REFERENCES:
Samuel Longfellow: Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, second edition, 1886, and Final Memorials of ... Longfellow, 1887.
W. D. Howells: Literary Friends and Acquaintance, 1900.
G. R. Carpenter: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ‘Beacon Biographies,’ 1901.
T. W. Higginson: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ‘American Men of Letters,’ 1902.
I
HIS LIFE
The Longfellows are descendants of William Longfellow of Horsforth in Yorkshire, who came to New England ‘about 1676,’ settled in Newbury, and married Anne Sewall, a sister of Samuel Sewall, the first chief-justice of Massachusetts. ‘Well educated but a little wild’ is one of several illuminating phrases used to describe this young Yorkshireman. He joined the expedition against Quebec under Sir William Phipps (1690) and perished in a wreck on the coast of Anticosti. One of his sons, Stephen, a blacksmith, had a son who was graduated at Harvard, became a schoolmaster in Falmouth (Portland), and held important offices in the town government. His son, the third Stephen, grandfather of the poet, was judge of the court of common pleas, and representative of his town in the legislature.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was born at Portland, in the District of Maine, on February 27, 1807. He was the second son of Stephen Longfellow, a prominent lawyer, conspicuous in political life, a member of the Massachusetts legislature, and afterwards, when Maine acquired statehood, a representative for his state in Congress. The mother of the poet, Zilpah (Wadsworth) Longfellow, was a daughter of General Peleg Wadsworth, whose adventures during the Revolution bordered on the romantic. Through the Wadsworths the poet was a descendant of John Alden and Priscilla Mullens.
At the age of thirteen Longfellow printed in the Portland ‘Gazette’ his boyish rhymes on ‘The Battle of Lovell’s Pond.’ He studied at private schools and at the Portland Academy, entered Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine, in the Sophomore year, and was graduated in 1825, the fourth in a class of thirty-eight. That he stood so high seemed to him ‘rather a mystery.’ Before leaving college he had begun contributing to the ‘United States Literary Gazette,’ a new bi-monthly, published in Boston and edited by Theophilus Parsons. In one year seventeen of his poems appeared in the ‘Gazette,’ for which payment was made at the rate of two dollars a column. Five of these early poems were reprinted in Voices of the Night.
At the Commencement of 1825 the trustees of Bowdoin had determined to establish a professorship of modern languages. The chair was promised Longfellow when he should have fitted himself for it by study abroad. He sailed from New York in May, 1826, provided by George Ticknor with letters of introduction to Irving, Eichhorn, and Southey. He travelled in France, Spain, Italy, and Germany, mastered the Romance languages, planned certain prose volumes, and announced to his sister Elizabeth that his poetic career was finished. In August, 1829, he was back in America.
His appointment being confirmed and the stipend fixed at eight hundred dollars (together with another hundred for services as college librarian), Longfellow entered on his duties. During the next five and a half years he corrected bad French and Italian exercises, heard worse viva voce translations, in brief, was a pedagogue in all homely and trying senses of the word. With any one save a born drill-master the class-room soon loses novelty. In spite of the knowledge that he was useful in a chosen field of work, more than happy in his home-life (he had married, in 1831, Miss Mary Storer Potter of Portland), Longfellow felt the narrowness of his surroundings. Bowdoin was a little college and Brunswick a village. The young professor was ambitious. In his own phrase, he wanted a stage on which he could ‘take longer strides and speak to a larger audience.’ At one time he thought of buying the Round Hill School, and visited Northampton to look over the ground. Fortune had something better in store for him. Ticknor was about to resign the chair of modern languages at Harvard, and proposed as his successor Longfellow, whose translation of the Coplas of Manrique (1833) had attracted his notice. The position was formally offered and accepted; it was understood that Longfellow was to spend a year and a half in Europe before taking up his work.
Accompanied by his young wife, Longfellow crossed the ocean in April, 1835, and passed the summer in Stockholm and Copenhagen, studying the Scandinavian languages. In the autumn he was in Holland. Mrs. Longfellow died the last of November. Longfellow went to Heidelberg for the winter, and to Switzerland and the Tyrol for the spring and summer, and in December (1836) was at Cambridge preparing his college lectures.
