RICHARD HENRY STODDARD
IN NEW YORK
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 is not 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 of The Mail and Express are 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 what more 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 surely are marvels, 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 friendship formed 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 the Tribune,—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 Taylor Mr. 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.”
When Mr. 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 a young 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 the Rev. 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 been Mr. 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 he was forty-five when he regained his freedom from official bondage.
It was in 1870 that Mr. 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 of The 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 to The Critic since its foundation; until recently he was a leading review-writer for the Tribune; and he is still to be found now and then in the poets’ corner of The 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 the most 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-east corner 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 fashionable St. 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 to Mr. Stoddard’s, at the corner of Rutherford Place and Sixteenth Street; and a Friends’ School and Meeting-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-cases of 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 by Mr. 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 of Mr. 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,—