It is curious to notice that Chasles makes the same criticism on “Evangeline” that Holmes made on Lowell’s “Vision of Sir Launfal;” namely, that there is in it a mixture of the artificial and the natural. The result is, we may infer, that on the whole one still thinks of it as a work of art and does not—as, for instance, with Tolstoi’s “Cossacks”—think of all the characters as if they lived in the very next street. Yet it is in its way so charming, he finds that although as he says, “There is no passion in it,” still there is a perpetual air of youth and innocence and tenderness. M. Chasles is also impressed as a Catholic with the poet’s wide and liberal comprehension of the Christian ideas. It is not, he thinks, a masterpiece (Il y a loin d’Evangéline à un chef-d’œuvre), but he points out, what time has so far vindicated, that it has qualities which guarantee to it something like immortality. When we consider that Chasles wrote at a time when all our more substantial literature seemed to him to consist of uninteresting state histories and extensive collections of the correspondence of American presidents—a time when he could write sadly: “All America does not yet possess a humorist” 198 (Toute l’Amérique ne possède pas un humoriste), one can place it to the credit of Longfellow that he had already won for himself some sort of literary standing in the presence of one Frenchman. At the time of this complaint, it may be noticed that Mr. S. L. Clemens was a boy of fifteen. The usual European criticism at the present day is not that America produces so few humorists, but that she brings forth so many.
The work which came next from Longfellow’s pen has that peculiar value to a biographer which comes from a distinct, unequivocal, low-water mark in the intellectual product with which he has to deal. This book, “Kavanagh,” had the curious fate of bringing great disappointment to most of his friends and admirers, and yet of being praised by the two among his contemporaries personally most successful in fiction, Hawthorne and Howells. Now that the New England village life has proved such rich material in the hands of Mary Wilkins, Sarah Jewett, and Rowland Robinson, it is difficult to revert to “Kavanagh” (1849) without feeling that it is from beginning to end a piece of purely academic literature without a type of character, or an incident—one might almost say without a single phrase—that gives quite the flavor of real life. Neither the joys nor the griefs really reach the reader’s heart for one 199 moment. All the characters use essentially the same dialect, and every sentence is duly supplied with its anecdote or illustration, each one of which is essentially bookish at last. It has been well said of it that it is an attempt to look at rural society as Jean Paul would have looked at it. Indeed, we find Longfellow reading aloud from the “Campaner Thal” while actually at work on “Kavanagh,” and he calls the latter in his diary “a romance.”[78] When we consider how remote Jean Paul seems from the present daily life of Germany, one feels the utter inappropriateness of his transplantation to New England. Yet Emerson read the book “with great contentment,” and pronounced it “the best sketch we have seen in the direction of the American novel,” and discloses at the end the real charm he found or fancied by attributing to it “elegance.” Hawthorne, warm with early friendship, pronounces it “a most precious and rare book, as fragrant as a bunch of flowers and as simple as one flower.... Nobody but yourself would dare to write so quiet a book, nor could any other succeed in it. It is entirely original, a book by itself, a true work of genius, if ever there was one.” Nothing, I think, so well shows us the true limitations of American literature at that period as these curious phrases. It is 200 fair also to recognize that Mr. W. D. Howells, writing nearly twenty years later, says with almost equal exuberance, speaking of “Kavanagh,” “It seems to us as yet quite unapproached by the multitude of New England romances that have followed it in a certain delicate truthfulness, as it is likely to remain unsurpassed in its light humor and pensive grace.”[79]
The period following the publication of “Evangeline” seemed a more indeterminate and unsettled time than was usual with Longfellow. He began a dramatic romance of the age of Louis XIV., but did not persist in it, and apart from the story of “Kavanagh” did no extended work. He continued to publish scattered poems, and in two years (1850) there appeared another volume called “The Seaside and the Fireside” in which the longest contribution and the most finished—perhaps the most complete and artistic which he ever wrote—was called “The Building of the Ship.” To those who remember the unequalled voice and dramatic power of Mrs. Kemble, it is easy to imagine the enthusiasm with which her reading of this poem was received by an audience of three thousand, and none the less because at that troubled time the concluding appeal to the Union had a distinct bearing on the conflicts of the time. For 201 the rest of the volume, it included the strong and lyric verses called “Seaweed,” which were at the time criticised by many, though unreasonably, as rugged and boisterous; another poem of dramatic power, “Sir Humphrey Gilbert;” and one of the most delicately imaginative and musical among all he ever wrote, “The Fire of Drift-Wood,” the scene of which was the Devereux Farm at Marblehead. There were touching poems of the fireside, especially that entitled “Resignation,” written in 1848 after the death of his little daughter Fanny, and one called “The Open Window.” Looking back from this, his fourth volume of short poems, it must be owned that he had singularly succeeded in providing against any diminution of power or real monotony. Nevertheless his next effort was destined to be on a wider scale.
[74] Mistakenly described by the Rev. Samuel Longfellow as “nearly four hundred pages.” Life, ii. 3.
[75] Life, iii. 370.
[76] Life, iii. 94.
[77] Correspondence of R. W. Griswold, p. 162.
[78] Life, ii. 81.
[79] North American Review, civ. 534.