He lodged at the famous colonial mansion in Brattle Street known as Craigie House, in a room that had once been Washington’s. When Longfellow first applied, old Mrs. Craigie, deceived by his youthful appearance, told him that she had ‘resolved to take no more students into the house.’ Craigie House passed into the possession of Worcester, the lexicographer. Worcester sold it to Nathan Appleton, whose daughter Longfellow married in 1843. It then became the property of Mrs. Longfellow.
At Harvard the exactions of work were not like those in the smaller college, strictly pedagogical. Longfellow had time for literature and for society. The years were richly productive, as the following bibliographical lists show.
Outre-Mer, A Pilgrimage beyond the Sea, 1835; Hyperion, a Romance, 1839; Voices of the Night, 1839; Ballads and Other Poems, 1842; Poems on Slavery, 1842; The Spanish Student, 1843; The Waif, a Collection of Poems, 1845 (edited); The Poets and Poetry of Europe, 1845 (edited); The Belfry of Bruges and Other Poems, 1846; The Estray, a Collection of Poems, 1847 (edited); Evangeline, a Tale of Acadie, 1847; Kavanagh, a Tale, 1849; The Seaside and the Fireside, 1850; The Golden Legend, 1851; The Song of Hiawatha, 1855.
After eighteen years of service at Harvard, Longfellow, in 1855, resigned his professorship, handing over its responsibilities to a worthy successor, James Russell Lowell. Released from academic duties, he was able to give himself unreservedly to literary work. Even in these new conditions he enjoyed less freedom than would be supposed. Longfellow had become a world-famous poet and was compelled to pay in full measure the penalties of fame. The demands on his time were enormous. As his reputation increased there was a proportionate increase in the army of visitors which besieged his door. The uniform kindness of their reception encouraged hundreds more to come.
The beautiful serenity of Longfellow’s domestic life was broken in upon by a frightful tragedy. One July morning in 1861 Mrs. Longfellow’s dress caught fire from a lighted match. It was impossible to save her, and she died the following day. The poet never recovered from the shock of her death. How crushing the blow was may be faintly conceived from that poem, ‘The Cross of Snow,’ found among his papers after his death.
During the last quarter century of his life Longfellow published the following books: The Courtship of Miles Standish, 1858; Tales of a Wayside Inn, 1863; Flower-de-Luce, 1867; The New England Tragedies, 1868; Dante’s Divine Comedy, a Translation,[29] 1867–70; The Divine Tragedy, 1871; Christus, a Mystery, 1872;[30] Three Books of Song, 1872; Aftermath, 1873; The Masque of Pandora, and Other Poems, 1875; Poems of Places, 1876–79 (edited); Kéramos and Other Poems, 1878; Ultima Thule, 1880. The posthumous volumes were In the Harbor, 1882, and Michael Angelo, 1884.
All the customary honors with which literary achievement may be recognized were bestowed on Longfellow. Some were formal and academic, scholastic tributes to scholastic achievement. Others were spontaneous and popular, an expression of the heart. Two illustrations will suffice to show the range of the poet’s influence. In 1869, during Longfellow’s last journey in Europe, the degree of D. C. L. was conferred on him by the University of Oxford. In 1879, when the tree which overhung ‘the village smithy’ was felled, an armchair was made of the wood, and given to the poet by the school-children of Cambridge. Both these tributes were necessary. Each is the complement of the other. Taken together, they symbolize the characteristics of the man and the artist.
Of all American poets Longfellow reached the widest audience. And it was with a feeling of personal bereavement that every member of that vast audience heard the news of his death at Cambridge, on March 24, 1882.
II
LONGFELLOW’S CHARACTER
As a young man Longfellow was pretty much like other young men, fond of society and fond of dress. At Cambridge the sober-minded were a little disturbed by the brilliancy of his waistcoats. In the Thirties it was permitted men, if they would, to array themselves like birds of paradise. Longfellow appears in some degree to have availed himself of the privilege. After a visit to Dickens in London in 1842 the novelist wrote Longfellow that boot-maker, hosier, trousers-maker, and coat-cutter had all been at the point of death. ‘The medical gentlemen agreed that it was exhaustion occasioned by early rising—to wait upon you at those unholy hours!’ An English visitor who saw Longfellow in 1850 thought him too fashionably dressed with his ‘blue frock-coat of Parisian cut, a handsome waistcoat, faultless pantaloons, and primrose colored “kids.”’
