Longfellow, and other essays

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I. Longfellow i

II. The Heart of Midlothian ... 37

II

The chief facts of the early life of the child who was born a hundred years ago in the town of Portland in the District of Maine are, I take it, four in number. He came of solid and excellent English and New England stock; his nature was from the first a blend of the characteristics of his admirable parents, strong yet gentle, self-poised yet sympathetic; he was endowed with a genuine native faculty for culture and for artistic self-expression, which was fostered by the education his father and mother were in a position to give him; and, last but not

LONGFELLOW II

least, he grew up among a homogeneous, unsophisticated people within sight and hearing of the far-stretching, mysterious sea. These four facts will be found singly or in unison behind nearly all the poems of Longfellow that really count for the world — ^behind, for example, "The Wreck of the Hesperus," "Flowers," " The Psalm of Life," « The Bridge," " Evangeline," "The Courtship of Miles Standish," and "The Saga of King Olaf." Few poets have better comprehended the romance and the power of the ocean, the beauty of flowers, the sentiments that touch the heart and the resolves that fire the mind of youth, the joys and the fears of love, the calm thoughtfulness of mature years, and the reverend charm of age. Life in all its multitudinous fullness it was not in Longfellow's power to .grasp and present ; it was not his to live apart upon the heights of thought, or to haunt the wildernesses of despair, or to dwell a privileged denizen in the realms of fairyland. With his nature, his training, his environment, any such exceptional development of his genius would have been more than ordinarily surprising. His early years prepared him to be a true and very influential poet within somewhat conventional lines, not to be one of the giants or the demons or the fantastic elves of literature. The four facts I have just enumerated might all be dwelt upon with some profit, but I shall comment for a moment only upon the last of them — the fact that Longfellow grew up among a homogeneous, unsophisticated people. In this fact lies, I think, one of the most potent of all the causes of his pervasive influence and popularity. It is among the homogeneous, compact peoples, in the main, that the arts have had their greatest flowering. It is among comparatively unsophisticated but far from backward peoples that native genius seems to stand the best chance of coming to its own. Now in the evolution of American life these three elements — ^homogeneity, compactness, lack of sophistication unaccompanied by backwardness — ^have been found fully united and fused only in the New England of the first half of the last century. It is precisely in the New England of that period that we find our nearest approach to an epoch of fairly copious, sustained, and important literary production. We have had great authors who did not represent New England life and training — some of them greater perhaps than any writer New England can claim as her own — ^but we have had elsewhere in America nothing that approximates a distinct and notable school of writers. It is to this fact and also to the facts that settlers from New England have penetrated to the farthest corners of our country and that the basal

New England virtues are, fortunately, the basal virtues of the American people taken as a whole, that the predominance of New England in our literary history is chiefly due. The individual genius of an Emerson, a Hawthorne has, of course, counted for not a little, but the influence exerted by the compact, well-defined school has counted for more. Of this school the most typical, the least eccentric and extravagant representative was, beyond all doubt, the poet whom we are considering. He was comparatively untouched by the impracticable features of transcendentalism; although he wrote a few antislavery poems, he was nothing of a political partisan; though far from destitute of humor, he certainly aroused not the least suspicion that he was a jester or a freak. He was not too high for the many, or too low for the few. He was clear, wholesome, gracious, sympathetic, fluent, melodious, cultivated, not unendowed with fancy, and saved by his common sense from being fatuously sentimental. What wonder that he became popular with his countrymen whose ideals he so well represented, being himself the typical product of a simple and refined New England, which had broken gently with the rigorous Puritan system and was dominated by an optimistic belief in the orderly evolution of men to individual and national felicity in a new and favored world? What wonder that, since this optimistic belief still persists among us, despite the shock of the Civil War and the confusion and the perplexities that have resulted from our expansion as a nation during the past thirty or forty years, we still open our hearts to the pure, natural, kindly poet who won the love of our grandfathers. Perhaps the most encouraging and significant fact about our celebrations of Longfellow's centenary is the proof they afford that, in an epoch which lays a childish emphasis on its strenuosity, so many strong, thoughtful men have taken delight in expressing their reverence for a man who in his life and in his writings illustrated the truth that to be entirely noble and inspiring human strength must not be divorced from tenderness and purity.

