We all know with what results. He has earned a manly living from the first, and therewithal has steadily contributed a vital portion to the current, and to the enduring, literature of his land and language. There was one thing that characterized the somewhat isolated New York group of young writers in his early prime—especially himself and his nearest associates, such as Taylor and Boker, and, later, Aldrich and Winter. They called themselves squires of poesy, in their romantic way, but they had neither the arrogance nor the chances for a self-heralding, more common in these chipper modern days. They seem to have followed their art because they adored it, quite as much as for what it could do for them.
Of Mr. Stoddard it may be said that there have been few important literary names and enterprises, North or South, but he has "been of the company." If he found friends in youth, he has abundantly repaid his debt in helpful counsel to his juniors—among whom I am one of the eldest and most grateful. But I cannot realize that thirty-seven years of our close friendship have passed since I showed my first early work to him, and he took me to a publisher. Just as I found him then, I find him any evening now, in the same chair, in the same corner of the study, "under the evening lamp." We still talk of the same themes; his jests are as frequent as ever, but the black hair is silvered and the active movements are less alert. I then had never known a mind so stored with bookish lore, so intimate with the lives of rare poets gone by, yet to what it then possessed he, with his wonderful memory, has been adding ever since.
If his early verse was like Keats, how soon he came to that unmistakable style of his own—to the utterance of those pure lyrics, "most musical, most melancholy"—"to the perfection of his matchless songs," and again, to the mastery of blank verse, that noblest measure, in "The Fisher and Charon"—to the grace and limpid narrative verse of "The King's Bell," to the feeling, wisdom—above all, to the imagination—of his loftier odes, among which that on Lincoln remains unsurpassed. This is not the place to eulogize such work. But one thing may be noted in the progress of what in Berkeley's phrase may be called the planting of arts and letters in America. Mr. Stoddard and his group were the first after Poe to make poetry—whatever else it might be—the rhythmical creation of beauty. As an outcome of this, and in distinction from the poetry of conviction to which the New England group were so addicted, look at the "Songs of Summer" which our own poet brought out in 1857. For beauty pure and simple it still seems to me fresher and more significant than any single volume produced up to that date by any Eastern poet save Emerson. It was "poetry or nothing," and though it came out of time in that stormy period, it had to do with the making of new poets thereafter.
In conclusion, I am moved to say, very much as I wrote on his seventieth birthday, that our poet's laborious and nobly independent life, with all its lights and shadows, has been one to be envied. There is much in completeness—its rainbow has not been dissevered—it is a perfect arc. As I know him, it has been the absolute realization of his young desire, the unhasting, unresting life of a poet and student, beyond that of any other writer among us. Its compensations have been greater than those of ease and wealth. Even now he would not change it, though at an age when one might well have others stay his hands. He had the happiness to win in youth the one woman he loved, with the power of whose singular and forceful genius his own is inseparably allied. These wedded poets have been blessed in their children, in the exquisite memory of the dead, in the success and loyalty of the living. His comrades have been such as he pictured to his hope in youth—poets, scholars, artists of the beautiful, with whom he has "warmed both hands before the fire of life." None of them has been a more patient worker or more loved his work. To it he has given his years, whether waxing or waning; he has surrendered for it the strength of his right hand, he has yielded the light of his eyes, and complains not, nor need he, "for so were Milton and Mæonides." What tears this final devotion may have caused to flow, come from other eyes than his own. And so, with gratulation void of all regrets, let us drink to the continued years, service, happiness of our strong and tender-hearted elder comrade, our white-haired minstrel, Richard Henry Stoddard.
LESLIE STEPHEN
THE CRITIC
[Speech of Leslie Stephen at the annual banquet of the Royal Academy, London, April 29, 1893, in response to the toast, "Literature." Sir Frederic Leighton, President of the Academy, spoke of Literature as "that in which is garnered up the heat that feeds the spiritual life of men." In the vein of personal compliment he said: "For literature I turn to a distinguished writer whose acute and fearless mind finds a fit vehicle in clear and vigorous English and to me seems winged by that vivid air which plays about the Alpine peaks his feet have in the past so dearly loved to tread—I mean my friend, Mr. Leslie Stephen.">[
Mr. President, Your Royal Highness, My Lords, and Gentlemen:—When a poet or a great imaginative writer has to speak in this assembly he speaks as to brethren-in-arms, to persons with congenial tastes and with mutual sympathies, but when, instead of the creative writer, the Academy asks a critic to speak to them, then nothing but your proverbial courtesy can conceal the fact that they must really think they are appealing to a natural enemy. I have the misfortune to be a critic [laughter], but in this assembly I must say I am not an art critic. Friends have made a presumptuous attempt to fathom the depth of my ignorance upon artistic subjects, and they have thought that in some respects I must be admirably qualified for art criticism. [Laughter.]
As a literary critic I have felt, and I could not say I was surprised to find how unanimously critics have been condemned by poets and artists of all generations. I need only quote the words of the greatest authority, Shakespeare, who in one of his most pathetic sonnets reckons up the causes of the weariness of life and speaks of the spectacle of—