In middle age his social instinct was as strong as ever, but he cared less for ‘society.’ He restricted himself to the companionship of his friends, holding always in reserve time for his dependants, of whom he had more than a fair share.
Longfellow was large-hearted. He liked people if they were likable and sympathized with them if they were unattractive or unfortunate. He was open-handed, a liberal giver. Adventurers preyed upon him. He endured them with patient strength. When their exactions became outrageous, he made an effort to be rid of them. If unsuccessful, he laughed at his own want of skill and resigned himself to be imposed on a little longer. A weaker man would have sent these bores and parasites about their business at once.
Incapable of giving pain to any living creature, he could not understand the temper which prompts another to do so. Fortunately the violence or malignity of criticism had little effect on him. He could even be amused by it. Of Margaret Fuller’s ‘furious onslaught’ on him in the ‘New York Tribune,’ Longfellow said, ‘It is what ‘might be called a bilious attack.’
He disliked publicity whether in the form of newspaper chronicle of his doings or recognition in public places. He thought it absurd that because Fechter had dined with him this unimportant item must be telegraphed to Chicago and printed in the morning journals. Fond as he was of the theatre, he sometimes hesitated to go because of the interest his presence excited. It was thought extraordinary that he was willing to read his poem ‘Morituri Salutamus’ at the fiftieth anniversary of his class at Bowdoin. He was delighted when he found he was to stand behind the old-fashioned high pulpit; ‘Let me cover myself as much as possible. I wish it might be entirely.’
One trait of Longfellow’s character has been over-emphasized—his gentleness. He was indeed gentle; but continual harping on that string has created the impression that he was gentle rather than anything else. In consequence we have a legendary Longfellow in whom all other traits of character are subordinated to the one. His amiability, his sense of justice, his entire freedom from selfishness and vanity, and his genuine modesty, which led him even when he was right and his neighbor wrong to avoid giving needless pain by intimating to the neighbor how wrong he was—all contributed to hide the more forceful and emphatic qualities. But the qualities were there.
Nothing is easier than to multiply illustrations of this poet’s gracious traits of character. Holmes epitomized all eulogy when he said of Longfellow: ‘His life was so exceptionally sweet and musical that any voice of praise sounds almost like a discord after it.’
III
THE POET
Americans sometimes disturb themselves needlessly over the question whether Longfellow was a great poet. It is absolutely of no importance whether he was or was not. Of one thing they may be sure,—he was a poet. Song was his natural vehicle of expression. He had a masterly command of technical difficulties of his art. Language became pliant under his touch. Taking into account the range of his metres, the uniform precision with which he handled words, and the purity of his style, Longfellow is eminent among American poetical masters.
His sonnets are exquisite. His ballads, like ‘The Skeleton in Armor,’ have no little of the fresh unstudied character which charms us in old English ballad literature, a something not to be traced to the spirit alone but to the technique as well. The twenty-two poems of ‘The Saga of King Olaf’ show an almost extraordinary metrical power.
It must also be remembered that Longfellow popularized for modern readers the so-called English hexameter. Evangeline was a metrical triumph, considering it wholly aside from the innate beauty of the story or the artistic handling of the incidents. The poet did not foresee his success. In fact, as early as 1841, in the preface to his translation of Tegnér’s Children of the Lord’s Supper, Longfellow speaks of the ‘inexorable hexameter, in which, it must be confessed, the motions of the English muse are not unlike those of a prisoner dancing to the music of his chains.’ But here he was hampered by his theory of translation, by his anxiety to render as literally as he could the text of the original. When he took the matter into his own hands and moulded the verse according to his own artistic sense, it became another thing. Wholly aside from the pleasure Evangeline has given countless readers, it is something to have broken down prejudice against the hexameter to the extent of drawing out an indirect compliment from Matthew Arnold, whose self-restraint in the matter of giving praise was notorious.[31] Scholars have by no means withdrawn their opposition to the English hexameter. That a more liberal temper prevails is largely due to Longfellow.