Of Longfellow's college life at Bowdoin from 1822 to 1826 little need be said, since in the main it was a prolongation of the quiet life he had led at home. He continued to read and dream, to avoid rough sports, to display a chivalrous regard for women, and to carry out the precepts of that spiritual, undogmatic Unitarianism which satisfied his religious aspirations from his earliest to his latest years. With Bryant, Irving, and Cooper laying the foundations of a native literature, it is not surprising that he ghould have resolved to be a writer, or that he

LONGFELLOW IS

should have composed some not very remarkable poems. Nor, in view of the provinciality of the country and the epoch, is it at all extraordinary that these poems, when published, should have gained him a reputation out of all proportion to their merits. What puzzles one is the question whether, if he had been less kindly treated by fortune, if he had had a taste of the misery which befell that Chatterton, for a copy of whose works he paid the few dollars coming to him for his own poems printed in The United States Literary Gazette, Longfellow would have gained a deeper insight into life and a mastery of the more sonorous chords of the poetic lyre. Tragedy did not pass him entirely by, but it made its entrance late — ^long after the character and scope of his genius had been determined. To wish to change the sweet, guileless, attractive record of Longfellow's early years would be a kind of profanation — ^they made him what he was — ^but to repress the wish is only to recognize one of the reasons why, with all his excellence and all his reputation, he is not enrolled among, the supreme masters of song.

For over three years after his graduation he traveled and studied in France, Spain, Italy, and Germany, preparing himself to be Professor of Modern Languages at Bowdoin. To-day college trustees would demand a candidate four or five years older, equipped with a doctor's degree. As one of the best of his biographers, the late Professor George Rice Carpenter, has well said, the poet felt no need of the systematized German scholarship whigh his friend George Ticknor, who was far in advance of the times, had advised him to acquire. What Longfellow wanted was culture, linguistic practice, contact with the richly complex life of the old world. What he wanted was what the new world, homespun and unsophisticated, really longed for, despite the crass, stentorian self-assertiveness of those Jacksonian times. Irving had celebrated the charms of historic Europe, Willis was soon to picture the delights of travel and the glamour of fashionable life, Thomas Jefferson, Ticknor, Bancroft, and Legare had realized what great services the scholarship of Europe might render in broadening and deepening American education. Longfellow seems, in a rather remarkable way, to have combined and harmonized many of the qualities and functions of all these men. He was in full sympathy with the past — especially with that of Spain — ^he was young and active enough to enjoy the color and the movement of a strange world — ^he was so attractive that foreigners and expatriated countrymen took him to their hearts — and yet he was too conscientious to neglect the studies that were needed in the profession he had undertaken. His journal shows that he was a wide-awake, sympathetic traveler and, for an Anglo-Saxon, a very accomplished linguist, whose acquirements were genuine, whatever the thoroughness of his scholarship.

. Thus he returned to America prepared to teach and write in a way that would produce a more permanent and inspiring effect upon the public than was possible to any of his literary predecessors or contemporaries. When after about ten years devoted to teaching and writing prose he turned again to poetry, he touched the hearts of his readers in a more intimate and sentimental way than the equally tender but more formal Irving had done. He stood upon a higher plane than the versatile Willis. He did not imitate Ticknor by settling down in his study among his books. While he was traveling and while, after his home-coming, he was busy teaching and translating text-books and writing lectures and contributing articles to The North American Review and collecting his sketches of travel into a volume entitled " Outre-Mer," his college-mate Hawthorne and his future critic Poe were slowly working out the principles of their art amid surroundings not altogether propitious to their genius and in the face of temperamental and financial obstacles such as he was never destined to encounter. After nearly three-quarters of a century we can perceive that the two lonely, struggling story-tellers struck into less trodden paths and reached higher places upon the mountain of inspiration ; but their gentle, less individual contemporary was attended to his humbler station by the tears and smiles and benedictions of thousands of men and women who were oblivious of the fact that his rivals for fame had passed beyond him. I think that part of Longfellow's work is for all time, that his place is secure and high upon the mountain of inspiration; it is no matter of opinion but rather of positive certainty that almost the whole of his work was of great profit and pleasure to two generations of his countrymen. He led them along the inviting paths of old-world culture, and he sang to them the songs of new world courage and faith and kindliness. Could there have been a more truly noble mission of a practicable kind, and could anyone have been more fitted for it by temperament and training than the young man who in 1835 accepted the call to succeed Ticknor at Harvard?

