EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN (1833-1908) 1 Strictly speaking, Edmund Clarence Stedman was a New York business man who turned at times to literature for recreation. He was a native of Hartford, Connecticut; he attended Yale, but because of youthful pranks was not permitted to finish his course; and at the age of twenty was married without his guardian's consent. Necessity for securing a livelihood sent him to New York to engage in the manufacture of clocks. The company soon failing, he turned in 1855 to real estate business and brokerage. In the early days of the war he went to the front as a newspaper correspondent, reported brilliantly some of the early battles, and. returning in 1863, entered Wall Street as a broker and a little later as a member of the Stock Exchange. He had found his profession, and, though nearly ruined by the panic of the early seventies, and always in great financial anxiety, he maintained his place until 1900, when he resigned to devote himself wholly to literary work. From the first, poetry was to Stedman an avenue of escape from the distracting hurly-burly of business life. Like Taylor and Stoddard and Hayne and Timrod, he considered it something sacred and apart, to be approached with reverence. He translated Theocritus, made poems of Grecian beauty, and dreamed dreams in a world far from his own land and day. The war awakened him for a time, but he must be classed with the transition poets who, Janus-like, stand looking longingly backward and at the same time timidly forward into the future. He published enough poetry to make possible a Household Edition,' but of it all only a few virile war lyrics, written in the days when the war shook him out of his dreamy reveries, and two or three other lyrics that came from his heart, have survived him. In his later years he turned to prose, and wrote graceful studies of the Victorian poets and of the American poets. But he was a soul too poetic and sentimental to succeed as a critic. His flowing and ornate appreciations to-day seem lacking in force and breadth and philosophical insight. In spirit they are of the generalizing, and gorgeous mid-century rather than of the more scientific and accurate later years. In his study of Poe he reached his highest point as a critic. of an artist's life is that of his inspired moments. There were occasions when Poe was the master, when his criticism was true, when he composed such tales as Ligeia,''The Fall of the House of Usher,' poems like The Raven,' 'The Bells,' The City in the Sea.' It must be acknowledged, moreover — and professional writers know what this implies that Poe, in his wanderings, after all, followed his market. It gradually drifted to the North, until New York afforded the surest recompense to authors not snugly housed in the leafy coverts of New England. Nor did he ever resort to any mercantile employment for a livelihood. As we look around and see how authors accept this or. that method of support, there seems to be something chivalrous in the attitude of one who never earned a dollar except by his pen. From first to last he was simply a poet and man of letters, who rightly might claim to be judged by the literary product of his life. The life itself differed from that of any modern poet of equal genius, and partly because none other has found himself, in a new country, among such elements. Too much has been written about the man, too little of his times; and the memoir containing a judicial estimate of his writings has not yet appeared. His story has had a fascination for those who consider the infirmity of genius its natural outward sign. The peculiarity of his actions was their leaning toward what is called the melodramatic; of his work, that it aimed above the level of its time. What has been written of the former quite out of proportion to the analysis derivable from his literary remains frequently has been the output of those who, if unable to produce a stanza which he would have acknowledged, at least feel within themselves the possibilities of his errant career. Yet, as I observe the marvels of his handicraft, I seem unjust to these enthusiasts. It was the kind which most impresses the imagination of youth, and youth is a period at which the critical development of many biographers seems to be arrested. And who would not recall the zest with which he read, in schoolboy days, and by the stolen candle, a legend so fearful in its beauty and so beautiful in its fear as 'The Masque of the Red Death,' for example, found in some stray number of a the originals of The Sleeper,' ' A Dream within a Dream,' and 'Lenore'; while 'The Doomed City' and 'The Valley of Nis' reappear as The City in the Sea' and The Valley of Unrest.' Others were less thoroughly rewritten. Possibly he thus remodeled his juvenile verse to show that, however inchoate, it contained something worth a master's handling. Mr. magazine, and making the printed trash that convoyed it seem so vapid and drear? Not long after, we had the collected series, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque.' With what eagerness we caught them 5 from hand to hand until many of us knew them almost by heart. In the East, at that time, Hawthorne was shyly putting out his 'Mosses' and Twice Told Tales,' and it was not an unfruitful period that 10 Stoddard thinks, and not without reason, fostered, among its brood of chattering and aimless sentimentalists, two such spirits at once, each original in his kind. To-day we have a more consummate, realistic art. But where, now, the crea- 15 tive ardor, the power to touch the stops, if need be, of tragedy and superstition and remorse! Qur taste is more refined, our faculties are under control; to produce the greatest art they must, at times, compel the artist. 