Evangeline had a stimulating effect on one English poet of rare genius, Arthur Hugh Clough. A reading of the Tale of Acadie immediately after a reperusal of the Iliad led to the composition of The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich.[32]
Another of Longfellow’s triumphs was so great as to make it difficult for any one to follow him. Hiawatha succeeded both because of the metre and in spite of it. Any one can master this self-writing jingle. ’Tis as easy as lying. One hardly knows how facile newspaper parodists amused themselves before they got Hiawatha. Holmes explained the ease of the measure on physiological grounds. We do not lisp in numbers, but breathe in them. Did we but know it, we pass our lives in exhaling four-foot rhymeless trochaics.[33] To write a poem in the metre of the Kalevala still remains, with all its specious fluency, an impossible performance for any one not a poet. Thus Longfellow’s success had a negative and restraining effect. He opened the field to whoever cared to experiment with the hexameter, but closed it, for the present at least, to any rhythmical inventions calculated however remotely to suggest the metre of his Indian edda.
IV
OUTRE-MER, HYPERION, KAVANAGH
The most popular of American poets first challenged public attention as a writer of prose. Outre-Mer is a group of pieces after the manner of Irving. Hyperion is a romance ‘in the old style,’ and shows the influence of Jean Paul Richter. Kavanagh, published ten years after Hyperion, is a novel.
Neither of the first two books is marked by a buoyant Americanism. Outre-Mer does not, for example, suggest A Tramp Abroad, and certainly Paul Flemming is no kinsman of ‘Harris.’ In other words, Europe was as yet too remote to be made the subject of easy jest. Men did not ‘run over’ to the Continent. The trip cost them dear in time and money, and was not without the element of anticipated danger. Travelling America was unsophisticated and viewed the Old World with childlike curiosity. Foreign lands were transfigured in the romantic haze through which they were seen.
The chapters of Outre-Mer were written by a man too intoxicated with the charm of European life to be annoyed by the petty irritations that worry hardened tourists. Rouen, Paris, Auteuil, Madrid, El Pardillo, Rome in midsummer, afford the Pilgrim only delight. As in all books of the kind there are interpolated stones, and in this book interpolated literary essays. Every page betrays the student and the lover of literature, who quotes Jeremy Taylor and Sir Thomas Browne at Père la Chaise, James Howell at Venice, and Shakespeare everywhere.
Hyperion is steeped in sentiment—almost in sentimentality. Such a book could only have been written when the heart was young. It is a mistake, however, to read the volume as an autobiography; the author objected to its being so read. More important than the love story are the romantic descriptions of the Rhine and the Swiss Alps and the golden atmosphere enveloping it all. Both these books have a common object, namely, to interpret the Old World to the New.
When Outre-Mer was published an admirer said that the author of The Sketch Book must look to his laurels. The praise implied was extravagant, but not groundless. Longfellow’s prose has a measure of the sweetness and urbanity which we associate with Irving. Both writers are classic in their serenity, and if highly artificial at times never absurdly stilted. They often appear in old-fashioned dress, but they wear the costume easily and it becomes them. The modern reader, with a taste dulled by high seasoning, marvels how the grandparents could find pleasure in Hyperion. It would be to the modern reader’s advantage to forswear sack for a while and get himself into a condition to enjoy what so greatly delighted the grandparents.
Besides a group of literary essays (published in his collected works under the title of ‘Driftwood’) Longfellow wrote a novel of New England life, Kavanagh, which suffered by coming too soon after Evangeline. It seems colorless when placed beside the romantic tale of Acadie. Yet one can well afford to take time to learn of Mr. Pendexter’s griefs, and incidentally to become acquainted with Billy Wilmerdings, who was turned out of school for playing truant, and ‘promised his mother, if she would not whip him, he would experience religion.’ Hawthorne was enthusiastic over Kavanagh; he, however, disclosed the secret of its unpopularity when he said to Longfellow: ‘Nobody but yourself would dare to write so quiet a book.’
V
VOICES OF THE NIGHT, BALLADS, SPANISH STUDENT, BELFRY OF BRUGES, THE SEASIDE AND THE FIRESIDE
Longfellow served the cause of his art in two ways: first, he was an original poet, having a genius which, if not profound, or brilliant, or massive, or bewilderingly fresh and new, was eminently poetical and eminently attractive; second, he was an enthusiastic interpreter of the poetry of other lands through the medium of trustworthy and graceful translations.
In Voices of the Night, his earliest volume of verse, the translations, from Manrique, Lope de Vega, Dante, Charles d’Orléans, Klopstock, and Uhland, outnumber the original pieces almost two to one. Their characteristic is fidelity in spirit and letter. They illustrate the genius of a poet who found pleasure in giving wider audience to the work of men he loved, and who did his utmost to preserve the singular qualities of these men.