Although I am not so restricted in time as Longfellow was when in his graduating speech at Bowdoin he was expected to mete out justice to all our native writers in the space of seven minutes, I must, nevertheless, pass rapidly over this period of our poet's preparation. As a teacher he seems to have been flexible and sensible; he comprehended the student heart just as later he did that of the large public; he broadened his knowledge of books and criticised them sanely, though not, perhaps, with special acuteness. During the eight years prior to 1832 he wrote practically no poetry, but whether, if he had seriously tried, he could then have trained himself to become a great prose writer seems to me rather doubtful. It is not open to doubt, however, that during those years travel, work, and marriage matured him greatly as a man, or that, when before entering upon his duties at Harvard he sailed for Europe a second time, his period of preparation had reached its final stage. This second journey brought him his first great sorrow — ^the death of his young wife — and introduced him to the literatures of the Scandinavian nations, which had a deep influence upon him. It also strengthened greatly the hold of German sentiment and romance upon his spirit, chastened as that was by his bereavement. This meant a softening, an emotionalizing — if I may so phrase it — of his poetry and a consequent widening of the appeal he was soon to make to his countrymen. Within three years after his assumption of his duties at Harvard and his installation in the famous Craigie House, the author of "Hyperion, a Romance" and of "Voices of the Night" had fairly begun his career as a popular favorite of the most exceptional kind — a favorite against whom there is practically no revulsion. Young people going to Europe no longer expect to follow the footsteps of Paul Fleming, the somewhat naive hero of " Hyperion," but the " Voices of the Night " are still vocal in the "Psalm of Life" and " !^ootsteps of Angels." Their chief appeal was probably made through their didacticism, which is what some people of our day make a fad of objecting to, as though all didacticism were bad in itself — a proposition true apparently only for those who are beyond the reach of teaching. Be this as it may, there can be no doubt that the " Psalm of Life " was didactic and, if we may judge from the stories told about the inspiration it afforded to this and that susceptible person, there is equally little doubt that it and its companion poems were very popular and well adapted to the needs of the Americans of two generations ago. Those same Americans also perceived that the new writer was a more melodious verse-man than any of their poets to whom they had lent an ear. He had caught from his beloved Germans a certain simple sweetness which appealed to a kindred people who did not know that he might have borrowed from the

English poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and from their successors Coleridge and Keats deeper and richer harmonies than could be derived from any continental source. Admirable though his metrical art became within its limits, Longfellow rarely caught those harmonies, and, as he himself admitted, he could not attain the higher reaches of blank verse; but most of his contemporaries did not realize his shortcomings. If they had, they would have hailed Poe's "To Helen" and "Israfel," and would not have waited for his " Raven" before yielding that wayward genius a grudging acknowledgment as an exceptionally, though narrowly gifted poet. There is no need, however, to dwell upon this point, though it may be worth while to remark that it is the rich harmony and color of Poe that have affected later poets like Rossetti and Swinburne, and that the simpler sweetness of Longfellow has made him a favorite with the people, not only in England, but throughout the Teutonic world. His appeal to the Latin races, though not negligible, does not seem to have been strong, but he is sufficiently cosmopolitan to answer well one of the best tests of literary eminence. To speak slightingly of Longfellow's poetry in the face of its hold upon two generations of readers in several countries is more or less to proclaim one's indifference to the teaching of that portion of culture-history which deals with literature.

