Edmund Clarence Stedman

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It was

developing and controlling our material heritage." because Stedman was so enthusiastic a follower of all the efforts and advances of the human mind, an alert man of affairs, experienced in business and finance, as well as a poet," that he possessed in such generous measure the ability to judge both scientifically and poetically. His volumes Victorian Poets (1876) and Poets of America-those standard works of fine sanity and even finer vision-reveal the great eclectic who with warm heart and open mind had a thousand approaches to life. His understanding of philosophy and his vibrating sense of melody are evident, but perhaps nowhere more significantly than in his appraisal of the poetry of Emerson, where he uses a metaphor suggested by science and the practical affairs of everyday life. Emerson, writes Stedman, "had seasons when feeling and expression were in circuit, and others when the wires were down." Only Stedman could thus have evalued the electric spark, the brilliant mysterious vitality of Emerson's poetry, negated at times by the insufficiency of his art.

Stedman's essays were almost exclusively in the field of literary criticism, but there have been published since his death two copious volumes of letters revealing in delightful fashion the range of his interest and the charm of his temperament. Beauty was his guide, and friendship was his passion. He had that spirituality which led him to write to John Hay -the most enjoyable of letter writers among our literary statesmen-that the earth "is smaller than either your soul or mine"; and though Stedman's manliness remained undaunted before cruel onsets of fate-frequent illness, the loss of fortune, the death of near and dear-he could be moved almost to woman's tears when the love of friends brought to him unexpected tribute. "For of Heavenly Love we may dream, but know nothing, while from the currents that flow between earthly hearts-young and old-we do gain our most real and exquisite compensation." In the hurried life of New York this poet who was a broker on the Stock Exchange made time to correspond not alone with his many confrères in fame but with a host of younger writers; and it was his chivalric boast that no letter from a woman ever remained unanswered.

1 See also Book III, Chap. X.

The

broadness of his sympathies in art, in drama, in music, as well as in letters, coupled with his generous interest in the effort of all those who even at the furthest radius came within his circle, made of Stedman one of the finest influences in the development of New York's cultural life. "New York," Stedman wrote in his essay on Bayard Taylor, "is still too practical to do much more than affect an æsthetic sentiment." This judgment was pronounced more than a score of years ago, and if it is now increasingly open to qualification, Stedman is one of those whom we have therefor most to thank.

Another, and to a marked degree, is William Winter (1836-1917). For many years the dean of American dramatic critics, he ever rode full tilt and fearless against the commercialism rampant on our stage. He was the most winning of our essayists on Shakespeare, having in his own nature more than a touch of Hamlet. Erudite in the technique of the playwright, Winter was still more versed in the lyric knowledge of the poet and in that high wisdom which realizes both the potentialities and the obligations of dramatic art; and thus his critiques in the daily press were concerned with the eternal, as opposed to the diurnal, aspect of things. But while his standards were uncompromising, his style was gracious, courteous, tender even-as we should expect of a poet; and in such a series of papers as are included in his Gray Days and Gold (1894) we see how great a part sentiment played in the life and writings of that brave antagonist of all the blatant and all the insidious influences which drag down the art of a nation. The past lured him with every manner of associations, and his writings on Shakespeare's England have the charm of old days-one of the characteristics most appealing in the work of Washington Irving. Indeed, with a greater strain of melancholy, and a lesser strain of humour, William Winter was, in the closing years of the nineteenth century, the last and most winsome descendant of our first great essayist; and especially by the English public should he continue to be read as one who held that land in the tenderest regard.

The marked enjoyment in things of old-old books, old places, the myriad associations binding together the blossoms of the years-which casts glamour on many of the pages

See also Book III, Chap. XVIII.

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of Winter, underlies the literary work of Laurence Hutton (1843-1904), his companion in the field of dramatic criticism and along the byways of foreign travel. Among collectors Hutton is remembered for the treasures he amassed, especially books relating to the theatre and play-bills. The corollary of this enthusiasm is found in his papers and addresses on the drama, wherefrom arises winningly the human note. He wrote, also, a series of volumes describing literary pilgrimages in England, Italy, and many another land,-volumes that place him graciously in the large company of American essayists whose theme has been that of travel; and with him our own journey fittingly ends.

The scope of present-day essayists is far wider than that of the men of the preceding century. The tendency is away from the traditionary essay of morals or of literary culture, partially because the classics are no longer part and parcel of our education, and largely because science and social economics are more and more requisitioning the pens of many of our most brilliant contemporary essayists. We have, however, many writers, of course, whose work continues the literary tradition; and to name Howells, Woodberry, Santayana, Woodrow Wilson, Henry Van Dyke, Brander Matthews, Paul Elmer More, Agnes Repplier, and John Burroughs-foremost among nature writers were yet to omit others well deserving of inclusion lest too long a catalogue of ships should still overlook some bark of letters already worthily launched. Our grateful task has been to write of the men who have gone by, a group of noble gentlemen, whose attitude towards life was that of the idealist, and whose courtesy of spirit and courtesy of phrase are permeating traits of their work. Not even in the harshest days of the Civil War is there a brow-beating epithet or sneering causticity. If the American essayists and critics owe a debt to the English writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries-as indeed they do they have removed from their inheritance all taint of bitterness and cruel satire, and our critical literature has (with the exception of Poe in his uninspired moments) no mean, no biassed, no tyrannical-and no fulsome—appraiser of literary values or of the motives of men's actions. If, however, we turn to our group of later essayists 1 See also Book III, Chap. XVIII.

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as a whole, we are soon aware that they leave something to be desired, and that we must have recourse to European essays for the supplying of this want. As our fiction has refused to portray life with full verity, to dissect with searching candour the hidden motives in individual life, so, too, have our essay writers abstained from the subtle workings of the mind in the field of personal emotions and desires. There is, however, a distinction to be made when we seek to explain these limitations in American fiction and American essays. In the first case is preponderantly involved the purpose of popular appeal along the lines of least resistance, with financial success as the writer's reward. In the second case, the purpose of educating the mind of a nation not yet ready to appreciate art in all its ramifications, has, whether directly or unconsciously, led our essayists to refrain from themes which Continental writers have made luminous to peoples inheriting the Renaissance rather than the Puritan traditions. The group of essayists that we are leaving may indeed have theoretically subscribed to the French dictum that style is the man, yet they wrote, rather, under the propulsion of the idea that mankind is more than style.

CHAPTER XIV

Travellers and Explorers, 1846-1900

TH

HE central world-belt of human progress up to the present era lies along the fortieth parallel of north latitude with general limits ten degrees on each side. That the region now the United States falls almost entirely within this belt explains the instinctive drift of Europeans westward to, and across, this particular untrodden field. The Anglo-Saxon branch, attaining a dominance of power therein, halted briefly at the obstacle of the Appalachian mountain system, passed that barrier, and marched on its predestined course to the western ocean with a development of accompanying literature described up to 1846 in a former chapter1 and continued in this to the year 1900, with a slight extension at each end.

A new order of events developed speedily with the triumph of the Texans over Santa Anna and the creation of the Lone Star Republic in 1841 with its premeditated intention of annexation to the United States. This intention the Mexican Republic declared would be, if consummated, a cause of war, but the movement was not halted. The constant influx of pioneers from the "States" made annexation a foregone conclusion, while books that now appeared like Colonel Edward Stiff's The Texan Emigrant (1840) aided and abetted the prospective addition to the American republic. He offers for a frontispiece a map of Texas which has small consideration for the expansive Texan idea that the new republic's western limits were where the Texan pleased to place them, quite regardless of Mexican contention, for the Colonel draws the I Book II, Chap. 1.