Longfellow’s second volume, Ballads and Other Poems, contains only four translations, but one of them is Tegnér’s Children of the Lord’s Supper, in three hundred and fifty hexameter verses. The Belfry of Bruges contains a handful of translations from the German, including a lyric of Heine’s done in a way to cause regret that Longfellow did not put more of the Buch der Lieder into English. In The Seaside and the Fireside is given entire ‘The Blind Girl of Castèl Cuillè’ by the barber-poet Jasmin.
The translations bulk so large and are so plainly a labor of love that it would seem as if Longfellow regarded such work an important part of his poetic mission. At the present time there is no need to urge the translator to ‘aggrandize his office.’ He does so cheerfully. Sometimes it is done for him. Are we not told that Fitzgerald was a greater poet than Omar Khayyám? In 1840 the office had not grown so great.
This interpretative work by no means ended when Longfellow’s fame as a creative poet was at its height and there was every incentive to build for himself. When compiling (with Felton’s aid) the Poets and Poetry of Europe he translated many pieces for the volume. He gave years to reproducing in English the majesty of Dante’s verse, counting himself fortunate if his transcript, made in all reverence and love, approached its great original. This disinterestedness in the exercise of his art is so greatly to his honor that praise becomes impertinent. Catholic in his attitude toward workers in the field of poesy, Longfellow recognized the truth of the line
Many the songs, but song is one.
Longfellow’s early verse had all the requisites for popularity; it is clear, melodious, simple in its lessons, tinged with sentiment and melancholy, dashed with romantic color, and abounding in phrases which catch the ear and pulsate in the brain. The poet voices the longings, regrets, fears, aspirations, the restlessness, or the faith, which go to make up the warp and woof of everyday life. An allegory, a moralized legend, a song, a meditation, a ballad,—these are what we find in turning the leaves of Voices of the Night or the Ballads. Here is a certain popular quality not to be attained by taking thought. ‘A Psalm of Life,’ ‘Flowers,’ ‘The Beleaguered City,’ ‘The Village Blacksmith,’ ‘The Rainy Day,’ ‘Maidenhood,’ ‘Excelsior,’ ‘The Bridge,’ ‘The Day is Done,’ ‘Resignation,’ ‘The Builders,’ are a few among many illustrations of the type of verse which carried Longfellow’s name into every home where poetry is read. The range of emotions expressed is of the simplest. There is feeling, but no thinking. The robust reader who perchance has battened of late on sturdy diet, like Fifine at the Fair, hardly knows what to make of these poems, so little resistance do they offer to the mind. The meaning lies on the surface. But it is no less true that their essence is poetical. The one thing never lacking is the note of distinction. The human quality to be found in such a poem as the ‘Footsteps of Angels’ almost overpowers the poetic element. Nevertheless the poetry is there, and by virtue of this Longfellow’s early work lives.
Other poems show his scholar’s love for the past. They express the natural longing felt by an inhabitant of a crude new land for countries where romance lies thick because history is ancient. ‘The Belfry of Bruges’ and ‘Nuremberg’ are examples. Moreover Longfellow’s ballads have genuine quality. ‘The Skeleton in Armor’ illustrates his study of Scandinavian literature. ‘The Wreck of the Hesperus’ is based on an actual incident which came under his notice. The criticism reflecting on this ballad because the poet had never seen the reef of Norman’s Woe, is superfine. Longfellow was born and reared almost within a stone’s throw of the Atlantic. His knowledge of the ocean began with his first lessons in life. His sea poems are distinctive. ‘The Building of the Ship,’ ‘The Fire of Driftwood,’ ‘Sir Humphrey Gilbert,’ ‘The Secret of the Sea,’ ‘The Lighthouse,’ ‘Chrysaor,’ and ‘Seaweed,’ whether or not they deserve the praise Henley gives them, will always be accounted among Longfellow’s characteristic pieces.
Two other works may be noted in this section: the Poems on Slavery and a play, The Spanish Student. The first of these, though academic, shows how early Longfellow took his rank with the unpopular minority. The Spanish Student, a play based on La Gitanilla of Cervantes, was written con amore, and ‘with a celerity of which I did not think myself capable.’ Longfellow had great hopes of its success, though he seems not to have been ambitious for a dramatic presentation. The success was to come through the reader. The Spanish Student shows that Longfellow could have written good acting plays had he chosen to submit to the irritations and rebuffs which are the inevitable preliminary to dramatic good fortune.