Yet w6 need not rely entirely or in the main upon the teachings of literary history in order to justify our appreciation of Longfellow's merits as a poet. His themes and his way of treating them may not be those of Poe, but they are surely those of a genuine poet, whose admirable qualities as an artist in verse emerge the more clearly the more sympathetically and carefully his works are studied. Think of the felicity and power of the opening stanza of " Seaweed " : —

When 'descends on the Atlantic The gigantic Storm-wind of the equinox Landward in his wrath he scourges

Think of the elevation and sincerity of the invocation that closes "The Building of the Ship":—

Thou, too, sail on, O Ship of State! . Sail on, O Union, strong and great! Humanity with all its fears.

With all the hopes of future years, Is hanging breathless on thy fate !

Think, finally, of the " piercing pathos," if I may borrow fiom an apt phrase which Matthew Arnold employed in connection with a few lines of Burns's "Auld Lang Syne" — ^the piercing pathos of these stanzas from " The Bridge," all the more piercingly pathetic because they are so unpretentious and so universal in their application : —

Yet whenever I cross the river On its bridge with wooden piers,

Like the odor of brine from the ocean Comes the thought of other years.

And I think how many thousands

Of care-encumbered men, Each bearing his burden of sorrow,

Have crossed the bridge since then.

I see the long procession

Still passing to and fro.

The young heart hot and restless,

And the old subdued and slow!

And forever and forever.

As long as the river flows, As long as the heart has passions,

As long as life has woes;

The moon and its broken reflection

And its shadows shall appear.

As the symbol of love in heaven.

And its wavering image here.

Shall we haggle about the epithets applicable to the man who could write such poetry?

in

These quotations have carried me forward a little in point of time and I must return to 1842, the next year in Longfellow's life that requires a brief notice. In the course of that year he made a third visit to Europe and published his third volume of verse. The visit inspired, among other poems, the pleasing and popular "Belfry of Bruges," which gave the title to a collection issued in 1846, four years after "Ballads" and " Poems on Slavery " had made his reputation practically unassailable. The first of these volumes, the " Ballads," in such a piece as " The Wreck of the Hesperus," not only showed Longfellow's ability to carry out the purpose expressed in his statement, "I have a great notion of working upon the people's feelings " ; but also started him on a line of work in which he was destined to win success — to wit, as a narrative poet. "Evangeline," "Miles Standish," "The Golden Legend," some of the " Tales of a Wayside Inn," to name no others, suffice to prove that Longfellow ranks among the more eminent of the poets who have tried to tell stories in verse, and, so far as I can judge, his attempts in this kind have kept fresher than the more romantic metrical narratives of Byron and

Moore. I will not go so far as to assert that Longfellow's stories in verse are great poetry, but I will point out the difficulty of finding really great narrative poetry in English since the days of Chaucer, the allegory of Spenser and the epic of Milton being put to one side. Longfellow, I repeat, ranks high in narrative poetry, as a true poet of a very different type, Mr. Austin Dobson, has lately told us in an appreciative sonnet.

The " Poems on Slavery " fortunately demand less notice now than they did half a century ago. Like the equally gentle and urbane Cowper, Longfellow was averse to strife of any kind — his "Journal" shows this on page after page — but both were exceptionally sensitive to sufferings and wrongs borne by humble men and women, and both uttered protests against the anachronistic institution which was demolished in our great war. Longfellow was not so consummate a master of irony as Cowper, but he was perhaps more effective by means of his vivid imaginative pictures of such atrocious if uncomT mon scenes as that described in " The Quadroon Girl," and also through the metrical skill displayed in his small volume. It is easy to exaggerate the merits of the " Poems on Slavery " — I think, for example, that Mr. Howells has recently been guilty of this — ^but on the other hand, it is equally easy to minimize both their temporary and their permanent value.

