedman possesses the first and highest of qualities—that of spontaneity. The thought leaps at a bound into expression. So rapid is the flow of ideas, and so fluent its delivery, that one thought sometimes trips on the heels of the next. His talk, in its range, its variety, and the multiplicity of subjects touched upon, even more, perhaps, than his work, is an unconscious betrayal of his many-sided life. The critic, the poet, the man of business and the man of the world, the lover of nature, and the keen observer of the social machinery of life, each by turn takes the ascendant. The whole, woven together by a brilliant tissue of short, epigrammatic, trenchant sentences, abounding in good things one longs to remember and quote, forms a most picturesque and dazzling ensemble. Added to the brilliancy, there is a genial glow of humor, and such an ardor and enthusiasm in his capacity for admiration, as complete Mr. Stedman’s equipment as a man and a conversationalist. He would not be a poet did he not see his fellow-man aureoled with a halo. His natural attitude toward life and men is an almost boyish belief and delight in their being admirable. It is only on discovering they are otherwise that the critic appears to soften the disappointment by the rigors of analysis. Stedman is by nature an enthusiast. He owes it to his training that he is a critic. As an enthusiast he has the fervor, the intensity, the exaltation, which belong to the believer and the lover of all things true and good and beautiful. He is as generous as he is ardent, and his gift of praising is not to be counted as among the least of his qualities. But the critic comes in to temper the ardor, to weigh the value, and to test the capacity. And thus it is found that there are two men in Mr. Stedman, one of whom appears to be perpetually in pursuit of the other, and never quite to overtake him.
If poets are born and not made this side of heaven, so are sportsmen. In Stedman’s case the two appeared in one, to prove the duality possible. Summer after summer, in the hard-won vacations, the two have sailed the inland lakes and fished in the trout streams together; the fisherman oblivious of all else save the movements of that most animate of inanimate insects—the angler’s fly; the poet equally absorbed in quite another order of motion—that of nature’s play. The range of Mr. Stedman’s acquaintance among backwoodsmen and seafaring men is in proportion to the extent of his journeyings. “There are at least a hundred men with whom I am intimate who don’t dream I have ever written a line,” I once overheard him say in the midst of a story he was telling of the drolleries of some forest guide who was among his “intimates.” This talent for companionship with classes of men removed from his own social orbit has given Stedman that breadth of sympathy and that sure vision in the fields of observation which makes his critical work so unusual. He knows men as a naturalist knows the kingdom of animal life. He can thus analyze and classify, not only the writer, but the man, for he holds the key to a right comprehension of character by virtue of his own plastic sensibility. His delight in getting near to men who are at polaric distances from him socially, makes him impatient of those whom so-called culture has removed to Alpine heights from which to view their fellow-beings. “There’s so and so,” he once said, in speaking of a second-rate poet whose verses were æsthetic sighs to the south wind and the daffodil; “he thinks of nothing but rhyming love and dove. I wonder what he would make out of a man—a friend of mine, for instance, in the Maine woods, a creature as big as Hercules, with a heart to match his strength. I should like to see what he would make of him.” Stedman’s own personality is infused with a raciness and a warmth peculiar to men who have the power of freshening their own lives by that system of wholesome renewal called human contact. Much of the secret of his social charm comes from his delight in, and ready companionship with, all conditions of men.
In his present study in the little house in Thirtieth Street there are several photographs, scattered about the room, of a quaint and picturesque seaside house. This is the summer home on the island of New Castle, N. H. It has a tower which seems to have been built over the crest of the waves, and a loggia as wide and spacious as a Florentine palace. No one but a sailor or a sea-lover could have chosen such a spot. To Mr. Stedman, New Castle was a veritable trouvaille. It fulfilled every condition of pleasure and comfort requisite in a summer home. The sea was at his doors, and the elms and fields ran down to meet it. The little island, with its quaint old fishing village, its old colonial houses, its lanes and its lovely coast line, is the most picturesque of microcosms ever set afloat. There is no railroad nearer than three miles, and to reach it one crosses as many bridges as span a Venetian canal. Mr. Stedman himself, the poet John Albee, Barrett Wendell (one of Boston’s clever young authors), Prof. Bartlett, of Harvard, and Jacob Wendell’s family, make a charming and intimate little coterie. At Kelp Rock Mr. Stedman is only the poet, the genial host, and the bon camarade. Business cares and thoughts are relegated to the world whence they came. The most approachable of authors at all times, at New Castle, with the sea and the sunshine to keep his idleness in countenance, he seems fairly to irradiate companionship. His idleness is of an order to set the rest of the world a lesson in activity. In his play he is even more intense, if possible, than in his work. The play consists of five or six hard-writing hours in his tower during the morning. This is followed by an afternoon of sailing, or fishing, or walking, any one of which forms of pleasure is planned with a view to hard labor of some kind, some strenuous demand on the physical forces. The evening finds him and his family, with some of the group mentioned and often with stray visitors from the outer world, before the drift-wood fire in the low-raftered hall, where talk and good-cheer complete the day.
With such abundantly vigorous energies, Mr. Stedman’s quarter of a century of productiveness is only an earnest of his future work. He has doubly pledged himself hereafter to the performance of strictly original creative writing. As critic he has completed the work which he set himself to do—that of rounding the circle of contemporaneous poetry. In giving to the world such masterpieces of critical writing as the “Victorian Poets” and “Poets of America,” he owes it to his own muse to prove that the critic leaves the poet free.
Anna Bowman Dodd.
[Since this sketch was written (November, 1885) Mr. Stedman has sold his Fifty-fourth Street house, leased a house in East Twenty-sixth Street, bought one in West Seventy-eighth Street (1890) and sold it in 1895, at the same time that he disposed of “Kelp Rock.” His permanent home is now at Lawrence Park—“Casa Laura,” named after his wife and granddaughter—although he spent last winter in apartments in New York. His most recent works are his Victorian and American Anthologies and “Mater Coronata,” the poem written for the Bicentennial Celebration of Yale University.—Editors.]
RICHARD HENRY STODDARD