VI
EVANGELINE, HIAWATHA, MILES STANDISH, TALES OF A WAYSIDE INN
Evangeline and Hiawatha mark the climax of Longfellow’s contemporary popularity and may be regarded as the principal bulwarks of his fame. There is an anecdote to the effect that Hawthorne, to whom the subject of Evangeline was proposed, was not attracted by it, while Longfellow seized on it eagerly. Such was the divergence of their genius. Longfellow’s mind always sought the fair uplands of thought, checkered with alternate sunshine and shadow; it did not willingly traverse deep ravines, gloomy and mysterious, or haunted groves such as those about which Hawthorne’s spirit loved to keep. The instinct which led the one poet to reject the narrative was as infallible as that which led the other to appropriate it.
The tale of Acadie is engrossing in its very nature, and whether told in prose or verse must always invite, even chain, the attention. It is dramatic without being melodramatic. The characters are not mere ‘persons’ of the drama, they are types. Evangeline will always stand for something more than the figure of an unhappy Acadian girl bereft of her lover. As Longfellow has painted her, she is the incarnation of beauty, devotion, maidenly pride, self-abnegation. So too of the other characters, Gabriel, old Basil, Benedict; each has that added strength which a character conceived dramatically is bound to have if it shall prove typical as well.
Longfellow gave himself little anxiety about the historic difficulties of the Acadian question. It was enough for him that these unhappy people were carried away from their homes and that much misery ensued. He painted the French Neutrals as a romancer must. Father Felician was not sketched from the Abbé Le Loutre, nor was life in the actual Grand Pré altogether idyllic.
Evangeline aroused interest in French-American history. For example, Whewell wrote to Bancroft to say that he feared Longfellow had some historical basis for the story and to ask for information.
In the Plymouth idyl of the choleric little captain who believed that the way to get a thing well done was to do it one’s self, and who exemplified his theory by having his secretary make a proposal of marriage for him, Longfellow made one of his most fortunate strokes. The Courtship of Miles Standish showed the poetic possibilities in the harsh, dry annals of early colonial life. The wonder is that so few adventurers have cared to follow the path indicated.
Bound up with the story of Priscilla and John Alden is a handful of poems to which Longfellow gave the collective title of ‘Birds of Passage.’ Here are several fine examples of his art: ‘The Warden of the Cinque-Ports,’ ‘Haunted Houses,’ ‘The Jewish Cemetery at Newport,’ ‘Oliver Basselin,’ ‘Victor Galbraith,’ ‘My Lost Youth,’ ‘The Discoverer of the North Cape,’ and ‘Sandalphon.’ It is a question whether in these eight poems we have not a small but well-nigh perfect Longfellow anthology. Certainly no selection of his writings can pretend to be characteristic which does not contain them.
Hiawatha was not intended for a poetic commentary on the manners and customs of the North American Indians, though that impression sometimes obtains. It is a free handling of Ojibway legends drawn from Schoolcraft’s Algic Researches and supplemented by other accounts of Indian life. The grossness of the red man’s character, his cruelty, his primitive views of cleanliness, are wisely kept in the background, and his noble and picturesque qualities brought to the front. The psychology is extremely simple. This Indian edda must be enjoyed for its atmosphere of the forest, its childlike spirit, and its humor. Hiawatha was a friend of animals (when he was not their enemy), and understood them even better than writers of modern nature-books. One does not need to be young again to enjoy the account of Hiawatha’s fishing in company with his friend the squirrel. The sturgeon swallows them both, and the squirrel helps Hiawatha get the canoe crossways in the fish, a timely service in recognition of which (after both have been rescued) he receives the honorable name of Tail-in-air. In fact, the poem abounds in observations of animal life which as yet await the sanction of John Burroughs.
Taking a series of poems on the half-real, half-mythical King Olaf, adding thereto a group of contrasting tales from Spanish, Italian, Jewish, and American sources, assigning each narrative to an appropriate character, binding the whole together with an Introduction, Interludes, and a Conclusion, Longfellow produced the genial Tales of a Wayside Inn. The device of the poem is old, but it can always be given a new turn. Adapted to prose as well as verse, it may be used ‘in little,’ as Hardy has done in A Few Crusted Characters, or in larger form, as in A Group of Noble Dames.