'Poetry,' said Poe, 'has been with me a passion, not a purpose,' a remarkable sentence to be found in a boyish preface, and I believe that he wrote the truth. But here, again, he displays an opposite failing. If poetry had been with him no less a passion, and equally a purpose, we now should have had something more to represent his rhythmical genius than the few brief, occasional lyrics which are all that his thirty years of life as a poet - the life of his early choice - have left us. In estimating him as a poet, the dates of these lyrics are of minor consequence. 35 They make but a thin volume, smaller than one which might hold the verse of Collins or Gray. Their range is narrower still. It is a curious fact that Poe struck, in youth, the key-notes of a few themes, 40 and that some of his best pieces, as we now have them, are but variations upon their earlier treatment. His first collection, as we have seen, was made in his twentieth year, and re- 45 printed with changes and omissions, just after he left West Point. The form of the longer poems is copied from Byron and Moore, while the spirit of the whole series vaguely reminds us of Shelley in 50 his obscurer lyrical mood. Poe's originality can be found in them, but they would be valueless except for his after career. They have unusual significance as the shapeless germs of much that was to grow 55 into form and beauty. Crude and wandering pieces, entitled 'Fairy Land' and 'Irene,' ' To -,' 'A Pæan,' etc., were that he found it an easy way of making saleable copy.' The poet himself intimates that circumstances beyond his control restricted his lyrical product. I scarcely remember another instance where a writer has so hoarded his early songs, and am in doubt whether to commend or deprecate their reproduction. It does not betoken affluence, but it was honest in Poe that he would not write in cold blood for the mere sake of composing. This he undoubtedly had the skill to do, and would have done, if his sole object had been creation of the beautiful, or art for art's sake. He used his lyrical gift mostly to express veritable feelings and moods I might almost say a single feeling or mood to which he could not otherwise give utterance, resorting to melody when prose was insufficient Herein he was true to the cardinal, antique conception of poesy, and in keeping it distinct from his main literary work he confirmed his own avowal that it was to him a passion, and neither a purpose nor a pursuit. A few poems, just as they stood in his early volume, are admirable in thought or finish. One is the sonnet, To Science,' which is striking, not as a sonnet, but for its premonition of attitudes which poetry and science have now more clearly assumed. Another is the exquisite lyric, 'To Helen,' which every critic longs to cite. Its confusion of imagery is wholly forgotten in the delight afforded by melody, lyrical perfection, sweet and classic grace. I do not understand why he omitted this charming trifle from the juvenile poems which he added to the collection of 1845. It is said that he wrote it when fourteen, and nothing more fresh and delicate came from his pen in maturer years. The instant success of 'The Ravenand this was within a few years of his death first made him popular as a poet, and resulted in a new collection of his verses. The lyrics which it contained, 5 raven is the very genius of the Night's Plutonian shore, different from other ravens, entirely his own, and none other can take its place. It is an emblem of the Irreparable, the guardian of pitiless memories, whose burden ever recalls to us the days that are no more. and a few written afterward,—' Ulalume,' 'The Bells,'' For Annie,' etc.,- now comprise the whole of his poetry as retained in the standard editions. The most glaring faults of Al Aaraaf' and 'Tamerlane,' phrases such as the eternal condor years, have been selected by eulogists for special praise. Turning from this practice-work to the poems which made his reputation, we come at once to the most 10 keeps it. But how much more imaginawidely known of all. Poe could not have written The Raven' in youth. It exhibits a method so positive as almost to compel us to accept, against the denial of his associates, 15 his own account of its building. The maker does keep a firm hand on it throughout, and for once seems to set his purpose above his passion. This appears in the gravely quaint diction, and in the 20 contrast between the reality of every-day manners and the profounder reality of a spiritual shadow upon the human heart. The grimness of fate is suggested by phrases which it requires a masterly hand 25 to subdue to the meaning of the poem. 