In 1843 Longfellow published " The Spanish Student," which illustrated his love of Spain and his total incapacity as a dramatist; and he married his second wife, Miss Frances Appleton. She brought him love, beauty, children, wealth, and for nearly twenty years — until her tragic death by burning — she made his life as serene as befitted his disposition and his chosen lines of labor. It seems almost idle to speculate with some biographers as to what Longfellow might have become if he had married a less sophisticated woman and had lived in a more bustling community. He was thirty-six years old, his character had been formed, the lines of his activity had been determined. One may wish that he had been somewhat shaken up earlier in his life; dropping into metaphor, one is glad to find that after he settled down to a steady stroke in his voyage on the river of time, he was able to keep it up for a splendid stretch. For about seventeen years he seems to have led a truly ideal life for such a poet as he aspired to be. He was idolized by his readers and could afiford to be magnanimous when Poe rather captiously assailed him. His friendships with such men as Felton and Sumner and Agassiz continued green; he dispensed hospitality to a group of attractive acquaintances and to eminent foreigners; he could turn continually to his books, especially to his beloved Dante. He planned a great poem, the "Christus," which should unfold the evolution of Christendom in the apostolic, the mediaeval, and the modern periods, and he brought the second part of it at least, " The Golden Legend," to a state of perfection sufficient to satisfy many a lover of the Middle Ages and to make some critics wonder why so charming a poem has been so inadequately admired by the public. He published the popular "Evangeline" and "The Song of Hiawatha," both extraordinarily successful despite their novel metrical forms; and he reached the zenith of his narrative power in "The Courtship of Miles Standish," which had its roots in the graves of Longfellow's Puritan ancestors, if I may be allowed to use so grewsome a figure of speech. In short, by adding sustained, elaborated poetical works to his fugitive pieces he became in the eyes of his countrymen and the world, the representative American poet of his day and a man of letters whose preeminence none could dispute or dream of envying. It is not a romantic career, nor one that is thrillingly inspiring, but do I exaggerate when I call it one that is delightful and worthy of emulation?

We Poets in our youth begin in gladness; But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.

So sang Wordsworth, and Shelley declared that

Most wretched men Are cradled into poetry by wrong; They learn in suffering what they teach in song.

If these two eminent poets laid down the rule, Longfellow — and let us hasten to add the singularly self-centered Wordsworth himself — furnished the exception. Prior to the great tragedy of his life Longfellow's causes of complaint, if we may trust his diary, were mainly three — weak eyes and neuralgia, the importunities of autograph-hunters and other bores — and the demands upon his time and patience made by his college duties. With regard to his academic troubles he showed himself, I think, a trifle querulous and weak, but by 1854 he was able to resign his professorship at Harvard and to devote himself entirely to literature. Until he was past fifty, his might well have been deemed a life favored by the gods. Contrast it with that of the most popular poet of the generation before he was born, the ill-fated William Cowper, with his ever-recurring attacks of derangement and his conviction that he was a specially devoted victim of the wrath of heaven. Contrast it with that of the tempest-tossed Byron or of that waif of fortune, Poe! Less romantic, less interesting, less pathetic we must certainly pronounce it to have been. Yet I can scarcely name in the annals of literature a lovelier life, and Longfellow stands beside Cowper as an almost unapproachable example of true urbanity and gentle manliness. Charm is no bad substitute for interest, and the charm of Longfellow's character and life is reflected in his works — in the " Hymn of the Night," "The Day is Done," "The River Charles," " The Village Blacksmith" and "The Children's Hour."