No secret was made of the fact that the ‘Wayside Inn’ was the ‘Red Horse Inn’ of Sudbury, Massachusetts, or that the characters, the Sicilian, the Poet, the Student, the Spanish Jew, the Musician, and the Theologian, were real people, friends of Longfellow.[34]
The reader who takes up Tales of a Wayside Inn knows by instinct that he may not look for the broad and leisurely treatment, the wealth of beauty and harmony, which characterize The Earthly Paradise of Morris. That need not, however, prevent him from enjoying the Tales on quite sufficient grounds. The poems are often too brief; some are mere anecdotes ‘finished just as they are fairly begun.’ We are prepared for a more generous treatment.
Though not written for that complex and formidable entity ‘the child-mind,’ two poems in the collection, ‘Paul Revere’s Ride’ and ‘King Robert of Sicily,’ are beloved of school-children and dear to the amateur elocutionist. The most original of the tales is ‘The Saga of King Olaf,’ drawn from the Heimskringla, and appropriately put into the lips of the Musician. It is a poem redolent of the sea and the forest. The theme was congenial to Longfellow, who loved ‘the misty world of the north, weird and wonderful.’
Prompted by the good fortune of Tales of a Wayside Inn, the poet was led to make additions to it. A second part appeared in Three Books of Song, a third part in Aftermath. With these fifteen additional tales the three parts were then collected into a single volume.
VII
CHRISTUS, JUDAS MACCABÆUS, PANDORA, MICHAEL ANGELO
As early as 1841 Longfellow had conceived the idea of an ‘elaborate poem ... the theme of which would be the various aspects of Christendom in the Apostolic, Middle, and Modern Ages.’ In 1851 The Golden Legend appeared, with no word to indicate that it was the second part of a trilogy. Seventeen years more elapsed and The New England Tragedies came from the press, to be followed three years later by The Divine Tragedy. The three parts were then arranged in chronological order and the completed work given the title of Christus, a Mystery.
One may guess why the first part of the trilogy was the last to be published. A bard the most indubitably inspired might question his power to meet the infinite requirements of so lofty a theme. Longfellow’s Divine Tragedy has received less than due meed of praise. It has an austere beauty. If a reader can be moved by the Scripture narrative, he can scarcely remain unmoved by this reverent handling of the story of the Christ. Through many lines the poet follows the Scriptural version almost to the letter, bending the text only enough to throw it into metrical form. Often the dialogue seems bald and the transitions abrupt because the poet allows himself the least degree of liberty. This severity and repression in the treatment are one source of that power which The Divine Tragedy certainly has.
Part two, The Golden Legend, is a retelling of the story of Prince Henry of Hoheneck. Here, Longfellow reproduces with skill the light and color of mediæval life, if not its darkness and diablerie. The street-preaching, the miracle-play in the church, the revel of the monks at Hirschau, and the lawless gayety of the pilgrims are all painted with a clear and certain touch, but in colors almost too pale, too delicate. Longfellow had not the courage or the taste to handle these themes with the touch of almost brutal realism they seem to require.
The third part of the trilogy, The New England Tragedies, consists of two plays, John Endicott and Giles Corey of the Salem Farms, one dealing with the persecution of the Quakers, the other with the witchcraft delusion. The first is the better. Edith Christison’s arraignment of Norton in the church, her trial, punishment, her return to the colony at the risk of her life, and the release of the Quakers by the king’s mandamus, followed by Endicott’s death, are vigorously depicted. The character of the governor is finely drawn, and the last scene between Bellingham and Endicott is a strong and moving conception. As he bends over the dead man, Bellingham says:—
How placid and how quiet is his face,
Now that the struggle and the strife are ended!
Only the acrid spirit of the times
Corroded this true steel. Oh, rest in peace,
Courageous heart! Forever rest in peace!