'Sir,' said I, 'or madam,' this ungainly fowl,' and the like, sustain the air of grotesqueness, and become a foil to the pathos, an approach to the tragical climax, 30 of this unique production. Only genius can deal so closely with the grotesque and make it add to the solemn beauty of structure an effect like that of the gargoyles seen by moonlight on the façade of 35 Notre Dame. In no other lyric is Poe so selfpossessed. No other is so determinate in its repetends and alliterations. Hence I am far from deeming it his most poetical 40 poem. Its artificial qualities are those which catch the fancy of the general reader; and it is of all his ballads, if not the most imaginative, the most peculiar. His more ethereal productions seems to 45 me those in which there is the appearance, at least, of spontaneity, in which he yields to his feelings, while dying falls and cadences most musical, most melancholy, come from him unawares. Literal 50 criticisms of The Raven' are of small account. If the shadow of the bird could not fall upon the mourner, the shadows of its evil presence could brood upon his soul; the seraphim whose foot-falls tinkle 55 upon the tufted floor may be regarded as seraphim of the Orient, their anklets hung with celestial bells. At all events, Poe's As a new creation, then, 'The Raven' is entitled to a place in literature, and tive is such a poem as The City in the Sea'! As a picture, this reminds us of Turner, and, again, of that sublime madman, John Martin. Here is a strange city where Death has raised a throne. Its 'shrines and palaces and towers (Time-eaten towers that tremble not!) Resemble nothing that is ours. Around, by lifting winds forget, Resignedly beneath the sky The melancholy waters lie.' This mystical town is aglow with light, not from heaven, but from out the lurid sea, light which streams up the turrets and pinnacles and domes, 'Up many and many a marvelous shrine, While, from a proud tower in the town, The sea about is hideously serene, but at last there is a movement; the towers seem slightly to sink; the dull tide has a redder glow: 'And when, amid no earthly moans, Down, down that town shall settle hence, Hell, rising from a thousand thrones, Shall do it reverence.' This poem, notwithstanding its somberness and terror, depends upon effects which made Poe the forerunner of our chief experts in form and sound, and both the language and the conception are suggestive in a high degree. The Sleeper' is even more poetic. It distills, like drops from the opiate vapor of the swooning moonlight night, all the melody, the fantasy, the exaltation, that befit the vision of a beautiful woman lying in her shroud, silent in her length of tress, waiting to exchange her death chamber 'for one more holy, This bed for one more melancholy.' Poe's ideality cannot be gainsaid, but it aided him with few, very few, images, and those seemed to haunt his brain perpetually. Such an image is that of the beings who lend their menace to the tone of the funeral bells: And the people,- ah, the people,— They that dwell up in the steeple All alone, And who, tolling, tolling, tolling, In that muffled monotone, Feel a glory in so rolling On the human heart a stone,They are neither man nor woman, They are neither brute nor human, They are Ghouls.' In the same remarkable fantasia the bells themselves become human, and it is a master-stroke that makes us hear them shriek out of tune, 'In a clamorous appealing to the mercy of the fire,' The most he dared to ask for 'The Sleeper' was oblivion; that her sleep 20 might be as deep as it was lasting. We lay the dead in the cold ground' or in the warm, flower-springing bosom of dear Earth, as best may fit the hearts of those who mourn them. But the tomb, the end 25 of mortality, is voiceless still. If you would find the beginning of immortality, seek some other oracle. The Conqueror Worm is the most despairing of lyrics, yet quite essential to the mystical pur and forces us to the very madness with 30 pose of the tale Ligeia.' But to brood which they are Clearly this extravagance was suggested by the picture and the rime. But it so 40 carries us with it that we think not of its meaning; we share in the delirium of the bells, and nothing can be too extreme for the abandon to which we yield ourselves, led by the faith and frenzy of the poet. The hinting, intermittent qualities of a few lyrics remind us of Shelley and Coleridge, with whom Poe always was in sympathy. The conception of The Raven' upon men as mimes, ironically cast in the form of God on high,'- mere puppets, where 'the play is the tragedy, “Man,” And its hero the Conqueror Worm,' that way madness lies, indeed. In the lyric, For Annie,' death is a trance; the soul lingers, calm and at rest, for the fever, called living, is conquered. Human love remains, and its last kiss is still a balm. Something may be hereafter,but what, who knows? For repose, and 45 for delicate and unstudied melody, it is one of Poe's truest poems, and his tenderest. During the brief period in which he survived his wife, he seemed to have a vision of rest in death, and not of horror. Two was new, but in method it bears a like- 50 lyrics, widely different, and one of them ness to Lady Geraldine's Courtship,' so closely, in fact, that the rhythm of the one probably was suggested by that of the other. In motive they are so different that neither Poe nor Mrs. Browning 55 could feel aggrieved. After an examination of dates, and of other matters relating to the genesis of each poem, I have of a most singular nature, are thought to be requiems for his lost companion. It is from no baseness, but from a divine instinct, that genuine artists are compelled to go on with their work and to make their own misery, no less than their joy, promote its uses. Their most sacred experiences become, not of their volition, |