The man who wrote those poems was precisely the man to reply to Professor Norton who expostulated with him for being over-sympathetic and forbearing with a bore — "Charles, who will be kind to him if I am not?" He had also humor enough to ask when a certain lady was besieging him for a poem — " What shall I do with a ' strong-minded woman' after me?" And occasionally even Longfellow's gentle spirit rebelled and we think all the better of him for his sporadic self-assertion. He once declared that he would not read Mr. Blank's poem unless Congress passed a special law requiring him to do it. Congress did not pass the law, did not even require him to be interested in its own proceedings during what was probably the most momentous decade in our history as a nation. Perhaps more interest in the strife of parties would have meant a stronger poet than the author of "Evangeline," and a greater novelist than the author of "The Marble Faun." But Whittier and Lowell, and Mrs. Stowe and many another author who showed far more concern for the evolution of American life than Longfellow or Hawthorne ever did, surely did not surpass either of them in essential character or in important achievement. Let us be careful then not to criticise too harshly Longfellow's apparently easy-going life ' — the comparative desultoriness of his methods of composition and study, his lack of enthusiasm for the Transcendentalists and the Abolitionists, his rounds of mild social pleasures, even his fondness for a cigar and a game of billiards — in short, his ability to enjoy his good fortune during the years when his wife hovered about him as his ministering angel. It is not given to every one to lead the severely strenuous or the severely simple life.

IV

With July, 1 86 1, for I must pass rapidly to my conclusion — the month that taught the nation what a tremendous conflict it had upon its hands — came the cataclysm of Longfellow's life. He bore his affliction with a quiet fortitude that was heroic. Eighteen years later he could master his feelings sufficiently to write his beautiful sonnet "The Cross of Snow," but he could not make any sort of capital out of his sorrow, and the poem was given to the world only after his death. Perhaps the depth of his grief comes out most significantly in a reply he made to some well-meant but banal remark about the necessity of his bearing his cross — " Bear the cross, yes ; but what if one is stretched upon it?"

He had nearly twenty-one years to live, however, and he was not idle, though it may be doubted whether the writings of this period added very greatly to his fame. He published his " Tales of a Wayside Inn," which contained some creditable work, and "The New England Tragedies," which few people have read. He paid a last visit to Europe, and like Cowper and Bryant he found comfort in accomplishing a set task of translation. His version of Dante's Divine Comedy ranks high among English works of its class ; his own ambitious " Christus," completed after years of preparation, fell short of his hopes. Other volumes need not even be named, but the briefest survey should take note of his sonnets and of the equable " Morituri Salutamus," a veritable old man's poem which he read in 1875 ^^ ^^e semi-centennial of his class at Bowdoin.

Upon the sonnets the younger generation of critics like to dwell. A natural patriotic bias makes them anxious to say all they can in favor of one of the most distinguished figures in their country's literature, and they are also influenced by the charm of Longfellow's character and by the dignity of his old age, which impressed their own youth. Their standards of artistic excellence are different from those he set himself in his early years — ^they require more originality and depth of thought and feeling and a subtler sense of poetic values than can be discerned, let us say, in "Excelsior," in "Evangeline," in " The Bridge " — and they naturally emphasize such ballads as " The Skeleton in Armor," where his mastery is plain, and his sonnets, a favorite verse form with many of the greatest British poets of the last century and one in which only a true artist can invariably succeed. I am far from wishing to deny the right of these critics to praise Longfellow's sonnets, for such excellent poems should have the widest sort of currency; yet I cannot help suspecting that, good as Longfellow's sonnets are, they will never win the right to be placed side by side with the best sonnets of Wordsworth and of Keats, and that they will never mean to the American peopie what "The Bridge," "The Day is Done," "Resignation," "Twilight," and similar lyrics have meant and still mean. Without desiring to minimize the danger I may run of degenerating into a sort of demagogue-critic forever bent upon flattering the public into the belief that it is an inspired judge of literature, I must still express my very distinct respect for the public's ability to tell what it wants and to determine in a broad way the vital features of the writings it admires ; and it seems to me that the American public long ago took to its heart, not so much Longfellow the cultivated poet and the careful artist, though in a true sense, as I have already said, his culture meant much to the generation that first welcomed him, as Longfellow the tender, sympathetic teller of tales like " Evangeline" and the pensive, moralizing poet of lyrics like "The Bridge."