The companion play, Giles Corey, shows what has been already observed, how little adapted Longfellow’s genius was for dealing with psychological mysteries. He could understand the mental conditions and sympathize with persecutors and victims, but he could not reproduce the uncanny atmosphere enveloping the witchcraft tragedies. Giles Corey is a finished study of a theme which might have been developed into a powerful play. It is profitable reading, yet if one would be carried back into the horrors of that time he must go to Hawthorne’s ‘Young Goodman Brown’ and not to Giles Corey. Poets are notorious for taking liberties with the facts of history. But according to the late John Fiske, the poetical conception of Cotton Mather as set forth in The New England Tragedies is much nearer truth than the popular conception of the great Puritan minister based on the teachings of historians.
The little five-act play, Judas Maccabæus, is a piece of careful workmanship, like everything to which Longfellow put his hand, and the scene between Antiochus and Máhala rises into passionate energy. The Masque of Pandora was more to Longfellow’s taste, and if it does not satisfy the classical scholar, who is proverbially hard to please, it remains an attractive setting of one of the most attractive of mythological stories.
The dramatic poem, Michael Angelo, though not usually accounted Longfellow’s masterpiece, better deserves that rank than certain more popular performances. Besides being a lovely example of his art, it is the expression of his maturest thought. He kept it by him for years, working on it with loving care, adding new scenes from time to time and weighing critically the value of those already written. Finally he put it to one side, and to show that he had not entirely carried out his idea, the words ‘A Fragment’ were subjoined to the title. It was published after his death.
Michael Angelo is not a play, but a series of dramatic incidents from the life of the great sculptor, illustrating his character, his thought, his work, his friendships. Many passages display a strength not commonly associated with Longfellow’s poetic genius. Little is wanting to the delineation of Michael Angelo to create the effect of massiveness. From the first monologue where he sits in his studio, musing over his picture of the ‘Last Judgment,’ to the midnight scene where Vasari finds him working on the statue of the Dead Christ, the effect is cumulative. The other characters are no less skilfully wrought. Vittoria Colonna is a beautiful conception, lofty yet human. Equally attractive with a more earthly loveliness is Julia Gonzaga, her friend, she to whom one to-day was worth a thousand yesterdays. Titian, Cellini, the Pope and his cardinals, Vasari, Sebastiano, the old servant Urbino, and the aged monk at Monte Luca effectively sustain the parts assigned them, and unite to bring into always stronger relief the character of the unique genius whom Longfellow has made his central figure.
VIII
LAST WORKS
The translation of Dante was a difficult task to which Longfellow gave himself for years with something like consecration. It is satisfactory or it is not, according to the point of view. He who holds that verse can never be translated into verse, and that a poem suffers least by being rendered in prose, will make no exception in Longfellow’s case. On the other hand, the reader who is not, and who has neither the opportunity nor the power to become a scholar in Italian, owes Longfellow an inestimable debt of gratitude. The unpoetic accuracy of which some complain counts for a virtue. The translation remains, with all that can be said against it, the work of a poet.
As age came on, Longfellow’s own verse, instead of losing in charm, the rather increased. Kéramos, Ultima Thule, and In the Harbor contain many of his loveliest and most gracious poems. ‘Not to be tuneless in old age’ was his happy fortune.
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His skill in the sentimental, homely, and obviously moral has blinded not a few readers to the larger aspects of Longfellow’s work. One wearies, no doubt, of the ethical lesson that comes with the inevitableness of fate. But there is no need of impatience, Longfellow does not invariably preach. Besides, all tastes must be taken into account. Many prefer the ethical lesson, unmistakably put.
Had Longfellow been more rugged, and had he been content to end his poems now and then with a question mark (figuratively speaking) instead of a full stop, there would have been much talk about the ‘depth of his meaning;’ and had he been frankly suggestive on tabooed topics, we should have heard a world of chatter about ‘the largeness of his view’ and the surprising degree in which he was in ‘advance of his time.’ Doubtless he lacked brute strength. Whitman could have spared him a little of his own surplus, and neither poet would have been the worse for the transfer. Nevertheless Longfellow had abundance of power exerted in his own way, which was not the way of the world. What preposterous criticism is that of Frederic Harrison, who characterizes Evangeline as ‘goody-goody dribble’!
Perhaps Longfellow should be most praised for his exquisite taste. He was refined to the finger-tips, a gentleman not alone in every fibre of his being but in every line of his work. The poet of the fireside and the people was an aristocrat after all. Generations of culture seem to be packed into his verses. In a country where so much is flamboyant, boastful, restless, and crude, the influence of such a man is of the loftiest and most benignant sort.